June 25, 2009
Introduction: In today’s podcast episode from www.bengreenfieldfitness.com: low back pain and sacroiliac joint issues, the number one cause of low back pain in athletes, bone healing and stress fractures and a new product called lactoferrin, tapering for a triathlon, recovering after a triathlon, snack substitutes for crunchy craving and much more.
Ben: Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and today we’ve got a couple of different interviews. I had two that I wanted to get out to you and so many of the podcast today is going to focus on those. One in particular is with a chiropractic physician and focuses on low back pain but it’s really non run of the mill information. This is a guy, Dr. Brian Mather, who I work with and who I’ve written a couple of articles with and the guy is simply an expert when it comes to identifying one of the number one causes of low back pain that most physicians really don’t even know about or diagnose, or know how to treat. So Dr. Mather is going to kind of give us the lowdown on that and he’s just a wealth of knowledge. I was really happy to get him on the show. And then the other interview is with a guy named Jim Dragon and Jim has a strong background in the pharmaceutical industry and he’s introducing us to this brand new supplement called lactoferrin. And I thought it was a really interesting compound. I’ve actually seen some of the before and after x-rays from people who have taken this stuff in terms of their bone density and it’s pretty interesting how it actually sits with bone formation and really decreases bone breakdown. So this is one you’d like to look at especially if you’re at high risk for osteoporosis, low bone density or if you don’t want stress fractures, bone healing, that type of thing – you’re definitely going to want to listen in. I’ve also got some great Listener Q and As today. One that focuses especially on triathlon and another one that’s focused on cravings and snack food and some healthy substitutes for snack foods. We also have quite a few special announcements today so we’re going to go ahead and get into this week’s content from www.bengreenfieldfitness.com.
Chuck asks: I had a couple questions I was hoping you could answer for me for my race next weekend. On Sunday I will be racing Montclair Olympic triathlon in Virginia. The race is on Sunday and I was curious about your recommendations for tapering the week before? Also, what is the best way to train the week after the race – take a day off, get right back into it?
Ben answers: You like that? I put the question mark in there just so you know that he’s actually asking a question. I always like to read my punctuation out loud. Well essentially what it comes down to is there’s always going to be a different taper for the different length of a race or event that you’re doing, whether that be a marathon or half-marathon or an Ironman triathlon or whatever. But Chuck’s asking about Olympic distance triathlon. For those of you who don’t know, Olympic distance triathlon generally takes people anywhere from an hour and 50 minutes up to about 3 and a half, four hours max to do. And the taper for that is generally going to last about 6 to 10 days depending on how important that race is to you, but there are a few overall rules that I always follow in any of the tapers. The first is you always go after a pyramid taper. That gives you the best results and it’s always done the best for the athletes that I coach. The way that we do that is for the first few days or if it’s a longer taper, sometimes for the first week we drastically reduce volume. So about 30 to 40% of the normal training volume that you would normally do and then what we do for the next few days or for the next week depending on the length of the taper again, we actually bring the training volume back up to 50 or 60% of what you world normally do. So what that does is it allows the body to recover, to hypercompensate, to give a lot of juice so to speak back to those legs and then after that it allows you to actually get back into training, get a feel neuromuscularly for your training again, not take so much time off that you feel stale right before the race. But it’s called the pyramid because you have a sharp decrease in volume followed by a slight increase again in volume and then that’s followed again by a decrease in volume again, back down to 30 to 40% leading up to the race. So what that would look like, just so you can visualize this is let’s say I’ve got a race on Sunday and I’m going to start my taper the Sunday before, the Sunday and Monday before I might do barely anything. Just 30 to 40% of what I would normally do. And then Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I would be back up to 50 to 60% of what I would normally do, so still a reduction in volume but not quite as significant and then Friday and Saturday, back down to 30, 40%. So, it’s down, up, down. It results in kind of that pyramid type of look. And then the other thing you want to ensure that you’re doing during the taper is take 48 hours before that race or that event and just take the day completely off. Stay off your feet, keep your feet higher than your head if you can. So spend a lot of time laying down, lounging around, not doing too much because 48 hours is really the time that it takes for soreness and peak calcium leakage, muscle damage, etc. to actually cause you to feel it. So if you’re doing your workouts, your pre-race workouts 48 hours prior to an event then that’s when you’re going to feel it the most, during the event. So what you do is 48 hours before – so Thursday for example for a Saturday race would be completely off. And then what you do is the day before the race you go out, preferably at the same time you’re going to be racing – like 7am-ish for a 7am race start and you go out and you do a little practice, just a little warm-up – for example if you’re doing a triathlon, warm-up swim, warm-up bike, warm-up run with a few race pace efforts thrown in. 30, 60, 90 second race pace efforts thrown in there and then you get off your feet and stay off your feet the rest of the day. But that pyramid taper and those 48 hours off are two of the important things. Other important things to think about, avoid too much fiber for about 48 hours prior to an event. So whereas normally I do eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, I tend to taper those off in favor of slightly less fiber dense carbohydrate sources. So sometimes that means I’m doing a little bit more crackers, a little bit more potatoes, some of the things that are carb dense but not as high in fiber compared to fruits and vegetables. And then the other thing that I’ll focus on doing is way back earlier in the week, I’ll eat a higher protein diet but as I get closer and closer to the race day, I’ll gradually from just a common sense perspective increase carbohydrate intake by about 5 to 10% each day. So whereas at the beginning of the week, I’ll be eating my normal diet which is about 50 to 60% carbohydrate, by the end of the week I’m eating 85, 90% carbohydrate for at least the couple of days before that race. So those are a couple of the general rules that I use no matter what the length of the taper or the type of the event that the taper is intended for. So I hope that’s helpful Chuck. Great question and then Jane also has a question.
Jane asks: Now that we’re in the middle of the summer, I’m finding myself absolutely craving more calories in between meals, especially from “crunchy” foods, like cracker mixes and banana chips. Are these type of foods healthy for snacking?
Ben answers: That’s a great question Jane. Your body crying for calories like this in between meals especially in the summer is usually just a sign of increased physical activity. And it is true that a lot of us are getting out and about a lot more in the summer. So you probably are burning more calories and that may be a sign that you should actually slightly increase your overall food intake. But you got to be careful with the type of things you’re consuming. So you take your banana chips for example and just a couple of handfuls of those dried banana chips can get you up to two entire bananas. The caloric equivalent of two entire bananas – but they’re bananas that have been dipped and drenched in 100 calories of vegetable oil and a lot of times they’re powdered with a fructose sugar if you’re getting them in most commercial grocery stores. Now if you do get your banana chips at a health food store, a lot of times they are raw. They’re unseasoned. They don’t have the fructose added. A lot of them don’t have as much of the oil added, and you can actually get more along the lines of the equivalent of just eating a crunchy banana. But make sure you check out the ingredient label. Because a lot of times those aren’t just bananas. And the packaged cracker mixes or the Trail Mixes that you refer to – a lot of times, even if you’re getting those out of the bulk food section and not pre-packaged, they do have a lot of preservatives added and a lot of extra vegetable oil added. Something common that you’ll see when you turn around the ingredient label on those or when you turn around a packaging and look at the ingredient label, something like canola oil. Which they just put on there to make it a little bit more tasty versus the dry unoiled version. And so I do have some substitutes that I’ll use when I get a craving for something crunchy to avoid some of those pitfalls. One of the things that works out really well is to self-season your own raw almonds. So you go out and get a package of raw almonds or almonds from the bulk food section. You put them in a zip lock bag and just put about not even a teaspoon – just a little bit – like a few shakes of a good high quality sea salt in there and then you can also add just a little bit of chili powder. That’s something that I like to do to actually make my own at home snack mix. They taste really good and at least you know what you’re getting in those almonds. It’s almonds, sea salt and chili powder. And it’s pretty tasty. Another thing that I’ll use is something called jicama and that’s a round vegetable that’s in the produce section of most grocery stores. You peel the skin off usually with something like a potato peeler and you get a nice crunchy vegetable, high water content, real low caloric content. You can use it for dipping in hummus or guacamole or salsa or you can just eat them raw and they’ve got a great crunch for them. Something similar is a radish. I actually have radishes growing out in my garden and right now on my kitchen counter there’s a plate full of sliced radishes with a little bit of sea salt. Nice. Crunchy. A bit of flavor. Yeah you don’t want to overdo your sodium intake but a little bit of salt on a vegetable is a lot better than a commercial packaged Trail Mix that you’re going to buy. So another thing that I’ll use is cucumbers in addition to radishes and jicama. And what actually tastes really good on a cucumber is a higher quality salt. There’s one called Fleur de Sel, real high quality tasty salt. If you’re not into salts, you can go to a website – I believe there’s one called www.seasalt.com. Or just go to the grocery store and look for the higher quality salts. And you can actually get a lot of different types of salts. You can get black volcanic salts, you can get this French sea salt – the Fleur de Sel – it has a real distinct flavor. A lot of times it’s got a great mineral content to it and it’s really tasty on vegetables. Again as long as you don’t overdo salt, it can make something that tastes a little bit blah, a little bit bland actually go down a lot easier. So there is a reason that salt has existed for a long time as a flavor for food. Don’t fear it, don’t do that. If it’s going to increase your blood pressure or cause bloating or cause you to feel like your fingers are sausages or your ankles are really big around, then yeah you ate too much salt. But most of the time, if you’re lightly sprinkling vegetables with a little bit of salt, you’re going to be ok. And then the other thing that’s really good is they have quite a few different crackers on the market now, like crunchy gluten free crackers. Those are a lot better than a wheat thin or the Trisket. But if I look at the ingredient label that I’m looking at here, it’s got organic golden flax seed. Organic hemp meal and that’s just basically a protein component. Organic agave syrup – aka sugar – nutritional yeast, organic apple cider vinegar, organic rosemary and Celtic sea salt. And that brand is Foods Alive Hemp Organic Flax Gluten Free Crackers. A lot healthier, a lot lower in some of those vegetable oils than some of the alternatives that are out there in the market. Granted these crackers are a little bit more expensive but if you think about the fact that five crackers has about 150 calories, it’s not like you’re going to be downing these by the handful anyways. So the fact that they aren’t the cheapest cracker on the market can actually help you a little bit. And then the final thing that I’ll use is just gum. I always have gum around. I know it’s chewy but it actually can satisfy that crunchy craving. Yeah gum does have artificial sweeteners in it, yeah it has preservatives in it but a couple of sticks of gum a day is really going to not do that much damage especially if it’s keeping you from eating 600 calories of banana chips. So hopefully those recommendations help and the other thing I would definitely check out Jane is that book that I wrote. The Holistic Nutrition for Ironman Triathletes. Yeah it was written for endurance athletes, but if you’re somebody who is just trying to get through the day and eat enough calories to keep you alive but also feel good, that book was written specifically for people who want to eat or need to eat a lot of food to satisfy their physical activity but are having a hard time making sure that that food is from healthy sources.
Now the last thing that I wanted to mention during this week’s Q and A is that I do get a lot of questions from listeners who are interested in what online personal training and nutritional consulting is all about. So rather than answer them in this podcast, what I’ve done is I’ve recorded a 90 second long video and uploaded it to the Shownotes for this week’s podcast and it’s basically me telling you about why when you work with me, it’s a heck of a lot different than working with anybody else. I don’t want to be narcissistic, I don’t want to brag but I just want you to watch that video because there is a big difference among the types of trainers and the types of nutrition consultants that are out there. So I’m going to end this self commercial right now and tell you just go watch that video. We’re going to move on to this week’s interviews. The first interview is going to be with Dr. Mather, and then what I’m going to do is just send you straight onto the next interview with Jim Dragon. So both of them have some real great immediately implementable practical material and you’re really going to get a lot out of it, so let’s go ahead and move on to this week’s special topics.
Ben: Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and you remember way back in podcast episode number 13, I had a chiropractic physician Dr. Brian Mather come on the show and introduce us to the sacroiliac joint, which is a place where a lot of chronic repetitive motion athletes like endurance athletes, triathletes, cyclists have a lot of pain and sometimes don’t even know it. Well since that interview quite a bit of research has come to light on the SI joint. Dr. Mather has done quite a bit of studying on the joint and some of the problems that athletes experience so I thought it would be a good idea to have him back on the show to introduce to you some of the latest, greatest information on SI joints. So thanks for coming on the show Dr. Mather.
Dr. Brian Mather: You bet.
Ben: Now tell me a little bit about why this is something that you really don’t hear that much about when it comes to back pain.
Dr. Brian Mather: Well I would say in my opinion, the number one misdiagnosed muscular-skeletal problem is SI joint dysfunction and probably the primary reason that it’s misdiagnosed is the fact that most medical doctors when they go to medical school are taught that the SI joint is a fixated joint and it doesn’t move. We know through research, if you really do your homework that the SI joint absolutely does move. It just doesn’t move very much. There’s a very limited amount of movement that takes place at the SI joint. Research suggests it’s somewhere between 2 and 3 degrees of motion. However if those 2 or 3 degrees of motion are not there, it’s catastrophic for your biomechanics of your lower extremities. So for somebody that’s an endurance athlete, if their biomechanics are goofed up and not working, they’re going to have a lot of problems whether it be injuries to the SI joint or whether it be injuries in their lower extremities. They might have hip pain, they might have knee pain, ankle pain, foot pain. So anywhere down the lower extremity, if they have problems due to repetitive motion it often is traced back to the SI joint as being the culprit. The other major problem we run into with the SI joint is there’s no imaging modality that will tell you you have an SI joint problem. You can MRI it, you can x-ray it, you can do a CT scan and it will look completely normal and the reason it does that is because the primary problem is the SI joint gets locked into place or it gets fixated and when you’re taking a picture of something, it’s not moving anyways, it’s a static picture. So you can’t determine its mobility by an x-ray or an MRI. So that’s one of the challenges, there’s simply no good imaging modality that will tell you, oh you have an SI problem. So this is something that’s diagnosed off of history and exam.
Ben: In any given week, how many athletes do you typically see? Like endurance athletes, runners or cyclists or swimmers?
Dr. Brian Mather: On any given week I would say that I probably see 20 to 30 different endurance athletes in my practice.
Ben: How many of the ones who have low back pain have an SI joint issue?
Dr. Brian Mather: 99.9995%.
Ben: That’s pretty amazing. And if you’re listening to the show, and you have low back pain this is something that you’re going to want to pay a lot of attention to. What I’m wondering is if an MRI can’t diagnose this. Then how do people know?
Dr. Brian Mather: They have to find a physician that understands the SI joint, understands what it’s supposed to do and understands how to diagnose it. That is the challenge – that there are in my opinion, there are very few practitioners out there that really understand the intricacies of this joint. I’ve been doing this for almost 13 years and every year when I sit down and I start studying the latest stuff that’s on the SI joint, I’m continually learning more and more about the joint and what I find is that it’s even more complicated than I thought it was a year ago.
Ben: Now like I mentioned at the beginning of our talk, you’ve learned some things lately that have to do with the sacroiliac joint, what types of things have you picked up on in the past few months that you think would be relevant to an athlete listening in who struggles with SI joint?
Dr. Brian Mather: Well I think the biggest thing that I’ve found by looking at the research that’s out there is that when you pull up the research that’s done in the medical community and you look at the literature, it’s a very confusing and perplexing problem. Most of the research suggests that it’s very difficult to diagnose and it’s very difficult to treat. And I would beg to differ, that the challenge is when you’re doing research on something, you have to try and reproduce it over and over and the SI joint challenges is that it’s a certain number of symptoms of exam finding that are unique to the SI joint, so it’s very multi-factorial and when you have multi-factorial problems, most of the research is challenging because they want to measure one thing and the SI joint really can’t be measured consistently with one thing. So the research – there’s a limited amount of research and it’s not very good. The more I look into understanding the anatomy of the joint, the more I understand the complexities of the joint. It is a joint that has very little movement but it has an intrinsic and an extrinsic ligament system that helps to control it. It has over 40 muscle groups that help to influence it and so many of the repetitive motions that athletes go to continue to irritate that joint. So it is a challenging joint to treat and it’s also a challenging diagnosis to come to.
Ben: If you’re going to treat it, what would you do? What would someone who’s listening to the show expect if they were to for example, walk into your office and say “Doc, I think I’ve got a bad SI joint or stuck SI joint?”
Dr. Brian Mather: I think that the primary treatment for an SI issue really comes from a three-pronged approach. First and foremost the joint has to be manipulated. You have to be able to adjust that joint and restore motion. Ultimately a sacroiliac problem is really the joint has just locked into place and it’s not going through its motion like it’s supposed to, so the primary treatment is to manipulate the joint. It’s challenging to do and I don’t think there’s a lot of people out there that are very good at doing it. But you have to be able to adjust the SI joint. The second approach is the soft tissue work. As we all know, muscles move joints and those muscles have secondary effects when the joint has locked into place. You’ll develop tightness in the muscle, you’ll develop trigger joints or knots in the muscle. You’ll develop tendonitis, you’ll develop different types of soft tissue irritation. And those have to be addressed. Those have to be worked out in order to support that adjustment or that manipulation that’s being done to the joint. And then the third piece and probably the most important piece for long-term improvement so that you’re not having to go to the chiropractor or go to the physical therapist all the time is you really do have to have some strengthening. One of the newer things that I’ve come across in the research is really this idea that your gluteus maximus is the primary mover of hip extension and that’s essentially what the SI joint does. It takes your pelvis or your hip through extension and flexion. And if you have a sacroiliac problem, you’ll have what we call neurologic inhibition. Essentially the gluteus maximus muscle short of shuts off and it doesn’t do its job like it’s supposed to. It’s the equivalent of having weak glutes. Now for an endurance athlete or someone who does triathlon – that sounds kind of funny, because all you guys do is spend time swimming, biking and running and you use your glutes for all those things. It’s not really that you have a true weakness in the glute, but neurologically you don’t have the neural pathway from your brain to the muscle telling it what to do at the right time and telling it to do its job for an extended period of time. So by treating the neurologic inhibition, by strengthening the gluteus maximus and getting it to do its job and building endurance you start to get the long-term improvement to treating the SI joint so that it heals up and you have a limited amount of problems in the future.
Ben: That’s an interesting observation because a lot of times with IT band friction syndrome or problem with the external rotators, those can be linked back to problems in the gluteus medius and that’s another big problem among triathletes. We really won’t get into too much today but the fact that a weak butt muscle could also contribute to weak SI joint or weak gluteus maximus, that’s pretty significant. The difference between the two is gluteus medius, you would want to strengthen that with external rotation, hip opening type of exercises. Gluteus maximus, you primarily encourage your patients to do kickouts, lunges, squats, things of that nature?
Dr. Brian Mather: Ironically what I do is I actually have them do bridges with their gluteus maximus contracted. I find that a lot of it again is not so much a true weakness in the muscle as much as it’s an endurance issue. If we can build the endurance of gluteus maximus so it can maintain a contraction repetitiously over time, that supports your pelvic mechanics. So I have patients pretty much do 5 second bridges with the gluteus maximus in a contracted state and I have them do up to 15 repetitions. But the important piece with that exercise is that once those glutes fatigue out and you can no longer control that contraction, you have to stop the exercise. Most of us like to grind things out and push the envelope and if you do that, you’re re-enforcing your problem because you’re basically requiring your body to recruit other muscles to do the job of the glutes when they have fatigued out. So it’s very important when you’re following this exercise, if your glutes fatigue at repetition number five, then you’re done with that exercise at that particular time. And you over time build it up to doing repetitions of doing up to 15.
Ben: Now if someone is local in the Spokane or Coeur D’Alene area and they’re interested in coming to you to get their SI joint looked at, what’s the best place to actually find you?
Dr. Brian Mather: Well primarily my office is at the Wandermer area. We have on there five days a week and then I also come down to Champions Sports Medicine which is here in the Gonzaga U district and I see patients on Wednesday afternoons. You could call our office or you could get on our website which is www.spokanesportschiro.com and you can get all of the information, address, and phone number to track me down.
Ben: Fantastic. I’ll put a link to that in the Shownotes and the other thing that I wanted to mention, if anyone out there is a subscriber or reader of Triathlete magazine, Dr. Mather and I actually recently finished a pretty comprehensive look at some of the things that he talked about today on this interview as well as some of the strengthening and prevention protocols that you can adopt. Basically a program so to speak for preventing SI joint problems and that’s going to be in the August or September issue of Triathlete magazine. You can check that out. I’ll put a link to Brian’s website on the Shownotes to this podcast and right away, probably one of the best things that you could do is find a physician who understands SI joint, start working on strengthening your glutes and any other last minute practical suggestions for people Brian?
Dr. Brian Mather: I would say that the most practical thing you could do for the SI joint is keep moving and stretch. The more flexible you are, the less effect that SI joint has on you.
Ben: Great advice. Hey thanks for coming on the show.
Dr. Brian Mather: Thank you.
Ben: Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield coming to you again from www.bengreenfieldfitness.com. And you may have remembered that a couple of weeks ago we had a discussion about stress fractures and bone density on the show. And one woman wrote in asking a question about nutrition supplements and (unintelligible) the topic of bone density and I decided to get someone on the other line who is – he’s an (inaudible) on the way that bones can actually rebuild themselves and some of the ways you use nutrition or dietary supplementation to actually help assist with bone density, but as I discovered after looking over a little of the information this gentleman sent to me, quite a bit more in terms of overall health. And so the guy that I have on the other line is named Jim Dragon. And Jim, thanks for coming on the show today.
Jim Dragon: Thank you Ben, I’m delighted to be on your show.
Ben: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you came into this field.
Jim Dragon: Well, Ben, I graduated from college I became a pharmaceutical representative and I stayed with a company for 20 years and in the time frame being with that company, I had then took 2 and a half years of classes of physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, etc. And I took my exams at the medical center so that I could be a more effective certified medical representative. And so I was nicknamed Mr. Molecule in the pharmaceutical world and I’ve always had an interest in how do things work and how does the body heal and I myself had a problem that this product line that we’re going to be talking about today dramatically helped me and actually changed the whole direction of my life. We want to promote this concept. So for really my whole life I’ve been in health care and for the last 14 years I’ve been in more of the wellness side, the natural side, what does nature do naturally.
Ben: Tell me about that concept, what does nature do naturally? What is that based on?
Jim Dragon: Hippocrates said that let food be your medicine and medicine be your food. He said in essence that there are very powerful body changing elements in whole foods and as I look at the whole world of pharmaceuticals versus the whole world of food, I realized that the truth is that the only cure is a natural cure. I’ve not seen abnormal cures and as I started into this whole issue of wellness I found out how the body is healed, if it’s got a chance of healing at all, it really has to do with the proper nutrition, getting the proper elements in the body particularly as a person’s aging a little bit. Tremendous difference can happen to people.
Ben: What kind of compounds have you found to be the building blocks when it comes to what nature does naturally?
Jim Dragon: Well, the first food that we have is milk, all of us. And inside milk, the first milk from our mother, there’s a wonderful basic building block of your body called lactoferrin. It’s a protein and it has a amazing multipurpose. The very first purpose that it has is for the immune system. It actually looks at the immune system and activates it, modulates it, it (inaudible) it if the immune system is out of control, it will bring it back into balance. It’s a wonderful substance that we got a lot of if we were fortunate to drink breast milk and at the early ages of your life, your teens and early 20s, your body produces a very large amount of this lactoferrin substance and because it’s there people have very rapid healing from injuries and your body’s young, your body uses it really well. But now they’re finding that this element can be isolated and purified and made available in a (inaudible) form for people who have bone problems or joint or cartilage problems. So that’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about a whole food element that has a dramatic impact on people’s lives.
Ben: One of the things that we’ve talked quite a bit about before on the show is some of the dangers of dairy and some of the problems with the modern dairy industry when it comes to the presence of hormones and antibiotics and just the impact that it can have on our health overall. Now when you’re talking about milk being one of these building blocks of life, I would absolutely agree with you that mother’s milk is great for an infant. But for adults, is milk really something that they should be drinking large quantities of to maintain health?
Jim Dragon: Well that’s not even the topic here. Where we get our milk from to make this Osteodenx element, this Osteodenx capsule starts in New Zealand where they have organic herds of cattle where there’s no genetic modification and no antibiotics being used so that we have a pristine herd. And the whole country of New Zealand really prides themselves on having the best cows in the world and actually a source of milk proteins. There’s a very large amount of research going on in the colostrums and the milk protein world, New Zealand’s published quite a lot of new papers but I love that it’s coming from that kind of an environment. We’re not talking about a sugar here. In milk you’ll have sugars like lactose that will cause lactose intolerant in people. That’s not what we’re dealing with here at all. This is only this small molecule called lactoferrin. What an amazing discovery it’s led to. As a matter of fact if a person is listening to this and they want to know where can we get more information. Where you can get more information is a website called www.nterminus.com.
Ben: And what will someone find on that website?
Jim Dragon: What they’re going to find is first of all they’re going to find about all the research on lactoferrin and how it’s one of the keys to the aging process in life and how they studied different body systems like the osteo system, the muscular-skeletal system of the body and what research they’ve actually done, what research has actually been published on bringing youth back to the muscular skeletal system. You may have people out here who may have been athletes their whole life and have hurt their knees and their knees are in trouble, and they may be thinking maybe one day I may have to get a knee replacement. I have good news for all of you, you do not – you may never need to get a knee replacement. Wouldn’t it be far better that you get a new young knee again. That’s the purpose of this research. That’s exactly what they’re saying and when it comes to the research, it’s phenomenal.
Ben: Interesting. Now who actually discovered this lactoferrin?
Jim Dragon: Well, I don’t really know the answer to that. I know that the father of lactoferrin, the man who’s the head of research behind it is Dr. Nirain Nidu. And that’s an excellent Google search for anybody. Just type in Nidu and you’ll find amazing papers that have been published, phenomenal stuff. So, he’s really the top expert. He’s written a huge book on this. But the concept is that when you’re 20 years of age, you’re making a lot of lactoferrin and you’re young and you heal great and you’re reproducing like rabbits and you’re just young, everything is great. But when you turn 50, the amount of lactoferrin your own body makes, your own marrow and different glands in your body – the production goes way down. And Dr. Nidu came up with the concept of bioreplenishment. Where you actually replenish the lost amount, the youth amount, the different amount. If you’ve lost 80% of production, by taking one pill of Osteodenx you actually go back to the age of 20 with the amount of production that your body was putting off, and this gives you a youth effect back to you your bone system. Brilliant concept. One thing that I didn’t know until recently was that in the bibliography of all of the work, there was an article from Endocrinology volume 145, in Endocrinology, about stem cells and lactoferrin interacting with stem cells because you know every adult has adult stem cells. And we’ve heard of these things. A lot of people don’t quite know what they are. The stem cell is what they call a multi-potent cell. It’s a cell that can be anything. It can (inaudible) into a bone cell or into a cartilage cell or into a muscle cell or into a pancreas cell. It just needs direction. It needs information to know what it should become and the element lactoferrin – if you’ve got enough molecules of lactoferrin going throughout your body, it gives this information to the stem cell, it’ll look at your bone, it’ll say well wait a minute, these knees – the bone density is not right, the cartilage is not right and it gives this information to the stem cell and actually the stem cell begins producing ondrocites which are cartilage cells and then the stem cells start producing osteoblasts which are baby bone cells and actually bone formation is occurring. That’s what you’ll find at the website in terminus.com when you go to the osteo replenishment section of the website. Very exciting because for the first time ever in history, we’ve been able to document and show even in a pictorial way that old bone can turn young again. And so all of you listening to this show, I want you to know this that if you’re thinking you’re going to need a hip replacement, knee replacement – that’s not the case. And some of you ladies worry about osteoporosis in the future, I want to boldly say that no one ever has to break a hip again because of this new discovery, Osteodenx. It’s a major discovery in health. I really don’t know if there’s ever been a more important discovery because there’s never been proof until now that you can take an old system in the body and give it youth again. That’s why I put it high on the list of all health discoveries.
Ben: And how recent this was made available to the public? This lactoferrin?
Jim Dragon: Well it actually became available to the public about two years ago without any documented proof. And people began to just take it in hopes it would help them with their bone density. And it did, it started working incredibly well, but it wasn’t until this year – February of this year that a paper was published on research and this was in Osteoporosis International. The paper came out about the use of this enriched lactoferrin supplement called Osteodenx and these were women who were post-menopausal women who of course the women after menopause, they end up losing massive amounts of bone. A woman in five years, post-menopausal, can lose as much as 20% of their entire bone mass and yet this study was done in that women group and it was a phenomenal outcome. Never ever have we seen anything like it. There was a natural 43% increase in just 6 months of osteoblast formation in the bone cell formation. The women literally re-established the balance of the bone density in just six months. It was also no side effects, and you think well how could there be a six month medical study with no side effects? Well it wasn’t really a medical study, it was more of just a health study. It was just what does nature do naturally? This milk protein is what we make in our body already. And so we’re just introducing a little more of youth amount of it. So we’re not introducing a new foreign substance to the body, it’s the same thing we’re still making. There’s just not enough of it. So there’s no side effects, but it was an incredible result and I want all the ladies to know and please tell your mother or your grandmother, no one ever has to break a hip again because of this new discovery.
Ben: And where can people find something like lactoferrin or be able to utilize something like this. It is taken in oral form, I’m assuming this isn’t like a topical application?
Jim Dragon: Yes, a capsule. It’s a capsule. There’s actually two products on the market right now made by Japan’s Living Health Care company and one is for the gastrointestinal tract. It’s called Lactoferrin Gold, and its intent is to bring youth to the GI tract and help people with a whole list of problems people have with their gastrointestinal tract. So if that happens to be a problem with some of you on the call today, you might get back to the radio station here and get more information on this – this is a way to actually stop the cramping that you have with your gut or the pain you’ve had and diarrhea. It’s a very amazing. I’ve seen personally people who – I know one guy who is a real bull of a man, incredible power and he started getting this condition that was awful. He had cramps all the time and diarrhea all the time and he couldn’t stop it. He would lose his confidence, but by getting him started on this product, from day one the man started having cramps, it restored his health, restored his energy.
Ben: Now because it’s a dairy derived compound, does it actually have probiotics in it? Do you know?
Jim Dragon: They did… the concept here is that the lactoferrin has an intelligence to it. On the bacterial side, lactoferrin has the ability to sense in your intestinal tract or anywhere in the body, it will sense bacteria that puts off toxins. If there’s a bacteria in the gut like E-coli that’s putting off toxin, lactoferrin is going to – it has like a c-clamp to the molecule, lactoferrin. As the bacteria comes in in the c-clamp area, the lactoferrin detects the toxins being produced and if it is, lactoferrin clamps on it like a mouse trap. And it pulls the iron out of the pathogen. This can even be c-diff. Costrolean difficile. The lactoferrin easily kills it. And takes it out of the body. Another thing that lactoferrin does is it’ll take this iron that it just stole from the bacteria to kill the bacteria… and it’ll transport this iron to the red blood cell and actually help a person with their anemia problem. It actually is helping with anemia just by moving iron around in the body. But I love it that it’s from breast milk on, this element has been created for our good to cause bacterial control but no resistance ever happens to it because it’s a mechanical clamp like a mouse trap. It’s not a chemical that causes – like an antibiotic that causes resistance. So for the first time ever, we now have a substance that is a selective antibiotic and these products are very potent and save a lot of people from misery.
Ben: Interesting.
Jim Dragon: So by doing that, Ben, what I’m saying is that if the E-coli is killed then the bacterial – the lactobacilli – the normal friendly bacteria that makes up your immune system in your gut, they flourish. And they flourish wonderfully and so there’s a restoring of the balance of the proper bacteria in your gut and your immune system is improved. They say that your gut is about 70 to 80% of your entire immune system… originates from the gut and the bacterial balance in your gut system and then about 20% of the immune system comes from the bone marrow. And the making of these products, you actually restore most of your immune system. Very wonderful.
Ben: Interesting. It reminds me of an actual TV show I was watching about a month ago where a chef was actually serving people bone marrow. I think it was a calf femur or something like that but they were literally scooping out the bone marrow and eating it. This sounds like a little more palatable way to actually get some of the components that your bones actually need to regenerate themselves.
Jim Dragon: Yeah. People have eaten a lot of different things to help them, but what you want is this natural substance that has always been involved in youth and building up, strengthening your body and you want this substance to affect your stem cells and that to cause proper growth as needed in the body – there’s an intelligence to all of this and it’s something you can rely on not to hurt you, not to harm you… (inaudible) to get results. And there’s another thing that happens from this too. The Osteodenx capsule has an ingredient in it called angiogenin and that helps with proper blood vessel growth as needed in the body, and (inaudible) complexes are a major form of new patterns now in the natural world and I’m fascinated by that as well. That’s real important in the healing process with people, particularly in sports injuries – if you’re out there and you have sports injuries and you can’t get well, this is what this is for. This is for you. This Osteodenx. And you need to spend 6 months with this product and if you’re in a hurry and you’re worried about your health, I’d take two a day on this product. It’s normally a one a day capsule. I had a degenerative disc disease in my neck. I pulled it when I was in high school since I was pole vaulting and my neck is degenerating with age now and I was getting to the point where I had not seen the back of my neck. Anytime I touched the muscles around the back of my neck it would be sore and my neck would grind as I would turn it, and the x-rays at the chiropractic office looked horrible. I’ve been taking two a day of the Osteodenx when I found out about all of this research and it took about five months – four to five months – and I was out of the woods. And I’m still taking two a day and I love it. I have a young, functioning neck. No more knots and this stuff works. All the science is important but the actual personal result with my neck sold me and made me very confident in talking to other people about this. And I’m telling you out there, guys, some of you may have problems developing but this is the youth protein you want to be taking.
Ben: Wow. Well for those of you who are out there listening, who may have seen the recent post that we had on the website about 18 different ways to help your body heal from injuries and bounce back like wolverine from the x-men, this may be a compound that should have been added into that discussion. I look forward to going to www.nterminus.com and checking out a little bit more information about lactoferrin and the research behind it and some of its applications. And I want to thank you Jim Dragon for coming on the show today and sharing this with us.
Jim Dragon: Well Ben, thank you very much. I hope it’s been a help to your audience.
Ben: It’s been fantastic. Thank you for your time Jim.
Jim Dragon: Same to you.
Ben: Ok, goodbye.
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