February 17, 2010
Podcast #82 from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2010/02/podcast-episode-82-is-modern-medicine-killing-you-or-your-loved-ones/
Introduction: In this podcast episode: the latest research on strength and conditioning, timing your supplements before exercise, alkaline water, the lemonade diet, women’s hip issues, more on wheat germ, sitting on exercise balls, which low fiber foods to eat before an event and death by modern medicine.
Ben: Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and we have a full podcast episode today, that’s for sure. This is podcast number 82 and I would encourage you to visit the Web site and check out the Shownotes to follow around if you hear stuff that you’re interested in as you listen. We have some of the latest research from the Journal of Strength and conditioning that we’re going to start off with along with some special announcements. We’re going to move on with an interview with Carolyn Dean about her new – pretty controversial book – Death By Modern Medicine as well as another new book that she has, How to Change Your Life With Magnesium, and then we’re going to move on to a really great Listener Q and A. So quite a bit to cover today and real quick before we jump into it, I do know that there has been some issues with the audio – especially people have noted that the audio kind of appears to be different between myself and the person that I’m interviewing. I’ve tried to fix that in the interview with Carolyn Dean. Please stay on top with the audio. I’m going to make sure that this is just perfect for you listening. Especially if you’re swimming or biking or running or doing something while you’re listening. I want to make sure it’s the right volume for you so that you can hear everything. So, just shoot me a quick note – [email protected] or leave a comment if you feel the audio needs any work and other than that, let’s get started.
Judy asks: I have taken your advice on the supplements and ordered quite a few which I like. However I’m hoping you can clarify how and when to take performance supplements you suggest. Specifically, I have race caps supreme, the cordygen vo2, and creatine. They all say best used “45-60 minutes before exercise” and better on an “empty stomach”. How long do I wait to eat, assuming some nutrition is required before an extended period of exercise. Also if I do 2 a days, should they be repeated in the afternoon prior to the next event, lasting approximately an hour or longer. Finally, I have the recover-ease and should that be taken twice as well if there is two exercise periods a day, and should it be taken if you do a recovery drink?
Ben answers: All great questions, and it looks like what Judy has done is kind of put into practice some of the performance supplements that I’ve recommended in the past on the show. And first of all, let’s tackle that first part about timing your supplements prior to exercise. That’s the issue a lot of supplement manufacturers don’t take into account the actual carbohydrate supplementation that you got to take in before you go and do an exercise session, so you have adequate energy levels. And so when it tells you to take a performance supplement 45 to 60 minutes before exercise and to do it on an empty stomach, that’s kind of hard to do and still be able to get your pre-workout meal in, or your pre-workout snack in. So the best case scenario, if you want to get the best of both worlds is you make sure you time your exercise session about two to three hours after you’ve had your meal, like a main meal, and then you take those performance based supplements about 45 minutes after you exercise. So your food has a little bit of over an hour to digest and some of the acidic environment of the stomach has cleared up, just a little bit. And then if you’re hungry right before you exercise, have a little bite of sugar. Like half a piece of fruit or a sports gel or something of that nature. Now if you’re exercising in the morning on an empty stomach, just take your supplements and then go work out and you’ll be fine. Now as far as taking the supplements twice, definitely no. If you’re doing it two a day, I don’t recommend you take the supplements twice. That can get expensive and it can also kind of overload you with too much. I recommend that you take your hardest workout session, take your supplements before that session. Then your question about the Recover-Ease, which is the recovery supplement that I recommend – it’s basically a pill or a capsule. Those are something called protolytic enzymes and branch chain amino acids. Both of those types of supplements, they aren’t calories but they’re good to give your muscles some of the building blocks they need for recovery. Again, I wouldn’t take them twice in a day. What I do is I choose my hardest workout that I have in a day and I take about four to six of those recovery capsules right after that workout. Now if I’m’ drinking a recovery drink, which I don’t do too often, but if I’m drinking a smoothie or something like that that has a protein powder mixed with a carbohydrate like RecoverRite or EnduRox or something of that nature, I actually won’t take those capsules along with that, because a lot of times those compounds already have glutamine or amino acids and a bunch of other stuff in them. But if I’m doing what I usually do and eating some real food after I exercise, having a piece of fruit with some nuts or something like that, I definitely do the recoveries. So it depends whether you’re taking what I would consider to be a fake food powder after exercise. It’s already formulated for recovery. Or if you’re eating real food that you might want to add a little bit of amino acids and building blocks to using something like those recoveries capsules.
Listener Judy also has a follow up question.
Judy asks: What are your thoughts about alkaline water? Specifically, will it lessen the effectiveness of any supplements?
Ben answers: That’s a great question Judy. And the idea behind alkaline water is that the body functions best in a certain PH state. So it can’t be too acidic and it can’t be too alkalinic. Now in most cases, for those of us eating a typical western diet, exercising, getting exposed to pollutants in the environment and essentially just living, our bodies tend to migrate towards what would be called a net acidic state. And the idea behind alkaline water is that the filtration process and the minerals that they add to that type of water makes the water a little bit less acidic. The problem I have with alkaline water is that a lot of it also tends to be very expensive. I happen to have a filter that I put on my kitchen counter and that’s what I use to filter my water. Where did I get the filter? I actually got it from www.greenfieldnaturals.com. Isn’t that cool? A Web site with the same last name as me. www.greenfieldnaturals.com is where I got the water filter. It sits on my kitchen counter, and that’s kind of the economical way that I found to get alkaline water. Any relationship to me? Yes, in full disclosure. Greenfield Naturals is actually owned by my father. So, there you go. You can get an alkaline water filter at www.greenfieldnaturals.com. I don’t get paid for seeing that, but it is all in the family. So when you did ask about the supplements, for those of you listening in – all those supplements, if you want to read more about them or check them out, the place to go is the same place you go for training plans and things of that nature and that’s www.pacificfit.net. Pacific like the ocean, Fit like fitness.net.
Katie asks: My question for you is this: what has been your experience or thoughts with the master cleanse lemonade diet? I did it once a couple of years ago and I remember feeling good when I did it, but I wanted to see what those more informed thought about it. Let me know if you can–I’d like to start it soon if it really is something as beneficial as it says.
Ben answers: Now, the master cleanse diet is a diet that incorporates a cocktail of lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper and water. And you basically drink six to 12 glasses of that through the day. Now of course like any diet, there are all sorts of little details about when you drink water and what times. But essentially the basic idea is that you’re living for a certain period of time off of lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper and pure water. I have a couple of thoughts for you. The first is that when you’re on this diet, your primary source of calories is rich maple syrup. About two tablespoons of that into each of those glasses of water – the six to 12 of them that you drink during the day. So you’re getting 600 to 1200 calories basically of pure sugar in your system. No protein. Cayenne pepper and lemon juice, and you’re basically flushing out your system while giving it just enough sugar that it needs to survive. I’m really not a big fan of doing something like this for a couple of reasons. First is that all that sugar we just talked about in that acidic state, it’s going to do that to your body. If you want to listen to more about what that sugar can do to your body, listen to podcast episode number 80. Suicide by sugar. Where we talk about a lot of the damaging effects of having that much sugar in your diet and rich maple syrup is a source of sugar and it’s a very concentrated source of sugar that you’re eating all day long when you’re on that lemonade diet. Now the other thing is that I’m also not a huge fan of going on a diet like this, that is this drastic unless you’ve tried other more sustainable lifestyle type of measures like switching to eating more vegetables, some of the healthier grains, lean proteins, healthy fats and just changing your diet to a healthy diet that you can sustain for life rather than going on one of these types of cleanse diets that could lead to a little bit more of a yo-yo effect meaning that you strip your body of a bunch of nutrients and completely derive yourself of calories for a few weeks and then you start eating again and you tend to gain back a lot of that weight and it tends to just lead to that yo-yo effect through the year. I’d be real, real careful with the master cleanse diet. If you’ve tried everything and you’re at a weight plateau, you could try a more extreme diet. We’ll actually talk about one that I would recommend if you literally have tried everything and have been unable to lose weight, we’ll talk about that later on in that podcast. But I’m really not a big fan of the master cleanse diet. Primarily because of the high amounts of sugar that you’re dumping into your body day after day. And it’s not something that I put any of my clients on. So great question, Kate. The next question is from Listener Bret. So here we are at the next diet I was talking about.
Bret asks: On your podcast number 51 you mentioned a client you put on HCG diet. Last summer I went on a 45 day cycle of HCG and dropped about 40lbs. As you know I am 11 weeks out from my Ironman and am maintaining weight but I want to drop another 20-30lbs. Would you suggest HCG again? I know that another 20 lbs would really help with my speed and get better results from all the work that I am doing.
Ben answers: Okay, so the idea behind the HCG diet is that’s a hormone that you either inject or inhale via nasal spray. It’s called human chorionic gonadotropin and it actually does enhance the body’s ability to tap into storage fat and use that for energy. It’s something that’s produced by pregnant females in high amounts so that they’re able to mobilize adipose tissue to grow a healthy baby. Both males and females traditionally found a great deal of success with something like the HCG diet because it also suppresses your hunger. So the whole idea is you go on about a 500 to 800 calorie a day diet for right around 45 days with a daily dose of HCG. Now like I said, I’m not a huge fan of drastic measures like this unless you’ve tried everything and found little to no success. But I have overseen several of my clients going through the HCG diet which actually does involve getting a prescription for HCG from a physician as well versus ordering HCG from an international overseas laboratory which I do not recommend. Now, the idea is that if you are taking the very, very few calories that you’re allowed to take in on the HCG diet, and try to train for an Ironman at the same time? You can’t do it. You literally can’t do it. I mean when I oversee this diet for my clients, by day 20 they’re literally banging their head against the wall. Just completely tired. Yeah they lose a lot of weight but it’s not a good experience and they can barely even exercise let alone do any type of job that involves standing and walking and lifting, etc. So it is kind of a tough diet to be on and I would not recommend it while you’re preparing for Ironman. What I would recommend is that you adapt some of the other protocols that I’ve talked about on this show before. Specifically getting up every single morning and on an empty stomach doing anything from 20 up to a maximum of 60 minutes of aerobic exercise. Preferably taking in a little bit of caffeine before you do that, but not any food at all. That can help mobilize the fat tissue a little bit. I recommend you take something like the Thermo Factor or the Lean Factor that I’ve talked about before on the show to help you mobilize a little bit more adipose tissue and bump up the metabolic rate just a little bit more. And of course it should go without saying, caloric control. Not eating for two hours before bed. Really tapering your carbohydrate levels so that most of your carbohydrates are coming in in the morning, not in the afternoon or the evening and focusing more on the healthy proteins and the healthy fats. So if you’ve tried all that and you’re training for Ironman, I guarantee if you’re doing all that you’re going to drop weight and you can easily drop a couple pounds of weight doing something like that. So it would really come down to dialing in your nutrition before you do something as drastic as the HCG diet and if you do the HCG diet you’d probably have to quit the Ironman training.
Anya asks: I have a running question for you. I do some running-nothing crazy-but I can easily run 5 miles and up to 8 miles off the couch without any training. I have been noticing that my knees are bothering me. I have new shoes fitted at running store–so it’s not that. The owner said being a female who has had children, that knee pain is to be expected and he said to do dynamic stretching. Do you agree with this? I really don’t want to stop running. I love little races and half marathons, etc. What do you think?
Ben answers: It’s a great question Anya. Post-partum, there can definitely be a change in the structure of your hips especially if you’ve given birth vaginally. Women who’ve had a C-section tend to have a little bit less of an issue with this. But what happens is that the amount of stretching that occurs when you give birth can actually change anatomically the angle of your hips and it can increase something that’s called the Q angle, which is the angle from hips down to your knees. And when that Q angle increases, every step that you take just puts a little bit of extra torque or extra pressure on your knees and on your ankles. Now what that means for a woman as a runner is if that extra pressure and extra torque is being put on those joints, you have to be able to do something to either make yourself stronger to be able to withstand the extra pressure or essentially do something that will allow you to be able to move a little bit freer with that wider hip angle. The dynamic stretching that your running store recommends would be okay. But it’s not going to do a lot for you. I would recommend that you really focus on core strengthening protocol, that you really focus on strengthening your hips specifically your butt muscles, by doing kickouts and side kickouts, squats and lunges can help out quite a bit as can any type of core exercise done in the standing position, like cable torso twists. Plank position exercises will also help like front planks or side planks, moving in the front plank or side plank position. Like getting into a front plank position and doing toe taps or getting into a side plank position and reaching for the sky over and over again. Those exercises can help your body to be able to be stronger to withstand some of those extra pressures, and then also in your shoes themselves, making sure that you add some over pronation orthotics or get a higher stability running shoe. But ultimately, you are going to be at a higher risk for knee pain post-partum. It’s just one of the joys of having children. So hopefully that helps. Do the core strengthening, the butt strengthening, get some over pronation orthotics and it should help out quite a bit.
Next up, Listener Eric has a follow up question from the interview with Nancy Appleton about Suicide By Sugar, where I said that sugary drinks and diet cokes weren’t a good choice.
Eric asks: What are some drinks you use? I have been doing Stevia and lemon in water and it is really good, but want some additional ideas for a low calorie somewhat sweet drink.
Ben answers: Great question Eric. Now I drink my calories very, very seldom. Basically you’ve got no fiber and a lot of calories in most drinks, and they tend not to satiate your appetite very well. So most people who drink their calories tend to consume too many calories and also tend to consume a lot of calories from sugar. That includes sports drinks, smoothies, anything like that. So I don’t recommend that that form the crux of your diet. Now in terms of low calorie drinks, a couple of things that I’ll use… there’s a product called U Hydration which are basically flavored electrolytes that you can get from a company called Noon. You drop one capsule into some water and my only caution I’ll give you with those is they are about 7% of your daily sodium needs. So if you’re not exercising or sweating, limit yourself to just one or two of those a day. If you’re in a hot environment and moving around a lot, perspiring a lot, you can get away with a little more than that. But it’s called Noon U Hydration. Now, Noon does make another capsule, just called a Noon capsule. They flavor that with sucralose whereas the U Hydration is flavored with Stevia. So I’m a bigger fan of the U Hydration. The other thing that I’ll use is something called Delta-E. It’s more of a low calorie energy drink flavored with a pomegranate extract. It’s about 20 calories. You can find that at www.pacificfit.net. Now that one has a little bit of caffeine in it. It’s a great alternative to an energy drink if you’re hooked on energy drinks or hooked on something that has a lot of caffeine in it but also has artificial sweeteners. The other thing that I’ll use is something that I wrote a blog post about at www.bengreenfieldfitness.com called Solar Energy. And it’s basically a blend of juice powders and anti-oxidants but it’s not that many calories. It’s about 50 calories or so for a couple of scoops of that. Put it into water, it’s really great for recovery, for exercising a lot. You can read the article that I wrote about that, but it’s called Solar Energy. That’s another one that I’ll use, and then finally from a company called Bioletics, they put out this amino acid powder that’s also flavored with Stevia. That’s good as well, but if you use that you want to make sure that you drink it with warm water because the amino acids don’t dissolve very well in water room temp. So that’s what I use. Noon U Hydration, Delta-E, the amino acids from Bioletics and then the Solar Energy that’s put out by Mt. Capra. So, those are some things you can have in your pantry, your cupboard if you’re craving a drink especially at night but you want to go the low calorie route.
Chuck asks: I thought that information about Octacosanol was very interesting and you gave a really good answer to the question. How much wheat germ would I have to eat daily to obtain the suggested benefits? I’ve seen it available in oil extract as well, but would rather just be able to eat it.
Ben answers: Well in those studies that were done on Octacosanol, Chuck, they used about 20 mgs of that as an extract from wheat germ. The recommendations are that you not actually take in more than 20 mgs of the Octacosanol per day. Now, in about one tablespoon of wheat germ, which is right around 14 grams, you would have about a milligram of Octacosanol. So you would have to take 20 table spoons of wheat germ to get the ergogenic dosage of Octacosanol versus just taking Octacosanol in just a capsule or tablet form. That’s the thing with a lot of these supplements, is that you have to take them in their isolated form versus their whole food form to really get the ergogenic effect because if you actually ate that much wheat germ, you would have some other issues. But it’s a good question.
Jen asks: I spend most of my work day sitting at my desk, but as I have learned from you, I know the benefits of standing as much as possible versus sitting. I can’t stand at my desk, but I’ve seen people in the past sit on inflatable exercise balls. Does that actually provide any benefit? My back often hurts and I am hoping it may help this as well. What do you think?
Ben answers: I think it’s a great idea Jen. You tend to incorporate a lot more of your butt muscles, your core muscles, your stability muscles when you’re seated on an exercise ball. You can bounce around a little bit, burn a few extra calories. You can improve your balance. It helps out with your spinal alignment, you’re forced to change position a lot. The only issue is I have also seen people who have some really, really bad posture on stability balls before. So if you’re going to sit on that ball, make sure that you sit upright, that you keep your core tucked and if you find yourself slouching, you correct that. But ultimately, as long as you have good posture, it can help. It can also be a huge crutch though and if you tend to have bad posture naturally, you may want to try an ergogenic chair if all you’re going to be doing is aggravating your poor posture if you sit on a stability ball. But if you’re able to keep your core aligned, I’d definitely do it.
Chris asks: Switching to low-fiber foods a few days before an event is advisable, right? I was just doing a Google search on low-fiber foods, and found a lot of lists that contradict each other. Could you make a short list of foods that actually have low fiber content that are reasonable for an athlete to eat?
Ben answers: It’s a good question Chris and the whole idea is that this is something that I preach to my athletes, is that a couple of days before a race you really taper off the fiber consumption so that you’re not standing in a long line at the port-a-potty or having lots of butterflies over in your stomach right before an event like a triathlon. So, what I recommend that people do is that if they tend to have a big salad with lunch or a big salad with dinner that they eliminate that in favor of something like a brown rice or a potato or a sweet potato, yam. Even thing like carrots and parsnips and beets tend to be good carbohydrate sources that are lower in fiber than some of the things like fruit and oatmeal. So, you can use a lot of those type of root or tuber based carbohydrates and you can even remove the skin from a potato or sweet potato or yam if you want to get even lower fiber from those. Now the nice part about doing that is it kind of at the same time causes you to naturally increase your carbohydrate intake so you almost carbohydrate load as you decrease the fiber consumption. But I would recommend some of those starches that I just mentioned as well as some of the grains that tend to be just a little bit lower in fiber, like brown rice is a perfect example. Quinoa, amaranth, millet – a little bit higher in fiber and oats even higher in fiber. So you just need to make sure that you choose them correctly. So great question Chris.
Finally remember if you have a question, just email [email protected]. I also love those audio questions so you can call toll free 8772099439. You can Skype me at Pacific Fit. Yeah, those are the ways you can get a hold of me. So let’s go ahead and move on to this week’s interview. You’re not going to want to miss this. I know this is a long podcast, but hey split it up if you need to. We’re going to move on to our interview with Dr. Carolyn Dean.
Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and if you visited www.bengreenfieldfitness.com anytime in the past couple of months you may have come across a few articles by an author and physician, Dr. Carolyn Dean. And Dr. Dean is one of the top natural physicians in the nation, if not the world and she really is just a wealth of knowledge on taking charge of your health in a natural manner that actually gives you health for life. That’s why I’m such a big fan of what she does and the articles that she writes. I own, I’ve read all of her books from the Magnesium Miracle to some of the books that you’ll hear about today, and she’s just a wealth of knowledge and it’s going to be a real treat for you to listen in to what we’re going to talk about today and it’s going to be all about medicine and physicians and modern medicine specifically, and some good news for you on that. But also, some shocking and surprising things that you definitely are going to want to know about and listen into. So, Dr. Dean, thank you for coming on the call today.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Thank you Ben, great to be here. I just love what you’re doing and I’m really excited about this interview.
Ben: Fantastic. Well, if people go to www.bengreenfieldfitness.com and do a search there for “magnesium” and specifically “The Magnesium Miracle,” that was the book that I read of Dr. Dean’s that really turned me on to her and inspired me to hunt her down and see if she would be willing to come on the show to talk about that book, and I would recommend that you go back and listen to that interview if you haven’t. But Dr. Dean has a few other books and one specifically that I recently read that simply rocked my world when it comes to the modern medical environment is called Death By Modern Medicine. Dr. Dean, I guess we’ll just start right here. Why did you write a book called Death By Modern Medicine?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: I know. I tell people, Ben, that I wrote that on a bad day. Usually I focus on solutions. I have 19, 20 books and only one of them is the bad stuff, but you have to know what you’re up against. And what was happening with me at that time was I was travelling to Codex, meetings about the regulations on food and dietary supplements. I was in Bonne, Germany when I was sitting at these meetings with my computer there and I just started writing. It started with the article that I researched and wrote for Gary Null called Death By Medicine. He kind of challenged me to find out well how many people are really dying due to medical interventions and allopathic medicine. And actually when you pull all the stats together, and all I did was comb the medical journals and scientific literature and I put together the people who are dying from drug interactions, surgical intervention, bed sores in nursing homes – people don’t realize how many people are dying from bed sores, preventable bed sores. And I came up with three quarters of a million people are dying too early by medical intervention. And that kind of shook things up. That paper which people can find on the Internet, and from there I decided well let’s go into all the various aspects of why this is happening. So that’s how it came about and actually when I was working on the paper, my mother was dying of acute leukemia. Now 80 year old women don’t die of acute leukemia. It’s chronic leukemia. So it seemed to me like her cholesterol medication and high blood pressure medication were doing it. So I was very much immersed in drug side effects when I wrote the paper and then expanded to the book.
Ben: Interesting. Just for the listeners, this book isn’t just about medical errors in hospitals. You’ve got 13 different chapters in the book and each one goes over kind of a different issue when it comes to some of the problems in modern medicine. Can you talk about – I’m not asking you to read your entire book on the air – but can you talk about some of those issues that you bring up that go beyond just the idea of hospital errors and some of the issues that could be leading to death by modern medicine?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes. The chapter titles… they all start with “Death by…” and beyond the death by medical doctors… they don’t set out to kill you. They really don’t. I think doctors aren’t there trying to hurt people. They want to help, but they really have been systematically brainwashed. I can personally say that because I went to medical school in the mid 70s. We were told that everything that we needed to know to be a doctor, we would learn in medical school and if we didn’t know about a treatment or something that came our way then it was quackery. That’s it. If you go to your doctor and say, well what about this vitamin treatment or what about magnesium? They’ll check their brain and say well I didn’t learn that in medical school so it must be quackery. And they’ll just say well it’s probably bullshit. And that’s the answer you’ll get and you’ll feel kind of like well, where do I go? We were told that chiropractic, herbalism, nutrition, all that was bullshit. We were told that breastfeeding was bullshit. So all those things are in the minds of doctors, and so they will be – they’re culpably responsible I think because they’re not looking beyond what they learned in medical school. So there is this Death by Modern Medical Doctors. Then I go on to Death by Drug Companies, and we all can see on the Internet now the research, the scientific research is all being bought up by drug companies. They’ll do a study and if it doesn’t show that their drug is good, they’ll pull the study and it won’t be published. Death by Health Care Bureaucracy. The HMOs have been killing people since they began because they’ll put a limit on what can be covered by insurance. Death by Media. This is a whole world that your listeners might be interested in. Because we don’t just have physical bodies anymore. We have a chip body because we’re hooked into the Internet. We have a TV body. We’re sitting in front of the TV, and our whole being is being molded by this TV to the point… you know TV dinners. We’re eating snacks. We’ve gone to drinking everything because we don’t want to spill stuff on our computer. How much are we changed by our media in very simple and subtle ways. And so we have these other bodies, so when someone comes to me and they say… I do telephone consultations so on the phone they’ll tell me well I’m drinking 10 cups of coffee a day and I’m doing this… I’m saying well your chip body has decided that your physical body doesn’t need to have good nutrition. And that’s just not the case. We’re not all robots and synthetic body parts yet. So we have to take care of our physical body and that’s what you and I do. But I remind people that you’re also a chip body and a TV body and you have to balance the three. The Death by Propaganda, chapter 5, man… we’ve been propagandized since day one. But we take the… well it’s Madison Avenue. It’s the TV ads, the radio ads, newspaper ads that are our education for how we live our lives and how we grab for things and we want all the material. How many stories have we heard about people who just describe themselves through their work ethic, etc. and to the point where they die. This is where… when we talk about magnesium, athletes die when they push themselves because they get into heart arrhythmias because they don’t have enough magnesium. That’s why I’m so excited to be talking to you and your group of athletes because there are things that their bodies need. The overwork and stress of someone in business, men and women, puts them to the point where they get into deficiencies, diseases… nutrition. So the propaganda leads us to these physical body problems.
Ben: Now what type of propaganda? Can you give me an example of propaganda that you talk about in the book?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Well, that would be as simple as the drug ads on television now. They only came in… they were legislated about 20 years ago now. Everybody just takes it for granted. You’re sitting in front of a television program and you’ll be faced with about five or six ads throughout the one hour program telling you how sick you are, how depressed you are, how your legs won’t stop moving, how you’re sad and how your cholesterol is up. But oh, wait a minute we have the drug for you and then they’ll show someone running through a field, someone who is crippled with arthritis suddenly they’re floating through a beautiful, beautiful scene and there’s the drug for you. I know one of my sisters is a doctor and she said when those drug ads started, she started having to beat people away who came in and said I want to try this drug. And even though the disclaimer in the end which legally they have to say, they’ll speed talk it and it’ll say you’re going to have headaches, vision problems, bloating, diarrhea and constipation and sudden death if you take this. They’ll even have the death word in the disclaimer but people just – they’re hypnotized by the image that they want to be, and they want it to be a drug. I know one of our mutual friends, Dr. Roby Mitchell, he states very uncategorically that you can’t medicate yourself. There are symptoms you behave yourself into. That’s what (audio break). They had a lifestyle which they know… when people talk to me on the phone, it’s like well you know I know all this coffee isn’t good for me and I’m just eating doughnuts in the morning and all these sugars. They know. But it’s almost like some sort of human nature that we wait until we have real symptoms and we scare ourselves enough before we do something to change our behavior.
Ben: Even when you’re talking about those symptoms… in your chapter in the book on Death by Drug Companies, I noticed towards the end of that chapter, you even talk about how those symptoms are described sometimes using euphemisms to describe some of the drug side effects. Like a couple of the examples you use is that suicidal tendencies can be labeled as nausea and aggression verging on homicidal behavior in children can be described as hostile behavior. Just the list of side effects you list in that chapter alone, they’re mind blowing but yeah, then you go on to the propaganda chapter and it’s interesting to see just like you say, the person skipping through the field of flowers while at the same time the voice in the background is talking about the multitude of side effects that that drug has. But all we see is the person skipping happily through the flowers.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Right. And about the side effects, it’s interesting that they don’t even have drug side effects listed as a cause of death when they’re developing statistics for people’s reasons for dying. So if someone’s on a dozen medications and they have a heart problem and finally the medications do them in, well you’ll never hear that. It’ll just be well they died of heart disease or it’ll be buried within the known categories. So if you don’t have a category for side effects than no one’s going to list them. So it’s very deceptive, the whole business. Because people say to me, well how can there be this many deaths and we don’t hear about it and it’s been written about. The doctor that started talking about it equivalent to a jumbo death falling every day – the number of people that are dying, and you know, we go crazy if one plane falls out of the sky. So the propaganda goes to the point of just covering up this incredible surge of – this incredible epidemic of people who are being affected negatively by medicine, by the drugs and by the procedures too. You look at the body scanners that they’re trying to put into the airports and someone finally starts saying, well you know that’s – we’re radiating ourselves – and oh no, it’s only a little amount. Do you go to your dentist and they say, well before you see the dentist you have to have your x-rays done. No, I do not have to have my x-rays done before I even get looked at by the dentist. Oh well it’s digital, there’s no radiation. Yes, there is radiation in digital photography of your teeth. It may be less but it’s still radiation. Or the total body cat scans that they’re trying to do now. Oh well we can find anything in the body now. Well that’s equivalent to about 100 chest x-rays. So the procedures that doctors are relying on instead of their own common sense, their own fingers, their own intellect – they’re saying well go get all these tests and then come to see me. I won’t even bother looking at you or looking in your eyes. I’ll look down at the desk and look at the results of all these tests and say well everything’s normal. You’re fine.
Ben: Yeah, that’s something that I noticed in the sixth chapter that comes after the Death by Propaganda in the Death by Modern Drugs and Procedures – you give a pretty comprehensive list of both the costs and the deaths associated with most of the procedures that are being done and it’s simply amazing, not only how many procedures people are actually undergoing but the cost and the deaths associated with them.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes. And even in the news, we’ll hear about people going in for a routine – a recent politician had a routine laparoscopy for gall bladder. And they just put a little incision – an inch or two – they go in, they scoop out the gall bladder, pull it out, they tie it up. But oops while they were there, they nicked the intestines and you can’t see that through a one or two inch incision. So, it’s become so routinized. It’s such a routine procedure that people just – maybe they’re just not paying attention anymore. And then the Death by Modern Science, chapter 7. I mentioned at the outset where you’ve got drug companies that are controlling science. You can’t get money anymore from the government or from universities. The money dried up about 15 years ago. So that most research now is conducted by drug companies. And it’s on their drugs and it is (inaudible) that their drugs are good for you or beneficial and what also happened in amongst that is as we noticed that the placebo effect was actually – had higher ratings than drug effects… let me explain. Placebo is plausibly something that they laughed at when I was in medical school. Oh placebo, that’s where someone takes a sugar pill and they get better. Isn’t that stupid. Isn’t that crazy? Well actually it’s not. It shows you your healing potential. If you think positively about a drug or a treatment, then you are going to have a much better outcome than someone who is motivated by the “no-cebo” effect which is feeling you’re going to have a negative outcome. So what happened, because the placebo was looking better in drug clinical trials than drugs – especially anti-depressants – they couldn’t show that a drug was a better than a sugar pill. Then they just started matching drug to drug. They do a clinical trial where they’d say, well we’re going to use this anti-depressant and that anti-depressant and show which is better. And so when you’re studying two negative things, you’re just saying which is less negative than the other. So, science – they’ve manipulated it so much that people haven’t got a clue what’s going on until five or six even 10 years after a drug is out on the market, then they start looking at it like they did Vioxx and they say “Oh my gosh, this arthritis drug that was such a miracle and could have you dancing across the fields, all of a sudden it’s causing heart problems.” That’s part of the suppression of the inflammation, the normal inflammation in the body. The normal immune system in the body. It’s partly associated with the way it affects magnesium and the requirement for more magnesium and then the upshot is it was causing heart attacks and heart disease.
Ben: That was recently in the news – the placebo effect of anti-depressants. I was reading that recently. That most anti-depressant medications really aren’t even that effective.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes, I did notice that. It’s interesting. You know a lot of the things that I wrote about that and this book I did in 2005, a lot of things I’m noticing coming to the fore where when people took the first drug side effects study where they showed that 106,000 people die annually directly from drug side effects and 2.5 million are adversely affected. They may die later but they’re not even counted. When that first study came out of – I think it was the University of Toronto in Canada – they set about trying to disprove it, and all they came up with was more and more incidences of side effects and deaths. They really couldn’t disprove it. It was a very real research finding. I don’t know if anything has changed. The drug companies keep making drugs although in the book I talk about a report from a journalist in Canada who went to a pharmaceutical meeting. She somehow got her way in there and they said, well you know we’re having so many problems with drugs and people don’t like our drugs anymore. We’ll have to start pushing vaccines. And this was back in the 2004, I believe. And what we have got? Just wall to wall vaccines, now.
Ben: Yeah, you have in the next chapter Death by Cancer. You start off by saying “Why fix a system that’s earning billions?” What do you mean by that?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Well cancer is an industry. It’s another form actually of propaganda, because every time you do a report on television or talk about a new treatment for cancer, you’re actually advertising cancer, because now we’re at the stage where people are being told, well you know everybody is susceptible and everything is a possible reason for cancer. Instead of… I guess at the bottom where I talk about Death by Lifestyle, at the bottom of chapter 13, I mean… all the culmination of all the information and all the negative information, all the worries that people have is that you’re getting sick by this worry factor but you know, just taking yourself in hand could start to undo this. It’s lifestyle, nutrition and attitude. So the attitude we’re developing when we see all this information on our TV body box, all this information about cancer is that “Oh I wonder when I’m going to get it.” It’s no longer, oh that’s just not in my universe. You instill this little nodule of fear in the minds of everybody when you keep on talking about cancer. The race for breast cancer, the run for this, the marathon for that. We keep propagandizing cancer. And it is a huge industry, where you have the companies that are creating obviously carcinogenic chemicals and drugs… you have those same companies that are making anti-cancer drugs. And sponsoring the marathons for cancer. The only cancer establishments that I support are ones that try to undo the chemical industry – the way chemicals are thrown into rivers or the way they’re not regulated. You have to stop the source of some of these problems rather than wait until everybody develops cancer, give them all sorts of drugs, keep them alive for longer on their drugs so you can make more money off them.
Ben: That’s something you talk about in the chapter right after the Death by Cancer, the Death by Modern Chemicals. Primarily, I noticed that you talked about herbicides and pesticides and taking into account the environment. But in terms of that chapter, are there other things that people need to be aware of when it comes to the presence of chemicals in our life?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Well, I’ve been around this world for – I’m just turning 61 – so I’ve been around studying nutrition since my late teens, and I’m getting to the point where I’m developing the attitude of look at the anomalies in health. Look at the people who – they’re in the midst of (hormones) and chemicals and eating badly, and they still thrive. I’d like to look at those situations and it is a matter of attitude. It’s like, not in my universe. And if something is going wrong in the world, it doesn’t have to happen to me. We look at the people during the whole swine flu fiasco – where people were absolutely going crazy. Oh I’m going to die of the swine flu or I’m going to do the vaccination that’s going to be forced on me. For some people, they did badly with those, but so many people – they weren’t even affected by it. It does begin with attitude and then when you have your attitude in line, you either know you’re going to be healthy and take care of yourself or you know, I’m doomed and I’m going to die. So, you just develop your attitude and then you go from there. People with a good attitude – they will start exercising more. They will start looking at their nutrition and find simple things to help them. But they won’t do it so much out of fear. You see, what’s happening is we’re – we have medicalized natural medicine to the point where we’re just trying to scare people into taking care of their health. That’s as false a premise as it is in medicine. When I mentioned Roby’s statement about you can’t medicate yourself out of symptoms you behave yourself into… it’s the same with supplements. You can’t take supplements and expect them to undo your behavior. And that’s what I saw happening in integrative medical practices where people would go to integrative medical doctors, pay huge sums of money… I’ve had clients come to me on 80 supplement pills a day from natural medicine doctors and say, well you know the doctor said I needed this and this and this. It’s just completely undoes natural medicine.
Ben: Yeah, and they’re a reason that they’re called supplements right? They’re supposed to supplement a healthy lifestyle and healthy diet, they’re not supposed to be your lifestyle or your diet.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Right. So, we get into this propaganda aspect in the whole natural medicine world as well. With the – so with modern chemicals, I just tell people use your common sense. And work on ways where you can be away from the chemicals. Don’t buy the chemicals. The power of the purse is huge. That’s why the (inaudible) now is being so commercialized, it’s making billions. So it’s… I wrote the book so that people could understand the problem. Not to put the fear into them, so that they then were immobilized from doing anything because a lot of people have reached that stage. There’s just too much negative information, I can’t take it all in. I give up. You can’t.
Ben: Yeah, and that’s one of the reasons that I like that you’ve got some other books as well. Because when I read this book, there are obviously a lot of things that concern me. Everything from the Future Health Now program that you have to that – you have an entire encyclopedia… I don’t think a lot of people know this, but you have an encyclopedia that’s got a natural cure – not a natural cure but kind of a natural type of home remedy type of treatment for tons of different conditions and issues that – it works well with this book. I know you’re not just scaring people. You’re providing some solutions as well. Now we had just had recently on the show, Dr. Nancy Appleton who wrote the book Suicide By Sugar and who you talk about actually in your book in Death By Medicine. You also talk about in that chapter, chapter 10 about artificial sweeteners and things like aspartame. Do you consider those to be as big a problem as sugar?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Absolutely. It’s a chemical combination of two amino acids which are neurotransmitters and within a food, those amino acids are all balanced out and everything but when they’re taken individually like that in aspartame, they can just go straight to the brain and affect it. Beyond the two amino acids, there’s methanol which is with alcohol, which again if it’s within a food methanol is neutralized and the body takes care of it but as straight with alcohol then that can go straight to your brain and your eyes. The blindness from drinking alcohol from a still is well known and often they get a methyl alcohol when they’re making alcohol… I don’t know what exactly happens, but it’s something that goes very wrong when you’re trying to make alcohol. So with the aspartame, I think it’s like one of these additive situations where oh we’ve discovered something sweet by accident in the lab and maybe we can make a sweetener out of this, and oh well people they’ll drink a Coke or a soda or something once or twice a week. It should be fine. There shouldn’t be any side effects with that. Well what’s happened is now soda is cheaper than water. So you’ve got people drinking liters of this stuff. And really getting toxic levels of methanol in their body from drinking these sodas and being propagandized to think that they’re doing a diet product because that’s how they’re labeled and it’s good for their health. So it’s false advertising and it’s being shown in studies that aren’t done by the manufacturers – the independent studies are all showing great side effects with aspartame. The FDA had on its substance reports for side effects, 92 different side effects for aspartame and then apparently they closed the docket and stopped taking reports. So we’ve got a real big problem there. And I’ve done this. I’ve spoken to schools with kids telling them about the dangers of sugar, and they said well we’ll just drink diet and then I have to go into the whole aspartame situation.
Ben: And you talk about some of the other artificial sweeteners in there too. I don’t want people to think that just aspartame is the problem. Pretty comprehensive chapter in there on artificial sweeteners and the sugars. And then you go on to kind of a related topic, Death By Addiction. Now what do you mean when you’re talking about that in that chapter 11?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Well, it does flow from the sugar chapter. The late Abram Hoffer who actually forwarded the book… one of the forwards was by this incredible orthomolecular physician, Dr. Abram Hoffer. He said that sugar is as addictive as cocaine. And that’s kind of how it begins in our lives, that we’re given treats as our reward. Family occasions, you always have the cake. You have ice cream. It goes to the point where you become addicted to sugar, people can have all the symptoms of hypoglycemia or what the relationship of taking in something that has ten teaspoons of sugar into a body that at any one time… and I heard you on a podcast say this, and I worked out the numbers too Ben… that at any one time you only have one or two teaspoons of sugar in your whole bloodstream. Then you take a soda or… a milkshake has about 22 teaspoons of sugar. So you take something like that in and your body’s just going to go crazy. All the alarms go off. The insulin is flooding your system to try to drive this down and usually it’s so much insulin that the sugar dissipates so quickly that your blood sugar then drops, so (audio break). Your adrenal glands don’t want you to fall over and faint, so they’ll put out some adrenalin. Number one, to get your glycogen liver stores of glucose – get them into the bloodstream quick so you don’t faint. And number two, that adrenaline also pumps to your heart because the message is that you’re in an emergency situation. So the pumping of your heart and sweaty palms makes you think you have a panic attack. Hypoglycemic episodes like this are the prime reason why people get diagnosed with panic attacks and put on the tranquilizers – the Xanax and whatever – and I can tell you, it’s just close to hell for people trying to wean off and withdraw from these Xanax and the anti-anxiety drugs. If you look at the drug labeling, it says it’s for short term use only. When they first came out, it was for a period of two weeks. I’ve been trying to find… looking at the labeling and all that. Now it just says “for short term use.” People are using these things for years. They get panic attacks and not being told that… well it could be your blood sugar. But in that Magnesium Miracle book, how people get into this (inaudible) sugar and also if they have a magnesium deficiency on top of that, they’ve got kind of trigger happy adrenal glands, they’ve got muscle twitches, they’ve got cramping, they’ve got insomnia, headaches, all sorts of symptoms. So you go to your doctor and say, “I think I had a panic attack and yes I have all these other symptoms.” They’re going to put you on an anti-anxiety drug and an anti-depressant.
Ben: Now, in your final two chapters, you talk about denial and you talk about lifestyle. What are some of the considerations that people need to have as they come to a realization of some of the things that you talk about earlier in the book?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: I guess there’s a lot to be said for denial. I go back and forth on denial. It’s like how much do we deny about our own symptoms so that we don’t get caught into them? Because as soon as you start saying “Oh my heart just skipped a beat. Oh maybe I have heart problem,” because you’ve just seen a drug ad for heart disease or you’ve read an article about heart disease so you run to your doctor and the doctor is not there to give you hope or to tell you about nutrition or lifestyle. The doctor’s job is to diagnose and treat disease symptoms. Diagnose your symptoms into a disease and treat them with a drug. That’s the focus. And you’ll know that because the doctor will either do a bunch of tests and say “You’re perfectly fine. Go home.” And not give you any other advice, not tell you to take magnesium for your heart or join a fitness club or enter a lifestyle program. Their job is done. And you’re still left with your concerns and your worries, or the doctor will… if you keep complaining, the doctor will search and search until they find something. I get people who tell me, “Well I had this back pain so I had the bone density test and they told me that my discs were desiccating.” Now that’s a term that’s used after the age of 40, you start losing a little moisture from your discs. You can. If you’re the average person. Someone who’s well hydrated and exercising and stretching and everything – that doesn’t have to happen to them. But it’s kind of an average thing that happens. So, in order to give someone kind of a reason for why they’ve had all these tests and to tell them they found something – they’ll say, “Oh you have some mild desiccation.” Now sometimes that will (audio break) over a cliff. “Oh my gosh, my discs are drying out.” And their back pain will get worse because they think they have a physical problem. So you see what I’m saying? All this testing, you have to have some reason for the testing so the doctors are going to give you some information that makes you think oh you know I got my money’s worth because I found something out, but then you’re left with well, what do I do with it? Oh it’s okay, a lot of people have it. So you have this incredible situation where doctors are in the position with the technology, they can find out all kinds of information and have nothing to offer you to do about it, because they will wait until you’re really sick to give you a whole bunch of drugs. Actually, that’s not true. That’s a statement I used to make about 10 years ago, Ben. Because now, you have doctors that actually think they should give you statin drugs for cholesterol to prevent you getting cholesterol. Or if your blood pressure is just a tiny bit off, they’ll start giving you blood pressure medications because they believe the studies that have been manipulated to make you think that people who are on cholesterol drugs and blood pressure drugs live longer. And when you delve into those studies deeply, you find all kinds of anomalies in their reasoning. And we’ve got a situation now where people are put on medications. You’ll be under stress. If someone’s died in the family and your blood pressure goes up with the stress – when you’re under stress, you lose more magnesium, your blood vessels and your muscles get tight. So you develop higher blood pressure. And you’re put on blood pressure medication and it’s like the end for a lot of people. Oh I have high blood pressure, it’s only going to get worse. Now it will get worse because as you take a – usually the first line is the diuretic. As you take a diuretic for your blood pressure, then what happens is you drain out your magnesium. You actually worsen your problem of muscle tension and blood vessels being tighter. You come back a month later to renew your prescription, your blood pressure is worse. Oh my goodness, I knew this was going to happen. So you’re put on another blood pressure medication. That usually happens three times. You end up on three different medications and then at the three month mark, they redo your blood test – oh all of a sudden, your cholesterol is up. That’s because you’re (audio break) and losing more and more magnesium. And it’s a direct consequence that your cholesterol will go up and then maybe at that visit or the next, they’ll also do your blood glucose and invariably when your magnesium becomes more and more deficient with all the blood pressure drugs, your blood sugar starts going up and you’re put on an anti-diabetic medication. So that’s the scenario I see over and over and over.
Ben: Wow. Now, in Death By Lifestyle, your final chapter in this book, you write as an edit from a paper that you wrote for the Nutrition Institute of America entitled Modern Medicine Gets a Failing Grade, Birth of the Lifestyle Approach. What is the lifestyle approach?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: It’s basically eating – well I was going to say properly, but nobody knows what that means anymore. But eating well, exercising and having a good attitude that you develop by either your exercise and eating programs start taking the worry out of your mind… because when you start feeling better then it just perpetuates your ability to improve your lifestyle. It’s why I give most of my clients – I begin them with magnesium in some form. Because since you start relaxing your muscles with magnesium and sleeping better during the night and having more energy during the day then you can start tackling things. Your reserves start improving, your adrenal glands settle down, your brain neurotransmitters work better. So when people start improving their lifestyle and how they feel, take a few natural… and I recommend food based vitamins and angstromized minerals. We can’t really metabolize synthetic vitamins. I don’t know why we thought we could. But I saw the whole progression because I’ve been in this natural medicine field since the 70s, I saw doctors in natural medicine… if 10 mgs B Complex didn’t work, then it would be up to 50, and oh 50 twice a day. If that didn’t work, they’d start doing IV vitamins. All of the time kind of pushing and pushing and pushing. All synthetic because what happens is when they did research – it was epidemiologically… when they started doing studies on geographic locations where people were getting more of this food or less of that – when they looked at the areas where people weren’t having any synthetic products, any synthetic foods – they found health improvement and they isolated well what food would that be? So they looked at brown rice, and oh people who eat a lot of brown rice, they’re healthier. So then they’d isolate, well what’s in the brown rice? So maybe it’s the thiamine, this certain B vitamin. And then it narrowed down to where well if this is thiamine… we’ll just make it synthetically and give it to people and they’ll benefit, so chemistry took over (immunology) and became for no good reason became the sine que non of supplementation. And that’s been going on for 40 years.
Ben: So you don’t recommend synthetic vitamins at all? That would include like a Kirkland brand multivitamin or something of that nature?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: That’s correct. If the little bracket at the end of the thiamine – thiamine is a chemical – if the B1 bracket, rice powder or rice polish lists (inaudible) yeast as the source or the ones that I’m looking at now are the food sources grown in saccharomyces cerevisiae. It’s a yeast but when you grow these yeasts in a nutrient broth of a food that’s high in a certain vitamin, you grow it in citrus, then the little organisms start attaching the citrus (audio break) within them and then at the end of the process, they take these (audio break) get rid of their cell wall so there’s nothing left that yeasty and then you have a vitamin C complex product. Because ascorbic acid is just one of the 12 chemicals in the vitamin C complex and somehow we’ve been led to believe that if you take ascorbic acid, you’re getting vitamin C.
Ben: Interesting. Now I’m sure you go into all this and more when you talk to people in your consulting. Is all that what your Future Health Now program is? Because I’ve seen that on your Web site and linked to from your articles. If I were to come to you and do that program, do you walk me through a lot of these concepts that you’re talking about?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes. It’s my way of after 40 years in natural medicine… it’s giving you the nutrition and the lifestyle parameters so you can take responsibility for your own health. It’s not a lot about supplements although I have The Seven Pillars of Health which Roby Mitchell calls The Seven Pillows of Health. Pillows to support you. He’s so cute. Vitalizing food, number one. Personal care. That’s like hygiene aspects. Energizing exercises, super nutrients. Number four, living space. Like the electromagnetic smog in your living space, how to deal with that. Sleep, very important and mind over matter. So, all those aspects I cover but what it is is it’s so people can take responsibility for their health. It’s so important to get past the brainwashing by the TV medicine, where everyone thinks everything that has to do with health is life threatening and it makes people think they have no possibility of knowing how their body works. And at this point, I think there’s no physical education in schools and no education on health and nutrition. Actually as a sidebar, they tried to do sex education, but it just taught young kids how to have sex. So we have to get people back to taking their power for their own health. Take back their power. It’s not a matter of me… I don’t empower people. I think that’s a misnomer. You just give people the tools because it’s up to them, you are your own God. You are your own doctor. You are in charge of your own universe. So people take responsibility for their health. It’s like well, should I be encouraged to drink 12 cups of coffee a day? And then go to my doctor and expect my doctor to cure me? So, when I started studying nutrition and lifestyle in the late 60s, it was just about what you ate and how you exercised and how you lived your life. In the past 30 to 40 years, it’s become about what supplements you take. All those TV ads for Resveratrol and the doctors who get involved to promote these supplements… I saw a recent Resveratrol study, and they’re saying well actually maybe it doesn’t work so well. What will happen is you’ll get a study on maybe a pure form of the substance and it will look just fantastic in the mice. They do the animal trials. We don’t have clinical trials of Resveratrol on 5000 people to say what it does for their lifespan. Come on, we’re extrapolating from studies on small organisms in petri dishes or in lab rats. And this extrapolation then gets caught up in the whole industry of supplements and people think “Oh wow, I can undo 50 years of horrible lifestyle, horrible diet, no natural supplements and take Resveratrol and I’ll be fine.” Now, the placebo effect may kick in and people will give the most brilliant testimonials about how they were benefited. Well that’s just the placebo effect in maybe 80% of cases. It’s not the Resveratrol. So you’ll get this drive of all the placebo effect for the first few months or a year of a supplement and then it’ll just fall of the bandwidth.
Ben: I think that’s interesting, how you talk about empowering people. That’s something, with me as a triathlon coach and as a fitness trainer and nutritionist, that’s what I do now primarily is I’ve progressed from having people rely on me and meet with me three or four, five times a week to basically I just write out plans for people and they can consult me maybe once a month, and people are far more successful because they’re actually being empowered with the knowledge and learning to take charge for themselves rather than rely on somebody or some supplement. Now, a couple of other things I wanted to ask you about, I mentioned your Future Health Now encyclopedia as something I would consider as a really good companion, I guess you could say, to something like Death By Modern Medicine in terms of again, empowering people with knowledge. But you also have another new book called How To Change Your Life With Magnesium. Now, how is that book different than The Magnesium Miracle?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Right. Well, The Magnesium Miracle was the second edition of the book that I wrote in about 2000. The second edition, I wrote in 2006, published early 2007. So it’s already about four years old and since writing that second edition, I found out about angstrom minerals. And these are minerals that are 100% absorbed at the cellular level. So, I put that in the book because I get countless questions about what forms of magnesium to take. A lot of people take oral magnesium, they can get the laxative effect and that’s not good because if you’re having more than three bowel movements a day and they’re loose then they could be pulling out nutrients. So I go into all the forms of magnesium, how to take them, when to take them, why to take them and then I put in dozens of miracle stories and answer dozens of questions about taking magnesium. So it’s a very kind of consumer oriented… someone who wants to consume magnesium, this is what it’s all about. Whereas with the book you can go and find about research and references, go into all the conditions that magnesium treats and it’s a great read, that book as well. But people don’t have a lot of time so this is about a quarter of the size of the book, and just speaking of the miracle stories, I even have your story in there Ben.
Ben: Nice. Nice. Yeah, I’ve had just a little bit of success you could say by incorporating magnesium into my sports performance protocol. Actually my athletes are pretty crazy about it as well.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: I know it’s fantastic. I’d like to get a hold of Apollo Anton Ono and ask him if he’s taking magnesium because it really does enhance performance, because if you get a muscle cramp and you’re sidelined from your event, then how much worse could that be? Whereas muscle cramping, lactic acid buildup, the fatiguing of your muscles – all that can be undone, can be treated by magnesium and prevented by magnesium.
Ben: Yeah. So you have this book Death By Modern Medicine that we just talked quite a bit about, but we kind of didn’t even scratch the surface of what’s in the book. It’s about 250 pages long and it is an excellent read. I own the electronic version of that which I read on my computer, actually on the plane and then I’ve also got the electronic version of How To Change Your Life With Magnesium, as well as the Future Health Now encyclopedia which I keep on my computer. Now, I’m going to put a link to all those books in the Shownotes to this podcast. This is podcast number 82 for those of you listening in and I would highly recommend that you read those. We’re talking about literally just a few bucks to get your hands on this wealth of information and knowledge from Dr. Dean and I would say that these are a must-have in terms of an addition to your library when it comes to performance and health. And in addition to that, I’m also going to put a link to Dr. Dean’s Future Health Now program that you heard me talking about, because I think that’s worth it for a lot of you who are wanting to take charge of your health. Again, like Dr. Dean said, not have her take charge of your health, but have her empower you with everything that you need to know to make these changes for you or for your family. Does that about cover it, Dr. Dean?
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Yes, what it is with Future Health Now is you can search the Internet for – I think there’s about 150 different topics (audio break) on a weekly basis. You can find a lot of information on the Internet, but a lot of it is attached to a product or some (audio break) or another, I don’t have any (inaudible). I’m not pushing raw or heavy meat or… but I talk… and I give people ways of understanding how they can incorporate, know what’s good for them, know whether or not yeast is good for you, it’s about experimenting with your body and I lay it out step by step so that you can find out what’s good for you. Not what a certain percentage of the population thinks. Because you can be propagandized into anything, but I’d rather people figure out what’s good for them and not what’s good for a health guru that’s imposing it on the population.
Ben: Right, alright. Well we’ve gone on for quite some time here. I’m sure this is going to be a long podcast, but for those of you listening in, go to the Shownotes for podcast number 82 to learn more about everything that you just heard and read Death By Modern Medicine. I highly recommend it. Dr. Dean, thank you for coming on the call today.
Dr. Carolyn Dean: Oh, thank you very much Ben. It’s a lot of fun, and as I said I think you’re helping a lot of people and it’s just wonderful. Thank you.
Ben: Alright, well thanks. Have a wonderful week.
For personal nutrition, fitness or triathlon consulting, supplements, books or DVD’s from Ben Greenfield, please visit Pacific Elite Fitness at http://www.pacificfit.net
“And even though the disclaimer in the end which legally they have to say, they’ll speed talk it and it’ll say you’re going to have headaches, vision problems, bloating, diarrhea and constipation and sudden death if you take this”
I don’t agree, read: http://drcarolyndean.com/2014/06/body-black-belt-…
Friendly, Johana