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Dr. Joel Gould discusses How Lowering Deuterium Levels Promotes Better Health with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
1:22 Deuterium is heavy hydrogen. There are actually three different forms of hydrogen. Normal hydrogen contains a proton and an electron. Heavy hydrogen or deuterium contains a proton, an electron and a neutron. Tritium contains a proton, an electron, and two neutrons, though this version is rare and radioactive and is often produced in nuclear reactors.
9:04 It is common for elements to have different isotopes resulting from having different numbers of neutrons. Hydrogen is very unusual and this is why deuterium is the rate limiting step in our life. The more deuterium you have, it speeds up how fast your life goes. Deuterium dictates lifespan. If deuterium did not exist in our environment, our bodies technically would be immortal. This is what the ultimate root cause of aging is, according to Dr. Joel Gould.
11:32 Metabolic syndrome is a big focus of poor health and this is really about your mitochondrial function, according to Dr. Gould. The mitochondria resulted from the incorporation of bacteria-like microorganisms known as archaea into our cells via endosymbiosis.
Dr. Joel Gould is a dentist with an interest in Functional Medicine. Dr. Gould graduated from the University of Western Ontario in Canada and practiced dentistry in rural Canada and in Vancouver for 10 years before relocating to Los Angeles. Dr. Gould’s practice is called Modern American Dentistry and he has practices in Manhattan Beach and in Woodland Hills. His website is https://www.modernamericandentistry.com/
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss and also athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting-edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates. And to learn more, check out my website doctorweitz.com. Thanks for joining me and let’s jump into the podcast.
Hello Rational Wellness podcasters. Our topic for today is deuterium. What is deuterium? What is its significance? How does it impact our health, and what should we do about it? Here to speak with us is Dr. Joel Gould. He’s a dentist with an interest in functional medicine, and he calls his new health and wellness paradigm Modern Hunter-Gatherers. Dr. Gould has been practicing dentistry in Canada and the United States for over 30 years. Dr. Gould focuses on snoring, insomnia, and sleep apnea in a sleep restoration program at his practice in Manhattan Beach, California. And Dr. Gould is back for his third appearance on the Rational Wellness Podcast. Joel, thank you so much for joining us again today.
Dr. Gould: Great to be here again. Thank you.
Dr. Weitz: So, what the hell is this deuterium stuff? What is deuterium and why should we care about it?
Dr. Gould: Okay. So, this is one of those things, this is a word it’s called deuterium and it’s named after the Greek word deuteros, for double. So this is, I think, one of the most important topics in all of medicine, because this impacts everything. And this is a hard subject to get your mind around, because even just the word deuterium it’s not on anyone’s vocabulary, it’s not on people’s radar. But over the last couple years, so last time we spoke about this was a couple years ago and it’s funny because my knowledge and understanding of what deuterium is has really grown a lot. What people need to think about is over the last couple of years since you and I spoke, what’s become more and more popular is the understanding of a couple things. Number one, a ketogenic diet or a high fat diet. Number two, intermittent fasting. And number three is the understanding that sugar really is a villain and is bad for us. So, those are the things that have slowly started to make their way up into our consciousness from maybe like a a bigger picture. People are… you can see it on the labels, made with less sugar and then now the last component is we’re having this plant based stuff really creep up. And I definitely call it a green washing. Everybody wants to be healthy and when you call something plant-based, does that make it healthier for you as a person and is that healthier for the planet? And all these things really intersect in our health when it comes to how we make energy in our mitochondria, and that’s the area that we need to look at when we think about what is deuterium. So, for the majority of your people listening they understand molecular biology and how the different chemicals come together, but I want to do a little refresher course on water and say what is water? What are the three forms of water that exist on this planet? Because there’s definitely more than one form of water. And this is where it gets confusing for people, because they’re going to call deuterium a molecule. It’s an atom or an element, all right? So, a molecule is a combination of atoms and water is a great example of a molecule. It’s H2O, it’s two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom. And we know this and our body is a certain percentage of water and the food that we eat, there’s water everywhere. But that water can take on three separate forms. So when I say three separate forms, this shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. Everyone’s heard of heavy water. The discovery of deuterium in the 1930s, 1938, by actually a really cool guy, this scientist-
Dr. Weitz: Has everybody heard of heavy water? I’m not sure a lot of people have heard of it.
Dr. Gould: Well, I think with the Chernobyl mini series, and heavy water is what’s used to make nuclear weapons. It’s what’s used to make uranium that can be used either to fuel power plants or to make bombs. And the process is the enrichment of uranium, and it’s adding extra neutrons. So, we have to pause and say to your audience, do this real quick, everything that you see around us, this table, this computer, is made of three basic subatomic particles, electrons, protons and neutrons. You’ve got electrons, which are a negative charge, protons, which are a positive charge, and neutrons which are neutral. And every single element in the periodic table of elements is a combination of these three subatomic particles. When we take these subatomic particles we get an atom. And where we could break these down, each of these subatomic particles could be broke down further, I don’t really care. Because if you really think about it, Einstein said it best that energy and motion creates mass, and everything is just energy locked into motion. So, if we keep on trying to break down particles, we’re just going to get smaller and smaller bits of energy that are locked into motion somehow. And there’s a certain aspect to the laws of physics that are kind of magical, because certain things exist. Gravity, we can see gravity with the rise and fall of the tides, so we know gravity exists. It’s kind of like why should it exist? That’s one of the laws of physics that happens to exist in this universe.
So, the laws of physics dictate the way the particles come together. We can look at the periodic table of elements, and we look at hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element in the universe. Hydrogen is made up of one electron and one proton. Now every single element on the periodic table has isotopes, and an isotope is a different version of that element. And we know there’s different versions of carbon, there’s different versions of oxygen, but they vary only in the amount of neutrons. So, when you have something like carbon, you’ve heard of carbon dating, you know that we’re using a different version of carbon so we can see the difference between the two atoms, and we can trace this. But the thing with a carbon is that, carbon is 16, I believe, or 14, and carbon dating is done with carbon 16. So, there’s two extra neutrons, it doesn’t really change the properties of the atom itself or the molecules it gets incorporated into. It’s not a big change. So, water is found in our bodies and it’s made of H20, but the hydrogen could be a regular hydrogen, it could be deuterium, which is hydrogen with an extra neutron. And there’s a third form of hydrogen called tritium and that’s radioactive. That’s not naturally found anywhere on this planet, except maybe in nuclear reactors. And that’s something that we don’t have to think about. We only need to think about the two versions of hydrogen that are here on this planet, on the moon, on Mars, and that is hydrogen, regular hydrogen, called protium and its basic main isotope, which is deuterium. And the biggest issue is that when you add an extra neutron to hydrogen you double the weight of that atom. And when we think about our biologic systems, we are carbon based, we’re organic life. Carbon is covered in hydrogen. Because of the way carbon is structured, it has the ability to bond with four different atoms. And those are often just hydrogens and we see so much interaction in our biology through amino acids of how proteins fold, hydrogen bonds. So, if there’s hydrogen, if we replace it with a deuterium it profoundly changes the way anything that it’s incorporated into exists.
So, the three forms of water on this plant are H20, HDO, and D20. So, heavy water is very, very infrequently, if ever really found. If you’re looking in the ocean, it’s going to be .000, it’s a very, very small amount. The majority of water is going to be H20 or HDO, all right? And so wherever there’s more deuterium we kind of want to be interested. So deuterium itself is simply the name of a stable hydrogen isotope, and the reason I say stable is because it’s not radioactive, it’s not emitting radiation, and this is normal. Now, scientists know all about deuterium-
Dr. Weitz: Just out of curiosity. When we look at the other elements, do any of them have neutrons, or is neutrons added or do the versions that contain neutrons just a different… an eccentric version of those elements?
Dr. Gould: Yeah, so you have to think of mother nature as kind of sloppy, and when the Big Bang happened or when any intense explosion happened, the elements that we have, have a variety of different neutrons. I think carbon’s got a lot of different isotopes. So, isotopes are really normal in nature. Very, very normal. It’s just that hydrogen is so unusual, and I think I said this on one of our podcasts is that deuterium is the rate limiting step in our life. And so it’s really interesting, because I still see it this way, is that ultimately when you dig into the science there’s a lot more that’s been aggregated and put together now that you can more easily find on the internet. And when you start to read some of these studies, they’re basically the increase in deuterium speeds up how fast your life goes. So, deuterium dictates lifespan.
So, the more deuterium that you have in the environment and coming into your body, the quicker your life is going to pass. And it starts to become a mind-bending understanding of reality, because biologic systems on this planet were designed around deuterium. Because we can’t get away from this, this is the difference between zero and one. If deuterium did not exist in our environment, our bodies technically would be immortal. This is what the ultimate root cause of aging is. We talk about the theories of aging, the free radical theories. These are all legitimate theories of aging, but you have to understand if you dig deeper one level you’re getting into some of the root cause of why these free radicals are damaging us, and deuterium is there at every turn. And deuterium will change the chemistry of anything it’s incorporated into, because it changes the intensity of the bond, changes the bond angle, it changes some of the properties.
Heavy water and semi-heavy water, they have different boiling points, they have different melting points. And if you have heavy water in an ice cube, if it’s heavier deuterium, it’ll sink to the bottom, it won’t float like regular ice. Pretty interesting stuff. But where this really comes into play is that this is what’s messing up biological systems. So, it’s one of those things that’s extremely important. And ultimately, so here we go, we’re looking at what has come to the surface of everyone’s health these days? Metabolic syndrome, metabolic disease, number one. And what is that? It’s your mitochondrial function. So, all these things are starting to really come together and more and more people are talking about these metabolic diseases. Of course, because we’ve got COVID. Who are the people who have the worst results from COVID? Those are the people with metabolic dysfunction.
Dr. Weitz: Now when we think about metabolic disease, I think a lot of us rather than thinking of mitochondria, we think about blood sugar, we think about insulin resistance, we think about that whole aspect of health.
Dr. Gould: Right. Well, metabolism and metabolomics, the measurement of your health through metabolism, is really all mitochondrial function. And you have to really think about how we’re formed. If we want to really know where this story starts, aside from the beginning of the universe when all life was created, we need to think about how life evolved on this planet from being unicellular to multicellular. What was the big invention? What was it that changed life on this planet from a single cell to be allowing for multicellularity and the growth of more complex life? And that is the introduction of the mitochondria, and the idea of endosymbiosis. So, we know that mitochondrias have a double membrane. We can assume that at some point in time one single cell organism engulfed another and that’s endosymbiosis. And over time the development of the mitochondria, really, this is the universal power source for nature. All nature powers the biologic activity of us and plants through ATP, adenosine triphosphate. This is something we learned about in high school, but you need to understand-
Dr. Weitz: Is it generally thought that the mitochondria is the incorporation of a bacteria into one of our cells?
Dr. Gould: That’s right. Right. So, there’s the chloroplasts, the mitochondria are very similar. And the idea is that it’s the archaea, the archaea was engulfed in and over millions of years the system of generating energy really took root. And it all comes down to how does a mitochondria, whether it’s in you, or your dog, or in a plant, how does mitochondria generate ATP? And ATP is the universal currency of biologic function. How do you do anything? Well, unless there’s osmosis or natural chemical gradients to activate anything, you have to add that phosphate with a high phosphate bond onto anything. And when you add that phosphate onto anything, it changes the actual conformational shape that creates a change in an enzyme, or a protein. And that’s how we do all work. So, it’s so bizarre that we shrink down to the most micro mechanical level of how we produce energy. And a perfect example I want people to think about is you’ve seen motor proteins. You may have heard of dynein and kinesin. These are the two most known. There’s so many different variants. These are the little motor proteins that walk on the cables that are in our bodies, and this is some real-
Dr. Weitz: Can you repeat those?
Dr. Gould: Sure. Dynein and kinesin.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Gould: So these are motor protein enzymes.
Dr. Weitz: Motor protein enzymes.
Dr. Gould: Right. So, there’s all different types of enzymes and these particular enzymes they use ATP per step. And if you Google this, you can see it’s pretty fascinating stuff. You’ll literally see what looks like feet walking on the cytoskeleton cables, and what’s happening is this motor protein is actually attached to a vesicle that’s transporting something of value down to where it needs to go. And the best example I can give you, because this is related to my work in sleep apnea, is the production of acetylcholine. So, to make acetylcholine you have to have an enzyme called choline acetyl transferase. This enzyme in the neurons of your brain is actually made in the soma. So, this enzyme is made in volume in the soma, the body of the neuron, and then it’s attached to a vesicle. And then this little motor protein walks this all the way down to the synapse where that vesicle is offloaded and then the actual enzyme itself goes toward making acetylcholine to be put into vesicles so that those vesicles can move towards the synapse and the nerve can transmit the signal. And if we don’t have enough acetylcholine, we’re not getting proper nerve transmission.
So, this is just one example of one enzyme, choline acetyltransferase, and every step of that motor protein is powered by one molecule of ATP. So, literally a molecule of ATP bonds to this enzyme, causes a conformational change, and this thing takes a step forward. Another ATP comes in and takes another step forward. So every step of this motor motor protein is run by ATP. If you don’t have enough ATP in your body, you’re done for. No nerve can function properly, no immune cell can transcribe the right proteins to make the right things if you don’t have enough ATP. So, every bit of dysfunction that comes along with the human body is mitochondrial. We are making this ATP on a second to second basis. Cyanide poisoning, how long do you die? In 30 seconds, you’re gone. So, without the second by second production of ATP, adenosine triphosphate, no life exists. And this energy form is so universal, just think about like when you go to Europe you have to take your adapter, because you can’t plug stuff in. This is mother nature’s currency of life. In this particular universe the way things are ordered, this is the fuel. It’s made by a rotor that spins at 9,000 RPM inside the inner mitochondrial membrane of your mitochondria. Every cell has thousands of mitochondria and all cells have mitochondria, except for red blood cells.
Why do red cells not have mitochondria? Well, red blood cells are subjected to the highest levels of deuterium in the body, and if red blood cells had mitochondria, they’d get killed. Deuterium is concentrated in the blood, and that gets us into a whole host of questions about why? What are we doing with it? Why is this there? But we go back to the mitochondria, that deuterium damages how this actual rotor that spins inside the inner mitochondrial membrane and it slows the production of energy. Anything that lowers your ATP reduces your health. Anything that increases your ATP improves your health. If you cannot produce ATP, you’re going to become unhealthy, and that’s what metabolic disease is. From powering the sodium potassium pumps in your body, to the active transport enzymes in the blood-brain barrier that are actively taking up vitamins and pumping them into your brain so your brain can function. Any single system without enough energy is going to work poorly. You could have the best systems, you can get the fanciest house in the world, but when you plug it into the power grid, if you’re getting a weird signal, you’re not getting enough energy, all of your appliances are going to start to malfunction. You just won’t necessarily know. You’d be looking at the hardware saying, “Well, my dishwasher didn’t work, or my TV’s got snow on it,” you’re not thinking about the power source coming in, you’re thinking about the specifics.
Dr. Weitz: Now, aren’t there a lot of things that affect the production of energy? We have the electron transport chain, we have coenzyme Q10, we have a whole series of factors that affect energy reduction.
Dr. Gould: We do. But we want to think about deuterium in a completely different way, because when you think about the Krebs cycle, you think about how many enzymatic steps is there to produce ATP? You’ve memorized that at some point in your career and you’ve probably hopefully forgotten it, but so awfully expensive and big series of steps. Each one of those enzymes has been specifically designed to deliver and replace a hydrogen that could be deuterium, with one that your body knows is not deuterium.
This is how all life evolved on this planet. It evolved around deuterium. It evolved around this stable hydrogen isotope that’s a part of our world. And why? What’s so bad about it? Well, it slows life down. When deuterium gets incorporated into enzymes, they slow down their function. But worse than that, you know that enzymes all function based on their shape.
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For those of you who might be interested in getting the Apollo for yourself to help you reset your nervous system, go to apolloneuro.com and use the affiliate code, Weitz10. That’s my last name, WEITZ10. Now, back to the discussion.
Dr. Weitz: I mean you can tell me that deuterium slows down my mitochondrial production of ATP. Is there data that really shows unequivocally that that’s what happens?
Dr. Gould: Yes. Not only that, there’s some good scientific evidence out there and there’s never proof of anything, but I want you to understand something. So, we’re going through all these series of what’s the hot topic now. I think that you’ll agree at this moment in time, industrial seed oils are now the new villain, because everyone’s looking into this massive increase in obesity, chronic disease, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and dementia. These are the modern diseases. When we look at populations that live for a long time, where this whole deuterium stuff originally came from was in Northern Russia, in Siberia, in the Hunza, a population in the high Pakistani mountains, there were populations that were living a very long time. There was a lot of people who were reaching the age of 100, and they went and measured the water, the deuterium content of the waters people were drinking, and it was 90 parts per million. What does that mean? Water that you’re drinking from the tap is 150 parts per million, ocean water is 155 parts per million. Your body is at 130, 135 parts per million, depending on how healthy you are. And so if you drink water that’s low in deuterium, we see this literally translate into living longer and healthier, less cancer. There’s a lot of experiments out there where they gave animals with cancer low levels of deuterium in their water and seeing a decrease in the cancer rates. This is something that is called the kinetic isotope effect. You can Google it. The kinetic isotope effect is the idea that when an enzyme is functioning, if we can slow down the actual reaction rates and times of the enzyme by increasing the deuterium in the water that the enzyme is functioning, because everything in your body is happy in an aqueous solution. So, when you flood your body with deuterium, and that’s sugar and carbs, especially high fructose corn syrup, you’re overwhelmingly water.
Dr. Weitz: And they notice it because they have a lot of water in them, is that why?
Dr. Gould: No, because they’re very high in deuterium. Those are the foods.
Dr. Weitz: Why are sugar and carbs high in deuterium?
Dr. Gould: Well, that’s a great question. So, when did we start eating sugar, carbs and grains? When did that happen?
Dr. Weitz: Well, it depends who you talk to.
Dr. Gould: Right. Farming. So, maybe 10,000, 12,000 years ago we used to eat a diet that was primarily ruminants. And we’re omnivores, so we’ll eat seafood, we’ll eat almost anything, but this is where we’re coming into the big discussion of the plant-based life. And what I’m saying is that all misinformation aside, anything that you put in your body that has a lower level of deuterium is healthier food than with a higher level. If your body is at 130 parts per million and you’re eating foods that are much lower than that, you’re literally allowing your body to get rid of more deuterium because of the osmosis effect. So, deuterium hydrogen exchange at a very reliable rate. In fact, deuterium hydrogen exchange is what all physicists and chemists use to gauge reaction rates. This is something that’s very [crosstalk 00:24:59].
Dr. Weitz: So, we have a glycemic index, right? You can look at a chart and you can see what the blood sugar effect of different foods are. So, I can look at a glycemic index chart and see that the glycemic index of rice is 80. Is there a chart somewhere that will show the level of deuterium in different fruits?
Dr. Gould: So, some of that information is available. You have to understand that there’s only a specific amount of people who are working on this. I have seen very conflicting results, so just what are the lowest deuterium foods on the planet? Beef tallow. I’ve heard it called to 105 parts per million.
Dr. Weitz: You’re talking about beef fat?
Dr. Gould: Yes, beef fat. The fat from beef. And so, again, let’s simplify this. So, you’re seeing this and you’ve been hearing this carnivore diet, when I gave up vegetables, when I gave up carbs, I got so much healthier. What is it that is when people-
Dr. Weitz: Your fellow dentist, Al Danenberg, who is using a carnivore diet as part of his anti-cancer approach, and it seems to be working really well.
Dr. Gould: Why is it anti-cancer? Because carnivore, but it’s got to be grass-fed ruminant meat, so not chicken and pork, they’re mono-gastric. If you feed them high-deuterium foods, they’ll put on extra deuterium.
Dr. Weitz: Monogastric gastric?
Dr. Gould: Mono-gastric, yeah.
Dr. Weitz: What does that mean?
Dr. Gould: So, how many stomachs they have. So, humans evolved eating the meat of ruminants. Started out when we cracked the bones open, this is the food that is the lowest in deuterium, and that’s why we had a terrible crash in our health when we went from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers.
Dr. Weitz: So, you’re not just saying that we ate a percentage of meat, but we ate a percentage of cows?
Dr. Gould: Well, so initially we-
Dr. Weitz: Didn’t it depend upon where we lived?
Dr. Gould: It does, but so ruminants that-
Dr. Weitz: I mean if you were a Greenland Eskimo, you didn’t eat any ruminants?
Dr. Gould: Sure you did. Sure you did.
Dr. Weitz: Are whales, or-
Dr. Gould: No. No, no, no.
Dr. Weitz: … seals are ruminants?
Dr. Gould: So, no, but I’m talking about the evolution of hunter-gatherers with red meat.
Dr. Weitz: Right, but I mean some of us ate red meat, and catching animals was not an easy thing back then either.
Dr. Gould: Right, right. My point is that, ruminants eat green growing grass, and they have multiple chambers in their stomach that will take away the deuterium. The bacteria will use it as their food source, and the meat that gets onto ruminants is extremely low in deuterium. That’s why beef and grass-fed animal fats are so healthy. You feed an animal, so that’s their natural food.
All these ruminants, they evolved on the grasslands, the savannas of Africa, the North American Plains, the buffalo, these are the animals that are eating food, they’re chewing their cud, they’re really filtering all the food, and so that’s why their meat is the healthiest.
Dr. Weitz: Or maybe because they’re high in Omega-3s, because grass is very high in Omega-3?
Dr. Gould: That’s correct as well. So, we’ll go back to the actual mitochondria, and so the rotor that spins is generating energy. And the more deuterium you come in, the slower that energy is generated. So the actual damage… Now there’s an added secret culprit here that I don’t know that you and I have discussed before, I’m sure that you’ve had people on your show talking about glyphosate?
Dr. Weitz: Sure.
Dr. Gould: Okay.so, the problem is I don’t think that you can buy a lot of refined carbohydrate processed foods that aren’t also containing glyphosate, because-
Dr. Weitz: Well, I mean the cow’s probably exposed to glyphosate too. Everybody on the planet is, right?
Dr. Gould: Yes. So, you can’t spray glyphosate on grass, because the grass will die. You could do that, but no one is taking grass and desiccating it with glyphosate and feeding it to a cow. But in any event, it’s the corn grain and soy. Corn specifically, your corn fed animal. Now, it’s still the healthiest food on the planet to eat red meat, even if it’s corn fed, it’s just that if you had a choice it’s better if they’re grass fed. So the glyphosate is going to get into that cow, but less-
Dr. Weitz: So they’re healthier to eat than broccoli?
Dr. Gould: Yeah, I believe so.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Gould: And it depends, it’s much more nutrient dense. For how many months out of the year do people in northern countries… if you’re hunting reindeer and there’s no broccoli growing up at that time of year. So, broccoli and where’s it coming from? Is it organic? Is broccoli healthy? It depends on what you mean by healthy. Are vegetables healthy? In my opinion a lot of them aren’t healthy. You know a lot of vegetables have anti-nutrients, you know the carnivores are saying vegetables are trying to kill you they have all-
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, except there’s more studies showing the health benefits of fruits and vegetables than there are of anything else.
Dr. Gould: Okay. So, I’m going to suggest that the-
Dr. Weitz: And you think the animals want to get killed? They’re not using similar strategies?
Dr. Gould: I’m not sure. I’m not sure what you mean when you say that. Of course animals don’t want to get killed.
Dr. Weitz: Well, I mean there’s this theory that the plants are trying to keep getting eaten so they produce these chemicals.
Dr. Gould: Right. Well, okay, listen, you follow the same circles that I do and you know that we’ve really drilled down on what’s… Okay, so I want to ask you this. So, is sugar the root cause of heart disease? Is that the root cause? Is sugar the root cause of heart disease?
Dr. Weitz: Well, I don’t know that’s the only cause, but I think it is a cause.
Dr. Gould: It is a cause. So, I think we’re both in agreement that health is very multifactorial, and to say one thing causes one thing, or one thing causes everything, scientists don’t think that way. But we’re always looking for a scientific study to take one thing and one variable and say, “This is it.” So, when it gets to some of the studies on how healthy vegetables are, we can go back to the Ancel Keys days who fudged all of his data, saying that all of these people in the blue zones they’re not eating meat, they’re eating all these vegetables. You cannot trust the majority of scientific studies, especially if they were done by the industries that are promoting certain things, and you know that. Right now you can’t trust companies that are basically supposed to be self-policing and there’s a profit to be made. They’re going to work hard to show you the data that’s going to show what they want so you can buy their product.
Dr. Weitz: But there are thousands and thousands and thousands of studies on the health promoting benefits of various phytonutrients, and phytonutrients do not exist in animals. There are plant-based nutrients like curcumin and resveratrol and bioflavonoids, and we go on and on and on.
Dr. Gould: Right. Okay, so from a nutrient density perspective, animal meat, animal fat is one of the healthiest things that you can eat.
Dr. Weitz: But it doesn’t contain any phytonutrients.
Dr. Gould: Well, the animal that ate those foods may have those phytonutrients in them. When you’re eating an animal, you eat what it eats. So, what do people who don’t eat any vegetables throughout most of the year, where are they getting their phytonutrients from? Why aren’t they all dying? And again, these days I don’t know that you can find a population that’s not been tainted by western food, but-
Dr. Weitz: Well, you can say the same thing about vegans, right? Why aren’t vegans dying, because they’re not eating any meat?
Dr. Gould: Well, some of them are, just you know. A raw vegan diet-
Dr. Weitz: I think some of all of us are dying, but-
Dr. Gould: Well, that’s true. So, what I want to make clear is that, and again, this is just my opinion, I’m only bringing forward the scientists work that I discovered, because it’s important. So, the discussion about is this food healthier than food, if we pull 100 people off the street and say, “Is broccoli healthier than red meat?” They’re all going to say broccoli’s healthier. But in my opinion they’re most likely wrong. And then depending on how you’re going to look at the question, well, can you eat only broccoli and survive? Absolutely not. Can you eat only meat and survive? You can. You don’t need any broccoli to live. You do need meat to live. The fats that you can’t make. Now, start to look at the structure of Omega-3 and Omega-6 fats, and no one’s studying the stuff when it’s related to deuterium itself. So, there are some studies that are showing that deuterated PUFAs and MUFAs, because I know that’s the language you want to talk. Everyone wants to blame all these oils, is that there are studies that show that fortification with deuterium actually strengthens the lipids in the cell membrane, so it’s actually good for you. Which I think is really confusing, because we don’t want to do that.
Dr. Weitz: Say that again one more time? Deuterated-
Dr. Gould: Deuterated PUFAs and MUFAs.
Dr. Weitz: So, you’re saying essential fatty acids that have higher levels of deuterium are what?
Dr. Gould: There’s a few studies out there, because I don’t want people to see conflicting evidence here, that they strengthen the actual fat itself, because it makes it harder to oxidize the fat at the double bond. Because that’s what everyone’s talking about, they’re talking about Omega-3, Omega-6, but what I’m saying is let’s go a level deeper to deuterium.
So, if you eat a food that’s low in deuterium, grass-fed beef or grass-fed fat, beef tallow, it’s much lower in deuterium than beans, much lower. So, if you said to somebody, “Are beans healthier than red meat?” and even if you’re taking aside the fact that most beans are loaded with glyphosate depending on where they came from, you’re going to find the deuterium content of beans is going to be higher than red meat. Anything that lowers your deuterium level makes you healthier.
Dr. Weitz: But essentially what you’re saying is, Joel Gould is saying that the healthiest food you can eat is beef fat?
Dr. Gould: Yes. And I stand by that.
Dr. Weitz: You stand by that. Okay.
Dr. Gould: I stand by that, yeah.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Gould: And somebody you may want to want to investigate this with is Dr. Laszlo Boros, and he is one of the foremost experts in this field. And there are a lot of studies to support this, there are some good websites out there. And deuterium depleted water is being incorporated into a lot of different therapies now. And you’re going to see, I know the-
Dr. Weitz: Okay. So, let’s stop for a second.
Dr. Gould: Sure.
Dr. Weitz: What is deuterium depleted water?
Dr. Gould: It’s water that has a lower level of deuterium than tap water. So, it’s water-
Dr. Weitz: How do they do that?
Dr. Gould: So, there’s two ways to have lower levels of deuterium. You can go to a water source that has a lower level of deuterium, or you could do it artificially.
Dr. Weitz: Which waters have the lowest levels of deuterium?
Dr. Gould: All the glacial waters, so the higher up you go and the further north you go, the less deuterium you have. The closer to the tropics that you are and the lower down you are elevation wise, that’s going to have the highest level of deuterium. Even if you go lower, you go to the Sahara desert, the brown water there’s going to be 180 parts per million, whereas the water in glaciers at the top of high mountains is going to be 90 parts per million.
And that’s a very big difference. The amount of deuterium in the environment is tied to solar radiation, latitude, and elevation, and those are the things that affect sunlight as well, and that’s why Vitamin D and deuterium are also related. So, in the areas where you have a lot more deuterium naturally, solar radiation is much higher and it’s in balance. In the areas where there’s very little solar radiation, there’s less deuterium.
And life on this planet evolved over millions of years here, and all of our biologic systems are designed around the chemistry that the molecular biology that makes our bodies work. So, anything that slows down your production of energy is going to decrease your overall health, period. And I stand confidently behind that statement that red meat is the healthiest food on the planet. I didn’t say that eating it with a bun with cheese made from corn fed animals and with french fries fried in industrial seed oils is healthy.
You take that meat, and if that’s all you eat, that is the healthiest. So, that’s why so many people will have an improvement. Why does your brain fog go away? Why do kids stop having seizures when they go on a ketogenic diet? The reason is a ketogenic diet is a deuterium depleted diet. That’s why it works.
Dr. Weitz: But there can be negatives too, right?
Dr. Gould: Of what though? So, think about the foods-
Dr. Weitz: So, let’s say the person goes on a ketogenic diet and their LDL particle number and their small dense LDL goes through the roof, and now they’re at greatly increased risk of atherosclerosis and dying of a heart attack or a stroke.
Dr. Gould: Okay, so what you just said is one of the most important things that anyone could say. You believe that saturated fat is the root cause of atherosclerotic plaque? You believe that?
Dr. Weitz: No, I didn’t say that. You put that in there.
Dr. Gould: Okay. So, hold on.
Dr. Weitz: I’m saying that some people, and I think there’s more than one cause, but I think some people they go, and I can document this for you, there are some people that go on a keto diet, eat a lot of red meat and animal fat, and their unhealthy lipids go way up and they’re increasing, I believe and I think the studies show, they’re increasing their risk of heart disease and stroke.
Dr. Gould: So, what’s the mechanism of action for that? So, saturated fat, when you say saturated fat, and why would beef fat be the lowest in deuterium? Well, specifically these animals are eating green growing grass, which is extremely low in deuterium. So, don’t get me wrong, salads can be very healthy if you’re not talking about the plant toxins that are trying to kill you.
But the animals that are building this up, this is molecular biology, this is quantum physics. So, when you have a hydrogen atom, you have to understand that when you get into the mitochondria, we’re talking about a lot of quantum physics, there’s proton tunneling. So, at a very small scale things get much closer together and we get into the magical world, but what I’m saying is let’s look at the world 15,000 years ago. There wasn’t any processed foods.
You could never go to any grocery store. If you went to a grocery store you’re just going to find meat, you’re going to find seafood, you’re going to find tubers, you’re going to find the things that animals and humans ate on this planet. Humans are successful because we’re omnivores. We really will make a go of whatever we can get our hands on. But we evolved to eat the meat of ruminants that ate green growing grass.
That’s where Vitamin K2 comes in, and so we see that. So, if you’re telling me, if you think you can create a perfect ketogenic diet and control what someone’s eating, that’s not necessarily going to happen. But if you decrease the deuterium load that somebody’s taking in, you’re going to have an improvement in all their metabolic functions. Why is that? Because their deuterium burden has been lowered.
Now, the other component to that I want people to understand is that deuterium doesn’t act alone. It has a villain counterpart and I call them the tag team of terror. It’s glyphosate, and glyphosate and deuterium they run together, because they’re found in all of the high deuterium foods are also the ones with the high levels of glyphosate. Corn, grain and soy, wheat, these products, these are all GMO products.
And when they’re not GMO, they can still desiccate any crops that they want with glyphosate and they don’t have to tell you. It’s odorless, colorless, you can’t see it, you have to be specifically looking for it. What’s the big deal? Those two really work together, because the enzymes that are involved in the electron transport chain in the preparation for your NAD and your FADH to get into the electron transport chain, these enzymes are being profoundly damaged by glyphosate.
And it’s destroying specifically the phosphate bonding portions that activates everything. So, the disruption you’re getting this toxin with an unnatural level. The glyphosate is a toxin, deuterium is natural. You cannot say there’s unnatural deuterium. And the amount of deuterium on this planet is relatively finite. The problem is that we’re putting it all together and amplifying it. The plants, they control their deuterium. And they want to drop, they put it into their fruit.
That’s what makes fruit sweet. They concentrate the deuterium and it drops, the animals eat it and that deuterium gets taken away. A coconut is extremely low in deuterium. The coconut meat itself, it’s a fat. So, coconut oil is one of the healthiest oils on the planet, only second to beef tallow. And the reason is it’s extremely low in deuterium. Coconut water, it’s a great replenishment for your electrolytes and it’s delicious. That’s where the plant’s putting its deuterium, it’s getting rid, it’s making that coconut water so sweet.
So, why does this happen with fats? Fats are, especially saturated fats, their carbon chains boom with hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen, all packed in. Sugar is a circular molecule and there’s more opportunity to replace the hydrogen with deuterium, but the sugar itself that’s created in plants is created specifically as a higher deuterium product. Because plants make different things and there’s a different level of their deuterium.
Deuterium is what basically all life is working around to get rid of it, to deplete and reduce the amount of deuterium, because it messes up everything.
Dr. Weitz: So, if I want to have the most effective anti-aging program, if I want to decrease my risk of chronic diseases, cancer et cetera, what should I eat? What should I take?
Dr. Gould: Number one, intermittent fasting. It’s deuterium depleting. Number two, exercise depletes deuterium. Number three, being in the sun will decrease your deuterium burden. I would eat only, if possible, organic grass-fed ruminant meats. Buffalo-
Dr. Weitz: No chicken, no fish?
Dr. Gould: No. So, fish, yeah. So fish, they’re eating the plankton. There’s low deuterium seafood products as well made by mother nature. The algae is going to be low in deuterium. So, any fish that eat the algae, it’s like an animal eating grass.
Dr. Weitz: Which fish are those?
Dr. Gould: So, fish with scales. This is where we get into a more philosophical religious discussion. The kosher foods are the low deuterium foods. So ruminants, animals that chew their cud, those are low in deuterium. Fish with scales, those are low in deuterium. They basically-
Dr. Weitz: Which fish have scales?
Dr. Gould: Any kosher fish. So, fish with scales are salmon. Fished that aren’t kosher-
Dr. Weitz: They would get scales when they go to temple?
Dr. Gould: Exactly. Exactly. Well, it’s an easy way to… shellfish is in kosher, but it’s quite high in deuterium, because they’re filter feeders. So, it’s going to have possibly the same content as ocean water at 155 parts per million. Now is shellfish unhealthy? I don’t think so. I think the benefit’s there. So, how much deuterium is in Doritos? I don’t know, it’s probably 165 parts per million. So, when it comes down to it you have to understand that the body doesn’t know anything other than the actual biochemical processes that it’s going through. So, it doesn’t matter what the diet you think is healthy, if you have diet A and diet B, if diet A is lower in deuterium, unless there’s some additional toxins and-
Dr. Weitz: Okay, so what’s a low deuterium diet? It has grass-fed red meat, it has some fish.
Dr. Gould: High in fat.
Dr. Weitz: High in fat. Ketogenic. 75% fat diet.
Dr. Gould: Yes. I mean just fish with scales.
Dr. Weitz: Do we eat a lot of vegetables as well, or not?
Dr. Gould: It just depends. Some vegetables are much higher in deuterium than others, and those [crosstalk 00:46:16]-
Dr. Weitz: Which vegetables are high in deuterium?
Dr. Gould: The starchy ones. All the ones that the more delicious the taste is, the higher the starch.
Dr. Weitz: So, don’t eat root vegetables you’re saying?
Dr. Gould: I would limit your root vegetables just depending.
Dr. Weitz: Okay. No grains, no beans?
Dr. Gould: I personally prefer to stay away from those for two reasons. Again, grains… now listen, we live in a world where it’s funny, because when I hear people talking about the different diets, I live in the real world. I’m hyper aware of this and it’s still really hard to make really good choices throughout your day. I’m very specific about what I do. This is really hard stuff.
So, if you gravitate towards unprocessed foods, natural foods, grass-fed organic foods, you’re going to be cutting out a massive amount of the toxins, the glyphosate. But I’ve personally tested some protein powders based on peas. Peas and beans and oats, and I don’t eat oatmeal. You’re going to find that everyone who uses a continuous glucose monitor when they oatmeal they’re like, “Oh my god, my blood sugar went crazy.”
It’s because this is where the glyphosate is. This is when you’re starting to absorb, this is getting incorporated into your enzymes. Your body is switching out those enzymes and the actual enzyme complexes in the electron transport chain. In your mitochondria every 40 minutes you’re getting new, and that’s why intermittent fasting is so powerful if you decrease the deuterium load. You eat a little bit of sugar and fruit all throughout the day, it’s one of the least healthy things you can do. Now people who snack on food all day, they’re literally keeping their body in a state of deuterium overload. It’s not natural. We are only ever designed to eat a ton of food-
Dr. Weitz: How much vegetables and fruit should we eat?
Dr. Gould: I don’t believe that anyone has a particularly great… I have no formula for you. I personally, the vegetables that I like are the broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts. I like the cruciferous vegetables, because they’re high in sulfur. I think they’re also very, very… they have a low glycemic index. They’re also low in deuterium as well. But beans and corn and grain, these are the foods that we cultivated because they’re more convenient. You can feed all these people with this. It’s way harder to have a hunter gatherer’s diet and lifestyle.
Dr. Weitz: How about fruits? Should we be eating fruits? No fruit?
Dr. Gould: So, in my opinion-
Dr. Weitz: Not even berries?
Dr. Gould: So I love berries and I always consider fruit as a treat. So, berries should be eaten in season, in the location that you found them with your clothes off, because that’s how we evolved.
Dr. Weitz: You have to fly to Alaska at a certain time of year, pick your raw berries, and then you can have them for dessert. Otherwise no.
Dr. Gould: Otherwise no. Well, and losten, we’re all choosing-
Dr. Weitz: How about nuts and seeds?
Dr. Gould: So, hold on. So, let’s finish with fruit. So, the more sugary a fruit is. the less healthy it is. The more chance of a fruit being infected with glyphosate from the ground water, the more unhealthy it is. Sugary fruit should be eaten where the sugary fruit is grown to be safe. If you fly a pineapple up to the North Pole and eat a bunch of pineapple, it’s a deuterium overload. Being in the sun will literally decrease the burden. It’ll increase your Vitamin D, it will decrease the viscosity of the water in your mitochondria, so those rotors can spin faster and make up the difference. So, yes, so fruit-
Dr. Weitz: But I can eat the blueberries that grow in my backyard whenever I want.
Dr. Gould: You sure can, and especially if you’re not in California and when you grow blueberries, I grew up in central Canada, raspberries come at the end of the summer guys. There’s different seasons and that’s when you eat all these. You didn’t have them all year round. They’re flying in sugary fruit from the other hemisphere. So, fruit is not healthy. It’s not. It’s delicious and I like it and there’s some really good nutrients in it, but it’s full of sugar.
Dr. Weitz: How about nuts and seeds?
Dr. Gould: Some nuts are much higher deuterium than other nuts. So, I don’t believe drinking almond milk is particularly healthy. So, nuts have a lot of Omega-6 oils.
Dr. Weitz: If I get almond milk from the almond milk tree in the backyard. Just kidding.
Dr. Gould: Right. So, be careful what… exactly.
Dr. Weitz: Which type of milk?
Dr. Gould: So, are nuts healthy? Yeah, nuts are healthy, but not three pounds micro processed that you’re drinking and feeding your kids all day long.
Dr. Weitz: Right. But raw, uncooked, unsalted almonds or-
Dr. Gould: Yes, there you go. And just think about this is, if you’re a hunter-gatherer you still got to shell those nuts, you still got to pick them up. When we go and buy this whole bag of completely… and they’re using chemicals to take those, they’re putting in a big machine. So, when we process food, we make it unnatural and unhealthy.
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Dr. Gould: My favorite discussion is hot dogs. Now if you had asked me 20, 30 years ago… so let me ask you this, are hot dogs healthy? Yes or no?
Dr. Weitz: Generally not.
Dr. Gould: Probably not. What’s that?
Dr. Weitz: No.
Dr. Gould: No, no. It’s ridiculous. So, how could a hot dog be healthy? Now think about this. When I thought hot dogs weren’t healthy-
Dr. Weitz: How many people followed a ketogenic diet and think that means that they should be having bacon every day?
Dr. Gould: Well, I’m going to argue that bacon could be quite healthy if the animal… I’m going to argue that if you get bacon from a pig that is eating acorns in Italy-
Dr. Weitz: What? Who the hell gets bacon from a pig that eats acorns in Italy?
Dr. Gould: Well, you’ve had good prosciutto, right? So, you are what you eat. So, when an animal eats something, especially if it’s monogastric, you eat what they eat. So if you eat a pig and the bacon from a pig that is eating nothing but industrial feed full of corn and full of soy, very high in glyphosate and deuterium, they’re mono gastric, they eat something, it goes on to their tissue, and you eat that.
Take that same pig and compare to one that comes from the wild, a wild boar from Hawaii, completely different meat. So, when it comes to monogastric animals, chicken and pork, I only want to eat organic meat that comes from somewhere I know that they fed the animal organic feeds. When it comes to meat, when I go anywhere, I’ll go to any restaurant anywhere around the world and eat a steak or a hamburger, because the beef is still the safest food on the menu.
It’s still the healthiest food. And I’ll say it again, red meat is the healthiest food you can put into your body. Why? Most nutrient dense, gives you the most of everything. So, back to hot dogs. So, how do they make a hot dog? Well, they take the carcass and they use a high power suction thing and they suction off every last little bit off the bones, and they grind it up and they form it into a hot dog.
Now, it sounds disgusting and I used to think that was the worst thing that you could eat, but if you get a grass-fed organic hotdog done at a regenerative farming location, now you’re honoring the animal by eating a hot dog, because your kids are going to eat that hot dog. And what are you getting? A bunch of collagen. Why? Because they’re suctioning off all the connective tissue and all the gross stuff, and that sludge is being made into a hot dog. So, a hot dog, maybe some main brand one, not so much.
But I love a really well done organic grass-fed hot dog. And if you have kids, how easy is that? I think it’s one of the healthiest foods you could eat. Now, if they’re adding a bunch of junk in there, all bets are off. But if you just took the meat, a hot dog is just fine.
Dr. Weitz: So, Joel Gould’s food pyramids go-
Dr. Gould: Hot dog at the top.
Dr. Weitz: … beef tallow, hot dog and broccoli way at the top of the food that should be eaten the least of, potatoes, or rice, or something.
Dr. Gould: 100%. 100%.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. Gould: And I’ll stand by that.
Dr. Weitz: So, should we drink the deuterium depleted water? And if so, what kind and how much?
Dr. Gould: Well, so that’s a great question. Do I think the average person needs to drink it? No. The water that you drink it can affect you, but the food you eat is much more important. Why? because the water that we make inside our mitochondria oozes out of the mitochondria and is the primary hydration tool for the cell. So, the water that’s getting into the cell is actually being created from the oxidative phosphorylation, because the final electron acceptor is oxygen.
It gets added on two electrons and now you have H2O, and that’s inside the inner mitochondrial membrane. That’s deuterium depleted water. That is the fountain of youth. So, that is the difference, is that when you drink water it’s going to get transported, but the water that you create from the food that you eat is going to ooze out and fill your cells. Now who should drink deuterium depleted water?
Maybe somebody with cancer, maybe somebody who has a severe obesity issue, maybe a multi-millionaire who has nothing better to do with their money. At this moment in time it’s expensive. My prediction, I don’t think things have progressed enough because of the powers that be, this is hard to get your mind around. In a good way you’re kind of challenging and mocking me saying, “Joel, come on, red meat’s the healthiest thing? There’s thousands of studies to support this.” I don’t believe that. I believe that the majority of studies that are supporting this vegan, plant-based lifestyle, are funded by big food, the agrochemical industry, and the massive industry that we have. This is the same industry, and I don’t want to be a conspiracy guy-
Dr. Weitz: By the way, of course the vegans say the same thing, that all the research that you’re looking at for the ketogenic diet et cetera is being funded by the-
Dr. Gould: The what? The beef industry?
Dr. Weitz: … beef industry. Yeah.
Dr. Gould: And they’re right. And to a certain degree there is no scientific study that doesn’t come without bias. It just doesn’t happen. None of our groups that are supposed to be independent are. None of them. Every study is flawed for multiple reasons. So, I’ve looked at the evidence, and again, everyone listening to this is going to be-
Dr. Weitz: So, by the way, how should we measure our deuterium levels? Should we measure them?
Dr. Gould: So I think we should measure them? If you have done everything possible-
Dr. Weitz: Should that be part of our lab work up?
Dr. Gould: Honestly? Absolutely. How easily you deplete deuterium. You have to understand that we’re living in a false paradigm for a million different reasons. The medical doctors are treating diabetes with insulin, metformin, they’re not treating the root cause. Diabetes is staying out of the sun and eating the wrong foods, and that’s something that I’ve said before and you can quote me on it. That’s really what it is. We’re not going to find diabetes in people who are eating one meal a day, nothing but nose to tail animal meat that they caught out on their hunts. That’s just not going to happen. It’s the processed foods and the glyphosate. People are saying, “Oh, it’s insulin resistance.” It’s glyphosate and deuterium poisoning, that’s what it is. This stuff is messing up our bodies. We were never designed to… it is our primary fuel, is fat. It’s not carbohydrates. We store fat, because that’s-
Dr. Weitz: So, how do we measure deuterium? Is there a blood test that we should get?
Dr. Gould: There are blood tests that you can. At this point in time-
Dr. Weitz: Is that the best way to do it?
Dr. Gould: Well, I’m not recommending that. I’m recommending lifestyle changes to lower your deuterium. And then anyone who’s really concerned about their health can contact, yes, you can have your deuterium tested. It’s real. Athletes may have a much lower deuterium level than a-
Dr. Weitz: There’s also a breath test, right?
Dr. Gould: Yes, correct.
Dr. Weitz: So, what’s the best way to measure?
Dr. Gould: I cannot endorse anyone. I’m not currently working with any deuterium, no company, so I can’t tell you that. I don’t think it’s important. But I do want to go back to the idea that, we never finished our talk on saturated fat, cholesterol, and atherosclerotic plaques, and that I don’t believe there’s a single scientific study to accurately show that that buildup of cholesterol is caused by eating organic saturated fats. Not coconut meat, not beef tallow, not red meat, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that you can faithfully trace back the vilification of red meat to causing heart disease. I don’t believe you’ll find that. Heart disease is caused by multiple deficiencies and a lot of it’s mostly… there’s a massive Vitamin D component, but eating the wrong food, staying out of the sun, lack of Vitamin K2, lack of magnesium. There’s major systemic dysfunction in how our biology is working, because our doctors don’t understand how our bodies work. You can’t fix or repair something unless you understand how it works and know why it broke down in the first place. And until people understand what this deuterium does, deuterium dictates lifespan. It tells your body how long you have left to live. That’s the way it works. And this is a quantum physics issue, because of how things resonate. It’s a stereo structural issue, because of how enzymes work. The more deuterium that gets incorporated into your enzymes, the slower the reaction time. The slower the reaction time of your enzymes, the less healthy you are, period. It’s just an equation.
Dr. Weitz: Are there any nutritional supplements that will lower deuterium levels?
Dr. Gould: Not that I’m aware. Aside from Vitamin D, not that I’m aware of. This hasn’t been brought to the forefront in a meaningful way, because it sounds ridiculous, it sounds like crackery, but this is the basement level of health. And you’re going to see the carnivores are going to continue, the vegetarians, vegans, they can do whatever they want. You cannot get rid of that extra neutron unless you know where it is and how to avoid it.
And I’d love it if people could be speaking about this and we could have some real scientific interest in this, that would be great, but the real problem is that you have to think about who funds scientific studies. The people who fund the studies they want the money back, and you can’t trust the larger organizations because they’re corrupted through money and investments.
Medical schools, you really can’t trust those. I want to actually, because I know we’re getting to the end of our time here, but I wanted to say something really bold, is that deuterium is at the core of cancer as well. So, that’s where the connection is between sugar and a ketogenic diet and cancer. Red meat is not the root cause of cancer. In fact, it’s the opposite. If you ate nothing but red meat, you would greatly decrease your cancer incidence, and those studies exist.
I encourage anyone to Google Laszlo Boros and some of the studies that he’s published. It’s not proof, but we have a mechanism of action, we have evidence, we have quantum physics, and we have common sense thinking about who is it in our society that’s getting fat? Who is getting heart disease? These are the people eating the processed foods, and what is it? It’s not just sugar, it’s these toxins coming together that are destroying the mitochondria’s ability to generate energy.
That is what metabolic disease is, period. It’s the metabolism and your metabolism is your mitochondria. Those are the equations that we can’t change and I’ll be excited when more… I’m glad you challenged me, but I’ll stand by every… we can pull this up again and I’m really waiting for more research on Omega-6 and Omega-3 um fats, but I can guarantee you when it comes down to it, there’s going to be some enzymatic issue with deuterium.
And I’m sure almost everything falls to deuterium, really. When the dust clears, deuterium is going to be there as the root cause for a lot of things. So, I don’t mind you giving me a hard time.
Dr. Weitz: So, it’ll be interesting if there was a study that compared people with lower and higher deuterium levels to see if they had a difference in… the latest data on anti-aging is to measure something called a methylation clock. And so this is the latest cutting-edge way to measure your biological aging.
Dr. Weitz: And so it would be interesting to see if people with higher and lower levels of deuterium, how they came out on this methylation time clock.
Dr. Gould: That’d be great. So, I would recommend that, that’s a great question. And like I said, Laszlo Boros, he’s a busy guy, but he’s one of the foremost experts on deuterium. And the other, Robert Slovak, is also highly knowledgeable on this. He’s been involved in this. And these are great questions. The problem is this is new stuff, but we’re seeing this. You can see it, if you give up, if you go on a carnivore diet and you get healthier, how many studies do you need to show you what the root cause is?
Now, I think it’s unlikely that people who get extremely fit and they’d be able to maintain this are going to look back in 20, 30, 40 years and say, “Wow, that was a giant mistake to eat what my ancestors ate.” I don’t think we’re going to say that. Hunter-gatherers didn’t evolve with cutting boards and washing vegetables and soaking them and cutting them up. We didn’t have pea protein, we weren’t supplementing, we weren’t making smoothies. Hunter-gatherers ate what they ate. So, I don’t know believe them.
Dr. Weitz: But on the other hand, we can go around and around on this, but just one more challenge is that hunter-gatherers, depending upon where they lived, ate different fruits. And some ate ruminants and some didn’t.
Dr. Gould: Right. Their biology was tied to that geographic location.
Dr. Weitz: Right. And they ate what they could to get the most calories possible so they could survive another day.
Dr. Gould: Right. But when you say that, that’s painting all hunter-gatherers over a couple hundred thousand years with one stroke. There were hunter-gatherers who probably struggled a lot with their diet. And the hunter-gatherers that lived along the seashore where there was easy pickings, they probably didn’t have those same issues with famines. But keep in mind there was ice ages where I don’t know where all the vegetables came from during the ice ages, but man survived on eating animals and seafood.
Dr. Weitz: !Kung Bushmen basically ate mongongo nuts, because that’s what they had. They gave them a lot of calories.
Dr. Gould: Right. It’s interesting stuff, but I look forward to listen maybe in three or four years we can see how far this paradigm has come. But I think that there’s going to be a lot of pushback, especially in the cancer arena. And to anyone listening to this, cancer is not a genetic disease. It’s not. I know that everyone wants to believe that there’s these gene therapies and that, and they can absolutely work to some degree. But root cause of cancer, sorry guys, it is not a genetic disease-
Dr. Weitz: It’s metabolic.
Dr. Gould: … it’s a metabolic disease. And if you know who Thomas Seyfried-
Dr. Weitz: Yes.
Dr. Gould: Yeah. So, I did a podcast with him, he put it as plain as day. We took the genetically messed up DNA and put it in a fresh cytoplasm and the DNA repaired itself, oh my god. This is really a deuterium issue, sorry. Deuterium will change how DNA and RNA polymerases work, because those enzymes when they’re deuterated, they do not create the same accurate copies of your DNA.
The more deuterium you flood into your body, the quicker you’re going to age. And I stand by that and all the contents of this podcast. And I really appreciate you peppering me with those questions. And to anyone who wants to know more about this, I think this is really going to be the root cause of disease, because it’s obvious to me. You see behind me, I’ve got my posters in that, I’ve got some books. My website is Modern Hunter-gatherers. That’s basically where I want people to go check it out.
They can download my free ebook that shows you this cartoon character, because this is confusing stuff, and this is confusing to scientists. You’re a highly knowledgeable guy and you’re skeptical about this, which is good. This is really good, but skepticism, I’m pretty sure that it will all come out in the wash, but I’m going to stand by that red meat stuff and beef tallow. And there’s some different signaling aspects of the different fats and what is stearic acid, is a signal of the abundance of summer.
There’s lots of meat and everything. So, I think that ultimately it comes down to a lot of different things, but at the very basement level you’re going to find deuterium there every time.
Dr. Weitz: Cool. Thank you Joel.
Dr. Gould: All right, I look forward to it. Thanks a lot.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you listeners for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness podcast. Please take a few minutes and go to Apple Podcast and give us a five star ratings and review. That would really help us so more people can find us in their listing of health podcasts. I’d also like to let everybody know that I now have a few openings for new clients for nutritional consultations. If you’re interested, please call my office in Santa Monica at 310-395-3111. That’s 310-395-3111, and take one of the few openings we have now for a individual consultation for nutrition with Dr. Ben Weitz. Thank you, and see you next week.
