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Dr. Darin Ingels discusses Lyme Disease at the Functional Medicine Discussion Group meeting on June 27, 2024 with moderator Dr. Ben Weitz.  

[If you enjoy this podcast, please give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, so more people will find The Rational Wellness Podcast. Also check out the video version on my WeitzChiro YouTube page.] 

Podcast Highlights

Dr. Darin Ingels is a Naturopathic Doctor with a license both in California and Connecticut, and his office is in Irvine, Califonia. His practice focuses on treating patients with Lyme disease,  Dr. Ingels has published three books, the most recent is The Lyme Solution: A 5-part Plan to Fight the Inflammatory Autoimmune Response and Beat Lyme Disease. His website is DarinIngelsND.com.  His office is in Laguna Hills and his phone is 949.551.8751.

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.  Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111.

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, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me. And let’s jump into the podcast.

Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining our functional medicine discussion group meeting. I’m Dr. Ben Weitz. So we hope you’ll join some of our future meetings as well. We usually meet on the fourth Thursday of the month.

July 25th, Alan Barrier is going to speak about the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis.

August 22nd, it will be about Integrative Cardiology with Dr. Cynthia Fink. 

September 26th, Dr. Mark Pimentel will be talking about SIBO as the cause of IBS and all his exciting new research.

I encourage everybody to participate and ask questions. If you’re not aware, we have a closed Facebook page, the Functional Medicine Discussion Group of Santa Monica.  So please join that and we continue the discussion. We post a lot of articles and, uh, this is going to be recorded and included in my weekly Rational Wellness podcast. So please check that out. And if you enjoy listening to it, please give me a Ratings and Review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

So we’re so grateful that Dr. Darin Ingels has made the trek all the way from Irvine to speak to us about Lyme disease. Darin is one of the leading experts in the country on Lyme disease. He wrote a spectacular book called The Lyme Solution and his practice is focused on treating Lyme disease and I’ll let Darin introduce himself.

Dr. Ingels:  So, my own story, if you don’t know, is I was a Lyme patient. So nothing like getting an education on Lyme disease than getting the disease yourself.  I got bit by a tick in 2002, living about 30 minutes from Lyme, Connecticut.  I got bit two weeks before my own practice, so, uh, the timing of it couldn’t have been worse. And it really was the perfect storm. And I think, you know, as we kind of dig into Lyme, we’ll realize that it’s a common infection. I think there’s a lot of people that have that exposure, uh, but it is an opportunistic infection.  And it’s not just about killing the bug, it’s about all the other things we do to help heal the body, helping the terrain, the most inhospitable place for the organism. So, it took me about three years to go through my cascade of all the different Lyme treatments, and we’ll see this is a very common scenario with people dealing with Lyme disease, as often they cycle through treatment after treatment, often it’s targeted towards killing the organism, but we’ll see as we go through this that, there’s a lot more to it.

So, let’s dive in. So just a little background on Lyme disease, if you don’t know, it’s a bacterial infection primarily caused by the Borrelia species. Borrelia burgdorferi is the most common strain in North America. It’s transmitted primarily through the bite of a deer tick, the Ixodes tick in particular.  And this all started back in the late 1970s in Lyme, Connecticut. There was a group of children that started having this mysterious arthritic stuff. And juvenile rheumatoid arthritis is actually a very rare condition. But there were a lot of kids and there were a handful of adults that had all these arthritic things.  They didn’t really know what was going on. Nobody recalled getting, a rash or any kind of tick bite. And, uh, they started sending, uh, samples to a guy named Willie Bergdorfer. He was a researcher for the NIH. And his expertise actually is Rickettsial Illness, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. So they thought this was some weird Rickettsial Illness, and it took them several years, but they finally found this little critter under a microscope.  So the rule is, if you discover the bug, you get to name it after yourself. That’s why it’s Borrelia burgdorferi. It’s named after Dr. Willie Bergdorfer. And Dr. Bergdorfer just passed away not too long ago.

So there are at least five subspecies of Borrelia burgdorferi, over 100 strains in the U. S. and more than 300 strains worldwide.  This is important because when we talk about testing, testing looks at one strain. So often we’re missing the boat of all the potential Borrelia species that are out there that can cause infection, but there are a lot of them. We don’t even know how many strains are clinically relevant. Our best guess is it’s probably somewhere around 8, 8 to 10, uh, but nonetheless there are a lot out there.  Most of the cases in the United States come mostly from New England, the Central, Midwest. We’ll see in a little bit though that the East and West coasts of the United States are endemic for Lyme. And yes, even here in California, there is a ton of Lyme disease. The CDC says California is the fifth fastest growing state for Lyme disease.  I’ve had doctors in California tell patients there’s no Lyme disease. I had one doctor in San Diego tell my patient there’s no deer in California, I’m like, dude you need to get outside.  There’s deer everywhere. But deer, by the way, aren’t even the primary vector for carrying ticks. I mean, every furry little creature, mice, rats, squirrels, raccoons, all of them can carry these ticks.  So we get about 476,000 new cases of Lyme every year in the United States, more than 90,000 cases in Europe, and again, that’s new cases. We don’t really know how many new cases there are because of the reporting criteria.

Most people who have Lyme do not meet the CDC criteria for a positive Lyme test.  We’ll talk more about testing, but we’ll find that the testing was never designed to be diagnostic. The testing was designed as a surveillance tool for people who had known Lyme disease. So we know that whatever number’s out there, it’s probably much bigger than we think it is.  So, you can do the math, that’s almost half a million new cases a year.  We literally have millions and millions of people in North America living with Lyme disease. So, I mentioned transmissions primarily through the deer tick bite. There is very weak evidence that other biting insects might transmit Lyme. There’s a few small studies out of Europe with baby mosquitoes.  We actually have a colleague who is a medical doctor. His son is an entomologist in Florida. They actually were looking for Lyme in mosquitoes in Florida, and they found no evidence of Lyme in mosquitoes. So, I think that’s very low. However, other biting insects can transmit other diseases. They can transmit Bartonella and Babesia and Rickettsia.  We know Bartonella can be transmitted through fleas, it can be transmitted through lice. So, even though these biting insects may not carry Lyme per se, they can carry other tick borne illness and the symptoms look very, very similar.

We’ve now got ample evidence there is vertical transmission from mom to baby.  So if mom is pregnant, she can transmit it to her baby. And vertical transmission usually results in stillbirth, birth defects or these children start up with severe developmental delays. They miss all the early milestones and so forth. So, I’ve had parents come in where they got a nine year old child who’s having issues and mom found out she had Lyme.  She’s like, oh, I gave my baby Lyme. I’m like, well, if it started happening at seven years old, probably not. You know, if you live in the same area, child could have had their own ticks, but it’d be unlikely that was related to mom passing. With sexual transmission of the Lyme, we don’t really know, to be honest.  As far as I can tell, there’s only one study. Ray Stricker, who’s a researcher up in San Francisco, he did a study where he looked at the semen of men, looked at the vaginal secretions of women, he found it was like below 20 percent had evidence of Borrelia, but we don’t know if it actually gets transmitted.  Vaginal pH is very acidic, most organisms don’t thrive very well. So, Richard Horowitz, who’s really the Lyme guru of the country.  He’ll stand on stage and say his wife’s had Lyme forever, he’s like, we have unprotected sex, I’m not worried. So it’s possible, probably not probable, but we always err on the side of caution.  If one partner has Lyme, we do recommend barrier protection, just in case, because we don’t really know the truth. There’s other strains in the United States, Burrelia Burgdoferi, most of the East Coast, but we see it here on the West Coast. Borrelia miyamotoi has been an emerging strain that we see a lot more, about half the cases out in California are Borrelia miyamotoi.  There’s Borrelia mayonii, Borrelia lonestarii, Borrelia hermcii, which is causing what we call relapsing fever. In Europe, Borrelia afzalii and gorinii are the primary strains. So, it’s good to understand for a patient, where have they been in the world? Because, they may not have acquired Lyme here, they could have. We’ve been backpacking through Switzerland, and they got a bug while they were there, so it’s good to ask about foreign travel.  Uh, interestingly, Australia says there’s no Lyme in Australia, I guess ticks can’t swim that far. But, we’ve had a few Australian patients we’ve worked with that actually test CDC positive, so again, I don’t know what to tell you. I think they’re looking for the wrong thing, because they’re testing for Borrelia burgdorferi.

You’re looking for the North American strain in Australia, and you’re just, like, you’re probably looking for the wrong thing, would be my guess. This is just a map of how Lyme has changed over the years. Uh, the one on the left there is 2001, just kind of showing where we get, this is CDC positive Lyme. You can see, fast forward to 2022, that green is getting bigger and spreading.  Again, this is grossly unreported, but this is the CDC statistic and you can see that it’s getting worse. And again, if we start looking at where ticks and other infections are found, I’m sorry, no, this one’s on ticks. And you can see that the spread of ticks is starting to get worse and worse. They’re finding that the migration of birds has changed with climate change, and birds basically become the carrier of the tick hops on the birds.

Bird flies from Vermont to North Dakota, lands, and now there’s a new tick population in North Dakota. Uh, there’s been at least almost a 48 percent increase since 1996 of Lyme.  59 percent of U.S. counties have established populations, almost half of the country has established populations of these ticks.  And again, we’re seeing a merging of these regions where there used to be gaps, they’re now getting closer and closer together. So again, people who live in Texas and Colorado places, they say, well, there’s really not a lot of Lyme. Again, it’s been reported in all 50 states. In addition to that, we’re seeing all these other illnesses, Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Anaplasmosis, Ehrlichiosis, Babesiosis Tularemia, Bartonella, again, all these are getting worse and worse.

Now this is just a map of Europe just to show again that they’re, pretty much almost all of Western Europe is endemic for Lyme disease, so, uh, they get it there too. If you’ve never seen a picture of a blacklegged tick, this is it. This is, there’s Ixodes scapularis, which is primarily on the east coast.  There’s Ixodes pacificus. I can’t tell the difference between the two, they look the same to me, but apparently there is a difference. These are the different species of the ticks, and these ticks are tiny. So a fully engorged tick is a large poppy seed. A non engorged tick is a very [00:12:00] small poppy seed.  So a lot of people, even if they had a tick on them, they would very easily think it was a fleck of dirt, uh, something else. And, uh, I can remember, after I had Lyme disease, I remember standing on my porch in Connecticut, and I saw a little fleck of dirt on my arm, and I went to flick it, and it started moving.  Dirt doesn’t move. Uh, and I realized, oh shoot, it’s another deer tick. I was already on treatment, so I’m kind of like, ha ha, screw you, you’re already dead. Uh, yeah, these things are very hard to find, and they like the warm, moist areas of your body. They like the back of your knees, armpit, behind your ears, hairline.  So again, a lot of people who get bit, even if they had a bullseye rash, they might not even see it. Because it does go to those areas we don’t usually check for. It is the number one spreading vector borne epidemic in the world. It can affect any organ, any tissue, and as a result of that, we see a very large variety of symptoms.

There’s over a hundred different symptoms of Lyme disease. Borrelia is also a true shape shifter. It has the ability to change its shape and it is one of the, as far as I know, I think it is the slowest replicating bacteria out there. So if you consider most bacteria in your body replicate every 10 to 20 minutes, Lyme replicates every 1 to 16 days.  And if you get tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, your doctor will put you on 3 hardcore antibiotics for 9 to 12 months. Why? TB is a very slow growing organism. It replicates every 15 to 20 hours. So why are we willing to give people hardcore antibiotics for a year for TB and we’re willing to give people two weeks of doxycycline for Lyme disease?  It makes zero biological sense. But this is, this is what they do. Uh, the nature that Borrelia can change its shape also makes it a true evader of the immune system. So the immune system’s effort to get rid of the bug, and I’ll show you a picture in a second how that looks, but this ability to get into different tissues, change its shape, it really is able to hide the immune system, which just makes it more difficult to kill.

So if you look at the picture here, you can see over there on the left, you know, that’s a spirochete. It’s a [00:14:00] sort of corkscrew shaped organism. Of course, this is a 2D image. We’re not appreciating it. It does look like a corkscrew. And that’s in its uncoiled, normal form. That’s the best time our immune system has to recognize it and kill it.

You can see in B there, some of them are starting to ball up. It goes in what they call a round body form or cyst form. That little gunky stuff around it is basically biofilm. It’s protecting the organism. And when it goes into that form, our immune system and most antibiotics will not kill it in that form.

Uh, they’ve done lots of studies on doxycycline, rifampin. They do not work when it goes into that round body form. Or what they call stationary bugs. And then you can see, uh, there’s like a couple of organisms, they’re all bound up in that biofilm together. Very hard to kill, and, uh, very hard for the immune system to recognize.

They’ve done studies with other organisms that when biofilm is present, you have to give 250 times the amount of antibiotic to kill the bug when biofilm is not present. So, part of our treatment we’ll talk about is breaking down the biofilm to expose the [00:15:00] organism to whatever treatment we’re instituting.

So I kind of break Lyme down into acute and chronic Lyme. In reality, it’s a gradation, it’s a continuation. But most people with acute Lyme disease are sick. They are acutely sick. I’ve treated over 8,000 Lyme patients at this point. Maybe I’ve treated 40 acute Lyme patients. You know, more often if people have these symptoms, they probably go to the ER, they go to their primary doctor.  I’m not either one of those, so more than likely they’re going somewhere else to get that initial help. But, headaches, stiff neck, high fever. When I had Lyme, I had 105 fever. It looks a lot like meningitis, and you can’t get any type of Lyme meningitis. Arthritis, swollen joints, back pain, spine pain, muscle aches.

That erythema migrans, that classic bullseye rash. I’ll show you a picture in a minute. That’s sort of the telltale path, mnemonic sign of Lyme disease. Uh, the CDC says 60-80% of people with Lyme get the erythema migrans rash. The research suggests it’s about 40%. Those of us in clinical practice will argue it’s less than probably 20%.  So if you’ve got the rash, you know, do not pass go. Do not collect $200. You know you have Lyme, but the absence of the rash doesn’t mean anything about whether you’ve been exposed to Lyme or not. Fatigue, Chills, Lymphadenopathy, Heart palpitations, there is a rare form of Lyme Carditis, which will cause an AV heart block.  You’ll see that on EKG. Shortness of Breath, Memory Loss, Brain Fog, and Bell’s Palsy, One Sided Facial Paralysis are all very common acute Lyme disease. This is kind of what the bullseye rash looks like, the target logo.  There are a lot of variations of this rash. I’ve seen patients that don’t have that necessarily, the red with the central clearing and then the red again.  When you see a flat, red, spreading rash, be suspicious. This gets confused with histamine reactions all the time from someone that got bit by a mosquito. Histamine reactions usually go away in 24 to 48 hours. These rashes will usually last days to weeks. Mine lasted almost eight weeks before it went away.  Mine started off about the size of, I’ll say, a baseball, and by the time it was done, it was almost 18 inches. It covered the entire back of my leg. And that’s very common for a Lyme rash. But it also doesn’t tend to itch. Most mosquito bites, horse flies, other bite instances, because of the histamine reaction, tend to get very itchy and raised.

This is flat and generally not itchy, at least not for several days, until after the bite. Acute symptoms can happen within 3 30 days following a tick bite. As I mentioned, CDC says a bunch of people get the rash, most people don’t. So again, the absence of the rash doesn’t really mean very much. And because Lyme causes so many different symptoms.

Misdiagnosis is really common. People go to their PCP, they go to the ER, they get all these standard tests. Frustratingly, most standard blood tests look normal in Lyme patients. You know, their white count is elevated, their CRP is normal, they’re not showing all the typical things of like autoimmune disease.

And so often though, they get all these blood tests, they might get a CT scan or an MRI, [00:18:00] everything looks normal. They get sent out the door with, you know, it takes Vibuprofen and good luck. But that’s a very, very common scenario. And chronic Lyme disease, we’ll see a lot of the same kind of symptoms, more debilitating fatigue, we might start getting abdominal change, bowel changes, more memory loss, cognitive impairment, more neuropathy, numbness, tingling, different kinds of sensory distortions, burning sensation in the skin, a type of neuropathy is very common with Lyme and Martinella.

A blundering joint pain, we call migratory joint pain, that’s another classic sign of Lyme. There’s a lot of things that cause joint pain, there are very few things that cause migratory joint pain. One day it’s my right shoulder, then it’s my left knee, then it’s my right ankle, then it’s my right wrist.

That is very classic for Lyme. You know, my big red flags, when you hear about arthritic symptoms and neurologic symptoms, think about Lyme, because again, there’s very few things that cause Lyme. Light and Sound Sensitivity, Dizziness, Vertigo, Sleep Disturbances, Rheumatism, I mentioned Heart Block, Coordination Problems, People all of a sudden will complain they’re clumsy, I’m dropping things, [00:19:00] I’m tripping, I call it Newly Acquired Dyslexia, it happened to me.  People start transposing letters and numbers, whether they’re writing it or typing it, I think it’s just part of the neurologic disruption that happens, and then you can start to see secondary endocrine disruption. Hypothyroidism following live is very common, but when we start having reproductive hormone issues, adrenal issues, all that could be affected after.

Lyme in children, uh, if you treat children in your practice, what’s a little bit different, again, these kids can be acutely sick. Uh, it looks sometimes like strep throat, a complaint of a sore throat, swelling glands, fever, uh, fatigue. You might see gait alterations. But mood changes, you know, it looks like PANS, Pediatric Acute Onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome, where all of a sudden it’s anxiety, OCD, tics, Lyme is a major, major trigger for PANS.  We used to call it PANDAS because we said it was associated with strep. Strep can be a cause of it too, but in our practice, I would say Lyme is probably a bigger culprit than strep. So if you get these kids that all of a [00:20:00] sudden overnight turn into little demon seeds, I would be very suspicious of something like that.

The great imitator, the great imitator, Lyme looks like a lot of different things, any chronic neurologic illness can potentially be due to Lyme. You know, I think it’s kind of interesting, you know, you talk to a neurologist, talk to a rheumatologist, but any disease, MS, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, they say, okay, well, here’s your label grade.  Why? I don’t know, you know, bad luck, bad genes. Well, is it possible that there’s an infectious cause that’s triggering this autoimmune inflammatory condition? And more often than not, they’ll say no, but when you go into the research, all you have to do if you’re really interested, go into PubMed, and type in any condition, and in capital letters and, this is what they call Boolean search, Molecular Mimicry.

Molecular Mimicry is the immune mechanism by which most organisms trigger this autoimmune response, and it’s amazing. Go type in Aromatoid Arthritis and Molecular Mimicry. Klebsiella, Proteus, all these different viruses have all been [00:21:00] associated as causes of rheumatoid arthritis. So, are we just going to give immune suppressive drugs, or are we just going to treat the underlying cause?

And you’ll be amazed at how much information is out there, on, you know, post infectious and post adventure. Uh, autoimmune issues. You know, for better or for worse, I think COVID kind of brought this to light. You know, all these people have long COVID, so you can get a virus and have all this sequelae afterwards, long after the viral infection is cleared.

Well, duh, I mean, you know, we’ve known this forever and ever. It’s just different organisms causing a different set of problems, but Lyme is a, I mean, we’ve been dealing with this for years with Lyme. There’s a lot of co infections. We know from the research, there’s Certainly the ticks up in New England, like 33 percent of the ticks that carry Lyme, also carry something else.

So if you suspect Lyme when we’re testing, we’re almost never testing just for Borrelia, we’re testing for other organisms that might have been transmitted during that tick bite. So Babesia, Bartonella, Hannaplasma, Ehrlichia, Mycoplasma. That’s why every time I go to another Lyme conference, we’ve learned there’s now 10 [00:22:00] other things that ticks carry that we need to test for.

But understand what’s in your area. I mean, here in California, I mean, we test for, I mean, it also depends on the symptoms too, but I routinely test for Lyme, Bartonella, Babesia, Mycoplasma, Anaplasma. Rickettsia, I hardly ever see, unless I have a patient that has symptoms that make me think Rickettsia. But the other ones, a lot of these viruses are pretty rare, uh, Powassan virus, I don’t know that we’ve even seen in California, Tularemia, Harlan virus, these kind of things are pretty unusual.

So, from my standpoint, there’s the first tier testing, and then as we get stuck, maybe the second tier would be some of these more obscure pathogens. So the diagnosis of Lyme disease, again, the CDC criteria was for surveillance purpose, it was never designed to be diagnostic, at the end of the day, Lyme is a clinical diagnosis, It’s based on your sign and symptoms.

This is even according to the CDC. Incredibly, infectious disease doctors don’t even follow the CDC guidelines. You know, if your test is negative by CDC, they say, well, you don’t have Lyme [00:23:00] disease, they will fight you tooth and nail on this. But that’s not even the CDC guidelines. Go figure. As again, I mentioned with all these different strains, we’re testing for one.

Maybe we’re just testing for the wrong stuff. So this is straight from the CDC’s website. Lyme is diagnosed based on signs and symptoms and a history of possible exposure to infected blacklegged tists. Laboratory tests are helpful if used correctly and performed with validated methods, blah, blah, blah.

But basically, it’s a clinical diagnosis. As I’ve mentioned, you know, this test was never designed to be diagnostic, it was designed to monitor people with no Lyme disease. So if you have somebody who has these symptoms and their tests come back negative, that doesn’t mean they don’t have Lyme. But, depending on what lab you use, and I’ll talk about that in a second, some labs do better testing than others, and, uh, again, I was a microbiologist before I was a doctor, I used to do Lyme testing for a living, so I know what I’m looking at.

If we even see Lyme specific antibodies, even though it doesn’t meet the CDC criteria, and you have clinical symptoms, just document that. It’s like, hey, we did this test, they’ve got Lyme specific [00:24:00] antibodies, their clinical symptoms fit Lyme, and, you know, they probably ruled out other things. So, at least it gives you justification of why you’re implementing some element of treatment.

So this is the CDC criteria. They do a Lyme screen. If that test comes back positive, it flexes over to what they call a Western blot. It’s a more specific antibody test for IgG and IgM antibodies against different parts of the Lyme organism. And so these, these antibodies are called BANs. They separate it out through electrophoresis, so they’re separating out the antibodies by weight.  And each weight antibody represents a different antigen on the Borrelia surface. Now again, we know some of these are specific. Some of them are not.  The CDC criteria says you have to have 2 out of 3 IgM or 5 out of 10 IgG to cause either one positive. Well, if you’ve got one Lyme specific IgM band, and you have clinical symptoms, why is it that relevant? I mean, it’s like being a little pregnant, right? I mean, you [00:25:00] are, you are. So if you’ve got Lyme specific antibodies, I think that’s relevant.

And for me, that’s important. In 40 years, this criteria has never changed. Uh, you know, we’ve learned about which antibodies are specific to Lyme, which ones are not. Why we’ve never even changed the criteria really just to focus on the Lyme specific antibodies, I don’t know. There’s a whole political thing behind this that I can’t even begin to speculate.

But, uh, nonetheless, this is where the criteria is and it hasn’t changed in 40 years. So yeah, just looking at these bands, so IgM, so 23, 39, these are Lyme specific antibodies. 41 is a very non specific antibody, it’s a flagellar protein. A lot of bacteria have the little tails, flagella, that’s how they swim through the body.

So flagellar protein antibodies by itself aren’t specific to Lyme. Uh, but yeah, 23, basically everything under 41 or less. 31 does cross react with Epstein Barr virus, so that’s a semi specific antibody, 23, 34, 39 and 93. All those antibodies [00:26:00] are very specific to Lyme. The other ones are not specific. So when something comes back to Western blot, it’s 45 and 58 and 66.

Without the Lyme specific antibodies, maybe it’s Lyme and maybe there’s something else going on, so we don’t have as much teeth behind our justification, but again, at the end of the day, we treat people, we don’t treat pieces of paper. This is the alternative criteria that was developed by ILADS. This is the International Lyme and Associated Disease Society, basically a group of doctors that kind of said, you know, the CDC is kind of off on this, and so again, if there’s even one positive band that’s Lyme specific, that’s relevant, and so again, it’s just a different interpretation of the same data.

So, really the pitfalls of testing is that a lot of people are seronegative, they don’t make antibodies. The further you get from year to year, the less likely you are to pick it up on a test. We know that immunity wanes with time, so, again, if you’re testing someone six months, six years, ten years, twenty years after their exposure, the likelihood of picking it up on an antibody test goes way [00:27:00] down.

Uh, again, because the, for a band to be considered positive, they are comparing you to a control, and you have to meet a certain percentage of the control. So they are measuring quantity of antibodies. So the CDC assumes if you have one, you have a very robust antibody response. There are a gazillion reasons people don’t have a robust antibody response.

And the lab that I use, they change it a little bit, but they used to give us a percentage. The cutoff was 60%. You had to be 60 percent of the control. Well, I get the test back, it was 59%. I’m like, that’s how much water you had to drink that day. That’s the difference between you do or don’t have Lyme? I mean, this is kind of the silliness of it.

So they only have one threshold where most tests kind of have a low, medium, high control. With this, it’s just a high control and that’s, so again, a lot of people unfortunately get missed even doing these kind of tests. Um, again, these labs aren’t testing for the breadth of antibodies, all the different strains of Borrelia, so it’s easy to miss.

And again, it can even take up to six weeks to make antibodies. So if you test someone right after their exposure, you might be too early in the window, or they haven’t made [00:28:00] antibodies yet. And you do the test and go, well, your test is negative. I’m like, well, you know, test them again in another three or four weeks and see if they’ve made antibodies then.

So I mentioned iLabs again, they came up with different criteria. At the end of the day, most iLabs doctors do the same thing I do. You know, they treat based on symptoms. And again, if there’s any evidence of Lyme specific antibodies, that’s relevant. Uh, again, it’s important to rule out other possibilities because Lyme does look like a lot of things.

So it’s good to run other tests, make sure they don’t have some other autoimmune disease or other explanation. And I also think sort of legally having that justification. You know, California, I’ll say, is a semi decent state. There are other states where they are very aggressive in going after practitioners for treating Lyme if the patient doesn’t meet the CDC criteria.

I’m sorry. So the labs that I use, uh, Igenex, they’re based out of Palo Alto, they do great testing. My only complaint about Igenex is that unless you have Medicare, they don’t take insurance and they’re expensive. So it’s not uncommon if you do a [00:29:00] full tick borne panel, 1, 500 to 3, 000 out of pocket. That’s a lot of money for people.

Uh, but their testing is great and reliable. Uh, we use a lab mostly called MDL, Medical Diagnostic Labs in New Jersey. They do very comprehensive testing. There are some tests that Igenex do, that MDL doesn’t do, but they build insurance. And for people who don’t have insurance, their cash pricing, if I run all the Lyme testing, Bartonella, Babesia, Mycoplasma, Anaplasma, their cash price is like 250 bucks, where Igenex is like 2, 500.

So, it’s a big savings, but again, they’ll bill those people’s insurance. So, they’re kind of our go to for testing, and they’re the only lab to actually send you a copy of the Western blot, the actuals, they take a, like a picture of the strip, so you can look at those percentages, you can see the different antibodies, and make a decision for yourself, you know, what you think Uh, Dr.

Richard Horowitz, he came up with this MS IDS questionnaire. He actually validated this research. It’s a free download. Uh, I recommend if [00:30:00] you’re treating Lyme, you know, have your patients fill this out periodically. It’s a good objective assessment on how they’re doing because it’s based purely on symptoms.

And there’s a score, and he actually did a study that found that if you score in the range that he says, there’s a high probability you have Lyme, even if your tests are negative. And the fact that he actually studied this is pretty cool. It’s a free download. Anybody can download it and fill it out for you.

Uh, I came up with my own little questionnaire. Dr. Hurwicz’s is a longer three page. This is my little one page cheat sheet. Same concept and uh, it’s in my book. Uh, I apologize. I had all these books sitting there. I was going to bring them and I completely forgot. So if anybody would like a copy of my book, uh, just grab me afterwards and I’m happy to send it to you.

So other labs to run. Again, it’s good to look at all the co infections. Look at endocrine function, thyroid, adrenal, run the CBC, iron panel, you know, sometimes you will see little changes metabolically after someone has Lyme. So just to be thorough, I like to look at immune markers, inflammatory markers, often [00:31:00] we’re looking at nutritional markers, and a lot of my patients have a lot of GI issues, so running a stool test in our practice is pretty common.

So conventional treatment, uh, if there is a known deer tick bite, this is the CDC recommendation. If it’s a known tick bite, they say give a single dose of 200mg of doxycycline for adults or children over 8. There’s actually zero recommendations if the child’s under 8, good luck. So uh, there’s no recommendations for other confections and this, the studies out there have never shown that this adequately treats Lyme disease.

What it does do is it suppresses the Lyme rash. And that sucks because that’s our marker that someone’s been exposed to Lyme. So not only does it not treat Lyme, now you potentially suppress the rash that would tell us you had Lyme, and it’s a completely worthless, ineffective approach. So for those who test positive for Lyme, it’s typically for adults, you know, doxycycline or [00:32:00] amoxicillin.

If people have neural Lyme, they’ll do IV rocephin, ceftrioxime. They’ve changed the guidelines recently. I think the latest recommendations from the IDSA, the Infectious Disease Society, I think they’ve shortened it from 21 to 14 days of treatment. They’re getting even shorter. For children, same thing, amoxicillin, doxy if they’re over eight, cefiroxime, and it’s just weight based dosing.

But again, it’s, you know, anywhere from 10 to 21 days, which we think is far inadequate. If the organism replicates every 16 days, And think about doxycycline. Doxycycline is not a bacteriostatic antibiotic. It’s not bactericidal. It actually doesn’t kill the bug. All it does is it stops the bug from replicating.

So you may have stopped the bug from replicating for one cycle. That’s it. Why would we expect this to be effective? You know, at least amoxicillin and bactericidal might actually kill the bug. So, a lot of the ILIS doctors who prefer the antibiotic approach, using two or three antibiotics in combination is kind of the norm now, [00:33:00] because you’re trying to stop it from replicating, you’re trying to break down the cell wall, and you’re often trying to get it from multiple approaches.

But, as you can imagine, the more antibiotics you add to the load, the greater the risk of side effects. So, the good news with antibiotics, I mean, some people do really well on it. They get better, and sometimes that’s the end of that. If you do get lucky enough to catch them early in their illness, there’s a good chance that, you know, you’ll treat them before they get into the chronic stage.

And, great. Uh, it can be really effective in the early stages of Lyme, and sometimes, you know, for people who have had exposure a while ago, some people do respond quite well to different antibiotic regimens. And of course there are some people where we’re not really sure and doing a therapeutic trial of antimicrobials I think is an accepted way and they do it in medicine all the time just to see if you get a clinical response.

If you improve on antibiotics, then there’s a good chance you’ve got this underlying infection and you’ll hear this in some of your patients where, you know, I was on antibiotics for sinus infection or had bronchitis and my joint pain [00:34:00] got better. You know, they weren’t even thinking about these other things in the background until they got treated for something completely unrelated.

Certainly the Lyme, but that’s kind of a clue that, oh, you got better on antibiotics, your other systemic symptoms got better. Maybe there is some other underlying infection that just never got addressed. The bad, of course, is that some people get really bad die off reaction. We call this a Gerrush Herxheimer reaction, a.

1. a. Herxheimer reaction, a. k. a. Herxing. And it’s really a combination of the organism, like, literally popping and releasing all the toxic material, plus it’s a combination of the immune system responding. And most people get these flu like symptoms. More tired, more foggy, more achy, just that general blah feeling.

A true die off only lasts for a handful of days, maybe up to 10 days tops. If it’s lasting longer than that, that’s not a die off. That’s them having a problem with whatever treatment they’re getting and they need to shift gears and do something different. Of course, the more combination of antimicrobials you use, nausea, loss of appetite, you know, disrupt the gut [00:35:00] microbiome.

So diarrhea, loose stool, abdominal pain, headaches, all that can happen. Of course. Some people were on antibiotics for weeks, months, even years, and, uh, I’ve seen people, I had one patient, uh, who was seen by a very well known Lyme doctor in the area where I was at the time. She had been hospitalized three times because of her antibiotics.

They made her so sick. And they kept giving her more toxic antibiotics, and I’m like, at what point do you draw a line in the sand and go, maybe this isn’t the right approach? But it is an approach. And of course, the ugly is, again, you can just completely wipe out your gut flora, C. diff infections, yeast infections, secondary infections.

Immune suppression, organ damage. All that can happen is for some people if they’re on antibiotics too. So, let’s dig into my world, natural treatments for Lyme. Um, I think starting with gut and diet is important. You know, the gut’s really the cornerstone of health, right? You know, 80 percent of your immune function stems from the gut.

So if your gut’s not functioning well, it’s very hard for your immune system to function well. And in terms of diet, you know, [00:36:00] there’s a lot of different diets that are promoted for various health reasons. I’ve always been an advocate, really, of an alkaline diet. I didn’t develop this. There’s books written about this going back to the 50s and 60s.

But the concept behind it makes a lot of sense. Now, if you look at cell physiology, your cells function best in an alkaline state. Your skin, your stomach, the bladder area, for women, the vaginal area, they’re very acidic to protect against outside invaders. The rest of your body is more or less alkaline.

Even your blood pH is slightly alkaline. And the argument I get all the time with, uh, alkaline diet is like, No, it doesn’t change blood pH. I’m like, I know it doesn’t change blood pH. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to change cell pH. And it does do that. And you can actually check this very easily.

Have your patients just get some pH paper at the pharmacy. It’s very cheap. 30 to 60 minutes after eating, go pee on the strip. We want your urine pH between 7. 2 If you can get in that range, we know metabolically you’re kind of doing what your body wants to do, and we’re giving your cells the opportunity to function the way they should.

So all those enzymes work the way they should, [00:37:00] all the repair mechanisms work the way they should, and it seems pretty straightforward. So the way I’ve kind of divided it is in three categories. Category 1, these are foods you can eat as much as you want. Uh, and by the way, if you guys want these slides, just let me know and I’m happy to send them to you.

Um. So, most of these are vegetables, vegetables as a whole tend to be very alkaline forming, so it’s not about the pH of the food, it’s about how it breaks down the body, so like lemons and limes are very acidic, if I squeeze lemon juice on pH paper, it’s very acidic, when I drink lemon juice, as it breaks down the body, it makes me very alkaline.

So again, forget the pH of the food, it’s about what it does to you metabolically. So all the food, the foods you can eat a bunch of, you’ll see it’s a lot of vegetables, there’s a few fruits, a few nuts and seeds, grains and so forth. Category 2 are foods that are either kind of neutral when you break down, slightly acidic, maybe slightly alkaline.

So it’s not that you can’t have it, but you don’t want it to really be the bulk of your diet. I tell people to try to keep it about 25 percent of their dietary intake. The [00:38:00] best way to think about Category 2 is to take your plate, divide it in quarters. It shouldn’t take up more than a quarter of your plate.

So it’s all animal protein, eggs, fish, meat. It’s a lot of fruit. Again, it’s not that you can’t have it, it’s just not the bulk of your diet. So people are really eating a mostly plant based diet with some lean proteins, uh, eggs, and things of that nature. And then Category 3, these are foods that are just highly acid forming, that’s a lot of junk food, processed food, garbage food, which I’m sure your patients don’t eat anyway, uh, dairy products, coffee, they’re all very acid forming.

But again, people are like, well, I love my coffee, and I’m tired all the time, I need my coffee. I’m like, well, If you have one cup of coffee, and they do make low acid coffee, uh, check your pH. If you’re able to keep the rest of your diet very alkaline, that one cup of coffee may not make a difference, and you know, you’re okay.

So, you know, you can just check yourself and see how you’re doing. Uh, when we started getting into active treatment, I am a big proponent of herbs. Now, I’m an atropathic doctor by training. Herbs, you know, we spent years in [00:39:00] medical school learning about herbs, so, uh, you know, I’ve said I’ve treated over 8, 000 blind patients.

I have probably written 10 prescriptions for antibiotics. Herbs work really, really well. And I think the beauty of herbs, too, is that they are chemically complex. So when you look at the constituents, there are components that target Lyme and the co infection. There are components that are anti inflammatory.

There are components that help support the immune system. There are components that soothe the mucous membrane. So you can really mix and match herbs for your patient to really tailor to what their body needs to get them through their collection of symptoms. So often we’ll find there’s like a few core herbs that we’ll use because they work really well against Lyme and co infection.

Oh, but this is really great for joint pain. And this is really good for the reflux and the GI issues you’re having. So again, I like the ability of being able to have all these different possibilities. And then when I sit down with my patients, I’m like, we need a place to start, but we’ve got plan A, B, C, D, E, F, and G if we need it.

We just need to give whatever we start with an [00:40:00] opportunity to do what we want. So my, my rule for treatment is two months. Whatever you’re doing. Antibiotics, herbs, I don’t care. You get two months. If they’re not better in two months, you’re barking up the wrong tree, and you need to switch and do something different.

I have seen patients be on the same protocol for six months, a year, and they and the practitioner are waiting for the magic to happen. It hasn’t happened. Like if it hasn’t happened in two months, it’s not gonna happen. You need to switch gears and do something. So the beauty of plants is that Relative to antibiotics, I think they’re safer.

Side effects are really uncommon. If they do happen, they tend to be very mild, go away quickly. It’s a much more comprehensive approach because of the broad activity of the herbs. Definitely less negative impact because they’re plants. Plants tend to get absorbed in the first part of the small intestine.

Very little of it actually gets down to the large intestine where most of your bacteria live. So we don’t see the same die off like you do with antibiotics. A lot of these herbs cover Lyme and the common infections, so there is a lot of overlap. Uh, Dr. Lee Cowden, I think Dr. Cowden, [00:41:00] he’s a big name in the Lyme world.

Uh, we were at a lecture he gave a few years ago, and he kept talking about this herb. I go, well, this is, yeah, he’s from Texas. And he goes, this is the key herb. And I go, yeah, I’m hearing this herb, this is the key herb. I’m like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. He goes, well, it kills everything except people.

So, you know, a lot of these herbs, because they’re antibacterial, they’re antiviral, they’re antifungal, Again, if there is overgrowth of other microbes in the body without knowing what it is, there’s a good probability with plants you will cover that base. So I like that perspective. Again, it can be very much tailored to the individual needs, help and support the immune function.

There are very few herbs that truly have immune suppressive activity, uh, maybe more cost effective if people are paying for some of these antibiotics out of pocket, because insurance will put a cap on how much antibiotics somebody gets, um, and when it gets out of pocket, some of these are very expensive.

Herbs by and large tend to be pretty inexpensive. Clinically, they’re very effective. Again, I’ve had great success over the years using herbs, and you’ll have people come in who tried the antibiotic route, just didn’t work. You know, they’ve been on three, four, five, [00:42:00] six, eight, ten different antibiotic regimens, didn’t work, or they got worse, and they’re looking for the next option.

So, uh, there’s a Dr. Zhang out of Johns Hopkins, and he and our colleague, uh, Dr. Jacob Leonian and naturopathic doctors, they’ve been looking at different plant extracts on how they affect Lyme and Bartonella and Babesia, and so this is all published research out of Hopkins. And looking at different herbs that are effective against Borrelia, uh, crypto sangu, polygonum ano, that’s called Japanese knotweed jus nigra.

That’s black walnut Artesia annua, that’s sweet. Warm wood Osa is ka claw sti, and canes is sti and ensis is Chinese. And you’ll see as we look across, so this is for Borrelia, this is against Bartonella, we see a lot of the same players, and same thing with Dobesia, so when I talk about getting this overlap of how these herbs treat these other different infections, you know, we know that we can use these herbs and they’re going to cover a [00:43:00] broad base.

So just kind of going through some of the plants that I use, uh, Allicin, this is garlic, Allium Sativum, this is a very well known antimicrobial, uh, soldiers in Russia in World War I used to carry it on their pack, they called it Russian Penicillin, if they were out in the field and got wounded, they would rub the garlic in their wounds to prevent infection or they would eat it to keep their immune system healthy.

It contains a component called Allitrity, that characteristic odor of garlic is Allitrity getting converted to Allicin. Uh, again, very well established antimicrobial, but also helps improve blood flow, and it has mild anti inflammatory. Uh, it’s best as a time release capsule, so it releases that allicin over time.

Uh, people will definitely excrete this through their skin, so for one, drink it in garlic, two, be prepared that you’re gonna smell like a pizzeria. Uh, when I first had lime, uh, I was treated by a different Dr. Zhong in New York City, and he gave me a lot of his allicin, which is a great product. And I was still seeing patients.

Like, you know, people would walk in my room and they’re like, you know, like, what does that smell? So I had to [00:44:00] stop doing it because it was just becoming offensive to me and everyone around me. So, forewarned people, uh, it’s gonna get excreted through their breath and their skin. People can take chlorophyll to help offset some of the odor.

If they want to stay on garlic and they’re worried about the odor, chlorophyll will help bind up. Andrographis, Andrographis paniculata. This is a great herb. It has very broad antimicrobial activity, including parasites. This is also a very effective antiviral herb. Uh, Andrographis actually was approved in Thailand as a treatment for COVID 19.

Uh, it works great for a lot of different viral illnesses, but it’s also a hepatoprotective, an immune modulator, antidiarrheal, anti inflammatory, helps improve cardiac output. And, uh, they typically sell it as a standardized extract. Uh, the one we use has a 50 percent andrograph lye content. Uh, I, I like this plant a lot and, uh, we use that quite often.

Uh, Artemisia, Artemisia annua, there are different species of Artemisia. So, if you’re looking at using Artemisia, make sure you got the right one. There’s Artemisia annua, which is what we want to use. [00:45:00] There’s Artemisia vulgaris, there’s Artemisia absinthium. They have different purposes, they have different constituents.

So, The artemisinin we’re using contains a compound called artemisinin. There are some supplement companies that will sell pure artemisinin. Be careful with pure artemisinin. There’s at least 14 cases of it causing idiosyncratic liver toxicity. Uh, I believe these are people that already have, uh, underlying liver disease that made it worse.

But nonetheless, if you use pure artemisinin, you do need to test your patient’s liver enzymes periodically. probably every few months just to make sure it’s not causing a problem. I’ve never seen it with whole plant Artemisia, so that’s my preference is to use whole plant Artemisia. Uh, it’s got a sesquiterpene lactone with a peroxide bridge.

Basically think it’s the peroxide bridge that’s causing oxidative stress in the organism and that’s what’s killing it. Artemisia has been used forever as a treatment for malaria, so anything that treats malaria is probably going to treat Babesia, since they’re both blood parasites and kind of cousins of each other.

Um, it helps with autoimmune [00:46:00] reactions, has anti inflammatory effects. There are studies on artemisia for rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases as an immune modulator. And, um, again, just make sure that, uh, artemisia, then, uh, check liver enzyme. But I would just recommend, there’s a lot of great companies that make whole plant artemisia.

Uh, Campciandra goes by the trade name of Bandarol. Uh, Nutramedic is the company that makes this particular one. This herb is somewhat unique to the Amazon jungle. It comes out of Peru. Nutramedics, uh, because they have a relationship with the Peruvian government, it’s one of the few companies that’s allowed to export it.

Uh, but it’s a very effective plant against Lyme and other co infections. They use it locally to treat malaria. Also, again, very potent anti inflammatory, treats arthritis. You can get some decent herds reactions with it, but it’s, it’s not too bad. Uh, Cemento, Cat’s Claw, Mouncaria Tomatosa, uh, has, uh, what they call alkaloids.

These are the active ingredients that help fight the infection. Also anti viral, it inhibits a lot of these pro inflammatory [00:47:00] cytokines, protects against oxidative stress, also useful treating co infections, and almost little to no side effects. There’s a woman out of the University of New Haven, Dr. Eva Shapi, SAPI, and she studied the combination of Cemento, Vanderol, and one I’ve talked about called Kumanda, and the combination of those three were more effective than doxycycline or rifampin in vitro, and it treated Lyme, whether it was replicating or not.

So there’s an argument that herbs actually may be more effective than antibiotics in some cases. These cases, uh, kafu is a nerve that’s used mostly in traditional Chinese medicine. Kafi, ensis. This is the root. It’s very rich in a compound called Burberry. You might know Burberry because it’s found in Golden Seal.

It’s found in Barberry, it’s found in, um, um, forgetting the third nerve. There’s, there’s three of ’em that are, are very rich in Burberry, but Copti is one of em. So, you know, burberine is a very well known antimicrobial, um, compound that again treats bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites. Um. In vitro studies, [00:48:00] it’s found it’s as effective as a lot of antibiotics and ricketting for eradicating other infections, like staph infections and strep infections and so forth.

So I’ll use Coptis even for people who get bronchitis and sinus infections and things of that nature. Also very potent in anti inflammatory, and Coptis has this unusual effect that’s really effective at getting gallbladder sludge out. So if you’re someone who’s got gallbladder sludge and they don’t want to have their gallbladder taken out, it’s got like an 88 percent efficacy in getting gallbladder sludge out.

Go figure. Cordyceps is a medicinal mushroom that has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for 2, 000 years. Very potent immune booster, so a lot of these medicinal mushrooms, they don’t kill the organism, they just help support the immune system to fight the infection. They contain beta glucans. Beta glucans, you’ll find in a lot of supplements now, has an immune stimulating.

Particularly, they help increase T helper cells, activate NK cells, and macrophages. They also help improve circulation, and they’re great for fatigue and inflammation. They do have mild blood sugar lowering effects, so if you’re going to use Cordyceps, if you’ve got a diabetic, [00:49:00] particularly if they’re on insulin, just be careful.

Make sure they monitor their blood sugar a little bit more. Decimodium or Berber, this is a plant that also grows down in Peru in the Amazon jungle. This is really just to help support detox pathways. We can get a lot of people out of their HERX reaction if they start taking more Berber and then companies like Nutramix, they also make one that’s a combination of Berber and Pinela.

Uh, the two of those together work really well at just clearing out the toxins faster. So, we don’t want people to stop their treatment. If they start Hurtsing, sometimes they feel so bad, they just say, you know what, I, this treatment is making me feel worse, I’m going to stop. And then you never get past that point of feeling better.

So if we can get people through their treatment, get through those handful of days of Hurtsing, then usually when they come out the back end, they feel a lot better. And this is a plan you can use as a rescue medicine to get people through that time. So they can take this every 10, 15 minutes. 30 minutes until they feel like that hertz reaction goes away.

Uh, Hetunia, Hetunia cordata, uh, this is another plant that’s used a lot in Chinese medicine. It has a [00:50:00] historical use of treating it for leptospira. Leptospira like, uh, Lyme. Uh, syphilis is the other spirochete that we all know about. We don’t see a lot of leptospira here in the U. S., but it’s pretty common in China.

Uh, leptospira we see here mostly with dogs in the U. S. They can be a cause of meningitis for dogs. But nonetheless, anything that treats, uh, spirochete probably works for Lyme as well. And in vitro studies found it’s antibacterial, antifungal, enhances the immune system, gets rid of swelling and inflammation, and it’s also one of the plants that helps break down biofilms.

So again, if we’re trying to expose the organism, breaking down biofilms is a good thing. Uh, it does have a relatively short half life, so this is one you probably need to dose three times a day just to keep enough of the herb in your system. Japanese Knotweed, Polygonum Cuspidatum, again very broad spetum and microbial, and again we found in Dr.

Zhang’s research that this is one of the top herbs to deal with Lyme and a lot of the co infections. Lion’s Mane is another great medicinal mushroom, again it doesn’t kill [00:51:00] anything, but it helps stimulate oligodendrocytes, helps make myelin based protein. I think a lot of Lyme patients that are dealing with these cognitive issues, neuropathy issues, To a certain degree, there probably is some impairment of myelin function, and that’s why they have this.

So, anything you do to help repair a damaged neuron is a good thing. Otava, this is commando. This comes from a bark of a tree, again, that grows in South America. Probably one of the best broad spectrum, uh, herbs against Lyme and co infections. Also very potent anti inflammatory, and again, this is one of the three I mentioned with Dr.

Schappe. It was found to eliminate all the different forms of Lyme. Uh, Porreria, this is a nerve that gets used mostly in Chinese medicine, but treats high fever, muscle spasms, headaches. So, this is a good adjunct for your pad if people are having a lot of the acute symptoms of Lyme disease. Helps improve blood flow.

Uh, also anti inflammatory. It can cause blood pressure to drop a little bit, so if anyone has POTS, they’re already prone to low blood pressure, just be a little bit careful. [00:52:00] Wireweed, this is called Ceta Acuta, broad spectrum antimicrobial activity, reduces fever, protects the liver, immune modulator. I don’t use this one as much, uh, Stephen Buehner, who’s an herbalist, he wrote two books on, one on Lyme, one treating on co infection, he used a lot of Ceta Acuta, uh, I like to mention it, but, uh, I don’t use this one as much, uh, it blends well with my practice.

Uh, Yellow Dairu, Cryptolepis, I use a lot of this, Cryptolepis Sanguinale, I like to mention it. This is the one, again, that Dr. John also found with Japanese not wanting to be at the top of treating Lyme and all the co infections, and you’re probably getting the idea here that they’re anti microbial, anti inflammatory, and reduce fever.

They all have very similar mechanisms. So again, this gives us the ability to swap out. If you start someone on Cemento and Banderol, they don’t seem to be doing well with one. This is where I actually like using the individual herbs versus combinations, because if someone has a problem with one, very easy to switch out, where if you give them a combination, they have a problem.

I don’t know what herb is the culprit. And it’s hard to figure out. Uh, other herbs just to [00:53:00] mention, uh, there’s one called Oncaria Orynchophylla, which is a cushion of Cat’s Claw. Uh, Stephen Buehner really liked it for Neuroborreliosis. Chinese Skullcap, very well studied. Astragalus, Hawthornberry, Alcornia.

Uh, again, I don’t use these as much. I’ve been using more and more Chinese Skullcap since Dr. John published his research. Uh, and also very good anti inflammatory. I’m going to skip through some of this just because, you know. So, Dr. Cowden has a whole protocol where every month there’s a whole protocol that, you know, they change all the herbs.

The idea is to kind of never let the organism get used to what you’re doing. He used to be very involved. The company has recently revamped it. It’s a much simpler protocol now. I do what’s called a modified version of Cowden. And I really just narrow it down to like three or four herbs. I use the Cemento, I use the Vanderol, I use the Camonda, I use the Berber Pinella as a base.

And then I’ll add in these other herbs really just as adjunct therapies. Uh, so these [00:54:00] combinations again help target the microbes, support detox pathways, clear heavy metals. It’s a nine month protocol where every month it changes. Uh, I know Dr. Tran uses it a lot more than I do. Again, it still works for people, but the old version was just more, took more compliance, because every like two hours you had something to do.

The new version is much more simple for people. So again, I do a modified version of it, and here’s kind of the doses. Uh, for acute Lyme disease, it’s better to go in with higher doses. You know, at 15 to 30 drops twice a day, you put all the tinctures together in a little bit of water. So it’s nice for people who already take a lot of capsules.

These are liquids. They can just put it in water in one glass, pour it up and drink it, a dose in the morning, a dose in the evening, it’s pretty simple for people. And again, we can add in Berber, Penelope, if they’re getting heart sick, and they can all add in others really as supportive for whatever they’re experiencing.

For chronic, uh, I found if you try the same approach, a lot of people will get pretty significant hurt. So I like to start really with just one or two drops twice a [00:55:00] day, and then every two days titrate up slowly by one drop. So if they start with one drop twice a day, two days later they don’t feel any different, they go to two drops twice a day.

Two days later they don’t feel any different, they go to three drops. And what you’ll find is some people, even at very low doses, get clinical benefit. I have some people do one drop of Simvastatin and they start Hurksin. So I find a lot of people with Lyme tend to be very sensitive and a little goes a long way.

So don’t feel like you have to go in with high doses. Low doses often will really be clinically effective for people. And for children, again, we just drop the dose down based on body temperature. So the advantage is it’s pretty easy to administer their liquids. The herbs actually don’t taste bad at all.

Nothing’s uberly bitter and nasty tasting like some herbs are. Uh, clinically very effective, reasonably very cost effective. You know, if people are only using two or three drops twice a day, that tincture might last them six, eight weeks or longer. So it, it ends up being very cost effective. The disadvantage is, is that you can’t get irksing, but you can get that with any Lyme treatment.

I’d say all, most Lyme treatment does tend to be [00:56:00] long term. I tell my patients 6 18 months of treatment is normal. Because of the slow growing nature of Lyme, and the up and down cycles of it, that’s pretty normal. Sometimes people recover faster, sometimes it’s longer, but 6 18 months is very reasonable.

Dr. Zhang, different Dr. Zhang from the Dr. Zhang at Johns Hopkins. Uh, this Dr. Zhang is a Chinese medical doctor in New York City. He’s who I saw after I was on nine months of anaphylaxis getting worse, and he turned me around in a month. And so, he uses a series of verbs. He’s got an Artemisia, Hetunia, and he’s got a couple of combination products.

Again, I won’t go through all of them, but a lot of them I’ve already talked about. Uh, Again, I like his approach because I think it encompasses a very broad scope of what Lyme does to your body. So there’s herbs to target infection, herbs to reduce inflammation, herbs to support the immune system, herbs to break down little crystals and micro clots, and I think it’s very comprehensive.

And again, it turned me around in four weeks. So [00:57:00] some of the formulas, he’s got one called R 5081M, Uh, seven traditional Chinese herbs, including Smilax and Chinese Skullcap. Uh, these are effective in treating leptospira, trypanema. They also help remove detoxification, reduce inflammation. So I like this formula because part of it’s killing the bugs, and part of it’s helping support detox.

He’s got one called Circulation P. This is a combination of two traditional Chinese medicine formulas. There’s 10 herbs in it, and it’s really to help prevent platelet aggregation in the microplots. And you can tell Lyme patients, if you draw blood in your office, you can almost tell when you draw blood, instead of the blood coming out like water, it comes out like oil, you can see the viscosity even when you draw blood, and that’s just a sign of inflammation.

It’s very common with Lyme patients. AIM, this is a nerve called Sardentodoxae. Again, we don’t use this in Western medicine, this is a Chinese herb, uh, but it has, uh, pretty significant anti inflammatory and analgesic effects, so this is a great one in to help control pain in patients. inflammation. So [00:58:00] John’s Protocol, again, combinations of petunia, coptis, cordyceps.

You might add in the AIM if there’s a lot of inflammation or peraria if they have high fever and muscle aches. Artemisia is great for Babesia. Persistent Lyme Disease, same kind of herbs. The dosing actually doesn’t change as much between acute and chronic like it does with the liquids. But again, I just wanted to give you an idea of some other ways of using these herbs.

The advantages is clinically very beneficial. I’ve probably used his herbs more than anyone else’s over the years. Herbs reactions are not common actually. Very few side effects. I find they’re very well tolerated. The biggest downside is that his herbs are expensive and people usually spend 500 to 600 dollars a month on his formulas relative to others which are much less expensive.

Byron White is an herbalist. He’s got different combination formulas that he kind of puts together for individual infections. So there’s not really a protocol with his stuff, like AL [00:59:00] complex is for Lyme, ABAB is for Martinella, and so forth. So here you’re kind of picking the formula based on whatever the patient’s dealing with.

I’ve used them, he has one called A Myco for Mycoplasma, that I’ve used a lot, it works very well for Mycoplasma, and I’ve used ABAB and ABARD, and again, they work, it’s just again, they’re combination products, so if people have a problem with it, you just won’t know. What the problem is. People like these because again, it’s like one tincture or two tinctures.

It’s not multiple tinctures. They are really concentrated herbs. So the amount you use is usually anywhere from like two to six drops twice a day. It’s a lot less than even the other tinctures out there. So for people who don’t like to do a lot of stuff, this might be an option because it doesn’t require a lot of stuff.

Disadvantages, uh, it’s just that herxing is actually quite common because they are so concentrated. Each bottle is about a hundred bucks, so the bottle itself is expensive. Now again, they’re not using a lot of it, so often it still lasts a while, but [01:00:00] when you talk to people like, hey, I want you to buy this little tincture, it’s a hundred bucks.

Uh, I have some formulas I developed myself with allergy research. I have a product called PhytoTik Defense. So, I took a lot of the herbs that I had used when I was being treated by Dr. Chong. Uh, so it’s got Nezunia, Artemisia, Cat’s Claw, Coptis, Cordyceps, Lion’s Mane, and Beta Glucans. I wanted something to get the encompass line and all the other co infections.

I’ve got a product called Biofilm Neutralizer to break down biofilm. I’ve got a product called Herxipher Support to reduce inflammation and to get Herx reactions. And Mitochondrial cofactors to help support the mitochondria. So these four were designed to kind of work together. Uh, the nice thing for patients with this is that they’re pretty easy to take, pretty well tolerated, and all four of the formulas are about a hundred bucks a month.

So it’s fairly reasonable for people. Uh, so here’s just the dosing schedule on those. Uh, the advantages, uh, really is it’s clinically beneficial, easy to administer, it’s pretty inexpensive. I really haven’t come across any major disadvantages. [01:01:00] I mean, I don’t get complaints of people not tolerating it, upset stomach, bad diet offset.

So far, they’ve been out for about a year and a half, and, again, I really haven’t had any major complaints. Other botanical therapies, again, Stephen Buehner has two books if you’re interested. It talks about some of these other herbs. There’s also a company called Beyond Balance. Uh, they make a series of combination herbal formulas.

Susan McCamish founded the company. She’s an herbalist. They make some good products. They’re all in glycerin. So for people who don’t tolerate alcohol and so on liquids, this is a great option because they’re not alcohol based, they’re glycerin based. So it’s great for kids and I don’t see any people anymore, but people are using disulfiram as a treatment for Lyme for a while.

Which, you know, you get disulfiram, you can’t take alcohol. It’s a contraindication, so people can still use Beyond Balance while they’re on disulfiram, but I think disulfiram’s kind of fallen out of favor. I don’t see anybody really on it anymore. Managing HERX reactions. Anything that’s anti inflammatory is probably going to help.

You know, tons and tons of [01:02:00] research on curcumin and boswellia reduces all the pro inflammatory cytokines, help prove vascular endothelial function, reduces oxidative stress. Uh, so, my product has a combination of curcumin and boswellia together, and then if you alkalize the body, this is an old school environmental medicine trick that people are having die off reactions or having allergic reactions.

When you take an alkalizing agent, you start shifting your cell pH, a lot of these reactions get better. So the Herx reaction gets better. I’ve had people stop their asthma attack by taking Alka Seltzer Gold every hour. Uh, kind of the worst thing that happens if you get too much bicarbonate formula is it gives you a little bit of diarrhea.

Um, but often we’ll stop that. So sodium potassium bicarbonate, I think potassium bicarbonate is a more effective agent. So regular Alka Seltzer is sodium bicarbonate, and baking soda in your fridge is sodium bicarbonate. In a pinch people can use good old Arm Hammer baking soda, but it’s kind of gross and um, I don’t think it works nearly well as potassium bicarbonate.

[01:03:00] But the whole idea behind it is that bicarbonate is shifting your cell pH and we know that potassium bicarbonate locks increase your glutathione levels. Breaking down biofilm, this is the slime that surrounds the bug. Uh, there’s a lot of different ways to approach it, but again, that protective slime is, you know, keeping the immune system and the herbs or antibiotics from targeting the organism.

So anything we can do to break it down. Proteolytic enzymes like serrapeptase, like trypsin, natokinase, is very effective, alpha lipoic acid. So again, the product I developed, he biofilm neutralizer, it has all four of these in it, just as a way to break down biofilm. So it’s important with any kind of biofilm disruptor, you take it away from food.

If you take it with food, it’s going to digest your food, and it won’t do much to break down biofilm. Environmental lifestyle factors, of course, anything we can do to lower the body burden. I will argue that most of my chronic Lyme patients are toxic, for various reasons, and anything we can do to [01:04:00] improve their detox pathways, reduce their body burden.

Help. So, it’s just bringing awareness that, you know, get all the crap out of your house. The Windex, the 409, Uh, the Glade plug ins, all that stuff. I mean, my sister and I have this running thing now. She’s better about it. We go visit the Glade plug ins in the bathroom, and I unplug it, and she plugs it back in, I unplug it, she plugs it back in.

I think one time we took it in the trash.

Dr. Weitz: Anyway,

Dr. Ingels: yeah, so anything you do to people can reduce that stuff. So be aware of what you use around your home, what you use on your skin. Personal care products, makeup, shampoo, detergents, laundry stuff, all that roundup, all that adds to your body where it has to load, makes it harder to get well.

And this is stuff people have control of. They can control what they use in and around their body and around their home. Lifestyle maintenance, sleep is critically important. Most of my patients don’t sleep well for various reasons. Uh, this is just some of the things I use with my patients to help them get to sleep, stay asleep.

Uh, melatonin is great for some people, helping them fall asleep. GABA, PharmaGABA is better at staying asleep, getting deeper sleep. Magnesium, particularly Mag threonate has evidence that it penetrates the brain better than other Mag chelates. Get them into a deeper state of sleep. 5 HTP, 5 Hydroxytryptophan is a precursor to serotonin.  You could use straight L tryptophan as well. Um, 100 to 400 milligrams of bedtime. Uh, just be careful if someone’s already on an SSRI, you don’t want to get serotonin syndrome. And there’s a lot of herbs. I mean, Passionflower, we use a lot of. Ashwagandha, Valerian Root, Lemon Balm. I’m becoming a bigger fan of California Poppy.  California Poppy works really well. You just have to warn people, if they ever get drug tested, you know, we’ll test positive on a drug test. I had a patient in New York City that, uh, he didn’t have one. I can’t remember. He called me one day, and he was a big financier. And he was just pissed at me, yelling at me, he goes, I don’t know what you gave me, I flunked my drug test, da, da, da, da, da, it’s something in your supplements.

And he calls me back two days later, very apologetic, he goes, every morning I have a poppy bagel, poppy seed bagel. [01:06:00] The poppy seed bagel was causing a drug test to go positive, so anything that comes from the poppy plant will test positive for heroin on the drug test. So, you just have to warn people if they have a job where they get drug tested, but it doesn’t cause any of the effects that heroin does, it’s just a cross reaction.

But yeah, California poppy can be very effective too. Getting exercise, movement, you know, I think it’s good for obviously moving blood flow, moving lymph, especially the lymph. It’s good for enhancing mood. So trying to get some element of movement every day. And it’s hard. I mean, for when I had Lyme, I mean, it was all my strength just to sit in front of the television.

And so, you know, I would start stretching and then, you know, a couple of laps around the house. So gentle exercise usually works best. If someone does any kind of activity and it wipes them out for three days, it was too much. So they have to scale it back. So it started with, you know, yoga, walking, swimming, tai chi, qigong, you know, whatever they feel like they can do.

But a little bit of movement every day is Stress management, this is always the, I [01:07:00] think, the hardest thing for people. Having any chronic disease sucks. You know, you’re, you’re trying to figure out how to manage your stress. A lot of people we see, they’re, you know, financially in trouble because they’re ill.

Many of them aren’t working as much as they should, or they’re having trouble in the work they do. So there’s a lot of stress on how it affects them, how it affects their loved ones, their family, their kids. There’s a tremendous amount of guilt about having a chronic illness. For So helping people navigate that, whether it’s with a guidance, with a counselor, a therapist, a support group.  But try and help and encourage people to find ways to deal with stress because you’ll hear it from every Lyme patient. Every time they go through a stressful time, their symptoms get worse. Nothing else changes in their treatment, but it’s just the stress that’s kind of undermining everything else. So as much as we can help support them.

Other treatment approaches, I just want to mention, Low Dose Naltrexone. This is a medication that was designed to get people off drug and alcohol abuse. We know at low doses it has a very different effect. It binds to opioid [01:08:00] receptors in the brain for about 4 6 hours, and then it causes a natural release of your own opioids for about 20 hours.  So it can be great for pain modulation, it’s great for modulating the immune system. There’s actually quite a few studies on Low Dose Naltrexone. It’s very safe, it’s very inexpensive, and I find it’s kind of the 50 50. 50 percent of people feel like it helps, 50 percent of people feel like it did absolutely nothing, but to spend 45 bucks for three months to try it, you know, I think it’s pretty reasonable.  And there’s studies on it for cancer, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease. There are no studies to date on Lyme disease, but most of us in the Lyme world try it anyway, and some people respond really well.  The dosing on it, you can start anywhere from like a quarter of a milligram to one milligram at bedtime. Uh, one of the side effects that some people do get is either disrupted sleep or they get really wild, flunky, vivid dreams. And if that happens, we just say take it during the day, don’t take it at bedtime.  Usually that’s okay. Once in a while I’ll feel like, you know, even during the day my [01:09:00] sleep’s goofed up. Okay, we try it and it’s fine. So, I think it’s worth, you can work up to, you know, three to four and a half milligrams. We go up by one milligram generally every two weeks, and so we get to a target dose.  It can take up to three months to get the full effect of it. So once you get to what you think is a target dose, wait three months before really saying yay or nay, it helped or didn’t help.

PEMF, Pulse Electromagnetic Frequency. The idea is that there’s these devices that create a signal that’s the same frequency as our own human cells.  And the Germans have done a ton of research on PEMF. There’s over 1,500 studies, and basically it helps improve circulation, help with tissue repair, and really offsets a lot of the negative effect of the bad frequency of like 5G and Wi Fi and cell phones and all that kind of stuff. So improved circulation, decreased pain, reduced inflammation, faster recovery after injury and surgery, healing skin wounds.

And Acceleration of Nerve Regeneration. And usually it just involves, you know, [01:10:00] laying on a mat or putting the device close to your body. It runs anywhere from 10 minutes to sometimes an hour. Uh, but it’s very safe and can be very effective. There’s a doctor named William Pollack, P A W L U K. He’s one of the top, like, researchers on PEMF.  And if you just go to drpollack. com, he’s got a ton of research on PMF. He’s got devices he sells. But he’s vetted a lot of these devices. And they range anywhere from A few hundred bucks to several thousands of dollars, but again, it’s something people can do at home, they can do for themselves, they can do every day, and again, can be very effective.

Other detox therapies, I’m a huge fan of sauna, people can tolerate it, it’s a great way to mobilize mycotoxins, heavy metals, other toxic stuff. Uh, some people are very heat tolerant, you gotta be careful with the heat tolerant people. Uh, constitutional hydrotherapy, this is alternating hot and cold packs on the chest.

This is a little naturopathic therapy just to help improve blood flow throughout the body. There’s different companies that make drainage remedies. [01:11:00] These are usually combination herbal products for homeopathics. So we use a lot of Picana in our office. Uh, gentle exercise, colon hydrotherapy. Again, there’s another great way to help promote detoxification, which is different than just doing a whole enema.

Uh, the alternating, you know, filling of the intestines, draining for the intestine. It’s really designed to stimulate the vagus nerve. That’s what helps induce that parasympathetic state. So it is a good way to clean out the colon, but that’s really not the intent behind doing colon hydrotherapy. It really is the upstream effect of what it does to the liver, the gallbladder, and you’ll see at the end of a colon hydrotherapy session, everything starts to turn green while that bile’s starting to work its way.

So I’ve had some people that, you know, they’ve tried all these other things, and sometimes we’ll do these other strategies, and they respond really well. I think supporting the mitochondria for a lot of our Lyme patients that are tired all the time, all these nutrients that support the mitochondria, don’t be shy about using higher doses, CoQ10, Acetyl L Carnitine, Propoic Acid, B6 Magnesium, NADH, all [01:12:00] these are in some way, shape, or form related to mitochondrial function.

And I’ve got the doses written down here. Neuropathy can also be a big problem for a lot of Lyme patients. So there’s a lot of nutrients they can do to help support the nerves. Phosphatidylcholine, either orally or IV, glutathione, B12. I like B12 shots. Uh, they work better than oral or sublingual B12. We talked about PEMF, hyperbaric oxygen.  It’s not easy or accessible for people, but if they do have access, again, it can be really helpful. Improving oxygenation, supporting the mitochondria, and stimulating nerve growth. And IVIG, it’s not at the top of my list, but if people are having more Guillain Barre kind of symptoms, if you can get insurance to cover it, it’s horribly expensive, it’s hard to get insurance to cover it, but we’ve had some patients that have done really well with IVIG.

And Low Dose Immunotherapy, this was developed by Dr. Ty Vincent. He’s a medical doctor in Hawaii. The idea behind LDI is that we’re basically trying to use dead organism that’s been diluted out really homeopathically [01:13:00] as a way to turn off this autoimmune mechanism to the butt. So if your immune system’s treating Lyme as an allergen and not a pathogen, it’s engaging a completely different part of your immune system.

So, it’s literally that. It’s been irradiated, it takes the Borrelia organism, it’s dead, it can’t reproduce, it can’t cause infection. We dilute it out hundreds, millions of times, and then we mix it with an enzyme called beta glucuronidase. And the beta glucuronidase seems to activate whatever you mix it with.  And in very specific dilutions, it just seems to turn off that autoimmune reaction. And we’ve had some amazing cases of people that, again, tried herbs, tried antibiotics, tried all these other things, nothing really helped. And then we do this, and It’s a game changer. The challenge of this therapy is you gotta find the right dose, you gotta find the right antigen.  And sometimes we get bamboozled and we think it’s one thing and it’s really something else.

Very quickly, I had a young kid come in who overnight had typical PANS, OCD, anxiety, and I did his blood test, his streptiters were through the roof. I’m like, okay, this makes sense, it’s a strep infection. I did the [01:14:00] LDI for strep, did absolutely nothing.  Okay, so four years ago he had Lyme disease, but he was treated, and as far as I know he’s fine. That night, I gave it to him in the morning, that night, she calls me in a panic, says that he’s got a monster headache, so we talked about doing some natural things to control it, and the next morning all his symptoms were 100 percent gone.

So it was actually, I think what happened was he had the strep infection, which was the catalyst for the Lyme that was in the background that really had probably never been treated. So, ultimately, our treatment goals here, treat the organism if it’s acute, uh, treat the other immune distractors, other allergies that distract from the immune system, detoxify the body, fix the hormones, get proper sleep, reduce inflammation, get the nutritional status up, help their mitochondria, get the circulation going, and modulate the immune system.  And this is the little book I wrote and that’s all of my information. Thank you very much.

Dr. Weitz: Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. For those of you who enjoy. Listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would appreciate it if you could go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and give us a five star ratings and review.  If you would like to work with me personally to help you improve your health, I do accept a limited number of new patients per month for a functional medicine consultation. Some of the areas I specialize in include helping patients with specific health issues, like gut problems, neurodegenerative conditions, autoimmune diseases, cardiometabolic conditions, or for an executive health screen and to help you promote longevity and take a deeper dive into some of those factors that can lead to chronic diseases along the way.  Please call my Santa Monica White Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition Office at 310 395 3111 [01:16:00] and we’ll set you up for a new consultation for functional medicine. And I look forward to speaking to everybody next week.

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Dr. Sarah Ballantyne discusses Nutrient Density with Dr. Ben Weitz.

[If you enjoy this podcast, please give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, so more people will find The Rational Wellness Podcast. Also check out the video version on my WeitzChiro YouTube page.]

Podcast Highlights

Dr. Sarah Ballantyne was previously known as the PaleoMom and is the best selling author of five books, including her new book, Nutrivore: The Radical New Science for Getting the Nutrients You Need from the Food You Eat.  In this book, Sarah creates educational resources to help people improve their day-to-day diet and lifestyle choices, empowered and informed by the most current evidence-based scientific research. With Nutrivore, Dr. Sarah has created a positive and inclusive approach to dietary guidance, based in science and devoid of dogma, using nutrient density and sufficiency as its basic principles: Nourishment, not judgment. Her new website is Nutrivore.com.

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.  Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111.

Podcast Transcript

Dr. Weitz: Hi this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to 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, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me and let’s jump into the podcast. Hello, Rational Wellness Podcasters.

I’m excited today that we’ll be speaking with Dr. Sarah Ballantyne about her new best selling book, Nutrivore. Nutrivore’s subtitle is the radical new science for getting the nutrients you need from the food you eat.  In this book, Dr. Sarah creates educational resources to help people improve their day to day diet and lifestyle choices, empowered and informed by the most current evidence based scientific research. With [00:01:00] Nutrivore, Dr. Sarah has created a positive and inclusive approach to dietary guidance based in science.  And this is the Rational Wellness podcast, so we love science and devoid of dogma, using nutrient density and sufficiency as its basic principles. Nourishment, not judgment. While there’s a lot of great valuable information in this book, one thing that I found particularly helpful was the Valuable Vitamins Cheat Sheet, which we can refer to.  Dr. Ballantyne, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Ballantyne: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Weitz: You say Nutrivore in your book is not a diet, however, you were previously known as the Paleo Mom, so in this book, your description of a healthy diet in this book sounds more like a Mediterranean diet, so, it sounds like you changed your [00:02:00] approach, did you have to file divorce papers from the paleo community?

Dr. Ballantyne: I’m, I’m pretty sure it’s still enough through legal action that I’m not allowed to say anything. No, in all seriousness, you know, I think, my transition from Paleo to Nutrivore has been a very iterative process. I can’t say that there was one moment where I went, Oh, I think I’m wrong about some things.  I think this entire community is wrong about some things. I think there is a more diverse diet that we can be embracing that actually will be more health promoting, but also, have better coverage in terms of supplying all of the nutrients that our bodies need. It really, the research started, I think it was 2014 or 2015, I started doing, researching for a book on the gut microbiome, that still has not been published, but it was that research of really trying to understand how different foods impact the composition of the bacterial community that lives in our guts. That was the beginning of me going, oh wait a minute, legumes are really phenomenally health promoting. They’re the most nutrient dense, starchy foods. They have vitamins and minerals that, make them very valuable. They’re really great sources of polyphenols, and I don’t think we think of legumes as, being particularly great sources of polyphenols.  And the more that I did this research, the more I really questioned a lot of the dietary dogma that I had bought into.  And as the research and reading the science really, like, opened up my eyes, I started to realize that I had some disordered eating patterns that I had learned through the Paleo community as well.  So I had this personal journey behind the scenes of addressing my own food fears and expanding my own diet as I was undergoing this professional journey right out in the open for everyone to see as I kept going, excuse me, I think, I think maybe we’re wrong about lentils. I think maybe we’re wrong about corn.  I think maybe we’re wrong about oats. And the, the more foods that I, that are not considered paleo, that I really started to, like, change my mind on, the more it became obvious that it was time for me to move on, and, and build something new, and that’s what Nutrivore is.  

Dr. Weitz: So, you have a chapter in, or a section in your book where you talk about the myth of plant toxins, and, you know, one of the big knocks against legumes and lentils, things like that, are that, and this is a argument that paleo advocates often utilize, that lectins, that these foods like legumes contain lectins and phytates and what are called anti-nutrients or plant toxins and these are one of the main reasons why we want to avoid grains and beans.

Dr. Ballantyne: Yeah, so I actually this is, there was a huge conversation behind the scenes with my editor and the team at Simon Schuster about this chapter. So chapter 10 is a myth busting chapter and it kind of has something for everybody in there because it also talks about, whether or not, right, the myths about animal foods being bad for us, which is not true.  There’s a lot of seafood myths that I bust, a lot of myths about food quality, talking about, you know, olive oil and, organic foods as well.  It was really important to me to include a section on plant toxins, because that was the world that I used to, to, those were the circles I used to be in. And I had sort of learned that way of thinking from very prominent scientists names that we’re all familiar with if, if we’ve heard about Lectins and Phytates and Oxalates.

Dr. Weitz:  We might call this the anti-Gundry section.

Dr. Ballantyne: That could be. And as you dig into the science, I mean there’s, there’s a couple of different layers here. So the first layer is that yes, like sometimes the isolated compound in a food, like in, in a lab, it, in, when scientists are validating these compounds, they’re looking at them for potential use in pharmaceutical industries, typically where these scientific studies come from.  And I used to do this type of research. So like, I’m very, very familiar with how these experiments are designed and the different types of techniques that are used. So you take this, this compound that’s isolated from something. And you, first of all, you put it on some cells, and you see like, what do those cells do?  Does it change the proteins those cells are making, right? Like, that’s a really interesting way to understand that compound. Does it have use in a pharmaceutical industry somehow? And then the next kind of step you do to understand what this compound does is you, use it in animal models. So for example, there are some specific, plant toxins [00:07:00] that in animal models of colitis, when you administer just that one compound, you get increased inflammation.  That sounds really scary. That is not, that scientific study is not there to tell us to not eat the whole food. It’s there to help understand whether or not there’s pharmaceutical applications for that one specific compound in the food. And so we need to be understanding those studies within that bigger picture of how does the whole food, because a food is thousands of different chemical compounds, you know, maybe dozens of different nutrients. How does the whole food affect our entire biology?  Because every food will have something that you could isolate and concentrate and put in some, you know, high doses in an animal and go, okay, here’s a negative impact to one biological system. That is actually where a lot of pharmaceutical discovery has, has come from. A lot of cancer drugs come from exactly that process, [00:08:00] but that doesn’t help us understand the whole food.

And so my, my realization of this sort of logical fallacy of like, just because a food has a compound in it that is harmful to one biological system or one specific circumstance, we can’t judge the whole food based on that compound. And that was one of my main, um you know, uncomfortable realizations that I had been thinking about nutritional sciences in this way that is incorrect. And that really drove me to go back to the research and go, okay, so now let’s actually look at studies showing, like looking at whole legumes and not just looking at phytohemagglutinin as a, as an isolated compound. Let’s see how, in animal models, in humans, in intervention studies, where you give a group of humans and you have them eat more legumes.  Let’s look at these studies. And what you see is. the fiber types, the polyphenols, the very high legumes are the the most nutrient dense starchy foods on [00:09:00] average. They’re very rich in vitamins including folate which is one of the most common nutrient shortfalls in the standard American diet. So legumes tend to be some of our best food sources of folate.  Very very mineral rich. You start to see that the that all of the benefit we’re getting from those nutrients, the way that that fiber impacts the gut microbiome, all of that constellation of beneficial effects that we’re getting from eating the whole food completely suppress any potential negative impact from that one compound that in isolation is not great for us.

We’re not eating that compound in isolation, we’re eating the whole legume. And so that is a major sort of difference in how I have changed my view of research. Another big thing that really shifted for me over the last seven or eight years is putting more value in meta analyses. Now, a scientist will always say, right, that the most rigorous scientific [00:10:00] evidence is meta analyses, systematic reviews, umbrella reviews, right?  Like these are the studies, that pool together data for many, many, many studies. So they have a bigger data set. So they have more statistical power, and they incorporate a step of evaluating studies for bias. And so they, they actually have a step for evaluating a study’s quality before they incorporate the data into their giant data set.  And then they typically include a, now let’s also look at all of these, animal model studies, cell culture studies that help explain why this is the average effect we’re seeing. And that is another change that I’ve really made over the last, you know, several years in how I am understanding food is instead of looking at that one study that used phytohemagglutinin in an animal model of colitis, right, and showed increased inflammation.  I’m looking at the systematic reviews that look at all of the different [00:11:00] intervention studies where they take a group of people and have them eat more legumes and then measure various health outcomes, look at it, reducing risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, how it can cause weight loss in people with overweight or obesity how it can reduce risk of certain types of cancer, like looking at that big, big picture in these huge studies that are pooling together data from 20, 30, 300 different studies.  So they have really, really high statistical power. So it’s also a more rigorous approach, and one that really values scientific consensus. And so I included that in Chapter 10 because, I know my followers have kind of watched this whole journey, right? They’ve, they’ve seen all the little bits and pieces as I start to piece this together and really question a lot of the diet dogma that I held to be true.  But it’s also there for the, for the people who are not following that closely to help them understand my transition to a permissive dietary [00:12:00] structure where we can make room in a healthy diet for any food.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. I generally agree with your overall dietary approach. However, when it comes to the research, it continues to be problematic.  And even if you’re looking at meta analyses, unfortunately, most of the dietary studies are not randomized controlled trials where they give people certain foods and they’re basically just asking people to fill out these food frequency questionnaires, which are so inaccurate. And that makes it difficult, I think, to talk about the real science when it comes to food.  You can’t just take a group of people and just give them, make sure they’re eating legumes, you know.

Dr. Ballantyne: So let’s drill down on that because I think, you know, your point of large perspective studies is really important. Like, I think that is a really important thing to sort of explain to your listeners here.  So perspective studies, or they can be retrospective too, [00:13:00] but these are the studies where we take, I don’t know, 20,000 people and we follow them for 10 years, right? Things like, these are things like, the NHANES study, Framingham, right? There’s these huge, huge cohort studies.

Dr. Weitz: Right, but none of these are control trials where you’re actually giving them food.  So you really have no idea what they’re eating. And then they’re filling out these food frequency questionnaires, sometimes asking them, what did you eat in the last month?  Sometimes in the last year?  And, you know, the recall is so sketchy.

Dr. Ballantyne: Absolutely. So different cohorts have different levels of, sort of trust in their diet recalls.  So for example, the NHANES cohort, their diet recalls are what did you eat over the last two days? And they take that as various snapshots over time. So that is considered a dataset that is much more reliable in terms of, like, actually reflecting what people eat, but also, Our memory is fallible.  We do not want to admit to eating certain things when we’re [00:14:00] being given a survey. And all of those studies are correlative, right? So they tell us that there may be an association, but we have no way of knowing from those types of studies if that association is causative. Did that group of people have lower cardiovascular disease risk because they eat fewer legumes or more legumes, or is it because of this constellation of factors, because that’s the other thing that we see in these types of studies is something called healthy user bias.

So this is where somebody who is eating more plant foods, less, I mean this is a big problem in all of the studies showing that red meat is problematic. It’s a big problem. It’s like a classic example of healthy user bias because red meat has been demonized for so long that people who don’t eat very much red meat tend to eat more fruits and vegetables, they tend to be more active, they tend to also have higher socioeconomic status, so they have social determinants of health working in their favor.  They tend to be female, who also we just get less cardiovascular disease.  And so it’s really hard when you have a lot of different things stacking in these correlative studies to be able to separate out, okay, but how much of this is that these people are eating more legumes? And how much of it is all of the other things that go along with that person who eats more legumes?

And that is, This is absolutely a challenge in nutritional sciences research, and one of the reasons why I never only rely on prospective studies in my interpretation of nutritional sciences. So fortunately for us, we are getting more randomized control. They’re not blind, because you can’t blind somebody from the diet they’re eating, typically.  There’s a few studies where they’ll be like, here’s a muffin and you don’t know if that’s the muffin that has the extra fiber in it or not, right? There are some studies that they can figure out blind, but overall diet studies, we can’t, but we are getting more studies where they take one group of people and say, keep doing what you’re doing, and they take another group of people and they have them work with a dietitian, they work with a, you know, work with a health coach, and they have a dietary structure for [00:16:00] them to follow.

And we’re getting more and more of those studies that we can then go, okay, so we have the intervention study that reinforces what we see in this big observational one that can’t establish causality. And then we can also look at The nutrient difference in, in what these people are eating and look at what we know about how those nutrients impact these biological systems and make a strong case for that being the causal mechanism here as well.  So it is very much about, yes, I absolutely agree that not putting too much weight into an observational study because it cannot establish causality. But taking that as our indication that here’s something to drill down further on understanding healthy user bias and, and how that impacts statistical analyses, but also then we can start layering on, other, other evidence.  And I think we do have a Fortunately, a growing body of intervention clinical trials, randomized but not blind, as well as animal [00:17:00] models that can help to drill down on the biochemical mechanisms behind the benefits.

Dr. Weitz: And let’s get back to the scientific information that you’re adding to our body of knowledge, which is the nutrient density of foods.  So tell us why higher nutrient density is so important and then how do we measure it?

Dr. Ballantyne: Yeah. So, I think that the background piece of information here is that most people’s diets fall short of actually supplying us with even the daily values of all of the essential nutrients, which, 

Dr. Weitz:  Which we know are very, very under, you know, very limited and most people would benefit from having more than the RDA.

Dr. Ballantyne: Absolutely correct. So, so we’re falling short of the RDA. Okay. And there’s some indication that the RDAs are still maybe not optimized, right? Like, they really need to be thought of as a minimum for most nutrients. I think they’re probably in the range for some. And [00:18:00] so there’s four essential nutrients for which 90 percent of Americans are not hitting the daily value, ever.  There’s ten essential nutrients for which half don’t of Americans are more or not hitting the daily value. But even when you, there’s a lot of different studies that will analyze diets that either look at meal plans from, you know, cookbooks or whatever, or they’ll look at people following that diet and look at what they’re actually eating.  And they’ll analyze the diets for nutrients and show that even people who are following diets anticipating that those are healthier ways to eat. Uh, each diet has a collection of nutrients that are a lot harder to get. And so there is a proportion of people who are not meeting the daily values of those nutrients.  And, I mean, government dietary guidelines aren’t off the hook here either. Even the dietary guidelines for Americans has a collection of about five nutrients that people aren’t getting enough of even if you follow the guidelines perfectly. So this is kind of a thing that is across dietary guidelines.

Dr. Weitz: Not to mention that there’s thousands of phytonutrients for which we have no guidelines at all and nobody has aren’t even calculated.

Dr. Ballantyne: Ew, I’m so glad you brought that up. I mean, we have, there’s like 10 ish thousand phytonutrients of which we really understand a few hundred. We know the more of them we consume, the healthier we are on average.  We know the biochemical mechanisms, there are very strong antioxidants, they tend to be anti inflammatory. Different phytonutrients localize in different areas of the body, they interact with different pathways, so they have a wide range of different benefits. So, we want. to be consuming a wide range of phytonutrients.  And there’s no daily value for phytonutrients. There’s probably enough data to actually establish one for polyphenols, but that hasn’t been done because we don’t get daily values for non essential nutrients. But I think you and I are on the same page that maybe phytonutrients could be labeled as essential just because they’re so important.

So we are, we’re in a situation where even people who are really intentional about their [00:20:00] food choices because We don’t learn this, right? We don’t learn in school, but also in dietary templates. When you are picking up a diet book at the store, you’re typically learning about what to not eat or how to measure the things that you eat.  You’re typically not learning about nutrients and what they do in the body and which foods contain what nutrients and how to choose foods from different groups so that you’re getting the full range of nutrients that your body needs. And that is what I am building with Nutrivore. And so that includes identifying nutrient dense foods and focusing on them because we’re trying to fill that gap.

So typically, our intake of these nutrients is high enough that we don’t have a disease of malnutrition, right? We don’t have scurvy. We’re getting enough vitamin C to not have scurvy, but we’re still falling short of hitting our daily value and vitamin C is definitely an example of a nutrient for which we Getting a lot higher than the daily value has been shown to have a lot of benefits for, for various situations.  [00:21:00] So, we’re in that weird ray of like, okay, it’s not so low that we’re like, I’m really, really sick, but not getting enough vitamin C is increasing risk of mental health challenges, increasing risk of cardiovascular disease. It’s having a negative impact on our health. So the best way to fill not just that vitamin C gap, but all of the different gaps that we have is identifying nutrient dense foods and being intentional about adding them to our diets.  So that is again, one of the tools that I am creating in my book, A Nutrivore.

Dr. Weitz: I’m curious as to how you come up with this, nutrient density score, for example, are all nutrients equal weighted? Are some more important than others, you know, how, how much is considered a good amount?

Dr. Ballantyne: Oh, I, that’s okay.  I’m going to nerd out about nutrient density calculation math with you. I think you, we’ve got [00:22:00] another three hours, I hope. So, I created something called the Nutrivore score, which is a measurement of nutrient density, which is scientifically defined. This is the consensus definition as total nutrients per calorie.  The definition of nutrient density, like it, Nutrient density calculations have an interesting history. So a nutrient dense food, that term was first coined in the 70s and it was defined as any food with a substantial amount of nutrients per serving. Substantial was not like specified any more than that.  You’re like, what does that mean? And so, I was someone who was alive in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I remember labels and how that was like the beginning of like the health aura and the like healthification of labels but not the product, right? That led to a lot of challenges. And what ended up happening in the 70s, 80s and 90s was the demonization of foods as bad because they had high [00:23:00] fat content, like avocados, nuts and seeds, right?  These foods that we now recognize are really like important heart healthy fats. Those foods got demonized for having high fat content. But a sugary fruit punch could say a good source of vitamin C on the label if it had 10 percent of the daily value per glass. And so in the early 2000s, that definition was updated to significant amounts of nutrients per calorie.  Because we were in a situation, we’re still at a situation, where there’s no shortage of calories in the food supply, but there is a shortage of nutrients in the food supply. So we need to understand how to get more nutrients per calorie, not more servings of foods. And at the same time, scientists are working on different nutrient density scores.  So there’s a few dozen of them that have been created over time, none of which have been adopted by any institute or agency. My initial intention when I was first building the Nutrivore website and working on the the early foundational content.  In preparation for writing the book was I’m going to go through all this research and figure out which one’s the [00:24:00] closest to being ready for prime time, which one is almost there.  And I’m just going to use whichever is the best one in the science. I spent three months reading every single nutrient profiling paper out there. And I kept hitting, well, why are you guys doing that? I kept hitting these moments where I was like, That makes no sense. So, couple of the challenges, and you identified a few right in the question.  So, one of the biggest like, like pitfalls that I see happening in nutrient profiling right now is scientists are trying to figure out which nutrients to include in the calculation so that the score at the end aligns with the healthy eating index, which is a measurement of how well someone’s diet follows the USDA dietary guidelines for Americans.

Uh, it’s kind of like retrofitting the score for the guidelines that already exist. I think that’s the opposite of the right way to go about it. I think we should be figuring out how to understand the food and then seeing what that tells us about maybe some edits to the next day. The guidelines are [00:25:00] updated every five years.  It would not be a big deal to edit them again and go, hey, now we know these foods are more nutritionally important, right? That, that’s, there’s, that should be something that can happen. And then there’s this idea of like penalizing foods for containing things like added sugars or sodium or saturated fats or cholesterol.  And then there’s this idea of, like weighting certain nutrients. That’s all kind of happening right now in the scientific literature. So like the Food Compass is sort of well known because it keeps making the news for having such a high score for Lucky Charms cereal. It is not ready for primetime either, although I think it’s probably the most interesting out of the ones that are in development right now.

Dr. Weitz: We have to look at who’s funding all this food science.

Dr. Ballantyne: They’re weighting food attributes, they call them, in a way that is a very like plant based diet lean. And the fact of the matter is you don’t need to weigh certain nutrients more [00:26:00] heavily than others to get to the end of plants have lots of nutrients per calorie.  Like that’s, that’s an easy conclusion. All of these different scores come up with that result. That’s not something you need to put in the math, but that’s what a lot of the direct to consumer, right? That’s what Furman’s ANDI score does as well. It doesn’t include nutrients that are mostly found in animal foods but it includes a lot of nutrients that are only found in plant foods.  And you end up with a system that makes animal foods look terrible and plant foods look great. So with that being, my starting place, like that’s okay. This is, this is the field of science. What that, this is what I have to work with here. I, I, it was a really obvious like algorithmic choice for me.

So the Nutrivore score is algorithmically identical to something called the Nutri Rich Foods Index. So it’s simply a sum of amount of nutrient divided by daily value of nutrient, and then that sum is divided by the energy density of the food. There’s no weighting certain [00:27:00] nutrients more heavily than others.  I think you end up in a situation where you, you bias foods when you start doing that. And also, you could take the approach of, I’m going to weight the nutrients that people are more likely to be deficient in. more in this, like, I’m gonna, like, let’s say it’s like folate, vitamin E, vitamin A, vitamin D. I’m going to give those more weight.  Magnesium, vitamin D. Magnesium, vitamin C. But, you know what happens when you do that and you create an entire system on that, is you overcompensate, right? So people start choosing those foods because they have these higher scores and now they’re missing out on the nutrients that are not given as much weight in the calculation.

So that just felt like that the future proofing of the score is to not actually give these nutrients more weight, but to include as many different nutrients as I have enough data that makes sense to. So the Nutrivore score includes 33 nutrients in the calculation and weight them all equally and make sure that I have representation in these [00:28:00] nutrients of nutrients that are inherent to plant foods, that those are the only source, but also nutrients that are inherent to animal foods, that that’s the only source, so that we’re not automatically putting in a plant based diet bias into the score, and then do all of the math blind, and then just see what it tells me.

And so the NutriScore doesn’t, like, all the nutrients are weighted the same. There’s no, it’s really too complex of a system to be able to do corrections for competitive binding or nutrient synergy because it has to do with everything you eat at a meal and not just what’s in one food, like, as soon as you put salad dressing on your salad, you’re going to absorb more vitamin K and beta carotene, it’s way, it’s, it’s way too complex, and it doesn’t really tell us about the food.  So it’s just a very simple calculation. And it’s the context of like how much is nutrient is versus how much we need. It’s the daily value. Thank you. Yes, the daily values might be an underestimate, but in terms of the math, that doesn’t really matter, because what it is doing is it is basically saying, [00:29:00] this thing we need 100, 100 milligrams of so 200 milligrams in this food is amazing, right?

That’s so great. This thing we need 10 nanograms of, I don’t think there’s anything that’s measured in nanograms, 10 micrograms of, okay, so we’re gonna, we’re gonna, you know, basically it’s, it’s a way of correcting for how much we need. So it doesn’t really matter that they’re, they might be a little bit off.

It’s ballpark is, is good enough in that math. Uh, and then yeah. And then there’s no normalization. There’s no weighing for different food groups, which some of these scores do. They’ll just say, okay, we’ll give the top food in every, in every group. We’ll get a hundred. So then all of a sudden you’re making, you’re making like kale look the same as like whole wheat bread because they’re the tops in their groups, which is, I think also silly.  So it just keeps it very, very simple. It’s a straight up calculation. Yeah. The thing that’s special about it is how much data is in the calculation and that’s why it gives us such a complete picture of the nutrient density of foods.

Dr. Weitz: I make a prediction you’re probably not going to get a huge grant from [00:30:00] Kellogg’s for your program.

Dr. Ballantyne: No, but you know what, a grant would be a grant. Would it be a grant? As long, as long as I can maintain my independence. Yeah, no chance, chances, chances are good. Uh, the Kellogg’s cereal tends, tends not to, even fortified tends, tends not to have Amazing nutrients. 

Dr. Weitz: You know that whole fortification thing, it’s interesting.  There’s an example of where you’re weighting certain nutrients and how we think we’re making people healthier. Just take iodine as an example. So we had all these millions of people suffering from goiter because they had low iodine. And so we add iodine fortification by adding it to the salt and we have this huge decrease in the number of people with goiter.  And we have this huge increase in the number of people with autoimmune thyroid Hashimoto’s. So, you know, it’s being applauded for years now as this great example of how fortification is so beneficial, but [00:31:00] we just traded one disease for another.

Dr. Ballantyne: I mean, potentially, as somebody with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis very, very personal one there.

Dr. Weitz: You can put me in that camp too. 

Dr. Ballantyne: Yeah, I know. It’s like worst initiation ritual ever to get into that club, right? But, but yeah, I think, you know, that’s, so fortification is fascinating to me. Let’s go on this tangent. Because, because, you know, it really has very limited success stories. So even if you, even if you bought into that very simple narrative of we got a 74 percent reduction in, in goiter.  And even if you wanted to say Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is much more complex than iodine excess. And so let’s, let’s not count that as, as like coming off of the success story. I think there’s a lot of nuance here and probably Of course. 

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I was oversimplifying for sure.

Dr. Ballantyne: And then we’ve got iron fortification, and that has caused, if I remember correctly, it’s like 30 or 40 percent reduction in iron deficiency anemia, [00:32:00] and then folic acid fortification has pretty, like, impressively reduced risk of neural tube defects.  Those are the three success stories of fortification, right? So we’ve got three success stories, we fortify with a lot more nutrients than just those three, right? Like pretty much all the B vitamins except B12 are in a fortification. Okay, well not B7 either. All of the, the, the B vitamins that we were known about in the 40s.  And then we’ve got vitamin D, but not, not in that many. That’s mostly in, dairy products that are geared at kids and not as much in dairy products that are geared as adults. I think it’s, it’s, It’s kind of surprising how little of an effect fortification has had on, well, no effect, on like the really big You know, health conditions that are a major burden on society that can completely take away your quality of life, that have really high morbidity and [00:33:00] mortality rates, right?  Like cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes and cancer. You can’t see a signal from fortification reflected in those health outcomes, nor can you from multivitamins. Which is fascinating to me, and it really to me reinforces the importance of getting at least most of our nutrients from whole foods.

Not that I’m anti supplement, there’s definitely a time and a place. Like, I take so much vitamin D to keep my levels normal, right? Like, I’m definitely not anti supplement, but I think that if you think of fortification as a supplement, right? It’s the same forms that are in a multivitamin, generally. It really, you see the value of a food first approach and then, you know, individualized supplementation as a second layer rather than supplementing the entire food supply.

Dr. Weitz: Right. So, since you’ve been calculating the nutrient density of so many foods, tell us about some of the biggest surprises that you’ve discovered, which [00:34:00] you talk about in your book.

Dr. Ballantyne: Yeah, there have been,

Dr. Weitz: by the way, warning, warning, … Sarah is about to bust some of the food myths and functional medicine practitioners are not going to be happy.

Dr. Ballantyne: Yes. Uh, thank you for the, like rolling out the, what is the opposite of the red carpet for the answer to this question. So I think the, there’ve been a lot of surprises now, my take a sort of high level view to this question before I share like the most nutrient dense food, which nobody would have ever guessed in a million years.  I think the best way to use the Nutrivore score is to identify simple swaps or additions in a meal that don’t take away from like your enjoyment of the meal, but will add a lot of nutrition to the meal. So like a really easy example would be like if you’re making a pasta dish, like swapping out regular pasta for whole grain pasta will add some nutrients, but then if you swap that out for like a lentil or chickpea based pasta, so you’re [00:35:00] gonna, you’re gonna double your nutrient density going from like plain whole wheat, you’re going to about quadruple it going up to like a lentil or chickpea based pasta.

And that’s all you did. But then maybe you also identified a simple addition and you added some sliced mushrooms to your sauce or some basil or some garlic. Probably added a lot of flavor to the sauce as well, but then you added a lot of nutrition and Your pasta dish is probably just as great. So, as a practical tool, I think that’s the best way to use the Nutri Force score.  My favorite, like, nerding out surprise moments, are the foods that have reputations for being nutritionally pointless, that get a redemption arc, that through the Nutri Force score calculation, my favorite example of this is iceberg lettuce, which has more nutrients per calorie than celery, or, which we put up on this pedestal.  or Cucumber or Artichoke. It actually has slightly more nutrients per calorie than Sockeye Salmon. 

Dr. Weitz: Does celery juice cure all ails?

Dr. Ballantyne: Waiting for the scientific study to show that one. So far, [00:36:00] so far so far lacking. Although celery does have some really interesting polyphenols, but you’re getting that from celery in any form, it doesn’t have to be juiced.  So that’s my favorite way to use the Nutri Score. Is to kind of say, like, look at the value of iceberg lettuce, look at the value of watermelon or potatoes. Like, foods that people kind of love to dunk on. But there’s also been a lot of, you know, Just like, who, okay, who could have known that the single most nutrient dense food was canned clam liquid?  Like, that is not something, if you had told me, like, here’s, here’s your data set of 8, 000 foods, guess, what, what are you gonna guess? And I would have guessed liver, maybe, Or maybe like a Leafy Green, like Watercress, and Watercress and Liver are both, like, way up there. But the single most nutrient dense food is canned clam liquid.  And here’s how the math works out. Like, here’s, here’s how that happens. I feel like that needs, because I do not want to start a drinking clam juice story. Trend That is not what we’re trying to do here. . I wanna say why we’re run clam

Dr. Weitz: juice in every [00:37:00] grocery store. .

Dr. Ballantyne: I mean, if you are going to incorporate, make sure to go up on totally paper

Dr. Weitz: and clam juice.

Dr. Ballantyne: Clam juice. Empty, empty shelves. Make sure to look for a low sodium option if this is something that you want to incorporate. You don’t have to, though. I think that’s the other liberating thing about the new, the 

Dr. Weitz: What the hell is clam juice anyway?

Dr. Ballantyne: So it is literally the liquid that, like, clams are cooked in.  So, so you can either get it from, like, it is the liquid when you drain a can of clams, or you can buy it separately because it’s used as an ingredient in linguine with clam sauce in clam chowder. It’s used as a cocktail ingredient. So it has some like traditional like food uses as well. But yeah, it is the liquid that clams are cooked in typically pressure cooked in.

Dr. Weitz: So there is some I think you should change the name to clam broth. It’ll sell like crazy.

Dr. Ballantyne: Yes. Clam juice does kind of sound like you squeezed the clams. That’s, I’m pretty sure there’s no squeezing [00:38:00] step. It’s just Heating them in liquid, then doing something really cool with the clams, and then selling the liquid because it has a lot of flavor.  Clam Bisque, I mean, I guess you could think of it as, yeah, but it’s unseasoned. So, there’s a lot of nutrients that are in the clams that ends up, you know, that are water soluble that end up in the liquid. So the reason why canned clam liquid or clam juice is the top most nutrient dense food, and this is true for all of the most nutrient dense foods, it’s very very low energy density.  So when you divide by a very small number, you get a much bigger number. So a food that has a very low energy density So canned clam liquid is five calories per cup. When you have something that’s that low energy density, it doesn’t have to have a ton of nutrition to have high nutrients per calorie.  So remember, nutrient density is nutrients per calorie, not per serving or per hundred grams. So, when you have something that’s super low energy density, doesn’t need to have a ton of nutrition. And canned clam liquid, [00:39:00] has some impressive nutrition. It has 500 percent of the daily value of vitamin B12 in a one cup serving, like, which is just huge.  And it also has some potassium, some other minerals, it’s, you know, it’s got some other B vitamins, it’s got some protein. So it has an impressive amount of nutrition. for that five calories. That’s how the math works out for it to be the top. But is it going to contribute the most, like, nutrients to your diet?

No, that’s going to be a food like the actual clams, right, or oysters, or liver, or those like really nutrient dense leafy greens like kale and watercress and rainbow chard. Those are all the foods that are going to contribute a lot more to your diet. like absolute nutrition, which is why I never recommend only using the NutriVerse score to choose our foods, that we, it’s fascinating, it tells us a lot about a food, but it’s not the only information that we want to be considering when we’re putting together our plates, because then we’re going to end up with a diet where we’re just eating, Clam juice and watercress all day and that’s not going to be [00:40:00] nutritionally beneficial.  But other foods that have that like really low energy density that end up with really high NutriVore scores are not as alarming as clam juice. Like coffee is way up there. You know, it’s, it’s one of the top most nutrient dense foods because it’s packed with polyphenols, actually has some B vitamins as well.  but also one or two calories per cup. A lot of leafy greens make the cut. Same, same thing, right? Not very high nutrient density, but for each calorie, tons of nutrition.

Dr. Weitz: Interesting. You also break the myth about healthy fats and you state in your book, that healthier fats include olive oil.  Avocado oil, which most functional medicine practitioners agree with, and soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, and sunflower oil, which many in the functional medicine community do not agree with.

Dr. Ballantyne: Yeah, this was [00:41:00] one of I want you to just imagine me coming from a place where I was very anti vegetable oils in the past and really reading in the science and falling down this rabbit hole of scientific studies for a few weeks, because I had such a hard time wrapping my head around this.  So I, I want to, like, like, I want to preface my answer to this question by, yep, I, my inner child had a temper tantrum as I was reading these studies. I had a really hard time. Being open to this research. It was, it was really challenging, and, and it’s because We’ve got such a strong mechanism in place for understanding high omega 6 polyunsaturated fats in relation to omega 3 polyunsaturated fats and how those should be inflammatory, right?

We, we just have such a wealth of scientific evidence showing that, These fats in the cell membrane are used as substrate and what, which one you have will [00:42:00] determine which you know, paracrine and autocrine signaling molecules are made. We know that if omega 6 is there, we get inflammatory signals.

We know if omega 3 is there, we get either anti inflammatory or anti inflammatory. Only mildly inflammatory signals. Like, we have, we have it all mapped out. We know, we know all the biochemical mechanisms. And yet, when you give humans canola oil, or corn oil, or soybean oil, not only does it lower their cardiovascular disease risk factors, like, like, seeing lower serum cholesterol, is only exciting if you also see lower cardiovascular disease risk, which we do.

We see lower all cause mortality, a general indicator of health and longevity. And, what’s fascinating is studies that have actually compared canola oil head to head with olive oil intervention trials have shown They’re both equally as good for cardiovascular disease risk, and they work through different mechanisms, so actually, we would be, we would be best off if we were incorporating [00:43:00] both into our diets, which is mind blowing, because it tells us that there is some regulation of these paracrine and autocrine signaling molecules beyond substrate bioavailability.

but we don’t know what it is. And that is, fascinating. This is definitely a, science has really shifted in the last five years. We’ve got now a really good body of scientific evidence showing benefits to vegetable oils. I still put olive oil on a pedestal. I still think olive oil is, is the king of oils.

You just can’t, you just can’t, like the polyphenols, the triterpenes, it’s got so much good stuff in it. You, you really can’t, I don’t, I don’t think you can beat olive oil, but it shows that these more affordable. oil options are beneficial. Not as good as olive oil, but for somebody on a budget, you know, still beneficial.

And I think what’s, what’s so important in following that science is, again, right, the difference between how we understood it when it was in animal models, [00:44:00] and cell culture models, versus now how we understand it in humans, and the fact that it reveals an important something different in our biochemistry that we still need to understand, but we’ve got these intervention trials that make the result very, very clear.

Dr. Weitz: I just want to apologize to the listeners for this gardener who’s right outside my window who seems like he’s never gonna stop with his lawn blower or whatever it is. So I wanted to push back just a little bit because I do think that a percentage of these studies that have shown that there’s a decreased cardiovascular risk with soybean oil and some of these other polyunsaturated oils is because they’re comparing saturated fat with substituting a soybean oil or something like that and That’s not necessarily substituting an omega 6 versus omega 3 or, you [00:45:00] know, an overall different type of, you know, there aren’t too many studies that, you mentioned one, but there aren’t too many studies that are really comparing olive oil versus soybean oil.  uh, saturated fats versus polyunsaturated fats and the polyunsaturated fats having some benefit potentially.

Dr. Ballantyne: Yes, I, so I think that’s a great point. So I think, the, the broader point is when we switch to something, right, There’s two parts of the equation. There is whether or not the thing we’re now eating, what its health effects are, and what is the thing that we swapped it out for.  Right. So absolutely correct. The studies that show benefits to vegetable oils are the studies that show swapping out butter or margarine for vegetable oils. So swapping out a saturated fat, whether that’s a natural saturated fat or a man made saturated fat, which what fully hydrogenated vegetable oils and margarine are.

For an [00:46:00] unsaturated fat. I still think that’s very fascinating and I still think that it makes a strong case for benefits of vegetable oil, but there are now more, more studies that are comparing vegetables to olive oil. There’s one that I cite in the book that compared If I remember correctly, it compared, olive oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, and I think canola was in there, and it looked at all cause mortality, again, sort of a broad indicator of health and longevity.

And, I think, like, nobody is surprised, it showed olive oil, right, high oleic uh, acid, right, a omega 9, a monounsaturated fatty acid, extremely rigorously shown to reduce cardiovascular disease risk, right? So, it showed olive oil was, was, was the king, was definitely beneficial but then it showed still reductions in all cause mortality from other vegetable oils and increases in all cause mortality from margarine and butter.

So your [00:47:00] zero was not having these things, right? And I think, I think there is a good enough body of scientific literature, for example, showing in humans that we don’t see vegetable oil consumption increasing C reactive protein or TNF Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha, or Interleukin 6, like these markers of inflammation.

I think there is enough information to say solidly, again, olive oil, avocado oil, I don’t think you could compete with them because those monounsaturated fats are so beneficial. But I think we can take a step back for sure from saying that vegetable oils are problematic. I don’t, science does not support saying that they’re increasing cardiovascular disease risk or that they’re inflammatory.

Dr. Weitz: Just to play devil’s advocate one more time, I hope you don’t mind, is, there was the Minnesota study, which was one of the few dietary studies where they actually had people staying at this mental institution and they were able to control everything they ate so they know accurately what they really ate.  And it turns out that when they [00:48:00] substituted, omega 6 oils for saturated fats, While there was a potential reduction in cardiovascular disease, all cause mortality actually increased in those eating the vegetable oils, and the conclusion seemed to be that there was an increase in cancer, which people attributed to some sort of increase in inflammation.

Dr. Ballantyne: I, I’d be very interested, I’m not super familiar with that study, so I, I don’t. 

Dr. Weitz: Remember the studies in the 60s, and the Minnesota was. Oh, the Minnesota starvation. Published, and they went. It was the Minnesota

Dr. Ballantyne: starvation experiment, was also part of it.

Dr. Weitz: I don’t know. This was like in a mental institution and they hadn’t published it.  And then just like in the last, I don’t know, 10, 15 years, they published it. And so.

Dr. Ballantyne: Yeah. I mean, I I don’t want to, to speculate on the quality of that study, having not, not read it. I, my, my, my little alarm bells go up as soon as you say the data was published 30 or 40 years later, because we don’t actually know what the methodology [00:49:00] was in that case.  The people who probably, We’re taking, right, taking notes on that data may no longer be with us. So I do have little like my little skeptic are dark up, but I don’t want to comment because I’m, I’m not familiar. That’s

Dr. Weitz: okay. Since, since you’re breaking myths, you also said something about olive oil, which I think people need to hear.  I talked to so many people who are like, I won’t cook with olive oil because it’s, it’s going to become rancid. It’s going to be damaged by the heat. Can you explain what the deal is and is it okay to fry my eggs in olive oil?

Dr. Ballantyne: It is absolutely fine to cook with olive oil. They’ve done studies where they sit, they heat olive oil for like 24 hours and measure how much of the fats get oxidized in that time and show olive oil is actually incredibly heat stable.  The higher the quality of olive oil, typically the better, even though it has a lower smoking point. So we do want to be aware of smoking points when we’re cooking with something like olive oil. So can

Dr. Weitz: you explain the difference between smoke point [00:50:00] and is it burning and heat stability? Okay.

Dr. Ballantyne: Yeah. So I’m going to try.  This, this is, I’m going to try. There, we’re getting into some really interesting physics phenomenon here. So, what is making a high quality olive oil have a lower smoke point, which is the temperature at which it will start to smoke is 

Dr. Weitz: And people automatically assume that means that the oil’s getting damaged.

Dr. Ballantyne: Yes, it kind of, so it is sort of. So it doesn’t necessarily mean oxidation of fat, so there’s other things in the olive oil that are starting to burn. So it is some, but it is other compounds, and these are compounds that are taken out in the refinement process in a regular olive oil. That’s why a refined olive oil has a longer shelf life and has a higher smoke point.  So it’s more like these other compounds are there that they can start to burn at a lower temperature and then that can trigger a bit of a downstream [00:51:00] chemical reaction for making some of the fats oxidize. So if you heat an oil to smoke, point. If it’s really smoking, like if I’m in my kitchen, if I overheated the pan, I didn’t realize it, if I’m putting the smoke, if I put the oil in and it smokes a little bit, I’m going to take the pan off the heat, I’m going to throw something in it, food, not water, don’t, don’t, not water, food in it to cool it down real fast, I’m not going to worry about it.  If I throw it in and it is like, smoke detector, like I need to throw on the fan over the range because it is smoking that much, I’m gonna toss that, I’m not gonna, like that is now going to have a lot of oxidized fat in it, and it can happen quite quickly.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Ballantyne: So, that being said, If you’re staying below smoke point, which most cooking applications will be like, like olive oil hat, depending on the quality of olive oil, it’s going to have a smoke point in the like 360 to 410 range.

Yeah.

Dr. Weitz: I’ve seen 375, 350. [00:52:00] Yeah.

Dr. Ballantyne: Most like baking is getting to like a hundred and sixty like anything in the oven, right? That your actual functional temperature is not as high Like your surface temperature on the food is not as high as the oven temperature, right? That’s because that’s that’s how cooking works. 

Dr. Weitz: Wait, wait, wait, wait.  I don’t think most people understand that So, so if you bake vegetables in the oven and you put the temperature at 375, the food’s not at 375

Dr. Ballantyne: Not yet. Yeah, it takes, so the food, so think about the heat transfer. Okay. So your food starts off, let’s say at room temperature. Okay. So it’s, it’s, it’s starting off at, I don’t know, 70 degrees.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Ballantyne: You rub some oil on it, some, some seasoning, you put that in the oven at 375. Let’s say the smoke point of your oil is 375, right? So you’re right at that that line. You are, until you’re at a point where the food is starting to burn, you are not at a point where that oil is going to be hitting the smoke point because the food [00:53:00] has, it’s like a heat sink, right?  So it’s absorbing the heat, from the rest of the oven, but the temperature of the food, where that oil is, isn’t coming up to the temperature of the oven yet, until, right, until you’re, it’s starting to burn, but in that like, nice phase of like, I’ve got a little browning, a little roasting, it’s very, very delicious, you haven’t hit the smoke point of the oil.

Okay. If you pull the pan out. Things are starting to burn. You pull the pan out and you can see smoke coming from the pan. You overdid it. So typically for me, if I’m roasting vegetables, I actually typically do them at 375, but I’m using an olive oil that’s going to have a smoke point more in the 400 to 410 range.

So like I never, I’m not risking it, by having the oven temperature higher than the smoke point. But like this is why you can bake with olive oil, right? Like baked goods, the internal temperature typically is getting up to 160 is typically where a baked muffin or, you know, a cake or something is, is done.

So most of the time, even on your pan, [00:54:00] The temperatures that you’re cooking with in your pan are probably more likely in the 300 range than in the 400 range. Again, unless you’re overheating the pan, which can happen. So these fats are absolutely fine to cook with. It is the vitamin E and the polyphenols are helping to prevent oxidation, but also just those monounsaturated fats are more heat stable than a lot of other, a lot of other oils.  So absolutely fine to cook with. But if, if you, if you whoopsie, and we all whoopsie, it’s fine. Like that is a normal I’m cooking at home experience, and you’re getting a lot of smoke, off of that oil, I, I would recommend tossing it and starting over.

Dr. Weitz: Okay, so you can cook with olive oil, you can bake with olive oil, but just keep the temperatures down below the smoke point.  So if your olive oil has a smoke point of 400 or 375, you know, then don’t roast at 450, roast at 350 or something like that. And with the pan, if you’re making eggs or something on a pan, just don’t [00:55:00] put it up to the highest heat and just watch to make sure that the oil’s not.

Dr. Ballantyne: Most pans don’t like that either, right?  Like most Most of your pans aren’t even as like, I mostly cook on stainless steel. My stainless steel pans don’t want to be cooked, like heated up on, on maximum heat either, like they’re going to warp. So it’s, it’s good for the oil and good for your cookware.

Dr. Weitz: So does higher nutrient density of your food correlate with better health outcomes and or longevity?

Dr. Ballantyne: Yes, so, what we know is that people who get more, have a more nutritious diet, who have fewer nutrient shortfalls, who are, like, eating more of these nutrient dense foods, eating, right, eating more vegetables, eating more fruit, eating more seafood, like these foods that are very nutrient dense, they have reduced risk of heart disease, all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, osteoporosis you know, like a list goes on and on and on. Do we have studies looking at people [00:56:00] following Nutrivor yet to be able to say that? Not yet. Not yet. But Nutrivor is very much built on the scientific consensus around the importance of nutrients and the overall eating patterns that are shown in a wealth of studies to support long term human health.

Dr. Weitz: You state in your book that being overweight is not necessarily associated with being unhealthy and that you can be overweight, or obese and still be metabolically healthy. Isn’t it the case that in the U. S. Very few people are actually metabolically healthy. In fact, one study published in 2018 found that only 12 percent of Americans were actually metabolically healthy.

Dr. Ballantyne: Uh, yes. So there’s a little bit of a difference in how, like, how metabolically healthy is defined. So the study that said that only 12 percent of people are metabolically healthy used a like more rigorous definition. There’s been other studies that, you know, basically it’s like how [00:57:00] many health markers have to be normal to be called metabolically healthy and how many are allowed to be abnormal, before we start calling you, metabolically abnormal.  Uh, so it’s like do you say zero markers, one marker, or two markers? And that’s, that’s kind of how it’s searched for hard to compared the actual stats in some of these studies because they’re using a slightly different definition. So, in one study that I quote in the book, it showed that basically about half of overweight people are metabolically healthy.

About a quarter of normal weight people are metabolically abnormal. We can’t directly compare that to the 12 percent study because they’re using a definite, a different definition. So, of like how many of these markers and which markers exactly we’re looking at. So it makes it a little bit tough, tough to, to do a direct comparison there.

I think the, rather than getting like into the weeds of the actual number because of that challenge with how it’s defined in different studies, I think the more important thing is to take that step back and say, look at this number of overweight and obese people. It’s about a third of [00:58:00] obese people, about half of overweight people who you know, have normal blood pressure, normal serum triglycerides, normal CRP, normal fasting insulin and glucose, normal A1c, like, they are the example of people who are not experiencing metabolic health detriment.

And when you, regardless of how you define, like, how rigorously you define metabolically normal versus abnormal, The, the, when you start to striate these populations based on other things other than BMI and you look at, for example, physical activity is, physical activity is the strongest indicator. So people who are physically active regardless of their weight have a vastly higher percent chance of being metabolically healthy and people who are inactive regardless of their weight have a vastly higher chance of having metabolic abnormalities.

Other factors that are influenced. are things like diet quality how much sleep we’re getting, right social determinants of, [00:59:00] of health. Uh, so that’s reflected in things like socioeconomic status and race and ethnicity. So it’s complex. And I think that because, because we have these large population studies showing, you know, 50 percent of overweight people are metabolically healthy.

Again, regardless of these differences and how different studies define it. The, I think the take home from there is these other things like physical activity, like diet quality are where the focus needs to be, right? We also see that most people regain weight when they lose it, right? That weight loss diets are not sustainable.

I’ve gone through this experience myself, having lost substantial amounts of weight three times in my life. Uh, hopefully third time’s the charm. We’ll see. It’s, it’s such a I think anybody who’s gone through it, so I can say from my own personal experience, the science backs this up, but this is my own experience.[01:00:00]

My health has not correlated very much, very well with my weight. So I have had very, very good health at moments in time where I have been heavier. And I have had very, very poor health at moments in time when I have been lighter and vice versa, right? Like, but the correlation is not really, you can’t really, you can’t really line it up.

But I can line up how my health has. related to my stress levels and I can line up how my health is related to my activity levels and my overall average diet quality. And so what I want to do with Mutivore is create that focus on the health habits that somebody who is obese, those are health habits that typically will lead to, to weight loss.

Maybe not for everyone. The great thing is it will lead to health independent of weight loss. So I’m trying to, create something that’s weight inclusive, that is certainly compatible with weight loss goals. You can definitely apply a NutriVer philosophy to [01:01:00] an energy deficit. Like that is absolutely something that you can do.

And actually I would recommend it because the less the gain, the harder it is to get all of the nutrients that we need. So the more that nutrient density focus is actually important. But I don’t want. The benefits of a healthy diet to feel unobtainable for somebody just because they haven’t had success on a weight loss plan in the past.  And by shifting that focus to the things that actually matter for long term health, independent of weight, that’s what I’m hoping to achieve is improving people’s health. And it’ll be, you know, individual whether or not that goes along with weight loss.

Dr. Weitz: Right, and you’re also trying to shift the focus away from all these restrictive diets and, you know, in the functional medicine world we constantly have discussions about, you know, which is the best diet, the vegan, the carnivore, you gotta avoid food BODMAPs, you gotta avoid lectins, Oxalates, Histamines, [01:02:00] on and on and on and people are constantly, oh I don’t know if I should eat that food because it might create oxalate and you know it it just gets kind of crazy end up with uh people on very very restrictive diets and that’s not healthy.

Dr. Ballantyne: I agree completely. And I think it’s not, I mean, there’s two challenges with restrictive diets. First is the fewer foods you eat, the harder it is to actually meet your nutritional needs from those foods. So that is kind of goes against the, the NutriVer philosophy. But the second one is we’ve got psychology research dating back to the nineties showing that restrictive diets lead to disordered eating patterns, emotional eating, weight regain cycles.

It’s, it’s when you define a diet based on the things you’re missing. and that you are depriving yourself of. It doesn’t set us up psychologically to sustain that diet. So on Nutrivore, we really talk about sustainable nutrition. So how do we increase diet quality, but without depriving us of our favorite foods?

Other than for medical reasons, that’s obviously a separate, that’s obviously a separate thing over [01:03:00] there. But how do we intentionally make room for what I call quality of life foods in order to sustain that overall higher quality diet? So that is a large part of the discussion in the first part of the book.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, I feel like you’re in some ways carrying forward kind of the Part of the philosophy of Dr. Jeffrey Bland, who I used to, every year, go to his lecture he would give. I used to listen to his audiotapes, and when everybody was engaged in all these diet wars, and they still are, of course, he’s always talked about emphasizing the quality of the food and not just, you know, how much fat and how much carbs, and we’ve got to look at the quality, and, and that’s what this is sort of getting to.  Let me, let me ask you one more question and we’ll wrap. You mentioned 12 foundational food families in your book, which are the categories of foods with the most nutrient density. So I thought this would be a good way to kind of sum, sum up this discussion. [01:04:00]

Dr. Ballantyne: Yes, so the 12 foundational food families are all of the foods that have something unique to offer us nutritionally, that have a really like solid foundation of scientific studies showing us health benefits of the nutrients those foods contain.  It doesn’t mean we have to eat all of them. So, for example, one of them is seafood, and if you’re allergic to seafood, or you can’t access it because it’s not affordable to you, like, it’s, it is, none of those foods are a absolute 100 percent must, but they are the foods that help, expedite the goal of getting all of the nutrients our bodies need from the foods we eat, which is our bodies.  the goal of Nutrivore. So they are the foods that make achieving that the easiest. And when we prioritize, I, I lay out serving targets per day or per week, depending on what food we’re talking about of these 12 foundational food families in the book. That adds up to like a third to maybe half of our, of our food intake, depending on, on, on what you’re choosing.

It is a small portion of the overall diet, but when we do that, that gets us most of the way to [01:05:00] achieving our, our nutrition. goals, you know, our daily values of everything across the board. So they are very much about achieving that goal efficiently so that we have the most room for rounding out with whatever other foods we want.  So the 12 foundational food families are, I will just list them vegetables in general, root vegetables, leafy vegetables, cruciferous vegetables, mushrooms, alliums, that’s the onion family, fruit in general, berries and citrus fruit, seafood I already mentioned, legumes, and nuts and seeds.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. This is just an aside.  I just recently became acquainted with one of the downsides of eating fruits, which is, for some reason, in the last couple of weeks, our house has become inundated with fruit flies.

Dr. Ballantyne: Oh, I have, I have two suggestions for you. Oh, really? Wow. Yes, let’s, great, perfect, perfect question to wrap up on. So, So I will say, you can buy these little, they’re like yellow look at like fruit fly traps or, gnat traps [01:06:00] on Amazon or wherever.  They’re these little pieces of yellow sticky, they’ve got some kind of coating on it that attracts insects. So in my house they’ll also, Find the occasional mosquito that makes its way in. I got rid of fungus gnats on one of my plants from them. And then I was like, what if I put this close to the bananas?  What will that do to the fruit flies? Oh look, it catches them. So that is the lowest, lowest effort one. But the free option is get a like old plastic, like a plastic water bottle, something like that. Stab some holes in the side so that there’s a way in, but the great thing about stabbing it, I use like a metal, like skewer for meat to stab, stab a ring of holes around the outside.

And then I stick, you can either use a string to like put a little bit of banana, it works really well. But a little bit of fruit either on a string that is like then tied with the cap. So it’s dangling down. or you can use like a bamboo skewer or something like that to put it in [01:07:00] so that you’ve got a little bit of fruit towards the top.

So the rotting fruit in there is going to be slightly higher than the holes. And then put like a half inch of water at the bottom with a drop of dish soap. So fruit flies are amazing at getting in. They’re not very good at getting out. They gorge themselves on the fruit and then they drop into the soapy water and drown.  And it is a fun project to do with kids. Definitely, highly recommend. Uh, careful with the stabbing things, because sometimes kids get a little excited by that. And it works, and it works, I definitely, it’s the, it works better than the sticky stuff. But then you do have that. And then when you’re ready, I just put, tape over the holes and throw the whole thing out.

Dr. Weitz: Oh, cool. That’s great. So tell our listeners how they can get a hold of the book and find out more about you, Ann. I’d

Dr. Ballantyne: love to. Thank you. Uh, so the book is called Nutrivore, The Radical New Science for Getting the Nutrients You Need from the Food You Eat. It’s available from just about any online bookseller and lots of local bookstores.  You can also request it at your local library if they don’t already have a copy. My website is neutrovore. com and that’s where like all of the really academic deep dive articles that are like the supporting evidence for everything in the book. Uh, that’s where all of those live and on social media, on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, threads, and Pinterest.  I’m at Dr. Sarah Ballantyne.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. Thank you so much.

Dr. Ballantyne: Thank you.

Dr. Weitz: Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. For those of you who enjoy. Listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would appreciate it if you could go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and give us a 5 star ratings and review.  If you would like to work with me personally to help you improve your health, I do accept a limited number of new patients per month for a functional medicine consultation. Some of the areas I specialize in include helping patients with specific health issues like gut problems. [01:09:00] neurodegenerative conditions, autoimmune diseases, cardiometabolic conditions, or for an executive health screen, and to help you promote longevity.  and take a deeper dive into some of those factors that can lead to chronic diseases along the way. Please call my Santa Monica White Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition office at 310 395 3111 and we’ll set you up for a new consultation for functional medicine. And I look forward to speaking to everybody next week.

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Julie Stevens discusses A Holistic Cancer Strategy with Dr. Ben Weitz.

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Podcast Highlights

Julie Stevens had a successful challenge with colon cancer and now she is helping others have a successful journey through her MOJO Health website.  Julie published a book about her cancer healing journey, Mojo Healing.

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.  Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111.

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, drweitz. com. Thanks for joining me, and let’s jump into the podcast. Hello, Rational Wellness Podcasters.

Our topic for today is building a holistic healing strategy and maximizing joy on a cancer journey. We’ve had a number of discussions on the podcast. on an integrative or functional medicine approach to helping to manage cancer patients, including Dr. Nalini Chilko, Holly Lucille, Naysha Winters, Thomas Seyfried, Paul Anderson, Elise Altshuler, Gio Espinoza, and others, [00:01:00] but only a few with someone with personal experience with cancer. which is what our discussion today with Julie Stevens is about. And Julie will share her experience of how she developed a strategy and worked her way through a successful cancer journey.  Julie, thank you so much for joining us today. And perhaps you can start by telling us a little bit about your journey.

Julie Stevens: Yeah, happy to. So hi everyone, my name is Julie Stevens and today is probably my 45th birthday, so I just want to remind everyone who’s listening to be a DataG and go get your data.  That could be colonoscopies, mammograms, or annual physicals, but get your data because that’s really the story of what’s unlocked in the cancer journey.  So, it was just shy of two years ago I was diagnosed, so it was June 14th of 2022, I was diagnosed with what ended up being stage 4 aggressive and inoperable chemo resistant colon cancer.

Dr. Weitz: A heck of a diagnosis. That’s a hell of a diagnosis for anybody to deal with, especially somebody who’s new to, really, the healthcare world.

Julie Stevens: With no symptoms, no signs, no family history, under the age of screening, which was 45, so it really was.

Dr. Weitz: Which is interesting how you say you had no signs, no symptoms, and it just is something that we all need to keep in mind.  I hear so many people say I’ll let my body tell me what’s going on, and unfortunately, sometimes that’s not the case.

Julie Stevens: For me, it was just, I had lower iron than I’ve ever had before. And luckily my primary care physician took that really seriously. And I was just in the middle of a major work transition.  I was leading a piece of an acquisition we were, we had just purchased. And so my life was wildly stressful and I thought I had an ulcer. And she said, let’s go ahead and get an upper and lower endoscopy. And so I called my gastro three times. They told me, you don’t need a colonoscopy. You’re under 45. You have no family history.  And my response was like, I’m a data gal. Let’s just go ahead and get it. I’m willing to do the prep. So let’s get the data. And thank God I did because my gastro woke me up and said the tumor was so large. They couldn’t get the infant size camera to the other side.

Dr. Weitz: Wow.

Julie Stevens: That was the beginning of my journey in June of 2022, and in July of 2022, unfortunately, my colon actually closed.  So I had to go get a right hemicolectomy and have about 12 inches of my colon removed and 61 lymph nodes. Those came back, and of course, the cancer had spread. And so they had suggested six months of chemotherapy. And while I don’t know really anything about science, I’d had the luxury during the rollout of Obamacare of working with the American Hospital Association in the world of industrial psychology to define different jobs, so I understood the job and the industry of healthcare very well.  I just didn’t know science. But also taking into account my history working in the field of industrial organizational psychology, I understand how to use data to predict outcomes. That’s what I do every day. And so when the oncologist said, we’ll do six months of chemo and then we’ll do a PET scan, I said, oh no, that’s not my story.  We’re actually going to do six months, like right after the first chemo, I’d like to test for efficacy. And she rolled her eyes and said, oh honey, that’s not how we do it. So in this condescending voice, and I was like, then I’m not going to do chemotherapy. And that was the moment I went rogue because I don’t know science, but I knew data.

And if they weren’t willing to let me track the data my way, I didn’t trust that doctor. So I had to start from scratch and really build a team around doctors that would really suit what I was looking for. And I even built, again, as I’m using my industrial psychology hat. a criteria for what I’m looking for in a doctor, and actually built a selection system to find the doctors that would really play my way.  And my way was using the most current data, willing to think outside of the box, willing to challenge the standard of care. I understand why the standard of care was created, and that was to create operational efficiency. I helped organizations understand how to do that. So, I don’t look up for Operational efficiency. That’s exactly right, and that’s [00:05:00] not what I’m looking for when your life is on the line. I’d have 14 percent chance of survival.

Dr. Weitz: Interesting. And we see that all the time, unfortunately, in conventional medical care.

Julie Stevens: That’s exactly right. So luckily my first, the first hire on my team I would say was an herbalist and I walked into his office thinking he was going to tell me to align my chakras and stop eating sugar, which he did.  But in addition to that, I said, he’s like, why are you here? And I said I want to understand the data I can measure, I can use to measure treatment efficacy. And he’s oh yeah. And he pulled up a website from cancer. gov and it had,  And then he goes, but wait, I can top this. Do you want to understand the data you can use to predict if the treatment will work before you ever start? And I was like, yeah, I didn’t know that was possible. And then the third thing he told me was, listen, we can not only do that, we can build your body up so you won’t feel the side effects.  That had my attention. So hence, right away, he was hired onto the team. And in fact, he did all three of those things. So I knew I was chemo resistant before I started. My oncologist did not trust me and told me, trust me, I know what I’m doing. I’m the expert. And so I went through two chemotherapy sessions where I tracked my data outside of what they were doing.  So I was able to identify I was chemo resistant, inform my oncologist about this, do the required testing, and then pivot to what actually worked.

Dr. Weitz: Wow.

Julie Stevens: But it wasn’t just the herbalist. I also had hired, I should say, an acupuncturist, a reflexologist, a chiropractor. So I had all sorts of traditional healers all designed to really heal different parts of my body as my oncologist was working on treating cancer cells.  So I really felt like it’s up to me knowing 92 percent of cancer is built because of what we eat, drink, think, and do, or epigenetics. So it was up to me to figure out why the root causes of cancer were expressed, because it wasn’t genetic in my case, and to also use the best of any science that was available.  And for me, the science that worked was science that was released in 2020, 2022, 2023. So it was very real, like it was happening real time as I was going through my treatment. And that was not the way my, my oncologist was working. And he was the chief of staff at a major academic health center in Atlanta.  So this wasn’t a slouch or a small person I was working with,

Dr. Weitz: My podcast is devoted to Functional Medicine and you just beautifully explained what the Functional Medicine concept of how we treat patients is by looking for the root causes, getting your body as healthy as possible to be able to handle whatever care we’re going to have etc. So that was a great statement of the functional medicine mission statement without even really having any experience in functional medicine.

Julie Stevens: That’s, that’s the part of this that’s been the most shocking to me, is that I truly did not understand how much power we had when we build up our immune systems, and how critical it was, and how hard it is in today’s world.  I’ve had to change just about everything about how I live, from the food I eat, to the activities I do, to the stress I keep, and the sleep I make sure I get, and the rest. And it’s really difficult to do that, and it really takes a lot of effort when you think about how we actually live in today’s standard American lifestyle.

Dr. Weitz: What you just said about the immune system is really significant. I don’t think most patients, even cancer patients, understand that without your immune system playing a very vigorous, active role in helping to kill cancer cells no matter what other form of treatment you get, whether it’s the strongest chemo in the world, whether it’s the strongest radiation.  You’re only going to kill a certain number of those cancer cells, and there’s always going to be a certain amount of cancer cells that are not directly killed by that.  And that’s your immune system needs to be stepping in and playing an active role. And then whenever you stop your treatment, the immune system needs to be continually working on eliminating cancer cells and controlling their growth, etc. Or your care won’t be effective. And of course, you utilized immunotherapy, which is an example of some of the newer forms of cancer therapy that involve getting your immune system to play an even more active part in eliminating cancer.

Julie Stevens: I think it’s important to note though, while immunotherapy was a huge part of my strategy, I had done all sorts of work to my body so that the immunotherapy would work. So I’d gotten off of the medicine for my GERD. I also had looked at every single reason for inflammation. I think this is a really important part of my story of before cancer, I was diagnosed with cancer.  I’d had a disorder called chronic idiopathic urticaria. That means for every day for 13 years, I had hives. Sometimes from head to foot, I was miserable. Sometimes I couldn’t even brush my hair or hold a pen or walk because of these hives. And I had gone from doctor to doctor to doctor to figure out what was driving these hives.  And everyone just put me on more pharmaceuticals. So before I was diagnosed, I was taking biologic shots every two weeks, up to eight Zyrtec a day and three different pharmaceuticals to mask the hives. And it didn’t mask the hives. So flash forward to, listen, my very first meeting with Oscar, my herbalist, he said, we’ve got to worry about your inflammation because cancer feeds on sugar, inflammation, and copper.  So let’s go ahead and figure this out. And he did this test that was by Dr. Russell Jaffe. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with him. It’s an ELISA.

Dr. Weitz: Oh yeah, He’s been on the podcast.

Julie Stevens: Sure, it was the ELISA LRA test.

Dr. Weitz: And it’s like a food sensitivity test.

Julie Stevens: Exactly. And it unlocked every single reason why I had hives. So for 13 years, I’ve been miserable with this diagnosis. So not only did I heal the cancer, I healed the root causes of why I had so much inflammation. And I had to do all that preparation work for the immunotherapy to work so flawlessly. And it’s important to say, not only from immunotherapy, but also chemotherapy, I didn’t have side effects.  I was going to music festivals in Mexico during treatment, and that doesn’t happen to the average person. But because I’d done such a beautiful job of having enough magnesium and vitamin D and vitamin K, my body rode through the waves without any problem.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. So explain how preparing your, explain how getting off your Omeprazole and doing some of the other things you did to heal your body, how did that play a role in helping your body fight cancer?

Julie Stevens: I think the important part is you want your body, and the way that this was described to me by my healers was, listen, you have an army of ten, and when you deploy your army so that they’re worried about this inflammation, and this, you have this glig plug in that creates this, and you have this toxicity, and this chemical that you’re having a reaction to, and you’re using this makeup, your body’s fighting all these wars, there’s no troops to fight cancer left. And we want all of the troops fighting cancer. So the job is to create homeostasis in every way you can so that your troops are focused on what’s important. That’s cancer cells, not on helping to moderate the impact. Because for me, it was green grapes. I was poisoning myself every morning by eating green grapes because that was my favorite food.  And come to find out that was giving me hives every single day. So, by helping my body avoid fighting the trauma of green grapes and focus on cancer, I was able to heal that. But, I think it’s important to notice, besides the, the urticaria, besides the cancer, I’ve also had a complete body transformation.  So, I’ve lost 140 pounds, every single part of my body, if you were to look at my blood markers, I look like a totally different human being. But, it’s because I was able to refocus on grounding myself every day, getting enough sleep, really healing my body the way it needed to be healed and giving it that homeostasis so it could work in its most functional, optimal option way.

Dr. Weitz: What sort of nutritional approach have you been using in your Cancering journey?

Julie Stevens: The first thing I [00:13:00] did was kind of anything that was non-organic left. So I really started to use grass fed beef and eggs and all the things. But then I started to so first thing was just as clean and as pure as I could without any chemicals.  But then I started to really get choosy about the types of food I eat. So the majority of my diet is plant based as much as I can. I do eat some seafood, I eat eggs every day, and I have some poultry but not a huge, not a ton. So I’ve really been able to shift that to be almost all plant based. I make sure I focus on getting five colors of vegetables a day.  That was my challenge for this year. Once I understood the different nutritional value of having green versus red versus purple vegetables. I understood that you can’t just eat a bunch of broccoli and think you’re going to have enough. It really is the diversification that allows your gut microbiome to really thrive.

Dr. Weitz: So you reduced your consumption of animal protein?

Julie Stevens: I did. And for me, as I mentioned, I did the ELISA LRA test and it [00:14:00] showed gluten, soy, sugar, green grapes, tuna, and scallops. So I have completely eliminated those things from my diet. Sugar was probably the hardest. And that still is the hardest because when you travel or eat out, you never know if sugar’s in the sauce or the, the salad dressing or things like that.  So it is challenging to really make sure you have a zero diet, a zero sugar diet. But as much as I can, I’ve gotten, gone to zero sugar. And then of course gluten was the thing that was, is, was a challenge to begin with. But really the reality is there’s so many beautiful gluten free products now, I don’t even miss it.

Dr. Weitz: Did you change your diet around the times that you got your treatment?

Julie Stevens: Oh, yeah, I so I should say my treatments don’t look like the average person’s treatment. So I think that’s okay. So when I did chemo, yes, I fasted. So I didn’t, I didn’t, I really, So part of my my training as an industrial organizational psychologist was I broke down every single [00:15:00] side effect that could impact me during the treatment, and I built a plan to moderate it.  So that’s part of why I didn’t have side effects. So I fasted for every single infusion. I made sure I had

Dr. Weitz: Did you fast for how long?

Julie Stevens: 24 hours before for the 24 hours of the infusion and six hours later. So I really tried to do before and after. I also like iced. So cold sensitivity, I was on oxaloplatin, cold sensitivity is a reality for that one treatment.  So I put my hands and feet in ice and I ate ice chips the entire time. So I had no problems with cold sensitivity. I had to fight really hard against my healthcare system to allow me to do that. But I was able to avoid that entire side effect of any cold issues.

Dr. Weitz:  Cool. What are some of the other important lifestyle factors that you utilized?

Julie Stevens: So you mentioned one when we started and that’s, you mentioned my mantra of maximizing joy. And I think that’s a really interesting one because that is something that’s kind of uniquely me and I think in my journey. I [00:16:00] decided when I was diagnosed and because you feel overwhelmed with fear and I immediately decided I will not do this journey in fear, I will do this journey in joy.  And that takes a lot of mental practice and really work to be able to do that. So I started to feed my mind superhero movies. So instead of watching the news, I watched Iron Man to understand what I could do. So I read books, I asked my network to send me pictures of rainbows and puppies and, flowers and all of the things because I really wanted to utilize

Dr. Weitz: In other words, Marvel Comics is directly responsible for your recovery.

Julie Stevens: For me thinking I was a superhero, that’s fair. That’s fair. And I brought that in. So part of my strategy is I went to my first treatment and I hated being there. As you can imagine, it is the worst place on the planet when you look around and you think all of these people are dying around me. And that’s what I thought.  And I thought, I can’t have this energy. So the next one, I got dressed in costume. And I brought, so basically I decided to have a [00:17:00] luau. You can imagine I walked into my second, my, my first chemo, my second chemo, my first party and walked in and said, Hey, you want to get laid in chemo and had lays for everyone and glasses and gift bags and, But part of those gift bags were I had a lot of frustration.

So I hand hammered bracelets for everyone that said, ride the wave. And I gave out 60 gift bags that day. So at the end of my first meeting this woman walked up to me and said, listen, Julie, I was planning to commit suicide tonight, and I’m not going to, because I met you and I know I can ride this wave.  And I realized right then I might be the only person that’s crazy enough to get dressed in costume and give, bring gift bags to an infusion, but every single person here needs it just as I did.

Dr. Weitz: Right. Awesome. You discuss how you use genomic data to predict treatment success. Can you tell us more about that?

Julie Stevens: Yeah. So this is pretty cool. And I think for, I’m guessing most of your listeners know this, but for anyone who doesn’t, I thought colon cancer was a thing or breast cancer was [00:18:00] a thing, but come to find out, it kind of matters where it is, but really what matters is the genomic makeup of the tumor cells.  So for me, I was a GKRAS13D, was what my tumor cell was genomically named. Well, come to find out, because I was KRAS positive, my herbalist had done research in lung cancer that showed that the platinum based chemotherapy wouldn’t work with a KRAS positive tumor. So I brought this research and my genomic data the morning of my first chemo to my oncologist and I said, listen, this isn’t going to work, let’s just go ahead and pivot to immunotherapy.  But come to find out, because of the standard of care You have to fail at chemotherapy before they’ll open up immunotherapy. He didn’t know I understood why he was forcing me to do chemo, but I understood the red tape was there because of my experience working in the field of industrial psychology. So I laughed.

So I was like, all right, I’ll do this, but I don’t trust you. But it was really the understanding the genomic fingerprint, which is required to have some sample of the tumor. So it’s not possible for all cancers right away, [00:19:00] but as soon as you can get this, I would implore you to utilize this data. And let me share, I didn’t call one time to get this data, I called over 20 times to get my oncologist to pull this data.  This is not standard to pull it this way. Typically they let you do 6 months of chemo, they fail, and then they’ll do genomic testing. But once I understood that could predict treatment efficacy, I was willing to do whatever it took so I could get that data as fast as I could and have that early in my process.

Dr. Weitz: Unfortunately, the reason why you were forced to get this traditional chemo first, it has to do with the attempt by the healthcare system, by the insurance companies, to spend the least amount of money possible and, taking traditional chemo is less expensive than immunotherapy and unfortunately that’s a factor.

Julie Stevens: It sure is, but you know what else is a factor? how your doctor is compensated. And unlike almost any other drug on the planet, your [00:20:00] oncologist is compensated based on the number of chemotherapy sessions administered. So it’s important to understand this is, and if they want to do something that is not the standard of care, the amount of paperwork and challenges and meetings they have to go through to get that approved, it’s not a small task.  So you want to find an oncologist that is a maverick, that is willing to think outside of the box and challenge those assumptions? It took me an army to get this done, but it is worth your energy.

Dr. Weitz: Yes, sometimes you have to swim upstream in the healthcare system to get the care you really need.

Julie Stevens: It’s true.  And you are your best advocate. Nobody cares about you like you do. But I knew the squeaky wheel got the oil. That’s true in everything we do. But I also knew the squeaky wheel that was positive and not a pain in the butt got better oil. So again, by throwing these parties and bringing stickers to everyone and postcards and showing my appreciation for everyone there, I got what we call incremental [00:21:00] effort from every single healthcare professional, whether it was the front desk person, whether it was a nurse, whether it was my oncologist, they all spent a little extra time with me, or came by to see me, or checked in with me, or checked in with me after my session.

So by bringing the best of who I was to these sessions, I got the best of my healthcare team as well. And I would encourage anyone listening to really think about, don’t bring sticks, bring carrots, and get them to really engage in your story.

Dr. Weitz: What was the particular genetic test that you utilized?

Julie Stevens: I used the neogenomics.  So that was, sorry Secretary, that was the specific genomic test. The genetic test I used was just through my hospital system, and they did the standard, yeah. Yeah,

Dr. Weitz: I meant the genomic test, the cancer characteristics, yeah.

Julie Stevens: Perfect yeah. So I used Neogenomics and that was really important to me. I actually had two different, I was switching oncologists at the time, so I had both of them pull, so I had Keras and Neogenomics, so I was able to compare what we thought were the two very best genomic providers out there.  It was almost the same data, but Neogenomics gave you a few extra factors. [00:22:00] And one of those To go back to your earlier question about how I change my diet, this is an interesting one. So my herbalist did mention, listen, if you’re HER2 positive cancer and olives are natural indicator of, or not indicator, but natural reducer of HER2 positive cancers.

So while I hate olives, I’m willing to eat eight olives a day if that’s what I need to do to keep my body cancer free because this is a HER2 positive cancer and olives can help reduce HER2 positive cancers. So those are the sorts of things that when you understand it, you can actually feed your body the tools it needs to repair itself.  Same thing with kiwi. Kiwi actually repairs your DNA. I had no idea until I got on this journey, but so now I’m willing to eat two kiwis a day. It’s easy when you feed your body the right things.

Dr. Weitz: I don’t think most people are aware of that. There’s data to show that kiwi repairs your DNA.

Julie Stevens: That’s exactly right. I have a podcast as well, so I have an episode with a person named Peter Broadhead, who was an herbalist, he had a nutrition store, he’s had all sorts of different environments worlds. And he came on and gave us [00:23:00] some really beautiful data about the types of foods you need to eat, so things like mushrooms, kiwi, etc., that can really impact your health outcomes. Yeah,

Dr. Weitz: mushrooms we know for their immune strengthening properties, the mucopolysaccharides. Thank you. In terms of you mentioned a few things what are some of the other ways that people can decrease some of the side effects of traditional cancer care like chemo and radiation?

Julie Stevens: Well, I’m going to say this. I actually built a tool. So it’s all available on our website for free. So you can go on and put in what chemotherapy you’re taking or any side effect of any medicine and understand the supplements, the diet, the lifestyle, or the healers you could use to avoid that side effect.

And so your question might be, how did I collect this data? Again, I’m an industrial psychologist by trade. So I understood how to build the formula and the protocol for how to do this. Then I went out and worked with experts around the globe to get the feedback on what would you do if, what can a chiropractor impact from a side effect perspective?

What can an acupuncturist impact? So I went out to each of these specialties [00:24:00] to understand what the opportunity was and did surveys to experts in those areas. So I got their feedback and then I used a number of different practitioners to help me build the list of what these supplements could be to avoid these side effects.

Come to find out, and this is one of the things that my team taught me. is if you start chemotherapy and your body’s idling at an 8, you’re going to drop to a 6 and you’re never really going to feel it. But if you start chemotherapy and you’re at a 5, and you drop to a 2, you’re on death’s doorstep.

So make sure you start these treatments as strong as you physically can be, so that when you take the hit, it’s no big deal. And so that’s part of it is, beyond everything, make sure your overall health is as strong as possible. That means staying Sleep and meditation and giving your body a rest before you start treatment.

I was walking. I literally have walked and exercised more than I ever have since I’ve been in treatment, knowing how important that was, not only from a health and wellness perspective, but for example, that helps express your lymph nodes. And for me, that was really important. [00:25:00]

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Absolutely. I think a lot of times patients going through traditional cancer therapy like chemo feel like crap and don’t have a lot of energy.  So they tend to avoid exercise and conserve their energy.

Julie Stevens: And that’s the whole point. You, your body needs the right fuel to have energy. There was never a day, besides when I was in surgery, so let me say that, once I was healed from surgery, there was never a day when I was in treatment that I wasn’t strong enough to go to work, to go out for a walk, to make my own food.

I never had a day where I wasn’t well enough, but that was because I had done all the preparation work to make sure my body would sail. And so you’re either going to pay for it before or after. When you pay for it before, it’s a lot more enjoyable for the way you live your life.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, you’re mentioning another concept, which is one of your principles that you mentioned, which is that when you have a diagnosis of cancer, all [00:26:00] the treatment is focused on trying to kill the cancer.

And yet, the health of the host is super important, as you’re mentioning, if you go in at a level 5 instead of a level 8, your ability to even handle the treatment is going to be greatly diminished there needs to be equal or, equal amount of focus on making sure you, your body, your health overall, I don’t know, is at a highest level possible, that you have good energy, that your blood flow is good, that your immune system is good, all these things that are going to play a secondary role in helping you to fight the cancer, survive, and also make sure you don’t die from something else.

Julie Stevens: That, so that was kind of the big thing that was a takeaway for me, is, your, is, and again, I’m using my industrial psychology brain, your oncologist job is to reduce cancer cells, it is not to make you live a long and happy life 15 years after treatment, [00:27:00] so they’re really focused on one, one microscope, and when you understand that microscope, you want them to do that, But you also need support so that you, that doesn’t kill you.

So things like when you think about certain types of radiation, that’s cool that you don’t have cancer anymore. You just died from radiation or you had this horrible chemo. I just talked to someone who was a a saxophonist for one of my favorite bands and he was diagnosed with the exact same genomic type of cancer.

And I talked to his wife. A couple weeks before he died, he had gone through the standard of care where it was one chemo, a more intense chemo the third hardest chemo. That chemo is what killed him. It wasn’t the cancer.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, it’s sad. You mentioned six toolbox to build your strategy. Maybe you could summarize what are those six toolboxes that are important in your Cancering journey?

Julie Stevens: Yes, can I give a, I’ll give a really fast history lesson too.

Dr. Weitz: Sure.

Julie Stevens: One, you think your doctor is trained on all these things. So again, using [00:28:00] my history, I went back and studied medical school curriculum because I believe we can only hold our doctors accountable for what they know and the data they have access to.

So when I’m back, but went back and studied medical school curriculum, I understood the little that they knew about six toolboxes. So I consider the six toolboxes Pharmaceuticals, Botanicals, Nutraceuticals, Diet and Lifestyle, Environment, and Facilitated Healers. In their curriculum, is pharmaceuticals. And when I went back to understand why, it was because of something in the 1909 that was published called the Flexner Report.

So many of you might be familiar with the Flexner Report, but that’s basically where they went out to have some continuity of medical school curriculum. And in that, if you taught acupuncture, or herbalism, or chiropractic as part of your medical school curriculum, You lost funding. So in 1910, our doctors went from being jacks of all trade to masters of pharmacology.

So it’s really important to understand it’s a really valuable toolbox, but it is one toolbox and it’s up to [00:29:00] you to get your botanicals, nutraceuticals, diet and lifestyle environment and healers in line to heal everything else.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, it’s absolutely the case that traditional medical doctors know little or nothing about nutrition, herbs, alternative care.  They’re basically taught that those things are not super important. Yeah, nutrition matters somewhat. So, don’t eat a couple of foods and that’s about it.

Julie Stevens: Don’t eat lunch meat, don’t eat sausage, don’t eat bacon, and don’t eat meat, or what they told me, but the reality is that’s so far away from the reality of how I can make my body thrive.  And when I understood that, I was like, cool, this is your box, but it was important to note, It’s not that they didn’t tell me not to take the herbs. It’s not that they didn’t tell me to do the, to eat the food. They told me, hey no, you shouldn’t do this.

Dr. Weitz: Oh, a hundred percent. In fact, those herbs are unproven.  They contain [00:30:00] antioxidants that can counter your treatment.

Julie Stevens: So I was strong enough to push back and say, if you can show me one research article that this is true versus your fear of how it’ll impact, I will stop right away. And they couldn’t come up with one research article. So I was like, cool, this is my body, what I do outside of your office, you’re responsible for cancer cells, I’m responsible for my body, you keep working on my cancer cells, I’ll keep working on my body.

But I don’t think most people are that bold.

Dr. Weitz: Right, yeah, this has been a discussion that comes up over and over again, every time we have a discussion about cancer is it’s known that traditional chemo and radiation, that One of the things that happens in the way that they kill cancer cells is by creating free radicals in the body.  So therefore, anything that contains antioxidants like vitamin C or vitamin E or any of these other antioxidants are therefore going to uncouple the chemotherapy. And yet, [00:31:00] many studies show that the more vegetables and fruits. that you eat, the more likely you are to beat the cancer, the less likely you are to get cancer.  And those are containing huge amounts of antioxidants. So it’s never really made sense.

Julie Stevens: Also, again, I’m a data girl. So let’s just say that when you look at this, your doctors, the data set they have to make decisions is disgusting. So I’ll give you a perfect example. There is one study of people who have been successful.  Like I have been. on, on, on immunotherapy with colon cancer. There’s one study. There’s not a study if they, if, what if you stop at 18 months? That data doesn’t exist. What if you do this drug for four years? It doesn’t exist. There’s one study that if you do it for two years, here’s the outcomes you can expect to achieve.

So when you’re listening to your doctor, actually look at the research they’re referencing. Understand this, the limited scope of the data they have to predict outcomes. Efficacy. It is not what you think, where they would understand, listen, if I stop at 18 months, here’s the reality of [00:32:00] your outcomes. No, they’re using the best guess based on the limited data they have, which is all we can hold them accountable for.

But the data is lacking because most companies only need data to get FDA approval, not to actually prove how to optimize the drugs so you live your best life. And that’s a different approach.

Dr. Weitz: There’s a lot of issues around data. We could talk for hours about it, but one thing to keep in mind is to conduct a randomized double blind placebo controlled trial on anything other than a drug, of course is very difficult. So, to try to run a study like that on a food, when nobody’s gonna benefit from potentially making billions of dollars from eating pomegranates or broccoli or whatever it is nobody’s gonna want to fund that study. So, those studies are not done, and we have limited data from these food frequency questionnaires, which are [00:33:00] completely inaccurate, and so we just don’t have comparable studies on Common Herbs Fruits and Vegetables many of the lifestyle factors because there’s no funding mechanism for that other than the NIH which is basically doing some of the basic research to help the pharmaceutical companies develop their drugs and

Julie Stevens: I would say yet.  I agree with you, but the answer I would say is yet. And that is why I started this non profit, Mojo Health Exist, to build the data set. Because I know my doctors have continuously said, we’ve got your data, and I’m like, you have a core of the data of what I actually did to heal this. So I know the reality is of what you did, you’re just giving credit to the pharmaceutical.

But much more went into my story than just that one drug. And so Mojo Health Exist, because I believe you’re absolutely correct. No one company is going to pay to understand the interplay of how all these things impact health outcomes. So this needs to be based on a [00:34:00] patient led revolution, and that is what I’m leading.

I want to invite patients to join together with me, so we build the data set on what we are doing, so this might not be a double blind placebo, but I can give you a correlation study to understand, listen, people who have your genomic type of cancer in Chile do this, and in Turkey they do this, and in Japan they do this, and the U.

1. they do this, and here’s the difference in outcomes. And when we can drive people to understand how the globe heals differently, and what options can give them the optimal outcomes, and what interplay of options really helps that’s how we can change cancer. We take this out of the corporation’s hands, and we put it in the patient’s power.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. You’ve mentioned already about using cancer biomarkers, blood biomarkers to track what’s happening with cancer. Maybe as opposed to when your oncologist told you that you would do six months of chemo and then get a PET scan to see what happened. And [00:35:00] you distinguish between the fact that the PET scan is a lagging indicator versus some of these biomarkers that can help you identify what’s going on right now. Which are you progressing? Are you regressing? Is can you talk more about some of those most important biomarkers?

Julie Stevens: Yeah, so, there’s a couple different types of biomarkers you can look at in your blood. And I think the, this is like measuring how many invitations were sent to the party.  So you understand how big is this party? What’s happening with my cancer? So when I understood the proteins that were being developed as a result of the cancer, and if those proteins are going up, You have more cancer activity. And if they’re going down, you have less cancer activity. So the first thing I looked at was something called CA 19-9.  That’s a blood marker that’s traditionally used for pancreatic cancer, but it can also be a good indicator for colon cancer as well. This is not something that’s used around the globe. It’s only used in a few countries. So it’s one of those things that my doctor said, Hey, I don’t follow that. I think you’re fine.  You’re not chemo resistant. [00:36:00] When I came back and said, Hey, I’m chemo resistant. Cause let’s be real. That was a 30 blood test that I was doing outside of my doctor. I did that on my own. I tracked and it was going up after my second chemo administration. So I texted my doctor and said, Hey, listen, I’m chemo resistant.

I’m not coming back for chemo three. And he’s like, Julie, I’m the expert. Trust me. That’s not a data point we follow. And I was like, these six industrialized countries follow this. So this is what I follow. So you need to pull data to disprove my theory in order for me to come back. Again, I don’t think most patients are quite that bold, but he, so he did two tests.  One is a PET scan and the other was CT DNA. which most of your listeners might know, but for those that don’t know, that’s looking for tiny broken particles of cancer. You’re circulating tumor DNA. And so the reality is we don’t want to use one of these tests to make a huge treatment decisions. We want to use a lot of different data points, looking at different aspects of the cancer to drive our treatment strategy.

So would I have made this decision on CA 19-9 alone? No. Was it a great indicator that we needed to collect more data? Yes. And [00:37:00] the idea here is we want to collect as much data as you can. before you start treatment. And I think that’s a really important thing. Doctors don’t tell you, hey, this tumor is not urgent.

They don’t tell you that. And as soon as you’re told you have cancer, you think, I want this out of my body as fast as we can. But the reality is my cancer was growing for over 10 years. I had a month to stop, collect my data, get all my baseline information, build my team, build my body, take the time to do that, because then the way you ride is much smoother versus jumping into treatment, and you’re like, and then you’re already knocked down a few pegs.  So I just wanted to mention that urgency thing is really important and to get all that baseline data so you can measure the score of the cancer early on and know when you need to fail and pivot.

Dr. Weitz: Right. I was reading that Your herbalist acupuncturist was also looking at things like zinc and copper and CRP and inflammation levels and things like that.  And some of these markers indicate what’s [00:38:00] happening in the body that is gonna change the terrain that the cancer is growing in.

Julie Stevens: That’s exactly right. His biggest focus was, are you going to have a blood clot? Because you’re going to die way faster than the blood clot than the cancer. So let’s make sure your blood’s in great order.  Your neutrophil and lymphocytes are in line. Like, let’s look below that first level to understand really what the score is of the health of your body and the health of your terrain. So it’s not just one, it’s really all of it.

Dr. Weitz: Right. And most cancer patients are going to die from heart disease despite the cancer.  So you don’t want to beat the cancer and die of heart disease.

Julie Stevens: Which that’s, when I understood, I was a little angry when I learned this fact, that most cancers are a metabolic disease. And in fact, if you keep your body in line, you will not only not have any heart tumor cancer, you won’t have heart disease.  So why don’t, why didn’t I know that until I dug into this world? That to me is such an important fact for everyone to understand. You can avoid heart [00:39:00] attacks.

Dr. Weitz: Yep. And that’s called the Metabolic Theory of Cancer.

Julie Stevens: Yeah.

Dr. Weitz: And that’s something a lot of people in this space have been talking a lot about, including Thomas Seyfried and Nisha Winters.

Julie Stevens: Nasha Winters was the book where, I mean, my herbalist said this, and he is a friend of Nisha’s, so he talked about her, and I was like, I don’t believe you. And so I had to go do my own research, and after talking to so many doctors and going to conferences and reading these books, I was like, I believe you and not only do I believe you, I want to shout it from the rooftops because I know we can create a body that’s inhospitable to cancer.  And if given the opportunity, we need to prove exactly what we need to do to do that because everyone who’s had cancer will do that to not have a recurrence.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, Nasha had a diagnosis similar to yours. She had a stage 4 ovarian cancer and basically was left to die and probably the fact that she felt so horrible and couldn’t eat and end up fasting for close to a month is probably what [00:40:00] helped her body fight the cancer.

Julie Stevens: For sure.

Dr. Weitz: So let’s bring this to a close. Let’s finish on the topic of trying to find joy in your healing process. And then tell us about your contacts.

Julie Stevens: Yeah, so, I think, one of the most things, the best things you can do for your body is to not live in fear, as I mentioned, and so I worked really hard to use joy.  So as I mentioned, I dress up in costume, I bring gift bags, but it’s more than that. It’s I look at every single day and realize what I’m grateful for. I start every morning by focusing there, not on the fact that I had to fight cancer. I never once looked at that as a cross to bear. That’s an invitation to change.

Right. And you reframe your thinking as, okay, the world’s got to change. Like my world is not the same as it was yesterday. Things are different. I’m willing to accept this change. I’m willing to take on the change and do what I need to do. It wasn’t a hardship. My life is better and I’m happier [00:41:00] post cancer diagnosis.

Dr. Weitz: Nasha Winters often talks about instead of fighting cancer, cancering, and how you’re basically going through this journey.

Julie Stevens: It is not a death sentence. It is a life sentence though.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. So how can listeners find out more about your program? You have a podcast, you have this website with helping cancer patients figure out how to work their way through this process.

Julie Stevens: Yeah, so I basically, as soon as I was declared no evidence of disease, I made a list of all of the reasons why cancer sucks. And I have one by one tried to systemically answer those reasons. So it started with I wrote a book so that you would understand how to build your team. And then it started with, wait, we can do better than this.

Actually, I’m going to write a job description so that you understand what your role as a patient is. Okay wait. Now I’m going to write tools so that you understand how to select a doctor and how to build this team. Now we went forward to, as I was working with my herbalist in this team, I was like, Guys, we [00:42:00] can build this so that anyone can go and figure out how to avoid side effects online.

So, that is all available for free on MojoHealth. org. Mojo Health, which stands for More Joy. Because that’s why every joy comes back to everything. So mojohealth. org is the place where you can go and we have built all sorts of resources. I just launched a what now guide for newly diagnosed so it’ll walk you through the very first questions you should be asking, the types of data you can really start to gather to change your strategy, how you can build your team so it walks you through step by step.

But we’re also just about to launch a what now guide for caregivers because we want to help people understand how they can gift better. And so this is one of the things I would mention is just this week one of the challenges I’ve faced and let’s be real, very little of what I did to save my life was covered by insurance.

I’m facing financial devastation as a result of saving my life and no one should have to face thousands and thousands of dollars in debt despite the fact that I have a wonderful job and a healthy savings account. All of that is gone because [00:43:00] this is, these are the reasons why you have a healthy savings account.

So one of the tools we’re building is a registry so you can go on there and build your strategy and share that with your network and someone else can buy you a bottle of magnesium or vitamin D instead of a coloring book or a Or dropping off lasagna or flowers that dies. So let’s actually teach people how to help you with what you need.

So I am just taking this off one list at one, one challenge at a time. And you’ll see that in my podcast. We’ve done podcasts, everything from how to have financial wellness after diagnosis to how to prepare. So you don’t lose your hair with capping. to most recently we just did one on how to prepare your body for radiation.

So we are talking with experts around the field, just all about cancer, the stuff that isn’t what your doctor teaches you, but really can change your game. So we’re going to not stop until I’m in the grave, because I know from what I know that we can have, we can make cancer suck less, only if we work together and share the best practices and tips that each one of us share and that one on one level to a [00:44:00] much broader audience.

Dr. Weitz: We can make cancer suck less only if we work together.

Julie Stevens: That’s exactly right. Hence the name of my podcast is Mojo Rising, How to Make Cancer Suck Less,

Dr. Weitz: thank you so much, Julie.

Julie Stevens: So grateful to be part of this and thank you so much for helping me spread Mojo with the world.

Dr. Weitz: Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast.  For those of you who enjoy Listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would appreciate it if you could go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and give us a five star ratings and review. If you would like to work with me personally to help you improve your health, I do accept a limited number of new patients per month for a functional medicine consultation.  Some of the areas I specialize in include helping patients with specific health issues, like gut problems, neurodegenerative conditions, autoimmune diseases, cardiometabolic conditions, or for an executive [00:45:00] health screen and to help you promote longevity and take a deeper dive into some of those factors that can lead to chronic diseases along the way.  Please call my Santa Monica Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition Office at 310-395-3111. And we’ll set you up for a new consultation for functional medicine. And I look forward to speaking to everybody next week.