Wendy Myers: Heavy Metal Toxicity, Mineral Power, & Coffee Enemas – #205
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Dave: Hey, everyone. It’s Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Your cool fact of the day for today is that fugu or puffer fish is a delicacy. You’ve probably heard about this, if you watch Charlie’s Angels at least you did, but the ovaries, the gonads, the liver, the intestine and the skin of that fish could be really deadly because of something called tetrodotoxin. It stops the flow of sodium ions into nerve cells, so then your nerve impulses stop, and then you die.
Japan made it illegal to eat this stuff in 1984, but a lot of fugu lovers feel that the liver is the best part and worth the gamble. I haven’t actually tried this stuff. I don’t think I am going to, but I am tempted because well, it sounds cool.
Today’s guest is Wendy Myers who is the founder, head writer and chief eating officer, the coolest title ever, of a blog and podcast called Live to 110. She has written a book called Live to 110 by Weighing Less, and has a new book called The Modern Paleo Survival Guide.
What I like about Wendy is that she is really looking at hair mineral analysis and then helping clients to look at the minerals that are deficient and looking at enzyme loads. These are bio-hacking techniques. If you aren’t getting the right minerals or if you are excreting the wrong ones, it tells you all sorts of things about what’s happening inside the body. By looking at this and then tweaking your environment, that is the things you put in, you can totally take control of your biology in an interesting way. That’s why I wanted to have Wendy on the show. She is also a certified holistic coach and a nutrition coach in LA, which is really cool because that’s where the Bulletproof Coffee Shop is opening up, real soon now. Wendy, welcome to the show.
Wendy: Thank you so much for having me.
Dave: How did you get involved in just this whole health coaching, living a long time kind of space? Give me your story.
Wendy: It started when I was planning my pregnancy. I had to learn to eat for two and get rid of all the chemicals in my house, and detox some of my beauty products, et cetera. Shortly thereafter, my father was diagnosed with cancer and unfortunately, I didn’t have the knowledge at that time to help save him but I’ve decided to study more about detoxification and the causes of illness, and the underlying root causes of cancer. That got me into detoxification and caring more about my own health. I started looking into infrared saunas and coffee enemas, and eventually found hair mineral analysis as a way to heal and detox your body.
Dave: You just said coffee enemas, right?
Wendy: Yes.
Dave: There is an important tip for anyone considering a coffee enema right now, and this is one you don’t want to learn the hard way, and it’s you’ve got to cool it off first. That’s it.
Wendy: Yeah, exactly. Actually, a lot of my clients use Bulletproof coffee for their coffee enemas.
Dave: They are not alone. I mean, if you are going to use a coffee for detox, you might as well go for something that’s lab tested and doesn’t have those slight little neurotoxins in it.
Wendy: Yeah. If you’re going to put coffee in your body that’s mold and microtoxin free, you might as well do that with your rectum too.
Dave: Just to be clear, when we are talking about coffee enemas, I didn’t think we’d go there so quickly but what the heck. We are not talking about putting butter and brain octane oil, and the coffee beans. Although, there are people who have done MCT rectally and people have done butter or more likely butyric acid rectally with great benefits.
I don’t actually think it’s a good idea to put butter in – I am not saying it. Anyway.
Wendy: You could probably absorb it that way.
Dave: You almost certainly could. I just think ghee might be better, but without getting too gross here, the idea, what we are talking about though is using coffee as just black coffee that’s been cooled, obviously, and brewed in a certain way. I am guessing you French press, metal filter is the way you do it?
Wendy: I actually just throw it on the stove and boil it.
Dave: You just boil it. Okay, so it’s even more extracted than the French press is.
Wendy: Yeah, and you can do it any way you want.
Dave: Right. This won’t be a Coffee Enema 101 sort of thing. There is plenty of info about it, but why do you people do coffee enemas?
Wendy: It’s a great way to detox for liver. A lot of people think it’s for colon cleansing, and that is a by-product of it, but it’s really more for stimulating the hepatic portal system where your body is cleansing toxins from the intestines and the coffee and the palmitic acid, and the caffeine in the coffee really stimulates the portal venous system that leads to the liver and it gets the liver detoxing really well.
When you retain the enema for about ten to fifteen minutes, which is the goal, your blood filters your liver about four to five times. It really helps to get rid of chemicals and metals that are in your system that you’re detoxing from infrared saunas or other means, and gets them out of your body. You eliminate them with the coffee enema, and then you mitigate detox symptoms like headache and nausea, and other symptoms like that.
Dave: For people listening, my research on these things says that there is actually some very valid things that it does for the hepatic portal, for glutathione production of the liver. It just still sounds kind of gross and waste of really good coffee but anyhow, this isn’t just a bunch of wacko, like, “Oh, my god, they are doing what now?” It is a known herbalist detox technique for a very long time with some real science behind it. It’s just not exactly very nice to talk about.
Wendy: Yes. They’ve been used for hundreds of years and they do work. They are not for everyone. Some people who are sensitive to caffeine, they don’t work and some people just can’t stomach them, but they are wonderful for the people that does work for them, they are great.
Dave: I am one of those people who will try just about anything at least once, in order to see if it works. I’ve probably tried this a half dozen, maybe a good dozen times over a while. I get wired from it. It’s super ampy and it’s a lot of work, and so it’s probably not my favorite thing but I do think it has valid detoxing things. There are other ways to raise glutathione though. It is one of those, if you are full of metals and by the way, what metals are we talking about that might be like cadmium or it is other metals? What are the ones that people get?
Wendy: Really, any kind of metal. Lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic. There is dozens of heavy metals, but really, anything that’s in your body that is causing toxicity can be removed using a coffee enema.
Dave: It’s not what I thought we’d end up talking but why would you want to get rid of these metals? If people haven’t heard all two hundred episodes of this, it’s actually, in some circles, still considered like there is a little bit of metal in everything and just man up, walk it off. Let’s talk about mercury or lead, those are the common ones, what do people experience when they have this? How do they get them and what does it feel like?
Wendy: Everyone is toxic with heavy metals. Everyone has some level of heavy metal in their body and they really are part of the underlying root cause of diseases, but some people are more sensitive than other than heavy metals. Some people can have a small exposure to mercury and be very sick from it and other people can be eating fish all day long and not necessarily exhibit any symptoms, though it does cause toxicity in their body.
If anyone is having any kind of health symptoms, beginning with fatigue, if people have recurrent headaches or have a chronic health condition or autoimmune issues, thyroid issues, adrenal issues, these are being caused in part by heavy metals and so, it’s just a really good idea for anyone that plans on being healthy, they have to add detox protocols to their health regimen.
Dave: It’s kind of a weird thing but I’ve heard so many people say, “Everything in moderation.” What about mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium? What’s the ideal amount of those?
Wendy: It’s hard to say what the ideal amount is, because everyone is different. Some people can be affected more than others, but ideally, we want them at really low levels and you can do that. If you are really focused on a detox program for two to three years, you can remove the bulk of heavy metals.
Some metals are harder to get out, like lead and cadmium, they can take up to ten years to be completely removed from the body. Because they are so toxic, they can only be released at low levels, very little bit at a time.
Dave: They are also held in your skeletal tissue, like the bone. It takes a long time for the bone turnover to happen, right?
Wendy: Exactly.
Dave: I’ve gone through, I had high mercury as measured by 24-hour urinary excretion with the DMPS Push Challenge, for those of you who are into that kind of stuff. There is fourteen people who seemingly got all excited when I said that. Everyone else is like, “Huh?”
What that means is they gave me an IV push, an injection basically into the vein of a chemical that helps the body release toxins, and it released mercury in this case. Then we collected all of my urine. At the time, I was so toxic with toxins and mercury that I collected seven liters of urine in 24 hours. That means I probably drank nine or ten liters of water, because I was always thirsty, always, no matter what. It was ridiculous how much water I had to drink, because my body was like, “Please get rid of these toxins. Please get rid of these toxins.” I don’t drink that much water anymore, because I don’t need to.
What we found was elevated mercury and I went through that whole chelation protocol, and it really helped. The color of my skin stopped being gray, my energy helped to come back. It was very meaningful.
If you want to live to a hundred and ten or like me, just a teenager, then what you want to do is you want to be aware that over time, these things build up in your body and that you can do something about it, and then on occasion, you should go on a focused program of dumping the metals and they’ll slowly build up over time, faster than they would have in your grandmother, because we’ve been filling the world with them. This is just part of adapting ourselves to the environment in which we live.
What should people do? You are saying for two or three years of focused detox program. What does it look like to get rid of your metals? What do you recommend someone do if they are like, “All right. I decided I am going to be super clean and I am want to be metal-free.” What is step one through step five? What do you do?
Wendy: I like it when people look at their body chemistry as a whole. I have a program called Mineral Power, at MineralPower.com, where I start with a hair mineral analysis to look at people’s adrenal, thyroid function, immune system function and get a picture of their heavy metal toxicity, as well. Once I get that, I can know exactly what supplements someone needs to take, whether they are a fast or slow metabolizer or based on their heavy metal toxicities, and I’ll give them a specific supplement protocol, mainly minerals, because when you flood your body with minerals, it helps to push out heavy metals.
For instance, when people are very toxic with cadmium, it’s usually because they are zinc deficient and when you don’t have zinc to repair your arteries or skin, tendons and other tissues on the body, your body is forced to accumulate and retain cadmium to do that same job. The body wants the preferred mineral but in the absence of that, it has to accumulate cadmium and uses that to repair the arteries and veins, and it makes them actually very brittle and promotes heart disease, hardening of the arteries and high blood pressure.
That’s just one instance of when you flood your body with zinc, for instance, your body can start releasing cadmium.
Dave: It’s this careful interplay, this balance. The idea that we are not robots and you just tweak that one variable. You change that variable, but everything else shifts, right? How do you use hair tests, which are your hair, like maybe it was in your shampoo or how do you get real data from hair? This has been a challenge, since I started metals, autism and ADD, going back a long time, it was, “Hair mineral test, we don’t believe in that,” from some people and other people say, “No, as long as you know how to read the data, it’s pretty good.”
Give me the why do you use hair instead of blood or urine?
Wendy: No tests can show you all the heavy metals that you have in your body but I like hair mineral analysis because it will show the heavy metals, but also certain patterns of body chemistry. When I can see the patterns in the hair test, it gives me a tremendous amount of information, and we are not just focusing on detoxing heavy metals. You have to heal the entire body chemistry. You have to heal the adrenals, thyroid and what not, and I have to get a picture of what’s going on in a person’s body to be able to accomplish that.
There is also forty years of research behind hair mineral analysis. I think a lot of practitioners and medical doctors mistakenly believe that the hair test is just to look at mineral levels and heavy metals, and that’s actually not the case.
We are looking at different ratios in the body. The calcium and the phosphorus ratio shows the metabolic rate. The sodium to potassium rates can show there is a lot inflammation in the body, if they have a lot of heavy metal toxicity that we can’t see in the test, so there is a tremendous amount of information.
It really took me about three years of reading them to become very comfortable, because there is so much information behind the hair test. To think that you’re just looking at mineral levels, if you are thinking about it in that way, that it’s just mineral levels and heavy metal levels, then you’re going to think it’s inaccurate and invalid.
Dave: You use it as a data point. What are some of the other common things that you would gather? If someone was to say, “I am going to get serious about this. I’ve got needles, I can pee in buckets.” What’s your ultimate list of tests that you’d want from a client who is wanting to say, drop five hundred dollars on testing in order to make sure that they were going to spend two years of their life detoxing in the right way? What does that look like?
Wendy: I would start with a hair mineral analysis. I recently became an FDN, so I do other functional lab tests, as well.
Dave: Explain what a FDN is because I am sure a lot of people don’t know.
Wendy: Yeah. Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. It’s just a way for me to play doctor and be able to run all kinds of labs to figure out what’s wrong with people. Basically, do some investigative detective work, but I really like people to do, like I said, the hair test first. They can do all kinds of tests, gut test, gut permeability test and food sensitivity test, but those are not for detox so much.
Dave: Okay, so getting an idea of what’s going on in there. What sorts of autoimmunity, what sorts of food immunity. I’ve got to say, if you are listening to this stuff and you’ve listened to Bulletproof Radio for a while, these things keep popping up because these are not about, “I just want to live long time.” If you want to perform better and you have mercury in your brain, you won’t perform as well as you can. Understanding where your weaknesses are helps you know what’s kryptonite for you so you can avoid it, and that’s why we have guests like Wendy on the show too who can talk about what works and what doesn’t.
Wendy, what about other kinds of toxins, like pesticides? How does that come into play with something like lead or mercury or cadmium or arsenic, or all these other things, nickel?
Wendy: Yes. A hair mineral analysis shows all the heavy metals but it doesn’t show any chemicals and things like that, but we automatically assume that everyone has those. The World Health Organization has estimated that we have seven hundred chemicals in our body. CDC has done other tests that show we have over two hundred chemicals in our body. Breast milk has seventy chemicals, et cetera, et cetera.
There is no need to really test for those. You just have to detox those in an infrared sauna. As you strengthen the body’s biochemistry doing a program like Mineral Power, that also just allows the body to improve its detox mechanisms and the infrared sauna facilitates that, as well. You get rid of all these chemicals and pesticides, and things that are so ubiquitous in our environment.
Dave: That makes a lot of sense. How does all this then plug into the other big system in the body, like the endocrine system, adrenals and the thyroid? When you put the hormone system into place with some hair mineral testing, what do you see?
Wendy: On a hair mineral analysis, the sodium or potassium levels are indicative of adrenal health. Most of my clients, by the time they find me, they have really low sodium-potassium levels because they are in some stage of adrenal fatigue and adrenal fatigue is caused in part by heavy metal and chemical toxicity, because one, you get metals and toxins in the adrenal glands themselves, but number two, when the body slowly over time becomes more and more toxic, the adrenal glands will rev up the production of stress hormones in an attempt to expel them to rev up the body’s metabolism and have the body excrete them. Over time, this constant stimulation and irritation of the adrenal glands in part causes them to become fatigued. That is why two thirds of people have adrenal fatigue and suffer from the symptoms.
When people begin experiencing fatigue, usually beginning in their twenties or thirties, that’s the beginning of adrenal fatigue and this whole cascade and domino effect of other health conditions in the body begins with adrenal fatigue.
Dave: One of the things that people often don’t know and I actually found a study about this, it’s that when your adrenals get off, your chances of getting autoimmunity go way up. Autoimmunity is when your immune system basically starts turning against you and attacking things like your brain or your kidneys, or some other part of your body, but getting to that point of adrenal exhaustion may be the trigger that then causes the immune system to do that, and that’s based on some very old work from a guy who did a lot of work with cortisol in the fifties, sixties and seventies, who documented this pretty well, and I am forgetting his name right now. I think I need more Aniracetam, but…
Wendy: Yeah, I totally agree with you. When we have lots of heavy metals and chemicals in our body, it causes adrenal fatigue but it also causes gut issues, which will also promote adrenal fatigue, these hidden stressors in the body. When people have chemicals or metals like mercury and copper, when you have copper toxicity, this will promote the overgrowth of candida and bad bacteria, gut dsybiosis in the gut and promote candida infections.
People, before they get rid of gut infections and things like that, they do have to address detoxing excess copper and mercury in their body or these infections will not go away.
Dave: Now, one of my top ten recommended supplements is copper because so many people have started supplementing zinc that now the zinc-copper ratio is off and I am a little concerned about recommending even more zinc because it’s already like if you take a vitamin, you are probably getting zinc but tell me about the risks of excess copper and why maybe getting a test, either hair or blood to get your copper versus zinc levels could be useful?
Wendy: Yes. I do blood testing with my clients, as well, for zinc, copper and ceruloplasmin, again to see if they have copper toxicity in their body. I did a podcast about this. There is a copper conundrum, so to speak, where most people today if they have adrenal fatigue, they have a copper disregulation in their bodies and the reason is because as they have adrenal fatigue, the adrenals are not able to signal to the liver to produce a protein called ceruloplasmin that binds the copper to make it bio-available in the body.
As people proceed further and further into adrenal fatigue, copper starts building up in their body and causing many health issues, but they also simultaneously have a copper deficiency, because they don’t have this protein to bind the copper to make it available in the body.
I very fervently recommend a copper supplementation, as well, but you can’t have too much because then it can promote copper toxicity.
Dave: Yeah, that’s bad news.
Wendy: Yeah. There is a fine balancing. You do have to do hair testing and blood testing to find out what supplement protocol people need to balance their copper.
Dave: If someone is a little bit copper-toxic, what does that look like?
Wendy: PMS, number one. Weight gain. Migraine headaches is very common. Copper stimulates the neurotransmitters, so people can very much have anxiety, bipolar disorder, even schizophrenia.
Dave: That sounds kind of serious.
Wendy: Yeah. Pain syndromes, because copper is a very good conductor of electricity. People’s nerves can over-fire and it can promote pain syndromes. Really, a lot of symptoms. I have articles on my website about copper that explain that.
Dave: If someone wanted to go to their doctor and say, “I want a test to find out whether I should have more or less copper, would they ask for RBC-copper levels? What is your favorite test that you can order from a “normal doctor?”
Wendy: Most doctors won’t do this testing, as I’ve found with my clients. I said, “Go to the doctor and do this testing,” and the doctors won’t do it, but it’s RBC-magnesium, ceruloplasmin, plasma-zinc and serum copper. Those are the blood tests you need to get, but even then, it’s very difficult. You can’t just look at your copper levels and say, “You have copper issues.” Hair mineral analysis is great to look at. You also have to look at if you have adrenal fatigue. You have to look at symptoms. You have to look at a person’s whole health history to be able to determine copper issues, because it can be very tricky.
Dave: How much would that set of tests costs?
Wendy: Not too bad. The hair test that I do is three hundred dollars and the battery of tests, I think with the RequestATest.com is I think about a hundred and sixty dollars. It’s not terribly expensive.
Dave: Got it. You can always order these yourself and go to your doctor, or not even go to your doctor. You order them and you are like, “Okay, I figured this out. I am going to take more or less copper, or more or less zinc, or whatever else,” that sort of “I am going to hack my own body” perspective, and I think there is value in working with someone who’s balanced levels quite a bit.
There is a bunch of people here who will go to the doctor and the doctor will be like, “I have no idea what you are talking about. We have four more minutes and the insurance is going to bill whatever.” If that is the case, you probably do want to go to Request-a-Test, or if you are fortunate enough to have found a doctor who works on these levels … by the way, there is a list of Bulletproof physicians on the Bulletproof site where people who work with these kinds of things are listing their availability.
What you can do is you can just go in and say, “I want to get the data.” Then you know and then maybe you’ll just change your supplement stack. By the way, if you are taking a multivitamin, even with some sort of balance or whatever, it doesn’t matter. If that multivitamin has copper, you don’t need copper, or if you need more copper, then it doesn’t have it. That is one of the reasons that I am not a huge fan of multivitamins, because you’re almost never going to get the right mix for you and there is probably stuff in there you shouldn’t be taking.
Wendy: Exactly. I agree with you. You can’t just throw the kitchen sink at your health, it doesn’t work.
Dave: Yes. I did take that approach at first. I went out, back in the late nineties, and I am like, “I am going to do everything right.” I went and I bought the most expensive vitamins, at a couple of hundred bucks a month. They had two hundred and forty ingredients, and essentially, it didn’t do that much other than give me a really big niacin flush that I thought was an allergic reaction at the time.
A niacin flush is one of the B vitamins that causes your skin – first, they get to turn red and they get flushed as it changes the circulation of your arteries and your veins. It’s a weird feeling but at the time, I was like, “Oh my god, these vitamins are tweaking on me,” but in retrospect, I still don’t use the regular multivitamin, even some of the fancier ones because I assembled the things that are right for my biochemistry because I did the testing.
I am not a doctor. You can do this kind of thing yourself but it helps to have a good advice, and we’re not talking about that much money compared to one doctor’s visit. Three hundred dollars for a test or maybe five hundred, just to get your numbers. You do this once a year. That’s real money, no doubt about it but if you have that data, it changes where you spend the rest of your health allocated funds. The idea is you can throw a dart and hope you’re taking the right stuff or you could get the data and spend less money on taking the right stuff, and probably still spend the same amount of money overall.
Here is an example from my own experience. About a year ago, I found out that my RBC-magnesium was a little bit low, which means in my red blood cells. Now, that’s weird because I have been taking magnesium on a regular basis in the most bio-available forms and it’s one of my top two most recommended supplements for people, because everyone is deficient. I am like, “What the heck is going on with this?” I am not sure that I know the exact reason why that happened but I did address it by increasing my magnesium intake and adding more magnesium to my venous cocktail, intravenous magnesium that bypasses all the absorption systems in the body. I have solved the problem and of course, I did it with a big heavy hammer because that’s kind of the way I like to solve these problems, but knowing that was quite useful.
If you don’t get the data, you don’t take right action and when you are using vitamin supplementation, having that ability to say, “All right, I did it for a while, and then I am going to test.” Wendy, my question for you, I do it for a while. How long is a while before you test? How long is the next while before you test? What’s the testing frequency that’s optimal, and then the minimum one that’s even useful?
Wendy: Yes. I have clients that do a hair mineral analysis every three months, because your body chemistry can change very quickly and then you need to change your supplements to continue to correct your body chemistry, but people can wait every six months to do it, if they are trying to save money or what have you. Some clients, I recommend that because they have a pattern to their hair test. I know it’s probably not going to change and their supplements therefore won’t change. Again, everyone is a little bit different but you need to continue monitoring your health on a regular basis, so you can continue tweaking and bio-hacking.
Dave: Every three months. There is some pretty good evidence for that. I tend to favor three times a year, because your red blood cells replace themselves about that often but it’s also a question of how much money do you have, to be perfectly honest. Right?
There are people who do their tests every two weeks, they are pretty unusual. I asked Tim Ferris about this when he was on Bulletproof Radio, and if I remember, I think it was every six or eight weeks. It was pretty frequently. In my case, I would like to do it every six to eight weeks, but it’s pretty expensive and contrary to popular belief, I am not like the multimillionaire, since I was twenty-six. People keep forgetting when I say, “I lost six million dollars when I was twenty-eight.” I have been working my ass off for twenty years here like the rest of us.
It’s also a question for me of I live in a small town. I have to go get a blood draw and getting a blood draw is inconvenient, and we don’t have theranos testing where you’re able to just stick something in your finger. I have a nice bruise on my arm right there, because I had a needle stuck on my arm the other day from testing and it’s one of those things where you are not going to do it every three months. The hair is easier, but if you did hair once a year? Is that viable or is that still…?
Wendy: I think getting one test to see where you are at is great. Once a year with the hair test, probably not valuable but people can get one test and see where they are at and they’ll generally know what’s going on with their body, what supplements they need to take, but people do need to do re-testing fairly frequently, if they want to continue balancing their body chemistry and getting the correct supplements that they need.
What’s great about hair testing is you can do it anywhere in the world. Hair sample doesn’t deteriorate. It lasts for a couple of months so that you can do the testing in the convenience of your own home. It’s very easy.
Dave: What’s the best kind of hair for hair testing?
Wendy: The best kind of hair? Really, any kind. It’s better if you have hair on your head. I tested Ari Meisel and he had to shave his chest but I got the sample, but you can use pubic hair too if you need to, but it’s not as reliable. There is a lot more phosphorus in pubic hair, and that’s more slow-growing. Head hair is very biologically active too.
Dave: You want fast-growing hair and there is a lot of people that don’t have any pubic hair now anyways.
Wendy: Yes.
Dave: I guess, and beards. Do those work?
Wendy: Beards do work. They are on your head, so they are biologically active.
Dave: I am tempted. My buddy Peter who works for Bulletproof, he can edit this out if he doesn’t like this. I am hoping people will hear this stuff, but he’s grown this insane beard. I think he is competing with Aubrey de Grey pretty soon and he is super-super bulletproof, and just did a hair mineral analysis with you. What did you find in his hair?
Wendy: I prefaced this talk with telling him how annoying he was, that he had the best hair test that I have ever seen and really, how hard he works on his health and the fact that he is doing, following all of your advice and taking your supplements, he’s been working really hard on his health for about ten years. He is twenty-nine and he had an amazing hair test. I was really blown away, because I hadn’t seen one like this before. I could tell he’d been doing the work.
Dave: I have a theory, because his beard is growing faster than any human’s should. He drinks the collagen every day, like I said that to my employees, everyone who works for Bulletproof gets Bulletproof coffee and brain octane and collagen. I want them to be healthy and vibrant, so I give them the stuff but his beard grows three times faster than it should. He is just sprouting. So, my theory is that he is dumping all the toxins into his beard so his head hair can be all mellow.
I actually am wondering, I’ll ask him if he is up for doing a separate beard hair test just to see the difference, because I swear, no beard is that possible. I am having beard envy, if you haven’t noticed.
Wendy: Yeah. We should test that theory and do his beard separately.
Dave: I’ll ask Peter. Seriously, it would be really an interesting thing. I just wonder how he has this beautiful mineral analysis in their hair and what’s going on? I just want to know, because it’s interesting. Maybe it’s not, if you are listening to this in your car, but I think it’s interesting so we’ll talk about it. Peter, thanks for letting us talk about your hair.
Let’s see, what about this Living to 110 thing? Why did you pick 110?
Wendy: Because Liveto120.com was taken, primarily.
Dave: It was the most honest answer on Bulletproof Radio, right there.
Wendy: But I think most people don’t want to live past the hundred and ten. I know I don’t, but some people don’t even want to live to one hundred and ten, but I think that it can be done. You have to eat the right diet. You have to minimize your exposure to toxins and chemicals as much in your food and your environment as you can. You have to detox your body. I teach people on Liveto110.com how to do that, how to live a long, healthy life, disease-free.
It’s sad when I see people, including my father hit sixty and their health just deteriorates, and they are on ten different medications, going to doctor after tests after doctor, tests after doctor. It just makes me sad to see people living this low quality of life. So, I wanted to empower people and let them know how they can heal their health conditions naturally and eat the right diet, and do all the things that make us healthy and have our brain function properly, and give us energy. People do have the power to do that. They can take control of their biology and live a healthy life.
Dave: Why not one-forty?
Wendy: I think because most people, they haven’t seen very many people living past the hundred and twenty, so that’s why Live to 110.
Dave: I don’t know. I think you are maybe copping out a little bit there, Wendy. You talk with some of the guys like Ray Kurzweil and I think he and I might have a contest to see who takes the most nutrients every day to optimize our biochemistry, but when you look at his perspective on things and you look at the medical advances, like I just managed to get in line to be one of the first vanishingly small number of people who get their full human genome sequence, not just the 23AndMe but like everything, the same way that Craig Venter has done. I am incredibly stoked and it is kind of a big investment, but I think the value is there.
I look at what I am going to learn there and I look at the technologies coming, and I will be pissed if I don’t live to a hundred and twenty. Seriously, I am going to be so mad, except I’ll be dead, so I probably won’t be that mad but —
Wendy: Just do coffee enemas and it might happen.
Dave: All right, maybe. It’s one of those things where if you have the means, and I don’t think everyone is going to have the means. This is probably something that we can in the west and something that we may be able to do in the east because the world economies are shifting and all the things like that, but in all societies throughout history, there are some people who are in the position to take advantage of technologies more than others.
One of the reasons that we are doing Bulletproof Radio today is that when we have new technologies and people become aware of them, it changes the demand for the technologies. When the demand goes way up high, then the supply increases. When the supply increases, the cost goes way down and what would have been something that only Hollywood elite or world leaders would have suddenly becomes available at your corner 7/11. By disseminating this knowledge, I think we can make people say, “Are you kidding? It’s not cool that only people who can afford to spend ten thousand dollars get that. We should make this thing available for a hundred dollars and we should give it to our kids.” It’s that economic thing that’s going to help us live way past one-ten. I think it’s a good stepping stone, but come on, I want to see you live to one-eighty. You can do it.
All right, I’ll get off my little lecture there but access to these technologies, you are talking three hundred bucks for a hair mineral test. There is a lot of families where three hundred dollars times say the four people in the family, I have two little kids. I am like, “All right, if they are having a behavioral problem or something, would I want to know what’s going on in their hair or whether the water pipes in my aging home are leeching lead from solder that was put in in the sixties?”
All that stuff can actually affect cognitive development, it can affect your kids IQ, it can affect your own ability to have candida or not have candida but damn, that’s twelve hundred dollars right there. Then I’ve got to go and buy all these supplements or I have to buy the grass-fed meat or stop eating shark because it’s full of mercury, or whatever the things you are supposed to do are. It’s still too expensive. How long is it going to be before … I don’t know, you can do hair mineral analysis because it’s so widely done or some other tests like that? What’s your futurist hat for this?
Wendy: I do give discounts to families, if they need it. Children usually don’t have to take very many supplements. They usually only have to take three supplements to get better. For instance, my daughter was diagnosed with autism when she was three years old and I put her on the program and she detoxed tons of aluminum, I mean just tons of it on every single hair test. She only had to do that for about a year and she is very much normal now. She is just a little bit behind other kids for same age but she doesn’t have an autism diagnosis anymore from doing this.
Dave: Congratulations on doing that and you are not alone, there are people who actually do reverse, they cure their kids’ autism. I even have a relative, I guess who’d be a cousin or a second-cousin, who’s the same thing, on the spectrum. Her parents really poured an amazing amount of love and honestly, it was an amazing amount of money. One of them quit working to take care of their daughter, but do you know what happened? She is fine. She is a great kid. The autism stuff is gone and to know that you can do that is both amazing and wonderful.
It is also kind of annoying, because if you think about how many of those successes, like the ones you’ve had and the ones that other people have had, compared to the number of kids who don’t even get an opportunity to do that. It seems like there is such a wide gap.
Wendy: Yeah, and the stuff like that, the sooner you get a diagnosis, the sooner you can start making headway with improving the diagnosis, but most kids with autism have a zinc deficiency. They typically have aluminum toxicity, as well. It is found in most vaccines and they also typically have gut dysbiosis. You can give them probiotics, definitely giving zinc and a number of other things, kids can turn around. They really can, but the longer you wait to seek treatment, the worse the prognosis.
Dave: That is definitely my experience in talking with autistic parents. I actually gave a talk at the Autism One Conference this year, because the whole idea of using Bulletproof and all these other techniques, the things that you do at Live to 110, in order to reduce the toxic burden on the body, you reduce the body burden and the body can heal. Whether those toxins are causing autism or enabling it, or whether they are a co-factor, they matter, and they matter even if you don’t have autism, if you just want to make the world’s best decisions all day, every day, have a ton of energy and kick ass all day, toxins matter. If you want to not be in a hospital completely twitching, toxins matter. They still matter.
Wendy: Exactly.
Dave: Wendy, what other things would Bulletproof listeners really appreciate knowing about?
Wendy: Actually, at your Bulletproof Bio-hackers Conference, I spoke about infrared saunas. I love infrared saunas, because I think if you do any one thing for your health, you need to get into an infrared sauna. They are countless benefits, so many benefits, including killing candida, it kills yeast, fungus, parasites, molds. It can kill cancer cells. Dr. William Pollack said that we have a hundred million cancer cells in our body at any one time, and if you don’t have a strong immune system to kill them off, an infrared sauna can aid in killing them off, and killing tumors before they have a chance to grow. It does so many things that I can’t even begin to express it.
You also sweat out hundreds of chemicals and toxin phthallates and additionally, dozens of heavy metals. Radiation, it kills cells that have been radiated. There are just so many benefits that people really need to get one in their home, I think.
Dave: I got my first infrared sauna back around ’97, ’98 and I used it when I was getting rid of mercury the first time, and then it got a little bit wet, and actually toxic mold grew in my infrared sauna, which is just bad news. I tossed that thing, but in the new bio-hacking facility, I am going to give listeners and viewers on You Tube or the iTunes Video a walkthrough of the bio-hacking facility. If you have been hearing constructions sounds in the background today, that’s them putting in the paths. It’s nearly done and I have the sweet new infrared sauna, and I am going to tell you guys all about it because I do believe that this is something that you want access to one, and they are remarkably affordable now. They still don’t look amazing in your living room, but if you can find space for one, they will change the way you perform. You are going to get a little bit more of a download on that in another episode of Bulletproof Radio.
Wendy, we’ve got enough time for our final question, which is what I ask on every podcast and that is what are your top three recommendations for people who want to perform better at whatever it is that they do? I don’t mean running. I mean, if you want to kick ass at being a parent, what should you do? If you want to be kick-ass at … (insert anything), what should you do?
Wendy: I think if you want to alleviate brain fog, which a lot of people are suffering from, definitely like I said, you want to get in an infrared sauna. You’ve got to get rid of mercury, aluminum and copper that have affinity for brain cells. You have to get those.
Dave: Sauna and metals, okay.
Wendy: Yeah, infrared sauna. Also, you want to take magnesium. Magnesium is needed for over thirty-seven hundred processes in the body and counting. That is one of the first things to go when we’re stressed out and you need that mineral desperately. Of course, I think people should take a whole range of minerals, because I think that’s the number one thing missing in people’s supplement protocols. People are taking minerals but not the right kinds and not enough of certain minerals.
I also think people need to sleep. People, I think, have very poor sleep hygiene. I love that you use the orange nerd goggles, I do. They do reduce the influx of blue lights that suppresses melatonin production. People need to have better sleep hygiene, get the EMFs away from their bed. They need to do everything they can to get the best night sleep.
I have been taking your GABAwave.
Dave: Does it work?
Wendy: It changed my sleeping. It absolutely did.
Dave: I love hearing that. Thank you.
Wendy: Amazing. I am recommending it to all my clients, because I was really blown away. I definitely had some sort of GABA deficiency, which many of us do. A lot of people, if they have copper toxicity, for instance, they’ll have too much norepinephrine and other stimulating neurotransmitters, and people need the breaks, which is GABA. People try to go to sleep at night, their mind is racing, typically like mine is. They need to have some breaks, which is GABA, and I think a lot of people are deficient in that today.
For me, when I was having trouble sleeping, it just took that all away. It just completely changed my sleeping habits. Anyone that is having trouble sleeping, I think GABAwave is the way to go.
Dave: Wow. That is a huge endorsement. Thank you and we didn’t plan that ahead of time.
Wendy: No, we didn’t.
Dave: I would caution people the first time you try GABAwave. Follow the instructions carefully. It is strong. It’s not like taking normal GABA, you really can feel it. Make sure that that first day that you have anything, you are ready for a ton of brain activity that you can really be focused, but you might really want to sleep that night.
Wendy: Yeah. I did a half an ampoule.
Dave: Yeah. It’s a good way to start.
Wendy: I started small first, but you do. You need to take phenylated GABA, if you do take GABA. It needs to be phenylated, it is more effective.
Dave: The other thing is, how do you like the flavor?
Wendy: I do like it.
Dave: No. You are the only person on earth. Most people grimace and cry when they have GABAwave, but that’s kind of by design.
Wendy: It smells really good, like the package, it smells really nice and I was really looking forward to the flavor but yes, it is a little tart.
Dave: I am working on a new flavor that people will like better, but the people for whom it works, they love it and it doesn’t matter how it tastes. That’s awesome. Thank you.
Wendy: I choke it down.
Dave: Awesome. Will you give me your URL and where people can get a hold of you so that they can find your work?
Wendy: Yes. You can find me on Liveto110.com. That’s where I have my weekly blog and Live to 110 podcast. I’ve got lots of recipes, et cetera. You can find my Mineral Power program at MineralPower.com. I also have an upcoming online health program called BodyBiorehab.com. It’s going to have all kinds of information about health, just the basics of health, stress, sleep, diet, exercise and detoxification. It’s just a basic program to help people reverse disease and increase their energy, and get their mojo back, basically.
Dave: Yeah, mojo deficiency is a serious cause of aging.
Wendy: Yes, it’s an epidemic.
Dave: Awesome. Wendy Myers, thank you for being on Bulletproof Radio today.
Wendy: Thank you so much for having me. It was an honor.
Dave: If you enjoyed today’s episode, please do me a favor. There is something you could do that really changes the needle for me, just move the needle and that’s buy a copy of the Bulletproof Diet book. If you already have a copy, this is a serious request, buy another one. I am really working to show my publisher that the audience of Bulletproof Radio is loyal and to do another book that goes even deeper into things you can do to upgrade yourself and what’s going to help the most on making that happen quickly is moving a few more copies of the Bulletproof Diet book.
Buy one for a friend. Buy one for that fat co-worker who is angry all the time, because you can seriously win just by getting the people around you to pay attention, and if they all want Bulletproof coffee, then you go up and be like, “Let’s get that stuff out of the coffee bottle. Let’s put the good stuff in.” I’ll help you out there too, but anyway, please consider buying another copy of the Bulletproof Diet book, and I’ll be so grateful. Just go online and click ‘Buy’ and then seriously, I’ll write another book for you, and it’s going to rock.
Thanks again, Wendy.
Wendy: Thank you so much.
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