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Swurfer

The classic swing redesigned into a wooden “swingboard” with a unique curved shape, on which you can sit or stand, “providing more moves, more range of motion, and more fun as you glide through the air.” Made of 100% hard rock maple, each board is one of a kind, and 100% proudly made in the USA. It’s a great way to get exercise outdoors.

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Eco Sheep Bicycle Chain Lubricant

“The happiest and most environmentally certified bike lubes in the world…Every year bike owners apply nearly 6.3 million gallons of harmful petroleum to their bicycles to lubricate their chain and gears. This petroleum has nowhere to go, so it winds up in our soil and waterways, polluting our environment and making a green activity not so green anymore. Eco Sheep® solves this problem through our revolutionary, patent-pendingpetroleum-free bicycle chain lubricants. Our lubes beat petroleum and are non-toxic, biodegradable, and sustainable. You won’t find dangerous petroleum, PTFE particles, or paraffin in any of our products.”

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Brazos Walking Sticks

 Handmade hiking sticks, hiking poles and canes, beautifully crafted by local artisans in Central Texas. Designed to increase your balance and mobility. Made from native and exotic woods, including sassafras, hickory, sweet gum, iron bamboo, and many others. Can be personalized with laser engraving or the addition of accessories such as strap, whistle, compass and others.

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Whistle Creek

“Whistle Creek is the nation’s largest manufacturer of rustic walking and hiking sticks. They’re warm, full of character and 100% US Made. You’ll be proud to own one – and we GUARANTEE you’ll get at least one compliment a month, or we’ll buy it back!” Accessories include compass, whistle, bear bell, leather straps, tree seeds, and more.

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Fluidstance

 Designed by the Mayo Clinic, this tool gives your body constant motion while you are simply standing. It increases energy expenditure, raises heart rate, and increases range of motion. Perfect for standing desks, washing dishes, watching TV, anytime you are standing, or can stand instead of sit. We’ve gone the extra mile to use eco-conscious materials in our fabrication process. The Original’s top deck is made of bamboo, one of the world’s most abundant and renewable resources; our finish is GREEN GUARD certified to meet rigorous standards for low emissions; our sand-cast bases are produced by hand in zero-water process in a solar-powered facility. We’ve also chosen to finish our bases via powder-coating, as it has almost zero emissions compared to painting and anodizing. It’s all part of our bigger mission to be responsible borrowers from Mother Earth, for team members and customers alike.

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Monkii Bars

These clever bars let you”take the gym anywhere.” Designed for people “who want awesome workouts without being stuck in a regular gym,” these bars are made for total-body workouts while traveling, at home, or even outside. Made from aerospace-grade aluminum and abrasion resistant nylon, with a 2-layer ultra durable weather-resistant powder coat. Handcrafted in the USA.

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Eclectic Institute

Quality herbs and supplements created by a naturopathic physician. “We start and end with whole, raw herbs. We start by growing herbs on our 90 acre certified organic farm, and then use freeze-drying to remove only the water. The end product is the whole herb in its original form still raw, intact, viable, and retaining the benefits of the fresh herb just as Mother Nature intended. We don’t believe in harsher forms of processing such as air or spray drying, chemical extraction, or standardized extracts which alter whole herbs, potentially excluding or destroying active constituents. Nestled at the base of Mt. hood in the pristine Oregon countryside, our family owned 90 acre certified organic farm is a leader in organic farming practices, utilizing crop rotation, mulching, composting, beneficial animal and insect allies, as well the naturally occurring rich volcanic soil. Eclectic Institute is devoted to researching and saving endangered herbs, and dedicates resources to growing many varieties of rare plants.”

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Khroma Herbal Products

 All organic herbal health products in glass bottles. “Because we love our planet (and our customers), we only use organic ingredients…We do not package any of our products in plastic and we don’t use any artificial coloring, preservatives, or dyes. It’s pure natural goodness…Every product we sell is carefully crafted to meet the highest standards for purity and potency. ”

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HealthLabs.com

healthlabs-2Offers lab tests without requiring a doctor’s prescription. You order the tests online or by phone, then take your receipt to one of 2000+ local labs, where your blood is drawn. Get results within 3 business days. Tests include Allergy Testing, Anemia, Anti-Aging / Hormones, Arthritis, Blood Typing, Cancer, Cardiac / Cholesterol, Celiac Disease, Diabetes, Drugs, Fertility, Gastrointestinal, General Health / Wellness, Heavy Metals / Toxins, Hepatitis, Immunity Detection, Kidney (Renal) Function, Liver Function, Military Testing, Pregnancy / Prenatal, Prostate, Sports Testing, STD Testing, Thyroid, andVitamin & Nutritional Testing.

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Berry Good Organics

Kits to make organic elderberry syrup, an all-natural traditional remedy proven to work. “Contrary to other elderberry kits, mine are infused with all natural, organic ingredients that enhance its function. With added bonuses such as Organic ginger root, Organic clove, Organic goji berries, Organic turmeric powder, Organic cinnamon, and Organic star anis, mixed with the infamous dried elderberries, you will enjoy a flu free season. My kits are easy to prepare, and are effective for children and adults of all ages. I am proud to offer an organic and powerful alternative medicine that should be a staple in every household.”

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Vaccines: Harmful or Necessary?

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today we’ll be talking about vaccines. I asked Pamela tim address this subject after seeing a scary commercial on TV trying to get grandparents to get a vaccine so they don’t infect their grandchildren. We’ll discuss the dangers and find out when and if they should be used. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. Pamela is the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Vaccines: Harmful or Necessary?

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld

Date of Broadcast: December 02, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Wednesday, December 2nd. Wow! The year is almost over. It’s Wednesday, December 2nd 2015. And today, we’re going to talk about vaccines, which is something that we haven’t talked about on the show before.

My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s on every other Wednesday because she has so much knowledge about drugs and natural alternatives and how things work in the body that we just talk about something new every other week.

She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. However, she is a pharmacist. She’s a regular pharmacist. She works in a pharmacy in a hospital and she also works in her natural pharmacy which she owns here in Clearwater, Florida. She works with people all over the country. So if you want to talk to her, you can pick up the phone and call her. We’ll give her number later on the show. But she also is right in the midst of both traditional pharmaceuticals and alternative pharmaceuticals.

So today, we’re going to talk about vaccines with Pamela. Hi Pamela!

Pamela Seefeld: Hi! It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Yeah, great to have you.

So I asked you to do vaccines as the subject on this show because I was watching television (I do watch television, there’s actually a lot of good stuff on television) and there was an ad for a whooping cough vaccine. It was a very scary ad. It was wanting grandparents, seniors, to get a whooping cough vaccines, so they wouldn’t infect their grandchildren and their grandchildren will die if they got infected.

And then, once that got my attention and we decided to do this show, I saw another one the other night for pneumococcal pneumonia vaccine. I don’t even know what pneumonococcal pneumonia is.

So what is going on now that in addition to these commercials for drugs that make it look either scary or desirable and with all these beautiful music in the background and they tell you all the side effects, that it’s going to kill you, what is going on with advertising vaccines like drugs?

Pamela Seefeld: Well, that’s a good question. What’s happening is vaccines (especially the pneumonococcal penumonia vaccine and the whooping vaccine), there’s a huge a market for these vaccines. So the way that they’re building awareness is by having these ads, these controversial ads that make people all scared. And especially when you’re talking about the whooping cough, it shows the grandparents turning into like wolves as if they’re going to eat their grandchildren. It’s very frightening. It’s basically insinuating that you’re harboring this really dangerous organism and you’re going to kill your grandkids if you don’t do something about it.

These advertising, let’s face it, is meant to motivate people. And if you’re motivated, you’re going to call your doctor and say, “I want this vaccine.”

There’s a lot of money in vaccines. And once the research has already been done and the production is inside the factory, there’s a lot of mark-up. You have to realize you have the pediatric population, they’re all forced to get all these vaccines.

So the adults are an untapped market, right? A certain percentage of the population is pediatric, those people have to get the vaccines.They have no choice. They can’t go to school. That market has already been tapped about. And if you think about it, a lot of people are refusing vaccines for tehir kids, so they have to start looking for somebody else to market to.

And who are they going to market to? The elderly people.That’s an untapped market – and a market that’s very lucrative.

A lot of them have Medicare. Medicare does cover a lot of the vaccines. And even if it doesn’t, there are a lot of retirees that would be willing to shell out the money if there was some sort of a payment that they have to co-pay in order to have these vaccines because they think they’re protecting their family.

DEBRA: Well, tell us what is a vaccine?

Pamela Seefeld: Vaccines, I want to explain something interesting. Vaccines are kind of like homeopathy. Now, homeopathic pharmacy is really what I do. And homeopathy was developed by Samuel Hahnemann in the late 1800s.He was a German doctor. And in the time that he developed homeopathic medicine, they were doing a lot of pretty barbaric stuff in medicine. They were doing leeches and things like that.

He came along and he discovered that like cures like. Basically, when you take a vaccine – this is really important. I use this example when I give a lecture to physicians or to people that are skeptical about homeopathic and the relevance and how well it works. What I’ll do is I’ll mention to them, “Look, people get vaccines all the time and they work. They provide immunity.The reason why a vaccine works is because it has a small amount of causative agent (whatever the vaccine is supposed to be against) that they put in this formula and they give it to you as an injection and basically, they’re inoculating you with a small amount of vaccine.”

What happens is your body makes an immune response to it and that can impart protection where you actually come in contact with the organism.

So that’s how the vaccines work. But I like to think of it as being a good intro into understanding homeopathy. If you don’t believe in homeopathy, you think it’s all bogus, then why are vaccines working? I use that case in point all the time. It makes the people think. They’re like, “Okay, I see what you’re saying.”

I’ll give you an example. In homeopathy, say someone has a lot of histamine and they have rashes and allergies and things, well we treat them with histamine. Low dose histamine is basically inoculating them against it so you don’t have what’s called mass cell degranulation and this massive histaminic release when you come in contact with the cat or the dog or oak trees or whatever they might be allergic to.

So this is a good intro when you think about it. People think, “Well, how would a vaccine work?” it’s exactly the same principles of homeopathic medicine. It’s exactly the same.

DEBRA: So is there any difference between homeopathic medicine and a vaccine?

Pamela Seefeld: Oh, by far…

DEBRA: So what would be the differences?

Pamela Seefeld: With the homeopathic medicine, it’s obviously encompassing a lot of different things. We use plants. We use toxins in some cases, things that work in the body to mimic a certain type of response. When you have a vaccine, all it is is some kind of a carrier fluid and specifically, the causative agent of whatever you’re going against. So say it’s pneumococcal pneumonia, say it’s a whooping cough, say it’s a papillomavirus virus, whatever virus it is, that’s all it contains. It contains nothing else.

And homeopathic remedies, it’s usually a combination of things. Most homeopathic things we use here, I can get injectables, but I don’t use those. They use more of that in Europe. Everything we use here is oral.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So you just put a few drops under your tongue and it’s a very different experience. But what you’re saying is the basic idea of like curing like applies to both.

Pamela Seefeld: It does. And that’s why I like to bring that as an example to your listeners because the people that are listening to this show, they’re going to be possibly more inclined to use homeopathic medicine and use alternatives. I mean,

I’m very busy and I’ve been very successful at doing this and helping people with homeopathics in Europe. In Germany, I know for sure in Germany, they actually cover homeopathic medicines with your health insurance. You can get to the pharmacy, you can get regular medicines or you can get homeopathic and they’ll cover it either way.

So the rest of the world does embrace homeopathy quite a bit. In America, it’s coming around. I think it’s really great because a lot of my clients have done very, very well with taking homeopathic remedies.

But it’s important to know that a vaccine and a homeopathic remedy is kind of somewhat similar as far as their modalities of action. So if somebody doesn’t believe in homeopathic medicine, the best argument to use is that’s how vaccines work.

That’s what a vaccine is, a small amount of a causative agent to elicit a certain type of immune response. It’s important for people to realize that. If you have doubts about homeopathy, you really can’t after you bring that point up for the people.

DEBRA: We’re almost to the break, but tell us what happens in the body when you get a vaccine, the causative agent goes in your body? What happens?

Pamela Seefeld: Your body makes antibodies. Your body sees this foreign entity in the bloodstream and it says, “Oh, my gosh! We need to mount an immune response.” This immune response allows for these antibodies to be formed. So it imparts immunity in that sense. You body thought that it went through an actual infection, but you didn’t.

DEBRA: And so then if you’re exposed to it, say it was a chicken pox vaccine, then if you were exposed to chicken pox, you would not get the chicken pox because you now have an antibody to it?

Pamela Seefeld: Correct! You have antibodies in the bloodstream that are against chicken pox. It’s specific to that strain, you have to realize. But yes, you have impartial immunity.

DEBRA: Great! We need to go to break. But when we come back, well talk more about vaccines with my guest, Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicine plants and other natural substances. You can go to her website at BotanicalResource.com. You can also call her on the phone. We’ll give her number when we come back.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who also dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances at her natural pharmacy called Botanical Resource.

Pamela, why don’t you give your phone number so that people know where to call you?

Pamela Seefeld: Okay, very good. You can call me here at my pharmacy. All consultations are free. I would be glad to help you if you have any questions about the medications you might be taking.

The number here is 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I would be most honored to help you and your family with any question you might have.

DEBRA: Yeah, if you have a question about a drug that you’re taking, if you want to get off of a drug, if you want to take a natural remedy for something that’s going on in your body, those are all questions that Pamela can answer very well. She’s very highly respected by doctors here in Clearwater, Florida where I live.

How long have we known each other now? A couple of years I think.

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely! It’s great.

DEBRA: Yeah! Yeah, yeah. And she’s helped a lot of people. I, in fact, first met her because a friend of mine referred her to me.

Anyway, back to vaccines, it seems like that the idea of vaccine itself just sounds very logical. But why are some people against vaccines?

Pamela Seefeld: Oh, this is a good question. What happened is a lot of the controversy really started with Dr. Andrew Wakefield and he is a British physician. He did some studies and published information, the Study in the British Journal of Medicine. He concluded that he looked at these 12 patients and his statistical of analysis of the data showed that autism was the result of the vaccines that were used on these children.

So there’s been lots of controversy about that. He lost his medical license. There are lots of stories as far as what he did to create it. They tried to recreate his data and they weren’t able to do that. So there was a lot of controversy. But really, it started this movement of non-vaccinations for children because people were scared of autism.

We now know that autism in the past was affecting not as many children as it is today. And we look at this – I mean, I don’t have the statistics off the top of my head. But it was like 1 in 56 kids or something – it’s a lot that have some kind of spectrum disorder. They might not have full autism, but they might have some type of spectrum disorder that’s related to some kind of unknown cause and they don’t really know why there’s this high propensity.

We do know that autism is directly correlated with the age of the father and there’s also infections in utero and a lot of other things. It’s the same thing with schizophrenia. We know that now too.

And actually, with schizophrenia, we now know that schizophrenia is directly related to the bacteria you get from your mother. And if you’re missing some of the vaginal bacteria when you’re born (like in a C-section), you’re going to be at much higher risk for schizophrenia. So it might be bacteria as well.

I don’t think all the answers are there quite yet. This is the problem because it’s overshadowed, the vaccine “hysteria” so to speak.

DEBRA: But there are some things in vaccines that are pretty toxic like mercury and aluminum, some other ingredients that might not be a good idea. Whereas the idea of a vaccine might be okay, what about some of these other additives?

Pamela Seefeld: Excipients, yeah. That’s the right word, yeah.

DEBRA: The excipients in there are controversial. And also, too, the fact that so many vaccines are given in such a small period of time.

So when you have children, you’re launching this immune response with a lot of different infectious agents in a short period of time because a lot of times, we get several vaccines in one visits. I understand why they’re doing that. They have a sequence of vaccines that they need to instill to these kids. I understand all that.

I think really what it comes down to is that I don’t think vaccines are going to necessarily be the one that’s going to be labeled as the cause of a lot of these problems. But I think there’s a lot of things going on in children (and even in adults) today that they just don’t know exactly what’s happening. And their cell signalling bacteria, like I said, are going to the front and foremost that we know are being linked to a lot of different diseases, especially colitis.

If you think about colitis, I mentioned schizophrenia. They’re showing that the bacteria that you have can predict whether you’re going to come down with these diseases.

DEBRA: You know, when I was a child (and I haven’t looked up any data to confirm this, I’m just going on my memory), I don’t know when they started requiring vaccines for children to go to school. But when I was a child, I remember that the big health problem for children was polio. They had posters up of kids in braces and all these things. Every child had to get a polio vaccine. I don’t know if it was required by all, but I remembered going to get the polio vaccine. But I don’t remember getting a lot of other vaccines. So, I don’t know what I actually got. I’m sure I got a polio vaccine.

But just in general, are vaccines being overused?

Pamela Seefeld: Well, that’s a good question. Polio actually has been eradicated from the U.S. very much. But we now know that there are hot spots in Afghanistan and in India and in Pakistan. I’m actually in Rotary International and we do a lot of for raising money with Bill Gates Foundation to try and vaccinate these kids in these poor areas because over there, polio is very debilitating. They still had people there being crippled.

So I don’t want to come out against vaccination in itself. I think that the excipients in some people, I would venture to say (and I may be incorrect, but this is my theory and I think I read this from other people), my theory is that the time at which you receive a vaccine, where your immune system is standing at that particular time does effect the type of response it’s going to launch.

And if you have a vaccine and your immune system is having some problems and it’s not working correctly, I think you’re going to have more chances for adverse effects.

And not only that too, talking about adverse effects. I was looking at one study here that they were talking about just Australian immunizations in the course of the year and what the side effects were, they actually had four deaths and they couldn’t directly attribute it to the vaccine. But I’m telling you that we’re talking about the whole country of Australia. It’s a lot of people. So what percentage?

They couldn’t really directly put it to the vaccine, but these people, maybe they had an anaphylactic reaction or something, but they did report causes of death. And the most common side effects are injection site reactions, rashes, fevers, dizziness and light-headedness. And you would expect that these would happen. You expect rashes because they’re probably reacting in a poor manner. And if a person’s immune system is compromised at the time or they have some other issues (maybe like we were talking about the excipients, the other factors in there), they might have a reaction.

DEBRA: Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting. Well, we need to go to break. But when we come back, I have a question for you about the immune system and vaccine.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who also dispenses natural remedies. She’s on every other Wednesday here on Toxic Free Talk Radio because she has so much information. We’ll be right back!

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who also dispenses natural remedies as well.

So, my question is I first got interested in toxic chemicals because I had an immune system problem where toxic chemicals had made my immune system in effective. And so what you said about the condition of the immune system affecting how vaccine might respond in the body is very real to me. And I also know that a lot of toxic chemicals that we’re exposed to in our daily lives can affect our immune systems and damage our immune systems. And then I’m thinking about the excipients in the vaccines adding even more toxic stuff like mercury and formaldehyde and aluminum. It just seems like a whole lot of other factors going on rather than just a healthy body getting just a vaccine.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s exactly right. And what we have to look at is the baseline properties of your own immune system and if it’s suppressed. And this is another theory, I guess, what I’m saying. People are under a lot of stress today. I’m not just saying that just in general. But we know that chronic stress depresses the immune system pretty much a lot.

I’m just trying to think back. When I was little, I think things were a little simpler time. Maybe I don’t want to play Pollyanna here. But I’m just trying to say that today, people have financial problems, a lot more homelessness, a lot more chronic illness. And also too, I might mention, that we have a lot of viruses they’re finding in the blood supply that we didn’t really know existed before. They don’t even have names for them yet.

So there are a lot of other things going on that are affecting our immune system. And chronic stress and chronic depravation of sleep, I think in the past, people slept a lot more, there are a lot of other things that are going on that I don’t know if we can peg it on one particular problem. But you’re exactly right, the chronic exposure to chemicals, toxic chemicals, contaminants in our food and environmental contaminants in the air and in the water are definitely affecting people’s health and they’re probably affecting their immune system.

Actually, what I do, because I have to get the flu shot where I work at the hospital. It’s required. I drink the Body Anew while they’re giving me the shot.

DEBRA: Oh, good for you.

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah! I tell all my clients to do that. You want to do the detox at the same time.

DEBRA: Yeah, I think that that’s a good idea. Somebody else was telling me the other day just in an email, she said, “When

I’m exposed to something, I take…” – and I’m not going to mention what it is because I haven’t researched it. But if she has an exposure, she knows to take something. And so I think that’s a great idea if you have to do something like if you’re forced to take a vaccine.

Now, weren’t you telling me that – what was it about people that are in hospitals, everybody gets vaccinated?

Pamela Seefeld: That’s exactly right. Part of the mandate for the hospital— and I really think it possibly even in ObamaCare, which I could be wrong. What has happened is these vaccines are offered to the patients, everybody gets the vaccine. It’s basically an automatically launched order. The doctor doesn’t even have to order it. It’s an automatic launched order. It’s for influenza vaccine and pneumococcal pneumonia. People are getting these vaccines when they’re in the hospitals.

And a lot of it is all the hospitals in the country get money based on what percentage of the population they vaccinate because while they’re there, they’re kind of like a captive audience. They can get these people all vaccinated before they go out into the communities. This is in the guise of, “Okay, we don’t want them to spread illness. There’d be an influenza outbreak. We don’t want there to be a pneumococcal pneumonia outbreak.”

So it’s kind of like a herd vaccination. That’s what they call it. They’re trying to get as many people as they possibly can. So they try and keep their vaccination rates up I’m sure close to the nineties. I’m not even sure what the benchmark is. But each place will have their own benchmark as far as their goal.

And I know that once they reach a certain threshold of people being vaccinated, there’s a financial incentive involved that is directly paid to the hospital.

DEBRA: Okay! So aside from the polio vaccine when I mentioned earlier many, many years ago, I haven’t been vaccinated for anything. I don’t get flu shots, none of those things. I’m not perfectly healthy. But the things that are going wrong with my body are not things that you can get vaccines for. So, it’s not from lack of vaccines. I usually go through the winter and I don’t get the flu.

But I’m also living in a very non-toxic home and probably control my exposure to toxic chemical as much or more than anybody that I know myself personally.

And so I’m wondering if – what it looks like to me is that vaccines are being used as a way for people to not get an illness instead of all of us doing things that promote health. You see what I’m saying?

Pamela Seefeld: Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. And that would be the ideal situation. But I can tell you just from my personal experience being in pharmacy (as long as I’ve been in pharmacy and also having my alternative pharmacy here) that a lot of people, we know what’s good for us, but we don’t always do what’s right. And a lot of people, they’re not sleeping enough, they’re around sick people, they don’t take care of themselves. Maybe they’re prescribed vitamins or medications, but they don’t take vitamins.

And so really, in the hospital setting and in the community hospital setting, we see the same people coming back all the time. Every month, they’re back or every two weeks, they’re back. They’re the same people coming back because they didn’t take care of their infection or they didn’t care of whatever they’re supposed to do. So this readmission rate, and really, I think the flu –

And I’ll tell you about the flu. I had the flu shot two years ago and I got influenza A and I got the bird flu at the same time from working in the E.R. I was actually in the hospital for two days and I was very sick. So even if you have the vaccine, they’re guessing which strains are going to be popular. And some years, they’re totally off and they really have no idea whether they’re picking the right vaccine excipients to have immunity.

So it’s not that the vaccines are bad. I don’t know if I agree so much with the hospitals putting everybody being vaccinated and I don’t think the patients understands sometimes (but they do need to have consent and everything). But the idea that every person needst to be vaccinated while they’re there is important to the country, but it seems to be that they’re not really thinking about the consquences of the shot when they’re there. [Inaudible 00:34:02] that everybody gets it.

DEBRA: Well, I would just like to say before we go to break that I think that there’s so much attention on vaccines and not enough promotion of doing the things that strengthen your immune system. And then if we were to all learn what those things are and do those things, there would be much less need for a vaccine and we could then choose whether we wanted to have it or not.

But still, having a strong immune system is the thing that really protects you against these things, vaccine or not.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s exactly right. Absolutely!

DEBRA: That’s what we need to be having, strong immune systems.
We need to go to break. But when we come back, we’re going to talk about flu shots. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist, but she also works with natural remedies, and in fact, prefers them.

One of the things that I found interesting about Pamela because I’ve been talking with her for a couple of years is that she will recommend a drug if she thinks that that’s the right thing to do. But she will also tell you what the dangers are of drugs and she will also find something natural that will heal your body instead of just alleviating symptoms.

So if you want to talk to her, her phone number is…

Pamela Seefeld: 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Thank you. Okay! So, let’s talk about flu shots. We actually did a show I think it was last year or the year before. I have to see how long we’ve been doing these shows. Maybe we’ve only been doing it for a year. But anyway, I know we did one on colds and flu. We talked about flu shots and things that you can do to help your immune system. Remember that show?

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah!

DEBRA: And so I will actually put a link to that show next to the description of this show on ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com so that those two can go together. But in this last segment, let’s just talk about the flu shot as a vaccine.

Pamela Seefeld: Okay, good. The flu shot as a vaccine, like I said, we’re trying to have a large portion of the population be vaccinated. This is the government’s goal, which is try and prevent against the flu. I thought it was kind of interesting. We were talking before prior to the break about what can you do as a personal responsibilty to try and help your body be more acutely aware and be able to launch an immune response. The flu shot is not necessary for a great majority of people.

And really, we know certain things that depress the immune system, lack of sleep, chronic stress, adrenal fatigue. You know the gamut…

DEBRA: Toxic chemicals…

Pamela Seefeld: Exactly! No, toxic chemicals. And during the break, I went and looked on the Library of Medicine. There’s a brand new study that was published concerning the flu shot in the Journal of Epidemics (it’s just coming out this month actually) where they did a 10-year performance looking at influenza and looking at the populations and what puts you more at risk for having influenza.

It looks like the regression analysis shows that somebody, of course, that has a chronic disease (say someone who has COPD or just some kind of chronic disease), they’re going to be more at risk for it because their immune system is already depressed. Being with a child and living with children, being female, smoking and pets at home were predictors that influenza may be a possibility.

But get this. The things that can prevent and help your risk assessment go down and help your immune system (and these were associated with less chance of flu) were participating in sports, walking, bicycling or some kind of locomation, moving around a lot, a person that’s very, very busy.

It’s not even necessarily cardio exercise, but if someone is active and moving around a lot (and let’s just focus on exercise for one second), what happens when we work out? What happens in the body? Well, what happens is these white blood cells, normally, if you were just sitting down, watching TV or on the computer, sometimes, they hang out. And this is just the way I term it. They’re sticking to the sides of the blood vessels and they’re not really doing anything. They’re laying low because there’s nothing going on.

So if that happens, what’s going on is you have less circulating white blood cells to recognize and attack an invader (a virus, a bacteria or whatever it might be). That’s why sedentariness is associated with poor outcomes for disease.

And when you exercise, say you take a brisk walk or you’re doing housework, you’re running around and you’re really working up a sweat, when you are active, what happens is we get what’s called ‘demargination of the white blood cells’. And this demargination basically means that you get this transient increase in white blood cell activity because these cells that were loafing around and not doing anything and hanging out to the side of the blood vessels, they’re forced because of the blood flow to start being active.

That would explain why activity is associated with a better immune response and a better immune system and in turn, less chance of getting the flu or getting any kind of illness that you might come in contact with. So there are things that people can do that help the body other than just taking vaccines. if you’re in poor health, vaccines aren’t going to do anything.

DEBRA: Yeah. I was a looking at an article because it’s this time of year when it’s flu shots and vaccines and things and so I get a lot of this in my email inbox. One was talking about that vaccines have very low level of effectiveness. It was something like 18% effective. That’s very small. That’s very, very small. All these people are taking it and only 18% are actually getting any kind of help.

This is the way I think. I think that the best thing to do is to just be as healthy as possible to do those things because they’re the things that are always recommended for good health anyway – exercise, drink water, eat good food, staying away from toxic chemicals. Well, people aren’t always saying that yet, but they will. They will. I’m working on it.

So, to just recognize that there’s a basic handful of things that are going to give you good health. And if you do those things, then that’s your vaccine. That’s the thing that’s protecting you from anything. You don’t need to have a specific vaccine because you’re protected from everything.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s exactly right. And it’s important to say this. We were talking about it’s your own responsibility in managing your care. And like I said, these people, I feel bad for them. It’s very, very sad. But constantly, the same people are coming to the hospital every month, every month, same people. It’s not about brain.

Especially people that are smoking, there’s a high percentage of the population that ends up in the hospital repeatedly from smoking. And that is a preventable problem.

DEBRA: It is.

Pamela Seefeld: Smoking, not just all the lives that were lost. If you think about Europe, they even have more people that smoke over there. But the effects on your immune system, the effects on your respiratory system, even people with COPD and asthma, smoking is robbing a lot of people out of quality life.

And actually, there are new studies that came out not that long ago talking about – this is just maybe local to Florida. But certain areas of Florida have a higher morbidity/mortality than being in areas that are more affluent. And what they were saying is that like in Pinellas County where we live in, if you lived in Pinellas County, you have a very good chance of making it to 77 years old. But if you live in Hernando or Date County, you lose 14 years off your life.

DEBRA: What?! That’s a lot!

Pamela Seefeld: Fourteen years…

DEBRA: That’s a lot!

Pamela Seefeld: Fourteen years, yes. Fourteen years. They went to the epidemiologist that are in charge of the health department in Hernando and Date Counties, they said, “Well, why do you think there’s such a huge skew. Basically, that’s a big difference in your lifespan that’s being cut short up there” and what they found is those areas have high rates of smoking and high rates of readmission of people coming into the hospitals and just not taking care of themselves.

So, just smoking alone and also, just diet. The food that the people eat in these areas, it’s a poorer group of people, lower socioeconomic, they don’t eat as well. These are directly correlated to behaviors and the fact that if they just would eat a little bit better diet, have a little bit more activity – and the smoking was a big thing! Apparently, those areas have a lot of people smoking – much more than Pinnelas County.

You think about it, 14 years. If you told somebody you were going to die 14 years younger than you normally would just by where you’re living or what you’re eating and what are the bad effects of your smoking, I think this would change a lot of people’s behavior.

DEBRA: I think so too. I mean, 77 minus 14, that’s 63. I mean, there’s a lot of people who are approachign 63 and they could be living longer.

Pamela Seefeld: This is the thing. The statistics were in the paper, but I don’t even know if that’s even brought up to the general population so much. I think people need to realize that they can literally peg it down to the zip code you live in.

And what is the difference between the people that are living in a better zip code versus a zip code where there’s more impoverishment, they probably eat better. They probably do some exercise. They maybe have some better stress-reduction activities. It really comes down to the things you do every day.

I always say it’s not like a marathon.It’s all the little things you do every day that add up. You’re trying to eat right, you’re trying to sleep enough, detoxing the toxic chemicals out of your body. I can’t emphasize it enough.

I know you’re a big fan of Zeolite. I think it’s an excellent product. I’m a big fan of Body Anew. And there’s also a detox product that…

DEBRA: I take both of them.

Pamela Seefeld: Yes. Yeah, that’s good. That’s perfect. And there’s a detox product by Desbio that’s called Comprehensive Detox and that’s even stronger. I think of Body Anew as the kindergarten and then the Desbio Comprehensive Detox which has six different bottles, that’s almost like the college. That’s even a lot stronger.

DEBRA: Oh, I have to look at that. I have to look at that.

Pamela Seefeld: No, it’s excellent! But detoxing and getting the chemicals out of your body, those are things that you can do something about – and the fact that smoking really would prevent a lot of this. And the fact is they just found that just in our local area. If you think about Florida, if you think about Florida, that’s pretty statistically significant, the fact that if you lived in Date or Hernando County, you would have 14 years off your life just from doing that. I think it’s unbelievable!

DEBRA: Yeah. It’s amazing. It’s just amazing. And I think that people should take those statistics to heart.

I was talking to somebody on the phone this morning and I had to give my birth date. I kind of joked, “I’m so old.” She knew exactly how old I am because she was looking at my birthday and then she said, “Oh, you don’t sound old at all.”

Pamela Seefeld: You don’t look your age at all. You look great. But you know what? What you’re doing, it shows.

DEBRA: It does show.

Pamela Seefeld: If you tell people to take care of themselves, I know some people might feel overwhelmed. “Oh, I just don’t have the… I’m tired. I don’t have a lot of money. I’m working a lot.” It’s the little things you do every day.

Even like the detox, putting some drops in your water doesn’t take a whole lot of time.

DEBRA: No, it doesn’t. And it doesn’t even cost that much money.

Anyway, we’re coming to the end of our time here today. Thank you so much. Why don’t you give your phone number again really fast.

Pamela Seefeld: Yes, absolutely. If there are any questions I can help you with, please call me here at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I’ll be very honored and happy to help your family.

DEBRA: Good. Thank you so much.

Pamela Seefeld: Thank you.

DEBRA: You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can find out more at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Be well!

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Effective, Time-Tested, Inexpensive Treatments for Life-Threatening Diseases

julia-schopick Today my guest is Julia Schopick, best-selling author of the book, HONEST MEDICINE: Effective, Time-Tested, Inexpensive Treatments for Life-Threatening Diseases. Through her writings and her blog, Julia’shonest_medicine goal is to empower patients to make the best health choices for themselves and their loved ones by teaching them about little-known but promising treatments their doctors may not know about. Julia’s writings on health and medical topics have been featured in American Medical News (AMA), Alternative & Complementary Therapies, the British Medical Journaland the Chicago Sun-Times. She also coaches patients in how to convince their doctors to prescribe a treatment they (i.e., the doctors) don’t know about. www.HonestMedicine.com.

 

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Julia reminded me that about ten years ago SHE had interviewed ME. Listen to our interview at The Keeper: Interview with author/advocate Debra Lynn Dadd

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Effective, Time-tested, Inexpensive Treatments for Life-threatening Diseases

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Julia Schopick

Date of Broadcast: October 22, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world, and live toxic free.

It’s Tuesday, October 22, 2015, and I’m here in beautiful, sunny Clearwater, Florida.

We’re having a little technology thing going on today. The power company, my local power company sent out a crew of guys to take the tree branches off the wires. In the process of working on trimming my trees, they also trimmed my cable line. So I have no internet and no phone, and no television until the cable guys come.

So I’m doing this by cell phone today. Cell phone and iPad. iPhone and iPad. And it’s a little different for me because usually I have all the things available in my computer.

The show must go on.

Anyway, my guest today is – [inaudible 00:01:58] to that and now, I have to turn on my iPad because it turned itself off.

My guest today is Julia Schopick. She’s a bestselling author of the book, “Honest Medicine: Effective Time-Honored, Inexpensive

Treatments for Life-Threatening Diseases.” Through her writings and her blog, Julia’s goal is to empower patients to make the best health choices for themselves and their loved ones by teaching them about little known, but promising treatments that doctors may not know about.

And I would just toss in and say that in my opinion, one of the little known treatments that doctors don’t know about is toxic chemicals that patients are being exposed to, and rarely do doctors recommend that their patients find those toxic chemicals and eliminate them as a first step to being well.

I’ll also tell you that Julia reminded me that some years ago, I think it was about 10 years ago, Julia actually interviewed me. I was the guest and she was the host. And we had a lovely interview. And now, Julia is here with me.

Hi, Julia.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Hi, Debra. It’s so good to be with you today. I’m so glad to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. I’m glad that you’re here too because I do remember that we had a wonderful interview. And you’re just an intelligent person to talk to.

JULIA SCHOPICK: That’s great. I really appreciate that. And I hope I’m as good a guest as you were.

DEBRA: I’m sure you will be.

So the first question that I always as people is how they got interested in doing this. And I know that you’ve been in public relations for 25 years. So what made you decide to become a patient advocate?

JULIA SCHOPICK: Well, it was, kind of, thrust upon me, Debra. A teeny bit of background is that my dad was a doctor, a general practitioner. And he actually warned me to stay away from the medical profession.

He did not like his fellow doctors, Debra, I have to tell you.

But then in 1990, when my husband was 40 years old, he was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor.

DEBRA: That’s so young.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I know. He was very, very young. And speaking of toxic chemicals – you know what? I’ll tell it right now. I believed that his brain tumor was caused exactly the way you were talking about.

Are you ready for this?

He grew up in Flint, Michigan.

Now, tell me.

DEBRA: Oh, my god.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I know. I know. But it gets better. It gets worse. Sometimes you use the word better when you mean worse, right? It gets worse. His parents were beauticians, and he lived in Flint, Michigan, the home of the automobile, above a beauty shop.

I know.

I’m quite sure I’m right that he developed a huge brain tumor. You said, it’s such a young age. And he was very, very young.

We had just been married for five years, as a matter of fact.

I know.

And you would have thought with my background, with a father who told me stay away from the medical system – well, I wouldn’t run away. I mean, it’s tumor with the size of an orange. So I couldn’t just run away.

But you would have thought that I would have started advocating, and I would have started researching right away.

It didn’t happen because what happens, Debra, when you are confronted – and this is one of the reasons why I’m out there even after my husband has gone, trying to help other people. What happens when you are confronted, when one is confronted with something like a cancerous brain tumor? I just froze. And so did my husband.

And we did – I’m embarrassed to say, we did just – well, I’m glad we did the surgery, for goodness’ sakes. And I questioned whether the chemo was a good idea, but we did do the chemo and the radiation. But I didn’t do one thing more for a few years. I was literally in the last step, literally terrified.

And then at around the third year mark, I began to get it because my husband, who was actually given only 18 months to three years to live, and he was outliving that already, he started to develop every side effect, every complication from the treatments. Not from the – yes. From the treatments, especially the radiation.

I mean, he got – are you ready for this? At 41, he had a radiation-caused stroke because radiation to the brain will do that. He also developed hydrocephalus, which is water on the brain. And they had to operate again and put a shunt in.

It’s just was a disaster. And of course, it was many, many [inaudible 00:06:59]. It was a disaster.

And at that point, I began to get it that I’d better start researching. He was the love of my life, and if I wanted to keep him around – he was already doing a pretty good job of staying around anyway without my help. But I really decided to step into gear.

And I did.

And I found a nutritionist whose area was cancer and brain tumors in particular. That’s an interesting story in itself.

We cleaned up his diet, gave him lots of supplements that she picked out definitely for him. She tailor-made it. And he started to thrive.

DEBRA: The thing is, that I’ve learned after all of these years is that medicine and surgery is not really designed to create health. That what they’re designed to do is kill the illness.

JULIA SCHOPICK: That’s right.

DEBRA: Unfortunately, a lot of patients get killed in the process of killing the illness.

But you don’t get any kind of support on anything from a doctor that supports your health.

And so even if you are going to have radiation and chemo and all of that it’s very, very clear to me that at the same time, you should be doing all kinds of other things that are supporting your immune system or supporting your body against that toxic thing, that toxic treatment.

And my personal view is that if we would all live the right way, if we would do the treatment, do the natural treatment before we get sick – does that make sense?

JULIA SCHOPICK: It does, but I have one caveat. Go on.

DEBRA: [inaudible 00:08:53] finish my sentence.

What I formed was as I started looking at all these different illnesses after I was so ill from toxic chemical exposure, I saw that what I should be doing is living in this non-toxic way. I should be eating whole foods instead of processed foods. I should be living without toxic chemicals.

I should be drinking clean water, et cetera, et cetera.

But then as I started looking at the natural treatment for all different illnesses, it was all pretty much – everybody was saying, “Do exactly that.” And I came to this conclusion that if we would all live in a healthful way, we’d have a lot less illness to begin with.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Unbelievably correct.

DEBRA: Thank you.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I 100% agree with you. The reason I was going to butt in before was my poor husband couldn’t have avoided Flint, Michigan.

DEBRA: I know. I know. I grew up in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was born in Oakland. I lived in Oakland for a long time, and Oakland is a pretty polluted place. And when my health finally fell apart, I was living in a condominium on the ground floor where they was a stop sign out the window and [inaudible 00:10:13] all day long.

The cars would come and stop right in front of my air supply.

Then they’d start up again and [inaudible 00:10:21].

I mean that’s how much I didn’t know. And I had just remodeled my condo – we need to go to break. But off the side, we had just remodeled my condo, so we were painting, and I had plastic shelf paper, and we [inaudible 00:10:39] all that stuff. And then I fell apart.

But when we come back, we’ll talk more and hear what Julia has to say about what we should be doing.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick, and I will tell you more about her except that my iPad has turned off. But I do know by heart that her website is HonestMedicine.com, so you can find out more about her there.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick.

So Julia, tell us what happened to your husband? How long did he live?

JULIA SCHOPICK: It’s so interesting, Debra. He ended up living 15 years post-diagnosis. Now, remember I said that –

DEBRA: That’s great.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Yes, I know. We both believed that it had mostly to do – yes, the doctors did their part, but it had a lot to do with the supplements, with the clean food, the change. And he was feeling so great.

What got me, and I hate to sound negative, but the doctors were not at all interested in anything we were doing.

DEBRA: Of course.

JULIA SCHOPICK: This hurt me because brain tumor patients just don’t usually live that long especially if they have the kind of tumor that my Tim, my husband had. And wouldn’t you think that the doctors would be interested in things – they fully acknowledged that he was their star patient. I want to make that clear.

They weren’t denying that he was outliving his prognosis. They were like, “Great.”

But they were not all interested. As a matter of fact, one time, Tim tried to tell one of his doctors, his main doctor – the doctors said which meds are you on, and Tim told them. And Tim then said, “I’m on a lot of supplements and good food too.”

And you know what the doctor said?

“Next question.”

DEBRA: I just want to say this, in defense of doctors. First of all, not all doctors are the same. I know some wonderful doctors that have completely changed their minds about things, and their medical doctors.

When I first was diagnosed with multiple chemical sensitivities and was starting to heal my body from that onslaught of toxic chemicals, I went to a lovely doctor who was an MD, and he had completely given up his practice, his previous general practice, to only treat people who had chemical problems.

He was doing what he knew to do to help us, but it was, again, very doctor-ish. There are products called antigens, which you can go to a doctor and get, and they can immunize you against reacting to a toxic chemical.

But that doesn’t get the toxic chemical out of your life.

And so then I was talking to patients, and they were talking about how they were starting to remove toxic chemicals from their life, and I started doing that. And I told my doctor. And you know what he said? He said, “I’m going to send you to everybody’s house, each and every one of my patients, and have you analyze where their toxic chemical exposures are, and I want you to come back and tell me, so that I can know what they’re being exposed to.”

JULIA SCHOPICK: That is a wonderful doctor.

DEBRA: And that’s how I actually started doing what I do, was because that doctor asked me to go to his patients’ houses. And then I had to make up a list of products that they could use.

I was like, “What? Where am I going to find these? How am I going to figure this out?”

And that’s actually how I started. It was because of the doctor.

But most doctors are very entrenched in their paradigm. And so they say, “Well, I know what I know, and I’m going to do what I do.”

And that’s what they do.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I’m so glad to hear that, your story about the doctor who did that because that is so wonderful, so unusual, and in my book, in Honest Medicine, I do include stories, as you know, about doctors who are creative, who do look outside the box.

And although they are unusual, they must be heralded.

Just like you tell your doctor’s story, I tell these doctors’ stories because they are open, they are wonderful, and there are too few of them, and I’m hoping there are more and more of that.

DEBRA: I hope so too.

So before we get to the break in about three minutes, why don’t you tell us what made you decide to write your book? And then when we come back, let’s talk about the contents of your book.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Excellent. I think it was the next little incident. Not little. I shouldn’t minimize what happened.

Remember, I told you about the doctors not being interested. Well, in 2001 my husband, Tim, had a recurrence of the tumor, and that was the time when – because the skin had had trouble healing from the last surgery, and all the other results, I said, “This surgery is going to be problem.”

And I was right. It was a problem. His suture line would not heal.

I want to stress that usually the tumors come back before 10, 11 years. His didn’t because of the good care that we were doing.

In any case, the suture line would not heal, and the only thing the doctors know how to do was to do more surgeries, to try to get two pieces of skin that would heal. With each additional surgery, he got sicker and sicker and sicker. At the end of the eighth surgery, he was bed bound, he was incontinent, he was severely brain injured and nearly paralyzed.

All from the treatment. From the repeated surgeries.

And at this point, to a PR client – you mention that I’ve been doing for many years, through a PR client, I found out about a product called Silverlon. And Silverlon is pieces of material with silver ions impregnated, FDA-approved for all non-healing wounds.

So with my PR skills, I was able to get the doctor to agree to put it on. We put it on Tim’s head and he started to heal overnight.

And this is when the doctors, they came to me and they say said – one of them came to me and he said, “We don’t think it was what you found that healed your husband’s skin.”

And I was puzzled. I said, “What do you mean?”

And he said, “Well, we’ve been thinking. We think it was the vancomycin.”

And vancomycin, Debra, as you probably know, is an IV antibiotic. And Tim had been on the vancomycin for at least six weeks. So that’s what I said. I said, “But Doctor, he’s been on it for six weeks.”

And the doctor said, “Vancomycin is like that. It kicks in.”

I was stunned.

DEBRA: I know. I totally, totally understand. The things that you and I think are the right things to do make so much sense to me. And if I hadn’t changed what I was eating and the chemicals in my life, in my home, I don’t know that I would even be alive now.

My mother died of cancer when she was 51. And that is so young. And we didn’t have any of this information then. That was just right before

I started doing my work. I didn’t even know about any of these things. I was just starting to learn about it.

I was only 24. And she was just [inaudible 00:21:01].

It’s just incomprehensible to me. And I have a friend, she had cancer. When her [inaudible 00:21:12] cancer started, she was only like 30-something. She survived her cancer.

But we didn’t have any of that and this information.

We need to go to break. So we’ll be right back, and we’ll talk more with Julia Schopick. She is the author of Honest Medicine. And I don’t have the subtitle right here in front of me. But you can go to her website, HonestMedicine.com, and find out a whole lot more. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick. She’s the author of Honest Medicine. And we’re talking about what she learned that she thought was so important that she wanted to write a book about it.

So Julia, in addition to the Silverlon that we’ve already talked about, there are three other things that you talked about in Honest Medicine. I wanted to pick out the one that is most important to me to talk about first, then we’ll talk about the other two.

This isn’t your order, I know.

JULIA SCHOPICK: No, this is great. I’m glad. Go on.

DEBRA: So the first one I want to talk about the ketogenic diet.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I knew it.

DEBRA: The reason that I want to talk about that first is because it’s something that anybody can do. All of our listeners can just go immediately on a ketogenic diet if they want to. And the other two are drugs, which is okay. I’ve nothing against drugs if they don’t have toxic side effects and they’re actually helping.

So tell us about the ketogenic diet and why you think it’s so important.

JULIA SCHOPICK: The ketogenic diet is one of my – I agree with you. It’s a very, very important treatment. The reason I think it’s so important is that children with epilepsy, the doctors put them on drugs, and not only one drug, several kids are on – many, many kids are on three, four or five drugs at one time.

This is just terrible.

The ketogenic diet, which is a very high fat, low carb, low protein diet, was the standard of care from the 1920s on at places like the Mayo Clinic, John Hopkins. And then with the advent of anti-seizure medications, I think it was 1938 that Dilantin was invented.

The pharmaceutical companies stepped in and started to do more and more anti-seizure medications.

And guess what fell out of favor? The diet.

And it was still being done.

DEBRA: I just want to say for a second that that was really care with everything. If you were to turn back the clock to 1900s, there were all these things that were natural, that people treated things at home. They made things at home.

And then it came along into the 40s and 50s, and World War II, and all this new technology. And all of those intelligent, natural things just went by the waste side in every area of life, and they were all replaced by drugs and plastics and all the things that are making us sick.

JULIA SCHOPICK: You got it. The ketogenic diet was no exception. I believe, and so many other people do too, that it would have died.

The diet would have died. It was still being done very sporadically at places like, as I said, Mayo and John Hopkins.

But if a little boy named Charlie Abrams had not started having intractable seizures, and if his father had not been Jim Abrams, and Jim Abrams was the Hollywood writer/director/producer of the movie, “Airplane” that is now considered a classic. Anyway, Jim, he did funny movies, as you can tell from Airplane.

And in 1994, something not so funny happened in the Abrams family. And that was that little Charlie, one year old, started to have what we call intractable seizures. That means when one seizure ends, the next one begins, the next ends, the next one begins, and on and on and on.

Little Charlie was having up to a hundred seizures a day. And Jim, he had money. He had prestige. He was able to go to the best of the best of the best. And they put him on more and more medications.

If you read in Honest Medicine, Jim’s introduction to his contribution, it quotes a doctor who says that this child, little Charlie, will be on more and more medications. That’s all we know that can help him, and perhaps, a brain surgery.

And Jim was frantic. He said, “We were crying all the time in our house because the seizure medications were not helping.”

That’s the first thing.

And so he went to the library. And he’s very cute, Debra. He says, “I didn’t go to the library the way people do today, when they go on the internet to find a solution.” He says, “My solution that I was trying to find is how is my family going to deal with a child who is not going to get better? And this is going to be our life.”

So that’s what he was really looking for. And what he found was something different. He found out about this diet, the ketogenic diet which had been around, as I said before, from the 20s, and he found studies, small studies from the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, all the way through the 90s.

He copied them. He took them to his doctor, to Charlie’s doctor, and he said, “Let’s try this.” The doctor said, “No, it won’t work. More drugs will.”

And Jim said – he said, “To my everlasting shame,” these are his words, “I listened.” He said, “And we let the doctors do a surgery on my baby’s brain.”

And right after the surgery, what do you think happened? He started having seizures again. And finally, Jim got it. He said, “That’s it. I’m taking little Charlie to John Hopkins.”

They took him to John Hopkins, he and his wife, put him on the diet. 48 hours later, he stopped having seizures. They never returned.

And Jim was so excited, and then he got pissed. He said, “Why did it take me so long to find the diet? And by the way, why did the doctors tried to discourage me? And by the way, why are people not being told about this diet?”

So remember I told you he was a Hollywood guy? One of his friends, Meryl Streep, did the promotional video to explain about the diet. Jim set up a website, CharlieFoundation.org. I’m not sure if he set up the website right away. But he did have this instructional video.

This is the wonderful thing, during the making of the instructional video, there was somebody on the staff of making the video who was also from Dateline MBC. His real job was Dateline MBC. He was freelancing to make Jim’s thing.

And he called his boss. He goes, “This is a great story about this child, this diet, this Hollywood producer.”

So it became two segments of Dateline MBC. And at that point, the diet took off because people started writing in, they started calling. And Jim had to take one of his rooms in his house to make it just for the letters he was getting.

And people are like, “I want to find out about this diet. My little baby has been seizing. My little child has been seizing.”

Long story short, he got Meryl Streep to do a movie – for TV, “First Do No Harm” and the diet really took off. And Jim, with his Charlie Foundation, hired a dietician whose job it is to go around the world, training hospitals about the diet.

Because you know what, Debra?

DEBRA: That’s so wonderful.

JULIA SCHOPICK: When there’s a child – yes, he’s one of my heroes, can you tell? Because one of the things – anyone who wants to use the ketogenic diet for exercise or for losing weight, they can do it on their own. But when you have such a serious condition as seizures, it does have to be started in the hospital.

DEBRA: I agree with that. Yes. I have a few things I want to say about this ketogenic diet, but I’ll say them after we go to break.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick, author of Honest Medicine. She also has much more information on her website, HonestMedicine.com. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick, author of Honest Medicine. And she’s at HonestMedicine.com.

So Julia, here’s what I would like to say about the ketogenic diet. First of all, I found out about it from a very good friend of mine who is surviving cancer on this ketogenic diet. She said it made a difference in the world for her.

Second of all, the thing that I think most people don’t know about this diet is that cancer feeds on sugar. And so if you’re eating a high carb diet, you’re just feeding cancer. That’s it. It’s that plain and simple.

Another thing is that when you eat high fat, your body operates in a different way, and so your body actually loses weight on a high fat diet.

In fact, that’s what you need.

And so this diet can help so many people that it can treat people who have illnesses like seizures and cancer. But people who don’t have those things yet, and they will if they continue to eat processed food, you can be making this kind of change in advance so that you’re not feeding your body in a way that cancer loves.

JULIA SCHOPICK: So are you reading my mind?

DEBRA: No.

JULIA SCHOPICK: The reason I’m saying that is – oh, my goodness.

DEBRA: This is one of those things – this is the whole point of your book, is that low carb – go ahead. I’ll let you say it.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I’m laughing because as I was hearing you say it, I had many windows open. I’m sorry that your computer is down, Debra. But I have many, many windows open. And one of them, which I’m working on writing something, perhaps, it’s an addendum to my – not addendum.

Long story short, the ketogenic diet is now being studied for many, many, many reasons. One of them is Dr. Thomas Seyfried. That’s what you’re talking about. He did the research on the ketogenic diet for cancer.

And of course, it makes sense. Cancer cells love sugar.

By the way, I believe that’s one of the reasons my Tim lived so long. I took sugar out of his diet, much to his chagrin, I must say. And when the doctors said he should drink Ensure. I said, “No way is he drinking Ensure.”

You know what I did in the hospital? I dumped it.

DEBRA: Good on you. They should just take sugar out of the hospital.

JULIA SCHOPICK: They’re never going to. They think of sugar as the main dietary – anyway that’s what they love.

Now, the ketogenic diet is being studied – are you ready for this? And I can send the link to anyone who wants it, if they write to me at Julia@HonestMedicine. It’s being studied for Parkinson’s, for cancer, with very good results, by the way, for brain injury, for diabetes, for all sorts of things.

It makes great sense because here is a diet that –

DEBRA: It does.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Yes, it does. There is something, by the way, the Deanna Protocol is using the ketogenic diet plus another nutritional program for ALS. And as you know, ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, is one of the ones that nobody has a treatment for, just nobody.

And Parkinson’s is pretty rough itself.

This ketogenic diet, I am in the process of figuring out how I’m going to use this information to get it out there. It can be used for lots of different things, and it’s being studied with great results.

So that’s why I said did you read my mind?

And by the way, I do know a –

DEBRA: We’re totally on the same page here.

JULIA SCHOPICK: And by the way, one of the people that Jim Abrams referred me to is a woman named Miriam Kalamian. Miriam is – are you ready for this, a consultant to people who want touse the ketogenic diet as part of their cancer protocol.

So this word is getting out there.

DEBRA: The word is getting out there, yes.

So our hour is almost up. [inaudible 00:43:20]

JULIA SCHOPICK: Where did it go?

DEBRA: I just want to make sure that we end with your basic message of your book, which is that there are these inexpensive, workable, much more effective things that you can do. Your doctor isn’t – I’ll give the subtitle again for Honest Medicine. It’s Effective, Time-Tested,

Inexpensive Treatment for the Life-Threatening Diseases.

And you talk about these different things that we don’t have time to talk about. But the ketogenic diet is just an example of one thing that people can do instead of getting medical care. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t go to the doctor.

But the thing is that we should also be looking at these other things as well, so that we can make an informed decision, and do things that support health. And by supporting health – I mean, this is what I’ve been doing for 30 years, supporting health.

And so I’m healthy.

I don’t know if you know, but I turned 60 this year, in June. And I’m healthier than I’ve ever been in my life.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Yes, because you’re living healthy.

DEBRA: That’s exactly right, and my body just gets stronger and stronger and stronger, and more healthy, and more energy, and sleeping better, and all of these things.

It takes time. It’s not like you’re just going to take a pill and get well immediately. The things that you do on an everyday basis, eating those good foods, the [inaudible 00:45:02] as well as the nutrition, and moving your body, so that your body can detox and build your muscle.

All these things that if you just do the simplest of things, then you might not even need a doctor.

JULIA SCHOPICK: That’s the aim.

DEBRA: That’s the aim.

So Julia, talk about your book more and the basic concept behind this.

JULIA SCHOPICK: The basic concept is that, as you sad, there are treatments out there. But there is a little bit of a negative thing. When you come to your doctor about these treatments, your doctor may very well [inaudible 00:45:45] them.

Your doctor may very well say, “No, the drug way is better.”

And you have to be very, very strong to know when you are interested in trying another treatment.

For instance, one that we don’t have time to discuss, it’s called low dose Naltrexone. Although it was developed from a drug and, indeed, is a low, low, low dose of a drug, it acts more like a supplement by raising endorphin levels. It makes the immune system act correctly.

It works for many, many autoimmune diseases. And your doctor will probably, unfortunately, only not have heard of it, but when you bring information, may not be open to it, which is why I’m doing consulting now, to try to teach people how to influence their doctors, how to talk with their doctors.

You obviously have –

DEBRA: That’s a really, really important thing. That’s really important to know because we’re indoctrinated in our society that what you do when you’re sick is you go to the doctor, and the doctor knows everything, and he’ll give you a pill, and you’ll go, “Wow.”

That’s what I was raised with. That’s what I was raised with until I started – and that’s what I did until I started finding out there’s a whole other world out here that isn’t the medical world, and it works a whole lot better than what I’ve seen.

No doctor would have ever made me well from toxic chemical exposure.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I think it’s amazing what you’ve done.

DEBRA: Thank you.

JULIA SCHOPICK: You are absolutely right. I’m trying to get patients – and actually, I’m having pretty good results. It’s not only me. It’s people out there like us, like you and like me, who are making patients realize that they have the power.

It may not feel that way when you’re confronted with your doctor. But you do have the power to suggest other treatments, if the doctor says, “No, no, no” to try to convince the doctor, and if not, to find a doctor who will do it.

DEBRA: And keep looking. I’ve been to doctors who dismissed me as a patient. I had a doctor yell at me once and tell me I was never going to get well because I would not follow his instructions.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Isn’t that awful?

DEBRA: Yes, he completely invalidated me.

JULIA SCHOPICK: You know how many people just listen to the doctor. You were a strong people.

DEBRA: I know. My father lying in bed in the hospital dying would not drink the fresh juice that I brought him. He said, “I’m going to do what my doctor tells me.”

JULIA SCHOPICK: That must have broken your heart.

DEBRA: It did. It did. He died very soon after. And it maybe that my juice would not have saved him, but it was that he wasn’t even open to even listening or trying. That the doctor knows this.

I’m not here to say that nobody should listen to their doctor, but it really is that patients need to really take their health in their own hands, and if the doctor is not helping you – I just have been to a doctor that I totally adore him as a person, but it got to a point where he wasn’t helping me.

And I said to myself, “I need to go to somebody who is going to help me.”

And it’s not that he didn’t want to help me, but what he has to offer me wasn’t helping.

JULIA SCHOPICK: So you have the presence of mind to know.

DEBRA: I did. I did have the presence of mind to know. I considered that I’m the one in charge of my health, and that any health care practitioner I go to, medical doctor or otherwise, they’re my team, but I’m running them. I’m not there to do what they tell me to do. I’m there to evaluate their advice and decide if that’s right for me.

And we need to go.

Thank you so much, Julia.

This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’ve been listening to my interview with Julia Schopick. Her website is Honest Medicine. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and listen to the other shows as well.

Be well.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Thank you.

DEBRA: Thank you.

Seven Deadly Drugs

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking about seven popular drugs that are toxic enough to kill, and which natural remedies you can take instead. Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and selling top quality medicinal supplements, so she’s seen it all. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Seven Deadly Drugs

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld

Date of Broadcast: October 07, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.

It is Wednesday, October 7th 2015. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. It’s a beautiful autumn day. The temperature is 80° right now. But in the morning and at night, it’s 70° instead of like in the summer time, really, it’s 85° and 90° all day long and all night long. So this is just like a breath of fresh air. Literally, I can open the windows now. Yehey!

Anyway, I just wanted to say that while I was listening to the music, the opening music, I was sitting here exercising my arms. That’s not something I usually do. I’ve been doing more exercise. I was listening to the music and I was just moving my arms up and down and out to the sides and just kind of moving around. It’s actually important. This is a toxics issue. I want to say this before I bring on my guest today.

In order for your body to process the toxic chemicals that you’re exposed to, it needs to go through your body’s detox system and your lymph system. You may have heard the term ‘lymph nodes’. But your lymph is this whole system that carries things around your body. It’s the waste products carrier. It’s like the garbage system. It takes out the garbage. And that’s how the toxic chemicals move into your detox system.

But your lymph system does not have a pump like your heart. Your heart has a pump that pumps the blood throughout your body, but the lymph system does not. And the only way that you can get your lymph to move is by moving your body.

And so the more you can move even if you’re just sitting here listening to the opening music of the show, move around. Move your arms, move your legs, jump around, whatever. And that’s a good way to just get in a minute of exercise there that will help your body get those toxic chemicals to and through the detox system and out of your body. That’s my tip for today.

So today, we’re going to talk about seven deadly drugs. I don’t even know what they are. It’s every other Wednesday today, so my guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. She’s going to tell us about those seven deadly drugs, what they are and what we can take instead to do what those drugs do. Hi

Pamela!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hi! It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. It’s great to have you. So where are we starting today with seven deadly drugs.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So, I looked at the common drugs that people are using and I decided that I’m going to start with Tylenol.

DEBRA: Tylenol?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Tylenol, yes.

DEBRA: I would never have thought that was a deadly drug, so it’s good we’re talking about it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is why the drugs I picked are going to be of interest to everybody because these are commonly used things that we see and they’re very ubiquitous. They’re everywhere.

So acetaminophen, the reason why it’s bad is it causes liver necrosis. It can be even small amounts. In the hospital, we check to see. There are a lot of pain relievers that people use that have narcotics along with acetaminophen because the narcotic will work through it essentially acting as a pain reliever. It dulls the perception of your pain (let’s say you’ve had an accident or you’ve had surgery).

The acetaminophen blocks the peripheral or the outside of the central nervous system like all the nerving endings in your hands, your feet and your body. So when you give the combination of the two, you get dual type of pain relief.

And so those drugs are commonly used. You should think of like Percocet and Vicodin and things like that.

So the Tylenol component, if you start reaching over 4 grams a day of that, it definitely will lead to liver necrosis. But there are a lot of people that even will pop a Tylenol here or there, an acetaminophen, I should say, here or there like if they have a headache. And then if they’re drinking at the same time (say they had a few cocktails at dinner), these things can be accumulative.

What I found when I did the research on this (I knew this because a lot of people take acetaminophen for pain) acetaminophen poisoning accounts for approximately one half of all cases of acute liver failure in the United States and Great Britain today. That’s all the liver failure.

If you look at acute liver failure and people that are in liver failure, it’s half of the cases. It’s not the drinkers. It’s the people who are taking acetaminophen. Sometimes, they don’t realize that they’re reaching toxic levels. They might have pain problems, maybe they’ve had a back injury, something to that effect. They’ve been taking this. It doesn’t take very long for it to have accumulative effects.

And I actually know, a friend of mine, his son was only 38 and he died from acetaminophen poisoning. And it wasn’t an overdose. He actually ended up in liver failure and they didn’t find a transplant for him. But it was from the acetaminophen. He was popping only one or two pills a week. He was popping when he had a headache. Then they found that he was on liver failure subsequently. He passed away now.

I call this deadly and the reason why is because yeah, you have the Tylenol overdoses and you have these situations where people are taking excessive amounts. But you need to realize that the accumulative effect of acetaminophen in the liver is pretty severe.

DEBRA: So, you mentioned one or two, but then you also said – what was it, four grams?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct, four grams. If someone is in the hospital, we look to calculate – sometimes, maybe the doctors won’t maybe pick up on that. Maybe someone is post-operative, they’ve had some surgery. They don’t want IV narcotics because maybe there’s been a history of abuse or maybe the person doesn’t want shots or maybe they’re going to be leaving that day, they’re ambulatory, they’ll give them maybe Vicodin or Percocet or one of these combinations that has either hydrocodon or oxycodone with acetaminophen. We have to make sure that they go under four grams a day because if they go over four grams a day, you’re definitely looking at a liver problem.

And actually, from the studies, what you see, four grams a day is very lenient. I mean, really, people really shouldn’t be even getting more than three because the toxicity is pretty bad.

DEBRA: So how many pills if you were just taking acetaminophen not mixed with anything else for a headache?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it depends.

DEBRA: How many pills is that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Three twenty-five would be a regular acetaminophen and 500 is an extra strength. So there are some combination products that have the 500 and some that have the 325. Actually, at the hospital where I work, we have removed all the products with the 500 because there were just too many chances that the person was going to end up in an acetaminophen situation. In those cases, those products are gone. We don’t even have them anymore.

What happens if somebody puts an order in the computer and it has too much Tylenol, we can’t automatically change it. We’ve got to call.

There’s a lot of phonecalls and sometimes people don’t call back. You know what I’m saying? So what happened is we just took them off.

They’re not even there anymore. That’s it!

DEBRA: But how many pills? What did you say, 325? That’s 325 mg?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! So if you’re looking at 325, that would be 12 pills in a day. But you’d be surprised because a lot of times, their order say, “One to two tablets every four hours as needed for pain.” Well then, it’s pretty easy to get up to that.

DEBRA: It is pretty easy to get up to that. But as you’ve said, you don’t need to be taking that much before you have liver failure. And so if you’re taking two tablets four times a day, how many? That’s 12, isn’t it?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! And even in an acute situation, say you have a back injury. You were fine before, you hurt your back, you lifted something or you were in a car accident, this happens quite frequently. And then they’ve given you this combination and you’re taking it every single day for like a week or so, well, you’ve already gotten to that point where you’ve got some accumulative toxicity. You have to always look too because the liver processes all the drugs, but it also processes alcohol.

So say a person gets a headache and they’ve had a few cocktails at dinner. And then they take Tylenol (acetaminophen) and then they go to bed. Those two are accumulatively toxic to the liver. Then say they took a Pepsid or a Zantac because they had an upset stomach, those work on the liver and those can cause toxicity too.

Say they’re on a cholesterol lowering medicine like Sendostatin. This is actually what happens with a lot of people. They tell me they drink wine at night. That’s fine. Then I see that they’re on a cholesterol lowering medicine. Then they take a medication for pain. I’m telling them, “You’re going to end up in liver failure. You’ve got to do something and cut some of these things out and take some herbs to protect the liver.” And that’s where milk thistle and Schisandra chinensis come in because those two can protect the hepatocyte from toxic injury from these substances.

So somebody that takes acetaminophen on a regular basis or drinks wine or beer on a regularbasis especially if they’re on a cholesterol lowering medicine, they need to be on something to protect themselves.

DEBRA: Yeah, that’s good. We need to go to break in just a few seconds. But I can tell there’s so much new information here. We’re going to have to get through each drug a little faster.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, that’s fine. That’s fine, absolutely.

DEBRA: We’ve only gotten through one in the first 15 minutes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is a pretty dangerous one, so I wanted to spend a lot of time on it.

DEBRA: Yeah, okay. So in the segment, we’ll do two. And then, we’ll do two. And then, we’ll do two. And then we’ll get through seven.

How’s that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Perfect!

DEBRA: Okay, good. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. She has her own lovely shop called Botanical Resource here in Clearwater, Florida. You can go to her website at BotanicalResource.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist.

You can go to her website at BotanicalResource.com.

Okay, Pamela, what’s deadly drug number two?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! Deadly drug number two is Ibuprofen, Naproxen. All these drugs are called collectively NSAIDS or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents. And what NSAIDs do (and that’s just some of the examples), those are commonly used as pain relievers.

And what’s bad about these is they are a risk for acute kidney injury – and pretty severely.

You’ve seen this a lot with athletes where they’ll be using Ibuprofen and Naproxen quite a bit and then all of a sudden, they’ll end up with kidney failure and they don’t realize why. This takes very small amounts as well to be damaging. And it looks like it’s not necessarily just one NSAID. This whole drug class is associated with acute kidney injury and kidney failure in some instances. So it’s really important to realize that if you’re taking these things on a regular basis.

And they also include Celebrex, Meloxicam is really popular, Voltaren. These are drugs that are prescribed quite a bit for injury, but also just for arthritis. So you want to definitely not be using these on a continual basis because of the kidney issues. It causes kidney injury.

And let me explain to your listeners too. If anybody has had any acute kidney injury from any of these products, using the Detox 1 is highly effective in reversing this particular types of injury.

DEBRA: And that Detox 1 is a homeopathic remedy that people can get from you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, the Detox 1 is what I would recommend and it’s from DesBio. That really would work especially to clean up the kidneys and repair the nephrones.

I would say, if someone’s creatinine has been elevated at all from Ibuprofen or Naproxen, they need to do something to repair. Let me tell you, kidney and liver failure, we don’t have anything in regular science and regular pharmacy for that.

DEBRA: Right! But what I’m saying is if people can call you and get the Detox 1?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, yeah. I apologize, I apologize.

DEBRA: That’s what I meant?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m sorry, I apologize.

DEBRA: As long as we’re talking about that, why don’t you give your phone number?

PAMELA SEEFELD: The number here in my pharmacy, it’s Botanical Resource, is 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I would be very honored to help you and your family in any of these situations have happened and also, like I explained, about the hepatic and the liver failure as well. I will be glad to help with that as well.

DEBRA: Yes. And she does free consultation. So please feel free to call her and she’s happy to talk to you about whatever is going on with drugs or your body. Whatever your symptoms are, she can help you with some natural and homeopathic remedies. And so, it really is okay to call Pamela and she will talk to you very happily for free. So give her a call. The number again is…

PAMELA SEEFELD: 727-442-4955. I’d be greatly honored to help you or your family. And also, if you’re on these medicine and you want to get off of them, especially the acetaminophen and narcotic combinations, I can help you transition off of those as well. I know those are very hard especially we’re talking about narcotic combinations.

The addiction potential really starts kicking in less than eight to ten days. It doesn’t take very long. People don’t realize they’ve become dependent in such a short period of time. It’s just very horrible.

DEBRA: And we watch commercials for these drugs on TV all day long. We get in this mindset that they must be safe, they’re on TV and they’re deadly.

So what’s number three?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Number three is Paxil. The reason why I picked Paxil is Paxil is an anti-depressant, but it has a lot of dangers associated with it. I want to explain.

Paxil, it induces its own metaboolism. So what this means when something is inducing its own metabolism, its autometabolism, we know that a person can come to a toxic level at a very short period of time.

And the new data was just released (a study in the British Journal of Medicine this month) that the original studies of Paxil in adolescents were skewed and the data was collected inappropriately and incorrectly and maybe was falsely misleading because Paxil is associated with increased suicide risk especially because of the fact that it inhibits its own metabolism. People, a lot of time, were becoming psychotic and suicidal on Paxil – and this still can happen. And the reason why is because the drug level would be 200 times what they’re expecting to be in the brain and so the person becomes psychotic.

So maybe that even should be number one. If anybody is on Paxil or if they’re contemplating on giving it to adolescents, the new studies show that all of the benefits that were previously shown had been retracted. And this was just Wall Street Journal like two days ago. They had a big article about it. It’s very, very deadly.

So if you’re taking Paxil, especially if you have any young people taking Paxil, the chance of the person becoming suicidal and pyschotic is pretty high. If it inhibits cell metabolism, what’s happening is each drug dose is making more of the drug dose in the brain and it’s a very dangerous combination. I would tell people that of all the SSRIs, that’s probably the worst, especially for young person.

And I want to just briefly talk about SSRIs for a brief second.

DEBRA: And what does SSRI stand for?

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s serotonin reuptake inhibitor. It’s a very common drug. Paxil is one of them and Prozac and Zoloft. They’re very, very common drugs.

In the last 20 years when they really started becoming popular, we saw that in the past – I’m just going to divert for a second about gun violence and all these shootings that are happening in society, mass shootings and terrible things like that. What happens is when people take serotonin reuptake inhibitors, they lose their inhibitions and their consciousness and their impulse control. This is the problem.

If you look at what’s correlated in society over the last 20 years when we’re starting to see all these mass shootings, all these terrible things, just these random acts of violence that they can’t explain why people are doing this, when you start using these drugs and have millions and millions of people taking this, their perception of impulse when it comes to violence, many times, it’s altered.

This can explain why all of a sudden this is happening. It’s not necessarily, “Are we controlling guns? Or aren’t we controlling guns?” It’s about the fact that you have mass amounts of the population, maybe up to 20% or more on these medicines, and their impulse control for some of these deadly things is gone.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s what’s really happening. And it correlates with this time period, right? Before these drugs were here, this wasn’t a problem. And now it is. You have to realize too, this stuff, even if you’re not taking this, this serotonin reuptake inhibitors, remnants of this are in the water. We have them in the water supply.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is kind of sideline, but I think people really need to ponder this and think. This is a direct correlation. This isn’t like some crazy science.

DEBRA: No, I understand what you’re saying. Exposure to these things affects the world in so many ways. And that definitely is a deadly association. Wow!

We need to go to break. When we come back, we’ll continue with our list of seven deadly drugs with my guest, Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist. Her natural pharmacy is at BotanicalResource.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is the Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers dispense medicine plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

So Pamela, let’s go on with now deadly drug number four.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, deadly drug number four is Metformin. I’ll explain what Metformin is. Metformin is an old drug. It’s been around a long time. it’s the first line therapy for people that have diabetes, type II diabetes particularly. It’s used a lot. Metformin can cause a condition called lactic acidosis. I’m going to explain what that is.

It changes the way lactic acid is produced in the body and handled. And it can happen in a very short period of time. What I want to point out is that a lot of people that are diabetics, they are on this medication (maybe 500 mg. twice a day) and what happens when sugar has been elevated over a period of time, your kidney function gets affected by the sugar damaging the glomerulus and the cells in the kidney.

So, a lot of times, people that have had type II diabetes and even the new ones that have had it for a while and are on Metformin, their serum creatinine (which is a number that is indicative of the kidney function) starts increasing. And I see this a lot of time when people come to the hospital. That’s when we catch it. The doctors are really bad about adjusting for kidney problems the medications.

And actually, as a man, if your serum creatinine is greater than 1.5 or a female, serum creatinine is greater than 1.4, it’s contraindicated.

They can’t take it at all. And I can’t tell you how many times I’m working as a pharmacist and I see people on this medicine and they do not meet the criteria. In fact, it’s very dangerous. Their creatining is elevated to those numbers and the doctors still has them on the Metformin.

This is something for all of the listeners. If anybody is on this drug and they have any questions about how to interpret their numbers, I will be most glad to help you figure out if this drug is damaging your kidneys.

DEBRA: Yeah, that’s a big concern. This is another one where people are just given this and no information about how it might damage your kidneys. My doctor gave me Metformin, “Oh, it’s okay.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah, this is what I’m saying. This is the problem. Say you go to a regular retail pharmacy, they don’t have your blood work, they don’t have your numbers. So, if the doctor doesn’t catch it and when you get it filled at the CVS or the Walgreens or whatever, they don’t see these numbers. So basically, there’s a lot of blind dispensing going on. That’s the way I look at it. They don’t have any of the information. They’re just sending it out. You’re going to be very surprised, what I see as a practitioner that even people coming in here that are on Metformin that have type II diabetes, their kidney function is not compatible with this medication. It’s contraindicated and they should never have been given it in the first place.

And you have to think. I don’t know the exact number of people, how many Americans are on Metformin, but it’s millions, I’m sure. I mean, it’s a lot of people.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Wow! So number five.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Number five is iron, ferrous sulfate, ferrous gluconate. I’ll explain about iron.

Iron, the reason why it’s dangerous – and I thought this is kind of interesting because I was even bringing this up to some of my customers the other day. People don’t realize how dangerous iron is. It’s one of the highest toxic things that you can have in your medicine cabinet and especially for children and adolescents, young kids especially.

That’s why when you see any products that contain over 30 mg. of iron or more per dosage, they have to be packaged in a blister pack. They can’t be in a full bottle. The most dangerous overdose for infants and children is iron. It only takes probably about four pills of 30 mg. to kill a small child.

So if you have iron salt, any iron salts, hanging around your house, if your dog eats it, if your children get into it, if the grandchildren get into it, it’s very, very deadly. It’s neurotoxic and causes seizures and death. This is one of these things that you might have in your medicine cabinet and not even think twice about it.

DEBRA: Well, it’s a vitamin.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Say someone has some low-grade ongoing anemia, a lot of the ones that the doctors are going to give you are 150 mg. It may only take one. It’s that deadly.

And especially, I have to bring up pets too, because if someone drops an iron pill on the floor and the dog eats it, it’s probably going to die.

So you have to realize that this is something important. So if you actually have a high iron formula or if you’re taking a lot of iron, this is something that little kids, pets, these should be locked up far away from any of these kids or the animals to get a hold of this. You know dogs, if you drop something on the floor, they eat it right away. If you’re counting out your vitamins, you have iron and you have dogs or cats, you need to be very, very cognizant of this.

I’m sure there’s a lot of people listening today that have never heard this before, but that’s very, very important. That’s why I call it deadly because it’s just a small dosage, a seemingly innocuous product can lead to lethal consequences.

DEBRA: Well, what can people take instead of an iron pill? If they have iron-poor blood, do you remember those commercials on TV where they talk about ‘iron-poor blood’?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, yes. Actually, you know what I use? I don’t use as many iron tablets because iron causes severe constipation for a lot of people. It causes these hard stools and cramping. It’s not tolerated very well. I actually use a homeopathic iron and I have reverse a lot of anemia with that. It works great. It’s liquid. You put it in your detox bottle, you just sip it through the day and it works. The regular hemoglobin and hematocrits, those numbers look better, but it looks on your deep iron stores, your ferritin levels as well. The regular iron, a lot of times, won’t reach those deep muscle stores.

The iron mix, I use that a lot of time. I sell quite a bit of that. It’s inexpensive. It works really well and it’s a liquid. It doesn’t constipate. You just put in the water. One or two months on it, you go get your blood work rechecked and it comes back in a nice level. That’s really, really a great product. I would say it’s much better tolerated and much safer than having iron pills around the house. I would not.

If you have kids visiting or living there, you really don’t want to have those. It’s not just worth taking the chance. If a babysitter or somebody else is watching the kids, they might not realize the deadly consequences of just a few pills that the kids get into.

DEBRA: Yeah. One of the things that is impressing me today about what you’re talking about – actually, the way I got the idea for this show was because you got email advertisements all the time for all these things. An email came in and it said something about the “seven deadly drugs.” I don’t even remember what they were selling. I looked to see what they thought the seven deadly drugs were and they were drugs that I recognized.

But what you’re telling us today is from your viewpoint, these are drugs that everybody thinks are safe. And that’s what makes them even more deadly, the fact that people could overdose on them and not know. As you said, drop an iron pill on the floor and the dog or baby just reaches over and picks it up and that’s it!

We’re just not aware of these things, that a lot of the things that are toxic that we talk about in this show are cumulative and so you’re exposed to them over and over and then you get sick. There’s also what are called ‘acute poisons’. These definitely fall into that category. It’s not necessarily that you take one and you’re going to die. But it’s easy to take enough that you could end up having these problems over time.

And they’re so common. They’re so common and people think they’re safe. That’s the thing that’s so amazing to me.

So when we come back, we’re going to heal the last two of the seven deadly drugs. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Her website is BotanicalResource.com.

And Pamela, before we go on, since this is the last segment, why don’t you give your phone number again in case anybody who’s listening wants to call you for a free consultation.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, absolutely. I’m very glad. It’s Botanical Resource. You can reach me here at 727-442-4955. That’s 727442-4955. I’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have about your supplements, your prescriptions, if you’re intested in getting off of some of your prescription, if there are some side effects you’re suspecting that you’re having from your prescriptions and also some homeopathic supplements in place of what you’re taking. I will be glad to adjust these for you.

All follow-ups are free as well. We keep [inaudible 00:39:46]. It’s very professional. So I’ll be very glad to help you or your family.

DEBRA: Yes, she is very professional. I take remedies that she suggested to me. She’s very well-respected here in Clearwater, Florida by patients and doctors. My medical doctor said, “If Pamela tells you to take it, take it.” She gives lectures to doctors and things like that.

Anyway, so we have two more deadly drugs. Number six?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Number six is Lamisil. This is a prescription. It’s called terbinafine. It’s one of these things if you have toenail fungus, you know the fungus beneath your toes that you go to the doctor, they give you Lamicil, they give you the treatment. You have to take one pill a day usually for several weeks. This can cause severe liver failure. It’s highly hepatotoxic. So if you’re going to the doctor and you’re asking for this particular prescription because you want to take the oral drug to eliminate the fungus that grows underneath the nail, this drug is very, very dangerous. I would tell people to really avoid it. You should be using topical things.

And actually, what works really well for that particular stuff is standardized oil of oregano. It’s an anti-fungal in itself. And the whole idea behind taking something orally is because you need to come up to the nail bed. They have a lot of these tea tree things and stuff you paint on.

That stuff doesn’t really work because it’s under the nail. It needs to come from the bloodstream and bring the medicine up. So oil of oregano capsules work very good for that.

And I also use medical-grade Andrographis to treat that instead. The fungus under the nail is a common problem, but taking the oral medications is highly suspect in causing liver failure. That’s one of those that you’ll go to the doctor’s, he’ll give you the pill and then he won’t really warn you about the liver failure. The thing with liver problems is that once they show up, they don’t have anything to fix it. It’s one of these all-or-nothing sort of problems. That’s really dangerous.

But these are the common problems. I mean, what precentage of the population has a fungus under their nail and they want to get their nail beds looking better. Maybe they want to have a French manicure and they don’t want to have the discoloration so they go to the doctor and they get the prescription. You need to be wary of using that.

DEBRA: I’ve been listening to everything you’ve been saying today obviously. But what I’m thinking is that most of the things that you’ve talked about, I thought, “Oh, damage the liver and/or the kidneys” and the liver and the kidneys are the primary detox organs in our bodies.

So here’s the question. Even if people are not having a deadly effect from these drugs, wouldn’t the liver and kidneys be weakened and it would be more difficult for them to detox other toxic substances that we might be being exposed to.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, by far. And the big thing is it’s cumulative. Maybe you have a glass of wine and you’ve had a Tylenol because you had a really bad headache and you had a really hard day at work. And then you’ve been treating your toenail fungus with this Lamisil. And maybe at the same time, you took some Ibuprofen the day before, maybe you’re on Metformin. Let’s start simple, but all these things together are a big problem.

DEBRA: Well, not only the drugs altogether, but you take these and then you go pump gas in your car or get this nail polish or hair spray or lie in bed and get a formaldehyde exposure from your permanent press bedsheets. All these drugs are contributing to the overall toxic load of your body.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. I’m a big advocate. If I tell people to do everything, you really need to be doing the Body Anew to clean the chemicals out of your day. I do it every single day to just take this stuff out.

And you really need to be on medical-grade fish oil, maybe a mood-elevating one. And you need to be on folic acid. Those two things protect the heart and the brain. A lot of people will be taking piles and piles of supplements, but if you’re not taking some of those basic things, you’re really missing the boat because you’re going to end up either with heart disease or cancer. That’s what most people are at risk for really == and the carcinogenic exposure.

But also, the fact that if your liver gets damaged, you’re really not metabolizing and conjugating all these chemicals. So if your liver has problems, whatever exposure you have to fat-soluble chemicals and pesticides, it’s going to be double-fold because your body is not going to process it.

DEBRA: That’s exactly right!

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s the problem. It’s going to store it and cause cancer and other things. It’s one of these things that you want to stay on top of. Especially the people that are listening are probably health-oriented to begin with, they’re interested in trying to improve their health, you need to look at this from a logical standpoint.

DEBRA: Yeah. Okay, good. So number seven.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Number seven is proton pump inhibitors. I would say Protonics, Prilosec, Nexium, Dilatant. These are the drugs that you see a lot. A lot of people are on Omeprazole, Prilosec or Pantoprazole which is Protonics. They’re on these drugs. They block stomach acids. They block all the stomach acids.

In the past, we used to use Tagamet and Pepsid and Zantac and these drugs. Those were called H2 blockers. They block some of the acid, but some of the acids are still there. Now, we use something that blocks all the acid and the problem with that is that you’re not absorbing calcium, you’re not absorbing iron and you’re not absorbing magnesium. Acid needs to be present. So if you want to give somebody brittle bones and anemia, this is a good way to do it.

DEBRA: Wow! Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: And a lot of people will go into the hospital for a routine situation. They put everybody on this automatically just to protect against the stress ulcer because you’re stressed when you’re in the hospital. And then they get discharged on it and then they’re on it forever.

Unless you have Barrett’s esophagus or something very dangerous (and there are homeopathic things that work better than this ta twe use), a lot of people are on these things to control stomach acid and they don’t realize that they’re going to end up with brittle bones. I can’t tell you how many times I see elderly ladies that are customers of mine that they’re on one of these medicines and at the same time, they’re taking calcium (well, they’re not absorbing it) and they’re on a medication because of brittle bones, a prescription medication like a biphosphanate.

I’m thinking, “Well, the reason you have brittle bones are because you’re on these drugs. You need to tell the doctor if he’s prescribing this that the anemia you have and the brittle bones and the osteoporosis/osteopenia, those problems are directly as a result because you’re not absorbing any of these nutrients.”

DEBRA: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There’s just so many things. I know it can seem really overwhelming at times. But I know for me that I’ve spent a lot of time studying this stuff and it’s easier for all of you listening and reading my things because it takes a lot of research to get to knowing these things. And then, we’re giving you this information, so it’s easier for you to apply than if we weren’t here having already done this research for you.

But I can tell you that over time, it just looks simpler and simpler to me. For example, I just don’t take prescription drugs, I don’t take over-the-counter drugs, that’s it. I mean, I haven’t done that in 25 years. And all the things, you just move over to a different way of looking at things and what your options are, Everything that I do is using natural remedies if I even need to take the remedy because you can do a lot to improve your health with diet and exercise. I know that that sounds like everybody says that, but it’s really true.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, most definitely. So, what I tell people, the diet and exercise makes a big difference. And also, you’re taking the chemicals out on a daily basis and protecting your kidney and liver function. So if you use these things, you need to be cognizant of that.

And there are herbs that can damage this as well. Not only herbs are safe either. There are things that can damage the kidney and the liver.

But if there’s any question about what you’re taking, just give me a call and I will go over it. It’s a short-time conversation that can maybe make a big difference as far as your long-term health.

These things are preventable to some degree. There are some viruses and things can attack the kidney and the liver and the heart. Things happens, I understand that. But a lot of times, these things could’ve been avoided if someone had the knowledge beforehand to try and do something about it.

DEBRA: Right! And we really need to be looking at this. One of the things that I’ve observed is that when you don’t know about toxics, then people are doing things like taking vitamins, maybe eating natural food, but not organic food, they’re not eating out of cans anymore, but they’re eating fresh lettuce from the grocery store, for example, they’re going and getting their check-ups and they’re going to exercise class and all these things, which in kind of the mainstream way are the positive things that people are told to do for their health, taking vitamins, et cetera.

But on the other hand, you’ve got this big onslaught of toxic stuff that is working against your health in consumer products and drugs just all over the place. And what I found in my own life and people that I work with is that if you just start by removing the toxics, remove the toxic drugs, remove the toxic chemicals and then do the things that support your body, it’s kind of like if you’re trying to empty the bath tub and you keep dumping water into it, you’re not going to empty the bath tub.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And the thing that I was talking about, the cumulative toxicity, is very real and very present and very dangerous. I don’t think people can realize enough they could do all these things for their health, they’re doing all these food choices, sleeping right, exercising, whatever it may be, drinking filtered water, and then when it comes down to it, they’re taking maybe even supplements that can cause damage to either the kidneys or the liver…

DEBRA: Pamela, I have to interrupt you because the music is going to start in just a second. So thank you so much.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely! Thank you.

DEBRA: You’re welcome. You can go to BotanicalResource.com. You can call up Pamela and she will help you figure this out. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

Chemicals That Don’t Cause Cancer Themselves Can Cause Cancer When Combined

Today my guests are Ken Cook, President of Environmental Working Group and Curt DellaValle, Senior Scientist at EWG. In August, EWG released a new guide called Rethinking Carcinogens which summarizes new research about cancer from the Halifax Project. This collaboration of more than 300 scientists are investigating ways in which toxic chemicals we are exposed to every day may cause cancer. This includes 85 common chemicals not known to be carcinogenic on their own, 50 of which were found to disrupt cancer-related pathways at low doses typically encountered in the environment. We’ll learn more about this in today’s show. www.ewg.org

ken_cookKen Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, is widely recognized as one of the environmental community’s most prominent and influential critics of the nation’s broken approach to protecting families and children from toxic substances. Under Cook’s leadership over the past 20 years, EWG has empowered American families with easy-to-use, data-driven tools to help reduce their exposure to potentially harmful ingredients in foods, drinking water, cosmetics and other household products. These unique digital resources are searched hundreds of millions times by consumers, journalists and policy makers.

curt_dellavalleCurt DellaValle, Senior Scientist at EWG, brings his background in epidemiology and cancer research experience to work on the development of EWG’s Cancer Prevention Initiative. He holds a BS in biology from the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in environmental health from Yale University. Prior to joining EWG, Curt was a fellow at the National Cancer Institute where he conducted research evaluating exposure to environmental contaminants and risk of cancer, with a particular emphasis on the improvement of exposure assessment methods in epidemiologic studies.

read-transcript

 

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Chemicals That Don’t Cause Cancer Themselves Can Cause Cancer When Combined

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Ken Cook

Date of Broadcast: September 29, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It’s Tuesday, September 29, 2015, and I’m here in Clearwater, Florida, where the sun is showing, and there are no thunderstorms, so we should be fine and have no interruptions or background noise.

Today, we’re going to be talking about a very, very, very – this might be one of the most important shows that I’ve ever done or may ever do.

I’ve been studying toxic chemicals and their effects for more than 30 years, and what I’ve learned is in the field of toxicology, they divide up chemicals and they say this one causes cancer. This one causes birth defects. This one causes headaches, et cetera.

They even name – have a category like neurotoxic, which means that it’s toxic to your nervous system.

Now, there’s a new study that’s going on, I don’t know how long it’s been going on, but it’s what their finding is that chemicals that were thought to not cause cancer by themselves, when they combine together in your body, do cause cancer.

They’re still doing this investigation. They’re still doing the scientific work. But this is extremely, extremely important because we tend to think that – we’d look up a chemical like formaldehyde, and we’ll see here are all these studies, and these tests have been done, and they say, “Okay, formaldehyde has these health effects. They’re safe or dangerous in these amounts.”

But that’s only looking at it in isolation. What this study is showing is actual scientific proof that when you combine chemicals together, they have totally different effects.

So this means that you can’t just let that chemical in isolation and say, “This chemical causes this effect” because you don’t know – we’re exposed to so many chemicals in the world that you don’t know what the combined effect is going to be.

This is why I’ve been saying for years and years and years that what we need to do is reduce our exposure to all toxic chemicals because we don’t know what the combinations are, and now here’s the science about it.

This study is being done by an organization called “The Halifax Project”. It’s called “The Halifax Project.” They published some papers this summer, and I went and looked them all up. They’re very lengthy and have a lot of big words in them and very difficult to read.

But fortunately, the Environmental Working Group read them all and translated them into language that we can understand. And so I have today with us Ken Cook, who is the president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group, and Curt DellaValle, who is a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group.

They’re going to talk with us about what’s going on with this study.

Hi, Ken and Curt.

KEN COOK: Hi, Debra.

CURT DELLAVALLE: Hello.

KEN COOK: Glad to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you.

CURT DELLAVALLE: – [cross-talking 00:04:30] on the show.

DEBRA: Thank you. I’m very pleased to have you here because I just think that this is probably the most important thing you’ve ever done.

It’s that important.

So Ken, as the co-founder, why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about Environmental Working Group, what you do, and how you came to be.

KEN COOK: Well, Environmental Working Group started 22 years ago. It was a small group of us working on environmental issues, initially working on the connections between agriculture and the environment.

Once we’ve started doing that work, we started branching out to adjacent issues that obviously presented us with some serious problems that we thought are particular capabilities of scientific research, database analysis and communications lent themselves too.

So that took us from agricultural subsidies and how to reform them, to pesticide issues, and what should be done to reduce exposure, particularly to children. This was in the early 1990s, to pesticides and food and from other sources.

From there we branched out to the problems posed by other categories of toxic chemicals.

And so recently, we became aware of the Halifax Project which is one of the projects that was initiated by an organization, a very small, non-profit, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, based there, called “Getting to Know Cancer.”

We had gotten in contact with this organization because they had this very intriguing hypothesis, and I just want to emphasize, it is still a hypothesis from them. But they devoted considerable amount of scientific research looking at the published literature to verify that this hypothesis is very well worth now testing in future laboratory studies.

The hypothesis is pretty much as you suggested at the top of the interview, which is we have always thought of carcinogens in the context of individual chemicals that by themselves would cause cancer.

And so what we’ve now done with the Halifax Project, we’ve seen them do, and these are dozens and dozens of scientists from around the world, is suggest that if you take closer look at the processes that we now know contribute to the formation of cancer that turn normal cells into cancer cells. Each of those various processes can be affected by chemicals even if they are not carcinogens in the regulatory sense.

So this opens up a whole series of important questions about how chemical exposures of all kinds might be affecting our bodies in ways that aren’t, strictly speaking, one chemical equals a carcinogen, but more one chemical might be contributing in ensemble fashion, in combination with other chemicals. It might be contributing to the risk of cancer.

DEBRA: I’m just so happy this is being done. I write so much about the subject. I’m always trying to understand the chemicals better. I’m particularly from a consumer viewpoint. I have no scientific background. I just have been studying it for many years as a consumer.

And so I want to think that if – what I need to do is I need to establish, as a consumer advocate, which are the chemicals that we should not be using, and that we should be finding safer alternatives for.

And so over the years, I’ve collected my own list of what I think that is. And so when I write, I write about how can we stay away from formaldehyde, for example.

I have a list of carcinogens which I’ve gathered from all different places that list carcinogens and have determined that. That is a category.

I also did an organization of symptoms and illnesses and things. Several years ago, I just looked at all the different body systems and I said, “What are the chemicals that affect the nervous system? What are the chemicals that affect the digestive system? The endocrine system, et cetera?”

And some of those chemicals are affecting more than one system. They just don’t go into the body. Some of them go in and target certain things, certain parts of the body, or they cause certain illnesses. But that’s not always the case.

So this is so important.

We only have just a few seconds left before we need to go to break. When we come back, what I’d like us to do is have you start telling us about the study itself, and you have this on your website. I have a link to it, if you just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and find this show. The link is there.

But there’s a section called “Rethinking Carcinogens.” And I think if you just type in “rethinking carcinogens” in any search engine, it’ll take you to this page.

So the things that we’re going to be talking about today, you can then find them on the website and go over them as carefully as you’d like to.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Ken Cook and Curt DellaValle. They’re from Environmental Working Group and the Environmental Working Group website is EWG.org.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Ken Cook, who is the president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, and Curt DellaValle. He is a senior scientist at EWG. And he’s working on the Cancer Prevention Initiative.

Curt, since you’re working on the Initiative, why don’t you tell us about the difference between a complete and a partial carcinogen.

CURT DELLAVALLE: I think Ken touched on it before that complete carcinogens are what are identified now. These are chemicals that on their own, can cause cancer or cause progression of cancer.

You mentioned formaldehyde is an example of what we know as a complete carcinogen. Exposure to formaldehyde can potentially cause cancer.

Partial carcinogens are a term that is now being phrased just because of – largely, in part of this Halifax Project’s findings. But these are chemicals that we think, on their own, are not capable of causing cancer. But they can disrupt certain cancer-related pathways.

And given that we know cancer develops through a multistep process, in combination with other chemicals that might also affect other cancer-related pathways, whether it’s cell division or impacting the way our normal bodies get rid of old and dying cells, those chemicals in combination might present a carcinogenic mixture.

And so each individual component would consider a partial carcinogen.

DEBRA: So as the development of cancer is going through its process, then I think what you’re saying is that the different chemicals that may not cause cancer in and of themselves might affect some part of that process, and then together, they result – can you just outline what is the process of cancer developing?

CURT DELLAVALLE: Cancer, just in general terms, is just when a normal cell begins to act abnormally, and it begins to divide uncontrollably. This uncontrolled cell division ends up creating, in most case, a mass of cells, which we know is a tumor.

And that would be what we would consider cancer.

So that’s the general process. Along the way, there may be chemicals that can interact on certain parts of this process. There may be a chemical that comes in and interact with our cells in a way that super speed their cell division. So now they’re rapidly dividing.

If that now abnormal behavior is not detected by our body’s defense system, or [inaudible 00:16:48] our bodies are unable to handle that, then that uncontrolled division can lead to other problems where another chemical might come in and disrupt how blood supply is supplied to those cells, all this leading toward the mass of cells as we would know as a tumor.

DEBRA: This is just amazing to me. It’s amazing but it’s also – it makes sense to me that all of these chemicals in our bodies – do you have a number of how many chemicals might be in our bodies at any given time?

CURT DELLAVALLE: [inaudible 00:17:27] we’re actually working on a report just chronicling carcinogens that have been measured in our body. So it’s [inaudible 00:17:38] to say. For any individual, how many chemicals you would have in your body. But you would think it would be hundreds of chemicals.

Some of them may be harmful, some of them not. And of course, just because a chemical is present in your body, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be present at levels that will be harmful for you.

DEBRA: So if somebody is exposed to a carcinogen, what are some of the factors that might be going on, such as the dose, as to whether or not it would affect them? Because I know – one of the things I have on my website is a Q&A. And so people are asking me questions all the time.

One of the most frequently heard thoughts is, how can I – it’s said in various different ways. But basically the idea is how can I not be exposed to this chemical or whatever it is completely?

My dishes might have a certain amount of lead on them. Is it okay to eat off of them? Because I should have zero amount of lead.

What are some of the factors that people should be considering when they’re thinking about [inaudible 00:18:46] may be exposed to these chemicals or not, and how much?

CURT DELLAVALLE: It depends on, I guess, what the chemical is. In general, if you’re trying to say, “I’m going to eliminate all bad exposures from my life.” That’s not going to be possible, unless you live in a bubble.

So that’s not possible. And obviously, people are living – our life expectancy is increasing. So it’s not a necessarily harmful thing that we’re being exposed to through all these chemicals, but certain chemicals and certain chemicals in too much of a quantity that are really the problem.

There are a lot of factors that are going to influence whether an individual is highly susceptible.

Just the other day, I saw a news article about – there have been certain genes identified for smokers that increase or decrease their risk or susceptibility.

Smoking, we know, is highly carcinogenic. It causes a lot of cancers, lung in particular. But some people can smoke all their lives and never develop cancer. And some people smoke just a little bit and they’re the unlucky ones that do get cancer.

 

DEBRA: My great uncle lived to be 99 and he was a chain smoker.

CURT DELLAVALLE: Exactly. So they’re not identifying certain genes that are protective against the effects of smoking.

We don’t know if we have those genes or not at this point in time, but certainly genetics is going to play a factor.

There’s even just random chance. Our cells, we have trillion of cells, they’re all dividing. Each time they divide, there’s a chance of an error, even though it’s minutely small. There’s a chance that that error won’t be caught, and if those errors propagate, then that’s when we have a problem.

So there is that factor too.

And then of course, the amount of exposure you have, the dose you are receiving.

DEBRA: So is your conclusion that if we know something causes cancer that it would probably be a good idea to be prudent and avoid it to the best of our ability, just because we [inaudible 00:21:07]?

CURT DELLAVALLE: [inaudible 00:21:07] for sure, yes.

DEBRA: We need to go to break. When we come back, we’ll talk more about the study that is showing how chemicals [inaudible 00:21:20] cause cancer by themselves, can cause cancer when they are combined together.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests are Ken Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, and Curt DellaValle, who is a senior scientist at Environmental Working Group. He’s working on the Cancer Prevention Initiative.

The Environmental Working Group website is EWG.org, and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Ken Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, and Curt DellaValle, senior scientist at EWG. And their website is EWG.org.

So one of the pages that I thought that was the most interesting in your report, “Rethinking Carcinogens,” and by the way, during the break, I went to a search engine and typed “Rethinking Carcinogens” and EWG’s report came out right at the top. So that’s something that you can do to get to these pages that we’re talking about.

But there’s a page called “Hallmarks of Cancer.” And it talks about how the body has many layers of safeguards to control cell division and preventing [inaudible 00:27:21] damage. And that a chemical that interferes with this single cancer-related hallmark process is unlikely to cancer. But combine the chemical that interferes with cell division cycle with one that interferes with the cellular dead cycle, and you begin to see how exposures to chemical mixtures have the potential to overwhelm the body’s defenses.

I’d like for us to talk about this page and this idea during the segment. Who would like to go first?

KEN COOK: I’d let Curt take the first swing at this because the Hallmarks of Cancer framework was really the inspiration for the Halifax Project because that is a couple of essays actually by that name that sought to organize what was understood around the year 2000. And then they issued this follow-up review in 2011.

How do you make sense of what we’ve learned from cancer biology over the past 25 years or so? That’s what the Hallmarks of Cancer framework was designed to do, is give some structure to that and yield an important insight that resulted in what we now know and discussing is the Halifax Project.

But I’ll let Curt speak to these hallmarks.

DEBRA: Before you start, I just want to also mention to our listeners, encouraging you to go to this page that – what’s on this page is a list of the different hallmarks which we’ll hopefully talk about a little. But then there’s a table at the bottom that says “chemicals with evidence affecting cancer hallmark processes” where you have this list of 10 different steps or hallmarks that contribute to the formation of cancer.

This page also lists individually the chemicals that contribute to each one of them. So it’s so interesting to me.

Most people have heard of Bisphenol A, and here, BPA contributes to – here’s the first one and the second one. It’s all over this list.

And so BPA isn’t just – it does a lot of damage.

So Curt, tell us about the Hallmarks of Cancer.

CURT DELLAVALLE: So Ken had mentioned that these were the ideas to – the structure to what we know about the biology of cancer.

So the Hallmarks of Cancer were just the characteristics that distinguish cancer cell from a normally operating cell. These things include self-sufficient cell division, which is normally our bodies control the division of cell. They tell when to divide, when to stop dividing. Cancer cells stop listening to our body signals, and they just divide on their own.

Resisting cell [inaudible 00:30:36]. As I said, when our body detects that a cell is either old or damaged or during the division process, DNA has been corrupted to some degree, it will act to self-destruct that cell. But cancer cells can avoid that process and continue to proliferate even though they’re damaged.

So these are just the three of those eight characteristics that distinguish the normal cells. And they also define – the reason there is 10 because there are two of them that they consider initially hallmarks of the cancer cells themselves, but things that enable those eight characteristics to arise like inflammation.

Inflammation creates an environment in which these cancer hallmarks are likely to arise.

DEBRA: A lot of people have inflammation.

We’ve talked about inflammation on other shows and here it is again.

Can you tell us about – I’ll just look at this page here. The first one is self-sufficient cell division. And so it has a low dose effect, threshold effect and low dose effect unknown.

When people come to this page and read these, what do those terms mean?

CURT DELLAVALLE: Those are just classifying what dose you would need to have to – of this chemical for it to have that effect on whatever particular process you’re talking about, that specific hallmark.

If it has a low dose effect, then that means there’s no known safe level. Even a very small exposure can have an effect on this cancer-related process.

A threshold effect means that you need to reach some sort of threshold of exposure. So you need to be exposed to at least a certain amount before that effect happens.

And then the effect unknown just means there hasn’t been enough research on this particular chemical to know what dose it’s acting at. We just know that there are some doses which it does behave in this way.

DEBRA: Some of the – like Bisphenol A is on the low dose effect [inaudible 00:32:55] for self-sufficient cell division. So even doing something like handling cash register receipts on a daily basis would give you a low dose.

CURT DELLAVALLE: It’s funny too. That is one of the things that I have – in my head, I stopped doing it, even though I know it’s a very small exposure. I usually turn down a cash receipt now.

DEBRA: I do too. And I’ve actually just started doing that in the last couple of months. And I’ve also started – because I actually realize that the reason that receipts are given goes way back pre-digital age, where you have to have a piece of paper to show that you paid for the item that you purchased.

But now you can walk into any big box store and say, “I bought it here. I’m bringing back my whatever.” And they can just look it up on the computer, and you don’t even need a receipt.

So our digital age has changed all that. And so I’ve been doing two things. One is I’ve been refusing the receipts, or if I think I need it, I have them put it in a bag and I don’t touch it. Or the third is I ask them, “Are these BPA free receipt?”

And I am just [inaudible 00:34:15] at how many people don’t even know what I’m talking about. They look at me strangely and then I go and I ask the manager. I’m making this big deal as I go around from store to store about these BPA-free receipts.

 

People don’t even know what it is.

We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Ken Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, and Curt DellaValle, senior scientist at Environmental Working Group, who is working on the development of the Cancer Prevention Initiative.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guests today are Ken Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, and Curt DellaValle, senior scientist at Environmental Working Group, who is working on the Cancer Prevention Initiative. Their website is EWG.org.

For both of you, I know one of the things that Environmental Working Group has been doing is focusing on – well, you have a lot of consumer recommendations who also are focusing on the legislative side of it, which is something that I don’t do. I’ve just been working on the consumer side of it for the last 30 years.

So I really appreciate all of the legislative [inaudible 00:39:35] that you do, and I’d like to know what are your recommendations, given this new information about cancer. But also just the fact that – when I started, I used to think that I could say, okay, here’s a toxic chemical, formaldehyde. We’ve been using that throughout the show. So let’s just continue.

So here’s a toxic chemical, formaldehyde, and you can avoid being exposed to formaldehyde by using solid wood instead of particle board, for example.

And so that was a very clear cut choice. But the problem that I see that we’re running into now, and I don’t know really when this started, but it seems to be getting worse and worse, is that there are some things that you can’t avoid because they are now ubiquitous.

So where do you think we need to go from here? Ken, why don’t you answer first?

KEN COOK: Well, to start with, I think the notion of giving people practical advice that doesn’t require them to abandon life as we know it in the modern world, but gives them options to avoid exposures to toxic chemicals. That kind of advice is very, very important.

There’s a lot of it out there. We advise people to take a careful look at their sources before they make decisions. But I don’t think there’s any question that we really do benefit when we are open to information that informs us about where toxic exposures might be happening because it’s often very straightforward and easy to avoid them.

DEBRA: Yes, it is. I would agree with that.

KEN COOK: So that’s the first step because when I’m sitting – I’m up giving a talk to an audience, and I look out and I see – it seems like every woman in the audience is pregnant. And I’m about to give them some really worrisome information about toxic chemicals including that babies are exposed even while they’re in the womb.

In my mind, I’m thinking I can’t give the answer to all of the questions that I know are coming as wait for the government to solve this problem for you because we know that the government not only not going to do it soon, but there are economic vested interests out there pushing very hard to make sure the government doesn’t take action.

So the personal steps and those can be done with, I think, in a very ordinary way to dramatically reduce a lot of these exposures. But at the policy level, a couple of things are important. One, it’s really important to pay attention to what may be happening in your state, to make sure that if there’s legislation moving through in the state capital that might help reduce chemical exposures, take some worrisome chemicals off the market or issue warnings, give you information about them, on product labels and so forth.

That kind of right to know transparency and state regulatory action, it’s important to be aware of that happening in your state.

California, for example, where I live, there’s a lot of action in that realm. And when California takes action, for example, restrict Bisphenol A in sippy cups and baby bottles, it can have an impact across the whole economy because of the size of the California economy.

First, pay attention to the state level action.

Secondly, if I were to give one recommendation, it would be, stay tuned to Environmental Working Group. Go to EWG.org. If you’re inclined, get on our e-mail list. We will keep you up to date on some of the most important debates unfolding in Congress that have to do with efforts to protect us by regulation and better, stronger laws on toxic chemicals.

It’s a very tough fight. We’re up against an enormous well-funded chemical industry that has spent tens of millions of dollar in recent years pushing at the legislature to establish weak rules and regulations around toxic chemicals.

We’re in a constant battle both at the regulatory agencies like FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. We’re fighting in the halls there.

We’re also fighting back against these interest in Congress to make sure that if Congress passes a new law, to regulate toxic chemicals, it’s going to be a strong one.

But we’re really up against a lot of money, a lot of suits, as we say, a lot of lobbyists for industry walking the halls, and button holing legislators, and giving them campaign contributions. But we’re on the front lines at EWG.org to do that. And we would really appreciate your help.

DEBRA: Yes, well, we do need to be addressing these issues on all levels. Absolutely. I used to think in the past that if consumers would just make the right choices that it would all turn out fine. But I do see that we need to be – in my best of all possible worlds, the way it would go would be that everybody would think like we think.

Everybody would look at the toxic evidence and that they would say, “We shouldn’t be using formaldehyde. It shouldn’t be on every permanent pressed bedsheet.” Just embalming people every night.

And that it just makes common sense to give consumers products that will enable their health and happiness, and that everybody who produces toxic chemicals and products made from them would just stop because it is common sense, and we have the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And toxic chemicals doesn’t contribute to that.

KEN COOK: I agree with that. I think – not everyone is going to obviously go at this with a kind of training and background that Curt has, for example. He really understands the science here. So there’s an important need to translate. I think from our standpoint, there are a couple of principles that we apply.

First of all, we don’t have all the answers. We can’t tell you that a chemical that’s in a sippy cup or a baby bottle or that is even in your bloodstream because you’ve been exposed from some source. We can’t tell you that that exposure is definitely going to cause a health problem. We know there’s a great deal of uncertainty.

What we can say is if you can avoid those exposures, and can do it in a way – sometimes, it might take a while to change your routines or your buying behaviors or what have you, give it a try because we know you can knock down thousands of exposure [inaudible 00:46:50] eliminate them from your routine and from your life just with paying a little bit of attention.

So that makes all the sense in the world. The bigger issue though is we need to re-tool and re-invent some major industries here that are [inaudible 00:47:06] consumer products and particle boards for homes and so forth.

When we’ve caught some of these companies doing things that are demonstrably bad for our health, they made change happen. We know that has happened with respect to lots of different areas, lots of different consumer product categories. But we need to do more.

Consumer pressure adds to that. It sends signals to companies that they need to re-invent how they make things, the types of products that they sell, and as that pressure builds, a lot of these things we’re seeking, I think, will come about into market pressure.

But one of the key components of creating these positive markets is a regulatory system that rewards invention for safer products, instead of slowing it down.

DEBRA: I totally agree. You and I have been doing this for a lot of years. And I think that both of us can see that there has been progress made.

When I first started, I remember the only clothes – let’s see. I didn’t start writing until 1984, but in 1978, I started looking at toxic chemicals and trying to find non-toxic products. The only thing I could wear was a tee shirt and jeans.

Now, we have organic everything. And there organic nothing in 1978. I couldn’t even find organic food in the stores. And there are all of these non-toxic cleaning products, great water filters, and people are talking about detox.

All these things weren’t happening before. I see a change in the right direction.

KEN COOK: I think that’s right. There are a lot of positive signs. It’s no time to be complacent not personally, and certainly, we don’t want to – even people who are turned off by government, and I know a lot of people are. They feel like nothing ever happens that’s good in Washington.

I am sympathetic with a lot of those views. But look at it this way. If you step back from these, what I think of is, civil obligations to engage with your government, the people who represent you, someone else is going to step in. That someone else is very likely to be a lobbyist for the chemical industry, a lobbyist for the coal or petroleum or oil industry. Fill in the blank.

They are very active in Washington. They will have their way if they can. And it’s very important for those of us who feel that we’re speaking on behalf of the public health to be there to contest these important policy issues.

DEBRA: I’m going to stop you right there because we’re at the end of the show, and the music is going to start playing. So thank you so much Ken and Curt for being here. Again, their website is EWG.org. And you can type in “Rethinking Carcinogens” into the search engine and come up with [inaudible 00:50:12] we’re talking about today.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

The Hidden Dangers Affecting Your Heart and How You Can Protect It Naturally

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking your heart and some not-so-widely-known dangers that can cause problems. Plus, as always, Pamela will tell us how you can help your heart be healthy and strong, naturally. Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and selling top quality medicinal supplements, so she’s seen it all. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Hidden Dangers Affecting Your Heart and How You Can Protect It Naturally

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, RPh

Date of Broadcast: September 09, 2015

DEBRA: Hi! I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It’s Wednesday, September 9th, 2015. The sun is shining here in Clearwater, Florida. It’s a beautiful early autumn day.

You know what? I’ll just say this. It’s going to come up on September 21st. It will be the first day of autumn. But actually, that’s the middle of autumn. Autumn actually starts somewhere in the middle of August. As the sun changes angle and the days start getting shorter and cooler, you get this midpoint. It’s just the difference between looking at nature and looking at our civil calendar, which doesn’t have anything to do with nature at all.

But I like to be connected with nature, so I look at time by the solstices and the equinoxes. So we’re moving towards that autumn equinox where the days are equal and the nights will start being longer than the days. I just think it’s a lovely way to look at time.

So I’m very aware of the angle being different of the sun now and that it gets dark here in Florida around 6:00 now instead of 9:00. It makes a big difference.

Anyway, that’s not the subject of the show, but I just like to talk about that. Today, we’re going to be actually talking about your heart and some hidden dangers that can be affecting your heart that you might not be aware of.

My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I am happy to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. I’m happy that you’re here too. I think we just need to keep saying over and over again that drugs are really designed to alleviate symptoms and not to cure the underlying thing that’s happening. So I think what we’re going to be talking about today are some of those things that your doctor probably will never tell you and may not even know. But these are things that we can be paying attention to on a daily basis as we have awareness of what’s going on in our own bodies and things that we can be doing day to day.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, absolutely.

DEBRA: Yeah, good. So where would you like to start?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I did a MedLine search since we were talking about hidden dangers and what are some things that we should be doing or shouldn’t be doing that affect our heart. And so, this is really current published information. Actually, I only went back six months. With everything currently published, this is what we’re seeing as far as the data.

What I found that was very interesting is that inflammation, chronic inflammation is definitely associated with cardiovascular disease. We know this. The reason why it’s associated with cardiovascular disease is it’s not just the myocardium or the heart itself as far as infarction, but it can lead to unstable angina. It can lead to sudden cardiac death stroke and peripheral thrombosis. And what that peripheral thrombosis is are clots that lodge and causes what’s called the deep vein thrombosis. So, these are all directly related to the inflammatory processes in the body.

So treating inflammation…

DEBRA: Wait, let’s talk about inflammation. Could you explain because we hear this word a lot? Could you explain exactly what inflammation is? And let’s talk about what to do for inflammation because I think that regardless of what the illness that somebody might have, or the condition, I think a lot of people in the world today have inflammation.

PAMELA SEEFELD: By far. And the best way to look for inflammation is if you’re going to the doctor, have them do a CRP in the blood stream and check to see if that is related to inflammatory processes that are going on in your body.

A lot of times, you have two different scenarios. You have the camp where the people are actually sore. They have arthritis and they’re sore. They feel sore every day. So that inflammation, they are aware of.

The more dangerous inflammation perhaps is silent inflammation, inflammation you are not aware of, you don’t feel, but because it’s an ongoing and it’s a chronic process, what it’s doing eventually is it’s taking the endothelium, which is the inside of the blood vessels and it is allowing plaque and other things, sticky substances, to affect – especially cholesterol. That’s why cholesterol has always gotten such a bad name. But really, it’s not all about cholesterol. Half of the people with heart attacks, their cholesterol is in the normal range.

So cholesterol is not the demon here. It’s untreated inflammation. If you don’t have the inflammation present, the cholesterol can be high, but it won’t really affect the endothelium or the inside lining.

DEBRA: Mm-hmmm… So then, what can we do? Since this is related to the heart, what can we do to treat inflammation, easy things we can do every day?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, some easy things, believe it or not, is avoiding certain foods that contain a lot of arachidonic acid. It doesn’t mean this is for everybody, but this is pretty true in the general consensus.

Arachidonic acid is an inflammatory component that’s in foods, egg yolks, red meat and peanuts. They tend to have the most arachidonic acid than any foods. Now, I am not saying you have to cut those out forever, but those particular foods definitely raise inflammation in a lot of individuals.

DEBRA: That’s good to know, yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So excluding those is extremely important.

I would tell you that there are data that show that dairy is very inflammatory to a lot of people as well. I’m not saying you go on crazy elimination diets, but try two or three days without any dairy. If you have actual physical inflammation that you feel, see if it goes down.

I’ve seen this in some of my clients quite extensively that people have dairy allergies. And dairy allergies will show up as low grade arthritis. That’s the first symptom people normally have. People will feel like they’re just a little bit sore and achy. They just think that maybe they’re getting a little bit older, maybe they over worked out.

Just doing a food elimination of just the dairy for several days (and like I said, the red meat, the egg yolks and the peanuts, eliminating those foods for just a few days) and seeing if you’re feeling better, that makes a huge difference as far as your diagnostics.

DEBRA: Go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I would also say that I’m a big fan of something called Traumeel. They call it T-Relief now.

It’s got arnica and it’s got a bunch of other different plants that are anti-inflammatory. It’s very inexpensive.

When you use this, it not only lowers inflammation in the body, but it actually repairs little tears in the tendons and in the tissue where you actually maybe have been injured, maybe you did too much yard work, maybe you did too much at the gym, lifted things that are too heavy. That has a really high anti-inflammatory component that’s very, very effective.

And don’t forget fish oil. I mean, I can just talk for an hour about fish oils, omega-3 fish oils.

DEBRA: And you have.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: Actually, I should just remind everybody that you can listen to all of the past shows including all of the shows that Pamela has done including her show on fish oils by going to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. They are all there.

Pamela, the other day, I looked and we’ve done more than 20 shows.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, my gosh! That’s wonderful.

DEBRA: Yeah. So there’s a lot of information there. If you just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, there is a link in the menu that says, “Listen to the archived shows.” And if you pulled down there, there’s a submenu and Pamela’s name is right there. You can just click on that and it will take you to all of Pamela’s shows.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I really appreciate that. So, the omega-3 fatty acid, the newest data that came out shows that consumption of omega-3 fatty acids reduced cardiovascular disease. And we knew this, especially the risks. But what it does is it provides a reduction in arterial stiffness.

So the actual endothelium of the arteries, it changes their physical constituent properties. And what happens is when the stiffness is reduced, it allows for the flexibility of the blood vessel and the general health of the endothelium is greatly enhanced. This improves the vascular function.

This actually works on a molecular, cellular and physiological pathway. It affects all three different functions in the cell itself, which is pretty interesting. We know that omega-3 has not just anti-inflammatory properties, but they turn on 300 different genes in the body.

So, when we talk about the arterial wall, they actually can see. This is brand new data that the beneficial effects impacts arterial wall remodeling. So the arterial wall and the endothelium of these vessels, blood vessels around your heart and in your whole body, they actually physically look different after a person has been taking omega-3s.

They incorporate into the cells of the vasculature and they actually find arterial wall remodeling. It looks different.

And this is after less than three weeks. So it’s a huge, huge impact. So now we know what is actually happening.

And don’t forget too (I don’t know if your listeners remember some of the omega-3 facts), but it has anti-inflammatory activity and it also has anti-arrhythmic activity. So somebody that has cardiac arrhythmias and they’re not well controlled on their medications, this can also have a great effect.

DEBRA: That’s great. I love it that a lot of these substances have multiple benefits, not just one. We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who also practices pharmacognosy, which is a wonderful field of using plants and other natural substances. Pharmacognosy means drugs with information, substances with information.

We’ll be back after the break and talk more with Pamela about how you can protect your heart from hidden dangers.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist and also a practitioner of pharmacognosy, which is the use of plants as medicine.

Pamela, before we go on, why don’t you tell us about what you do and give your phone number?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, great. My background is clinical pharmacy, but I also studied pharmacognosy at the University of Florida. Pharmacognosy, of course, we were describing, is plant medicine. It’s a little bit more than herbalism, talking about the medicinal properties of different plants and how they work in the body.

I have my pharmacy here in Clearwater, Florida. I would be very honored to help your family. It’s a free consultation.

If you have any questions about medications you’re on and if you want to get off of them or if you’re also interested in using some homeopathic medicine to treat chronic illness, maybe you have MS or heart disease or some of the other things we were talking about, diabetes and you don’t want to be on your medication, I can gladly help you with that.

You can call me here at my pharmacy. It’s (727) 442-4955. That’s (727) 442-4955. We use homeopathic medication instead of drugs.

DEBRA: Okay, good. Now before we go on, I just have one more question about inflammation. Inflammation has to do with blood vessels and what’s happening with them. If one has inflammation in their body, then wouldn’t that affect the functioning of every organ?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! And also too (it’s really important), we’ve done shows on weight and weight loss and trying to lose weight. It’s really hard for men and women. When you start reaching 40s and 50s and 60s and so forth, it’s really hard to lose weight and you gain weight very easily with not much caloric of change.

We know for a fact that if there is inflammation in the body that’s untreated and it’s circulating, so to speak – we have something called circulating cytokines, which are these interleukin, these chemical messengers that the fat actually produces.

That’s one of the reasons you see more cardiovascular disease in people that are overweight. The reason why is because their own fat is producing interleukins that are even more pro-inflammatory and cause more weight gain and cause more inflammation to the blood vessels.

So the subcutaneous fat, especially the visceral fat in the abdomen is highly problematic because it’s actually producing more of these inflammatory messengers that are making the person’s health decline even faster.

And this is the problem. Your body is actually working against itself.

DEBRA: I understand what you just said. I think what I’m trying to put two and two together here around is that we have inflammation and then we have organs of the detox system like the liver and kidneys and lungs. And if one has inflammation in the body, then that would inhibit the functioning of their detox organs.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! Because the inflammation, what it’s doing, is it’s actually working against itself.

You’re having the body producing more inflammatory components.

And the blood vessel inflammation (we’re talking about the heart today), this inflammation and the change in the endothelium, when there are interleukins and components that are pro-inflammatory, the changes in the endothelium are robust and very negative and they are affecting the blood vessels, especially going even into the kidney.

This is actually interesting. In one of the studies I was pulling, Deb, there’s a system in the kidney. And as pharmacists, we know about this quite well. There’s something called the renin-angiotensin system.

The rennin-angiotensin system is associated with the kidney and it controls blood pressure. This is why when people have pre-dialysis or dialysis or they have kidney disease, why they have to be on what’s called converting enzyme inhibitors or ACE inhibitors. They have to be on these medicines that affect the renin-angiotensin system because when people’s kidneys are not functioning properly, this system goes awry and what happens is blood pressure goes up.

So that’s why you see a lot of people on dialysis or people that have kidney problems on blood pressure medicine.

That’s why the blood pressure goes high. It’s not because they’re heavy, it’s not because they did anything. It’s because the kidney is messed up.

The studies show that inflammation and oxidative stress with the renin-angiotensin system not working correctly because the person maybe having some pre-kidney issues or actually are on dialysis is leading to excess atherosclerosis.

So we know when someone has metabolic syndrome or kidney problems at the same time and the renin-angiotensin system is not working correctly, they end up being put on a bunch of blood pressure medications, they feel very sick and inflammation and oxidative stress actually increase.

DEBRA: Okay, good. I understood that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s what’s really happening. So when you see people that are diabetic and maybe they have kidney problems too, it’s really, really terrible that the body is producing all these extra inflammatory components that are damaging the kidney. And when they damage the kidney, we’re starting the blood pressure problem.

That’s why you see typically when a person has kidney issues or metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes, that’s why they need blood pressure medicine, that’s why they need cholesterol medicine. All these medicines come for a reason and this is all because of the inflammation. If the inflammation wasn’t present, none of this would be here.

DEBRA: So, it looks like it is really important to treat inflammation regardless of what your condition may be in your body. And especially with our subject of detox, it can interfere with your body’s detoxifying as it should, which would lead to a greater build-up of toxic chemicals in your body.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, most definitely. All those things, it’s a logical progression. But it’s important that your listeners know that instead of feeling overwhelmed, they should realize that these things are working against you.

The best thing to do is maybe use some homeopathic stuff in the beginning to try and clear it out or make sure that you are on top of things because unfortunately, your practitioner, your physician is just going to keep adding medicine. If you’re trying to avoid that, you need to make sure you’re addressing this in the top form and not just putting it to the side.

And like I said, inflammation can be silent. So, you need to make sure that you’re checking these numbers.

DEBRA: And what were the numbers again? You gave some numbers earlier.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I would tell you, the most important thing they can check is your CRP. But if you actually have inflammation and you’re sore, that’s a dead giveaway that you’ve got a real problem there especially if it’s an ongoing basis or even if, say, someone’s diagnosed with arthritis or rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis.

It’s not the arthritis that’s going to get them, it’s the cardiovascular disease. So, it’s important to realize that these things go hand in hand with a lot of other diseases. It’s not like one thing is not connected to the other.

Our bodies are contiguous. All the blood vessels are connected to the other blood vessels. So it’s not just one area of your body.

Anything that’s not being treated (maybe just some simple homeopathy to prevent some of the problems associated with it) makes a huge difference in the long haul as far as the person’s general health. That’s very important to realize.

DEBRA: Good. When we come back from break, we’ll talk more about the heart. We’ll stop talking about inflammation and go back to the heart. I just am really interested in inflammation and how it contributes to detox.

So, when we come back, we’ll talk with Pamela more about some other hidden dangers affecting your heart. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about hidden dangers that can affect your heart. Pamela, are there some toxic chemicals that can affect your heart as well?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. Actually, there are endocrine and neuroendocrine disruptors and these chemicals and electricity too. I’ll pull the studies for that here. It’s interesting. Let me pull these studies here.

Studies show as far as these chemicals and things we’re exposed to environmentally (and we’ll talk a little bit more about different vitamins again after that), what they’ve found is (and like I said, these are recent studies) that neuroendocrine disrupting chemicals act like estrogens and androgens and glucocorticoids in the body, but they’re not really the actual chemical.

These are found in industry, agriculture and food preservatives. And these all have problems. They affect the endocrine system. They have activity on the same receptors as estrogens and testosterone and so forth. These things look like the hormone and they’re mimicking it. They can cause sex hormone dependent cancers, but especially obesity and cardiovascular disease (that’s what are implicated as far as if the people have high exposure to these particular things).

This is really important because what’s happening is this is stuff that you don’t realize you’re being exposed to. And the fact that they’re docking in on the receptors and doing the same thing as the chemicals, but actually in a more dangerous way (because your body is not expecting these to be present on the receptor and then all of a sudden, they show up), it has cardiovascular implications that are pretty severe.

And definitely, this is why we think that we’re seeing a rise in cardiovascular disease here in the United States. It’s not because people are eating more poorly. They always want to blame it on diet. It is not so much diet, but the neuroendocrine disruptors are really creating problems.

What they’re finding in these people is they’re having huge amounts. They’re exposed to maybe plasticizers and so forth or they work in industry. What they are finding is that they have much higher rates of cardiovascular diseases as a result of it. So this is statistically significant and I thought this is interesting.

Now, you would know about this quite more than myself because I’m more of a chemistry person. But it looks like they looked at electrical staff, people that are working around electricity, they found that electromagnetic fields had a higher incidence of cardiovascular diseases, these people that were actually exposed to EMF fields of 50 hertz. It actually has almost the same effect as being exposed to chemicals.

DEBRA: Wow! That’s something that I need to look up and find out what would be a 50 hertz exposure. That’s something to keep in mind.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s affecting the nervous system. That’s what they think.

DEBRA: Yeah. And of course, this is what they’re studying, just to find out what are the effects. This is all new.

People weren’t talking about these kinds of things even 10 years ago. So I’m really happy to see all this coming out.
And then, what about carbon monoxide?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Carbon monoxide, most definitely. They found that exposure to carbon monoxide – most people here in the United States actually were pretty fortunate. We don’t have indoor kitchens where we’re cooking food with twigs and stuff. But you have to realize that a third of the world does not have a toilet, does not have electricity and they cook in an enclosed area in their house with wood that they gather.

We have carbon monoxide exposure in varying degrees maybe depending on what we have burning in the house and also the fact that we have carbon monoxide sensors in a lot of homes. I actually have them in my house. We know it can be a dangerous thing, but it’s not as troubling as perhaps other areas that are much poorer than we are, but it’s still very important. And the study did show people that especially are working in kitchens and so forth, if it’s enclosed and there’s no proper ventilation.

And this could even be in the house. People sometimes go crazy where they’re cooking a lot of food on the stove, maybe they’re not having the windows open. Maybe it’s a small home, maybe it’s a small kitchen. What they found is that carbon monoxide, when they started to be elevated to some degree, what they did is they did the cardiac enzymes of these people and they found that they were elevated. They’re not elevated enough to cause a heart attack, but there were mild elevations, which signaled that the heart was being damaged.

This makes sense because we know carbon monoxide. And of course, we know with suicide attempts and so forth, you can kill yourself with this.

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: But you’re exposed to small, small amounts of it when you are cooking in your house. And it depends on the ventilation and it depends on the size of the kitchen. Sometimes people have really small kitchens and there’s no proper ventilation.

You may see this more in big cities. Here in Florida, we have pretty much bigger homes. But when you think about New York and Boston and these tiny little apartments, you’ve got to be really careful with what you’re doing.

DEBRA: Especially if you are cooking with gas.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: A gas burner will give off what’s called combustion byproducts and carbon monoxide is only one of them.

So if you are cooking with gas, it’s really important to make sure that the burners are adjusted properly, so that they are burning cleanly and also that you have overhead hood ventilation and you make sure that you turn it on when you’re doing the cooking. Those two things will greatly reduce the amount of carbon monoxide. But you should also have a carbon monoxide detector and this is the way to more safely use gas.

But I know in some apartments, I have seen where there’s a gas stove and then there’s a closet with a gas water heater and all these flames are just open flames and all that carbon monoxide and other combustion byproducts are just going throughout your home.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You’re absolutely right. People don’t even look at that. You need to emphasize that. That is very common.

DEBRA: It’s very common. And I know that also, these things can go wrong. My grandmother had gas heat. This was a long time ago. She had gas heat and something went wrong with it and it started putting carbon monoxide in her house and she almost died.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, my gosh.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. So this can happen even today. And I know for myself, I have gas in two of my homes.

We have the water heaters in the [inaudible 00:33:01] places and the open flames are still there in the previous ones.

The new ones are up to code. But unless you actually go there and change it out, you don’t see that.

DEBRA: That’s right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I mean, I had no idea.

DEBRA: That’s right. I have a gas water heater, but it’s one of those instant water heaters.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh yeah, those are excellent!

DEBRA: So there’s no tank. It’s a tankless water heater. It’s mounted on the side of my house and so there are gas exhaust fumes, but they go outside.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very smart.

DEBRA: They’re not in my house at all. They’re not in the garage, not anywhere near the inside of my house or an open window.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The interesting part about this little study here (and this was actually from April this year), the very, very small amounts of exposure to this, we are making small changes in the cardiac enzymes in the blood stream. They have very, very fine equipment to detect this.

Let me explain this. When you have enzymes and you can measure them in the blood stream, it means that the cells died. In the medical sense, it’s called cardiomyopathy when the heart gets weakened because some of the cells die.

If you have enough cells dying, that’s a heart attack. Once your cells die, they release these cardiac enzymes and that’s how they diagnose heart attacks. A heart attack is basically a certain area of the heart basically dying, the muscle, especially because it’s trying to over-compensate because that area is not pumping correctly anymore.

So this is important to realize in the ventilation. These are really important things to look at in your immediate environment and say, “Is this something that’s affecting me?”

DEBRA: Yeah. There are also other health effects of combustion byproducts and some of them cause cancer. Formaldehyde is one of them. So this gas thing is a really important thing and probably we should talk a lot more about that.

Anyway, you are listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. When we come back, we’ll talk more about what you can do to protect your heart from these hidden dangers. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist, but she also is a practitioner of pharmacognosy, which is the use of plants for medicinal purposes.

Pamela, why don’t you give your phone number again?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, you can call me here at my homeopathic pharmacy. I would be very glad to help you and your family, also your pets if you have any questions about them as well. The number here at Botanical Resource is (727) 442-4955. That’s (727) 442-4955.

DEBRA: Great! And that’s a free consultation. You can just call her up and Pamela herself will talk to you. She’s very well regarded here. I’ve taken some of her recommendations and they all turned out perfectly.

So Pamela, we are in our last segment here. Why don’t you tell us some of the remedies for these things? We’ve talked about so many problems.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is good. No, this is really good. Most people know that D is very important. It looks like low vitamin D levels, we’re definitely putting people at risk for cardiovascular disease and also risk for developing metabolic syndromes.

So it’s important to realize that in the past, the doctors wanted your vitamin D level maybe 30 or something like that, 20 to 30, something in that range. Well now, the alternative physicians (and actually a lot of medical establishments) are really embracing that they want you closer to 100. If your D levels are low, you definitely need to be taking more D and to try and get that up. It’s very important.

This is brand new study that just came out actually in August of this year. It found that when people had poor vitamin D status, they were more at risk for developing metabolic syndrome and more at risk for having heart disease.

D is not just for the bones (and we’ve known that for a while). D is a hormone and it acts in the brain. It works especially for depression. It protects against depression and lot of other things, but it looks like it has really strong implications in preventing against cardiovascular disease.

So knowing where your concentration is really important. If you’re going to do any blood work at all, you really need to have your D level made. And then you also need to have your CRP done. That’s very important, those two things, the inflammation marker and the D level. They tell a lot about what’s going on in your body.

DEBRA: I know that I’ve had difficulties sometimes getting a medical doctor to do some blood tests that I want because they say, “We can only request what the insurance company will allow us to request for your diagnosis.” But there are places online. It’s very easy to get all these tests and you can just go to one of those online places and get a vitamin D test.

There’s a whole organization that all they do is vitamin D test. So you don’t have to be dependent on a medical doctor to get a blood test and find out what’s going on in your body.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good point because I’m sure some people that don’t have a regular doctor feel pretty helpless when they listen to these things. They don’t want to go to the doctor and they don’t want to have a blood test with a regular doctor. The fact that they have other alternatives and they are not forced to have an office visit, that’s very relieving for a lot of people.

DEBRA: Yes. And if you think this is going to cost a lot of money, just go look and see what it costs because I went to those websites to see, it costs much less than I thought it was going to.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely.

DEBRA: So it is an option for you. You don’t need to go to a doctor to get a blood test. Okay, go on.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. So another really interesting thing (and I don’t know if people really thought about this), but it looks like women, just being a woman puts you more at risk for vascular problems, blood vessel problems, inflammation and cardiovascular disease, all of these. And we see that the prevalence is really related to women.

And what’s happening is a lot of times, it’s being linked to arterial stiffness. We were talking about the artery stiffness and lipid disorders (which is the elevated blood lipids) and in correlation with this, any kind of sleep apnea that’s untreated. So the sleep seems to have a big effect on this.

And we were talking previously about the fish oil. There was a new study that showed in July this year that fish oil plus vitamin E lowered LDL cholesterol and it lowered oxidative stress and it also helped for prevention of cardiovascular disease. So get some low dose of vitamin E, the fish oil.

This is really important that we’re talking to the implications for women because it seems like the woman gender has more chance of this being a problem than men. That’s important to realize, especially peri and post-menopausal more so because that’s when the hormones are changing. That’s when the adipose tissue in the abdomen tends to start really being active with the inflammatory components.

When you think about women, they go through menopause. And then all of a sudden, they have all those fats in the middle, little rolls in the middle.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a new onset for them. Maybe they were thin all their lives and all of a sudden, they have fat in the middle. And it’s not because their diet changed. A lot of it is decrease of estrogen, but also the fact that if that happens, those cells, remember, start making more inflammatory components and actually make you gain more weight.

I think that’s a lot of what’s going on in menopause. It’s not just estrogen decrease. There are increased inflammatory markers in a lot of middle aged women that are causing a lot of these problems.

DEBRA: Now that you brought that up, I just want to mention one thing about that. Weight has been an issue for me my whole entire life. I don’t think that I’ve ever been in what one would call “normal weight.” I was born overweight. So it’s always been a struggle. I’ve always had this weight around the middle no matter what I did.

But now, I’m older. I’ve said several times on the show that I had my 60th birthday this year and I’m doing different things. And two things that I’m doing that are very different are that I’m eating a tremendous amount of more fiber than I ever have in my life and I really actually calculated how much fiber I was eating and found some high fiber foods. I’m eating those high fiber foods with every meal. I really, really [inaudible 00:45:24].

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good for you.

DEBRA: Yeah. And the other thing that I’m doing is I’m walking in a pool at a gym three or five days a week. I’m only walking about 40 minutes, but I am really walking and I’m doing things to have more resistance like keeping my fingers together in my hands so that they’re more like paddles. And my fat around the middle is reducing.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good for you! Well, most definitely, all those things will work.

DEBRA: Yes. And so I think one of the things that’s really been impressing upon me this week is that there really are things, actions that produce effects, that when we take some actions, they do something for better or worse. [Inaudible 00:46:15]

So if we want to do something in a particular direction, if we know what those actions are and do them, we’ll move in that direction. It’s just like if you walk down the street and get to the next block, you just put one foot in front of the other and you’re going to get there. It’s just very predictable.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You’re absolutely right. The small changes do help.

DEBRA: Yeah. If you walk backwards, you’re not going to get to where you want to go.

So just being aware (I know we’ve talked about a lot of things today that might sound scary), but just be aware of the things that are the negative things and saying, “What can I do about those?” and knowing what are the positive things (like taking supplements or some homeopathic remedies or things like that) and actually doing those things will move you forward, that’s where you have control over what your health is going to be.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely. And these are some simple things. We’re talking about vitamin D, we’re talking about E, we were talking about looking at the carbon monoxide release in your house and the amount that’s there.

Also too, I found some studies here (we’ve kind of talked about this in the past), folic acidstatus is very, very important. So, folic acid really has always been implicated in preventing against cardiovascular disease. And the big things that it’s doing, it’s playing a role on preventing any kind of damage in the blood vessels themselves and in the heart.

But also what’s interesting (we’ve known this for a long time) is that folic acid and B vitamins are associated with lowering homocysteine. And homocysteine is a marker in the bloodstream. That’s another blood test that you can also order, the homocysteine level.

Homocysteine is really a marker of inflammation more so though for cardiovascular outcomes. It’s not necessarily an inflammatory marker per se, but when we see homocysteine elevated, the physician, in turn, will be concerned about what’s going on specifically with the body.

And homocysteine, especially if somebody has cardiovascular disease in their family, if it is elevated even mildly, that’s normally a red flag that they are going to be at risk for heart attack.

Homocysteine comes down very, very nicely and reproducibly with folic acid, maybe some pyridoxine and a little bit of B12. I use a formula that I love a lot. It’s really good. It’s called Cardio B. That’s got five milligrams of folic acid, it’s got 100 of pyridoxine, 1000 of B12. It’s great for energy. It’s great for mental health because folic acid binds to serotonin in the brain. It has really reproducible effects of lowering homocysteine really, really thoroughly in the body.

That’s an easy, inexpensive way to get homocysteine down and in turn, lower your risk.

DEBRA: Good! These are all really good suggestions. We’ve only got about a minute left. So are there any final words on this?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely! The last of the studies that I found was in July 22nd, 2015 of this year, melatonin in the endoplasmic reticulum. What are the effects? Melatonin, our levels of melatonin, melatonin is an antioxidant. It’s anti-inflammatory. It has anti-tumor effects. It’s not just for sleep. So it’s really important.

And melatonin is a very safe supplement to take if you’re having any sleep disturbances. Really, they looked at sleep disturbances and instability in sleeping and night time instabilities. They’re very much associated with cardiovascular outcomes in a poor way.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: So melatonin, we see the people, if their melatonin levels are coming at the right time and there are high peaks in the blood stream (and it can be faint)…

DEBRA: And I have to interrupt you because we just ran out of time.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, yes. Sorry. Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you.

DEBRA: Thank you. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest was Pamela Seefeld. And you can find out more about our guests, past, present and future at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Be well!

The Healing Power of Organic Herbs

jane--hawleyMy guest today is Jane Hawley Stevens, Founder of Four Elements Organic Herbals. From the time Jane chose her professional path, it was clear it was with the plant world. For over 30 years she has specialized in herbs. Four Elements Herbals began in 1987 as the pursuit of Jane’s dream to establish a family farm and continue her horticultural career while raising a family. Jane started producing herbal products made from herbs she grew on her farm. Certified organic since 1990, she still grows and produces herbal products from the 130-acre farm in the pristine Baraboo Bluffs of Wisconsin, designated as one of the Last Great Places by the Nature Conservancy. Her products are inspired by the healing qualities of herbs and align with the power of Nature. They are available online and at health food stores and supermarkets throughout the Midwest. www.fourelementsherbals.com

read-transcript

 

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO

The Healing Power of Organic Herbs

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd

Guest: Jane Hawley Stevens

Date of Broadcast: September 08, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It’s Tuesday, September 8, 2015. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And we’re having a pretty big thunderstorm right now. So if you hear any rumbling in the background, I have a pretty sensitive mic. If you hear any rumbling in the background, it’s thunder and lightning.

Actually, I live in place that is one of the extreme weather capitals, actually, on the whole planet. We get a lot of thunderstorms. It’s been raining every day for the past month. So there’s a lot going on here.

It’s also the day after labor day. And so that’s the end of summer. We’re all back from vacation. Everybody is starting school, going back to our jobs. So there’s a lot of activity going on.

One of the things that’s happening that I just had to tell you about is that the state of California has filed an intent to declare that glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in RoundUp, which is sprayed on GMO foods, they filed this declaration to declare it as a cause of cancer.

Now, what the means in the state of California is that if a product contains an ingredient that causes cancer, according to proposition 65, it has to contain a warning label. There has to be a warning label on the product that says, “This product contains an ingredient known to the state of California to cause cancer.”

So this is going to be very interesting to me to see what happens about food products now that contain GMO ingredients. Are they going to get the proposition 65 cancer warning label? This is very, very interesting.

So today, here I’m back after – last week, I didn’t do any live shows. But this week, we’ve got live shows. I’ve actually got my schedule for guests for the whole entire month of September already booked. People are really excited about being on the show. I’m really excited about having them on. It’s a whole new year. It’s a whole new year.

So my guest today, we’re going to talk about something we’ve never talked about before on the show and that is herbs and their power to heal and using herbs in personal care, healing products.

My guest today is Jane Hawley Stevens. She’s the founder of Four Elements Organic Herbals. It’s a beautiful website and we’re going to learn all about herbal products today.

Hi, Jane.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Hi, Debra.

DEBRA: I’m so happy to have you on. I love your website.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Thank you so much. I am so happy to be the first one to be talking about herbs on Toxic Free Talk Radio. It’s such an appropriate subject to be talking about.

DEBRA: I think so too because one of the things that I’m very aware of is that there’s a whole spectrum, and on one end is very, very toxic, and on the other end is totally pure and wonderful. But there’s a whole gradation of things that you could just move in the direction away from very toxic and slightly toxic or not toxic, I think. But non-toxic would be the middle of the scale, zero, where there’s no positive effect to no negative effect.

But then you can cross that point and start having things that have no harm and have tremendously, wonderful, beneficial effects.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Yes, like they have then for thousands of years.

DEBRA: Yes. So tell us how you got interested in herbs. Tell us about yourself. You’ve got this large farm, 138 acres, I think it was. So tell us how you got interested in this.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: So when I was a child, my grandmother used to take me out in the woods in Northern Wisconsin. I’m here in Wisconsin. We’re known for the natural beauty in this state.

So when I had to pick a career, I realized I just was happy as outside, remembering those days when my grandmother would take me out in the woods to pick blueberries. So I just realized my career should be outside.

So I chose horticulture as a career. I went to school at University of Wisconsin Madison. I got my horticulture degree. And my first job out of school, they asked me to put in an herb garden.

So I was first introduced to herbs for garden design. I learned about how they grew and handled them well that way. And then I learned about using them for crafts and cooking. But then when my son was born in ’87, I started making remedies for the family.

I just approached it even like folklore. I didn’t really know how they worked or anything. But when I saw that they were healing my family, my son, quicker than my friends who were taking their kids to the doctor, quicker and more effectively, with less side effects and less recurrences, I just had to learn more and more about this.

So it has become my passion and my path since really 1981 to study herbs and how they heal us.

DEBRA: I really think that if we want to heal our bodies (and our bodies certainly need healing in today’s world), if we want to heal our bodies, the best thing to do is to look to nature for that because I do think that there’s a synergy between herbs and plants and animals and humans, just the whole natural world functions as this one whole.

And to step outside of that and say, “Okay, we’re going to use something synthesized in a laboratory like a drug,” and expect that to do what a living thing does like an herb, they are just two different things.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Yes, they are two different things. And what herbs have (which drugs don’t) is hundreds or thousands of years of use and proving that it works well and it works on how many different people and cultures that these plants have worked.

In fact, for some plants that we use for healing, they have been used in different cultures in different times and have been recorded for the exact same use. So that’s a proof that those plants worked.

Personally, I’m in the camp that I don’t even need scientific proof anymore because I have seen so much. Although it’s beautiful we have science available to us for those who really want science to prove things, but I just see plants do so many wonderful things and healing. It’s just phenomenal. In a way more balanced way than drugs do.

DEBRA: Well, I do think that our own personal observation is just as valid as the observation of a scientist, especially if we’re – I mean, scientists are mostly looking at modern technology and chemicals and things like that. It’s not to say that scientists don’t look at plants because some do, but I think that each one of us can certainly observe with our own senses if our body is getting better by doing something or if our body is getting worse.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Right! And another thing that we’re lacking in this culture is even to trust our own senses and our intuition. That’s a message I’d like to be putting out there too. We’re all born with intuition. There’s nothing in our culture that really supports that.

So it’s using herbs, it is really great to listen to your own business. Two, you need to know what herb you’re – well, that’s the one of the really fun things about herbs. It makes you look closely at your body and look up in a good herb book what can help heal you and make that connection and really help in self-healing, which I think is just so important these days.

DEBRA: If somebody is wanting to heal themselves with herbs, should they be going to a professional who knows what they’re doing in order to get those herbal remedies? Or can people look it up in a book on how there are herbs that people should watch out for that might not have positive effects?

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: I think both. If you’re dealing with a really chronic, big situation and you want to go to nature for healing, thankfully, there are so many trained professionals out there. Naturopaths and acupuncturists are both trained in herbalism. And so, those are two places to go.

But for every day, common problems that pop up, I think to have a good herb book like anything by David Hoffman or Rosemary Gladstar, I would recommend. Having an herb book is just key. And even if you could grow even five plants or so, you could do amazing things for your family’s health and your health.

DEBRA: That’s great. We need to go to break. But when we come back, let’s talk more about how you can grow your own herbs.

I would like to hear more about that and which herbs actually we should be using. What are those five basic herbs that we could grow in our own backyards?

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Jane Hawley Stevens. She’s the founder of Four Elements Organic Herbals. When we come back, we’ll hear more about how we can grow our own herbs and also, how she’s growing herbs and her herbal products.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Jane Hawley Stevens. We’re talking about herbs. We’re about to talk about growing herbs.

But I just want to say the sun is coming out. No more thunder, so I think we’re fine. We’re not going to get disconnected or anything.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: That’s good. Nice to have rain too, but it sounds like you’ve had plenty.

DEBRA: We’ve had plenty. So what I did last week instead of doing radio shows live was I was working very intensively in my garden. And when I lived in California, I had a beautiful, organic garden, and then I moved to Florida and everything is different. I didn’t garden at all last year. But I want to garden this winter.

And here, we garden over the winter because if in the summer time, it’s too hot. And you probably did the opposite in Wisconsin where it’s very cold in the winter time.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Correct!

DEBRA: So I’m about to start planting for my growing season. So tell me what are the herbs that I should plant and what they’ll do for me.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: So I have a list that I work with in Wisconsin, but I think they would work well in Florida. I did live in Texas for six years where I first started my business and grew herbs.

So my number one favorite herb is lemon balm. Lemon balm, the Latin name is Melissa officinalis. And whenever you see ‘officinalis’ as the species of a plant, it means that it was a traditional healing plant when the plants were named in the 1700s.

But lemon balm not only is easy to grow, it’s a perennial. It smells really good. You get a lot of volume per one plant even. And it’s so easy to harvest and it tastes delicious.

Not only that, it has such wonderful healing qualities. It has been proven to shorten the duration and lessen the symptoms of cold sores, so it has antiviral quality.

My favorite use is that it’s very calming on the nerves. It’s called a nervine and it really helps to calm you down for anxiety, stress. And it’s said to even impart joy. And when you smell it, you would – it’s very believable because it’s just so sweet and delightful.

So it’s good for all those reasons and good for digestion, and probably a whole lot more. This plant just does about everything. I like to travel with it to keep me calm and healthy. So that’s just a great one.

DEBRA: So how would you incorporate that in taking it? Would you make a tea out of it, or what would you do with it?

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Yes, you can make – the most traditional way to use herbs is either in tea or just eating them. But lemon balm is such a delightful tea. What you do is just – you can pick it fresh or dry it for when it’s not growing, and put it in a teapot or a cord canning jar.

Just loosely fill the jar with lemon balm that you had picked fresh, pour boiling water over that, seal it so the volatile oils don’t escape, which contain a lot of the flavors. So then you keep that nice lemon-y flavor in the jar. And then just let it steep for 10 minutes or so, and then you can start enjoying your tea.

And the same is true for other herbs that we’re going to talk about that are either the leaves or the flower portion of the plant.

If we get in to talking about roots, barks or seeds, that’s when you have to simmer the plant a little bit in order to get the qualities to come out of the tissues. They’re a little more firmly bound in leaves, barks and seeds.

So another great one would be chamomile, and chamomile is similar to lemon balm in the way that it’s calming. It’s actually even more calming. I even think of it as more sleep-inducing. I wouldn’t drink a chamomile tea unless I’m having a really, really stressful day, or if it’s later in the day and I wanted to help me go to sleep.

I used to make chamomile tea for my kids when they were sick because it’s calming and it’s antiseptic, slightly antiseptic, so it helps to kick out infection. It helps with digestion. It has some bitter qualities in it. So it’s good to have for anyone just to help aid their digestion.

We don’t think of bitter so much in this country for digestion, but it really helps to aid digestion by eating a little or having a tea that has a little bit of bitter quality in it because it just gets your whole digestion going. Maybe we can talk about that more later because now we’re talking about the best herbs to grow.

And again, with chamomile, you would collect some flowers, and the more you pick them, the more they’re going to produce.

So I Wisconsin, we pick them twice a week, or maybe three times a week, and they don’t like the real, strong heat. So they like, for us, they come up with lettuces in Wisconsin that would be in May when it’s still cool out. And then when it starts getting hot in August, they’re done. They go away. So we just chill them under and put a cover grub in this past weekend on that.

So in Florida, they’d be the first thing that you’d plant. Just think of them as when you plant lettuce, whenever you plant lettuce in whatever region you’re in.

So then I think sage is a really great plant because of how strongly antiseptic it is. That one you should – it likes good drainage. It’s a Mediterranean plant. It doesn’t mean it likes to be bone dry, but where it’s planted, it needs to be well-drained, which I think Florida would provide a good kind of soil type, if you added some organic matter to your – I know it’s kind of shelly in your – isn’t it?

DEBRA: Yes, it is. But I just want to mention that we have about 45 seconds, so we need to go to break.

So tell us what the other –

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Okay, sage and then because it’s antiseptic and it’s really good for cooking and for tea. And Echinacea is such a great beautiful plant. It adds a lot of beauty to your garden, and it’s great for boosting the immune system, and you can use the flowers, the leaves, and the root on the Echinacea.

DEBRA: Let’s say that’s one, two, three, four. You have a fifth one?

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: I love elderberry or nettles. Let me see. I guess I’ll just pick holy basil.

DEBRA: I love holy basil.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: It’s really gaining popularity in America, and it’s traditional in India, also known as tulsi or tulsi, as they say in India. And it’s delicious in a tea. And it’s what I’m drinking right now. It’s great for clarity, for keeping you healthy, it tastes delicious, and it’s an –

DEBRA: And it lowers your blood sugar.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: It helps you cope with stress.

DEBRA: Blood sugar too. It lowers blood sugar, if people have elevated blood sugar.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Yes, just so many wonderful things.

DEBRA: We’re going to go to break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk more with Jane Hawley Stevens. She’s the founder of Four Elements Organic Herbs. Her website is FourElementsHerbals.com. And when we come back, we’re going to find out all about her farm and her plants.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Jane. Jane, I’ve forgotten your whole name. Here we go. Jane Hawley Stevens.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: I’m happy to be with you today, Debra.

DEBRA: Things happened during the break, and I have all the information just right here on a window on my computer screen. And if I’m looking at something else, and I come back during the break, it’s like, “What’s her name?”

Jane Hawley Stevens. And her website is FourElementsHerbals.com.

So you have this very large, certified organic farm. Tell us about your farm and about what it’s like to get certified organic. Why is that an important thing?

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Well, my farm is situated in a beautiful area called the Baraboo Bluffs, which the Nature Conservancy considers one of the last great places because there are so many woodlands here that are undeveloped, mainly, because it’s very rocky.

So I have, I think, the good fortune of seeing wildlife up here like last Christmas, I got to see a cougar running on my way to my Christmas party, and we have really great wildlife.

So it’s really in the wild. It’s very beautiful and pristine that way. And I was fortunate enough to find this farm, one of the last good deals in the Bluffs, 130 acres.

At the time, I had already had my business, and I was certified organic in my other location of three acres. And really, this was such a gift to me because I was looking for just five acres or any place at all I could continue my business. But this was a place that I found and it was just because of the circumstances, I was able to get it for a really good deal.

So that’s very cool, and it’s just so beautiful, and like I said, pristine.

DEBRA: There’s a great picture of it on your website. Listeners, you should go to her website, FourElementsHerbals.com, and on the homepage, there’s a little slideshow, and one of them is her farm, and it’s just so beautiful.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Yes, you can see how it’s surrounded by nature, not agriculture. So that’s a really good thing.

So my husband and I both have horticulture degrees from UW Madison, and so I also had this vision of having a small family farm, and it was my interest in herbs that grew into this line of herbal products.

We do grow the herbs that go into the products. We make teas, tinctures, creams, lip balms, soaps, salves, all different herbal products.

The Tea Project is a more demanding with the quantity of herbs, and I did find a certified organic herb farmer in Minnesota who has more equipment than I do. So I’m able to buy some of my herbs from him. But because my real passion is growing plants and also how they’re used, we still like to grow almost everything right here.

DEBRA: That’s just wonderful. I know having grown plants myself, herbs and flowers, and food, and even here in Florida, I have these little pots outside my backdoor where I grow various herbs like – culinary herbs I grow. So I’m not looking at them medicinally, but to have something like fresh parsley and fresh chives, and my very favorite, herb is pineapple sage.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: It’s so pretty too.

DEBRA: It is, and I eat the flowers.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Yes, they’d be beautiful in a salad too.

DEBRA: Yes, they are. I love pineapple sage. I love growing nasturtiums and then putting flowers in my salad, the nasturtium flowers that are so peppery.

I had some mustard plants in California when I lived in Northern California. In the springtime, they just have fields and fields of mustard. And I would eat the mustard flowers. And so, I actually grew some mustard flowers here and put them in my salad one spring.

And just having – listeners, if you never had this experience of growing your own food or herbs, or not going someplace where they’re growing them. I’ve had a lot of experience with that too, going to small farms and things where you can just eat the food or the herbs just right out of the buds.

It’s such a different experience than even if you go to a farmer’s market.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: It is. And you really brought up a good point too about – you were mentioning that these were culinary herbs, but really, the culinary herbs have great medicine in them too.

We think of sage and thyme as being something that we season food with. But these are highly antiseptic plants that have a lot of activity in them.

One of my favorite remedies for a cold would be either sage or thyme tea, especially thyme helps to open the bronchioles.

So by growing even some culinary herbs, you’re going to get a lot of medicine out of that. Parsley is so full of vitamins and minerals. It’s really – if you buy any type of vegetable powders, you can add just your own fresh parsley into your drinks or your foods and have just a powerhouse of vitamins and minerals.

DEBRA: I think that there’s a difference between something that’s fresh and something that’s dry then powdered. There’s a vitality to it. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t take them dried and powdered. But there’s a vitality to the freshness.

When I cut a piece of parsley and then it immediately goes in my salad. I just eat it, just eat those flowers of the pineapple sage. It just feels different.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: It’s also very empowering to grow something of your own too. Even if you have a pot that you put – if you live in an apartment and put it outside someplace, by growing just a few herbs that you can use, it’s very empowering for you to be able to grow some of your own either food or herbs and use them.

I think there’s really great energy in that too, just the self-sufficiency of taking care of yourself in that way.

DEBRA: I also like – I agree with everything you said. I also like the process of knowing that I’m taking care of the plant that I’m watering it and I’m feeding it, and I know what goes into it, and then it produces something for me. It’s like a gift.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Yes, it is a great interaction. That’s just such an important point about just the whole relationship of people and plants, how our culture has been getting more and more removed from plants since World War II and relying on store-bought stuff.

Even if you can go to nature and find something, have a proper ID book, and even collect some dandelion greens in a place that isn’t sprayed and add those to your salad, that’s a great digestive aid. And bitter, like I was saying before, which is so great for your digestive system. It can help with a lot of digestive issues by adding bitters to your salad and just finding some things that grow in the wild that you can properly identify.

DEBRA: When I lived in California, it was very easy to find those. Just as I would go for walks in the woods, I would learn what those were. It’s a lot more difficult here in Florida because I live in a suburban area. So the difference between living out in a rural area in Northern California and living in suburbia in Florida is amazingly different in terms of what and the original ecosystem is there. Not much here at all.

We need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll talk more with Jane Hawley Stevens at Four Elements Organic Herbals. Her website is FourElementsHerbals.com.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. You see, you take a week off and you forget to say everything, how to say everything.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Jane Hawley Stevens. She’s the founder of Four Elements Organics Herbals at FourElementsHerbals.com.

Jane, tell us, what does Four Elements mean?

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: The four elements are air, earth, fire and water. And of course, we use those a lot when we’re doing gardening and growing plants.

DEBRA: So there’s a Chinese system of four elements. Are you just referring to the four elements, or are you referring to the Chinese system?

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: It’s not really the Chinese system because if it is was the Chinese system, I think they would have the fifth element of wood in there.

DEBRA: Yes, you’re absolutely right. So the four elements are traditional earth, air, fire and water that goes into the growing of all the things, all the plants.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: That’s right. That’s what we’re based on.

DEBRA: Okay, so if somebody is looking for an herbal product, what are some guidelines about how to choose a good one? Are there herbal products that don’t have any herbs in them for example?

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: I think – and this is a big issue because the FDA is wanting – there’s some talk coming down the pipeline of every time somebody is – a manufacturer makes something with an herb, they’d have to take it to a lab to have it tested. But it does make sense if you’re just getting a powder from who knows what source, and you can’t identify it.

It’s different with me because I get the seeds, I grow the plant, I know what it looks like. And so I know I’m harvesting the exact gene or species that I want to work with. But I would – there are very reputable companies out there, but I like companies that are maybe smaller-owned in that the owner has a good reputation as an herbalist. It’s great if the person is growing their herbs and there are a few companies left like that too.

DEBRA: I agree with you. I know that – especially when I lived in California and it’s not so much available here in Florida. But I used to belong to community-supported agriculture, and so I could actually go to the farm where my food was being grown. I could work on the farm with the farmer if I wanted to. I could help harvest the food and put it in a basket.

So I knew exactly what was going on.

One of the things that is most distressing to me about the consumer world is that even as a consumer advocate, I can’t always find out what has gone into the product, whether it’s a food product or any other kind of product. And yet, if I were to decide that I wanted to buy one of your products, for example, I can just talk to you. I can send you an e-mail. I can pick up the phone and you can tell me all about it.

And you would.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: True. All of the ingredients that are in my products, you can read them. It’s not a long chemical name. It’s all simple ingredients that can be read easily. It’s just a real basic herbalism.

DEBRA: What’s your best-selling product?

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Well, it’s called Look, No X Ma! and I designed it for my daughter. When she was just an infant, she developed eczema. And I really researched that situation really hard and came up with this one remedy that is, by far, my best-selling product. It floats my whole business really.

We also make a soap out of that same combination of herbs.

DEBRA: What’s another product that people like? If you didn’t have eczema, what would be a good, first basic product for someone to try if they don’t have any experience with herbs?

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Well, I love the Rose Comfrey cream. So I have two comfrey creams, an unscented comfrey for the very chemically sensitive. It has very few ingredients in it. Another one of my top best-sellers is Calendula Neroli cream.

Down in Florida, you probably know how beautiful the orange blossoms smell. And that’s the scent when it’s distilled into a scent oil, orange blossoms mare called neroli.

So this is – calendula, bright, sunny, healing, calendula flowers. And then combined with that great scent of neroli, it makes a really lovely cream.

DEBRA: I’ll tell you when I first moved to Florida, my house is not a farm. It’s on a, what I would call, a large suburban lot. And so I have this beautiful backyard with all these trees, oak trees. And then when I moved here, there was an understory of citrus trees, different types of tangerines and grapefruits and oranges and things.

And there was a certain week in the spring when they would all bloom. And it was just so heavenly. You just go out in the backyard and have this gorgeous scent.

At that time, I was planning a wedding of my own, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get married just on those days when all the citrus trees are blooming?”

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Would that ever be nice? So gorgeous. And I just knew you were going to use the word heavenly when you described that smell.

DEBRA: It is. There’s just nothing like it. I just could breathe that all day long when those trees are blooming.

And that’s what nature is like. There’s nothing that duplicates. Nothing man-made that can duplicate that magic of nature, whether it’s the fragrance or the taste or the way it makes your body feel. It’s just a pretty incredible thing.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Yes, nature is here for us. Nature is here to heal us. I think it’s just so clear even to spend a time in a walk or watching the sunset, which is something that you have in Florida, either the sunrise or the sunset. All that beauty and majesty can really soothe us and help heal us and provide even an opportunity for our intuition to speak to us clearer.

Not to mention all the great plants that are out there that we have that are traditionally used or even have not yet been discovered their use.

In fact, that’s one definition of a weed, a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

DEBRA: Yes, I’ve heard that. I’ve heard that definition and I think that that’s right. I think all plants have virtues. We just need to find what they are. That sounds so lovely.

Are there a lot of non-organic herbs that – is there something about how herbs are processed that we should make sure we should get organic?

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Well, I think everything should be organic. We should have an organic plant as far as I’m concerned.

DEBRA: Yes, I agree.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: I wouldn’t really want to take medicine that’s been sprayed. It seems very counterintuitive to say the least, not to mention, there’s so much toxicity in fungicides and herbicides.

I was so happy to hear your message about glyphosates before the show. But yes, it’s really important to be certified organic too because you really have to prove in a lot of different ways to your inspector who comes every year about how well you’re keeping your products or your plants clean.

It really creates a great paper trail, which helps in a lot of other ways. You have to write down your daily chores and any off-farm inputs, anything that came from not on the farm that came onto the farm.

And so you have a great paper trail.

It is pricey but I think it’s worth paying to prove to people for that security that you are walking your talk. You’re not just saying it.

DEBRA: That’s right. I agree with that. I, of course, have heard the word organic for many years, but as a consumer advocate, I continue to research and learn more and educate myself as the years go by. Within the last few years, I’ve done a lot of research about what does organic really mean.

It means a lot more than just no pesticides, which is a big and fluent thing. But the whole process of certifying organic and all the things that you have to not only keep track of, but think about and consider that each one of those steps, each and everything that you do…

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Because you have to rebuild the soil. You have to take your soil out of production and put it into a cover crop every three years. And I think that’s really a beautiful thing because it just gives you a chance to honor and rebuild that soil in a way that you might not if you weren’t required to.

It’s so easy to just want to keep growing something either because you love growing something or just for the production sake of it.

They have a lot of good requirements.

DEBRA: I think so too.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: There are all different certifying agencies but it’s a very worthwhile thing to just assure people that you are walking your talk.

DEBRA: I think it would be great if all products of all types had that same kind of structure that required reporting and record-keeping, and all of those things so that – every product has a story, and if everyone could tell the story of their product to the customer, I think that would be incredible.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: Yes. A great idea while you’re saying that, I thought, wouldn’t it be great if you would have to prove if you sprayed chemicals and all the organic people wouldn’t have to go through all of that.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. I totally agree with you.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: And then, the people who spray all the chemicals, they don’t have to go through all the paperwork and prove it and pay the fees.

DEBRA: I often say that a label shouldn’t say organic apple sauce. It’s the other apple sauce. It should say apples and pesticides.

JANE HAWLEY STEVENS: There you go. Someday, we can create a vision here.

DEBRA: Yes. Well, thank you so much for being with me, Jane. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you. And again, Jane’s website is FourElementsHerbals.com. And you should just go there and see how beautiful her farm is, and how beautiful her plants are.

I’m just so happy that we talked.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out who’s going to be on for the rest of the week. Also, you can listen to any of the 200-plus past shows. They’re all archived and some are even transcribed.

Be well.

What We Can Do About Cancer

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking about cancer—what it is, how you can prevent it, and how you can help your body fight it if you have it. One of every two men and one of every three women in the USA and other western nations now have a chance of getting some type of cancer in their lifetime, but it is preventable. Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and selling top quality medicinal supplements, so she’s seen it all. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
What We Can Do About Cancer

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld

Date of Broadcast: August 26, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It’s Wednesday, August 26th 2015. I’m here in sunny Clearwater, Florida.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s on every other Wednesday, so she was on two weeks ago and will be on two weeks from today again.

I have her on so much because she has so much information from her viewpoint as a registered pharmacist who also dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances at her natural pharmacy, here in Clearwater, Florida.

So, she talks to us about drugs and their side effects and how they might not be so good for us and she also talks about what we can replace them with. She’s familiar with how the body works, how different substances interact in the body and what we can do to get healthy and stay healthy.

Today we’re talking about cancer. And that’s because two weeks ago when she was on, I was talking about somebody that I know who was just diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer.

Right before that I’ve heard about one of our guests that we’ve had on the show. She called me and said she was just diagnosed with breast cancer. In fact, she just had surgery last week.

This is just too much cancer. It’s too much cancer. There are so many things we could do to prevent cancer. There are natural substances that we can use to help our bodies recover with cancer. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Hi Pamela!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hi! It’s great to be here!

DEBRA: Thank you! So, where should we start?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, I think a good starting point will be talking about some of the chemicals or some of the things that are in our environment that are making us more prone to cancer. We know the statistics are pretty high as far as the incidents of breast cancer in the United States.

We’re exposed to chemicals on a daily basis in the environment around us and really, most people that are probably listening to the show eat pretty well, probably pretty clean and diet does affect to some degree what you’re doing. But also you have to realize that environmentally, you’re not living in a bubble and you’re exposed to pesticides, chemicals, especially in the drinking water and in the soil and also, in the tire dust.

If you walk by a road or if you’re jogging outside or even if you’re coming in and out of the store, the dust coming off the road is pretty high in cadmium. So really, I want people to realize that everybody has some risk and some skin in the game, so to speak.

DEBRA: I would agree with that, that even if we were to remove every chemicals that causes cancer from our homes, that out in the world when we go to a store or school or walking down the street, breathing, there’s actually a lot of carcinogens in car exhaust. So, if you’re sitting in traffic or even driving your car, these carcinogens are there.

So, one of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is not so much about avoiding chemicals anymore (although we should certainly do that), but it’s more about managing our chemical exposure, I think and being able to find the balance between reducing it as much as we can and doing the other things that we need to do like detox in order to help our bodies cope with the other chemicals that we are being exposed to that we can’t do anything about.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! And really, that’s why in previous shows, we had to talk a lot about it. I’m a big advocate of doing the Body Anew and I know you really like the Zeolite a lot. When you do these things on a daily basis…

DEBRA: I like taking Body Anew also, I do both of them. I take both of the on a daily basis.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Perfect!

DEBRA: Both of them.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely! And what I can say is when you’re doing these processes, you’re removing out chemicals on a daily basis that you’re exposed to. It’s like taking out an insurance policy, that’s the way I look at it.

I’ve been on the Body Anew probably almost 18 years now, at least 17 (I’ve lost count). It really makes a huge difference in taking these things out of the body on a daily basis.

It’s important to realize that even heavy metals, they stay within two inches of the surface soil. They’re not going to be going anywhere. So, you don’t know if somebody dumped them in your backyard a hundred years ago and we have to think about that too.

People are more acutely aware today perhaps, environmentally, of how things are being affected, how animals are being affected and plants. But a hundred years ago, people were really not being careful with chemicals and with the byproducts of industrial wastes because the knowledge wasn’t there.

DEBRA: That’s right. That’s totally right! And they would just go and put things – if they had extra gasoline, they would just go and dump them on the ground.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! That’s exactly right. And so, we can’t control some of the things that are happening here.

And also too, a lot of the pressure-treated wood that people are using in their decks has arsenic. And so, the soil will definitely test higher for arsenic. The thing is you don’t know necessarily that in previous times, if they were using those types of wood beams to build some part of the structure of an older house perhaps (even now, people are using those wood decking), there’s a lot chemicals that are being used to treat that wood that does have bleaching effects on the soil.

DEBRA: It does. A few years ago, I needed to buy a post to put my mailbox on. I wanted to buy a wood post. So, we were going down various stores, looking to see what we could get. Here in Florida, wood rots every easily.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: So, the choices were that we would either get the pressure-treated or just a vinyl post, neither were good choices.

But when we were shopping, I was asking somebody who works as a builder and he works with pressure-treated wood all the time (and this was before they changed it to the new less toxic ones, but still toxic) and he said, “Oh, that’s not toxic. With our bare hands, we just put those in the ground and then, eat lunch.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, my Lord!

DEBRA: And so, they still have this stuff on their hands and they’re picking up their sandwiches and hamburgers and putting them in their mouths.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, my gosh! That’s a crazy story! But I believe it. I really do because ignorance is bliss. If you start looking around and seeing where these things are coming into your life, you’re going to be much more aware of what is happening.

DEBRA: So, what are some of the chemicals specifically that people should watch out for?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right. Good. This is pretty interesting. If we look at HPTE, that’s an abbreviation for 2,2-bis(p-hydroxyphenyl)-1,1, 1-trichloroethane. I’m just going to pick some random chemicals, we’ll talk a little bit about those and I did some searches on this.

DEBRA: Okay. Good.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Estrogenic effects, most specifically. And with this pesticide effect (and this is pretty prevalent in the environment), the estrogenic effects is it affects follicle-stimulating hormone in women (that’s FSH).

When you have something that mimics and estrogen, the collective term to chemicals that mimic something else and they have bioactivity in the body is xenobiotics. That’s the term that they’ve assigned…

DEBRA: That’s a great word. I had to look it up. It’s X-E-N-O-biotics.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! Yes, xenobiotic. This particular chemical which tends to be pretty ubiquitous, it’s highly in the environment (you spray this on foods and so forth). This particular pesticide, affecting follicle-stimulating hormone, what does that mean?

Well, for women follicle-stimulating hormone is what starts to be elevated when they have menopause. When it goes up and it’s elevating, that’s when you get the hot flushes and you’re getting the night sweats, the irritability, the weight gain.

So, we can just further the dots when we know that this is affecting FSH, that maybe the women’s estrogen is affected in a way in FSH, that menopause maybe more severe, menopause may come sooner than in normally would and may affect fertility. And this is very important because that’s what women especially are going be very concern about.

DEBRA: Yes. Go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So, that’s what you need to look at. What I can also say and what also would work as xenobiotics and estrogenic effects are not just these chemicals, but plastics in the environment. So, if you heat up food in plastic, little beads of plastic.

They are starting to come to recognize the dangers of these little beads of plastics that they put in these some of these soaps. They’re finding these all in the oceans.

So, these little plastic beads or the plastic itself is leeching out into the food that we’re eating, they act as estrogens in the body.

And I can say that there’s actually a homeopathic product that if you’re really concern that you’ve warmed up food in plastics for a long period of time, you have breast cancer in the family, you’ve had breast cancer or they’re watching certain areas in your breast because of density, there’s something by Desbio called Detox 3 that actually removes out plasticizers that have xenobiotic estrogenic activity in the body.

DEBRA: I think that’s a really important thing for people to be aware of because we’re exposed to so many of these plasticizers in so many different ways unless you’re doing things like me where you’re storing your food in glass instead of plastics. I don’t know, I have plastics in my house, but not very much.

We need to go to break. When we come we’ll talk more about cancer and what we can do to prevent it and other things having to do with good health. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist that prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substance. She has her own natural pharmacy here in Clearwater called Botanical Resource. You can go to her website at BotanicalResource.com.

But Pamela, why don’t you give us your phone number. She is happy to talk to you at no charge if you call this number she’s about to give you and make some recommendations for you about how you can get off-drugs and use natural substances instead. Tell them what you do.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely! So, my background is clinical pharmacy, but I also studied pharmacognosy, which is plant science, at the University of Florida. I have my own pharmacy which does not have much in drugs. We do natural products, homeopathics, many professionally used and other health food store ones.

I’m very respectful of people’s time and money, so I don’t suggest something that’s overly priced. I would very honored to help you with your family, also for your animals. I do veterinary homeopathy as well. The consultations are free. You can call me here at my office, it’s 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I’d be very helpful in anything that you might have, any questions and even your health issues.

Also, today we’re talking about cancer, if you are worried about preventing cancer, you have family history, I would like to help you pick out the right quality products that would be most beneficial for you.

DEBRA: Thank you. So, before we go on, I just want to mention a few things that I’ve come across recently. The page I’m looking right now is on the Breast Cancer Fund website. It’s called Chemicals and Radiation Linked to Breast Cancer. And it has a number of – let’s see how many, a couple of dozen, maybe three dozen different chemicals where there is a page for each one of them. These are all chemicals related to breast.

Some of the things that are on here are pesticides like Atrazine, Bisphenol A, which is in so many things (canned food and cash register receipts, when you’re touching cash register receipts, you have Bisphenol A on your hands unless there are using the BPA-free ones).

Also, bovine growth hormone (that’s in milk), cadmium (that Pamela mentioned earlier), DDT in pesticide. What else do we have? Hormone replacement therapy, hormones in personal care products, infertility drugs. It just says oral contraceptives, phthalates that are in chemicals and personal care products, parabens, methyl and propylparabens that have been used for – it used to be that all the natural products have methyl and propylparaben because we thought they were safe and they’re taking them out now.

There’s a whole list here. So again, it’s called Chemicals and Radiation Linked to Breast Cancer. If you just type that on to a search engine – actually, I’ll put a link to this on the page on ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com about this show, I’ll put that link.

And also, the Environmental Working Group just came out with a list a couple of weeks ago, a PDF where they’ve put the top 12, their Dirty Dozen. They have a Dirty Dozen Series. They’ve picked up their dirty dozen top chemicals that cause cancer including lead, mercury, phthalates again, DEHP, let’s see, PBDEs, all these numbers, triclosan (which is in disinfecting soap), things like that. So, you can take a look at these.

But there’s another thing that I wanted to mention and I think Pamela read about this too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct!

DEBRA: This new report from Environmental Working Group where they took a research from a project called The Halifax Project where 300 scientists around the world are studying how cancer is formed. And one of the things that they’re studying with regards to chemicals is how chemicals that don’t even – if they don’t cause cancer by themselves, but combined, they cause cancer.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: The reality is that in our world, we’re not being exposed to these chemicals one a time. They’re in the environment, they’re combined when they get in our bodies. They combine in our bodies. And this is just wow! This just upped the stakes. If we can’t identify the exact chemicals that are causing cancer, it makes it a lot harder to control them.

But they do have specific chemicals that they’re looking at. And in the Environmental Working Group site, they have a list of chemicals that are being investigated by The Halifax Project. I’ll put a link to that too. So, you can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look at the archives and you’ll see the post for today’s show. I’ll put those links on there.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Really, this data is just very humbling for all of us. They’re trying to be so proactive and we realize that we’re bombarded.

And that’s how life really is. When you look at chemicals in the body and the things that we combined, our whole body is a chemistry factory.

These chemicals come in and out of the subcutaneous fat. They come in and out from our food, from the water, the air we breathe. It’s really important, the detoxification processes of body (mainly in your respiratory tract, your skin and also the fact of your liver), that these things are all working collectively in your best interests and that they’re effective.

That’s where nutrition is very important, your health is important, getting enough sleep is important , taking a detox product. All these little things can add up to quite a big difference. All it takes is one of these chemicals, either additive or alone, to start turning on the genes. And once those genes get expressed as cancer, if your immune system does not identify it, you result in having the diagnosis.

DEBRA: We almost need to go to break. But when we come back, I want you to talk about how the genes get turned on. As you’re talking, I’m thinking it’s not just one part of your body, it’s not just the detox system, it’s the immune system too, it’s the digestive system because you have to get those chemicals out through the intestines. Really, every system in your body needs to be working in order to prevent and fight cancer. And how many of us can say that every part our bodies are working?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely! That’s one why doing these detoxification processes is so important. Not doing it on a daily basis, you’re really taking a chance.

DEBRA: I completely agree with that – completely, completely. Okay, so when we come back we’re going to talk about more with Pamela Seefeld about how genes get turned on and expressed and turn into cancer.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and Pamela’s – would you give your number again in case people want to call you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Okay, we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances at her natural pharmacy called Botanical Resource. That’s BotanicalResource.com.

So Pamela, tell us about what happens with the genes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. So, they’re called as the gene expression. Cancer cell is characterized as uncontrolled cell growth and proliferations. These cells are growing, their turnover is very rapid and they don’t look like the cells around them.

It’s important to say that. When we have chemotherapy, it targets this turnover, this cell cycle, which is at a higher rate than the other cells around them. And that’s why people lose their hair and also why they get sores in their mouth and their GI tract because the cells in the mouth and in the mucousa of the GI tract and also the cells in the follicles of the hair tend to have similar growth cycles with cancer. Their turnover is very fast. That’s why people lose their hair. I think it’s important for people to understand that what we’re talking about in relation to chemotherapy as well.

So, that’s what cancer is all about. It’s got this higher rate of turnover, it doesn’t look like the cells around it. And when they do a biopsy and they bring it to the pathologist, what they look at is histology. They look and see what are the cells are made of. That’s how they identify what cancer you have. That’s kind of the basics.

But it’s important to know about the genes and what regulates cell growth and how these cells, these genes get turned on that cause problems. We’re talking about chemicals and heavy metals and pesticides and all these things collectively as a whole, we know that these can be instigators of cancer.

So, gene expression of cancer can be enhanced by these chemicals. Something has to turn the genes on to start making these unusual looking cells or the cancer cells. These things that we’re talking about, that’s why this is so important to know, taking these out will stop the expression.

Some of the things you can do to enhance the good gene expression, believe it or not, fruits and vegetables. We’re talking about our diet.

DEBRA: I’m laughing because Pamela talks about this in every show, fruits and vegetables.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. Gene expression, we know that when you eat a salad and it has lots of nice, colorful vegetables that they’re always saying for everyone to eat, we know it turns on the genes.

When you’re taking blueberries, why don’t you think the antioxidant property is supposedly so good and it’s so healthy for you? Berries have high propensity of turning on genes. These flavonoids, they have activity on the actual genome. And if you think about that, that is just so amazing, that literally, we are what we eat.

DEBRA: We literally are. And also, the thing that just impresses me so much is how in the larger picture of life, life has provided all these healthy things that create healthiness. The plants are there, so if we eat the plants, we’re going to get all those things that are just there. They are not manufactured. They’re there as part of life. And if we take advantage of those things, our bodies will be healthy. If we don’t eat them, our genes don’t get turned on.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right! Life is really amazing. We’ve talked in previous shows that I think that the enzymes that we have in our liver or in the plants, we share a lot with the plants and the animals around us as far as we’re made of carbon and hydrogen. We really are made from the same building blocks, we just look a little bit different. And we have a different genetic expression depending on what we are.

It’s important to know that for people, we know that the diet does a make difference and also, removing some of these chemicals out. I think it’s important for people to realize that.

And this is interesting, when I was looking at getting prepared for the show here, I was looking at drugs in the water supply. This is pretty much the problem. I just found there were several different drugs. But apparently, what’s happening is these drugs are in the water supply and they use chlorination and they use this process of cleaning of the water, the drugs, a lot of times, remain in there. But when they chlorinate the water, it causes it to just become more reactive.

DEBRA: Ahhh.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. And they gave an example of Tramadol, which is a very common pain reliever. And what they found is that once it’s been chlorinated and it’s released back to the water supply and it’s back [inaudible 00:31:18], they can test. What they’re finding in the lot of the water, believe it or not, is conjugated estrogens from birth control pills and anti-depressants. There’s a lot of that in the water.

They came measure that. Most municipalities can measure that.

This is interesting. They were talking about these drugs and all the drugs that have the same issues as well. The chlorination process, when they try to clean up the water and the drugs are still there, it gets activated and then actually, it becomes more genotoxic.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right.

DEBRA: I’m not surprised. Again, it goes back to this combination…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. And is buried in the Library of Medicine. This is recent. This one is published August 17th of this month. So, this is not some old data. This is brand new data. They’re showing that these medications, because we’re so highly medicated here in this society, these medicines ending up in the water supply, they go through the chlorination process to try to clean up the water, and as the result of that, we realize that some of these things get activated in a much more dangerous form that they originally were.

So, even if you’re not taking these medicines, you’re still getting them.

DEBRA: That’s right! And another reason that everybody needs to filter their water.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely.

DEBRA: …and filter it with the water filter that I recommend because it will filter more out than any other water filter that I know.

Excellent! Excellent information, Pamela! Wow! So tell us…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Go ahead.

DEBRA: So, tell us real quick, before we have to go to break about how the immune system looks for cancer.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, good. So, the immune system identifies cancer cells and it finds it and it destroys it. It has different cells that go after cancer itself. Natural killer cells are the ones that actually have the most activity against cancer cells themselves. But our regular immune system does find and see it. It’s kind of like amoebas where they engulf it and destroy it.

When the body sees this and starts to go and kill these areas, the cancer’s gone in that particular day. So, we actually have the beginnings of cancer every single day in our body, but our immune system find it. It’s when our immune system is maybe not working as well or the gene is an aggressive type of cancer that’s in one particular area that the immune system does not have high activity in. And then, as a result of that, the person could end up with cancer.

I think keeping your immune system working properly is a big component, not just the gene expression, but a big component. The oncogenes are what they originally discovered. These oncogenes are turned on by chemicals and they produce cancer and that’s the big problem. If your immune system is not working as well as it was in the past, cancer can definitely take hold.

And I have to tell you too that older people have a higher propensity for certain types of cancer. And the reason why is because they’ve collected these chemicals all over their lifetime in their body and they haven’t taken them out.

So, the net amount in your body is going to put you more at risk for having a cancer outcome. That’s why you see a lot of these in really elderly people especially ccute myelogenous leukemia. The incidences have gone up considerably in that. They have a new study that was just published today, that imitations in remission are still there even after they’ve had the chemotherapy.

DEBRA: You know we can really see this easily. I know that when I was a child that everybody was smoking. All over the place there were ads for cigarettes, people were smoking on TV. Everybody thought that smoking is fine. And then, they started discovering that it takes 30 years of smoking cigarettes to develop cancer. I think that these chemicals, even though we’re not seeing the results of cancer maybe in our bodies right now, these chemicals are creating cancer just like cigarettes.

We need to go to break. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela [technical problem 00:38:56]

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: A little technical problem there. I think that we’re doing fine now. So, what was I about to say? Pamela, I don’t know if I told you that both of my grandmothers and my mother all died of Cancer.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh no!

DEBRA: So, I really have it in my family. And where I lived when I was a child turned out later to be cancer cluster. A lot of people on my block got cancer where I grew up for – let’s see from age 7 to about 21. So, this is not…

PAMELA SEEFELD: It was definitely environmental.

DEBRA: it was definitely environmental. I don’t know what the chemicals were in that particular area. But that house, we moved into a brand new house, it had wall to wall carpets. And my mother loved everything modern and so we had plastic furniture giving off all those plasticizers. That’s what I grew up with, just the standard American home. And my mother died when I was 24.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, my gosh! That’s terrible! I’m so sorry. Very young.

DEBRA: She was only 52. Anyway, so, how does family history affects whether or not somebody get cancer?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, that’s good. So, family history definitely plays part in especially breast cancer, but also can be for stomach cancers and colon cancers as well, heredity. And actually, I have to say too, sometimes there’s probably a quarter or maybe more of the breast cancer patients that get diagnosed that have no family history at all. So, you can’t always rely on that, but definitely family history is kind of a beacon to start looking for things and to be more proactive about preventing. That’s kind of what I’m in.

I’ll just talk for a few seconds about some of the homeopathics stuff that you can put in your water that would prevent and maybe up your bets as far as what you would have as far as family history. It’s important.

We were talking about the Body Anew and that’s important because that just basically takes out the base chemicals out the body, pesticides out of the subcutaneous fat that regulates the liver, the glucuronidation and conjugation, to help remove it out. And I also think it helps a lot in the sweating process of removing heavy metals out from underneath the surface of the skin because that definitely promotes that process as well.

There’s something in homeopathy that we used called Bio Gallium. Bio Gallium has anti-cancer property, it also has anti-viral property. It’s kind of a hallmark that you can use either as a treatment or you can use as a preventative. It’s liquid, you can put it in your water and that’s pretty much what most of the homeopathic doctors will use for cancer itself.

Also, we were talking about in previous shows about pH and alkaline.

DEBRA: Wait! I want to ask a question about Bio Gallium.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Please.

DEBRA: Now, one of the things that I’ve learned with my friend who had – I don’t know why I said had, but has cancer (he was recently diagnosed) is that he had no symptoms, no symptoms whatsoever. It was something entirely different that took him to the doctor. It wasn’t cancer symptoms. It was pain from the cancer eating away at his bones.

And so, I think that there are probably a lot of people – I don’t know if this sounds scary. But there’s probably a lot people who have cancer in various, early stages that have no idea that they have cancer. And so, taking something like Bio Gallium, that would help cancer of those early even if you don’t know it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right! I do have people that continue to smoke (I’m not here to judge people, I don’t tell people what to do, I have clients of all socio-economic backgrounds) and if they want to smoke, I tell them that you really need to be in the Body Anew and the Bio Gallium everyday and they do that. And that’s just to protect against the inevitable perhaps it might end up as lung cancer.

Remember, there are people that never smoke that end up with lung cancer. So, this is the problem with this. I’d still say it comes down to…

DEBRA: Well, outside of you. My great uncle lived to be a hundred and he smoked everyday and he did not die of cancer. But look at this…

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s true!

DEBRA: But let’s look at this for a minute because he was born a hundred years ago. I mean, he died like 10 years ago. So, he was born way back at the beginning of the 20th century when people had good food. They were not exposed to toxic chemicals. His whole health was established at a time before World War II when they started making all these chemicals and all these plastics and all these things that so many of us were born into. He lived to be a hundred while smoking.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, absolutely! I see this all the time. Actually, there was another lady here in the area that was 102. And this lady, she drank a lot. She was a retired doctor, she drank quite a bit and ate a lot of red meat and she was even smoking most of her life.

This is really true. What you have to look at the genes are definitely there, but also the fact that environmentally, depending upon what you’re exposed to. And these people that have been around for quite a long time, they were raised not on pizzas and Cheetos, but they were raised on real food. They still may be eating that way to some degree, that makes a huge difference.

Like I said, the foods that you eat have the genetic propensity to activate and make these genes expressed. It just depends what you’re coming in contact with. The majority of the time, when they were younger (and even to middle age), they’re clean living. It probably had something to do with their outcome.

But taking Bio Gallium and taking detox, it’s very reasonably priced. You’re only going to be using a little bit every day. Putting it in your water and drinking it throughout the day, if you’re really concern about cancer risks, family heredity, maybe you had cancer, you’re on remission, I highly recommend it.

It’s a pretty easy thing to do and it doesn’t really take a lot of time on your part that you have to spending stuff, mixing things, doing things.

It’s not going to take a big amount of time on your day. The rewards can be quite beneficial.

DEBRA: Also, if you’re an environment when you can’t remove the toxic chemicals like if you work some place that is a dangerous environment (or that could be even an office building)…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely!

DEBRA: Yeah, if you’re around toxic chemicals and you can’t remove them or don’t have control over them, taking something like these detox products will really help your body have more resilience instead of just succumbing to the effects of those products.

So, it’s just that the more times go by and the more I learn, the more I think that every single person just needs to be detoxing because there is not a place on Earth that anybody can go where there is zero toxic chemicals.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely! You have to realize too that a lot of the chemicals we were talking about, like heavy metals, they’re neurotoxic. So, not just even the fact of the cancer we’re talking about today, but the fact that you might end up with neuropathy, seizures.

There are a lot of other things that could be happening, taking these things out.

I mean, we’re talking about cancer today, but you have to look at the other health implications that are pretty severe and pretty debilitating that you really want to prevent especially like copper and nickel. When they combine (we were talking about the list of additive toxicity), when those two combined together in the body, they’re doubly more toxic.

And that’s important for people to realize. You have to be taking some things, perhaps on a daily basis, depending on your risks and depending on your own tolerance of what you want to take. You want to be doing that.

Also, they actually make a homeopathic product that I use quite a bit called Radiation. We’ve been using that multi for people that are actually undergoing radiation to help prevent collateral damage to the tissue. But if you’ve had lots of chest x-rays, lots of MRIs, these sorts of things, just from the past, just your own history, then you really might want to go on some homeopathy to take some of that radiation damage out. There are things that we can use for that that are developed by physicians. They are not homeopathic products, they are health pills, they are health food store quality. They are more of medical grade. That would be much more effective.

So, you have to look at your risks. Like we have said earlier, I’ll be glad to have a conversation with you at no charge to see what you’ve been doing up to date here. Perhaps you’ve had cancer, maybe you have a new diagnosis of cancer.

The good thing about homeopathy is that you can use this along with conventional therapy and I highly recommend that.

DEBRA: Yeah. Pamela, we’ve got less than a minute left. So, why don’t you give your phone number again?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. It’s Botanical Resource and my number here is 727-442-4955. I would be glad to help you and your family in any health need that you may have.

DEBRA: And Pamela is very well-regarded here. Even my medical doctors said that, “If Pamela tells you to do it, do it.”

So, we have to go. We’ve only got about 20 seconds left. Thank you so much, Pamela! I always learn so much.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you so much!

DEBRA: I know you wanted to say something about pH, but we don’t have time.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s okay. Have an excellent day! Thank you so much!

DEBRA: Okay. You’re welcome! You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out who’s coming up, the new guests coming up and you can also listen to all the shows in the archives. Be well.

Healthy Home Detox With Ron & Lisa

ron-lisaMy guests today are Ron & Lisa Beres. As healthy home experts, building biologists, published authors, professional speakers and Telly Award Winning media personalities, this husband-and-wife team help busy people eliminate toxics from their home with simple solutions to improve their health. We’ll be talking about how to “Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days.” Lisa is also the author of the children’s book “My Body My House,” and the duo are co-authors of “Just GREEN It!“—simple swaps to save the planet and your health. Lisa and Ron’s TV appearances include “Dr. Oz,” “The Rachael Ray Show,” “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” “TODAY,” “The Doctors” and “Fox & Friends.” www.ronandlisa.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Healthy Home Detox with Ron & Lisa

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Ron & Lisa Beres

Date of Broadcast: August 04, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m fussing around at the moment with technical things. Okay! This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

So it’s – I don’t have that page up. It is a date. It’s the 4th of August. Sometimes, I’ve just got all these technical stuff to do and I have to do it while I was coming. Oh, shoot! Okay, we’ll get this right.

So, it’s now the 4th of August and I know who my guests are. My guests are Ron and Lisa Beres. They are a wonderful couple. I’ve known them for a long time. They know so much about indoor air pollution. They now have become media personalities. They give webinars, they give trainings, they give consultations. They know so much about indoor air pollution. They are actually trained and certified in this area.

They’re building biologists.

Today, we’re going to talk about their healthy home detox. They’re about to do a program and it’s called Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days. We’re going to be talking about that.

Ron and Lisa, I’m not usually this scattered. It’s just I’m having one of those mornings. Hi, Lisa.

LISA BERES: We all do.

DEBRA: Sometimes you have these days where all of a sudden, there are all these things that you have get done. And then, the phone rings and you have to talk to the person on the phone for half an hour. And then it’s noon and it’s time for the radio show.

LISA BERES: It should be Monday, but it’s Tuesday.

DEBRA: It is Tuesday.

Here’s what’s happening, listeners. Lisa and her husband, Ron are both guests on the show today, but Ron can’t make it until later on the show. So he’s going to be joining us. In the meantime, we have Lisa who knows everything. She can say everything.

So Lisa, why don’t you start by telling us how did you and Ron get interested in doing what you do?

LISA BERES: Well, we started this journey about over 13 years ago. Actually, I’d say it’s about 15 years ago at this point. Time flies!

Ironically, I was engaged to Ron about the time that this all happened. So it’s a really unique time for us.

I was working as an interior designer. That’s what I went to college for. I loved my job and I really thought I was living a healthy life.

I do like to share this story because I think a lot of people can relate to it.

I was working out, I was a vegetarian, I shopped at Whole Foods and thought that, “Hey, this is it! This is the end of the story, being healthy.”

DEBRA: Yes, a lot of people think that.

LISA BERES: A lot of people think that. And I am so happy, by the way, that you do what you do because you bring so much awareness on a bigger scale and really educating people about such an important topic.

A lot of people really do. The buck stops there with food. They think as long they’re eating healthy, that’s the end. As you and I know, there’s a whole another segue to being healthy and that’s obviously your environment.

So at that point, I had just moved in. I wanted to move closer to Ron, we were engaged. I found this little charming beach cottage not too far from him. It’s pretty close to the beach. It had just been newly remodeled. So I was so excited.

It had a brand new hardwood floor, brand new carpeting, fresh, new coat of paint. It had a new, cozy gas fireplace. It had new vinyl windows and sparkling white, new thermofoil kitchen cabinets. I was in heaven! I thought that I found the best place you could possibly move into.

So I was working from home at the time and I moved in there. And suddenly – it happened really quickly for me after being there because I was literally in this house almost 24/7. I started getting really severely sick. I could not get out of bed in the morning.

Prior to that, I’ve been pretty energetic. I’m working out even sometimes twice a day. I could not get out of bed in the morning.

And then my hormones started going crazy. I literally stopped having my period for a year. I’ll get into that in a minute. And then I was having chronic sinus issues. I was chronically fatigued. It was just a nightmare. This was supposed to be the happiest time of my life. I was engaged and planning this wedding. I just felt horrible all of the time. My stomach was bloated. I was just a wreck.

So I started researching and began researching. And that time, there really wasn’t the information that’s available now. So I had to really dig and I stumbled across building biology. And I started connecting the dots. I started realizing that my symptoms were directly linked to these chemicals that are in our home.

And every single thing I mentioned in the home was off gassing chemicals that I was being exposed to in a really high dose. I was severely having reactions to that.

So as I started connecting the dots, I ended up becoming a building biologist. I studied that for quite some time. But during this process, I was, little by little, changing my environment. So I would start with one thing, and then go to the next thing, and then [inaudible 00:06:43] water and then air and then bedding and all of this.

It took about a year. I forgot to mention this. This is extremely important. In this process, I visited at least a dozen doctors. I visited everyone from acupuncturists to chiropractors to MDs to naturopaths, you name it, endocronologist. I went to everyone and every kind of doctor because I wasn’t getting the answers.

So I’d go to one doctor and he’d try to load me up with prescriptions. This doctor wanted me on this. I was never getting better. No one could explain why these things were happening to me. Especially, with my period, they’d say, “Well, you just need to be on the pill. That will fix it all. Let’s just mask yours symptoms with more medications.”

I actually did do that for a year because I got so desperate. I felt horrible. So I did go back on the pill for a year. And guess what? My period stopped even on the pill. So I knew something was really wrong.

As I didn’t make the changes to my home – it literally took me about a year. But after that my health did a complete 180. I was healthier after all of that than I was when I started.

DEBRA: That’s my experience too.

LISA BERES: Is it? It’s amazing because I didn’t really know much about detoxing your body and how these chemicals could affect us.

And so as I cleaned up my environment and cleaned up myself (I did detoxification through this), I literally became a different person. Ron and I looked at each other and said, “Are you kidding me? We have to do something about this.” We have to create a business or something where we can help other people because people don’t realize that their environments are directly affecting their health. They’re just thinking about –

DEBRA: That’s my experience too. As I started getting well, I figured all this out. I was doing this even earlier than you. I was doing this in 1978.

LISA BERES: Wow! I wish we met earlier.

DEBRA: That’s when I started. It was in 1978. I had no information at all. There wasn’t building biology then or there wasn’t me. I couldn’t read my own books.

LISA BERES: You couldn’t time travel to the future.

DEBRA: I had to go and just sit in the library and look in industrial journals and things to find where the chemicals were. I had a clue it was the chemicals, but there was no information. And by the time I dug up all of this information and I started removing these chemicals from my life, my home, I felt so much better I said, “I have to tell people about this because nobody was talking about it. I had exactly the same response.

LISA BERES: Yes, they look at you like you’re crazy. Definitely, one doctor offered me anti-depressants because I cried in her office. I was so at the end of my rope with nowhere to turn. I felt so overwhelmed. I literally got a little weeping moment, nothing crazy. And she said she could prescribe me anti-depressants. And that made me cry even more.

DEBRA: Listeners, listen to how vibrant, alive and energetic she is right now. I’m sure this is not how you were at the time.

LISA BERES: No, not at all. And I don’t take anti-depressants.

It’s crazy. And I think that western medicine, that is the underlying theme. It’s, “Hey, let’s just give you a pill and make everything better.” No mention of side effects and no mention of how these medications are loaded with so many other things that can cause problems. At the end of the day, they’re just masking, so they’re never really curing anything anyway.

DEBRA: Wow! Great story1 Very much like a lot of other people, and aren’t we fortunate that we found this out because I think there’s a lot of people who are suffering from this and not knowing what it is. And of course, they go to the doctor and the doctor doesn’t know what it is either. So that’s why we talk about it here.

And we’re going to go to break. When we come back, Lisa’s going to tell us about some of the toxic chemicals that she found in her home and their health effects.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lisa Beres. Her husband, Ron, is going to be on with us later. He’s off at another appointment at the moment. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lisa Beres of Ron and Lisa Beres. And they are media personalities who go on TV and radio and speaking engagements, and tell the world about toxic chemicals in the home and how they can make you sick, and how you can get well by eliminating them from your life.

So Lisa, what are some of these toxic chemicals and what kinds of health effects do they cause for people?

LISA BERES: Oh, boy! I wish we had more than an hour. It’s not enough time to list them all. There are so many. I want to talk about some of the ones that are most prevalent inside of our homes and the ones that made the biggest difference for me.

Indoor air, in general, I like to call the umbrella of the home. Basically, if you can clean your air, you’re really covering a lot of the things that fall under it. So when we talk about toxins in flooring or carpeting or paint or bedding, well that’s all permeating into our indoor air. So if we can clean up our air, we’re addressing a lot of the problem.

Indoor air, it can have everything from biological contaminants like mold and pollen and pet dander to bacteria to chemicals. It can have flame retardants. It can have VOCs, volatile organic compounds. I know you know this.

DEBRA: No, you’re talking to the listeners. They need to know.

LISA BERES: I do like to say this because we hear the term VOCs a lot especially this paint, but people don’t really know what that is. So I’ll just give you a quick rundown.

So VOCs, they are volatile organic compounds. And at room temperature, they off gas, which means they vaporize into the air into a gaseous form. We breathe in these chemicals. So a lot of times, especially in our homes, we can’t smell these. We definitely can’t see them. But we are, in fact, breathing them in.

And that’s what happened to me. I didn’t know that I had all these chemicals I was breathing in in the home. VOCs can include really dangerous chemicals, many of which are carcinogens that cause cancer. Some of the chemicals are formaldehyde, xylene and toluene, benzene, trichloroethylene, ammonia, acetone and the list goes on and on and on. And so, our homes basically are a toxic brewery.

As the green building craze happens – that was a good thing for energy efficiency. It saved on our electric bills. But what happened is the homes became very tightly sealed and these chemicals really got trapped within our homes.

So back in the 1970s, the average air exchange in our home was once every hour. So we were getting a new fresh exchange of air once every hour. Today, it’s once every five hours. People aren’t opening their windows and they’re definitely not purifying their air like they should. So we’re literally breathing in and these chemicals are getting circulated through our HVAC systems.

DEBRA: Maybe if we didn’t have the whole energy thing happen, so that we tightened our homes, that these chemicals might not have ever concentrated to the degree, so that we wouldn’t have the whole field of what’s now called indoor air pollution.

It wasn’t called that. When I started, there was no such field.

LISA BERES: None of this existed.

I can’t even imagine your journey because I felt like doctors looked at me like I was crazy. So back in 1978, I’m sure they were like, “What is this person talking about?” It’s nice to know that there are so many amazing doctors now that do address this.

But yes, that’s a great point. The tightening of the building envelope has definitely addressed that. But you know what else? There are so many more chemicals on the market today. We’re talking about over 86,000 chemicals [inaudible 00:17:35]. And of those, less than 200 have ever been effectively tested for health. And that’s according to the president’s cancer panel.

I think people also don’t realize that. They think that if something is for sale at the store, then it must have been approved and gone through rigorous testing. There you go. It’s, in fact, safe for you to bring into your home. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Cleaning products, for instance, are largely unregulated. It is a multibillion-dollar industry, and they don’t, by law, have to tell us what’s in the product. So they can list a couple of the ingredients or none of the ingredients or all of the ingredients. And they’ll often the use the term “fragrance” to hide hundreds of chemicals.

So people really need to be educated and really need to learn how to understand labels and know what to look for and what to avoid because this is how we can get trapped into bringing chemicals to our lives and our families unknowingly.

DEBRA: One of the things that really astonished me when I started studying this was the labeling laws are so different for different types of products. And the ones that are most toxic, cleaning products and pesticides, are not required by law to list their ingredients. But they are required to give these signal words like “caution” and “poison”. It was supposed to give you some degree of how toxic they are.

But many, many years ago, I read a report that said that these aren’t even correctly applied. So the most toxic products we have have the worst labeling and the least opportunity for us to know what’s really in them. I don’t think that’s right. I think that needs to be changed.

LISA BERES: It so needs to be changed, Debra. I am so with you on that.

The Toxic Substance Control Act was actually formed in 1976. And this is the problem. 80,000 of the 86,000 or something crazy like that (maybe it was 60,000) chemicals are grandfathered in, which means they never went through any testing.

This law has literally not been updated since 1976. So I know so many people in the grassroots movement are trying to get this changed, but they’re going up against big corporations who don’t have the vested interested in doing this because they don’t want you to know what chemicals are in your products. They want to put them in there and confuse you.

In fact, I know you’re familiar with EWG, the Environmental Working Group. They created their Cleaners Database. They have actually over 2000 different brands of cleaning products.

For consumers and especially anybody listening who’s like, “Hmmm… I have this product. I wonder because they’re not listing all the ingredients,” you can actually plug in the name of your cleaning product and find out the toxicity rating. And they’ll tell you how hazardous it is and what’s in it.

But they also created what’s called the Hall of Shame. And these were the worst offenders of all in the cleaners. I got to tell you this because this blew my mind when I read it. Comet disinfectant powder, the green powder (and I actually used this growing up because I had to. I was doing my chores. It’s crazy), they literally found that it emitted 146 different chemicals in their testing. Some of the chemicals were thought to cause cancer, asthma and reproductive disorders. And the most toxic chemicals that they found were formaldehyde, benzene, chloroform and toluene. Some of those are carcinogens. And they were not listed on the label.

DEBRA: Wow! That’s just wrong.

LISA BERES: It’s wrong. And it’s shocking. I really want to stress that because these are name brand cleaners that people are using and trusting.

And then Febreze air effects. People spray this thinking they’re cleaning the air. Actually, they’re just contaminating their air with more chemicals. That was shown to release 89 air contaminants.

DEBRA: Wow!

We need to go to break but we’ll be right back. We’ll talk more with Lisa Beres and her husband, Ron, is coming up too. You’re listening to

Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Lisa Beres. And also her husband, Ron, will be here, I think, in the last segment. And we’re talking about healthy home detox.

Now, Lisa and Ron have a new program called Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days. And you can go to their website. I’m going to read it to you, but it’s long. You can also just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and I’ve got the link there. You can just click right through.

You can go to TinyURL.com/HealthyHomeSignUp, and you can sign up there for a free webinar which will tell you more about it and give you some information about how you can clean up your home. And you can find out about how to sign up for their Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days.

I think it’s great, Lisa, that you’re doing because I know you. I know you’re an organized person and that you have all the information. Putting it all together in a program so that people, together, you can help each other make these changes in your life, I think, is absolutely great.

LISA BERES: Thank you. That was the goal. And I know you’ve done such a great job with your books doing that as well. Because we both were in a situation where we didn’t have tools to turn to, I thought, “Mine would be great.”

We made it 30 days, but you can take it as long as you want. But if you want to finish it in 30 days, you can. And it goes through 12 modules.

So it goes through pretty much every room of your home. And we covered kids, how to grow healthy kids, your kitchen, how to detox your kitchen, pets, your bedding, your air, your water. So many things that obviously, we aren’t going to be able to cover today.

We try to make it fun because this is really overwhelming and in depth, intricate topic. When we talk about our homes, there are so many elements that comprise our homes. So we go through each. It’s digestible bites of information and you’re not really overwhelmed. You go at your own pace. So that’s really the goal.

DEBRA: That’s very good. So tell us some of the things that people can do.And I just want to say that Lisa mentioned earlier that they’re really focused on indoor air pollution. I think that that really is like a basic thing. You could change the water that you drink, you could change the food you eat. But you still got this air going on 24 hours a day.

And so that’s a segment of life in and of itself that you need to handle. And there is so much that’s involved in it that it really is important to learn it and do it, and then be healthier.

So what are some of the things, give us some examples of tips that people can do or things that you’re going to be talking about in your course?

LISA BERES: Starting with indoor air, obviously, implementing an air purification system in your home, it’s literally essential today. I don’t even think it’s negotiable. You need to do that.

Opening your windows, really letting your home breathe like homes used to is great. We can’t always do that depending on where we live and the time of year. And now, it’s allergies. Over 60 million Americans have allergies today. So that’s not always an option. That’s why I’m a really big proponent of air purifiers.

If you’re on a budget, there are air purifiers that you can buy that aren’t going to break the bank. There’s really an air purifier in every price points.

I think, generally, you do get what you pay for when it comes to these air purifiers. Some of them are only going to filter up to 3000 square feet. Some of them will filter just a few hundreds. At a minimum, have one in your bedroom and your kid’s bedroom. Children, especially babies, definitely need to be breathing in good air.

In our program, we go through all the air purifiers and break them down and tell you which ones aren’t good. There’s actually some on the market that product ozone and that can actually be more toxic to your health. So knowing what to avoid and what to look for is super important.

And then, you know what? If you’re at a really tight budget, then you can actually get plants, certain plants. NASA did a study and found there were 50 indoor house plants that normally produce oxygen, but actually remove chemical vapors and toxic gases from the air we breathe. It’s fascinating.

DEBRA: That was really fascinating, they do. I don’t remember the numbers off hand, but I calculated out how many plants you would need and it was a huge number.

LISA BERES: It is a huge number. To effectively clean your air, it’s one every hundred square feet. So if you have a large home, you’re going to have a lot of plants.

It’s not going to replace your air purifier by any means. But these plants, what’s really fascinating is each plant was different, and some remove benzene, some remove formaldehyde, some remove the trichloroethylene, xylene, toluene, ammonia.

And so you can pick the plant based on what you need. Certain ones are better for your bathrooms, certain ones are good to have by your bed.

That’s great too in an office situation. If you’re in a cubicle and you can’t do anything about your air, you can put some plants at your desk and at least try to keep that area better, giving you good, clean oxygen and also absorbing some of those chemicals that are common in an office situation.

DEBRA: I totally agree with all that.

LISA BERES: There’s a lot we can do. Changing your furnace filter, that goes without saying. But yes, so many people are not doing that. 41% of homeowners are not doing that frequently enough. And so really getting in the habit of changing all of your filters, changing your air purifier, your furnace filter, your water filters.

You may have to get on a schedule of making sure you’re doing that because these can cause more harm when these start to get backed up with bacteria and things like that if you’re not changing them.

DEBRA: I totally agree. And I also think that indoor air pollution is such a big subject. And it’s so critical because of these gaseous chemicals that are in the air that just go right into your body so quickly.

The first thing I think people should do is get an air filter because it takes time to handle your carpets and your bed and all these different things that you need to change in order to reduce the indoor air pollution.

But just putting an air filter right from the start, you start protecting yourself right away.

LISA BERES: Exactly! I think that’s such a good point because we talk about you want to have organic bedding and you want to have organic sheets and you want to do all these great, expensive investments. But if you’ve got that air purifier that’s absorbing some of those VOCs and formaldehydes off the bat, you can actually weight and stagger these projects.

You’re probably familiar with this study that they did in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology where they found the average home has 400 chemicals. Some of the chemicals are toxic, some were untested. And so this is just what’s going on in America across our homes.

DEBRA: It is. I know it sounds fantastic or unbelievable to some people because you look around and you go, “Well, I don’t see anything” and you say, “I’m not sick.” But the thing that’s so key about this is it’s not about getting sick like being exposed to bacteria and getting a cold. These are chronic exposure chemicals. It’s like you can smoke cigarettes and not be sick and then suddenly, get cancer.

It’s that kind of chemical where they build up in your body. And as they build up and build up and build up, then somewhere down the road, you’re going to get an illness that’s really a major illness. And it’s changing your DNA and all these stuff. You can’t see it, but it’s there. And then one day, you get sick.

LISA BERES: That goes back to, you mentioned, the labels on the cleaning products, the warnings, the danger and the caution. Those are literally there just for the acute symptoms. Is the chemical going to burn your skin instantly or are you going to have a reaction right away?

But nobody labels products about the long-term health effects.

DEBRA: No, they don’t label them at all. Not at all, not at all.

We need to go to break. When we come back, I’m hoping Ron will be there with you.

LISA BERES: Yes, he’ll be here.

DEBRA: Okay, good. So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Ron and Lisa Beres. You can go to their website, TinyURL.com/HealthyHomeSignUp and get more information about their program, Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guests today are Ron and Lisa Beres. They are healthy home experts, building biologists, published authors, professional speakers, and Telly award-winning media personalities. Actually, we have an interesting topic here. So is Ron there now?

RON BERES: I am here, Debra. Yes, thank you for that intro. That was very nice.

DEBRA: You’re welcome. Thank you for being here. It’s nice to have both of you on.
So Ron, I don’t know if Lisa told you but we have a special topic for the two of you to discuss together.

LISA BERES: I did. I filled him in.

DEBRA: So listen, what we’re going to talk about now is about husbands and wives and toxic chemicals. I hear a lot from women, especially, “I want to clean up my house, but my husband doesn’t believe me. My husband doesn’t care about this. My husband thinks it’s all in my head.”

I want Lisa and Ron to talk about how they’re working together as a team to have a healthy home and to be supporting each other and reducing your toxic chemical exposure. So I’ll let you guys decide where you’re going to start.

RON BERES: Lisa, I’ll jump in because I know you’ve been speaking here. I do want to say, I was not that husband, but I was that fiancée.

I have absolutely been that.

I did not really know what was going on and I have to say I came from a very traditional background, worked in Corporate America, I met the girl of my dreams, Lisa, on the phone right now. And so we were very excited. We just started our relationship. She moved into a home that was really nearby where I lived. And that’s when things got a little bit weird.

I have to admit, I did not see what I see now. My eyes were wide shut, quite frankly, because through Lisa’s experience, she was feeling chronically fatigued (I think you guys went over this earlier)…

DEBRA: We did.

RON BERES: And so, it wasn’t that I didn’t believe Lisa, but it was frustrating because I wouldn’t fear, feel this or hear this. I really was that guy initially. But through the process of just – as Lisa was discovering things, and she was getting better, and things we’re making sense to me, I really changed my path there, and I can tell you, it does happen.

There usually will be a skeptical spouse at first because let’s face it, they can’t physically see what’s going on. And it’s multi-layered. Particularly, if there are a lot of things that can be bombarding or affecting your health (and in Lisa’s case, that was definitely true) from, you mentioned the air quality.

I’ll tell you a funny story. Our first few months of dating, one of the first things Lisa wanted because she just moved into her home was an air purifier. She started…

LISA BERES: For my birthday, yes.

RON BERES: For her birthday. And I was like, “Wow,” which is great. It could have been more expensive than that. So we got her an air purifier.

LISA BERES: Not a very romantic gift.

RON BERES: Yeah, first year relationship. Needless to say, it’s been quite a journey. And even some of the initial literature and things that

Lisa was reading to better educate herself and before we became building biologists, I didn’t really accept it at first. And ultimately, I’m living and breathing it now.

We are so inspired by how Lisa turned around with her health that at that time, we wanted to go to the rooftop and just preach and shout, “This is what happened. This is so great.” Especially me too, I didn’t initially know what was going on.

So we made it our mission to go out there and educate people. I know you’ve been doing this for a long time too, Debra. It’s great to speak to you again. We always admire the great work that you do.

DEBRA: Thank you.

RON BERES: So we did books, then TV, then speaking engagements. We even had a retail business. And so we really just absorbed ourselves in being the best we can be to not only help us but other people.

And fast forward to today, we are now working together in a business that is focused on healthy living, and it’s awesome. It’s great. We have learned through the years (and Lisa, you can attest to this), don’t want to totally hog the conversation here but how to work together effectively.

And so, we’re both partners here. I think the key to really working together effectively is to make sure that someone is heading a particular project or someone takes a leadership role in something else and the other person has a leadership role in another area. And then it blends together and gives someone that detail power and everyone feels comfortable. But it does take a little time to do this.

DEBRA: I totally agree with that because I know in my relationship, if he’s in charge of something like the garden for example, and I’m in charge of something else, like the home, then each of us gets to be in a leadership position instead of just having one person be the dominant thing. And then we trust each other, and we help each other and everything gets done because we’re both leaders. And I think that makes a huge difference in a relationship.

LISA BERES: Yes, I really do, trusting each other. We all have different talents too. So honoring the talents that each person has and letting really bring that to the table and shine. And I think the trust factor goes back to really even – anyone listening who is going through a situation where they’re sick and their spouse doesn’t believe it, which is usually the woman.

It’s usually the woman saying her husband doesn’t believe it because we have more body fat, we store toxins more. We’re more susceptible to these things. Plus, we’re in the home more as a general rule of thumb.

And really, really trusting that because Ron went with me to these doctor visits and had to hear the doctors say, “We don’t know. We don’t know. We believe you’re having these issues, but we can’t find the problem.” And so that makes you feel insecure when you’re going through it. And Ron really stood by and said, “We’re going to figure this out.”

I think as a spouse, you really need to do that. You need to have ultimate faith in what your spouse is saying.

We just did the Dr. Oz Show actually a couple of months ago. It’s the same, exact situation. They had mold in the home. The wife and the daughter were the ones with the most severe reactions. The husband was really skeptical. He didn’t believe it. And it caused them to divorce.

DEBRA: It does, I hear this.

LISA BERES: And so this can really destroy your relationship. So you really have to trust your partner – and not even your partner, any of your family members – and just believe that what they’re saying is true and really stand by them because they need support.

DEBRA: They do. They absolutely do.

Many years ago, I was engaged to a man that I didn’t marry. And this was when I was first learning about all of these things. I would go to his apartment. It was an apartment in a renovated big, old house. And so it had a lot of toxic things, especially the heater was a freestanding heater with an open flame. You could see the flame burning.

And so, I didn’t know what all the toxic chemicals were then. So, I would go there and I would get sick and I would get upset and we would argue. None of these things would happen when we weren’t in the apartment.

And so finally, we broke up. Several years later, he found me and he said, “I have to tell you that you were right all along about the apartment making us sick.” I kept saying, “There must be something going on in the apartment.” And he said because he got much sicker after that.

And this is before I knew anything.

I’ll tell you something because this is so horrible. It was the bathroom. They had put in a shower where they had just made a frame and then they had cemented the walls of the shower. And they didn’t put any tile. They painted it. And it was very small. And so every time I would take a shower, I’d get paint chips all over my body.

So finally, one day I said, “I’m going to take all this paint off.”

I took very toxic paint stripper, the most toxic paint stripper. I took off all my clothes and I got in the shower, this little tiny shower that you could barely stand in, no ventilation and I’ve got toxic paint stripper. I put it all over the walls to loosen up the pain and then I’m standing there with a razor blade scraping it off in this little box full of toxic fumes. People do this all the time.

LISA BERES: They do it all of the time.

DEBRA: I know. I look at things that I used to do and I’m just horrified.

LISA BERES: It’s amazing. Like you said earlier, I don’t know if you had exposure or symptoms at that time, and maybe you did, maybe you didn’t, but I have similar stories where there was a lot of toxic exposure. Maybe you didn’t get a symptom at that time, but this is about the long-term symptoms.

Just because you used the products that was toxic and you didn’t have any symptoms doesn’t mean it didn’t affect your body.

DEBRA: That’s exactly right. And that’s what makes this so difficult. Over the years, I really found that what I need to do is objectively look at the data and say, “This causes cancer. This causes this. This causes that. And these are the chemicals I’m not going to have in my life.” I understand it that it’s these chronic exposures that build up and build up and build up. That’s why it’s so difficult to say this chemical led to this symptom.

LISA BERES: It’s still hard to pinpoint. That’s why it’s so hard for people to say. Out of sight, out of mind. “Oh, I know that has a carcinogen in it, but whatever.” They’ll use it anyway – from cosmetics to cleaning to home products. You name it! I guess you can’t emphasize it enough.

Even pregnant women you’ll see pregnant women remodeling their nursery. Babies today are being born with 287 chemicals already in their blood. We even had an advantage over that. We came in, I’m sure, with less chemicals. How about this new generation that’s already coming in with some many chemicals? How soon are they going to have the effects of exposures?

DEBRA: Well, we see it already that people are getting illnesses that they didn’t use to get until they were 60, they’re now getting when they’re 30.

Anyway, we’ve only got about 20 seconds left. So I just want to say thank you so much for being on the show. I’m so excited about the work that you’re doing. Again, listeners, you can go to TinyURL.com/HealthyHomeSignUp to find out more about their new program which is Change Your Home, Change Your Health in 30 Days. Thanks, Ron and Lisa. Bye.

RON BERES: Thank you, Debra.

LISA BERES: Thank you so much.

RON BERES: Thank you.

Toxics in the Air We Breathe—Indoors and Outdoors—and How it Affects Our Health

steven-gilbert-2My guest today is toxicologist Steven G. Gilbert, PhD, DABT, He’s a regular guest who is helping us understand the toxicity of common chemicals we may be frequently exposed to. Today we’re going to talk about indoor and outdoor air pollution: the different types of pollutants, how they affect your health, how you are exposed to them, and what you can do to reduce your exposure. Dr. Gilbert is Director and Founder of A Small Dose of Toxicologythe Institute of Neurotoxicology and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology- The Health Effects of Common Chemicals. He received his Ph.D. in Toxicology in 1986 from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, is a Diplomat of American Board of Toxicology, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington. His research has focused on neurobehavioral effects of low-level exposure to lead and mercury on the developing nervous system. Dr. Gilbert has an extensive website about toxicology called Toxipedia, which includes a suite of sites that put scientific information in the context of history, society, and culture. www.toxipedia.org 

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TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxics in the Air We Breathe – Indoors and Outdoors – and How it Affects Our Health

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Steven G. Gilbert

Date of Broadcast: July 30, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It is Thursday, July 30th 2015. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida with overcast skies, so it’s going to be cooler today. It’s only 80 today, that’s good.

Today, we’re going to be talking about air, air pollution and the air pollutants that can be making us sick both in outdoor air and indoor air. What’s toxic about air?

My guest today is toxicologist Dr. Steven Gilbert. He’s a regular guest on this show and he’s helping us understand the toxicity of common chemical that we’re maybe frequently exposed to. And if you’re listening to this show, you are being exposed to outdoor air pollutants for sure and indoor air pollutants if you don’t know about them and haven’t been doing things to clean them. So, we’re going to find out all about this today, what are the pollutants and what to do?

Dr. Gilbert is the author of a very good book called A Small Dose of Toxicology which you can get on his website for free. Everybody should have one. I just think that it’s the best way to start with toxicology. His website is Toxipedia.org. Dr. Gilbert, is it an .org or a .com?

STEVEN GILBERT: It’s .org

DEBRA: Toxipedia.org. I don’t have it right in front of me. So hi, Dr. Gilbert. How are you?

STEVEN GILBERT: Hi Debra, how are you this morning?

DEBRA: I’m good! And I actually start by saying something first. Usually, I let you talk but I have a post on my blog on my website that talks about air pollution is now the world’s single largest environmental risk to health. That was stated by the World Health Organization in March 2014. There may be more recent numbers about this.

It says that there that there were deaths. They’re not just talking about runny noses and it’s hard to breathe. So here are the outdoor air pollution that cause deaths, 40% of heart disease, 40% of stroke, 11% of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, 60% of lung cancer and 3% of lower respiratory infections in children.

So here, what we’re talking about today is not just how this affects your health. It’s talking about people dying. That’s what I wanted to start.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah. That is really, really a great starting point. Air pollution is a worldwide issue. It’s a serious matter that everybody should thoughtful about. I have some statistics too about that.

According to what I have from Mother Jones article (there’s a great article there about air pollution), over 1.5 million of people worldwide die of heart disease, 1.4 of stroke, lung cancer, 222,000 die of pulmonary disease, 43,000 people die every year as a consequence of air pollution. So, it really is a very serious matter, both indoor and outdoor. I’ll just say it’s bad.

Air pollution, for a long time, we still have not talked about this issue. But yeah, I see it’s getting better in some countries. I’ll just read this little quarter:

“As soon as I had gotten out of the heavy air of Rome and from the stink of smokey chimneys thereof, which, being stirred, poured forth from whatever pestilential vapors and soot they had enclosed in them, I felt an alteration in my disposition.”

This is by Seneca in 61 BC.

DEBRA: Yeah.

STEVEN GILBERT: So, air pollution is a serious matter as our population has increased for a long, long time.

DEBRA: Yes, it has. So, what I’d like to do is I’d like to do the first half of the show on outdoor air pollution and then let’s move to indoor air pollution. Instead of mixing them up, let’s separate them out.

So, why don’t you start by telling us what are some of the air pollutants that people are being exposed to outdoors?

STEVEN GILBERT: Well, outdoor, probably the most serious one is ozone, which is O3. It can be a very serious pollutant. Ozone at the upper stratosphere is very important. You’ve probably heard [inaudible 00:05:34] ozone hole in the upper stratosphere. Ozone at the upper stratosphere is very important. It protects us from ultraviolet light. But that’ll also be a serious lung irritant. So, it’s very important that we control that.

It’s produced by high nitrogen oxide. For example, produced from cars (too many cars on the road). I think that that’s where a lot of air pollution comes from, cars. Industrial pollution such as coal-fueled utility plants are a very important producer of air pollution and particulate manner. Diesel particulate matter is important. If you live near a port or a very active port, you know all about the air pollution that comes off of ports from the diesel engines that run the big ships that are coming out.

Here in Seattle, you’ll certainly see a lot of that. We’ve tried hard to reduce the amount of soot that’s produced by these generators that are on these ships. They plug in to the grid. They’re not running their big engines right next to the city.

So, I think another for outdoor air pollution are sulfur dioxide. They are an important air pollutant that produces acid rain and really clogs the atmosphere.

A pollutant that come out are also mercury, for example, with coal-fired utility plants. They produce mercury. It gets into the atmosphere, then mercury comes down as rain. And with rain, it enters the dirt, it enters the soil. It ends up in the rivers and the ocean. It gets into the fish we eat.

So, there are all kinds of outdoor air pollutants that are really critical. And of course, it all leads to climate change.

We get too much carbon dioxide from pollutants that come out of cars, from our industrial systems. It is causing global warming and global climate changes that we’re all becoming more and more familiar with.

And I think [inaudible 00:07:22], for example, that’s going to be really serious because it’s starting to melt the ice in the poles of the earth and it’s going to cause great increases in sea level. If it continues to rise, it will flood many things.

So, air pollution really has many, many different effects. It’s also affecting our health and well-being. It’s really important to pay attention to air pollution. UK is trying to regulate more of that. The United Sates actually has pretty good, clean air. They’ve done a really good job in trying to clean up the air, but it’s still a big issue.

In fact, the consequence of India and China and other developing countries that have a lot of coal burning plants and the air pollutants comes off of those in the air. It gets into the upper atmosphere and it ends up in the West Coast here. We see the pollution from China and other developing countries in our atmosphere.

So, it is something we really got to look as a global issue. We have done that in the past with ozone, for example, and volatile organic compounds and trying to reduce the amount of ozone contaminants that are killing off the ozone in our upper stratosphere.

We can do this. I think climate change [inaudible 00:08:35] air pollution goes.

DEBRA: Well, what can individuals do at home or in their personal lives to help reduce air pollution? I think it’s pretty clear that almost anywhere you are, particularly if you’re in a city or in a place like you are from Seattle where the pollution is coming from other countries across the Pacific that there’s going to be more air pollution.

And if you’re out in the country where you’re not next to so much cars and some things like that and industrial pollution, the air is going to be cleaner. But I think it’s probably safe to say that there probably isn’t a place on Earth where the air is actually clean.

STEVEN GILBERT: You’re absolutely right, Debra. It is really a serious problem, industrialization of the globe. It’s causing more and more air pollution. If you look at it historically, outdoor pollution, the Donora smog that occurred in 1948 in Donora, Pennsylvania was produced by a US Steel Corporation, Donora Zinc Works and American Steel.

The air [inaudible 00:09:44]. It was cold air that stuck the bottom air, so the air pollution stayed very low. Over 7,000 people died in this period of time.

DEBRA: Yeah.

STEVEN GILBERT: So, we’ve moved away from this gross example of pollution in the United Sates. But we can still issue. When you go out and look out in the ocean out in Seattle here, you see that pink sunsets, that’s the particulate matters in the air.

So, we’ve learned that these particulate matters, [inaudible 00:10:15]. They’re very small, fine particles. They’re a serious part of air pollutants. They enter our lungs, deep into our lungs. It can cause heart disease and other disease that can actually lead to death as well as asthma and things like that.

It’s very important that we can cure air pollutants and look at ways we can reduce it. For example, I’ve moved…

DEBRA: Wait! Hold on, we need to go to break. So, let’s go to break and when we come back, you can tell us how we can reduce it. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert.

He’s the author of A Small Dose of Toxicology which you can get at Toxipedia.org. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m sorry, I’m a little distracted here.

During the break, I was looking up the article you’ve mentioned, the Mother Jones article about air pollution. Well, I found five articles in Mother Jones. It was like a big thing, just now in June 2015. The one I have in front of me now is about our national parks. They rated 12 parks most harmed by air pollution. I’m looking at this picture of Yosemite.

I used to live in California and I’ve been to Yosemite National Par. It’s absolutely gorgeous! And when you go there, it’s way high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It’s got these gorgeous mountain peaks. And you’d thinks if there’s any place in the world where there’s going to be clear air, it would be Yosemite. It was one of the four national parks to regularly have unhealthy air pollution levels, Yosemite National Park!

STEVEN GILBERT: Yes.

DEBRA: So, this is what I was talking about earlier. There isn’t a place on Earth where you can go and breathe clean air. That’s just astonishing to me.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, it really is depressing! I think that, you asked earlier, “What can we as individuals do?”,

I think it’s a little bit of politics. But also, I think we can do some things and one is solar panels. We need to stop producing electricity from these large centralized systems that produce live air pollution on their own like coal-fired utility plants, even the gas plants. There’s a lot of air pollution from that.

I’ll just give you an example. I’ve put solar panels in my house about a year ago. For the last 30 days, I’ve generated 1.2 megawatts of electricity. Right at the moment, I’m generating over 3000 watts of electricity. And yesterday, I generated 47 kilowatts of power. It doesn’t sound like a lot. It’s not a lot for a house. [inaudible 00:15:54] to utility company 24, almost 25 kilowatt hours of electricity back to the power plant.

So, it’s really important for us as individuals. I also got an electric car this year. I tried to plug in my electric car and charge it off to solar panels from the grid. It’s [inaudible 00:16:16] have gotten great opportunities to move towards solar. But we’ve got to have better laws that encourages [inaudible 00:16:23] great incentive towards solar. [Inaudible 00:16:26]

DEBRA: That’s exactly right! First of all, I just want to remind the listeners that you’re in Seattle and the percentage of cloud cover days because it’s raining so much is enormous and you’re still getting that amount of energy that you just described.

Here in Florida, we have so many sunshine days. There’s so much sunshine here that actually – I think it was back in the ‘20s or something. There was actually a lot of solar. It was like almost everybody had solar hot water. That as the way they did it. We’ve lost all that easy, solar technology. It’s all been replaced by these pollution energy technology and we could easily do this.

For me, I would have solar panels on my house in a minute if I could afford it. If there was government incentive here, I’d do it in a minute!

STEVEN GILBERT: It’s that great incentive. And back into the politics, we have to talk to representatives, “We want solar! We want distributed power generation and move away from this large centralized systems.”

DEBRA: I totally agree! Another thing would be – how can I say this? If we use less energy in our homes, then are the power systems still going to generate that energy whether we use it or not?

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah! I generate it. The systems are set up so that all the excess power generated goes back to the grid, so my neighbors are using the powers I generated.

Yesterday, I sold 25 kilowatt hours back to the electric company. I have not paid an electric bill since last July when I installed the system on my house.

DEBRA: Wow!

STEVEN GILBERT: The power companies have to get onboard with allowing us to do this and adapting to the fact that as individuals, we can generate a lot of power in our homes. It’s very important we do that because that reduces the pollution and modern powers required from the utility plants.

And if it moves to electrical currents, we also use power from those plants in our house that we generated ourselves, but also, we reduce pollution that we’re putting out in the atmosphere from our cars because we have a whole bunch of cars that are pollution free, which is just great. I think…

DEBRA: I think that’s great! I would do exactly what you’ve done. I just need to figure how to make that work financially for me. I got a smaller car this year because my other car totally broke down and so I bought a very fuel-efficient car and I’m very happy I did that. Even if people were to move to having more fuel economic cars, that would reduce it a lot.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yes, it would! Unfortunately, gas prices have dropped, so people are moving back to the less fuel-efficient cars. It’s very important. And I really honor your decision to buy a fuel-efficient car. That might seem like a small thing, but it’s actually a big thing that we can all do to reduce pollution in the atmosphere, reducing greenhouse gasses.

It’s really important for us to reduce the use of greenhouse gasses so we’re not contributing to climate change and we’re starting to be thinking of future generations, of our children’s children, of what kind of globe we’ll leave them.

If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up with a lot of ocean rises, increase in ocean levels. It’s going to flood out a lot of properties. A lot of people live on the coast. It’s going to cause all kinds of problems. Florida, in particular, will be vulnerable to this.

DEBRA: Yes. I just want to ask you quickly because we only have about a minute before the break, “What kind people do to protect their health from outdoor air pollution when they’re walking around?”

STEVEN GILBERT: Well, that’s more difficult because we don’t have a lot of control of the outdoor air pollution. But I think the important thing is to look out for ozone, in particular, if it’s a high air pollution day. And then, don’t exercise if there’s a lot of pollution in the atmosphere.

But the main thing is we’ve got to reduce, we’ve got to ask our representatives to reduce our air pollution, to support the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s very discouraging to see this. Some of the republicans I met are going to wipe out the EPA or to reduce its authority. We’ve got to give our government agencies more authority to help reduce the air pollution that we inhale. We’re inhaling air pollution.

DEBRA: Yeah. It’s just way too much air pollution. So, I just want to mention before we go to break that one of the things that I recommend is to take Liquid Zeolite. The brand that I like is Pure Body Liquid Zeolite because it removes heavy metals and other things in your body in situations where you can’t control the exposure. And this is just one of those situations.

Outdoor air pollution is one of the reasons why I take this every day. And if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look up this show in the archives, there will be information there about how you can order that if you decide to do that.

So, we’re going to go to break, but we’ll be back. And when we come back, we’ll talk about indoor air pollution with Dr. Steven Gilbert, author of A Small Dose of Toxicology. You can get that free at Toxipedia.org. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, author of A Small Dose of Toxicology, which you can get free at Toxipedia.org.

So, I want to start this segment with the statement that according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, they have called indoor air pollution the nation’s number one environmental health problem. So, now we have the World Health Organization saying that outdoor air pollution is the number one environmental health problem in the world. And then, the EPA says that indoor air pollution is the nation’s number one health problem.

They say that people spend more than 90% of their time inside. The quality of our indoor air impacts our health far more than our outdoor air. And so, some things the indoor air pollution can cause is irritation to the eyes, nose and throat, headache, dizziness, fatigue, asthma, hypersensitivity, pneumonia and long term effects can include respiratory disease, heart disease and cancer. It can be severely debilitating and fatal. This is what our United States Environmental Protection Agency has to say about indoor air pollution.

Okay, I’ll let you talk now.

STEVEN GILBERT: You made some great, great point there. Your indoor air pollution is really critical, especially for young children, because children are not like adults. They eat more, breathe more and drink more than their body weight. Their airways are not as big as adults. So, indoor air pollution is really important for young. They also spend more time indoors. And also for the elderly, they will often have compromised lung function and they also spend a lot of time indoors.

So, indoor pollutants are really important. A lot of it are comprised of outgassed chemicals. For example, if you go the store and buy one of your plastic, rubberized shower curtains, that shower curtains will offgas phthlates and other chemicals. Even that new plastic smell is an important source of air pollutants that we inhale.

So, if you have that in your bathroom, you don’t have a fan, you increase humidity in your bathroom, you get mold in the bathroom, that mold outgasses particulate matter and you also inhale that. You get asthma and other conditions from that.

So, there are lots of indoor air pollutants. It’s actually hard to know where to start. You’ve got things like radon in certain places in the country. [Inaudible 00:29:30] I don’t about Florida so much.

DEBRA: We don’t have it here.

STEVEN GILBERT: You don’t?

DEBRA: No, we don’t.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, radon causes lung cancer if you can inhale. There are all kinds of different aspects of air pollutants. If three billion people around the globe have used wood, animal bones, crop waste, coal for cooking, if they’re heating their homes, those will produce lot of indoor air pollution.

People that use wood in certain places like Washington state. People still have a wood burning stove. There’s actually a little community. In Seattle, there’s still a lot of wood burning stove. [Inaudible 00:30:15]. That can be very reactive for some people. They’ll have really troubled breathing in wood smoke filled air. It causes a lot of problems in both outdoor and indoor pollution.

I have to mention lead for a second.We added lead to gasoline in the 30s and we produced a horrible mess of lead pollution which goes indoors and outdoors. Kids are exposed to lead from cars that once burned lead, of course. We got rid most of the leads from gasoline in 1990, which is a great move.

It’s still used, for example, used in airplanes, propulsion of airplanes. They have leaded gasoline. There’s lead around the outdoor. But indoors [inaudible 00:31:00].

For example, with pesticide, it’s the same thing. You use a lot of pesticides outdoors, you bring them indoors. It gets into carpets. The carpets has dust in them. Who’s going to breathe down the carpet? Kids again.

DEBRA: Right.

STEVEN GILBERT: So, kids are exposed indoors. Pesticides and lead are two good examples. There’s a whole other bunch of other examples.

So, it really is a complicated thing. I think indoor pollution is an underrated problem.

DEBRA: I totally agree with you! So, I’ve been writing about indoor air pollution for a very long time. I’ve been writing about the whole subject of toxics for more than 30 years. And indoor air pollution was one of the first things that I started writing about.

And at that time, it wasn’t even called indoor air pollution. They haven’t even done the studies yet. But I knew from my own experience (and the experience of others) that when we were breathing these things, then we felt sick. And when we didn’t breathe them, then we didn’t feel sick. It was pretty clear even though studies have not yet been done at that time.

So, things like carpets give off fumes that are very toxic. I know in my particular case, I was being made very sick by the chlorine fumes that were coming off of the water in my shower. And it’s not just chlorine. It mixes with other things in the water, so it actually turns into chloroform. And chloroform is that thing in old movies where the villain would put this cloth over the heroin’s face to knock her out. That’s chloroform. It just really does knock you out.

So, I would actually faint when I would take a shower from the amount of chloroform that was in my water. And all of these were considered to be indoor air pollutants.

I want to mention that there are two things that people can do with indoor air pollution. One is my website is full of products that don’t emit toxic chemicals, things like paints and even like the materials used to make your bedding and clothing. All these things, they are all emitting toxic chemicals into the air. And so…

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, things like that and perfumes, deodorizers. Absolutely deodorizers, they’re all outgassing.

DEBRA: Yeah, I remember when I first started being interested in these. One of the things that I had just done is taking vinyl shelf paper that’s sticking on the back. I thought it was so pretty. And so, not only did I put it on the shelves, I lined my whole cabinet with vinyl shelf paper. And then, I learned that it was out-gassing toxic vinyl and I’m like, “Oh, my God!” I ripped it out.

But I do a lot of consulting were people have me come to their homes and find the toxic chemicals. I can’t tell you how many times they’ve got these built-in closets with these cabinets and these shelves and stuff. Those are particle boards. They’re just wreaking formaldehyde. It just goes on and on like this.

So, one thing to do is to start identifying where are those sources of indoor air pollution are. There are a lot of information on my website and in my book about what that is.

But the thing that I would really recommend is just right away, get an air filter. Get an air filter that is really going to do their job. That way, you start reducing the air pollutants while you’re removing the sources. You can just immediately improve your air quality with the right kind of air filter.

And again, I’ve put some information if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. Look for today’s show and in the archives. There are some information there about the air filter that I use in my home. Even though I don’t have any toxic things in my home, toxic stuff is coming in from the outside. You can’t keep it out. So, this is something that we all need to be considering and taking care of in order to be healthy.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert, toxicologist and author of A Small Dose of Toxicology. He’s at Toxipedia.org and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dr. Steven Gilbert from Toxipedia.

So, we’re in our last segment. It always goes by so fast. There’s always so much information. So, what else would you like to make sure we say about indoor or outdoor air pollution?

STEVEN GILBERT: Oh, yeah. It’s really short. We should have divided this in two parts and done indoor air pollution one week and outdoor air pollution next week.

But it is a big, complex thing. We all need to be paying attention to what we breathe in. We’re only given one set of lungs that we start off with and it’s really important to protect our lungs.

One of the biggest issues that I can’t help but mention is tobacco products. We need to never smoke indoors. It really pollutes the indoors. You get not only the tobacco smoke, second hand smoke form indoor pollution, but you also get a third hand smoke through the walls, your clothing. It gets covered with tobacco products which outgasses it. So, the child, in particular, will inhale those products that are stuck on your clothes or in the walls of indoors.

DEBRA: Yeah.

STEVEN GILBERT: So, do not smoke indoors. Do not smoke to start with.

DEBRA: Do not smoke, yeah!

STEVEN GILBERT: Don’t smoke. Think about this. [Inaudible 00:40:13] The smoke that enters your lungs are all particulate matter [inaudible 00:40:17]. It is not good for you.

The other thing is I want to just hit on really quickly is industrial issue because I think the workplace is a really important part. A lot of the adults spend quite a bit of time in the workplace. It’s a very serious source of potential contamination especially, for example, silica, asbestos (you’ll really want to avoid asbestos). A lot of some older homes have asbestos. They wrap the ducting for their furnaces. So, be really careful about that for older homes. You want to watch out for asbestos in the workplace also.

Silica is another big issue. Silica will be from sand. It goes from cutting concrete, from grinding parts like that. It causes silicosis which can also be fatal in the lung damage. [Inaudible 00:41:09] So, take home products end up in the home can contribute to indoor air pollution.

Paint, formaldehyde, glue, you mentioned indoor cabinetry. That stuff will outgas for quite a while formaldehyde, another two three years to make those products.

Then, you have commercial cleaning products, also personal care products. Those things are very important.

Anything that’s got some kind of perfume on it is out-gassing chemicals. You’ve got to be thinking about that. If you have something that has perfume in it, it is built to offgas chemicals. Some of those chemicals they use are phthalates as well as other complex chemicals that make up perfumes. Air Fresheners, tire sheets…

DEBRA: There’s thousands, thousands of toxic chemicals in perfume, anything that is perfumed or scented or anything. That’s one thing you can do. If you were to just remove all the scented products from your life, you will greatly reduce indoor air pollution.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, things like that. If you have garage attached to your house or indoor garage or something, you drive your car in that garage, the car is offgassing a whole bunch of chemicals, oils and gasses and things like that, which contribute to the indoor air pollution of your home.

So, it’s really important to be thoughtful of where the pollution is coming from – cars, mold, dust. You really got to be careful about mold. You want to reduce the amount of mold. You don’t need to clean molds. If you do have molds in your bathroom, just use soap and hot or warm water on the mold.

Do not use chlorinated products on mold because it does not clean them off. It’s just bleaching, so you can’t see it.

So, just get down there and scrub away and then reduce the moisture. Mold feeds on moisture, so you just want to reduce moisture or you reduce the food source for all kinds products like that.

DEBRA: I think we’ve given a good overview. We still have about five minutes left. Let’s see what else can we say about indoor air pollution. What else would you like to say?

STEVEN GILBERT: Well, I would to just say you have to be really careful indoor and outdoor pollution. I think to come back to outdoor, I think it’s really important we try to figure out how to reduce greenhouse gasses in our materials that’s contributing to greenhouse gasses and then contributing to global warming and climate change.

The EPA has been doing a lot of work on that, trying to reduce the amount of fumes from the large industrial manufacturers, electricity-producing companies like goals and gas. Electric utilites are major source of pollutants and we really need to reduce the long run, the long term. We need to figure out how to do that. We need to start producing indiviually our own electricity because that will reduce outdoor air pollution.

I think reducing air pollution is everyone’s responsibility. Driving less, mass transit is really important. How do we increase mass transit in our society, so we don’t have to drive our own personal cars anymore. Walking is really important. I have a meeting in 10:30, I am [inaudible 00:44:21]. As soon as I get out of this call, I’m going to walk to my next meeting.

How do we do things like that? How do we reduce our contribution, our carbon footprint so we are not producing those greenhouse gases? In the long run, it’s going to cause us a lot of pain and trouble.

DEBRA: I know that at different times in my life, the choice about where you live and how you organize things in your life – like I work at home, so I don’t have any commute at all. I don’t need to take a bus, nothing. I just go from the bedroom to the kitchen to my desk.

And earlier in life, I lived in San Francisco. I worked downtown. And so, I lived in an area where I could walk to work in San Francisco. It took me about 20 minutes to go downtown, but I walked every day and I walked back. And now, where I live, I don’t have to go to work. But I have other activities that I do.

How much do I drive? I mean, everything that I do is within about a five mile radius really. So, it’s very rarely that I will drive across the bridge to Tampa, maybe once a month. But otherwise, I’m just in this little, tiny radius. It’s a little wide for me to walk it, but if I have maybe an electric scooter (which I am seriously thinking of getting), if I had an electric scooter, I could just scooter around to these places because they’re so close to each other.

So, that’s very different from people who are sitting in commute traffic for two hours every day.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah. That’s a really great point. [Inaudible 00:46:11]. I also work from our house too, so it’s really important to make your life something like that so you try not to contribute to the air pollution that’s out there already.

DEBRA: Yeah! I think that with wise decisions like that, we can reduce the outdoor air pollution that we are creating or experiencing.

I remember there was a time I was working in San Francisco and I was living in Oakland, which is across the bay bridge across San Francisco and I was driving a little Fiat X19 sports car. I do this commute with the top off. I’d just be sitting there for hours in the commute traffic breathing all of those exhaust. I mean, things that I used to do just horrify me now that I know what the consequences are. But I know that there are millions of people who are doing this.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, there are. There are all kinds of people that are just sitting in a lot of traffic and really breathing in the fumes from the cars all around them, which in the long run is not good for our lungs and not good for the future of the Earth and the planet and they’re not good for our children.

So, we’ve got to be thoughtful about that. We need to be me more considerate of our lungs and everybody else’s lungs. So, if you’re out there driving or polluting or even electricity, think of the pollutants that’s coming from that and all the pollutant that you’re producing and you’re breathing in at the same time.

It’s really important to be thinking about that, thinking about our homes, a lot glues and other solvents in our home. Our cars are manufactured with a lot of solvents, even the paint in the car. Paint produces a lot of chemicals. We need to be thoughtful about that and reducing our paint usage. Use only water-based paints. Stay away from all oil-based paints because there are a lot of oils and solvents in them. We need to reduce the amount of oil and petroleum products we’re using.

And we need to have regulation. I hate to come back to politics again. But again, we need to have those regulations.

DEBRA: We do.

STEVEN GILBERT: Know what’s in the products we’re using, know what chemicals are in the dryer sheets, the air fresheners and perfumes, so we know what to avoid and how to do that better and know what to buy.

DEBRA: That is a really big problem. Manufacturers don’t disclose what’s in their products. And that’s a topic for a whole show in and of itself. I’ve been a consumer advocate for more than 30 years now and the biggest problem I always have is I can’t find out what’s in the product. And if I can’t find out what’s in a product, then I just don’t use it.

There are ways that you can get around and find some of the ingredients. But the difference is that now, I’m starting to see that there are websites that fully disclosed their ingredients. And not only that, they tell you where they’re from and all about each ingredient and they’re very open about that. I think that that’s the world that we’re moving, that direction because how can we make decisions as consumers unless we know what’s in the product.

STEVEN GILBERT: Yeah, [inaudible 00:49:35] The American Lung Association is great. My book has a big chapter on air pollution and other materials about that. But I think we need to educate ourselves about the products that are produced and that we’re using

DEBRA: And we need to go because it’s the end of the show. Thank you so much Dr. Gilbert! I know, it goes by so fast! You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!

How to Protect Your Health From Toxic Mercury Dental Fillings

Pamela SeefeldToday my guest is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking about mercury dental fillings, which were front page news in our local newspaper last week. Senior US health officials stopped a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposal that would have told dentists they should not use mercury fillings in cavities in pregnant women, nursing moms, children under 6 and people with mercury allergies, kidney diseases or neurological problems. It also urged dentists to avoid using fillings that contain mercury compounds in any patient, where possible. Pamela and I will discuss the toxic effects of mercury in your body and what you can do to protect your body from the dangers of mercury fillings. Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and selling top quality medicinal supplements, so she’s seen it all. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Protect Your Health from Toxic Mercury Dental Fillings

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: July 29, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It is Wednesday, July 29th 2015, I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And today, we’re going to talk about, actually, some news, something that was in the newspaper.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s on every other Wednesday because she has so much information. She’s a registered pharmacist, first to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

But she knows all about drugs. She knows all about how toxic chemicals work in the body, what kind of things happen in the body because of our exposure to toxic chemicals and to drugs, and she knows what the natural solutions are.

So, every time she’s on, we talk about a different subject. This week, we’re going to be talking about how to protect your health from mercury fillings. The reason that we’re talking about is because Pamela actually alerted me to an article that was front page news here in Tampa Bay area, where I lived (although it wasn’t in any other papers across the country).

It was on the news service, so anybody could have picked it up, but not very many did. I also subscribed to a lot of newsletters concerning health and toxics and I haven’t seen it in one of them yet. But that doesn’t mean that that it’s not an important issue.

So, what you’re getting here is actually information that’s not being picked up in mainstream media and not even, alternative newsletters, but nonetheless is extremely important.

So, what happened last week was that it was found out that the FDA has a document which recommends against using mercury fillings and that they wanted to actually make that official. It was turned down by the Department of Health and Human Services.

So, what we’re going to talk about today is mercury fillings, that the FDA is now recommending against them and what they’re doing to your body and what natural things you can do in order to protect yourself if you have mercury fillings in your mouth.

Hi, Pamela!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hi!

DEBRA: Thank you so much for letting me know about this article because I don’t know that I would’ve seen it without you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, you’re still really sweet. I read three newspapers a day. And you’re right, this article is not showing up any place else. I’m very surprised.

DEBRA: I’m very surprised too! Because actually, I think it’s historic that the FDA has reversed their position on the danger of mercury in your mouth.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correction, this is really all about economics. If you look at the article, which is saying that, they don’t actually list the person or the committee that decided to not go through with recommending against using these mercury fillings. That’s really the problem too. Basically, the whole thing is being covered up.

DEBRA: In the article, it says it has been covered up for the last three years and it concludes, the article, that during that period of time, millions of people could have been affected, their health could have been affected. I’m just shocked! Isn’t the whole point of the FDA is to be alerting us to the dangers of toxic chemical exposures and then, recommending to the government that something be done about them?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely. And if you actually look at some of the statements that they’re saying in the article, Norway, Denmark and Sweden, they’ve banned use of these mercury and amalgam fillings for a long time. So, it’s not a new concept that other countries are trying to dispose of these dangerous fillings.

And I think it’s interesting too. Today, we’re going to be talking about this. Not only are these things being covered up. The fact that they we’re concern that low income individuals would not be able to afford more money, perhaps, or maybe Medicaid should pay for it (it costs a $100 more on average to fill the tooth with a different composite other than amalgam filling), really, we are trading cost for somebody’s life. That’s really something that, to me, is very frightening.

DEBRA: Well, to me too. Especially since it might cost a $100 more initially to fill your tooth with something else, but if you continue with the mercury and amalgams, you’re going to spend way more than $100 on health effects.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s actually right! And this is really interesting. Just reading this and being pretty upset about the situation, I went and did a full Medline search quite a long time to look at what is the new evidence about what does mercury do to the body, how do the vapors get into the body. There were some interesting articles. This is all stuff from the last year and a half that we’re going to be discussing today in relationship to this. But it’s important to realize that the definite link between these amalgam fillings and chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety and even suicide in some cases. These vapors are being release out of the tooth.

And even interesting to note is there’s one study here that I was looking at that I really had not even any idea. When you go for an MRI (so if you have MRI), it releases the vapor in a much more significant amount.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: What they found (and this just came out less than a year ago) is high-field MRI and mercury release from dental amalgam fillings. They’re suspecting it could even be from mobile phones, but maybe not that extreme. Any kind of magnetic field that’s produce around the mouth, if someone has an MRI of their head or their body and especially people that have cancer already, what they have found is even 72 hours after the MRI, the difference in the urinary mercury that was excreted (and they could tell that the vapor coming right out from the amalgams) was significant.

So, this is something to think about. It’s not just, even, “Okay, I have mercury fillings. I shouldn’t be concerned. They said it was safe.” There are things like small amounts of magnetic fields around you that are actually affecting the vapor release as well.

DEBRA: I have never heard that before, but that seems likely to me. I don’t know if you read this, but in the article, it was talking about the proposal. But I think maybe on the day – I don’t know if you read it on the paper online…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: But online, now, the word proposal is linked to the actual document from the FDA. And in the FDA documents, it talks about how the mercury is being given off into your mouth on a continuous basis. It’s more when you first put it in the fillings and then, it’s less over time. But you actually breathe the vapors of mercury into your lungs and that’s how it gets into your body. The FDA is saying this.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. This is the most shocking part, which we’re having a discussion. People, they really need to think about what’s happening here. We are not being protected in this manner especially when they’re coming out with a position paper. And then, all of a sudden, it’s retracted because of the fact that, first of all, they don’t want to warn people and secondly, they don’t want to have increase cost of fillings. This is really pretty bad!

Now, some other interesting things, it looks like there’s variance. We’re going to talk about some the genes and keep going back to the articles here. But it looks like boys are much more susceptible to the effects of the mercury vapors than girls because of the way genes are turned on. And what happens with mercury in the body is it’s not only causing central nervous system problems, kidney problems, liver problems, immune problems, of course, fetal development problems and of course, cognition, the CNS cognition.

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: …but the big things we’re looking at is it affects methylation in the body.

DEBRA: What is that? What’s methylation?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Methylation is why we want to take SAMe or folic acid especially (I use a lot of that). Methyl donors are like anti-oxidants, kind of think of it that way. When you take a supplement (and it’s a methyl donors), what it does is it helps to keep some of the damage done of free radicals in the body.

Methylation is very, very important for cells to work correctly. If methylation is taking place correctly in the body and the cells, it changes your aging process and helps you not age as fast. Exercise increases methylation. And this is all coming down to methylation and what’s called epigenetics.

Epigenetics is a science of…

DEBRA: Wait, Pamela, we need to take a break.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay.

DEBRA: I know! We could just talk, talk. Anyway, you’re listening to Toxic Free talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, she’s a registered pharmacist who’d rather give out natural supplements. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. I don’t have my page open to that. It’s BotanicalResource.com. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who has her own natural pharmacy at BotanicalResource.com.

Pamela, before we go on about mercury fillings, do you want to just tell people that they can call you?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes! So, my pharmacy has natural products and we specialize in medical homeopathy. You ou can call me here. It’s a free consultation. Today, we’re discussing mercury and the implications of such, but I cover everything from pet homeopathics to adults. If you’re interested in getting off your medications, either mental health or otherwise, blood pressure, cholesterol, I can help you with that from a pharmacist’s perspective. The products work very well, they are reasonably priced and we keep a chart for you. It’s very professional.

You can call me here at my office, it’s 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955, I’d be very honored to help you and your family with any questions you might have about your medications or treatments.

DEBRA: She’s helped me with some things that I was not able to handle otherwise. She’s right here in Clearwater, Florida, where I live and she’s very well-respected by the doctors here. I know a lot of people who have been to her with excellent results.

If you do have any question about your medications, you’re taking too many medications, you want to be more natural, please do call Pamela because she can help you with this.

Okay, let’s go back to dental fillings.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So, I was talking just a little bit – this is really how it’s going to tie in with these articles about the mercury fillings. Epigenetics is very important. This is really a new science. It’s the study of mechanisms that turn and switch genes on and off.

We’re concern about this mercury and how this is affecting our bodies. Well, it’s affecting our bodies by changing which genes are being turned on and turned off and this methylation or this process to protect the body.

There are two different things going on here. And when I was looking at this particular study, I was talking about boys, it seems that young boys that are exposed to mercury, they can have these genes that get turned on, the genotype for 27 variants in 13 genes. What this means to people is that it looks like it can be more so for males than for women, but women are also affected.

What’s happening is the mercury is causing an epigenetic change, meaning that is changing the way that genes are expressing themselves and this change is leading to disease. That’s important to realize. And this can be even mercury exposure to some degree from too much fish, but more often than that, what you were describing in the continuous release of the vapors out of the teeth, it’s important to realize there’s a chemical function with the genes being changed the way they are expressing themselves in a very negative format. That’s really harming people.

And the problem with this mercury exposure is (and this is what I like to say to people), it is variable and non-specific. It’s different for every person. This is why we’re having trouble with the FDA making position statements on these things. It’s because the symptoms are variable.

If you have the fillings, you might have different symptoms as somebody else. And the reason why this is, is because of the epigenetics, how it’s affecting the way the genes are changing because your genes will react differently to mercury exposure than my genes.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And this is why this variability is leaving this to be an open case that people say, “Well, it’s all in your head. You’re really not sick.” It’s because these genes are being affected for different people.

DEBRA: But isn’t that true for any chemical? I think there are a lot of chemicals that are allowed and I look at this and I go, “Why? These are toxic substances.” I can just go to any toxicology book or online and see, “Here’s a study that says it cause this and it causes that,” but it’s not getting cause these symptoms in every single person. So, you could either look at the group that is not responding or you could look at the group that is responding and say it’s safe or it’s not. Is that the way it goes?

PAMELA SEEFELD: You’re absolutely right! That is why (let’s say in a very easy to understand statement) that this has become oversimplified as being safe and it’s very difficult to prove the dangers and the problems that are associated with some of these things because of the variability of the individuals. It’s not the same for every person.

If we see a pattern and it’s pretty much turning on genes the same way in every person (there are things that do that), then we’re saying, “Okay, there’s an outcome, a coincidental outcome and there’s statistical significance.”

I think if they looked further, they would see more statistical significance than they actually think so. But really, the studies are pretty limited. I mean, I found a bunch of different studies that some are saying yes, some are saying no.

But the biggest things that I saw in the last year were the DNA changes and the way the genes were expressing themselves and they’ve actually identified the genes. They know which one is turning on, which one aren’t.

This is pretty interesting. They studied mercury biomarkers among Michigan Dental Professionals. They took all these dentists and there were 131 different dentists. It’s a decent size group. They went and took the mercury, they took the hair and they did a mercury sample of it and they checked to see what was going on with these individuals and to see if there were altered DNA methylation and they did find that. Remember, I was talking about the methylation, the way these function groups. The best way for methylation really is folic acid, anti-oxidants, things of that nature.

They found that this particular process, epigenetic, most definitely, it’s called SEPW1 and SEP1. They found that they have hypomethylation with increased mercury in the hair. What this means is that when you have low methylation, you’re more at risk for the diseases to take place, for the chronic illnesses to take place and it was directly correlated with this particular gene. It being expresses specifically when the mercury levels were high.

So, that’s important to realize, that there’s a genetic component to this. In most people, when their mercury levels are high, they’re going to have genetic predispositions to more disease.

DEBRA: This whole thing about epigenetics, it is pretty new. How long have they have been having epigenetics studies?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I would say it’s been around for 10 years in discussion, but the last five years, they are starting to get it more significantly. I have attended quite a few conferences that involved epigenetics in medicines and nutrition in people.

Actually, what I think your listeners would find really interesting, it’s not just we’re talking about mercury and what’s going on a body, but we know (and there’s a new study that just came out that I found when I was looking through the Medline search, it just actually came out this year) that low fruit consumption and folic deficiency are associated with LINE-1 hypomethylation in women of a cancer-free population.

So, they took women that we’re really healthy, they were of average age of 35. You wouldn’t be expecting these types of things…

DEBRA: Hello. Well…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I hear the music. Is it time for a break? I’m sorry. I’ll talk about the study, but I hear the music. I’m sorry.

DEBRA: That’ll be fine. You’re listening to Toxic Free talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who dispenses natural substances. We’re talking today about mercury in the body and particularly, that the FDA has reversed their position on the danger of mercury fillings from totally safe to don’t use them. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s on every other week, every other Wednesday, because she has so much information about drugs and toxic chemicals and their interactions in the body. Every two weeks, we talk about a different subject and how it affects the body and what we can do in a natural way to protect our health and be more healthy when these things are around us especially drugs that you may be taking.

But today, we are talking about mercury and mercury fillings. Before we go on Pamela telling us about the health effects and how it affects the body, the thing that is most dismaying to me (that’s not a strong enough word, but we’ll use it) is that we’ve been talking about mercury coming off of dental fillings and how it vaporizes in a continuous basis. We also talked about it’s difficult to make a connection sometimes with some people because some people, their bodies will respond to the mercury and others won’t.

But we’ve known that mercury is toxic for a very long time. In fact, I want to give you two examples from the past about mercury. One is you’ve all heard of Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. Well, there used to be a phrase, “Mad as a hatter” and it is a very common phrase. The way that that phrase came into our language is because it used to be that people who made hats called ‘hat-makers’, called ‘hatters’, they had occupational chronic mercury poison because the work of belting the hat involve prolong exposure to mercury vapors and it had a neuro-toxic effect.

So, these are the same mercury vapors that are now being installed in our teeth where they are being released into our bodies on a continuous basis all day and all night. In the past, it was known (it has been known for hundreds of years) that these hatters had exposure to mercury vapors, that they had neuro-toxic effects including tremors and irritability and going mad. That’s where the word “mad hatter” comes from.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: And the other thing that I want to point out, because it was so poignant to me, is Mozart, the famous Mozart, the composer (if you’ve never heard of Mozart’s music, it’s incredibly sublime and wonderful), he died at age 36 or 37 I think (I don’t remember exactly). But he died, he had syphilis. He died not from the syphilis but from the mercury that was given to him to heal the syphilis. I think about how much more just incredibly gorgeous music could he have written if he hadn’t died of mercury exposure.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely! Those two stories are very true and warnings to all of us that mercury exposure from these fillings in people’s teeth are extremely dangerous. Just because the FDA has reversed their position and just actually doesn’t even want to come out and say what’s going on, it should still have people in target mode to be cautious about having any of these fillings in their mouth. They’re very, very dangerous.

DEBRA: To me, mercury is one of those dangerous things that you can – even environmentally, that when mercury gets into an ecosystem, the fish die. I was born in the San Francisco Bay area and San Francisco Bay is having problems with mercury in the bay. And mercury in the fish all over the world is a problem. People are warned to not eat fish because of mercury. And then, dentists put this very same mercury in people’s mouths where they’re exposed to it by evaporation of the vapors of the mercury in their mouths 24 hours a day.

So, whether you happen to be a person who is susceptible to the negative health effects or not, this is one of those things where you just should say, “There’s a danger here. Let’s just be careful about this.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely! If you look at what the proposal was, it basically was saying that they were going to recommend, “Do not use mercury fillings in cavities of pregnant women, nursing moms, children under six and people with mercury allergies, kidney diseases, neurological problems.” How many people that have Parkinson’s, MS, Alzheimer’s, dementia have mercury fillings? These things are contributing.

DEBRA: Probably very many.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct!

DEBRA: Yeah! And then, it went on to say that it also urged dentists to avoid using fillings that contain mercury compounds in any patient where possible.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct!

DEBRA: Any patient.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. To me, the whole situation, I just can’t put my head around it really. I’m without words that this was just taken off there. And really, what we’re talking about is it seems to be more of a cost issue. They’re concern that people don’t want to pay more for the fillings, so they’re just going to say, “We’re not going to have a position against it. If they get hurt, they get hurt.” It’s extremely disappointing.

DEBRA: If they were to use that logic, then they would have to apply it to all the other rising costs that are going on in the world today. I mean how about – I’m not going to say this.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s true! No, you’re right. Healthcare problems are out of control and it’s not because of the mercury fillings.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The cost that we’re talking about versus the person chronically being sick and seeking extra healthcare because all of their obscure illnesses that they can’t figure out what’s wrong with them, I’m sure there are lots of people that have this like fibromyalgia, these kinds of things that a lot of doctors want to treat as psychosomatic, there’s probably mercury involved in some of the toxicity of some of these individuals.

DEBRA: Well, it’s a chronic exposure and it just goes on and on. It’s not one-time exposure. It’s everyday every night, day after day after day. That builds up in your body.

So, tell us more. Actually, could you just tell us – we only have a couple of minutes before the break, so tell us why so fast. Could you just tell us, explain from your viewpoint, how chemicals, when they are being expose on a chronic everyday basis, how that builds up in the body?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. So, we’re talking about epigenetics and we’re talking about the baseline health of the individual. Your genes are going to turn on from different exposures than my genes. As a result of that, there’s variability. It’s hard to pinpoint. This is why some of these things just kind of go under the radar. They’re not really trying to fully embrace the dangers of using these products.

So, what we find is that chronic exposure to chemicals by itself could be more insidious. When we have acute exposure to something, you can measure it in the peak in the bloodstream. It’s going to be very, very high and it’s something to treat. Maybe they are going to be extremely symptomatic at that point (especially if they get exposure to arsenic).

Even exposure to mercury, if it’s acute and it’s sudden, the person is going to become extremely ill. They’ll be able to do a blood test and they can even do a hair analysis and see where the hair’s growing out at a particular time and say, “Okay, we see this.”

But when it’s chronic, it’s insidious.

DEBRA: Right. We’ll just finish up with that thought when we get back from the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist, but she also has a natural pharmacy at BotanicalResource.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about the announcement that the FDA reversed its position last week on mercury fillings and now is recommending that people not use them. If possible, not any patient have them.

So, we’re in our last segment here, Pamela, It goes by so fast! So, tell us quickly, finish your thought about the difficulty of establishing chronic exposures to chemicals. And then, let’s talk about what you can do.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, good! So, this low level exposure is insidious and perhaps, even more dangerous than a chronic, acute exposure where all of a sudden you’re exposed to something. An acute exposure to anything, you feel different and you’ll notice the difference and it’s an immediate thing that you would go and seek medical help for.
Whereas if it’s chronic and ongoing, “I feel fatigued, I have blurry vision. I’m tired, foggy thinking. My muscles and joints ache,” all these things are obscure symptoms of something else. And so, many times people have used diagnosis as maybe chronic fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and it could very well be the vapors that coming off of their teeth and into their body.

DEBRA: That’s exactly right! So, what do we do? Obviously, the first thing is if you have no cavities and you suddenly have a cavity and you go to a dentist, you say to him, “I don’t want mercury fillings.” And there are other things that they use for fillings. We don’t have to use mercury.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely! They have composites that they can use that are very safe and have no toxic mercury in them at all.

DEBRA: The next thing is if you have mercury fillings in your mouth, what do you do?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, this is good. Good question! You can do one of two things.

And I just want to mention one thing. I was talking about this study a little bit earlier that the fruit consumption (how many fruits and vegetables you eat) affects methylation significantly in the body. It turns on several different genes. So, before we talk about some of the homeopathic things you can do and some of the surgical things you can do, eating correctly makes a big difference.

I can tell that this is very, very important. People will think, “Well, yeah right. What are you talking about?” But these studies show that the methylation is significantly enhanced and works more efficiently in people that are eating fruits and vegetables.

DEBRA: I just want to say that my diet has changed immensely over the course of my life. But what I’ve noticed is that the healthier I get, the more I want to eat raw fruits and vegetables. I’m not trying myself eat them, but it’s just want to eat. I eat salads for lunch and dinner now.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You’re absolutely right!

DEBRA: I used to eat a bag of cookies for dinner.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right! And you know what? Your body feels better. Some of this is epigenetics and a lot of these genes turning on and reassuring you that this is what you’re supposed to use, that these components, the flavonoids and the components in the fruits and vegetables turn on these genes to make you feel better, but they also protect you against toxins.

DEBRA: That’s right. Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And that’s very important to understand, your diet does make a difference, how you feel and the internal functioning of your body takes place.

DEBRA: It does. I can vouch for that. Okay. So then, what else?

PAMELA SEEFELD: So, say somebody has a mercury amalgam filling and they’re thinking what are their options.

Your options are you can have them removed. You have to make sure that the dentist who does this has the equipment and has the expertise in doing this. And there are dentists that do these. They have to have you wearing respirators at the time of the removal, they have to have the vents above the patients to make sure that any vapors are captured and not placed into the rooms and placed back into the patient.

But if that is not an option, I’m a big fan of using the Body Anew, the homeopathic detox. I have used this in the past for people that have tested highest in mercury or tested high for lead and arsenic. They didn’t want to use chelators.

They didn’t want to have mercury situation. They couldn’t afford to have their teeth redone at that present time. And after using homeopathy, specifically, to take out heavy metals and take out these components, their hair analysis and their blood work came back far improved after they have done that. So, that’s just a testament for that.

[Inaudible 00:43:17] every single day and it’s pretty easy just put it in the water. I would really highly recommend for people that have fillings. If they don’t want to go through the expensive process or perhaps they are saving up money for it or they’re looking for the right dentist, doing some homeopathy to start taking out these mercury components out of the body –

I’ll tell you, neurologically, the thing we should really be concerned about when people are exposed to mercury, the cognitive function and the variability of the cognitive function. The person might think, “Oh, I’m getting older… senile moment,” that kind of thing, but that’s not necessarily the case. If the person’s not on a bunch of prescription medicines and they are noticing some differences, there’s lots of studies that show – especially with tuna fish exposure in kids, it affects them scholastically. So, it’s so important to protect your brain, that you can have your cognitive function.

DEBRA: Yeah. So, I take Body Anew every day. Pamela’s been taking it for 15 years. I just consider it a standard thing to do because no matter how much you avoid toxic exposures (and you can greatly reduced your toxic exposure), still, if you’re going to leave your house and going out into the world, just driving your car or walking down the street, you’re going to be exposed to some. Body Anew will help your body process those chemicals.

Another product that I like a lot is Pure Body Liquid Zeolite, which I also take every day. It will also remove mercury and other heavy metals. So, I actually take both of these products.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s smart. That’s very, very smart.

DEBRA: They work hand-in-hand. Our world is so toxic. I live in a as non-toxic house as can possibly be had. I still take these products because your body has a whole lifetime of chemicals that it’s having to deal with. Your body wants to that detox and you’re being exposed to new ones.

So, if it were me, if I had mercury fillings, I would get them out. But if I couldn’t get them out, I will take Body Anew and Pure Body Liquid Zeolite.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s really good advice! I really have recommended some kind of a homeopathic detox with the Zeolite. When you take mercury out, at least, it buys you some time. That’s what you really want. You want time to decide what you want to do, maybe find the right dentist for you.

I know that some of my patients that have had removed mercury from their teeth, it’s can be quite expensive and insurance does not cover this. So, it’s something that you might not be able to do each tooth at one time. But maybe do one tooth. And then, save up and go do another tooth and find out if they have some kind of a financing plan.

But if you don’t want to spend that much money, first of all, whatever new fillings you get, as we’ve discussed earlier, no more mercury. After that, doing detox on a daily basis, I think it’s really important. Maybe having some baseline hair analysis or blood work and seeing where your mercury levels are at.

DEBRA: Absolutely! Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You have to know if it’s high or not. That gives you an idea how rigorous your treatment need to be.

DEBRA: I totally agree with that! I mean, if you can see those numbers then, you can see, “I’d really need to do something about it.” It’s not a guessing game.

I would say just in my opinion and estimation, if you were to take a hundred people who have mercury fillings and test all their blood, all 100 would have high mercury.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely.

DEBRA: I would think that would be the result.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Actually, I had a client of mine maybe about two weeks ago, he nearly had a heart attack and so he was checking everything to make sure everything’s okay (and he’s actually doing well). His mercury came back high previous to the heart attack. That was just a routine test that he had done. And then, he came back with the results after we’ve put him on a bunch of different things like Body Anew and of course, some things for his heart, and it came back much lower. I was like, “Look, this is a huge difference.” And it did take things out.

And this wasn’t even something we were looking for. He was just so concerned because of the heart attack that he was like, “I need to make sure everything is taken cared of in my body.”

You have to realize that these heavy metals, like I said, the reason they’re not warning people is because the symptoms that are very variable. And I’m telling you, if we cannot give any more important information to your listeners today, you really need to eat correctly if we can the majority of the time. You need to be taking antioxidants, any of these epigenetic influences we were talking about.

Really, this whole talk is really about the toxins and the teeth and the mercury and the craziness of the position that are not substantiated by the FDA. They know this is dangerous. They’re not going to have with their original statements. It’s very important that diet and epigenetics are playing a role in the process of methylation and some of the removal of some of these toxic chemical and heavy metals out of the body.

So, you are what you eat. It’s really important to realize that nutrition, it does have a component in some of these along with the homeopathics and the Zeolite.

DEBRA: I agree and I would say that even if you don’t have mercury fillings (but especially if you do) to do those, eating fruits and vegetables, do some kind of detox like Body Anew and/or Pure Body on a daily basis. Exercise, get good rest, those are things every single person should be doing as basic, bottomline things. No matter else you do, do those things and you’ll feel a lot healthier no matter what’s going on with your body.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! I also would like to say too that I really think pH balance makes a big difference in the way heavy metals are released out of the body with detox products. You really want to make sure that you’re using some kind of a pH adjuster in your water like Alkalife. There are some products that adjust the pH. There are different water ystems that affect the Ph as well and make their water alkaline. But you really want the water between 9 and 13, the pH. That makes a huge difference as far as the removal of these processes out of the body.

DEBRA: That’s an interesting subject! Actually, we should do a show about pH because I have questions.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely!

DEBRA: But we only have 15 seconds left. So, thank you very much, Pamela!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you!

DEBRA: She’s at BotanicalResource.com. Give your phone number really fast.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Great! And we’ll see you in two weeks.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Great! Looking forward to it!

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!

Pharmacology 101: How to Use What Pharmacists Know to Take Supplements to Best Advantage

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking about basic principles pharmacists use to maximize the effectiveness of drugs in your body and how you can apply those same principles to maximize the effectiveness of supplements and other natural substances you take. Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and selling top quality medicinal supplements, so she’s seen it all. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Pharmacology 101: How to Use What Pharmacists Know to Take Supplements to Best Advantage

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld

Date of Broadcast: July 15, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It’s Wednesday, July 15, 2015, I’m here in Clearwater, Florida and we’re having a little weather pattern here. Usually the rainstorms, the thunderstorms (we have thunderstorms almost every day), usually, they come from the Atlantic Ocean across the state of Florida and hit us on the afternoon. And now, they are starting in the Gulf of Mexico and coming and hitting us around noon time. So, we may be having more thunderstorms this week, but we’re fine right now.

So today, we are going to be talking with my guest, Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist. She’s on every other Wednesday. So, she’ll be on two weeks from now again. And I have her on so often because we’re talking about drugs, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, how they affect your body and what you can do naturally instead of taking pharmaceuticals.

She is a registered pharmacist. She has been a pharmacist over 20 years. She works in a hospital as a pharmacist. And what we are going to talk about today is actually something a little different. What we are going to talk about is how she applies what she knows as a pharmacist and what she knows about the body and how things move with the body and what happens on the body, how she applies her pharmacist’s training to giving people the natural remedies that she gives them. She also has a botanical pharmacy here in Clearwater, Florida where we both live.

So, that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. I asked her to do that because she keeps like throwing in these little things every time she’s talking about different natural remedies and the pharmaceuticals. I just wanted her to get all these ideas into one show so that we can learn how we can better take our natural remedies in a way that there has some intelligence and design behind it.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, it’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. So first, I want to tell you something and I’ll our listeners too as long as they are listening. No, but this is a personal message to Pamela.

I want to tell you. So, if you’ve been listening, listeners, if you’ve been listening for any period of time or have listened to other shows where Pamela is the guest, you know that she does consultations and anybody can call her. We’ll give her number during the show. But anybody can call her up and for free, she will find out what’s going on with you and help you choose some natural remedies.

So, if you can get them in front of her, she will look at your blood test. And so I took my blood test and I’ve been taking them in to her. A few months ago, I took in a blood test that showed kidney irregularity which indicated to her that I needed to pay attention to my kidneys now and not wait until the future when I have kidney failure. We did a whole show on kidney failure and how to take care of your kidneys naturally.

But I wanted to tell you, Pamela that I got another blood test and my kidneys are absolutely perfect.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great!

DEBRA: Yes!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good for you!

DEBRA: So, Pamela gave me, she gave me how many perfect remedy to detox my kidneys and it worked absolutely perfectly.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I can add things to that. Today is a very special day to me because my bichon frise, she’s going to be ten in October. She had a blood test. Her B1 kidney parameter was 40, which was high for her breed. Two months ago (and I told the vet), I said, “I’m going to treat her with some homeopathy and I need to have the blood test repeated. Yesterday, I brought her to the vet and I got the results this morning and she’s at 28. That’s’ only two months. She’s just completely reversed. I’m so happy! So, Vicky and you both have great results.

DEBRA: Yes, we do!

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m just super thrilled. I’m super thrilled for you and I’m very thrilled for my pet because I love this dog very much. I’m very good with the animals as well. So, for your listeners, if they have their cat or dog has liver or kidney failure, these kind of things that there is really nothing in the veterinary realm, in medicines to take care of this, please call me because I have very good results with my own pets and other people’s pets.

DEBRA: And go ahead and give them your number.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. My number to the pharmacy here is 727-442-4955. I’d be very honored to help you with your family or with your animals with any concerns you might have.

DEBRA: And she’s excellent, she’s excellent. She has a very good reputation in Clearwater, Florida both with people with the community and doctors. I’ve said before that my medical doctor when I told him that Pamela has given me something, he said, “Just do whatever Pamela tells you to do.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great!

DEBRA: Yeah. So, we’ve done so many shows, but I think way back in the beginning when we did the first show, I’d probably asked you this question. But I want to ask you again today because we’re talking about pharmacology. What made you interested in becoming a pharmacist?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, I always was very good in chemistry and I’ve always been interested in the chemical realm of nature and so forth. When I was in high school, I want to be an organic chemist and that’s what I wanted to do when I graduated. In my senior year in high school, my dad was an engineer and he told that I needed to get a real job.

So, the truth of the matter is I really wanted to be a chemist. He told me that’s too hard and being around dangerous chemicals, I’d be in laboratories all my life. That might not be the best suit for me.

So, one day I came home after touring the Pharmacy School of the University of Wisconsin and I came home and I said, “You know, I think I’m going to be a pharmacist because I found that it has lots of chemistry and I can help people.” I came home and my dad was all excited, he goes “You’re going to be a pharmacist?” I said, “That’s what I’m going to do.” And that’s exactly how it happened.

DEBRA: So, once you became a pharmacist, how did you get into your field of pharmacognosy? Details…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I was actually fortunate to study pharmacognosy at the University of Florida. They don’t have that anymore, but they did offer that and I did study that quite extensively as a side major to what I was working on. So, plant medicine is something that really most people probably aren’t paying much attention to.

You have people that do herbalism and they study the plants and how they react in the body, but that’s more wild crafting and I’ve studied a lot of that too. But I’ve been very fortunate. I studied a lot in Europe on homeopathic medicines. My formal training was in the University of Florida.

I’ve really made it my passion. I actually collected all the pharmacognosy books written in English all over the world. I’ve one of every volume. I’ve read them all.

I find plant chemistry very interesting, the primary and secondary metabolites of plants and how they act in the body and the fact that we could realize that the plants produce these for reasons of their own. It’s not just they’re producing them because they want us. A lot of these things were produced because to ward off herbivores and animals from eating them. But as a result, when we take them, they actually have different restorative properties in the body.

Understanding how this chemistry of the plants and the homeopathy work on receptors in the body, really, it is important for me to train the people and to educate them that this isn’t some sticks and twigs and hocus focus. There is actual scientific data that I can prove on the remedies that I am proprieting for patients.

DEBRA: So, now we know about your background. Now, I know that we have several different areas that we want to talk about today. We have just a couple minutes before the break, but let’s get started. What’s the first one you want to talk about in terms of what you can tell us as a pharmacist that will help us understand better how to take natural remedies.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So, what I like to look at is that certain things sequester your supplements when you’re taking them. So, we’re going to start to talk about that, introduce that subject. So, sequestering agents can somebody taking psyllium like Metamucil. A lot of people or a vegan, they’ll use Metamucil as a thickening agent. I know I used to make them like a crust, if you’re making a quiche that is vegan.

Fiber is also very sequestering. So if you have bran, flax, any of these things that have lots of fiber, when you eat them, they can act as a sequestering agent. So, say in the morning I have steel-cut oats and then I put a lot of flax there and then also some psyllium in there. And then I start talking all my supplements. Well, there’s a problem with that because if you don’t separate them by one or two hours, you’re probably not absorbing 90% of what you’re taking.

DEBRA: Well, that’s a very good thing to know because I just started eating a whole lot more flax and…

PAMELA SEEFELD: And the fiber is good, but separating it, it’s important.

DEBRA: Right. So, I see what I need to do because I do take my supplements. I eat my flax and then I take my supplements.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s just that it’s reducing some of the absorption because if you think about it, you’re taking these things and they sequester cholesterol, which we want. They kind of clean the GI tract to some degree. They’re taking things kind of whatever. They’re not supposed to be there and they’re taking it out with it. But at the same same time, when you’re doing this, you’re actually reducing absorption the supplements you’re taking.

DEBRA: That’s really good to know. We need to go to a break now. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And today, we’re talking about how what’s she’s learned as a pharmacist can help us better take our natural supplements. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist, but in addition to being a pharmacist, she has a natural pharmacy where she practices a field called pharmacognosy. We’ve talked about the meaning of this word before. The root of this, ‘pharma’ is drug, but ‘cognosy’, it means information. So, plants actually have information. You want to explain that, the difference between plants and drugs?

PAMELA SEEFELD: So, actually what’s interesting is that two-thirds of all drugs come from plants. Originally, they’re found in nature. That’s what we have to think when people say, “Oh, you know, but pharmaceuticals, they’re so good.” They came from the plants. They find them in plants. And then, they synthesize them in a lab. That’s how we get medicines.

So, what’s interesting about plants though is that they have activity in the body almost somewhat to what they produce in the plants. So, I’ll give you an example. I think it’s pretty amazing that quercetin is ubiquitous. It’s really in two-thirds of plant. Quercetin works in plants. If quercetin was not in the leaves of the plant, the leaves will basically fall to the ground because quercetin works as a vascular stabilizer of the plant vasculature. It makes the nice and taut and tight and it allows for the nutrients to go to the vessels in the plant.

When we take it orally as people and humans, when we take it, it does the same in our blood vessels. So, I use it for eye problem with the blood, small capillaries. I use for people that are bruising. I use it for hemorrhoids. I use it for leaky gut. I use for a lot of different things where there’s a permeability of the blood vessels.

To me when we think about the wonder of nature that it is pretty intelligent and amazing that the plant, how something works in the plant works exactly the same in people.

DEBRA: That’s so interesting. But I see that in nature (I’ve done a fair amount of study about nature myself), there’s consistency in their order and design and…

PAMELA SEEFELD: And, the cytochrome p450, which are the enzymes in your liver are found in the plant as well. That to me was the craziest thing that I have ever read. The liver enzymes that we have to metabolize medicines and what’s called phenobiotics, which is a terminology for like anything that we consume, maybe a chemical or plant, the metabolism in our liver is inherently related to the metabolism in plants themselves.

DEBRA: Wow! Amazing!

PAMELA SEEFELD: It is. So, we have to have a great appreciation for plants and understand that they provide wonderful things.

And most people, even if they don’t want to believe in alternative medicine (which I would find really hard to not be able to embrace that), everyone’s like, “Eat your fruits and vegetables. Eat plants. Eat salads,” well, what are you doing when you’re eating plants? You’re absorbing these vital nutrients and they’re helping your body.

So, you can help someone’s diet just by how they’re feeling and how they’re doing. I think your 20s and your 30s are very forgiving. People eat a lot of junk and stuff and they can get away with it. When you start you late 40s and your 50s, that’s when you’re not taking care of yourself and you’re not eating salads and trying to do something (it can’t be every day probably for most people, but in general, the trend of what you’re eating isn’t as healthy), that’s when people start having health issues.

That’s typical when I see people come to me because they’ve been able to coast along and now all of a sudden, things have happened. So, eating the plants, consuming specific remedies that I can suggest to you at a very economical cost –

And that’s really important people to know, that this is not very expensive stuff that I’m suggesting. We keep a chart for you, it’s very professional. If you call me and say, “My liver enzyme parameter came high. My kidney parameter came back a little high,” the time it would take you to deal with these issues is when you first find these numbers. When you wait and see what happens and you’re like, “We’ll keep watching it,” well, “watching it” means they hope it doesn’t keep going up. The problem with that is that there are certain things in the herbal medicine realm that can treat very well whereas in regular pharmacy, they have nothing.

DEBRA: Yes, that’s part of the problem. I know, I know. I see the difference. I have to go to a medical doctor because many, many years ago, I started taking thyroid supplement and you can’t just stop taking thyroid supplement although I’m holding out the hope that one day, I’ll figure out how to do that.

So, I have to go to the doctor every three months. I have to get a blood test. I have to get my thyroid prescription, et cetera. I can’t just stop taking it cold turkey because I would go into a coma. I almost did once when I tried that.

But in terms of keeping my body healthy, the doctors, the medical doctors just don’t have anything to give me but a drug. And that doesn’t contribute to health.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah, you’re right. It’s important to realize that we’re not saying everything’s good or everything’s bad. I like to think to myself that I’m very reasonable about straddling the lines. Okay, you’re on thyroid medicine. I have homeopathic T3 T4. Is it going to replace your Synthroid? I don’t think so. For somebody that maybe is a little low on the bell curve and their reading is a little bit lower and for some reason, the doctor doesn’t want to give them thyroid, but there having symptoms of thyroid and they are having symptoms of hypothyroidism and they want to use that, perfect situation.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You maybe don’t want to be on as much medicine or the doctors not willing to accommodate your needs as far as adjusting it a little bit because you feel like you’re just very sluggish. T3 T4 can help a little bit.

But basically, when the TSH just keeps releasing it and it’s elevated and it’s trying to release thyroid and it’s not, that feedback mechanism is gone. And as a result of it, you really need medicine.

I think life is not about good and bad, black or white. It’s really about knowing that there are certain things you can treat well with herbal medicine. Then there are other things that I tell people, “No. This is the medicine that they should have given you.” I’ll write the name of the prescription down and I’ll say, ” Go to the doctor and this is what they should have ordered.”

So, you have to really look at that, that your knowledge, you use it in a very effective manner for your patient. That’s what really comes down to. It’s not about saying, “This is also good or bad.” It’s really about, “Let’s be reasonable and from the chemistry stand point, what you need…”

And many times, I can say, “Look, let’s just try and get rid of it” and it does work. So, really, experience matters a lot.

DEBRA: Well, I think one of the reasons why I like you so much (aside from that I just think you’re a wonderful person), one of the reasons why I like you as someone to have around to advise me on some of these things is that you do have both the drug background and the natural background.

And so many people who have natural background don’t have a drug background. So, you could bring both of those and say, “This is the one that will be most effective thing to do in this particular situation.” You can help people…

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very true. That’s why I’m very proud of what I do because it’s not about shaming medicines. It’s not about totally saying 100% of the time that herbal medicines are going to work.

I know from the repertoire that I use here what works and what doesn’t. Case in point, your pre-kidney failure for yourself and for my pet, I know that product works. I’ve actually given talks to the doctors on that and they were pretty amazed because I’ve seen some dramatic results.

DEBRA: Yeah. We need to go to break again, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about specific things that knowing will help you take your natural supplements better. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who also knows about how natural remedies can work as well if not better than drugs. But she also, as we’ve been talking about, knows when we need to take a drug as opposed to a natural remedy.

So, Pamela, before, you told us that if we eat a lot of fiber, that can interfere with absorption. Is there anything else we need to know about food?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s good, yeah. Fat and protein, when you take fat and protein in a meal, it delays the emptying, the gastric emptying. And so, it delays the [inaudible 00:27:25] of the blood stream.

Let’s give it two examples. Say you’re having a really bad headache and you want to take a homeopathic remedy, you want to take a vitamin that helps for fighting a headache. If you want a peak in the bloodstream, you want it to be high and immediate and not have a delay of at least 20 minutes to an hour. You would want to take it in an empty stomach or you would want to take it with something fizzy, something that’s carbonated because carbonation pushes it to the bloodstream and you’ll get a peak within three to five minutes.

DEBRA: Oh! I didn’t know that. This is just great. It’s just great to know these things.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That way, it’s absorbed through the stomach. So, even pain relief. Let’s say you sprained something, you hit your hand and you’re taking a homeopathic that maybe has Arnica in it (I like tea relief a lot, which formerly was called Tramil), if you wanted to have a peak in the bloodstream faster, instead of just taking it orally or taking it under your tongue, if you put it in something that’s carbonated like Perrier or some Sprite (of course, I’m not a soda person), something that’s got some carbonation in it, even just seltzer water, your peak in the bloodstream is going to be immediate. That’s a good little trick to get it to absorb to the stomach. Fat and protein delay emptying.

So, if you take something that’s time released or you want this to last over the course of the day, you want to take it with a meal. That’s how food affects absorption with these particular things.

DEBRA: Very interesting! The first time I realized that what I was eating was affecting my medication was I used to take soy protein bars for breakfast. I would take my thyroid pill and I would eat the soy bar only to find out that soy negates thyroid.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yup, you’re absolutely right.

DEBRA: And it just amazes me. I had no idea. I was just eating and taking vitamins. We don’t even think about these things. I was completely negating my entire prescription. So then, when I went back to the doctor, he asked me if I was eating soy. But nobody ever told me at the beginning that soy could do that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very important to know, that what you’re eating at the same time as you’re taking supplements, we were talking about fiber sequestering it, so your peak in the bloodstream is low and you might not even absorb the contents because it’s going to be sequestered in the bowel basically inside the fiber.

Also, if you’re taking something that has Vitamin A, D, E and K, which are the fat soluble vitamins, you need to take fat at the same time to have them be absorbed. The reason behind that is that the taste of fat in your mouth (even if it’s just a few almonds), the taste of fat in your mouth releases bile acids in the small intestines. And so when you have a vitamin that has these fat soluble vitamins, say, Vitamin E, you’re not going to absorb it if you’re taking it with pear. So, that’s important to know.

DEBRA: That is important to know. Now, but also, I think it applies to the vitamins in food as well like a supplement. If you’re eating those foods that would have those vitamins in it, then you need to eat some fat with those foods. It’s so interesting how to optimize all these things.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It is.

DEBRA: I think it’s all so new, but once we start understanding it, I think can actually apply this.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I was going to say, another thing to, say you’re taking a homeopathic to block acids, we know stomach acids peak between 10 pm to 2 am. So, that’s why a lot of people have indigestion at night, more heartburns are going to be in the evenings.

So, I used a lot of Reflux Rx because people don’t want to be in a proton pump inhibitor like Protonics and Prilosec and these medicines, we have to remember when you take Protonics, Prilosec, Nexium, any of those medicines that are proton pump inhibitors (and a lot of people are on those), when you take those medicines in a consistent basis, you absorb no calcium and no iron. And that is very important for people to know. You’re going to end up with anemia and you’re going to end up with very frail, brittle bones.

DEBRA: Another important thing to look at. See, this is why I wanted to do this show.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It is important!

DEBRA: You mentioned about time of day. I think there is more about time of day.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! So, some interesting tidbits, the Wallstreet Journal had a really interesting article…

DEBRA: Very good article.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, very good. It’s about your body’s witching hours. It talks about the worst times of day for your health. And I think this is very important for your listeners.

Overnight, you blood pressure and your core body temperature and heart rate are at their lowest, which makes sense. But melatonin, of course, is at its highest. But the liver releases large amount of glucose and blood sugar levels rise between 4am and 6am.

Now, how is this important? It’s important for a person that’s watching their fasting blood sugar when they first get up in the morning if they’re a diabetic. It’s normally going to be elevated because the liver is dumping all this sugar.

So people need to take that into account when they’re checking their fasting blood sugar. They haven’t eaten all night, they take their blood sugar, if it’s high, it might not necessarily be pre-diabetes. It might be the fact that depending on how much glucose the liver has dumped, that might be pre-disposing you to inaccurate readings.

DEBRA: Especially if you get up at five in the morning and take it. That’s just the peak time.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: That’s the peak time. That’s an important thing.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right. So maybe somebody that’s monitoring their sugars, maybe their fasting blood sugar is like in the 90s or close to a hundred. They have a glucose monitor. They’re really on top of things. They’re trying to figure out how to get their sugars down. They keep taking it early in the mornings and it’s registering high. But when they take it in the afternoon, maybe fix or six hours have gone and they haven’t eaten, then all of a sudden, it seems normal. They’re perplexed, they can’t figure out why. It’s important to realize what times of day sugar is being released at a higher amount.

So also, cortisol. Now, cortisol is a stress hormone. That increases in the morning when you first get up. The reason why that your body does that is it’s trying to prepare for the day. Your mind starts racing, “Oh, I’ve got to call this person. I’ve got to go buy groceries. I’ve got to go, do here.” Let’s face it, all of our days are filled with errands and things to do.

So, cortisol goes higher as a stress hormone. That’s why we know more heart attacks and strokes between 6:00 am and noon. Cortisol can be a pre-requisite to heart attacks.

DEBRA: Good, Good. So if anybody wants to look up this article, it’s called Your Body’s Witching Hour. Is that the title?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: You can just search for that, but I’ll put a link to it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s Tuesday, June 2nd of this year, that’s when it came out

DEBRA: That’s a very good article. Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So knowing what times of day heart attacks are more frequent. If you’re going to taking a baby aspirin or in place of a baby aspirin, if you want to be taking a 800 to 1200 units of vitamin E, you need take it in the day time, not in the afternoon because you’re most at risk for the heart attack in the morning. That’s important to know.

And as I was saying, if you’re going to take something for heart burn, for stomach acid, I used a lot of Reflux RX. It’s medical. It’s very good for people that don’t want to be in the proton pump inhibitors as I was talking about, the acid not being there to absorb those things. You want to take it at night.

DEBRA: Okay, good. And that’s why doctors tell you take this at night or take it with your meals or whatever. When we come from the break, we’ll talk more about when to take you take your supplements and how to determine your dose.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about what we can learn from a pharmacist about how we take our natural supplements.

So Pamela, there’s a couple that I can think go together that I’ve noticed and that is about dose and also, about taking your supplements throughout the day. Talk about what you tell about drinking water throughout the day? Knowing you has changed completely how I take things because I have my bottled with my liquid supplements in it. I also spread my solid supplements throughout the day, breakfast, lunch and dinner for the reasons you’re going to tell us.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right, a very good question. So, a lot of times, when I give somebody homeopathic remedies, we’re putting it in a water bottle and you’re drinking it over the course of six to eight hours a day.

The reason why you want to do is that every time you take a sip, your body is taking a hit of the medication. It’s like getting an IV fluid. We think about the people in critical care at the hospital, you have them on continuous drip. There’s a reason behind that. We want this to be released continuously into the body.

When you take something just for one time, let’s say you take everything in the morning with a swig of water and you walked out the door and you don’t take anything else the rest of the day, depending on what you ate, whatever your breakfast was [inaudible 00:40:02], maybe you add a big bowl of All Bran’s extra fiber and you didn’t absorb any of it or maybe you had some fat and protein if you had some scrambled eggs and then maybe it’s delaying it for another hour, the peaks in the bloodstream are going to be a sudden peak. It’s going to be, in the bloodstream, let’s say, 15 to 20 minutes, maybe less than that. And then after that, there’s no medicine around.

So, if you’re trying to get a therapeutic outcome and you’re looking to have a result, if you’re not just taking them just because you just want to take them (and I respect people’s time and money ), if you’re going to take something and you really want to absorb it and you really want it to be effective for you, then as a result of that, you really need to look and see taking it through the day.

And a lot of people are taking the homeopathic supplements that are liquids because it is easy. Just throw it in your purse or put it on your desk, drink it through the day and you have much more consistent result because of that.

DEBRA: Yes, I just think that’s so important because I used to take everything in the morning. I would say, “I can’t remember this through the day. “ But after listening to your explanation about this it made so much sense to me that I now make sure that I take it all day long.

I actually have three little containers on my desk where I work. One says ‘breakfast’, ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’. I can see them in front of me all day long. So, there’s no forgetting. I know that I’m just supplementing my body all day long and it does seem to make a difference.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It will. And the thing that’s important too. Like we were talking about the different times of the day, as another aside, I’m talking about this article here. Arthritic joints are stiffest and most painful between 8:00 am and 11:00 am. That’s because when you sleep at night, you have a rise in pro-inflammatory markers.

Now, why is this important? Because these rise and pro-inflammatory markers that takes place while you’re sleeping (it makes you have arthritis and stiffness in your joints when you first wake up in the morning. And of course, part of it is inactivity when you’re lying in bed), but a lot of this is these pro-inflammatory markers, if your c-reactive protein or your SED rate or your estrogen (there’s different things that the doctor can do) or your ANA, all these different tests, these numbers (the c-reactive protein is more associated with heart attacks. If they’re worried about your heart, they’ll do that, so they can be aware of what your number is), if those are mildly elevated, then you need to take some anti-inflammatory at bed time before you go to bed. It -might help the morning stiffness and some of the arthritis that may be associated for some of these individuals.

DEBRA: Good!

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s important to know. Those inflammatory markers, that’s probably part of the explanation we were talking about heart attacks in the mornings. This article doesn’t go into that factor. But heart attacks are more frequent in the morning, we know cortisol rises in the morning, we know that stiffness due to pro-inflammatory factors is from the evening when you sleep is rising, it would make logical sense that the c-reactive protein, these inflammatory markers that are elevated at night not only contributing to arthritis, but they’re also contributing to heart attack prevalence.

DEBRA: Yes, good.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So, taking these things, if you’re going to take an anti-inflammatory, arthritis or not, but maybe you’re worried about heart disease, maybe you have heart disease in your family, maybe your doctors are already giving you something for heart disease prevention, the time to be taking homeopathic or vitamin supplements for inflammation might be at your bed time.

DEBRA: Okay.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So, that’s important to know.

DEBRA: You want to take things at the right time of day, that’s so important. So, we only have few minutes, but I want to make sure that we just talk about dose for a minute.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah.

DEBRA: There’s a big difference between taking six pills or one pill. How do you what the right dose is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, obviously, we’re talking about the dose. When we dose children, we dose it in so many milligrams per kilogram. So it’s done on weight.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: If we’re not talking about [inaudible 00:44:01] and we’re not talking about smalls animals (like we were talking about this earlier in the show), then we are looking at what is the normal therapeutic dose for most individuals.

Most of the time, I’m very conservative. I start with a few things and I start with the lowest dose that I think is going to be successful. If you start on a dose that’s higher, first of all, you might be overmedicating. And secondly, if we do a dose that’s higher, you’re going to be more at risk for side effects. And there can be side effects for anything.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And I have to tell people too that when you’re talking about dose, when you see a product and it’s a vitamin product and it’s got about 20 different things in it and its says it’s herbal pain relief or just some kind of a generic product, when you have lots of different herbal products in one container, one capsule, there’s more chance for side effect than if you use one single agent at a time.

So, a lot of times, I use single remedies. I don’t use a bunch of combination remedies because if someone’s not responding correctly or they’re responding adversely, you don’t know which ingredient is causing the problem.

DEBRA: Exactly! I tried to take just single ones too. Right now, I’m taking an herbal blend because that was what I was given, but I’m actually doing really well on it. But usually, I just try to take single things and I tell people to just take single nutrients or herbs or whatever because that way, you’ll be able to tell what is the problem if there is a problem.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Also, I wanted to caution people. When you’re taking blood pressure, because a lot of people have hypertension, your blood pressure will peak at 9:00 pm at night. So, if you take it in the morning and you take it night and every single time, you take it in the evening and then every time you go back to the doctor, he’s looking at your numbers that you’ve been writing down and he says, “Oh, your blood pressure is going up at night. Let’s add another medicine,” (I’m just bringing blood pressure as an example. I can treat that homeopathically for your clients that are listening), but what I want to tell people is that typically, this is what they’ll do, they start somebody on a beta blocker or something like that at the doctor’s office and then instead of titrating that particular medicine up and bringing it to its maximum or near maximum dosage, just because the dose was too low, they add another drug. And then, they add another drug.

It’s not uncommon that I see someone with mild hypertension on three things, low doses of three different things.

So, you need to question that. If you take your blood pressure at night, it seems like it’s high, but it’s normally what it’s supposed to be. It’s important for you to look at those numbers and not be over-zealous in treating them.

And if their doctors are giving you two or three different things for your blood pressure, maybe it’s something that you can approach – unless you have another existing condition like congested heart failure or something else. But a non-complicated mild hypertension, please question whether you need to be on two or three medicines where they’re using low doses and they never really have used the correct dose of the first drug.

DEBRA: Well, also, I know from watching from other people around me that you can take care of high blood pressure just by taking magnesium.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: …that it can be just a nutrient deficiency. Just taking magnesium can take care of that. So, I’ve seen that happen over and over. It’s pretty amazing to me have a lot of people seem to have high blood pressure, but it’s not because they’re sick in some way. It’s just that they are not getting enough nutrition.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. Magnesium makes a big difference in the blood pressure. But also, if someone has a mild hypertension – you know, people are stressed out a lot. Cortisol is a big driver of hypertension. And especially the top number, the systolic blood pressure, if you use 1500 mg vitamin C of time-released vitamin C and you do that twice a day (I use a 12-hour release Vitamin C called C-Max), that would lower it 20 points in four days. And that’s an easy way to get the top number down.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: For the bottom number, I use Cartego Complex. It’s homeopathic Hawthorn. That takes that bottom number down nice and easy.

So there are things you can do. Blood pressure, and we were talking about kidney failure and different things, there are things you can do and you need to question whether you need to be on so many medications. Titrating up to the correct dose is really more important than keep adding in another medicine or another homeopathic remedy. We respect people’s time and money. You want to make sure that if you are not maxing out at the right dose of whatever product you are using or whatever vitamin, then you are not really sure what’s working and what isn’t.

DEBRA: How do you know what the right dose is?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Empirically, it will depend on the product that you’re using. But as a pharmacist, I can tell you – I’ll give you an example, Vitamin C. After 5g of vitamin C at any one time, you really don’t absorb it anymore. It basically spills out into the urine. So, if you’re going to give someone high dose of vitamin c, you would want to say, “Okay, maybe I should split that dose up through the day if I really want to absorb it,” so this person gets the full benefit of the C and it’s not necessarily going and being wasted. So, it’s important to know.

And these doses have all been determined by scientific method. So, now we know. And people can look those up. I wouldn’t just search it in Google, but if you look it in the National Library of Medicine, you can find all the medical data that’s been published on things.

Or I would just say to tell them to call me. I’d be glad to answer over the phone if there’s a question about, “Are you taking too much? Are taking too little? And what are you treating?” Sometimes people are just taking thing empirically just for their general health. That’s great. Other times, somebody actually has a real condition and they are trying to treat something. And if they are using sub-therapeutic dose, they are going to see any outcome.

I see this a lot where people say, “I tried that vitamin and it didn’t do like they said.” And then I’m like, “Well, what was the product you were using and what was the dose?” And then, they give me this glassy-eyed look. People don’t realize you just don’t take something randomly off the shelf and take it and think that it’s going to work. There should be…

DEBRA: I have to interrupt you, Pamela just because we only have seconds left. So, why don’t you give your phone number real quick.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Okay, thank you so much! This has been a great show. You can go to the ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out about all the shows and there are transcripts. So, if you want to read the transcript of this show, it will be available next Tuesday.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!

Tests You Won’t Find at Your Doctor’s Office

Wendy-Myers-1My guest today is Wendy Myers, CHHC, NC, founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. We’ll be talking about special tests that Wendy offers that go above and beyond what you can get from a medical doctor. Things like organic acids and neurotranmitters, and how these relate to your health and detox. Wendy is a certified holistichealth and nutrition coach in Los Angeles, Ca, She is also certified in Hair Mineral Analysis for the purpose of designing Mineral Power programs for clients to correct their metabolism and body chemistry. She is currently seeking her masters in clinical nutrition at Bridgeport University in Connecticut. Wendy hosts the weekly Live to 110 Video Podcast and the Modern Paleo Cooking show on her Live to 110 Youtube Channel. store.liveto110.com/functional-medical-tests

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Tests You Won’t Find at Your Doctor’s Office

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Wendy Myers, CHHC, NC

Date of Broadcast: July 08, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It is Wednesday, July 8, 2015. I’m here in beautiful Clearwater, Florida.

Today, we’re going to be talking about tests that can you can have done on your body that you’re not going to find in your doctor’s office.

I go to a medical doctor. I go to alternative doctors. I go to practitioners that know about health but aren’t even doctors. The experience that I’ve had in the doctor’s office is that there are so many tests even that they could order through a lab that would tell you things like how much vitamin D is in your body, for example or testing other things like how well your kidneys are functioning and various kinds of things.

But they don’t order those things even though they are there and they’re available to the doctor to order. They don’t order them. Several months ago, I got a list of tests from Pamela Seefeld, who is on every other Wednesday. She’s a pharmacist. And we’re talking about how you can not be taking pharmaceuticals but instead, be taking natural remedies.

And so I asked her what are the tests that I should be taking, and she gave me a list, things that the doctor should be ordering. It was much longer than what my doctor was ordering, and I took it in, and I said, “We do order these.” And he said, “Sure.” And that was the last time he did it, only just because I asked him that one time.

So then I asked the receptionist about ordering and she said, “Well, the doctor can only order the tests that go with your diagnosis. He can’t order anything else and have it be covered by the insurance.” And I don’t have insurance but that’s another issue.

But the thing is that regular medical doctors are not necessarily ordering the tests that could be telling you things about your body that you might want to know.

So my guest today is Wendy Myers. She has a bunch of letters after her name which we’ll ask her about when she comes on. She’s the founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. And she is very trained in a lot of things that most people aren’t trained in. She has just started offering a lot of tests. And we’re going to talk about some of the different tests that she has available to you now, things that she can interpret that you’re not going to find in a lot of other places.

Hi, Wendy.

WENDY MYERS: Hi, and how are you?

DEBRA: I’m good. How are you?

WENDY MYERS: I’m doing fantastic.

DEBRA: Well, I have a bunch of letters after your name. CHHC, NC, and you now have FDN. What are all these things?

WENDY MYERS: The first one is a Certified Holistic Health Coach, this certification I got from this nutrition school I went to. The Nutritional Consultant I got when I got certified in hair mineral analysis. That’s my first love. I love hair mineral analysis. It’s such an amazing tool which I’ve done with you a handful of times.

And the next one is FDN, Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist. And I added that because I really felt that I needed to—I wanted to do all kinds of testing with my clients, testing that’s not typically done in a medical doctor’s office and testing which is needed.

I think that’s why a lot of people are going outside of their medical doctor and seeking the consults, the natural health professionals that are doing a functional diagnostic testing to get to the root cause of their illness, as opposed to covering it up with medications because that’s a doctor, they’re trained to do, and that’s what the insurance company would pay for.

So that’s what I do. I do functional diagnostic medicine to help unroot the cause of illness and to correct it naturally, to completely resolve the health issue at hand.

DEBRA: Why did you become a health coach?

WENDY MYERS: Well, I was having my pregnancy and I started studying nutrition and health, and cleaning up my environment, prepping for the baby and whatnot, and I just thought, “Why haven’t I studied this before?” I was so interested in this. And then I became very, very passionate about it. And then my father was diagnosed with cancer and really it was devastating, and he passed away within six months of his diagnosis. And I was angry about it. I didn’t understand why his cancer treatments made him so sick. I felt like he could have lived a few more years had he not undergone this treatment, radiation and chemo and whatnot. And I just started studying—I had all these questions. Why is everyone so sick? Why is everyone having cancer? Why was my father on 10 medications? And that contributed to his demise.

So I just started studying. And I started my blog, Liveto110.com, and I just wanted to share everything I was learning. And I just discovered about the underlying root cause of disease are mineral and nutrient deficiencies, and heavy metal and chemical toxicity.

When you blow it down and you look at all the disease labels, the majority of them are due to these two factors. So that’s my main message that I’m trying to get out to the world is that people need to do a foundational work that they’re not getting with their physicians. They need to mineralize their body with targeted nutrient therapy, like the sniper approach as opposed to the shotgun approach, of just taking a multivitamin. And they need to detox their body of heavy metals and chemicals.

You really don’t have any hopes of being healthy long term if you don’t address these two pressing health issues.

DEBRA: I completely agree with you. And I’ll just tell our listening audience that I figured out exactly the same thing before I even met you. So when we met, it was like, “Oh, here’s some agreement.”

We’re approaching it in slightly different ways, I would say, they were complementary, in that you know so much more than I do about how the body works and nutrition and all these tests, and you have all these certifications to do your nutritionist work. And I know more about where the toxic chemicals are and how they affect your body and what you can use instead. So I think that Wendy and I go together really well.

WENDY MYERS: Yes, we do. We’re like peas and carrots.

DEBRA: So let’s start talking about your tests. So what is the most important test that you think—now, before you answer this question, I’m on her page and it’s a huge page. Let me see how many tests are done on this page. There are 22 tests, I think, of all different kinds. And we obviously can’t talk about all 22 tests, in just this hour that we have together. So let’s start with which test do you think is the most important?

WENDY MYERS: Well, my favorite test is the hair mineral analysis. It gives me a picture of your body’s chemistry. But after that, an organic acid test is very, very important. That’s what gives me a tremendous amount of information about the acid that’s the ones gut bugs are producing.

DEBRA: Before we go on, tell us what the organic acids are because when I—I’m sure that most people listening have no clue what it is. I’m not even sure I know what it is.

WENDY MYERS: Basically, the gut bug too, what it is. It’s the waste products that your gut bugs are producing. And so by looking at these acids, we can tell what bacteria or families of bacteria you have in your gut. But it also tests other things in it as well. It tests your neurotransmitter metabolites. So we can see if there is an imbalance in your neurotransmitters. It tests amino acid absorption, so we can see if there’s possibly some reduced intestinal absorption, maybe some leaky gut, if you’re not absorbing proteins. It tests all your B vitamins. You can see if those are low. It’s just got so many different markers that it’s such a tremendous amount of information.

For instance, your ammonia levels, if those are high, we know you’ve got some liver problems going on. We’re going to work on that liver health. It will give an indication of your phosphoric acid and perhaps you’ve got some bone density issues, if that’s low. It gives a lot of information and it really helped me to work on someone’s gut issues. If they have bacterial infections or yeast infections, or it can show me potentially, you might have mold issues going on.

DEBRA: I need to interrupt you for a second just because we need to go to break and we’ll finish talking about this when we come back.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Wendy Myers with many letters after her name. She’s at Liveto110.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Wendy Myers. She’s the founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. And we’re talking today about a new set of tests that Wendy offers. If you want to go exactly to the page, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, find today’s show, and there’s a link to the page that has the functional medical test. That’s the name of the page, functional medical test.

Wendy, if they go to your website, how can they easily find that page?

WENDY MYERS: You can go to Store.Liveto110.com, and then on the left hand menu, you go to functional medical test, and it will all be right there.

DEBRA: So we were talking about the organic acids test.

WENDY MYERS: Well, I was saying before that when I discovered what type of gut infections people have, almost every person I test has some sort of gut infection. I automatically assume that everyone has parasites. It’s kind of a given especially sushi lovers. Each square inch of sushi has 10,000 parasite eggs.

DEBRA: I knew there was something I didn’t like about sushi.

WENDY MYERS: It’s pretty gross when you think about it but it sure is tasty. I like it.

So the organic acids test does not show parasites but it will show yeast and bacteria. And then based on that, I can give people all natural biocidal. They work just as well as prescription antibiotics. You have to take them for longer though. I’ll give people a course for about six to eight weeks and start with the parasite, then do bacteria, then do yeast. That’s six to eight weeks for each of those protocols. And then we’ll re-test in about six months and see if we were able to clear everything up.

DEBRA: That’s good. I just want to mention that I’ve had some test with Wendy, and she found some things and gave me some things. And when we had the next test, there was an improvement.

WENDY MYERS: You had a lot of improvement.

DEBRA: Yes, I’m really happy about that.

So what about oxalates? First, what’s an oxalate?

WENDY MYERS: I forgot to mention that.

DEBRA: There are no organic acids tests.

WENDY MYERS: The main reason you want to do the organic acids test, in my mind, is to find out if you have oxalates. And the Great Plains Laboratory is the only lab that does the organic acids test, that shows oxalates. Genova does not—many of my clients coming to me that the organic acids test with their doctor, using Genova, but you are missing a key component of the test, a key indicator of oxalates, which are major impediments to your health.

Oxalates are these little crystals that form in your body, one, through dietary intake. High oxalate foods include cacao, collagen, [inaudible 00:17:07] or using lots of collagen. I’m not a big fan of that because it’s very high in oxalates. A lot of greens like spinach and Swiss chard, the green smoothie fanatics out there, extremely high in oxalates. So you need to be very careful about that.

That’s just one aspect of oxalate intake. The next is if you had gut infections or long term gut infections, those produce oxalates as well.

DEBRA: I actually looked at the oxalate diet, and I was on it for a while because it was high oxalate—I had high oxalates in my body. But I was going on a kale kick, and you read things and you say, “Oh, I should be eating more greens, more kale, more this, more that.” But you don’t often find out the other side of it. And so if your body doesn’t deal with oxalates, well, then they’re going to build up and you need to watch out for that.

And so there’s all these balancing things that we need to watch out for.

WENDY MYERS: It’s a big problem. I find oxalates in 9 out of 10 people that I test. It continues to amaze me how many people have issues with oxalates. And when you have these, they cause so many problems in the body.

Number one, an inability to detox. The oxalates, these crystals will bind in mercury and lead and can make people very, very toxic, if these metals would be lodged in these crystals, and then lodged in your body, and you can’t detox them. It interferes in your entire body’s ability to detox, your ability the methylate, which means creating your own transmitters, and just so many different processes in your body are involved in methylation. It really gums up your whole body’s metabolism.

Not to mention causing really tight, achy muscles. People out there, their neck is always hurting, or you’re getting massages and just nothing helps it. They’re taking [inaudible 00:19:16]. Perhaps they’re taking pain medication or you have fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue. These can be caused by oxalates.

And so I think it’s very important, especially for anyone who has long term GI issues or known gut infections or parasitic infections. Get tested for oxalates and address it because it’s a fairly simple regimen to remove the oxalates from your body. And what I do with a client is I address the oxalates and once those have been broken down to a significant degree in the body by taking a handful of supplements and doing the low oxalate diet, after that, then I see what’s still left over that we need to address. But it really solves a lot of problems and removes a lot of health symptoms in the body that are bothering clients.

DEBRA: And it’s so not wildly known.

WENDY MYERS: No, it’s not. I don’t know why, but it’s not.

DEBRA: But it’s so important, and especially if you want to detox. And if you’re having problems detoxing, this could be something to look into.

We’re actually needing to go to break in about 40 seconds, so when we come back, let’s talk about neurotransmitters. I think you mentioned that the organic acids test tells about the neurotransmitters, right?

WENDY MYERS: It always shows the neurotransmitter metabolites. So it will only give an indication of an imbalance of them. But I like to do a direct test for neurotransmitters, which is a urine test. That’s a little bit different than your organic acids, but at least it gives an indication of some issues that require further investigation.

DEBRA: Okay, we’ll talk about that when we come back from the break.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Wendy Myers. She’s the founder and head writer of Liveto110.com, and she has a number of nutrition certifications that give information that is very different from other people that you will go to, including a doctor and other natural practitioners. Her website is Liveto110.com, and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Wendy Myers. She’s the founder and head writer of Liveto110.com, and has many nutrition certifications. She knows more about nutrition and especially about detoxing than practically anybody I’ve talked to. She always amazes me with what new things she has to say.

Let’s talk about neurotransmitters. First, tell us what a neurotransmitter is, and what can go wrong with it.

WENDY MYERS: Well, neurotransmitters are substances made in the body. They begin with amino acids, so you have to have proper protein consumption and intestinal absorption of proteins.

And so this is very, very important. A lot of different things can interfere with neurotransmitter production. The main neurotransmitters people have are serotonin, dopamine, other catecholamine, like norepinephrine, epinephrine. And most importantly is gaba. A lot of people are missing gaba and we’re so overstimulated today with stuff like the internet and even just the effects of EMF and wireless internet on our body. And always looking at screens, and we’re getting caffeine all day, and doing all this stuff that we’re so stimulated, we are depleted in gaba.

DEBRA: What is gaba? What does it do for our bodies?

WENDY MYERS: Well, gaba is the break. Gaba is a substance that turns all the stimulating neurotransmitters off. So the adrenaline, the norepinephrine, the epinephrine, gaba shuts that down, so you can relax.

So anyone with anxiety, anyone who can’t go to sleep or they’re constantly waking up, they probably need gaba. And for me, it was life-changing when I started taking gaba. And I recommend it to almost every single of my clients because they all usually some sort of issue with sleeping or falling asleep, et cetera, or anxiety. You do want to do neurotransmitter test first because if you just take gaba, it can make you depressed if you’re depleted in some stimulating neurotransmitters. So there has to be a delicate balancing act where you may need to supplement the amino acids to improve and upregulate the production of stimulating neurotransmitters or gaba can make you feel down or depressed or really tired.

Another really important one that was really life-changing for me was PEA, and PEA is found in chocolate. So for all of you chocoholics out there, like myself, you may just be—

DEBRA: I love chocolate.

WENDY MYERS: Any of you women out there or men that are—you’re going to murder someone if you don’t have your chocolate.

DEBRA: I used to be that way but my body’s calmed down about it. And now, I feel like I have a choice that I can eat chocolate or not eat chocolate, and I’m okay either way, whereas before, I had to have my chocolate.

WENDY MYERS: I was that way for a number of years. I had to have my chocolate. Where’s the chocolate? And I’d have anxiety if I didn’t have it. And I made the correlation that when I ate chocolate, I was really able to focus and work really productively for a few hours following the consumption of chocolate. I thought it was just the sugar. I was doing a sugar high. But what I found out when I tested my neurotransmitters is that I was deficient in PEA, and chocolate contains PEA.

And so now that I’ve supplemented the precursor the PEA, which is phenylalanine, kind of a mouthful, I don’t even think about chocolate. And I lost actually—yes, it called phenylalanine, and it’s just a simple amino acid that I take in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon if I feel I need a little more brain functioning or concentration or focus. And it completely took away all my brain fog, any kind of remaining brain fog I have left over. I can focus for hours. My thinking is still clear. My verbiage, when I speak very, very clear, and it just was really life-changing for me, just taking this one supplement, and following supplementation of the phenylalanine, I lost 20 pounds in about two and a half months because I no longer ate this gigantic chocolate bar. Literally, I ate a massive chocolate bar about 2 to 3 pm every day. I wanted some sugar and I wanted some PEA, and that gave me the focus to finish off the rest of my day.

DEBRA: Let me tell you, as I have a similar story. So I don’t eat chocolate bars because I don’t want the sugar and stuff, and so I figured out how I could make with organic cocoa. I would make what I would call “fudge.” And so what I would do is I would take about a heaping teaspoon of organic cocoa. I would put in coconut sugar and grass-fed cream, and butter made from grass-fed cream. And I would mix it all up, and sometimes I put walnuts in it or some kind of flavoring like orange extract or something. But I had to have this every day after lunch. I just had to have it after lunch as I couldn’t work unless I had this chocolate.

And now, I don’t eat it anymore at all. I haven’t lost 20 pounds but the point is that I must be doing something right in my diet and in the supplements that I’m taking because I’ve gone from craving specific foods to—in the past couple of weeks, it’s been so ripe that—I don’t even want to eat almost. Yesterday, honestly, I made this wonderful salad that was all vegetables. It was lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, avocadoes, and I put wheat-free soy sauce on it and olive oil. And my body loved it so much. I got so much satisfaction out of that that I had it again for dinner.

And that’s all I ate yesterday. And if you were to have said to me eat that a few years ago, I would say no. I want my chocolate. And I felt good all day long.

WENDY MYERS: One of those things where when you are taking the right supplements, especially minerals, and you’re nourishing your body, you don’t need as much food and you don’t have the food craving you used to have. Before I started taking minerals, I always craved salt and vinegar potato chips, and my body just wanted that salt. It just desperately wanted that salt. And as soon as I started taking minerals, I started having calcium and magnesium and zinc and a handful of trace mineral complex, et cetera, it’s amazing to me that I never looked at them again.

DEBRA: That’s very interesting.

WENDY MYERS: It’s just amazing to me. So a lot of women out there I know are struggling with certain cravings and things like that, and biology will always overcome will power. And so you have to listen to your body. Your body is trying to get a nutrient need or minerals or if you’re craving chocolate, maybe PEA, magnesium, copper. There are all kinds of things that your body is craving that you probably need something in that. If you’re craving carbohydrates, your body is trying to make serotonin. You need serotonin.

DEBRA: We need to go to break. So hold on. And we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, I’m talking with Wendy Myers, founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Wendy Myers, founder and head writer of Liveto110.com, and holder of many certifications about nutrition that are far beyond what most nutritionists are going to talk to you about.

Wendy, so another test you have is the genetic test. Tell us about that and why should somebody get that done.

WENDY MYERS: Well, I love to do a genetic test on clients because it gives us a lot of information about nutrients people may be needing more of, should avoid. And it gives us a lot of information about—it explains to clients why they have certain health issues. For instance, if someone has a lot of GAD smith, or mutations in those genes, they’re going to have a lot more anxiety, a lot more propensity for drug and alcohol abuse, and it will explain why their family members or a lot of their family members have additions and things of that nature. It also will show someone’s propensity for certain issues, if they need to bio haggard, do a work around for.

Namely, if people have this one smith, they will need to really be worried about their estrogen. People that tend to have estrogen dominance and there are people that really need to worry about their liver health and be worrying about xenoestrogen intake and their environment or detoxing these estrogens because they’re at risk for estrogen-dependent cancers.

These are people that need to really maybe avoid hormone replacement therapy or birth control pills.

There’s a lot of different things that people learn about, about their health, and it can really help them to tailor their health regime or their supplement program, tailor it to their individual genetic needs.

DEBRA: So can there be information in this test that would help people understand how their body detoxes or doesn’t detox?

WENDY MYERS: Yes, exactly. It will tell me if people are having trouble making glutathione or if they have trouble with liver detoxification. It just gives a lot of different markers for detox issues. It also will give me markers for mitochondrial function or energy production, if they’ve got a lot of problems with their mitochondria and perhaps, it explains why they’re so tired all the time.

So again, it really helps me to really target their supplementation or get it more customized for their genetic issues. And that’s really, really important. There’s another pattern called the [inaudible 00:42:03] pattern, where these are people that cannot take flouroquinolone medications like antibiotics, certain antibiotics like Cipro and a handful of other family of antibiotics. And this will make them very, very sick.

I know there’s a lot of listeners out there that have taken Cipro, a round of antibiotics at the hospital with their doctor, and they were just never the same afterwards or it took them years to recover. So it can be very, very important to pinpoint if you have the [inaudible 00:42:36] pattern, but we call them [inaudible 00:42:38] because they need to avoid flouroquinolone medications because it can really kill them or make them extremely ill.

DEBRA: I’m actually really interested in the genetic test because I think that each of our bodies as an individual—we are like snowflakes. There are no two patters that are the same and our fingerprints are all unique. And I think that we probably all have unique genetic patterns that can tell us something about all these things that you’re talking about and where our strengths and weaknesses are. And we don’t know that if all we’re doing is taking drugs.

WENDY MYERS: Yes, exactly.

DEBRA: More and more I’m understanding the necessity to test whatever the test is, whatever method you use, to find out what’s really going on with your body because I see doctors just handing out prescription drugs. Of course, they do some testing but not as much as what you’re talking about and even natural practitioners whether they’re herbalists or homeopaths or whatever, it’s not that they’re not doing their own method—I’ve been to so many different people and I’ve never had a genetic test. And yet, that’s the basic blueprint of my body. And I didn’t even know that I could get one.

You hear about them on TV. Some character on a TV show needs a paternity test or something. But if you look at a hospital show or a doctor show, they’re not saying, “Well, let’s do a genetic test.” They just don’t do it.

WENDY MYERS: It takes a very special doctor to go outside his medical training, question his medical training and further their training even if they just have a personal interest or whatnot to be able to further their education and really want to provide their patients the very best care. Very few doctors that are cognizant of doing the latest test because it takes a lot of work. It’s a lot of reading and training, et cetera. Many doctors are overwhelmed with their patient load, especially if they work for HMO or whatnot, or at a clinic, a very busy clinic.

But it’s still important to learn about your genetics, your genetic weaknesses and propensities for certain diseases so you can do the work around for these, and the supplements according to your genes. But additionally, there’s a new field called pharmacogenetics where you can get a test done to find out what medications you should take and which ones you should avoid because every pharmaceutical company has to create a blueprint of the pathways that certain medications have to go through to be metabolized.

For a lot of people that have drug side effects or really bad side effects, it’s because they can’t metabolize certain drugs. So when you do this pharmacogenetic test, you can find out the drugs you should avoid or ones you should take. And you have to do this. I mean, I personally will never going to take medications but if you do take medications, which can be life-saving for many, you need to find out the ones you should avoid and the ones that work for your body.

DEBRA: Actually, I’ve never heard of that. That’s very interesting. But wouldn’t that also apply to—well, this test is designed for drugs, but to me, there should be a test like that for taking supplements. I just keep thinking about how so many people will take supplements or drugs or alternative therapies just on a shotgun approach, where you just take it and see what happens. And you’re approaching 180 degrees and absolutely opposite direction of saying, “Here are these tests and then I can give you supplements that are going to be exactly pinpointed for you.”

WENDY MYERS: And that’s important. It’s all about bio-individuality in supplementing according to you bio-individuality and taking medications based on your bio-individuality. And I have an article in my site about pharmacogenetics. It’s right on my homepage at Liveto110.com. I think it’s an incredibly interesting field that not a lot of people are talking about. You can get the testing with [inaudible 00:47:16] Laboratories. All those links and everything are on my website.

For me, I just think taking multivitamins are so 1990s. Today, it’s all about individual supplementation and medication.

DEBRA: I’m so glad to hear this. Now, we only just have about two minutes left. But I just want to mention that people can change their genetics. They can change their DNA. And so a test could be done before and then you could do things to improve your genetic situation. And a test done afterwards and see what happens.

WENDY MYERS: It’s very, very important.

DEBRA: Well, we only have a minute and a half left.

WENDY MYERS: So what was your question again?

DEBRA: I was talking about the genetic test and how we can change our DNA and that’s a whole show in itself about how we can change our DNA. I should probably do one on that. But we could take the test before and take the test after and see how we’ve changed our DNA.

WENDY MYERS: Actually, genes don’t really change at all. You want to do that test one time, which is great. But you can change your genetics or prevent mutation by detoxing your body and by eating a healthy diet. You have to be cognizant of this because many metals and chemicals cause our genes to mutate, and you can pass this down to your children, the future generation. So I think we’re becoming more and more sick as a population because of so many metals and chemicals in our environment mutating our genes, causing cancer, mutating cells, et cetera. But the gene mutations do get passed down to your children.

So it’s a paramount importance today to be thinking about your health, eating the right diet, avoiding chemicals in your diet, and thinking about a lifelong detoxification strategy which I talk a lot about on my podcast in the Live to 110 Podcast and on my website as well.

DEBRA: And I need to interrupt you again because we’ve only got several seconds now. So I want to say thank you so much. And everybody can go to Liveto110.com and Wendy has such interesting articles there and podcasts. Liveto110.com. You can also go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out more about the guest to come and the guest from the past. All of our shows are recorded and you can listen to the archives.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.

Are You Heading For Kidney Failure? Natural Remedies Can Help

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking about your kidneys and how to keep them healthy in our toxic world. Your kidneys filter all your blood so they are constantly exposed to toxic chemicals that have made their way into your body. More than 31 million people in the United States alone are on dialysis because their kidneys don’t function. Learn what you can do naturally to protect your kidneys. Doctors have no drugs to help kidneys, but nature can protect and restore them. Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and selling top quality medicinal supplements, so she’s seen it all. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Are You Heading For Kidney Failure? Natural Remedies Can Help

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: June 03, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Wednesday, June 3rd 2015 and it’s, again, a beautiful day in Clearwater, Florida. It’s our sunny summer. And let’s see, I have a thermometer on my window. It’s 84° here. We’re having summer.

Today, we’re going to be talking about kidneys, our wonderful, valuable kidneys that do so much for us to detox and how we can end up with kidney failure.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s on every other Wednesday. So she will be on again two weeks from now and every two weeks after that. And you can also, I should say, go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and you can listen to her past shows because what we’re doing is we’re talking about different parts of the body, different illnesses that people have, different drugs that people take and how those things can be taken care of with natural remedies. So if you’re just tuning in and hearing her for the first time, you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to all her past shows.

So today, we’re talking about kidneys. I especially wanted to talk about kidneys because the way kidneys work is all the blood in your body passes through your kidneys and so all the toxic chemicals that may be in your body, the heavy metals and all those things, in addition to all the body waste that are floating around in your body all passes through the kidneys. Those toxic chemicals can damage the kidneys. And when your kidneys stop functioning, then your kidneys aren’t taking those toxic chemicals out of your body. And also, when your kidneys stop functioning, you end up on dialysis.

Pamela, I’m getting to you. I just want to say this because I just got this email yesterday with an ad for something and it said that the average annual cost of monthly dialysis treatments is $44,000!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, I would believe that. In fact, in 2009, Medicare here in this country (and then of course, today, it’s even more, but that’s the last statistic), just on kidney failure alone, they spent $33.8 billion.

Debra: I looked at that and I thought, “I can’t have kidney failure.” That number really woke me up.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s a tremendous cost and it’s a tremendous disability to the patient as well.

Debra: Yes, because you have to go in – let’s see, it also said something about you have to go in for four hours three times a week or something like that.

So explain to us. If somebody is on dialysis, what’s going on with their kidneys or what’s not going on with their kidneys?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, good. This is just kind of a lead-in to talk a little bit about what’s going on with people and kidney failure. What typically will happen is you have some common things that put you at risk for kidney failure. The most prevalent is diabetes. Diabetes can put you at risk because of the sugar going to the kidneys. Secondly is high blood pressure that’s not treated. So maybe somebody is in hypertension and they’re not taking something for it.

There’s something called glomerulonephritis, which is the inflammation of the glomeruli or the cells in the kidney themselves. And sometimes, people can have a hereditary disease. That’s the next thing. And then, also, there’s something called interstitial nephritis and pyelonephritis. That’s when people get urinary tract infection and the area keeps getting inflamed and infected. And sometimes, people have inflammation of the blood vessels.

So those are the ways that these can take place. But I can tell you from personal experience seeing people’s blood work that a lot of people are in pre-kidney failure and they’re not aware of it. And actually, nine out of ten people who have stage III chronic kidney disease, moderately decreased kidney function do not know it at all. This is what’s really bad because if they don’t know it, they can’t do anything about it. Dialysis really is the end means of everything. And definitely, you want to avoid that.

Debra: So you were telling me what happens when people go to the doctor and what doesn’t happen about kidney. Tell our listeners about that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So what I see (and this is pretty typical) is that [beeping 00:05:32] nine out of ten people that have stage III kidney disease do not even know it. They’re not told about it. So what happens is you go through your physical, you have your blood work, your routine blood work [beeping 00:05:43] and they do what’s called the CMP, which has the kidney function as part of the panel. If somebody’s serum creatinine is mildly elevated (let’s say it’s 1.2 or something like that), most of the time the doctor doesn’t even mention it. And the reason they don’t mention it is because they don’t have anything for it. When you go to the physician, we’re really looking for medicine, right? There’s no medicine for that.

So what they typically will tell one of my patients is we’re going to send you to the nephrologist (who’s a kidney doctor) and then, when they go to the nephrologist, the nephrologist tells them, “I’ll see you every six months. And then when you go on the dialysis, I’ll see you every month.” I told one of my clients, “Are those the kind of odds you want?” That’s what they offer, dialysis. And unfortunately, in the pharmaceutical realm, there is really nothing that they have that’s efficient for preventing kidney disease.

So I would really urge the listeners that if they’re already having some elevation in their serum creatinine, they can call me. It’s a free consultation. I can tell them some things that they can do because I have had very good luck with some of the homeopathic products reversing the pre-kidney failure.

Debra: Yeah. I think the numbers are staggering. What did you say to me… 3.31 million people in the United States are on dialysis?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, chronic kidney disease, 31 million. Kidney disease is the 8th leading cause of death in the United States. It’s just something I tell people to take seriously.

All kidding aside, there’s a lot of different things – maybe someone has gastritis, maybe they have IBS, maybe they have diabetes, either chronic or ongoing hypertension. These are all ongoing problems and they can all add up to bigger problems as we can see.

But when someone has pre-kidney disease, their serum creatinine is starting to be mildly elevated, the time to act is now. That’s not one of these things that you want to just sit around saying, “Well, you know, let me think about it.” These things are very insidious and they can creep up on you. These can become extremely debilitating.

There are also some racial ethnic risks. It looks like relative to whites, the risk for African Americans is 3.8 times higher. Native Americans are two times higher and Asian is 1.3 times higher for a person to develop kidney disease. So knowing that almost 40% of all kidney failure cases are related to diabetes, it’s important to be using some homeopathic products that can prevent the sugar from increasing too much to start damaging the kidneys and also, to reverse the pre-kidney failure itself.

These are things that you can really look at. The statistics are really overwhelming.

Debra: And I just want to say again (and I’m probably going to say this twenty times during this show), toxic chemicals in your body that you’re being exposed to every day, if you’re not reducing your toxic chemical exposure, if you’re not reducing your heavy metal exposure, then all these things – the kidney is the filter.

Pamela, tell us how the kidney functions so that everybody gets that this really is a filter. So all these stuff is coming through your body, then you’re just damaging your kidneys. Your kidneys, every time, it’s having to deal with these toxic chemicals. And you can stop the toxic chemicals by not being exposed to them in the first place. So tell us more about how the kidney functions.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, the kidney regulates water and electrolytes and it also regulates protein. So when someone is in pre-kidney failure, they might be spilling out a lot of protein into the urine, protein that normally is reabsorbed and stays in the blood.

Also, sodium and potassium, the electrolytes are affected by a person’s kidney function as well. That’s why a person might be – what I like to say is that the electrolytes will get messed up. So many times, when a person is on dialysis, they have to put electrolytes into the dialysate to try and compensate for that.

So it’s not just that the kidney is filtering – and I want to tell people too that the best time that the kidneys are filtering your blood is when you’re sleeping. The reason why is your center of gravity changes and of course, the center of gravity and all the fluids in your body pretty much are going through the kidneys at a higher rate during that time.

That’s part of the reason why when you go to bed at night, you think you have to keep getting up and going to the bathroom. The reason why is because your body is really trying to clean up everything from the day time during that process while you’re sleeping.

So there are very different types of kidney disease and we can probably just break down each one. What I would say is you need to look at your risk factors. And if you don’t know your serum creatinine number, that’s very, very important. Call your doctor and find out when was the last time you had your blood work done and what was the number.

Anything above one, I start to be concerned. Most people are going to be lower than that. And then also, there’s something that we calculate in pharmacy and in medicine called creatinine clearance. That’s kind of basing your age and your weight. That calculation can be done and that’s also another indicator of how your kidneys are functioning.

But I really want to impress upon listeners that there’s a product…

Debra: Wait, wait, wait. Pamela, we have to go to break, so you can talk about this when we come back.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, okay. Sorry.

Debra: It’s okay.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you.

Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who uses natural substances instead of drugs. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. You should just call her up if you have any questions because she’s totally happy to talk to you. Pamela, why don’t you give your phone number?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. My telephone number here at my pharmacy is 727-442-4955. That’s 722-442-4955. I would be most grateful and honored if I could help you or your family with any of the things we talked about today or any other issues you might have about your medications or your health.

Debra: Pamela, she’s right here in Clearwater with me and she’s very well-regarded in the Clearwater community. The medical doctor that I go to, I told him that I was taking something that she had given me and he said, “If Pamela tells you to take it, take it.” She’s just very highly regarded.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hmmm… that’s great. Yeah.

Debra: So creatinine, did I say that right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. Correct, yes, the creatinine. That’s the magic number. You need to know where your serum creatinine normally lies. A lot of times, people look at the BUN, which is called blood urea and nitrogen. That’s another measurement. But the BUN sometimes doesn’t always correlate as much with the kidney as human creatinine. And that is pharmacy. When we dose medication, when we decide to adjust somebody based on their kidney function for their medications when they come into the hospital, a lot of its calculations are based on the serum creatinine.

So knowing what that number is – and I would really urge your listeners, if your serum creatinine is mildly elevated, anything above 1.0, I’d be glad to have a brief discussion as far as what they can do to get it down and prevent your risk.

But it’s interesting. Another statistic here says, “Dialysis patients have adjusted all-cause mortality rates 6.5 to 7.4 times higher than the general population.” So not only the fact that the debility, the fact that you’re spending hours a week sitting on a chair being dialyzed, you have a much higher chance of dying. And don’t forget too diabetes with it, not just the kidney failure, but just the complications of amputations and eye problems and so forth.

So all these things are all-encompassing and we really want to treat them. I think it’s important to mention that once you know what your serum creatinine numbers – and especially, I would urge anybody that has some pre-diabetes or diabetes, since that’s really a big, integral part of leading into kidney failure, you know what that number is. I have encouraged earlier that perhaps if that number is mildly elevated, I really would like to help you get the number down.

Most people will think of the kidneys as taking cranberry. I want to just focus on some of those things. What cranberry does, when you take it – and I’m not talking the cranberry juice a lot of times. You want to take the concentrated cranberry in a capsule because the juice has a lot of sugar. But when you take cranberry, what it does is it prevents bacteria from adhering to the bladder wall. So somebody that has urinary tract infections with frequency – which of course, also put people at risk for kidney problems. You want to make sure that this isn’t something that happens quite frequently, that you take some preventive mentions. Taking cranberry capsules would be one of them.

The Body Anew, we talked about this before, is the detox product. And your emphasis the prior part of the discussion on the chemicals and what’s it doing to your kidneys, I really would encourage and let people know that what happens with Body Anew is it goes to the liver and in the liver, it up-regulates what’s called glucuronidation and conjugation.

Those terms are how a fat-soluble drug like a pesticide or a chemical is changed into a water-soluble substance via the liver. And as a result of that, it’s able to be filtered into the kidneys and into the urine. So that’s how things leave the body. By up-regulating that process, you’ll probably have a much better outcome and less chance of having any damage.

Debra: It’s important to do that. And we can always just avoid them in the first place. But in today’s world, we really can’t avoid every single chemical or every single thing that’s harmful to us. We can do a lot and everything that we can do to reduce it, I think, everybody should do. I do as much as I can.

But we can do all these things in our homes. We can choose what we’re eating, we can filter our water. We can do all these things, but we’re walking around in the world. And when you’re walking around in the world and there’s all these toxic chemicals and you’re going to be exposed to something. And so the more we can do to reduce that home, the more we can do to detox our bodies, the better off our kidneys will be and every other part of our body.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And it also is important to mention some other things that people won’t probably think of as frequently causing some kidney issues. Dehydration is first and foremost a very important problem. We’re in the warm climate here. If you’re doing a lot of exercise, if you’re doing a lot of yard work and you’re not drinking enough fluids and you notice that your urine is really concentrated, that’s bad. When you have that situation, you’re not putting enough fluid and water through the kidneys to try and filter that out.

And also, I want to caution on doing too much protein. Protein, a lot of people, they want to lose weight. Everything’s got protein fortified in it now. I like to eat a lot of protein. I feel better because of the exercise I do. But protein, you need to compensate that with lots of water. So if you’re going to do a high protein diet, you’re going to do an Atkin’s diet, you’re going to eat a lot of meat or whatever kind of protein you want, but if your protein in your diet is 75 to 150 grams a day (you’re doing protein shakes and protein bars and all these kinds of things), you need to be making sure that you’re consuming enough water to clean that out.

The protein being too high can also lead to kidney failure. I’ve seen that before with people doing more of an Atkin’s type diet trying to lose weight and not drinking enough water at the same time. All of a sudden, their serum creatinine go up. Also, too, what you see with people eating too much meat, their calcium levels will go up in their bloodstream and that’s indicative of bone loss because calcium is a buffer and will go out into the bloodstream to try and buffer the elevated acidity. So you could actually end up with very bad frail bones and fractures too.

So those are some things I just want people to know. These are lifestyle things that you’d really want to take a look at. Make sure that you’re hydrated correctly. And if you’re going to eat a high protein diet, you’re drinking enough water to make sure that you can clean all that through your kidneys.

Debra: Yes, that’s very, very important especially in the summer time. Right now, it’s summer time. I know people are going to listen to this in the archives in different times of years. It’s just so important to get enough water, just so important because the water is flushing all those toxic things out of your body through the kidneys.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. Water is the most important. And I would say too that when you’re drinking the water, check and see what your baseline is. You can look at your electrolytes and so forth, but a lot of times, people forget too that if they’re drinking a lot of water, they’re sweating. You want to make sure you have maybe some electrolytes in the water too.

Debra: Yes, I agree with that as well. We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who has a natural pharmacy with many, many things to help with many different things going on with your body. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances in her natural pharmacy in Clearwater, Florida. Her website is BotanicalResource.com.

Okay! Pamela, so tell us what we can do to protect our kidneys.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, good. I want to talk a little bit too about hypertension. Say someone doesn’t want to be in medicines and their blood pressure is mildly elevated. We have the systolic and diastolic blood pressure. That’s the second leading cause of kidney failure. We’ll talk a little bit about the second.

What really works well to get the top number down if your top number is high is something called [Inaudible 00:27:31]. It’s a 12-hour release 1500 mg. time-released [inaudible 00:27:31]. If you take it every 12 hours, typically you’ll see that number come down about 20 points. It works on cortisol and the adrenals. And just this particular formulation seems to work the best. I’ve tried several different [inaudible 00:27:43], but this one brings it down the fastest. So if somebody has a higher systolic blood pressure, their top number, that’s what I would recommend.

[Inaudible 00:27:51] Complex is a homeopathic product. It’s a medical product. It will lower the diastolic blood pressure, the bottom number, probably 20 to 30 points probably between five to seven days.

Debra: That’s fast.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. This is really important. So if you know you have some borderline hypertension, you don’t want to take the medicines, you were on the beta blockers maybe before, you don’t want to take them, you’re trying to get off your medicines, whatever situation you might have, you definitely would be wanting to treat the hypertension and try these things first because these have no side effects and they’re natural alternatives to blood pressure medicine.

So treating hypertension is really important because like I said, that’s the second leading cause of the diabetes.

Now, cystitis is where there’s inflammation in the bladder. People that get cystitis, sometimes they see blood in the urine and sometimes they don’t. But they’ll find it painful to void. The people that have cystitis know about this. Interstitial cystitis is actually pretty common.

And what works great to treat cystitis – and of course, cystitis is actually number four as far as causes of kidney problems – is Quercetin. Quercetin works great just to close up those leaky membranes and the inflammation because Quercetin has anti-histaminic properties, it has vascular stabilizing properties and it can work really well in those interstitial spaces in the bladder to prevent some of these things.

Also, there’s a homeopathic product called Hamamelis. Hamamelis is a homeopathic witch hazel and it’s an astringent inside the body, so it can work on blood vessel swelling anywhere in the body.

Any of these are homeopathic, so when you take them, what happens is these products concentrate in the urine when you take them orally. So that’s just typically what happens with even medications. That’s why when we treat urinary tract infections – say someone is very sick and are in the hospital. They have a urinary tract infection and they’re getting IV’s. They can use a much lower dose of medication that we can for, let’s say, a lung infection.

So it’s important to realize that whatever you take is going to concentrate on the urine. And Hamamelis has high effects specifically for that. That’s why it’s important for people to realize that sometimes, you can use less homeopathic medicine if you’re treating kidney bladder than if you’re doing other areas of the body. It’s probably a little fact that many people don’t know.

Debra: I didn’t know any of those little facts.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. Well, it’s kind of pharmacology 101. It’s like what we do in the hospital, but most people aren’t going to really realize that. So what you would want to do is you can concentrate them by drinking them. And that’s the great part because if you think about it, that’s where all things kind of end up. That’s the end result. So that’s very important for people to realize.

Now, the first leading cause (and we had talked a little bit about diabetes) is diabetes. Using some things that can lower the blood pressure is really important. So, all the time, I recommend people use the Body Anew just to get the chemicals out of their body. But you can add in the pericardium triple warmer to lower your blood sugar if that’s the cause.

And a lot of people perhaps that sees their fasting blood sugar in the 90 to the 110 range, that’s pre-diabetes and you might want to treat that especially if you see that your serum creatinine is starting to become elevated. I really have to impress upon to people. The take-home message today, find out what your serum creatinine is and find out what your fasting blood sugar is. Those numbers mean a lot.

Debra: Yes, yes, very much so. And let me just ask you a question about people getting blood test. I get a blood test every three months, but I think that most people don’t. I don’t even remember the first time I got a blood test, but it seems like I went through most of my childhood not having a blood test at all. Blood tests can tell you so much. Can you just talk about that for a little bit?

PAMELA SEEFELD: So the blood test, why it’s important – and typically, when we’re looking at these things, you can order what’s called a BMP, which is a basic metabolic profile and that will have the kidney function and it’ll have the electrolytes and the fasting glucose. It just has a few things.

When you do your physical or even if you’re doing it every year or every other year, you want probably what’s called the CMP, which is the complete metabolic profile and that has your liver function. It has all these other things that are very important to look at as well.

When people have the blood sugar – most people’s fasting blood sugar should be between 75 and 85. Well, that’s not going to hit the majority of the population, but that’s ideal. So any time where you’re starting to get into the 90’s and into the 100’s, you’re maybe not ready for medicine, but you’re getting there. I would just caution your listeners that if those numbers are already starting to creep up and then the serum creatinine number is starting to go up, you need to treat that.

And what I’d like to emphasize that the treatment for serum creatinine, mild elevation or even if it’s really high, if it’s over two is something called detox II. Detox II was designed specifically for the kidney and I’ve seen very, very good results with it.

There was another product they used to use called Renil that was out of Germany, but I’m not able to get that anymore. They’re only making it in Europe. But the Detox II is having the same result I used to receive with my patients for the Renil. This is a liquid, which is a lot easier to dose because the other one is a tablet, so you had to dissolve it in your mouth.

But what I’d like to emphasize (and this is very important), if somebody has a serum creatinine mild elevation, I have seen personally three patients in the last year that their serum creatinine went down dramatically. And one was really a great success. My point is that he came to me (and he had been a client for a very long time, he still is) and the doctor told him the dialysis, “You’ll get pre-kidney failure. I’ll be seeing you more often.” The kidney doctor was telling him how he’s going to have to go on dialysis someday. He came to me and I said, “I don’t want that.” I agreed 100%. This is not just an option we want to explore.

So he went on a Detox II for 30 days and his serum creatinine went from 1.9 to 1.3. Now, that’s a huge difference. Life is about like, “You know things I don’t know and I know things you don’t know,” but if you would know from a professional standpoint (anybody that’s in the medical field that knows what these numbers mean), for 30 days, to have that number drop that much – and he’s perfectly fine now. It’s a very big deal.

So I have to tell people that if you don’t do anything else, this is something that you really probably need to take with the body in order to clean this up.

Debra: Yes. Yes, there are things that can be done and we don’t have to – you know, I think that earlier in my life – and I don’t think this way anymore. I think a lot of people think this way if they haven’t changed their minds. It’s like you go through life and you just don’t do anything about your health until you have symptoms or you can’t get out of bed or whatever. And then you go to the doctor and it’s already too late sometimes or more difficult.

But if you can get these blood tests, if you know what you’re looking for, if you can catch it early, it’s a lot easier to turn things around.

We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist. Pamela, why don’t you give your phone number again for people who might want to call you to ask about their kidney problems?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. My number here at my pharmacy is 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I would be grateful to help you with your kidney problem or any other issues you might have. And I have to emphasize that it’s really not about selling things. Debra knows that I do a lot of things outside of this. This is just more of something of my passion that I really know I can do very well. If your human creatinine is even mildly elevated, I really encourage you to try and get that number down and prevent some of the problems that are associated with kidney disease, which can be very debilitating.

Debra: Yes, and I know Pamela. She and I are friends. And so I know that she’s not doing this to make money. She doesn’t need to do this to make money. She’s doing it as a public service that she’s bringing her knowledge as a pharmacist.

And Pamela, I was just thinking so much as we’ve been talking that we should do the next show on Pharmacology 101 because…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good idea!

Debra: Yeah. Because I think that people don’t understand about what a pharmacist knows and can do and how you have a different perspective. So let’s do that for the next show.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I think that’s an excellent idea. All these little tidbits are things that I can reveal of how things work in the body, where they go and how to…

Debra: Right. You know these things. You have a different perspective than anyone else I’ve ever talked to about how these substances go in the body, how they work. You were talking about dosing earlier.

Nobody knows anything about dosing, but you know as a pharmacist that things have to be dosed correctly.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, because once you know the dynamics of the vitamins or the things you’re taking, you can use that to your advantage to see that things are more effective. If you’re going to pay money for something, you’re going to take it, take the time and take it, count it out and take it, you really do want them to work well and you want to take it so they work properly and perhaps some thing that need to be with food, some things don’t, some things, you can concentrate more in a particular area of the body by doing certain select things. It is very important to realize that you have control over some of these.

Debra: Okay. So we’re going to do this for the next show. Now, two weeks from now, we’re doing a replay because it’s my birthday and I’m going on vacation.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Happy birthday!

Debra: It will be four weeks from today.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great.

Debra: So I’ll tell you, it’s going to be my 60th birthday. Can you imagine that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, my Lord. That’s wonderful! I think you definitely don’t look it. I’m very happy for you.

Debra: Thank you, thank you. Listeners, she sees me all the time, so she knows what I look like.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, yeah. She looks great. You don’t look sixty at all. No, you look great.

Debra: No, no. People, sometimes they ask me how old I am and I always say, “How old do you think I am?” The other day, a man said to me that he thought I was 47.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I believe it. Maybe even younger. No, you have great skin and you look very healthy. You don’t have a wrinkle on your face.

Debra: Thank you. Alright! So let’s keep talking about kidneys. Go ahead. 

PAMELA SEEFELD: So what I would like to emphasize in some of the things we were talking about is if you have any of these symptoms, if you’re dehydrated a lot because you work outside and you’re not drinking enough water, if you have diabetes or pre-diabetes and your fasting blood sugar is in the 90 or 100 range, but they haven’t diagnosed you as a diabetic yet, if you’re borderline hypertension that you’re either treating or not treating, that’s something that really needs to be addressed as well.

And I was talking about cystitis. People know when they have cystitis or some kind of inflammation in the bladder. That’s very important to treat.

I was talking about some simple things to use for those particular things. When we look at chronic kidney disease and we think about what’s happening, the fact that nine out of ten people don’t even really know that they have kidney disease yet because the doctors haven’t mentioned it to them (and I told you the reason why. By default, they don’t really have anything for it, so they kind of wait until things get bad), this is one thing –

There are a lot of things in medicine when you go to your physician that he’s really in control of the situation and monitoring these things and trying to make good decisions for you. But when it comes to your kidney, I have to really emphasize that you’re pretty much on your own.

You’re going to have to know what these numbers are. If it’s starting to elevate at all over the course of the year too, it’s time to take action and not wait because these people, the nine out of ten people that don’t realize they have pre-kidney failure, it’s pretty bad once the revelation that comes to light that they have this. This might be something that unfortunately is not being shared with you.

Debra: I want to say I know some people don’t even have doctors. And so if you don’t have a doctor and you’re not going to a doctor on a regular basis and you don’t have a medical professional who can diagnose and run blood test – especially I know people who go to chiropractors or massage therapist or herbalists or what, none of those people can order blood tests.

But here’s what you can do. There are places now. Just go online and type in ‘blood test’.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good point.

Debra: I was just looking this up the other day because there are places where you can just walk in and you can get a blood test without a doctor’s order. They have a doctor on staff. You can walk in and say, “I want a creatinine test” and it will be $45 or something. I don’t know, I haven’t looked it up to know. But you can order these tests individually. You can order a panel. All these things that a doctor will order for you, you can order yourself now.

And then you can see what your fasting blood sugar is. You can see your creatinine. And whatever else you want to know about your body, you can look on the blood test.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And this is really great information for your listeners because it’s true. A lot of people are using alternative practitioners to MDs and NDOs. And as a result, they’re just not given access to this information. It’s really important.

If you have not done this, I really think having a baseline number is very, very important because once you know where your baseline is, you have a reference.

And if the person’s serum creatinine as I had stated earlier is anything over 1.0, that’s when I start to think, “Okay, it’s starting to come there. It’s starting to get a little bit worse.” Anything over 1.5, you’re starting to get closer to two, I’d seen people that they really hadn’t been to the doctor in a while, the serum creatinine was closer to two and they really had to try and get their mind around that they were starting to have kidney failure and was getting worse. The treatments that they’re offering are none. I mean, the doctor doesn’t have anything for them.

So really using the Detox II and Body Anew. And what I would do is I’ll tell people to do a month’s course and get the number repeated and see where it’s at. It’s going to be down. And hopefully, it’s going to be close to normal and then there can be a decision making time, “Do I need to continue this? Do I need to continue it for a few days a week?” I must emphasize too that I have used this on dogs. Animals will respond to the homeopathy as well. I’ve had two dogs that had some pre-kidney failures and the drops reversed it. And actually, one of them was my dog that I’ve treated before in the past. She had a mild elevation of her serum creatinine and I got it back down.

So it’s important to realize that even your pets might be at risk for these kinds of things as well. This is something that can be easily treated with, some simple drops to put in the water. I really would think if we had nothing else to summarize for the talk today, that you need to know what your baseline number is of your fasting blood sugar, you need to know what your serum creatinine is and you need to know your blood pressure.

And the blood pressure, you can even take these just at a drugstore. They have these little machines someplace. But knowing what your blood pressure is, if your blood pressure is high, this is something that you have to treat.

Debra: And it all comes down to awareness of what’s going on with our bodies. It’s not about focusing on illness. It’s just focusing on monitoring what is going on in your body. You want to know is something normal or is something cause for needing to do something about it. The earlier you can touch these things, if you just know to look at blood sugar, at blood pressure, at creatinine, whatever those basic things are and look at them on a regular basis especially if you’re going to an alternative practitioner who’s not a medical doctor, you’re not going to a check-up, a yearly check-up where they would check these things, then you need to check these things.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, this is really important. And I’m assuming there’s probably a portion of the people listening that really never had given second thought to this. And that’s okay.

Debra: I think so.

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is to reveal what’s really going on. Those numbers belong to you. Those numbers are indicative of something going on in your body that you don’t feel any difference. That’s the problem, you can’t tell. You can’t look and say, “I feel like I’m having some pre-kidney failure.” There are no signs and symptoms. All of a sudden, they’re going to come to you with this number, send you to the kidney doctor and that’s about it. And really, I think those are terrible odds.

Debra: I agree, I agree. It’s just like all of a sudden, we’re going to go to the kidney doctor. No, I’d rather know a little beforehand, so that we can do something about it. And that’s basically what we’re talking about today especially since our kidneys are just being bombarded with toxic chemicals all the time. It’s like poor, little kidneys. We need to take care of them. We need to be aware of what’s going on with them.

So Pamela, thank you so much for…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you. I really enjoyed talking. And if anyone has any questions, please give me a call. I really would love to help you.

Debra: Yes, she’s really good. The doctors around here love her. The patients around here love her. She does really good work. She has many things to choose from and she knows what to tell you what doses to take and how they affect your body.

So I want to tell you more about Toxic Free Talk Radio. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and you can listen to all the past shows. There are more than 200 of them. I also have transcripts for many of the shows. You can go listen to past shows that Pamela has been, but I have a wide variety of people talking about different issues about living in a toxic-free way.

So thanks for listening. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

How to Keep Your Blood Vessels Open and Flowing With Supplements

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking about our blood vessels today—what can go wrong and how to keep them in good shape to carry blood to all parts of your body. We’ll cover problems with blood vessels in the eye, the legs, and peripheral neuropathy experienced by diabetics. There are no drugs for these conditions, but they are highly responsive to supplements, and we’ll learn which to take. Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and selling top quality medicinal supplements, so she’s seen it all. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Keep Your Blood Vessels Open and Flowing with Supplements

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld

Date of Broadcast: May 20, 2015

DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It is Wednesday, May 20th, 2015. It’s a beautiful day here in Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining. We’re probably going to have thunderstorms, but not during this hour. It’s a beautiful day.

Anyway, today is Wednesday. Every other Wednesday, my guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

She just has so much knowledge about things that can help your body that aren’t drugs and how to get off of drugs and how your body works. She just has so much information and she’s so healthy. She is the healthiest person I’ve ever seen. I can hear they are laughing in the background.

Pamela lives here in Clearwater, Florida with me. Not with me, but here in Clearwater, Florida just as I do and she’s very well-regarded in our community. The first time I met her face to face, I just thought this the healthiest looking person I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, I have her on every other Wednesday, so that she can just give us all her wisdom and knowledge. Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thanks for the great intro. It’s wonderful to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. Today, we’re talking about vascular health. I’m just going to let you explain to our listeners what vascular health is because I think it’s something that most of us don’t even think about.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. And this is a really good topic to talk about because it encompasses a lot of the diseases and a lot of the issues that people face. Vascular health, I want to say in a simpler word, is all-encompassing. It can be explained. The blood vessel health and the ways the permeability of the blood vessels themselves are connected too.

I’m just going to just go through some of the things we’re going to talk about today literally starting from the top of our body, allergies, sinus infections, so on and so forth, glaucoma, eye problems, lungs, asthma, GI, colitis, Crohn’s, leaky gut, your legs, peripheral vascular disease, going all the way down to your body. Your blood vessels and how they’re functioning are responsible for a lot of the outcome of these particular states. So it’s really important that we focus on this.

What we can do to close up the leaky gut membrane, close up the vasculature and also improve the health of it in case things are impregnated and stuck in these particular areas? This is what’s really important.

If you think about it, all these disease states are directly responsible from the vascular health. That’s the very, very foundation of the problem.

DEBRA: That’s so interesting. Before you tell us everything you want to tell us, I want to ask you a question. When toxic chemicals come into your body, they get carried all around your body through the blood vessels, right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: Yeah. So are they damaging the blood vessels as they’re moving around?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good question. I went and did a search in the library of medicine. We’ve known this, but there are really interesting studies.

The big thing is the chemicals themselves can cause genes to change and change the expression of them and can cause cancer. Of course, we already know that’s what does cause cancer, if the genes are expressed for cancer. They have to nudge it along, usually the chemical that we come in contact with.

But a particular concern as well is exposure to particulate matter constituents in the air. What we know is that long-term exposure to particulate matter – usually these things, you can’t see in the air because they’re copper, iron, nickel, potassium, sulfur, silicon, things like that, vanadium, zinc, moving [inaudible 00:05:04] around things, get tossed up into the air and these particulates.

And we’re not even talking about factories because we’re not really actually near factories here. But it does apply to other people that perhaps are.

You’re breathing these things in. It is directly associated with the increased cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Where’s the cardiovascular? Your vascular system.

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So we know that for some reason it is directly correlated when people are exposed to these things, these airborne particulates that we breathe in. There are very poor outcomes as far as cardiovascular health. And this actually might explain why cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in the country.

DEBRA: The EPA has said that air pollution, indoor air pollution actually is the number one health problem in the country.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: It’s just…

PAMELA SEEFELD: That would make sense.

DEBRA: That would make sense because we’re breathing all these gasses and particulates coming from consumer products that we have in our homes, unless of course you’ve been listening to the show and going to my website and taking all those out of your homes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. That’s true. It’s important that people realize that we have some control over these things, but also there are some things that are way out of our control. We have to be responsible and understand that most people are going to have an issue in their lifetime.

Maybe they have asthma. Maybe they have leaky gut. Maybe they have IBS. All these things are related to the blood vessels. That’s why we really need to focus on what’s the very bottom line. The basement membrane is where all these problems originally take place.

DEBRA: Okay. So go ahead and tell us about our vascular system because I learn so much from you with all I think take-in biology and things in school. I think that most people are not aware of what’s going on in their bodies when I ask people. “Do you know what your body systems are?” People would say, “What?”

The cardiovascular system is a very, very important system. But when we hear that word cardiovascular, I think most people don’t know that cardio means heart and vascular means your blood vessels. That’s why anytime you hear that now, just think heart and blood vessels. It’s the whole system in your whole body.

So tell us what the cardiovascular system does.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You have to think of it like the pipeline. All these blood vessels, you have these really small blood vessels, the capillaries, literally these red blood cells that are going through a single [inaudible 00:07:37], these large areas where the blood flow is massive and it’s fast.

The heart is obviously pumping the blood and it’s going through our body. And this is a closed circulatory system or it’s a closed piping system.

What we want to concentrate on is to say that the blood vessels themselves are made of cells, each individual cell and they’re all sitting next to each other, altogether and they form this particular means of allowing blood to go flow through the body and allow waste products, oxygen, these things, nutrients to bring to the cell.

So we know this is the exchange process taking place. What’s really interesting is that when you think about the blood vessel, you have to realize that our blood vessels are sensitive to things that can cause permeability issues.

Let’s talk about the sinus infection. Let’s just talk about that. Sinus infection or the runny nose allergies, when you have this, the fluid has to come from someplace.

What happens is there are permeability issues in the nose and in the sinuses. The fluid that normally is inside the blood vessel is allowed to escape to some degree and it goes into the sinus cavities and then you have to blow your nose. That’s how it happens. It’s got to come from someplace and that’s what happens.

We think about just the simplicity of it. If we use vascular stabilizers throughout the body, we can have the blood vessels in one area like the sinuses – maybe you have allergic rhinitis, you have the allergies, you can affect that. But there are also the other parts.

So I tell people, a good example is when somebody has spider veins or the blood vessels are breaking really easily and they have a lot of bruising. They have blood vessel problems elsewhere.

I see this too in the people that have hemorrhoid. Hemorrhoid, you’re going to have trouble with blood vessels in the eye. You’re going to have allergies. You’re going to have other things too because the blood vessels are swelling and the rest of them are also swelling in other areas as well.

That’s the thing that people really need to get their head around. Inflammation and swelling and permeability issues in one area of the body with the blood vessel can affect another, in fact even vice versa. In a person, in the GI tract, it can also affect our eyes because the blood vessels in the eyes might be affected as well.

This is what’s really important. These things are all interconnected. So if you are having one set of symptoms, you might eventually start having others.

DEBRA: It’s because the basic problem is your vascular system.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right, exactly. And it’s not confined to just one area because it’s all connected. That’s what people should see.

Say somebody has asthma. We just talked about the [inaudible 00:10:18] and we talked about the sinuses. Maybe someone has glaucoma.

They might also develop having some GI issues as well. A lot of times, the alternative people could classify this like leaky gut. It can be IBS as what maybe the doctor would call it. And maybe the person has issues with – they have diarrhea, constipation. Or maybe they have [body?] cramping. Maybe they feel like they’re having allergies.

The hallmark of leaky gut is the person just feels low when they’re eating certain foods. The reason why is because the permeability of the gut has been compromised and particulates are allowed to go into the bloodstream and make antibodies.

DEBRA: Wait. We need to go break. We’re going to need to go to break. When we come back, I’ll have you just start right there and talk about what happens when particulates are going into the bloodstream. We’ll be right back.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. In fact, she helps people get off prescription drugs by giving them natural alternatives.

Pamela, before we talk about leaky gut syndrome as we started before the break, tell the listeners about how they can call you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, very good. Thank you. If you have any questions about your prescription medications or if you have health issues for not to be on prescription medications, you can call my pharmacy. My consultation is free and I will be glad and very honored to help you and your family. The number here at my pharmacy is (727) 442 4955.

DEBRA: Great. Now, tell us about leaky gut syndrome. The way you just started was so interesting because you explained exactly what was happening.

PAMELA SEEFELD: What’s happening is permeability issues in the leaky gut, the blood vessels are allowing space between them. They’re allowing the fluid to move back and forth more copiously and more exchanging than they should.

As a result of that, the foods that you’re eating, certain things are not supposed to be passing into the bloodstream. They’re going into the bloodstream and you’re making antibodies to them. So all of a sudden, they can make you think you’re allergic to banana or whatever.

That’s what’s happening because these foods are [priming?] the immune system. The immune system will see something in the blood and recognize it as foreign. When people have leaky gut, they have all these food sensitivities and different things like that. What is really happening? It’s the permeability of the gut.

So all of these issues…

DEBRA: Wait. When you say permeability of the gut, I think really what you’re saying if I understand this is the permeability of the blood vessels…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: …in the intestines. So you have intestines…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, the micro [colitis?]. The small areas there where the absorption takes place at that particular location, the blood vessels are inflamed.

They’re not just inflamed, but they’re compromised. They’re allowing things to come in and out and the exchange back and forth from the gut in an unreasonable manner. As a result of that, things are getting into the gut and then making people so sick. The case in point, when people eat something, then all of a sudden, they’re just not feeling well, that might be what’s happening and they might have this very issue going on.

And the great part about it is that this particular problem and the ones we discussed prior to that, they are heavy responses to supplements. So this is really a great thing.

I mean when somebody has a GI issue or even some of these things we’re talking about, I usually say the vascular health is highly responsive to supplements. It’s pretty inexpensive and easy to treat. And even just having GI issues, the first thing you should think of is permeability issue. And this applies to somebody that’s getting colitis, somebody that has Crohn’s disease.

Obviously, Crohn’s in some cases will need treatment in steroids and things like that. But most people, when they’re [in re-emission?] or have to prevent a reoccurrence, they can use the things that stabilize the blood vessels and the inflammation in the blood vessels themselves and have a great outcome.

DEBRA: What kinds of supplements would you give somebody for this?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. When we look at what supplements work for allergies, for the eyes, for lungs, for the GI, we can look at several different things.

What the studies show is that flavonoids are highly responsive. That would include rutin, quercetin and hesperidin. I tend to like quercetin quite a bit. But the studies show, especially in allergic rhinitis, that rutin is highly effective for that.

Now, resveratrol is another supplement that works very, very well. Actually the new studies show that when someone actually has a spinal cord injury or they have bulging or hernia or just any kind of back problems, it’s causing inflammatory changes in the body as a result. Believe it or not, it’s all encompassing. They can change the whole body chemistry. That resveratrol seems to help that and it helps the injury on the spine as well.

So that was pretty interesting. Both sequences have vascular stabilizing properties, but they also seem to have some neurological positive outcomes as well. That’s very important as well.

What I tell people too is that using the detox, the Body Anew is important because permeability issues, especially the sinuses or the lungs – when things get stuck in the area, the lung tissue and the sinus cavities and mucus membranes, when things get stuck in those particular areas, we know for a fact that moving it out makes a big difference.

If the area is constantly irritated with particulates like the gut, if the area is potentially irritated with particulates in different areas of the nose, the mouth, wherever the problem may be, especially the lungs of people with asthma, if you don’t get the particulates out, that’s where the problem is.

Remember we were talking about particulates in the air, things you’re breathing in? Well, they get stuck in those membranes and then they’re allowed to stay in there. They’re going to start moving in and out. That’s where some of the issues really are. You need to remove it.

DEBRA: What about bloody noses? What causes bloody noses?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a good question. Bloody nose, first of all, can be spontaneous, which means it just shows up out of the blue.

It can probably be something that’s going on with the blood vessel itself. Maybe the person was blowing her nose so much that it has actually broken a blood vessel, so it continued to bleed.

It could be the person’s platelets are too low. I always tell people that if they’re starting to show lots of bruising or there are lots of bloody noses, things like that, you really need to check your CBC with your doctor and just see where your platelets reside because you’d be surprised some people come out with really low their platelets.

The platelets of most people are probably going to be around 250. That’s the number when the platelets are taken. But you can also see people – quite frequently I see people in the hospital that have 100 and below. And you can have a spontaneous bleed if it’s below 20. I mean you’ll start bleeding anywhere.

Most people will probably don’t think about that. You have to look at it too. Maybe a multivitamin has a lot of vitamin E in it. There are other ways you’re getting blood thinning activity. A lot of people take a baby aspirin for cardiovascular disease and also for preventing cancer. Baby aspirin is excellent for both of those things.

It can really be other factors too. A lot of times, you need to look and see where the platelet count resides because that just gives you clue as to whether you need to look in that particular direction. The platelets will definitely affect whether it’s clotting or not.

DEBRA: Okay, that’s good. We only have a few seconds before we go to break. So I’m not going to ask you a new question.

I’ll just say during these few seconds that you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Pamela Seefeld and her website is BotanicalResource.com. You can go there and get her phone number and find out how to call her and get a free consultation.

We’ll be right back after the break and hear more about vascular health and what you can do.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

And she really does get a lot of people off prescription drugs and feeling healthier and happier. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. You can call her for a free consultation.

So Pamela, talk to us about peripheral neuropathy. I think so many people have a problem with that or so many diabetics in the world.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The peripheral neuropathy is the nerves being affected. When someone has peripheral vascular disease, they can also have…

DEBRA: Yeah. Let’s clear this up. Okay, go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s okay. It’s alright! [Inaudible 00:27:32] The peripheral vascular disease is important to focus on when we’re talking about vascular health. There are several different things that can cause it, diabetes, smoking, chemicals, those particulates that I was talking about, untreated hypertension.

And it’s really important for your listeners to know that when someone has hypertension and it’s not treated, it does damage the blood vessels. I’m not saying it’s going to cause permeability issues, but it could lead to that. The bad part about it is that it puts strain on the blood vessels themselves.

It’s very important if someone does have high blood pressure and perhaps they don’t want to be on a prescription, they can just give me a call and I can tell them what would work naturally and would be very effective. That’s very important to realize. There are a lot of options for that.

So a person that has abnormal cholesterol is another thing. Say someone is procrastinating and their cholesterol is 290 or 300. Trust me. I don’t think cholesterol is the big demon that they think it is. But most people, that’s how to check the cholesterols in the normal range. So this doesn’t really have anything to do with the cholesterol.

But we know that if the inflammation is there, permeability problems there in the blood vessel and then you add extra cholesterol in the bloodstream, you’re going to have a problem. And that problem will be that the arteries are going to start collecting the cholesterol and letting it form this peripheral vascular disease where it just narrows.

As a result of it, you have this terrible circulation in your legs. You can tell when people have peripheral vascular disease or vascular problems through their legs because they’ll be swollen, they’ll be red. It will maybe lead to what’s called cellulitis, which is an infection to the skin.

And many times, the people will complain of pain. That’s the most common thing. People would be walking and then all of a sudden, their legs start really hurting badly and they can’t walk stairs, they can’t walk across the yard, things of that sort. This is actually preventable.

When someone has a vascular issue, we would want to put them on those bioflavinoids that I was talking about. There’s also a homeopathic product that I use a lot for people that have issues with circulation in their legs. It’s called Circulation, no doubt. Yes, it’s a great name for it. This particular product increases blood flow down to the legs about 90%.

You can also use arginine, which is an amino acid that does have dilating effects on the blood vessels. And there’s a product from Thorne called Perfusia, which I use quite a bit. It dilates arterial blood flow and increases about 40%. So we can use that for the legs.

I also like to mention for our male clients that are listening on the radio today that using Perfusia or using arginine to increase blood flow in the legs also increases blood flow to someplace else. So we use it for erectile dysfunction.

And if you think your blood vessel issue is just delegated solely to your leg or to your eyes or to your sinuses, that might explain some of the other things that are going in the private areas of the body. I think it’s important for people to realize that that’s connected as well.

DEBRA: It’s so interesting to me that you keep saying that all these things are connected and that this one thing in vascular health can be affecting all these different areas of your body. And yet in the world of drugs, there’s a different drug for each of these different conditions.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You are the smartest woman in the world. Yes. Isn’t that amazing that they have a drug for each condition and they have a whole series of doctors for every single condition we’ve mentioned for some specialty?

But really what it comes down to it is the vascular health of your body can be reversed and can be improved simply by doing some simple supplements and realizing early on when you start seeing some of these things happening that you need to literally start treating it. And start treating it with vigor until it’s finished.

That is really important because when one thing crops up, something else is going to show up eventually. I can promise people that. It will lead to something else and to the next thing and to the next thing.

I think this really explains a lot of people, just their decompensation of their body and how, as they get older, they expect states would start showing up. And if they do, it’s like you put it out there and you get it.

Your vascular health is something that is heavily responsive, believe it or not, even to vegetables, eating vegetables in your diet because there are lots of bioflavonoids in your vegetables, having a big salad with lots of colorful vegetables. You can eat bioflavonoids. Those have vascular stabilizing activity.

That’s why people that have a vegetarian-based diet or having lots of plants in their diet have better vascular health and less of these chronic diseases. It’s directly functional to what you’re putting on the blood vessels and what you’re allowing them to be in contact with.

DEBRA: Does it make a difference if the vegetables are cooked or raw?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Not necessarily. In fact, some vegetables actually release more bioflavonoids when they’re cooked.

I want to believe it is carrots and broccoli that might release more than being raw. When they’re raw, digestion itself has to break all these down, especially for carotenoid vegetables. So we’re talking about maybe carrots and sweet potatoes. Cooking actually helps them to release their nutrients better.

But when you take bioflavonoids in a tablet, you would have to be eating a huge amount of produce to get the same results. If you actually want to do a treatment, you really would be best off to say, “I’m going to take some bioflavoinoids.”

The great part about bioflavonoids – resveratrol is pretty inexpensive. It’s not a big cost layout and the results are excellent.

DEBRA: What if the people listening to this are saying to themselves, “Maybe I should just take these supplements to help strengthen my vascular system and avoid problems,” would that be a good idea?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely. Prevention is really the key in anything. You’ve seen the way I have my practice here. You’re preventing problems.

You have to look at the crystal ball of your own life and say, “What am I at risk for?” You look at your family. You look at your blood work, which I do with people. I look at your blood work and say, “Look. I see this is coming. It’s not here yet.”

And if you can look at some of the leg health, if the legs are bruising really easily, if they have allergies that are just not seeming to get better, but then all of a sudden, they start ending up to hemorrhoids and other problems or a man gets erectile dysfunction – all of a sudden, you’re thinking all these problems are just new problems showing up and that’s just the way life is. It’s not because you’re doing things that stimulate and close up these permeability issues that are highly affective.

That’s why really taking some bioflavonoids everyday, especially for your eye health is really important. And it’s easy. Like the quercetin, I use quercetin in liquid quite a bit. And you can even just put it in water and it really has a great effect to fight allergies, hemorrhoids, things of that nature, but also probably ED to some degree.

DEBRA: Wow. This is so interesting to me. Every time we do a show, I learn new things from you.

This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist. But she likes to give natural substances instead. Her website is BotanicResource.com.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist who dispenses natural substances instead of drugs through her pharmacy at BotanicalResource.com.

Pamela, this is our last segment now. We only have about 10 minutes left. I’m going to let you talk about whatever you want to talk about, about the subject.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. You’re so sweet. I would like to repeat my phone number if anyone would like to call me and has any questions in particular. I would like to help you. The number here at Botanical Resource is (727) 442-4955.

I like to talk a little bit about the supplements some more, about looking at preventing these vascular issues.

One of the things that you should probably be taking everyday – we were talking previously about the peripheral vascular disease and how fat deposits can go into the arteries. And there’s permeability issues associated with that as well. And then all of a sudden, there are areas narrow and the blood cells can’t go through there very well and you end up with very painful legs, trouble walking and in some case, you’ll really need surgery.

We can’t prevent the fatty deposits by taking pantethine which works very good to lower cholesterol or red rice yeast. I’m sure most people know about that. But the big culprit in a lot of these is elevated fasting blood sugar, which is causing the lipids to rise in the first place.

What I can tell people is you really want to know what your blood pressure number is. We were talking about hypertension causing some problems and causing problems in the blood vessels. Maybe you want to do some homeopathy if your systolic is a little bit high.

Case in point, if your blood sugar and your fasting blood sugar is anywhere around 100, if it’s getting up to that point, in the high 90s or 100, you need to look at that and say, “Am I at risk for diabetes? And is this elevated blood sugar in particular causing problems with the vasculature itself?”

DEBRA: Wait. Could you talk about that a little more?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely.

DEBRA: How could elevated blood sugar do that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: What happens is elevated blood sugar is doing several different things. It’s circulating cytokines, which cause inflammation in the blood vessel. It also increases blood lipids, triglyceride cholesterol and LDL.

In turn, when it’s increasing these lipids and there’s inflammation present from the cytokines when they’re enhanced and it was causing them to start up causing inflammation, what happens is the area becomes sticky and allows the cholesterol and the lipids to attach to the blood vessel lining. Peripheral vascular disease could set in, in these patients that are not treating the cholesterol itself.

So inflammation, it all comes back to your blood pressure and in your blood sugar. Those two things really are hallmarks. Remember I was talking to you and we were talking about vascular health and your platelets. You really want to know where they’re at and see if they’re on the low end of normal. That’s something to really watch for bleeding.

In particular, the sugar itself is causing several things. It’s causing increased inflammation. It’s causing increased lipids. And in turn, it’s causing the blood vessels to become occluded. So cardiovascular disease has lots of different tenets, but we know that blood sugar elevation allows for the other damaging aspects to take place.

DEBRA: Very good explanation. Okay, I interrupted you. Go on with what you are saying.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, it’s good. I like that you have a question in between. What I would tell you are the things that people really should be on. You need to be on fish oil first and foremost. That lowers your triglyceride, 30% of them.

And fish oil does have lots of other effects in the body. We know it has central nervous system effects for cognition. We also know too that it has anti-arrhythmic effects on the heart. The reason why I bring this up is that we’re talking about the heart and we’re talking about the vascular system.

I don’t know if your clients and the people that listen on this show have heard about this. But atrial fibrillation is when the heart is quivering. It’s beating too fast. And atrial fibrillation shows up in a lot of people. This is something I see quite frequently working as a pharmacist and a lot of people are on Coumadin or on blood thinners. The reason why is they have what’s called as AFib.

AFib can show up from several different things. But really it commonly happens when someone has diabetes or is overweight. The ones that are at risk for it also, believe it or not, are people that are drinking. Alcohol can put them at risk for AFib. There are a lot of different things.

When you have AFib, you have to be on blood thinners. And a lot of these people are on it for the rest of their lives.

I would say taking care of your heart and taking care of your blood vessels is very, very important. That might be something that people are overlooking.

I was talking about the resveratrol, looking at improvement from spinal cord injuries, people with inflammation and also had blood vessel disease. Taking quercetin, these are very inexpensive. That would be very good. I think taking fish oil is very important.

And I think taking the Body Anew – we were talking originally about these particulates getting stuck, chemicals and pesticides as well, but also more particularly the things you’re breathing in the air in your house and outside. These things that get stuck in the mucus membrane, in your nasal passages, in your lungs – you want to take that out. And by removing it, you’re going to have a much better outcome. That’s first and foremost.

It’s the Body Anew with quercetin in the water and maybe an anti-inflammatory. I really like taking something called [Traumeel?] or you can use [Chronogies?]. There are different ones you can put in the water. If you drink that through the day, your inflammation will be drastically reduced. So those are very important.

DEBRA: Let me just insert here. Pamela has been talking about drinking things in water. One of the thing that she does with all her clients is that she has – I’ll say S because I’m one of her clients.

Start the morning with a bottle of water and then add things to it that are liquids like homeopathic remedies and things. And then drinking it through the day is being on an IV. Didn’t you say that one?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: Throughout the day…

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right because you’re getting continuous peaks in the bloodstream of the medication. That’s how medications are dosed when someone’s in a CCU or an ICU or something like that. It really changes the dynamics of how things work in your body.

When you take a pill and you swallow it and you get a peak in the bloodstream and then 5 to 10 minutes after that, it’s not around anymore, that’s the problem. You want to have something that’s released all day long.

DEBRA: Right. I’m kind of lazy about taking supplements. People will tell me, “Take one of these at breakfast, lunch and dinner.” And I go, “Yeah, I can’t remember this.”

For a while, I was just taking all my supplements in the morning. And then when I learned this from Pamela, I went “Oh, that’s why they say take it at breakfast, lunch and dinner.” I realized that I just need to train myself to do that because the best way to be taking supplements or medications or whatever is throughout the day.

I have my bottle here. It just sits on my desk all day long and I just keep sipping it. And I have my supplements sitting right here at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It gets rid throughout the day and then my body gets what it needs when it needs it instead of just having it all in the morning. I think that’s just a really important point.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It is. And the continual dosing of the medication and the homeopathic medicines in the water is really, really a hallmark of a lot of things to do here. If you’re just taking it or you’re having it just in the morning, you’re not going to get it all day long.

I’ve been treating some people that have cancer or if they have a really sever infection of some sort – we really want to have even a morning bottle and an afternoon bottle so you’re covered all day long. You don’t want to have it temporarily like you’re just getting a small peak in the bloodstream. That’s why liquids are really the way to go if you want to have a better outcome for patients.

And it’s the same thing with the quercetin. I know quercetin are tablets and I do use those here. But quercetin and liquid will be far more effective for somebody that’s looking for this type of outcome than someone that’s using it with the tablet and taking it three times a day.

You’re right. The compliance of somebody taking something sporadically through the day and capsules is very low. I see that most people don’t do the liquid and don’t drink it through the day and bring into their office, put on their desk. But taking tablets through the day doesn’t really work as well.

I can help people if they have questions about any of the vascular issues we discussed today, especially if that’s affecting you or your loved ones. You can really treat that pretty easily with some bioflavonoids in the Body Anew to really pull that out.

I would really tell your listeners that that’s something that they should really think about, especially we were talking about the peripheral vascular disease. And also allergies are extremely common. Most people realize that this is usually treatable.

And it’s treatable in your pets, your dogs and cats. If they’re sneezing a lot, if they’re scratching, you can use bioflavonoids for animals as well.

DEBRA: This is so interesting. We only have just a couple of minutes left, but I just want to say that one of the reasons why I have Pamela on so much is because she has a unique combination of understanding of how things work in the body because she’s a pharmacist and then she’s applying that pharmacist understanding to using natural substances. It just makes a combination that I’ve never seen any place else, but it makes so much sense to me.

Usually if people want to use something natural or a natural supplement, they just go to the natural food store, they read an article or something. And people are taking supplements not understanding how they work in the body.

Pamela does understand these things. That’s why I just appreciate her so much. Anyway…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I appreciate you. I really appreciate the opportunity to be able to talk to these people and help them understand.

Thank you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Your vascular health is really in your hands. Believe it or not, there are some things you can’t control. There are some things that people come to me and I’m like, “You know what? This is better handled with medicine.” I’m very, very honest about that.

DEBRA: Yes, she is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: There’s not a lot, but this is one that medicine does not address.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Really. Medicine does not address all these things we talked about, the sinus problem, asthma, the colitis, the Crohn, the leaky gut, the peripheral vascular disease. All these things to some degree are preventable and treatable pretty easily with some common supplements. And your outcomes are pretty much better than taking a bunch of medications for these things.

I would tell you that…

DEBRA: Wait. Pamela, Pamela, the music is coming on in two seconds. Thank you very much.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you.

DEBRA: Until you’re back in two weeks on Wednesday. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

Obamacare Alternative Insurance That Includes Holistic Care

kari-grayMy guest today is Kari E. Gray, Founder of GreenSurance Natural Medicine. We’ll be talking about Obamacare requirements and some options for how to fulfill them, including her innovative new program that cove rs alternative medicine as well as conventional. A passion in Kari’s professional career left by terminal cancer, Kari’s determination to survive by exploring all options despite medical diagnosis of no survival, led a tenacious, driven mother to natural treatments that in time gave her a second chance at life. Twenty-five years later she has an even more amazing story and passion to lead the natural medicine healthcare mission. As an insurance professional, Kari’s knowledge of healthcare including first-hand experience of being denied coverage when choosing natural treatments, empowered her with a commitment to ‘pay it forward’ and help people with life saving healthcare. www.mygreensurance.org

read-transcript

 

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
ObamaCare Alternatives Insurance that Includes Holistic Care

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Kari E. Gray

Date of Broadcast: May 19, 2015

DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It’s Tuesday, May 19th, 2015 on a beautiful day here in Clearwater, Florida. Today, we’re going to talk about insurance, insurance, insurance. Oh, wow! I just want to say what a mess this is.

Okay. So I’ll just say that for the past – I don’t know how many years, four or five years, I had a wonderful little insurance – I’ll say “insurance” – that I pay $69 a month for. What it does is it pays for doctor visits. It pays 100% of labs and it gives a prescription discount. It’s $69 a month. Now, that is ending because of ObamaCare.

So I did my taxes this year. There’s this thing about having to pay the penalty if you don’t have insurance. What I saw in my tax return was that it just asks you, “Do you have adequate insurance?” And then you just get to answer yes or no. I just answered yes because I felt like that I had adequate healthcare. But it didn’t even have a definition of what that meant in the instructions with the taxes.

My guest today knows all about this. Not only does she know all about ObamaCare, but she has a new insurance program that qualifies for being your insurance for ObamaCare that also gives you holistic care. She’s going to tell us all about everything.

Her name is Kari Gray. She’s the Founder of GreenSurance Natural Medicine. Hi, Kari.

KARI GRAY: Good morning. How are you?

DEBRA: I’m good. And you’re in Hawaii. How is it in Hawaii?

KARI GRAY: It’s wonderful! It’s Hawaii. Is there more to say? We always have sunshine and we have rain. And it’s green and it’s always beautiful.

DEBRA: It sounds like Florida. I’ve never been to Hawaii, but I’ve seen pictures and it’s a place I’d like to go one day.

KARI GRAY: Yes.

DEBRA: Tell us your story of how you got to establishing GreenSurance Natural Medicine.

KARI GRAY: This has been actually quite a long journey. But I’ll focus in on just the most recent part of it just because of the fact that it’s most relevant.

Basically, as you know, we have this ObamaCare legislation. I have written a patent actually for a natural medicine health insurance. Recognizing the bureaucracy of insurance – I’m a licensed insurance professional, so just recognizing how flow change is coming and recognizing that there’s also this love-hate relationship that people seem to have with insurance.

So really, just doing market testing, as we called it, kind of field of testing a product, people were very excited of the idea that there would be a product that would give them alternative medicine, but weren’t [inaudible 00:04:24]. It was kind of strange, the responses that we’re getting from people are strange.

And so continuing the research actually the legislation is how I actually came upon a different kind of application. The law basically said that there were exemptions to the penalty. So I really focused in on what the exemptions were. I won’t go into all of it now. Anyway, there were a number of different exemptions and organizations that qualified. It was a strenuous list and it seems really rather unusual that anybody could even pass this.

For example, they had to be in existence before 1999 and they had to have third party verification. There were just a lot of very ambiguous things. I was like, “Wow! I’m not for sure who else qualifies for this because who would have known in 1999 or before what was coming down the pipe years later.”

Anyway, as I continued to research, then I found that actually there were a lot of organizations to start with that applied for that exemption. But because of the criteria – there were more – they couldn’t pass. And what remained were just a handful of organizations that actually qualified.

That’s how this actually migrated from insurance to what’s called cost sharing. And cost sharing is an alternative. It’s like if you think about the difference between what a credit union offers and what a bank offers.

When you realize that there is a difference between the two, yet the service they provide to individuals feels the same, there is a completely different dynamic that goes into how they do and what they do. And that is for profit is what a bank does and for people or for members is what a credit union does. That’s really the similarity and difference that health insurance has with cost sharing.

We are a non-profit and we’re a coalition of non-profit. What we’re doing is using the federal law to provide something that’s really not done anywhere. And that’s what’s really exciting about this because what that has now opened up – we’re not inside, we’re not mandated by ObamaCare to have all of the kinds of coverage that ObamaCare requires for an insurance company to have, which is what skyrocketed the rate. For example, no one can be turned down. That’s a big problem. So that means everybody has to be insured.

The next problem is that you can have any kind of lifestyle and you can have any pre-existing conditions. All of those things are what are making it hard for all the other people, who, like yourself, may have had one small insurance policy. Now, those are no longer in existence because there are actually 10 different criteria that, according to ObamaCare, an insurance policy have to make. If it doesn’t make that, then that’s why they basically have to put some money to the policy or they can’t even reissue them. So that explains how your policy is lost because it just doesn’t qualify any longer.

There are a lot of people that are kind of thrown under the bus in all of this. Anyway, the great thing is that the cost sharing is a wonderful alternative. It’s not insurance, but it actually serves the same capacity and it gives people also what has never been given before. So it’s not just alternative, but it’s a conventional and alternative approach to medicine and it’s all under the same organizational services that are being offered now.

DEBRA: So now, there are a lot of details that you can give us and I want you to give all these details. But before we get to those, I want to talk a little bit more just because I think that I and a lot of other people don’t understand this. So what ObamaCare wants – and we’re going to run into the break, so you might not get to answer it all and then we’ll finish after the break. What Obama wants is for everybody to get insurance, regular insurance according to the guidelines that they have in ObamaCare. Correct me if I’m wrong. If you don’t, you have to pay a penalty. Am I right so far?

KARI GRAY: Yes, you’re correct.

DEBRA: Okay. So could you tell us about this penalty?

KARI GRAY: Yeah, sure. The penalty basically starts out small. It’s 1% of what’s called your AGI. That’s your Adjusted Gross Income. In other words, it’s not what your income starts out at. If you take some deductions, it’s that final number.

So it’s 1% of that number or $90. I think that’s how it starts. In other words, for a person who doesn’t even make enough that he would qualify for that, then it’s just $90. It’s not too bad, but basically what’s going to happen is time goes by, every year, that number goes up.

Anyway, it’s going to be a lot more significant. Of course, the more income the person makes, the more significant that’s going to become. So it’s going to actually be thousands and thousands of dollars as time goes by because I think by 2016, it will be 3%.

Just to give you an example and just to give your audience an example of what that really means. So if you just estimate what your adjusted gross income is, times that number, times 3%, you can just get an idea. Now that’s just what the penalty is.

That means you still don’t have any options really, but you’ve got to pay a penalty. That’s what it comes down to.

DEBRA: This year, when I was doing 2014 taxes, this is the first time that I saw that penalty. So it’s $90 for the 2014 taxes or 1%. Is that what you said? And then there’s 2015. By the time it’s 2016, it’s 3%. And then does it go up from there?

KARI GRAY: Actually, the legislation doesn’t go into it. This is where the…

DEBRA: Oh, wait! Wait! I have to cut you off because we have to go to break.

KARI GRAY: Okay.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I’m talking with Kari Gray, the Founder of GreenSurance Natural Medicine about ObamaCare and what we can do to have alternative health as part of our insurance. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: We’re having some technical problems, but now we’re back. Kari, I hope you are still there with me. Are you there?

KARI GRAY: I am.

DEBRA: Yeah. Wasn’t that strange? I’ve been doing this show for two years and I’ve never had something like that happen. So I’m sorry that it happened on your show, but here we are again.

We were talking about – what were we talking about? I asked you a question. I’m sorry. My attention is on all this technical stuff. What were we talking about?

KARI GRAY: You were asking about the penalty. And I said that it’s going to be 3% by 2016 and you were asking if it goes up any further.

From anything that I’ve read, I don’t see anything expressing that right now, but it could be. I read a lot of information. I’ll let that be something that we can leave for another conversation when we have more time to research that. But I know that it goes up to 3%. That’s what I have seen.

DEBRA: So this is like forcing us to get insurance.

KARI GRAY: That’s the idea.

DEBRA: What if we don’t want insurance?

KARI GRAY: Then that’s what the penalty is to coerce a person into. I mean, that’s really what it comes down to. You can’t go to jail for it, but basically though they can seize some assets or freeze assets. Really the way they collect this is through refunds. That’s how they enforce it. It’s through an overpayment of taxes, then the IRS can take it from your refund.

DEBRA: I can’t tell you how unhappy this makes me because what is going to happen for me is that I’m either going to have to pay the penalty or I’m going to have to get insurance that I don’t even use or I can get something like your program.

KARI GRAY: Yes.

DEBRA: Your program is not insurance, but it qualifies under that other thing. So if I were to get your program – I don’t want to call it insurance, your cost sharing. But I guess people think of it as insurance anyway because it’s like [inaudible 00:19:01].

KARI GRAY: Yeah. It’s what most people think of it, but it isn’t and we don’t want to represent it that it is. That’s why we always clarify that it is not insurance.

Basically, I use the illustration about the credit union. Really cost sharing is where people come together with a united purpose. That united purpose is the fact that they basically are going to put their money together. It’s kind of an insurance called a risk pool.

Basically, when you pay premium, then that goes into obviously covering the cost of the insurance and all their salaries in the company and the profits and all that. But then a portion of it goes into what’s called the risk pool. When that claim is paid out, it comes out of the risk pool.

In cost sharing, it’s not the same, but it is similar in the fact that the person makes a donation to the community. And then those community resources are what actually in the end (because they’re combined with other people in the community as well), it actually is similar because it is what pays the medical cost that a person experiences at the end of the day. That’s really what we’re looking for. It’s a way to not go health care cost alone, which is what the penalty is all about or to try to encourage people or force them actually once it becomes more enforced.

It will become more enforced as time goes on. It’s written in the body of law, but it’s not really clear yet what’s going to happen.

But anyways, point being is that what cost sharing does is it gives people a way to really give themselves that protection, which is that they’re not going to be penalized and that they’ve got freedom. What we say is, “Freedom equals choice. And choice is power for medicine.”

If your choice in your health care is not just looking at things that potentially could be toxic. If you want to have some options outside of just the status quo of conventional approaches, then cost sharing actually is what you really need to look at because that’s the only way to get the freedom that, even under ObamaCare, will never be offered.

DEBRA: Okay. We need to go to break. We’ll talk more about this when we come back.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guess today is Kari Gray. She has found an alternative program for ObamaCare. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guess today is Kari Gray. She’s the Founder of GreenSurance Natural Medicine.

Kari, before we go on and have you to tell us all the details about your program, you have quite a dramatic personal story of how you got interested in this. Would you tell us your story?

KARI GRAY: Sure, yes. Actually that’s the true beginning of how this started. In 1988 – actually I’ll start with the funny part of the story.

We all remember – or we’re old enough to remember I guess I’ll say. When Oprah Winfrey evaporated in front of everybody when she throws this coat and there was this much smaller version of Oprah and it was shocking to everybody.

And then she followed it up with pulling a wagon that represented all the weight she lost.

DEBRA: I remember seeing that on TV. Yeah.

KARI GRAY: Yeah. It was an epic moment. Oprah had some real epic moments in her career as a talk show host for sure.

That motivated me because I always felt like I was overweight even though actually at the time, I really wasn’t. But anyway, it motivated me to go to my doctor because she had taken this miracle substance called Optifast. You had to go to the doctor and get a physical in order to get on it. That’s actually how I got started.

So I went to the doctor thinking, “I’m going to try this.” So I go and I have a complete physical. When I called to go back for my results, I didn’t even begin to guess where this was going.

I was given two diagnoses. The first one was multi sclerosis. I asked what the cure of it is. There is no cure, they told me. And the next thing was liver cancer. I said, “What?”

They said, “Yes. And the bad news is that you’re too far gone for chemo and radiation. Basically you didn’t have much longer to live. So I’m sorry. There’s really nothing we can offer you.” That was the news I was given that day.

That was very devastating needless to say. And 25 years old and I had a house full of kids and I was dying. It was very, very overwhelming. I was depressed, I was devastated and I was dying and I just went to bed.

So [inaudible 00:29:12] and I really didn’t know what I was going to do. But the one thing that I had the presence of mind to realize was that first of all, I needed to start exhausting options. Maybe there was something that the doctor didn’t know about. That was my first thought. I had no idea at the time what that could be.

And then the second one is I realized, especially when I got the second diagnosis, that the first thing I needed to do – I could feel what’s in me. I was starting to die. I could feel the process happening. It was like psychologically, I was starting the dying process. I recognized that the first thing I needed to do is I needed to stop listening to bad news because that really was creating quite a psychological mind play on my psyche and my will to live.

Anyway, that’s basically how this all got started. I don’t know if you can hear rain or not, but that’s what that is if you do hear it. Anyway, that’s how my story got started, basically just exploring the options.

I felt my eulogy to my children would be that, yes, I died young, but I exhausted every option for their sake. That’s what really pushed me to start reading and researching and talking to people. You got to realize this was before the Internet.

There was a lot of diligent effort on my part. And sure enough, it eventually got me to a practitioner who not only did she immediately, through her testing methods, find the cancer and again confirm that I was terminal with not much longer to live. But the good news for me was that – since I already knew, I told her she wasn’t breaking the news to me. So she felt better.

But she asked me if I believe that I had a chance. I said, “Well, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I had a chance. That’s why I’m looking for something other than my doctor and what they told me.”

She said, “Here’s the thing. I believe that you do have a chance because you’re young.” And she said, “But it’s going to require 100% diligence on your part. You got to be fully committed to everything I tell you to do. This is going to take a lot of change on your part.”

But she said this. “Your health insurance, you have insurance, right?” I said yes. She goes, “Your health insurance is going to pay for it.” I said, “Wow! Okay, let’s do it.” I didn’t know what other options I had and I really didn’t have any.

That’s how this shift started in my own personal story. I was just basically trying to survive, a catalyst, the soon-to-be death that I was facing.

What I was found was the problem. I found that there were a lot of things that I was doing wrong. That’s really what was causing the cancer.

Unfortunately, I had a lot of people. Every time we have a health issue, I just went to the doctor. And I usually ended up with a prescription like an antibiotic prescription. I did recognize how the overuse of antibiotics and all the other things in my life, too much sugar in my diet, too much stress in my life, birth controls. All of those things were contributing to setting me up to having a compromised immune system.

So I learned all the things that I was doing wrong. And I learned how to change all of those things, and it was a massive change. She was right when she said it’s going to take a lot of change, a lot of commitment on my part. It really did.

Anyway, here’s the interesting part. Eight months later, I’ve been spending thousands and thousands of dollars on all of this.

First of all, I submitted all my receipts. I thought this is [inaudible 00:33:19]. I submitted all my receipts. What’s interesting is the letter that I got back. They said that not only was I out of coverage for what I was doing, but it was unproven. So I was like, “That’s very interesting.”

I ended up going back to the doctor and I want to suggest seeing if I had made any progress. Now the way that the conversation went from here really again shifted my consciousness.

The first thing is my doctor was shocked that I was alive. “Okay, that was great. That was great news.” So I want to tell her why I was alive and what I was doing. And then I was shocked because she didn’t want to hear it and I was like, “What?”

She said, “Absolutely, I do not want to hear this.” And she said, “We are running new tests and you need to prepare for the works.” And I think she thought maybe I was delusional. I don’t know. But the point is that I spent a few more days anxious of waiting again, more bad news.

But this was where it all shifted for me because when she came in, she had my charts down and she didn’t make eye contact with me. So I sat there in silence for a while. And then I thought it was awkward. So I just decided to break the silence and started talking again about what I’ve been doing. And then she immediately stopped me. So we sat there.

And then finally, she looked at me and she said, “I saw what your original test was like and I see what these look like. And I’m here to tell you, the liver does not do this on its own. I don’t know what you’ve been doing and I don’t want to know. But I know this much, you’re cancer-free. Congratulations!”

DEBRA: We’re going to go to break there. That’s an amazing story, really wonderful.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kari Gray. When we come back, she’s going to tell us about her program that you can use instead of Obama Insurance so that you can get alternative health as part of your program and not just regular doctors. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Kari Gray. She is the founder of GreenSurance Natural Medicine.

Kari, as we ended off before the break, you were telling us how you did all these alternative things to get cancer-free and that your insurance didn’t cover any of them. So I consider that would be a big motivation for you to come up with a program where people who are having catastrophic situations like you had would have a program where they can get some help and support with the financial and with those kinds of illnesses.

So would you tell us in detail now about your program and what people get and what they don’t get? What does it cover? What is it all about?

KARI GRAY: Sure. There are a lot of things. Basically we let people to be aware of it. Our website actually is a great source of information and it actually is always kept most up to date. So please, if I can mention the website.

DEBRA: Sure.

KARI GRAY: Okay. It’s MyGreenSurance.com.

DEBRA: Is it not .org?

KARI GRAY: Yeah, it’s both. We have .com and .org. Yeah, we own both. Anyway, basically that’s where all of the facts are up. Anything that I’m not covering that people still have, the FAQs is a great page to look at and so is the health plan. It just narrows it all down.

But basically what we’re talking about is this. The purpose of the community approach is that it’s to offer lessened basic treatment to people versus what conventional wants to do oftentimes. That really is nice. People don’t like to be having basic things if they can avoid that.

And it also offers things like it prevents more costly conventional treatment. That’s big because really now you’re getting into more proactive things that you can do for your health.

Just to give an example. In ObamaCare, it requires things like screening. They call that Preventive Treatment Screening. The problem with screening is that if the screening finds the disease, then it didn’t prevent anything. That’s the irony.

But we know more about ourselves, especially once we get educated and become in tune with ourselves. Providers do obviously. I mean their job is to figure it all out. But if we’re really in tune, then that really helps us to stay proactive and healthy.

That just gives you an overview of really what the criteria is. So it really opens up doors to things like acupuncture, chiropractic, herbal regimes, massage therapy, homeopathy, colonics, detox programs, Chinese medicine.

And then if you are talking about some of the bigger things like cancer for example, you have to understand that this isn’t a health plan for people who have cancer. It’s a health plan for people who are healthy who can get cancer for example.

The way to illustrate that is you don’t buy car insurance after an accident. You buy car insurance in case.

DEBRA: Yeah. That’s what insurance is for. It’s the in case.

KARI GRAY: That’s where we get – sometimes people will say, “I have cancer.” It doesn’t work in a cost sharing environment because we can’t keep the rates low if the people that are participating and donating to the cost sharing communities are coming in terminal already.

That’s the reason why unfortunately we can’t put them in the cost sharing. But we do have another program we’re working where they can have access to at least discount services.

Once a healthy member is diagnosed with some terminal illness, things like this will be very important, which is like intravenous vitamin C treatment or we have got things like [inaudible 00:43:32] technology. There are a number of them.

[inaudible 00:43:40] cream, hemp oil, there’s a lot of real specializing for cancer for example. Oxygen therapy, chelation, oxygen IV therapy, there are a lot of things for serious disease that really open up the door to recovery. That’s really what the bottom line is in all this.

It’s not the slow road and the most profitable road to an early to an early grave. It’s actually how to help a person recover their health so that they can have the optimum life. That’s really what we’re talking about, not a managed care or treatment mentality.

That’s really the difference, just the polar extreme between conventional and alternative. While conventional deals with symptoms, alternative deals with causes. That’s really what we’re talking about. It’s opening up this place for people now to start addressing causes so that they don’t have a lifetime dependent on a prescription because that’s actually not covered in the health plan, health insurance either. A short term is, but not long term.

That’s why we use the alternatives, then we can break the symptom dependence cycle, pill for every ill, which is basically often what happens when a doctor is limited only conventional approaches, which is what is part of ObamaCare.

DEBRA: So I just want to be clear because you and I have talked about this. I’m considering getting this program myself. I haven’t made a decision yet if it’s the right thing for me.

But one of the things that I learned about when I was talking to Kari was that it’s not insurance-like if you were to get insurance and then they pay for all your doctor visits and stuff like that. It really is for if something happens in the future that is a big thing like cancer or heart disease or something like that where you have a lot of medical bills, that it covers those kinds of things.

So you still have to pay for going to a chiropractor, going to a dentist, doing whatever. It’s not kind of plan. But when you need it if you need it, it’s going to allow you to get all these alternative treatments that insurance doesn’t cover.

And it’s a very low price. Tell them about the price.

KARI GRAY: Okay. Let me just clarify something here. Just to give your listeners an idea here.

We’re talking about things like accidents, ambulance, X-rays, lab work, emergency rooms, home health care, hospital services, surgery, [inaudible 00:46:27] outpatients, maternity care, prescriptions, surgery, therapy, on and on it goes. I mean it’s not just singular approaches with alternatives, but it’s actually the very comprehensive health plan.

There are a lot of things to understand about it. I know that it’s hard to digest a plethora of information all at one time, but just to give you an idea. This is really part of the excitement that people have when they realize how low cost this really is.

For example, if…

DEBRA: Before you go on, let me just tell you that we only have three minutes left.

KARI GRAY: Thank you for that. So if it’s a single person, it could be anywhere from $249.99 a month to around $380. If they’re married, it could be $349 to $580. If it’s a family, it can be anywhere from $499 to $680.

Those are estimates because everyone falls in those estimates based on their health questionnaire that they complete. So those are just lows and highs, but it’s very, very affordable.

DEBRA: It is very affordable in comparison. I’m so happy that you’re doing what you’re doing because whether it works for everybody or doesn’t work for everybody, you’re taking a step out of the old insurance idea.

And you’re looking at how to bring the alternatives, help people afford the alternatives when they need some help. I think that what you’re doing will grow in the future to have other kinds of plans as well. That’s the way I see it at least.

You really are forging a new direction. I really appreciate that.

KARI GRAY: Thank you very much.

DEBRA: You’re welcome. We do have still about a minute left. Are there any final words you’d like to say? Let’s give your website address again.

KARI GRAY: Yes.

DEBRA: It’s MyGreenSurance.org or MyGreenSurance.com.

KARI GRAY: That’s right.

DEBRA: It really has all the information there.

KARI GRAY: Yes. Really what we say is that GreenSurance is about people who are ready for change. GreenSurance is about people who want an alternative to ObamaCare.

GreenSurance has a lot of messages, but really what it’s about is about environment. So it’s about being able to finally start having some control over something as important as your health care. And really isn’t that refreshing?

DEBRA: It is refreshing.

KARI GRAY: Yeah, it’s very fresh and organic. And people are very really excited about that. We have the ability now to become the change that we want to see. How that happens is like-minded people get together for making change happen. That’s why we invite people to join us.

DEBRA: That’s great. That’s great. Again, I’m going to give the URL for the website. It’s MyGreenSurance.org. There’s so much more information there.

When I think about having to pay the penalty, why not take that penalty money and actually put it someplace so that I can get some help if I need that help? This sounds like an interesting place to put it. I’m looking for all kinds of alternatives for making sure I make the best ObamaCare choice.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

How Inactivity Leads to Illness and Drug Use—And How Exercise Can Get You Off Drugs and into Health

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking about the latest studies that show how inactivity contributes to illness (and subsequent drug use) plus how simple exercise can help your body be healthy more than expensive drugs. Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and selling top quality medicinal supplements, so she’s seen it all. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Inactivity Leads to Illness and Drug Use and How Exercise Can Get You Off Drugs and Into Health

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld

Date of Broadcast: May 06, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It is Wednesday, May 6, 2015, and I’m here in sunny Clearwater, Florida. And today is every other Wednesday so my guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. She knows so much about how we can use natural substances to heal our bodies that I have her on every other Wednesday. And today’s the other Wednesday. And so here she is again.

What we’re going to be talking about today is inactivity, how inactivity leads to illness and drug use because when are inactive, as most people are in the modern world, then we get illnesses that lead to us taking drugs and then we start going down that drug spiral.

So today we’re going to be talking about how inactivity leads to illness, how exercise makes you healthy, and what we can do so that we can be drug free. For anybody who is still taking drugs or knows anybody who is taking drugs but is close to you, this is important information.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, it’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. You sound so bright and healthy. You always do.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I feel healthy. I feel great.

DEBRA: I have to tell everybody. I said this before but I just want to say it again that Pamela is the number one, healthiest-looking person I’ve ever seen. When I first saw her, I thought, “This is a healthy person. I want to be healthy like this.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, I feel really great. I really do. I’m very blessed. Great health.

DEBRA: Yes, you are. But you do so many things to be healthy. And so we’re talking about inactivity today. So I’m sure that sometime during the hour, we’re going to talk about how active you are.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. How we want to try and get America and everywhere else as well, try and get everybody to get up and start moving because the new statistics don’t look very good for what we’re actually doing right now.

DEBRA: So why don’t you tell us about this statistics? I think you have some studies to tell us about?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. The Wall Street Journal, two days ago, had a report and they published this, and they were talking about this brand new survey that took place that’s called the Physical Activity Council that took the survey, and it found that one in four Americans didn’t exercise at all in the past year.

So that’s one in four. That’s a lot. So that’s 25% of the population and we know that – and actually, it’s closer to 28%, it says here, but more than a quarter of the US population, 28% did not participate in a single physical activity last year as defined by the Council. And the definition of physical activity is simple stuff, even yard work, walking around the block. It’s not going to the gym and working out for an hour and running a marathon. It’s simple activities that people just are not doing even at all and these inactivities are not just because of people always so concerned about their weight. That’s a factor. But also the fact that it causes metabolic syndrome and allows for diabetes, hypertension and other things took place, even if the person is of normal weight.

So that’s very, very important to realize that it’s not just okay – I’m telling people to get active because I want them all to get skinny. It’s not necessarily about your body habit as in your weight. Though sometimes with activity, of course, that can help to lose weight. But the fact that these people are all going to be at risk for a lot of metabolic diseases is very, very dangerous.

DEBRA: I think about prior to the industrial age when people used to live out in nature and they had to get everything that they needed directly off the land. People were incredibly active that they were – there were no cars and so they walked everywhere. And if they wanted to eat, they had to go hunt a wooly mammoth or whatever they were hunting. And there’s this whole period of time that’s called the hunter/gatherers. And so the men were off hunting animal which they had to run after and chase and go to the areas where the animals were, and the women were to gather everything. They had to walk around and find berries and carry them home. And they were walking to the stream and carrying the bottles of water, the jugs of water I should say.

And people were just moving around all day long doing the basic stuff of life. And we don’t do any of that anymore. And I think that most people just sit at a desk and they go home and sit in front of the television.

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is what the Physical Activity Council is really saying. And they’re saying also that the number of Americans, whom we describe as totally sedentary, and that’s in quotations, has risen to its highest level since 2007. So we’re talking about the epidemic of lots of diseases and most of the people listening to this are probably interested in improving their health and doing some simple things. Obviously, not being on a bunch of medication is one of them. And if we’re totally sedentary, we’re not walking to do things and do the yard work, maybe go to the gym, it doesn’t mean you have to be working out, per say, on an exercise equipment all day long. That’s not what we’re talking about.

But even mild activities – and I really have to think that a lot of people I know really outsource a lot of the things that they used to do, their housework, the washing of the car. All these things that used to be activity we don’t want to do, especially in Florida. People don’t want to sweat so they hire people to do everything.

Look at everybody here in Florida. I have yard service. I have lawns. And I have a pool guy. You have people for everything.

DEBRA: Hello, I don’t.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You don’t because you probably don’t have a pool to take care of, a yard maybe. I have all these people doing all this stuff. Now, I’m still very active, but I see this everywhere I go. You look in Florida, how many yard services are out there? There must be a million. Everyone has a yard service.

DEBRA: I think part of it in Florida because it’s hot and humid most of the year that you don’t want to go out there. It’s hard for me actually in the summertime that it’s so humid, it’s difficult to breathe.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I mean, if people haven’t come to Florida, we can tell them from firsthand experience that it’s like walking into an oven.

DEBRA: It is. Or like walking around in a sauna all day long, all night long. If I don’t close my windows for six months of the year and run the air conditioning while I’m sleeping, I wouldn’t be able to breathe at night because it’s so 85 degrees and humid for six months of the year.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely.

DEBRA: And that’s what it’s like. So that’s why I think people aren’t doing their yard work. But some people are out there, really sweating and exercising. And they’re getting plenty of activity doing our yard work for us.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s right! Well, it’s true. [Inaudible 00:08:11] I’m always was like, “Can I offer you some water?” because it’s really hot.

But the thing about the sedentariness and really, I really do think the study is very valid. Wall Street Journal is pretty upfront about publishing things that are not bogus. We see this in activity level has gone to such a crisis level here in the United States. And in looking at physical education in schools has been really pretty much phased out in many cases. A lot of times, it’s just really not important to them to do these things.

I think it’s really important to look at little things that we can do in our daily live to increase our activity level and of course, going to the gym. And I think we need to focus on the fact that a lot of the medications that people are taking from high blood pressure, maybe for diabetes, for a lot of these different disorders are really related to inactivity.

And don’t forget too, exercise. When you exercise and you have your heart rate go up, what it does, it really boosts the immune system. And how this works is the white blood cells are hanging on to the side of the blood vessel just during inactivity. And then when you get this rush of the blood moving through, what happens is, you get this process called demargination of the white blood cells. And what this means is the blood cells come off of the blood cells where they’re hanging out and doing nothing and they become very active.

So if you’re sick (and you’re not definitely sick, I’m not talking about someone that’s really, really sick, but you maybe have a bad cold or something), you can really boost your immune system by just working out.

DEBRA: That’s so good to know. That’s very good to know because [cross-talking 00:09:45]

PAMELA SEEFELD: There’s a physical process involved and this activity, you will see a transit increase in white blood cells after a person has done cardiovascular exercise. And that’s why I always make sure that when I’ve been sick, unless I’m running a high fever, I used to go out and run all the time doing that because you cough all this stuff, you’d feel a lot better and your fever eventually would just go away because you have the transient boost in white blood cell activity that’s very reproducible and it also works for the differentiation of the different white blood cells like lymphocytes and macrophages.

They all have a little, special assignments. Some go after viruses, some go after bacteria. It’s really important to realize that even small amounts and burst of activity can increase your immune system tremendously besides fending off the fact that we’re talking about these metabolic diseases which a lot of it is a result of inactivity of people.

DEBRA: And we’ll talk more about this after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And today, we’re talking about how inactivity leads to illness and drug use and how we can turn all that around by getting a little exercise.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. She has a great, little shop here in Clearwater, Florida called Botanical Resource. And she also has a med spa there in the back of the Botanical Resource Natural Pharmacy where they do all kinds of natural facials and things like that.

And Pamela, tell us a little bit about what you do and tell us about your consulting services, your free consulting service that you can help people get off drugs.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely. I’ve been doing this probably 20, 25 years, at least. And my store here in Clearwater is a homeopathic pharmacy but we also do natural supplements. I actually teach this and I grant review for the National Institute of Health in Washing DC as well on alternative medicine.

So my consultations are free. You can call here at any time. My hours are normally here at the store is from 10 to 5, Monday through Friday, 10 to 2 on Saturday. But I’m always here pretty much between noon and 2 before I go to my other thing. And I would be very honored and happy to help your family if you want to get off prescription medications, if you’re interested in something alternative to narcotics, high blood pressure medications. And I also do a lot of veterinary work as well in the homeopathic realm.

But I would be very happy to help your family. My number here at the pharmacy is 727-442-4955, and I’m very sure that I would be very successful with you and your family. Any quick questions you might have about the medications you’re on or trying something else.

DEBRA: And she is very knowledgeable. She helps me and many other people here in Clearwater, Florida. Doctors send their patients to her. I once said to my medical doctor that Pamela had recommended something and he said, “Absolutely. Take it. Do whatever she tells you to do.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great. I feel very assured that we can provide excellent service for you and you’ll be very satisfied.

DEBRA: Yes, I feel that way exactly too.

So Pamela, in that study from the Wall Street Journal, were there any other categories of how much exercise people were getting? Or were they just looking at that one?

PAMELA SEEFELD: They were looking at the one study and talking about the metabolic syndrome. But also, I have to think that – this is kind of an aside, but it’s really funny – apparently, we need to look to the fact that a quarter of Americans are completely sedentary. And if you realize, Chipotle will now deliver.

So if you can’t go and get your Chipotle, they will come to you, which is really to me, absolutely insane. And they were saying that there are 90,000 Chipotles in New York. And people can pretty much walk to any of them and they’re going to deliver your food for you now.

DEBRA: I don’t think there are 90,000 Chipotles in New York.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It does sound pretty [inaudible 00:16:43]. But the fact that people can really – they made things way too easy. I want to go back again to talking about the metabolic syndrome and what happens when people are sedentary.

The fact that detox is very important for having your body move. So you know how you feel really sluggish and you feel tired and not well when you’re sitting for long periods of time? The problem is most of our desk jobs are very sedentary. And so we can’t get around that. So it’s just important to stand up, move around, so on and so forth.

But what I would like to mention to the listeners is that when you start moving around, you’re not only moving the blood, but you’re allowing the fat to start mobilizing fat-soluble chemicals. And they go to the liver and they become metabolized, and they’re water-soluble, and they go out in the urine. And it’s really important.

If you think about the detoxification processes of a lot of people, if they’re sedentary, a lot of that process is not fully taking place and we now know that the study show that people, especially with diabetes, that they’re testing very high for urinary pesticides. And a lot of this might be because the fact that maybe their detoxification process to the liver and the way things are handling, the way the fat is releasing these chemicals is impaired to a great deal because of the sedentary activity of the person.

DEBRA: Well, that makes sense to me because I’ve actually studied, and I’m sure you have too, a lot about the detoxification system in our bodies. And one of the things that I learned is that if we’re not doing things like – we have to sleep. We have to sleep at night in order for the detox system to work. So it would make sense to me that we also need to move our bodies. One of the things I know is that the lymph system that carries a lot of these things around in the body in order to be detoxed, that doesn’t move unless you move your body. It just doesn’t move. It doesn’t have a pump like the heart. And that’s very important, the lymph system, to our whole detox.

And so I really, even though I grew up not liking exercise at all, I had one very positive exercise experience in my early 20s when I lived in Downtown San Francisco, and I went to Jane Fonda’s Workout. Do you remember that? Jane Fonda’s Workout?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: I went to Jane Fonda’s Workout and I had my own private trainer who was just adorably cute, a very cute, young man. And then I went to aerobics class and my teacher was a male ballet dancer, the aerobics teacher. And it was great because I went every day. I had professionals absolutely telling me what to do every minute, and I lost weight and I felt great. And it was the best shape I think I was ever in, in my entire life.

But then they closed. They closed and I could never duplicate that experience. So I just went back to not getting much exercise. But more recently, I’m really paying a lot more attention to exercise and one of the things that I started to do that was the easy thing was that I just got a little bouncer, mini-trampoline. And then I just get up from my desk once an hour, and I go bounce on the trampoline. And I could only do 20 bounces and I got up to a set of 300 bounces at once.

The next hour, I get up and bounce a little more. And it just gives you arrest and clears your mind, and gets your blood moving, and all of these things. And it doesn’t take a lot of time.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, it doesn’t. I want to bring back a point. You were talking about the lymphatic. The Body Anew, the detox product that I use a lot, has a lymph gland drainer in the kit. And one of the bottles is specifically to increase the lymphatic drainers. And it’s about 40% increase, very significant, as far as moving things out.

So when we’re thinking about that maybe we have to spend a certain part of our day at the computer working, it’s important to maybe be taking the detox. And I used to have a lot of my patients drinking it whether there are their desk or even when they’re working out because [cross-talking 00:20:29]

DEBRA: I’m drinking it right now, actually, I got my bottle [cross-talking 00:20:59]

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good for you.

DEBRA: And it’s got Body Anew in it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That makes a huge difference because what we want to acknowledge is that a lot of us have desk jobs and we have to be on the computer for certain period of a time for the day. Maybe it’s a significant time and we really want to move things out.

DEBRA: We need to go to break. When we come back, we’ll talk more about inactivity and activity, and how we can be healthy without drugs by being more active.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist and she has her own natural pharmacy, Botanical Resource. Her website is BotanicalResource.com, and you can go find out more about her. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And you can go to her website at BotanicalResource.com.

So what else would you like to tell us, Pamela, about inactivity and activity and good health?

PAMELA SEEFELD: So exercise does some other things to the body that’s very important. When we think about atherosclerosis and we think about people trying to get healthy as far as preventing cardiovascular diseases, we know that cardiovascular disease, heart attacks and so forth, is the number one killer of people in the United States. That’s an epidemic problem.

And the reason why we want to label it as endothelial dysfunction – the endothelium is the inner lining of the blood vessel. Endothelial, the area, is sensitive to several things, and especially, it is sensitive to reactive oxygen species. They abbreviate that ROS. And reactive oxygen species, why this is important to recognize is that’s why you want to be taking antioxidants. You want to be using vitamin E, vitamin C, maybe a multivitamin with antioxidants. Reviratrol is a great antioxidant, grape seed extract and things like that.

Because when we have reactive oxygen species, which can be present in the body – and let me tell you where they can be present from. Fish oil that’s old, fat vitamins that are old, old olive oil, things you’re cooking with. You’d be surprised. Reactive oxygen species, especially in fats, are really prevalent in different areas. But the reactive oxygen species are necessary for endothelial damage. So when there’s a damage to the inner part of the blood vessel, then what we find is we start to get sticky, is inflamed, and as a result, the plaques are adhering to these areas. And then subsequently, we start having heart attacks when in fact, we don’t need to have them. Going in there and cleaning things up, so to speak, having a cardiac test.

So all these things are a process, and let me explain that when you exercise, reactive oxygen species are taken down significantly. So doing that has a huge effect on cardiovascular disease. It’s not the fact so much we have multiple things. It’s the fact that reactive oxygen species are happening. It supports the healing of the endothelium or that inner part of the blood vessel, and at the same time, remember I was talking about the immune system, how the white blood cells are being kicked off and basically saying, “You’re lazy. We’re going to make you start being active.”

All these things are doing, so there’s a lot more process. So when people think, “I guess I have to do all those heavy exercises.” But we’re not even so much that. It’s the movement and moving around and taking the antioxidants which are so important. When you’re taking these antioxidants, reactive oxygen species are made to a very, very small amount. And as a result, you really decrease your cardiovascular significantly.

So it’s important to think about this. I don’t want people to think, “Oh, my gosh. I have to go out and run. I have to do all these heavy, heavy execises.”

It’s really not so much about that. It’s about taking the antioxidants, doing the detox to make sure you’re getting these chemicals out of the body, and the pesticides that might be due to metabolic syndrome, and acknowledging the fact that these reactive oxygen species can be contained with exercise.

DEBRA: So I just recently changed my exercise a month ago. And I want to talk about a bit about that because it’s made a big impression on me. And I actually started doing this because I watched a friend of mine just get fit right in front of my eyes by going to the gym. And as I said earlier, I had this one good gym experience many years ago. Many, many years ago.And I saw such progress with him and when he got down to this – he looks like he lost 10 years, not just losing pounds. He just looks so much younger. And he looks fit and attractive. And he said, “You should come to the gym with me.”

And so I went and what I learned was that when you do certain type of exercise that it builds what’s called a lean muscle mass. And that you can do other kinds of exercise but they’re just burning calories and they’re not creating lean muscle mass. And what the lean muscle mass does is that it actually is burning fat while you sleep.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: And so if you put in your time building the lean muscle mass on your body, then – most people, they try to reduce their calories and whatever. But they’re not turning their bodies into fat burning machines. And I really didn’t understand this. I’m an intelligent woman and I really didn’t understand this until I went to this gym, and they started explaining to me about building lean muscle mass and how to do it.

And so I started going three times a week.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good for you.

DEBRA: I do lean muscle mass building on the machines. I do four machines. It takes me maybe 15 minutes. And then I ride on the stationary bicycle. And when I started, I could do maybe 4 minutes, and now I’m doing 12 minutes. And when you do it on a stationary bicycle, you can push up the strenuousness and it just is a very organized thing.

But what I found was that I’m only doing – it’s not like I’m lifting these big weights. I’m only doing enough weight so I can get resistance. That’s all.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s what you need.

DEBRA: Yes, it’s just resistance. It’s not a big push. And you can push and it can be like pulling on a rubber band, when you’re not pulling it, it’s just clobby. I don’t know how to describe this. But then if you put a little more weight on, there’s a point where you have to push without straining. And all I’m doing is just doing this easy push and I’m doing my little 15 repetitions. And it’s not a big deal, it’s not a big sweat, I just go in with my shorts and my tank top, and my little tennis shoes. And I push these weights. And that’s it. I just go and do it for three times a week. And I’m starting to build muscle. I can see the muscle.

But the most interesting thing was that this past week, I’ve had a virus so – I should have continued to go to the gym, listening to you. But I didn’t go to the gym. And what’s happening is that I’m starting to feel like my muscles are actually burning fat while I’m not exercising. And I have more strength and it’s just like I can see the results for very, very little effort. And that was the thing that was amazing to me. So little effort, and I’m getting such a big result.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s what I’m saying to people. Physical activity, even small amounts, are really important. Now, I was looking here at a new study, and this is really important. Physical inactivity – and they have a diagram. This just really explains it really well. If we have physical inactivity, you get abdominal adiposity. So you start putting on weight around your middle. And what happens is the macrophages, these particular white blood cells that go after infections, they start going into the visceral fats. They actually start going into that area there and become chronic systemic inflammation. That’s what’s really happening.

DEBRA: That’s very good to understand. We’ll talk more about this when we come back from the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist. And she has a natural pharmacy here in Clearwater, Florida. You can go to her website, BotanicalResource.com. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
 

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist, and she dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. She can help you get off prescription drugs. She can tell you what prescription drugs are coming up in your future by looking at your blood test. She’s just able to do so much around prescription drugs and natural substances that she can help you with.

Pamela, give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So you can reach me here at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Thank you. So what are some things that people can do that are small, easy to get started with movement things? How can people incorporate more movement into their lives?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, very obvious things like taking the stairs, parking your car a little farther away at the grocery store. Just looking for opportunities or physical activity maybe instead of having always somebody clean your house or do your yard work. Maybe you can do some of that at some time as well.

It’s important to find small amounts and we know that little spurts, if you’re going to go walking and then do a run, if you do small spurts of running between walking, it’s called interval training, that you get better results.

The thing that I wanted to focus on too is that if you’re going to do detox and do Body Anew, even regardless of your physical activity or if you’re physically active, it’s going to make it better. A lot of these things are going to start moving out and it’s going to facilitate your weight loss but also helping to get rid of the adipose amount that are in your abdomen, as far as how much it’s storing. That’s important because we now know that when we start having chronic inflammation and we have increases in visceral fat, we are at risk for breast cancer, type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and also depression and dementia and colon cancer.

So there are so many diseases that are associated with the physical inactivity. And it doesn’t mean that you have to be at the gym. I really want to stress that because I don’t want people to feel – a lot of times, when people aren’t exercisers and they hear these types of talks, they feel overwhelmed and they get more depressed. It’s like, “Oh, my god. I have to do this now.”

That’s not what we’re trying to accomplish here today. We’re trying to say that I really think small burst of activity can be very helpful. I think getting up from your desk and walking around can be very helpful. And I think doing a detox to try to remove some of these things out of your body that maybe are in a static form, it’s very important.

DEBRA: I think so too. I constantly am saying that I think that detox is the number one most important thing anybody can do for their health because as long as you have those toxic chemicals in your body, you would do everything else and none of it is going to work if it’s the chemicals that are causing the health problems. And in many cases, it is.

Pamela, tell us how many years you’ve been taking Body Anew.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I would say 15, maybe longer, close to 16. Really, when you think about it, most of my clients – sometimes, they’re like, “Well, I only want to do it twice a year” and that’s fine. But I think it’s extra insurance. When you’re taking the detox on a daily basis, you’re not in a bathroom. It’s not laxative. It’s not the kind of a detox [cross-talking 00:42:11] body. And what’s important about that is you think you have control over everything. You have a lot of control on what you eat, but you don’t have control environmentally of things that you’re exposed to just randomly. Going to the store, walking along the road, you’d be surprised. Most people are saying, “Well, I’m all organic.” They’re very proud of all the different things they do but you really don’t control everything.

DEBRA: That’s right. I think that’s a really important point to make because I’ve been doing this for more than 30 years. And at first, I thought if I just remove all the toxic chemicals from my home, and I did a really good job with that, then my body would naturally detox. But I wasn’t considering all the things that I’m being exposed to outside. Unless you’re in your home 24 hours a day, and you removed every single chemical from your home, and you’re filtering the incoming air, you are being exposed to toxic chemicals.

And you do need to do something about those. And they’re getting built up in your body. In addition, there’s all the toxic chemicals that you’ve been exposed your whole, entire life until now. Everybody has what the CDC calls body burden. Every single person on the planet needs to be detoxing in some way.

Pamela likes Body Anew. I’ve been taking Body Anew since I’ve known her. It’s so easy to take. You don’t even know you’re taking it. You just put little drops of water in a bottle and little drops out of a bottle, into a bottle of water, and you just siphon it. It’s just easy. I have no detox symptoms from taking it and I know that it’s working every day.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s an easy, inexpensive way to detox in a long term basis without having to worry about not feeling well. It’s safe for children. I use it pretty much for everybody. I think the idea of increasing your activity in small burst, if people are able to do that and doing the Body Anew, and also realizing that when the chemicals are in effect, the cell signals are messed up. And as a result of that you get increases in circulating cytokines and these inflammatory components. These things feed on each other. We’re just starting to learn about cell signaling and different things that affect the way the cell signal each other, and they communicate with these little messengers. And these messengers definitely are very sensitive to the environment which they’re living in. And if they signal each other and there are other things that are in the way, that’s called extracellular matrix, the area outside the cell where things need to be drained out. And if you have the extracellular matrix that’s full of, I don’t want to use the word toxin so much but just full of chemicals, full of debris, cellular debris and so forth, you’re going to get congestion in those areas and you know what you’re going to end up with? Inflammation, pain, trigger point.

All of these things that are really very avoidable. You’d be surprised. The general body habit is in the health of the individual by moving these things out. Activity helps a lot. Massage helps a lot. But really, having a homeopathic product that facilitates the extracellular matrix kind of cleaning up and mopping up all the stuff with the huge difference as far as the trigger points and for pain for a lot of people as well.

DEBRA: Yes, I think that everybody should find some detox product that they’re happy with and just continue to take it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I agree. The conversation here today is talking about inactivity, the fact that 28% of Americans really are doing no activity at all. None. Zero. And that the inactivity we know is associated with, obviously, gaining weight, but we have to think about these macrophages going into the visceral fat. They’re causing systemic inflammation. It’s chronic inflammation. And as a result, you get insulin resistance, you get atherosclerosis, neurodegeneration, tumor growth, and it puts you at risk, especially for these things that are – obviously, type II diabetes, breast cancer and cardiovascular disease, but realize that depression is also a side effect of this and dementia, which is a horrific problem here in the United States with all the people getting older.

These things are preventable to some degree. I understand genetics do play a role but the genes have to be turned on by something. And the something is the chemical.

DEBRA: Right. And then this exercise helps with the good genes?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, because when you exercise, there are thousands of genes that get turned on as a result of the cardiovascular exercise. And those genes have healing properties. When you are continually exposed to inactivity and to chemicals, you don’t have an active process of removing them out thoroughly, as a result of that the chemicals are what instigate and turn these things on. That’s why people when they get older, it’s not just because their genes are more active as far as turning on dementia and these sorts of things. It’s because the chemical compound and the net amount in the body is so much higher as you get older.

Think of a big tuna. That’s why we worry so much about tuna. It’s a huge fish. It has a time to accumulate all of these metals and toxins. Small fish like sardines don’t. That’s why they use sardines for the higher quality oil.

DEBRA: So we only have a couple of minutes left. Any final words you want to give?

PAMELA SEEFELD: The final words are that when you look at type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, dementia, depression, these are just some of the disease we know that having activity, increasing small amounts of activity can be actively prevent these things. If we can keep systemic inflammation down and off from the road, we’re talking about the endothelium inside the blood vessels, a lot of this is preventable by taking antioxidants, by taking the Body Anew, and also having some kind of activity every day.

DEBRA: Activity is just so important. And I think that it gets talked about a lot. But I think that people don’t really understand what’s going on. I know I’ve heard it my whole, entire life. But when you start getting older and you start seeing that things are getting older in your body, you just start saying, “What can I do?” And exercise is really the thing. I live in Florida where a lot of people are retired. And I see all these senior people walking around my neighborhood. They’re just all walking and walking every day. I see the same people walking around.

And it is great. They have on their little visor hats and their little shorts. And some of them walk their dogs and they’re just out there saying hello to their neighbors and walking around and getting some exercise. And I really see when I exercise more how much better my body feels. And it really cuts down on how many supplements I need to take, it increases how well I fell, and it’s just a matter of, if you can’t do it yourself, get a friend. Find a friend who is going to the gym or going for walks, or ask a family member to do it with you. Or just find a way to start moving. It will make all the difference and it just shakes up things in your body so those stored chemicals start releasing and then they can be detoxed. It’s so important to the detox process. I can’t even say how important it is because it’s just so important.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Immune system moving chemicals out. I’m talking about the white blood cell activity. All these things are intimately affected by what you do. And you have control over these things. It means walking to your car. It means walking upstairs. It’s some simple, simple lifestyle changes.

DEBRA: And I’m going to say thank you, Pamela, because the music is going to come on in about two seconds. Thank you so much.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you so much. Have a great day.

DEBRA: You too. This is Debra Lynn Dadd with Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

Toxic Free Lifestyle As The New Medicine

Tina-ChristieMy guest today is Naturopathic Doctor Tina Christie BSc, ND. She lives and practices in Ontario, Canada, and is producing a summit in May called “Lifestyle is the New Medicine.” I will be speaking about how the toxic free living as a lifestyle and how it can improve your health. We’ll be talking about lifestyle as medicine, what a naturopathic doctor uses for treatment, and how she incorporates toxics reduction and detox in her practice. Helping others through naturopathic medicine is Dr. Christie’s great passion. She was accepted immediately out of her undergraduate program at the University of Toronto (Bachelor of Science, Biology/Chemistry) into the naturopathic program at CCNM and graduated in 2001 at the top of her class. www.themindbodydoctor.ca

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxic Free Lifestyle as the New Medicine

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dr. Tina Christie

Date of Broadcast: April 28, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It is Tuesday, April 28, 2015. You can probably hear I have a little stuffy nose. Well, there’s just stuff going around here, allergies, people coughing and sneezing. It’s raining today. But even though I have a little stuffy nose and a little sinus stuff going on, I’m still feeling good in here in doing my radio show and living my life. And even though stuff’s going on in my body, I still have the strength, the stamina and interest to be able to continue life and not just lie in bed.

I think that’s one of the benefits, one of the results of living without toxic chemicals because – sorry, I just got a little distraction there. That’s one of the benefits of living without toxic chemicals because your body gets strong, your immune system gets strong, all your body systems get strong because they’re not being destroyed and/or made weaker by toxic chemical exposures.

So today we’re going to be talking about actually living toxic free as a lifestyle. And we’re not going to talk about it exactly today. I’m going to be talking about it at a summit that’s coming up in May. I don’t have the dates right in front of me. I think it starts May 7th, but that’s a wild guess. And I’m going to be speaking on May 10th about a toxic-free lifestyle, what is a toxic free lifestyle?

We’re going to touch a little bit on that today. But what we’re going to talk about more is the whole idea of lifestyles as the new medicine. And when my guest contacted me and asked me if I would speak about lifestyle as the new medicine, how perfect, because that really is what I’ve been talking about for more than 30 years, is to look at how you’re breathing and how that affects your health.

And just like you take a medicine because you want to relieve symptoms or make your body healthier if you’re sick or whatever, you can do that with the choices that you make in your life, with the foods you eat, with the things that you have in your home, with the things that you’re exposed to. Everything has either a negative effect, a non-effect (it’s just neutral) or it has a beneficial effect. And choosing those beneficial things to create our lifestyles with I think is the perfect thing.

So my guest today is Naturopathic Doctor Tina Christie. Hi, Tina.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Hi, Debra.

DEBRA: How are you doing?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: I’m great, thank you. How are you? You have a little sniffle.

DEBRA: Good. I have a little sniffle. So as a naturopathic doctor, what would you tell me to do?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Well, if you’re feeling good, if your appetite is good, your energy is good, it should go pretty fast. Stay away from sugar completely.

DEBRA: I stay away from sugar all the time.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: That should boost your immune system by up to 50% for up to five hours. No sweeteners, no sugars, lots of water, lots of sleep.

DEBRA: I think what’s going on here actually is that my body is detoxing because on Saturday, I started taking a new homeopathic remedy for kidneys. It’s a kidney detox homeopathic remedy. And ever since that time, I had a headache and my nose is running. And all of those things I recognized as detox symptoms. So that might be what’s going on.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: It sounds like it could be. Are you drinking lots of water to help?

DEBRA: Lots of water, lots of water.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: The other thing that can help if you’re feeling good energy-wise, nothing too intense, but to get some exercise even if it’s just a nice walk. When you move, you drive more blood to your liver. And so you get more detox effects that way as well.

DEBRA: I didn’t know that. Well, thank you. I’m actually about to go sit in a car for six hours. I have to drive across the state of Florida sideways all the way to the other coast, pick up something and drive back. But tomorrow, I can go for a walk. That’s a really good idea.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: So much for that advice today.

DEBRA: So how did you get to be a naturopathic doctor?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Well, I always wanted to go into medicine. I was one of those little kids that said – I remember my grandmother saying to me when I was five, “Are you going to marry a doctor when you grow up?” And I said, I’m half-Italian so I said, “Nana,” which is Italian for grandmother, “Nana, I’m going to be a doctor. I’m not going to marry a doctor.”

But I grew up with a lot of health problems. I had a lot of infections, lots of antibiotics, tired all the time. My mom was always taking me to the doctor.

And then when I was 17, I started having a lot of stomach pain, higher up kind of stomach pain. And I got diagnosed with something called gastritis. It’s not an ulcer, but it’s an irritation of the stomach lining where an ulcer is a more of a hole. I was only 17 and I had prescription medication for bad menstrual pain, which I took occasionally. And that can cause it.

And so I thought, “Wait a second! I took one pill. And now I have this problem. And now, I’ve got another pill, and I’m 17 years old, where is this taking me?” And in a big, emotional moment, I said, “That’s it. I am not going to medical school. I am finding something different.” It was one of those huge, emotional reactions, but it really was a turning point for me.

And from there, as silly as it sounds, I went to the public library where I lived and took out a whole bunch of books on everything that I could find that had to do with natural healing. And that’s how it started.

DEBRA: Wow! I hear the story over and over and it’s always a different illness or a different symptom. But usually people become interested in natural healing because of something extraordinary that’s going on with their body and wanting to heal that. And so right there, at the beginning, you had this idea of lifestyle as the new medicine. But you didn’t say, “I’m going to take a pill. I don’t want to take a pill.” You said, “Let’s find out what to do.”

So tell us more about the summit and this idea of lifestyles as the new medicine.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Well, the summit is 22 speakers, all talking about different aspects of the way we live. The idea is that I see so many patients that are living in a way that they’re not eating healthy food or they’re stressed out and unhappy all the time or we want to lose weight, but watch four hours of TV a day. Their lifestyle is just beating their body down and beating their health down. And then they go looking for a solution.

If they come to me and they’re in that mindset of, “Let me just find a solution to compensate for everything I’m doing,” they’re probably coming to me for a supplement or that there’s a food they can eat. You read studies, “Oh, eat blueberries. They’re so good for you and they cure all these things.” But that’s not the way it works. It’s not the way it works.

One of the examples I like to give patients is to say, “What’s the one thing you could do to make your relationship really strong?” One thing. And just do that.

Well, there is nothing. It’s a constellation of things. And lifestyle is the same way. We’re living longer than ever today. Most people are going to live to the late 70s or early 80s. I think men, the average lifespan is 78, and for women, 83. But the difference is how are we going to live.

I saw my grandmother lived to one month before her 99th birthday. And for about 20 years before that, she sat on the couch. She was tired. She had arthritis, horrible arthritis in her knees. She did crochet a lot for the last couple of years. She had such bad arthritis in her hands and she couldn’t even do that. She took naps and she watched TV.

DEBRA: To me, that’s not the way to live. I’m older than I used to be and I’m looking at how many years do I have left, but how many good years do I have left? How many more years do I have to complete the work that I want to do in terms of toxics and all the things?

I want to go see the Aurora Borealis live. And how many more years do I have while I can still do that?

And so I’m really revving up my health care in terms of what I’m doing myself to make my body healthy and exercising more and really maybe giving more emphasis to doing things that I wasn’t quite doing as well as I could be doing to take care of my body because all of a sudden, you get to an age and it’s like, “Well, okay. Everything is going to start falling apart unless I do something.”

We need to take a break. But when we come back, we will talk more with my guest, naturopathic doctor, Tina Christine. And I’m at her upcoming summit called Lifestyle as the New Medicine. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is naturopathic doctor, Dr. Tina Christie. And she is hosting a summit called Lifestyle as the New Medicine, which is coming out in May. I’m going to be speaking on Sunday, May 10th, about Toxic Free Lifestyle as the New Medicine. And you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and scroll down the page and you’ll see a place where you can sign up. I’ll just tell you to go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, you’ll see the place to go there. I’ve got a big picture there of me and Tina. And you can just click right on there and you can sign up to hear me speak about toxic free lifestyles as the new medicine.

So Tina, I know that toxics play a part in your treatment. As a naturopathic doctor, what kind of things are you seeing in your practice that are the results of toxic chemical exposure?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: I see a lot. One of the big things that toxins do is slow down thyroid. They either slow down thyroid function itself or they slow down how well your body makes active thyroid hormones. I see people being tired and sluggish. I often see people who want to lose weight and while that’s fine, they want to lose weight because they feel gross in their body, is often the word they use. I find that fat is a build-up of toxic chemicals. Because when I detox people, they don’t lose a lot of weight. They maybe lose a couple of pounds of fat and they say, “Oh, I feel great. I still want to lose some weight but I don’t feel gross anymore.”

So it was the toxin build-up. Just fatigue, sluggishness, for a lot of people, it causes skin problems as well. Eczema, psoriasis as well, but especially eczema and acne. Often your body is pushing a lot of toxins through your skin.

I find that it can affect mood as well. When your body is so burdened down by toxins, you’re really not running at your peak. And it’s the stress on your body, and that can pull your mood down. And it can also add or promote weight gain, just going back to the weight piece for a second. But I also see joint pains. Often, toxins, when they’re not really being pushed through our skin tissues, people can have body aches, joint pains, they can settle in our joints. And they can also disrupt our digestive system and cause digestive upset, bowel problems, poor digestion.

So it really runs the gamut and that’s actually one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the summit because if you’re overloaded with toxins, no matter what you’re doing, it’s going to pull you back down.

DEBRA: See, listeners. Listen to her say that because I say that every day. If you’re overloaded with toxins then you can be doing any number of treatments in order to try to feel more healthy, but the toxins are still pulling you down. You just can’t get well without addressing those.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: And that there exactly, Debra, is the thought process behind lifestyle being the new medicine. That it’s not the treatments you do. Yes, you may need treatment, but that’s not the crux of it. It’s how are you living, first of all.

DEBRA: And it’s so interesting to me. If you’re trying to empty a bathtub but you have the faucet on, you can’t ever empty the bathtub because it keeps filling you up and filling you up. And it’s the same way with lifestyle because if you’re having a lifestyle that’s a faucet just pouring water into the bathtub all the time, then when you’re trying to get well, which would be to empty the bathtub, then you just can’t because there’s all these stresses on your body of all the negative things that you’re doing in your lifestyle. And if you fix the lifestyle, then you actually don’t need so much treatment.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: It’s true. It’s absolutely true. And I see that, I’ll change someone’s diet, I’ll do some detox, I’ll get them sleeping better, and half of their probems or 75% of their problems sometimes, depending on what they’re coming in with, go away.

DEBRA: Yes because so much of it is just what we’re eating and what we’re exposed to in our home.

So what kind of things do you do for detox for your patients?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Well, first of all, the foundational stuff. So I get the chemicals out of people’s lifestyle. I get the chemicals out. I try as much as possible to have people switch to organics because there’s a lot of chemicals coming in.

Sometimes I do these tests and they show that organic food or regular produce, you test the outside of the produce and say, “Oh, it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of chemicals on there.” But these plants have had chemicals sprayed on them from the time they were sprout. It’s not just going to sit on the surface. It’s going to be absorbed into the inside of the plant.

So you can’t just test the outside and see what’s there.

DEBRA: That’s right. But also, they’ve done studies which show that if you stop eating regular food and switch to organic food, that it takes as little as three days for the pesticides to no longer be in your body. That there are some pesticides, it’s a whole group of, toxic chemicals on some of them last for a long time, but other ones, they flush right through your body.

So if you continuously are eating pesticides, you’re going to continuously have pesticides in your body. If you stop eating them, in three days, you’re going to have a lot less pesticides in your body. That’s all it takes.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Amazing.

DEBRA: I was really amazed when I read that. Because the changes can happen so quick. The changes can happen so quick.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: They can. It’s fantastic.

So I get the foundation going first. If there’s food sensitivity or food intolerance, I take those out. If people aren’t sleeping, you produce so much extra stress hormone when you don’t sleep. And that is a toxin in and of itself. The more toxins your body has to eliminate, the slower everything goes.

So it’s not the very first step I do with people in terms of doing a detox because I want to make sure, again, we’re turning off the bathtub tap before we try to empty the bathtub.

DEBRA: And let’s just stop right there because we need to go to break. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is naturopathic doctor, Dr. Tina Christine. And she’s doing Lifestyle is the New Medicine Summit, where I’m going to be speaking on May 10th, and we’re talking about lifestyle and toxic chemicals, and what she does as a naturopathic doctor.

And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dr. Tina Christie. She’s a naturopathic doctor and she is putting on a summit called Lifestyle is the New Medicine, which is coming up in May. I’m going to be speaking on May 10th about creating a toxic free lifestyle. And it’s a very good interview. At the summit, they pre-record it. The interviews are then played during the summit time. And it’s a really great interview. I was really pleased with how it turned out.

So Tina, so after you get the basics in about detox, then what do you actually do to help the detox process?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: For the detox process, I’ve bounced around between different things in the past. There is herbal detox. You can do homeopathic detox. But the one that I’ve settled on the most that I see some of the best effect is a detox that uses, it’s like a protein shake. It’s a powder that contains protein powder as well as a variety of nutrients that support the detox pathways.

Because there are two different pathways. Our detox pathway isn’t actually just one pathway, it’s two pathways that hook up.

DEBRA: Tell us about those.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: So they’re a little tricky. The first pathway and the second pathway don’t necessarily, and a good percentage of people, they don’t go at the same pace. And it’s not uncommon especially for people who are unwell into any degree that the first pathway goes either too fast. The first pathway goes really fast and the second pathway goes normally. Or the first pathway is normal but the second pathway is slow.

DEBRA: So what are these two pathways?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Pardon me?

DEBRA: What are the two pathways?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: They’re called phase 1 and phase 2. And in between them, whether the second one is slow or the first one is too fast, in between, stuff can build up. And the stuff that builds up in between phase 1 and phase 2 are very bad. It’s actually worse than the toxins before your body started detoxing.

It’s a little crazy. And the stuff in between phase 1 and phase 2 causes more damage than the toxins before we started detoxing them. So we still want to detox these toxins. They can’t stick around. But if they get halfway through, if they get through phase 1, and then they sit there because there’s back-up, phase 2. And phase 2 can’t keep up for whatever reason, it’s going to cause more [inaudible 00:29:43] free radicals, it can damage DNA, it’s associated with increased risk of cancer and just overall toxicity.

So the protein powder that I use are the protein shakes, let’s call it, has a variety of nutrients in them. And there are some different companies that make these. And they also have extra nutrients to support phase 2 and to make sure that phase 1 doesn’t go too fast.

DEBRA: So could you describe what phase 1 and phase 2 are?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: So phase 1 is, it takes the chemicals in your system, or the toxins, and it starts to break them down, but it only goes halfway. Before your body can actually eliminate them through stool and urine, they need to be broken down further.

DEBRA: Then that happens during phase 2.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Yes, and that happens during phase 2. But there can be a bit of a backlog, almost like traffic on the highway when there’s like a bottleneck. One lane is closed, so you get home 40 minutes late.

DEBRA: I totally understand what you’re talking about. So how would somebody know if that was going on in their body?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: They wouldn’t. There’s no specific sign that, “Oh, I have a slow phase 2.” Some people may notice but they just don’t seem to process toxins. Say they’ll do a detox that their friend did. And they got really sick right away. The friend felt amazing and they just feel really, really sick. Or they get a detox reaction and instead of lasting for a day or two, they’re two weeks into their detox and they just feel like they’re going downhill. They’re not getting any better. And if anything, they’re getting worse.

I have a slow phase 2, and if I try to detox and I don’t support that phase, this is how I actually got into really this way of doing it, I don’t support that phase 2. Anything that detoxes me, my skin breaks out in about an hour, two hours. And it does not slow down. It’s not one of those temporary healing reactions.

So people may notice that. There’s something going on when they try to detox. It just really doesn’t go well.

DEBRA: I have heard this from people. And I’m sitting here with this headache after I started taking this detox product and I know that’s a symptom of detox. But this makes sense what you’re saying. So what is the product that you like?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: The one that I like, it’s by a company called Metagenics. And it’s called Ultra Clear Plus. Lately, I also use Ultra Clear Plus PH. They put some extra potassium in there that’s alkalinizing. Because when you alkalinize, it helps your body remove toxins a little bit easier as well.

And there are other companies that make these detox protein powders as well but I got into this one years ago and I know that it works well, and I know what to expect from it. And it’s the one I use for myself also. So I also like to stick with what I know works and what I know is going to give a good, predictable result.

DEBRA: Good. Now, is this a professional product or is it something that people can buy and use themselves?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: It’s mostly sold just through professionals. Some health food stores have professional-run staff that bring it in. It’s not necessarily the best thing for people to do themselves, in case there’s another factor in the way. Remember how I talked about, to set that foundation for people first. If there’s another factor in the way and people detox, for example, if someone’s not having good bowel movements and they detox.

DEBRA: That’s a very good point. Another thing I say a lot. Go ahead.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: They’re probably going to feel worse because you’re dumping all these toxins into your colon and then you’re soliciting there and you’re re-absorbing it. I’ve actually seen people feel a lot sicker if they’re not having proper bowel movement. Or heaven forbid, if anyone is a smoker and they decide they want to detox anyways, and I’ve had smokers come to me and say, “Can you detox me? But I don’t want to quit smoking.”

That’s like having five bathtubs in one.

DEBRA: Wow. Talk about messing up the phase 1, phase 2.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE:Yes, no kidding.

DEBRA: Wow. Well, I would say if somebody wants to detox and they smoke, they first thing they should do is stop smoking.

We have to go to break. So we’ll talk more about this one when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is naturopathic doctor, Dr. Tina Christie. And she’s putting on a summit in May called Lifestyle is the New Medicine. And you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and sign up. It’s free. It’s free to attend the whole two weeks of 22 lectures by people like me who are talking about their special part of the lifestyle as the new medicine. And you can just go to Toxic Free Talk Radio and sign up for free and you can hear me on May 10th.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Dr. Tina Christie. She is a naturopathic doctor and she’s putting on a summit in May called Lifestyle is the New Medicine. And I’ll be speaking on Sunday, May 10th, about toxic free lifestyles as the new medicine. But there will be 22 speakers in all who will be talking about different aspects of things that you can do to help your health yourself.

Okay, so before the break, we were talking about doing a detox and you were talking about a product that is only available to professionals. So I have two questions. One is, if somebody wanted to detox at home, and we’ve talked about on the show about different types of detoxes. But if somebody wanted to do something without going to a professional, what would you recommend?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Well, first of all, if they want to detox at home, to set that foundation. Go on your website, all the chemicals and products you mention. Just by having less chemicals come in, your liver detoxes, that phase 1, phase 2 that I’m talking about, 24/7. If that stops, you’re in liver failure.

So when you have less toxins coming in, now those processes in your liver have more resources to deal with the toxins that are sitting in your body. So a natural increase in detoxing what you’ve got in your body will happen, again when you turn that bathtub off. So switching out the toxic products, switching over to organics, and then something called dry skin brushing helps your skin draw off more toxins. Exercise drives more blood to your liver. Drinking enough water. There’s a lot of people who don’t drink enough water.

DEBRA: And how much do you think they should drink?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: It’s an ounce for every two pounds of body weight.

DEBRA: So I don’t know how much that would be. So you basically would take your body weight and multiply it by two, and that’s how many ounces?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: No, take your body weight and divide it by two. And that’s how many ounces. So for the average, 140, 150 or so pound person, you’d be looking at about two liters a day.

DEBRA: And how much is a liter? I’m asking these questions because I know the listeners, many of them are not going to know what a liter is.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: You know those regular-sized water bottles you buy for 99 cents or something like that at the, and I’m not a fan of plastic bottles, that you buy at the corner store? That’s half a liter. So it would be four of those.

DEBRA: So I just figured out if you divide your weight by two and then you get a number, and then you divide it by eight, that’s the number of cups you need to drink.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: I’ve never actually done that. I always have a one-liter bottle sitting on my desk at the office. So when patients say, “Well, what is that?” I’m like, “Okay, this is a liter. Drink two of these.” That’s a good conversion.

DEBRA: So you’re in Canada though. Don’t you have metric there? So everybody knows what a liter is?

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: What do you guys go in there? Ounces?

DEBRA: Ounces and quarts.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: I’m so sorry. I talk in pounds but I also talk in liters. So I’ve got one foot in each camp because we also do kilograms here for weight. But I don’t do that. So yeah, 140-pound person, let’s say, divided by two, that’s 70, so that would be 70 ounces.

DEBRA: 70 ounces. That’s right. And then if you wanted to know how many cups that is, then you divide it by eight. So that’s about, I’m doing it my mind here, so that’s probably nine cups. It’s four cups to a quarts, so that’s about a half-a-gallon.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: What I’d like to encourage people to do, let’s say you’re going to have 10 cups a day, is not to try to get 10 cups. If you got a fill a cup up to 10 times, most people aren’t going to do that. Unless you’re really diligent. But then I don’t know if that is really sustainable because it’s a lot of thought all day long.

DEBRA: I’ll tell you what I do. What I do is I have a big, I don’t even know, it’s more than a quart, glass bottle. And in the morning, I fill that up and then I drink that, and then I make sure that I drink two or three of these throughout the day. And I just have it sitting on my desk. So I’m just sipping water all day long. This is part of my lifestyle.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: And that’s perfect. That’s what I usually recommend. Get a big container, let’s say, it’s going to be about half of what you’re going to drink for the day. And then set a time. By lunchtime or whatever, it needs to be empty. And then you fill it up at lunch. And then it needs to be empty by the time you, if you work in an office, by the time you leave the office.

DEBRA: I think that’s a really good plan. It’s not about drinking water randomly. It’s about making sure that your body has enough water. And so once you figure out what that amount is, then if you set up a little program to do that every day, it starts becoming second nature. I don’t even think about it anymore. I just fill my water bottle. But you have to figure out how much water you need in the beginning and then do something so that it just becomes part of your lifestyle.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Yes. Perfect. It’s all about lifestyle. And once you start drinking, once people start drinking throughout the day, they’ll feel thirsty first thing in the morning and they’ll feel thirsty when they get home at night because once you have more water, your body also craves more water.

And we talked about exercise. Saunas are a great way to detox. I don’t want to tell people to go out and get certain products because people tend not to be the best, the clearest, shall we say, judge of where they’re at and if the detox is the right thing to do. And there are a lot of these things that are sold in health food stores like ‘three-day detox’. It takes three days when you’re using herbs, it takes three days to get your liver working to upregulate or to up those detox pathways. It takes three days. So a three-day detox is going to do nothing for you.

DEBRA: Well, I totally agree because as you mentioned before, detox is a 24-hour process for your body. For me, it’s not about are you going to do a three-day cleanse in the spring, go on a detox diet for a week. We need to be supporting our detox functions.

And so my next question is going to be, when should somebody get a professional involved? Because I think that there are things, I recommend the people to take liquid Zeolite because I know that it just takes toxic chemicals out of your body. It’s not about supporting your liver or anything like that. These zeolite particles just roam around and pick up the chemicals and they come out through your kidneys.

And so I think that there are things that everybody can do. Toxic chemicals can leave through your skin, and through your liver, and through your kidneys, through the lymph system. There are so many things and it seems like that at some point, if you can find somebody who knows something about detox like you, that maybe it’s a good idea to go to a professional to get help with the specific type of detox that your body needs and is ready for.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Yes. If you really want to get things done right, you should see a professional, and especially if someone doesn’t feel good. If someone is not feeling well, their health isn’t well, I would say, don’t mess around with. In the health food store, people who work in health food stores, they have some education but they’re often reading books. Someone with a good amount of experience that can really help you isn’t working in a health food store.

DEBRA: Good point.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: Because they just not. I went to school for eight years for this. I’m not working in a health food store for a minimum wage or whatever it is. That’s ridiculous. It’s just not going to happen.

And they don’t know you. They don’t know overall what’s happening with you and if there’s anything else to take into consideration. Sometimes people, they feel great and they’re just really healthy and they want to optimize and they tinker around with this, and they tinker around with that. As long as you’re not high risk for anything, that’s probably okay. But if you don’t really want to tinker, you just want to optimize and you want someone to set you on the right path, then find a good practitioner and find someone who is willing to education so that every time you want something, you don’t need to go running back to them because they’re the only ones that know what you’re doing. They’re educating you.

So many of my patients e-mail me. I haven’t seen them in a couple of years. “Oh, I wanted to do that detox again. Can I do exactly what you told me last time?” I will say, “Yes, has anything changed?” They’re like, “No, I’ve been feeling great ever since. I stuck to the plan you told me.” “Well, great. Go ahead. Do it again As long as there’s nothing else has come up.”

Because they understand how to read their body and what’s going on with their body.

DEBRA: Right. That’s absolutely important. So we’re getting to the end of the show. And I want to make sure that I don’t cut you off mid-sentence in about 45 seconds. So is there any final words you’d like to say? Tell us something more about the summit? Really now, we only have about 30 seconds.

DR. TINA CHRISTIE: The summit is across the board, what it looks like to live a healthy lifestyle. Society is not set up for you to live a healthy lifestyle. So it’s something you need to learn apart from looking out into society in general. And we also have a Facebook page. We’ve created a community of people that are also interested in this. So you can get a lot of support around your new lifestyle.

DEBRA: Good. Well, I’ll sign up for your Facebook page. And you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. And you’ll see the information there where you can sign up for free. And then you’ll be on the mailing list. That’s the end of our time so thank you so much, Dr. Tina Christie. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

How to Protect the Environment from Pharmaceutical Pollution by Using Natural Medicinals

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. In celebration of Earth Day we’ll be talking about how popular pharmaceuticals pollute the environment and natural medicinals you can take instead that biodegrade.  Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and sellling top quality medicinal supplements, so she’s seen it all. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida.  www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Protect the Environment from Pharmaceutical Pollution by Using Natural Medicinals

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefled, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: April 22, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I am Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Fee Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It is Wednesday, April 22nd 2015, it is Earth day, so happy Earth Day. But it’s also the second anniversary of this show Toxic Free Talk Radio.

I’ve been doing this for two years. I counted it up and it’s 295 shows that I’ve done. Now there are the live shows and then there are also shows that are broadcast sometimes. Well, at least, twice a week. It’s a replay, usually it’s twice a week, not any more than that. But it’s 295 unique individual live shows in the last two years. I’m pretty proud of that and they’re pretty wonderful. If you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, you can listen to all of them. They’re all right there and there will be more.

And I have this show booked up usually about three weeks in advance. I just have a steady stream of people either contacting me to be on the show or people that I’m finding just in my normal, everyday work activities. It’s really one of the highlights of my daily life, to come and be here with you on this show. I’m glad that it’s going so well and I’m glad people are listening and I’m glad that people are coming and being guests. It’s just wonderful activity for me.

So today my guest, since it’s Earth Day, we’re going to be talking about an environmental subject. Actually, all week has been environmental subjects. Some are replays. We had a new show yesterday about building soil in your garden and around the world actually, what you can do to restore soils around the world. And today we’re going to be addressing the subject of pharmaceutical pollution in the environment and how, when we take drugs, whether over-the-counter or prescription drugs, what happens to those drugs after they’re no longer in our bodies and how they go into the environment and what kind of harm that they cause.

Now before I introduce my guest who was going to tell us what we can do to reduce the amount of pharmaceutical pollution that we put into the environment, I want to just give you a little background about how much this really is a problem.

I’m looking at a document called Pharmaceuticals in Wastewater Streams: Disposal Practices and Policy Options in Santa Barbara which was done by Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This is a whole study that they did on this subject actually in 2007, but this is all still going on now.

What they said is – I’m going to read some of it and paraphrase some of it. If you want to know about this subject, this is a really good document to look at. They said, “Recent advances in analytic technology have lead researchers to discover trace amounts of pharmaceuticals in wastewater effluents,” that’s the water that comes out the other end of the wastewater, “…the wastewater effluents, rivers, lakes, and groundwater. They are finding pharmaceuticals in rivers, lakes, and groundwater.”

“Pharmaceuticals have also been detected in soil samples and fishes. Based upon this wealth of published occurrence data, it seems probable that most, if not all, urban wastewater is contaminated with pharmaceutical compounds differing only in the type and abundance of the substances present.”

And then I go on to talk about how this is a problem to the aquatic environment because pharmaceutical compounds are specifically designed to affect biological organisms. They said that if environmental concentrations are below acutely toxic levels – and what that means if something is ‘acutely toxic’, it’s something that’s going to cause harm right now today like you drink gasoline and it would kill you.

They say, “While environmental concentrations are below acutely toxic levels, the main concerns are the chronic,” that’s long term, “…or synergistic effects.” Synergistic effect is how things combine together and then what happens when you combine them. So I’ll tell you this sentence again.

“While environmental concentrations are below acutely toxic levels, the main concerns are the chronic that’s long term or synergistic effects of the cocktail of pharmaceuticals humans have created in the water. And occurring disruption is the most widespread and documented effect that pharmaceuticals have on aquatic organisms.”

And they talk about the feminization of male fish in waters treated with wastewater effluents and the development of antibiotic resistance and there’s a whole list of things here of how the aquatic environment is affected.

But they also affect us humans because the water that is coming out of our tap is coming from the environment, those environmental waters that are being contaminated, and so we get those pharmaceuticals, we get drugs, prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs in our tap water.

Now, you can remove those by using a water filter, but there’s no water filter on all the aquatic life. There’s no water filter that can protect the environment from these drugs. So while we can protect ourselves, we can’t protect the environment. The thing needs to be done is to not put them there in the first place.

So this report says, that “pharmaceuticals reach the environment be it two pathways, excretion from humans and disposal into the wastewater treatment system, which is not equipped,” the wastewater treatment systems are not equipped, “to remove pharmaceuticals.”

Now this particular study focuses on the disposal pf pharmaceuticals and what to do. But what we’re going to be talking about today is what we can do instead of taking drugs, so that these drugs don’t go into the environment and they don’t go into our water system.

And my guest, of course, is Pamela Seefeld who is a registered pharmacist and I have her on every other Wednesday because she knows so much about the subject. And so today, we’re going to be talking about some drugs and some natural things that we can do so that when they go into the environment after our bodies have excreted them, they don’t cause harm. Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, it’s great to be here. Congratulations on your show, this is wonderful. What a great anniversary.

DEBRA: Thank you, that was a really long introduction, but I had to explain why we’re doing this.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, I think it was very, very timely and very good.

I stumbled on a list of what they’re seeing most often in the water. As far as what you’re talking about, the contamination, antibiotics and anti-depressants are at the top – and anticonvulsants and estrogen, beta blockers (from blood pressure, and cholesterol lowering medication). Those are the top six they see. But of course, the benzodiazepines like Xanax and Ativan, those are the particularly ones that are problematic.

Actually, when I was looking at the information about wastewater treatment, apparently, conventional waste treatment does not destroy the medications. These medications are also resistant to photodegradation, meaning that they persist in the streams, like you were saying, and in the rivers. So, they don’t degrade in the presence of light. Where some things will breakdown, they don’t because they’re artificial compounds and they’re not recognized in nature.

DEBRA: That’s a really important point. But before we talk about the drugs, it just occurred to me, would you explain to us what happens when you take a drug and it goes through your body. Why is it even coming out the other end? Isn’t our bodies absorbing them and using them?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct, right. So there are different types of metabolism routes when we swallow pill. It goes into the stomach, and there, you have those acids. It gets broken down and then it gets absorbed into the bloodstream. It goes to the receptors or the place of location where it’s supposed to take place. And after that particular period of time, it can go to the liver. Some drugs are actually eliminated unchanged meaning they don’t have any kind of metabolism. They are eliminated unchanged almost totally and they go out to the urine or the feces.

Other drugs go to the liver and they’re changed into, what’s called metabolized. What the metabolized are is especially when something is fat soluble like [inaudible 00:10:30] anticonvulsant, an anti-anxiety medicine, an antidepressants, they have to be eliminated with metabolism.

DEBRA: We have to interrupt you because we have to go to break and then when we come back, we’ll hear more about this.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll talk with her more when we come back about pharmaceuticals and how they affect the environment.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And Pamela, we’ve failed to – hmmm, the music is still playing. Can you hear me, Pamela?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, absolutely.

DEBRA: Okay, good. It’s not you. I thought I’m not being heard.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, no, no, no, no, no. It’s good.

DEBRA: Okay, good. So I just want to take a minute before we continue to talk about our pharmaceuticals, I just want to take a minute and really introduce Pamela because I didn’t do that at the beginning of the show. And as I said, I have her on every Wednesday because she knows so much about drugs and natural remedies and how things work in the body. I’ve never heard anybody explain things the way she explains them to her clients and to us on the show about how things work in the body. It’s just so fascinating to me.

So, she has a botanical pharmacy here in Colorado, Florida called Botanical Resource and she has a little med spa as well there. So you can get massages and facials and all those kinds of things. And her website is BotanicalResource.com. And she is very happy to talk to anyone at no charge about how you can stop taking your prescription drugs, so those.

Pamela, you want to tell us about that and give your phone number.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, so I’ve been doing this for quite a long time, probably 25 years. Basically, what we do here is we have natural products. We have homeopathic supplements that are medical grade. And if you have any questions about the prescriptions you’re on or if you want to transition off of those prescriptions into natural products or homeopathic medicine or if you are at the verge of needing to get on a prescription medication, I’ll be most honored and grateful to help you and your family address those issues especially even mental health, which I do quite a bit of it as well.

And you can contact me at my pharmacy here in Clearwater, 727-442-4955. I would be very grateful to help you with any medical concern you may have.

DEBRA: Thank you so much. She does a really good job. All the doctors around her know her. She’s very well-known and respected for the work that she does. I’ve just seen people just get off their drugs.

This is a show about toxics. But drugs, prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs, they are synthetic substances made from petroleum, the same substances that is used to make toxic chemicals and they have toxic side effects. And so I do consider that drugs need to be something that we remove from our lives in order to be toxic free.

All right, before the break, I had asked about what happens when a drug goes into your body, why is there something left that gets excreted and then goes to the environment?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! So we have these different pathways. And let me explain, a liver contains enzymes, which you collectively call the cytochrome P450. Why is this important is because they have them all cataloged. They know exactly which enzyme metabolize which medication. And sometimes, actually, these enzymes, if you have one medication that you take in that inhibits the enzyme and another one that’s a substrate of it or it gets metabolized by it, you can actually change the way things are metabolized and that’s where the drug interactions come in where a lot of people end up very, very sick.

That’s why it’s important, if you have any questions, you’re taking multiple medicines, I will be glad to go and make sure that’s not a drug interaction if you’re not responding correctly or if you need to get off of them.

So what’s happening with these enzymes is that they’re very active. They’re upregulated for different people depending on their age and also just their genetics. But when the drug leaves in the metabolism, you take a fat-soluble drug (which something that goes to the central nervous system into the brain like all these psychiatric drugs), then this is the propensity of the drugs that we’re seeing – the antibiotics, of course, but the antidepressants. There are a lot of antidepressants in the water and the anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax and Ativan.

So these things go into the metabolism, they go to the liver. A lot of these live the Benzos, which is the Ativan and Xanax, they can eliminate pretty much unchanged. So you’re getting a lot of drug itself (not metabolites, but drug) into the feces and into the urine that is going into the wastewater systems. And that’s the reason why they can’t seem to get these things up because they really don’t have effective means to remove these medications out the water supply.

Of course, once these things are discharges, they go into the streams, they’re affecting aquatic life. But also, they’re affecting people because now they are testing it and it’s rampant in the water everywhere.

So what does this mean for people?

DEBRA: Yes, what does this mean for people?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it’s a possible risk of cancer. That’s what I think.

DEBRA: Well, what about – I know that I said earlier in the show that the amounts that they’re testing are below the acute toxic levels, but they are in the degree that they can have a chronic effect. So what if we’re drinking in our tap water every day in addition to the chloramines and the fluorides, and all that stuff this, as I’ve said, a cocktail of unknown pharmaceuticals, how is that affecting our body?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, that’s a very good question. Let me explain. I like to use the analogy of homeopathic medicine. I use a lot of homeopathy. And what is homeopathy? Small amounts of an agent that you’re using to treat somebody, that’s what it is.

So we’ve done it a hundreds of times. Well, what’s the difference between that and the stuff you get in the water? None. It’s the same thing. They’re getting drugged and you’re getting drugged because we know that these work on small, small amounts.

DEBRA: That’s right, but what people are getting are antibiotics and antidepressants and all of these things. They’re going into our bodies whether we want them or not. I just think that that’s such an important point because you have to get a doctor’s prescription to get these or you can just drink them out of your tap water.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct, and really, there’s no consent.

DEBRA: There’s no consent and there’s no control over dose, is the thing. No control over those.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! These substances, when you have substances that work like estrogens in the body or work like drugs in the body, the have a term. The terminology is called xenobiotics. It’s something that you don’t expect to be taking into your bloodstream, into your body, but you are taking them in and is changing the way your hormones act. And also, it’s changing the way the dynamics of the genes fire off.

I wanted people to think about it. Maybe there’s someone who’s skeptical who says, “Oh, it’s just in the waters. No big deal,” but the fact that I want you to think about it is it’s a homeopathic medication, a medication you didn’t want to take that you now have to take because you earned the regular water supply. This is where the problems are.

There can be organ damage from prolong exposure. Some people do not tolerate medicine. If they’re getting these in the small amount and they’re getting it in a chronic level – acute means you have to go to the hospital, you’re very sick, you need medicine. Chronic is different.

DEBRA: It’s a long time building up, but it doesn’t have to take that long before it builds up.

We need to get a break and when we come back, we’re going to talk about some specific drugs that we’re putting into the environment that are harming the environment and what we can do instead so that we’re not taking and excreting those drugs out into the environment and into the other people’s tap water.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who, instead of drugs, likes to give natural medicinals. So we’re going to talk about what now are some natural things that you take instead of prescription and over-the-counter drugs? We’re going to focus especially on these top drugs that are the once being found in the environment. So take it away, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. Well, first of all too, I want to mention, if you want to pull the chemicals out and pull these drugs out, I’m a big fan of using Body Anew, which is a detox product that pulls out nickel, cadmium, lead, mercury, pesticides, and it removes chemicals out of the fat. You have to realize all these things here are fat-soluble. That’s why they’re able to come back into the body and cause these issues because if they’re water soluble, they wouldn’t keep coming back in. So that’s important for people to know.

DEBRA: Wait, wait, wait. Before you go on, I just want to make a point about this. Fat-soluble toxics, whether they’re drugs or anything else, they accumulate in the fat, correct?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: So then, when you do something like lose weight or exercise or do something that’s start melting your fats, then those stored toxics and drugs then melt and go back into your system.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And that’s when toxicity can take place. You can even get that with fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. If you’re taking huge, huge amount and they’ve been stored in the fat, you go on a crash diet, you lose a lot of weight, you can end up in liver failure.

So that’s why it’s important to really know the balance of the vitamins you’re taking, if you’re taking any medications.

And I’m a big fan of using Body Anew because we homeopathic detoxification, it goes to the fat and it starts dumping the fat, but it does it in the controlled manner that upregulates these functions in the liver. I was talking about these enzymes the P450 and also something called glucuronidation and conjugation, which changes the composition of the drug to remove it out of the body. These are really hallmarks of just taking these inside of your body regardless of whether you control what you’re consuming or not. That’s really important for people to know.

DEBRA: Yeah. It’s like we’re walking around – the CDC, the Center for Disease Control calls it body burden. And so it’s just like we’re carrying around this storehouse of toxic chemicals and drugs that we’ve taken in the past or drugs that we drink in our tap water. We’re just carrying them around until our fat releases them into our body in some unexpected that we don’t even know when that would be.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I think that’s right. If you think about it too, you know what, older people, why they get so much more cancer, the propensity is higher than younger people, it’s because they stored all of these for such a long period of time.

DEBRA: Yes, yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: People need to realize that. It’s not like this person is elderly, she lived a long life, she’s 90 years old. Why do you think she’s ending up with these diseases? It’s because burden load in her body, in her fat is pretty high.

DEBRA: Yes. That’s what happens. The toxics accumulate until they get to be too much and then you get sick. Anyway, let’s talk about drugs, but I just wanted to make sure that everybody understood why this is so important. What we’re about to tell you…

PAMELA SEEFELD: These are really, really important points. So I’m just going to talk about antidepressants. We will just talk one drug class at a time. I just want people know that the average woman here in the United States is on five prescriptions and the average man is on four. That’s just average. That’s a lot of prescriptions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that, “I’ve had things arranged with the hospital. I’m supposed to go talk to different groups.” Especially the colleges and things around here, their faculty is in so many medications. Their budgets are out of control. I’m trying to tell them there are other things they can do. It’s really a crisis.

So you have a huge amount of percentage of the population in antidepressants. Let me tell you, antidepressants, the serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the antidepressants, they have a response rate of less than 30%. So if there was any other category, let’s say it’s a heart condition, and the drug responded less than 30% of the time, would they even bother to use it?

DEBRA: No.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It makes no sense. But all these people are not on all these antidepressants. They’re accumulating in the water supply. They’re causing all these problems.

Antidepressants, if you look at what’s going on with serotonin in the brain, Omega-3 is specifically eicosapentaenoic acid. If you use a product like OmegaBrite, which is designed by Dr. Andrew Stoll who’s a Harvard psychiatrist, he did double-blind, placebo-controlled trials with Zoloft, the the trial is actually better than Zoloft using that particular fish oil, which is an EPA/DHA of 7.0:1.

So there’s things you can do other than these medications. You really need to look at that and think to yourself, “Can I possibly use something other than something that’s damaging the environment and also, might be even more highly effective?” That’s important. Let’s face it. If you’re taking a supplement or you’re taking a prescription, you want an outcome. You’re taking it for a reason you’re doing this.

And also, high dose folic acids, there are five serotonin receptors in the brain. It binds to four of them. These things are inexpensive and they’re pretty readily available and they’re very effective and the data’s there. It’s a no-brainer. And also, the cardiovascular benefits from taking both of those are superior. So you’re getting all other things as well.

And heart disease is the number one killer of women in the countries. You would be taking some of these things anyway, just maybe different amounts.

I think people need to realize there are options and it’s not all about medication. That’s really the hallmark of this. Antidepressants being rampant in the water supply is really preventable.

DEBRA: Yes, it really is preventable. This whole thing about drugs and the water supply is totally preventable. So tell us about another one.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. So, let me talk a little bit about anti-anxiety medications and specifically, the class of benzodiazepine. And this is where the Swedish study was done. This was very interesting with benzodiazepine. They found low levels of psychotropic drugs, specifically benzodiazepine, and they found that it changes the way the fish behave, affecting the balance of aquatic life.

And what they did is they found that this fish in Sweden, they were just charging the water like they do here and there’s high amounts of benzodiazepines, which the water dose here as well, the fish were swimming in the water and they weren’t scared of the predators. So they were just there basically waiting because they were chilling out because they were drugged.

This is really, really important. People need to think about this. If it’s affecting the fish, it’s affecting us too. You’re being drugged. And like I said, consent is not being given. You’re consuming these things and you don’t know if the toxicity, but also it’s affecting your mental health. You have a right to know what’s coming into your body. Fish were so equally affected. Go ahead.

DEBRA: I was thinking while you were talking that fluoride is another one. They intentionally put that in the water. It has a whole list of other health effects, but we don’t have any consent about that either. That’s something that we can filter out, but that fluoride is going into the environment as well from the wastewater.

That’s something nobody ever talks about. They talk about the health effects of fluoride, but we’re fluoridating all those fish too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, we are. I think it’s really important that people realize – and there’s a common statement I said at the beginning of our talk here – that photodegradation, a lot of things in nature, if they’re not meant to be in the water, they will degradate in the presence of light. These drugs do not. That’s really important to know. That’s why the waste treatment products, they can’t use light and they can’t use other things to take it out. They have nothing to remove it.

DEBRA: Yeah, it just won’t biodegrade and it doesn’t biodegrade in our bodies and that’s why it makes us sick. Yeah, exactly.

Well, we need to go to break. wHen we come back we’ll talk about more drugs that are accumulating in our water supply and what we can take instead of these drugs, so as to be healthier ourselves and have a healthier environment. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. She’s here to tell us today about what we can do instead of taking prescription and over-the-counter drugs in order to solve whatever our health problems are without putting toxic drugs into the environment where they are accumulating and hurting aquatic life.

So Pamela, tell us more about different types of drugs that we can take instead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: All right, very good. So I’m going to focus on antibiotics for a minute because antibiotic resistance – and I still work in a hospital, so I can tell you that there’s big problem with resistance to antibiotics and having the good options for patients.

When people are on antibiotics – let’s just take an example like a sinus infection. The sinuses are very sequestered cavity and that’s why people that sinusitis, you keep going back and getting courses after courses of antibiotics and it doesn’t get any better.

There are certain infections in the body that just takes a long time to clear up. A lot of times, people have viral infections and they don’t need antibiotics at all. But what I will explain, let’s say you have a minor infection – I’m not talking about someone who has been in a car accident. They might need antibiotics because they have cuts. I’m talking about just routine stuff. You have sinus infection, you may have some bronchitis, you have a little cellulitis, some inflammation on the skin. In place of antibiotics or if you’ve been on antibiotics and they weren’t just responding, I’m a big fan of a plant called Andrographis Paniculata.

DEBRA: Can you spell that? Spell that, spell that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Let me get the exact spelling here off the internet because I think people really should know about this. They haven’t used this plant before. Here we go, it’s A-N-D-R-O-G-R-A-P-H-I-S and the second word is, P-A-N-I-C-U-L-A-T-A, Andrographis Paniculata.

I use this almost exclusively. There’s a product from Cardiovascular Research called [inaudible 00:41:02] and that’s a medical version of this. I use this a lot. When someone comes to me and says, “Every time I travel, I get really sick… I’ve been two courses of antibiotics for my sinus infection and it’s just not getting any better,” what this particular plant does (and there’s a lot of clinical data behind it), it prevents cytokines or inflammatory components from feeding into the inflammation of the infection itself.

But what this does is it actually makes your white blood cells boost up and it goes after infections. So instead of taking an antibiotic, which they really are guessing and they don’t know which one’s going for what infection, they’re just like, “Oh, let’s just try this (most of them, they have no cultures), this particular plant is excellent alternative to medication because when you can take it – I usually recommend each capsule is like 500 milligrams. And so maybe two or three times a day, if you actually have an infection, you want to treat it.

But say you’re worried about getting sick, it’s flu season, it’s cold season, you get sick easily during certain times of the year, just take one or two a day just as a preventative, so you don’t get sick. But I use this routinely to treat urinary tract infection, sinus infections, bronchitis, where someone is just like, “I don’t want to be in the antibiotics,” or they’ve been at them and they just weren’t working. So this makes your own immune system go after the infection. That’s really what you want. You want to boost that up in an effective manner. And this is much different than taking vitamin C and taking [inaudible 00:42:20] and a bunch of other immune boosters. This acts like medicine.

I’m going to tell people they should really embrace this product. It works great.

DEBRA: Yes, yes. Well, I think it’s just that most people don’t know about it, but now they do.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The show is here to inform, right?

DEBRA: That’s right, we’re here to inform. I’ll just mention that if you’re having trouble finding this product and wherever you are, Pamela sells all these things that she’s taking about at her botanical pharmacy. You can just call them or you can go to a website, but they do orders over the phone.

So give the phone number again so that if people are interested in this product or anything else that we’re mentioning, she has all the correct brands that she’s been working with for over 25 years. She knows they work, she sees them working in her patients.

You can just give her a call and order tight over the phone. What’s your phone number again?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, the number here of Botanical Resource is 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. And as Debra had said, the consultation’s free. We do keep a charge [inaudible 00:43:31]. So if you want to have a quick call on the phone, you have an infection that you want to address or any other prescription medications you want to address, I can do it over the telephone. We just mail things out. I’d say 90% of my business is mail out. We do a lot of the work right over the telephone.

DEBRA: Yes, yes. And if this sound like, “Well, how can this work? It’s not a drug,” it never hurts to try. I always say these products don’t cost very much compared to drugs and you can save a lot of money if you find that they work for you and the only way to find out if it works is just try it. If it doesn’t, you only lost very little.

We still have about six minutes for the show so give us another alternative.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, for medication, if people are taking the betablockers specifically, people are taking medication for hypertension –

Hypertension is a pretty common problem. I use some homeopathics that have cardiac glycosides. And then there are homeopathics that have hawthorne in them. And if we take that protego complexes, what I normally use, if you take that probably once or twice a day, normally it will lower the bottom number of the blood pressure, the diastolic blood pressure. It will lower at about 20 points.

So if people were trying to transition off their prescriptions for their hypertension and they’re looking for alternatives, also, time-released vitamin C, 1500 milligrams of a 12-hour release vitamin C twice a day will lower the top number of the blood pressure, the systolic blood pressure about 20 points as well. So a lot of times, people are like, “I don’t want medications anymore,” just taking those two simple things for about four or five days, you see a nice reduction of the blood pressure and it’s pretty consistent.

So there are really effective things. The data is there that really can bring the blood pressure down without taking the betablockers in all the different medications that they have for that. So that’s another thing that’s very, very effective.

DEBRA: Good. Give us another one.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Don’t forget about cholesterol medicines. If you’ve got everybody running around taking statin medication, you can use probably cosanol, which is really good. Red rice yeast works really very good.

And in a lot of people too who are taking this maybe in turn to get the triglycerides down, fish oil brings down your triglycerides 30% every month just taking Omega-3’s. So that’s an excellent alternative.

And don’t forget too, we were talking about the anxiety medications, the benzodiazepines, passion flower is an excellent, excellent, alternative to benzodiazapines because it works on the same receptor, but there’s no tolerance and dependence. They don’t become addicted to it. It has very, very good outcomes. And normally, we use here prescription quality in the label. It’s very strong. I used that to transition people off of the benzodiazapines and quite effectively. So that’s an excellent, excellent alternative too.

I can tell you too about estrogen.

DEBRA: Okay, tell us about estrogen. Yeah, keep going.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Estrogen, if you look at it, you can take wild yam, which works the same way as estrogen in the body. It does the same exact thing. It doesn’t have the side effects of taking an estrogen pill. That’s really important to know that. And also, taking wild yam will also help for the vaginal tissues as well.

So you don’t have to be in estrogen when you go into menopause and perimenopause and postmenopause. You have to realize, this estrogen, going into the water supply, is affecting the males in our culture a lot because they’re drinking this and they’re becoming feminized and their skin. They [inaudible 00:47:03], which is breast tissue. A lot of this can be related to the estrogen in the water. And this is really a dangerous possibility.

So I want to reemphasize that these things store in the fat and you might want to use a detox product to take them out. I can’t say that enough times. Not only that too, when you use something like Body Anew, you end up losing some weight sometimes too because it’s taking it out of the fat and of course the fat is where you’re storing all these things. It’s a depot forming your body. You want to facilitate this going on.

If you do any kind of exercises at all, even if it’s just walking, it even moves things out even quicker. That’s what I like. I drink it when I’m exercising in the morning. I think that that’s the best thing. But even if you didn’t exercise at all, if you drink it over a course of several hours a day, it’s just going to keep pulling all these stuff out of your body. It’s very, very efficient. And the good part about it is you’re not in the bathroom, it’s not that kind of a detox.

DEBRA: Now, I take it every day. Pamela takes it every day. You’re even taking it for 15 years or something like that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: A long time. Yeah, a long time.

DEBRA: I take it every day and it’s just like an everyday support for your body in a slow, but sure way to start getting those toxics out. It’s totally comfortable. I have no discomfort from it at all. Our bodies just have so much more toxic stuff in them than just our normal body systems can handle. Our bodies just can’t handle it. Everybody needs to do something to detox and Body Anew is a good homeopathic way to do that.

Also, Zeolite is a good thing to take. But these different things, these different products actually work on different things. Zeolite is really, really good for heavy metals and Body Anew takes out some other things. And if you just do different things, sauna, all these things, put them all together, we could end up being a lot healthier.

So we’ve only got about a minute left. Any final thing you want to say about this?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, I just wanted to let people know that these are things you can control. You can’t control what’s in the water you’re drinking unless you can filter and stuff, but you’re exposed to these things periodically through the day and through your life, but it’s important to realize that these things can be carcinogenic, they can cause disruption of the endocrine system and disruption in your body and taking them out of the saunas, with exercise, but really, with Body Anew, trying to get rid of some of these fat-soluble chemicals, not only for today, but I would tell you to look ahead in the future when you’re elderly, you don’t want to have these chemicals hanging around and putting you at risk for these horrible diseases.

DEBRA: Right, thank you so much, Pamela. And again, give your phone number again, so that if people want to get any of these products, they can just call you directly.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, please call me here at Botanical Resource at 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Thank you. That’s all the time we have. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!

Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking about—as Pamela puts it—”the good, the bad, and the ugly” of supplements: adulteration, missing ingredients, manufacturing practices, contamination, quality, and more. Pamela has more than 25 years experience choosing and sellling top quality medicinal supplements, so she’s seen it all. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida.  www.botanicalresource.com 

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LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld

Date of Broadcast: April 08, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It’s Wednesday, April 8, 2015. If I sound different than usual, it’s because I’m having technical problems with my computer and my microphone today, and I’m speaking to you via the old fashion telephone recorded from, not a cell phone, a corded phone, not even a cordless phone, but landline corded telephone. So there is no EMFs here on this phone at least.

So today, we’re going to be talking, it’s every other Wednesday for my guest, Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist who talks about natural ways to handle health problems without prescription drugs. Even though she is a pharmacist, she prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural things. I have her on every other Wednesday. So it’s this Wednesday, two Wednesdays ago, two Wednesdays coming up, and we always have something interesting to hear from Pamela.

Today, we’re going to be talking about Hidden Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements. And did I say this is Pamela Seefeld? I’m a little bit distracted at the moment because of all these technical difficulties.

Anyway, my guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist. Hi, Pamela!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Sorry about your computer issue.

DEBRA: Me too, me too. It’s just technical things. This is now the second computer that I’ve had problems with in terms of plugging the audio in, so I just need to solve this. But we’ll do fine on the phone today.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely.

DEBRA: Okay, hidden dangers in common dietary supplements. There are so many things we could talk about with this. Where would you like to start?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I would like to start, and this is actually very timely…

DEBRA: Oh, wait, wait, wait. Before you talk about that, there is something else we were going to talk about.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s showing up everywhere for sure.

DEBRA: The thing that I wanted to talk about was that Pamela, a few weeks ago, told me about a recipe that she had tried and that she really loved, which was to make flax chips. Now, some of you may have heard of making flax chips, which is you just take flaxseeds and you soak them and then you put them in a dehydrator or a low oven. And when you soak flaxseeds, they turn into a little gelatinous mess. And so they stick together. Then when you dehydrate them, they make these great, crunchy chips.

But they don’t taste like much. I had made them before. And I thought this was a great way to eat flaxseeds. They’re so nutritious for you.

But Pamela makes them in a different way. She adds tomatoes, onions and all kinds of things. I made them her way this week and they were so good that I couldn’t stop eating them. So I have them. I put it up on my food blog. Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and up at the top, just click on food and you’ll see Pamela’s Premium Flax Chips.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is so cute. That’s hilarious. That’s funny. That’s really very funny.

DEBRA: Do you want to say anything else about your flax chips?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, I think everyone really enjoyed them. And what’s good about them is that they don’t have calories. They’re going to be negligible calories because really, flaxseeds when you have them whole, they pretty much go through you untouched to some degree. You do observe some omega-3’s somewhat. But what’s good about is that it’s a low-calorie, very filling snack.

I snack on those a lot when I’m working late at night because you don’t want to eat something really heavy, but you want to have something that satisfies. It really fills you up. And since there’s no calorie, this is a very good tool for weight loss.

And it’s just super healthy and super cheap to make and easy that I think your listeners will just really find that this is super, super easy. It takes me a matter of a minute. And then you put them in a dehydrator, the oven or whatever you want to do. It’s very quick. Anyone can do it, even kids can do it. It’s very, very simple.

DEBRA: I told a friend of mine about this recipe yesterday. I told him it was weightless. He said, “Weightless?” And I said yes because there’s no calorie, there’s no fat. There’s onions, there’s those fats, there’s those omega-3. It doesn’t affect your weight at all. And you can eat them and they’re so delicious with all the vegetables in it.

Again, just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and click at the top of the menu, it says ‘Food’, and today the recipe is right there on top for Pamela’s Premium Flax Chips.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I just love the name. I think it’s very cute. I really appreciate you doing that. I love to share that with everybody and I know that they’re going to really enjoy it.

DEBRA: Thank you, and I have a little picture. You can go there after this show and see my picture of the little flax chips on a little dish.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, my gosh. That is so funny. That’s hilarious.

DEBRA: But what I want to mention out of this first, before we talk about the hidden dangers in supplements, let’s talk about why you should take supplements at all. Why can’t you get your supplements, all your nutrients out of food?

PAMELA SEEFELD: And that’s a good question. So people, a lot of times, you’ll hear these people making excuses saying, “Oh, I don’t need to take any supplements because I’m getting everything from my food.” We do get a lot of things in our food. That is true. Eating a varied, balanced diet of lots of fruits and vegetables, especially the vegetables, you’re getting a lot of phytonutrients that have high activity in all areas of the body, especially the fat-soluble tissues depending on what you’re eating them with.

But in many cases, the amounts that you’re getting, it’s going to be sporadic because you’re not eating the same thing every day. And also too, if you’re making green juices and so forth, you’re probably getting a lot more of the enzymes of the plant. But in most cases, you’re taking the supplements, you’re getting these things, but you’re not going to have high amounts of.

A good case in point, vitamin D. People think, “Oh, you go out in the sun, you’re getting enough vitamin D.” Well, we know that the amount of D you make in your skin is inconsequential. It really doesn’t matter. So your sun tanning is never going to bring up your D level very much. So supplements need to be employed in those cases.

Also too, resveratrol is a good example. How many gallons of red wine you’re going to have to drink to get enough resveratrol to have a really therapeutic outcome? It’s not going to be possible.

I’m still even a big fan of taking a quality multivitamin because you’re really just getting a little bit of everything. The vitamins you have to be careful of of not taking too much are vitamins A, D, E and K, which are the fat-soluble vitamins. You do need to use those to some degree, but those, when you’re taking them in really high amounts, can damage the liver. So those are the ones that you really want to be careful of.

But all the other vitamins, you’re not really getting as much as you think out of some of your food. And a lot of it depends on what you’re eating the food with, are you taking it with a lot of fiber. Fiber binds up nutrients too. There are a lot of other variables. This way, you’re going to be very consistent in what you’re getting.

DEBRA: So when you say fiber binds up nutrients, that means that you’re not absorbing as many as nutrients because of the fiber?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! So I’ll give you a good example. In pharmacology, we tell patients if they’re taking psyllium husk, if they’re eating All-Bran extra fiber, really, just basically, the meal is mostly fiber. It binds up everything in its path.

So a good case in point is these people use psyllium powder in the morning to try and make themselves more regular. It’s a bulk-forming laxative and what it does is it brings water into the gut and forms this bulky, gelatinous stuff in the GI tract and it moves through. It binds up cholesterol in its way through and it moves its way to the GI tract. But it also binds up medications and supplements.

So if you’re taking a lot of psyllium or if you’re making – I know I was using a vegan recipe that use psyllium for a pie crust if you’re making a torte or something, you have to realize that you’re not going to be absorbing most of the nutrients out of the food you’re eating in the proximity of two hours of consuming that. That’s important to realize.

It’s the same thing with all bread, extra fiber. I just give that as an example. The point is it’s all fiber. That’s all it is. Eating that for breakfast with a banana and milk, you’re not going to be absorbing your vitamins. So you need to separate that by at least two hours.

So those are just some examples. Fiber itself, I’m talking about where the meal is mostly fiber. I’m not talking about a salad, which contains fiber. I had a pear this morning. It has fiber. That’s different. But something that’s specifically a bulk-forming laxative and it’s all that is, fiber in that particular meal. You’re going to really have impairment of absorbing anything, especially medications. That’s very important for somebody that’s on medicine from the doctor. You’re not absorbing them if you take it with that type of a meal.

DEBRA: I think what you just said is so important and especially when people are in what one could probably call an ‘alternative diet’ where they’re trying to avoid some kind of food product and so they substitute other things. But psyllium husks is a substitute ingredient that I see frequently in recipes. And if it has that effect, then you aren’t getting your nutrients from that meal. It’s important to know about these foods.

We need to go to break. But we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back to hear more from Pamela.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who dispenses – I’m so distracted today because of all these. I’m so distracted because of all the technical things going on here. And there’s my page. So anyway, you know she’s Pamela Seefeld

PAMELA SEEFELD: You’re so funny. Oh, my God! Hilarious.

DEBRA: Pamela, tell us about why people should call you or give your phone number.

PAMELA SEEFELD: People should call me, Pamela Seefeld, clinical pharmacist, because I’ve been doing this probably 25 years. I specialize in medical homeopathy, so all the products that you will get from me will not be available at the health food store. I actually teach this.

And the things I’m using, I see children, I see adults and I can treat anything from ADD. I specialize in mental health, but also if you have high cholesterol, if you have low energy and fatigue, chronic fatigue, viruses, anything that’s going on in your body that you would like to address.

My consultations are free. I’m here in my pharmacy pretty much every day. You can call me here at Botanical Research in Clearwater, Florida. It’s 727-442-4955. I would be greatly honored to help you and your family with any medical need you might have. And also, if you’re actually inquiring to transition off of prescription drugs, I can assist you with that as well.

DEBRA: Yes, and she’s very good and very well-regarded. I say that all the time, but it’s true.

So Pamela, tell us about hidden dangers in supplements. Where do you want to start with that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, we can start with the article that the front page of the New York Times today. When I was reading this this morning, this is titled, Study Warns of Diet Supplement Dangers Kept Quiet by FDA. Basically, what they’re talking about is that there is a chemical that they want to assign. It’s available in this acacia plant. But not necessarily, it’s what’s actually in the products. And this particular chemical called MBPEA acts like a stimulant. And a lot of these diet products that have been available, they’re actually containing these stimulants and that could actually be dangerous for patients. And the FDA really wasn’t keeping track of that because what was happening on the labels of these products is that they’re actually putting that this particular plant was in there, but actually, instead of using the plant, they were actually spiking the product with this MBPEA, which actually is a stimulant. And so that’s how people were losing weight with it.

So if you have a heart condition or you have high blood pressure, you wouldn’t be taking these things. But if you don’t have it labeled properly, you wouldn’t know that you’re taking these chemicals that are stimulants and are potentially very dangerous.

So it’s front page in the New York Times today. If you want to see that, I was reading the paper this morning and it was pretty bad. And I’m not surprised. Of course, it wasn’t even a month ago, I had come out talking about how that they tested several different herbal products that were available at major manufacturers that were at regular drugstores, even at GNC and what they were finding is that it did not contain what they said they were containing.

So that’s a part of it. That’s more of an adulteration in the fact that they don’t contain things. But some of the dangers, we’ll move beyond that, but this is just…

DEBRA: Wait, wait, wait. Let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question first. What is the law about labeling these things? I know that on food labels, if it’s a food product like catsup or something, they have to tell you – well, I was going to say they have to tell you everything. Let me just explain about food labels.

If you were in your kitchen and you put in sour cream and ground beef and flour, you would have to list on the label sour cream, ground beef and flour. But you wouldn’t have to list the ingredients of the sour cream. If you see on the label something like ham, for example, it would have all kinds of nitrates and coloring and stuff like that that you might see on the ham label if you were buying a ham. But if you’re buying a ham sandwich, it just says ham on the label, it doesn’t have to say all the ingredients that are in the ham. That’s the rule for food products. What’s the rule for supplement products?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a good question. The rule for supplement products is probably, most likely, you don’t have to be listing everything. The ingredients are in there, but what the problem is that it’s a voluntary process to follow good manufacturing practice and have the FDA inspect your facility.

Especially these wow-crafted products that people maybe do private labeling, you don’t necessarily know what it’s in there. But these things will be changing. That’s for sure. But now, the way the law stands, if you are a medication company, a pharmaceutical company, and you manufacture something, it has to follow good manufacturing practice, KGMPs. And this is a group of regulations, its rules, it’s a huge book and you pay the FDA to come in and inspect your facility.

If I’m manufacturing a pharmaceutical product, I don’t have a choice. I have to do it. I pay them to come in. They come in, they issue a certificate of authenticity, whatever you want to call it, of what’s going on in that particular facility, whether the machines are being cleaned, the product labeling, so forth and so on. That’s that process.

But with herbal products and supplements, that doesn’t take place unless you want it. So the whole idea is a cache of a company that manufacturers of herbal products to say, “Look, we have GMPs. We have the people inspect our facility.” And that’s what separates the poor products from the other products.

Like I said too, it’s very important to realize about private labeling. A lot of people that are practitioners might label like ‘Pamela’s Vitamins’.

DEBRA: I’ve seen that. Doctors have their own brand.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Doctors do that a lot. Chiropractors do that a lot. You don’t know necessarily what you got there because there’s some third party. Basically, how that works too is I’ll go to a company, say, it’s a private label. I go to them, they put my name on the label and I have to order $2000 worth of whatever. This is a minimum order. And I have all these products. The reason why most people do that is because you can use inferior-quality products, but it has this cache of like it’s a personal product. But it’s not really my vitamins. It’s somebody putting my name on whatever they’re manufacturing.

And that’s important for people to know. That’s why I’m not a big fan of private labeling because of that. The talk we have today is about hidden dangers, but you really need to know what you’re getting.

So the dangers that have been showing up in these articles that have been front page news should be really looked at seriously. They’re very dangerous. And just the fact that they’re now figuring this out, this thing has been going on for a long time.

And also you need to realize that good manufacturing practices, if they’re not being adhered to and the facility where the products are being made and privately labeled, you don’t know where that’s coming from. The machines might not be cleaned properly.

DEBRA: Okay, good. The thing that comes to mind is that maybe there is something you’re allergic to that might still be on the machine.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly!

DEBRA: And somebody who is allergic to peanuts or something like that, soy, a lot of things, you don’t even know if they’re in that.

We need to go to break. So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today, we’re talking about hidden toxic dangers that may be in some of those natural supplements that you might buy in various different places.

So Pamela, go on with – let’s see…

PAMELA SEEFELD: We were talking about private label.

DEBRA: Private label, yes. We were talking about private label.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m not saying necessarily that they are going to be bad. It’s just that there are going to be inadequacies in analyzing the quality of it because this is really not that person’s vitamins. It’s obviously a company. And most of the time, when people private label, they shop these things around and they want to make the most profit off the bottle.

With my stuff here, I don’t even know what I paid for mine. I have a staff running these things. I don’t know.

But if you’re going to put your name on a product, a lot of times, people will do whatever they’re making the best profit on. So maybe the product is not going to be necessarily good.

And another thing for evaluating hidden dangers is when you see a product on the back of the label, it has all these little asterisks next to it with all the ingredients, I don’t like that. And the reason why I prefer not to use those types of products is because you cannot evaluate how many milligrams of each product is in there to make a dose.

So if someone brings me a product and they bought it at some place, at a health food store, and it’s got these little asterisks next to it, when you look at that, there’s no way to adequately evaluate what dose you’re getting of each product.

So typically, when they do this kind of things and they have these blends of all of this stuff and there are little stars next to each one so they don’t tell you how many milligrams, the majority of the time, the reason why is because they’re putting more of the less expensive ingredient and less of the more expensive ingredient if that makes sense to you. So that’s what’s really happening.

And so when you see those types of products, there are a lot of multilevel marketing products that fall into those categories. I have hesitancy in saying that they would be even safe because you really have no way of knowing. The real way to evaluate something is having faith that what you’re seeing on the label is something that you can determine if this dose is appropriate for the individual. And that’s where a pharmacy comes in.

But a regular individual could look at that and say, “I don’t really know what I’m getting.” That could be a problem, especially if there’s drug interaction or if the person has allergy. How would they know what they’re even getting in the product?

DEBRA: I agree with you. I think that a lot of times, people are taking these products because they want them to have a medicinal effect. And so if you don’t know what’s in it – I mean, part of getting the effect is knowing what you’re taking and what’s the dose.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. And so if you can’t adequately evaluate it because of the fact that they’re really not revealing it on the label, I have some problems with that. So that’s another thing.

Now, the fact that there are heavy metals in some of these things – and I like to point to calcium supplements and lead. They’re cleaning that up a little bit better than it was in the past, but if you look in consumer labs, there are a lot of different products. Almost 20% of the products that they reviewed had some small amounts of lead in them. And of course, lead is a neurotoxin. And that’s something that we need to be cognizant of.

And you have to think about too where the plants are grown. I mean, I have nothing against China, but I really would not be using a lot of any of these oriental products that are actually made in China. And the reason why is that the environmental pollution is so rampant there that if you’re growing the plants there in the soil and the air, the environment is pretty much destroyed as far as heavy metal contamination. When these plants are eventually put to a product you’re consuming, you might not really be aware of what you’re getting. And that’s very important.

In not only that too, the American companies, at least when you have plant material, they do genetic testing on it to make sure that’s what’s really in it. And that’s actually how they found that the products that were being carried by these various pharmacies and GNC did not have that particular product because they actually tested the DNA. What they said in the label was not what’s in the bottle.

So there’s lots of room for air. I personally use a lot of products with companies that I really like and I know follow a good manufacturing practice. A good case in point is if you go to the health food store, Nature’s Way, Nature’s Plus, they follow GMP. It’s what they’re saying in the label.

I actually went out to the Nature’s Way plant in Utah a long time ago and toured the facility. It’s very clean. The plant material was being analyzed and checked for fungi and bacteria.

And that’s really important to know. If you go to the health food store and you’re buying herbal products in bulk, maybe they’ll have bulk whatever herb you’re particularly buying, and it is in a bulk container, bacteria, fungi and bugs contaminate a lot of bulk, raw herbs.

So you got to be very, very careful about that. That would be something that if you have any issues with your immune system, if you’re immune-compromised because maybe you had a transplant, you have no business doing anything bulk. Those products need to be medical grade from a store that is specifically using products that have been tested to be free of bacteria.

And that’s probably important to know. I’m not sure what percentage of the population has immune issues. But even if someone’s been having chronic herpes infection, chronic Eipstein-Barr, any of that kind of stuff, your immune system’s already low and taking in bulk herbs that you’re buying from a container where you’re measuring out so many grams of it or whatever you’re buying, I would really hesitancy and advising against that.

DEBRA: So that would be true for culinary herbs as well.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: I mean, it’s all just the same herbs. They’re in [cross-talking 00:32:51]

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct, when it’s in bulk. So if you’re buying some of those in a container, that’s pretty much had been tested and is probably free of that. But mold too, if you just think about it, it’s plant material. And even if it’s been dehydrated, there still might be small amounts of water and that’s all it takes. These are the things that you can’t see with the naked eye.

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: But if you’re drinking or eating it, it could be a big problem, especially if you’re making an extract of it. Like I said, if the person is immune-compromised, you might not realize why you’re getting these infections and it might be because of the bulk products. And you’d want to have something in a capsule that’s been sealed, that the top of the label has been sealed. That would make a big difference as well.

Now, I’m going to switch over a little bit talking about mercury in fish oil products. The best way to have mercury removed from omega-3 is by molecular distillation, fractional distillation. You think about when they process oil in refineries, there’s columnar filtration and certain things come off at certain points. And that’s the same thing with fish oil. We want to make sure that when we have something, it has been filtered in that sense that the mercury has been removed.

I also have a problem too if we talk about hidden dangers that if you have a really big bottle of fish oil, you buy something in bulk, by the time you’re halfway through the bottle, there’s so much degradation of the product inside because of oxygen being affected. That’s another thing that you actually could end up with lipid peroxidation in coronary artery disease even as a result of taking omega-3’s just because of the fact that they become adulterated from the oxygen.

DEBRA: We need to go to break. So I’ll ask you this question when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who – I can’t talk. I’m just having one of those days. You know who she is. Okay, let’s go over to the question.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly, you know who I am. So we were talking about the large containers of fish oil.

DEBRA: And I had a question for you. Are you talking about large containers of liquid fish oil or fish oil in capsules?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Both.

DEBRA: Okay, so my question is, does the capsule keep the fish oil fresh?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Not necessarily. It’s just a more convenient dosing mechanism for some people. What we have to realize is that oils are sensitive to light, heat and oxygen in that order actually. We know that if something has oxygen coming into it in the bottle, what happens is each time that you open the bottle and take some pills out and then close the bottle, the oxygen is let in the bottle and it stays in there.

And so what happens is the oil itself can start having derogatory products as a result of it. It becomes rancid. You don’t really smell it because it’s not really to the point of – if you think about it, if you kept a bottle of fish oil and you kept the top off and you had it sitting out for weeks on end, eventually, it would start to smell.

But even though it’s just small amounts of oxygen that you keep letting when you keep opening the cap, there are some problems with that.

So a case in point, in Costo and Sam’s, they sell fish oil in these huge, big containers, that’s not good. People think they’re getting such a deal. It’s not a good deal because you really want to have a bottle of fish oil that has maybe 120 in it or 90 capsules or whatever the case may be. You use that up within a month and get a fresh bottle after that. Each time you’re opening it up and you’re letting the capsules out and you’re letting oxygen into the bottle, the derogatory products that are going to be present there in the liquid or in the capsules, either way, those are bad because they have free radicals. And so when you’re consuming those, those free radicals, depending on your anti-oxidants status at the time when you consume them can be probably detrimental to the blood vessels.

And I really wanted to talk a little bit, just briefly, about fish oil just really quickly. There is a study that came out maybe a few weeks ago. And it was talking about how fish oil is shown that the benefits were not really derived there for these patients that had heart disease and that it really didn’t protect the heart and everything. I want to point out something to your listeners. Those patients that were in that study (and it’s very important that we look at the study) had already had a heart attack and had heart disease.

So what I’m telling you is that if you’ve already had a major health problem, you’ve had heart attack or you have heart disease and I give you fish oil, are you going to be like you and me and you’re going to be completely fine? Probably not.

Look at the studies and look at the population of the people that they’re using in that. They didn’t use healthy people. They used people that have already been sick, were on a bunch of cardiac medicines. They gave them fish oil and we’re trying to see if it would protect against further cardiac damage. And the study showed that it probably didn’t.

What that means is that maybe it’s not just fish oil that’s needed when these people are very sick and have heart disease. Maybe they need to be on B vitamins, maybe they need to be on exercise, maybe they need to be on a different diet, all these other things. It’s not all or nothing.

I think that’s important for people to realize when they see this. I read the study and people come in and say, “Well, I guess fish oil really doesn’t do what it says it does.” All these negative studies that they think that they have, you need to look and see. If they were dealing with very, very sick people, you might not have the outcomes you’re expecting because the health of these individuals is very poor.

DEBRA: I think that’s a really important point to make. I think that people read just an article where a reporter who is not trained in these subjects write something and it’s his understanding of what the study is. And when you go and read the study, it’s sometimes completely different.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it is. Many times, it is. And I think, let’s face it, if you’re trying to make a name for yourself and you’re a reporter, the sensational titles really catch people’s attention.

And maybe they really should have looked at what they’re trying their outcome to be. Is a person’s heart disease going to completely go away? Probably not. But maybe if they’re using homeopathic cardiac glycosides, maybe if they’re incorporating diet and exercise and some other things that we know has shown to be helpful, maybe the outcomes would have been different.

But when you deal with a patient population that already has some baseline health issues that are pretty severe, you might not always see the results that you want. Should this mean that the person who has really bad heart disease shouldn’t take fish oil? No, they need to be taking it. But there might be other things, other variables along with it, some lifestyle factors, that probably are influencing it. That’s really important.

So I don’t want people to stop taking fish oil. I think this is just, since we’re talking about, important to bring that up because it doesn’t mean fish oil doesn’t work.

DEBRA: Fish oil has a lot of other benefits as well. And that said, I’m really understanding in my own life very much lately that it’s a combination of things. Everybody needs their own individual combination of things in order to build health. And we’re exposed to different things. Our bodies are different. And it’s not just one thing. It’s not even just one thing of avoiding toxic. I think that everybody needs to avoid toxic chemicals. Everybody needs to get toxic chemicals out of their bodies as I think like a baseline thing. But then after that, there are still other things that are needed.

PAMELA SEEFELD: What you’re saying is these are inter-individual. And that’s why I like what I’m doing here because I can select these things for you based on your family history and what you think you’re more prone to or at risk for or what situations you have cropping up. It’s really important. I can look at your blood work with you and say, “These are things that I see that are coming. They’re not being flagged yet, but I don’t like these numbers and we need to try and reverse those.”

And especially if you’re dealing with anybody that has some pre-kidney issues or some pre-liver issues, those two things in particular are very, very bad because you don’t want to end up on dialysis and you don’t want to end up with a liver transplant.

So when you start seeing some things, some changes physiologically in the person in their chemistry, their blood chemistry, those you need to act on. And those people in particular would really want to be cognizant of what supplements they’re taking because you don’t want to be taking anything that’s possibly adulterated.

And another thing too, when you see these supplements and it says, “Genko, two for a $1” That’s not Genko because there’s no way they’ll be able to sell that. That’s a lot of these products that were private-labeled by these different pharmacies that were just really junk. They were picking them up because they were cheap.

That’s what really it is. They didn’t go and explore, “Is this an adequate supply? Do these people actually test these things?” We’re looking at that because the bottom line, if you’re a retail business and you’re a chain nationwide, it’s, “What profit am I making off of each bottle?” And that’s what a lot of people need to realize, that the practitioner and the integrity of who’s dealing with the products, that’s very important.

DEBRA: Well, I want to say on your behalf, Pamela, I want to say to the listeners that it’s really a very different experience working with Pamela because not only does she have the products that she’s investigated and evaluated for herself and has been using for many years and she knows the people who are making them and things like that, but she also has the skill and experience to know exactly which products to give you, exactly which natural substance is going to do the thing that your body needs.

And it’s very different in terms of just walking into a natural food store or a drugstore or any place like that where you’re just choosing something off the shelf without having the knowledge that she brings to this. And her knowledge is so great in a large sense. She’s so experienced that she can just choose the right thing and give it to you and it just cuts right through to having the right solution.

It’s very different. I’ve never been to any kind of store like Pamela’s pharmacy. She just does something completely unique that is, I think, so needed in the world.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I really appreciate that. I really pride myself that what we’re providing is a very valuable service here, that people, once they’ve realized that we’re really micro-managing their stuff and just looking at it and we’re doing it in a very economical way, that’s what it’s really all about. It’s making sure that people have quality choices and especially if they’re on prescriptions and they don’t want to be on them or they’re coming close to needing medicine.

I see a lot of people that are coming here and they may be are needing medicine in some time in the future. And I’ll tell them exactly what they’re going to eventually give them and say, “Do you want to just get rid of the problem now? We can address it today.”

But I respect people. If they want to triage something and say, “Okay, let’s check the blood work in another month and see where they’re at,” we can do that too. And if they’re still continuing to get worse, then you have to act on it.

I think people need to have choices. And especially, I keep bringing up the kidney thing because there’s some homeopath stuff that I’ve been using for people with kidney issues and starting to have pre-kidney failure and they’re reversing pretty significantly. I’m even astounded at the numbers. There’s a big, big difference in people’s [inaudible 00:48:48].

In fact, I’m doing some speaking next week, which is continuing education for the doctors. And I’m going to be providing some of the blood work (I only blocked out the names and everything). I’m showing the blood work of people that actually went on some inexpensive, simple, medical homeopathy and his pre-kidney failure was reversed in a month. And that, to me, is just unbelievable. I wouldn’t even expect the results to be that good. Huge differences!

So people need to know there are choices for that. And I’d be very grateful to help you in anything, especially if you have any question about a supplement you’re taking. We’re talking about these hidden dangers, but if you have questions about any kind of contamination or anything that’s going on with it, I’d be very grateful to look and see if we can find us some information, if there are some questions about some kind of adverse reaction that you’ve been having to a supplement you’ve been taking because there’s a lot of that much more prevalent than you would think.

DEBRA: Well, we only have about 20 seconds left. So why don’t you give your phone number again?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely. My pharmacy is 727-442-4955. I would be very grateful to help you in and your family if you have any questions you might have about your medications or your supplements.

DEBRA: And thank you very much, Pamela. We’ll be back again in two weeks with another show with Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

See More Clearly with Natural Remedies

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking about what causes eye problems and natural treatments, how to prevent eye problems naturally, and why many standard eye treatments fail. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
See More Clearly with Natural Remedies

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: March 25, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.

It’s Wednesday, March 25th, 2015.It’s nice and warm here in Florida, a lovely spring day. And we’re going to be talking about how we can see more clearly by taking care of our eyes naturally. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with our eyes and a lot of eye treatments.

But today, we’re going to find out what we can do naturally.

My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

She studied a field called pharmacognosy, which literally means plants with intelligence. It’s the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources. So she brings her training as a pharmacist in dealing with how the body works and dosage and how to take medicines and combines that with her knowledge of plants and other natural substances.

So she has a very interesting viewpoint and is very effective and very well-regarded here in Clearwater, Florida where we both live. So I have her on every other Wednesday because there is so much to talk about on the subject.

She regularly gets people off of prescription drugs and she just has a lot of knowledge. Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. So tell us what causes eye problems.

PAMELA SEEFELD: When we think of the eye, we think of a very unique area of the body. And why we say that is because certain areas of the body are very sequestered from the activity of our immune system. And so when you’re trying to get antibiotics or medications or you’re trying to even have the nutrients from your food or the antioxidants that you’re taking in the form of supplements get to a particular, the eyes are one area that you have to just realize that the penetration into those area from supplements and from medications is highly limited just because of the construction of the eye, the structure of the eye and how the capillaries bring the medications and supplements into the eye.

It’s important. We’re going to talk a little bit about the structure of the eye and how the sequestration of the eye from the rest of the body and the way self-defenses move will prevent something from getting there and how we want to try and supplement more appropriately so that these supplements get into a higher concentration into the eye.

DEBRA: Let me ask you a question. This may sound like a silly question, but I don’t know a lot about the physiology of the eye. Now, it seems that there’s an eyeball in a socket and that they are two different things.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right.

DEBRA: And so is the eyeball just sitting there completely independent or is it attached with capillaries or what’s the relationship there? Do the eyeballs fall out?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s funny. It’s not like that, but you’re right. I will give you an example. Say someone has an eye infection and we treat that with eye drops. And the reason why we do that and we don’t treat somebody with oral medications is because when you take something orally, if for some reason the eye wants to protect itself against invasion from species, bacteria, viruses from our body, so it actually has this way that it’s sequestered.

The blood vessels, the capillaries, each red blood cell goes in single file when they go through there. The immune system does not have high activity in the eye and the reason why that’s the case is because it’s protecting the eye against invasion from other species that might be in our blood if we’re septic and coming to the eye. That’s just the physiology of the eye.

So the socket and the blood vessel obviously are attached to our body and it’s there. But for some reason, the areas of the body that don’t have high concentrations of medication when you take them orally would be the eyes.

Another place is the sinuses, the sinus cavities. That’s why when people have chronic sinusitis and they’re on antibiotics, they never get rid of it. The reason why it doesn’t get rid of it is because the penetration into the sinus cavities just really isn’t that good with the blood vessels.

It doesn’t get the high enough concentration to kill.

And the same thing with the eye, that’s why we choose eye drops. And in the severe cases, when someone has an eye infection, we have to actually make concentrated eye drops with antibiotics [inaudible 00:05:41] in the hospital. And many times, the doctors have to inject them directly into the eye. So it’s important.

The reason why we want to lay the groundwork of the talk today is to understand that – some people say, “I’m taking my supplements to the eyes.” I want to talk about how to get it into the eyes and how to prevent capillary bad leakage and macular degeneration and things like that. And the reason why this is happening is because of the physiology of the eye itself. I think it’s important to lay the groundwork for people to understand that drugs taken in a pill do not get into the eye.

DEBRA: Well now, I am taking a supplement that’s designed to improve your eyesight, so I guess it’s not getting into my eye, but would it be supporting my body in some other way?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. It is getting into the eye if the concentrations are high enough. That’s really what’s to be said. A lot of it too is your baseline circulation. That’s why we’re going to really focus on the blood vessel.

DEBRA: Okay.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The health of the blood vessels determines a great deal of the penetration into the eye. Also, the supplements that work on the eye, many of them are fat-soluble. So if you’re taking the supplement and you’re having a pear for breakfast and you’re not having some almond or a little bit of olive oil in your food or something to that degree to help get the peak higher in the blood stream, you might not be absorbing a great deal on the medication or the supplement that you are taking.

DEBRA: Okay, good. So continue with the eye physiology.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. So I’m going to focus a lot on the capillary bed, the blood vessels themselves in the eyes because a lot of these problems that people have with their eyes are related directly to capillary permeability.

Capillary permeability is talking about the junctions of the cells. When you talk about a capillary, the cells there and blood vessels in general, the blood vessels are not contiguous. You have cells all packed next to each other and it forms a vessel. We’re all made of cells, all different cells. And these cells, sometimes they can be mildly irritated to some degree and this can happen from inflammation, it can happen from a lot of different things, environmental causes, pollution. What happens is the cells start to move apart slightly, ever so slightly and then fluids are allowed to go out into the area.

So what’s happening in those cases is that the blood vessels will break. And so, people are having lots of redness or irritation, maybe allergies, things like that where you have lots of redness in the eye. The reason when redness is there is because of histaminic release, but also because the blood vessels’ permeability is then affected.

The easiest way to affect gap capillary permeability in the eyes and also to the whole body is using bioflavonoids. The three bioflavonoids we use in my natural products pharmacy are rutin, quercetin and hesperidin.

Rutin was originally found in onions, but it’s so ubiquitous. It’s in two-thirds of all plants. Hesperidin was originally found in the pith around grapefruit. And rutin was originally found in buckwheat. We know that these are all very strong vascular stabilizers and you can eat buckwheat rose and get the vascular stabilizing permeability from a food if that’s how you want to take it. I eat those quite a bit and they’re very, very good.

DEBRA: I liked that too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. They’re excellent. And then also quercetin, I think, is probably even the most effective. Quercetin comes in tablets, but they have it also in liquid. I use liquids for a lot of people.

To give you some examples, if somebody has quercetin and they are using it in their detox bottle or they’re using it in their water every day and very often, what are some of the things that you would see difference in? Eye clarity, lack of redness. If you have allergies, histaminic release would diminish because it has anti-histaminic property. And at the same time too, you’re going to see that the puffiness underneath your eyes, that swelling that you get at the beginning and the end of the day, the darkness under your eyes, that’s capillary bed permeability.

That’s what causes the discoloration.

DEBRA: Oh!

PAMELA SEEFELD: You can treat with taking quercetin orally.

DEBRA: How do you spell that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Q-U-E-R-C-E-T-I-N.

DEBRA: Perfect.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Quercetin. And I can tell you too, we’re talking about eye health, but just a side line, I am treating one of my clients right now that had very, very bad prostatitis, which is inflammation of the prostate. He called me and he couldn’t whole day sit. He’s an executive and he’s got to be at his desk all day and it’s just very, very just uncomfortable for him. And the quercetin, I told him, “You need to put this in your water all day long because quercetin will affect the blood vessels and the prostate too.”

Sure enough, not even a day, Larry calls me and says, “I’m feeling better.” Just keep taking your water and we’re trying to get the inflammation down. But this person has been on multiple courses of cipro and he wasn’t getting better. So it’s very, very important, quercetin. It’s excellent.

DEBRA: Thank you so much. We’re going to go to break. And when we come back, we’re going to talk more with natural pharmacist,

Pamela Seefeld. She’s a regular pharmacist also, but she loves to work in a natural pharmacy even more.

So when we come back, we’ll talk more about eye health, treatments, prevention and how you can treat your eye problems naturally. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Pamela, continue telling us about what causes eye problems.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, so the things we’re talking about that are causing eye problems, we talked a little bit about the groundwork about the sequestration properties of the eye, how things really don’t get into high concentration.

When you are looking at what you are eating, your food, obviously the nutrients in your food, the supplements you take, the fat-soluble components of your supplement are what affect the eye health most significantly. So it is important to make sure that the meal that you’re taking these with has some fat.

When you look at the eyes themselves and you are trying to think about what supplements you want to take and how you want to affect them most significantly, thinking about the capillary bed is the basis of your program. It’s very important.

And the capillary bed (we’re talking about the permeability of the capillary bed) will determine whether you see redness in the eyes, whether you have puffiness underneath your eyes because of capillary bed permeability.

And like I was saying previously, they’re ubiquitous to the body. They’re all through the body. So the capillaries, if they’re affected in the eyes and if you’re having eye problems, they also might be affecting the prostate, they might be breaking blood vessels, you bruise very easily.

These are outward signs that the inside health of the capillaries is not as good as we want. So it’s important to look at it.

So if you’re bruising really significantly more recently than you had in the past and your platelets are normal (it’s not something the doctor can check, so it’s not because of that), then there might be permeability issues with the capillaries. So let’s focus on the capillaries, but also the supplements.

Buckwheat, we were talking about that rutin was originally found in buckwheat. It’s important to realize too – now I don’t want to forget to mention the carotenoids. We think about carrots and these orange vegetables. They are very significant, carotenoids and vitamin A. They have great effects on the eye health. And this is something that is pretty simple to do because if you eat a carrot every day, you’re getting quite a bit just from that and that tastes delicious in our salad. I always have carrots.

DEBRA: And I love rainbow carrots. Have you had rainbow carrots?

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, no. Tell me about them.

DEBRA: Oh, you can get them at our local natural food store. They’re called rainbow carrots and they’re in all different colors. They’re yellow, they’re purple, they’re white.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great.

DEBRA: They’re orange. I just love them.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, you do. That’s a great idea. I have to go get some today. That’s an excellent idea.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Having varieties of these colors (I always say you want to have lots of colors in your salad), the variety of all these things contained lots of different phytonutrients that all have significant effects on the eye. So that’s really important to think.

And also too, I want to mention a little bit sunlight. It’s crazy, people don’t think about too much sunlight, wearing your sunglasses when you go out. Sunlight, the reason why light affects your eyes is your eyes basically are lipid. They’re fats. If you think about what it is, water and fat makes up most tissue. When you look at light and expose anything that’s lipid-base to light, it has oxidative properties. So these free radicals that can be formed not just from the eye, the dilation of the eye itself, but you want to think about the eye itself being exposed to the light, there definitely are some reactions. So that’s why it’s very important to have fat-soluble antioxidants in your diet.

So either a supplement, vitamin E is a great antioxidant too and not necessarily just for eye health, but generally to protect against free radicals (an unpaired electron that starts doing damage). We want to make sure that when we provide these healthy vitamins in our body and also in the food, when we have free radicals and we have antioxidants – and antioxidants give extra electrons and it squelches and stops that process.

It’s a pretty simple thing to do because you have to eat every day, so you might as well be eating some of these things that protect against these problems.

Think about it. When your eyes get affected, it really affects your quality of life significantly. So, this isn’t something you want to mess around with.

I’ll tell you too, talking about eye health, one of my clients that have had some problems with macular degeneration and some eye problems – and this is actually a younger lady. And she’s only in her late 40s, but she had some kind of other regressive eye disease.

There’s a product that DesBio makes called Eye Sarcode and you can use this for eye problems. It’s a medical product that they have developed. I had really good results with that with people. It’s really beyond just giving people quercetin and antioxidants and changing their diet. They maybe have some physiological problems there. Maybe their sight is starting to be impaired. This actually is a treatment for the eye.

And if somebody’s really concerned that there are lots of macular degenerations in their family that they are starting to have some trouble with the capillary bed. They’ve tried some bioflavonoids and they’re not really seeing the results. This product might hold some promise to them.

I only just thought about it during the break. We want to mention that there are some things that you can take orally that are homeopathic that actually are developed for eye problems that might be a little jumped up from just taking an eye supplement.

DEBRA: That’s good to hear because certainly homeopathics can change what’s going on in the body and start healing some of those things. So tell us also about what will the genetics play?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good question! Genetics, of course, our genes are inherited from our parents. The genes that we have turn on and off depending on what we’re exposed to. That’s how the environmental component of the genetic influence play into favor here or against depending on what’s going on.

When you’re exposed to a lot of pollution, a lot of antioxidant – trust me, I used to run outside a lot. But running outside, you’re exposed to a lot of cadmium and lead and nickel and other things that are coming from the tire dust or maybe you’re running on the golf course and there are pesticides. So being outside and doing sports outside isn’t necessarily always the best, but it is definitely mentally and physically very nice and we enjoy it. So it’s not like I’m trying to tell people lto hide out in a bubble someplace because it’s not really a practical situation.

Just think about it. When we get exposed to these things, our body has these different genes and cells and they turn on and off depending on what we’re exposed to. That’s what causes cancer. That’s what causes any kind of problem when these genes are turned on and it’s a gene that we don’t want to have turned on.

Say we have a genetic propensity for macular degeneration. Your mom had it, your dad had it, aunt had it and your grandma had it or, say, a typical type of eye problem. The reason why genes play a role is because you have the genes that have a propensity to react and activate as a result of stimuli, things in the environment, emotions. And now we know that actually a big part of that (maybe not so much in the eye health) is epigenetics.

DEBRA: Well, let’s talk more about this when we come back because this is all very interesting about the genes turning on and off. And I want people to know more about this particularly in response to toxic chemicals and what happens with that.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back to talk more about eye health when we come back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld.

One of the things that she does is that she helps people get off of prescription drugs and find natural remedies to help whatever is going on with their body. And she does free consultations. You can call her up from anywhere and talk to her about this and she can help you with that.

She’s very successful at doing that. I know some people here locally and she has helped them very much and she has even helped me, not that I am on a lot of prescription drugs, but she has helped me a lot to choose natural remedies to improve things that are going on with my body.

So Pamela, why don’t you give your phone number? Listeners, really you can call her up. She loves to hear from you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. Please call me. I would love to talk to you and I would be most honored to help you and your family if you want to get off of prescription, if you’re concerned about the health concern you have, blood pressure, cholesterol, whatever is going on, your eye health. I would be glad to help you and go over what you’re taking and decide to something that might be more effective in the homeopathic realm.

So the number here at my pharmacy is (727) 442-4955. That’s (727) 442-4955.

DEBRA: Great. Okay. Before the break, we were talking about genetics. And could you just start over with this idea that the genes turn on and off depending on what you’re exposed to and how you feel and all of that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. So we were talking about the influences on the genes environmentally. The things, that we’re exposed to, have high significance as far as turning on the genes. And also we need to look at something called epigenetics and epigenetics is how our feelings and thoughts and the way we handle stress affect our genes. It has now been proven that if we’re anxious, if we’re angry that it affects our genes and makes them more susceptible to turn on illnesses and problems.

We’re talking about eye health today, but in general, I was talking about other things, especially coronary artery disease and influences on infection. We’re going to get an opportunistic infection. Maybe case in point you have five people in a room with one person has flu, not everybody gets the flu. So it just depends on where immune system is at that point.

And so our genes are affected a lot by how we feel, so it’s very important, stress control and diet and sleep and all these things people keep talking about all the time. It really does affect the way the genes are turned off and on and literally, you can worry yourself sick and they know that this is actually true now and they can see now that the genes actually change and if different genes are turned on and not favorably respond to chronic stress. So it is really important.

It’s probably the worst case scenario because I am always worried about things that I can’t control. But it is important to realize that this is the case and to really look at how we can make less of this impact on our bodies.

DEBRA: So say you’ve been exposed to toxic chemicals and you turned these genes on, can you turn them off?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. The things that affect the genes and we were talking about what turns them on and turns them off and stress of course affects that. But what we do know is that the supplements we take, especially the antioxidants and we were talking about that previously, make a huge difference as far as how we’re going to affect the way the genes turn off and on. That’s what’s really important that you take your supplements, your antioxidants.

If you’re worried about the eye health, the effects of quercetin – I’m really a big fan of taking ProDHA. ProDHA is a common focus in fish oil and that works extremely well for stress. And people that are stressed out are going to see much more effects as far as their genes not being accepted too much by stress because of ProDHA. So you want to take fish oil anyways, but that has a DHA, the BPA, the ratio of 4.5:1 and it’s just the right mix of reducing stress for influences of everyday life. And I use a lot of that for my patients. It works really well.

DEBRA: Yes. I take that every day.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it’s excellent.

DEBRA: I’ll just say, we did a whole show about fish oil. Actually, I’ll take this opportunity to say that I now have, Pamela and other regular guests, all their shows are on a single page. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and see where it says “Archived shows” in the submenu and pull it down and you’ll see her name and you can just go look at all the shows that she has done.

One of them is about fish oils. I used to never want to eat fish oil or take fish oil. I don’t eat seafood. My body has never wanted fish since I was a child. And yet I can take this and it makes a difference. You don’t even know you’re taking fish oil. So if you are not taking it and not getting the benefits of it, thinking that you’re not going to like the way it tastes, just try it. Just try it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it is true because when you use a medical grade oil, all of the fish protein in the residue is removed. So you’re not taking fish, you’re not burping up fish. It’s not that kind of a product, but that particular ratio is found to be really effective for ADD, ADHD and I use it a lot for adults just because of chronic worrying and just worrying about everyday stresses and so forth.

It really reduces quality of life for everybody if they worry about things. There are things that you worry about that you can control and there are a lot of things that you worry about that you cannot control. It’s important to be able to turn some of that off and improve sleep as well.

And of course, we know that omega-3, EPA and DHA have significant effects for eye health and it really corresponds to what we’re talking about today.

The omega-3s and stuff make up all the membranes of cells and it is important to know that when you do that and the propensity is shifting with taking an omega-3 supplement that you have more of the omega-3s in the cellular membrane and less of the 6s, the actual functionality of the cell membrane is greatly enhanced. That’s where you really see that.

Fish oil turns on over 300 different genes. I’m talking about genetics and the activation of those genes is in an extremely favorable stand versus previously where the person has not taken it. So that’s a simple thing you can take.

The quercetin, the omega-3 and looking at bioflavonoids and saying, “Okay. Can I get them in my salad? Can I get them in a supplement?” I really want to emphasize that if someone has capillary bed permeability and they have eye issues, maybe dizziness and a blurry vision to some degree, redness in their eyes, strain in their eyes when they’re up at the computer. Quercetin has really the vascular stabilizing properties and it also relieves a lot of that puffiness under the eyes and the darkness under the eyes.

From a vanity standpoint, I think most women could appreciate that, it’s just about understanding why it’s dark under their eyes in the first place. It’s not because you didn’t sleep. People constitute that. The reason why you think this is, “Okay, when I get more rest, it gets less puffy,” but really there’s more chance for those vascular beds the time that you’re laying prone more time for that fluid to dissipate. That’s the reason why.

It’s kind of neat! I look at this product and what’s actually happening because when you think about it, you’re like, “Oh, okay. Now that makes sense.” And this is what this show is about.

DEBRA: Yes. Yes, things that make sense. We need t go to break.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: When we come back, we’ll talk more about natural eye health with our guest, Pamela Seefeld. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. In addition to her phone number – why don’t you give that again, Pamela? Hello?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. Can you hear me?

DEBRA: Now, I can hear you. So I was just to say in addition to calling Pamela, you can also go to her website, which is BotanicalResource.com. But give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. My phone number here at my pharmacy is (727) 442-4955. And please call me. I would be very grateful to discuss any of your health problems and suggest some alternatives that you might provide instead of medication.

DEBRA: So why do eye treatments fail?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Eye treatments fail many times because the person that’s treating them, whether an alternative practitioner or a physician, does not take into account the sequestration properties of the eye and the fact that things don’t necessarily go there in high concentration. That’s really important to think about.

Let’s say you’re getting lots of white discharge in your eyes. Maybe when you wake up in the morning and do you have that gunky feeling in your eyes sometimes if you’re sick?

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: What is that? What that is dead white blood cells. That’s it. So if you think about it. If the white blood cells actually had really good affinity for the eye, which they don’t, it would even be more than that. So when you actually see some and you see whites in the corners of your eyes and it’s white and sticky, that means that there’s even more of a process going on and these cells, these white blood cells will go there and in response to injury, in response to bad allergies, anything that’s calling in the troops to go there and see what’s going on. That’s what these cells are. They’re exploratory and they’re called in for a reason.

So we used to see that type of thing. You have to see and think, “Okay, if my practitioner is just handing me some antioxidants, but not telling me to take it with fat or if my doctor is handing me some eye drops that have steroids in them and telling me that I put this, two drops in the eye three times a day and not really explaining to me that when you use steroids that the eye drops…” – let me tell you about that. A lot of people do this, especially if you’re using it more than six or seven days consecutively in a row, you actually have a higher risk for infection because now, your immune system is not going there at all.

As a consumer, I really would caution taking blind faith in anything to treating your eyes because it’s such an important part of your body.

And any time there’s a question about what it’s giving you for your eyes or question about what you should be doing for your eyes, like I said, my advice is free and I can tell you if I think that they’re using it appropriately whether it’s in the pharmaceutical realm, which I am qualified to do or in alternative realm, which I’m also qualified to do. I think it’s important to realize that many times people make quick judgments as far as their treatment modalities and their thought process. I see in many different professions, either alternative or in regular pharmacy that you need to really think things through.

That’s why I think today’s talk and telling people how the eye is situated, how things don’t penetrate there well, how you need to be proactive about capillary bed permeability if you’re getting dark circles on your eyes. It’s maybe affecting the blood vessels in the eye themselves. All these things are important.

When you see this white discharge, what does it really mean? So my blood cells are going there for a reason. There’s something wrong. And if it’s excessive and continual over a period of time, maybe it is untreated allergy, maybe there’s baseline infection or maybe your makeup is contaminated. It’s important to think through the process of it because really life is like a little discovery, isn’t it?

DEBRA: It is. It is. So could you just tell us some eye problems, some common eye problems that people could treat in a natural way?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. The macular degeneration probably or eye sensitivity and they’re starting to have some vision issues as a result of it. Maybe the doctor said they had wet or dry macular degeneration. This is probably something that even the eye doctors are starting to [inaudible 00:43:19] eye vitamins as a result of it because they realize they can’t really turn their back on the data now that it’s showing that’s important.

It’s important to embrace the fact that if you have any types of issue or you’re worried about macular degeneration, if you’re starting to have vascular changes in your eye, when you go get your eyes examined, the doctor can look in your eyes and they can start to see if the blood vessels have been affected, that’s what they’re really looking at, the health of the blood vessels.

And I can say this, which I’m very, very proud because I’m 49 and I went to the eye doctor not that long ago and she looked in my eyes and said, “How old are you?” Again, she looks in my chart and she says, “I am so shocked because you don’t have the beginning of any cataracts and no problems with your blood vessels in your eye.” She says, “I never see that in a woman your age.” And I was shocked. This is unsolicited and you know what it is, it’s the antioxidants.

DEBRA: It’s the antioxidants, but I also think it’s because you take homeopathic detox everyday and that you’re in your sauna frequently and you’re detoxing your body just constantly.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You’re right. And you know what it is? Life is not only like, “All or nothing. Okay, I’m going to have a house full of vitamins today and then I’m not going to do anything else.” It’s not about that. It’s all these little things we do every day.

It really was reassuring and confirming that the things that I’m doing are helping and it’s working really well and the fact that she says she never sees it in people in their late 40s makes me think that obviously what I’ve done is I’ve got the right mix of things and maybe I stuck with this through enough for myself as well and I could do that for you and your clients too. That’s important for people to realize. There are things you can take other than just grabbing just a vitamin for eyes off the shelf and using blind faith, knowing that this issue is as far as how to increase the concentration.

I’ll tell you that there’s another homeopathic product that I like a lot. It’s called Circulation and it increases the concentration into an area of the 90%. So say you really have an eye problem or say you have problems in some place in the body and you want the things you’re taking to go there at a higher concentration. Using circulatory enhancers is an excellent trick. I utilize that frequently with patients all the time because I know that it’s going to really get there and it’s going to deliver it right to the area that I want at a high concentration because homeopathy is a secret medicine. It follows these little unique assignments to go and really deliver things and take care of it at the location you want. And regular medicine just never provides that.

DEBRA: That’s so interesting about these natural things, the way they act so differently. Well, I want to tell you this since you went to the eye doctor. I want to tell you that over the weekend, I went to the gym for the first time in 30 years.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good for you.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s so great.

DEBRA: A friend of mine figured out that what I really needed to do was lose weight, which is true and I haven’t been able to lose weight all these years. It’s not that I don’t try. It’s that there’s something going on with my body. He figured out that I needed to exercise because he had just started going to the gym and he got on a program with a trainer and he said, “You can do this too.” And you know what? He paid for my gym membership and took me down there personally.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, my gosh. How wonderful is that? Good for you.

DEBRA: Yeah. But here’s the story. I went down there and I started lifting weights and stopped, and the trainer is just amazed and he says, “You haven’t been in a gym for 30 years and how old are you?” And he says, “You’re as old as my father.” He was just really impressed at how well I could just walk in and do it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh my gosh, that’s just great.

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You don’t realize because you’re actively learning around doing stuff. Your baseline health is probably a lot better than you would think as far as your activity level. But that’s just really great.

You know what? The gym and working out is just a great way because when talking about vascular permeability, it decreases the permeability and the problems associated with blood vessels and it has demargination of white blood cells. When you do exercise, it makes these white blood cells start having high activity in the bloodstream and prevent infection. So it’s doing all kinds of great encompassing things for the body. I’m just so happy for you.

DEBRA: I’m happy for me too. My body felt really good. I felt like they gave me things that I can do, that it wasn’t too stressful and that I could just up how much I was doing. But I did a lot more than I thought that I could. I did more repetitions than I was able to do longer. I really thought that I was out of shape and it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

So I’m very excited about going to the gym now because I understand. I’m going to a specific gym where they really help you. It’s not just about walking in and saying, “Okay, here’s the machine you use.” They’re really helping me and that’s why my friend wanted me to go to that gym with him.

So I’m excited and I know that it will help release toxic chemicals so that they can detox out. And they have a sauna there, so I can go sit on a sauna.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good for you.

DEBRA: Yeah. I’m so excited.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s just so positive. I’m telling you, if you take away my biking every morning, I will be like, “No, this cannot be happening.” Every day, when I’m biking in the morning and having my exercise, I thank God for the ability to be able to exercise and enjoy my time because it’s really a treasure.

DEBRA: Yeah. And it makes your body feel good. We’ve only got about a minute left for the show. Are there any final words you want to say about eye health?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. I want to mention real quickly that GLA or gamma-Linolenic acid, found in evening primrose oil. It’s also found in borage oil. I don’t use too much borage by itself because there was some evidence a long time ago that it was shown to be linked to seizures by itself, so you don’t want to do that. But some evening primrose has been shown to be very, very safe.

And taking that increases the moisture in your eyes about 25% in about two weeks. So people with dry eyes, GLA is an excellent source to have this moisture and it works for any of the mucus membranes as well. So it works for vaginal dryness, things for menopausal women, hormone relief, things like that. But for your eyes, GLA could be an excellent addendum to your regimen for your vitamins for your eye health and I really encourage people with dry eyes that taking GLA orally will not only increase the moisture in the skin, but in the eye health as well. That’s something that we do have readily available at a health food store.

DEBRA: Good.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Like I said, it works for other areas of the body, especially dry skin because usually dry eyes and dry skin all seem to go hand in hand.

DEBRA: I’m going to interrupt you right there because we’ve only just now got a few seconds. Thank you so much. Again, if you go to Pamela’s website, which is at BotanicalResource.com and her phone number will be there. Give her a call. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

Hidden Mental Health Dangers in Common Drugs

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be talking about commonly prescribed medications that have mental health side effects, which often go unnoticed by medical professionals. These side effects include memory loss, confusion, black outs, panic attacks, and more. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida.  www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Hidden Mental Dangers in Common Drugs

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld

Date of Broadcast: March 11, 2015

DEBRA: Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It is Wednesday, March 11th, 2015. I just actually was on another radio show this morning, on the Woman’s Radio Network, I think it was.

As I was talking – it was only for eight minutes – as I was talking, I was talking about detoxing our bodies and that we have toxic chemicals in our bodies and that we especially need to have a good source of water so that we can drink enough water and flush those toxic chemicals out.

I was talking about using Pure Body Liquid Zeolite in order to immediately, within 46 hours, start pulling those heavy metals and radiation and toxic chemicals out.

As I was talking to the host, I realized that you know what? There really isn’t anybody else talking about this. There are people talking about detox as cleaning out your intestines or something or getting off of drugs or getting off of alcohol. I’m talking about removing toxic chemicals from the body.

I can’t think of another website. I’m researching this stuff all the time. I can’t think of another website where so many options for removing different types of toxic chemicals were laid out and so many options for not putting toxic chemicals in your body in the first place by using toxic-free product.

There’s no other radio show like this. So you’re all very fortunate. You’re all very fortunate to be in the right place to getting this information because it really is the thing that is underlying all the health problems in the world today. It’s exposure to toxic chemicals.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist and she’s on every other Wednesday. I have her on so much because she knows all about the health danger of drugs, pharmaceuticals and their addictive quality and the side effects.

I always have to smile to myself except that it’s so sad when I’m watching television. You can’t watch television for an hour without seeing how many drug commercials and they show you beautiful pictures and have nice music playing in the background and a very soothing voice tone and saying how they’re going to relieve your symptoms. It’s always about the symptoms.

They’re going to relieve your symptoms and then they start giving you the whole list of side effects. “By the way, it will damage your liver and you can die.” But all of this is going on with music playing in the background.
There’s just so much harm that can come from drugs and so much we can talk about that I’m just having Pamela on every other week so that she can really educate us.

And also, if you have been listening for a while, you know that my brother recently died from drugs, prescription drugs, not recreational drugs. So I think it’s one of the most important toxic exposures we can talk about.

Today, we’re going to be talking about some of those hidden things that can happen that you guys are taking drugs for symptoms with side effects. And we’re specifically going to talk about mental health dangers, mental health side effects that can be going on that you don’t even realize from taking these synthetic drugs.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey. It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. I gave just a long introduction today, but you’re the one that must talk.
Anyway, I’ll just tell you that Pamela is a registered pharmacist. But instead of dispensing drugs – she has a pharmacy, a natural pharmacy called Botanical Resource where she dispenses other kinds of things made from natural ingredients, medicines made from natural ingredients.

Pamela, tell us a little bit about your background on that so the people can understand the difference between a drug like a prescription drug and what you’re doing.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. Yes. My training originally was in Basic Pharmacology. I’m a clinical pharmacist here in Florida.

At the University of Florida, I also studied Pharmacognosy which is Plant Science. Actually, they don’t offer that anymore. So it’s basically the study of medicinal plants and the pharmacological properties.

It’s a little bit more than just Herbalism. It’s talking about where in the body they work in different receptors and the dosage and where the plants are found and what parts of the plant we’re using. They have specific indications.
My pharmacy here really concentrates on saying to people that prescription medications are now what we’re using here. I know this very, very well. I work still full time as a pharmacist in a hospital. I know all the IV drugs. I know all the chemo drugs. I know all the medicines and all the drugs as well.

So if someone’s taking a medicine for hypertension or for sleep or whatever they’re doing, I can suggest a homeopathic or a vitamin alternative because the products we use here are really medical grade homeopathic products that you’re not going to necessarily find at the health food store.

I can customize a regimen for you, free of charge. We keep the charge here for you. It’s very professional. I really would like to serve you and your family if there would be questions about medications that you want to get off of or avoiding them.

I also can look at your blood work and decide if there are maybe prescriptions that are lurking in the future that you don’t want to be on. And I can just honestly tell you where we can go with that with homeopathy at a very modest price.

DEBRA: And she’s very good and very well-respected. All the doctors around can know her. I said to my MD, “Pamela told me to take this.” And he said, “Take it.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. It’s great.

DEBRA: Okay. So we’re going to be talking today about different drugs that are very common drugs and their hidden mental health dangers.

So I’ll just let you start.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, good. When we’re thinking about what would be most logical to discuss about these hidden dangers in some of the medications?

I wanted to talk about the hidden dangers in the mental health realm of commonly used medications that in some case, the side effects of these medicines might be misconstrued as being a new onset development to some disease or problem.

These are things that the doctor probably won’t catch and maybe even the pharmacist won’t catch because you just have a keen eye to look at maybe these are what are causing the problem.

So I made a little list and Debra and I have talked about this. I really want to go through some of these because this is very, very important for yourself, maybe an elderly relative. You need to know that these are very, very prominent problems.

I wanted to start with the statin medications. Those are the cholesterol-lowering medications that are very commonly prescribed. I would imagine 25% of the population. A lot of people are on this.

What we’re seeing is that they’re given – we know about the liver problems and that’s associated with that. And that was called Rhabdomyolysis where you get muscle damage.

But what we’re going to talk about is the mental health realm of these medicines. And memory loss is actually a black box warning, which is a very severe warning that’s on the package insert for these medicines.

If you’re taking a medication to lower your cholesterol and you notice that all of a sudden, you’re starting to have some memory problems, these medicines may very much be the problem, especially in elderly people. I’ve seen this quite frequently.

When they put on a cholesterol-lowering medicine, they start showing some signs of memory loss. The relatives and the doctor think it’s because the person’s getting older and they’re having some cognitive decline.

Once the person gets what’s called – we call it drug holiday where you go off the medicine for a few weeks, all of a sudden, they start perking up and acting like themselves. This is very, very important.

Do not misconstrue people having memory problems and elderly people showing more fragility and cognitive decline. And if they’re on statin medication, somebody needs to really look at that.

DEBRA: Pamela, one of the things that came to mind when you were talking just now is you’re talking about that this is a symptom that is on the little insert in the package. I immediately thought, how many people actually read those?

PAMELA SEEFELD: People don’t. You’re not given that when you go and have your prescription.
Basically, you get a little flyer of some side effects. They’re not telling you that memory loss is really one of them. It’s probably buried in there someplace.

But it’s not something – most people aren’t going to read that. The healthcare practitioner and very astute family members need to catch this because especially like I say in elderly people.

I have even seen that in people. I had a client of mine that was probably mid-50s. He was a computer programmer and he came to me. He was telling me, “I need something for my memory. I’m having some trouble remembering things.” He writes codes at the computer, so he really needs to have his mind sharp.

I realized he was on statin medication. I looked at his med list. I said, “This is what’s causing the problem. You need to go off this for a few weeks and see if it improves.”

And sure enough, he came back and said, “You know what? My memory is better.” This is in a younger person.
So I’m more concerned too about these elderly people that are in maybe a nursing home. Maybe they’re in assisted living. If you have an elderly relative and they’re on these medicines, you need to be really, really careful that memory problems that you’re treating with medicines are not from the drug.

DEBRA: Well, it just seems like such a thing that – memory loss. No.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s terrible really, right?

DEBRA: No, I was going to say – I was just having memory loss. No.
It’s just a thing that it seems like memory loss is so common as people got older. So we don’t think twice about it.

People stop in midsentence. I hear people stopping in midsentence and they can’t remember what they were saying.

And then they go, “Senior moment.” And we all just laugh.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly.

DEBRA: So you’re not on the lookout for this. It’s not like your nose is bleeding or something like that. It’s just something that people accept those, “That’s the way it is.” But it could be a response to this drug.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. That is my key concern. If we have elderly people that most of the time the people around them, the practitioner, the family member, maybe the little nurse’s aide that’s coming in to help, you either really look and see how the medicine is causing this problem.

Another medicine that’s pretty commonly prescribed and can cause some more problems is beta blockers. A beta blocker is for hypertension. There’s metropolol, atenolol, nadolol. There’s a bunch of them. And propranolol.

These drugs have been prescribed I would guess 50 years. Beta blockers have been around forever, but if you look at most people that have a little bit of hypertension – they’re using some newer drugs now, but a lot of these elderly people are on beta blockers.

And beta blockers block the beta cell or the beta receptor in the heart. They slow the heart rate down. They slow the blood pressure down.

So a lot of times, people use beta blockers if they have some mild hypertension. These are very, very commonly prescribed. I see this stuff all the time.

But they can cause confusion, memory loss and in some cases, I’ve seen where someone’s medication hasn’t been adjusted appropriately. This is pretty common.

The beta blockers can cause blackouts. So if somebody’s fainting, having their blood pressure goes to low, that can happen with people taking these things. They feel lightheaded and dizzy.

Especially in an elderly person, if they are on these medications and they’re having dizziness and lightheadedness, they’re going to be at risk for fall. And what do we think about falls when somebody’s having lightheadedness and having confusion? Fractures, right? Hip replacement, surgeries.

And then I can say this. When people are elderly and they have falls and they break bones, there’s a high morbidity in mortality associated with that because they’re elderly. They have had surgeries, then they go to the rehab, then they get an infection – you know what I’m talking about. There’s a whole thing that cascades along.

These things are avoidable. So if somebody that you know is on a beta blocker, they need to keep track of what their blood pressure and their heart rate are. And the doctor’s office can do that if they’re elderly and they’re having someone coming in to nurse.

But knowing where your blood pressure is, especially if it’s running on the low side and you’re on this beta blocker, they need to adjust it. That’s very, very important. But from a mental standpoint, we know that confusion can be other things.

Imagine, which is a very common scenario, a person in her 80s that’s on a statin medication and a beta blocker – I’m telling you it happens all the time. And they come in to the hospital. Altered mental status, they’re confused, they’re tired. And then they work these people up for all this stuff. And really it’s the medicine.

DEBRA: But they don’t – when these people come in, they don’t look and check and say, “It’s the medicine.” They put them through all these other things and maybe give them another drug.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. It just depends if someone’s really on top of things. Most of the time, they’re not going –

This is what happens. Dr. X prescribed this medicine. Now, they go to the hospital and they have somebody else there. So they’re not going to check what somebody else’s medicines are. They usually leave those alone.

They just start looking and saying, “Why are they showing confusion? Why are they showing lethargy?”

And when they take their blood pressure, they might say, “Okay. Their blood pressure is a little low, but maybe that’s how they normally run.”

This is what’s really important. You need to be aware of your own body habitus. You need to be aware of what your blood pressure normally runs.

These are little things that you can probably find out even if you go to the Publix and put your arm in the blood pressure machine if you don’t know. But you should know what your normal results are so that if something looks strange or if you’re being placed on a medicine, you know where your baseline is.

Doesn’t that make sense?

DEBRA: It does make sense. First I want to say for people who don’t live in Florida, the Publix that Pamela just mentioned is a supermarket.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m sorry. It’s a grocery store. It’s a grocery store, correct. So whatever grocery store or the pharmacy, they have a little blood pressure machine.

DEBRA: You can go to the pharmacy. They usually have a blood pressure machine.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. Yes.

DEBRA: But the other thing that I’m thinking about is that there really – this whole thing about side effects. We’re talking about mental health side effects today. But the whole thing about side effects is so widespread with these drugs.
I started setting toxic chemicals because of toxic chemicals in consumer products. I didn’t start setting them because of drugs.

But drugs are made – most of them are synthetic. They’re made out of the same coal tar and crude oil that all the toxic chemicals are made of. It’s all made in the lab, the same way that they make the toxic chemicals in consumer products.

It’s just like you’re taking – we have things called Poison Control Centers. But all these drugs are just like taking poisons. They’re taking poisons.

Pretty much every drug you can find, here’s a whole list of health effects. I think that if I were taking drugs like these – there are so many online resources that if you don’t –

I know at the pharmacy, the pharmacists, they give a little pamphlet or something about the drug and make sure that you understand I guess how to use it. But maybe you don’t always get the health effects.

You can go online and look up any drug. It will tell you the health effects.

For me, if I was taking multiple drugs, I would just write down all the health effects for taking five drugs, which I wouldn’t do. But some people do.

I would write down – memory loss, memory loss, memory loss. I’d write down all the health effects and I’d see which ones cause the same health effects like memory loss. And I’d also really know what to be looking for that if I start having symptoms, I would already know if I made a list.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly. And just knowing that – we were talking about the statin medication. We’re talking about the high percentage of medications, the beta blockers.

In place of a statin medication, you can use Pantethine. I did it quite a bit. I have a medical grade Pantethine. It will lower your cholesterol about 20 points a month.

So why would you take a chance using a statin medication with the memory problem, the muscle damage, the liver disease, all these different things?

It’s the same thing with hypertension medications, the beta blockers that we’re talking about. I use a homeopathic product called Crataegus Complex. That will lower the heart rate and will lower the blood pressure. It’s pretty consistent.

I’ve used it extensively. It’s homeopathic. There are no side effects, but it contains homeopathic versions of Cardiac glycosides which have these effects on the heart, which are very advantageous for someone that got some mild hypertension, even severe hypertension. It can help augment the use of additional medication.

There are solutions to these instead of having these and taking a risk with your memory.

Also, I wanted to really talk a little bit about benzodiazepines. Benzodiazepines are these anxiety drugs like Xanax, Ativan, Clonazepam, Valium. These medicines are highly prescribed.

If you work in a retail pharmacy and you’re a pharmacist, they are fast movers. We have a name for that. They’re in huge, huge container. They just put the bottle underneath it and they fall in there.

They put a number, 100 or whatever they want. They set it in a computer. They don’t even have timeouts anymore because there are so many that they dispense. This is really widespread. We’re talking about these mental health implications and what are some of the side effects of these.

If you put somebody in the benzodiazepine, this works in the brain. It was called the benzodiazepine receptor and it causes this Coleman effect. But the problem with that is that you get what’s called tolerance and dependence. So you need more medicine.

Take the same effect over a period of time and you become dependent on it. There’s psychological and physical dependence. So you think you need the medicine and physically, you start craving the medicine.

The problem with this in the mental health realm is that these medicines can lead to panic attacks. They can lead to confusion of the elderly and falls. And we were talking about elderly people fall.

It’s a high chance that they might have a very negative outcome as a result to those because they’re frail. They have to undergo the surgery. They have to go to rehab. There are a lot of secondary infections that happen.

It’s not easy pass for these people, even for younger people if this would be the case. So the impairment and the panic, if the person is not taking them consistently – they’re taking the medicine twice a day and they forget to take it or they need more medicine and they haven’t gone to the doctor increasing the prescription because now they’re dependent on it.

Panic attacks happen with these medicines quite frequently and that can be very dangerous. Can you imagine a person having a panic attack while they’re driving a car?

DEBRA: I wouldn’t want to be in a car around them.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly. These are hidden dangers of these medicines that I think people need to realize.

When you start taking these even just temporarily for sleep or for anxiety, you’re on a long term path of some problems.

That’s the danger with these.

Passionflower is a partial agonist to this receptor. It has no tolerance, no dependence. It’s very effective as an anxielitic without having these side effects. So really when you…

DEBRA: I need to interrupt you because we missed the last break. Didn’t that seem like a long one?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay.

DEBRA: So let’s take a break. I was listening to you and I completely forgot to look at the time.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Sorry.

DEBRA: Anyway, listeners. This is what it’s like when Pamela and I get together. We just talk and talk.

Anyway, you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

When we come back, we’ll give you her phone number and you can call her up to [inaudible 00:21:49]. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She dispenses medicines based on plants and other natural sources. She has her own pharmacy called Botanical Resource in Clearwater, Florida.

Pamela, give us your phone number because Pamela will talk to you for free on the phone and help you figure out the drugs that you’re taking and suggest some natural remedies if you’d like her to do that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. You can call me here at my pharmacy. It’s (727) 442-4955.

And I would be very honored to help you and your family get off any medication that you need to get off of or also avoiding medication. If you have any health issues or concerns, I’m very well-versed in all these different problems.

DEBRA: And she really is. She’s been doing this for more than 20 years. She’s very well-respected in our medical and alternative community here in Clearwater, Florida.

Okay. So tell us more about hidden dangers in medications commonly prescribed, hidden mental dangers in medications commonly prescribed.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. So we were talking a little bit about the benzos, how the benzodiazepines have this affinity for causing problems with confusion, with panic attacks, all these kinds of things that can result via the dependency on the medicine.

DEBRA: What are some common names for those drugs?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Ativan, Xanax, Valium, those are the ones that most people are on. They’re the most commonly used ones.

What I should tell people is that many times when you’re given these medicines, initially that discussion about dependence and tolerance never comes up. The doctor doesn’t hand this to you and say, “By the way, there’s dependence and tolerance with these. So there might be some problems down the road that you might become dependent on.” That’s not in the conversation. I think that’s pretty bad.

DEBRA: I think so too. So it shouldn’t – we recommend that if people are being given drugs that they should ask their doctor since they’re not going to be told. Ask their doctor about if they could become dependent on that drug.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely. Really you can look case in point the opiate addiction epidemic in this country, how you have a huge percentage of the patients on narcotics, long term.

When their initial – the new study shows, especially for back problems, that if you treat them with anti-inflammatory, physical therapy and maybe a low dose of steroids, you don’t need narcotics at all.

But I don’t think the conversation is really brought up to people when they have an injury that the narcotics after a short period of time, many people can be left in 10 days, that they already start becoming dependent on it.

So we need to really look at a very frank discussion before we start any of these medicines about some things that we can do in place of using these medications. Most people I don’t think really realize or maybe don’t grasp that these can be some long term problems.

And especially for the memory, you think about what’s the most important thing in your body. You want your health, but if you don’t have your memory and you can’t concentrate, it’s going to be very hard to go to your job and just do your activities in daily living and maybe you enjoy reading. All these things are going to go out the window. This is going to be very, very bad.

So you need to really think about what you’re doing. Nothing comes without a price. Isn’t that true?

DEBRA: Yes. I’ll just give you just some example from my life with regard to this question. I take thyroid supplement. I take natural Armour Thyroid Supplement.

But the reason that I’m taking it now is not because I decided in recent history to take it. It’s because when I was – how old was I? I think I was about 29 or something like that.

Of all people who you think would be natural, my chiropractor said, “I think you could use a little thyroid, just a little thyroid supplement that would help you.”

She didn’t really know me. I had just gone to her just because I have a little thing going on in my neck. Right at the first visit, she says, “I think you could use a little thyroid.”

And she sent me off to an endocrinologist who put me on Synthroid. Now Synthroid is the thyroid supplement that leads to people taking psych drugs because it gets them such mental health symptoms.

My brother who we’ve talked about before, who died recently, he was taking half a dozen drugs including some of these.

He ended up in a psych ward after taking Synthroid. This is just a thyroid medication, thyroid medication.

Here I am 25 years later or something, I’m still taking thyroid because once you started – I never took those psych drugs. They wanted to give them to me, but I wouldn’t take them.

What I did was I moved from Synthroid to a natural thyroid because once you start taking it, you can’t stop taking it for the rest of your life.

And my chiropractor, very sweet woman, very natural-oriented, she sent me off to the endocrinologist to get synthetic thyroid medication, which I now have to take for the rest of my life. There was a time period when – I’m watching the clock.

There was a time period when I couldn’t get my Armour Thyroid. There was a supply problem. I almost went into a coma. It’s like you get…

PAMELA SEEFELD: You’re right. No. No.

DEBRA: I mean this is a real life story. And I can’t choose to not take it. I think we need to be extremely careful when doctors or chiropractors or anybody are recommending taking drugs because you need to find out what are the long term things that are going to happen.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. Knowing what’s going on and understanding that there are long term implications with anything.

I mean I have a stereotype, but a lot of Americans – we really want it easy to fix everything. I understand. We get impatient because we’re so used to everything just running so perfect. So we want a pill to solve every problem.

But really homeopathic things or vitamins that can mimic medications without having all those side effects, they really need to be embraced in a large scale operation so to speak. Maybe that’s not going to happen in this country. I’m okay with that. In Europe, a lot of people really embraced alternative medicine, maybe more so than here.

But this is really coming of age. You see a lot of people do spend a lot of money on supplements and want information.

I’m very busy because people don’t want to be taking all these. The awareness about the side effects is becoming more obvious now.

You’re right about the thyroid. The thyroid – they don’t tell you when they first put you on thyroid. If your thyroid is running a little bit low, you’re going to be on it for the rest of your life. They’re never going to take you off of it.

DEBRA: And every increasing doses too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly. That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: People don’t know how much dose they’re going to take. But I have to go in and get a blood test every three months.

Anyway, we need to go to break. But I wanted to tell that story. When we come back, we will talk more about the hidden health dangers and hidden mental health dangers in common drugs.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld.

And quickly, what’s your phone number?

PAMELA SEEFELD: (727) 442-4955.

DEBRA: Okay, good. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist.

She mentioned at the beginning that she studied Pharmacognosy. I love that word. It’s a study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources.

The first time she was on, I looked up that the root of that word is pharma. Pharma is medicine. And cognosy is information and intelligence.

So it really is – Pamela, tell us the difference between a medicine that comes from a living source versus a synthetic source.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very true. And when you think about it, two-thirds of all the medicines we have originally came from natural sources that they tested, the plants and so forth. They figured out that these compounds had activity.

When we look at it, it comes from a natural source. But the good part about it is that it’s more homogenous with our body because it’s not made in chemistry in a factory. These things the body recognizes and uses, I would say it more effectively medicates the system than the prescription medication. That’s the beauty of it.

A lot of people study Energetics and how things have energy in themselves and implicitly. But we know that something that’s coming from a plant will be highly effective and maybe even more advantageous for the individual and also you really see this a lot with animals.

With people, we have so much going on in our head that we many times don’t recognize the subtle nuisances. But with animals, they respond tremendously better to homeopathic medicine. And because things from plants, I think their energy is much different than people themselves.

DEBRA: Yes. I think so too. It’s the world that we’re designed to be in. Synthetic products come from digging up crude oil from under the ground where Mother Nature put it.

And of course there are places like the La Brea Tar Pits in LA where you can go and see it bubbling up out of the ground.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly.

DEBRA: Usually, it’s underground. If you look at non-industrial people before we have all these industrial machines that can dig it up, they didn’t use crude oil unless it was bubbling up. If you see…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I got the point.

DEBRA: Yeah. If you see where it is in the world, how many locations have crude oil bubbling up at the surface? Not many.

So I don’t think it’s really – nature didn’t intend this to be rubbing in our skin and eating it and drinking it and taking it as drugs.

Anyway, we have some more drugs to talk about.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, absolutely. I’m going to talk a little bit about the Diuretics. Diuretics are commonly used – Lasix, Hydrochlorothiazide, you have a lot of people on these medications to remove fluid off the body.

Diuretics many times, they lead to dehydration. People don’t realize it, but of course it’s removing fluid off the body. As we get older, a sense of thirst changes significantly. So we don’t realize when we’re thirsty.

And then these people that have kidney problems or blood pressure problems, the doctor is like, “We don’t want too much fluid. We want to take this out of the body.”

So what happens is removing the fluids off the body is going to be a problem because if somebody is dehydrated as a result of it, that can lead to confusion. So this can also be another course of someone having falls, someone having issues where all of a sudden, they’re losing their sense of direction, memory loss, things like that.

Dehydration, if you think about – have you been dehydrated before? It’s significant and it can cause mental problems.
If somebody is elderly or if they’re on new onset and they’re in diuretic and they can’t figure out why their memory is shaky, they’re having some trouble with just remembering things, they need to check and see. Are they being over [inaudible 00:42:57] or they’re having dehydration setting in. That can be a problem too.

So you’d be surprised how many people are on a statin medication, a beta blocker and a diuretic at the same time. It’s a lot.

DEBRA: Wow. You would know because you’re dispensing these drugs in the hospital.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly. Exactly. So this combination of medications is pretty commonly used, even with the benzos if you think about it. So all these medicines together, if your grandmother or your mother all of a sudden is looking particularly frail, she’s falling, she’s having memory lapses, she’s not remembering simple ordinary things, maybe forgetting people’s names, you need to look and see. Are these medicines causing the problem? I’m telling you, this is a very common issue where people are missing this very, very often.

Another medicine I was going to talk about is Lariam. This is a medicine that not so many people are going to go on, but I really want to mention them a little bit. It’s something that they use to protect against malaria. And if you go out of the country to an area, like when I went to India, there are times they recommend you take this before you go and while you’re there and for a short period of time afterwards.

So if you’re going to do any international traveling and there are areas that they’re endemic with malaria, this is something that they commonly prescribe.

Lariam can cause severe psychosis. This is something that you’re not going to be told about. So if someone is doing any international traveling and they’re considering going on this, you need to realize that the mental health problems that are associated with this medication are very significant. I don’t think they’re really relayed to the patients very often.

Have you ever traveled overseas that you were near with malaria?

DEBRA: I’ve traveled to Europe, but I haven’t ever traveled to Asia or South America or places like that where malaria would be something to watch out for.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I mean this is off to being passed, but I think it’s important to mention because it just depends.

You have a very diverse crowd that’s going to be listening to the show people all over the country. And there are people who are…

DEBRA: All over the world actually.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly. Exactly, very well put. So this is something that you really need to look at.
If you’re starting to have some mental health changes as a result of going on the medicine, you need to realize that it’s the Lariam. This is highly documented.

So it’s one of these things that maybe, we call it – in pharmacy, we call it an orphan drug. It’s not used a lot. But it’s something that if you’re going to do any traveling to areas where malaria is a problem, they will recommend that you go on some prevention.

And the other medicines really aren’t working as well anymore. This is the problem because we resist it and so forth.

But that’s just a side note. I just thought I would bring that up.

The things that really are going to be important the people that are listening today and in the future who are still listening to the show, are look at these commonly prescribed medicines that you have probably a good quarter of the population on, any of these at anyone’s time and look to see are these really the focus of the problem. Are the reasons why the person is having some memory loss?

And especially, may I say for the people that have relatives that are elderly or they may be the elderly themselves? Realize that it’s not your fault and it’s not your bodies declining that are causing these problems. Many times, it could be the medicines.

What we need to do is say, “Maybe they need to be stopped for a short period of time and see if the person improves.”

In many case, I have seen improvements in people when they just took a small period of time away from some of these medicines that were causing the problem.

These are common problems that you’re going to see. But like I said, it can be misconstrued as the person just having some frailty and becoming more elderly. Do you see what I’m saying?

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And I think it’s important for people to realize…

DEBRA: Okay. Let me ask you. Is there any danger in – if somebody’s listening or they’re making notes or they’re going to read the transcript and they know say a parent or relative or themselves are on these medications, they say, “Let me just try not taking them and see if my memory comes back.”

Is there any danger of just stopping your medicine? I mean people are on medicines because there’s something wrong with them in the first place.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. That’s a good point. I mean I can give people direction or they can tell to their doctor and ask them, “Do you think this may be causing some memory problems?”

The easiest one to stop for a short period of time would be the cholesterol lowering medicine because two weeks of no cholesterol lowering medicine, that’s not going to make a big difference. That might be enough for you just to see a difference and then go back on it.

But I would suggest is that these things if they are having some problems or if it’s a new onset, there are things that are showing up with the medicine being initiated, maybe they use some homeopathic or some alternative. Especially if they’re monitoring their blood pressure, use some homeopathics.

I’m not saying that they just stop everything and don’t take anything at all. You would want to gradually switch over to some homeopathy or some homeopathic medical products and see how your blood pressure is working, but also see how your memory is improving.

The cholesterol would be the easiest because you’re only stopping it for a short period of time. It wouldn’t be threatening your life. It wouldn’t be a danger for a short period of time to take a drug holiday from that.
So yeah, it’s important that you don’t want to just be stopping things. And medicines aren’t the big evil person here. But it’s to say that maybe these problems that are showing up for the person are very much related to the combination of medicines or even just one of these medicines.

I don’t think that this conversation is really held quite frequently because I see quite a lot of people are very educated coming here on these things and they had no idea that this might be part of the problem. It’s pretty established.
There are a lot of new studies that show that things that I was talking about today are highly correlated with these medicines. This is important.

I’m more concerned about the elderly person that might be on these and they don’t really know how to voice what’s going on. But if you are a family member and you start seeing some changes in them, don’t think it’s just because they’re getting older. That’s my big take-home message today for people.

It’s not because it’s a senior moment like you were saying. It’s not a senior moment. Maybe it’s the medicine. And we need to rule that out before we decide that it’s just because you’re getting older. We’re all getting older.

But that’s really important. What if this is robbing this person of some real quality time in their life?

DEBRA: Yeah. Well, I do know that a lot of toxic chemicals that we’re exposed to in consumer products can also cause all kinds of mental effects including memory loss and not thinking clearly and depression and confusion and such. So it makes sense to me that these drugs will too.

We’re almost out of time. So thank you so much again for being on. Pamela will be on again two weeks from today.

And there is a whole list of shows from the past that you could listen to as well. Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. I don’t have time to explain it.

Thank you so much.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you.

DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. In our last interview, we talked about my brother’s death from prescription drugs. Today we’ll talk about how natural remedies can act as a bridge to move away from taking prescription drugs and their side effects. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO

Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd

Guest: Pamela Seefeld, P.Ph.s

Date of Broadcast: February 11, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Wednesday, February 11th, almost Valentine’s Day. It’s February 11th, 2015.

We have a beautiful, early spring day here in Florida. My office is what’s called a Florida room here, which is a room that has big windows. It’s got 17 ft. of windows. I think it’s 17 ft. or something like that. And as I do the show, I just look out the windows into my beautiful backyard with oak trees and birds flying by.

In the spring time, I have this whole bank of beautiful azaleas right under my window and they’re starting to bloom. They’re just starting. So for the next two weeks, we’re going to have beautiful azaleas. And so spring is starting to be here. Even if you’re in the snow in Florida, it’s starting to be spring.

So my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. She’s been on many times before. I have her on every other Wednesday because she has so much information and prescription drugs. Even over-the-counter drugs have so many health effects.

The last show we did – actually, two weeks ago, we did a replay because I didn’t do any live shows last week. But a month ago, we did a show about how prescription drugs just undermine your health over a lifetime of taking them. We did that because of the recent death of my brother from prescription drugs. So if you haven’t listened to that show, you might want to take a listen to that one.

But today, what we’re going to talk about is how to get off prescription drugs and also other types of drugs that are over-the-counter or even recreational drugs or psychiatric drugs that often, you can’t just quit. Natural remedies can be used as a bridge between taking these drugs and being off of them.

So welcome, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey! It’s great to be here.

Debra: Thank you. It’s always nice to have you on. I always like talking about this. You are a – wait a minute, I have to find the word. I keep forgetting it. What’s the word? It’s pharma—

PAMELA SEEFELD: Pharmacognosy.

Debra: Pharmacognosy! That’s right. I have it here in the description somewhere. There it is right there. So I always love giving that word because I’m very happy to know that there is a whole field called pharmacognosy that is just about the healing power of plants.

The word itself, pharma-, that’s a drug, but cognosy means information, intelligence. It really describes what a plant does. A plant has its own intelligence. It can work with your body and all of the nature intelligence that happens between different kinds of natural things. it’s so different from what a drug is.

So with that said, let’s start talking about how people can get off prescription drugs with natural remedies. Let’s start with psychiatric drugs.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I just kind of picked a few different things and then we can just expand upon that. Anti-depressants, we’ll go through that category first. So if a person has some depression symptoms, they go to the doctor and the doctor give them most commonly something called an SSRI, which is a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. These drugs include Zoloft, Paxil and Prozac. They’re very commonly prescribed.

And in fact, many times, in most cities here in the country, they test positive for these in the water supply because there’s so much of it.

It’s in the tap water now.

Debra: That’s just amazing!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it’s in most municipalities – that and cholesterol lowering drugs and estrogen from birth control pills and from women taking estrogen. Those three things are found ubiquitously in water supplies around the country.

Debra: Another reason to get a water filter.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Well said.

So let’s say that somebody has depression and they go on these medicines. And then what happens is the original instance that they were depressed about maybe passes (maybe they lost a loved one or something like that) and then they end up staying on these things for long periods of time.

So to avoid this, basically, most of the time, the physician won’t re-evaluate at any point coming in the future. They’ll basically just stay on it and maybe even the person thinks that they need this medicine because they’ve gotten so accustomed to it.

The neurons, when you start taking these medicines away, there’s a process that takes place and it’s called neuronal retreat. What it does is the neurons start to retract from where they’re branched out. And so that’s what explains the transient amnesia for some people, the anxiety, the sleep problems, all these things that gets them anxious and make them think that they can’t get off the medicine

So there’s a physiological change in the brain that takes place taking these things that needs to be addressed before you take them away.

So a lot of the times when we look at the brain and we talk about taking away anti-depressants, first and foremost, we need to say, “Okay, what’s going on in the frontal cortex where we do our thinking and reasoning?”

The brain is folic acid and it’s made of omega 3 fish oil. So what I normally do for people if they’re trying to come off of these, what we normally would say is that, “Okay, to avoid these electrical impulses in the brain, this foggy thinking, the anxiety, all these side effects that happen when you first try and take the medicine away, what we want to do is we want to refurbish the brain. And at the same time, we really want to use Body Anew, a homeopathic detox to just clean out all the stuff in the body that might be contributing to it.”

So really, the hallmark of taking away an anti-depressant would be first and foremost is to say, “With the depression that you had,” you kind of go back and look, “was that issue resolved?” If there’s an underlying depression, that can be a problem.

But what clinically is shown (and there’s been studies with this) is that if you used a product called OmegaBrite – OmegaBrite is a fish oil, it’s a 7:1 ratio of EPA to DHA. It was developed by Dr. Andrew Stole. He’s a Harvard psychiatrist. He did a double-blind placebo-controlled trial with Zoloft, which is the anti-depressant we are discussing. And in the trial, it was actually better for depression than Zoloft. That’s very, very important for people to realize. Think about that.

There is a fish oil developed by a psychiatrist. He’s a doctor he lectures worldwide. He’s very famous. He’s at Harvard University. This is his product. He has a patent on it. He did the study, the clinical data that show that this works better than Zoloft. That’s very important for your patients and the people that are listening to this show. Don’t you agree?

Debra: I do. So explain why it’s better to take this natural remedy than taking the Zoloft. Why is it better for your body to do that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: So omega 3 fish oil, I’m sure there’s somebody perhaps listening to this on the computer or on the radio and saying, “Well, I take fish oil. I know about fish oil. I take that every day.” Well, there different concentrations of EPA to DHA. The 7:1 ratio that Dr. Andrew Stole has patented and he did the studies on is the one that shows to be the most advantageous for depression.

The reason why you would want to use a natural product instead of the anti-depressant is that the fish oil itself does not have these long-term side effects and you would want to be on omega 3 fish oils anyway because we know fish oil turns on over 300 different genes in the body, it works effectively against cardiovascular disease, cancer, anti-inflammatory. So it’s doing all of these other heart-healthy things.

We look at heart disease being the no. 1 killer in the country. We know that this is something that is really, very important. In fact, isn’t this American Heart Moms? They wear red…?

Debra: I think it is. I was thinking we should be talking about heart, but I wanted to talk about this…

PAMELA SEEFELD: It is! These all coincides with it because you only want to know that omega 3 fish oils, it’s imperative for the brain function, but also, it’s so significant for the heart.

In fact, when people do studies on omega 3’s and they radio-label it, so they can see it lighting up in the body and they do PET scans, in the very beginning, if you just started taking omega 3’s and maybe you haven’t been taking them in a long-term basis, the heart takes up quite a bit of it. It concentrates and it’ll light up. So it’s really important to know that sometimes you have to saturate these areas.

Debra: We’ll talk more about this when we come back. We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She is a pharmacognocist, which is a special field of the study of medicinal plants. She’s also a registered pharmacist who can dispense drugs, but she likes plants better. She’s telling us today about how you can take plants instead of drugs. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

Pamela, before we go on, please tell the listeners how they can reach you. Pamela has a business and website called Botanical Resource at BotanicalResource.com, but the best thing to do is to just call her up on the phone and she will talk to you about whatever drugs you’re taking and tell you what you can do to get off of them.

She can also help you with any physical condition you have or your children or your pets and she’s happy to do that free. So give her a call. Pamela, tell everyone how they can reach you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The number here is 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I would be greatly honored to help any of you or your family member with any questions you have about your medications. Perhaps you want to get off of medications or you know it’s coming and they want to prescribe you something. I would be most happy to help you with that selection and prescribe something that’s natural for you that would be very effective.

Debra: She’s very good and she’s very well-known here in this community where I live in Clearwater, Florida because she’s helped so many people here. All the doctors know who she is. All the doctors I’ve ever talked to know who she is and she’s just very well-regarded. So take advantage of the help that she can give you.

Alright! So let’s go on. We were talking about anti-depressants.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! So we were talking about using something that has effectiveness. Someone might say they want to take 5-HTP. I think it’s 5-HTP is good. It turns into serotonin. Maybe they want to take other kinds of natural mood boosters. That’s fine. But if you’re really trying to get off of a prescription, you want to definitely have some kind of meditation that is really going to work.

The thing that you need to do is use specifically and foremost the anti-depressant fish oil by Dr. Stole if you really want to come off the medication. So I would tell you that that’s the most effective medicine that you could use .

And with that, we know that folic acid works specifically to remyelinatethe outside of the nerves. High dose folic acid (and I usually use 5 mg.) is very specific to – it binds to serotonin. There are five serotonin receptors in the brain. It binds to four of them. So you get natural anti-depressant activity with folic acid.

Most people know folic acid as being something that’s used when they’re pregnant and they’re trying to protect against neural tube defects. Why do we take folic acid when women are pregnant? Because they want to prevent these specific birth defects that take place and those are in the brain. We know that it has high affinity for the brain and it’s very specific to refurbish those areas.

So you would be taking this for a cognitive boost, so to speak, preventing against neurological decline, preventing against dementia, preventing against Alzheimer’s, all these other things that maybe someday, you’d be concerned about and that you’d be taking these same products as well.

So I think it’s just all-encompassing to take the high dose folic acid. Take the OmegaBrite and you take these at the same time as taking the anti-depressant for about two to three weeks and then you start breaking, just putting the anti-depressants away. I’ve done this hundreds of times and it works very well.

Debra: That’s so great. That’s so great. Well, let’s talk about pain because there’s so many people that are in pain. Isn’t this one of the top reasons why people start taking drugs in the first place?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. Pain is a very important subject and I think we really need to spend some time on that. So what happens is somebody gets in a car accident, they lifted something to heavy, whatever happens with this train or they doing backyard work, whatever happens. All of a sudden, they’re injured, they go to the doctor, they give them a narcotic and they start becoming addicted to the narcotic. We know opiates have tolerance and dependence, so after a while, you need more medicine, you need to take it more frequently and you need to get higher dose.

So that’s the problem. I think sometimes when people have an injury and if they were to realize that eventually, it’s going to set them up to this long-term addiction, they really would have second thoughts of embracing the medicine in the first place. I really think that’s true of a lot of people.

Debra: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: But we look at it and we say, “Okay, there are different kinds of pain.” And actually, the new studies show that someone who has a back injury has a far better outcome if they use heat, physical therapy, massage and using anti-inflammatories, very specific doses for a period of time (maybe Ibuprofen or Naproxen). The trick with these kind of things if you have an injury is to take them three times a day with foods for let’s say five days, seven days or something like that.

This basically gets inflammation down. They found that the people that actually the anti-inflammatories on a scheduled basis for a short period of time have a far better outcome. They’re back to work. They’re feeling better.

We see a lot of this. I’m not against this. There are lot of workmen who gets comp, right, where someone gets injured. They go to the doctor and they get narcotics and there’s a high propensity for these people not to return to work. And so we lose a lot of productivity because basically, they’re not getting better, but then too, there’s an impairment issue with the narcotics, correct?

So they’re taking this on a long-term basis. It’s not going to be a week or two. They’re going to be on this for months, maybe years.

So if you have a back injury, I’m not saying you can’t be on narcotics. I’m sure a lot of people who are listening are maybe on pain medicines and want to get off of them, but you need to look and see where it’s working.

It’s working in the brain. It’s called a centrally-acting pain medication, right? And if you have a fresh injury and you want to have the highest outcome and get back to your regular schedule (you’re working out, you’re going to work), you really need to embrace some anti-inflammatories and maybe some muscle relaxants first and foremost before you ever touch a narcotic.

Debra: Because a narcotic only decreases pain. It doesn’t do anything to help heal your body, right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And when you take a narcotic (you’re taking oxycodone or hydrocodone, Vicodin, Percocet, all these types of things), when you take that, there’s no solving taking place – none, zero. What is it doing? It just blocks your perception of pain in the brain. So you still have the injury, you still are sore, it’s still inflamed, but your perception or your thinking of it is gone.

Debra: So then you might go out and play a round of golf or whatever or whatever activities you like to do and you’re just aggravating the injury.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! That’s exactly right.

Debra: …because you’re not having the perception. This is one of the reasons why I don’t take pain pills. If I have a cold or something, I don’t take drugs because they cover up awareness of what’s really going on with your body and I want to know if my body is getting well, I want to have a real perception of what’s really going on in my body so that I can do the right thing to help support its healing. And when you take narcotics, that all goes out the window.

We need to go to break again, but we’ll be back and talk more about this. We’re also going to be talking about sleep aides. We’re going to cover it today. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants at her business called Botanical Resource. That’s at BotanicalResource.com. When we come back, we’ll tell you again how you can call her and get her personal advice. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances. Pamela, tell us again what your phone number is so that people can call you for free advice.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, just call me here at my pharmacy. All consultations are free and I’d be very happy to look at what you’re taking and see if there’s something else, an alternative. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. The number here at Botanical Resource is 747-442-4955. Please let me help you, I’d be glad to.

Debra: Yes. And tell her that you heard her on the radio, so she’ll know. So we were talking about pain killers.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. And your wording is really great, talking about you want to know and have the perception of the pain, so you know not to be reinjured or that you might be harming yourself. People really get their mind around that. Blocking out the perception of an injury is not the solution because what’s going to happen is first of all, you might become addicted to the medicine, which is highly likely. Secondly, you’re not really solving where the problem is because the pain reliever is blocking the signal from your brain to the injury.

So you really want to start using anti-inflammatories. If you don’t want to use Ibuprofen and Naproxen and these types of things that are over-the-counter, curcumin (standardized turmeric) works excellent. It’s a COX-2 inhibitor. It works like Celebrex. It’s a very strong anti-inflammatory. And don’t forget omega 3 fish oils. Taking these things on a scheduled basis three times a day, taking curcumin, which is a really great product with with boswellia and turmeric, these things work in tandem and are actually better than medication. You can do this.

Let me point out something else too with the narcotics. It’s not only with the addiction and the poor outcomes, which they see with an injury, also, if you’re losing lots of Ibuprofen (like a lot of these athletes are popping Ibuprofen for injuries because they have to keep in form, a football player perhaps), those have a high activity for damaging the kidneys and a lot of these people end up in kidney failure. So people need to realize these are not innocuous products.

Debra: No, but they do. They take them like candy.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah.

Debra: But I also want to mention that particularly for pain, if there’s been an injury or even – I’m trying to think. I’ve been in a couple of car accidents. But just in the everyday wear and tear of life, you can end up having aches and pains (you’re sitting in chair wrong for two hours and things like that), I think massage is great and it’s not even something you take. It’s so helpful for getting rid of those pains and actually healing and moving things back to the right place and getting the tension out of the muscles.

And so we could think outside of the box altogether here when it comes to pain. That’s why I like to feel my pain. That’s why I like to feel my pain, because I know it’s gone.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah, exactly. The whole idea is that behind this, if you have an injury – you’re going to be injured at some point in your life, maybe not so severely, but you’re going to lift something heavy, you’re going to do something, you’re going to get in an accident. This is inevitable for everybody. Everyone’s got strains and pulls.

But it’s how you solve the problem and the methods that you employ and what you take, that’s where it’s going to improve your whole outcome. One time that you end up taking narcotics for a back injury or for something that happened, that may be could’ve been treated with some homeopathic muscle relaxants, with some fish oil, with some anti-inflammatories that have the same kind of data, that does show it blocks COX-2 or blocks eicosanoids that cause pain and doing this in a natural manner and having high effectiveness, there’s an empowerment to it as well. You’re not going to be addicted to these things and you’re not going to run the risk of having kidney failures as a result of taking too many of these what are called NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents) that are either prescription or over-the-counter.

These are real risks. People need to realize – even myself from a pharmacist’s perspective, I really have to question whether all these people really need these things and they wouldn’t have done better with some natural products in the beginning.

Debra: Yes, I agree. I totally agee. Okay, good! So should we move on to sleep aides?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, I think that’s good. So, sleeping and anxiety. We just picked up two common problems that people have and that they might reach for a medicine during these issues.

Sleeping, a lot of people have sleep issues. That’s a pretty common thing. I still think people should rule out sleep apnea. Sleep studies are really important. The doctor can address that. Some people do not breathe consistently when they’re sleeping and as a result, they don’t get to REM sleep.

But say the person is pretty healthy, it doesn’t look like they have a sleep issue besides the sleep apnea and they want to go on something for sleep. They’d go to the doctor and he gives them Xanax or Ativan or Valium. The person is taking this drug (it’s called a benzodiazepines) and maybe they’re even taking some during the day for anxiety. When you’re taking these medicines, we know that these medicines have tolerance and dependence just like the narcotics. So sometimes, you need more medicine. After a while, you become addicted to it. There’s a physical and a psychological addiction. You think you need it and you also physically need it. I tell people, “Before you go down the road of taking benzos, you need to realize that this is a long-term game.”

You really can get away with using a medical grade passion flower, which is a partial agonist to the receptor, the benzodiazepine receptor. So when you have agonistic activity on there, it actually can take the place of drugs and it can actually take the drug off.

Say we have somebody that’s been on a benzo and they want to come off of it, what we’d normally use is a high dose folic acid to start repairing the brain. We would also use a calming fish oil. I normally use Pro-DHA and Pro-DHA 1000 because that’s going to start taking some of the anxiety away and it has a calming, focusing effect on the brain.

Those products typically are DHA to EPA, 4:1, some place in that range. And when we do that, with the passion flower, what it’s going to do is it’s going to start actually repairing the brain itself as far as the areas where you go into sleep. But the drug and the passion flower, they’re going to both hit the receptor and as a result of it, it kind of fakes out the brain and the brain is not going to know which medicine is actually on it. And that’s the beauty of it.

So you can take passion flower and tolerance and dependence are not side effects with it and you get the same outcome as in taking a benzo.

Debra: And I’ve experienced that because you’ve given me passion flower and I wasn’t taking any kind of sleeping pill drugs before that, but my ability to sleep is sometimes better and sometimes worse, but it’s getting better and better.

When I took the passion flower, I noticed that I just went to sleep right away and I slept all the night and then I woke up and I felt fine. And after a while, I just forgot to take it – and a while was maybe two or three weeks…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

Debra: I just forgot to take it and I just kept sleeping. So something shifted by taking that for me. I think its’ a really good idea for people to get off sleeping pills.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it is.

Debra: Yeah, yeah. Why don’t you tell us again your phone number? We’re coming right up on the break.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So if you’d like to reach me here at my pharmacy, please call me at 727-442-4955. I can do any type of medication, not even limited to the ones we’ve discussed so far today.

Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of drugs. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

Debra: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, she’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drug.

Pamela, since this is National Heart Health Month or whatever it’s called, let’s talk about what kind of medicines are people taking for heart problems that maybe they shouldn’t be taking and what they can take instead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, elevated cholesterol. That would be something that would be important to realize. Cholesterol lowering medications, especially statin medications (Pravastatin and Simvastatin, all these different medicines), they have very specific side effects. When I see a patient that’s on these, the two things you have to really worry about liver damage and you have to worry about something called rhabdomyolysis.

Rhabdomyolysis isa severe attack on the muscles and it causes muscle weakness. Sometimes people don’t realize they’re having it. They feel like they’re just a little sore, maybe they overdid it.

I have clients of mine that used to like to golf all the time and they can barely lift up their arms now because the rhabdo, people don’t understand that in some cases, in many cases sometimes, the muscle damage is permanent.

What the medical establishment has done (and I understand their thinking behind that) is that when they put someone in a statin to monitor their liver enzymes, they see them every three months, they take a blood test to see if the liver enzymes have elevated. So most people have that comfort level that’s, “Okay, they’re checking my liver enzymes, everything is fine,” but actually, that’s not fine because by the time they catch the problem, sometimes the liver enzymes do not come back to baseline.

I don’t know if people realize it. There are two very important side effects with this medicine. I have seen people come in that are having severe muscle weakness and I told them, “You know, it’s probably your statin medication. You need to take what they call a ‘drug holiday’. Take a few weeks off from it and see how you’re feeling” and all of a sudden, the pain goes away.

So this is really important to realize that it can be overlooked sometimes and your healthcare practitioner might not cue into that because you might shake your pain with lots of housework, athletic activities and things like that.

So for cholesterol, most people know about red rice yeast. That’s really a very common medication. And that actually works. It’s a small dose and it works like a statin just like Mevacor, but it’s a very, very lose dose. But if somebody has a history of liver problem with the regular prescription cholesterol-lowering medicine, red rice yeasts, these are not candidates for that. And I’m not even a big fan of lowering cholesterol anyways.

Debra: Why is that? Why, why?

PAMELA SEEFELD: The reason why is because – and actually, there was a study I just read today that said that the different associations in this country are not recommending eat a low cholesterol diet. They found they don’t need to be taking cholesterol out of their diet.

The reason why is that cholesterol is made by every cell in your body. And if somebody has uncontrolled inflammation and their cholesterol level is elevated, then sure, they’ll have risks of cardiovascular disease because the inflammation allows the cholesterol to stick to the side of the blood vessel.

So if inflammation is controlled, then you really don’t need to be lowering the cholesterol because what’s happening is it’s an inflammatory process. Most people don’t realize that.

And also, too, a lot of people, blood sugar being mildly elevated (it could be in the 90s or even close to a hundred), it still says ‘normal range’. When they pull their blood draw, the doctor doesn’t really acknowledge the fact that the sugar is turning into cholesterol. So you have to look at two things. If you really think cholesterol is a problem, it’s not. The problem is uncontrolled inflammation or elevated fasting blood sugar and both of those things being present can put you at risk for a cardiovascular event.

People are looking under the wrong rock. We’ve got several rocks there. We’ve got the rock of the sugar. The next rock is is your cholesterol elevated and is there inflammation. For the heart to be healthy, we know that very specifically, we want to do some kind of physical exercise. I don’t care what it is. Walking is pretty good. And eating halfway decent. Mediterranean diet is what they’re really proposing most commonly now because they know there’s the nuts, the vegetables, the fish. All these things have heart healthy implications.

And really inflammation is the key. If people’s inflammation is not down (and fish oil can bring the inflammation down and turmeric can bring the inflammation down), what I would tell to see that you have the healthiest heart and have the best outcome, whatever you’re taking, make sure that your doctor, when he does the split draw orders some inflammation markers – a c-reactive protein, oestrogen, sed rate. There’s a bunch of them. You can just ask your doctor, “Please, can I have some inflammation markers on my blood draw.” And if you see that they’re elevated , you know you have to do something about it. That is very, very important.

And in fact, the doctors (or the cardiovascular doctors at least) are doing c-reactive proteins pretty routinely, but your regular doctor might not do it.

Debra: Well, I’ve never had anybody do those. I’ve never seen that on a blood test that I know of. And in fact, I just want to say this just because this just happened to me last month. I get blood tests every three months and I go to the same lab every time and cholesterol is one of the things that I get checked. And all of a sudden, I thought, “You know what? The doctor didn’t say anything about my cholesterol.” I went and I look at the lab test because I always ask for my lab test – and you know, I had them back for eight years.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly!

Debra: I looked on my blood test and there was no cholesterol on the blood test. Now, I know my doctor ordered it and the lab just simply didn’t do it. So you need to make sure when you go in and get your lab test that all the tests that were ordered get done.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly!

Debra: That’s our tip for today.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good advice. And if you are concerned, you have heart issues in your family since these things run in families, but also if you have a high stress job and you’re anxious all the time (a lot of people, their anxiety levels are pretty high nowadays, just people trying to get everything done), stress definitely increases inflammation.

We know that when people are stressed out, they start putting on belly fat. It allows levels of fat to be deposited much more effectively. And it elevates the cholesterol, it elevates the blood sugar. Knowing your inflammatory markers and to see if they’re elevated, that’s a very, very important piece of information. And if they’re not doing that, you can call me here and I can talk to you a little bit more about what it entails.

But I think a lot of people are being poorly served in that sense. If we’re looking at the heart health, folic acid and fish oil are very important – good diet, exercise every day. All these are so important. But you need to know if you’re dealing with inflammation. That’s kind of like a stealth killer.

If you have inflammation that’s so high – and these markers are non-specific, but they’re very, very indicative of inflammation that’s taking place in the whole body, but we’re particularly concerned about the blood vessels because when inflammation is in the blood vessels, they become sticky and it allows all these different things to start sticking to them. That’s what really causes cardiovascular disease.

If you can treat the inflammation with some natural products and if you know you have elevated inflammatory markers, you have tools to do something with that. I think most people are missing that.

Debra: I think so too. So if people need to lower their inflammation, how would you do that naturally?

PAMELA SEEFELD: If somebody has an elevated CRP, I would tell them that I usually use an anti-inflammatory called Tramiel. It’s a homeopathic product and that’s really good because it works for the muscles, but it works more on a cellular level. Omega 3 fish oils are excellent at lowering CRP. If you have an elevated CRP and you wanted to get it down quicker, you need to do it more than once a day, maybe even like with each meal or something like that, omega 3’s. And I would say probably 5000 mg. a day to try and get that number down.

And don’t forget turmeric. I’m a big fan of turmeric. Turmeric is an excellent anti-inflammatory, very specific. It works just like Celebrex, which is a prescription. It’s a COX-2 inhibitor. And some products even has boswellia in there. But fish oil can do quite a great job on this particular problem. But like I said, you need to just probably take it three times during the day to really have complete effectiveness.

Debra: Yeah. Yeah, good. Well, we only have a couple of minutes left. That is such good information today. You always give good information. I always learn something when I have you on this show and I’m sure my listeners do too.

So tell us again how you can help them and what your phone number is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So if you are interested in coming off of your cholesterol lowering medicine, your anti-depressants, narcotics or if you have any kind of an issue for you or your family or a loved one, I would be very helpful in helping you come off of these things and I’d be very grateful to be able to do that for you.

You can reach here at Botanical Resource at 727-442-4955. Let me help you look at your options and see what you can do. You can even email me your blood work and I’ll go over it with you and tell you if there’s something that I see coming now or in the future. You can triage these problems and avoid going on medicines altogether ever.

Debra: Yeah, this is a very interesting thing that Pamela does because she can look into the future, she can look at your blood test and tell you what is already developing. You might not see the symptoms right now, but you can see what’s coming in the future and what drugs that your doctors are going to prescribe for these things. She can stop these things with natural remedies before they happen by getting to whatever the disorder is in the early stages.

I think that’s really fascinating. I met someone else this week actually who can do that too by looking at blood tests. It’ s amazing what your blood can tell you.

She’s a wealth of information, a lot of help here. She also has a whole shop here in Clearwater. So she can ship to you whatever it is that you need if it’s not available to you locally. She can just take good care of you.

So we just have a few seconds left. So I’m going to just say thank you once again. Pamela will be on…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, thank you.

Debra: You’re welcome. Pamela will be on again two weeks from now. And you can also go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to past shows if you want to. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!

How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved A Life

Pamela Seefeld,R.PhMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. The week before Christmas, my brother died suddenly. The death certificate says the cause of death was pneumonia, but this was only the result of a lifetime of cigarettes, alcohol and prescription drugs (read more about my brother’s death at Life and Death: A Tale of Two Children.) We’ll talk about how prescription drugs can undermine your health in general, the side effects of the specific prescription drugs Bradley was taking at the time of his death, and what he could have done naturally instead of taking these prescription drugs. I can’t help but think my brother could be alive today if he had made better choices. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved a Life

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: January 14, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.

But actually, we’re actually – I can’t talk this morning. Actually, this show is going to be about a sad subject, which is that the week before Christmas, my brother died, my little brother. He’s younger than me and the death certificate says that he died of pneumonia, but my opinion is that he died from a lifetime of taking prescription drugs.

I have on the show today as my guest, Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist. She’s been on the show many times. She’s on every other Wednesday. You can listen to the back shows if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.

She dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs, but she knows all about prescription drugs and what they can do to your body. I just want to do this show today in honor of my brother and of other choices, so that if you have loved ones that are on prescription drugs, that you can know what the possible outcomes might be and offer them another solution.

I know that sometimes, that’s hard to do because obviously, I’ve known and my brother all his life and he knows all about my work and I have tried to help him many times to do things a more natural way. The last time I talked to him – he lived clear on the other side of the country, so we didn’t see each other all the time. The last time I talked to him before I got the phone call (the week before Christmas), that he was on maximum life support.

The last time I talked to him, he was telling me about all the drugs that he was taking and how despondent he was about being addicted to them, but that he couldn’t get off of them. I offered to help him get off of them and he said, “I can’t go through that.”

I want to do this show today because if you have loved ones that are in this situations, loved ones who are taking these kinds of drugs (and we’re going to be talking about them today), please, please, please do whatever you can to help them because this is the end result. And Pamela, registered pharmacist is going to talk to us about that today.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, Debra. I’m really sorry for your loss. This is really important that we do this show and that people know about some of the dangers of the medications that he was taking, which are commonly prescribed medicine.

DEBRA: Yes, I’m going to let you do a lot of talking because I find myself sitting here being quite emotional since it’s only been a month. It’s only been a month.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, it’s not too long, but we need to just kind of look at some of the medicines. We’ve discussed this. I have a list in front of me, the things that he was on. He was taking dextroampethamine, which everyone knows as Ritalin. He was on oxycodone, which is a very strong narcotic. He was on Ketorolac, which is an anti-inflammatory; Methadone, which is another narcotic; Valium, which is an anxiolytic; and he was on Lasix, which is a diuretic. He was also on Synthroid and some stool softeners.

So this, I can tell you just working as a pharmacist that this is pretty typical. A lot of people are prescribed these medications. And some of the things that people maybe weren’t aware of, but I’m going to explain a little bit about the scheduling of medication because three of the medicines he’s taking are schedule II.

Schedule II is the most highly addicting besides schedule I. Schedule II is what’s recognize in the prescription realm as being the most addictive and the most problematic. So the FDA assigned this scheduling system quite a long time ago to try and categorize different medicines, so people knew what their – and the categories are one through five based on potential for addiction and dependence and abuse.

So schedule I (and I think this is important for people to know about these schedules because it shows you how dangerous the medicines are), schedule I, there are no schedule I drugs available in pharmacies here in the United States. Schedule I is heroine and LSD, marijuana – which of course, different states are legalizing it above and beyond what the federal government has mandated – ecstasy and [inaudible 00:06:05]. People, they’re smoking these kinds of things.

These medicines are not considered – schedule I’s, there are no schedule I’s available in regular pharmacy practice in the United States. In Europe and in England, there are some schedule I’s that are available through research. They do have heroine and so forth. That’s different over here. In the United States, schedule I is not available.

Schedule II – and I want to really focus on this, schedule II. This is from the FDA site itself describing schedule II, “…substances or chemicals are defined as drugs with high potential for abuse, less abuse potential than the schedule I drug, with use potentially leading to severe psychological and physical dependence. These drugs are also considered dangerous. Some examples of schedule II drugs are…” – there’s the methadone, there’s the oxycodone and there is the Adderall and the Ritalin.

So the three of the drugs that he was taking are considered schedule II. I was reading right from the FDA website the definition of a schedule II drug.

So this should make people pause and concerned that schedule II drugs, the FDA is saying they’re potentially leading to severe psychological and physical dependence. “These drugs are also considered dangerous.” That is a sentence, period.

We know that these three medicines that he was taking have high tolerance, high dependence and the fact that most of these people that are put on these – especially the narcotics, in particular, the oxycodone, maybe even more so than the methadone. But we know that taking schedule II narcotics, patients have a higher risk of what’s called morbidity and mortality. They have a higher chance of dying at a younger age from complications from the narcotic usage.

DEBRA: Now, I want to ask you a question. So Ritalin, when I put together this list, a friend of mine who went to get my brother’s effects (because I wasn’t living close by in order to do that), he was reading to me over the phone what was written on the bottles. And so I didn’t realize that he was taking Ritalin and Valium because I was just looking at the medical names for these.

But Ritalin, I mean, school children are given Ritalin?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, this is the problem, yes. It’s highly addictive and has psychological dependence and problems. We know that kids have ADD, ADHD, these sort of diagnoses where they have inattentiveness. I have different theories about that. I mean, that’s probably a whole other show in itself. I really am against using medications for small children. I think it’s really dangerous. We have a high percentage of children – I think I was reading in New York City like one in four kids is on a psycho-stimulant. It’s a lot.

DEBRA: It’s a lot.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s a lot of children. I don’t agree with it, but I understand why society is leaning towards using these medicines in small kids and in people because people are demanding it. Most parents are not going to take the time to spend a lot on parenting skills and get the kids to be attentive to school. Most people are just basically surviving, running around trying to get everything done. I think it’s just an easy solution to maybe a complex problem that requires lots of lifestyle changes that they’re not willing to do. I mean, that’s a personal opinion.

DEBRA: Well, I think my brother has been taking these drugs for a very long time because I remember like 40 years ago – that’s a long time – 40 years ago, when we were young adults, I sent him a Christmas present. He called me up and he just screamed at me over the phone about, “Why are you sending me a Christmas present? Don’t you know that I have to go down to the post office and pick it up and I just can’t do that? Why are you bothering me?”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, no!

DEBRA: He just totally flipped out because I sent him a Christmas present. I recognized that’s not him, that’s not my brother. It was the drugs. That was going on like 40 years ago.

We need to go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about prescription drugs and safer alternatives with my guest, Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist. She actually practices – say the words of what you practice because I’ve got it right here. Pharmacognosy! That’s the word. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And there is a term for that. It’s actually a field in itself called ‘pharmacognosy’, which is the study of medicinal plants. And I’ve said before on other shows with her that I love this word because it’s pharma, which is drugs and cognosy is intelligence. And plants are healing substances with intelligence coming from a live thing instead of being synthesized in the lab.

Any time we’ve talked many times before about how taking plant-based substances for healing will actually heal your body, whereas drugs might alleviate your symptoms, but they don’t have healing factors. You just keep taking them and taking them and get addicted to some of them. That’s what we’re talking about today, addiction to some prescription drugs and how they can lead to not living as long as you might. As I’ve said at the top of the show that my brother died the week before Christmas and he was taking quite a number of drugs which we’re discussing today.

Okay, Pamela, let’s talk about the first drug on the list, Ritalin.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. So the Ritalin, we know that most of the time, people are given Ritalin because of inattentiveness, ADD, ADHD, that type of thing. Ritalin is a psycho-stimulant. And of course, especially in younger people, when they start on this medicine, there is some data that shows that it’s a gateway to other drugs. It opens the potential for alcohol abuse, marijuana, cocaine, things that are illegal drugs.

So we have to look and think that when the body gets conditioned – and you have to understand that these receptors in the brain, that’s how these drugs work – there are receptors in the brain that are stimulated and when they get stimulated, the body likes this. That’s why they’re considered addictive. Using psycho-stimulants to get attentiveness instead of looking at behavioral issues themselves really needs to be addressed.

I know for a fact that I’ve used these with adolescents before and adults that people that have ADD, instead of using Ritalin, they can get away with using pro-DHA, which are the common focus in fish oil, the DHA, the EPA of 4.5 to 1. And a lot of people really respond to low dose zinc, 15-30 mg. a day because zinc is a co-factor for over 200 enzymatic reactions in the brain and a lot of people with inattentiveness, children and adults alike, they can benefit from having more of the zinc.

Actually, zinc is depleted when people eat lots of preservatives, refined food, high fructose corn syrup, a lot of things that are just hidden in our diet. If they’re not eating a really clean diet, which most people aren’t, the zinc depletion as far as these co-factors in the brain is pretty significant. Just doing those two things there, many times, people notice a big difference in their attentiveness and they can possibly avoid being on this drug.

DEBRA: Well, I think that we’ve talked about it so many times, but it bears repeating here. The two things that are probably the biggest things that are contributing to health problems today are number one, exposure to toxic chemicals and number two, lack of nutrition.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct!

DEBRA: Most people are so malnourished that if they would just take the right vitamins before they ever consider taking a drug, a lot of their symptoms will go away.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, that’s exactly right. So what I’m telling people is that these drugs, not even looking at them as gateway drug, but when you’re drug naïve, you haven’t been on these medicine and you’re kind of standing in front of opportunities (because life is full of opportunities and knowledge is power), instead of putting these things into your body, you can stand there and say, “Okay, I see that I have a problem. I need something for pain or I need something for attentiveness” and look for tools that can help you instead of doing to the medicines first because the medicines, it’s kind of like you open the door and you can’t close it. You’re on them forever. Very few people will take – especially pain medicines, we’ll take patients off of these things.

So it’s kind of like all-or-nothing. It’s like you’ve got the gambling table, all or nothing. I don’t really think that that’s the best way to approach people’s issues. The best way is to try some other things first. Natural products do work very well. Maybe they won’t work for 100% of people, but I see this from personal experience that because I actually transitioned people off medicines many times, I tell people, “Before you actually take that initial step, you really need to look at what we can use.” A homeopathic detox takes the chemical out of the body. Use a calming, focusing fish oil to try and focus the brain.

Also, Huperzine, which is an herb has very, very good data that it works as an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. I’ll explain what that is. When the brain and the synapse, when people have Alzheimer’s or memory issues, they use a drug called Aricept. Aricept is very expensive and Aricept has very limited use especially in Europe because it’s so expensive and they find that it just really kind of staves of the memory problems for maybe six months. But it’s used quite widely in the United States.

What this does is it allows more acetylcholines to make memories in the brain and it kind of stops the enzyme that breaks it down in the synapse. So generally, what it does is acetylcholine is a memory and when you make a memory, acetylcholine goes and it puts it in a certain place in the brain and then that’s your memory. You can retrieve it or put it away.

So Rx-Brain or Huperzine (Huperzia serrata) is a plant that shows the exact same activity as Aricept with none of the side effects. I even use it for people that come and say, “I need more attentiveness. I’m going back to school, I’m reading.” Instead of reaching for the Ritalin, these supplements run like $10 to $15 for a month, very inexpensive and very, very effective.

There’s tons of data on the Library of Medicine. If somebody wanted to say, “I need memory improvement, I need attentiveness improvement,” for $10 or $12 or something like that, you are really looking at enhanced memory. And there are studies that show that this works just like the drug.

DEBRA: Wow! I think that it’s just – we talk about this show after show. I think we’ve done ten shows or something like that now, but we keep talking about this show after show, about how it seems like any drug that you would be taking that’s a prescription drug or even an over-the-counter drug, that there’s a natural substance that can be used instead, which doesn’t have side effects, which is less expensive. We just should be reaching for those first.

We should be reaching for those first because you could stop taking them whenever you don’t want to take them anymore and you’re not addicted to them for life and they cost so much less. So in this country, we just need to have a reorientation to know that there are safer things that we can choose.

We needto go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is registered pharmacist, Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about some prescription drugs that my brother was taking the week before Christmas when he died and what you can do instead that is far safer for yourself and for your loved ones. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

Pamela, we haven’t mentioned yet today that people can call you and how you can help them. So why don’t you tell everybody about that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. I’ve been 20 years in business here in Clearwater, Florida. My store is Botanical Resource Pharmacy. It’s all homeopathic and natural products. Consultations are free. I also do consultations on adults, adolescents and children and pets as well. You can reach me here at the pharmacy at 717-442-4955. I would be very honored to help you or your family member with anything related to medication, avoiding medicines. If you want to know medical homeopathic products that we have here, they’re not typically available in health food stores, they’re medical grade that I can prescribe for you if you have any issues with blood pressure, cholesterol or whatever and of course, pain, which is what we’re focusing on today.

DEBRA: And the way I met Pamela was actually a friend of mine went to her. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida where I live. A friend of mine went to her because his mother was on a number of prescription drugs and Pamela not only got her off the prescription drugs, but his mother is doing much better now. Even his other’s doctor commented on how well she was doing.

So Pamela really knows her stuff. She’s very well-regarded here in Clearwater, Florida. So if you have any health problems that need some help, if you’re on any prescription drugs, if you have loved ones on prescription drugs, I highly recommend that you call Pamela and let her help you with this because she really has things that work.

Alright! So let’s talk now about Valium.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. So Valium is a schedule IV. They consider it low-risk for dependence, but actually, I don’t really believe that’s the case because most people that start on Valium, there is a lot of tolerance and dependence and people do become addicted to it.

And so when you look at people taking anxiolytics especially this particular class called benzodiazepines, benzodiazepines work in the brain and they work on the benzodiazepine receptor. When a drug binds into the receptor, it has this calming effect on the person.

The problem with this is that there’s psychological and physical dependence when you take benzodiazepines. People typically need more medicine. They stay at it for a long period of time. And when you start taking benzodiazepines, Xanax, Ativan, Valium, these different drugs that are very, very, very commonly prescribed, it takes probably less than 10 days and after that period of time, you start to develop intolerance.

So these medicines, it’s one of those things that I was talking about that when you start them, you’re going to be on it for a long time. You’re going to have a hard time getting off of it. It’s really a bad road to go down.

If you’re looking at natural alternatives, Passion Flower, medical grade Passion Flower is a partial agonist or has activity in a partial manner towards the receptor. So what’s interesting about this is that if your brother had been taking Passion Flower instead of Valium, he would be in a much better situation because the Passion Flower binds to the receptor – and I use this sometimes when I’m trying to take people off these medicines because the body can’t tell if it’s the drug on there or the herb. Passion Flower has this affinity for it and Passion Flower, it has anti-depressant activity and it has some anti-pain activity as well.

So it’s maybe more all-encompassing than the Valium and it’s very safe and you can’t overdose on it. So I really would suggest that if people are contemplating going on a benzo or looking at getting off of benzo, Passion Flower is a very helpful tool.

DEBRA: And I’ve taken Passion Flower. Pamela gave it to me to help me sleep. It did help me sleep. And then after a couple of weeks of taking it, I just decided not to take it one night and I’ve just been sleeping just fine ever since. So it certainly is something that can be used safely. She told me I could just take as many of them as I needed to in order to sleep. I did and it worked just fine. It worked very well.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. These medicines, benzos are highly addicting and like I said, the problem with tolerance and dependence is that a lot of times, you have a physical dependence where you’re craving the drug, but you also have psychological dependence because you start thinking that you need the drugs and you can’t live without them.

That’s the problem. You really want to start embracing and looking at are there things we can do other than that because anxiety is a pretty universal problems and it affects people in different ways especially stress. So we need to embrace other things that can be used in a safer manner and more effective manner and also safer for the long-term.

The medicines that he had here, the narcotics, the Ritalin, the psycho-stimulants and then also the anxiolytics or the Valium, these things all have higher risk associated when the people are taking them versus the person that are taking natural products and using some other alternative therapies in place of these medicines.

DEBRA: One thing that I want to mention is that my brother wasn’t taking like recreational street drugs. He was just – I’m going to say “normal” person. I remember my brother when we were younger before he started taking these drugs, as a child even, he was interested in cooking. He used to watch the Galloping Gourmet on TV and he got my mom to buy all the cookbook. He couldn’t wait to make chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. He wanted to.

He had loved airplanes. He was always bugging my father to take him to the airport. He just wanted to watch the planes take off and land. I remember, his happiest moment was when – I think he was about 10 or 12. He so wanted to fly that my parents bought two plane tickets, one for me and one for him. I had never been on an airplane either. They put us on the airplane in San Francisco and we got to fly down to Monterey, which is a very short flight, 30 minutes or something. We flew and they drove…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Ah!

DEBRA: They met us down in Monterey.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s really sweet.

DEBRA: It was so sweet. Bradley was just so jazzed. This was like the highlight of his life so far, to fly. And as soon as he became old enough and started working and started making money, the first thing he started doing was flying around the country. And then he flew to Europe. He just loved to travel and he was very sophisticated and he liked to eat in nice restaurants and go to nice places and do nice things. And he got on these drugs because he went to the doctor and he believed the doctor.

The same thing with my father. My father died at age 77, but as he was having greater health problems, I was going in and saying, “Here’s a natural remedy. Here, drink this juice. Do this natural thing, do this natural thing” and he wouldn’t do any of it. He just said, “I’m going to do what the doctor tells me to do.” I would like people to see that there are other choices. There are other choices.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist. She’s here helping us all understand about some prescription drugs that my brother was taking most of his life and at the time of his death at age 56, the week before Christmas. His death certificate says ‘pneumonia’, but I know that these prescription drugs and maybe others he was taking were taking a toll on his health.

Pamela, before we talk about another drug, you mentioned about how prescription drugs can reduce your life span.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. A lot of the data is really with elderly people because there’s a lot of controversy about giving elderly people these medicines. The whole idea is that your brother was on these medicines for a long period of time. And then eventually, if he wouldn’t have passed away, he would be an elderly person on these medicines.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So we looked at these, especially the narcotics. The narcotics, to oxycodone and the methadone are statistically significantly correlated with higher morbidity and mortality in elderly people – and even in middle aged people. We know that when a person’s drug are narcotics, the actual problem, what they had, the pain problem, the initial reason why they were prescribed the medicine, it’s not solved.

And this is important for people to know. The pain medicines that we use, there’s really two ways to approach it. One is the narcotics, we call them ‘centrally-acting’, which means they act in the brain. And when they act in the brain, they block the signal down to where the pain took place.

I’ll just give you an example. Say your brother had a back injury. He picked up something wrong, a car accident or something like that. This is very typical. He has a back problem, he goes to the doctor, they hand him the narcotics. They don’t tell him, “You’re going to be on this forever. You’re going to become addicted to it.” Really questions aren’t really brought up in the initial conversations.

So what it does is it blocks the signal from the brain.

DEBRA: Wait, wait. Wait, wait. I just want to interrupt you for a second because…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Please…

DEBRA: …I think this is an important point. You said the doctor hands them the bottle or the prescription and they don’t say that they’re going to be addicted to this for the rest of their life.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No! It really does not enter the conversation, correct.

DEBRA: And then it’s going to cost you hundreds of dollars a month. I think that my brother told me that he was spending $500 a month on his prescriptions.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s insane!

DEBRA: $500 a month, it is insane. And I will tell you that – and I don’t like to say this about my brother, but at the time that he died, he was just staying at somebody’s house and all of his possessions where in his car. He wasn’t homeless because he was staying with somebody. Fortunately, he had people that he could stay with, but he couldn’t afford to have his own place to live.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, because he’s spending it all on drugs.

DEBRA: Because he’s spending it all on drugs, I know! He got to a point where he couldn’t work anymore. It wasn’t that he was a bum. He worked all of his life. But it got to the point where his physical condition was that he couldn’t work anymore.

And so he was staying with friends. He had his things in his car. He was eating in diners. I mean, this is not my brother. This is not what he would’ve chosen. But that was the end of his life. I’m just stunned by this whole thing.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, we know that he made the choice of going to the physician. The physician is not the bad guy here. I don’t want people to think that.

DEBRA: No, I don’t want them to think that too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m not against that. I’m a regular pharmacist too. What I’m saying is that I think it’s empowering and important to individuals to realize that at any one time in our life, we probably are going to have an injury that we’ll need to see the doctor and we’ll need some kind of pain control. That is an absolute fact. That’s an absolute fact. He had an initial injury of some sort and he went to the doctor.

What we see that the data shows that when we look at an injury and if we treat this injury with a steroid burst, which is like maybe a Medrol Dosepak or some amount of steroids, steroids bring the inflammation down quickly in the body and allow things to start getting back into normal. A steroid burst and taking a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agent like Advil or Naprosyn, something like that (there’s tons of them in the market), Ibuprofen and taking it in a scheduled manner, not like when you think you have pain, these peripherally acting or the ones that don’t work in the brain are much safer. They don’t have the addiction and the tolerance. S

So when a person has an injury (especially for back injuries), the data shows give some steroids and give them some anti-inflammatory on a scheduled basis, maybe one pill with each meal for a weak so you get the inflammation down and start healing the body. In those cases, it locks pain signals in the periphery called eicosanoids. It will just let that area start healing, maybe some physical therapy and things like that.

Those are the real ways to have positive outcomes. It’s negatively correlated when people get narcotics on the first forefront, they give them narcotics because basically, they’re going to be on it forever. And then the bad part about it is when you are on a centrally-acting narcotics, you’re on the oxycodone and he’s on the methadone, when you’re on these medicines, it blocks your perception of the pain, but the injury is still there. So what this means to you and I and to your listeners is that your injury actually can continue to get worse because you start exerting yourself and you’re moving around and you’re not cognizant of the pain.

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So that’s the problem.

DEBRA: The thing I wanted to say and failed to say just recently here is that when a doctor gives you – I don’t want it to sound like I’m against doctors because I’m not.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, I’m not either.

DEBRA: I think that a lot of doctors do a lot of good in the world. But the thing is, any one of us, when a doctor gives us a prescription can go online and look up the prescription and find out what it is. And instead of just taking it blindly, we can find out if it’s addictive, what schedule it’s on. All these things, all the information is there.

And then we can see for ourselves – like when I used to take Synthroid, I was having side effects and everything (a lot of people do). I went and I looked up Synthroid and I said, “Well, you know what? Let’s look for something else. I looked for something else. I went to a different doctor and I found a natural form of thyroid supplement. It opened the door for me to say, “Well, I don’t have to always take this prescription drug.”

And so I’m just encouraging people to find out what your choices are and then make a choice. We don’t have to just do what the doctor says. You can decide for yourself if that’s the road that you want to take. And if you want to do what the doctor says, okay, but just know that there’s other choices.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, that’s exactly right. And also too, I mean, I have thousands of clients, but I have a lot of clients right here locally. If they have a prescription, they’ll come bring it to me first before they’ll go fill and say, “Do I need this? Is there something I can take?” And there’s a lot of times, I’ll say, “No, this is what you really need. This is what you have. Go fill it. But these are the side effects and this is what you need to look out for. Don’t combine it with food/combine it with food” or whatever. I’ll give them all that information.

Or I’ll say, “Look, I have something here. You can try this first. I think this is going to work and it’s comparable to what they wrote for you” and most of these people will embrace the natural products first especially the medical homeopathy, which is designed and developed by physicians, not herbalist.

So it’s really important that people know that there are really high-functioning products that can take the place of medications. And you have to look, two-thirds of all medicines were found in plants. This isn’t new information.

DEBRA: Yeah! Right, right. Yeah.

Pamela; The medicines that you’re using were found in the dirt or in plants or some place in the natural realm.

DEBRA: It all started with that. And then now, they isolate the active ingredients and duplicate them. In many cases, they duplicate them in the laboratory synthetically made from coal tar and things like that. So what you’re offering is the plant version, the plant version.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: Anyway, we’re getting to the end of our time together. It’s gone by so fast, it always does. But I want you to give your phone number and tell people again how you can help because it’s so valuable, what you’re doing.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. So I do homeopathic and alternative medicine in pharmacy. I would be very happy to help with any of your concerns. Today was just kind of a microcosm of what we’re doing as far as looking at narcotics and medications, but we do have natural alternatives, homeopathic and alternative medicines that are plants and supplements that I can write out for you free of charge and mail it to you.

I’d say two-thirds of my business is really mail-outs, so you can call me from any place in the country. It’s a 10-minute conversation. I can go over what you’re doing and help you, guide you as far as what choices you want to make if you want to get off of prescription. If you don’t want to be on certain medicines, if you’re having some life issues that you need to deal with stress –

And I do a lot of mental health. So if you have anxiety or depression issues, severe stress, I’m very, very good at that and I would be most honored and would be glad to help you and your family. You can reach me at my pharmacy at 727-442-4955, I would be so very glad to help you see what alternatives you might have as far as for you and the future. I think choices are very important and knowledge is power. So I want to empower you, to let you know that there are things you can do other than medicines if you chose.

DEBRA: That’s right. And you do such a good job. I know I keep saying that, but I mean, Pamela has helped me so much in terms of helping me with some physical conditions that I’ve had for years. Even though I’ve detoxed and changed my diet and get nutrition and stuff, there’s still things that you want to do. Sometimes, your body just needs a little help. She knew exactly what to give me and my body has been so much better since she’s been helping me.

And so anyway, we’ve only got a few seconds left, so I just want to thank you again and thank all of my listeners. Just having somebody so close as a brother not be here anymore, I appreciate you all. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today we’ll be talking about insomnia and natural things you can do at home to get enough sleep. According to National Geographic, less than one-third of our population in the USA get enough sleep. Since sleep affects our mental state, the aging process, our immune system, and our body’s ability do detox toxic chemicals, it’s very important to get enough sleep. Pamela will tell us about phases of sleep, sleep hygiene, dangers of using prescription hypnotic drugs and how they lead to psychiatric problems, plus natural substances to help you sleep that target similar areas of the brain without the side effects. . Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

 

The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.

read-transcript

 

LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

 

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld PhD

Date of Broadcast: December 3, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It’s Wednesday, December 3rd 2014. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And in fact, she helps people get off prescription drugs.

I have her on every other Wednesday because she has so much information about the negative health effects of taking prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs and so much information about simple, natural things that we can do to help our health that I just want her to tell you everything that she knows. I learn from her every time I talk to her.

So today, we are going to be talking about insomnia. Are you having trouble sleeping? Well, it’s winter time, there’s hibernates, so I thought we should talk about sleep since this is a natural time for us to be getting more sleep and rejuvenating our bodies and that you absolutely need to sleep in order for your body to detox toxic chemicals. This is an extremely important subject today and so let’s just get started.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, it’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. It’s always great to have you. So what did you tell me about National Geographic said one-third, less than one-third of our population in the United States get enough sleep?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! And they just had a special on that just this last Sunday talking about the dangers of sleep deprivation and how the majority of the people are really driving around with insufficient sleep and as a result of it, are basically impaired.

And we see this quite a bit. If you look at the rate of car accidents and the rate of just accidents in general, it’s highly associated with lack of sleep. Most adults are going to need between seven and nine hours of sleep at night. The majority of the people in this country are probably getting six or less.
DEBRA: I think that that’s probably true. So what would sleep deprivation look like?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it can go in different phases. Chronic sleep deprivation will definitely age the person for one thing. Inattentiveness, these people tend to compensate by trying to drink lots of caffeine and coffee. And also, if you look at the very severe side effects of it, if someone goes several days without sleep, psychosis can set in and can really make this person end up in a hospital.

Sleep deprivation tend to really cause hallucinations. A lot of different things that are psychiatric symptoms that maybe if they’re people that see a psychiatrist as a result of sleep deprivation that’s been severe enough for a long enough period of time, these people might be misdiagnosed with depression and then placed on medication as a result of it.

So it’s really important to say that the brain needs this time to basically mop up and clean out the remnants of the day and get started fresh for the next day.
And what we also find is that people who have had chronic sleep deprivation – it doesn’t really have to be like you haven’t slept two days in a row. It can be six hours of sleep and that’s not what your body needs.

What we see is that it’s kind of like the brain is on fire and putting this in terminology, ‘inflammation markers’ in the circulation go up. And that’s why we know that weight gain is associated with not sufficient sleep. We find that this actually can have effects in memory and cognition and a lot of it is related to circulating cytokines that come in and out of the brain.

So it has some very, very serious health effects by not having decent sleep.

DEBRA: Great! Well, tell us about what are the different phases of sleep.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right! So most people know a little bit about some of this. I’ll kind of go over some basic things. There are two types of sleep. There’s non-rapid eye movement and there’s rapid eye movement, which is REM sleep. REM sleep is known as ‘active sleep’ or ‘paradoxical sleep’. So this is the time when your eyes are actually moving underneath your eyelids.

So at the beginning of sleep, you’re kind of relatively awake and alert. The brain produces beta waves. But as the brain slows down, slower waves called alpha waves are produced. You’re not quite asleep at this time, but this is when you can have vivid hallucinations and ‘myclonic jerks’ where all of a sudden, you feel like your muscles move or your legs move suddenly. That’s what’s happening during that phase. That’s to be expected. We actually have a lot of that going on at night, but we only remember it maybe once in a while.

So stage one sleep is the beginning of the theta wave. And then stage two lasts about 20 minutes and then the brain activity called ‘sleep spindles’ and body temperature and heart rate slows. So this is asleep. Stage there is delta waves and deep sleep. And stage four is dreaming or REM sleeping brain activity.
What I thought was very interesting is that you actually go through this pattern where you start in stage one, you go to stage two and three, then you go back to two and then you go to REM and this gets repeated four to five cycles per night – and then the average REM time is 90 minutes.

So this is pretty interesting. When you have to go through these different phases, setting an alarm – I know a lot of people have to wake up by an alarm, but if you think about it, you’re kind of jolting yourself out of sleep, right?

DEBRA: Yeah, right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So depending on where you were at that time, what I see in most people is they can try and get themselves to a point where the alarm isn’t suddenly waking them, where they’re actually getting to bed at a reasonable time so that if they need to have an alarm to get up for work, that it goes off and they’re really through most of their sleep cycle, that makes a huge difference.

But if you think about most people, they go to bed late, they procrastinate, then they set their alarm and they get up really early, they’re not going through all these phases of sleep. And then they get in the car and drive. And also, a lot of these people end up taking prescription hypnotics. We’ll talk a little bit about that, how this really changes the chemistry of the brain in an unfavorable way.

DEBRA: I know for myself when I used to go to school when I was a child, my mother would set the alarm and I’d have to be forced to be awakened every morning so that I could get to school by 7:30. I hated that. I just didn’t like that all.

And so now, it’s really important to me that I allow myself to fall asleep when I want to fall asleep. And then I wake up when I want to wake up. I think that that makes a huge amount of difference in terms of just allowing your body to do what it needs to do.

Sometimes, I think I should get up and work and then I think, “No. You know what? I’m just going to let myself sleep” and having that extra hour of sleep or whatever, just going back to sleep in the morning. It just makes a huge difference in how well I’m able to function for the rest of the day. You think, “Oh, I’m going to get an extra hour of work done if I get up early,” but I actually get more done if I sleep.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah, correct because what happens is the consolidation of memory – well, we want to just use simplistic terms, the mopping up of the brain. But basically, what the brain is doing during this sleep process – and you think about the rest of your body too. In the beginning, you were introducing about cleaning up toxic chemicals. The body during sleep basically gets ready for the next day. This is preparatory work that takes place in our sleep cycles. It’s cleaning up the brains. It’s getting rid of remnants of things from the day time that really are non-consequential.

And basically, what the brain is doing during this time is categorizing whether they need to save something or not. So all these little memories and things that we had – that’s why I think when people are studying for a test, studying just before you go to bed and really making an imprint on that will enhance your studying capacity when you take your exam in the morning.

So there’s a reason for studying just before you go to sleep because the consolidation, the memories, it’s going to start putting these memories, which are made of acetylcholine, it’s going to start compartmentalizing them in the brain. And the things that are non-consequential and not important is going to clear that out.
Also, if we’re talking about this from a detoxification point, the kidney start removing all of these excess remnants of metabolism from the day time. And that’s why when you go to sleep at night, you keep going to the bathroom. People get up and go to the bathroom when their bladder is full. The reason why is your center of gravity when you’re lying down changes. So during the day, your center of gravity is at a different location. It’s more central. But when you sleep at night, the center of gravity changes to the back of the kidneys.And this was designed intentionally so that the fluids of the body that are containing waste products will go to the kidneys during that time and leave.

So actually, when you think about it, your first void in the morning really contains all these things that have accumulated during the day that really were not processed at the time that you actually were drinking water and going to the restroom then.

So it’s really amazing the way the body decides that this is a time to restore, re-nourish and clean up things that can lead to diabetes, intellectual problems or cognitive delays. All these kinds of things are basically mopped up during this process.

DEBRA: Wow! I haven’t thought about it quite that way, but I think that you described it really well, that it really is not about being lazy or anything like that. It just really is that time for us to rejuvenate, for our bodies to rejuvenate and to have that rest.

We need to go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about sleep and natural ways to sleep better. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

She has very successfully gotten people off drugs. She helps people replace drugs that they’ve been taking with natural substances that can do the same thing. But the thing that really seems most important to me (having been somebody who has taken prescription drugs and also natural things) is that when you take prescription drugs, it might alleviate your symptoms, but they’re not healing your body. Pamela can replace those drugs with substances, natural substances that actually are repairing and healing your body. To me, that’s a huge, huge, huge difference. It costs less too and you end up with a better result.

So Pamela, I know that you are happy to talk to anybody on the phone about what they’re taking and what they could take instead. So what’s your phone number?
PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. I would be very happy to help any of you, even your children if they have any issues as far as medications or any behavioral issues. You can call me here at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s Botanical Resource.

And I really do everything all-encompassing. So cholesterol, blood pressure, mental health. I do a lot of mental health. So if you want to get off these prescription medications or you want to know some alternatives for depression or anxiety, for sleeping, I would be most honored to help you and your family.

DEBRA: And she’s really wonderful. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida where I am and I found out about her and invited her to be a guest on my show because she has such a great reputation here. Everybody loves here. Medical doctors recommend her. My medical doctor, when I told him that I was taking some things that she had given me said, “Oh, just take whatever Pamela tells you to take.”And that was the end of the conversation.

So I completely trust her. I have had wonderful results from what she’s advised me to do. If you’re having any kind of health concerns, I hope that you will call her and get some help too.

Alright! So as long as we’re talking about prescription drugs and getting off of them, why don’t you tell us next about the dangers of using prescription hypnotic drugs for sleeping pills?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Great, great. Great subject. So what happens is that someone will go to the doctor, they’re having some sleep disturbance and insomnia, maybe some stress going on in their lives and the doctors, the first thing that they’re going to normally prescribe for a lot of people is then benzodiazepines. That’s a class of drugs that includes Xanas, Ativan, Valium.

These medications have two problems with them. They have addiction; they have tolerance and dependence basically.

Tolerance means you need more medication to get the same effect. And dependence means, of course, that you’re dependent on it. And the dependence with these medicines is physical and it’s psychological, which is bad. It’s both aspects.

So when people go on these medicines, they need more medicine over time to get the same effect. And then when they try and take it away, they can have panic attacks, severe anxiety. And people are on long term benzos, it’s really very problematic. And most of these people, I’m sure given the opportunity, would have chosen not to be placed on them.

A good example of a hypnotic that’s been used forever really (probably, I don’t know, 34 years) is Restoril, which is Temazepam. It’s an old benzo drug. And if you look at these drugs – and I still see people coming in on those – the studies show after about threeweeks, it doesn’t work anymore. So say somebody that’s on 15 mg…

DEBRA: Only three weeks?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah! It doesn’t work. So they need more medicine and it’s that quick. In fact, they’d tell somebody that’s even using a benzo on a part-time basis or short period of time for an anxiety disorder, you’ve got a window of maybe nine to twelve days of taking it consistently, then after that, you can’t really be without it. It’s pretty quick.

So I don’t think people realize that tolerance and dependence show up rather fast. I don’t know if they’re necessarily warned about that.
And you have to be careful too because when you take these prescriptions, there’s cognitiveproblem associated with this – and memory. Remember we were talking about memory consolidation, this kind of messes with your head.

So people that have these and take these prescription hypnotics, there can be some hang over sedation. And especially with Ambien, which is a very common prescription hypnotic, when someone is given Ambien, there are lots of cases where people are sleep walking, they get up in the morning and they don’t remember the commute to work. There’s a lot of problems with memory and cognitive impairment as a result of taking Ambien.

And what scares more than anything is that you have a large of population in this country that are taking these every night and then they get up and drive a car to work. This is really frightening if you think about.

Now, the benzos are kind of going out of favor because of the tolerance and dependence, but I still see quite a lot of people that are on Ativan and Xanax for sleep especially older people where they’ve been put on that a long time ago and basically, now,they don’t have a choice, but to be on that.

So really, just kind of to regroup, there’s different drug classes of these anxiolytics, but they can be use for insomnia, for hypnotics. Taking these drugs definitely has some other aspects as well especially even looking at elderly people.

And we should really focus on that because we have a lot of elderly people that have sleep disturbances. Our sleep changes as we get older. It’s a more lighter sleep. And not only that, when you think about you and I, we run around all day, so when we go to bed, we’re tired. But the older people, they’re more sedentary.

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right? So when I go to sleep, I fall into bed. They probably because they’re doing activities of daily living, they’re doing some shopping, they’re watching TV. I mean, they’re not really doing a whole lot.

So I think, my theory really, I think most people need to be tired to sleep.

DEBRA: Well, I think so too. I mean, I had noticed that recently (like maybe in the last month or so) that I had been a lot more physically active, that I’ve been doing things where I’m walking more, I’m not sitting at my desk so much, I’m not thinking so much, as much as I am out doing things. I noticed that. And I’m also working longer hours. So I have activities in the evening as well as during the day.

And by the time it gets to be 10 o’clock, I am just physically tired whereas I know before, there had been time in my life where if I wasn’t working long hours or I wasn’t intensely getting a lot of things done in the time period that I have, that I wasn’t as physically tired and it was harder to sleep. But now, it’s just like, “Oh, thank you. It’s bed time!”

I mean, we live here in Florida. Wesee a lot of older people and…

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: They just sit around all day. I don’t want to say all older people sit around all day because we certainly have active seniors, but a lot of old people just sit or watch TV all day or they talk to each other or they play checkers or whatever it is that they’re doing. They’re not physically engaged in life to the degree that younger people are.

We need to go to break. But when we come back, we’ll talk more about sleep, sleeping pills and what we can do naturally to sleep better. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

So Pamela, let’s talk about some things that people can do to sleep better. First, I wanted to say that many, many years ago when I started researching toxic chemicals, one of my first, most exciting discoveries was that formaldehyde causes insomnia.

At the time, I really had insomnia. It was excruciating for me to go to bed at night because I would not sleep and I would just toss and turn for hours. It turns out that formaldehyde is the major chemical in permanent press finish and that if you have permanent press sheets on your bed as you’re lying there at night, you’re going to be sleeping in a cloud of formaldehyde, particularly if you just take the sheets out of the package and put it on the bed.

But even after you’ve been washing and sleeping, there still is formaldehyde. It’s lessening amounts, but still, for a very long time, the sheets are still emitting formaldehyde.

I had to put that together. Nobody had put it in a book yet that I had see. I had to find out in one book that formaldehyde caused insomnia and find out in another book that formaldehyde is in permanent press resin on bed sheets. And when I put those two things together, I said, “Oh, my God!” I went right down and found the only – at that time, there was only one brand of untreated cotton sheets. I managed to find it, put those sheets in my bed and I slept. I slept.

It was just like so wonderful to sleep after all those nights, months, years of not sleeping well because of the formaldehyde on the bed sheets. And now, for the past 30 years, I have only slept on cotton flannel sheets every night – not that there aren’t other types of cotton sheets, but I just love cotton flannel sheets. And even though I live in Florida, I would think it’s too hot for flannel sheets, but it’s not. It’s very comfortable to sleep on them year around.

So that’s my two cents worth on how we can sleep better, change your sheets.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, you’re right. Chemicals affect a lot of what is going on in our lives. Let’s face it, people have those artificial candles burning in their houses. It reaches your eyes, your eyes water. Formaldehyde coming offof the mattress, coming off of the sheets, coming off of the carpeting, you are exposed to these things continuously. And that’s why when people, you go into a store to buy, that new mattress, no that’s formaldehyde offgassing.

So it’s pretty prevalent. A lot of people are very sensitive to it. And this can explain a lot of people’s sleep disturbances. Environmentally, their room is just not equipped for them to get a restful sleep. So that can even be part of sleephygiene.

Sleep hygiene, really, the study show a dark, cold room. You don’t have a lot of ambient light coming in from outside. You want to have comfortable clothes, comfortable sheets. Sometimes, they believe that protein or a carbohydrate snack. Make sure you have some food in your stomach. I’m not talking about a meal, but if you go to bed with your stomach hungry and it’s growling all night, you’re not going to really have some decent sleep. So you shouldn’t be hungry when you go to bed, you shouldn’t be full either. And then limiting alcohol consumption just before you fall asleep.

And screen time. A lot of people know that looking at the screen – and I tell a lot of people too, get your cell phone out of the bedroom because there’s constantly little emails and dings and those noises wake you up.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So really, it’s important to look at that. And the formaldehyde issue, I think that most people aren’t really cognizant of it. You and I know about this sort of thing. But remember, we weretalking about the kidneys and the mopping up of the body, what happens during that process is if you’re exposing yourself to these chemicals while you’re sleeping, you’re not really realizing why it’s interfering with the way you feel and function.

DEBRA: Well, you know, it’s – I forgot what I was going to say.Okay, go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Even the mattress, I know for myself, the mattress that I have at my house – I mean, I bought this quite a while ago. It’s an organic mattress and it’s made with wool or organic latex…

DEBRA: I have a wool mattress too, Pamela. Another common…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I know! The whole frame is not made with any varnishes. I love it! It’s green sleep. I’ve had it for – I don’t know, probably ten years. That’s the best thing I ever bought. And it’s just completely chemical free.

DEBRA: Yeah, I have a wool mattress and it’s the best thingI ever bought. I just love it. I just love my wool mattress.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Look at us. Look at this, the two ofus. People who are probably listening to this thing, “Oh, they planned this.” I mean, I didn’t know she does what she has done.

DEBRA: No, we didn’t.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And here I am, I had to order from Canada. It came down from Canada. It came down from Canada. I had to custom order and it came from Canada.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s really a great investment in your sleep and your comfort.

But I kind of want to talk a little bit more about the medication and the fact that when people are having sleep disturbances, they need to realize that perhaps stress an anxiety during the day are affecting your sleep too.

So let’s look at it from a mental health perspective. We address the chemicals and the comfort and the dangers of some of the prescription (and we can talk about the dangers of the prescriptions for hours), but I want people to realize that when you go to sleep and you’ve done all the sleep hygiene things, but if you have a lot of stress in your life and a lot of people really, you have overwhelming stress –

This is what I find in my business, that the people come and the first thing if I say, “Are you stressed?”, they just lose it. They’re like, “Yeah.” It’s just that a lot of people work full-time and they have to take care of their home, they have children, maybe they have elderly parents. The stresses of life perhaps have gotten more extreme I think in recent years for a lot of people especially with the economy in some places.

So I’m a big advocate of using calming fish oil to calm the brain and some of the racing thinking that’s associated with not being able to turn the brain off. So there’s a product by Nordic Naturals, it’s called ProDHA. They have two of them, their professional line, ProDHA and ProDHA 1000, which is the higher octave of that and is much stronger.

ProDHA, I take that myself, has a calming effect on the brain, but it’s not making you sleepy. So what it does is it turns off a lot of that subconscious worry that people have. “I need to add something to the list of things to do,” you know what I’m talking about, these constant thinking in the back of your head.

I also noticed with the higher docosahexaenoic acid that are in those products, you have a lot more vivid dreams. You can remember your dreams. And I really put this together because DHA is very active in the brain. Customers, I remember, were coming back to me after they’ve taken it and saying, “Does this make you dream vivid dreams?” and I said, “Well, DHA has a lot of activity in the brain and it would make sense that that would be the case” and then I started noticing myself when I switched to that product as well.

So if people has sleep disturbances and they’ve done all these other things or cause from stress, you would want to be on omega 3’s anyway, customizing your product that would be specifically towards more restful and relaxing sleep, but also that you’re not kind of being spontaneously upset about things during your daily life, during the day. I’ve noticed that this has really taken the edge of being stuck on traffic, things don’t go your way. Things that normally could be aggravating for most people, I think that this would be highly helpful.

DEBRA: Yes, it’s so interesting about how you can take natural substances and have them affect how you think and how you feel and your ability to do those two things. When I see that from taking a supplement, I start thinking about how – oh, I hear the music, so we have to go to break. I’ll finish my sentence. Sometimes, I get so interested in what we’re saying, I don’t even look at the clock.

Anyway, let’s go to break. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’ll be back in a moment.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

I mentioned before, Pamela that you talk to people on the phone and can help people get off their prescription drugs and also recommend natural substances to people for virtually any conditions, so why don’t you give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So you can reach me at my pharmacy here. I’ll be glad to help you with any particular need you have about a supplement or a question about the drugs you’re taking or to remove those medicines from your life.

The number here at Botanical Resource is 727-442-4955. I would be very happy to help you or any loved one in your family or even a friend, anybody you know. My business is really word-of-mouth. I’ve been doing this for 20 years probably. It’s really very positive and I think you’ll find your results to be very good.

DEBRA: Very good. And just give your number just one more time.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So it’s 727-442-4955. And as I’ve said previously, I would really be honored and happy to help you or your loved one.

DEBRA: Great! So tell us about natural substances that people can take that will help them sleep better.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Alright, good. So there’s lots of different products in the market and I’m going to talk about some of the ones that actually can work.
So a lot of people use theonine. There is limited data on that as a hypnotic and sleep. I personally don’t use it. So I’m going to go through the pros and cons of the products I like. I don’t really think that that works as well. It does work for some people, but not for the vast majority.

Now Valerian is very popular. Valerian does have components that put you into deep sleep, but it has a really nasty smell. And if you’ve ever smelled it, it smells like dirty, old socks.

DEBRA: I’ve never smelled it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it does, it does. It smells like dirty, old socks and I’m not kidding you. If you buy a bottle and you open it up, you’ll know exactly what I mean. So some people can’t get past the olfactory problems associated with that product.

My personal favorite is passion flower. The reason why I like passion flower is that it works like the benzodiazepines receptor products – the Xanax, the Ativan, the Valium – but it’s a partial agonist to the receptors. So when you take these benzodiazepines, the agonist has an affinity towards the receptor. The receptors are proteins and cells and that’s how drugs work.

So when you take Xanax, which a prescription that has addiction and tolerance, it binds to the receptor and it changes the chemistry and the cell and that’s how you get calm or that’s how you sleep. What the passion flower does is it has partial activity. So it goes on the receptor, it goes off the receptor. It goes on the receptor, it comes off the receptor. And when you’re doing this, you have some pharmacological advantages because you don’t have tolerance and dependence, but you have a highly effective product because it really binds right to the receptor pretty reproducibly.

I use that to get people off the medicine. By using that and few other little supplements, we can kick the drug off and the body is kind of faked off. It doesn’t know if the drugs are on or the supplements are on. So if someone really has pretty bad insomnia, passion flower is going to be the strongest product that you’ll probably be using in the natural realm.

DEBRA: I was taking passion flower. You gave me some passion flower and it worked very, very well. And then there was a day – I took it for about a month or so. I still have a bottle of passion flower in my nightstand.

After about a month, I thought, “Well, let me just see what happens without it.” And since then, I just haven’t even needed to take it because I still get my seven to eight hours of sleep every night. It got me through a period of time when I wasn’t sleeping very well. And then I know that I have it right there in my nightstand. If I’m not sleeping, I can just take some.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, yeah. That’s the best way to use that. I mean, somebody that has chronic insomnia and they’re not responding – and you’re on a few supplements too that we were just balancing the chemistry of the body. So the sleep disturbance would eventually go away. That’s what we would expect. But the good part is that we’re looking at trying to use the chemistry of the body and what we know about pharmacology to use these products in a responsible manner so that you’re not having these tolerance and dependence and these addiction properties.

And so passion flower is really a liberating product because you can use it for a certain period of time and like in your situation, sleep eventually started to come on a normal cycle and was much more reproducible and much more serene so to speak. You got better sleep, so you didn’t need it anymore, whereas if you had gone to the doctor and he had given you a benzodiazepine, you wouldn’t be able to stop it.

And that’s the beauty of using herbal products that work in a pharmacological basis. When you decide to target things based on the receptor on the brain and you’re trying to get a therapeutic outcome using the drugs, you might get an outcome, but you’re also going to have a negative outcome in the fact that you’re eventually going to need it to sleep every single night. And that’s not what we want for people. We want people to be able to make a choice.

DEBRA: Right, right. Absolutely.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So also too, there’s a product called Perfect Sleep that I like a lot. It’s a liquid tincture. So sometimes, people don’t want to swallow a capsule, they want to hold it underneath their tongue. That’s by DesBio. That works really, really well.

And that has some things that also help our hormones as well especially if someone has menopausal issues or so forth or depression, it has some other serotonergic activity as well. It might help for the person that maybe has sleep disturbances as a result of depression. So that product works really well.

There’s a homeopathic product (especially for children and for adults too). It’s called Neurexan. It’s from Heel. It’s a German company. Neurexan has a lot of data behind it. And what’s nice about Neurexan, it says clearly in the label it’s for overactive minds.

It really probably can be used in tandem with the Pro DHA for people that are having this obsessive thinking, worrying about the day, all these pressures that are on people today. The idea that we have to just fall into bed and turn everything off is very difficult for most people. They really can’t do it. So that’s a really good tool.
I want to mention one more thing and we’re going to talk a little bit more some of the natural stuff quickly. But there’s a higher incidence with elderly people using prescription for sleeping, hypnotics that they have a higher co-morbidity and mortality. They have a higher chance for a severe fall or fracture. And when we know when elderly people have fall and fractures, there’s a lot of co-morbidities that is caused, problems that all of a sudden, they end up with an infection, they’re in rehab, they’re not doing well and then they die.

So if you’re young or even if you’re older, if you want to try and preserve your health and your quality of life, reaching for the prescription hypnotics first before you tried some of the natural products and used the correct dose – because sometimes people, I’ll say, “Try this passion flower” and they’ll say, “Well, I’ve tried that, it didn’t work.” Well, it depends what product you’re using, what dose you’re using. And Debra, that’s really what it’s about. I select that for you for free. I tell you what to take. You’re not just going to randomly grab something.

DEBRA: No. I really want to really emphasize this point because you can go to a natural food store and look on the shelf and buy passion flower or whatever, but the difference is Pamela understands about dose because she’s a trained pharmacist and she has all these decades of experience. And so she can tell you exactly how much to take. She understands exactly how dosing works in a way that we who are not trained don’t understand this at all.

You can’t just look on the back of a bottle and say, “Take one pill.” She knows exactly how much you should take, she compare you with exactly the right product. And the products that she carries in her pharmacy are products that she personally has been using with her clients for years and she knows what works and what doesn’t work. She can help you make that decision instead of spending hundreds of dollars on products that you won’t know whether they work or not just because you’re trying them because you read them on a magazine article.

She really will give you a very precise recommendation based on her knowledge and experience. That’s one of the reasons why she’s just so incredible.
PAMELA SEEFELD: I really appreciate that. And that’s important to realize. I really respect people’s time and money…

DEBRA: And she really does.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I really want the best for everybody. It’s not about, “Okay, I want to mail you something.” It’s not about that. The things that I suggest like the passion flower product that I ended up deciding on ultimately, I probably used five different ones with different people and I just kind of decided to looking at what is actually in there, how it’s standardized, how many milligrams, what’s actually working as far as feedback.

I’ve been doing this long enough. I know if people are coming back and saying, “It’s not working,” a particular product, “I just don’t want to use it anymore,” I move on to something else. There’s a lot of products that are very popular, that there’s a lot of advertising around, but I found that they just don’t work very well for people and they’re expensive and I just don’t carry them here.

So it’s really about selecting something that’s appropriate for the person. Especially if they’re drug naïve or not drug naïve and they haven’t had anxiolytic prescriptions, but especially the person that’s tittering on the edge and needing to have prescription therapy and the doctor or the practitioner is pushing for it, you really need to look and see if there’s some other things you can do instead.

And this encompasses not just the sleep that we’re talking today, but your blood pressure, your cholesterol, all these different things. Depression, anxiety, ADD, ADDHD, OCD, all these things can be helped very effectively with the right supplements, the right dose and just a few simple things.

DEBRA: Yes, they can. Now, we only have less than a minute actually, so I just want to slip one more thing in here and that is to say that being a registered pharmacist, Pamela can order and sell natural supplements at professional prescription grade that they cannot sell in the natural food store.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: And so you’re getting a completely different kind of supplement when you go to her than if you’ve been in a natural food store.
Okay, so we’ve got 15 seconds left, so give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, yes. It’s 727-442-4955 and as I’ve said previously, let me help you with any of your questions. I would be glad to answer those. I’m here full service for you.

DEBRA: Okay, great. And Pamela will be onagain in two weeks and every two weeks after that for an undetermined period of time. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today we’ll be talking about back pain and how you can help alleviate it using natural things you can do at home. There are more than 200,000 back surgeries in the USA every year and a lot of these are due to chronic pain. We’re going to talk about chronic pain, some of the causes beyond the injury itself and how to control pain instead of surgery. Doctors offer only surgery and drugs, but there are other natural solutions, some surprisingly simple. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: November 19, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Wednesday, November 19th 2014 and it’s still cold here in Florida. I’m still cold. I’m still waiting for my heater that I ordered to arrive that I have finally turned out the central heat for the house. So it’s warming up slowly, but boy! It’s cold here.

Anyway, my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s on every other Wednesday. She was on two Wednesdays ago and she’ll be on two Wednesdays from now again and every other Wednesday thereafter because she’s got so much to tell us about how we can not take prescription drugs, but instead handle things that are going on with our bodies by using natural means.

She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And today, we’ll be talking about back pain and what you can do to alleviate it using natural things that you can do at home.

There’s more than 200,000 back surgeries in the U.S.A. every year and a lot of these are due to chronic pain, so she’s going to tell us what to do, some of the things that cause pain beyond the entry itself and how you can control pain instead of surgery.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, it’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. You know, I have to tell you that yesterday, I got an email that said, “Debra, I love your show and especially Pamela.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, that’s wonderful. Thanks for the great feedback.

DEBRA: You’re welcome! So anyway, let’s talk about backs.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So what happens is, like you said, there’s 200,000 back surgeries in the U.S. every year and that’s probably even a low estimate. What we find is if we go to an allopathic doctor and we have a chronic back problem – and a lot of people do have chronic back problems either because of an injury or dehydration (and we’ll go to that in a minute), what does the doctor offer you? They offer you surgery, they offer you opiates (pain relievers) and they offer you muscle relaxants.

So a lot of times, I tell people that especially surgery, the outcome sometimes is not so good. I’ve seen quite a few of my clients that things just did not turn out the way they perceived they would be. So it’s really a dicey situation.

And what we want to look at is that back pains (especially lower back pain, which is probably the most common type of back pain), there’s two components to back pain. So when you look at natural substances and what we want to do in place of surgery, in place of being addicted to narcotics (because that’s typically what they offer), lower back pain, the component you look at are muscle spasm. That’s 80% of the cause of back pain. So the muscle around the area are contracting in a way that’s very, very painful.

And secondly, there’s disc degeneration. So it puts strain on the tendons and the ligaments that are on the spinal column.

These two processes are really what’s causing the pain. Both of these are caused by chronic dehydration. I mean, I have met people that treat back problems pushing fluids. Water will take these areas. And if you think about the vertebrae, they have these cushiony areas between the vertebrae and what happens is chronic dehydration sets in and sets in motion all of these types of back problems.

DEBRA: So let’s talk about dehydration for a minute because I think that most people don’t understand what dehydration really is. I think that people understand that it’s not enough water, but what is the definition of how you would be dehydrated besides having back pain? How would you know that you’re starting to be dehydrated and how much water to drink?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. Well, that’s a very good question. It’s going to vary for different people. I use the sauna a lot, I do 30 miles on a stationary bike every day. I need to drink a lot more water than somebody perhaps isn’t doing all the exercise because I sweat a lot. So these things are components that need to be looked at – the daily exercise and how much you sweat.

But most definitely, you can tell a person is dehydrated, I always tell people to look at your skin. Your skin gives away a lot of what your dehydration says. And of course, when you use the restroom, if your urine is really dark and concentrated – outside of taking vitamins because when people take B vitamins, riboflavin gives you that kind of fluorescent, yellow urine color. That’s a metabolite. It doesn’t mean that you have expensive urine.

I always hear people say, “Well, you know, you’re peeing out all these vitamins.” That’s not what it is. It’s the metabolite, the riboflavin. So people can correct them that that’s what it is. It shows that it’s actually being metabolized and utilized by your body, so actually, it’s a good thing.

So you need to look at those things, people’s skin. But really, it depends on activity level more than anything especially here in Florida, we’re going to be needing more fluids when it’s hot out than a person perhaps maybe up in Canada where it’s cold and they’re not sweating so much.

So I always say that it’s a broad question, but it would be inter-individual on the person. You’ll know when you’re dehydrated.

A lot of times, people with dehydration, the symptoms that show up most frequently are headaches. That’s what I find for most people. A lot of headaches are from chronic dehydration because a lot of people drink a lot of coffee and they drink a lot of alcohol. Those tend to be dehydrating by themselves.

DEBRA: People who are drinking coffee all day long (like sitting at work, drinking coffee all day long), they’re not actually hydrating their body. They’re dehydrating their body.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. That’s a big culprit.

DEBRA: What we really need to be doing is drinking water. I actually drink water all day long. I’m drinking – let’s see, how much water am I drinking now. I’m drinking at least a half a gallon of water a day. It’s got all of these things that I got from Pamela. So I’m like sipping all these nice nutrients all day long in homeopathic.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great!

DEBRA: But I read a book many years ago – it’s an excellent book and I highly recommend it – called Your Body’s Many Cries for Water

PAMELA SEEFELD: My favorite!

DEBRA: Good! Yeah, I really love that book. When I read that book, I went, “Oh, my God! Everything that could be wrong with your body could be dehydration” and I think that that’s really true. I just started drinking more water and it explains in the book about how your body needs water and that people are drinking soda or they’re drinking juice or iced tea or whatever and what you really need is water – water, water, water.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, you’re right. I’m telling you, water is the no. 1 healing property that you can bring into your body. We look at the things that cause epigenetics, what turns on genes, what helps the body heals – water, sleep, plants, consuming plants. All these things matter, but water is one of the most important things because our bodies are mostly made of water.

And we know that the joint surfaces, the cartilage, it’s the padding that separate the bone structures and the joints. The cartilage contains a lot of water.
So when we get the stability that we’re having all these dehydration, the cartilage starts to dry out and the sliding surfaces between the cartilage and the joints, all of a sudden, there’s friction there because there’s not enough lubricant. And as a result of it, you start getting knee problems, hip problems, back problems. They’re all interrelated.

DEBRA: And it’s all dehydration.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s right. I’m saying, it’s so simple. Water is free!

DEBRA: Yeah, it is. It’s something that everybody can take and I would just say that you want to make sure that you drink filtered water, so that you’re not getting all those chemicals that are in tap water.

But aside from that, you’re not going to drown by drinking too much water. Your body needs more water than you probably think that it needs. I feel just a lot better. When you drink a lot of water, your skin looks really good too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Almost definitely. I’m telling you, people are always coming to me, “I want anti-aging skin secrets. I use medical skin care and vitamins here,” I’m like, “Look, you need to start pushing fluids.” When people are dehydrated – especially here in Florida, a lot of people have boats. They’re out in the sun. They’re doing house work outside, yard work, you get dehydration set in very easily even for active people.

DEBRA: Yes, yes. So how much water do you drink? How much water do you drink?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I mean, I drink probably a gallon or a gallon and a half.

DEBRA: Yeah, but you’re execising so much and you’re sweating.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The exercise, yeah, exactly. You know what? I’ll tell you. If you drink alcohol in a daily basis and you’re drinking coffee, you need to probably double up what you’re normally drinking now. That’s what I tell most people. Those things are naturally going to dehydrate the individual quite severely.
And also, too, don’t forget, you need to have salt. A lot of people are on these low salt diets. Salt needs to be with water.

DEBRA: That’s a very important point.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. Personally, I like rock salt. That’s one of my favorite. People have their personal favorite, but rock salt on the Himalayan especially has all the minerals and it has iron in it.

DEBRA: I only have two kinds of salt. I use real salt and Himalayan salt.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Me too!

DEBRA: Me too!

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly all I have in my house.

DEBRA: Yup, that’s all I have in my house too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Real salt and Himalayan, yes, those two things. But it’s really interesting because we know that especially the Himalayan, when it’s pink, it has a lot of iron and it’s really great for the body especially for heme and for oxygen-carrying capacity. You’re getting quite a lot of it. It’s very bioavailable when it’s located in the salt itself.

DEBRA: That’s great. We need to go to break. We’ll talk more about back pain and dehydration and other things that we can do to handle these pain in our bodies when we come back.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

Pamela, before we go on about back pain, tell people what you do and give your phone number so that they can reach you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh! Okay, great. Yes, so my background is clinical pharmacy, but I’m also a pharmacognosy consultant (and that is an expert in plant medicine). I have a homeopathic and natural pharmacy here in Clearwater, Florida called Botanical Resource. It’s been in business for 15 years, but I’ve been a pharmacist for almost 25.

I would be most glad to help or your family with any condition, not just back problem, but any sort of condition that you might be interested as far as natural remedies and alternatives to prescription.

My consultations are free and the number here at Botanical Resource is 727-442-4955. I would be very honored and pleased to help you or any other individuals in your family with any need you may have.

DEBRA: And please call her if you have any need. Really, she does want to talk to you and she’s happy to talk to you for free. I know she has a very good reputation here in Clearwater, which is how I found out about her in the first place. It’s because of so many people who are saying so many good things about her including medical doctor, including my own medical doctor.

She is just every day taking people off of prescription drugs and putting them on plant-based natural kinds of remedies and their conditions improve. So she knows what she’s talking about in terms of viewing it from a pharmacist’s viewpoint and dose and how the body works and all these kinds of things. She’s really made a difference in my health, really helping me with the things that I’ve been trying to work on for years and not getting through. I’m now such a difference. She can tell you. Pamela, tell them how much better I am.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You’re doing great. You’re doing wonderful. Really, it’s a tremendous turnout for you and I think I’m just really pleased that I could help you so much. I really have done this a long time. I’d be the first to say that if someone needs a prescription, they need to stay on what they’re doing, but I do have alternatives, homeopathic medical alternatives that are not available at the health food store that I can sell with counseling that will take the place of prescription. I can even order things out of Europe as well.

So it’s truly all-encompassing. I teach this. Your health is just paramount. You’re doing phenomenal and you’re off a lot of your stuff. And really, we were going over that, for eight years, you were going to all these doctors and nothing really was changing. But in a short period of time, we got you on the right track and everything is great. I’m very, very happy I could help you.

DEBRA: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Okay, tell us more about back pain.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, great. So this is interesting. During the break, I pulled out The Body’s Many Cries for Water, the book that we both love so much. It’s talking about the importance of the 5th lumbar disc and this is the part in the book that they were talking about why people end up with so much lower back pain with dehydration setting in.

What he’s saying (and this is something I tell my clients a lot of times), 75% of the weight of the upper body is supported by the water volume that is stored in the disc core on the 5th lumbar disc.

So that dehydration in that 5th lumbar disc – and if you look, a lot of times, people, L5 and L4 is where they’re having a lot of problems as their lower back. And sure enough, it’s because of the dehydration.

If you think about it, your upper body, the core, it has to be held, the weight of this upper body has to be held by these small disc in this very concentrated area. So dehydration setting in is really a big problem.

Also, I want to bring up about alkalinity. When you have dehydration, you become more acidic. And so as a result of that, that changes the pH of the fluid around the cartilage. And as a result of it, it ends up in more denegeration. And of course, then it leads to more pain.

I’m a big fan of using alkaline boosters. That’s really an easy way to get the alkalinity of your water up. You can do it by becoming a vegan too, but a lot of people do not want to do an extreme diet change and I don’t necessarily recommend that. But pH boosters are great because they’re drops you put in the water.

I like AlkaLife. Personally, I’ve tried several of them. That’s the one I consistently have stayed with. I test the water.

And typically, most water, from a filtered water or from bottled water, it’s going to be probably between let’s say pH 2 or 3 to 7.5, something like that. I’ll tell you, the worst bottled water as far as pH is Dasani. That tested out to be like a 1.

DEBRA: Because I think that’s tap water.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s the same pH of Coke.

DEBRA: Isn’t Dasani tap water?

PAMELA SEEFELD: It is, yeah.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s very acidic. So when I see people, they go to Costco or someplace and buy bottled water, I say, “Don’t get the Dasani if you’re going to do anything. That’s really extremely acidic.” I mean, you can change the pH of that water with it. But basically it’s just water from the tap that they put in a bottle. It’s really a poor choice.

So I use my regular filtered water. But when you do Ph drops, a lot of times, it’ll boost it up to 13. That’s a great, easy way, inexpensive. You can use baking soda. But sometimes, that has too much sodium. For some people, if they have blood pressure problems, I’m not going to recommend doing that. But just in a pinch, you can take baking soda and put that into just sodium bicarbonate and put that into your water and it will change the pH pretty effectively.

DEBRA: Yeah, alkaline booster is something that Pamela gave me. And so I take it as part of my – what she does frequently is she gave me some tablets and capsules and things, but not very many. Mostly, what she gave me is in liquid form. And then she tells her clients to just have a bottle of water and put all the things in the water and sip it over the course of the day, which is exactly what I do. It works beautifully, it just works beautifully.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great. Because you know what it is? It’s like getting an IV. When you take sips of the medication all through the day, every time you take a sip, you’re getting a little hit of the medicine into the tissue. So that’s going to be more reparative and more restorative than taking single relief pill. When you take a pill or a capsule, depending if there’s food in your stomach, but most of the time, it’s going to take about 20 minutes to dissolve. You’re going to get a peak in the bloodstream and then about five minutes later, it’s gone. So it’s inconsistent dosing. Putting it in the water, you’re going to get a much better outcome.

DEBRA: Well, I really see that for myself. I mean, the change has been remarkable. It was fast. This week too, I just felt like something kicked in. You start feeling better. But then there’s a point where you just go, “Wow! Things are different. I’m in a whole new level.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m so excited.

DEBRA: That happened for me this week. Really, it’s like I’ve been sleeping better so much, but it was just like my energy level and the way my body is shrinking in terms of losing weight, but also just in terms of losing puffiness. I’m just more trimmed and energetic and all those things that I always wanted to be.
Anyway, we need to go to break again. When we come back, we’ll talk more with Pamela about back pain. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who dispenses natural things instead of prescription drugs. She has a business, Botanical Resource. She has a lovely spa here in Clearwater, Florida. You can call her, she’ll talk to you on the phone. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about back pain. So tell us more about some of the natural remedies that you can use for back pain.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Perfect! So we’re going to do this little comparison like what will the doctor give you, what am I going to give you.
DEBRA: Good, I love that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: We’re going to play that little game here because most of these people, let’s face it, a lot of people that are listening maybe have had back pain or have back pain and they know it, what normally are being prescribed.

So when you have muscle spasms, you go to the doctor and he’s going to give you a muscle relaxant like Flexeril or Zanaflex. There’s a bunch of different ones. These muscle relaxants, they relax the muscles, but they also make you loopy and tired and these are highly sedating. There’s a lot of cognitive impairment with these. You’re very sleepy.

So what can we use in the natural realm that I think personally is just as effective as these. And this is what I normally use when someone comes to me and say, “I really don’t want to take these. I’m scared driving. I have to go to work.” There’s a product called Spascupreel, which is made from Heel. It’s a homeopathic product and it’s very strongly effective. It was Rx for a long time, a while ago. The FDA has made it OTC now.

Spascupreel is excellent! And it works for any muscle spasm anywhere in the body and it’s non-sedating and it’s non-addicting and it’s very well-tolerated. So I would say figuratively, 90% of the time, someone comes to me and says ‘chronic back problem’, is on this prescription anti-spasmodics and really wants to try something different, Spascupreel does the job.

And it also can work for leg cramps like Charley horses in the middle of the night. It can work if your eyelid is twitching. It can work for any kind of cramps any place in the body. Basically, it’s kind of all-encompassing.

And these products tend to have a long shelf life. So it’s one of those things that you could use periodically or if you could use it every day if you need it to.

DEBRA: And that’s a homeophatic remedy, right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s a homeopathic product and it’s developed by MDs. It’s inexpensive. It works really well. They’re little sublingual pills. And like I said, you get away from the sedating properties that are very common with the prescription that a lot of people, if they have to go back to work and they have to go along with their day, these things really knock you out and make you extremely tired. So Spascupreel is an easy choice for that.

Remember we talked about the two components of the back pain. We have the fact that we have the disc degeneration and then we have the muscle spasm. This can take care of the muscle spasm.

Now, the disc degeneration, when you have stenosis or the spine is narrowing and it’s pressing on the nerve, we want to look to what’s happening in the area of the body. I usually recommend instead of going right away to surgery and doing all these very invasive procedures, costly procedures, but also high chance of disability, maybe more so than the person already is experiencing, there’s a product from DesBio called SpinalMax.

Now, there used to be a product I use from Heel that was very, very good, but they’re only making it in Germany now, so that one’s not available here so much. But SpinalMax has had excellent results. SpinalMax actually repairs the nerves coming off of the spine. I cannot explain how homeopathically this works because I was trained as a pharmacist…

DEBRA: Please do, please do.

PAMELA SEEFELD: …because it moves the spine back into place.

DEBRA: Wow! Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing.

DEBRA: The thing that’s very interesting to me about homeophatic – I mean, I’ve known about homeopathy for many, many years. When I used to live in California, I went to a homeopath, but there’s homeopathy and there’s homeopathy. It didn’t do much for me at the time. But what you’re giving me – like I was on insulin and Pamela gave me a homeopathic remedy. The difference is that insulin is just making your blood sugar go down and is not healing your body and the homeopathic remedy is actually healing my pancreas.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct!

DEBRA: And so the long-term effects of these two things, the outcome is very, very different. And so now, it’s been what? A couple of months I think…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: …since I haven’t been taking the insuling and my blood sugar is still the same today as it was the day I stopped taking insulin. So, my blood sugar has not increased over time. I feel like more sugar is getting into my cells and I have more energy and everything. And so I’m just getting stronger and stronger. That was not happening on the insulin.

So it’s pretty amazing. It’s pretty amazing, these homeopathic remedies, these particular ones that I’m taking in and some that Pamela is talking about. They are developed by doctors to be healing. And there are things that you can’t just get it without – I mean, Pamela can give it to you because she’s a pharmacist. You can’t just go to the natural food store and buy these.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very important to know, right because they want these products. In fact, I was looking at the disclaimers in a lot of the things that I sell, they can basically go ask you legally if you’re putting it on the Internet and people do click and ship. We don’t want that. We want these to be sold with directions and counseling and I personally select for you.

And I think what’s interesting with SpinalMax and any of these kind of products, when you go to a traditional homeopath, they do the constitutional make-up, they do all that kind of stuff. Personally, I use homeopathy in a pharmacological realm. I look at the ingredients that are in there and I decide how I’m going to use it for the individual based on how I know the dynamics of these properties of these different plants are in there.

That’s why sometimes I’ll even give somebody a product for a particular ailment and it doesn’t say that’s what it’s for. I say, “Look, I know what I’m doing. Just use it for this.” It’s really important to kind of sometimes think outside of the box. Well, this SpinalMax was actually designed in place of surgery, this particular product is.

But it’s important to use your God-given talents and your intellect, all these reading and all these learning. If, for some reason, you view a particular product that has ingredients and a make-up that might be particularly good for another ailment, it’s important to realize that. You’re able to challenge that and say, “Yeah, I think I’m going to use it for that” and it does work. That’s why we go to school, right?

DEBRA: Right, right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: …to learn all these things.

DEBRA: Healing, you know, it’s not a static thing. It’s not something that you can just write a book on and say that applies to everybody, everywhere at every time. And so your experience and your intelligence and ability to put all these pieces together for an individual really comes into play here. I just think that you’re doing an excellent job. I can’t say that enough because I’ve known a lot of people over the year who do various kinds of healing things and I just see you helping people over and over and over. It’s really pretty wonderful.

We only have a few seconds left until we need to go to break, so why don’t you give your phone number again?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, yes. If you’d like to call me at my pharmacy, it’s Botanical Resource, it’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Okay, good. We’re going to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld.

She’s a registered pharmacist. And as you know from listening, she prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And in fact, she gets a lot of people off prescription drugs. She just does remarkable work.

So we’ll be right back and hear more about what you can do about back pain.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist. She prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. And Pamela, give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, you can call me here at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. And like I said, I would be really, really happy to help you or your family member with any issue you might have regarding prescriptions or avoiding them. We handle all cases.

DEBRA: Yes, she does. And she can even tell you what is going on in your body now that will lead you to need to take a prescription drug in the future and how you can handle that, so that you don’t have to get sick in the first place. She does so much, it’s amazing!

Anyway, let’s go back to backs.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah.

DEBRA: So where were we? What would you like to talk about next?

PAMELA SEEFELD: We were talking about alternatives, the basis of what you would normally get from the doctor. You would get narcotics and you would get muscle relaxants. So we could treat all those things. So let’s talk about the pain.

For the pain itself, remember we’re talking about using hydrating, water to increase the fluidity of the joint.
[dial tone]

DEBRA: Uh-oh, did we lose you, Pamela? Uh-oh… I’m sure that – I have a message here. Okay! So my producer is calling Pamela back. So she’ll be back just right in a minute. Let’s see, what can I tell you about backs. I know a lot about back pain because my ex-husband had a lot of back pain, a lot of injuries.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m back.

DEBRA: Oh, good!

PAMELA SEEFELD: I lost our connection. I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened.

DEBRA: It’s okay.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So, we’re regrouped. We were talking about water, lessening the friction and lubricating the joint. Now, let’s talk about the pain.

So if you go to the doctor, what he’s going to give you when you’re complaining of chronic back pain is he’s going to give you some anti-inflammatories, okay? He’s going to give you Mobic or Celebrex. They’re very common drugs – especially Celebrex.

Celebrex is a COX-2 inhibitor. It works on that particular pathway, that cascade of eicosanoids in the body. Those are pain signals. It blocks it. But of course, by blocking it, life is not like all or nothing. So when you block that, it has other problems. That’s why Vioxx had to be taken off the market because there’s people with heart problems and heart attacks. So it’s not a good idea to just completely block out a particular pathway.

I’m a big fan of using curcumin, which is turmeric. It works as a COX-2 inhibitor. It’s a natural COX-2 inhibitor. And that’s pretty easy to use and it’s pretty inexpensive. I also am a big fan of Traumeel. Traumeel is an excellent anti-inflammatory. And what Traumeel does – and it’s from Heel. It’s homeopathic. They come in drops, they come in tablets, sublingual tablets. It also comes in injections and cream. But I use the liquid quite a bit for people because you can put it in water like we were describing. When you drink it through the day, very specific.

But why Traumeel is different than using an anti-inflammatory, if you take an anti-inflammatory, that’s all you’re getting. Like a prescription anti-inflammatory, it blocks a certain cell signal, a pathway and there’s no solving.

So if we want to start solving the problem, if you’re doing this Spascupreel for the muscle spasm, you’re drinking more water, you’re doing maybe some exercises, some physical therapy to try and help the area with mobility and the SpinalMax to try and realign the spine, the Traumeel actually goes to where the injury is taking present and repairs small tears and damage in tendons, ligaments and the areas surrounding the tissue itself that’s injured.

So I like it because I think of it more as a reparative than just blocking out a cell signal. It’s more of a solving of an injury. And that’s what they really developed it originally for, for athletes. It solves where the injury takes place.

DEBRA: Yeah. Traumeel was one of the first things that Pamela gave me because I was having a problem with my foot at the time. When I went into her office, I was in so much pain I could hardly walk. She gave me Traumeel.

Later on, I had to go do other things and I was in pain. I was taking it, I was drinking it throughout the afternoon while I was sitting down. And then I had to drive myself home and I thought, “How am I going to drive home with all those pain in my foot?” But when I stood up, there was no pain in my foot after I had been drinking this bottle of water with Traumeel in it for several hours. That really shocked me. It works so well.

Pamela, are you there?

DEBRA: Yes, yes. I don’t know why I keep cutting out. I apologize. No, that’s what it is. When you’re drinking it in the water, specifically, what it’s going to do is it’s going to start releasing it gradually over a time period. And what you’re going to do is you’re saying to yourself is, “Okay, I’m actually looking for a complete solving of the issue instead of just blocking out a signal.”

All of these different prescrpitoin things that we use only block out a certain pathway and we really want to try and heal the area. So we say to ourselves, “Okay, in place of surgery, push fluids, SpinalMax, using some Spascupreel for the spasm, using some anti-inflammatory be it Traumeel or turmeric.”

And also, too, probably to some degree, eliminating nightshades in your diet because tomatoes, eggplants, some of the different vegetables that are nightshades, they do cause inflammation in some people. And sometimes, people have to try and eliminate those foods to see if the inflammation goes down a little bit.

But the hallmark of this whole talk today is to say all these people having all these back surgeries, if they did a few, inexpensive supplements (we’re not talking a lot of stuff here really) and water – like I said, the water costs nothing. It’s right there, it’s your filtered tap. If you start doing those simple things there, I’m sure that most of these people could avoid surgeries.

And I can tell you from experience and also just from listening to a lot of different lecturers, I’ve heard people, different doctors even profess that dehydration is causing a lot of the back problems. This is not new science. I can’t understand why when someone shows up with the initial, the beginning of some back problems, that water is not suggested first and foremost. I just really cannot understand that.

DEBRA: Because they don’t make money selling water. You know what? I think that back doctors, all the back doctors should all sell water filters in their offices and that way, they would make money.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I concur.

DEBRA: Yeah. I think all doctors should sell water filters. I just think that the first thing that anybody should do if they have anything going on with their body is drink more water, drink good water that is healing water and that will just hydrate your body. And then you should call Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, that’s true because we were talking about dehydration. When dehydration sets in in these discs in the spine, that’s the first place it’s going to show up because like I said, we have L5 holding a huge amount of our upper body weight. So if the dehydration alter the rest of the body, then it’s also going to start especially affecting that joint.

I’m telling you that most people could’ve reversed a lot of their back problems specifically with that SpinalMax bringing the spine back into alignment and repairing those nerves. And don’t forget to mention too that really, folic acid and omega 3 fish oil form the actual nerve themselves. Those can be excellent adjuncts to therapy to these things. I usually use those with it too because if you give the building blocks of the nerve, you’re going to have much better nerve repair off of the spine.

DEBRA: You know, Pamela, with my ex-husband, we went through years and years and years of disc problems. They wanted to give him surgery and he didn’t want to have surgery and all these stuff. And then there were chiropractor’s massage, we did something called VAX-D. There were exercises. Not one single person ever said to him these things that you’re saying now. Just having been through all that years of pain with him, I wish we knew you then.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s just really sad. These are like very elementary concepts too. Anybody that has any kind of – even a minor understanding of the human physiology would realize that the fluid and the water and how it is allowed to take waste products away from the area, how it’s needed in the subluxation station or the area where the cartilage is moving back and forth to protect the joint and lubricate the joint, these are rational concepts. They’re not like out there kind of concepts.

We know what the body is made of. We need to start remembering that we’re kind of like a chemical soup and the water is where all these ions and everything is moving around in. And if we don’t have that basis where things can be eliminated and the body can basically lubricate all these different joints and different areas, it’s going to be an uphill body for a lot of individuals – especially elderly people because their sense of thirst is altered as they age. And that’s why you see a lot of these older people with so many back problems. A lot of it is dehydration.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. Alright! So we’ve only got about a minute left. We’ll just say drink your water…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Drink your water…

DEBRA: Call Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Call me for homeopathic anti-spasmodics. And also, the SpinalMax, I cannot say enough how many wonderful things I’ve seen. I’ve had people that were on Fentanyl patches and oxycodone and they’re completely off of it doing the homeopathy for the spinal repair. I told them, “Look, pain medicines aren’t going to solve the spine. We need to solve the problem so that you don’t need the narcotics.”

They’re very liberated and very, very happy that we were able to accomplish that. It can be done. I want to tell people that there’s lots of encouragement. If you’re on all of these medicines, I can help you, give you some kind of path away from these things. I think you’ll be very satisfied.

DEBRA: Yeah, I think that you will be too. So it will not be an intrusion for Pamela for you to call her.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, I do this all day long.

DEBRA: She does, she does. And she loves to hear from you. And so just if you’ve got something going on with your health or somebody in your family, even with your pets – she can help pets too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes!

DEBRA: …and so just give her a call. Give the number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, you can reach me at 727-442-4955. As I’ve said previously, I would really be most honored to help you or your family member or your dogs or cats with any issues they may have. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve very successful at it and I really want to help people. So really, please call me if there’s anything I can help you with.

DEBRA: Thank you! And that’s it, we’re at the end of the show. Thank you so much, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you.

DEBRA: Pamela will be back in another two weeks. You can listen to this show again or her back shows at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today we’ll be talking about how toxic chemicals cause free radical damage that ages your body, and which specific antioxidants to take to heal free radical damage in various parts of your body. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: November 5, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. We have an autumn day today, Wednesday, November 5th 2014. Today, we’re going to talk about how toxic chemicals aid your body and what you can do to stay young.

I don’t know if you’ve seen my pictures, I don’t know how old you think I am, but everybody tells me that I look younger than I actually am. I’m not going to tell you how old I am today, but I could guarantee to you, I am much older than my picture looks. People are just guessing all the time how old I am and I’m actually pretty old. I mean, you can figure this out because last Saturday, November 1st, I celebrated 30 years of having my books continuously I print. If I’ve been writing books and having them published for 30 years, then – I didn’t start when I was six years old.

But I think that I look so young because I’ve been away from so many toxic chemicals so much. Obviously, it’s impossible to stay away from 100% of them in today’s world. There’s so many things that you can do to remove them from your home and your workplace and your body. And when you do that, then you’re not suffering from the damaging effects that we’re going to be talking about.

So my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s on every other Wednesday, so she was on two weeks ago and she’ll be on again two weeks from now. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. In fact, she helps people get off prescription drugs and uses medicinal plants and other natural substances in place of drugs in order to handle physical problems.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey! It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. I’m so glad you’re here too. So, we’re kind of in this pattern of starting off your shows with me telling how well I’m doing from working with you and having you give me various supplements to do various things.

So last week, I think we were talking about weight loss and I was talking about my weight loss of 14 lbs. since I’ve been working with you. But the thing that’s happened in the last two weeks that has been really astounding to me is that I actually have so much energy that I want to exercise. I want to exercise.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is just so great!

DEBRA: It is because I’ve spent most of my life not exercising because it’ll just be, “Oh, I have to drag my body out of the chair?” or I get short of breath or something like that. And so I have this little rebounder. I’ve had it for a couple of years and I know that jumping on a rebounder is really good for you. But knowing that something is good for you and actually doing it are two different things.

When I started out, I could maybe ten bounces. I mean, that’s how out of shape I was. And so then, I got up to a hundred. And then a couple of weeks ago, I got up to 150. And this week, I’ve been doing sets of 200 bounces and I’ve been doing that two or three times a day.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is great!

DEBRA: Yes, yes. This is huge progress.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m just so very, very happy for you. You deserve it. Your health is just of the utmost important.

DEBRA: It is because really, if you don’t have health, you’re not going to be able to do anything else in the world. So actually, we’re talking about aging. As my body is getting older, I am getting stronger and healthier and more able. And so aging doesn’t have to be deteriorating. It could be restoring.

Anyway, let’s start out just by talking about toxic chemicals and how they damage your body.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So there’s different categories of things that can be damaging to the body. We know heavy metals, lead, mercury and nickel, these things can accumulate in the body because they really don’t leave the body. It doesn’t have a really good process for eliminating it. What actually helps eliminate heavy metals pretty effectively are saunas.

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Because saunas, most of these heavy metals are stored under the skin and they can come out in the sweat. So we know that’s a very good way to remove that kind of body burden so to speak.

But we also know that the chemicals, the pesticides has to be fat soluble to stay in the body. So I’ll explain what that means. From a chemistry standpoint, something that’s water soluble, if you’re in contact with this chemical and it’s water soluble, it is going to go into the urine and leave the body. But they’re more your really aren’t water soluble chemical that accumulate in the body, so those aren’t the ones we really concern ourselves with.

When you think about a pesticide, the reason why it’s fat soluble is because think about it, when they spread a field, how do these bugs die? You don’t see bugs that are burst apart, right? That doesn’t happen. They find them dead. And how they die is in the central nervous system. So these bugs are neurological toxins to these different insects and they have affinity to do that. That’s why they’re also neurological toxins for us. So someone that maybe sprays pesticide for a living will be at a higher risk for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, any of these neurological disorders.

So people need to kind of phrase these things in their mind, going like, “What are we trying to get rid of?” Metals are easily removed from the Body Anew, which is the homeopathic detox that I use. That’s going to work its way into the central nervous system in the brain too so that if someone ate a lot of fish at one time, that can remove mercury. But it’s important to say, “We want to remove fat soluble chemicals” and to do that, the body has to undergo moving the pesticides out of the fat, into the blood stream and changing them in the liver to make them more water soluble.

So it’s important to note that that’s how these things kill bugs and they also accumulate in us.

DEBRA: Yes! So then what do you do…?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I think it’s interesting. I don’t know if people really think of it that way.

DEBRA: Well actually, I think of it that way because I wrote several pages exactly on that process in my book, Toxic-Free. But I had to research that and I had to have a friend of mine who’s a doctor explain it to me. You explained it really, really well. But I only know this because I’ve been studying toxicology for 30 years.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! You’re an expert in the field and so you would know that, but the person listening, they might not have had it presented to them in that matter to understand how it works. I hope that that clarifies the different levels and the things we’re trying to remove out of the body.

DEBRA: Yes, and you explained that very well because the heavy metals have to be removed in a different way than how the pesticides need to be removed. Even fluoride needs to be removed in a different way.

This is what I’m finding out as I’m researching the whole subject of detox. You have to know what it is that you’re wanting to remove from the body in order to remove it. To just drink a green smoothie doesn’t necessarily remove what you want to remove. That’s why we need to be so careful about this one when we’re actually doing it.

Tell us about free radicals and how the toxic chemicals, that damage that occurs with toxic chemicals.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. Yes, absolutely. Great question. So free radicals, basically what is – and we’re going to talk a little bit about antioxidants coming up. Free radicals are basically an unpaired electron. It’s an unpaired electron and it’s allowing damage to take place.

So what can free radicals do in the body? If you don’t have anti-oxidants whether you’re getting them from food or from supplements (sometimes, I like to say you can get it from both), what they do is it can damage blood vessels and vasculature and allow for plaque and hardening of the arteries and atherosclerotic disease.
They can work specifically on the arteries, but also on the internal organs (the liver, the kidneys).

And a good example of free radicals that are damaging is macular degeneration. When these free radicals are damaging the eye and people start having issues where they start losing their sight as they get to be elderly.

DEBRA: Right! So I also wrote about free radicals in Toxic-Free. Actually, anybody who’s interested in how toxic chemicals affects your body and what the detox process is, there’s a real clear explanation in my book if you just get my book, Toxic-Free. But I’m going to explain something about free radicals because this is how I thought of it really easily.

What free radicals are is that they’re a natural byproduct of energy production. So our body is producing free radicals. What they are is they’re molecules, but they’re unpaired on their outer shells. And so it’s like if you were a single person, you would be like an unpaired electron and you’re looking to mate up with another electron.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: But what happens is instead of mating with another single electron, they go steal husbands and wives from other marriages and they destroy those marriages.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Aah, I like your analogy.

DEBRA: Isn’t that great?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I like that. No, I really like that. That’s simplistic because I mean, really, I’m sure most people in their mind don’t know how to picture an electron.

DEBRA: Right, right. But that’s exactly the function that’s happening. We need to go to break. When we come back, more about antioxidants and free radicals and unpaired electrons.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s funny.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld and we’re talking about how toxic chemicals age your body and what you can do to stay young. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. There’s actually a word for it, it’s ‘pharmacognicist’.

I always like to mention this ‘pharmacognocy’ because it means the study of medicinal plants, but the word root itself is pharma-, which is drugs and -cogno, which is intelligence. So plants are drugs with intelligence and I really like that because nature has its own intelligence and it gets transferred to the plants into our bodies and then that intelligence helps heal us. Yes, is that correct? Hello?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is correct.

DEBRA: Okay, good. So let’s go back to anti-oxidants and free radicals. Alright! So then the free radicals, when they mate up with husbands and wives instead of another single electron, then there’s damage. It just destroys that. And so then what happens with the antioxidants?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So the antioxidants go and they stop this process. They’re basically donating electrons. So what’s important is there’s different levels. We think of vitamin E and vitamin C, those are very strong antioxidants. Vitamin C is the water soluble antioxidant, so that goes into the blood and the tissues that have water affinity and vitamin E is the fat-soluble antioxidants. So that goes to the brain, to the cellular membranes, things like that.

The problem with free radicals is they are not taken care of and ‘neutralized’ so to speak, you end up with damage to tissues. So antioxidants are really an important way to circumvent that. The vitamin C and E are really good. I did some searches in the Library of Medicine because I have some particular favorite antioxidants that I like.

I like Resveratrol quite a bit. Resveratrol has anti-cancer activity. It decreases your lipid, your circulating lipid (so your cholesterol, your triglycerides) and its anti-aging effects are really great because it encompasses anti-aging properties in the inside of the body, but it also stops hyperpigmentation and aging in the skin, which I thought was really interesting.

So it works inside and outside. And really, that’s what we’re all kind of concerned about, right? We want to look young, but we also want to feel young too.
So this has high affinity for the plasma membrane.

DEBRA: What is Resveratrol? What plant does that come from? How does that get made?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Resveratrol, it was originally located in red wine. It’s kind of like the going joke you need to drink lots of red wine for getting your Resveratrol. But you’d have to be drinking quite a bit, which probably wouldn’t be good either intoxicated people walking around all day. And we do find these components in wine, but it’s to a very small extent.

So the capsule, they’re relatively inexpensive. They work really, really well and they’re well-tolerated. There’s also some data, I think this is quite interesting, that this has really high penetration to the brain. And they have some studies that they’ve shown with mice that they make them both alcoholic mice. That’s the particular mouse that they breed. And then they made sure that these mice had cognitive impairment as a result of it. They couldn’t find their way around the maze.

And then they gave the one group a placebo and the other group, they gave Resveratrol. And within a month, the Resveratrol group actually overcame their cognitive decline and could run the maze like mighty mouse. So we know that it really does help to change tissue in the brain too in a favorable sense.

So there’s tons of different antioxidants. I can go to a lot of the different ones, but Resveratrol might be the one you really want to try because it does prevent the aging of the skin, which that’s been shown to be statistically significant especially the hyperpigmentation and the sun spots that you get. And then also, the internal organs and the circulating lipids and the anti-cancer and anti heart attack capacity that it entails as well is really important.

DEBRA: That’s really good.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I would tell you too green tea.

DEBRA: Yeah?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s good. Green tea is excellent as well. Green tea contains epigallocatechins, over 300 of them. I would tell people not just drinking the green tea because when you do a green tea teabag, you’re only doing the water soluble components of the plant, right?

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So drinking green tea is great for you, but I prefer to tell people to actually consume the capsules because when you consume the capsules, you’re getting all the tea. You’re not just getting the water soluble components, but you’re getting the fat soluble components.

So remember, fat soluble is where all the problems are. You want something that’s going to target into these membranes, into these tissues and the anti-cancer – like especially for breast cancer with green tea, it’s highly efficacious.

So I would tell people that green tea capsules. And not only that too, you get the added benefit that green tea capsules are great for weight – weight loss, I should be more specific.

So I know I do that. When I exercise in the morning, I take four small green tea capsules just before I start working out with my detox bottle. That way, it really helps to burn a lot more fun. There are studies that have shown that the increase in fat-burning is quite significant. So those two supplements are something that most people should really be taking.

DEBRA: That sounds good to me. I actually take a green tea extract. So would the fat soluble be in the extract or should I switch to capsules?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good question. So yeah, if it’s an extract that’s in glycerin or in alcohol, yes, it would because glycerin and alcohol (especially alcohol, maybe more so) extracts those components out. When you do a water soluble extract (with basically, the hot water over the tea bag), you are still getting components, but you’re not getting all the epigallocatechins that are in there because you really want the 300 different components that are in there.

An extract would have that. I like just taking the capsules, which is pretty easy because they’re tiny, little capsules. The good part about it is that I don’t do real well with caffeine and the capsules – and I think you should notice it for your extract, they don’t make you jittery.

DEBRA: Yeah. No, it doesn’t make me jittery at all.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right! Whereas if you can get it from coffee, I don’t tolerate it very well.

DEBRA: I don’t tolerate coffee well either even just a cup of coffee in the morning. I only drink it like if I’m in a different timezone and I have to be awake.
PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s the way I approach it. I don’t have coffee in my house.

DEBRA: I don’t either.
PAMELA SEEFELD: But if I’m working as a pharmacist and I’m filling prescriptions and it’s late in the afternoon, I take maybe a few sips. I’m probably getting 2 mg., just something just to make sure that I’m not getting tired.

This is really good too because we’re like parallel lives.

DEBRA: We are, we are.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, exactly. And green tea is a great way to get those components – so Resveratrol and green tea. I want to mention too just eating vegetables in your salad. If you have vegetables that have all these different colors, if you put olive oil on them, you’re going to absorb all of these flavinoids and polyphenols directly out of the vegetables. That’s why you’re eating food in the first place, to nourish the body.

DEBRA: Let’s talk more about that after the break.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: Yes, we need to go break. So we’ll talk more about that when we come back.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, very good.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about how to stay young even in a toxic world that cause the damage and aging to your body. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

And Pamela, we haven’t given your phone number yet. Pamela will talk to you on the phone for free about whatever your physical condition is that you’re concerned about and make some recommendations. So tell us more about what you do and what your phone number is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, very good. So my background is clinical pharmacy, but also, of course, pharmacognocy, which we discussed. I have a pharmacy in Clearwater, Florida. I do natural products. I’m a natural product pharmacist technically. We do homeopathic medicine, full service of vitamins.

And basically, I can even look at your blood work. I can tell you what’s going on in your body, not necessarily what’s normal range and out of range. And we can customize a program for you if you want to get off of particular medications. I do specialize even in mental health. So it’s all encompassing.

I also veterinary homeopathy for dogs and cats. So if there’s a particular ailment that your favorite friend in the house is suffering from, I’d be happy to help you with that.

So my number for the pharmacy is 727-442-4955. I would be really honored to help any of you that might have some issues about the medications you’re on or avoiding medicine. Everything we do here is all-encompassing. We keep a chart for you and all services are complimentary. So that’s basically the gist of it.

DEBRA: Yes. And she’s extremely effective. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida where I live. I found out about here and started having her on the show and started working with her myself because I was hearing from so many people how well they were doing after visiting Pamela.

And even my medical doctor, when I told him that Pamela was giving me some things to help some of the things that had been long-term conditions for me, he said, “Just do what she tells you to do.” And so she’s very, very, very highly regarded.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, that’s great.

DEBRA: Yeah, she’s very highly regarded here.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I teach this. I’ve done this a long time. I’ll be very glad to answer any questions that you might have about the supplements you’re taking, the medicines they’re taking. I know both very well. This is something that I can help you with tremendously.

DEBRA: Yeah, she really can. And another thing I just want to add about what she does is that she’s looking at supplements from the viewpoint of a pharmacist. The dose that you’re taking and what you’re taking it with. All are intertwined with how effective it is instead of just going and saying, looking at the shelf in the natural food store and saying, “Well, what should I take?” or reading an article.

Have someone who really knows what they’re doing help you choose what your supplements are. It really makes a difference, it really does because then you’ll be spending your money on something that’s really working.

When I first went to Pamela, one of the first things that she said was, she looked at my blood work and she said, “You know, whatever it is you’ve been doing, you haven’t been making progress for the past eight years.” And then she gave me some things and I made progress in two weeks.

So that’s the difference. And so if you have something that you’ve been struggling with, please, please, please call her because she’s helped so many people.
Anyway, give your phone number and we’ll go back to talking about antioxidants.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, thank you. So the number here at my pharmacy is 727-442-4955. I’d be very honored to help with any of you with any issues you might have.

DEBRA: Yes, call her. Anyway, so antioxidants. We were talking about food before the break and you were telling us that we should eat salad and put olive oil on it. Explain about why the olive oil.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right! So fat on these vegetables. And it doesn’t have to be a lot. It can be half a teaspoon even. When you have fat on the vegetables, what it does is it allows to carry these components, which are fat soluble and that’s what you want, these antioxidants because we were saying that the areas that are most susceptible in your body are the ones that have cellular membranes and that is made of fat, so the fatty acids.

So what we want to do is we want to have this peak in the blood stream be very high. So a lot of these people that are dieting and eating lots of salad, but they’re not having olive oil with it, they’re getting the peaks in the blood stream. That explains why people, when they go on extreme diets, so they’re switching up just eating lots of salads in trying to lose weight, if they’re just putting vinegar on their salad…

DEBRA: The lemon juice.

PAMELA SEEFELD: …they start losing hair. The reason why, it’s not just the idea with the little calories, they’re not absorbing anything. That’s the real problem. So by not absorbing things, it’s causing these particular types of problems.

So the vegetables are really important. But also too, the supplements. I was talking about the Resveratrol and the green tea.

I want to mention, kind of an honorable mention of curcumin, which is turmeric. Turmeric is really interesting. Before the show, I did a Medline search in the Library of Medicine to see some of the different studies and turmeric, actually, we know it protects heart disease and cancer, it reduces incidence of type II diabetes, but its antioxidant effects are extremely effective for protecting neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s.

It has a high affinity for the brain. And as a result of that, if you’re really concerned about cognitive decline, this would probably be something that you would really want to take.

DEBRA: So how…

PAMELA SEEFELD: But studies also show that it really…

DEBRA: Go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Go ahead.

DEBRA: Well, I was going to ask…

PAMELA SEEFELD: …macular degeneration, which I thought was interesting.

DEBRA: That is interesting. I think I should take that. I’d been considering taking that just recently. And I want to ask you, so you just probably give it to people in capsules?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct, correct. You can cook with it, but it just doesn’t quite give us the peak in the blood stream because you’re not getting the same amount.

And I would also tell you that this one is particularly sensitive to needing fat present at the meal to have it absorbed. So if you’re having an apple for breakfast, this is not going to be absorbed. I tell my clients when I put them in curcumin (which is also extremely effective for arthritis and for pain), you can use curcumin many times even in place of narcotics for people who have severe back pain or rheumatism because it works like a COX-2 inhibitor, which is like Celebrex. It works exactly the same. It blocks chemical signals. You’re also getting the effects to the brain.

DEBRA: So what you need if you’re going to take turmeric, you need to take it with fat. So if you were eating Indian food…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct! You have to have that. Otherwise, it won’t absorb.

DEBRA: Yeah, if you were eating Indian food, it has a lot of turmeric in it, you would also be having the fat from the food. But you need to make sure if you’re going to take a capsule that you’re taking it with some fat.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very important because I see people that have tried turmeric for pain – usually, most people take it for rheumatism. And they’re like, “Well, that didn’t work.” And then I bring it to the fact that that’s why it’s important that people call me and I tell them, “If you eat this particular food with this particular supplement, you’re going to get the full 99% of the dose into the bloodstream.”

And we can target different supplement and different foods to deliver these things in a more effective manner. That’s what’s really important, understanding the physiology of your body and the chemistry of your food and making these things all work together in harmony, right?

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: …because a lot of people, they’re not thinking of it in that sense.

DEBRA: Well, not only are they not thinking of it…

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is very, very important. So why spend the money if it’s not going to work?

DEBRA: You’re the first person in 30 years of study on this subject that I’ve ever heard say this, but it makes so much sense. And you’re trained. You’re bringing a different viewpoint to it. I think that you have your whole pharmacy background and that you’re looking at all these interactions and it makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference. I’m so interested in this.

We need to go to break, but when we come back, we’ll talk more about antioxidants and other things that you can do to help stay youthful in a toxic world that is constantly aging your body. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about aging, antioxidants, toxic chemicals and what we can do to have more antioxidants in our body.

So what do you think about chocolate as an antioxidant?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I think chocolate is just showing very convincingly the data that chocolate has strong antioxidant activity. But what I would say is that unfortunately, the majority of the chocolate we see is combined with a lot of sugar and fat.

I personally like regular chocolate like everybody does, but you know what I’ve tried to do (and I can do this a great deal of the time) is have you ever tried Cocoa Nibs?

DEBRA: Yes, I have. And you know what?

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s raw chocolate pieces.

DEBRA: One of the thing that I found about it is it actually does taste like chocolate, but it has a real kick to it in terms of – it seems to have more of a caffeine kind of kick. It’s more like caffeine than eating regular chocolate. Somehow, eating a chocolate bar maybe doesn’t have as much chocolate in it because it’s got all the other stuff in it. But the Cocoa Nibs, they’re really good. I like Cocoa Nibs.

What I like to do is I like to take cocoa powder and then mix it with whatever I want to mix it with. And one of the things that I like to mix it with is I just mix it with grass-fed cream and put whatever natural sweetener I want to put in it…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Great ideas!

DEBRA: I’ll make a little fudge.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a great idea!

DEBRA: Yeah, one serving at a time like I’ll take a teaspoon, a heaping teaspoon of cocoa and then I’ll just put a little bit of, say, coconut sugar or honey or whatever and then put in the cream and just make a little paste and it’s delicious. It’s delicious and you can mix it with nuts or put mint extract or orange extract or whatever you want. That’s what I do when I want chocolate.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s very smart. I mean, a lot of times if I want to make a little fudge, I’ll mix cocoa powder with a little bit of agave and almond butter.

DEBRA: Hmmm… that sounds good.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You can roll them into little balls and put them in the refrigerator.

DEBRA: Yeah!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. I mean, you can be creative. There’s lots of different ways you can do it. So I think that the antioxidant activity in cocoa is hard to deny. It’s there and it’s really – life’s but enjoyment. The cocoa is good for you. We’re not saying, “Sit there and eat the whole bag of fun-sized sneakers” even though I was handing out candy on Halloween. I’ve had to bring it to the hospital to get it all out of my house because I’m like, “I don’t want to have that stuff sitting around.”

DEBRA: I know.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s so funny. Antioxidants some place else thinking that other people will eat it. But yeah, the antioxidant activity in chocolate is definitely there. We know that has high affinity for fat and water soluble areas of the body. That’s very important.

I was going to mention too, we’re talking about anti-aging exercise. What does the data show about exercise?

DEBRA: Oh, good. Tell us.

PAMELA SEEFELD: We know that the study show – and this is very interesting. This just recently came out. They took people that never exercised. These people were an average of 65, they never worked out before and they took a punch biopsy of the skin on their derriere. So that’s an area that normally doesn’t see the sun and so will have the least aging effects underneath the microscope as the rest of the body.

And then they put these people on exercise routine and they had them exercising for 45 minutes for four times a week.

After three weeks of this particular study, they went and resampled their skin and their skin in that time period from the exercise (and they don’t know if it’s the sweating or the exercise) actually look like a younger person’s skin.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: So the anti-aging effects of exercise are really important especially on the skin. The sweating process and also the capillary dilation during exercise allows more – this is my theory – allows more of the nutrients and the antioxidants that are present in your body to go to the cellular membranes and be much more effective. So it’s kind of up-regulating the area.

DEBRA: My theory is… go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: Well, I was going to say too…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I was going to say too white blood cell demargination. The white blood cells have a transient increase during exercise. So these cells were normally kind of hanging on to the side of the blood vessels. Because your heart rate goes up, they’re kicked off.

And so if you take someone’s sample of their CBC and looked at their white blood cells prior to exercise and then right after exercise, you get this transient increase. That’s why people that work out quite a bit don’t get sick.

DEBRA: Hmmm… well, I was going to say that my theory about why your skin looks better when you exercise is because when you sweat, you’re removing toxic chemicals from your body and so there’s less free radicals damage.

And I’ve also noticed that at times when I drink a lot more water (like if you go on vacation and you’re hot and sweating in some other climate where you aren’t usually), I notice that my skin just looks clearer and softer.

And so I really drink. I drink about three quarts of water a day, which I think is more than most people drink. I’m just sitting at my desk and I just drink and drink and drink pure water. I think that makes a huge difference.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it does. You have to realize your body is mostly water. So basically, when it comes down to it, your carbon and all these electrolytes (sodium, potassium and your hydrogen) – I mean, basically, your body is a chemistry stew and what’s holding it all together is water. So your skin, of course, when it’s hydrated, it’s going to make a huge difference as far as the way it looks.

And believe it or not, even from people going out in the sun and sun tanning, just being hydrated makes a huge difference in the texture of the skin regardless of whether the person had sunscreen or not because dehydrate steps in and it’s really common that this can happen.

So I would tell people that you’d want to really push fluids and also try and find room for exercise during the week, whatever you can do. Personally, I think that the best time to work out is in the morning because it kind of sets the tone for the day and gets your metabolism up. But some people do much better in the evening. It just depends if it affects your sleep or not.

I would also say too there’s another supplement that I’m interested in, collagen. If you take collagen or hyaluronic acid, that can work for the joints if you have arthritis.

Collagen also, of course, builds up the collagen under the skin. You can take oil collagen. It’s pretty inexpensive. I use a drink here at the pharmacy that I take myself and it kind of tastes like orange. You put it in the water and it brings you into a peak in the blood stream really fast (but you can take it in capsules too).

And collagen, what it’s going to do is it’s going to help the skin look much more youthful because collagen is kind of like the – I want to say the scaffolding under the skin that holds it up, makes you look useful. You can take it in a supplement.

And what you can find too is that collagen has high affinity for the joints. So a lot of people, as you get older, you start having mild arthritis in your joints, it reverses that. So that’s an easy, inexpensive way to get the anti-aging effects. But at the same time, also, be working on the joints because rheumatism tends to set in as people get older. So those are some really good things too.

I’m not sure, but what are you using on your skin right now?

DEBRA: What am I using on my skin. I don’t use a particular skin product. I’ve tried a number of different ones. I mean, people are always sending me skin products because that’s a big thing in the natural products industry, natural skin products. And so I’ve tried a lot of them, but I just basically wash my face with filtered water from my shower and just various kinds of soap, just soap. I know that I probably shouldn’t do that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: You probably shouldn’t say that because your skin looks really good. Your face looks great.

DEBRA: Thank you. Okay! So Pamela, wait, I want to ask you a question. How old do you think I am? I think you don’t know my age. I think you don’t know my age, right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, I have no idea how old you are.

DEBRA: How old do you think I look? How old do you think I look?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Late forties? I have no idea.

DEBRA: Okay, that’s what people think. I’m older than that, I’m older than that. But see…

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, you look really good. And you know what too? And all kidding aside because people can’t see you (we’re talking on the radio), the difference since you’ve been doing the Body Anew and the few things that I’ve put you on, your skin and your body has transformed quite a bit. I mean, you looked pretty before, but now, you really glow when I see your face.

DEBRA: Thank you. I agree.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I can tell that things are just starting to fall into place.

DEBRA: I agree. Yeah, yeah. And you guys, you should see Pamela. You could go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.comand see Pamela’s picture. I want to look like Pamela because she just radiates health more than anybody I’ve ever met. I mean, you cannot look at her and not say that she’s not the healthiest person in the room. She looks healthy in a way that I’ve never seen anybody look health and I’m going to look that way too. So there!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely! That’s the only way to be. I get stopped in the grocery store and they’re like, “You look really healthy” and I’m like, “I do because I am. Please call me. I’d love to help you too.” So it’s all-encompassing.

Let me tell you, your health is your wealth and you really want to take care of your body. You only have one body. Taking some of these simple supplements we were talking about – the Resveratrol, green tea, salad with olive oil, maybe some turmeric, some curcumin, vitamin C and E, of course, getting enough sleep (we’ve talked about this before, sleep and exercise are very important), all these things that you do, these body habits affect aging in subtle ways, but very significant as well.

And these are things that we can easily do. This isn’t really too difficult. Even if you have to take the stairs when you’re at work, little bits of exercise here and there make a huge difference in the heart disease, cancer and also the way the skin appears. Study is showing that with people exercising, it can change their skin to a younger person just from a few weeks. It’s really a testament that exercise is not just for the physical health, but the skin health and the mental health as well.

DEBRA: Well, I want to say that I have this rebounder I mentioned. It only cost me $40. I just have it in the corner of the room.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Good for you!

DEBRA: And it takes me what? A minute or two to do 200 bounces. And so I can just take a little break from my desk and do the 200 bounces and come back. It’s not even time-consuming anybody can do this.

We’ve got only 20 seconds less, so give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So if you can call me here at my pharmacy, the number here is 727-442-4955, I would be very glad to help you and your family with any questions you might have.

DEBRA: Great! This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!

You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Today we’ll be talking about what you can do to help your body lose weight. Pamela has been helping me with weight loss and I’ll talk about my story and success. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before”

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

DATE OF BROADCAST: October 22, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. Today is Wednesday, October 22nd 2014. The weather is beautiful here in Clearwater, Florida where I’m looking out my window.

Actually, as I’m sitting here doing the radio show every weekday at 12 Eastern, I’m sitting here looking out 17 ft. of windows into my backyard where there’s all these oak trees and birds. Sometimes I see cardinals and red-headed woodpeckers and all kinds of things. It’s just really lovely. It’s lovely to sit here and chat with you every day and to be with my guests in this beautiful, natural atmosphere. Anyway, that’s what I’m looking at when I’m talking to you.

Today, my guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Pamela knows so much. She’s just incredible in terms of what she knows and her ability to help people to get well. She’s been working with me personally (we’re going to talk about that a little bit today) and also other people that I know here in Clearwater, Florida. She’s based here in Clearwater.

She’s a registered pharmacist and she educates physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She also studied a field called ‘pharmacognosy’. That’s the study of medicinal plants (in addition to studying drugs).

And so what she likes to do really is take people off prescription drugs instead of give them to them. She likes to help people with medicinal plants and other natural substances to handle whatever is going on with their bodies instead of going on drugs in the first place because the difference between drugs and medicinal plants is that drugs may control your symptoms, but medicinal plants and natural substances will actually heal your body.

She knows so much about this that I have her on every other Wednesday because we’re just going through all kinds of different physical problems and talking about what are the alternatives so that you don’t have to take drugs. I’m just thrilled to be bringing you this information.

Hi, Pamela!

Pamela Seefeld: Hey! It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. So today, we’re going to talk about how you can lose weight even if you’ve been having difficulties losing weight like me. And especially, I know that a lot of people who have had chemicals damage their body (which is virtually everyone in the world today) that if you have endocrine problems or other kinds of problems like with your liver and you can’t detox or whatever, that a lot of times, you’re overweight not because you’re eating too much or that you’re a bad person, but that your body just isn’t functioning the way it’s supposed to function.

I know that you’ve been working with me for a couple of months on just all the things, all my unhandled physical conditions, which are all improving, but specifically…

Pamela Seefeld: That’s great!

DEBRA: Yes, they are. But specifically, since I’ve been working with you, I’ve lost 14 lbs. really kind of effortlessly.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s excellent!

DEBRA: Yes, yes. And part of it has been because something that you’ve done has changed the way my body interacts with food. And so I don’t have cravings for anything, I don’t have to use any willpower to eat the right foods because I have no desire to eat sugar or any of those things that I use to have to struggle with, that I knew what was the wrong thing to do, but my body was saying, “Give me that sugar!”
And so now, it’s just like I just eat my three meals a day. I even forget to eat my snack in the afternoon. I eat my three meals. I eat something before I go to bed and I’m never hungry in between. I have no cravings and my body is just getting smaller and smaller and smaller and my clothes are hanging on me. I’m just very happy.

Pamela Seefeld: I’m so happy for you.

DEBRA: Thank you, thank you. I’m so happy for me too! I got to a point the other day where I realized with a bang! kind of actually that I could put my attention on other things in my life instead of having to deal with my body problems. That was kind of funny because…
Pamela Seefeld: Good for you! You know what? I’m really, really touched. I’m really so happy and honored that I can help you and that you’re doing so well. I mean, I knew that this was just really what you needed.

DEBRA: Yes, you did. You gave me exactly the right thing. I was telling somebody about this yesterday and he said, “Well, what is she giving you?” and I said, “Well, it’s not about having just like a box of things that she gives to every person who has a weight problem. It’s very individual.” By you giving me the right things for my body, my body is saying, “Okay, I can release this weight.”

Pamela Seefeld: Correct.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So it’s about the individuality. But we’re going to talk today about different things, different ways that you can help people lose weight if they’re having trouble losing weight. I’m hoping that we’re going to talk a little bit about some of the drugs that people take to lose weight and why people shouldn’t take them and what they can do instead?

Pamela Seefeld: Correct.

DEBRA: So why don’t you start wherever you’d like to start?

Pamela Seefeld: Okay! So the end game, we’re blaming people that they’re not eating the right food or that it’s somehow a moral dilemma that they’re not just able to control their hunger. That’s not really what it’s all about. It’s not necessarily calories in and calories out because we know the person that sticks thin and they eat all day long. So it’s not necessarily even though circumstances.

Okay, so there’s different things in the body that affect metabolism. The good way to look to see if you’re having insulin resistance and storing a lot of the calories as sugar is to look at your fasting glucose like if you go to the doctor and they do a blood panel on you. It’s called a CMP and it’s called ‘complete metabolic profile’. You can see all your electrolytes and your sugar.

And when people meet with me, there’s a free consultation. If you bring me your blood work or fax or email it to me, I’ll go over the numbers with you because it’s not about the range. The problem is looking at blood work and deciding whether somebody has metabolic syndrome or has some problems or some propensities to store excess sugar as fat.

It’s not about the range because that’s for the general population. One person, a fasting blood sugar at 95, they might be stick thin and another person, they’re already gaining a lot of weight. So it’s not necessarily about the range. But I tell people that if your fasting blood sugar should really reside between 75 and 85. That’s where most normal people are going to be.

So when you start getting up to the 90s (95 or 96 or close to 100), what I typically see when somebody comes in here – maybe they’re middle age, so they’re blaming it on menopause. That’s not necessarily always what’s happening. They’re starting to gain weight. They’re not eating very much. I look and their fasting blood sugar is in the 90s and they’re triglycerides are sky high, their cholesterol is sky high and they’re like, “Well, I don’t eat these kinds of foods.”

And so what’s happening is that they’re being blamed for this, but really, it’s insulin resistance. Sugar is turning it to fat.
So a good way to start is to say, “Okay, am I putting on weight and what’s my fasting blood sugar?” That’s something that the doctor can easily determine.

There’s some new studies too. And I know with fructose, when we think about high fructose corn syrup (and of course, we’re trying to avoid all that in general), if you look at what the study show, the amount of sugar that’s added to food if you’re in the United States between 1970 and 2000, the amount of added sugar in the food supply rose 25%.

DEBRA: Wow! That’s amazing. A friend of mine just went to see a film (I haven’t seen it yet), it’s called Fed Up. He said that it was about sugar in our foods and that on the back of the label, a food label, it has the nutrition facts and it has all these different things and it gives the percentage of the daily requirement or the daily allowance. Sugar is listed, the amount of sugar is listed, but it doesn’t give the percentage.
And he told me on the film, they said that the daily allowance for sugar is something like 6-9 teaspoons, 6-9 teaspoons a day.

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, it’s insane!

DEBRA: It is! And he said even at that being the allowance that if they were to put the percentage of the daily allowance that is the sugar in the product, it would be like 400% or something and that’s why they don’t put it on there because there’s just so much sugar in tehse processed foods and people just don’t understand.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s what’s happening. And not only that, even in healthy foods, you look at a lot of these soy milks and so forth, they’ll put rice bran syrup. It’s sugar.

DEBRA: It’s sugar, it’s sugar.

Pamela Seefeld: They re-label it as something else. ‘Organic cane juice’, it’s still sugar. So you have to look at that and what we see now is there’s a new study that was published in molecular metabolism and they were talking about how…

DEBRA: Before you tell us about that, wait, wait. Before you tell us, we have to go to break.

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah.

DEBRA: I don’t want to interrupt you in the middle of you telling us about the study.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s okay. Sounds good.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. We’re talking about losing weight and well be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is a Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist. You can go to her website at BotanicalResource.com.

Okay, Pamela, tell us about the study.

Pamela Seefeld: Okay! So what they’re finding is there’s a vulnerability and a variability to fructose. This is a brand new study that was published on the Journal of Molecular Metabolism. The New York Times’ was citing this on October 14th of this month. It was looking at what is exactly happening with fructose.

What we’re finding is that fructose, when you take it, say you have a piece of fruit and you don’t have any protein or fat with it like yoghurt or a piece of cheese or something, if you just have fructose by itself, what it does is instead of doing into the bloodstream, it goes immediately to the liver and it stimulates the production of triglycerides. So it increases cholesterol.

So this is a good example. When I see some of these women that come in, they’re very athletic and they work out a lot and they’re thin and they’re in great shape and they eat a lot of fruit, all of a sudden, they come back and they’re having cholesterol at sky high. This is what can happen.

Fructose, the sugar fructose is handled differently than glucose (which is like in regular table sugar). So if they’re going to have fruit and what they’re seeing is berries, they’re finding that there’s a growth factor. It’s called fibroblast growth factor 21. That’s not really important. But what they’re finding is that obese subjects have higher levels of this and it makes you store fat.

So it’s not that the person that’s heavy is eating improperly. It’s that there’s this other things going on with the hormones. And apparently, this hormone is much more effective with fructose than any sugar.

So what does this mean to you and I? I always tell this to my patient. You don’t want to be eating fruit that’s high in sugar by itself because you’re going to store it as fat. For example, watermelon and all these lemons because it’s kind of liquidy…

DEBRA: That was the first thing that came to mind, watermelon.

Pamela Seefeld: Yup! I mean, it’s not that these things are bad. It’s not like you can’t eat them, but you have to combine them with fat or protein to delay the gastric emptying. But if you’re eating lots of fruit that are basically water and sugar, you’re going to end up with these problems. You might be thin in the beginning, but eventually, you’re going to end up gaining a lot of weight.

DEBRA: Well, you know, I watch people eat or drink smoothies with a lot of fruit in them, just straight fruit and protein powder or something (although protein is probably good, that protein or fat). But that’s just a lot of fruit and a lot of sugar that’s going on.

I know that Whole Foods are good, but vegetables, most vegetables don’t have the same degree of sugar.

Pamela Seefeld: Exactly.

DEBRA: And I also know from my own research that different fruits have different amounts of sugar. I eat mostly berries and cherries because they’re on the low end of how much sugar they have in them. I eat them by themselves (I mean, separate from a meal) and I put cream on them, grass-fed cream.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s smart. That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: Yeah. Every night, I have my lovely bowl of mixed berries or cherries with grass-fed cream and I’m very happy.

Pamela Seefeld: Look at you! So you understand the physiology of it, that the sugar is really going and it’s creating all these lipid.

You have to know too that fructose is pro-inflammatory. It can cause inflammation. So somebody who has any kind of rheumatism or arthritis, they have no business eating tons of high sugar fruits. The same thing, it also alters body weight by altering the leptin sensitivity. Leptin is al about whether you’re storing fat and also, whether you’re feeling hungry or not.

So I’m not saying fruit is bad. But when they say “eat your fruits and vegetables,” I really would rather say, “Eat your vegetables.”

DEBRA: I totally agree with you.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s where I’m coming from.

DEBRA: And that’s my experience in my own body. The other thing that I can say is that I used to – now, I’ll say something that’s very embarrassing, but it’s true, it’s true. I think there are other people in this boat and so I want to say this so that people can see how far you can come.

I used to do things like eat a whole bag of cookies for dinner or I once ate a whole coconut cream pie.

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, I’m sure a lot of people have done that of course.

DEBRA: I used to eat a half a gallon of ice cream.

Pamela Seefeld: I’ve done that!

DEBRA: It’s interesting because I love to travel, but when I travel, it’s interesting just for me to see what different places consider to be food. When I went to San Francisco (I lived in San Francisco a few years ago for three months), I couldn’t find a sweet potato to save my life in a restaurant. I had to eat three meals a day in restaurants and to try to find something…

Pamela Seefeld: That’s funny.

DEBRA: And you know, you go to a restaurant for breakfast and everything is sugar and wheat. They even put flour in scrambled eggs in some places. You have to ask, “Is this 100% eggs?” It’s just kind of amazing to go out to eat and see what you’re being fed and how much sugar is anything.

I’ve said this before, but I’m going to say it again. Just go to the Food Channel and watch Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and you’ll see how much sugar is in restaurant food. It’s in everything!

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, because you see them cooking the food, right?

DEBRA: You see them cooking the food!

Pamela Seefeld: Exactly!

DEBRA: It’s in everything. They just toss it in. It doesn’t matter if it’s a dessert or not.

People don’t understand what sugar actually does to weight. I can tell you for a fact, I don’t eat white sugar. I mean, I eat white sugar maybe once a year if I’m out some place and I just have to eat that Godive chocolate cheesecake, you know? Gluten-free Godiva Chocolate Bars, I think not. I was like, “I don’t need them.”

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, I don’t even have it in my house. It is a problem. If I have people over for coffee, like the family, I don’t have any of that there. I mean, look, we have coffee here, but I don’t have sugar in the house. I’m really sorry if that’s what you want.

DEBRA: Yeah, I have things like honey and coconut sugar, which are not so refined and stuff. But I’ll tell you that if I eat even coconut sugar, I stop losing weight. That’s the thing. And if I cut out the coconut sugar, I’ll lose weight again. It’s as simple as that.

But if I’m eating whole foods, if I’m eating my fruit with cream, if I’m not eating any kind of sweetener at all, refined or unrefined, just nothing, then I will lose weight.

Pamela Seefeld: Well, yeah. It’s because it’s altering the leptin sensitivity.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

Pamela Seefeld: Let me talk a little bit about green tea too. Let’s talk about some of the different supplements.

DEBRA: Okay, so you have 40 seconds.

Pamela Seefeld: Forty seconds? Okay. Green tea is great because it contains epigallocatechin and it can protect against cancer as well. It revs up your metabolism and it’s not going to make you jittery. I use this every day before I work out. I think it’s great.

DEBRA: I take it every day too. I take green tea extract and I also drink green tea that I grew. I love green tea.

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, I’m a big fan of the capsules themselves because if you do the tea itself, you’re doing water-soluble extract. You’re not going to get all the epigallocatechin. The best combination would be some of both.

DEBRA: Oh, good! Well, that’s good to know. So we need to go to break and then we’ll come back and talk more about how to lose weight even if you’ve had difficulty losing weight before. There are things that you can do and I’m living proof of that because after years of not being able to lose weight, I’ve lost actually 25 lbs. since January. I’m very proud of that.

This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dad and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK=

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs.

Pamela, you mentioned that you do free consultations on the phone. Why don’t you give people your phone number so after the show, they can call you?

Pamela Seefeld: Yes, that’s great. So you can reach me here at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s 72-442-4955.

DEBRA: Okay, great! So I think you were going to tell us some things that people can take that will help their bodies.

Pamela Seefeld: Right! So the different supplements you can take, the green tea was the first one that I was just kind of talking about that works really good. There’s one also (and I’m not sure if your listeners have heard of this before), it’s called Nopal cactus.

DEBRA: I’ve never heard of that before.

Pamela Seefeld: Nopal cactus, I was looking up the studies – yes, it’s really interesting. It’s a cactus extract and what it does is it lowers postprandial glucose, which is the glucose after an hour (so after you eat, you take a blood measurement) by 25%. So this can be for people that are pre-diabetic or worried about diabetes or even if they’re eating sugar or sweets or fruits. It lowers the amount of sugar that reaches the blood stream. As a result, it stops the spiking of the sugar.

It’s pretty interesting. They use this a lot for people that are diabetics to keep blood sugar low. But it also has polyphenols, which have really strong antioxidant activity as well.

So this is a new supplement that’s up and coming. People might be interested in trying some of that. It’s not that expensive and it works really well.

DEBRA: Wow!

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, it’s pretty cool, Nopal cactus. So green tea and Nopal cactus are really good. There’s another supplement that I really like a lot. It’s made by Nature’s Plus and it’s called Synaptalean. Let me explain what Synaptalean is. This is why I like this.

DEBRA: Can you spell it first? Can you spell it first?

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, it’s S-Y-N-A-P-T-A-L-E-A-N.

DEBRA: Okay.

Pamela Seefeld: So this product is called Synaptalean. It’s at the health food store. I use it quite a lot. What Synaptalean does is it has what’s called a neuro-synapse complex in it.

So this particular product originally, they were doing the testing to see if it had activity and they were going to use it as a happy pill. It has antidepressant activity because it works on dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is the neurotransmitters that’s released when we’re eating something fattening, intoxication and that kind of thing. So dopamine is really important.

So sometimes when I have people that have some depression and I’m using maybe 5-HTP or omega-3 and I’m not sure if I’m getting the full result, I’m like, “Look, let’s try a neurotransmitter. Let’s try and work on dopamine.”

So I use this a lot for mental health, but what’s interesting is that they decided to market it as a weight loss product because they found that when people were taking it, this happy effect actually makes you not want to eat.

DEBRA: That’s interesting because I think that…

Pamela Seefeld: Isn’t that cool?

DEBRA: It is cool. I think that a lot of wanting to overeat gets triggered by wanting food for emotional comfort. And when you’re not eating emotionally – I would probably say the single, biggest change for me since I’ve been working with you or you’ve been working with me (we’ve been working together) is that this big shift from feeling like I need to eat or that I have to eat. It’s just my body is just calm all the time and I just go, “Okay, it’s breakfast time. It’s time to feed my body.” It’s not like, “I have to eat or I’m going to die” or “I’m upset, so I have to have a pizza.” All of that is just gone and I just feed myself healthy foods.

Pamela Seefeld: Well, that’s wonderful. That’s what it’s all about. It’s hard to detach yourself from that because a lot of times, we associate food with comfort.

DEBRA: Right!

Pamela Seefeld: So this is interesting because you can use this for depression especially if someone has refractory depression where the medicines really weren’t working for them and I’m using some supplements for them and I’m getting half results and I want to just kind of boost it up a little bit. But then the nice part about it is that weight loss tends to result from it as well.

So that’s a really good supplement. It has a lot of data on it that works really well. And just like I said, it’s available at the health food store. I use it a lot for mental health too, so that’s very good.

I don’t want to forget to talk about coconut oil because coconut oil is very important. We know that coconut oil lowers viruses in the body. It’s like a 75% reduction, so it has a lot of effects as far as for someone who has chronic fatigue, they worry about the cold and flu season.

But coconut oil, what the studies found is that when you’re using coconut oil and replacing that from other oils in your diet, oil makes you feel filled up. You’re not as hungry. This does not promote fat storage because coconut oil is made of medium chain triglycerides and MCT oils are burned up immediately in the blood stream. So when you take coconut oil, it’s actually used as energy right then. It cannot be stored as fat.

DEBRA: Wow. Wow! I didn’t know that. Hello?

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, you didn’t know that, yes! It can’t be stored.

DEBRA: I love coconut oil.

Pamela Seefeld: Yes, it’s MCT oil. MCT oil is what we use in people with liver failure because people with liver failure can’t process fat. So they get special nutrition in cans that are MCT oils.

So what we’re finding is we’ll give this primarily as MCT oil and as a result of that, you get lots of energy. So people that are doing athletics, they want to just up their game as far as their energy levels during the day. They don’t want to be necessarily consuming lots of high caloric foods, coconut oil is a good, little trick.

DEBRA: Wow! We talked about coconut oil on the show that we did about colds and flu and helping your immune system because it boosts that as well.

Pamela Seefeld: Correct.

DEBRA: But I just want to say again that coconut oil is great for any kind of cooking. It hardens at a cold temperature, so you can’t make salad dressing and then store the salad dressing in the refrigerator, but you could use it for salad dressing if you make it up fresh and you’re oil is at the right temperature.

But also, there’s something called coconut manna or coconut butter (differentiate brands have different names). It’s coconut oil mixed with coconut meat. So it’s more of the whole coconut. I can just eat that stuff right out of the jar with a spoon. It is so delicious.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s very good for you.

DEBRA: Oh, delicious! So delicious, yes. So if coconut oil doesn’t seem appetizing to you, look for coconut manna. My favorite one is I think it’s Artisana, Artisan something is the brand. It’s just so good, coconut manna. That’s a really great way to get those.

Pamela Seefeld: So the MCT oils are important. That’s another way to lose weight. Studies show too that taking fish oil also helps to keep weight down. We’re talking more about natural supplements. I’ll talk a little bit about the drugs at the end. But taking Omega 3’s every day also helps a lot.

I’m a big fan of doing the detox. I know you’re on the Body Anew and I’ve been on it for 15 years. That pulls out the pesticides and the chemicals that are stored in the fat soluble tissues. So that’s the best way too because it actually starts dumping the fat. That can work with or without exercise.

DEBRA: I really feel that happening. It’s just like you go along days, days, days. And then all of a sudden, there’s a day that I wake up and I was like, “What happened to my body?” It just went whoosh and got smaller.

We have to go to break. So, we’ll talk more about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist that dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. She’s at BotanicalResource.com. We’ll talk more about losing weight when we come back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants and other natural substances instead of prescription drugs. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. Pamela, give us your phone number again.

Pamela Seefeld: Yes, it’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Good! And you can call her after the show. She’ll be happy to talk to you. She gives free consultation. I can vouch for the fact that she knows what she’s doing, not only with me, but I know other people who see her in Clearwater. My doctor, my medical doctor recommends her. She’s unlike anybody you’ve ever talked to, I’m sure.

Okay, so go on. This is the last segment. So you want to tell us about some of the drugs that people shouldn’t take.

Pamela Seefeld: Correct. So going back really quickly, the detox is really important because it starts taking all these stuff out of the body and that helps with the weight loss in itself. What they’re normally going to give you if you go to the doctor and you’re asking for weight loss, the most popular product that they’re using Phendimetrazine. It’s basically an amphetamine derivative and there’s a million of doctors around here in Clearwater (I’m sure all around the country) that you go there, you get a B12 shot every week, they give you these appetite suppressant and they put you on 600 calories a day.

Well, if you go 600 calories a day, you’re going to lose weight anyways. This is just so you don’t feel like you’re hungry. The problem with this medicine is that they can raise your blood pressure, they can cause heart problems. Remember when people were doing the Fen-Phen and they were ending up with all these heart problems? Those are pretty serious risks.

I can also tell you for a fact, some of my clients have done this kind of stuff where they want to drop a lot of weight before a reunion or something, they’ll come in and the one client was telling me that her blood work got completely messed up as a result of taking these medicines. And then when she brought it up to the doctor, he says, “That’s not my problem.” That’s for your regular doctor. I’m just your weight loss doctor.

I’m not saying you’re all going to be that way, but I was just shocked. I’m like, “No, he put you on these medicines and the blood work looks really bad now as a result. He’s responsible.” But they think to themselves, “Okay, you’re going to pay me cash, we’re just going to go ahead and give you the weight loss pills and we’ll move on from there.” That’s not how things work.

DEBRA: Wow!

Pamela Seefeld: Yeah, I can’t make this up. I told him, I said, “No, you go back to him and tell him, ‘You’re the one that messed it up. You fix it.’” But they don’t want to manage anything with chronic management. You have to really take that into consideration when you decide to go and have to say, “Okay, I want to lose all these weight really fast and I’m going to go for these pills.”

And I can also tell you that I see this quite frequently of the clients that do decide to go do this against my wishes. I’m like, “Alright, you go do whatever you want.” They gain the weight back and more after they stop the program because it’s an artificial situation for your body. No one is going to stay on that low a calorie. And also too, you lose a lot of hair as a result of this.

So what happens is you’re eating such a low calorie diet. And if you completely cut fat out of your diet, what the study show is you’re eating these big salads, but if you’re just putting vinegar on it and you don’t have olive oil, you’re not absorbing any of the nutrients. So actually, the hair loss that these people are experiencing during these extreme diets is not necessarily because they’re not eating enough protein or enough calories. It’s because literally, the food they’re eating (especially the antioxidants), they’re not absorbing any of it.

DEBRA: That’s so important. There’s all these people who have been on low fat diets for so long and their bodies just don’t have that ability to absorb the nutrients because they’re not eating fat. It’s just been going on for so long.

Pamela Seefeld: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: Please eat fat. Eat fat, eat fat, eat fat.

Pamela Seefeld: Yes! Because if you’re thinking yourself healthy, you’re eating all these vegetables and you make this huge, colorful salad (which I do every single night), if you don’t have some fat – I’m not saying douse the whole thing in tons of oil, but if you don’t have a few tablespoons of olive oil on the salad, you’re not absorbing any of the nutrients.

The whole idea behind eating healthy foods is that your body needs to have these things being bioavailable. And to make them bioavailable, there’s ways that you can stir it into the blood stream. Otherwise, it’s just providing fiber.

That’s where a lot of these people miss the point. It’s not about extreme calorie reduction. It’s about eating every three hours, using detox. Maybe you want to throw in some green tea or some Nopal cactus.

A lot of it is looking at your blood work and saying, “Is there something here that the doctor is not seeing that’s telling me why I’m putting on weight and I should be losing weight.” That’s a lot of it. Your numbers tell a lot about what’s going on inside your body. And I think that they’re commonly not looked at.

DEBRA: Well, I think if we look at – correct me if I’m wrong, but I think if we look at fat as a symptom, as an indicator that there’s something going on in your body instead of something that “you’re eating too much” – I mean certainly people in the world as a whole are eating incorrectly in ways that put on more weight. Like for me, I’ve been eating organic, natural, unprocessed food for years and I am still not losing weight. I couldn’t figure this out. It turned out that there was something wrong with my body, not something wrong with me.

Pamela Seefeld: Correct.

DEBRA: And I think that that’s where people need to look at this and say, “It’s not about the latest fad diet. If I’m gaining weight, if I can’t lose weight, that’s my body saying, ‘there’s something wrong here.’” Normal, healthy bodies are not overweight. And so it’s a symptom like having a headache or blowing your nose, runny nose and what-not.

Pamela Seefeld: Well, it is. It is a symptom and like in your case and in the case of a lot of other of my clients, if you have pre-diabetes or diabetes or if your fasting blood sugar is in the 90s, I tell people that we want to use some homeopathy, some medical homeopathy like Pericardium Triple Warmer to start bringing the sugar down.

Most of the time, these hints are coming in your blood work and they’re telling you that you’re going to be at risk for a certain thing especially diabetes and metabolic syndrome and I think that they’re often ignored. Most of the time, people do not hear any kind of word of caution out of their physician until they’re up in the 100.

DEBRA: Yes, yes.

Pamela Seefeld: …by the time you already need medicine. So it’s really wrong. We don’t want people to be on a bunch of medicine. We want people to be healthy and happy and prevent these ongoing problems.

I always tell people it’s kind of like you’re in front of a misty bridge. These things are all showing that something is coming. I would just tell you to approach it head-on and stop it at the pass. Going to the other side means medicine, getting sick and not being 100%. That’s what people really deserve.

DEBRA: They do! And you know, I really hear you talking about health and happiness and you’re not talking about how can the industry make more money. We’re talking about how can we be healthy?

Pamela! Right!

DEBRA: I mean, if you really look at – I mean, I know that doctors help people in various ways and I don’t want to be against the whole, entire medical profession, but really, if you take a look at it, their job is to sell drugs.

Pamela Seefeld: Right! And that’s what pharmacies does. I understand it because I still work as a pharmacist. I like pharmacy. I embrace both. But I see this in a lot of patients and I see this even as a clinical pharmacist that people, if they were given an opportunity a few years before to do a few, simple, inexpensive things, they wouldn’t need any of the medicine and they wouldn’t end up in the hospital where I have to dose their medicine.

And that’s what it’s all about. It’s preventing some of these things. And look at the healthcare costs! They’re out of control in the country. Some of these could really be prevented. But also, quality of life.

DEBRA: Right, right.

Pamela Seefeld: These people deserve to not be on all these diabetic medications. A lot of these weight gain is just a symbol that the sugar is not balanced. Using some homeopathy in your water every day pretty much reverse it and it’s inexpensive and it’s safe.

So I really encourage people if they think that there’s some kind of an imbalance with glucose metabolism especially in the way they handle fructose and fruit to give me a call and I can tell you some simple things that you can do.

DEBRA: Yes, please do that because it has made a huge difference in my life. And tell us some of the conditions that you end up with, other conditions besides overweight? If you’re overweight, what else happens in your body?

Pamela Seefeld: Well, you have excessive inflammation because it stimulates circulating cytokines. So people end up having pain and arthritis and maybe even leading to chronic fatigue. But also, it impairs memory. And this is what they know, that people that have excessive amounts of circulating sugar, it impairs hippocampal memory formation.

So that’s why you’re talking about people that you kind of get foggy when you’re eating too much sugar. Well, this is what happens. The sugar can overwhelm the body. And as a result of that, you’re not only gaining weight and your lipids are really high and you don’t feel good, but it can create an element where your cognitive function is impaired to some degree.

And this is really important because let’s face it, we all want to be on top of our game with our memory. This is something that excessive amounts of sugar can cause problems – don’t even mention the fact that kidney problems, eye problems and all those especially with diabetics.

DEBRA: Yes, yes. So this is really…

Pamela Seefeld: So those are all very, very important.

DEBRA: This is something that people can do. I mean, isn’t overweight one of the major health problems in America today?

Pamela Seefeld: Most definitely. Let’s face it, a lot of people’s problems are because they’re storing the sugar and they’re storing the calories that they consume in an excessive manner. And then a lot of times, they’ll chalk it up to, “Okay, it’s hormones… she’s big-boned.” I mean, I understand a lot of stuff, but really, it’s about why is your body storing it and is it really storing it because there’s this imbalance with the way that the insulin is taking sugar into the cell.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. And there’s something we can do about it.

Pamela Seefeld: Well, definitely.

DEBRA: Well, this has been so interesting. We only have a minute left. So anything you want to say for a minute that we haven’t said?

Pamela Seefeld: Also, I would tell you, sleep is very important. I mean, this sounds like really ordinary talk, but people getting eight hours of sleep or seven and a half hours of sleep, they know that sleep affects weight and it also affects your hunger levels. So people that do not sleep the appropriate amount of time, they’re definitely going to be more at risk for storing all their calories as fat.

Debra; I have found that too. And one other things that you gave me (we talked about this on the sleep show) is passion flower. That really helps me sleep. I wake up in the morning and my body has had the opportunity to do its fat-burning thing overnight and I feel better!
Anyway, we’ve got only about ten seconds. So thank you so much. Give your phone number again.

Pamela Seefeld: Okay, yes. Please call me. I would be very gratefully happy to help you at any circumstance. It’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Thank you so much.

Pamela Seefeld: Thank you.

DEBRA: Pamela is on every other Wednesday. So two weeks from today, she’ll be on again with more great information about how you can live healthy without drugs. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

Calcium—Is There Really a Deficiency in America?

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants. Today we’ll be talking about calcium, osteoporosis, boneloss….Should you be taking calcium at all, and if so, how much and in what form? And what happens to your health if you take too much. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Calcium – Is There Really a Deficiency in America?

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld

Date of Broadcast: October 08, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to survive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.

It’s Wednesday, October 8, 2014. It’s a beautiful day in Clearwater, Florida. Oh, my God, we’re coming into our autumn and our winter where it’s not humid and the days are beautiful. I’m just out looking in my garden. I was clearing out my bed so that I can plant trees because they grow over the winter. It was just beautiful. It was just exactly the right temperature. The reason people live in Florida is the weather like today, which is great.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist. She prefers to dispense medicinal plants, instead of drugs. And she really knows what she’s doing. Today, we’re going to be talking about calcium, and what types of calcium. We’re going to be talking about osteoporosis, bone loss, all those kinds of things. But before we do that, we’re going to talk about me for a minute.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey! It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. Actually, I wanted to say that I have Pamela on every other Wednesday because she has so much information and so many different things that we can talk about. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and see the list of links to her past shows every other Wednesday. So it’s going to be two weeks and four weeks, and six weeks and eight weeks and we’ll just continue to talk about how we can be healthy by using natural supplements instead of drugs.

I want to say actually so I don’t forget also that the difference between taking drugs and taking the supplement – from Pamela – is that drugs might control your symptoms, but they’re not healing your body. The kinds of things that she gives me and her other clients are things like homeopathic remedies. She’ll tell you about it.

They’re actually healing my body. I can tell that they’re healing my body because the last time we were together, I was talking about how I was sleeping better because I was taking passion flower. And what happened in the last couple of weeks – mid-last week – is that one night, I just fell asleep and before I even thought to take the Passion flower and I slept through the night. I thought, “Okay, the next night, let’s just see if I can just fall asleep.” And for the past week— I’m somebody who just had trouble sleeping, but for the past week, doing all the things that Pamela has been telling me – how long has it been? Like two months or something?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah.

DEBRA: This past week, I have fallen asleep on my own every night and slept for – for the last three nights, I’ve been sleeping eight and a half hours.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great.

DEBRA: Yeah, all by myself without taking any other supplements or anything. So changes are going on in my body. What I’m most excited about aside from feeling so much better is that people are noticing that I look different. This week, I’ve been getting compliments that I look prettier and younger.

PAMELA SEEFELD:How wonderful is that?!

DEBRA: It’s true!

PAMELA SEEFELD: You deserve it.

DEBRA: Thank you, thank you. They’re saying, “What are you doing? You look so pretty.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. You know what? It’s your body’s healing. We were looking back at your blood work for eight years that you’ve been going to the regular physician for and you weren’t getting better. And I told you, I pointed out, the numbers, it didn’t change in eight years. I’m like, “This is crazy! We need to get you better so that you don’t need to be on any medicine ever.”

DEBRA: Yeah. And the other thing is I’ve been off my insulin. So it’s been a month or something that I’ve been off my insulin. My blood sugar is the same and even better than it was when I was taking insulin. I’m not taking any other kind of Metaformin or Glucophage or any of these things. I’m only taking what Pamela is giving me, and it just is making a huge difference. I’m using all natural substances.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The homeopathy heals the beta cells of the pancreas. That’s happening for you. That’s why your sugars are coming down and you’re feeling better because the insulin doesn’t actually approach the beta cell.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. So I can tell that healing is going on in my body and my clothes just keep getting looser and I don’t have to be so strict about what I’m eating.

This is a really huge thing because it used to be that I would choose foods that I was eating – well, not that we shouldn’t do this, but I had to be very strict about what I was going to eat because if I ate one wrong thing, I would really pay for it by having a lot of symptoms. And now, if I want to eat a potato or something, I can eat a potato, and nothing happens.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. The homeopathy is balancing your body and your meridian. Yes, it’s really wonderful. I am so happy for you, I really am.

DEBRA: Yes, thank you. I’m happy for you too. It’s not that I want to eat potatoes every day, but I can eat a potato instead of saying, “Never again have potatoes.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Great.

DEBRA: And what it’s done is it’s starting to open the list of foods that I can eat. And so, it’s giving me more nutrition and more options. I couldn’t eat broccoli. I haven’t tried to eat broccoli yet, but I couldn’t eat broccoli. I mean, something as a whole real food like broccoli, I couldn’t eat – or a potato. And now, I can eat a potato. I’m just so excited…

PAMELA SEEFELD: The cell signaling in your body is much more effective now. We’ve cleaned a lot of the stuff out. So what’s going to happen is it’s just going to be an upward process.

DEBRA: Yes, I’m looking forward to it. I’m enjoying it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m just so happy. I just love what I do, and the chemistry background that I possess and what I prescribe for people and what regiments I decide to write out for them. You know it’s a simple thing. You’re not on a million things.

DEBRA: No, I’m not on the million things. It’s affordable. It costs less than standard medical treatment, a lot less than standard medical treatment and I’m getting better. I’m actually getting better.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Efficacy is my 100% point.

DEBRA: It is! And she said this to me many times. I’ve heard her say that she really is result-oriented and she’s using supplements that are tried and true that she sees on many people. She sees this result over and over again.

And so, just right up front, I want to say that if you’re having some health concerns, if you’re on any kind of prescription or over-the-counter drug and you would like to not be on that drug, if your family or friends or co-workers are having problems in their own drugs that are just controlling your symptoms and maybe not even controlling your symptoms, and they want to get off of them, then all you need to do is just call Pamela because there’s a free consultation.

You can call her, she will talk to you on the phone and she will tell you what to take. You can just buy them from her. It’s affordable. So give your phone number because I just can’t recommend you highly enough.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, you can call me. And I’ll be glad to talk to you on the telephone and go over everything and mail some things out to you if you don’t live here in the Clearwater area. The number here at Botanical Resource Pharmacy is 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: And we’ll give that number throughout the show. You really just want to call her up. You could go to her website, but you really want to call her up.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, please. I would be honored and I would love to help you and your family.

DEBRA: She would, really. I talked with her all the time. She’s here to help. She’s here to help. So today, we’re going to talk about calcium, osteoporosis, bone loss, all those kinds of things. And we’re going to be coming up on a break in about a minute and a half. So let’s just get started. Where do you want to start?

PAMELA SEEFELD: We’ll just talk a little bit about calcium. Most people know what calcium is, where it’s found. It’s an element, a chemical element. It’s in a lot of food. It makes up our bones and teeth.

Most people think of calcium when they’re concerned about osteoporosis and osteopenia and preventing these problems. But really, it works also for muscle contractions and other things too. So there are calcium channels in the muscles that control contraction. So it’s actually really ubiquitous. It’s everywhere in the body.

So what I wanted to talk about today with the calcium is we’re going to talk about some of the myths of calcium deficiency and what really is going on in the United States as far as, “Are we really deficient in calcium?”

DEBRA: Just go ahead and start and I’m going to interrupt you when we need to go to break.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, very good. So we know that the calcium is necessary for bone mineralization, for the teeth and most people focus on that, but what we’re going to talk about is is there really a calcium deficiency in the United States.

So this is what we see. We see all these commercials, “Take your Calcium. Take your Calcium plus D.” What we’re finding is that – this is more of an opinion, but it’s also being substantiated by clinical documentation in the Library of Medicine. They really think, if you look around, that everybody’s deficient in calcium. Here in America, we all eat pretty well. And everything is fortified if you’re eating meat and processed foods. So the notion that everyone is calcium deficient maybe is wrong.

DEBRA: Now, we have to go. So we’ll take a break and we’ll come back and hear all about calcium. So you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants instead of drugs. So we’ll be right back to talk more about calcium.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants instead of drugs, and we’re talking about calcium. Just go on from where you were, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, very good. So calcium is important to take. It’s important to have in your food and in your diet, and also as a supplement if need be. But I’m going to explain to you about what’s really happening as far as this whole notion about, “Everyone needs to take lots of calcium.”

You look around, how many women are following their doctor’s recommendation to take calcium and D every day? I see this a lot with my clients. They consistently do that. If they don’t do an adjustment in pH – and I’m going to explain what that is – what happens is it really doesn’t work.

So all these women running around, taking all this calcium and D. If we don’t make it go and facilitate it going to the bone, what happens is they’re taking the supplement, but they’re finding that a lot of these women that are taking so much calcium are actually ending up with osteoporosis because the excess calcium is not really going into the bone. It’s actually just clogging the arteries, which is not what we want.

So we have to direct things into the body. That’s what I do like when we were talking about certain supplements that I give people and homeopathics, sometimes I’ll use even a circulatory enhancer to enhance the circulation in a certain area of the body to bring a particular product there. So it’s all about understanding your body and where things go.

Calcium is a buffer in the bloodstream. So if you eat a lot of meat, a lot of animal products, things that are acidic (we talked about acidic and basic), if your diet is basically mostly acidic food and you’re not doing some kind of a PH adjuster –

It can be as simple as taking a pinch of baking soda and putting it in water every day. I usually don’t recommend it for people because a lot of people have hypertension and other things. It’s not a real accurate way of doing things. I use a product called AlkaLife quite a bit, but there a lot of different pH adjusters. I tried about four different ones myself until I settled on that one. That one has a lot of clinical data behind it.

But when you take a pH adjuster and you make your body more alkaline, it takes the calcium you take, either in the supplement or in food and move it into the bone. So I can always tell when someone comes to me and I’m looking at their CMP, which is their Complete Metabolic Profile with all the electrolytes of their body, and they come with the blood work, I look at it and I’m like, “Your calcium level is 10. It’s really high. Are you eating mostly only meat?”, and they’re like, “Yes, I’m on an Atkins diet.” You can always tell what people are eating by their blood work. I think that’s amazing.

DEBRA: That is amazing. Yes, that is amazing.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m spot on every time. So I tell them, “Look, I’m okay with that. I don’t tell people what to eat. I think you have to eat what you really want to eat and your body is going to tell you what it needs,” but if you don’t do a pH adjuster, these types of individuals that are eating lots of protein, lots of chicken breast – there’s nothing wrong with that. Protein is very, very important – but if they’re not doing a pH adjustment at the same time, they’re really going to end up with brittle bones and osteopenia and osteoporosis regardless if they take calcium or not.

DEBRA: That’s very interesting. One of the things that I want to say right here, because you’ve just been talking about directing things correctly in the body, one of the things that I find so valuable about working with Pamela (and I’m so fortunate to have her right here in Clearwater where I live) is that she really understands how things occur in the body and how the body works

And so it’s not just about, say, reading an article or hearing on the news that you need to take more calcium, she really knows what is needed to make the supplements actually get where they’re supposed to be and how much you need to take and what you need to take with something. And sometimes, there are even foods or whatever or the way you take it and she knows all these things. She has so much experience that when you follow her recommendations, you’re actually going to get a result.

So, it’s not about whether you take calcium or not take calcium. It’s “Do you need the calcium? What type are you taking? What are you taking with it? How are you taking it?” That’s where his expertise comes in. She sells supplements and so do a million other people, but she’s got a way of understanding from her medical background and experience. I’m not sure if medical is the right word – pharmacist background and experience.

It’s like a pharmacist is looking at dose and what’s the right drug and all those kinds of things and she’s been trained in that. But she brings that to the use of natural supplements. Did I get that right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah! You’re very articulate and you understand because now we’ve been working together, you realized it. Really, the things that I tell people – it’s true, you’re not going to read that in an article.

And I can’t tell you enough times. I even have medical practitioners that are interested in doing natural health and they’re like, “Well, give me some articles to read, so I can learn this.” It’s not always about that. You have to really do a broad variety of reading.

I’m kind of like at the top of the food chain now. I’ve read so much. I spent like three hours a day reading and I go through the medical literature every day that I already know what’s going on. But understanding how cells signal and even understanding (even when we’re talking calcium), there’s a calcium-sensing receptor, they’re all through the body and these receptors affect weight, they affect muscle contractility, they affect whether the calcium is going into the bones or into the teeth or not.

It’s really amazing! You have to understand that things are on a cellular level and there’s really no big blanket statement like, “Okay, let me hand you an article and all of a sudden, you’re going to be an expert on a particular settlement or product.” It just doesn’t work that way. It’s a collaboration of lots of understanding and reading and knowing how the body works.

DEBRA: Yes. And I see that in your work. I absolutely see that in your work. I just want to tell our listeners that a couple of weeks ago, I went to my medical doctor who had given insulin. And I said, “I’m not taking my insulin anymore.”

He said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m taking this homeopathic remedies.”

He said, “Where did you get those?”

I said, “From Pamela Seefeld.”

And he said, “Okay. Just do what she tells you to do.”

This is my MD doctor.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. He knows, he knows I know what I’m doing. Actually, the product I gave you, that’s not at the health food store. I mean, there are homeopathic products, but they’re only sold from pharmacists and doctors.

The things that I give people, I really respect people’s time and money. I want them to have to pay a minimal amount of money to get a maximum amount of outcome. And it’s really about picking the right things that you know are going to work on the spot. Some of these OTC doses, they’re going to help somebody in your situation. So we need to give you something that actually is formulated by medical doctors.

DEBRA: Yeah. Most of people I think don’t know this because I’ve been in this field for years and years and I didn’t know this, but there’s like a whole other level of natural products that exists for professionals to give under supervision that are not in the natural food store or anywhere. You just can’t go buy them in a store. You have to buy them from somebody who’s trained to use them. And they’re so much more effective.

That’s why it’s so worth it to work with somebody like Pamela – specifically Pamela. I’ve never met anyone else like Pamela. She just has a unique set of abilities and a unique set of products that you can’t just go to the store and buy.

So we’re going to go to the break, and then we’ll come back and talk more about calcium. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. When we come back, we’ll talk more about calcium. Bye. Bye? This is not the end of the show. We’ll be back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld and we’re talking about things that you can do instead of taking drugs by using natural things, natural plants.

I’m always saying medicinal plants, but I now that – and we’ve talked about this on the show –you’re a big fan of fish oils. I don’t want to get off talking about fish oils. What’s the proper thing to say that’s the encompassing terminology for the like?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m a natural product pharmacist. How is that?

DEBRA: Natural product pharmacist. I’m going to write that down, I like that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, natural product pharmacist. When I go to medical meetings and I speak, I go pharmacognosy consultant, which is plant medicine, but I usually say natural product pharmacist and then they understand, “Okay, we’re not using regular pharmaceuticals and legend drugs. We’re using drugs derived from plants.”

And the interesting part of that when we think about it, these things work like medicine. And they have similar activity and similar receptors except that they’re not prescription and they’re not having all the side effects too. So that’s all about it – its safety, efficacy and outcome.

DEBRA: And also, the word pharmacognosy. ‘Pharma’ is drug and ‘cog’ has to do with information and intelligence. And so, I like to think of these natural substances that Pamela is using as intelligent drugs because it has the intelligence of nature and they come from living things, so they’re mpt synthesized and all that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Definitely. And they incorporate into the body in a better manner too.

DEBRA: Yeah. They absolutely do. Okay, good. Let’s go on with calcium.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right. Okay, good. So I was talking about my perception (and what is being substantiated now) that calcium, it’s not really a deficiency so much. Sure, there are going to be patients that are deficient, maybe their diet is very poor, but most people are taking calcium either in supplements or they’re getting it from their food.

We know that dark, leafy greens have a lot of calcium. Kale is very high in calcium. Spinach is very high in calcium. And of course, dairy. A lot of people eat a lot of dairy and that’s very high in calcium. That’s what we give to little kids, milk and so forth.

But we need to think about bone mineralization and let’s give them some different examples of some situations. Say, you’re really at risk for osteopenia. Say, you have osteopenia in your family. Your mother had really bad osteoporosis. She’s leaning over. She can’t walk very well. She’s had some vertebral compression, which can happen because the disc, the mineralization and the bones in the back are affected.

What are some things we can do to prevent bone loss? I’m not telling people not to take calcium. I’m saying that if you’re going to take calcium, whether it is in food or in supplements, you really need to shift it into the bones if you’re eating animal products. So that’s the first situation.

This is one example that I use. Sometimes, people get what’s called a bone exostosis. And what that is is an outpocketing of bone like a bone spur. We see this with people, runners get plantar fasciitis and sometimes, people get them in their shoulders (I see quite a lot of that). And there are some interesting things that you can do.

So if you’re taking tons of calcium, it can actually exacerbate or make that worse because you have to direct where you want the calcium deposited, not to a spur. You want it deposited into the big bone. So what I normally recommend if you’re taking calcium and D, there’s a few simple things you can do. You can incorporate something called ipriflavone. An ipriflavone is an isoflavone derivative that actually was shown to stop bone loss. What it does is it stops the cells that tend to chew up bone and throw the calcium back out into the bloodstream. It tends to stop that activity.

So that’s a good easy trick. Ipriflavone is available in a health food store. I use a product called RX Bone. It’s got calcium, it’s got D, and it’s got ipriflavone in it. So that’s one thing you can do.

Say, youhave a bone spur, and you’re concerned because your joint is torn in one particular area and they see a spur, and they’re telling you that they want to do surgery or, “Don’t run anymore.” It’s impeding your activities, correct?

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So what do we do? This is pretty interesting. There are homeopathic products that have an element in there called Hekla Lava. Hekla Lava is from a very specific volcano in Iceland. And what they found is the animals that grazed on this particular volcano have bony exostoses and spurs all over the body. We know that in homeopathy, [inaudible 00:31:05] kind of like vaccine.

So they put Hekla Lava in certain medical products that are homeopathic and you can actually dissolve out the spur or the bone exostosis maybe even in your hands if you have rheumatoid arthritis and the joints are starting to get swollen and big. You can dissolve out the spur, and at the same time build bone mass in other areas that are neglected.

DEBRA: Wow, that’s amazing.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, it works very, very well.

DEBRA: So those spurs are just misdirected calcium.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Both. Both. Both. The foot problem is pretty common because a lot of people like to run. You can see this and it’s very debilitating because people that run, they’re diehard about it, and they don’t want to stop running. They’ll run even with the pain, but it’s not good because it’s obviously causing damage.

Shoulders as well. I’ve seen even some people who had exostoses in the spine, and it was causing a lot of back pain. And this actually will dissolve it.

Andso, Hekla Lava is a great little component in products that can go and direct and help for bony spurs – also too, bony exostoses in feet. Sometimes, people that have trouble with their feet and they have bunions, but there’s actually bone underneath there, I use those to dissolve that out.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

DEBRA: You have so many really interesting things that I’ve never even heard of.

PAMELA SEEFELD: These are very, very important aspects to taking supplementation because you have to look at the whole body.

If I see someone’s hands and they’re having lots of exostoses of calcium, they come in and they’re taking calcium up the wazoo, I’m like, “Look, you’re making the bones worse there.” What’s happening is the body, due to inflammation, is misdirecting where the calcium is going.

And the new studies are showing – you probably have read this, about how calcium is related obesity. If your calcium level is too low, and it’s not being utilized in the body, it can actually affect your weight. And they’re thinking it’s associated with inflammation in the body. It’s misdirecting the calcium. It makes sense, because when people have really bad inflammation, look at their hands, they’re all deformed.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And that’s what’s happening with the calcium. Because of the inflammation, the calcium senses are not working correctly. And as a result, the calcium is being deposited in the joints in the hands and not in the big bone.

DEBRA: Wow! Just wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: So this is about understanding and saying, “Okay. What do we need to do if I see someone’s hands, they have problems and they’re taking calcium?”, we need to redirect out of the bones in your hand, in the joints, and we need to direct it to your back and your large bones.

Now, I’m going to talk a little bit too about the medicines that they give people for these problems. Let’s say you have osteopenia and you want to prevent it. I told you about the ipriflavone, I told you about the products that have Hekla Lava. There’s a product I use a lot of times called Osteobios, which actually builds bone density. And if you do pH adjustment, that can pretty much reverse where the osteopenia/osteoporosis is taking place.

But the medicines that they used, if you go to the doctor, they use a drug class called bisphosphonate. Some of the drugs are called Actinel and Fosamax. If you’re watching any of the TV ads, they’re talking about all these lawsuits and so forth that are associated with that because what happens is when you take those medicines, they only build the bone around the bone itself; the inside is still hollow.

DEBRA: On that note, we’re going to go to break. We’ll talk about this more when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a natural product pharmacist.

And Pamela, why don’t you give your phone number? Remember, you can call her for a free consultation and she will help choose the correct supplements for you at the right dose for what’s going on in your body. What’s your phone number?

PAMELA SEEFELD: 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Great! We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a natural product pharmacist.

I know we could talk for hours. I know you have so much information about this, but I want to ask a question. I want to make sure I get this thing because we’re on our last segment now. It goes by so fast. Why calcium and vitamin D?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a good question. So calcium, to be incorporated into the bone, there are D-receptors all over the body. These two things are needed at the same time to build the bone density.

So if you’re just having calcium and you don’t have any D in your body. If you’re in Florida, we’re out in the sun a lot. But most people in the rest of the country probably don’t see the sun as frequently as we do. So the D is important.

So here’s another good question. Why are they always saying you have to take magnesium? Okay. Really, magnesium is not needed to bring calcium into bones and for mineralization so much, but a lot of calcium supplements have magnesium because calcium tends to be very constipating. And magnesium really can prevent that side effect pretty effectively.

So a lot of it is tolerance for patients taking it more so than a physiological reason that the magnesium has to be there.

And I tell people too, the only time someone really is going to be low in magnesium – because I work in the hospital too, and we look at people’s bloodwork. People that come into the hospital a lot of times need to have magnesium infusions because it’s low. The only time you’re going to see someone with magnesium that’s low is if they’ve been vomiting a lot or they’ve had a lot of diarrhea. Those are the main reasons why. Or they have lots of fluid loss because of there’s a fistula in the gut or some leaky gut problem. That’s actually a real medical problem. They need a bowel resection or something.

So literally, most people are not going to be necessarily deficient in magnesium, and the magnesium is not necessary for the calcium to go into the bone. What needs the calcium to go into the bone is the pH has to allow the calcium to leave the bloodstream and enter into the bones at a more ready pace.

DEBRA: Wow! That’s just…

PAMELA SEEFELD: So that’s what’s really happening. So we want to change the pH of the body with some alkalizing agent to make the calcium go into the bones. Otherwise, people taking calcium supplements, they’re really not getting the full benefit of the bone density increasing.

DEBRA: That’s just so interesting. You say these things and what I think is, “Oh, that sounds absolutely perfectly right, but yet it’s just so different from what we’re hearing in so many other places.”

While you were talking, I was thinking about things I’ve read about the widespread magnesium deficiency, but you’re looking at blood tests every day and you’re seeing what people’s actual deficiencies are.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. And what we see is that if you’ve had these issues where you’ve been really, really sick with a flu, and like I said, you’ve been vomiting or having diarrhea, magnesium is expected to drop, and those people will have what’s called hypomagnesemia, which is low magnesium. Those are the people you have to be concerned about.

But magnesium is like a two-edged sword. You can take enough of it and it’s really good for the muscles and for the body, but if you take too much, you’re going to end up with diarrhea and you’re going to end up with more fluid loss. You have to be really careful.

Now, I was talking about these drugs that people use. So what’s happened is, the reason why there are lots of lawsuits (and if you watch any kind of TV and they’re always saying, ‘Call 1-800-Bad-Drug,’ or whatever, all these different law firms, when you’re building bone density with these medicines, what’s happening is the density is not going into the bone itself.

So that’s why you’re seeing all these lawsuits for people who are fracturing their femur. They’re fracturing these long bones in their leg. And the reason why is because they have this feeling that, “Okay, I’ve been taking this Actinel or this Fosamax and my bone density is great now,” and then actually, it isn’t because the bone in itself, the outside has more mineralization and is stronger, but the inside is still hollow. It’s really defeating the purpose, and these people are ending up with very painful fractures as a result.

So the things I was talking about are some simple inexpensive solutions. If you’re going to take calcium, you’re going to take vitamin D, you need to do something that directs the calcium into the bone – pH adjustment and maybe even some homeopathic products like I was talking about, the ones that have the Hekla Lava.

The Hekla Lava is going to take the calcium away where it’s been deposited inappropriately and move it to the bones of the body where it needs to go. And that’s what we need to, redirect the calcium from food and from supplements.

DEBRA: Good. Alright! So let’s see what else do we need to talk about. So, should people be taking calcium at all? Is it really necessary or are we getting – I think you might have covered this earlier, but I just want to make sure we get this point.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a good question. So who should be taking calcium? The person that should be taking calcium is a person that has some kind of osteopenia, osteoporosis or is really at risk. We know these things run in. If your mother had osteopenia and osteoporosis and she was a slight lady, then you’re probably going to be at risk for it too.

And bone loss is nothing to take lightly and especially even with men. I think men are really not looked at as being possible candidates for bone loss, they’re overlooked a lot of times because we focus so much on women. Men and women both can end up this way.

And men tend to be more meat consumers. That’s when I see these gentlemen coming with their wife, and I’m looking at them and I’m like, “Look, I’m okay if you want to eat meat for every meal, but you have to realize that you’re going to end up with very frail bones.”

And this is something that the regular doctors just never saw. They’re not really looking at the calcium level and seeing what’s happening with the patient. They’re just basically giving the calcium to the lady, and not to the men.

So calcium is very important. I would say though that if you’re taking calcium with every single meal, and you’re not doing a pH adjustment, you’re really missing the boat, and it’s not going to go into the bone. So the trick is to have calcium and D. And remember, D also works a lot for mental health.

The D levels, in the past, they’d say, “You’re at 20 and that’s a good level.” But now, a lot of the doctors are saying, “No, the data is showing you need to be closer to a hundred.” When you’re taking calcium and D, look at your levels from your blood draw from the doctor and see where the D is.

Most of the times when you’re taking 1000 to 5000 units a day of D, it takes very long time for it to budge. So I even use like 10,000 units a day for maybe a month or two to try to get it up there and then re-test it, and then we see where the person is at.

I think some of the biggest failures of this supplementation is that you’re taking it, but you’re not adjusting the pH, and you’re eating a lot of animal products, and then you’re expecting a certain outcome, and it doesn’t happen.

DEBRA: Or you’re not even taking enough. The other day, I have a drawer where I put supplements that I’m no longer taking because I’ve had at least six or seven years of people telling me different supplements to take. They say, “I’ll take these for right now” and then, you don’t need to take it anymore.” So then, it goes in the drawer.

And interestingly enough, you gave me 10,000 units of vitamin D, 10,000 units in one pill. I had an old bottle with vitamin D, but somebody said, “You don’t need to take vitamin D anymore.” I mean, people that I don’t see any more, I’m talking about here. And I had a bottle that was just 500 IUs…

PAMELA SEEFELD: They saw all these different low strings…

DEBRA: I had to take the whole bottle.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s not going to work. I mean, that’s not bad. I’m very much a realist. I’ve had these women and I really realized that a long time ago that you see, the D to be measured in the bloodstream has to be not sitting on a receptor. There are D-receptors in the brain, there are D-receptors over the body. In the past, we used to think, “Okay, vitamin D, you need it for bone density,” but it does a lot of other things, especially like for the whole immune system, for our hormones, all that stuff.

So what’s happening is the people are taking all these D and I was noticing that they get all excited. They were very, very loyal to it. They were taking about 3000 to 4000 units a day. They get their blood draw back, and they barely budge. The reason why is because you need to saturate all of these receptors with D and have those receptors pretty much be occupied before the blood test comes back to show that it’s elevated. And it takes a long time to do that because there are so many numerous D-receptors in the body.

The body is an amazing place. Let me tell you. When you start really looking at what’s happening, if you think about directing something to where you want it to go, that’s the only way you’re going to get an outcome. And if people are going to spend money and take supplements and want an outcome, you really deserve to have a positive outcome – sub-therapeutic outcomes.

I’ve been a pharmacist for 26 years. I see this through observation and from reading that these people are very disenchanted when taking the supplements when they don’t have a result. You really have to target what you want to do.

DEBRA: Well, it’s not just disenchantment. It’s that the supplements really aren’t doing anything, because they’re not strong enough or the person isn’t taking enough.

I’ve been going to people who have been advising me about supplements for – I think it’s about seven or eight years now. And before that, I would just take something from the health food store. I’m not saying that those are bad products. I mean, right now, I’m taking vitamin C that I buy at my natural food store. It is a whole food organic, vitamin C. I just get it there.

And my phone is ringing, so I’m going to turn it off. There! So, yeah.

Usually, I have my ringer off except that I have a house guest in the other room where the phone rings and you can’t hear it. It’s still ringing. I can hear it, but you can’t hear it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s life. These things happen.

DEBRA: And I was missing phone calls because I couldn’t hear. The door was closed and I couldn’t hear. Anyway, that’s what’s going on with the phone.

But what I wanted to say particularly since we only have one minute left is that make sure when you go to the doctor that you ask them to test for things like vitamin D because it’s not part of the standard blood test.

I had Pamela give me a list of all the blood tests that would be good, that are just standard baseline blood tests. I took them to my MD and I said, “I want this on my blood test,” and he wrote it in the request to the lab.

Anyway Pamela, once again, excellent, excellent information. I’m just so excited. Please give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. If anyone has any particular questions about the supplements or medications, please give me a call. I would be very happy to help you. It’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Great. And two weeks from now, on Wednesday, we’re going to have Pamela on again, and you can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and listen to her past shows. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you.

DEBRA: Thank you.

It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants. Today we’ll be talking about your immune system: how it works and the best things to do to protect yourself from catching colds and flu this season—without a flu shot. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld

Date of Broadcast: September 24, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.

It’s September 24th 2014 and it’s a beautiful early – well, I was going to say ‘early autumn day’, but it’s not early autumn anymore because yesterday was the autumn equinox, so we’re officially in the middle of autumn. Here where I live in Clearwater, Florida, that means that instead of it being 90° higher day and night, it’s now 80°. And it was 70° overnight. So I’m very happy it’s getting cooler.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants rather than drugs and she’s telling us – I have her on every other Wednesday and we’re doing a whole series on how you can use plants to heal your body. And if you’re taking any prescription or over-the-counter drugs, how you can get off of those drugs and use plants instead.

Today, we’re going to be talking about why you shouldn’t get a flu shot and how you can support your immune system during cold and flu season so that you won’ t get sick or if you do, then it’s less of a problem.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey! Great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you! Great to have you here. So first, before we talk about colds and flus and shots and all of those things, I want to talk about me.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s good.

DEBRA: I want to talk about the work that you and I have been doing and particularly, a couple of weeks ago, I stopped taking insulin.

Now, the reason that I have been taking insulin is because obviously, for blood sugar, but I only started taking it as an emergency. I was doing well controlling my blood sugar with diet and exercise. And even though it wasn’t normal, it was good enough for me.

But then last summer (not this year, but the summer of 2013), my blood sugar went way up into a dangerous area and nothing I did could bring it down. And so I started taking insulin as an emergency life-saving kind of thing at the insistence of my medical doctor. But then I kept doing things to heal my body. Was it really necessary to continue to take insulin?

Some of you know that earlier this year, I went on a Paleo diet for 30 days and during that time, I reduced the amount of insulin I was taking by half. And then after I started working with Pamela a couple of months ago (it’s been a couple of months now), but I think it’s just been about a month where it was time to buy another bottle of insulin for $200. And I said, “Pamela, isn’t there something else I can do?” and she said, “Of course, there is!”

PAMELA SEEFELD: And I said yes!

DEBRA: So tell us what you told me to do.

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is what I told her to do, Debra and this is what we normally do with people that are transitioning off of insulin or especially oral hypoglycemic like metformin and glyburide and some of these popular drugs.

What you have is type II diabetes. Someone that has type I diabetes has been a diabetic since they were a little kid. That’s a different situation. The pancreas just never really worked correctly. In your case, what happened is you get insulin resistance and the insulin is just not working correctly in the body and the pancreas is not producing correctly after a while because it’s kind of overtaxed at one point.

So what we’re doing is we gave you homeopathic medicine, pericardium triple warmer. These particular brands of homeopathy that I use, that particular company only sells to pharmacists and doctors. It’s not at the health food store. It has to be prescribed.

What this does is it actually starts making your beta cells and your pancreas to start working again. I use this with countless patients. They’re off their medicines, they’re doing great. And what we do is we’re offering – the way I approach things, I want a cure. I don’t want to just give you something to replace what you already did.

And when we were discussing that, $200 is a lot of money to put towards the insulin. We are already trying to transition you off. It’s like, “Okay, look, we can just up the dose of this particular product and do a circulating enhancer to get them into the beta cells and it’s working great. “

DEBRA: It is working great. I mean, it isn’t costing me $200, but it is costing me over a hundred dollars to buy that amount in order to do that for the same period of time as I would have had to pay $200. But here’s the big thing. All insulin does is control your symptom. It’s just there to make your blood sugar not so high. It’s not doing a thing to help heal your body. And so now, what I’m spending my money on is something that is actually healing my pancreas.

And in all these years, nobody had ever given me anything to heal my pancreas. All they were trying to do was control my symptoms.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And the other thing I want to tell you too is that you won’t eventually be using two to three bottles a month. After a while, the pancreas is going to kick – it’s kicking in gradually and you’re going to see huge declining of blood sugar.

DEBRA: Well, I’m expecting that. But what I’m happy about right now today after two weeks (or maybe it’s been three weeks, something like that) is that without my insulin taking what Pamela gave me to take, my blood sugar is the same as it was on insulin.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yehey!

DEBRA: I was a little afraid. When I went to her, I said, “Well, I don’t want to buy my insulin. What could we do?” and she says, “Well, let’s just try this because you can always go buy your bottle of insulin if your blood sugar just goes crazy.” And what happened was that for the first couple of days, it just like went up and went down and went up and went down. And then, it evened out just right where it is. And every day, it’s just right at that level. And even though it’s not going down yet, I know that I’m just waiting for my pancreas to heal and then it’s going to down. And then I’m going to be taking less. And then I’ll be taking nothing. I’ll be able to have a normal pancreas.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. I mean, it’s going to come. The thing is with these cells – I mean, in most cases, most people, they never regenerate at all. But in your case, we’re giving homeopathic products that actually open up the meridians in those areas and actually target those cells completely instead of just doing just some general cleanse and that kind of thing.

This product is specifically for the little assignment I gave it. That works exactly like that. I’ve seen it very reproducibly work in a lot of patients.

DEBRA: I think this is just wonderful. And this is only just an example of what Pamela does. I just wanted to tell all of you that it’s possible to actually heal your body and it’s not about taking drugs or even natural remedies to control your symptoms. What we want to go for here is healing, regeneration of the damage that toxic chemicals and toxic foods and all those things are doing to your body that you want to detox, stop being exposed to and regenerate.

And now, I’m starting to regenerate. It makes me so happy. It just makes me so happy.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s wonderful. I’m very happy for you. You’re doing great.

DEBRA: Thank you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m glad I could help… I am.

DEBRA: So I do want to say right off right now that you can call Pamela if you have health issues you want to talk to her about, if you’re on some drugs you want to get off of, if you have loved ones with health issues or drugs that they should be getting off of. You can call her on the phone and she will talk to you for free and advise you about what you can take instead. You want to give them the number?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, the number is here to my pharmacy, Botanical Resource. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I highly recommend her especially if you have – like I know in my body, I’ve had a lot of difficult situations especially from all the toxic poisoning that I have had in my life and my body not functioning in all its wonders because of that. A lot of things that I’ve tried to do hasn’t worked over the years and everything that she’s given me is working. It’s just like night and day especially if you’re a difficult case.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, I’m very proud of what I do here. I’m very happy I can help you. I’ve been doing this over 20 years. I teach this.

I’m a really good chemist. I look at the products, I look at the ingredients and I decide what I’m going to use them for. So it’s much more than like me taking a class and someone old me that “Do this for that.” As a pharmacist, that’s how we learn, “These drugs go for certain things.” You have to sometimes think out of the box and look and see what’s really happening in a person’s body and target the exact ingredient to go to where you want it to go.

DEBRA: And she just does that very well. So when we come back from the break (because we’re already through the first segment), we’re going to talk about flu shots, why you shouldn’t take them and how your immune system works and what you can do to support your immune system as we go into the cold and flu season.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who dispenses medical plants – and there’s a word for that. It’s a pharmacognosist. I love that one. So we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants. And today, we’re talking about what you can do so that you don’t have the flu.

So let’s start. I saw something, I get a lot of newsletter from different places, but one came last week that talked about how Dr. Oz had a show where he was talking about mercury in flu shot. Mercury is certainly something that we don’t want to be putting into our bodies. I think that there are some other reasons why not to take flu shots. Could you talk about that first because I know every place I go, they’re saying, “Have you had your flu shot?”

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s true, that’s true. They do ask that quite a bit. Well, this is the thing with the flu shot. We’ll just kind of backtrack for one second. We’ll talk about the immune system, okay?

DEBRA: Okay.

PAMELA SEEFELD: How do you keep your immune system working really well so you don’t even need the flu shot or even considering it? If your immune system is depressed, you’re going to be at risk for not only the flu, but a host of other colds and things that come around during the winter time. And we’re going to start going into cold and flu. That’s called cold and flu. It’s the two of them.

Your immune system acts on certain different things. There’s cellular and humoral and mediated immune system. The humoral is these things called chemotactic factors. They’re little signals that bring the immune system to the area. It’s kind of like a little signal like little beacons, “Come over here and take care of this.”

The immune system that goes after just in general any kind of cell (it can be a bacterial or a fungus or a virus) are called leukocytes. When people are sick and their immune system is trying to launch a response, you get these huge increases of leukocytes. And leukocytes are kind of cool because they don’t actually have an assignment. They just go everywhere. They look around for the tissue. These little factors bring it to the tissues. So how can we enhance these first line defenses so that no matter what you get in contact with, you’re not going to get sick?

A big thing is, believe it or not, diet. We have found – and I just downloaded some different studies here – that the t-cells, the t-lymphocytes, which is what’s affected in AIDS patients, when their immune system goes really low and they’re able to be infected with AIDS, we know that vegetables and fruits regulate and up-regulate t-cell activity to go to find viruses.

So when we want to prevent getting sick in the first place (because let’s face it, we know we don’t want to do the flu shot altogether), let’s get the immune system working better so you don’t need to have it.

The preservatives that are in – that’s pretty easy step. We always talk about diet, but there’s actually proof now that shows that these t-cells are up-regulated specifically by what you eat.

DEBRA: Oh!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Another thing too is stress control. Now, people that are stressed out, they have increases in cortisol in their blood stream and it suppresses the immune system, an increase of inflammation.

I’ll give you an example. If I go in a room and there’s like 20 people there and one person has the flu, will everybody get the flu, Debra?

DEBRA: No.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No. Right! That’s the trick. You’re saying, “No, I’m not going to get the flu.” What Dr. Oz is saying and commenting on those things is that when you have a flu shot, you’re launching an immune response. That’s what it does.

A flu shot and vaccines are kind of like homeopathy, but they’re not. I don’t want to confuse people. You’re getting a small amount of a causative agent to try and elicit an immune response. So what happens those little cells that were called in, they come to the area and they make antibodies. And so supposedly, supposedly, when you come in contact with the virus, you’re not going to get it.

You know what percentage of people still end up with the flu even with the flu shot?

DEBRA: I don’t know, but…

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s over 50%.

DEBRA: So over 50%? It doesn’t work.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s pretty high, yeah. They still end up with the flu. So when we look at it, we have to say, “Okay, the flu shot is bad.

We really shouldn’t get it.” But really, what we need to do is make our immune system work like it should work, so that if I’m sitting next to you and you’re sneezing and coughing, you have the flu, I don’t get it.

DEBRA: That’s right. So how do we do that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s the trick, to prevent it. If we want to prevent it, there’s some simple things you can do. What you’re eating is very important. If you’re going to eat fruits and vegetables, especially vegetables that have – you know, we’ve always talk about all these bioflavinoids and these immune system enhancement. You need to have oil, some kind of fat present on the vegetables to be absorbed.

Otherwise, you’re not going to be getting the benefit of bioflavinoid.

And taking a good multivitamin is also important. I would really like to comment that fish oil has an excellent immune response. It increase the immune system and lowers inflammations consistently and that’s an easy thing to take. If you don’t want to take fish oil capsules, you can even take sardines. If you have sardines a few times a week, that’s very preventative as well.

The immune system, the biggest depressant of the immune system is stress. It sounds crazy because people are talking about stress and anxiety. But if you’re really stressed out and you are not sleeping correctly, a lot of that is going to affect your immune system, right?

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And we know that glucocorticoids, which is cortisol that’s released from the adrenal gland – like people get adrenal fatigue where the cortisol is just released and released constantly. We know that excessive amounts of glucocorticoids in the blood stream can really depress the immune system. So stress control is really important.

If you take calming fish oil or passion flower or maybe do some yoga or some breathing techniques, you try and control your reactions to stress in everyday life, things like that. If you look at most people, when they end up getting the flu, it’s through at a point where they’re underslept and they’re anxious, so they have a lot of stress going on in their life.

DEBRA: Right! And you know, I’ve really noticed that most of the time, I can handle a normal amount of stress and even an extraordinary amount of stress. But when my adrenal glands go out, then I can’t handle any stress at all.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly!

DEBRA: And so I would say that if people are finding that they can’t handle stress and that they fly up the handle or that any little thing bothers them or if something goes wrong and they just got upset about it and they can’t do anything about it, that is a sure sign that the adrenals are being stressed and that you should do something to strengthen your adrenals.

So would it be a correct assumption to say if you have adrenal problems that your immune system is going to be less functional because of the stress?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. Yes, that’s exactly right. This sounds crazy because this sounds like elementary advice. But if you, like you’re saying, flying off the handle at little things, can’t keep your stress under control, that’s a big part of your immune system. It basically shuts everything down.

I’ll give you an example. When you have an immune response and the doctors are trying to control, say, an allergy or a rash, they give you prednisone. Prednisone is a steroid, it’s a glucocorticoid. You make cortisol in your body from your adrenals. It’s the same thing. That’s why they give you that, because your adrenals aren’t working correctly. You’re not preventing a severe immune response, so that’s why they’re giving it to you in a pill.

What I tell people is that you need to make sure that your adrenals are working correctly to make sure that you can launch a stress response.

DEBRA: Interesting. Well, we need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants that’s called a pharmacognosist. I’m still loving that word. I love it because it means drug cog- as intelligence. So you’re dispensing intelligent plants that have drug-like effects I guess. So we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants. We’re talking about what you can do for your immune system now that it’s getting to be cold and flu season so that your body will just fight off those bacteria and viruses and germs and you won’t get sick because that’s what your immune system is supposed to do.

I just want to interject that there are many toxic chemicals. The way that I got interested in this in the first place is because my immune system was damaged by toxic chemicals. There’s so many toxic chemicals that harm the immune system that there’s a whole class of chemicals called immunotoxicants, which destroy your immune system.

We’re all being exposed to them day in and day out unless we do something to not be exposed to those immunotoxicant. What I found was in order to heal my own immune system so that I wasn’t just reacting to everything all day long – it was like I couldn’t even wear a cotton share without reacting to it. Even things that people aren’t allergic to, my body would react to because my immune system was damaged by these toxic chemicals.

The thing that I really want to emphasize is that if your immune system is damaged, it leaves you wide open to catching anything that’s an infectious disease. So it’s not just cold and flu. Another thing in the headlines of newsletters I get is ebola virus. In Africa, there’s a big problem with it. Well, what if it came over here and we started having an epidemic of ebola? If your immune system is not in good shape, you’re going to be one of the first ones. This is just what happens.

And so our immune system is – everything in the body is important, but I can’t imagine life without a functioning immune system. You would just be open to everything.

Do you remember many years of ago, there was a movie I think with John Travolta called the ‘Boy in the Plastic Bubble?’

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: Remember that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yep.

DEBRA: Well, that’s somebody who doesn’t have an immune system.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: That’s what it would be like. So I can’t stress how important this is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, your immune system is like a little army. Like I said, it’s a front, right, front and center looking to see. There’s all these different cells. Some of them are little beacons and say where the problem is and others actually go and just keep combing the area to find where they can go and activate so that they can engulf – kind of like amoeba, they engulf the different viruses and bacteria.

What I’ll say too is that I just looked at a new position statement on exercise. People that do intense exercise, they’re just like kind of the Weekend Warriors, they’ll go out and do too much, it actually suppresses your immune system.

But moderate exercise actually increases your immune system. When you do moderate exercise, it actually increases these neutrophils and lymphocytes and these different cells that go after it. It’s a transient increase and so it actually activates your immune system to go after infections. So I’m talking about walking, biking and things like that, not running a marathon, which can actually be counterproductive for some people. So exercise is important.

But I’m going to talk a little bit about supplements too.

DEBRA: Okay, good. Go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is probably what most people are interested in. So we talked about we got to protect stress, we got to help the immune system.

If we looked at a product called andrographis (it’s an herb), an andrographis is very, very great as far as the immune response. I call this an herbal antibiotic. Now technically, it’s not an antibiotic, but it’s one of these things that you can use if somebody has an infection brewing or say that they’ve – a lot of times, when people have the cold or flu, they go to the doctor and they give them a Cipro or a Z-Pak and they really don’t have a bacterial infection. They give them antibiotics just to make them happy.

So now, when we do this, if someone comes to me and said, “I don’t want to take these prescription” or “I’ve been on all these different prescriptions and it’s not working,” andrographis is where they might go to. That increases the white blood cells, increases the lymphocytes, the neutrophils and all these different cells that have really specific assignments to go in the immune system and to take care of bacteria and viruses. It elevates that tremendously. It’s inexpensive and it works great.

You can get it at a health food store. I use a medical version of it, but I know that the health food stores sell it too. So, andrographis is great.

DEBRA: Could you spell that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, andrographis. So it’s A-N-D-R-O-G-R-A-P-H-I-S.

DEBRA: Good. Thank you. I’m sure some people will go get that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Andrographis is great. Now, there’s a product from Heel. I’m not affiliated with the company, but Heel is a German company that does homeopathic products (a great, great company) and they have a product called Engestrol. Engestrol, you can get that even off of the Internet. It’ll say right there for flu. I’m sure it’s going to be prominently displayed on any website. Engestrol is what they’re using in Germany in place of flu shots.

DEBRA: Oh!

PAMELA SEEFELD: And this goes after viruses. It’s an increase in the lymphocyte activity, the lymphocytes that go after viruses by 95%.

You can give this to children and babies and adult. So I use this a lot. People, I tell them, “Just keep it in your purse. You put them underneath your tongue. You can do one or two a day as needed.”

Say you have a little child in childcare and you’re worried about cold and flu (you know, little kids pass these things back and forth to each other), you might want to use this. When you give them to infants and you use any kind of homeopathic pills, you want to crash it between two spoons and then put a little water and make a paste and put it on the gums of the baby. That works very good too.

DEBRA: Hmmm… so can you take that as a preventive like if you’re going out and you don’t want to get something, you just take that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yup, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. When people are traveling, I tell them to take it as a preventive. If you’re feeling you’re getting sick, you can take even more. I feel it’s perfectly safe even if you take up to eight tablets a day of that product.

So Engestrol is the real go-to because like I said, in Europe, they’re using that on the frontline instead of using the flu vaccines.

DEBRA: Okay, spell that one too. Spell that one too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, let’s see, Engestrol. E-N-G-E-S-T-R-O-L.

DEBRA: Okay, good.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Engestrol. That would be really an excellent product to have around, kind of a go-to product in your house for your children, for yourself. There’s a lot of excellent data on that. It’s very, very effective.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about coconut oil.

DEBRA: Good!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Coconut oil is probably one of the most underutilized supplement for viruses. Most people think about cognitive issues and of course, there’s data with dementia. A lot of people are using it for that, for prevention or for stopping some of the advancement of dementia in elderly patient. But coconut oil is a great product especially for children and for adults, but especially for little kids.

When I see someone come in and they have a little child getting colds and flu and viruses and things like that because the immune system is really low, the coconut oil, what it does is it’s medium chain triglycerides. So it’s not actually fat. You don’t actually store it. So it’s kind of like a free calorie. Coconut oil, with MCT oil, it contains lauric acid. And lauric acid has the effect of lowering viral activity probably up to 75%. So it can stop shedding and activity in the bloodstream.

I use this a lot where someone comes to me and says, “I’m using the Engestrol. I’m really concerned. All the kids at the preschool have this cold or flu” or whatever they’re trying to prevent, coconut oil in the kids’ food. It works great.

DEBRA: Wow! I didn’t know that at all and it’s so easy and so inexpensive. We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who uses, as you’ve been hearing, medicinal plants and foods in order to handle all kinds of body conditions. We’ll hear more about what you can do for your immune system in the cold and flu season when we come back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who uses medicinal plants and foods and other natural things in order to make people’s bodies heal, actually heal. She doesn’t just get rid of symptoms. She actually wants to make the body well.

That’s what I think is one of the big differences. A drug is just about symptoms, a lot of natural remedies are just about symptoms, but she actually does something that’s healing.

Pamela, can you tell us, just you mentioned coconut oil fighting viruses and flu. Can you tell us a couple of ways that people can use coconut oil if they’re unfamiliar with it and how they can use it for their food?

DEBRA: Yeah, great question. Okay! So coconut oil comes in capsules and it comes in solid. Sometimes, people, if I tell them, “I want you to put a tablespoon of coconut oil” and it looks like a clear fat. It has no coconut taste. Some of them do have a coconut taste. If it’s unrefined, it’s going to have a little bit of coconut taste. Most of the ones you’re going to get don’t have coconut taste. If you don’t like coconut, you don’t have to worry. It’s not going to taste strong coconut.

And what I normally recommend that I know for myself, what I do if I feel like my throat is getting sore, if I have my lymph glad swollen a little bit, if I’m feeling kind of run down, I like to put it on a cracker. I make my own organic crackers and just spread a little bit of almond. I eat a cracker before I go to bed. When I wake up in the morning, all the swelling in my neck have gone.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s quick and easy and it works great. I use it a lot too for mono. I see a lot of mono where kids in highschool have mono and the parents come to me and like, “She’s on the basketball team” or, “She’s on the tennis team. She needs to get back to where she was. She can’t be laying on the coach.” I see a lot of that where young people come to me, teenagers and we have to get them back in shape within a few weeks instead of them lingering on with this.

Coconut oil is quick. It’s within a few days and the person turns the corner. So if you’re looking for a quick result, but especially for children. What I recommend for the little kids is just mix it with their food. Pretty much, at room temperature, let’s say your house is – like if you’re in Florida, it can be like 80° depending on what time of the year it is, it’ll be like a semi-solid. If you put it in the refrigerator, it will be solid.

And if you have it in your cupboard, depending on the temperature of your house, if it’s in the low 70° or in the 60°, it probably will be solid.

If it’s in the 80°, you and I might leave the air conditioning off during the day and come back later on, it might be liquid. So it just depends.

You can literally mix it into food. You can melt it a little bit if you want to to to put it on things. I like it on popcorn really. I think it tastes great.

DEBRA: I was going to say that. I was going to say that because what I found is that if you make your own popcorn at home, which you should and not buy it in a bag (you can make your own organic popcorn at home), you have the issue of heating up bat enough to be able to make the popcorn pop. And I think the coconut oil is the perfect oil to pop corn in because you can heat it up and put in the popcorn and it just pops right up.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely!

DEBRA: It doesn’t taste like butter, but it has its own pleasant taste I think. I mean, I’m somebody who likes coconut, so what I like to eat is coconut manna or coconut butter, which is coconut oil with some coconut meat in it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great.

DEBRA: I just think that that’s delicious. If it gets kind of melty so that you can pour it, what I do is that I put it in just on a baking sheet. I put little globs of it on a baking sheet and put it on the freezer. It actually turns into something like a candy. It has its own sweetness and you can put a little mint flavoring or whatever and it’s just like eating white chocolate. That’s what it tastes like, white chocolate. There’s no sugar in it or anything, but those coconut manna, frozen tastes like white chocolate.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, you’re exactly right. I’ll tell you, coconut is great for the family to just cook their food in it. You could throw vegetables in it. And what’s good about coconut oil instead of good butter and olive oil, the burning point where it starts to smoke and smolder is much lower in coconut oil. Coconut oil, you’d have to put it in the calorimeter. You cannot reach that temperature in normal cooking conditions in your home. So it will never burn, it will never smoke. You can walk away from it, come back to there if you’re throwing vegetables in it and chopping it up. So it’s very versatile. You can just mix it in with the food.

So the coconut oil is great. I’m going to talk a little about too about astragalus. Astragalus works on the t4 lymphocyte, the cell that’s affected in AIDS patients, but can affect for our immune system and for viruses. Astragalus is an inexpensive herb. You can take that to enhance the immune system as well.

So really obvious things, you can be cooking with coconut oil and the engestrol, maybe you have that sitting around for your kids and either the andrographis or the astragalus could be a back up product if you really wanted to do that.

Now, I wanted to talk about one thing really quickly about the stress effect. I found something. Do you know – and this is really interesting.

I did a full MedLine search, the National Library of Medicine last night to look at different things that affect the immune system.

This was just published and archived to toxicology this year, 2014, September 12th. It’s called the The Role of Oxidative Stress and Carbon Nanotube-generated Health Effects. I was not really aware of this and I thought this was very interesting that I’d like to tell your listeners.

Carbon nanotubules are a type of nanotechnology that is ubiquitous. It’s all over the place. It’s in semiconductors. It’s in radios. It’s in our phone. It’s in car parts and in electronics. What they found is that these nanotubules, because it’s nano technology, they could come on to our body and we can breathe them in.

And what they have found now, some of these toxicologists is that exposure to these carbon nanotubules is associated with depletion of antioxidants, increasing reactive oxygen species, cellular damage, inflammation signaling is impaired. So the immune system can be impaired from the electronics.

I’m not saying you’re going to throw away your phone. I’m just saying that we need to just be aware of this. The scientists are even questioning some of the safety of the nanotubules. It damages DNA. Now, I’ll let you ask some questions. What do you think of that?

DEBRA: I think we shouldn’t be using nanotechnology at all. More and more, I read these kinds of things or hear them from you. My first question is what do we do to counteract that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well yeah, this is really important. I could be maybe far-guessing in this, but I will tell you that homeopathy would probably be your best bet because homeopathic medicine kind of goes where it needs to go and it has a very generalized assignment in the body other than specifically targeted herbs, vitamins or medicine.

But I didn’t realize that these nanotubules are coming onto people and they’re breathing them in. I thought that was pretty upsetting. I don’t really want to change the tone of the conversation, but I wanted to make sure that people were aware that there’s a lot of other things going on that are affecting our immune system – some, we can control and some, we can’t.

But in all realism, you really need to be taking some of these supplements to counteract some of the things that are going to be affecting your immune system. You have to do what you can about the things that you have control over.

DEBRA: Do what you can. That’s exactly what I was going to say. Do what you can about the things that you have control over because there’s so many things we don’t have control over that we need to give our bodies the best chance we can.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, most definitely. So the exercise, the healthy food. You’ve all heard these things before. I will tell you to have the coconut oil at the house and Engestrol is a really good product. I’m still really a bit fan of Body Anew, which is the homeopathic detox product that I use because that actually elevates humoral and cellular immunity. It works on both parts of the immune system.

I’ve been doing it consistently for 15 years. You don’t have to do it every single day, but it does basically scan the body and remove out things that aren’t supposed to be there (bacteria and viruses). Your immune system works in a much better level as far as the cellular level and effectivity level.

DEBRA: And I’ll tell you, I have seen Pamela. You can look at her picture, but she’s one of the healthiest people I’ve ever met. She really is. Her skin glows and she’s very happy and energetic and just all the things that you would want to be.

And so I see the results of what she talks about in her and I see the results of what she’s giving me. I see these same kind of results starting to happen. I can’t say enough.

So we only have two minutes left. Do you want to give your phone number again?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, most definitely. So if there’s any questions, they can call me at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I would be glad to help you with any condition you might have for yourself, for your pet. I treat pretty much everything. And also, I get people off of medications if they’re interested in that as well. I really appreciate everything.

DEBRA: And she really loves to get people off mental medications especially.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Specifically, correct. Mental health is a specialty that I’m very good at. I’ve done this for a long time. So anybody that’s on psychiatric medicines that wants to look for something other than that that actually works, I can talk you through it. It’s pretty easy and pretty inexpensive to do.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. I’m just always impressed when I hear some stories about what she’s doing. We only just have less than a minute left, so do you want to tell us a really quick story about somebody that you treated that had a big surprise this week?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, yeah. Actually, we’re talking about the immune system, I had a lady come to me last week and her little child was in daycare and had been constantly getting sick, constantly getting sick, constantly at the doctor – ear infections, throat infections, all these sort of stuff. She works full-time. She’s just a professional lady.

She’s very upset about the whole thing. She goes, “I don’t have time to keep taking my child at a daycare.” I said, “Look, the coconut oil.

Use the coconut oil.” She looked at me like I was crazy. I said, “Look, just put the coconut oil in the baby’s food in the little baby jar. Put it in there, warm it up, half a teaspoon twice a day.

She called me not even 48 hours later and said, “You know what? She’s better.” She’s not coughing anymore. All the drippiness stopped.

Anyway, it was a significant change within a short period of time.

You would be surprised. Natural products work very well, and I’ll tell you, especially about psychiatric products. I get people off of medicines every single day especially anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medicine and even narcotics.

DEBRA: And I would stop you because the music is going to come on. So thank you so much.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, thank you so much.

DEBRA: Pamela will be on again two weeks from today. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health

Pamela Seefeld,R.PhMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants. Today we’ll be talking about new discoveries about “cell signaling,” the secret communication between cells that makes health happen. And how eating fruits and vegetables and taking plant-based supplements helps that communication happen. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How Eating Fruits & Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph.

Date of Broadcast: September 10, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It is – what’s the date? Wednesday, September 10th 2014. I’m here in beautiful Clearwater, Florida. The sun is shining today. It’s a beautiful, late summer day. We’re going to be talking today about fruits and vegetables, why you need to eat your fruits and vegetables. It’s really fascinating. It’s probably something that you don’t know anything about because I’m still learning about this subject.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a pharmacognocist. And what that means is that she uses medicinal plants instead of drugs. She’s very, very, very effective at this. She’s right here in Clearwater, Florida with me and I met here because a friend of mine told me how she had gotten his mother off of all her prescription drugs by using medicinal plants and that right away, she started doing better.

I, of course, immediately went to her and she started helping me with problems that I’ve been having with my body that I’ve been trying to handle for years and years and years. All the things that I have done handled them some, but not as much as I would like. So she gave me some medicinal plants and we’re being quite successful at taking care of problems in my body that I have otherwise not been able to take care of.

So I’m very happy to have her on. She’s on now. I’m having her on every other Wednesday, so the next show will be two weeks from now. She has so much knowledge and so much information. We’re just going through all kinds of what’s coming up. We’ve got it all scheduled out through the end of the year about what we’re going to talk about in terms of how medicinal plants and foods can be used to heal instead of taking drugs.

And she knows all about drugs too because she is a registered pharmacist and is trained in that as well.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. I’m very happy that you’re back. So I know what we’re talking about today is cell signaling and how eating fruits and vegetables can help your cells create health. So why don’t you just start by telling us what is cell signaling.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, that’s very good. It is exactly what it sounds like. Your cell communicates with each other. They have little signals, hidden messages perhaps you would call them. The messages that they send each other determine if the cells are going to be robust and healthy and they’re not going to cause cancer or it’s going to be the other extreme where you’re going to be actually repelling cancer, stopping the blood vessels from going to a cancer state.

And so the cell signaling from fruits and vegetables and I’m going to talk about the flavinoids and the compounds in these fruits and vegetables, how the science is pretty concrete and it shows exactly what you can eat, what you can take for supplements to enhance the cell signaling so that cancer cannot form in the body.

DEBRA: That’s just so amazing. And for me, it also comes back to I keep seeing that nature knows best. And when we come back to just being align with nature and eating natural foods and taking natural supplements that that’s exactly what our bodies want. It just keeps being proven over and over again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it is. So we know in herbal medicine and if you look in the plant kingdom is really there are three bioflavinoids that we look at a lot. Can we use those actually in herbal medicine? There’s quercetin, hesperidin and rutin.
Quercetin was originally found in apples and in onions. Rutin was originally found in buckwheat. And hesperidin is found in the pithy part that’s around grapefruit. That’s where they originally located that. I use quercetin and rutin probably exclusively more so than the hesperidin.

But when I was looking, I went to the National Library of Medicine because I like to have everything be very scientific and to the point and very recent, so I did a recent search of some of the bioflavinoids and I found some interesting information that was just recently published. Actually, one of the studies that was just published was out of August 28th of this year, so it’s very recent. It talks about quercetin preventing prostate cancer through cell signaling, probably signaling to stop prostate cancer from dividing – very, very interesting.

Also, and this is actually something I wasn’t quite aware of. Quercetin looks like it’s preventing neurodegenerative diseases. This is of August 7th of this year in neuroscience. So these are major journals. They’re publishing things about bioflavinoids that show disease prevention and it’s all through cell signaling. It’s affecting the way the cells communicate with each other and preventing disease in the process.

DEBRA: Tell us just a little more about – could you paint a picture of what happens between the cells when they’re signaling each other and how the bioflavinoids and other phytochemicals affect that. Tell us what the cycle is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So what happens is there’s good signals and bad signals. We’re going to try and make it easy because I don’t want to make it too difficult.

DEBRA: Yeah, let’s make it easy.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, exactly, easy for everybody to understand. So there’s good signals and bad signals. The cells have a potential to put up both. So we know that if for some reason bioflavinoids and flavinoids and sesquiterpenes and alkaloids and phenolics, these are all these different compounds that are in the foods, you see, the plants make these compounds to prevent herbivores from eating them. So the plants aren’t making this just for no reason at all.

Quercetin in particular is being made by a plant to maintain the structure of its leaf. So if they took quercetin away from plants, the leaves would fall to the ground. It maintains vascular stability in the vessels that are in the leaves.

So what happens is when you take these components, it interferes and it blocks the bad signals, but the good signals are actually enhanced. And it does this through several different mechanism. What we’re seeing is that it can reduce inflammation and cytokines definitely play a part in disease processes. They’re just recently realizing how these cytokines – and cytokines make you fat too. People don’t realize it too.

That’s why when people eat a plant-based diet, when they’re having a greater proportion of flavinoids in their diet, quercetin, rutin from buckwheat, all these different components, that’s why we know that when cytokines decrease (and those are inflammatory cytokines that are actually produce by the fat cells, the adipose cells), when they decrease, you lose weight. It’s not just because you have less calories coming in, you actually are affecting the signaling out of the fat.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: I think it’s amazing.

DEBRA: It is amazing. So again, that’s when people fruits and vegetables and that is what helps the cell signal your body to lose weight.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly right, yes. We found here that this is also another new study that was published in the Journal of Nutrition in June of this year and we found that overall, when you take quercetin – you can take this as a supplement. There’s different doses that I use for different indication. You can take it as a supplement. And quercetin, they’re seeing here that in cancer patients, it prevents severe weight loss. But in normal patient, it actually can help prevent the cytokines from circulating and prevent weight loss. So it’s actually going to help in both situations – someone that has cancer, but also someone that’s healthy.

DEBRA: Wow! It’s so interesting how this things work. It’s boggling my mind. Let’s just talk about weight loss for a second. Let’s talk about weight loss for a second because there’s so much emphasis on lowering the calories in and burning calories. It’s all about calories and balancing them. But really, there’s all these other things going on that affect things.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly right, that’s exactly right.

DEBRA: It isn’t just the calorie balance.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, it’s not. And I think it’s really important to realize that because this is what we’re really told in the media. You need to exercise a lot. I work out all the time. You need to exercise a lot and you just lower your calorie. And people are associating that the fruits and vegetables that you’re eating, this type of diet, when you have two-thirds of diet as fruits and vegetables, which is what I recommend, when you’re doing that, you’re thinking, “Okay, I’m consuming less calories, that’s why I’m losing weight.” It’s not the reason why.

Calories are a part of the component, but the big part is that we’re seeing is it’s affecting inflammation and these cytokines that are coming in and out of the fat that make you more fat. Cytokines, inflammation, this is why when people are kind of overweight, they tend to have a lot more arthritis, lupus, all these different diseases. Well, it’s not just because the weight is affecting it. It’s the fact that the cytokines being produced in the fat are making you gain more weight and making you have pain.

So when you take these components, it’s kind of blocking these cytokines. So the circulating amount, the net amount is decreasing. And so these negative signals that are coming from the cytokines and the fat are reduced.

DEBRA: And then you don’t have those problems anymore. This is so – wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s right. The pain goes away, you lose weight. I mean, that’s what’s really happening. I think this is very, very important for people to realize that it’s not all about this guilt trip about how many calories you’re eating a day. It’s not about that. It’s about what you’re eating supplement-wise and food-wise to change the signaling of the cells so that your body is more in harmony and the cytokines are decreased, the fat goes away and you feel better.

DEBRA: We’re going to talk more about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a pharmacognocist, which is a pharmacist who uses medicinal plants to heal. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is pharmacognocist, Pamela Seefeld. What she does is she uses medicinal plants instead of drugs to heal the body.

Now, Pamela, before the break, you made the comment that we should be eating two-thirds fruits and vegetables. That’s a lot of fruits and vegetables especially for people who are not eating them. I mean, I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, but I don’t even think I eat two-thirds fruits and vegetables. And all the vegetables people are eating is iceberg lettuce salad with a slice of tomato on it and lots of dressing. What does that look like to eat two-thirds fruit and vegetables?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, that’s a good point. I’m not saying that I’m always perfect at that. But maybe two weeks, we can try and focus on the vegetables and fruits that you eat. It’s got to have high impact. So maybe it’s not two-thirds of your diet, maybe it’s even half your diet, but the things you’re eating like you’re talking about the iceberg lettuce, it has low nutritional value, we know that the high nutritional value are these plants that have not been modified so much over the time period.

So we know scallion, onion, garlic, green apples. They have not been modified over the past hundred years. They pretty much look the same. Arugula, dandelion greens. And believe it or not, what’s really high in nutrition is watercress because that has not been modified at all.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s really basically a wild plant. So I’m a big fan of incorporating these plants.

DEBRA: I have heard that vegetables and fruits that have a lot of color in them have more nutrient. But this is the first time I’ve heard someone say plants that haven’t been modified. That kind of goes back to the Paleo idea of what people ate many, many years ago. I am very much in favor of people eating as close to nature as possible, but I’ve never divided my fruits and vegetables into like how – how can I even say this?

When I was gardening in California, I would grow heirloom varieties. I loved eating those heirloom varieties because those are the natural non-hybrids. I’m not shopping at the supermarket, so I’m not even going to say that. But if I go to the natural food store or even to a farmer’s market, at a farmer’s market, you can ask the farmers what they planted. But at the natural food store, you don’t know whether these are hybrids or heirlooms unless they’re labeled heirloom and they’re practically not. I mean, even organic, most of what they’re growing is hybrid.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, that’s true. What I would tell you though is that what I make a point of doing that’s pretty easy to do is my breakfast always has a green apple associated with it because the inulin is present in it, the bacteria in your gut really like it. In fact, they’re healthy food, they munch on it. So that’s a good start.

We look at the gala apples and the grannies, just the golden delicious, all those different apples. They have been modified a lot and they have a lot of sugar. Granny Smith apples are a great way to start the day with maybe some Greek yoghurt and some nuts. That’s typically what I have. That has the proteins. It has the carbohydrates and the fat. But the carbohydrates are going to be liberated out of the green apple because of the pectin. It keeps your blood sugar very stable. So it’s a really good fresh start to the day.

DEBRA: Oh, great!

PAMELA SEEFELD: I would say too that the garlic and the onions, I just put tons of that stuff with my lunch and dinner.

DEBRA: I do too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So we’re really kind of getting it from that. And then, of course, the dark, leafy greens. The trickiest too when you’re looking at the vegetables you’re eating that the variety of the color is important, but what’s really important is there’s fat present on the salad because if there is not, you’re not going to absorb them. These are fat-soluble components. The flavinoids in these fruits and vegetables need to have a small amount of fat.

So olive oil with a little bit of lemon and I usually put garlic in there too, that’s my typical salad dressing because you’re going to really absorb them. If you don’t have something that has a small amount of fat even if it’s just nuts on the salad, you’re not going to absorb these flavinoids. And these are fat-soluble. You want to have them peak in the blood stream.

DEBRA: Then I’m doing the right thing because my salad dressing is olive oil and unrefined salt.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Perfect!

DEBRA: Yeah, and I think that it taste better. I used to be a big salad dressing person. I love ranch dressing and thousand island dressing, all those tasty things. But once I started using olive oil and just unrefined salt, organic olive oil and unrefined salt, you can actually taste the vegetables.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: It just taste so fresh that I don’t even want to eat those over the salad dressings anymore.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it enhances the flavor and that’s really proven to be true. And if you think about it, I was looking here, there’s another study that came out in Cancer Prevention, which was August 26th of this year and it talked about why do fruits and vegetables prevent cancer. The anti-cancer properties appear to be cell signaling the topic we’re talking about today, cell signaling). We know now that this particular cell signaling I was talking about, the cytokines, it down-regulates these cytokines, which can be pre-cancerous (initiators) and it starts something called – it stops angiogenesis.

Angiogenesis is when cancer forms in one area and blood vessels have to come out to feed it particularly. It’s kind of like outside of the normal pipeline so to speak. And angiogenesis is what we want to stop. We want the blood vessels to not go and seed a tumor cell.

So we know now that the plants, when you take them and you consume them, these flavinoids stop that process where the blood vessels are able to go on feed onto the cancer.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it’s pretty great.

DEBRA: Wow! Wow! So in another show, we learned that sugar feeds cancer. So now we know no sugar and lots of fruits and vegetables, that would prevent cancer in the first place.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And this is in the Cancer Journal or this year like less than a month ago. So that’s really important.

There’s another study I was just looking at today because I did a full Medline search of anything most recently published. This was just published in Asian Pacific Journal Cancer Prevention. We see that lutein bioflavinoid (and lutein, people take it a lot of times for their eyes), lutein has cell signaling pathways and it stops the progression of colon cancer.

So these things are found, these bioflavinoids are found in fruits and vegetables to varying degrees. What you need to do is say, “I need to try and incorporate as many of these in every day for disease-preventing activity.”

Also, too, you can take these things as supplements. And depending if you had a cancer history, we can prescribe bioflavinoids and these antioxidants that go to certain areas depending on which cancer somebody has. I think someday you’re going to see cancer prevention and treatment tailored by their diet.

DEBRA: Wow! That would be so cool. That would be so cool, yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s where we’re headed. Luckily, the cancer journals are picking up on this and it’s not pharmacognosy journals and the people just meeting that are plant scientists. It’s becoming mainstream that people are embracing this. Cell signaling is all about – remember, we talked about dampening the anybody signals, enhancing the good signals.

DEBRA: Wow, that’s amazing. Okay! Well, we’re going to talk more about this when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacognocist – and that word, pharma- is drug and then –cog is intelligence. And so it means plants, these medicinal plants have intelligence really. This is what we’re talking about, intelligence and the ability to communicate, which I think is all amazing – not amazing, but so wonderful because I think everything alive can communicate.

Anyway, I’m going to stop talking. We’re going to go to break and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is pharmacognocist, Pamela Seefeld. She uses medicinal plants and other things like fish oils to heal the body instead of drugs.
So Pamela, what else do you want to tell us about cell signaling?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So flavinoids, we were talking about these flavinoids. These bioflavinoids and flavinoids in general are found in plants. There’s also other things that can affect cell signals. I’m going to talk a little bit about some of these other things as well.

But this is interesting, the flavinoids themselves. We’re talking about these components in the plant that the cells produced to keep herbivores from eating then, animal grazing in the grass. They have enhanced activity for us.

It’s interesting. The cytotoxicity or the anti-cancer effects – this is just some chemistry for some people that are interested in that. This is a brand new study that just came out. They have found that the reason why this has anti-cancer effects, the flavinoids that are in your salad is there’s a 2-3 double bond in a C-ring, one of the structures. They look for that in the flavinoids. If it has that double bond, it causes what’s called mitochondrial poisoning.

So the mitochondria if you remember back in highschool, it’s the power house of the cell. It’s where some of the energy is produced for the cell. This actually stops. The cell signaling prevent cancer from having the mitochondria perform correctly and that’s why it kills the cancer cell. So they actually know the very mechanism why these components – you can take them in a supplement or you can take them as well in your salad – actually stop cancer from growing.

Interesting that we see know too is that flavinoids are very much arresting cell cycles with the cell signaling, the cell cycle signaling in breast cancer. And breast cancer we know affects one in eight women in America. So it’s one of the most common cancers. There’s a high propensity of people concerned about cancer – family heredity, BRCA gene testing, all these sorts of things that are going on right now. But really a big prevention of breast cancer is consuming flavinoids and consuming them along with the fat – we were talking about the olive oil – to make sure that you get a high peak in the blood stream.

Another interesting study that just came out too and I think your guests would find this interesting is that there are inhibitors of cell signaling for cancer and genistein, which is found in soy – and I’m not saying people go out and eat tons of soy. I’m saying genistein looks like it has some activity in preventing that.

Now, of course, someone who has a history of breast cancer, eating tons of soy is not a good idea, but a small amount of soy seem to be preventing this and it stops the signaling from the cancer cells themselves.

Now,I want to talk a little bit about Resveratrol because this is a supplement that people take quite a bit. Resveratrol, I really have high regards for, not so much – people say, “Well, I drink red wine.” Well, it’s not really quite the same time. But Resveratrol, if you take medical grade Resveratrol in a capsule, it’s very economical and it’s very effective.

And what we found now in this new study – this just came out this year August 21st, Molecular Medicine Reproductive Technology – in this particular journal, we’re talking about what’s going on as far as proliferation or the acceleration of cancer. We see that if you take Resveratrol, it induce what’s called apoptosis. Apoptosis means that the cancer cell actually burst open and die. So Resveratrol, its affinity for inducing apoptosis or the actual breaking up of the cancer cell is very high.

And also, new studies that just came out prevent cancer in the mouth epidermis. So this means that they look to induce skin cancer in this mice – and this was just published in Cell Molecular Biology in 2014, August 29th. This shows that Resveratrol stopped the mouse epidermis from proliferating for cancer. So it can have anti-cancer effects especially us being here in Clearwater and having lots of sunexposure. Skin cancer is a big problem here in the United States. So preventing skin cancer and the invasiveness of cancer is a brand new study as well. It stops the cancer from actually invading into the tissue.

So all this is through cell signaling. That’s how it works, just all through cell signaling.

DEBRA: And this is just amazing. I hear that – what is it? Like two out of three people have cancer, some big number like that? I think it’s different for men and women. I don’t remember off the top of my head. But these solutions are so simple.

PAMELA SEEFELD: They’re very simple and they’re very inexpensive. You’re going to eat anyway, right?

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And some of the supplements I’m talking about, the quercetin, Resveratrol, if you have a cancer history and so forth, I would be glad to talk to anybody. I don’t charge for my time at my pharmacy. If you had a question about dosages and how to incorporate them and what to eat them with as far as to get the highest peak in the bloodstream, as far as where you want it to target, whether you’re looking at colorectal cancer, breast cancer, any of your clients that are listening here today can call me some time at my pharmacy. I’m just going to give the phone number.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s Botanical Resource and it’s 727-442-4955. You could check with me and see exactly what you’re doing as far as gearing towards the right dosage and the right product. I can help you with that.

So, we see also – another study that came out in a cancer journal this year, October. Actually, it’s October of last year. That was the most recent one that came out. In this study, it shows that also Resveratrol stops the cell signaling for prostate cancer. So we were talking before about how the different flavinoids affect prostate cancer. And prostate cancer really for most men that are going to be in their sixties and seventies, they’re going to end up with some kind of prostate issues as well.

Now we know that in the past, they used to treat these things very aggressively and they found that there was incontinence and sexual problems and a lot of things that were associated with it. Now, they’re trying not to be so aggressive because they realized that the outcomes were not as favorable as they thought.

So these are some simple things that you can take if you’re concerned about that. If you’re, males in particular, are having some issues with their prostate, these are simple supplements that you can take to prevent this. But at the same time, you can prevent cancer for the skin as well. So this is really something that can be all-encompassing.

Now, I’m going to talk a little bit about fish oil.

DEBRA: This is just – wait, we need to go to break. Actually, we have one more minute, go ahead, go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: After the break, we’re going to talk about fish oil and I’m going to talk about how that’s cell signaling as well. This is important because a lot of people take omega 3’s and we want to make sure it’s signaling to prevent cancer.

DEBRA: Good! Well, I’ll just say that I’ve been taking fish oil for the last couple of weeks. I absolutely refused to take fish oil before because I don’t eat fish, my body reacts to it pretty badly. But Pamela explained on an earlier show about how fish oil is processed and that if you get a good quality one, then there’s no toxic pollutants in it and it also doesn’t have the protein in it that most people react to.

And so for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking fish oil with absolutely no problem. I actually feel very happy taking it. I go, “Oh, good! Fish oil, it must be doing something right in my body.” So after the break, she’s going to tell us more about this.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is pharmacognocist, Pamela Seefeld. She’s at Botanical Resource in Clearwater, Florida. She has a website, it’s BotanicalResource.com. But you can just call her on the phone. And when we come back, she’ll give her phone number again. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is pharmacognocist, Pamela Seefeld who dispenses medicinal plants to heal the body instead of drugs. Okay, tell us about your fish oil. I know that’s your favorite subject.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I love fish oil because it’s so effective and it turns on 300 different genes in the body. So we know it’s all-encompassing, it goes to the entire body. And of course, because it’s fat and fat-soluble, it has high penetration to the central nervous system. We know it works really good to prevent cognitive decline, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, all these types of things that people are really concerned about. It has high penetration for the brain.

The brain is mostly made of DHA. But EPA, giving it on the front-end tends to be more of a mood-elevating load. So actually, when they autopsy, they only find DHA in the brain. So these things are really interesting.

Fish oil, you can get DHA from algae, but a lot of times, I don’t like to use DHA by itself because it can tend to make people depress. So usually, you want to have ratios. There’s different ratios depending on what types of effects we’re trying to do towards mental health.

But the cool part about the fish oil, we’re talking about cell signaling, we know it signals cells all throughout the body and in a favorable manner. For cardiovascular reduction, it’s a 75% reduction of cardiovascular disease. So it’s really significant.

And we know that what it’s doing too as well – and this is a new study that I just downloaded talking about on the skin. Say someone has a cut or an injury and they’re taking fish oil, it looks like injury from blood vessel being damaged, say you get a bruise or a cut, what this seems to be doing is it’s protecting the endothelium, the skin and it allows new blood vessels to go and have more nutrients to the tissue where it’s needing repair.

So somebody that has maybe diabetic wounds or even gum disease, something is not healing correctly, fish oil can be an adjunct therapy to make sure that the blood vessels deliver the nutrients directly to the wound. To me, that is just absolutely amazing.

We’ve known about the effects on the heart and that’s what most people take it for, but really, we know too now that it can prevent the damages taking place. Say something is just not healing correctly, a wound that won’t heal properly or if you have a cut, if you already are on fish oil or taking omega 3’s, it’s going to make a huge difference as far as the blood vessels reaching the area and delivering medication, nutrients, things that will actually repair where the injury took place.

We also see that it helps augment brain repair. Go ahead.

DEBRA: Wow! Well, what I wanted to say is that I’m just thinking about in times past when people ate diets that were not industrial diets, they were eating things like fish and so getting the fish oils. They were eating plants that were just right out of the ground.

If you think about the hunter/gatherer – again, going back to the Paleo diet – and every time I say the Paleo diet, I feel like I want to add a disclaimer and say, “Meaning foods that people actually ate prior to industrialization” because a lot of what’s called the Paleo diet now, I look at those recipes and I go, “Oh, my God!” They’re not very natural even though they’re designed around eating things that are basic to nature. I mean, people didn’t eat a pound of bacon for breakfast, I’m sorry.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. You’re correct about it. They’ve really kind of gone to the deep and say, “Okay, we used to eat lots of meat. So that’s what we’re going to eat, just always meat.” That’s now what it’s about.

DEBRA: That’s not what it’s about and that there is a lot of meat in the Paleo diet, a lot of emphasis. But what I found after being on a Paleo diet for three or four months just trying it to see how it would work, what I found was that it was way too much meat for my body – way, way, way. And it’s not that I don’t eat meat or that I’m a vegetarian or whatever, but it’s just the whole emphasis on all this meat because that’s what people ate in Paleo times.

I actually think that they ate a lot more vegetables and fruits because you could go around and gather them, whereas to eat meat, you have to go kill a big animal.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And you’re right. If we look at these people that are talking about the hunters and gatherers, they weren’t sitting there eating steaks all day long. That really was not the situation.

DEBRA: No!

PAMELA SEEFELD: They’re eating lots of berries and lots of plant. This is what they decided to start calling the Paleo diet, just basically eating every kind of meat you want. It’s kind of like a modified Atkins, but you throw a few plants in it. That’s not really what we want to do.

We want to say that these plants that I talked about that haven’t been changed that much, colorful vegetables are very important and making sure there’s fat present. All these things are very important. And you can take Resveratrol as a supplement, you can take quercetin as a supplement.

And fish oil is a very, very important supplement. Especially if you want to have maybe mood elevating or calming effects. I do a lot of mental health. And especially if someone has anxiety or lots of stress, you can take fish oil that takes the edge off and makes you just a lot more relaxed about day to day activities.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. I noticed that since I’ve been taking fish oil – I don’t remember what was the mental health benefit we were going for. I’ve only been taking it for two weeks, but I noticed that – not that I was so anxious before, but I noticed my ability to just sit and concentrate and do my work and feel calm and not be worried about things or just have my concentration distracted, I can just sit here and work very calmly hour after hour after hour. And that’s tremendous for me. It’s just tremendous.

I really see everything you’ve given me, I see the benefits. I just see the benefits. And I’ll also just mention just because I’m so happy about it – I’m happy about all of it. I really encourage you if you have anything wrong going on or anything that you want to prevent, please call Pamela because she will give you the right thing.

One of the things that I’ve had problems with is sleep. For years, I’ve had problems with sleep. She gave me Passion Flower. And now, I just sleep the eight hours. I just fall asleep and I sleep for eight hours. I am so happy.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I really appreciate that. That’s really great. And you know too, I have tried probably ten different Passion Flower products for different people. And the one I settled on was the prescription quality. So I’ve really kind of done the leg work. I’ve been doing this probably 20 years. I’ve been 25 years as a pharmacist, but I’ve been doing 20 years of naturopathic pharmacy.

Really, it’s important to understand that people take a lot of different things, they might read a magazine or something, but especially knowing and taking the right dose at the right time and how to make sure that what you’re taking, you respect people’s time and money is really important.

Like the sleep issue, the few products that I didn’t think were working, I don’t have them anymore. That’s what it felt especially even homeopathy. You know I’m a big fan of homeopathy. They’re finding now that homeopathy prevents – it actually affects cell signaling. That’s the brand new studies that came out.

So all the things that I’ve been telling people about homeopathy are really true. It affects cells signaling favorably.

DEBRA: Well, it’s interesting because homeopathy is one of those things where place say, “Well, there’s nothing in the bottle, but the energy of the material is so dilute, but it’s not like eating an apple or something.” That’s interesting that a study has come out to say that. It just goes to show that very small amounts and even just the energetic imprint of things can affect our bodies.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, very much so because they found that effected reactive oxygen species, it reduces that. It helped for mediating cell signaling in a favorable manner.

And homeopathy, what’s great about it is you can give this to animal. You can give it to little children. You can give it to adults. And really, a lot of times for homeopathy, I’ll give a homeopathic product that I think really can be all-encompassing for a family. They could all use it in different doses and everybody comes back feeling better.

So people need to embrace that homeopathy really is kind of like secret repair. That’s the way I look at it. It kind of goes to the area of where it needs to in each individual and repairs and stops disease processes on multiple levels.
Wendy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s some amazing. We have so many amazing tools available to us and they all come back down to nature.

The thing that I wanted to say and I got kind of sidetracked before was about how in the past, pre-industrially, people were eating the food that was there in nature. And so it included things like fish oils and a lot of plants. And all these things that we’re talking about, people were getting on a daily basis in their diet because they were eating the foods direct from nature.

And the fact that we need to supplement them and be paying attention to them is because just our average food supply is processed foods and hybrid foods and all these things. It’s so far away from nature. And just as we get back to having the things that we would have if we were just living in a natural environment, then that handles all these diseases because we’re just getting what we need, what our bodies need.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. A lot of people are embracing fresh diets if you looked around. I mean, this is what people want. But it’s not just that it’s trending, it’s neat. It’s the fact that we know that there’s certain flavinoid you can take, certain doses of fish oil you can take, certain types of Resveratrol like the passion flower product that we’re talking about, there are certain things you can take to really target and say, “Okay, I want a therapeutic outcome. I’m not just taking this because I read about it and I want to take it. It sounds neat!”

That’s what’s really important, using your knowledge. I mean, God gave us, everybody, unique knowledge and applying those talents is what it’s really all about.

DEBRA: Yeah. So I just want to emphasize again what Pamela just said that it is about getting a therapeutic result. And so if you just are going to read an article or go to the natural food store and pick something off the shelf, call Pamela because she has the experience of knowing what to use for what condition and she also has the products that she’s honed down after 20 years of experience to see what works and what doesn’t work and she’s going to give you something that works. Give the number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. If they have any questions, they’d like to contact me, my number here in Clearwater is 727-442-4955 and I would be very honored to help any individual that has questions about medications they want to go off of or if they just want to enhance their health or if they actually want to treat a disease state, I would be very happy to share my knowledge.

DEBRA: Thank you very much.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you.

DEBRA: We’re at the end of the show. We look forward to talking to you again in two weeks from today.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I love it! Thank you.

DEBRA: This is Pamela Seefeld, she’s a pharmacognocist and she’s great. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and you’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.

Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a pharmacist who specializes in pharmacognosy, which is healing with medicinal plants. Today we’ll be talking about her particular interest in the toxic effects of psychiatric drugs and how she helps people get off them. In addition, we’ll discuss how various natural supplements can affect your mood and feelings for better or for worse. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy. She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and is the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

 

 

transcript

DEBRA: Hi. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It is August 27th, 2014 and I am here in beautiful Clearwater, Florida where it’s a lovely late summer day. The sun is shining, there is no thunderstorm, so we should have no interruptions in our transmission here today – not that we ever do, but sometimes the electricity goes out when we have thunderstorms, so it’s always a possibility. But everything is perfect and smooth today, beautiful summer day.

Today, we’re going to be talking about toxic psychiatry. We’re going to be talking about toxic psychiatric threads, and how you can have mental health without them.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a pharmacist, who specializes in a specialty called pharmacognosy, which is healing with medicinal plants. So instead of giving people toxic drugs that are made in a laboratory, Pamela, with her pharmacist training, finds things to give people that have the same beneficial effects as drugs, but these plants actually heal you, instead of just alleviating symptoms.

So she works with a wide variety. She is right here in Clearwater, Florida with me. And I’ve been to her. She has helped me tremendously. Actually, I’ve only been to her once. She gave me one bag full of things to take. One of the things that has happened is I have lost 10 pounds in three weeks. That was one of the things I want to do, it’s to lose some weight; and Pamela helped me do that. Before, losing weight was really a struggle for me.

I have another friend whose mother was on a whole lot of drugs for a condition that she has. And Pamela gave her some natural remedies; and right away, his mother started doing better. That’s actually how I found out about her in the first place.

So today, she’s going to tell us about how psychiatric drugs are toxic, how they affect your body. We’re going to be talking about little things that you can do if you have mental health things that need to be improved, how plants can help you.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Congratulations on your weight loss. I know you’re doing great.

DEBRA: I am doing great. I am doing great. I’m actually…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m very happy for you.

DEBRA: Thank you. Actually, I’m going to see Pamela again on Friday this week and I found a whole lot of old blood tests.

She has to look at your blood test because she can tell how your body is doing from looking at the blood test, even if something is coming up, some body condition that’s weakening, symptoms in the future that you’re going to have. She can help you handle that in the past before you can get sick. And so I just gather up all the blood tests I could find, and I’m taking them all to her on Friday. We’re going to go over them and see what we can do next.

I just think it’s fascinating, what you do, Pamela and so needed.

I knowin past shows – you can go ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and see the links to past shows we have already done with her. Actually, she’s going to be on every other Wednesday because there’s so much to talk about on this subject and so much to learn.

But how did you get interested in the psychiatric part of this?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good question. Just a little brief background, my background is Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacognosy, which is the study of plant medicine. It’s much different than Herbalism. People that are doing herbal medicine, there’s not really so much of the study of the medicinal qualities and where they go in the body. I also trained in Homeopathic Medicine here in the United States and in Europe.

So I do a broad range of things. I can do pretty much everything. We’ve talked about this, some cardiovascular disease to sleep disorders and so forth, but mental health has always been a particular interest of mine. I have definitely had plenty of time spent up in Washington DC grant reviewing for NIH, which is National Institute of Health. One of my best friends works at the National Institute of Mental Health and I tended to hang around with a lot of the psychiatrists and the people that work in mental health that are interested in other means of getting people well.

So my background is very varied in this. And mental health to me is like the final frontier because a lot of people, when they realize that their mental health is balanced and they overcome insomnia or depression or anxiety, all these things that are really harming people and making them not have their potential, most people’s illnesses really start out psychosomatically as a psychiatric issue where we can use some simple tools, some plants, some vitamins and some simple things that will work just like medicine and get people better so they are not needing medicines in the future.

DEBRA: That’s so great. That’s so great. So then, you were hanging out with people who were looking at these mental health things. And then now, what do you do with this?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Now, I tend to go to Biological Psychiatry. I try and go in there once a year, to their meeting, and see what they’re proposing. And what I have found by learning all these different things – and I actually lecture on this too to the psychiatrists. I do grand rounds.

Grand rounds are like when – like the VA Hospital, I do grand rounds at the VA Hospital. Grand rounds are when the doctors and psychiatrists get together at lunch and they meet in the room and they have a speaker. They do this every week, and it’s called grand rounds. Sometimes, they do it once a month, depending on which hospital institution.

So I do grand rounds, psychiatric grand rounds. We met several times a year. And the grand rounds talk about this is what you give this patient in the psychiatric realm, which are drugs and this is the data that shows that these vitamins or these plants can do exactly the same thing at a lower cost, better outcomes, and less side effects.

My background is very varied in this, but I have done this a long time. I lecture on this quite a bit. But I write new lectures for several psychiatrists that are very good friends of mine that really ask, “Can you please send me those lectures because I’d like to read it.” I really summarize all the data. And that’s what we’re going to do today.

DEBRA: Good. So go ahead and start.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay. I’ll just…

DEBRA: I don’t know what to ask you first.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, no, no. Don’t worry about it. I’ll just go there and you can interject as you wish.

All right, what we see is that a lot of people – and we were talking about the blood work. It’s nice sometimes that I see people blood work because if you go to a regular allopathic doctor and he’s going to do your blood work – and even pharmacists, when I worked as a pharmacist in their hospital – when you look at the blood work, they only look and see if it’s out of range.

If it’s out of range and it’s flagged, so to speak, then that’s the only time they address it. But a lot of times, people have things that are coming along that I tell people, “In five years, they’re going to give you this medicine. In 10 years, they’re going to give you this medicine.”

So it’s really about preventing all these medicines because people do not want to be medicated. They want natural solutions. And the thing with medicines is that a medication works on receptors. That’s how drugs work. That means this drug, drug X or whatever it is, goes to a protein on a cell and it’s an exact match. It looks just like the configuration of the protein.

And then, when it binds to the cell, it changes something inside the cell, and you get the effects. So you get the anti-depressant effect or you get the anti-anxiety effect or whatever you’re looking for. So when you do this, let’s face it, there’s no solving the problem. You’re just covering it up with medicine.

So what I do is say, “Look, you have some depression and anxiety. There’s nothing wrong with that. Life can be very stressful. Let’s solve what’s going on in the brain, the neurotransmission. Let’s get this solved so that this problem is gone.”

That’s the difference with what I do versus what we do in a pharmacy and medical realm.

DEBRA: That’s totally amazing. That’s just so amazing…

PAMELA SEEFELD: It is! It’s all about solving things, solving problems…

DEBRA: Yes! And that’s the difference in. In the first show that I did with you, during the first break, I looked up the root of the word pharmacognosy because I was curious about that little syllable cog- that has to do with the intelligence. And what pharmacognosy really means is it’s a drug, but it has information. It has intelligence. It does something. This is what’s missing.

This is what’s present in plants, it’s that information. That’s what’s missing in drugs that are synthesized in a lab and toxic chemicals and all these things. It doesn’t have the information part that exists in nature. Is that right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And we tend to take things very simplistic. We don’t think of plants as being intelligent. But they have enzymes in the plant that are identical to what we have in our liver. They metabolize. They’re unique and they can make their own food.

What’s unique about plants is that the reason why they have activity and they have these compounds is they make them to prevent herbivores from eating them. And these compounds are toxic to some animals, but for us, they’re very, very therapeutic.

DEBRA: Good. We’ll hear more about it after the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacist. She specializes in pharmacognosy. She’s here in Clearwater, Florida, where I live, but she works with anybody by phone. Her website is BotanicalResource.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. We’re talking about toxic psychiatry and how we can help mental health without drugs. So go on.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So this is what we have to look at. We’re talking about solving the problem. So I think most people would want a solution versus, “Okay, I’m going to give you a medication and this medicine is going to go bind the receptors. It’s going to change the chemistry in the cell,” but after the effect wears off, the problem is still there.

So this is what is different from what I do versus when we’re handing out medications to people. So let me just start with a few simple diagnoses and what we use versus what the doctor would give you.

DEBRA: Great.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So depression. Depression is a very common problem. And depression, we know that when people have excessive amounts of cortisol because of stress – and we all have heard these terms like adrenal fatigue and so forth. The adrenal glands rest on top of the kidneys. When you’re under chronic stress, anxious, stressed at work, stressed at family, things like that, traffic, cortisol is released.

When the cortisol keeps being released chronically all the time – the cortisol is really designed to be there if you have to flee a dangerous animal when we were hunters and gatherers, that kind of thing. But nowadays, people’s cortisol levels are elevated all the time because we’re constantly stressed out, worried, whatever.

So what happens is this cortisol components go in and out of soluble tissues. They can come in and out of the brain. So a lot of people’s depression is a result of excessive cortisol stimulation in the body.

So how does the doctor treat this? What they do is they give what is called the serotonin reuptake inhibitor like Paxil and Prozac and Zoloft. Those drugs are very common medicine.

In fact, do you realize they are so often prescribed that they are in the water supply everywhere in the country? When they actually measure the water, it has the serotonin reuptake inhibitors and estrogen from birth control pills. They’re in all the water. They can’t even get it out of the water anymore.

DEBRA: Which is another reason to filter your water.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! That’s exactly right. And you know what too? Don’t think that these things are innocuous because there was a study that was recently done about a year and a half ago in Norwood that found that because there was such a high incidents of people using benzodiazepines, which is like Valium and Xanax and Ativan, those drugs, there was such a high incidence in that particular town that it was on the water supply and they were dumping the water into the river and the fishes were being killed. The reason why they’re being killed is because they weren’t fleeing their predators anymore because they were drugged out.

DEBRA: Oh, my God!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Do you want to talk about environmental problem? These kinds of things are happening every day. So these medicines are very dangerous and they have a lot of side effects and people need to realize that.

So if you’re depressed and you go to the doctor and he gives you one of these medications, when you take this, it just allows more of the serotonin or the happy neurotransmitter to be in the synapse in the brain, but it’s not solving anything.

And the problem with taking these medicines is that say, I put you on this medication. Two months later, you decide you don’t want to be on this anymore. You don’t feel good, you feel foggy, you feel out of it, your affect is very flat, you don’t have this experience of joy anymore. So what happens is you try and take it away, but then when you start taking it away, you have withdrawal, you have severe side effects.

We actually know now that the neuron, when you start taking away these medicines, they start to retreat into the brain. As a result of it, you start getting more depressed, more anxiety. It’s like a negative backlash.

DEBRA: Yeah. Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And so this happens a lot. I did this a lot. I take people off medicines a lot. They come to me saying, “Please help me bridge off of this.”

The difference between going to a psychiatrist and saying, “I want to get off this medication” is that they just start breaking and splitting, but there’s no bridge to solve to get off of it. What happens is whatever was going on in your brain before you start taking the medicines, it’s still present and at the same effect, the medicine, you’re going into withdrawal. So actually you are at a worse stage than you were initially.

So what do we use for someone that’s depressed? There’s a product called OmegaBrite. It was developed by a psychiatrist, Dr. Andrew Stoll at Harvard University. There were double blind placebo-controlled trials against Zoloft. Actually, in the trial, it was better than Zoloft. What do you think of that?

DEBRA: I love it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah. So, when people come to me, sometimes, people are skeptical. They’ll say, “Well, really? There’s no data on that.” I’m like, “Oh, actually, there are.” I print the studies out of the National Library of Medicine and you can see that these particular products have clinical data that show it’s actually better than the drug as far as the outcome.

So OmegaBrite and something called Cardio B, which is a prescription dose folic acid, which binds to five serotonin receptors in the brain, phenomenal results to get people off of medicines, but also to treat the depression itself.

And the cool part is that both of these products make up the neurons in the brain, so you are solving the problem and you are not just covering it up.
DEBRA: Okay. I have a question for you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Please.

DEBRA: And we have just a couple of minutes until we have to go to break. I know that people can go through – like something can happen in their lives. Like this morning, I was just feeling stressed about something and I just started feeling overwhelmed and like, “How am I going to get through this?” It was something that because it just seemed like an overwhelming thing to me, but I felt fine. Within minutes, I went, “Okay, so I can handle this.”

But I think that there’s a difference between — I’m asking a question here. There’s a difference between the ordinary up’s and down’s of life, but isn’t there also physical things going on in your brain that cause people to be depressed that has nothing to do with the ordinary up’s and down’s of life?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right, yes.

DEBRA: So you could, say, try to solve it by not wanting to be depressed or solve the problem or whatever, but if there is something biological going on, then you could go to a psychologist or psychiatrist or a psychic or whoever you want to go to all day long and it wouldn’t solve it because there’s wrong biologically.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. What you’re stating is that organically, there’s something going on in the brain that needs to be addressed. That’s why when you take medication, you actually are not resolving what’s going on in there

And really, when you’re taking omega 3’s and folic acid – and a lot of times too, I’ll even use some products that work on dopamine like SynaptaLean, which actually goes and targets dopamine and brings more dopamine into the brain. When you do this, you’re saying, “Okay, I’m acknowledging the fact that the neurons on the brain are not firing the way they should be and as a result of it, I am feeling very distressed and unhappy.”

Life events can bring upon these things especially because it seems overwhelming that you have to figure out some way to cope with what’s going on, maybe the death of a spouse or something really bad happening.

And this is what I typically see people being put on these medicines. But then after the event has passed, they want to come off of it and those options are not being brought to them. That’s where I see a lot of this.

So looking at that and saying, “Okay. Can I work on serotonin? Can I work on dopamine in the brain and improve my outcome and improve my brain function, and my cognition and memory?”, that’s where these supplements take place.

DEBRA: Okay, we’re going to go to a break and we’ll talk about this more when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacist. She specializes in pharmacognosy, which is the healing with medical plants. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a pharmacist who specializes in pharmacognosy, which is healing with medicinal plants.

So even if somebody doesn’t have a mental health condition, like say depression, then there can still be benefits for people from taking certain plants because it sharpens up their brain.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. So everyone has their very own level of comfort of where they are. They know that they’re functioning really high and they’re feeling really great, or they’re having some issues and they’re not feeling so well. We know that these things can fluctuate.

What I would tell people, there’s a few simple points. If you are going to take a supplement, you want to make sure you’re taking the right supplement and something that’s targeted directly towards you feeling better.

For example with the OmegaBrite, OmegaBrite is a type of fish oil. Everybody should be on fish oil regardless, because we know it works on 300 different genes in the body, it helps prevent cancer, it helps for cardiovascular disease, it helps lower triglycerides 30% every month. So that’s just the baseline.

And what I do a lot of times, look, you’re going to be taking Omega 3’ss anyways, why don’t you use one that’s going to be tailor-made for you? If you need more energy, if you have a little bit of mild depression, OmegaBrite is a great product for you.

And converse to that, if you have anxiety, if you worry a lot, Pro-DHA and Pro-DHA1000 works very, very good to keep the anxiety at bay and make you just not worry about things, feel less stressed about things.

And sometimes, I even use both of those. In the morning, I’ll give somebody OmegaBrite. This is what psychiatrists do. They give somebody an anti-depressant in the morning and they give somebody the mood stabilizer later in the day.

Looking to the same thing with fish oil, you can say, “I’m going to give you OmegaBrite in the morning. You’re going to have phenomenal energy. Go work out and just feel great.” And then, as the day goes on, if you have anxiety, you can take Pro-DHA or even some passion flower and they will cut the edge and not feel like you’re so stressed out.

DEBRA: Amazing! I think that there’s a lot of emphasis that we should be able to solve our problems or handle things in life and that there’s certainly benefit to doing a lot of different —whatever is the program that you choose in order to do that.

But I still come back to what I said earlier. If there’s something going on biologically so that you’re not at your optimum, you could be trying to handle a depression when there’s actually no emotional cause of depression. It might be biological.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: And it’s important to handle the biological card, and then see if there’s something that you need to take care of emotionally.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. We just have to think about ourselves. A lot of times, we’re not living in the present, let’s face it. Most people, we’re thinking about a lot of other things. But if you actually practice mindfulness and you’re living in the present and you look at your body, what is your body made up of? It’s made of carbon. It’s made of hydrogen. It’s made of electrolytes, sodium and potassium and magnesium and phosphorous. So all of these different things, when we look at someone’s blood work, what would we be looking at? We’re looking at all these chemical components that are in somebody’s body.

We forget that we are made of the earth. We are made of all these things around us, water and oxygen. We’re all made of these things, but especially, we’re made of all these metals. A good example is lithium. I use low dose lithium for people as a mood stabilizer. It’s excellent. It works phenomenal. We have lithium in our body. We have all these elements in our body: copper, zinc. It’s in our body.

And these all are called co-factors. A lot of these different things, these elements are co-factors to different reactions of the body. So if you took all the zinc out of your body, your body would fail. You took all the copper out of your body, your body would fail.

It’s really an amazing thing. We say to ourselves, “What is going with this individual? Why are they not feeling well?” And that’s where I like using homeopathic detoxification. When you start cleaning out this basement, so to speak, of all this different stuff that’s going on in your body, you really are able to revise yourself and be refreshed. And these products go into the central nervous system too, so they pull out mercury and lead and cadmium, things that can interfere with neurotransmission. A lot of people, they basically are harboring a lot of these things in their body. And that’s why they’re not thinking clearly.

DEBRA: A lot of those chemicals actually can be—those chemicals and heavy metals, some things can actually be in your brain, which would make it difficult for you to think and feel.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And that’s exactly what’s happening. That’s why part of my mental health protocol is always to involve using homeopathy to just clean out the body as well, because most people, inevitably, they’re going to feel better. They’re going to lose a little bit of weight, their energy levels are going to improve.

I’ve personally been doing this probably 15 years as far as taking these detoxifications. You just put a little bit of drops in your water. It’s very simple, but it removes nickel, cadmium, lead, mercury and pesticides. You would be surprised how many people have lead and mercury levels that are too high in the central nervous system. When you take these metals into food, they don’t leave your body naturally. That’s really the problem. We want this to be completely taken out.

So what do we want to do? We want to make sure that someone is solving the problem, taking the chemicals out of their bodies, so that whatever is interfering with the neurotransmission is gone. And then at the same time, saying, “Okay, you’re going to need to take some fish oil, some folic acid and maybe some other things for mood-stabilizing. Why don’t we take things that go specifically to your particular needs?”

DEBRA: Amazing! So tell us about some other mental health conditions and what you do for them.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. So if somebody has anxiety – and anxiety is a really common problem – most of the time, the doctors are going to give you something called the benzodiazepine. The benzodiazepines are a class of drugs that are highly addictive. They have what’s called tolerance and dependence.

So you need to give more medicine each time to get the same effect. And when you try and take it away after a period of time if you’ve been on it, you have withdrawal, panic attacks and anxiety. These are very commonly prescribed medications. I can tell you from working retail some time that it’s a fast moving drug, and they’re in huge, huge bins because they dispense hundreds and hundreds of these pills every day.

So people are addicted to this. When you look at benzodiazepines, they work on these particular receptors called the benzodiazepine-receptor. You can take medica-grade passion flower. I use that quite a bit here. It works exactly the same on the same receptor, but it’s not on the receptor all the time.

What’s great about it is I use it as a bridge off of benzos if someone wants to get off of them. But at the same time, you can go on it and you are not going to have tolerance and dependence. What does that mean? It means that if you want to use that once in a while for sleep or anxiety, when you take it, you’re not going to become addicted to it. And if you decide that you don’t need it anymore, you can put it aside, and you’re not going to end up with withdrawal.

DEBRA: That’s really a key difference between taking natural things and taking drugs whatever kind of drug you’re taking.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. It’s a key difference. I like the words you’re using, because it is. If you go for a medication for anxiety, you will become addicted. If you use a natural product that’s prescribed for you in an appropriate manner, you will never become addicted to it. You can use it as an excellent tool, and improve your life tremendously.

DEBRA: I just want to say that I had that experience actually with sugar where as long as I was eating refined white sugar and products that had high fructose corn syrup and things like that in it, all those industrial sweeteners, they’re very, very, addicting.

And it was really, really hard for me to stop eating them. It’s been years now since what I’m talking about here. It was very difficult for me to stop eating them because they are so addicting. But what I did was that I replaced them with things like honey and maple syrup and agave nectar and all these natural sweeteners that were not refined. And it was easy for me to then after a while. I just didn’t even want those sweeteners at all.

I can see the same pattern here, the difference between drugs and the plants you’re using.

We need to go to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacist. She specializes in using plants, medicinal plants. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, a pharmacist who specializes in pharmacognosy. I love that word every time I say it, pharmacognosy.

PAMELA SEEFELD: There are committees of us around. It’s a really great profession.

DEBRA: I had never heard of it until I met you. It is a great profession. I think that what you’re doing is wonderful. So go on with what you’d like to say. We are in our last segment now. I want to make sure that you get to say everything you want to say.

PAMELA SEEFELD: All right, absolutely. So I want to also put in a word if anyone is on any of these medications, prescription or otherwise or is having some issues as far as they’re not functioning at 100% of their peak and they really want a free consultation, please call my office here. I will definitely go over at what you’re taking and tell you how you can improve on that. It’s (727) 442-4955.

So another good diagnosis that’s very, very common is ADD and ADHD. Let’s face it, every kid is ADD and ADHD. They take a child. You give them sugar breakfast, you send them to school and they’re supposed to sit there and they pay attention all day. This is not how it works.

So what do they normally do? They normally give the kids psycho stimulants like Ritalin. But also, more dangerously, they’re using a lot of anti-psychotics.

Anti-psychotics originally (especially a typical anti-psychotics like Abilify and Risperidone), these drugs are dangerous in effect that they really are designed for somebody that’s hearing voices. They’re not designed for little kids. So we know that this is not the problem. They’re using it for sleeping for adults too.

So what do we do with children that are having some impulsivity issues? I don’t know about you, but when I was a little kid, I was running all over the place tearing up everything. That’s children.

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So what do we do? Instead of giving them psycho stimulants, we say, “Why don’t I give them some calming, focusing fish oil like pro-DHA, pro-DHA1000?”

Also, they have new studies that just came out that show that zinc is a very, very important co-factor for over 200 reactions in the brain. And kids that have hyperactivity disorder test very low for zinc. The reason why is that zinc gets utilized and used up when kids are eating lots of preservatives and pre-packaged food. And you look at these different kids, most of these kids are eating a lot of things out of boxes.

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So I usually use low-dose zinc for children along with the fish oils and the detox, to clear all this out of their body. And then, I always recommend exercise. As kids have a way to take their internal energy and externalize it other than causing trouble in school, you see dramatic differences in the way they conduct themselves.

DEBRA: Many, many years ago when I first started doing this work, the thing that was very popular then was the Feingold Diet. It’s about taking out artificial colors and flavors and preservatives because it made children hyperactive. And I don’t hear much about that anymore. I’m supposing that it’s still there. The Feingold Association is probably still there.

You hear a lot about kids taking drugs for these things, but you don’t hear about just something as normal as feeding your children good, wholesome, organic, whole foods that you prepare yourself instead of all these packaged foods that will just completely change their behavior.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Most definitely! There is a program that I was participating in and that I did some talking for called I Love My ADD. And what they did is they take a school and they changed the desks. Instead of the kids sitting, they could have standing desks if they want. So they can stand if they don’t want to sit there all day.

They changed the food in the cafeteria. It was all whole grains and fruits and vegetables and lean meats. They actually baked their bread there. They saw that all the behavior problems went away. Grades improved…

DEBRA: I love it!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Everyone’s better. Yes!

DEBRA: Yeah!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Maybe, the kids doesn’t want to sit there all day. They have desks. Now they have treadmills on there that you can walk on them. This is like the big thing I got out of New York, some of these really trendy places. People don’t want to sit.

So changing the diet, remember I was talking about what your body is made of, the sodium and the potassium. Omega 3’s make up the central nervous system. We’re made of all these things. Remember, you always hear these little tales, “You are what you eat.” Well, actually, that’s true.

DEBRA: Yes!

PAMELA SEEFELD: You need it in your body. If it’s a supplement or food, it’s all the same. Food and supplements turn on genes in the body and you want it to turn on the ones that help you, not the ones that are causing disease.

DEBRA: Exactly.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s what’s really happening, food. This is really coming to be a very unique science. We know that cells signal each other and we know that when you take a supplement and you take food, these things all have healing, restorative properties because they affect the way the genes are turned on in the cell.

And what we want to do is we want to say, “I understand how this works. I am going to customize and tell you how to take these two or three things, so that the genes are going to be turned on in a favorable manner.”

As a result, mental health improved, cognition improves, all these things that people want. People just really need to realize that food is also medicine.

DEBRA: Exactly! I am sitting here with the biggest smile on my face. I’m starting to jump up and down when you said that. Would you just say that again, about the genes?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. Food is medicine. Food actually turns on genes. These genes are favorable and they prevent diseases. And we know now that what we’re really seeing is, “Why is there such a high incidents of breast cancer and cancer in general?”, you know why? Because people are not consuming enough of these disease-fighting property foods.

DEBRA: And what are those foods? What are those foods?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Fruits and vegetables.

DEBRA: Exactly.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Lean meats. But the big things are fruits and vegetables. I’m telling you that two-thirds of your diet should be made of plants.

DEBRA: I’m so happy to hear that because in the last few weeks, since I have been going through a lot of changes in my body the last few weeks and I’m dealing with things, I have gone through a phase where it was like I didn’t want to eat meat, I didn’t want to eat grains. I mean, I wasn’t eating grains anyway.

But what my body was craving were fruits and vegetables, particularly vegetables, particularly raw vegetables. And I’m not saying that we should just all be eating at 100% raw vegetable diet, but the thing is that I was just really getting down to really needing to have at least half of what I eat be vegetables.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely.

DEBRA: And we don’t think of it that way. And plants have so many wonderful healing properties to them. They need to be organic and they need to be fresh. I’m really getting to this point where I just want to – when I lived in California, I had a garden, and I would just go eat what was in my garden. I just went out in the backyard and pulled the raspberries off the raspberry canes and put them in my mouth. I need to get that here too. And that’s what we should be doing. That’s exactly it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: We know that. Let’s face it. Most of these people that are not feeling well, their diet needs to be improved. But I’m telling you that the cool part about this is if you take supplements along with it too that are specifically targeting certain areas of the brain, your outcomes are going to be even more phenomenal. I really can attest that. The plant-based diet is really the way to go.

But what we want to do is say, “Look at your blood work and see you are made of all these elements. Is there something there that’s making you not feel well?” I see this quite a bit actually where people maybe have pre-kidney problems or pre-liver problems or maybe metabolically they’re having some issues too and they don’t even know it.

DEBRA: Yeah. Well, I am so excited. I can’t wait to bring you my blood test, so that you can look at them over time and see what the trends are. I think this is just so fascinating. And I do see the difference, taking the things that you’ve recommended for me. I mean, just right away, I saw the difference. And I was already doing a lot of good things, eating my organic food, eating a lot of plants – although not enough, I could see.

But I think it’s a process. I wrote a thing for my blog a few weeks ago about how I was falling in love with kale. And when I first started, I didn’t want to eat kale at all. But as I started eating it, your body starts changing and then you want these good things.

And I can see the changes from taking the supplements that you’ve given me that are very, very specific to me and what’s going on in my body.

I just want to also emphasize – and I think that you’ll agree with this – about the necessity to be specific, because I think that a lot of people will just say, “Oh, I think I’ll go on this side or that diet,” or “I read an article that I should take this supplement.” That’s not the way to do it because our bodies are so specific.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right because what happens is most people watch a television show or read a news magazine and they’ll say, “Oh, I heard billberries are good for my eyes. I heard this is good for that.” And a lot of people come to me and they’ll be taking all these stuff. I would tell them, “The big things you have to protect against are cognitive decline, cancer and heart disease. You’re not taking anything to prevent those three things. And if you’re not taking anything to prevent those three things, one of those is going to come.”

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So that’s why it’s really important to look at what you’re taking. I always say, I really respect people’s time and money. You shouldn’t really take a bunch of things that you don’t need. You should take what you need. It should be customized. And your diet should be cleaned up, if you can possibly do it.

DEBRA: Well, I will say that you gave me things that were very specific to me. They were affordable. It wasn’t like you were getting me something that was $100. Things were $15, $25, things that most people could afford.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: They were all plant-based, kind of a whole nutritious thing to take, and they work. They work. So I really encourage anybody who’s listening who is on drugs, number one, to call Pamela. If you’re not feeling well, call Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I can get you feel better. I know what I’m doing.

DEBRA: She does now what she’s doing. I’ve seen this in myself and other people. Her approach is completely different than probably everybody that you’ve ever met and it all makes sense.

So we’ve got less than a minute. So give us your phone number again twice.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes. You can reach me at my natural pharmacy here in Clearwater. It’s (727) 442-4955. Okay. So the number again is (727) 442-4955. I would be delighted to help you with any issues you might have, if you want to come off medicine or if you’re trying to avoid medicines altogether. It can be any issues, diabetes, anything you have. I’ll be glad to help you and the consultation is free.

DEBRA: Great. Thank you so much, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you so much. Have a great time.

DEBRA: She’ll be on again two weeks from today.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: She’ll be on again, and we’ll learn more about this fascinating thing. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How To Choose the Right One for You

Pamela Seefeld,R.PhMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld,R.Ph, a pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances to heal the body, instead of drugs. We’ll be talking about different kinds of fish oils, their health benefits, and how to choose the right one for you. Pamela was my guest on 30 July (see Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs) and was so informative that I invited her to be a regular guest (she’s going to be on every other Wednesday). Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

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transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How to Choose the Right One For You

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: August 13, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free and in fact, how to do things that are helpful and regenerative for those of us (which includes everybody) whose bodies have been damaged by toxic chemical exposure.

Whether you know it or not, if you live in this world today, that’s what’s happening. And your body, if you have any kind of health problems, any kind of illness, it’s probably being contributed to by your toxic chemical exposure for everyday products that you’re using in your own home and just being exposed to toxic chemicals when we go out in the world. There are things that we can do about those things. That’s what we’ll talk about on this show.

Today is Wednesday, August 13th. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida and it looks like we’re going to have some rain. It’s a foggy August here and that’s great because it cools it down.

Today, we’re going to be talking about fish oil. Not my favorite subject because I don’t eat anything from the sea. I never have since I was a child. But I know that fish oils are extremely important in keeping your body healthy. And we’re going to talk about different kinds of fish oil. How you can choose the ones that are right for you (and maybe we’ll see if we can find a fish oil for me). But they are very important, so we’ll find out about that.

My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacist who specializes in medicinal plants and other natural substances in order to heal the body instead of giving people drugs. I met her because she has a shop here in Clearwater, Florida where I live and she helps people get off of their prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs and even psychiatric drugs. She knows how all these natural substances that can work to heal your body.

I am so impressed with the amount of information she has and the clarity with which she understands all of those that we’ve actually scheduled her every other Wednesday for the rest of the year and probably beyond. So you’re going to hear a lot from Pamela and I think you’re going to learn a lot.

Hi Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. For those people who weren’t here the last show and don’t know your background, just tell us a little bit about how you got interested in and what your viewpoint is about what you do.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I studied pharmacognosy at the University of Florida and pharmacognosy is the study of plant medicine. It’s a little bit more than herbalism, which is the study of the pharmacological properties of plants.

I’m also a pharmacist as well. My background is also in homeopathic medicine. I studied that in England and in Germany. And here in the United States, I’ve done extensive speaking, talking, and attending conferences that were in relation to pretty much every subject I’m interested in, which is basically all human health – a lot of cardio-vascular disease, a lot of mental health. I specialize in mental health more than anything probably.

What I really do is look at the pharmacological background of all the different plants and of the natural and homeopathic products that we’re using and to determine what’s best for most people from a pharmacological standpoint. In regular pharmacy, we learn that “this drug is for this disease and that drug is for that disease” and everything is pigeonholed. Natural products don’t necessarily work that way. It’s very important to realize that these have multiple effects on the body and the chemistry behind it is what I’m very good at.

DEBRA: And I will say that she is very good. After the last show, I went right down and said, “Okay, what should I take?” and she gave me a bag full of them. And I liked all of them.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great. I know what I’m doing. I’ve been doing this a long time. That’s wonderful.

DEBRA: She really does. She really knows what she’s doing. The way I found out about Pamela was from a friend of mine whose mother had Alzheimer’s I think and was taking a whole lot of prescription drugs. My friend went down and Pamela replaced those drugs with natural drugs and his mom is doing a lot better. So I looked at that and I said, “I need to talk to this woman.”

So let’s start by telling us why are fish oils important?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, so omega 3 fish oil are made up principally of EPA and DHA. That’s eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid. You can see why they are shortened into acronyms. These particular products are in concentrations depending on how they process the fish.

The majority of the products that you see are going to be a 2:1 ratio of EPA to DHA. That’s how it normally comes from the fish. But the smaller a fish is, like a sardine for example, they have a shorter lifespan and they’re smaller. And so they have less time to concentrate toxins in the environment like mercury.

And that’s why tuna fish is really problematic because tuna is a very large fish and it has a longer time period to expose itself to things in the environment. And as a result, it can accumulate mercury and that’s why they’re always giving warnings that you don’t want to be eating too much tuna fish.

DEBRA: Oh.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, did you know that? It’s cool, huh? And it’s very interesting.

DEBRA: Yeah, I didn’t know about the sizes of fish since I don’t eat fish.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, the size and the lifespan of the fish matters. You have to think that it has a larger surface area and a greater chance to be able to concentrate. For us, it would be subcutaneous fat, the fat underneath the skin. That’s where things are stored.

When people look at tuna fish and giving it to small kids or to pregnant women, there are restrictions to how much they can eat. When you take in mercury, it doesn’t leave the body. And the bad part about mercury is that it has high acidity for the central nervous system, the brain. And we know that it’s directly related to cognitive impairment.

DEBRA: And so it’s not a good thing to be feeding children every day when they go to school.

PAMELA SEEFELD: They should not have that, no. Or I use homeopathic detox that can pull that out. You would want to use something to remove it if you’re going to be doing that. But really, in all honesty, young children should not be eating tuna fish. It doesn’t say that they shouldn’t be eating fatty fish. There are plenty of other fishes that are safer, but that would be the worst.

The safest thing to eat is probably sardines. And what they do when they go out and catch a school of sardines, they test them on the boat immediately. So the very high-quality oil, for the products that I use like OmegaBrite from Dr. Stoll (he’s a Harvard psychiatrist and I can talk a little more about that later with the mental health), these particular products that are very, very good, they buy these sardines that, they test that. They’re very pure and they buy them off the ship literally. That goes for the better, higher quality products. The lower grade oil, the less expensive brands, the mail order stuff, Costco, that kind of stuff, you know what I’m saying, not that they’re bad, but those lesser quality oils, those go for the cheaper products. So that makes sense.

So the more expensive products, the medical-grade products, they take the better quality oil because they don’t want the contaminants. And actually, when they go and purify them, they use what is called fractional distillation, which is how they process petroleum. They use these column filtrations and different products are put off at different areas depending on how they go through these microbeads. It’s really very interesting.

DEBRA: That is interesting to me. I just want to emphasize what you just said because I understand what fractional distillation is from studying petrochemicals.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly!

DEBRA: So what it does is that – and correct me if I’m wrong – they heat it up, but then different things will evaporate at different temperatures.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct, and doing this separates out the components that we have –the fish protein, the components that have contaminants, things like that.

But what’s important to know is that the concentration of the EPA and the DHA has unique effects on the body and that’s leading up to mental health. It can turn on 300 different genes in the body and those are the ones they know about. It can be for cardiovascular disease, it can be for mental health, it works for children.

It’s a bunch of different topics we’re going to hit on today, but what I would say is that it’s important to realize that it’s all encompassing for all individuals. It can address a lot of different things in the body which are very important.

Luckily, fish oil doesn’t have one specific assignment. And it’s important to know that when you first start taking fish oil, the organs have very high affinity for fish oil – the heart, the lungs, the liver. They can actually radio-label these fish oils. And when they’re first given to somebody who hasn’t really taken supplementation in the past, we see that those areas light up the first.

So when you’re treating somebody for mental health, you really have to load the body with omega 3’s in the beginning because you have to realize that the first few weeks, these body organs are going to take the majority of it and the central nervous system will see very little of it.

DEBRA: Oh, I see. So, when you give people fish oil, or anything else, then certain parts of the body are going to take it first then other areas will…

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. That is important to know.

DEBRA: That is very important to know. We need to go to break. We’re going to find out more when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and I’m here with Pamela Seefeld, pharmacist and pharmacognocist – I don’t even know how to say that word.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Pamela dispenses good, natural substances. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a – okay, I’m going to get it now, “pharmacognosist.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes!

DEBRA: I was practicing during the break. The thing I really want to remember about this word (because I looked it up at the last show), the key part of it is, well, “pharma” means “drug,” but then “cog” is like the word, “cognitive” or “cognition” and it means “knowledge.” And so these are “drugs with knowledge.” They work differently from drugs that don’t have knowledge. They’re natural and they have all that good information that comes from nature that is in there because it’s a natural substance and it works with our bodies in a knowledgeable way, pharmacognosist.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: Now, I want to ask about something that you said. You talked about medical-grade supplements. So I just want you to tell us the difference between medical-grade and what people just buy from the drugstore.

PAMELA SEEFELD: All right. That’s a really good question. So, medical-grade oils, like I said, are going to be prepared from the sardines that are very small fishes, shorter lifespans, caught in very clean waters and they’re tested in the boat. Those particular products will go for the medical-grade oils. What I normally would recommend is, especially if you’re using it for mental health or for wellness, when you’re using products that are not medical-grade, there is a risk of having contaminants in there and also, the way the oils have been handled.

The higher grade oils are going to go for the better products. A lot of times, what we use, especially from a mental health standpoint because these people, technically, a lot of times already have issues with mercury, arsenic, lead, and pesticides, these things go freely in and out of the central nervous system and it affects people’s cognition, mood, and depression. And a lot of times, when you remove those things out with a homeopathic detox, you can normally correct some of that.

Especially if you’re doing this for mental health, but you’re also doing it for cardiovascular disease, you want to have a medical-grade oil. And some of the products that I use are from Nordic Naturals and they have a medical health line that’s different from the health food store line. That’s actually a higher grade product.

DEBRA: So can people buy medical-grade? I know my doctor gives me professional-grade vitamins and I have to get them from him. I can’t order from another professional. I can’t just go to the natural food store and pick these up.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, that’s a good question. The products that you’re going to have at the natural food store are not bad. I’m not saying that they’re bad. It’s just that they will not be specifically geared for your indication, what you’re trying to treat. And the quality of the oil might have some contaminants in it. That’s possible.

When people call me or they come here in person, I usually ask them, “Are you depressed? Do you have a lot of energy? Do you have a lot of stress? Do you have a lot of anxiety? Are you having trouble sleeping? Are you having trouble with work?” because most people inherently have something else going on in their lives.

A lot of times, people will read or watch a television show and it says, “take fish oil,” and they know they should take it. They’re going to grab a product and take it from the shelf. They’re going to ask the lady at the health food store and she’s going to say, “Oh, this is good,” but it’s inherent to look and important to see that the concentration that you use will affect the way your brain works. And that’s the beauty of it. You need to decide on the product.

For example, there’s a product I use quite a bit called OmegaBrite. OmegaBrite is from Dr. Andrew Stoll. He’s a Harvard psychiatrist. He did a double-blind placebo-controlled trial with Zoloft, which is a drug used for depression.

And in the trial, the fish oil product that he came up with had actually more anti-depressant effects than Zoloft. There are clinical trials with this. So I use that product a lot even for people who aren’t depressed, but also for people who need more energy, for people transitioning from a serotonin reuptake inhibitor like Paxil and Prozac and some of these drugs because the clinical data showed that you can actually come off the medicine with that product.

I’m not saying randomly take a fish oil. You want to take one that is specific to your particular need.

DEBRA: I know you have five different kinds of fish oils. You have multiple fish oils. And so I think that if someone probably wanted to take a fish oil, the smartest thing to do would be to have you help them choose which one it is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is important, yes, because what they are going to choose from the store (it doesn’t mean that the product’s bad), you want to have something that is going to inherently enhance your life, right? So if you have a lot of stress, you want it to take the stress away. And normally for that, I use a DHA to EPA ratio of 4.5:1 and that was shown to be very effective for ADD, ADHD, scattered thinking, anxiety, and a lot of stress. It takes that off the brain.

And it’s really interesting too to note that EPA, when it goes into the brain, it has its own transport protein that moves it into the brain and that’s what causes this mood-elevating effect. But when they autopsy, they only find DHA in the brain. So these things actually interconvert. They’re thinking that it’s actually converting. That conversion process in the brain is why it’s causing that mood-elevating process.

There’s a lot of chemistry and science that backs up which product you need to use and I will be very grateful to talk to anybody that has a question about what oil they want to use to treat their mental health issue, whether they’re on medicines or not. They can call me at 727-442-4955 and I’ll be glad to tell them which concentration they use for which product.

DEBRA: Yeah, it really is one of the things that I think is so fascinating about what Pamela does. She really is approaching it as a pharmacist where it’s not just about taking something at random and not knowing how it affects the body. She knows how it affects the body, but also what goes with what condition.

It’s a very exact, precise thing. And that’s so different from just hearing advertisement that you should take fish oil or whatever that supplement might be and taking it on a random basis. When I had her choose my supplements, it was just right on.

We need to go to break. Actually, we have 15 seconds. Pamela, why don’t you give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, it’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Okay, so now we’re going to go to break. It’s so tough to not ask a question before we have to come on to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld and she has so much to say. So when we come back, she’ll tell us more about fish oils. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacognosist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances to heal the body instead of drugs. In fact, she helps them off drugs if they’re on drugs, and she’s really, really good at what she does. Okay Pamela, what else do you have to tell us about fish oils?

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is pretty good. In preparation for the show today, I went on the Library of Medicine, the National Library of Medicine, which is nih.gov. And the National Library of Medicine has all the articles all over the world about health. And these are studies that people conduct, clinical trials, and you can read about these different trials and what their results are.

I went and did a search, which is called a MedLine search. I went to see some of the newer articles, some of the newer studies that show some of the benefits of fish oils so we could have some timely and really interesting information to talk about today (besides all the other things we can discuss).

So a brand new study just came out last month and it’s talking about cardiovascular disease, omega 3 fatty acids, fish oils and what it does for the cardiovascular risk factors. And this is very interesting. We find that when people are taking fish oil, we know that their lipids go down. Fish oil will raise HDL, the good cholesterol, and lowers the triglycerides. In fact, fish oil, if you look historically at all the studies combined, fish oil will lower triglycerides 30% per month, which is a huge number.

In fact, I found one study that talked about patients that are on hemodialysis. These people are really highly at risk for cardiovascular disease and for heart attack. Taking the omega 3’s in a higher EPA to DHA ratio raised up their good cholesterol and lowered their triglycerides more significantly than medication. It’s very important to these people especially if they have any type of illness to be taking it.

But this is really interesting. We find that it lowers blood pressure, and also at the same time, it helps for people to lose weight. We’ve known for a long time that it’s anti-inflammatory and it has antioxidant effects as well. So these things work collectively all through the body to prevent heart disease. It’s very interesting that it’s so significant on multiple things.

Most people that have had heart attack risk factors, they’re going to have high blood pressure and high lipids. You think all go in together. Really, fish oil is all encompassing to take that down.

DEBRA: I want to ask you a question first. You’re telling me all these great things. I’m listening to this and I’m thinking, “I should be taking fish oils.” But I know for myself that I’ve tried to take them in past and also, I don’t eat any kind of seafood at all because my body just doesn’t like it.

I know some people who have difficulty swallowing the pill, and you have a trick for that. But also for people who are allergic to fish, are there other things that they can take that are comfortable? And why do things like walnuts have a lot of omega 3’s? Why would that not be as good as fish oil?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good question. Okay, so omega 3’s, when we take them in in fish oil, a medical-grade product does not have anaphylactic, which is the throat closing up, we need to go to the hospital, call EMF and that type of thing. They probably could take a fish oil product that’s medical-grade and I could assist them in that because the fish protein that people react to would have been removed, but the lesser-quality products, it would still be present. That’s right there. When you take omega 3…

DEBRA: That’s a huge, important thing to know. That’s a huge, important thing to know because I really thought that all fish oil would be the same.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, and that’s probably the general consensus because we would think that the FDA’s regulating it, the products are all the same. But really, in reality, the medical-grade products will have gone through a much higher degree of scrutinization than the other products that you’re going to get, “buy two, get one free” that kind of stuff if you use mail order, things that come to your house.

Those products, like I said, are going to be the poor-quality fish and they’re not going to go through the extra processing because that’s going to cost money. I really respect people’s time and money. You know that being in here. This isn’t like a big markup kind of thing. I look up to see what is someone’s value and what works within their budget to get the best product. People that have real allergies to fish oil, they really need to check and talk to a pharmacist like myself that can tell them what to use.

But going back to what’s in food. When you take walnuts or flax seeds or these types of things that have omega 3, you’re still absorbing a lot of the omega 3, but you have fiber with it too. Deending on what you’re eating at the same time will depend on how much of a peak you get in the bloodstream.

So I’ll give you an example. If you take a fish oil capsule in the morning but you have it with an apple, and you don’t have any fat in the meal, your absorption peak in the bloodstream, which is what you want, is going to be pretty low.

So I tell people the trick, when you’re taking omega 3’s or any kind of medical-grade oil, you want to have a small amount of fat present at the time you consume the food. So it doesn’t have to be tons of oil or anything. It can be almonds along with the fish oil or something that has some fat.

I like to drizzle olive oil on a lot of things. That’s what I use. If you have the taste of fat in your mouth prior to taking the supplement, you get a much higher peak in the bloodstream and that’s really where the trick is. Otherwise, you’re not absorbing most of it.

DEBRA: That is so useful. If you didn’t say anything else on the show today, just knowing that one thing – because people are taking so many supplements and spending so much money on supplements, and to know that there are so many ways to take them that would make them more effective on the body, that is very, very important to know.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it is. And I think that from my background, being from pharmacology, what I do is really unique. There are million vitamin stores around the country, but not many people know about the chemistry behind food and behind supplements and how it can work in the body.

And that’s very important to know because when I prescribe a regimen for somebody and I say that you need certain doses put in your diet and certain products, it’s very important that they know that you should take this with this type of food or that type of food.

If you’re going to spend the money and take the time, you’re going to want a high peak in the bloodstream. You don’t want to have a low peak because you’re taking the supplements and they’re not going to be used for what you want them to be for.

Another interesting study I found (and I think you’ll find this pretty neat) is that when we combine fish oil – this I another study that was just published this year talking about intestinal inflammation. When we look at inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract, we know that a lot of people have irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s Disease, all these different inflammatory diseases in the bowel.

What the studies found is that if you consume bioflavonoids like quercetin – you can get those in vegetables and fruits. Quercetin is very highly-concentrated in apple and in onion just to name a few. But quercetin is in three-quarters of our plants), if you combine the two together, they react to protein which is a measurement of inflammation that’s very dangerous, it comes down 75%, just combining the fish oil with the bioflavonoid.

So what does this mean for us and our diet?

DEBRA: But before you answer that, we need to go to break. We’re going to have a cliff hanger. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is pharmacognosist Pamela Seefeld and we’re talking about fish oils. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is pharmacognosist Pamela Seefeld. She helps people find healing plants and other natural substances to help heal their bodies instead of drugs. So, go on with what you were saying before the break.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, so we were talking about ways to improve absorption of different food with fish oil and about bioflavonoids along with fish oil. There are three bioflavonoids in herbal medicine: quercetin (which was originally found in onion); hesperidin (which was found around the pitty part around grapefruit); and we use rutin (which was originally found in buckwheat). So that’s where they were originally isolated from the plant.

It’s so important that when you’re taking fish oil as a product, we need to have real food in our diet as well as taking supplements. People that are just taking supplements and not looking at their nutrition at the same time are really missing a key concept and a part in fixing their illnesses in their body.

So the beauty of it is that we find that when combining the two – you can take quercetin in a pill too. I use homeopathic bioflavonoids as well. When you take those, they incorporate together in the body and they create a decrease in inflammation that is much more significant than fish oil by itself.

DEBRA: Wow, this is so fascinating to me that 1) nature does this and 2) that you understand all this because it all just makes sense to me.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Nature is really unique and it’s very special. People really underestimate the intelligence of plants and I say that very figuratively. The enzymes that are in the plants are the same enzymes that are in our liver that metabolize medicine and pesticides. The plants have the same P50 enzymes, which to me is just very amazing.

And what’s nice is that the bioflavonoids in plants are there to keep the vascular structure intact, so that the leaves are taunt and sitting up straight and they can have photosynthesis. But when we take those into our body, they do the same exact thing to our blood vessels…

DEBRA: Oh, I love this.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Isn’t it unbelievable?

DEBRA: No, it’s believable. It’s so right. I love how right it is that of course, there are these functions that happen throughout nature, that they need to happen in the plant, they need to happen in our bodies and you can put them together and they’ll perform the same function.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The same exact function and the same little assignment. They go to the same places in the body as they do in the plant and they come, repair, and heal us. Taking and picking the right supplements and the right concentration based on your level of stress, are you sleeping, especially for children. We really didn’t touch too much on kids. We can probably do a whole show just on children.

Children are so important not to be on medication. All these kids on all these medicines for attention deficit and hyperactivity, you can take omega 3’s and the DHA to EPA 4.5:1 and see a miraculous difference in the child’s behavior with no drug. And there are studies that can show this with a few simple supplements that’s very inexpensive.

We need to look at mental health as being the forefront of treatment, because if you’re not feeling well and things are not convalescing in society, you’re not doing well with all your things that you have going on, it’s really going to be hard to occupy yourself with creating something to get over other health issues.

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So this is interesting. I wanted to say one more thing. There’s a study that just came out this month, August 1st and this was talking about osteoporosis and obesity. These are major problems that affect a lot of people going into middle age and going into their golden years, right?

We see all these women walking around and they’re all taking calcium and D and they’re having lots of trouble with their spine. My grandmother used to call it “settling”, when the spinal cord starts to settle and they lose height.

Well, the new studies show that taking fish oil – this was just published – affects the skeletal response. What they’re saying here is that when you take fish oil, it’s associated with increase in bone density and a weight loss as well. It also seems to be particularly helpful in the spine.

This is where you see a lot of people hunched over and their posture’s not good anymore, they’re having trouble with compression, which is called “stenosis” where you have narrowing of the spine. The fish oil, believe it or not, actually helps build bone density. This is pretty new information. This was just published.

There are other reasons. Everyone’s taking all this calcium. Calcium’s not the problem. The problem is that the calcium is not staying in the bone. That’s what the real problem is. And it looks like fish oil works on the receptor called the peroxisome proliferator and it looks like it works on PPAR, which is really interesting. People are looking for other ways to build bone density other than just taking calcium and D.

DEBRA: Wow. Wow.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Isn’t that neat? This was literally just published.

DEBRA: Yeah, it is so neat. I think that you have such a different way of looking at things than the standard medical way of looking at things. I understand what you’re talking about because many years ago, I discovered for myself that if I want to heal something, look to nature. In nature, there is a regenerative factor that isn’t in things that are man-made in a factory or in a laboratory. And I think we’re just going to keep finding that the answers to everything that we see as a problem is all going to be found in nature.

And so I’m not surprised to hear about all these studies and it just delights me because we should be healthy. Our natural state should be health. And so the fact that plants and fish oils and all these things can help us restore ourselves, I just think is wonderful.

I wanted to just ask you one more thing. Let’s come back to the medical-grade. I asked my doctor once about professional-grade supplements and he said to me that one of the differences between medical-grade and the stuff that you buy from the natural food store or the drugstore, is that they’re really designed to be more dose-specific, so that somebody like you or somebody else who is a health professional could look at it as giving something as therapeutic, rather than simply giving somebody vitamin C or giving vitamin C for a purpose. Did I get that right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right. That was very well-spoken. What we’re seeing is that a lot of people will read an article or see something on TV or know that they’re supposed to be taking supplements of fish oil perhaps and they go take something off the shelf and they ask somebody at the health food store, “Is this good or bad?”

But most people, especially when you’re looking at what’s encompassing the whole family, you are going to need to take something that is going to be specific for your needs. And mental health is the first and foremost like if you have mild depression and you just think it’s an astoundingly hard day, “I can’t believe I have to go through this again,” or if you have a lot of stress, stress at work or stress at family.

It’s important that if you’re going to take omega 3, then you need to take one that will be absorbed, that you will know exactly what food you need to consume with it to get the highest peak in the bloodstream, and something that has a high affinity with the brain.

Actually, I even use homeopathy, believe or not, I use it. There are circulation enhancers to bring it to a higher concentration in the brain. It’s for when I have people that really want to get a fast result.

DEBRA: Wow, I love this.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It works really good. “We don’t have all day, we’re going to get this done this week. We’re going to front-low. We’re going to try to push it into the brain at a higher rate.” That’s the beauty of using the natural products along with homeopathy. It works fantastically.

DEBRA: Okay, so we have two minutes left. And this is my last question. There are all these different kinds of fish that are used in fish oil, like anchovies, sardines, krill, and all these things. Can you just tell us what they are and something about them?

PAMELA SEEFELD: The anchovies are en even smaller fish than the sardine, so their quality of oil is very good as well. What we find is that when we’re talking about the different qualities of oil, when they catch a school of fish and there are these anchovies, sardines, salmon, they test it and the higher quality oils are going to the companies that sell medical-grade. They buy that immediately. They pay top-dollar for that.

The others go to more junkie stuff, things that are more mass market and not sold to professionals. They’re just at regular health food stores or places like that, chains. And it’s interesting that the sardines, the bottom level go to the grocery store. So it doesn’t mean that it’s bad, but you’re getting the ones that the other companies didn’t want.

The krill oil is better because it has more free form fatty acids than fish oil does. But in my opinion, and I looked at this quite a bit because I revisit it all the time, I don’t think necessarily that the krill is better over the fish oil. And the reason that I say this is that it’s not necessarily the amount of free fatty acids that are in there. What determines how something is going to work in your body is what you’re consuming with it at the same time to get the right peak.

Remember how I was talking about how your body releases biomasses and as a result, you get a peak in the bloodstream? I think a lot of people are taking these different types of oils and they’re getting what is called a sub-therapeutic response, “Fish oil didn’t work for me.” Well, were you taking the right product that fits what you’re eating, and are you looking to trying to get the highest peak in the bloodstream? There are little tricks to do that and I think a lot of people, the reason why…

DEBRA: I need to interrupt you because the end of the show music is about to come in in 10 seconds. I want to tell you that her website is Botanical Resource. Give your phone number again and then we’re going to be saying good bye.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh my gosh! Yes, it’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out more about the show. Be well!

Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs

Pamela SeefeldMy guest today is Pamela Seefeld,R.Ph, a pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants. I heard about Pamela from a friend of mine, whose mother was on a lot of drugs for a specific condition. Pamela replaced the prescription drugs with medicinal botanicals and his mom started doing better. We’ll be talking about how synthetic drugs are toxic to the body and how medicinal plants can be a viable alternative. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

 

The MP3 of this interview has been lost, but will be placed here if we can find a copy.

read-transcript

 

LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

 

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph.

Date of Broadcast: July 30, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s a beautiful summer day here in Clearwater, Florida on July 30th 2014. And today, we’re going to talk about drugs and some alternatives to taking drugs.

You’ve probably all seen those commercials on television where they come on with some product, a drug product they want to sell and there’s a beautiful scene of grandparents playing with children or running through a meadow, just something really beautiful and this is the life that you want to have and that you’ll have if you take this drug.

“And oh, by the way,” they say in a very pleasant voice, “it also causes liver damage and kidney failure and death.”

And if you go through volumes of places you can go online, books at the library and if you take any of these drugs, it will come with a warning label that has a very huge, long list of side effects. And all of these drugs are made in laboratories and factories. They’re industrial products that are made from some of the same chemicals that toxic chemicals in consumer products were made from.

So they may alleviate your symptoms, but they don’t have any properties in them that actually heal your body like natural materials do.

So today, we’re going to be talking with my guest. Her name is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants instead of drugs. I had never heard of a pharmacist who dispenses plants and so I thought I’d have her on the show.

I actually heard about her because a friend of mine, she practices here in Clearwater, a friend of mine, her mother has been taking a lot of drugs for a very common illness. He wanted to get her off the drugs. He went to see my guest and she gave him some medicine plant kind of remedies instead of drugs and she’s doing a lot of better – right away, she started doing a lot better. So I thought I’d better call her. She’s Pamela Seefeld and her business is Botanical Resource in Clearwater, Florida.

Hi, Pamela!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey! Great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. I’m so happy to have you because this is a new field for me to learn about. So tell me, how did you get interested in being a pharmacist. And within the field of pharmacy, why did you chose – there’s a word for this. I’ve got it here somewhere, but you’re going to tell us about the word for pharma-something rather that is the study using medicinal plants.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. If you look at medications, two-thirds of all medications originally were derived from plants. They started changing it quite a bit and it doesn’t really resemble the original product.

I’ve been a pharmacist for about 25 years and in pharmacy school, I studied something called pharmacognosy. Pharmacognosy is the study of medicinal plants. It’s a little bit even than herbalism. It’s knowing the medicinal qualities and the constitute properties, how they act in the body, what plants possess them and what different parts of plant different part of these properties, different chemicals. They’re actually natural product pharmacy that go to different receptors in the body and repair the body.

And what’s interesting about natural products – and I do a lot of homeopathy, which is natural products – is that when you use these products, it goes to the area and it actually starts solving what the problem is, whereas medications are really just treating symptoms. There’s really not a solution to the problem. You get a medication, you have it and maybe some of your symptoms go away, but you have a lot of side effects and it’s not really solved. If you take the medicine away, you’re still sick. But with natural products, if you use them correctly, you see tremendous results.

DEBRA: And I think that that’s – I mean, what I use as a healing modality is I get body work and I get nutrition and I take professional grade supplements. So it’s a lot of plant materials. I had never heard of someone who does what you do looking at what the plants do and being able to dispense them specifically to help different body areas. I think that’s very fascinating.

Do a lot of people do what you do? I mean, there must be pharma – how do you pronounce that again?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Pharmacognosy?

DEBRA: So you’re a pharmacognocist?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Pharmacognocist, correct. I’ve met a few pharmacist that do this. There are maybe a handful of people in the whole country. I’ve really taken this to a new level. I’m kind of hiding out here in the weeds, so to speak, in Clearwater. I’m sure I could be up in New York and I’ve had offers to go a lot of different places. But I like my practice here. It’s contained. I love Florida and I really love what I’m doing. And a lot of times too, I do things internationally and even on the telephone.

I’ve done lots of TV and radio nationwide from different shows. I don’t necessarily even have to see the person. I can talk to them on the phone. It’s a brief 15-minute conversation if they want to fax me or email me their blood work. I look at what they’re doing and I say, “Metabolically, I’m telling you what’s not necessarily…”

Like if you go to the doctor’s, he’ll look at your blood work and say, “Oh, this is out of range.” They only look at something that’s out of range. I don’t look at that. I take a few seconds. It’s a free consultation. I say, “Okay, this is what I see coming. This is what’s happening because of the medications you’re taking. This is the medicine they’re going to prescribe for you within the next two to five years” and I just tell them flat out, “Do you want to not take medicines? Would you like to get rid of the problem now?” and we can triage the problem.

I have thousands of clients. I’m very, very blessed at what I do, I have eight years of college chemistry, I’ve been doing this a long time and I know looking at labels naturally what the products are and how they will work in the body.

DEBRA: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. I don’t even know what to ask you next.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, that’s okay. I can talk just in general about some of the things I see.

DEBRA: Talk!

PAMELA SEEFELD: My specialty is – I do really everything. I even do veterinary, dogs and cats. I do liver failure, kidney failure, things like that. I use homeopathy for that. I have been very good at that. I can tell you, Crohn’s disease, GI issues are easily treated with homeopathy because when you take stuff orally, it goes directly to the lining of the stomach and into the intestines. So anything GI-related is very easy to treat.

But my interest is really things that regular medicine can’t treat technically. If they give you medicines for a particular problem, it gets worse and it doesn’t get better. I can give you an example.

When I see people that have borderline kidney issue, it’s not out of range yet, but I can see where it’s trending. I look at them and I just calculate what’s called their creatinine clearance, which is a measurement of how the kidneys are handling protein and urine and I’ll tell them flat out, “Look, you’re going to be needing to see a kidney doctor within the next few years. And then he’s going to…” –

This is what I’ve had my clients tell me. They go to the kidney doctor, the nephrologist and he’ll say, “Okay, you’re starting to have kidney failure. I’ll see you every six months until you end up on dialysis. And then I’ll see you every month.” I look at them and I’m like, “Are those good odds? Is this what you really want to hear?”

So I use professional homeopathy. I actually got a lady off of dialysis. She was a new start, but she’s kidney issue free.

DEBRA: Wow! I do believe in my experience I’ve seen that we live as human beings in this bigger system of nature and I think that everything that we need in order to be healthy is all in nature.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very profound statement and very true.

DEBRA: Thank you, thank you. And so we just need to look to nature and see where the solution is, that we live in this culture. I think of our industrial culture as being like an artificial culture. The whole way that we think is artificial as opposed to natural world that if you were to take away our industrial culture, we all have come from nature. Our bodies developed in nature. There’s a grand design or however you want to say it. The solutions are in nature and it’s just a matter of learning them and finding them. This is why I’m so fascinated by what you do.

So we’re about to come up on the break. I don’t want to ask you a question that you’re going to start answering, but we also have a few seconds too. I’ll just say when we come back, what I’d like to do is talk about – let’s take a situation like something that a lot of people have like diabetes. Let’s talk about the drugs and let’s talk about how we could handle that in a safer way. How does that sound?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is a great topic.

DEBRA: Okay! Well, we’re still not to the break.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, diabetes is pretty prevalent and it can be prevented, so yeah, definitely, I have lots of great ideas for that. And that’s pretty easy to do.

DEBRA: Great! So we’re going to do that. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph. Does that sound for registered pharmacist?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: Okay. Her website is BotanicalResource.com and she has, as she said, a practice here in Clearwater, Florida and we’re going to find out more after the break about the different ways that we can handle diabetes and really handle it in a natural way. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist, but what she really is is a pharmacognocist. I’m always fascinated by word roots and I looked it up during the break because I looked at that and I go, “Okay, pharma, that’s pharmacy, about drugs. And then cognosy–, that must have something to do with knowing or knowledge.” I looked it up and that is the origin. Pharma- is about drugs and gnosis is knowledge. So it’s like drugs with knowledge instead of drugs without knowledge.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly what it is. And it’s so timely and so important, absolutely.

DEBRA: Wow! Wow! I love words. And I love how they just absolutely describe what it is. Okay, so before we talk about diabetes, could you just give us a little rundown of the kinds of things you mentioned, homeopathy, but what are the other kinds of plant-based remedies that you might use?

PAMELA SEEFELD: I do a little bit of everything. I do use herbal medicines. I use standardized products that I think are very, very complete and very effective. A lot of times, we’ll use products in place of medications. For example, some people are using Celebrex for arthritis. I have other things that I can use homeopathically and herbal wise that work very well to stop inflammation in the body. And inflammation is a big problem for a lot of people.

I would tell you too that we use vitamins as well here in my natural pharmacy. And the things that we’re using, I use high dose folic acid. Folic acid, if you use 5 mg. of folic acid a day, there’s five serotonin receptors in the brain and it binds to four of them. So I do a lot of mental health.

A lot of what I do is transitioning people off of medication. It could be heart medicine. It could be diabetes medicine, but I particularly help people when they really want to come off of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety agents, things like that. Those typically, what happens is you go to the physician, he’ll put you on that and you’re on it indefinitely.

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And a lot of these people, maybe there was a circumstance in their life like their father died or something happened and they were put on an anti-depressant and ten years later, they’re still on all these medicine. This is just not appropriate for many individuals.

So mental health is the last frontier really because when people aren’t feeling happy and feeling great and full of energy, then typically, we’ll start getting medicines for everything else. And that’s the hallmark of it.

Also, I am a really big advocate of using homeopathic products to detox the body because sometimes, when you go to a health food store and you ask for a detoxification product, it might have a lot of laxatives. A lot of these contain like rhubarb and cascara. These things make you use the restroom, but that’s not really detoxing. This is more of a bowel cleanse.

The things I use actually pull out nickel, cadmium, lead, mercury, pesticides and chemicals. I’ve been doing the homeopathic detoxification probably 15 years and I feel great. My clients that actually stick with it, they come in, they look younger, they feel great, they don’t gain weight. It makes a huge difference.

So taking chemicals out of the body especially in the brain too – we know that mercury, haven’t you read about these studies where kids are eating too much tuna fish and they have memory problems and things? You can pull mercury out. The problem with heavy metals is that they’re very difficult to leave the body.

Saunas are a great way to remove nickel, cadmium and lead off of the sweat. They can measure that coming out of the sweat. And I guess here in Florida, we can go out and do yard work. I do have a big sauna in my house, so I use that quite a bit.
DEBRA: All we have to do is lock outside…

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly! Exactly! I don’t know, people come to my house and they’re like, “Is that a playhouse?” I mean, they take a path to the room, I go, “No, that’s the sauna.” They’re like, “What?!” But I use it quite a bit. But if people can’t afford a sauna, just go outside and do some yard work and you’ll get the same kind of results.

The metals are really important to take out because once you take those into your body, they don’t leave. And especially mercury in the brain, it’s particularly problematic, so is lead. It can lead to cognitive deficits that most doctors really won’t pick up. Especially if it’s an older person, they might think, “Okay, we’ll just chuck it up to age.” It’s not that. They need to get the chemicals out of their central nervous system.

DEBRA: I’m glad that you’re talking about this. Actually, we can just move diabetes a little further into the show and continue to talk about this because it’s such an important thing.

One of the things I do write a lot about is detox because of my work. I’m interested in people getting toxic chemicals in. And for many years, I only told people to avoid toxic chemicals and it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve been so interested in getting them out of bodies because I started doing various detoxes that were specific for things and I found that I felt a lot better if I did that.

And then I suppose that if we stopped being exposed to toxic chemicals, our bodies will go through the detox process. And maybe over a period of years, some of those toxic chemicals will come out. But the amount that we’re exposed to today, would you say that everybody just needs to do a detox?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good question. Yes, absolutely. That’s the first thing I’m recommending for mental health, any debility, anything someone is coming to me for, “My cholesterol is high. I don’t feel good. I don’t have energy,” all these things, which is just typical. I see a little bit of everything every day.

I tell people, “Look, first and foremost, we need to remove the chemicals out of your body because the cell signaling, we know that the signaling takes place on a cellular level. And cell signaling…” – and some of my friends are actually physicians. They work in physics too. They can start measuring these cell signals are affected by chemicals.

And interestingly enough (and I know we’re going to defer to the diabetes), what they’re finding – I mean, I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal every day, these articles that aren’t even necessarily concentrated in medical journals, they’re showing up periodically in mainstream media that are discussing that people in the past – for example, diabetes – used to think, “I eat really bad. I gained a lot of weight. I have insulin-resistance. Now, I have diabetes.”

Now, the researchers are finding – this isn’t some obscure journal, these are front-rate journals – that okay, these people are testing very high for urinary pesticides much more so than the general population, so now they’re thinking, “I got exposed to a bunch of chemicals, preservatives or whatever they may be. It started to damage the pancreas. As a result of it, I started putting on weight. Now, I have diabetes.”

That chronology of events is a big change because in the past, we’re saying, “Okay, you ate sodas, you ate fried food.” It might not necessarily be that. We are finding that these people for some reason are not processing the chemicals the same as other people.
And I think you’re going to find in the future – I’m really telling you this, this is the truth. You watch and mark my words. A lot of diseases that we have today will be linked to chemicals in the environment.

DEBRA: Well, that’s already true. When I was researching my last book, Toxic-Free a few years ago, I actually could find studies which associated toxic chemical exposure to every body system, problems in every single body system.
PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely!

DEBRA: And so I can say without a doubt that any illness that anybody is having, any body malfunction is associated with toxic chemical exposure in our world today. It just is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh, we know that probably since the industrialized revolution, there’s probably 20,000 chemicals. The Environmental Working Group with their body burden a few years ago, they found 300 chemicals in cord blood for these babies that were born. It’s pretty significant.

DEBRA: It is. We need to go to break. And when we come back, we’ll talk more about toxic chemicals, toxic drugs and how we can use medicinal plants to heal our bodies with my guest, Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacognocist. There, I got it! I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a pharmacognocist. We’re talking about using medicinal plants in order to heal bodies. Okay, let’s talk about diabetes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct. Diabetes is very common and very preventable. I’m talking mostly about type II diabetes, people that are in their middle age, even 30’s, 40’s, 50’s. All of a sudden, they go to the doctor and the doctor is like, “We need to give you Metformin. We need to give you Glipizide.” Those are the medicines they typically use. Those are the first oral drugs they use.

Now, diabetes doesn’t show up overnight. It’s not one of those things that, “Okay, today I’m a diabetic. Yesterday, I wasn’t.” It doesn’t necessarily work that way. And this is what I find a lot of times. I can tell you some situations I see quite frequently.

What happens is the big thing is that someone may be treated with high cholesterol, statin medications. I look at their blood work and I’m like, “Well, the reason why your cholesterol and your triglycerides are going up and the reason why they had to put you on Lipitor or something like that is because your blood sugar is unstable and it’s too high.

Fasting blood sugar for a normal person should be between 75 and 85 on a blood draw. The little range that they have goes up to 110 and 120 depending on which lab you used. And so if somebody is already in the nineties or close to a hundred, they’re already pre-diabetic. They’re already on the road to it.

And typically, what I see is that the physicians won’t intervene at that point. They’ll say, “Look your blood sugar is what’s causing me to put you on cholesterol medicine and triglyceride medicine and all these other stuff. We need to get your sugar down. Let’s look and see what you’re eating. Let’s see how you’re eating your meals. We need to balance your blood sugar.”

That’s not the way things are approached in regular medicine. It’s that, “Okay. Your cholesterol is up. Let me give you a statin medication.” And a few years later, like, “Oh, now we’ve got to give you something for the diabetes.”
Meanwhile, all this time has passed and no one has done anything about it. It’s just very, very sad. This is a preventable thing.

So what I tell people, if you’re fasting blood sugar is a little bit high, even in the nineties, I don’t like that. You need to look at a few things.

Fruit has a lot of sugar. So if you’re eating fruit, you want to have some kind of protein or fat at the same time. Now, I’m not talking about you need to put oil on something. If you want to have a banana, you need to have some natural peanut butter a piece of cheese or something that has a little bit of fat or protein along with it or even, a lot of times, I eat a lot of almonds. If you have fat or protein along with the carbohydrate, it delays the emptying out of the stomach and so the blood sugar rise won’t be so precipitous.

This can also apply to candy, anything else, soda. Obviously, we don’t eat that kind of stuff. I would tell you that carbohydrates are your friend, but you need to have some kind of fat or protein present at the same time.

So a lot of people just don’t realize these are just easy ways to balance their sugar. It could also just be from poor eating as well. We know that nutrition is the hallmark. A lot of people do not see that. If somebody already has a fasting blood sugar close to a hundred (and I see this pretty much every day), I have a homeopathic product that actually repairs the pancreas, reverses the damage that’s already been done. And then when I also use the Body Anew, which is the homeopathic detoxification, it cleans everything up. I’d say that within a month, you can reverse all of these.

DEBRA: Wow! Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, it’s great.

DEBRA: Wow! Okay, so…

PAMELA SEEFELD: I know! I mean, that’s probably a lot of information. I mean, I can tell you that pharmacologically, there are things vitamins-wise and homeopathic wise that are significant and very effective and it takes a short time to really have them work.
Another thing too is that people, when they’re starting to have elevated blood sugar end up with something called neuropathy. Neuropathy is numbness and tingling in the hands and feet. It’s nerve damage. In regular medicine, the medicines don’t work for it – Lyrica and Neurontin and all these stuff. They can’t handle it, all these medicines.

A lot of those medicines make you really loopy and tired, they don’t solve the problem and the nerve damage is very bad because when you start damaging the nerves from sugar, what happen is some of that is not reversing in the regular pharmacy realm.
But in homeopathy, you can actually target it with homeopathic products that actually resurface the outside of the nerve. So that can work for any kind of nerve conduction issue that might be taking place – even carpal tunnel. Anything that’s going on with the nerves, these are obscured diagnoses and things that happen that regular medicine just has nothing in the goody bag for you.

DEBRA: How did you even find out about this field? I’m astonished that they’re teaching it in pharmacology school.

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is what really led me on that path. I was already studying pharmacognosy. And then I got out of school and I was working – I mean, I still work as a pharmacist. I was working as a pharmacist, a clinical pharmacist (I was a clinical, not the drugstore type), I really decided that I wanted to put my education to good work.

So then I decided that I was going to go and spend a great deal of time in Europe and here all over the United States (and I even went to Cuba) and I studied homeopathic medicine under different people and herbal medicine. So I went to King’s College in London. I was really traveling quite a bit and decided that I was going to read every pharmacognosy book written in English. I’ve memorized everything. And now, it’s kind of like I just kind of build on my own background of chemistry and knowledge.

A lot of times, I’ll even use a homeopathic product that really have an inherent and deep understanding of what the chemistry is behind natural products that I can look at a homeopathic product and I will decide to use it for something else in a particular area in the body and I will tell my client, “Look, it says another indication on the front” or whatever (they put these labels on the front of these products), “Do not look at that. I’m using it for something else.” And sure enough, a few days later, they’ll call me back and like, “I’m already better.”

So it’s important to think out of the box. Life in the world, in the United States, we always are kind of pigeon-holed and we have to think, “That this is for that… this is for this…”and in pharmacy, “Drug A goes for this diagnosis… drug B goes for that diagnosis” and that’s not really how the world works. The world works that you need to build on your mastermind in the back of your head, all the things that you’ve accumulated and understand.

When I look at somebody, I look at someone’s blood work or they call me with an individual issue, I say, “Okay, what’s really happening here?” and I explain to them, even sometimes diagram. “This is what’s happening with these cells, with these blood vessels in this area and we are going to change that.” That’s why what we’re doing here is solving the problem instead of saying, “Okay, let me give you something. You’re going to be symptom-free,” but meanwhile in the back of my head, I know she’s not really going to get better. That’s not how it works.

DEBRA: Wow! No, I understand. I totally understand what you’re saying. I’m sitting here being so excited because I understand it’s a different way of thinking.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it is. I mean, I can’t think of myself as a mad scientist, but I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’m very successful at it and I have a lot of clients. I just feel very, very grateful that God has given me the intelligence and the understanding and the inherent knowledge of how to use pharmacy to my advantage to heal people instead of saying, “Okay, this is the drug you need.”

And I have in the past. There have been rare opportunities where someone came to me with all these symptoms, they’re misdiagnosed and I write down their diagnosis, “This is what you have. This is the prescription medicine that they should’ve given you and you need to go see this doctor” and I was right. I mean, I’ve done that before too.

That’s a rarity. Most of the time, I can pretty much take care of it with homeopathy, but when it really comes down to it, it’s people saying, “I really want a solution.”

Or if you know certain things reside in your family, there’s a family heredity of certain diseases, you can prevent that also too. We didn’t even touch on cancer. I see a lot of people with cancer.
DEBRA: We have to go to the break. Wait, wait. We’ll have to go to the break. We’ll talk about this when we come back.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s okay, thank you.

DEBRA: You’re welcome. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. Pamela Seefeld and I are very excited about what she’s talking about. We’ll come back and tell you more of that. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist, but she’s also a pharmacognocist – I love that word. I just love that word – which is a pharmacist who…
PAMELA SEEFELD: It packs a lot of meaning.

DEBRA: It does! A pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants. And I’ll just say again, we talked earlier about this, I looked up the root of it, it’s ‘drugs with knowledge’. And that’s what plants are. They have knowledge and information and they’re part of this big system of life and they can do things to heal our bodies.

So tell us about cancer.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay! So cancer is prevalent. You have what? One in eight women in America with breast cancer? It’s such a big problem. It’s highly diagnosed.

What we’re seeing with cancer is that cancer is caused by chemicals, pesticides, any sort of chemicals in our environment that turn on genes. We have the beginning of cancer in our bodies every single day. But our immune system seize it. It takes care of it. There are these genes called ankA gene and they get turned on by chemicals.

So when people come to me with cancer, I’m telling them that, “Okay, do the chemo, the radiation, whatever you decided to do with the oncologist, but let’s face it, the chemicals that caused the initial cancer are still there.”
DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The trick is to get them out. You might be in remission, but the chemicals that were capable of turning on those particular ankA genes in your body and your immune system was unable to identify will not leave with traditional method.

In fact, the things that we use now in chemotherapy are really quite barbaric because it has a lot of collateral damage. It doesn’t only kill the bad cells that have the high turnover by cell cycle – that’s how these drug works, like how many times this thing replicates – they have collateral damage of these other cells that have high replication. That’s why you lose your hair. That’s why you get the mouth sores. All those things are high turnover cells and the drug cannot see the difference between the bad cells and the good cells. And that’s what happens.

So really, when it comes down to it, if you want to protect against having cancer, you really want to do like the Body Anew or a homeopathic detox product. I personally do it every day when I work out.

My big thing is cardiovascular exercise because when you sweat, you mobilize toxins and get things out of the body. When you drink the detoxification, my homeopathic detox, when you drink that while you’re exercising, you’re removing a lot more of these toxic products.

It’s important to realize that people, when they’re treating cancer, they don’t look to say, “Okay, what caused the cancer?” People will say, “Well, it’s genetics” or “I was on a hormone.” That really is not what’s happening. What’s happening is chemicals you’re exposed to every day, whether passively or intentionally that you don’t realize (your cleaning products, you’re out and about) –

And also, too, I may say even if your diet is really clean, you don’t live in a bubble. You might take the dog for a walk by the gold course, there are pesticides there. I see a lot of people that are tennis pros and spend a lot of time on golf courses, they end up with neurological problems because of the pesticides, lots of MS. Let me tell you, it’s very much related to the chemicals. People that play tennis and teach tennis, I have seen a lot of people with neurological disorders.

DEBRA: Wow! I’ve been studying for 30 years, more than 30 years like where are the toxic chemicals in the world that we are being exposed to. I started out with toxic chemicals in my home because those are the ones that I could see were harming my body.

But really, out in the world, we don’t think about this. I got an email this morning from an organization talking about how we go to places like Home Depot and Lowe’s and stuff and we buy plants that are marketed as bee-friendly, but they have pesticides on them that kill the bees. And we don’t think about that thing.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. We can’t see it, but it’s everywhere.

DEBRA: Yeah. And so you don’t think. You think, “Oh, tennis, that’s good that we’re going out and exercising,” but there’s these invisible chemicals everywhere. I don’t want to scare people to think that we need to be afraid of all these toxic chemical exposures. Other people have identified a lot of them, but even if you knew every single one of them, until the world gets cleaned up, we do need to do these detox things. It’s the detox activities in my opinion that save us from those exposure.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: We do need to do the clean-up, but we don’t have to be victim of the exposures. Everybody go around being sick from them because there are things that we can do to protect our bodies and to clean out our bodies so those toxic exposures are not making us sick.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And what I would recommend – and people can get a hold of me if they have a question particularly just on occasion that they don’t have Internet access at 747-442-4955, Botanical Resource Pharmacy. I just want to mention that.

If you use homeopathic detox and you do it every day – what I typically do is layer these things in the water. So basically, say someone has a little bit of pre-diabetes or someone has a little bit of hypertension or they have some anxiety, the best way to do it is put homeophatic detox in water, you kind of drink it through the day or you drink it while you’re exercising. This way, you’re really taking things out on a daily basis because if you think that you’re able to circumvent chemicals in the environment, it’s really hard.

Now, really interestingly, during your commercial break, you were talking about water filters and things in the water, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but here in Clearwater, there’s radium in the water because a cardiology practice in Sarasota dumped radium down the drain because the people that were handling the radioactive properties of these products weren’t paying attention and they had to be cited for it. This happened in two places – here and in northern Minnesota. And so we have radioactive water right here in Clearwater.

DEBRA: Well, this particular water filter removes radioactive particles. That’s one of the things that it removes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right, that’s right. That’s interesting.

DEBRA: And so I have one in my house. Actually, this filter protects me from exposure to all the pollutants that I know of. It’s just a little over $300. It’s something that everybody could have everywhere and it would protect them from all those water pollutants. It’s such an easy thing that people can do.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely!

DEBRA: You never know. You never know when there’s going to get something dumped in the water. You really don’t.

PAMELA SEEFELD: What I’m telling you, this is just really ridiculous. And really, there were articles about this. It’s kind of buried with the news. Really, there was one article even (I think it was in the Wall Street Journal) a long time ago, they were talking about how in the past, radioactive materials were really handled by the hospitals. The staff is trained in that.

But you have a lot of cardiology practices that are doing these procedures because they’re monetarily very good and they’re handling radioactive materials and their staff might not be properly trained. They’re just dumping it wherever.
And this is really, really dangerous. And that’s just the stuff we know about. There’s a lot more going on.

Also, too, we have the EPA, we have rules and regulations in place, I always tells people heavy metals never leave within two inches of the surface soil. They’re there forever. So if somebody dumped a lead battery in the back of yard a hundred years ago, you don’t know. Those things are still there. They do not go down into the water supply.

And also too, all these pressurized decks, these treated decks that people have in their backyard, there’s a lot of arsenic in that, which has high affinity for the soil.

So I think if you’re going to do a few things –because I see a lot of people come to me thinking, “I heard Dr. Oz say I should take bilberry and take that…” – they come in with bags and bags of all these vitamins that they heard about. I say, “Look, your chances of disease are two things. You’re either going to have a heart disease or you’re going to have cancer. Those are the things that get most people. Everything else are non-consequential.”

I mean, those are things you should look at, but I tell people that you really want to do detox every day. That’s very, very important because it protects against cancer, it protects against neurological problems and memory problems, all these things that are very, very important to people.

And you need to take prescription dose, high dose folic acid (which I use here a lot) and fish oil. If you take the fish oil and the folic acid, the reduction of heart attack incidents is 75% just doing that. I don’t care what you’re eating, what you’re doing.

Obviously, all that good, healthy things make a huge difference, but if you don’t do those three things, you’re really missing the boat on preventing against a lot of very bad things.

DEBRA: Okay, let’s talk about fish oil. I can’t take fish oil.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, good.

DEBRA: Maybe you have a fish oil I can take, but I have never been able to take fish oil.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Alright, okay. So there are different categories. Some people, they have an allergy to fish oil. Those people are opted out. What I would tell you is that if people don’t do well with fish oil because they’re gastrointestinal tract doesn’t handle it very well, maybe they burp it out, the trick with any vitamin or any supplement is if you have issues with a sensitive stomach, you want to put it in the freezer.

When you put something in the freezer and you take it frozen, what it does is it bypasses the stomach and goes to the small intestine. That’s where it starts to thaw. It will release the medication in the small intestine instead of the stomach.

So I use that little trick all the time for someone that comes to me. I say, “I want you to take this supplement,” “Oh, I can’t take supplements. They make my stomach upset,” I’m like, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got you covered.”

You just have to use basic pharmacology to understand that you need to bypass the stomach for the absorption. A lot of things can be absorbed, but there’s a partial absorption in the stomach, but the small intestine is where the majority of our nutrients are absorbed from food and it’s a perfect locality to put the vitamin.

DEBRA: Oh, wow! You know so much, I’m so impressed.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, I know. This is fun. I’m having a great time. No, there is a solution for everything. Remember I was talking about thinking outside of the box?

DEBRA: Yeah.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s why God gave us this wonderful thing called a brain and the ability to learn, retain knowledge and to assimilate and to try and comprehend what’s best to help people because let’s face it, when we learn things, my feelings is that we learn to give it away. That’s why we’re here. We’re here to learn and organize data in our head and organize our thoughts to help in the betterment of mankind. If we are not on that mission to try and make people well in some capacity, what is really the point?

DEBRA: I totally agree with you. I totally agree. Well, we have less than a minute left. And so I just want to ask you, first, why don’t you give your phone number again? And the website is BotanicalResource.com. Give your phone number again so that people can call you if they want to meet you. and

PAMELA SEEFELD: So my phone number here at my natural pharmacy is 727-442-4955. We’re here Monday through Friday, 10 to 5 and Saturday 10 to 2. And any questions you may have about yourself, your family or your pets, I would be very, very honored and happy to help you with that.

DEBRA: Well, I’m going to come down and see you in the next couple of days. I can’t come this afternoon, but I’m going to come down and see you because I think you can help me.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Please do. I think you’ll be very impressive.

DEBRA: I think I will. Okay, that’s the end of the show! Thank you so much for being with me.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Thank you so much.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.

How to Live With a Reactive Body

My guest Larry Plesent is the Founder of Vermont Soap, He began making organic soap products because his own body was “reactive” to toxic chemicals in common personal care products. He’s now written a book called The Reactive Body Handbook, which tells what he’s learned over the past 20 years about surviving in our artificial toxic environment. The Reactive Body HandbookVermont Soap makes “100% natural and non-toxic alternatives to the chemical based personal care products now in general use, including; handmade bar soaps for sensitive skin, anti-aging products, 100% natural shower gels, castile liquid soaps and non-toxic cleaners. Most products made by Vermont Soap are certified to USDA organic standards. Larry is also a writer,philosopher, restaurateur and farmer. www.debralynndadd.com/debras-list/vermont-soap

read-transcript

 

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
How to Live with a Reactive Body

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Larry Plesent

Date of Broadcast: March 27, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free.

It’s Thursday, March 27th 2014. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida—and actually around the world because this radio show is broadcast via the Internet. Every place, everybody gets Internet. And you can listen to all the shows in the archives 24/7 as well as live shows (like right now) Monday through Friday at 12 noon Eastern.

Today, my guest is Larry Plesent. He’s the founder of Vermont Soap. But here’s today not to talk about soap, but instead, he’s here to talk about his new book called The Reactive Body Handbook.

Now, this is actually a free book. You can go to the website and you can download it immediately for free. So, everything that we’re going to be talking about today, you can go get this book for free and see what he has to say about this.

It’s actually a brand new book. I think that it was just posted this morning or yesterday. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and look for the How to Live with a Reactive Body listing of today’s show. And in that paragraph, there’s a link to the Reactive Body Handbook. Just click there, and you can get your free copy.

Hi, Larry.

LARRY PLESENT: Debra, great! Thanks for having me on again.

DEBRA: You’re welcome. Thanks for being here. This is a subject that I’m very interested in. And I know it’ll be valuable to a lot of people.

So, you started your business, Vermont Soap, because you have a reactive body and you needed to have some soap that you could use yourself.

LARRY PLESENT: Absolutely! Well, soap and every other product.

DEBRA: Every other product, yeah.

LARRY PLESENT: I figured I was the ideal guinea pig if you will. So, I tell people, “Well, I formulate for myself. I have an extraordinarily sensitive skin. So, if it can get past me, you’re most of the way there.”

And then, I have some other people who are also part of our initial testing of new products. And their skin sensitivities go in different directions than mine, so we can get a good picture of how sensitive skinned people will handle it.

DEBRA: Well, tell us what is your definition of a “reactive body.”

LARRY PLESENT: Oh, boy! I’m so glad you asked.

DEBRA: I know! You were just waiting for me to say that.

LARRY PLESENT: Can I read right from the book or is that cheating?

DEBRA: No, you can read from the book.

LARRY PLESENT: See, now that I’m a published author, even if it’s a free book, I can quote from my book. We have a chapter here called What is a Reactive Body?. I’ll have to start right in:

“You know the old practice of bringing canaries down into coal mines? Mining, coal mining especially can release large amounts of the natural gas methane. And methane displaces the air we breathe. Without necessary amounts of oxygen from that air, humans are toast in a matter of minutes.

The canaries were brought down to sing as the miners worked. And they were more sensitive to the drop in oxygen levels than humans are. They would be the first to suffer from the lack of oxygen, and they’d stop singing.

This gave the miners a couple of minutes of notice to get the heck out of dodge and possibly save their coal-mining lives.

Now, reactive bodied people are like those sleeping canaries. We notice molecules before other people do. Reactive bodies feel and perceive the world more intensely than most.”

So, if you’re a reactive bodied person, if you’ve ever suspected that you indeed feel the world more intensely than most people around you, you’re correct. It’s not narcissism.

“This hyped up sensitivity increases the risk of becoming over-stimulated. And when you become over-stimulated, you become exhausted. You wear yourself out. And then, we become short-tempered with those we love. ”

You hear that? Reactive bodies are easily over-stimulated because they feel the world more intensely.

“A reactive body is not a psychosomatic illness as some people—and even many professionals—believe. And as I like to say, if they have a reactive body, they will not talk so foolishly.

DEBRA: I agree!

LARRY PLESENT: Now, let’s keep it real simple. Debra, you’ve heard me say it. I see it this way. Having a reactive body is kind of like having body asthma. Think of it, body asthma.

Now, asthma, by definition, is a pulmonary (lung) condition. It’s characterized by the inflammation of the bronchial lining. But a reactive body is essentially a body in which every part and system has the potential for inflammation and hypersensitivity.

Now, when something molecular—and this is a molecule-based way of looking at things—when something molecular triggers you, you might, if you’re worn down, experience a flare-up.

Now, the symptoms of a flare-up may or may not include histamine-based reactions (like true allergies), runny nose, […], et cetera, hypersensitivity to aromas—that’s very common. But also, it affects people emotionally. There’s the possibility of mood swings. Suddenly, you’re feeling claustrophobic. Mood swing, bipolar behaviors will come out, anxiety and panic. If you can’t breathe, you start to have anxiety and panic and general hypersensitivity to anything that might pose a threat to your metabolic well-being and balance.

Now, the flare-up eventually subsides. But the hypersensitivity, they linger on for days (and for some people I’ve talked to, even weeks after a flare-up, an episodic flare-up). You can just feel your hypersensitivity go up.

And after a flare-up, you’re left feeling spent and emotionally wrung-out.

Now, I believe that reactive bodies are following a normal human mechanism. I think this is a normal thing.

DEBRA: Yes, it is. I agree. I agree.

LARRY PLESENT: It’s normal.

For example—and I know you and I have talked about this—we all know somebody who’s drunk too much of some alcohol, right? “Tequila,” they go, “Oh, don’t even say the word. I feel nauseous.” So, one night, they had a big night out. They got very sick. And now, their body can’t even stand the smell of the stuff. And I’ve known people get nauseous just from talking about it. I say, “Wow! I had a sip of some amazing tequila” and they start grabbing their belly.

This is, in fact, the same principle as a reactive body response. And as I like to say, it’s your body’s way of saying—the basic premise of this book is your body is trying to talk to you. But we’re distracted and we don’t get all the messages.

DEBRA: Well, I agree with that. Our bodies know when there’s something wrong. And in all the research that I’ve done about toxic everything, in the world of toxicity, symptoms are signals to you.

LARRY PLESENT: That’s right.

DEBRA: It’s like the body is saying, “Wait!” I’ve never smoked cigarettes or anything else. But I know from watching other people that the first time you smoke a cigarette, you cough. Your body doesn’t like it. You have to keep smoking and smoking and smoking, so that you can smoke without apparently having symptoms. And then, you smoke too much, and then you’ve got emphysema and cancer and all those things.

But the point being is that your body will tell you almost immediately when you—like smoking a cigarette for the first time—are exposing it to something it doesn’t like. But what happens is we get exposed to some toxic chemical or some food or something, and then we don’t pay attention to the symptoms and the signals, and then we eat it or smoke it or whatever again, and then we stop paying attention. We’re exposed to so many things that are causing these symptoms that we can’t distinguish them even. But our body is just getting worse and worse and worse, until eventually, there’s some kind of breakdown and our bodies get overloaded.

LARRY PLESENT: You’ve got it! That is the essence and a good summary of my conclusion of 20 years of living in a reactive body.

DEBRA: When I used to work with people who were chemically sensitive—I mean, I still do as a consultant. But I used to work at a doctor’s office. We use to explain it by saying there’s like a water bottle or a rain barrel. You can be exposed to all these things, and they keep building up and building up and building up. But it’s that last drop, you put in the last drop, and you start overflowing. And that’s when you start being hypersensitive—that’s the word that you used.

LARRY PLESENT: That’s when you’re filled up.

DEBRA: When you’re filled up and your body just can’t take anymore.

So, we need to take a break, and then we’ll come back and talk more about this. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Larry Plesent. He’s the founder of Vermont Soap, but he’s also the author of The Reactive Body Handbook which is what we’re talking about today. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Larry Plesent. He’s the founder of Vermont Soap and author of The Reactive Body Handbook. And you can get a free copy of this instant download.

Just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, look for Larry’s smiling face. He’s the guy with the hat on. Just scroll down the page where it’ll say “How to Live with a Reactive Body.” You’ll see Larry. And in the middle of that paragraph, you can just click on The Reactive Body Handbook and get your free copy.

Larry, you have a statement in your book that I want to make sure that we say in big letters—like you did in the book. And that statement is:

“It’s not that I am broken. This stuff is bad for me.”

LARRY PLESENT: This stuff really is bad for me.

DEBRA: It really is bad for you. And I want to really just emphasize this because so many people with this condition, they think there’s something wrong with them, like “the environment is okay. There must be something wrong with me that I’m getting sick from the environment.”

LARRY PLESENT: Right! “My friends are eating poison and breathing poison and driving in poisonous vehicles…”

DEBRA: “They’re all okay. What’s wrong with me?”

LARRY PLESENT: “They seem to be okay.”

DEBRA: “They seem to be okay. But what’s wrong with me?”

I want to make that everybody understands that if you’re getting sick, you’re normal. You’re healthy. Your body is responding the way it’s supposed to respond. And what we need to do is have a less toxic world to live in. We need to live in less toxic homes. We need to use less toxic products like Larry’s soap products and all the other products he makes and all the products that I talk about on my website and all the products that my guests talk about. These are the things that will make us healthy. What’s going on with the world at large is these things that are making us sick.

And so let’s just say that together again.

DEBRA: It’s not that I am broken. This stuff is really bad for me.

LARRY PLESENT: It’s not that I am broken. This stuff really is bad for me.

It’s so true. And it’s so liberating to say it. Yeah, just say it out loud yourself. You’re not broken. You’re beaten up, but you’re not broken.

DEBRA: But you’re not broken. There’s not something wrong with your body.

LARRY PLESENT: No, there is…

DEBRA: It’s the world.

LARRY PLESENT: No, your body is acting differently than other people’s bodies by and large because reactive bodied people are still a very small percentage of the population. Although, increasingly, as people are overloaded with the—we use the word “toxics.”

You know, I’d like to define that a little more narrowly if we could.

DEBRA: Okay, good. Go ahead, let’s talk about that.

LARRY PLESENT: So, I like to say that I’m a natural formulator. I work with tens of thousands of molecules that are found in nature. They’re all found in nature in these useful little bundles (like vitamin C isn’t found in itself. It’s found in a bundle of bioflavinoids. And that’s how your body uses it too).

But as I say, human minds are restless minds. And because we can, we think that means we should. We’ve gone ahead and we’ve synthesized/created hundreds of thousands of molecules that never existed in nature before (or only for a few seconds, excuse me. Maybe they were burned up or something. That’s the end of it).

And not only that, we’ve created these new molecules and we’re pouring them all over the soil, the food, the air, the water.

Now, even natural things—think about it, this is something that maybe people don’t think about that much. For example, metals—copper, lead, all the metals that we use to build our civilization, nickel, aluminum—these are always found bound up in ores. They’re always tightly bound to other things, so that they’re inert because nature seeks to be leveled, to be even, to be inert (just as water seeks its own level. It’s the same principle).

So, we come along and maybe take some aluminum, and we blast that aluminum ore with all kinds of electricity to blast out the so-called impurities (everything that’s not aluminum). And now we have pure aluminum in our hands that hasn’t existed for 2 ½ billion years on this planet—even longer, since this planet was made.

So, here we are. Did we create something new? No, it’s aluminum. It’s an element. But is it its natural state to be found that way?

DEBRA: No, it’s not. See, this is the point. This is the whole point of industrialization. I’m glad that you’re talking about this.

What industry does is it takes all these raw materials and it purifies them. And so not only do we have pure aluminum, but we have pure sodium chloride instead of natural salt, and we have pure sugar instead of sugar cane, et cetera, et cetera.

Our bodies don’t like those.

LARRY PLESENT: Exactly!

DEBRA: It’s not the way it is in nature.

LARRY PLESENT: Exactly! We’re designed to use everything in a bundle. Too much pure sodium chloride is unhealthy for us. But sodium chloride found with all of the other trace minerals that are dissolved […]

DEBRA: Yes!

LARRY PLESENT: And that’s the point.

And now we see a lot of nickel poisoning. As I’ve been researching the roots of Alzheimer’s disease […], everything that I see points to metal—not just aluminum, but all metals (possibly discounting iron because it’s taken up much differently).

And I talked to chemists who have said, “You know, people are paranoid about aluminum and that it might lead to Alzheimer’s disease. I’m not paranoid about aluminum.”

I say, “You’re not?”

“No.” He says, “No, when you look at its reactivity, how your body would deal with it,” he says “I’m not really paranoid about aluminum.”

He says, “You know what I’m paranoid about?”

I said, “No…”

He said, “Nickel.”

I said, “Why is that?”

He says, “Your body needs a little bit of nickel. There’s actually a requirement for it. There’s a nutritional requirement for nickel. There’s no nutritional requirement for aluminum. So your body goes, ‘Oh, nickel, yeah! I know that stuff. Good stuff.

Oh, I’ve got too much of it? Let me store some for later. Where are we going to put this stuff anyway, body?’ And there, you start to get into problems.”

We wouldn’t normally uptake as much nickel as we do these days. We don’t even know we’re getting them.

DEBRA: Well, as you were talking about taking the metals and things out of the ground and blasting them and then having them in their pure form, also, I think that there’s a reason why nature has hidden some things underground like petroleum and coal and metals and things like that. They don’t belong in these huge amounts on the surface where the plants and animals and humans can get to them.

LARRY PLESENT: Well, that’s a very interesting point. All of nature did not evolve to live on puddles of petroleum.

DEBRA: No.

LARRY PLESENT: We’re on a very, very narrow band which is only about an inch and a half deep of the soil which is where most microorganisms, most life live. It’s a narrow, little piece of our world.

DEBRA: That’s so interesting.

We need to take another break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Larry Plesent, founder of Vermont Soap, and author of The Reactive Body Handbook. You can go during this commercial break to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and click on The Reactive Body Handbook. Look for Larry wearing his hat and get your own free copy. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Larry Plesent. He’s the founder of Vermont Soap and also the author of The Reactive Body Handbook, a new book that has just been released.

I think we’re the first ones to hear about it. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and download it for free. Just scroll down the page until you see Larry with his hat on. And right next to it, it says The Reactive Body Handbook. Click on that and you can get your free copy.

Oh, I know what I want to ask you next. Tell us how you discovered that you had a reactive body.

LARRY PLESENT: Oh, that’s a great question. How did I discover I had a reactive body? Nothing worked! I was broken.

DEBRA: It’s broken!

LARRY PLESENT: I was broken. I had the worst depression of my life. It lasted three days, Debra. It was terrible. And then, I woke up on the fourth day. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I had this big sad [frown] on my face and I said, “Alright!

Enough of that.”

DEBRA: I should tell you, all listeners, that I have talked a number of times with Larry. And I’ve met him in person. And he is always one of the most cheerful people that I’ve ever met.

LARRY PLESENT: Thank you. You have to be. It’s a choice.

DEBRA: You have to be.

LARRY PLESENT: It’s a choice.

And let me just say just to kind of side step your question just for a minute (and then we’ll get back to it). Having a reactive body means—once you recognize it, you take off the blinders, you go, “Oh, okay. I’ve got this reactive body, fine”—it means that you’re in training.

In fact, I’ve used that line. “What do you do with that big pile of kale on your plate?”

“Well, I’m in training.”

“What are you in training for?”

And I look up […], “Brother, life.”

You have to have a sense of humor. First of all, you’ve got a whole negative cascade of hormones when you’re feeling down. And you get an all positive cascade of hormones when you’re feeling up. So, the cheapest way to live a long, healthy, happy life is to practice being positive.

And by the way, what that means is—in case you’re wondering—it doesn’t mean you don’t get annoyed, you don’t get upset, you don’t get angry. It means you let it go as quick as you can.

DEBRA: You know, my grandmother, she would tell me not to frown and not to get angry. Well, you’re going to get angry.

But the point is that people who are down all the time, she said, “When you get upset, it’s poison to your body.” She actually used that word. She said, “Getting upset, getting angry, being negative is poison to your body.” And it does release, as you’ve said, negative hormones in your body that depress your body, your physical body.

LARRY PLESENT: Well, as a middle-aged man in business in America, I watch other middle-aged men around my age in business eating up their arteries with worry and stress.

DEBRA: Right!

LARRY PLESENT: Where are you going with this guy? You’ve got to live every day. Great! You’re 70 years old. You sell your business, you cash out. And you’re walking wounded the rest of your life. You’ve eaten yourself up. That’s not winning.

DEBRA: No, it isn’t. And we also know that a lot of chemical exposures actually make you feel depressed, so it’s more difficult.

LARRY PLESENT: That’s so true.

DEBRA: So, I think for myself, I decide to be happy. I think it’s very easy to just go around not being cheerful and…

LARRY PLESENT: Oh, it’s a habit.

DEBRA: Yeah.

LARRY PLESENT: It’s a habit to be cultivated. It absolutely is.

And I’ve talked to people who are generally happy people about this. I said, “So, how did you arrive at this state? Were you born this way?” And one woman said—again, her grandmother taught her. She said, “Wake up with a smile. It doesn’t cost you anything. It’s just as easy to wake up with a smile on your face as a frown.”

DEBRA: Absolutely! I totally agree.

So, tell us. How did you discover you had a reactive body?

LARRY PLESENT: Sure! Let’s see. I couldn’t use anything. I guess it was really about the soap. I could put up with only washing my hair once a week or something like that and chronic, strange scalp issues that I had and all kinds of reactions.

But it was when there was no soap left that I knew about it that I could find that I could use. And for me, that kind of pushed me over the edge in a way.

I don’t know if I’ve told you this story last year. I hope I didn’t. But I was in a country fair in Vermont. I think it was 1990 or 1991. I found some goats milk soap. I took it home. I’ve used it. And this contact dermatitis I’ve had for eight years on my arm went away after the third day. I said, “Well, there’s either something magic about goat’s milk or there’s something magic about farm soap, the process of making this kind of soap.”

And it turned out, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing magic about goat’s milk, but there’s everything special about making handmade soap (which it takes a month to make a bar).

So, I looked at that. I said, “Well, here’s a craft item.” It’s hardly available in any stores back in 1990, 1991. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I said, “Well, hey, I know! I’ll be the guy who takes this handcrafted item, perfects it and starts making millions of bars, so everybody who has sensitive skin can use it.” It’s the process of making it that’s different than making other kinds of soap. You get a very, very mild bar.

So, I said, “Well, that’s it! I’ll make soap the rest of my life. That’s great.”

So, after about eight years into it, I felt like that I’ve taken it as far as I really could for what I was doing with bars, bar soaps.

So I began formulating. My goal became (and continues to be) to replace every single item in your household with non-toxic, effective and cost-effective products that you can buy factory direct. And that’s what our mission is. We replace yucky stuff with yummy stuff.

DEBRA: Yeah! And you’re doing a really good job with it too.

LARRY PLESENT: Oh, I know! You’re the same. Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

And we have a new completely—I have to say it’s completely unscented. But soap does have a mild soapy aroma. You can’t get rid of that completely. We quadruple filter it and carbon filter it. We do all kinds of things. It still smells a little bit like soap.

So, when I say “unscented” or “scentless,” that’s what I mean.

DEBRA: Well, I think that “unscented,” the general term of “unscented” means that there’s no added scent. I think that there are some people who think that unscented means that it has no smell at all. But you really can’t get away from—

This is an interesting, ironic thing. If you make something out of natural ingredients, it’s going to have its own scent from the ingredients—its own smell. The only way to get something that smells like absolutely nothing is to process it industrially. And so you have these products that smell like nothing that are made out of petroleum and crude oil. And then, you have things that are natural that have their own smell.

LARRY PLESENT: …which is usually something nice.

DEBRA: It is usually something nice. I don’t mind something that has a smell that’s natural. I don’t mind. I mean, at this point, I’m able to use products with essential oils. I didn’t used to be able to do that.

LARRY PLESENT: Oh, yeah, that means you’re healing.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

So, we’re going to take another break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Larry Plesent. He’s the founder of Vermont Soap and the author of The Reactive Body Handbook. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and click on The Reactive Body Handbook link, and get your own free copy of this book. It’s a good book to have. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Larry Plesent, founder of Vermont Soap and author of The Reactive Body Handbook which is free. You can download it instantaneously from his website. You can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and click on The Reactive Body Handbook link to do so.

Larry, you mentioned so much information on this book. You talk about not only what is a reactive body, but the science behind the reactive body, what triggers flare-ups. And you also have a lot of suggestion on what you can do to make your body less reactive. So, let’s talk about some of those.

LARRY PLESENT: Oh, yeah. This is a handbook.

DEBRA: It really is a handbook.

LARRY PLESENT: You’re supposed to walk away with specifics.

DEBRA: Yeah, I mean this isn’t just theoretical. This is really Larry’s chronicle of his 20 years experience living this way and what has worked for him.

So, tell us some of the things that have worked for you that made your body feel better.

LARRY PLESENT: Oh, great! So I’m just going to run quickly down through the list.

DEBRA: Good!

LARRY PLESENT: First of all, maximize nutrition. No empty calories. I mean you’re in training here. There’s no room in your training diet for empty calories. You are maximizing nutrition. And that’s a systematic way of life. It’s an ongoing process of improvement.

So, if you’re just starting that journey, you can start by saying, “You know what? I’m just going to cut out dessert. That’s a really good thing. And I’m going to replace those calories with nutrition-packed calories and, along the way, taking supplements” like the good stuff that you have, Debra. And there’s a huge difference in supplements as people will find. It really makes a difference. So there, right there.

General good advice any grandmother would have given you—fresh air and sunlight. Lots of fresh, lots of sunlight.

DEBRA: I agree. I agree with everything you’ve said.

LARRY PLESENT: Of course! And water, try to get the best water you can. And anybody who has spent any time around me knows, I am vehemently, vehemently, I’m extremely against plastics in the food and water supply. There are no good plastics. People always ask me, “What’s the better plastic?” Well…

DEBRA: There are none.

LARRY PLESENT: There are none. We can give you plastics that have less phthalates. And phthalates basically are miracle growers for cancer cells. Or we can give you plastics that don’t off-gas phthalates, but they off-gas things like bisphenol-A.

DEBRA: It just destroys your endocrine system. And when your endocrine system goes, that’s it.

LARRY PLESENT: Oh, yeah, besides the fact they were estrogenifying our population which is very, very strange. It’s a very strange thing.

So, get the best water you can.

And while we’re on water, Debra, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard me say this—we’ve had a couple of conversations—that I don’t travel well?

DEBRA: No, I’ve never heard you say that.

LARRY PLESENT: Oh! I don’t travel well. Reactive bodied people do not travel well. It’s basic. You have strange foods, strange smells, strange carpet preservatives, all kinds of weird things, the air fresheners. God help us!

But I would go and I would go to conferences—I’d go down in New York City, for example—and I’d come back, I’d be sick for two weeks. I go away even for a couple of days, come back—

Now, I started coming back covered with rashes all over my torso. Quite frankly, I thought I had staph-A. I thought I had MRSA. I came back from Africa, I was sick for a month. And it turned out—one of the things wrong with me anyway—was that I’m highly reactive to chloramine.

It’s not new, but it’s new to most municipalities. A lot of municipalities are switching from chlorine or free chlorine to chloramine because it makes the water taste better.

DEBRA: Actually, I think it’s because it lasts longer. As the water goes through the pipe, it has to travel for miles to get from where it’s being delivered to your house. And so the chloramine actually lasts longer to continue to hold the disinfectant quality.

LARRY PLESENT: Yeah! It works better.

DEBRA: It’s chlorine and ammonia. It works better.

LARRY PLESENT: It also almost put me in the hospital.

DEBRA: Well, it also kills all the fish in the aquarium.

LARRY PLESENT: —and kill the fish in the aquarium. And if you brew beer with it, there’s a poisonous reaction that occurs.

You can look that up on Wikipedia.

So, I went away to—Debra, I’m at an organic farming conference eating organic , farm fresh foods, and I have a complete collapse. I had a flare-up. My immune system collapses. My whole body breaks out in a pulsating red rash.

Well, guess what? I was drinking the water and I was bathing it. And by the second day, people were saying, “Hey, Larry, you look really healthy. You look really strong. Have you been working out?” “No, I’ve been working in the woods.” “Hey, that’ great, okay” to my neighbor who came over and he said, “Look, I’m a trained EMT, and I’m making the call. I’m taking you to the emergency room.”

I said, “No, the doctors can’t help me.”

He said, “Do you need a glass of water?”

I said, “No, that’s probably what did it.”

And then, I finally came to realize that, in fact, it was the chloramine.

Mind you, I’ve been working in Monrovia, Liberia doing some volunteer work the last few years. And it turns out, they disinfect their water lines with chloramine as well which explains why I kept getting sick.

So, get the best water you can. And best of luck with it! Know what your water department is putting in your water. It may be stranger than you think.

DEBRA: That is really important. As long as you’ve bought yourself—I’ll just say that if you go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, I have a little ad over in the right-hand corner that says “the water filter I use in my home.” And it really is the best water filter that I’ve found in 30 years.

I used to say to people, “Make sure that you test your water first and get the right water filter for your water.” But this filter actually removes everything.

LARRY PLESENT: My web guy bought your filter.

DEBRA: Oh, great!

LARRY PLESENT: When we work together at his home office, I drink copious amounts of water from your filter.

DEBRA: Oh, I love hearing that. Well, did you get one for yourself, Larry?

LARRY PLESENT: Well, unfortunately, at home, we have our own well. I know everything that goes in there.

DEBRA: Oh, great! Well, I’m glad you liked the water. I’m glad you liked the water. Everybody that I know, everybody that comes to my house and drinks it buys one.

LARRY PLESENT: Well, Jackson said it’s the best water filter he’s ever seen. Him and his wife, especially his wife, have reactive bodies.

DEBRA: I’m so glad to hear this. Yeah, it really is.

LARRY PLESENT: And I hope they don’t mind. I just said a name. It doesn’t indicate…

DEBRA: Yeah, they won’t know who Jackson is.

LARRY PLESENT: But this is a wonderful couple that has Lyme Disease. They are battling Lyme using the exact, same technique (and others) that I use to keep my reactive body functioning.

DEBRA: Well, you know, a long time ago when I was first struggling with this exact, same thing myself many years ago and I started studying, my logic was, “If the industrial toxic world has made me sick, there must be some other alternate universe where things would make me well.” And I started looking at all the different ways, all the things that you’re talking about—how could I remove the toxic chemicals, how could I eat healthy and get good nutrition.

And what I discovered was that if you really look to nature, if you really look at the basics of what supports life, there’s a way to be healthy that applies that is the antidote to any body condition. Anything that’s wrong with you, if you do these handful of things, you’ll get better.

LARRY PLESENT: You know, I can almost feel the audience saying, “Now, come on, Debra, what about cancer? I need to go and get radiation to cure cancer, right?”

DEBRA: No, no. Actually, what you need to do is stop causing cancer, then your body will heal. And I really have researched this. I really looked at it. And so I decided that I was just going to live this way regardless—I wasn’t going to wait to get sick. I mean, my immune system was already shot, but I rebuilt my immune system and I’m in the process of rebuilding my endocrine system. And I can tell which body systems have been affected by my body.

But the answer to everything is that you get the chemicals bond, you eat organic foods, you get nutrient-dense foods, you exercise, so that you can move things around in your body, you get good rest, you breathe clean air, you get some sunshine, and you’ll be healthy.

LARRY PLESENT: Everybody’s grandparents who came over from the old country would be very happy to hear you saying that.

DEBRA: But it really is the answer to everything.

LARRY PLESENT: Time-tried and true advice. But it’s getting harder and harder to get food that actually is nutritious or water that’s actually safe to drink and air that’s actually safe to breathe.

DEBRA: That’s right. That’s the problem. That is exactly the problem. I mean I could fill my house with your products. We could all fill our houses with your products. But then we walk outside and the air is not fit to breathe.

I was reading something (and I think it’s going in my newsletter next week) about the number one environmental problem—air pollution.

LARRY PLESENT: Well, yeah now that there’s radiation blown around.

DEBRA: Yeah, that’s right. And so not only do we need to just—I mean, we just can’t go to some Garden of Eden spot on Earth that isn’t polluted anymore. It doesn’t exist. And so what we need to be doing is we need to be doing things that get the toxic chemicals out of our body that we can’t […]

LARRY PLESENT: That’s right. You have to continuous. It’s not just you do a big cleanse. And I’m not telling people to over-cleanse over-fast or any of that stuff. But certainly, Debra, you’re exactly right. You have to get what’s in you out.

There are some really good methods for that.

DEBRA: I have to interrupt you though, Larry. I hate to do this. But in a few seconds, the music is going to come on and the show is going to be over.

LARRY PLESENT: You have to have me back on!

DEBRA: I will, I will. But I want to say thank you for being with us.

LARRY PLESENT: Well, thank you, Debra.

DEBRA: Larry’s book is The Reactive Body Handbook. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and download it. We’ll talk again soon!

Patient Centered Healthcare Helps You Find a Doc That Understands Toxic Chemical Detox

Today my guest is James Maskell, CEO of Revive Primary Care, a new project dedicated to restoring the health of America. By combining proven, dedicated, holistic doctors and practitioners with a scalable, digital, education platform, their intention is to inspire a revolution of empowered health advocates. We’ll be talking about the state of healthcare today, what you need to be healthy, and his new healthcare program that includes doctors who detox toxic chemicals. www.reviveprimarycare.com

read-transcript

 

 

transcript

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Patient-Centered Healthcare Helps You Find a Doc That Understands Toxic Chemical Detox

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: James Maskell

Date of Broadcast: January 06, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world.

It’s Monday, January 6, 2014, the first show of the year in 2014. And I’m actually very excited to be back after the holiday. I took three weeks’ off, and I know you’ve all been listening to shows in the archives because all of the shows are recorded and are in the archives. You can listen to any show from the beginning of Toxic Free Talk Radio. And we’ve been on the air now since April 22nd of last year.

So that’s more than a hundred shows. They’re all in archives for you to listen to. You can even listen to today’s show again, or if you want to tell a friend about it, you can tell a friend, and they can listen to it any time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from any electronic device in the world.

So I’m very happy to be back. I just can’t tell you how happy I am to be back. This is actually one of the highlights of my day.

So I’m here in Clearwater, Florida where it’s about to rain, but I don’t think that we’ll be disconnected.

Today, we’re just going to start the new year off with talking about healthcare. And we’re not going to talk much about that healthcare that everybody is talking about, but we’ll talk about it a little bit. We’re going to talk about how you can choose healthcare that is patient-centered, and includes education, and also includes dealing with toxic chemicals, and helping you remove toxic chemicals from your body because there are doctors out there who can help you with that. We’re going to talk about some of that today.

My guest is James Maskell, and he’s the CEO of a business called Revive Primary Care, and it’s a new project that’s dedicated to restoring health of America, by combining proven, dedicated holistic doctors and practitioners with a digital education system. Their intention is to inspire a revolution of empowered advocates.

Doesn’t that sound great? Empowered health advocates.

I’d rather be an empowered health advocate than a patient. And I’d rather be healthy than sick. And the whole idea is to keep us healthy, for us to be doing things, so that we stay healthy and know what to do if, by any chance, we get sick.

In Ancient China, the doctors were paid on a regular basis to keep people healthy, and they stopped paying them when they got sick. I think that’s a fine idea.

So welcome to the show, James.

JAMES MASKELL: Great to be with you here today, Debra. Thank you.

DEBRA: Thank you for being here. So could you just tell us very briefly—we’re going to have a lot of time to talk about this later, but just give us a brief introduction to what your business is about?

JAMES MASKELL: Well, first and foremost, I feel like Revive Primary Care is a rational response to these types of epidemics that we see today in America. The healthcare picture that we look at and see today is very different than times gone by. And I just really felt that, coming in, the healthcare system that we have doesn’t really aim to deal with the epidemics that we have now. And so my goal with Revive Primary Care is to provide a rational response to that, something that can help to deal with […] epidemic.

DEBRA: Good. Now, tell us, I know you have an interesting story that you’ve already told me about how you became interested in this and why you’re doing this. So tell our listeners, so they know who you are.

JAMES MASKELL: Well, despite my English accent, I was actually born in America. I was born in Colorado to South African and English parents who were on vacation (and I think sort of working too).

I grew up in England. I was definitely the weird kid at school. We did a lot of alternative medicine. I had chiropractic. I always used homeopathy. And I had good results from that. My parents were very interested in that.

I sort of followed a rebellious path for a while where I thought I needed to be an investment banker. I did economics, and went down that route. But I very quickly realized that I was playing for the wrong team.

The way that I had grown up, I realized that there was a lot that needed to be done. There were a lot of problems that needed to be solved. And from my economics training, I really realized that the biggest problem in the biggest economy in the biggest country in the world is healthcare in the United States. And I really just had an inkling that what I had growing up with could provide some sort of answer to this problem that was identified years and years ago. But it’s still coming to fruition even now.

And so in 2005, I moved to America and started on this course towards trying to make a difference in American medicine. And it’s been a wonderful journey. There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not glad that I left job and started in this.

DEBRA: It’s a very interesting field. I love alternative medicine. What was your first job in the field?

JAMES MASKELL: My first job was I actually worked in a clinic. A friend of the family convinced me to come to America and work for him. He had started a clinic that he thought could be a model for the future of primary care, which is essentially holistic, naturopathic medicine delivered in a spa environment.

And he felt that, for the baby boomers, and also moving forward, there was going to be a movement away from a hyper-clinical medicine towards more of a lifestyle medicine. And you have to get people involved.

And in order to get the patients involved in their care, they have to want to be there.

And so, that was his vision.

So, for a year and a half, I worked in his clinic. It was in rural Georgia. It was not a major, major metropolitan area. It was not even necessarily a very rich area. What they wanted to do was to provide a model for the future of primary care.

I moved to Georgia. I worked there for a year and a half, getting that business going, really learning about what it took to run and grow a successful wellness/holistic medical practice.

DEBRA: And then, how did you get from there to putting together this business?

JAMES MASKELL: It’s about seven years in between. So, after a year and a half, I really got a good understanding of that, and I became a regional manager for a supplement company. It’s a supplement company that only sold through doctors. It’s called Energetics. It’s based out of Georgia.

And in 2007, I moved up to New York to be the representative in the Northeast. And so for a few years, I just did that.

And that was really what brought concretely down my understanding of how toxins and all of these other factors could affect health. I worked with practitioners and doctors who were getting great results with kids on the autism spectrum and Lyme disease and had digestive complaints. And I really saw that there was another type of medicine that was dealing with these kinds of chronic cases, and that it was useful and valuable.

So, for three years, I was really focused on that. And then in 2009, I just had this inkling that there are these doctors out there, they are doing amazing work, but they don’t really communicate what they do very well, especially online.

Still, they’re sort of stuck in ‘70s mentality. Everything looks a bit hokey. I knew that there was value out there, but I just felt like these practitioners weren’t doing a good job of communicating that out.

So, I started a digital branding agency in New York. We would take these brands and doctors and help them communicate their vision better.

And then after three years of that, I really saw that we’d learned a lot from that process, but it really didn’t scale. Making websites, doing social media and helping doctors to do that, we were just doing it one doctor by one doctor. And we learned a lot through that process, but there’s a lot more people out there that needed help than just the doctor in whatever zip code we were working in. And Revive Primary Care is my first iteration of trying to scale that out to a lot more patients across the country.

DEBRA: Good. And as I said, we are going to talk about that in detail as we go through the show.

So, I’m looking at your website which is RevivePrimaryCare.com. And one of the first things at the top, it says, “Fire Your

Doctor.” Why should you fire your doctor?

JAMES MASKELL: That’s a great question. I generally feel like if you have a doctor that is not treating the causes of your disease—

You know, in the past, the doctor-patient relationship was very one-sided. If you had a car accident, or if you had an acute infection or otherwise, this is the way that the doctor-patient relationship evolved. The doctor knew what was going on, the patient didn’t know anything, and the doctor was there to fix you essentially.

Now, in the future of medicine, and in the current epidemics that we see, these are not those kinds of issues. Those kinds of issues have fallen away. We’re very good at dealing with them in America, maybe the best in the world, but what we’re not very good at dealing with is conditions where there is not a single cause, where different causes are building up over time, where we have a chronicity of cause, and then we have a chronicity of symptoms.

DEBRA: I need to interrupt you for a second because we need to go to the break. But we’ll be right back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is James Maskell from Revive Primary Care. He’s the CEO and founder. And that’s RevivePrimaryCare.com. We’ll be right back after this.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is James Maskell who is the CEO of a new company called Revive Primary Care.

And James, before the break, you were telling us about why you should fire your doctor. So continue with that.

JAMES MASKELL: Thanks, Debra. I feel like if you have a chronic condition, and your doctor is treating you as though you have an acute condition, there’s no way that you’re going to get better.

All of these types of things, a lot of chronic disease, if we go right from the top of the body to things like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease right through the chronic classic autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, and those types of things, plus all the big chronic diseases that we’re seeing—heart disease, hypertension and so forth—if your symptoms are being managed with drugs for those diseases, I think it’s time to take a new approach because it’s not a cure.

And in the past, these kinds of approaches have been a cure for acute infections and so forth. But this is not a cure. You’re looking purely to manage symptoms. And I think that if you find yourself in that category, then it would be a good idea to seek a second, third or fourth opinion from someone who understands the causes of chronic disease and the best ways to work with those causes.

DEBRA: I completely agree with you. I know that in my life, I have been dealing with ongoing conditions. And sometimes, they’re better; and sometimes, they’re worse. And yet, I do need to go to a medical doctor for a prescription because I take a thyroid supplement.

And so, I go to the doctor, and I say, “I want a thyroid supplement,” which I take Natural Armour Thyroid. And every time I go, I get this whole lecture about how this symptom and that symptom is going to get worse and turn into this, and what I need to do is take this drug, and that drug, and another drug, and another drug, and another drug.

It’s like I just go to primary care to get my little prescription. And I have to keep going from one primary care to the next (you know, the little express doctors), because if I go to a regular doctor, if I go to a regular MD in an office and become a patient, all they want to do is give me a program of drugs.

And there are some types of doctors, which we’re going to talk about later, that don’t do that. But a lot of those doctors can’t give prescriptions.

So, it’s been really difficult for me to find the right kind of healthcare that I want. And I think it’s probably difficult for other people too which is one of the reasons why I’m really, really interested in your program. I think that you’re doing a fantastic job with this, what you’re putting together.

So, could we just talk about ObamaCare for a minute? Do you want to talk about that?

JAMES MASKELL: Sure! Sure, absolutely. Yes, we can definitely do that.

DEBRA: What I want to say, first of all, was that I couldn’t even figure it out. And I have a very tiny, little type of insurance. It’s called Go Blue. I don’t know if they have it in other states. It’s in the State of California that is put out by Blue Cross and Blue Shield. I pay $68 a month, and I get unlimited lab tests, I get a big discount on my thyroid prescription, and they’ll pay $50 towards a doctor visit. And that’s all it covers. But if you’re going to get lab tests on a regular basis, then that’s a huge amount of savings.

And so, that plan fit just fine for me. And it costs $68 a month. It saves me a lot of money. I even once got an MRI on that plan, and they paid 100% of it.

And so then I get a letter saying Obamacare is saying that we can’t have this plan anymore. And so now, you couldn’t pay—this recommended plan is $585 a month. Well, I don’t want to pay $585 a month because the government tells me I have to.

Otherwise, I have to pay a penalty.

I’m sorry, it just doesn’t make sense.

JAMES MASKELL: Yes, I completely agree. We’re operating in a medical industry that is changing in front of our eyes as we speak. And I think January 1st 2014 is a big wake-up for all the people that they’re not getting what they want.

And it’s actually called the Affordable Care Act. That’s the name of it.

If you look in history, you see that they name these bills to really confuse people as to what the problem is. I mean, when you look at who wrote this legislation, and you look at the revolving door between industry and government, the people who wrote this [inaudible 15:11] now work for industry, and it’s the main industries that benefits. Obviously, the insurance companies benefit because now you’re forcing people to buy their product and service. And then the pharmaceutical industry benefit because you have to operate within their network of doctors and all strange and pharmaceutical prescriptions.

And so, I’m not a big fan. I don’t think it could move in the right direction. But in some ways, I think it’s maybe a wake-up call to Americans that if you don’t stand up and look after your own health, the government will be taking care of it for you.

And I think maybe in the medium-term, it will actually be valuable as a wake-up call, but I don’t think as a way of dealing with the big problem.

I grew up in England, Debra. And even in England now, they’re saying that England is looked at by a lot of people as amazing because it has this single payer health system, where basically, all care is free for everyone. You have to maybe wait in a waiting list. But generally, all of your care is free.

But even now in England, they’re saying, by 2015, they’re not going to be able to continue on with that plan. They’re not going to be able to have a single payer system. And it’s the same reason why they can’t have that there as they can’t have it here in America or why almost all healthcare systems are unsustainable. It’s because they’re not dealing with the causes of the disease.

Until we actually deal with the causes of chronic disease—chronic disease management is ridiculously expensive. And until we actually can deal with the causes of chronic disease, it doesn’t matter who’s paying for it—small business (which is only in America, businesses pay for the insurance. That’s unique to America really) or single payer (the government pays for everything), or this bit of hybrid system that we have right now where, essentially, some patients are paying some of it, businesses are paying some of it, small government is paying some of it, the local government and also the federal government.

It doesn’t really matter who’s paying. If the costs continue to ratchet up at this pace, no one can afford it. It will bankrupt everyone.

And so, that’s why we really need another—it doesn’t matter who’s paying for it. We need a way to control the cost. And from my perspective, the only way that we can control the cost is to actually deal with the causes of these chronic diseases and catch them a lot earlier than we’re catching them right now (which is basically when they’re symptomatic).

DEBRA: I completely agree. And we’re going to talk more about your program, and what you think that we all should do, and what kind of system we should have after this break.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is James Maskell from Revive Primary Care.

And his website is RevivePrimaryCare.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And today, my guest is James Maskell. He’s the CEO of Revive Primary Care. We’re going to be talking about all the details of that now, and you’ll probably want to go to RevivePrimaryCare.com to find out more and to sign up yourself.

So James, tell us everything. Describe the program. I remember, when I first went to your site, I wasn’t quite sure what it was all about. So tell me.

JAMES MASKELL: Thank you for saying that. And you’re right. I mentioned at the beginning of the call, this is really the first iteration of Revive. We launched in October. We had a really amazing response right from the beginning. And we filled out our memberships.

We’re actually sold out right now. We’re trying to get to a point where we can take a lot more people through the system. But we learned a lot at the beginning.

And essentially, what we’re trying to do, the name, Revive Primary Care, to me, I really wanted to call it something that really talks about what it is. Primary care refers to, in medical terms, your first thought of call in medicine. So you go to a primary care doctor, and they take care of you.

However, those two words by themselves really have meaning by themselves. Primary, what is really primary? I think that primary needs to be redefined because the way that we take care of ourselves and our home is really primary—before the doctor visit. And care also, what kind of care that we take?

So, what I saw out there was that there was this big network of holistic doctors that were doing great work in dealing with the causes of chronic disease.

So, what Revive Primary Care does is basically a three-step process. The best way to get the most out of Revive is this:

First of all, to understand the four major cause of chronic disease. There are probably more causes, and more will come to light, but from what I understand, and from speaking to the top doctors and the top lecturers across the country in integrative medicine who have been doing this for years, is that there are four main causes of chronic disease. And that’s what you can find out. Anyone can go to our site now and look at some of the videos that we have and some of the articles that talk about those main four courses.

A couple will be obvious to you. Obviously, diet is a huge driver of chronic disease. The American diet is very different from others all around the world (although there’s KFC in Iraq, in Afghanistan. So we’ll see how that proliferates across the country, across the world). But diet one is one thing.

Obviously, stress is a huge driver as well. And those are the two obvious ones. I think people really understand that stress and diet now can affect their health.

But there are two other ones. One of them, I think, will be very obvious to you and your listeners if they’ve been listening to you for a while. There’s toxicity in all of its forms. And I love to talk more about that because I just think it’s such an interesting issue.

And the fourth is more about the bugs. We call it immunity, but it’s the new understanding of the bugs that we live on and around us.

I really got fired up about a year and a half ago because I went to a conference all about this on the human microbiome which is a new understanding of the microbes that live on and around us. We have misunderstood them for years. We thought they were bad. Ninety-nine percent of them are actually good. They do a lot of work in detoxification or otherwise.

But what I basically identified was these are the four major causes of chronic disease. The fifth cause that I think that we can deal with as well is what we call iatrogenic disease, which means caused by medicine or doctors which is the third or fourth biggest killer in America which is a great concern.

So, what Revive Primary Care really does is, first of all, help you to identify the four major causes of chronic disease that you can do something about without ever seeing a doctor. The second phase is to actually do something about it, to put some of that into action. And this is all free. We’re all at free level at this stage.

And then the third phase is to actually go and see one of these doctors who will support those choices.

I think one of the things that I feel, and what I hear from patients—and we took a bunch of new patients in—they just didn’t feel like their doctor is listening to them. They understand their body. They understand the cause and effect that’s happening between these causes and their disease appearing, their chronic disease. But the doctor is not listening. The doctor is listening for 7 seconds or 23 seconds, cutting them off and then prescribing.

But I think that between those four causes and iatrogenic disease, if we can do what we can do to eliminate those, then I think we can actually not need so much healthcare. And that’s how we actually contain cost—not actually needing as much care.

We’re feeding the beast all this time because we still go to the doctor, we still do our prescriptions, we still go to the hospital.

We really need to starve the beast. And I think the way to starve the beast is to actually take what’s ours to take, and take responsibility for those things that we can take responsibility for. And then use the doctors and use those practitioners that have a history and experience in reversing the cause of the chronic disease.

DEBRA: I just so completely agree with this because I know in my own life, in dealing with my own health, I have observed that the body wants to be healthy. For me, it’s just been a matter of figuring out what it is that I’m doing to make it sick.
It’s not like illness is this random thing. I don’t even think in terms of illness anymore. For me, illness is only if you catch a bug.

But for me, everything is about body condition, and that that condition is a result of what we do day in and day out, the choices that we make. It’s a result of the foods that we eat and the toxic chemicals that we are exposed to, and how much sleep we get, and how much stress, and how much love, and all these things that contribute to our health.

And so, at this point in my life, I am not even thinking in terms of fighting disease. I’m thinking in terms of building health. And as I build health, and build health, and build health, then I get healthier. And so even though I’m getting older, I’m healthier than

I was when I was younger.

And I have a wonderful doctor that I work with who is not an MD, but he’s a holistic practitioner. He can’t give me my prescription, which is why I have to go to the instant doctors to get prescription. But he listens to me, and he encourages me to think for myself. And we talk about different issues.

And so, I use him more as an adviser or a consultant to say, “This is what I’m thinking about doing. What do you think? And what can you offer me? And what recommendations can you make?”

But it’s my responsibility. Instead of putting the responsibility in the hands of the doctor, instead of us just living however we live, and then saying, “Doctor, fix me,” it’s about us living to be healthy, and then using health advisers, what I would call health advisers.

That’s why I love when you say that you want to be making health advocates. That’s what we should be—advocating for our own health.

I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’re going to go to break. We’ll be back with my guest, James Maskell, from Revive Primary Care. And that’s RevivePrimaryCare.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest is James Maskell, CEO of Revive Primary Care. And that’s at RevivePrimaryCare.com, where you can go, as he said, and get a lot of free information about the four main causes of illness—which are immunity, stress, toxicity and diet.

Now James, would you tell us when people do have the opportunity to sign up with you, and go through your program, could you tell them step by step what happens? First, they get the information, and then what happens?

JAMES MASKELL: So, at the moment, for our first iteration, you sign up, you went through what we call a Patient Preparation Program, which essentially was a daily video and a blog post that was sent to you. It will take you about 10 or 15 minutes a day for a week to just prepare you so that you’re going to get the most out of your relationship.

Most of these doctors at this point, some of them take insurance, some of them don’t. Most of the insurance that people can afford now is going to be a high deductible insurance. So most of the time, you’re actually going to be paying for your care anyway until you meet that deductible. And you’re in a position now where you’re having to pay for your care.

So, I want to make sure that if you choose to go to one of these doctors around the country that does this kind of work, that you get the most out of your time and get the most bang for your buck. And the way to get the most bang for your buck is to make sure that you’re dealing with these four issues before you go and see them.

So, you’re eating a good diet. You’re eliminating toxicity. You’re respecting your microbes and doing things to actually honor the fact that the majority of these microbes are extremely valuable. And you’re taking active work in de-stressing.

If any of those four are crazily out of balance, then you’re not going to get the most out of the time with a practitioner. And so it’s good to go and see them, but I want you to make sure that your investment and your time and their time, and maybe the supplements that they recommend for you or otherwise, you’re getting the most return on your investment.

So, the first step is to go through this Patient Preparation Program. And then the second step is that we actually pair you with a practitioner in your zip code. That’s been the process up until now. We launched it in October. We took a hundred patients through the system to really test the system, see what its strengths were, see what its weaknesses are. And now, we’re in the process of re-jigging it, so that we can actually scale a lot more quickly.

And we learned so much from our first group. We had a great group of patients, people who were really excited about this new paradigm of medicine. But we also learned things. It’s always an evolving process. Everything you do has things that really work or otherwise. And we’re just continuing to build on all the things that worked, switch up the things that didn’t. And we hope to re-launch at the beginning of February with an opportunity for every American to come through the system and get a lot of benefit from it.

So, that’s where we are right now. It’s been a great journey. We look forward to serving a lot more people.

And more than anything, we have so much feedback that people were just blown away by what it was like to have this kind of different relationship with a doctor—where they listen to you, where your story was important to them, where they actually ask questions of clarification about your story and the details of it.

I think on a lot of levels, that’s almost the best thing that came out of it. People realized that there was another option out there.

And I think that’s part of our mission here, re-educating and re-alerting the population to the fact that your doctor visits don’t have to be this sort of like—just as you explained earlier, bullying type of experience that a lot of people are used to right now.

DEBRA: I’m always looking for doctors who will write my prescription. And I went into one of these little primary care places.

And the doctor so immediately bombarded me. But I just walked out. I said, “I’m sorry. This is not going to work,” and I walked out. And I had never done that before, but that’s how bad it was.

I want to say that one of the things that I like so much about your program is that—and I hope to be one of your members when you start again in February—you have education on your website which includes about toxic chemicals in your home and in your body. And then, when you go to the doctors that are in your program, they know what you’re talking about.

When I wrote my book, Toxic Free, I thought—and this was just a couple of years ago—I thought, “I need to tell people where they can find doctors who might understand what they’re talking about when they start talking about toxic chemicals, and ask them.”

I actually have a page on my website. If you go to ToxicFreeNutrition.com, and look over in the right-hand column, there’s a link that says Professional Help. And it lists the types of doctors who might know something about toxicity, might know something about toxic chemical exposures, and might have an idea about how you might remove toxic chemicals from your body.

And those would be naturopathic doctors, doctors who practice environmental medicine, doctors who practice functional medicine, anti-aging medicine, a clinical nutritionist, a chiropractor, or a biological dentist—but then, not necessarily. Just because they’re in this field, they’re not necessarily going to understand what we’re talking about.

And what you have here is an opportunity to put together a viewpoint of body of information that is consistent from the patient education through them going and seeing a practitioner. So, when you sign up to be a member of this program, you know that there will be a consistent viewpoint from one end to the other.

JAMES MASKELL: Yes, we’re just trying to create a unified combination of the practitioners and the digital education platform that has so many synergies and efficiencies with providing this kind of education.

People are making amazing content all the time. On our website, you’ll see there’s a video made by the [Story of Stuff] talking about toxic chemicals. It’s an 11-minute video, and it really shows why you can go into the supermarket, and there’s a thousand different types of shampoo, and they’re all toxic. That is something that is changing slowly. But there’s no reason why every person in the world could not watch that video. It’s available, it’s free, it’s on YouTube [inaudible 32:45].

What we’re really in the job of is curating the best stuff that’s coming out for the patients, so you don’t have to go and try and find it yourself. We curate the best ongoing education on those topics. And so patients stay up to date, they get the best information, the coolest stuff. And also, when they go to their doctor, they know that they can have a proper conversation about these causes, and the doctor is going to be clued into it.

And I would say that most of those professionals that you’ve included—the naturopath, the environmental medicine, functional medicine—it’s a big part of their training to really understand toxicity as a cause.

But you’ll also see that all of these different four causes are not just operating in isolation, they’re also synergistic. So the majority of methyl detoxification in your body is being done by the microbes in your gut. Stress, if the immune system is stressed, then the detoxification pathways are stressed, and you’re not going to detoxify in the way that the body is doing all of the time. And if you eat a crappy diet, you’re going to be introducing more toxins into it.

So, toxicity is one thing. But they all interact, and they all have a synergistic effect.

DEBRA: They do. I agree. I agree, I agree. I used to think you could just avoid toxic chemicals and all would be fine. But I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that we also have to be looking at how we can help the body rejuvenate. And we need to be caring our detox systems because we can’t avoid every single toxic chemical. Our body has a system, the detoxification system, that can process some chemicals, but we have to keep it in good shape. And that requires having nutrition. That requires exercise. You even have to be able to get enough sleep in order to detox.

So, it does all work together; it really does.

We have just about two minutes left. Is there anything else that you’d like to say that you haven’t said?

JAMES MASKELL: I just wanted to share my appreciation for you, Debra. Part of the reason why this is easier for me—I was only born in 1980, so I’m a newbie onto the scene, and I know that you’ve been doing this for a long time. But it’s really the hard work of those advocates like yourself, and all the other doctors—

You know, one of the people I introduced and interviewed on toxicity and stress is Dr. Ronald Hoffman. He’s been on the radio for 25 years talking about this kind of stuff.

It’s the work of the pioneers that have gone forth at the beginning that are allowing these next steps to occur.

And it takes time to happen. I was just meeting with a practitioner the other day who started their own gluten-free plan in 1997.

And now, you can get a gluten-free Domino’s pizza. So, you can see that it takes time.

DEBRA: It takes time, I know.

JAMES MASKELL: It takes time for stuff to happen. But I really just wanted to say I appreciate yourself and all of those other people out there who have been on this bandwagon for a long time. The bandwagon is moving more quickly, it’s moving downhill, and more and more Americans are realizing that what they do affects their healthcare outcomes—what they do at home.

And for me, Revive Primary Care is just the next logical extension of that. If you know that what you do with your body and so forth is going to affect your health outcomes, why not have a doctor that also understands that so you can have a proper conversation? And that is really what we’re trying to with Revive Primary Care.

DEBRA: That’s so great. So, everybody can go to RevivePrimaryCare.com. And right at the top of the homepage, there’s a place where you can put in your name and your e-mail, and click the submit button. And I’m sure if you do that, James, you’re going to send them an e-mail when it’s time to sign up for being a member, right?

JAMES MASKELL: Absolutely, yes. That will be the best way to stay up-to-date. Also, on Facebook.com/RevivePrimaryCare, that’s where we’re putting up all the best articles that we’re seeing on all this range of topics. You’re good to go on there and share out with your friends if you’re an advocate. If you are an empowered advocate already, social media does provide an opportunity to be able to spread information very quickly.

And so, those would be the two actions that I would take right now.

DEBRA: We are just running out of time. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’ll be back tomorrow.

Pharmaca

A pharmacy with a natural twist, Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy has offered traditional pharmacy services alongside holistic remedies since 2000. Their staff of certified practitioners help guide customers through an extensive selection of alternative remedies, natural cosmetics and body care products. They also provide “easy access to credentialed pharmacists, naturopathic doctors, nutritionists, herbalists and more so you can achieve good health without an appointment, insurance or headache.” They carry professional grade supplements that can only be sold with professional health advice. “We believe that personal health is connected to environmental health. We ensure our stores are environmentally friendly by buying wind power offsets, installing recycled carpet and offering organic and sustainably harvested products.” I had the pleasure of visiting a Pharma store when I was in San Francisco and spent a long time browsing.

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Direct Laboratory Services

Offers lab tests without requiring a doctor’s prescription. You order the tests online, then take your receipt to a local lab, where your blood is drawn. Get results online in 48 hours or have them mailed to you. Tests include ALCAT, Alcoholism, Allergies, Anemia, Amino Acids, Arthritis, Cancer, Cardiovascular, Comprehensive Wellness Profile, Colon, Drug Screen, Food Allergies, Hair Elements, Homocysteine, Organic acids, Prostate, VAP Cholesterol Test, and more.

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“EnviroKlenz"

“Happsy"

ARE TOXIC PRODUCTS HIDDEN IN YOUR HOME?

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