Dr Carolyn Dean: Magnesium, Yeast Overgrowth & What Are rNA Drops? Introduction
Today, we are going to explore a key deficiency. Now, we’ve often talked about the importance of soils and one of the biggest deficiencies in soils are magnesium, selenium, and zinc. And magnesium, as you will hear, is a critically important element to so many functions within the body, over a thousand functions within the body. And as I’ve often said, if I had a choice of what I’d go back and study, it would be biochemistry, because that just happens to be the way every cell in our body works. And if we understand that, then we understand why a nutrient-dense diet is important.
Well, my guest today is Dr. Carolyn Dean. She’s a medical doctor and a naturopath. What a great combination. And, you know, really, when medical practitioners go through medical school, they probably couldn’t help but notice how little is spent on nutrition, nutritional and environmental medicine. And, you know, if we are really interested in dealing with the causes of diseases, then you would want to explore nutritional and environmental medicine if you were interested only in the management of the disease, well, I guess the prescription pad will see you through.
But Carolyn wasn’t that person. She studied naturopathy, as you will hear almost as soon as she finished or while she was finishing being a medical doctor. A great combination. She’s the author of over 35 books, including the best-selling book, The Magnesium Miracle, which we talk a lot about today, as well as IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome for Dummies, Hormone Balance, we talk a lot today about her other book that she wrote in 2003 and recently updated.
Well, recently in 2014, Death by Modern Medicine. She’s written over 100 Kindle books. She is also, along with myself, one of the 50 plus editors for the orthomolecular news service. And when I listen to that group and I read all the emails that are exchanged, I’m humbled to be in the company. They are truly some fabulous practitioners with some incredible knowledge, and this is one of them. So I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Carolyn Dean.
Podcast Transcript
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:08] Hello and welcome to Unstress. My name is Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Now, before we start, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I am recording this podcast, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging.
Now, today, we are going to explore a key deficiency. Now, we’ve often talked about the importance of soils and one of the biggest deficiencies in soils are magnesium, selenium, and zinc. And magnesium, as you will hear, is a critically important element to so many functions within the body, over a thousand functions within the body.
And as I’ve often said, if I had a choice of what I’d go back and study, it would be biochemistry, because that just happens to be the way every cell in our body works. And if we understand that, then we understand why a nutrient-dense diet is important.
Well, my guest today is Dr. Carolyn Dean. She’s a medical doctor and a naturopath. What a great combination. And, you know, really, when medical practitioners go through medical school, they probably couldn’t help but notice how little is spent on nutrition, nutritional and environmental medicine. And, you know, if we are really interested in dealing with the causes of diseases, then you would want to explore nutritional and environmental medicine if you were interested only in the management of the disease, well, I guess the prescription pad will see you through.
But Carolyn wasn’t that person. She studied naturopathy, as you will hear almost as soon as she finished or while she was finishing being a medical doctor. A great combination. She’s the author of over 35 books, including the best-selling book, The Magnesium Miracle, which we talk a lot about today, as well as IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome for Dummies, Hormone Balance, we talk a lot today about her other book that she wrote in 2003 and recently updated.
Well, recently in 2014, Death by Modern Medicine. She’s written over 100 Kindle books. She is also, along with myself, one of the 50 plus editors for the orthomolecular news service. And when I listen to that group and I read all the emails that are exchanged, I’m humbled to be in the company. They are truly some fabulous practitioners with some incredible knowledge, and this is one of them. So I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Carolyn Dean. Welcome to the show, Carolyn.
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:02:54] Well, thank you for inviting me to your show, Ron. I appreciate the invitation. Across the, across the Pacific, I’m in Maui. And you’re are you in
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:03:07] In Sydney, Australia. East Coast, yes. So I could almost look out and see you from my bedroom window, I got a good view over the Pacific Ocean. But listen, you’ve done so much. There’s so much we could talk about. But, you’ve recently got you the book that you had written some time ago called Death by Modern Medicine. And it covered so many, so many areas, which some of which will touch on. But I wondered if there was a particular moment or experience in your professional or personal journey that made you write that led you to write this kind of book.
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:03:43] Right? Well, it was the Codex Alimentarius. Do you know that movement began in Germany and Europe, the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization. Once they thought in the early 2000s, once they thought Europe was going to unite, they decided they wanted to regulate food and dietary supplements that were going across borders. And they decided not just to do that for Europe, but for the whole world.
And all of a sudden, everybody was pulled into these incredibly huge meetings, hundreds of countries sitting in rooms and people up on the dias trying to control what would happen to our food supply and our dietary supplement. So in 2004, 2005, I went to Bonn, Germany, and then to Rome to see what was going on. I joined a nonprofit group and we all knew we saw the writing on the wall that they wanted to control dietary supplements so that the supplements would not interfere with drugs. And that was the stated purpose. But they made it out to be the dietary supplements could make the drugs not work properly. And really what it was, is we don’t want to use dietary supplements because then you might not need our drugs. So that was going on.
And with the food, they were trying to organize it so that the maximum amount of poisons, and toxins, and heavy metals would be allowed in the food supply so that the companies wouldn’t have to clean up the food supply. So the writing was on the wall, I came home, I didn’t want to be involved with these organizations.
We called it the Health Freedom Movement in the US. And I began to spot infiltrators in amongst us. And I just thought, well, if anything’s going to happen, I’m going to have to do it for my own self, for my own world view, for the people that I was working with. This is before I had a dietary supplement company. So I started to lobby dietary supplement companies to make absorbable codecs non laxative magnesium.
By this time, I had written the magnesium miracle that was back in 1999 and it was finally put out. It was supposed to come out that the day of nine eleven. And that’s when I was my husband and I were living in Manhattan and everything crashed in New York, the publishing industry, etc… So that book didn’t come out for another two years because everything was just focused obviously on what had happened. So I was the expert in magnesium. I have found it by doing the research backing up a bit, I was asked by Random House to write a three hundred page book on magnesium, and I thought, how can I possibly do that?
But in doing the research, I realized that in my heart palpitations and Charley horse leg cramps and neck pain from typing so much, etc., etc… I was a poster child for magnesium deficiency and on top of that, I could not take magnesium without getting the laxative effect. So I realized, I mean, this is a serious problem. It’s epidemic magnesium deficiency in population. But what about us folks who can’t take the magnesium?
To build up our stores to run 80 percent of metabolic function in the body, magnesium is required for one thousand enzyme systems and 80 percent of metabolic functions. So I thought it was a huge problem. So I set out to find a company that would research and make a nonblacks of magnesium.
Short story, nobody is interested, it cost too much money, too much education of the public. So I finally found a chemist and we worked together and created a nonblacks of magnesium and that it changed the whole world of magnesium. So I guess it was I was spurred on to do that because of these meetings in Europe, this Codex Alimentarius that was trying to, you know, just throttle the whole supplement industry, see what they wanted to do is regulate supplements as drugs.
Now, they did that in Australia and they did it in Canada. They meaning the government officials said, well, if that’s going to happen, we might as well do it ourselves. So they bit the bullet and regulated their supplements near to a drug category. Now, the US didn’t do that because we have DSHEA it’s a Dietary Health Education Supplements Act, something like that. And that allows us to sell supplements, but we’re not allowed to say what they do.
You cannot recommend dietary supplements for a health condition unless you run the billion-dollar drug study to prove that your drug supplement helps the condition. And I’ve kind of I mean, I wrote Death by Modern Medicine, as you mentioned at the beginning. I mean, I say that was on a bad day. That was on a bad day in Bonn, Germany, when I saw the director of the whole codecs procedure totally humiliate a woman in a nonprofit who was saying we can’t put bottle baby formula in Africa, for example, we have to promote breastfeeding. And he made her feel this small, saying she was emotional and emotions weren’t allowed in this meeting.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich [00:10:35] Well, I know you use the I think the word health care system is one that gets bandied around a lot here in Australia as well as in the US. But you’ve come up with you’ve used the term disease care system. Tell us the difference. Tell us what that means.
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:10:55] Well, I guess from my perspective now, looking back at what I’ve learned, I mean, I was in med school in the mid-70s, and at that time I really had the idea because I had already been reading prevention magazine, traveled a lot with my then-boyfriend, now husband of fifty-three years. And we saw so much and learned so much to get a perspective on them on West Coast. Like we went to California, we were hippies, we didn’t do drugs, we were looking at the health thing. And I really thought that by now every medical doctor would also be a naturopath, which is what I am.
I did my M.D. And then immediately during my internship, I started to do my naturopathic degree because I knew that prevention and lifestyle, and health supplements, all that were extremely important. But it never caught on in medicine because the pharmaceutical industry, they were funding medical schools.
They began to fund all the medical research so that nothing to do with natural medicine was ever researched. You heard the story. Everybody’s heard the story. Oh, yeah. They only have one or two hours of nutrition in med school. And why is that? I mean, how is that even possible if it wasn’t for the drug companies funding the alternative? So I don’t know if I answered your question, but I just went on my a little rant there.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:12:47] No, no. It’s a rant I feel totally in tune with. It’s actually a rant that is very easy to miss as a health professional. This is the role of the chemical, food, and pharmaceutical industry in all levels of health care. But it’s a story that’s easy to miss. But once you hear it, it’s difficult to ignore.
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:13:10] Yeah, it does make sense when you can say as I do now with my customers that, well, your doctor never learned that when you have the Krebs cycle in each of your cells, in the one to two thousand mitochondria, the Krebs cycle rotates around. It’s got eight steps. Six of those steps require magnesium.
Now, that’s in biochemistry. I do know that it was in my biochemistry. Our dean of medicine was a biochemist. So we had two hundred hours of biochemistry. And so I knew a bit from Prevention magazine and reading every book there was back then. And you could do that. There was so little about health back in the 70s. And then I realized, oh my gosh, every metabolic reaction needs a cool factor of a vitamin or mineral. And we never learned one thing about that because the drug companies ran and do run medicine. They still do.
The drug lobby is so huge that actually in the health freedom movement in the early 2000s when I was involved, we would lobby Washington and Ottawa, Canada because I’m originally Canadian. And we were told point-blank that their representatives, congressmen, and senators would not support alternatives to drugs because the drug lobby was so powerful and the drug companies were threatening to take their product offshore if they weren’t supported.
Now they took their product offshore anyway. We all heard recently that, what, ninety to ninety-five percent of the drugs are made in China. So we lost that battle and we’ve lost things like defense now battle that they’re sending drug of fentanyl over to the States. And what? Fifty thousand people are dying a year from that problem or I’m sure it’s more. But yes, we’ve totally been brainwashed that the doctor will take care of us. Wait until you get sick enough, we’ll give you drugs.
And also, Ron, when I was in med school, we were told, just use drugs as long as the patient can’t mobilize their own resources short-term as possible, and then the patient should be able to survive. Without them, whatever, but then in the past 20 years, all of a sudden, drugs are prevented if we given, you know, the status or just in case or your blood pressure is a little high, let’s give you this, because doctors do not cure anything, they have not been able to stop heart disease or cancer.
I don’t really get involved with cancer because as an online dietary supplement company, I can’t go there. But certainly with heart disease and 65 conditions that are related to magnesium deficiency, when a person starts building up their different mineral and vitamin reserves, they no longer require these drugs. And doctors are you know, they’re just half the time, no, more than half, seventy-five percent of the time, they just push it aside and say, well, whatever you do it occasionally the doctor will say, oh, you know, I’m interested, how were you able to get your blood pressure down this? Because it just doesn’t happen.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:17:09] Now, listen, you talk about this. It’s the codecs thing that you attended in the early 2000s. And it was trying to exercise a control over all aspects of food and supplements. But then we find ourselves in 2020 in a global pandemic, which kind of has elevated health to everybody now, I think we can fairly safely say focused on health and everybody’s been introduced to comorbidities and the ramifications of that. How are you seeing the way the pandemic has panned out? You know, you’re in America. You were in the epicenter, although not in New York, of course. But how do you see the pandemic? How have you viewed it, given your 50 years of experience in this area?
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:17:55] Well, I guess it was inevitable. Inevitable, because 70 percent of the population has these comorbidities. They talk about the disease names, but they never mention the half dozen drugs that these people are also on. And the drugs are causing up to a hundred side effects, each of them.
So we’ve got the disease, we’ve got the drugs, we’ve got the lack of vitamins and minerals because doctors don’t tell their patients to take them. We’ve got people 70 percent of the population is overweight in America, and that’s a comorbidity factor. And then, you know, we’ve got the, you know, the straw that breaks the camel’s back and whether or not it was made in the lab, the virus. Has been used politically to promote. A society that will kowtow to the people that run the society. So I don’t know how much you want to get into all that.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:19:17] I’m interested. I mean, I’m interested in your perspective, although I don’t want you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, that when I kind of see this pandemic as an incredible opportunity for us to really focus on improving our immune function,.
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:19:36] Of course.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:19:38] Any mention of immune function, certainly in Australia, and I’m sure that is that the case in America, any mention of improving immune function is somehow seen as some kind of way-out alternative idea. Is that how you’re seeing that?
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:19:54] Absolutely. And you know, what’s happened in America is that the FDA, maybe the FTC, Federal Trade Commission, they’re actually fining people, practitioners or dietary supplement companies, ten thousand dollars or jail time, if they say that their products are going to help people prevent or treat covid so that we’re only just starting to come about.
And even Joseph Mercola with this huge website has said he has to take all the mention of Covid off his website and we’ve had to scrub our websites as well. And it’s just a hundred percent frustrating because we do know that someone who’s healthy with a strong immune system, they’re able to fight whatever comes along. Our bodies are resilient.
You know, they’re made to last and all the rest of it. And I was fortunate, I mean, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I have this dietary supplement company and there’s something that made me in the fall of 2019, it made me look more at vitamin D and the omega-three fatty acids and pico zink which I created. And I do have a pico silver. So all of a sudden, just as people were starting to realize they had to support their immune systems, I was able to have these products available. And we have a very good track record with our patients staying healthy, then I guess that’s what I can say.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:21:45] Well, let’s talk about magnesium for a start. Just wanted to touch on that because we hear a lot about calcium supplementation. Of course, we’re bombarded by it through the dairy and food industry that it’s fortified with calcium and to make strong bones.
But of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. Tell us a little bit about you touched on it before magnesium and you were mentioning biochemistry, which I must admit, if I had a choice of what I would go back and study now, I wouldn’t do Ph.D. I would go back and study my biochemistry, anatomy, and physiology. But anyway, this is an opportunity for me to get a refresher course, Carol. Can you tell us about magnesium? Or more about that.
Calcium and Magnesium
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:22:30] Well, there’s this balance between calcium and magnesium that we know of. But because medicine likes to think there’s there’s one treatment for one condition, they brought that over into supplements as well. And they began to say, well, women with osteoporosis, we better give them extra calcium. Let’s start early in age 40s, the bones will get brittle, etc., etc.. So there’s this big push and as you say, by the dairy industry, too, they grabbed onto this cash cow.
Anyway. A cash cow and they just ran with it to the point now there’s a Dr. Boland over New Zealand, I’m sure you’ve heard of him. He’s had at least half a dozen studies showing that women, just by taking calcium supplements, put themselves at a much higher risk for heart disease because calcium precipitates in the body.
It doesn’t flush out like magnesium. See, there’s a failsafe magnesium. If you take too much at once or if you’re very sensitive like me, you flesh out your magnesium, you’re in and out. But calcium supplements will cause constipation and then that calcium is reabsorbed and precipitates, whereas a precipitate in the heart, in breast tissue, in the gallbladder, in the kidneys, in Healdsburg and even in arthritis, so you get this calcium precipitation because you’re taking too much calcium for one and two, you’re not getting enough magnesium.
Magnesium is not even tested on an electrolyte panel. So it’s way down on anybody’s radar and calcium gets all the advertising to the point now that we know it’s detrimental and that’s being combated. And instead of realizing I don’t know if Boland has said anything about it, but certainly, Doctor, to read Boland’s studies and say, well, you know, I guess calcium is not so good. They don’t offer any suggestions.
But what they did wrong is really horribly funny. But they started promoting vitamin D, vitamin D became the sexy new supplement. And the crazy thing about vitamin D is it helps absorb calcium. So the more vitamin D you take, the more calcium you absorb and precipitate. So vitamin D, calcium, and then magnesium also have a relationship because if you don’t have magnesium, you don’t activate your vitamin D. I don’t know how many steps there are in vitamin D metabolism, but it’s kind of like the Krebs cycle I told you about with producing energy, you need magnesium.
Well, to activate vitamin D from the sunshine, vitamin D, food-based vitamin D or supplement, you have to have magnesium in about eight steps. And what I noticed happening about 15 to 10 years ago maybe, when doctors start realizing, oh, vitamin D, everybody’s low in vitamin D and they would give fifty thousand units of synthetic vitamin D to people, I would get back then my patients and telephone clients telling me that all of a sudden their magnesium wasn’t working.
They were having a six week migraines and heart palpitations. All their magnesium deficiency symptoms came back. And when I did a very quick history, I find out they recently taken high dose vitamin D. So what the vitamin D was grabbing all the magnesium it could, to help metabolize and causing vitamin D deficiency excess calcium and putting us right back into that imbalance.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:27:02] So that, you’ve said two things there that have really alerted my mind. You’ve said a lot there, actually, but two in particular. One is the calcium precipitation being so dependent on a good balance of magnesium. And if you are deficient, if I’m getting this correctly, if you’re deficient in magnesium, you will have an increased calcium precipitation.
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:27:24] Correct. Magnesium will keep calcium in solution in the blood.
Dr.Ron Ehrlich [00:27:31] That’s a really big statement. That’s a really strong statement.
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:27:37] And then it pulls it into the bones and the teeth out of the blood, just like vitamin K2 dots and vitamin K when you, like when I made my vitamin D supplement, I put in vitamin K too as well. They’re vitally important.
Dr.Ron Ehrlich [00:27:55] And the other thing you said that a little light went on in my head was about vitamin D, because so often we hear of people who are, I get plenty of sun, I’m out in the sun all the time, and yet I’m vitamin D deficient. How is that possible?
Magnesium Deficiency
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:28:12] Right. Well, it’s possible if you don’t have enough magnesium and I’ve heard crazy stories that you just think were, you know, not to be believed where people say they’ll go to the beach and lie in the sun and they’ll get headaches so they’ll get twitchy. Or the ones who are educated in magnesium deficiency will say, like, I have magnesium deficiency and yeah, the sun is coming in and the sunshine vitamin D has to be converted and you need magnesium.
If you don’t have magnesium and it pulls whatever small amount you have in storage, it pulls it out, then you’re stuck and you’re stuck with major problems. I mean, migraine headaches, eye twitches, esophageal spasms, heart palpitations, angina, heart attack, Haisla hernias can be caused because diaphragm spasm, IBS spasms can be a magnesium deficiency, infertility can be magnesium deficiency as the fallopian tubes go into spasm and won’t allow the sperm and eggs to meet up. So any muscle and any nerve in the body can be affected by magnesium deficiency.
And it freaks doctors out when you try to tell them, well, you know, you could have these 10 symptoms and it could be one problem because they’ve never learned about magnesium, magnesium deficiency symptoms. They’ve never done a magnesium blood test. And then that’s another question you’ll probably have. Why don’t we test for magnesium? It’s because the test is a crock. It doesn’t test what’s in your cells, it just tests the little bit in your bloodstream that always stays at a perfect level to keep your heart from, you know, going into a heart attack spasm. And that’s what they’re testing.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:30:23] Well well, that’s why we were on that topic. I mean, other than assuming that we are all magnesium deficient, which arguably and we’re very interested in soils in this program, you know, regenerative agriculture, you know, stimulating the microbiome within the soil to break down and give us all the good stuff that we need, which we don’t have. So it’s not a big stretch to think that maybe, just maybe, the vast majority of the population are deficient in this very important mineral. How do we test for it? How should we test for it?
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:30:59] Well, I mean, you’ve mentioned the soil. It’s been farmed out of the soil, and it’s not put back. I live in Maui. I think we have 17 golf courses. I live right beside a golf course. I do my morning walk. I know all the guys that work the golf course, and I see what chemicals they’re putting on the grass. It’s mostly minerals. And the biggest that is magnesium, our golf grass is getting more magnesium than our population. So they know it’s deficient, they know it’s needed. So it’s not in the soil. It’s cooked out, it’s not in fertilizers, it’s not put back in the soil.
I have seen so many customers and clients who are vegan vegetarians, although I’m drinking my 40 ounces of green drink a day, I’m getting all my minerals, all I’m getting magnesium and they’re twitching away and their heart palpitating. And they just need they need the magnesium so we know we’re not getting it. How do we test for it? The blood test serum magnesium just measures, as I mentioned, the tiny amount of it. It’s a very small but it can range of magnesium that’s necessary to keep the heart functioning.
Now, the doctors don’t know that. They just know that whenever they test your magnesium, it’s always in this range. So I say, well, it’s OK, you’re fine. And it being the most important electrolyte in the body, it’s not even on electrolyte panel. So what I have done, I’ve been out this a number of years, so I finally get enough money to do university research because it’s very costly to do the research. And what they’ve done is they’ve proven my remark magnesium is people meter in size, it’s a stabilized iron of magnesium that stays stable for years, and that iron can go straight into the cells and it’s absorbed within one to two hours into the cells.
So the test for that, the test they use in the research, it’s called an ionized magnesium test. There are electrodes for it there is actually an ionized calcium test, there’s ionized potassium, but the ionized magnesium is only used in research. So with the papers that my research fellows are working on after doing clinical research on humans, not on mice and rats, but on humans, we’re going to be proposing to the government that they change their measurement. Because we call it an epidemic, it’s a public health crisis, it’s an epidemic, a lot of magnesium researchers say the same, but it doesn’t get translated into clinical. Nobody’s looking at the patients like our studies are looking directly at the patient. So it’s an uphill battle. But we’re in the war.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:34:29] And when people are walking into supermarkets or vitamins or in health food stores, what is the typical magnesium supplement that they will see on the shelf? You know, they pick up little and they go one hundred milligrams of magnesium and it’s written down. What is that and what is the problem with some of that?
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:34:50] Right. Well, the most well-known magnesium is magnesium oxide, and it’s only four percent absorbed. And it’s a great laxative because it’s not absorbed. It just rushes right through. And why it became the most well-known.
Magnesium is a very brilliant woman who owned a magnesium oxide company, gave tons of samples to magnesium researchers to do their research with. And even at four percent absorption, there were great results. So everybody thought, OK, that’s the magnesium to use, you know if you go by the research. OK, Oxide, let’s do it. And it’s only recently that people began realizing, well, it’s just a laxative and then they went to citrate, they go to glycinate, there is magnesium chloride.
But any one of those, it’s only from four percent absorbed which is oxide to load 20 percent absorbed even the chelate the chelated minerals. It doesn’t have that much absorption. It’s actually more work for the body to break down the chelate. And that’s where I went to the liquid magnesium.
It’s a magnesium chloride, but then its process, a proprietary process that, as I mentioned, it stabilizes the iron of magnesium, or I have 14 other minerals. I put 12 minerals in a multiple. I have a Pico zink we call it Pico meter and the Pico silver.
So all these are stabilized mineral ions that will get right into the cell because it’s the cell mineral ion channels are Pico meter in diameter. So you have to be that size. And the reason why other mineral compounds can be absorbed and can certainly be helpful is because in the blood the compounds will disassociate and liquids compounds disassociate. So you get your magnesium here and your chloride here.
But magnesium is so reactive it’ll just join right back up to that chloride or anything else that’s round and it becomes a compound again, which is too big to get into the cell. So it’s all of it keeping the ion state and you’ll see a lot of minerals, they’ll say ionic minerals and whatnot. And they’re just sort of picking up on that word. But I know for myself, I am the guinea pig, I’m trying all these other supplements. And they all caused me the laxative effect because they’re not fully absorbed.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:37:58] Now, another part of your focus is on the yeast, on the issue of yeast overgrowth. How does that happen? How does it impact on the body? Give us the yeast overgrowth 101.
Yeast
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:38:13] Yes. Well, yeah, a mineral deficiency is number one. Number two is yeast overgrowth. Those two things kind of propel chronic disease, in my opinion. And how we get to yeast overgrowth, because yeast is normal in the body, it’s normal in the environment.
Yeast and fungi to death and dying material so that you don’t have a force loaded with a hundred years of, well, it wouldn’t even be dry rot. It becomes dry rot when the fungi get after it and break down the wood.
They’re breaking down material in our intestines as well. And unfortunately, it tends to be incompletely digestive foods and sugars, and then yeast feed off those, but it really began to be a problem when we started using antibiotics and antibiotics will kill off good and bad bacteria, leaving wide open ranges for these to grow into. And the yeast will grow up through the large intestine, into the small intestines, start to puncturing the mucous membranes, causing leaky gut, and then the yeast byproducts, their breakdown byproducts that we call toxins.
There’s one hundred and seventy-eight of these toxins and they’re absorbed through the leaky gut into the bloodstream and can affect the body from head. So another sort of head-to-toe problem with brain fog and the coated white tongue and itchy ears and itchy discharge from the eyes, you get that chronic yeast infections in the sinuses that are misdiagnosed as bacterial and you’re given more antibiotics.
So in our society, back in the 40s when penicillin was discovered, it wasn’t long. I mean, it wasn’t more than a year or two that doctors began to realize, oh, my gosh, the people we give this penicillin to, all of a sudden they’ve got yeast problems, yeast discharge, and then it can go to athlete’s foot. It can lead to the rashes under the arms or under the breasts of women.
Yeast is all over us and it’s under control. And, I mean, for many years, I was thrashing away this, you know, get rid of this. And finally, I realized, especially moving to Maui and loving truth, I realized, well, we’re always going to have this kind of yeast overgrowth and over balance of yeast if we keep feeding it. And I didn’t want to keep starving myself, so I created the anti-fungal probiotic using Saccharomyces boulardii, which is the type of yeast which just helps balance out these.
So there are ways of working with the environment. And I love to, I want to bring up right now about the soil because that may be number three in my plan of taking over the world is working with the soil because one of our products is barley seeds that are germinated in a great big rotating batch. And when we take the liquid off and we do things with the liquid, I will go into that for what’s leftover is actually a probiotic barley straw. And I support a farm here in Maui and we put that straw in a plot of land and grow radishes.
And we had the same sized plot where we did not put our barley straw. And after the twenty-five days of growing the radishes on the barley plot, we produced eighty-five pounds of gorgeous bright red, huge radishes on the other plot we had three pounds that could go to market. So what had happened is the life force in that barley straw, the probiotics, the living, and matter actually made the weeds and the worms and the predators just turn around and run over to the other plot that wasn’t protected. And the worms just circles around these radishes, the weeds were crazy.
So we know from that experiment that if something is strong and alive and has a strong life force, then the predators aren’t going to go after it, just like humans. If you were healthy and vibrant, you’re not going to get attacked unless your body wants to go through the experiment of having some sort of infection or something wrong. I do that all the time.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:43:40] Well, It’s a very popular, very favorite theme of mine on this podcast, and that is exploring ways of enabling rather than trying to dominate nature. And whether we’re talking about it in the farm, in the soil or in our garden or in our mouth, or wherever. Enabling nature is a major theme. Another thing that you’ve touched on is ignoring the stress in our in our modern world and how do you define stress in our modern world? I mean, apart from the obvious. Oh, I feel so stressed.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:44:15] What do you think?
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:44:18] Well. I mean, that’s a huge question. There’s a lot of ways to answer it, but let’s just say, you know, things are going not so perfect with a person. What happens is they usually try to find a reason to blame something, someone some of them. And that’s kind of where psychiatry comes in.
Well, let’s blame your parents or what’s right, let’s blame somebody. So there’s a blame game going on that is detrimental because you have to take responsibility at some point. There’s a prayer in Hawaii called Ho Oponopono and it’s just four lines. I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. So it, I mean, to me, it’s a little too whiny. Please forgive me. I’m sorry. I sort of changed the words around a bit. But what you’re doing there is you’re taking responsibility for everything that’s going on around you.
You know, it’s as simple as if you’re frowning and angry. That spreads to the person who’s observing you with my farm or I volunteer at our markets, you know, farmer’s market. So, you know, I’m talking to people all the time with my stupid mask on and they’ll come up and, you know, some small percentage, maybe 15 percent will come up and say, oh, I want this and I want that. And I’ll just sort of lean into them and say good morning. And yeah. And they you know, they just snap out of those doubts or I remember I you know, I tend to give little presents to people.
So I brought over something for somebody to she looked like she was having a hard day. So I said, I’d like to give this to you. And she said, well, what’s wrong with this? What’s wrong with it? So I said and I went into her move to order a little bit and I said, what would make you think I would give you something that wasn’t perfect? And so she calmed down. So, you know, there are people that come with an attitude and even for that, Ron, I will right away say if they were saturated with magnesium, they wouldn’t have that tension.
They wouldn’t have that irritable, they wouldn’t snap. And I do start with the magnesium before I would go to any sort of psychology. But then in terms of the psychology for more chronic disease, I do refer to something called total biology.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:47:17] Yes. You talking about German, the German system of medicine,
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:47:22] German new medicine.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:47:25] Are you familiar with neural therapy. Have you heard of neural therapy? Tell us about that German system going.
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:47:36] So I think you can you can use a definition, the conflict basis of disease. So if you have a conflict that you don’t think you can control or remedy, then that sets up what I call a gramophone, people don’t even know what a gramophone is anymore, but it sends up this world of conflict where you’re always worrying more and more.
Now, that worry will distract the mind from living a safe life, for example. So what we were told in our total biology classes is that if the mind is so distracted that it might cause harm walking out in front of a car or not eating or whatever, then the mind will put the solution to the conflict into the body and try to resolve it there.
Now, the very best example is in the German branch, the originator of German new medicine, Geerd Hamer. He is an oncologist and a psychiatrist, and his son in Europe was shot by some member of the royalty. So there was no way that he could get justice. And the son lingered for three months and finally died. Three months after his son died, he developed testicular cancer and his wife developed ovarian cancer.
The two generative organs, the body was trying to make a new trial that was its response. So when this happened, I mean, Geerd being a psychiatrist and an oncologist, he went back to his files and found that every one of his cancer patients had an unresolvable conflict prior to their diagnosis. So he set about matching the conflict with the physical you know, If your child is ill and in intensive care, you can develop cells in your breast ducts to try to make milk to nurture the child. And if you happen to go for your mammogram around that time, you’ll be told you have breast cancer.
Whereas if that conflict is resolved in your breast tissue results and our teacher said that, you know, they’ve had many, many cases where once a woman knows that she’s in conflict with not being able to save the child and she puts it into her body, then that the pressure from the brain doing that actually can stop. And it’s you know, when I started learning total biology and this is 15 years ago, I lost my fear of cancer because I realized it’s you know, just don’t let the conflicts build out toxins through, you know, resolve issues so that blood conditions, I’m talking with a friend right now who has a type of leukemia.
And I said to the person that I referred to from total biology consultations, but I told him the leukemia and blood disorders is family, you know, look for conflict in the family. And he couldn’t think of anything. And then he realized that someone who he looked upon, his family had stabbed him in the back, you know, had created the conflict. So it’s important.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:51:51] German new system approach to medicine is very interesting and holistic one isn’t it. I seem to have a very open mind. The type of medicine I was referring to neural is all about the autonomic nervous system and its ability to heal, provided it’s allowed to do so. And you’re talking about an emotional background to disease. There were thoughts of things and they are the neurotransmitters. They would have an impact on cell function I guess. That’s that makes total sense. Total biology. I’m going to look that up.
Listen, we’ve covered so many different areas here, and I’m going to have links to your site and all this. I’m going to explore those supplements myself as well. I wanted to finish because we are all on this health journey together in this modern world and we’re all on a journey. What do you think the biggest challenge for an individual on that journey is?
The Biggest Health Challenge
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:52:50] I guess it’s staying balanced and staying happy. But also another thing that I explore is my personal place of power, you know, where I stand in the world, how I am, as I said, responsible for myself and my environment.
It’s a bit of a biblical thing where we were told or I think Jesus said when he brought someone back from the dead or whatever, you can do this and much more so we don’t give ourselves enough credit for the power that we have as humans.
We subjugate ourselves and we’re doing it right now with the quarantine, we are subjugating ourselves to masks and vaccines and powers that are very weak in terms of their knowledge and their ability to help us. So we have to maintain our strength and our power and our common sense. And before you listen to anybody else, listen to yourself.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:54:12] I love that. What a great note to finish on. And I know you’re passionate about empowering people. As am I. Thank you so much for joining us today. Carolyn really enjoyed our chat.
Dr Carolyn Dean [00:54:21] It was wonderful. Thank you so much. Mahalo.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:54:24] Mahalo.
Conclusion
Dr. Ron Ehrlich [00:54:26] Well, what a note to finish on therewith, you know, finding your own place, your own power, reminding yourself of how powerful you are. I often find it interesting exploring change, what constitutes change, how people change. And I think there are two, there are many reasons why people do and don’t change, but two things that I’ve often focused on is your locus of control and the other is, is your tolerance of ambiguity.
And the locus of control refers to how much control do you feel you have in your life? And while no one has 100 percent control over everything that goes on in your life, how you view that is quite important. If you feel a total victim as to what is going on in the world and you surrender to what you’re being told always to do, you do. And just following instructions and I’m just following the public health messages of the food pyramid the last 50 years.
I’m on low fat. I’ve done everything right. I’m blah, blah, blah. You may have an external locus of control and be resistant to change. On the other hand, if you have an internal locus of control, meaning no, you’ve got control over things that go on in your life. In fact, you’ve got a lot of control over a lot of things. That’s called an internal locus of control and you will probably be more open to change.
The second aspect that I’m referring to is tolerance of ambiguity, and that is while we love things to be right and wrong, black and white, good and evil, that’s just not really the way things work. And there are plenty of shades of gray and there are plenty of ways of approaching a problem. So I think those two aspects and so for Carolyn to say that she’d like to focus on her position in the world and remind herself of the control that she had, I thought was a really important thing for her to remind me of as well. And I love the fact that this magnesium and I must say we know that soils are deficient in minerals.
We know that the human body is made up of 50 or 60 of the hundred and twenty-odd elements there are in the world. We know what twenty-five or 30 of them do. We don’t know what all of them do, but we know that we are made up of fifty or sixty elements. Whether those elements come from, well, the food we eat, how is it delivered to the food we eat through the soil, the food is grown. And for that to happen, you need a healthy relationship with microbes and the mycorrhizal fungi in soils.
That’s why we’re focusing so much on regenerative agriculture in this podcast because we all need to be engaged in this issue about having healthy soils. And that’s a whole story which any regular listener of this will be familiar with. But the point about it is that a healthy microbiome will break down the elements that are found in the earth, and those elements are then absorbed by the plants. And either we eat those plants, we eat the animals that have eaten those plants, and that’s how we end up with our minerals.
So now we know in Australia and globally as well that soils are chronically deficient in magnesium, selenium, and zinc. Not to mention another 20 or 30 or 40 other elements, you can grow healthy soils with fertilizer, superphosphate, three elements, nitrogen phosphate, and potassium, I think. And you can make a plant look very healthy. But is it nutrient-dense? No. And this is where magnesium comes in.
It is one of the big deficiencies that we all face. And I know myself, for example, I have a complexion which makes people think I spend a lot of time out in the sun. I probably don’t spend as much time as I should, but my vitamin D levels have constantly been low. Calcium, you may recall an episode I did with Dr. Ross Walker where we talked about coronary calcium city score, and that means calcium is deposited where it shouldn’t be in the coronary arteries and taken from where it should be, either in the bones or floating around in balance in our blood. And precipitating calcium is a problem. It’s calcifying arteries. It’s calcifying joints. It’s calcifying. It’s calcifying on teeth.
You know, so this imbalance or deficiency in magnesium results in increased calcium precipitation, which manifests itself in many ways. And I as a dentist, see that all day, really, when I look in people’s mouths and I see calcium buildup and also vitamin D, the importance of vitamin D, you cannot produce vitamin D unless you have adequate calcium. Look so much there. And with a conversation about yeast and the importance of finding a balance, that’s what I think is ultimately the key.
So I hope you enjoyed that. We’re going to have the links to Carolyn’s great site and some of those supplements that she mentioned. Please don’t forget to get online and leave a review on the iTunes. You know, push the ratings up. Always a good thing. We wanting to get this story out. We are a podcast on the move. Yes. I kind of finally, after three years, got my head around the fact that I’m going to see how far we can actually take this podcast. And I would appreciate your helping us achieving that. I think there are some important messages that we try and convey. I hope this finds you well until next time. This is Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Be well.
This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences, and conclusions.