The Fountain of Youth World Summit with David Wolfe, nutrition authority and author of Sunfood Success System.
Kevin: Let's take another turn here and let's talk a little bit about some of the common things that people are experiencing nowadays and maybe if you can just give some suggestions on what they can do to help them out. I know that, to start, we'll start with osteoporosis. A lot of women are concerned about osteoporosis and they're concerned about calcium and taking these calcium pills. You know, what are some of the pros and cons of that?
David: Okay, well the nations that consume the most calcium, the United States, Canada and the Scandinavian countries, have the worse osteoporosis and that's because our theory of mineralization or our theory of nutrition is incorrect. The general theory is that a hundred years ago they started looking at people's bones. They found out that, oh my god; these bones are made out of calcium. When people don't have enough bone density the thought is, oh they just have to eat more calcium because that's what builds bones. Calcium does not build bones and that is one of the biggest misconceptions ever and it actually goes to the real core of our problems with science. And that is the human body is a complex biological machine of an unbelievable of mystery. And there is strong evidence that indicates that if you eat some of the calcium, let's say it's calcium from coral calcium, for example, oyster shell calcium. That it is almost impossible to get that stuff into your bones to increase bone density. The amount of increasing bone density, at best, is 1 or 2%. It is not good enough.
What increases bone density? Well, it turns out it's two other minerals and that is silicon and magnesium. Now, the best natural source of magnesium is cacao and cacao is known to be good for your teeth. In fact, there are chemicals in cacao that kill the organism Streptococci mutans that cause cavities. And, in fact, those extracts of the chocolate are now going to be showing up in toothpaste all over the world.
Kevin: No kidding?
David: That's amazing. That to me is just such a dramatic irony.
Kevin: Wow.
David: All along chocolate has been good for your teeth. It's the sugar that's been bad but even then, even then, studies have been done on people who eat chocolate even with the sugar and it's been found with a study done in Scandinavia on this. It's been found that even then that people who eat chocolate have been teeth health than people who don't. To me that's amazing. But let's get on to silicon because this is the mineral that is difficult to get in today's diet. What is silicon? It's a mineral. You get it in the skin of cucumbers. It's in the skin of bell peppers. It's the skin of tomatoes. It's in certain special herbs, which I'm going to name and you can drink this as a tea or take it in supplemental form and you will notice that it helps with your bone density.
And here are the herbs. One of them is called horse tail, horse tail and it's not a horse's tail. It's actually an herb. Another one is nettle. Stinging nettles have been eaten by the druids in the U.K. for thousands of years and it's one of the most important foods to eat if you know how to do it or if you juice it or you can just dry it and make a tea out of it, which is what I'm recommending; horse tail, nettle, oat straw. The oat seed of the oat grass has a little straw around it. It has a little coating. It's the seed capsule. That oat straw is one of the richest sources of silicon. You can buy it in health food stores. You can get in as extracts in health food stores.
You can get it raw and make your own tea out of it. You combine those three together and you want you can add alfalfa, which is also a great source of silicon. You can either make a tea out of that or you can just eat those any way you can find them. And you will find if you do three strong teas of that per day you will start increasing your bone density but how? It's the silicon. Now, how does silicon increase calcium? I mean that doesn't make sense. It's because our theory of minerals is incorrect. Our atomic theory is incorrect. And that is if you eat silicon rich food your body, through the power of enzymes transmutates it into calcium, turns the silicon into calcium. That was discovered by a great French researcher by the name of Louis Curvan, a Nobel prize nominee, who wrote five books and 5,000 pages of research on just this particular subject; how silicon and calcium are related to each other.
It was very well honored in France and he is very intimately entwined in the science of what's going on in France; but because of the language barrier his research really never made it to the English-speaking nations.
Kevin: Interesting when we're still taking calcium pills from, you know, sea shells and everything.
David: I recommend to god, you know, this is so engrained in our minds about calcium that if you are confused about this, get on the Internet and research exactly whose getting the results of remineralizing their bones and you'll find it's people who are not taking these forms of calcium that are toxic, which is the oyster shell calcium and to some degree even coral calcium.
Kevin: Now, bones are alkaline and doesn't the acidity of meats and sugars - does that eat away at the bone? I mean has that been proven or is that just a theory that I think I have, you know?
David: Well, that's a great question and that's the other side of the equation about osteoporosis. One is we've got to make sure we get the right nutrition to build strong bones. The other side of the equation is we've got to make sure we are doing things that aren't hurting our bones. Eating lots of sugar is one of the worse things we can do to our overall health of our teeth, which are living bones and to the density of our bones because when we take in lots of sugar our body has to use calcium, it has to pull calcium out of the bones to buffer or neutralize the intense acidity of the sugar. Calcium is highly alkaline, as you stated. Our bones are alkaline and, therefore, alkaline minerals are used whenever we're exposed to real strong acids. Sugar is a very strong acid. I mean, you know, we used to dissolve the corrosion on our battery terminals of our bus by dumping soda pop onto it because that sugar just dissolves and the phosphoric acid just dissolves all the corrosion right on the battery terminal. I mean you don't' want to be putting that in your body. That's dangerous.
Kevin: Let's get into supplements little bit. And you walk into a health food store and there are literally thousands of them. How do you get through them to find the ones that help with weight loss, and longevity, is really what I think the fountain of youth is all about? Which ones of those are the best? I mean rhodiola, turmeric, cinnamon. I mean which ones are the ones that people should be focusing on, not necessarily take but should be focusing on?
David: That's such an excellent question. My job is to basically guide people into health food stores and create order out of chaos. There are so many things. Okay, well the most important thing, in my opinion, that you can buy in a health food store in that department is going to be vitamin C.
Kevin: Okay. In what form?
David: Well, there's different forms. Now, I recommend that you start experimenting, moving away from synthetic forms of vitamin C or ascorbic acid, which is still beneficial, still good for you, and moving towards powdered, really high vitamin C plants. For example, you can get acerola cherry. It's a tropical berry that is really high in vitamin C. It's like 1 or 2% vitamin C and basically what they do is they grow these berries. They dry them and they powder them down and the encapsulate them or put them in a glass jar and sell them in health food stores as vitamin C. Now, that's a real great way to get lots of vitamin C natural with all the cofactors. Vitamin C needs cofactors like rutin and bioflavonoids that are all naturally present in those powders, like acerola cherry. You can either take it supplementally as capsules or you add it onto your smoothies. You can literally put it in your water that you drink in your morning and it kind of sweetens the water. It sweetens the water but doesn't sugarize the water.
Kevin: Gotcha.
David: Vitamin C is sweet but not sugary. So it makes your morning water easier to drink. So that's one thing, vitamin C. The next thing is, what I believe to be, the greatest discovery in the last -- probably in the last hundred years in the field of nutrition other than vitamin C and enzymes and that is sulfur, MSM, Methylsulfonylmethane. MSM is a biologically available form of sulfur that's naturally found in wild food, untended food. We don't really have access to that hardly at all any more. I mean, almost all our food is grown on farms for us. It's not being watered naturally by the rain. I'm talking about the natural sulfur that's produced in the oceans that helps create clouds, then drops them on the land that we need nutritionally in order to produce flexible collagen. Now that in the world does that mean? It means that sulfur produces flexible skin and flexible muscle tissue. It stops, in essence, wrinkling and increases the juiciness of the collagen and the discs, the joints that basically separate our bones from each other. On top of all that, it increases the growth of our hair, our nails, so that we have thicker, richer growth of our hair and nails. This can all be easily experienced within two weeks of taking MSM.
Kevin: It's going to grow like weeds.
David: It's really incredible and people who want thick quick growth of their hair and nails are almost always completely shocked by how powerful MSM can be. You can get it in capsule form. You can get it in a powder form. It's available in every single health food store now. Once you start looking into it, and especially when you take it, here's what you're going to find out. You're going to find it's one of the most important things you've ever taken. I have randomly polled hundreds of people about MSM. I almost always to a T here from people who have taken it before. Oh, MSM changed my life. I've heard that dozens of times, that exact quote. Oh, MSM changed my life.
The Fountain of Youth World Summit with David Wolfe, nutrition authority and author of Sunfood Success System.
Kevin: I'm excited about this talk today and let's get right into it. Why don't you tell us a little bit about, ah, how you started in this and your own personal story?
David: Well, I think I got oriented towards natural foods when I first came to California when I was seven years old. That was the first time I had ever eaten an orange or a tangerine off of a tree and that memory has continued to stay with me and it's probably what got me started. I ended up growing up as kind of a San Diego, Southern California, Los Angeles surfer and pretty much was oriented, I think, genetically towards natural healing and health because both my parents are medical doctors and they met in medical school. In fact, I was conceived in a medical school library!
Kevin: Okay.
David: So in some strange way this is something that was probably preordained. I got deeply involved in natural diets when I went to college because I started buying my own food. I realized I was allergic to quite a few different foods. I had no idea that food allergies even existed before that, particularly dairy products. So I stopped eating dairy products and upon doing so I thought I'd better study this subject and began to research nutrition and read books on nutrition and inevitably that led me to what was really easy and simple, which was just eating an orange, eating an apple, eating natural foods. It's the fastest food. Being a very busy person studying a lot in school at that time, going for three different degrees at once that just made the most sense to me, natural, original food, raw food. And eventually after a number of years I became a raw food eater, meaning that I would eat salads and I would eat fruit. I would eat nuts, and seeds, and eat seaweed and all kinds of things like this because it was -- it took no preparation.
Kevin: Right.
David: And that's -- that's led me into transforming what was a hobby of nutrition into a career because people would always ask me, well what are you eating? We want to know what you're having. Can we have what you're having? And eventually it led to a book, and several books, and lecture tours and a whole of fun in between.
Kevin: Sure. And a lot of people come to you for nutrition advice. What do you think is their mindset when they're introduced to your philosophy on eating?
David: I think the general mindset out there is open. People really want to believe, with all the choices we have, and all the knowledge that's available, people just want to know the simplest way to do the right thing. And that's my job to connect people with simple foods that are great for weight loss that are fun to eat, that taste good, that are natural, that have the minimum amount of processing so that they can arrive at the end of their day and go, you know what? I did something good for myself, for my family, for the planet.
Kevin: What are three or four things that you can identify that you basically can tell just about everyone about weight loss, a key to weight loss or success in nutrition?
David: Well, I think the key to weight loss is you want to get more bang for your buck. You want more nutrition, less calories, more fiber. Well, what does that equate to? It just means eating more plants. It means eating more salad. It means eating more vegetables. It means eating more fruit. It means eating seaweed, and nuts, and seeds and things of this nature; and less of everything else. So my approach to eating really is really enticing because you get to eat things that taste good. It's not dogmatic. It's not a something where okay, you can't eat this anymore. You have to eat this. It's just simply eat replacing, because there's only so much we can eat in a day, some of the other choices, for snacks, for example, with healthier choices, replacing, say, a big dinner meal with half of it being a salad. So, again, we're getting more nutrition. We're getting less calories and we're getting more fiber and that provides us a satiated feeling but it begins to increase our metabolism so we start dropping that weight. I even go into specifics about foods that speed up metabolism, which is a very important thing for us right now. For example, kelp, powered kelp, it tastes like salt. You can sprinkle it on an avocado. You can sprinkle it on a salad. You can sprinkle it on a steak even. You can put it on anything.
Kevin: It comes from seaweed by the way just so...
David: Yeah, kelp is a seaweed and it's probably the most important seaweed for us today with all the chemicals and toxins in our environment because it helps protect our immune system. In fact, in the 1930s it was found out that iodine, which is prominent in kelp seaweed, was the most powerful mineral for your immune system and wow, what an incredibly powerful piece of information. It also helps the thyroid and it helps speed up metabolism. So it helps us to lose weight quickly.
Another thing that's really powerful in that is coconut and coconut products. So any kind of coconut products generally helps to speed metabolism, provides us with the right kinds of fat and oils and especially if those foods are raw. If that coconut is raw we get the right type of fat. Saturated fat is a critical part of being healthy. Even though we've heard so much propaganda to the contrary, most of the saturated fat we've heard about has come from, for example, animal products or something that's a steak or something that has unsaturated fat that has been cooked. Now, once that saturated fat's been cooked it then does become problematic but in it's raw natural state, as the Polynesians discovered over thousands of years, there is no connection between heart disease and coconut because the saturated fat in coconut is almost always consumed in its raw natural state.
Kevin: Okay. Then why do we hear that coconut oil is bad for you?
David: Well, it fits into the issues of our day in terms of marketing of foods. And that is there's very major interest out there. There's the soy interest. There's the corn interest, which feed the cattle industry, which feeds the dairy industry. And the soybean industry has a cheap raw product they can create, which is hydrogenated oil. They can take a soy oil that's rancid and bubble hydrogen gas through it and turn it into something that looks like coconut oil and is extremely difficult for the body to deal with. It's a Trans fatty acid. It's a rancid fat. And they use propaganda against coconut and tropical oil products in order to drive them out of the U.S. market to be replaced by cheaper alternatives "soy products," hydrogenated oil products or hydrogenated corn oil products. And this is really something that in the last about ten years has finally reversed. People have finally realized oh, actually coconut is good for me and the Polynesians never had heart disease. In fact, it's the hydrogenated oil that has been most connected to the whole syndrome of heart disease.
Kevin: Sure. And the coconut oil speeds up metabolism?
David: That's exactly right. It's an incredible weight loss food. In general, if we are able to eat on top of those two things, kelp and coconut oil, in general if we're able to eat more vegetables we're going to get more nutrition. We're going to get less calories. We're going to get more fiber. We can snack on that stuff all day, cucumbers, carrots, lettuce, things like that; right at our desk or whatever we're doing and not have to worry about gaining weight. In fact, we'll probably lose weight if we snack all day because we keep our digestive system active. We increase our metabolism and we can get things moving quicker due to all that fiber.
Kevin: What about some of the diets out there like the South Beach Diet? A lot of people come to me and they say protein, protein, protein, protein. Tell me a little bit about protein and what you have experienced with it.
David: Well, the best sources of protein are from plants because they're A.) The cleanest sources. One of the problems we have today is the animal food industry cannot be trusted. If we want to do a little research on this we can even go back to Upton Sinclair's incredible book written in 1930s about the meat industry back in the 1930s, how toxic it was; all the way up to John Robbins "Diet for A New America" and even the expos's that we find in "Fast Food Nation" and more recent writings. What we discover is that the fast food industry is an industry. It has lost the love. It has lost the compassion. It has lost the care for detail. These are things that I am intimately concerned with when it comes to food because, you know, we're sensitive to subtle things in food. Everyone knows that mom's home cooking tastes better. That's just a fact. So if we have food that's treated with love we know it tastes better. But if we have food that's treated with unconsciousness, greed, the bottom line then that food cannot be nutritious. I don't care how much protein it has. Too much protein is a major toxic issue to the kidneys. It's very problematic for heart conditions and generally becomes over time sluggish. So we have to be very careful that we get our protein from plant sources so we get real protein. For example, hemp protein; it's a complete protein source. It contains the sulphur (sulfur) bearing amino acids, which create not just muscle but flexible muscle, which creates the neuro transmitters for proper brain chemistry. We can get our protein, for example, from spirulina, which is a super food that has been eaten, in say, Mexico for thousands of years and maybe unknown to our listeners but it's something we want to explore if we really want to get the right kind of protein.
Kevin: Tell me a little bit more about spirulina.
David: Spirulina is a microscopic alga that grew in the biggest city of the world for thousands of years and even still today is Mexico City. Now, how in the world did they feed all those people in Mexico City? I mean when Cortez arrived in 1520 in Mexico City him and his men could not believe what they had seen. This was a city bigger than all the cities in Europe. It was a city that fed itself primarily on the protein source called pirulina, which is an algae. It's a spiral algae. They grew it in the volcanic lakes and the highland planes in the Mexico City region and they would just dry it on rocks and sell it in the market and it turned out to be, when western analytical science got a hold of it, the highest protein content food in the world.
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