The Healthiest Year of Your Life with Jonny Bowden, author of many books including The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth and a board certified nutrition specialist.

Kevin: I want to talk about your book, because there's so much information in this thing. The book is called, The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth and I don't even know where to start, because I just got this book and I read through it and it's one of these books that you keep on your desk and not put up on the shelf. You could use it almost every day, particularly in what I do and what a lot of people do. Natural cures, are they real?

Jonny: Well, as I said in the introduction - let me do a disclaimer. I hate that title. It What I explain in the introduction, very quickly after I apologize for using this title, is that you can't take a pill and get rid of cancer. You're not going to find a vitamin that's going to cure Alzheimer's.

In that sense, they're not natural cures. Folks, here's what they are. By natural medicine, all I mean is stuff that you don't need a prescription for. It's basically herbs, vitamins, minerals and yes, it' s a kind of shifting line of what's natural and what's not. Some drugs are made from natural substances and some natural substances are toxic. Basically I'm talking about the non-prescription area of intervention. Those things can do one of three things. They can make all your symptoms go away, so you don't even notice that you have this disease and maybe they actually do send you into remission and maybe it's gone, or they can significantly improve what you have and work with your current program. If you're on medications, then maybe they can reduce the need for those medications. In some small cases they won't do anything, but they'll never harm you and what they will do, for some people, is they'll fix everything, or they'll make things better, or they'll make some other area of your life better.

Like for example, there's an example I give the book, The Paleolithic Diet has a phenomenal effect on acne. Maybe it doesn't clear up your acne in every single case, but I'll bet you it will give you more energy, so all these things are just things that people can do to empower themselves. There are vitamins and minerals and treatments, in some cases, that are noninvasive, that are basically soft, gentle substances. I've never found one single case of an overdose, or a death from anything that's in this book and in that sense they're not - "cures" is a kind of marketing term, but I would say that they are treatments that can really go a long way towards alleviating a lot of the discomfort and pain and sadness that goes with a lot of chronic conditions and in some cases, they may be able to clear them up completely.

Kevin: What do you think is the line between someone taking the book like this and using some of the information here, or going to a naturopath, or a doctor and getting tested for some of these things beforehand? When do you think someone should do each one?

Jonny: Well, I think it's very individual thing and I think it kind of depends on the symptoms and how far things have gotten along. I hope nobody's going to use anybody's book to try to cure their own cancer. I guess it also depends on where in the trajectory of an illness you decide to seek help and how much information you are able to amass on your own. So again, there is no perfect answer for that. That's a very good question. There are doctors like naturopaths, who often function as the gatekeeper for people. They're your wellness coordinator and if something comes up and there's a symptom or something, then you may be able to catch it before it becomes a full- blown condition. So I don't think a book like mine takes the place of having a health professional that you can believe in and count on.

I'm not particularly fond of the HMO model of medical where you go in and see somebody for seven minutes and they look at your chart and they don't know your name and they look at a symptom and they give you a drug. Clearly, I think that this is probably a better place to start than that, but I'm all for using the people who have been trained in what we call, functional medicine, looking at the whole person, whether they be naturopaths, or osteopaths, or MDs, NDs, clinical nutritionist.

So I'm all for having as much information as possible. I think the book, The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth is just another piece of the armory, the arsenal that people that kind of arm themselves with, of knowledge and information you can ask your professional about if you need to do that.

Kevin: Great. I do want to address this question first, because I get it a lot. How much do people need supplements? There's a lot of people out there who think that whole foods are the answer to optimal health. How can supplements augment that, or do people even need supplements?

Jonny: That's a great question and I'm not going to be evasive on this at all, but the answer hinges on the term, the definition of need. Do we need supplements? No. We also don't need indoor toilets and we don't need our cars. I think what everyone listening to this call is interested in is not what I call, minimum wage nutrition, what we need to stay alive, what we need to fend, nutritional deficiencies like Beriberi, scurvy and rickets, which we really don't see very much. So we can get enough B vitamins to stave off Beriberi and enough C to keep scurvy probably with meals at McDonald's. We're not going to not have these kind of deficiencies.

So if, however, by need you mean what is going to optimal. What's going to really give us that super health, that extra level of energy and vitality and have everything running well. So it depends what you mean by need. Now, I'm all for whole foods. I'm 1000% for whole foods and I think we should absolutely eat whole foods. The problem with getting all the nutrients for optimal health, just from food is twofold. One is, most of us don't do it. Two is, even when you make a real effort to eat nothing but whole foods the mineral that we get are largely dependent on what kind of soil those foods are grown in and a lot of soil is very depleted in minerals. There are some nutrients, like vitamin E, that you would have to -- the amount of food you would have to eat to get 400 IUs of vitamin E is so enormous, it's just not going to happen. Number three, there are conditions that we are exposed to in modern life. Unless you're living - I wrote this in one of my older books. If you're living on an organic farm, you don't go into the city, you're not exposed to car exhaust, you don't have much stress in your life, you go to bed when the sun goes down, you wake up in the sun comes up and you don't have a computer and all that, okay. You don't need supplements. You're fine. The fact is, I live in L.A. I don't care how many whole foods I eat. I'm breathing smog. I'm exposed to pollutants. We take medications. Our liver doesn't know the difference whether they're prescribed not. They still have to detox them. It still has to get rid of them.

There are things in our food, even organic foods. There's stuff that our body needs to get rid of and there are stresses in modern life that are probably greater than the stresses of any time in the past. These things eat up nutrients. They eat up vitamin C. They eat up B vitamins. There are what we call, designer nutrients, alpha lipoic acid, which you can get tiny amounts from food. There are things in which the only real source is brains and organ meats and nobody's going to eat those anymore.

So I think that supplements fill a wonderful need and that need is, it's a delivery system for the nutrients that your body needs to run optimally and again, it depends on what you're looking for. If you're just looking to run a clunker car that you can park anywhere and you just need to take it down to the general store once a day, no problem. You probably don't have premium gas in there.

Everyone listening to this call wants Formula 1 performance out of their body and that's why I really do believe that supplements are -- as a supplement. Remember, as a supplement, not as an excuse remember it's a supplement not an excuse to eat bad food all day, but as a supplement to a great whole food diet, I think carefully chosen supplements make a huge difference.

Kevin: What are maybe one or two things that someone can use to get that Formula 1 type of performance?

Jonny: Well, if you put a gun to my head and you asked what was probably the most important supplement anybody can take in America and I have to kind of generalize for the people on this call, who are probably a very good health, down to the people who are barely on life support in terms of their health, I would probably say that the most important supplements that virtually everybody can benefit from would be fish oil. We just do not get enough Omega-3 in our diet. We just don't.

Why is that so critical? Because all of our hormones and prostaglandins and inflammatory substances in the body are made from these Omega- 3s and Omega-6s and they need to be in the right proportions for healing, for health, for just a hundred different functions that we could talk about for an hour. In our current American diets, industrialized diet, the ratio is about 20 to 25 to one in favor of the Omega-6s. So we're not getting enough of these Omega-3s. These Omega-3s are anti-inflammatory. They help the brain function better. They get incorporated into the cell membrane, so that information can come in and out, like neurotransmitters, things like serotonin and dopamine and things that make you feel good. That's why Omega-3s are used in the treatment of depression. They help the heart. They help lower blood pressure. They just do all these great things and what happens is we've got this imbalance. We've got a car that's jacked up 3 feet on one side and it's got flat tires on the other side and we're riding in this car and I think what we need is to bring those Omega-6s and Omega-3s into balance. I know you want to talk the whole hour about fatty acid biochemistry. It's pretty boring, but the point is you got these two flavors. You've got chocolate and vanilla and they need to be in proportion and they're not and that's why I think probably Omega-3 would be the number one supplement for everybody.