Best of 2024 – Controversial Health Optimization Protocols & Biohacks: Fad Diets, Magic Beans, Tulsi, Omega-3 Red Flags & More

Nick Urban [00:00:07]:
Are you a high performer, obsessed with growth, and looking for an edge? Welcome to MINDBODY Peak Performance. Together, we’ll discover underground secrets to unlocking the full potential of your mind, body, and spirit. We’ll learn from some of the world’s leading minds, from ancient wisdom to cutting edge tools and everything in between. This is your host, Nick Urban. Enjoy the episode. Want to know 10 powerful health optimization insights from world leading experts? In this special recap, we’re breaking down the most eye opening insights, wildest experiments, and biggest breakthroughs from mind body peak performance in 2024. Whether you missed an episode or just want a refresher on the most transformative bioharmonization and longevity tips, this is your chance to absorb a year’s worth of cutting edge health wisdom all in one episode. Everything discussed today will be linked in the show notes for this episode, which you will find at mindbodypeak.com/190seven.

Nick Urban [00:01:19]:
To begin with today, we’ll dig into an episode titled the shocking dark side of keto, intermittent fasting and caloric restriction and what to do about it. This was episode number one seventy two with Jay Feldman. And in this clip, he breaks down the biochemical differences between being a fat burner, someone that runs on fatty acids, and being someone that derives the majority of your energy from carbohydrate sources. Now, of course, being able to burn both types of fuels is ideal, but there’s a widespread notion that running predominantly on fat is a better, more efficient, and effective thing. Jay is an independent health researcher. And in this clip, he breaks down the differences between glucose and ketones. What I like about that clip is it shows that we’re able to derive plenty of energy purely from fats, but it’s not necessarily optimal. At least when we look at it through an evolutionary biology lens, if you have access to high carbohydrate foods, the unprocessed, unrefined versions such as ripe fruits, that’s a signal of abundance and prosperity to your biology, which then enables you to have a high metabolic rate and all the benefits that go along with that.

Nick Urban [00:02:38]:
How do you explain the difference in metabolism and the output of energy from glucose versus ketones and fat in the body and in the brain because that’s one of the most common things that I used to believe and I read, and it seems to be parroted parroted around the Internet that ketones burn cleanly and glucose is a dirty fuel. Therefore, you want your brain to run exclusively on ketones and you wanna minimize glucose as much as possible even though it’s not really possible. But yeah.

Jay Feldman [00:03:09]:
Yeah. So many misconceptions wrapped up wrapped up in in there. When we’re comparing the biological context of when we’re mostly relying on fat versus when we’re mostly relying on carbs and fat and ketones tend to go together because essentially we’re only going to have ketones if we’re really depleted in carbs or calories. That’s the only time where we’re going to produce ketones. So as a starting place, it’s really a question of carbs versus fat, especially also because even when we’re fully on a ketogenic diet, most of our energy needs are coming from fat. In our brain, about 60% will come from ketones and the rest will still be from glucose. And then the rest of our bodies, again, most of it is gonna be fat. Really, ketones aren’t used so much in the rest of the body, mostly just in in the brain.

Jay Feldman [00:03:51]:
So when we think about this biologically, the times when we’re mostly relying on fat and some ketones are during periods of intense and extended stress, like famine or starvation, or if we are in a heavily stressful environment environment, maybe we’re doing excessive exercise, like we’re running away from something or we’re battling something or whatever it is. These sorts of times of intensely high energy demands and a lack of energy supply. And when that happens, we rely on our backup fuel, the fuel that we store as our reserves and body fat, which is which is fat. And one then the opposite is when we’re well fed, when we have lots of abundant food available, we’re relying more on carbohydrates, especially in, you know, more abundant places and times where you have more carbohydrate based foods available like fruits as an example. Now in that the former state of stress, famine, starvation, when we’re relying on fat as a fuel, that is a time of conservation. Right? We were talking about this earlier in terms of the kind of bank account analogy, but when there’s not a lot of fuel coming in, that’s when we shift toward fat. And it’s also time when we wanna shift toward conserving the amount of fuel we have and the amount of energy we’re using, because we’re recognizing that this environment is not supportive of a high amount of output. Right? We don’t have a lot of high quality fuel coming in and we’re relying on our reserves.

Jay Feldman [00:05:08]:
And that is built into the physiology of how we use fat and carbohydrates. So when we’re oxidizing fat, when we’re burning fat in the mitochondria, it ends up providing various signals that encourage the conservation of fuel. It helps to slow down the rate at which the engines are producing energy so that we can conserve the fuel and run on it for longer in comparison with glucose, which is going to be

Speaker C [00:05:28]:
a much higher output and produce a

Jay Feldman [00:05:30]:
lot more energy, which is great for when we have a lot of fuel available and we’re not in a kind of high stress environment. So that’s the kind of bigger picture context. And then along with that, there are hormonal implications or hormonal effects of using fat versus carbs that further shift us toward more of the kind of starvation state versus the abundance state. And this has to do with certain stress hormones. So when we’re relying mostly on fat, we’re going to be up regulating stress hormones like glucagon and adrenaline and cortisol. And short term, these help us deal with whatever issue we’re facing and they upregulate metabolism, but long term, they do the opposite and they suppress our metabolic rate. They turn down our non important or less important functions, and eventually also encourage us to store as much body fat as we can so that we can deal with the future famine. You know, any food that we have, we wanna try to store it so that we can survive.

Jay Feldman [00:06:22]:
And these are basically survival type hormones, and they turn down our high output hormones like thyroid hormones. So they turn down the thyroid hormone production and conversion, and they turn down the reproductive hormone production. It’ll turn down testosterone, turn down progesterone, and will cause that shift toward more of a hibernation state in the long term. So that’s the big picture context. And then we can dig into the specifics of we’ve got these different fuels, glucose, fat, and ketones, and we’re using them in various amount you know, varying amounts at different times and in different places like the muscle versus the brain, and what are all the differences there.

Speaker C [00:07:00]:
So

Nick Urban [00:07:00]:
next up, we have actually a continuation of an interview with Jay Feldman. This one’s a separate episode, episode number one seventy three, where we break down what happens when you consume different fats and particularly the polyunsaturated fatty acids, the PUFAs, aka omega threes and omega sixes. Obviously, this one’s a bit more controversial as he highlights some potential downsides of omega three fatty acids. The dominant fats in fish oil and algae oil and other so called heart healthy oils. While they are essential fatty acids, meaning you need to have some of them in your diet because your body does not produce them, and, technically, you would die without essential fatty acids, the actual amount of omega threes and omega six fatty acids you need to live is negligible. We’re talking in the milligram ranges. Now, personally, I still get some through fish oil and real whole food sources. It’s virtually impossible to avoid.

Nick Urban [00:08:07]:
But I have all but stopped supplementing omega three for this very reason, And also because most of the supplements in the market are not very effective and often contain other things that you don’t wanna consume. And you can even tell if the product has spoiled before it arrives at your house by breaking open the fish oil capsule and tasting it. If it tastes rancid, that means you’re just putting a rancid oil in your body, and it might show up fine on your blood work. It might show that you actually improve certain biomarkers. But as we discuss in this episode with Jay, the context behind the appearance of improved biomarkers also matters a lot. For example, if your LDL goes down, that might be seen as a good thing. But if your oxidized LDL goes up, as is the case with industrial seed oils, that’s actually a worse thing because oxidized LDL has a much higher correlation with cardiovascular complications. Alright.

Nick Urban [00:09:13]:
Here’s Jay explaining the impact of PUFAs on cellular membranes and overall cellular health.

Jay Feldman [00:09:21]:
The fats that we consume get incorporated into the every cell in our bodies, And we wanna have very stable cellular structures. Right? The the walls and the the kind of separations, the the what are called membranes in the cells are all made up of fats. And the more unsaturated those fats are, the leakier they are. And, generally, leakiness is not a good thing. One place that it’s especially a problem is in the mitochondria in the engines of the cells. Basically, in order to produce energy, we create a gradient. It’s an electrochemical gradient that allows potential energy that allows us to produce ATP. You can kind of think of it like a hydroelectric dam where we pump a lot of water to one side and then push that water through one specific area that, you know, spins a wheel or turbine or something that allows for energy to be produced.

Jay Feldman [00:10:08]:
We do something very similar inside ourselves, inside our mitochondria, and the wall is made up of fats. And so whether we’re talking omega sixes or omega threes, they basically are much less stable, and they don’t provide a a very solid wall. So the more of those we consume, it’s basically like the more holes we have inside of this wall, this this dam, and the more water that leaks through that’s not actually being used to produce energy. So we lose out on a lot of potential energy in that way, not to mention that those parts of the water are also really susceptible to damage and we’re in a very highly reactive environment. And when you damage those fats, you’re not effectively producing energy. Our body’s actually or the cells will actually turn off energy production there because of how dangerous and damaging it is. It’s like turning the plant off because it’s creating a lot of smoke and exhaust and pollution, not to mention it’s it’s really dangerous. You know, it could explode or something like that.

Jay Feldman [00:10:57]:
And so that’s what our our cells will do when they’re producing a lot of reactive oxygen species and a lot of lipid peroxides, and and the presence of these very unsaturated fats increases susceptibility to that. So those are some of the biggest concerns.

Nick Urban [00:11:11]:
Okay. Now I’ve got a clip for you that’s all about an herb that our guest describes as the relaxation of alcohol, the energy of caffeine. Yet instead of hammering your liver and your stress hormones, it actually promotes natural detoxification. It balances your blood sugar. It cleans your mouth more effectively and safely than chlorhexidine. And best of all, it’s actually a plant that is highly revered in the ancient system of Ayurveda, and you can sip on it as a tea. This is from an episode titled how to use the pharmacy in your pantry, fermented foods, kombucha, tulsi, oxymels, and manuka honey. And if you wanna hear the whole thing, this was episode number one fifty five.

Dr. Marc Cohen [00:12:02]:
Tulsi is holy basil. I mean, you’re in India right now. It’s if you’re a Hindu, you generally have a tulsi plant that you worship as a dainty. It’s usually, you know, ceramic pots in the house, and tulsi is literally worshiped as a deity, and you take a leaf and and have it every day. Often, you you dip it in water, make holy water, and it’s a makes an amazing tea. It’s a it’s a form of basil, oxymosanctum, holy basil. But in the in the West, it’s not used that much, but whereas in the in India, it’s called the incomparable one or mother mother nature’s gift to humanity. It’s one of the few plants you can eat from every day.

Dr. Marc Cohen [00:12:38]:
If you you I grow toasted bushes outside, but you can literally eat a few leaves every day, and the plants will stay healthy and and keep, you know, growing and producing. The flowers themselves are really pretty. Bees love them, so they’ve always got bees around them, so it’s great for bee forage. But the plants themselves will will repel mosquitoes and fighting insects. They actually the smell will just enhance memory and cognition. If you make tea out of it and I had a PhD student spend four years researching tulsi showing that even just a single cup of tulsi tea, which I’ve got now, can improve cognitive function and reduce blood pressure and have positive effects on the whole cardiovascular system. So tulsi is we call it or I I wrote an article about a peer reviewed article that’s open source called Tulsi, a herb for all reasons, and it often gets cited. I get a citation alerts with my papers, and that’s one that gets cited a lot because, Tulsi, it controls blood sugar.

Dr. Marc Cohen [00:13:29]:
So it has all the benefits of the of sugar drinks, but it it regulates blood sugar rather than giving you sugar spikes. And we can talk I’ve got a whole well, lot we can talk about sugar spikes later if you want. I’ve got a whole poll in that discussion with sugar spikes. It gives you the alertness without the jitteriness of caffeine, and it gives you the relaxation without the depressant effects of alcohol. So if you think about modern modern beverages are sugar, caffeine, and alcohol. Every restaurant, every airplane, every hotel, you can buy sugar, caffeine, and, you know, alcohol drinks. But Tulsi has all the benefits of those three without the drawbacks. So it it’ll enhance liver detoxification instead of hammering your liver like caffeine and alcohol does.

Dr. Marc Cohen [00:14:04]:
It’s a better mouthwash than chlorhexidine. So just rinsing with Tulsi tea so you can leave it cold. You know? Often, I’ll make a hot cup of Tulsi tea before I go to bed, have some of that, I’ll leave it in the morning and just rinse with it, and you can swallow it. And so it’s a better mouthwash than chlorhexidine. You can swallow it. It enhances liver detoxification, balances blood sugar. It stimulates the immune system, so, immuno immuno stimulatory, balances blood pressure, cholesterol. It’s just got it’s like the the herb that is beyond all other herbs.

Dr. Marc Cohen [00:14:34]:
And if you think about Ayurveda, they have the biggest range of and even Indian cooking have has the biggest range of herbs and spices out of any cuisine because they have herbs from the rainforest and from the jungle and from the desert and from the mountains, and they call tulsi the incomparable one. So compared to, you know, turmeric and all these other amazing herbs, tulsi is considered, like, the ultimate herb in in Ayurvedic practice. And something you can have every day, and you can grow it yourself. And often, I’ll take cuttings and propagate them, then give them to my friends. It’s a gift that keeps on giving, because the flowers are beautiful, but then it’ll sprout, and you can keep growing it. So it’s Tulsi is fantastic like that. So you can give it away, and you still get to keep it. And then if your tolpsy plant is dying, you go to your friends, hey.

Dr. Marc Cohen [00:15:16]:
Could I that cutting I gave you? Could I get a cutting back? That’s happened to me because it doesn’t like frost. So I often you know, sometimes I’ve gone away overseas over the winter, and the frost has killed my tolpsy plants. I’ve got cuttings back. So tolsey is a amazing herb.

Nick Urban [00:15:28]:
It’s 2025, and you’ve surely heard about ice baths. And the benefits of cold plunging ranging from increasing levels of cold shock proteins and heat shock proteins, yes, Heat shock proteins also for longevity, the 250% increase in dopamine levels, the anti inflammatory benefits, perhaps the upregulation of brown fat leading to reduced visceral fat or the fat around your organs. But the real reason that a lot of Olympians and professional athletes use it actually has nothing to do with any of these. For more on this, you can check out episode number one fifty four on contrast therapy using hot and cold baths, ice plunges, saunas, and breath work for peak performance.

Dr. Marc Cohen [00:16:17]:
I had another PhD student who’s, she’s amazing. Lauren Burn. She she won the gold medal for taekwondo at the Sydney Olympics, and she’s in the in Australian Sports Hall of Fame. So she’s a super peak performer. And her PhD was interviewing people who had won multiple world championships. So they’ve been the world champion in their sport for multiple years just to be on her interview list. And she asked them, you know, what do you attribute your success to? How do you stay at the top of the world in your sport for multiple years? And, I mean, she she published a whole PhD on this, and she’s published that. We’ve we’ve done a couple of academic papers on it.

Dr. Marc Cohen [00:16:49]:
And some of the things that, came up, mindset was the most important. One of the things that that hadn’t been that well talked about in the literature was social connection, having a friendship group who appreciate you for who you are, not because you’re a winner or a loser or whatever. But the thing that the all the athletes did was ice bathing, and they said that they were introduced to ice bathing for recovery practices for training, but they kept on doing it for the mental health benefits that it gave them. And they said, you know, we didn’t wanna you know, no one wants to get into an ice bath, but when you’re doing when you’re in an ice bath, it brings you into the present moment. You’re not thinking about the competition or what happened yesterday or cursing yourself and not doing better. You’re just creating a discipline of doing something that you didn’t wanna do and realizing you can do it. And they all continued the ice bathing for the mental health benefits. And and now we know that there’s there’s research on depression with, cold water swimming and and ice bathing, for example, but there there are mental health benefits that I think are quite underrated.

Dr. Marc Cohen [00:17:47]:
A lot of people talk about ice bathing for the, you know, the physical benefits and and the mental health and and just the fact that you can force yourself to do something that you didn’t really wanna do and get a benefit from this, is a really great practice. So I’d encourage people to find something you don’t like to do and practice doing it.

Nick Urban [00:18:04]:
At this point, I feel like we are really hammering the point that carbohydrates have an essential role in the human diet. I bring this up because I followed low carb and a ketogenic style because I personally followed a low carbohydrate and ketogenic ish meal template. I actually did carb back loading where I would eat all of my carbs in the evenings for the last seven or so years. And I really added a lot more carbohydrates into my diet last year in 2024 and felt a lot better. I felt more comfortable doing this after I read a couple of Joel Green’s books on his immune centric approach to health. If you find the world of nutrition complicated and confusing, I highly suggest you check out the full episode I recorded with Joel, which was number one sixty seven. In it, you’ll also hear a very compelling case that he makes arguing for both arguing for and against both meat and plants. Essentially, he advocates an omnivorous diet.

Nick Urban [00:19:10]:
Alright. Enjoy this clip with Joel.

Speaker C [00:19:12]:
One of the things I hear in the low carb carnivore side often, all the time in comments actually, is that there are no such thing as essential carbohydrates. And, yes, there are essential fats. There are essential amino acids, but no essential carbs. Can you explain why looking at it through that lens is inadequate and what the how the body has to compensate and throw other systems out of balance if you just completely cut out and neglect what what you call it one guild from the diet completely?

Joel Greene [00:19:42]:
Yeah. That’s that’s twenty years ago nutrition. I mean, that’s that I I I sat through a seminar in 02/2006 with, with Udo of Udo’s Oil who gave that argument. And, you know, he was carbs around essential. You know, he was given that whole thing. And a real nice guy. We’re really knowledgeable guy. Here’s the problem with that argument.

Joel Greene [00:19:59]:
We can reverse engineer the the mechanisms of real and lasting health. And top of the list is insulin function. Insulin must operate, efficiently. And when you break that down and you reverse engineer, well, what do you need to get that? You have to stimulate all the hormones involved. It’s not just insulin. It’s adiponectin. It’s glucagon. It’s, GLP, GIP, you know, adiponectin.

Joel Greene [00:20:21]:
So there there’s a family, but then it’s also the microbiome. It’s not just those hormones. So optimal insulin function rests on an optimized microbiome. And along with that is the gut immune access. The gut immune access is also essential for real and lasting health. So, so if what you’re after is not a fad, is not some short term improvement, but, but something true and real, then you have to keep the long term into account. And now if we reverse engineer, how are we going to get there? Two things show up. You have to have the Fiddle bacteria in the picture.

Joel Greene [00:20:51]:
Must have, it’s a must have mechanism because the Fiddle bacteria sort of acts as the central central gatekeeper in the gut immune access. You have to have that. How do you get it? Carbs. The way to get it, like, like it provable. Long term carnivore diets will suppress the fetal bacteria. For that reason alone, that reason alone, they they disqualify themselves from being the thing, the thing that’s gonna give real and lasting help because you suppress bifidobacteria. But the other thing too is optimal insulin function and and the two work together. And so it’s it’s very complex, but, you know, through a number of mechanisms, through bile acid secretion and the impact of the gut immune access on x receptors in the liver.

Joel Greene [00:21:31]:
There’s a there’s a pathway which is, the farinoid receptor and liver x receptors, and that pathway dovetails with stress hormones like FGF fifteen and nineteen. It governs a lot of things in the liver, and it’s driven by ratios of things like the bifidobacteria in the gut, which control bile acids. Optimal insulin function requires kind of this this picture in the microbiome. That’s true for just about all humans. Now you can you can make an isolated case. That’s not true for the Hasdah. However, that’s not to say that other bacteria that we haven’t categorized aren’t picking up slack to perform the same thing. But, basically, long story short, if we’re gonna reverse engineer how to get real and lasting health, we have to reverse engineer how to build optimal levels of the gut immune access, which means bifidobacteria, which means the best way to get that is through carbs.

Joel Greene [00:22:20]:
And so while you can make an old school case to say carbs are not essential in an updated understanding of real and lasting health, you can make a very good case. Actually, they’re absolutely essential to feed the taxa that are essential in the gut. You can’t feed them otherwise. Not only that, optimal insulin function requires carbs. What you see over and over and over is people who eliminate carbs from the diet. Eventually, what happens is they get an improvement short term, but long term, they get insulin resistant, and their fasting insulin goes high.

Nick Urban [00:22:49]:
Okay. Arthritis is on the rise. And if you personally have it or you know someone that does, this could make a big difference in the way you approach it going forward. In episode number one forty one, doctor Elizabeth Yirth explains a different paradigm highlighting how arthritis is not just a wear and tear issue.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth [00:23:12]:
So what we learned is that osteoarthritis or wear and tear of joints is not a wear and tear disease like everybody will tell you. And it’s the same thing that you’re addressing with all these other processes that you’re talking about. How do we protect the brain? How do we protect our hearts? How do we protect our muscles? This is all systemic processes that we have to get under control. And that some of us are genetically inclined, unfortunately, that when we have an injury, that it will stir off this inflammatory cascade that doesn’t shut off normally. It sort of stays up. So perfect health, perfect case, everything’s good. You’ve got perfect genetics. You’re eating perfectly.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth [00:23:47]:
Your your health is perfect. You’re exercising perfectly. You hurt yourself, and we see this cascade of inflammation. Right? That’s supposed to happen, but that should last a few days. And then your body comes in and starts promoting anti inflammatory things. What we know is in people who have injuries, a lot of times, instead of that anti inflammatory stage happening, the inflammatory stage just stays. And it stays and it stays and it stays. And that’s what progresses these joints after an injury into developing osteoarthritis and that progressive osteoarthritis.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth [00:24:17]:
And it’s why really and such a controversial topic because even in the functional medicine world, I see my colleagues not really paying attention to joints. Right? They they’re like, well, you should just go see the orthopedist about your joints, and they’ll they’ll address everything else. This is a systemic issue. Let’s get you healthy, but they won’t really, look at joints that way. And, you know, and so I think we have to really start teaching that this is a pathologic process even when all factors are equated for, like age and exercise level and diet and whether you’re a smoker or not. If you have osteoarthritis, you have a five time higher likelihood of cardiovascular disease. So we know that this is a systemic disease process going on. And it’s why if you replace a hip, all is not well.

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth [00:25:00]:
Right? Sometimes you need to replace a hip. It’s just too far gone. But what happens next? That person two years now who needs their next hip replaced and year after that needs their knee replaced, right, because we have not treated the systemic disease process. So that’s really been one of my goals is because I’m so I’m coming from this from a such a weird world of orthopedics to functional medicine or health focused medicine. You know, it’s not what orthopedic doctors wanna hear. There’s a whole lot of money in replacing the hip. So the fact that you can avoid it is not really a well, well liked thought among the medical community.

Nick Urban [00:25:32]:
Since recording this next interview that I’m about to play a clip from for you, I began introducing legumes into almost all of my meals. You’re about to find out why. It’s also one of the most compelling and heartbreaking stories that you’ll hear, but luckily, there’s a positive ending. You can find the full episode for this one at mindbodypeak.com/130eight. And as a quick disclaimer, if you have SIBO or major gut issues, I recommend against immediately incorporating a bunch of complex carbohydrates, such as legumes, until you get your gut health under control. Only then will it provide the protective butyrate and short chain fatty acid production and other things that have cemented fiber and the other protective substances that have earned fiber’s reputation as a super protector amongst nutritionists and longevity researchers.

Karen Hurd [00:26:31]:
I’m sure people are gonna be curious. How did you get so involved in fiber, in legumes?

Karen Hurd [00:26:38]:
It was to save my little girl’s life. So I had 18 old, and then I had two other children just slightly older. I had three children, five and under. And we moved into a home where they had just put down a new to the home carpet, although this carpet had been stored in man’s garage for several years. Well, it was infested with carpet beetles, which we didn’t know because they have to be in the warm to be able to hatch out. Anyway, they hatched out all the larvae hatch into the little adult. They they go through these stages. Anyway, they came out as carpet beetles.

Karen Hurd [00:27:06]:
We had carpet beetles, not 10, not a hundred, not a thousand. We had hundreds of thousands, millions of carpet beetles everywhere because they put the carpet throughout the entire house. You open the sock drawer, they were running out of sock drawer. You open the kitchen door of the the silverware. Everywhere they were everywhere. We could not vacuum them up quick enough. You couldn’t smash them, hit them. There it there were just they were we were overwhelmed.

Karen Hurd [00:27:27]:
And so, we called the exterminator, and he came out and sprayed for them. It killed them all. And it also caused us all to be very sick, and my 18 old went into grand mal seizures. And so we, of course, rushed her into the hospital, and it was they said, no. This had nothing. I said, they just sprayed our house for blood. They sprayed every square inch of the carpet. I think it has something to do with that.

Karen Hurd [00:27:47]:
And I have some military training. I was in United States Army. I knew that this was a nerve agent and it you know, and that this could be a biological response to the this particular nerve agent that they put on the carpet. And they said, no. No. No. No. No.

Karen Hurd [00:28:00]:
No. No. No. She’d have to drink the, you know, the it was Ders Van Tui. She’d have to drink it. They sprayed it on the carpet. This couldn’t happen. I said, we’re all sick.

Karen Hurd [00:28:08]:
I was carrying a baby at that time. I began to miscarry that baby, and I did end up miscarrying that baby. It was a very horrific time. So they sent

Dr. Elizabeth Yurth [00:28:15]:
us back home, said, look. She has double pneumonia.

Karen Hurd [00:28:16]:
I said, but if she was poisoned with a nerve agent, that’s how they die with double pneumonia. Their lungs fill with fluid. They said, no. You’re wrong. And they sent us back home, and I went back home. Now she’s unloading doses of phenobarbital. And then she started with the same symptoms, which I trained all my troops on. This is what you need to look for for nerve agent poisoning, pinpoint eyeballs, slight cough, diarrhea.

Karen Hurd [00:28:36]:
Anyway, I said she had all those, but this time she’s on phenobarbital, and I thought she is going to die. She’s going to die if I keep her. So I walked out of that house and said I will not return till I get the bottom up. And you have to understand, we were in St. Louis Children’s Hospital where they were treating us, and they said that that I was wrong. I was barking up the wrong tree. I had nine neurologists in the same room with me sat down and said, missus Hurd, you were barking up the wrong tree. Those are exactly their words.

Karen Hurd [00:28:58]:
Missus Hurd, you were barking up the wrong tree. Your little girl was not poisoned. She has double pneumonia. She’ll have to be on phenobarbital loading doses and on it for the rest of her life. And so I said, just do a cholinesterate level. I begged them because I knew enough. I said, because of got my army training. Just do a cholinesterate level because then you can check her liver to see what the liver enzymes of cholinesterate is, and then you could tell me if she’s poisoned.

Karen Hurd [00:29:19]:
There is no need to do that. It’s a simple blood draw. It is a simple blood draw. It’s a simple test. They refused to do it. Anyway, so I went home and I came out of that house, and I said, I will never go back in that house again until we get to the bottom of it. So I called every poison control. I mean, you got a mad mama, okay, when you get a mama trying to protect her young.

Karen Hurd [00:29:37]:
You’re you’re yeah. I was on the trail. And so I finally got ahold of poison control center in Dallas. They said, well, you could talk to doctor Sheldon Wagner out in Corvallis at the university there. He knows child tox, Holly. I told him the whole story. He said, it’s absolutely probably that your daughter was poisoned. Have you had the carpet test? I said, I wanna do that, but the lab said they have to recalibrate their instruments, and it’s thousands of dollars.

Karen Hurd [00:29:57]:
My husband is a pastor of a church. We had no money. You know, I said, he said, send it to me for free. Put on a dry ice because it breaks out at this rate. I sent it to him, his lab out in Corvallis at the university. He tested it. It was 100 times the normal strength that it should have been. And he said, why hasn’t she been had a cholesterol level test? I said, because the doctors wouldn’t do give me your doctor’s name.

Karen Hurd [00:30:17]:
Within thirty minutes, the doctor was calling you and saying, would you bring Ruth in for a cholesterol level? Yes. Cholesterol level is She’d been poisoned. It was a hundred times the strength she should be. Actually, the Illinois EPA had to come out and take all of the carpet out and everything because it was so highly toxic. They had to haul it to a special waste facility, hazardous waste facility. It was so bad. But now so high have a little girl. And so now they’re all aware of the problem.

Karen Hurd [00:30:41]:
They’re testing her liver. She’s dying, and she was dying. It was apparent to me. It was apparent. All of us were very sick. By this time, I miscarried this baby, and we were all very sick. My husband and my two other little older children, but my 18 old, she was not recovering. And they test their liver enzymes inside her off the charts.

Karen Hurd [00:30:56]:
They said she is going to die, and there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a few more weeks, missus Hurd. And I said, somebody, somewhere help me. And they all I took her to specialist in Chicago. We conferred with specialist, of course, in Saint Louis. We conferred on phone with specialist in Dallas, and they all said the same prognosis. She is not going to live. This is no way her liver can detoxify from this poison.

Karen Hurd [00:31:21]:
There’s no way. And so I left Ruth. She’s just 18 old with my husband. And the other two kids, I said, I’m going to the Washington University Medical Library, and I’m going to read. Nobody has an answer, but I’m going to see if there’s any answer. And so I read, and I read about this thing called the anterohepatic recirculation, and that we could pull toxins out if we had soluble fibers. So then I made a concoction of psyllium, basically, and bing. And then she wasn’t eating at that time.

Karen Hurd [00:31:48]:
I mean, she was languishing. It was a really she was almost gone. And I would shoot it with an oral syringe and make her swallow it. You know? And she began to recover. And and she was covered with wart. She was covered with everything because every virus took a hold too. I mean, everything was shot. I mean, she was it was really bad, and she began to recover.

Karen Hurd [00:32:07]:
And in six weeks, she was completely well. And all the doctors, I mean, they were like, what happened? How could this be? And then it was in the newspapers, and then people started calling me and saying, what did you do? You saved your little girl. Same you know? And it’s like, I’m not a doctor. I’m not a nurse. You know? Hey. You know? I’m not anything. I’m just trying to save my little girl. And she, by the way, is safe.

Karen Hurd [00:32:27]:
She’s 35 years old today, and she’s married and has two little children. And so god saved her, but it was through soluble fiber. It was through these beans that people won’t eat because they’re afraid of gas, and they don’t understand. And so that’s how I got into it all.

Nick Urban [00:32:44]:
Are you experiencing any uncomfortable symptoms, debilitating symptoms, health conditions that just seem to be working against you? If so, this next clip could provide a powerful reframe that will help you discover the root cause of what’s behind those symptoms and how those symptoms are actually benefiting your biology in some way. Not only that, but this alternative perspective can help you address the root cause so that you no longer have those symptoms. The system that we’re diving into today is called German new medicine. And if you wanna learn more about it, you can check out episode number 148 with doctor Melissa Sell.

Dr. Melissa Sell [00:33:30]:
He discovered this map that’s always existed for how our tissues adapt to shocking circumstances. And so the main difference, when you really start to understand the implications for what he discovered is that cancer, you know, I used to think that cancer was a mistake, something going wrong in the body. Either you, you know, your diet was bad, your immune system was low, you got exposed to something, you know, it destroyed your, you know, damaged your genes in some way, your genes now, or, you know, doing things they shouldn’t be doing. And that cancer is this like end result mistake. But what Doctor. Hummer found is it’s actually a functional, meaningful adaptation. That’s there for a specific biological purpose, depending on the nature of the type of shot that you had. You know, so for him, he lost his son, you know, so his psyche.

Dr. Melissa Sell [00:34:24]:
So this is, you know, the psyche is the subconscious mind. It’s the part of your body that built your body, that runs your body. It’s not your conscious mind. That’s thinking and, you know, using words, this beyond language, this is primal, adaptive consciousness that is keeping you alive in every moment. And so the psyche perceives everything that’s going on. And if something in your environment is shocking to you, if you weren’t expecting it, if it was highly acute, if you were caught on the wrong foot, The biology has the capacity to activate a significant biological special program. And so basically what this is, it’s, you know, I think of it in this, in this kind of simplistic way of like, okay, I have a shock. And then depending on the type of shock, my brain has like a panel of buttons and it can activate a certain when a certain button is pressed, depending again, what is needed for that shock.

Dr. Melissa Sell [00:35:21]:
So do I need more oxygen in my blood? Do I need more, bile in my digestive tract? Do I need, more digestive juices in my colon? Do I you know, what do I need in that moment in order to help me better survive this thing that I’m dealing with? Do I need to enhance my ovaries? Do I need to enhance the, you know, make my lymph nodes stronger and more robust? And so the psyche knows the subconscious mind that built your body. Remember this part of you built you, you didn’t build your body, your subconscious mind did. And so that part knows exactly what is needed in that moment in order for you to survive. And so there’s an impact in the brain. So that’s that kind of button in the brain. We activate that and it enacts a cascade of changes at the tissue level. And so at the tissue level, we can grow extra cells. We can erode cells, or we can have a functional change in what that, organ or tissue does.

Dr. Melissa Sell [00:36:19]:
And it’s kind of like we have, we can become a transformer, you know? So if you need more digestive juices, the big picture thing is Doctor. Hamer at first thought that this was just for cancer, testicular cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, but he found that these laws and the way the tissues operate, it’s for everything from, a pimple to a cold sore to an earring to a sty in your eye. Every single time there is something that’s happening in the body, with the exception of injury, poisoning, and malnutrition. And so those are the three exceptions.

Nick Urban [00:36:53]:
Do you view everything as a problem? Perhaps your stress is your advantage propelling you forward, helping you get stuff done. Our guest in this next clip explains how you can use the sources of stress in your life to go inward and figure out what is causing that stress and how to interrupt those patterns that don’t serve you the easy way. For the full interview, check out episode number one seventy four with Christopher Mayer.

Christopher Maher [00:37:23]:
I know your negative stress management tools are really, really, really intense, and you’ve had some level of traumatic brain injury, which means you’ve hit your skull into something really, really hard. And so the first step is to get people out of that fight or flight response and deregulate them into a parasympathetic response. So now they’re moving through the world, seeing the world for what’s actually going on as opposed to viewing the world from a fear based position. Because when you’re in a parasympathetic state, you see everything is wonderful. When you’re in sympathetic high state of response, you see everything is a problem that needs a solution. You know, stress is valuable. Stress is important as long as it gets you to take heartfelt action to your own benefit. But if you’re outside of the ability to be able to take heartfelt action to your own benefit, this stress that you’re experiencing is absolutely useless.

Christopher Maher [00:38:23]:
So use your stress, use your addictions as motivators or inspirers to get you to go, woah. Why do I really drink caffeine? Why am I really smoking? Why am I really hyped up on this marijuana? Why do I need three or four bowls just to be able to go to work? Okay? Why do I need to be on these pharmaceuticals? Like, you’ve gotta be asking yourself, what’s going on inside of you that you’re taking this easy street? Look. Everyone pays the piper at the end of the day. So if you’re on those substances, well, guess what happens? You end up with a horrible death. Right? Anyone who’s listened to call, do yourself a favor. Go down to the local nursing home. Right? And if that’s what you want for your elderly life, keep doing what you’re doing. But if what you want is an opportunity to ascend when you feel like you’re complete in this life and you wanna be absolutely physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually present through the entirety of your life, then you’ve got to look at what you’re putting in your body and what’s in the way of you taking harmful action to your own benefit because there’s something in the way.

Christopher Maher [00:39:38]:
And, look, maybe this is just an ancestral pattern, but you gotta interrupt the pattern. And as soon as you interrupt that pattern, guess what? A whole new world opens up to your possibilities. Instead of anxiety, you got excitement. Instead of anger, frustration, agitation, irritation, you got love and care and kindness and compassion. Instead of fear, you got confidence. Okay? You got courage.

Nick Urban [00:40:05]:
I used to think of personality, my own personality included as something that was fixed, and then I noticed that some little shifts here and there changed who I was fundamentally. How often when you’re working with someone do you see an anatomical cause such as a longer leg as a reason that these that their stress baseline is higher or they’re having other dysfunctions that are holding back who they wanna show up as?

Christopher Maher [00:40:34]:
Every single time. The moment you get a now I have a five day process that I take people through. Right? They’re seeing me twice a day. I’m getting to in into everything. I’m getting to their fascia. I’m getting to their muscles. I’m getting to their emotionality. I’m getting to their psychology.

Christopher Maher [00:40:47]:
I’m getting to their energy. I’m getting to their moods. I’m getting into every part of them or we’re just stripping things away. Right? Well and I tell them always on the first day, I go, look. Just so you know, you’re never gonna be able to go back to the person that you were because we’re going to be creating such a successful pattern interrupt that there’s no road back. So are you sure this is what you really wanna do? Because you’re gonna be happier. You’re gonna be more present. You’re gonna be more loving.

Christopher Maher [00:41:15]:
Your body’s gonna feel better. You’re gonna sleep better. Your life is gonna make sense. You’re gonna forgive your parents. You and your husband are gonna be able to move into more of a functional relationship. You’re gonna get along better. Like, is this what you really want? Because you got the opposite of this now. And then once we go in and we start making those shifts, then everything in the world changes because because they’re different, everyone in the world treats them different.

Nick Urban [00:41:39]:
For this last clip, it’s a bit longer than the others simply because I think it’s some of the most important information you can have around the supplements and substances worth prioritizing. If you followed my work for a long time, you know that this is one of my foundational supplements that virtually everyone needs more of. This clip comes from an episode titled rediscovering ORMIS, quote, black gold, marine plasma, and powerful ancient substances. For your reference, it was episode number 150 with David Reid if you wanna

Speaker C [00:42:15]:
check it out. Why are you so into minerals?

David Reid [00:42:18]:
Well, I guess from my journey of, deep dragging from the corporate world and going back into nature, I really connected deeply with the elements and with the elements. I mean, predominantly the sun and, and water and the earth, being the minerals and really the, the sun and the, and the water, being the ocean is the parents of the minerals, you know, salt, as an example, there’s 12 main salts and salt really is crystallized light, or it’s like being dehydrated by the sun and comes from the ocean. So when I say the sun and the ocean are really the parents of salts and minerals, that’s, that’s why I say that. And so the minerals are really the building blocks of the physical world, the entire material world and an extension of that is life and biology. So minerals and everything on the periodic table is, are the building blocks of, life and biology. And that is another way of saying that is that that’s the elements or or the minerals. And so many of those minerals are no longer in our food because they’re no longer in our soils anymore. So it’s really important that we supplement those because if we’re depleted in our mineral composition or those building blocks, there’s gonna be some aspect of our expression, which is compromised.

David Reid [00:44:01]:
And that can obviously lead to, you know, disharmony in, in the body. There was actually a Nobel prize winner last century, Linus Pauling. And he famously claimed that, lack of minerals in the body can be traced back to all, all disease in the body. So again, without those building blocks, because all the other nutrients are made from those too. Like all your vitamins, all your amino acids, all your proteins, they’re all made from those building blocks. So

Speaker C [00:44:37]:
Can you elaborate on that a little bit more? I think that’s an underlooked role and reason that minerals are so important. Because, like, when we talk about nutrients that are essential for the body, it’s like, okay. We need our proteins, which are really just amino acids. Then we need our vitamins and then fish oil and all these things. And sometimes minerals are like an afterthought. They come after vitamins and minerals, but you just said that they are the building blocks for so much else in the body.

David Reid [00:45:01]:
Yeah. So if we were to go to, you know, the first principles thinking has become like a, a trend in the last decade. And some of our great leaders and entrepreneurs think first principles with, with builders like an Elon Musk, when it comes to a Tesla factory or, or just in his way of thinking, right? If we were to go to first principles of, of nutrition, what we would find is atoms. And what atoms are is minerals or elements on the periodic table. Like the only difference between one element and another element is the amount of protons and electrons in the atom. So I guess we go from the subatomic world into the atomic world. And first principles of nutrition is all of those mineral expressions on the periodic table. And that’s what we’re talking about here.

David Reid [00:45:53]:
It’s the building blocks for everything else. So to your point, your proteins, your vitamins, your fats, anything you can think of is made from those building blocks. It’s almost like Tetris, right? Like those building blocks are there and you need a certain combination of those building blocks or those Tetris blocks to produce a vitamin or to produce a, a molecule, if you will. So molecules are in combinations of the building blocks. And I mean, it’s also an honor to the intelligence of the body, which we believe is the most intelligent technology in the universe. So if we give the body access to those building blocks, it’s intelligent enough to take what it needs and actually produce a lot of those compounds and molecules. Our current conditioning doesn’t necessarily allow for that. We still need proteins, vitamins, like science says that we can’t produce vitamins internally, but new science is showing that we absolutely can.

David Reid [00:47:06]:
Once we have access to these building blocks, our body can produce them internally. So, our biological systems are changing along with everything else on the planet right now. And the most like, the the greatest honor we can give our body from a nutritional perspective is to give it the minerals because it is the building blocks of everything else.

Speaker C [00:47:28]:
You mentioned Linus Pauling earlier, and I think most people know of him, if they know of him as the vitamin c guy because that’s what I knew him as. Then I was writing a post on minerals and trace minerals, and I came across that exact same quote that you just mentioned that he viewed mineral deficiency as a root cause of all disease. And why don’t we know these types of things? Like, how come so many times throughout history, different scientists and researchers have emphasized the importance of minerals and remineralization of our bodies, yet it’s still an afterthought.

Dr. Marc Cohen [00:48:06]:
Yeah. I think it a a lot of

David Reid [00:48:07]:
it’s just science and marketing. We’ve been so focused, like you said, on proteins, amino acids, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins without actually thinking, what are they made from? Like, what’s the source of those? And I guess minerals are so abundant and they’re so available that it’s not it from a marketing perspective. It’s not the best thing to be, sharing with people, right? Like you can go for a swim in the ocean and access a lot of the minerals for free that you can otherwise purchase. So, I think there’s, I think there’s multiple layers, to the science. I mean, there was another beautiful, doctor last century, Renee Quintin, who, the, the, the Quintin ocean plasma is, is kind of, birthed from his research. And he was curing tens of thousands of people throughout Egypt and France simply with giving them 10 mils of ocean water several times a day, which is, which is amazing. And it totally makes sense because they’re getting all of that, all of those minerals that they require again. And that’s a big part of what we do at Manor as well is is have access to, those minerals from the plant world and the ocean world.

David Reid [00:49:40]:
And that’s why we’re so passionate about it. It is, it is such a, great opportunity for the human body at the moment to come back online, recognizing that we’re giving those minerals back to the body physically, but we’re also electromagnetic beings. So, you know, a huge part of minerals is conductivity. It’s the old science experiment that most of us did at school, right? If we have distilled water and put, two, a battery in there and a light bulb, there’s no charge. The light bulb won’t turn on. But as soon as we add minerals, the light bulb turns on because there’s conductivity in the water. So our body being 99% water by molecular count. And a lot of people are now aware that, you know, to drink a lot of water each day and stay hydrated.

David Reid [00:50:35]:
But the big missing link again is we’re not water beings we’re salt water beings. So it’s so important. And all of our functions, all of our cellular functions are based around mineral charge and cell membrane potential. It’s really, really important that we not just stay hydrated, but we also stay mineralized.

Speaker C [00:50:54]:
Yeah. It’s funny you mentioned Renee Quintan too because he was the one who made me realize there’s more to minerals than meets the eye. Didn’t he have some kind of experiment or practice he did during one of the world wars where he would actually transfuse soldiers when they ran out of blood with minerals, and they did just fine.

David Reid [00:51:16]:
Yeah. There’s a beautiful website set up almost in, reverence of Renee and several other doctors that have done amazing things with ocean water or ocean plasma, and it’s simply called oceanplasma.org. It’s a great, great website. It shows dozens of clinical studies.

Nick Urban [00:51:35]:
Okay. Well, there you have it. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I appreciate your time, your energy, and I would love to know what I missed. Which moment from Mindbody Peak Performance this year was your favorite? Leave a comment below, and I look forward to connecting with you. See you in the next one. Thank you for tuning in to this episode. Head over to Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating.

Nick Urban [00:52:04]:
Every review helps me bring you thought provoking guests. As always, you can find the show notes for this one at mindbodypeak.comslash, and then the number of the episode. There, you can also chat with other peak performers or connect with me directly. The information depicted in this podcast is for information purposes only. Please consult your primary health care professional before making any lifestyle changes.