Podcasts about pau d'arco

We're switching up the roles on today's pod folks! Our SuperFeast mamma and papa, Tahnee and Mason, take the guest seat as Oni Blecher from the Pregnancy, Birth and Beyond podcast takes the mic to explore reproductive health, the family culture and pregnancy preparation with our fearless leaders. Mason and Tahnee absolutely loved offering their insights in this beautiful conversation, we just had to share it with ya'll. Mason and Tahnee explore: Reproductive health from the Taoist perspective. Reproductive health as an equal responsibility between BOTH the male and female. Preconception planning. Health sovereignty and personal culture. Tips on how to cleanse and prepare the body for conception. The tonic herbs, medicinal mushroom and minerals suitable for preconception. Developing personal and family culture, inviting in sustainable practices that can be carried forward long-term over the lifespan. Children's immune health.   Who are Mason Taylor and Tahnee McCrossin? Mason Taylor: Mason’s energy and intent for a long and happy life is infectious. A health educator at heart, he continues to pioneer the way for potent health and a robust personal practice. An avid sharer, connector, inspirer and philosophiser, Mason wakes up with a smile on his face, knowing that tonic herbs are changing lives. Mason is also the SuperFeast founder, daddy to Aiya and partner to Tahnee (General Manager at SuperFeast). Tahnee McCrossin: Tahnee is a self proclaimed nerd, with a love of the human body, it’s language and its stories. A cup of tonic tea and a human interaction with Tahnee is a gift! A beautiful Yin Yoga teacher and Chi Ne Tsang practitioner, Tahnee loves going head first into the realms of tradition, yogic philosophy, the organ systems, herbalism and hard-hitting research. Tahnee is the General Manager at SuperFeast, mumma to reishi-baby Aiya and partner to Mason (founder of SuperFeast).   Resources: Nourishing Her Yin Event Video The Brighton Baby book Pregnancy Preparation SuperFeast Podcast Episode Pregnancy Health SuperFeast Podcast Episode   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Oni:   (00:00) I'm going to be interviewing Mason and Tahnee of SuperFeast, an ever-growing health initiative based around a variation of adaptogens, medicinal mushrooms, and blends that allow support for the body to return to harmony and thrive. The SuperFeast vision looks at the individual in regards to understanding best practice for educating and spreading the wisdoms of ancient traditions and medicines. Mason and Tahnee have also recently started their own journey in parenthood.   Oni:  (00:25) Look forward to chatting to this synergistic couple for their individual and collective knowledge on attitudes towards health, but particularly preconception health, reproductive health, and looking at the individual, and how social and cultural pressures influence our health-related decision-making processes. We are also excited to hear about their experiences in parenthood and how this new role for them has influenced their own attitudes toward everything in their life. Welcome.   Tahnee:  (00:52) Thanks for having us.   Mason:   (00:53) Thank you.   Oni:  (00:53) Yay. It's so nice to have both of you here. I know that you are not strangers to vocally sharing your wisdoms. You host talks and also have your podcast, and blog-related information. But there's thousands of things I could ask you. I'll have to narrow it down today.   Oni:  (01:11) Well, I want to start with reproductive health and it's such a huge topic, particularly with rising dysfunction around reproductive health. It sounds basic, but what is reproductive health to both of you, or either of you?   Mason:  (01:25) Pretty huge topic. Tahns and I, we've been working together about four years now. I tapped out of being a yoga teacher early on, but Tahnee, being a yoga teacher, her work went into Taoism and my work primarily being in Taoist Tonic herbalism. There's where we connected in our philosophy when it came to reproductive health. In the context of Taoist Tonic Herbs and Taoism in general, there's Three Treasures within the body that we're wanting to tonify through our everyday life, through our lifestyle and through our herbs, Jing, Qi, Shen.   Mason:  (01:56) And we can go a little bit more into those, but that baseline... Think about the analogy of a candle. Jing is like the wax of your candle, and that's associated with your physicality, your skeletal system, but also your reproductive health. And in that reproductive health association, you're associating with the ability to reproduce cells, and heal tissue and heal from trauma, so on and so forth.   Mason:  (02:17) And so, when we're talking about reproductive health, it's not something isolated. It's part of something that's going to be... Yes, it can be sexual reproductive health, but it's also going to spill over into your ability to actually stay physically robust within your foundations up until 80, 90, 100 years old. So, you don't get into that, burn through your telomeres, and your cells lack the ability to reproduce cells, and enter into that death cycle, really nice and early.   Mason:  (02:41) That's where we talk about when you're in your 20s and 30s, and have low reproductive health, yes, you can just be like, okay, well I can deal with that later. I don't want to get pregnant right now. But when you're associating with it, being one of your reproductive health, being associated with one of your treasures, and one of the ideas, in life in general, but we connected from that Taoist philosophy is guarding your Treasures and tonifying, building your treasures.   Mason:  (03:03) You can see that you can't, like in the West, compartmentalise reproductive health and be like, that's fine, don't really need that now anyway, or it's not really that important. Whereas we're like, it's one of the most important things because if the wax of your candle starts... If you're leaking your Jing, and so, therefore, you're not building any wax. You're burning through it faster than you... Than is responsible, or sustainable for your lifestyle. And then, we know, you see that Western flow where people go in lifestyle, you're heading down a route you're getting more reliant on external institutions, drugs, surgeries, that kind of thing.   Mason:  (03:36) Where the path that we like, is one of health sovereignty. It's a longterm conversation. Whereas you take a little bit more responsibility for that, including your reproductive health. That's associated with your Jing, your genetic potential, your lower back strength, your bone strength, your capacity maintain bone marrow, so on and so forth. And so, reproductive health is just a part of who you are.   Tahnee:  (03:58) And building on that. If you think about every cell in the body needing to reproduce multiple times a day, sometimes multiple times a minute or a second. That's what the Taoists identified as one of the roles of Jing, was the reproductive health of the entire body.   Tahnee:  (04:11) So, we really look at this ability to produce healthy cells. This ability to produce a healthy reproductive cell in your body, so an egg or a sperm. These are things that are essential markers of health. So we look at it as like a report card. It's like, if you don't have a great sperm count, if you aren't having a healthy menstrual cycle with no pain and if you're not ovulating and these things, then you're actually... There's something going on that you need to have a look at. And we look at that as in a really holistic way.   Tahnee:  (04:38) It's not that necessarily there's something wrong with you in inverted comma's but it's like that would be a sign or call. From the body that that is something that needs to be addressed and we have such a high stress lifestyle, such a high stress culture. Women are given hormonal birth control very young, men are exercising a lot these days. We've got this culture of activity and athleticism, which we didn't really have historically. If you look back until around the sort of 70s and 80s that we first started to get this physical culture come through and the impact that has on people's bodies when they're working out all the time. It's interesting stuff to have a look at. So a lot of the time we see people that are on really strict diets, they end up with reproductive issues or people that are overworking their bodies and their physiology and they tend to be the ones that maybe in their 20's like Mase said, they'll get away with it because they still have quite a lot of energy.   Tahnee:  (05:30) They can drink the coffee and take the supplements and do the things, but as they slide into the 30's and 40's it starts to catch up and a lot of the time people choose to have children a lot later as well. So you can end up in your 30's and 40's with out anything left in the bank to actually carry a healthy pregnancy through. I study a lot with my acupuncturist who work on how to help people with their fertility journeys and it's not just women, it's the men as well. And I think really tend to focus on women when we talk about reproductive health. But that's something I'm quite passionate about. The men have to take responsibility too. And the amount of times I've spoken to women who are doing the cleanses and taking the herbs and eating all the right foods and their partners are like, I don't want a bar of it.   Tahnee:  (06:13) I think as, as a culture, if we could start to expand the conversation to say, look, reproductive health is everyone's responsibility and if we want a healthy species, if we want to really be the most amazing potentiated humans as we grow and develop, which is what our culture really needs, especially with all the stuff going on politically and socially at the moment. It's on us to create healthy children and that's where this passion for preconception really comes through with us as well. Because we're not just talking about reproductive health as having healthy periods and stuff, it's also this responsibility that if you do choose to have children that you are giving them the best possible start.   Mason:  (06:48) There's a lot to that in terms of men being able to just go bypass going, I'll support you by getting healthy as well. And I'm not one for extremism, so if you're like a lot of the people are like right "I'm going to start preparing for pregnancy" and all of a sudden it becomes this obsession where anything you deem subconsciously as unhealthy, you need to cut out and rararara. But it's just about the direction that you want to go and you want to go into a direction of genetic potential. One that's not leaking Jing, and so men, when we say pregnancy preparation, we don't need to be obsessive, we need to realize that it isn't just like, oh this is just going to be for support. You can get your sperm health rocking and the unification of the parent's Jing is what's going to have a huge contribution basically to the primordial gene of that kid. And so the foundation of that kid.   Tahnee:  (07:32) It's their inheritance. One of the great analogies of Chinese Medicine with this is you might inherit a great car from your parents or you might inherit a bomb. And so we want to try and give them...   Mason:  (07:45) I think the woman has a great responsibility in terms of like housing,an environment where the liver is rocking and so you can handle hormonal fluctuations and you're going to be processing toxicity. You've got a microbiota that's actually going to be... That's another inheritance of the child, making sure that the microbiome is absolutely rocking so your passing that onto the child. Yes, a lot's on the woman but theres lots on the man as well. And you want to be healthy if you're going to be surviving and thriving through those initial years as well.   Oni:  (08:08) What a great a conversation to have with both of you. I wish that you conceived me, in a way. Because I'm sure you probably really looked after yourself.   Tahnee:  (08:19) We're focusing on reproductive and preconception health, but also the wider ideologies around health and how we need to really focus on our individual physiologies and biologies before we start applying these grand perspectives of what people should do or what we should do, what we shouldn't do, and looking at reproductive health as reproducing yourself as the best selves with your cells as time goes on throughout your whole life.   Oni:  (08:46) What do you advise when people are thinking about preconception health regardless if they're soon to conceive?   Tahnee:  (08:54) We typically do hear from a lot of people who are in the early stages of starting to think about a family for the first time. And I think a lot of the time people don't give themselves enough time, so they sort of think, oh, I've met someone and I want to have a baby. And obviously life happens and sometimes we just get pregnant. These kinds of things. And I don't think we should ever be ashamed of ourselves, I've heard from people, they're like, oh my gosh, I didn't do any cleansing before I conceived. And it's like, well that's not always necessary. We definitely, for ourselves, talked a lot about this idea of conscious conception and trying to at least prepare our bodies in a way that they were... Be like having guests over. You want to like get the house looking good and tidy it up and all that thing.   Tahnee:  (09:35) And I think it's the same with... That's how I thought about it with getting pregnant, having my daughter living inside of my body, I wanted to be in a quite a good state of health for that process. And obviously Mason was aware of his roles in that as well. So we worked with a book called the Brighton Baby, which is written by a naturopathic doctor in the States and he outlines this like two year plan, which is really great. So for anyone who's a little bit older and probably closer to having children, that would be something I'd recommend getting a hold of because it really does outline quite comprehensively all these different ways in which you can prepare your body and different tests you can have to ensure you don't have really high heavy metals and these kinds of things because children do take that stuff from our bodies.   Tahnee:  (10:16) So the things that you know you can do just to as a precaution, and that's something we've seen, when you look at the prevalence of things like ADHD and autism and these kinds of things, it's like, well, is this coming from this accumulation of these kind of toxins in the diet? Which is possible because we're eating more of these foods and exposing ourselves to more of these things. So we just think, hedge your bets, you're better off starting, in the best place possible. And then also we think if you're a bit younger you can start to really... Because a woman start to get really in tune with your cycle and start to be more conscious of your period isn't this curse. It's this actual really epic thing that happens in your body every month that has an emotional and spiritual component as well as a physical component. And as men to learn to be more respectful of that flow in women's lives and to really take the time to understand what's going on.   Tahnee:  (11:07) We have such a stigma around menstration in our culture and it's shifting slowly. I think a lot of the younger girls I talk to are a lot more aware of that, but people are so... This idea of sovereignty is really important because you have to take some responsibility. You can't expect a healthcare system to catch you. You can't expect that if you can't get pregnant, you're just going to go and do IVF. I know those are options, but they should be an absolute last case resort in our opinion. We believe in public health care and we believe that that should be available to everyone. But we also believe the individual needs to take responsibility. And so that really looks like... For sure have fun and do things and explore your life and don't be a martyr. That's not what we're trying to say.   Tahnee:  (11:45) But health really is about moderation. It's about getting into the rhythms of nature. So summertime here it's like everyone's feeling a little bit more energetic, a bit more party vibe. Everyone wants to be outside and that's fine. Like in Chinese Medicine, this is the time to do it because it's summer time, we're meant to be expressing ourselves. We're meant to be engaging and enjoying life. Then in winter time we should be sleeping more and resting more and taking more time to be internal and inward focused. And these transitions occur in all of us all the time as well. So we have a circadian rhythm and we're like the birds. We want to be up with the sun and down with the sun and we really push the limits of that in our culture. And we could talk about that all day long, the lights that we choose to use in our homes and all of this stuff.   Tahnee:  (12:27) But whatever curiosity has grabbed you, whether it's diet or whether it's culture or whether it's creating a home that's a sanctuary. Start to look at these things. And this idea of a personal culture is something that we're really passionate about at SuperFeast.   Mason:  (12:39) Brighton Baby was the book that Tahns just referenced. And I think in saying that we worked with a... I feel like it was more like we were looking at it and going, oh yeah, that makes sense. That's good. And what Tahns wasn't mentioning is that she'd had 10 years of healing, like in pretty serious gut stuff. 10 years of liver...   Tahnee:  (12:54) And emotional stuff.   Mason:  (12:55) Yeah. And emotional. And liver cleansing, parasite cleansing for myself. I can go into some of the cleansers, but that had been a big run up. And so basically it wasn't just a... Two years, it's almost a little bit of a rush to be like... Especially to know you're going to be... And there's a little bit unrealistic because you're going to have to go into a huge phase where you're going to have to completely and somewhat unrealistically, like a bandaid, you're going to have to change the direction of your life and your personal culture is going to look completely different.   Mason:  (13:21) And that might be necessary and it's worth it if you're going to be having a baby. However, is that really the context of... You're going to be going and creating a family, we're creating this family culture, we're creating this personal culture and that, in that that talks to the ideological aspects that come in, especially if you are... This area we get to explore cleansing our body and cleansing our spirit or ignighting our spirit, I don't know if our spirit needs a cleanse. But, definitely our emotional selves. In that we become susceptible to ideologies, especially if we go from the point where we've been eating really crappy food and we've been in really crappy relationships and then there's room for extremism to kind of like sneak in, in the preparation stage or if you do get pregnant and all of a sudden you have to kick back and oppose the the unhealthy culture or who you were before in your obsession with getting healthy and protecting your child.   Mason:  (14:10) And it's not the good thing to cleanse, but it's a better thing for you to start thinking about the creation of your personal culture and your family culture. Now hopefully a bit more void of ideology and then the necessity for obsession, exclusion in because you've decided to go and get healthy. So I think that's a real huge one because a lot of people who get into and say, we will look at Brighton Baby preparations. It's just a little bit of, you go on a series of anti-parasitic cleanse, get the viruses out of your body. That's going to have a lot to do with clearing your body of bad calcium and sediment build ups. Which has a lot to do with taking these kinds of things you get into the Msm's, methylsulfonylmethane's, zeolites and possibly taking hydrogen, maybe fulvic acids and these kinds of things which are going to be able to get in and hopefully dissolve these pockets of calcium which are gunking up within organs, within arteries, within joint tissue, within...That's what you think of when you think of arthritis. That's like what I mean by a bad calcium. That's going to be a huge part of the initial part of the cleanse.   Mason:  (15:06) Underneath that you're going to see a housing of viral loads and nano bacteria. It's also going to be that calcium can be mixed in with fungal loads and this is really fun. I guess because I was someone that dove really, really deep in. And you could see I probably did have that orthorexia session of I've gotta be constantly on one of these protocols because there's parasites in me. I'm gonna like... Myself all the time just going into an unhealthy ideological reliance on that as what I do. But at the same time, when you're clearing out those bad calciums, you're going to be maybe hitting some antifungals at the same time, really going to be getting onto like the, the Pau D'arco tea's, Amazonian Lapacho tree, that's the back of that tree, getting into the antivirals like Cat's Claw [inaudible 00:00:15:48].   Mason:  (15:49) And there's many other Western herbs Astragalus's and medicinal mushrooms. Well you're going to start actually doing some deep clearing and at the same time, maybe that's a time to work with a naturopath or someone to see if you actually have parasites or fungal loads or things going on with your microbiome. Then from there you want to start getting in and doing a little bit of all the time you want to be reseeding the gut health and maybe getting in and doing those liver cleanse and getting onto those liver herbs. That's like the next somewhat step. Doing a little bit of a Kidney upgrade. That's going to have a lot to do with your Jing and make sure that you're sleeping. Make sure you're thoroughly hydrated, getting off municipal water, getting a really good filter. Ideally getting onto good spring water. I'd much prefer people getting onto a spring water and that's a huge part of it. Making sure that you're getting into the sun, getting sun onto your reproductive organs thouroughly.   Mason:  (16:32) And these are all things you can start inviting, not with obsession. You can integrate them into who you are and what you're doing already. Rather than just taking that external cleansing identity that's obsessed with health and making that who you are. Because a lot of people here are deficient in Jing, deficient in personal identity. Therefore they start identifying externally with that, with that ideology.   Oni:  (16:51) What I'm hearing from both of you is that to look at what is coming back to nature for you, not just for whatever is trendy at the time. Instead of going, oh what in that ideology suits me? Who am I and then what suits me and then finding things that resonate potentially different traditions. Individual health, and looking in insight instead of looking outside from the shame perspective of something's wrong with me. I need to fix through obsessive health ideologies and getting to learn, what your health identity, but what your identity and spiritual identity is. So Mason, you've got some things to say.   Mason:  (17:29) Basically I like banging on about this topic I can get very excited about the potential you have for cleansing your body. I'm someone that quite often I'll follow the shiny thing, the shiny thing being these idealistic, perfect bodies to bring through these magical little spirits, but a lot of that, they're not truly great, but at the same time does lend itself, one to become a boring person if you get obsessed and a boring couple. But at the same time, what I'm basically driving home here is to not let these... When you're going into cleansing as with Tonic Herbalism, I try and pull these things off pedestals as soon as I can and I'm someone that can talk... people telling me I'm a really good salesman and say I can sell ice to the eskimo's but I can't if I'm not really invested in something, but I also have the vested interest to make sure that these... Integrating something like medicinal mushrooms or tonic herbs or whatever it is, and to someone's local cleansing practices, we want to make sure that it isn't just being sold with this beautiful shiny language, but we're actually able to take it off a pedestal, talk about, get very realistic about what our expectations are when we're integrating these things and make sure that it gets merged with our own intention for our own lives and our own family.   Mason:  (18:39) So it doesn't just come a thing on a list and ambiguous external thing that we should do in order to be right or in order to be valid. In terms of being good parents in our preparation. So I like to add these caveats that when you like, whether it's just yourself or your partner, whoever it is, when you are going down the route of cleansing your body and making sure that you are, you're creating a lifestyle that's going to lead towards real healthy and vibrant self. Make sure that you're not just doing something external and not just following some ideology or diet. Make sure that you are considering the fact that you are creating a family culture, that you have a personal culture and what you do needs to be part of a pattern of what you're going to be doing for many decades.   Mason:  (19:21) For now, not just something extreme that you're going to do now in order to make everything okay. It needs to be very sustainable, right? So think about the diet, oh I'm never drinking again or I'm only going to eat this from now on. Can you do this realistically for the next 50 years? And can you do it within the context of the priority being creating a super beautiful, loving environment, family culture, making sure that you're taking you away from connecting with your partner because that's going to be like one of the most important things. So just make sure that that doesn't create a wedge. Make sure you get your priorities right and just make sure that it merges into your own family culture and not a family culture that's going to be like Instagramable. You know, you can feel this bubble of intention when you're adding things into that family culture.   Mason:  (20:04) Remember that you need to be able to do this for the next 50 years, 40 years, 20 years, whatever it's going to be. So is what you're bringing in and inviting in to your culture, which isn't... This is possibly what you're going to be handing down the way you do things, your intention, the way you cleanse your body, the way you think about food, the way you think about other particular foods. Are they good? Are they bad? Do you really want that to be a part of your culture or do you want maybe greater nuance in how you talk about diet? Do you want extreme rights and wrongs? No. You want just to be able to have beautiful ongoing conversations without extremism and thinking you need to be doing that because that's what you're maybe going to be passing onto your children.   Mason:  (20:39) That's what you maybe pass onto your nieces and nephews if you're not having children. So you may be very precious about that and make sure that you can maintain being excited or doing this thing for the next few decades. Otherwise it's very short term and when you get involved in little short term, things like that, short term diet, short term cleansers, you're burning through your gas, you're burning through your Jing and you're ultimately going to lead. It's not a sustainable way to begin to lead more towards a path of degeneration anyway, which takes away from that land like that potential longevity intention and healthy intention you had to begin with.   Tahnee:  (21:07) And that's what reproductive health is. It's not degeneration, it's regeneration. So it's about ability to regrow the body. Does that, like what I think people forget all the time is like the doctor doesn't heal you. A herb doesn't heal you. No one can heal you. Your body heals itself and you really just have to get out of the way. The block to that healing, which can be physical, it can be emotional, it can be spiritual. Like I'm a huge fan of Seth Godin and he talks a lot about how from a very young age, our children are taught to be obedient. They're taught to look for what other people want them to say as the right answer instead of coming up with their own right answer. Like we can't trust you to know. So you have to find what other people want you to notice that you can be right.   Tahnee:  (21:47) You know, and then you'll be validated and then you'll be approved. And so we do this, people like us and do things like this, right? So we join a club and we become a whatever kind of club you want to join. But you say that a lot in this area where if someone doesn't agree 100% with you, then they get ostracized from the group. And so the complexity and the times when you know we aren't perfect and cause that's human life, right? But we also have to accept that if we want to be sovereign, if we want to be healthy, if we want to like be balanced, we need to actually do the work inside. And that's work for me. A lot of the meditation and yoga practices have been super powerful because I started to realise that yeah, a lot of the ideas of who I was and what I could and couldn't do weren't mine.   Tahnee:  (22:29) They were created by culture they created by family or by even just my own rebellion or response to my life. And so when I started to really examine that stuff, we had a beautiful birth at home. I felt very strong, very powerful through my pregnancy. If I was me 10 years before that, I wouldn't have had the same experience because I'd had so much personal growth in those 10 years that the 30 year old me was able to have that experience that the 20 year old may wouldn't have had, and I remember saying like, I'll take drugs. I don't want to feel anything. I'm afraid of pain. And then I started doing Yin Yoga and I learned to feel pain and then I realized that pain wasn't even pain. It was sensation and sensation was interesting and there was this tapestry of feeling going on in there and oh.   Tahnee:  (23:10) It's actually connected to my feelings and my emotions and dotted auditors when we can really start to grow internally, then a lot of the external stuff just falls away.   Oni:  (23:19) So reframing through experiential learning, I guess.   Tahnee:  (23:22) Yes, which is exactly what you know. If you go and listen to Seth Godin's work on education, it's all around. Don't teach people to look for the answer, teach them to ask interesting questions.   Oni:  (23:32) Okay, perfect. We've covered a range of topics, reproductive health, integrated into overall health attitudes and how to approach preconception, not just in the idea that we'll creating children, but also how to give birth to ourselves over and over again through cell health and regeneration. And I want to ask you too about your own journey in Parenthood and how potentially some of your attitudes have been challenged in that journey or enhanced or expanded. And what was that like for you two?   Tahnee:  (24:05) It definitely had a bit of an idea of what I thought I was going to be like when I was pregnant, which was like vegetarian and all of these things because I was vegetarian for 14 years and then for a few years I to [inaudible 00:24:21] struggled to really integrate it into my life even though I think my body really thrives, eating it, but mentally I had a lot of trouble. My acupuncturist would say that I was addicted to that ideology and I think to a degree that was true. Like this idea for me of what it meant. And even I think the fear of death and participating in death and comfort around death. When I was probably 28 or 29 I did this meditation retreat in Thailand a Tantric one, and we spent quite a bit of time doing death meditations and that was a huge realisation for me of how much I was afraid of that and avoiding experiences with death.   Tahnee:  (25:00) And so I actually found eating meat a lot easier after doing that because I was like, oh, you know, I feel like I'm really part of this natural cycle and I'm studying Taoism, you know, it's so integrated with the earth and humans are this bridge between heaven and earth were supposed to be able to anchor us spirit into this physical body on this plane. It's not about ascension and about leaving this body, it's about actually being here in a spiritual form, but through the physicality of the body. And so I think those kinds of ideas in my late 20's really helped me to transition into Parenthood. And I think my intuition was so strong, like so strong that my daughter came through to us, to me in meditation, she, I knew her name, I knew she was a girl. I was getting all these amazing insight.   Tahnee:  (25:45) But then I was also getting eat meat. I'm going to compartmentalise and put that over there and I'm going to let go. Oh, this stuff's interesting. And I could really feel how my rational mind was interfering with my intuitive knowing self. And I could feel that in birth, I could feel like these waves where if my mind kicked in and was starting to think about the physiology a lot about the body from studying yoga. And I would think, oh my gosh, like there's a bend in my pelvis. Like, why has there been to my pelvis? I have to get a baby through this bend. And then I would get out of that. I need to like my intuitive knowing, which is like, of course this is fine course. Like I felt connected to every woman ever through this incredible portal of birth.   Tahnee:  (26:22) And so I think for me it's really been a lot to do with trusting my intuition and her body's wisdom. Like she'll get a fever and we just let it burn. We let it break and then she changes. You look at Steiner's work and he talks a lot about how illness is like an upgrade for children. It reboots their immune systems and teaches their bodies how to respond and, and she goes through this huge developmental leaps off to these things. So I had to really let go of this idea of like, oh my God, she has a favor. I'm a bad mom. She's sick. And being like, this is really important for her and my job is to support her. So I take time off, I stay home with her, I coddle her until she breaks and then she's fine again. So things like that I think I've really leaned into more and the trust in the body's wisdom and that we don't have to know all the answers mentally that it's just like a lot of the time it's holding space.   Mason:  (27:12) I think you've just knocked it on the head. The main thing that's that's come up. I mean I probably respect the change that occurs in life now more than ever. I don't think I was like a know it als necessarily. I knew everything about parenting until I become a parent. I thought I was going to get that. Those, I think it's definitely been humbling so I'm definitely going with the flow a little bit more made in order to show up the great dad for me anyway, the amount of time more than beforehand. I need to make sure that I've compartmentalised in my life start like a little bit of time for myself so that then I can create more space within the family unit as well so that things can flow a little bit more. Because before that like we were hustling big time.   Mason:  (27:52) I mean we were on before we had Aiya and so to change gears was a bit of a big deal sometimes. Yeah, that's like that's been a harsh lesson here and there in order to find that nice balance between a business that's growing nicely and requiring a lot of energy and then yourself and your own personal practice, your a meditative practice or whatever it is. It's pretty huge. I'm very dynamic in nature. I feel like respecting the fact that I can't just be like okay, in this hour I will meditate in this way and in this area. Like I need space in order to tune into where I am at within for that week or for that phase of my life or for that day. And so the biggest thing I've realised is that I really need to know myself, when you've got the intensity of like, especially now like a toddler, I haven't got a you've got a three year old and right now she's going through something and she needs a lot of space.   Mason:  (28:45) And if I'm not creating a little bit of space for myself, if Tahnee and I are communicating and creating space like space in our relationship, which can be difficult when you've got like 20 business babies and they need time and we've sort of stopped showing up with our family. And so on a practical note and in terms of our family culture, i've started to try and get a little bit more savage with like our time and this is the most important thing and it's, it's my space, our space, space for the baby.   Tahnee:  (29:12) And that goes back to looking after the culture that you mentioned that you're creating. And speaking of which, and thank you so much for joining us. Both of you are so generous with what not only right now today, but through all of your resources. So what are some of your best resources that you can clue us into now?   Mason:  (29:28) Well, in regards to pregnancy preparation, Tahnee and I have a podcast that goes for two hours. We were pregnant when we filmed it. So that's on superfeast.com.au. You can just, if you type in pregnancy, it'll pop up that pregnancy prep and we have... It's called healthy pregnancy is another two hour podcast episode that we did just after we've given birth to Aiya we go through everything that we did, supplementation, Tahnee's exercise routines and all those which just looked like a lot of walking and spaciousness.   Mason:  (29:54) Anyway, a lot of stuff on our pregnancy and then postpartum and birth.   Oni:  (29:59) And that's through your website, SuperFeast?   Mason:  (30:01) All the other super phase podcasts. You can just try and get that on the super face podcast on iTunes type in pregnancy and they should pop up.   Oni:  (30:08) We're so grateful for you, Tahnee, Mason for coming on today and sharing your growing wisdom.   Mason:  (30:13) Thanks for having us.   Oni:  (30:14) And we hope you've enjoyed this episode today on pregnancy, birth and beyond. Tune in next week for more information inspiration, bringing us full circle. You can find our show on iTunes, Spreaker and the usual social media under pregnancy, birth and beyond, and our website at ppmedia.org

Ready to take your brain health to the next level? Ready to be proactive, or even reverse, the signs of brain aging? Then this episode is definitely for you! We are fortunate to have “Amazon” John Easterling, Plant Medicine Formulator, with us again this week. He dives into the plant medicine treasures he’s found in the Amazon Rainforest that beautifully support healthy brain function and help you ward off brain aging.  ABOUT "AMAZON JOHN" EASTERLING Since 1976 John Easterling has been an explorer and treasure hunter in the Amazon Rainforest. It was there, after a personal health crisis, he was introduced to the traditional use of medicinal plants by the Indigenous People in Peru.    Since then his passion for plant medicine has only accelerated.    Easterling's original degree is in Environmental Studies, he founded the Amazon Herb Company in 1990 and serves on the board of the Amazon Center of Environmental Education and Research.    Amazon John’s 28 years of Plant Medicine experience have been profiled on TV and Radio including "Good Morning America" and "Fox and Friends".  His product formulations have sold over $100 million worldwide.   John has been featured in two PBS documentaries, World News Report "Amazon John and Rainforest Medicines" and Jean Michel Cousteau's "Return to the Amazon."    Easterling believes the dramatic growth and interest in plant medicine is still in its early stages and will continue to significantly improve life experiences and healthy outcomes into the future.     Causes of Alzheimer’s and Dementia Beta amyloid plaquing. “So when you get plaquing, your spark plug would foul, and you couldn't start your engine. So same thing here. You get that plaquing in there, and it just can't transmit to the next one, and you don't remember. You can't access that data where you put your keys.” Tau tangle, where you get the neurons that really just become tangled. Inflammation is a really big deal, and actually these other factors are really caused by it. It's a kind of inflammatory response from your brain to protect itself sometimes, developing this amyloid plaquing to seal off what it sees as an insult. Involvement of Candida in brain issues. Recent research showed was that people did not think before that the Candida could cross the blood brain barrier. Now they found that it actually can. It travels through your body doing that, looking for a place to reside where the biological terrain is right. If you introduce a lot of sugar and a lot of carbs into that terrain, they really love that. When these Candida cross that blood brain barrier, the brain recognizes that as an insult, and then you have this coating process. The brain will try to coat that to seal it off.   Prevention Lifestyle and diet - low sugar, more green vegetables Probiotics after a course of antibiotics - maintain a diverse colony-forming units of probiotics. Maintain healthy inflammation levels throughout the body. Exercise - improves the microcirculation to the brain. Sleep - get quality sleep each night (7-9 hours). Lower your exposure to environmental toxins.   Botanicals to Improve Brain Health Una de Gato - Cat’s Claw Primarily known for its ability to stimulate the macrophage phagocytosis activity, which is our immune system. Source of epicatechins and the brain derived neurotropic. Stimulates neurogenesis - the creation of new brain cells. Camu Camu Tremendous source for a whole food vitamin C. Powerful anti-inflammatory. Increases the proper cycling of serotonin. Potent source of polyphenols, quercetin, and resveratrol. Bacopa Reduces brain amyloid levels in mice by as much as 60%. Increases cognitive function in humans. An ayurvedic plant. Cinnamon - cinnamaldehyde Able to break down tau tangles. It’s anti-inflammatory. Balances sugar levels. Cacao Is anti-inflammatory. Helps increase microcirculation in the brain. Contains epicatechins, which have been shown to be very helpful for brain chemistry and to help to slow down the death of healthy brain cells Pau d'Arco Many medicinal properties include antifungal, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antiviral and anti-parasitic. Scientists have found that Pau d'Arco has a unique, two-pronged effect on fungal infections. ... In this way, it is able to kill off a variety of bacteria, fungi, and yeast, including Candida albicans. Good source of polyphenols. Anti-inflammatory. Dragon’s Blood - Sangra de Grado Pure antioxidant by dry weight. Great source of proanthocyanidins. Anti-inflammatory. Helps facilitate the breakdown of plaquing in the brain. Guayusa Substitute for caffeine. Enables ‘first time’ memories to be recalled. Anti-inflammatory.   Signs of Alzheimer’s and Dementia People may experience: Cognitive: mental decline, difficulty thinking and understanding, confusion in the evening hours, delusion, disorientation, forgetfulness, making things up, mental confusion, difficulty concentrating, inability to create new memories, inability to do simple math, or inability to recognize common things Behavioral: aggression, agitation, difficulty with self care, irritability, meaningless repetition of own words, personality changes, restlessness, lack of restraint, or wandering and getting lost Mood: anger, apathy, general discontent, loneliness, or mood swings Psychological: depression, hallucinations, or paranoia Also common: inability to combine muscle movements, jumbled speech, or loss of appetite

Ready to take your brain health to the next level? Ready to be proactive, or even reverse, the signs of brain aging? Then this episode is definitely for you! We are fortunate to have “Amazon” John Easterling, Plant Medicine Formulator, with us again this week. He dives into the plant medicine treasures he’s found in the Amazon Rainforest that beautifully support healthy brain function and help you ward off brain aging.  ABOUT "AMAZON JOHN" EASTERLING Since 1976 John Easterling has been an explorer and treasure hunter in the Amazon Rainforest. It was there, after a personal health crisis, he was introduced to the traditional use of medicinal plants by the Indigenous People in Peru.  Since then his passion for plant medicine has only accelerated.  Easterling's original degree is in Environmental Studies, he founded the Amazon Herb Company in 1990 and serves on the board of the Amazon Center of Environmental Education and Research.  Amazon John’s 28 years of Plant Medicine experience have been profiled on TV and Radio including "Good Morning America" and "Fox and Friends".  His product formulations have sold over $100 million worldwide. John has been featured in two PBS documentaries, World News Report "Amazon John and Rainforest Medicines" and Jean Michel Cousteau's "Return to the Amazon."  Easterling believes the dramatic growth and interest in plant medicine is still in its early stages and will continue to significantly improve life experiences and healthy outcomes into the future. Causes of Alzheimer’s and Dementia Beta amyloid plaquing. “So when you get plaquing, your spark plug would foul, and you couldn't start your engine. So same thing here. You get that plaquing in there, and it just can't transmit to the next one, and you don't remember. You can't access that data where you put your keys.” Tau tangle, where you get the neurons that really just become tangled. Inflammation is a really big deal, and actually these other factors are really caused by it. It's a kind of inflammatory response from your brain to protect itself sometimes, developing this amyloid plaquing to seal off what it sees as an insult. Involvement of Candida in brain issues. Recent research showed was that people did not think before that the Candida could cross the blood brain barrier. Now they found that it actually can. It travels through your body doing that, looking for a place to reside where the biological terrain is right. If you introduce a lot of sugar and a lot of carbs into that terrain, they really love that. When these Candida cross that blood brain barrier, the brain recognizes that as an insult, and then you have this coating process. The brain will try to coat that to seal it off. Prevention Lifestyle and diet - low sugar, more green vegetables Probiotics after a course of antibiotics - maintain a diverse colony-forming units of probiotics. Maintain healthy inflammation levels throughout the body. Exercise - improves the microcirculation to the brain. Sleep - get quality sleep each night (7-9 hours). Lower your exposure to environmental toxins. Botanicals to Improve Brain Health Una de Gato - Cat’s Claw Primarily known for its ability to stimulate the macrophage phagocytosis activity, which is our immune system. Source of epicatechins and the brain derived neurotropic. Stimulates neurogenesis - the creation of new brain cells. Camu Camu Tremendous source for a whole food vitamin C. Powerful anti-inflammatory. Increases the proper cycling of serotonin. Potent source of polyphenols, quercetin, and resveratrol. Bacopa Reduces brain amyloid levels in mice by as much as 60%. Increases cognitive function in humans. An ayurvedic plant. Cinnamon - cinnamaldehyde Able to break down tau tangles. It’s anti-inflammatory. Balances sugar levels. Cacao Is anti-inflammatory. Helps increase microcirculation in the brain. Contains epicatechins, which have been shown to be very helpful for brain chemistry and to help to slow down the death of healthy brain cells Pau d'Arco Many medicinal properties include antifungal, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antiviral and anti-parasitic. Scientists have found that Pau d'Arco has a unique, two-pronged effect on fungal infections. ... In this way, it is able to kill off a variety of bacteria, fungi, and yeast, including Candida albicans. Good source of polyphenols. Anti-inflammatory. Dragon’s Blood - Sangra de Grado Pure antioxidant by dry weight. Great source of proanthocyanidins. Anti-inflammatory. Helps facilitate the breakdown of plaquing in the brain. Guayusa Substitute for caffeine. Enables ‘first time’ memories to be recalled. Anti-inflammatory. Signs of Alzheimer’s and Dementia People may experience: Cognitive: mental decline, difficulty thinking and understanding, confusion in the evening hours, delusion, disorientation, forgetfulness, making things up, mental confusion, difficulty concentrating, inability to create new memories, inability to do simple math, or inability to recognize common things Behavioral: aggression, agitation, difficulty with self care, irritability, meaningless repetition of own words, personality changes, restlessness, lack of restraint, or wandering and getting lost Mood: anger, apathy, general discontent, loneliness, or mood swings Psychological: depression, hallucinations, or paranoia Also common: inability to combine muscle movements, jumbled speech, or loss of appetite  

Today we're in for a real treat, Mason chats to Dr Molly Maloof. Dr. Molly is a physician, technologist and entrepreneur. Dr Molly aims to cultivate a global wellness consciousness and promote a preventive, predictive, participatory and personalised field of medicine. One that creates health, increases quality of life, and enhances human resilience. Dr Molly is a passionate speaker and an abundant source of information in her area's of expertise. Tune in for the download.  Molly and Mason discuss: The medicinal use of psychedelics. Spirituality and meditation. Grounded "enlightenment". Clinical medicine. The importance of "Jing" herbs and "adaptogens" in our modern society. Holistic entrepreneurship and life satisfaction. The practices essential for bone health. Food preparation and sourcing. Sovereign health.   Who is Dr. Molly Maloof? Dr. Molly Maloof’s goal is to maximise human potential by dramatically extending human health span through medical technology, scientific wellness, and educational media. Her fascination with innovation has transformed her private medical practice, which is focused on providing health optimisation and personalised medicine to San Francisco & Silicon Valley investors, executives, and entrepreneurs. Molly's iterative programs take the quantified self to the extreme through comprehensive testing of clinical chemistry, metabolomics, microbiome, biometrics, and genomic markers.    Resources:  Molly's Website Molly's Facebook Molly's Instagram Molly's Linkedin Molly's Twitter   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify! We got you covered on all bases ;P   Check Out The Transcript Here: Mason:  All right everybody, joined by Molly Maloof, my new mate, who I met in Arizona earlier this year. Thanks for coming on the pod. Molly:  Thank you for inviting me. Mason:  Absolute pleasure. I really, really enjoyed your talk. There were a lot of interesting talks at that weekend event at Revitalize. I think the trippiest and weirdest, that left me just like, "Huh," and I got it in a good way from a couple of them. But the Whole Foods CEO, founder guy. Molly:  I loved his talk. Mason:  Yeah, that was a very interesting one. He's a, yeah, interesting guy. I kind of was a little put off by his, like how when Whole Foods saw Amazon it was love at first sight and they were swept off their feet. I was like, "What?" Molly:  And the funniest thing about the technology and the tech scene is just how many parallels there are to modern dating. And the best VC firms really court that 1% of startups that they really, really care about, but they ignore everyone else. There's literally so many parallels to how you date and how companies are founded and formed. It's like everything in life's relationships at the end of the day, you know? Mason:  I'm just trying to get my head around that, because I just didn't grow up in that world. Even when I was doing my international business degree, I just didn't listen and studied herbalism. I'm not... SuperFeast ... I'm just never, SuperFeast just isn't going to date anyone. It might have relationships. I might have a couple of little flings here and there, but because I'm not in that world it was so interesting. Mason:  Anyway, your talk was really cool. You guys, like you were on that panel talking about psychedelics. Molly:  Oh man. I mean I'm fully out of the psychedelic closet by now, and what's cool is that I was just at Burning Man and I saw some amazing, amazing talks by founders of MAPS. Rick Doblin spoke about being after this movement for 40 years. He has been working for 40 years to get psychedelics approved, and we are really close. Well, you know, mushrooms have been decriminalized in Oakland, and people don't know this, but they're selling mushroom chocolates in Oakland. Dispensaries are selling mushrooms. I think that's actually positive as long as people are safe with their dosing. But we're going to see I think the same kind of movement around the medicalization of these, as well as the- Mason:  Recreational. Molly:  Recreational use of these happening in America. I think both are needed and both are valuable experiences, but the important thing is safety. That's one thing I really wanted to get across on stage at the conference, was whether or not these are legal or not legal right now, whether or not you use them in ceremony or recreationally. Whether or not they are used for medicinal purposes or spiritual purposes, the whole goal of this is that no one gets hurt. Molly:  They can be dangerous drugs. If you're not prepared, if you're not in the right situation, right environment, right headspace, right part of your life span, they can be really damaging. So I was really happy that there was a place to talk about them with some pretty forward thinking people and some people who've also suffered from addiction. So it was important to have the balanced perspective, but at the end of the day I think the end conclusion was that there's definitely a place for these in wellness. Mason:  Where are you using them? Like is it clinical, is it just waving the flag? I feel like there's a because, because recreational came up, and I like your take. I think a lot of people keep it very clinical when they have these conversations, and of course it's not because we need to be having many types of conversations. We don't want them institutionalized as well, but almost you can start looking at the perceived social value and then the need somewhat of a structure. I mean you have the complete kind of somewhat like, say, left view that it's just open doors and it's just like whatever. Everyone goes nuts. Then there's that right view, which is a little bit more of that like, "Create a full solid structure and get the pharmaceuticals involved." Mason:  Then there's that middle ground, and a lot of the time, especially if you're going to be in a clinical setting, I can see how some things might be standardized and it can become under those regulatory bodies. But then almost it's the outside of that, when you go more recreational, it's like having the maturity as a society to create that somewhat of structure, for lack of a better word, rules that keeps everyone healthy and keeps everyone understanding it and not just separating it within society. So yeah, where are you falling with it? Why are you talking about it? Molly:  I mean I talk about it because I use them for spiritual purposes. I use them for social purposes, and I use them for medicinal purposes. I do refer people to healers who administer them ceremoniously in an environment of safety and security and careful dosing. It's not legal for me to currently administer them myself as a doctor, so I just make referrals to people. I just connect people and say, "Hey. This person I trust. You can trust them. They're good people. They're not going to harm you in any way." But it sucks, because they aren't legal yet I can't fully prescribe them, but I have prescribed ketamine for medicinal purposes. You can do that in America legally right now. They are psychedelic. It is the only legal psychedelic right now. Mason:  Is the research of ketamine around PTSD mostly, or what's going- Molly:  Actually it's depression and suicidality, which are frankly killing a lot of people right now. America is suffering from a lot of despair deaths is what they're calling them, which is deaths due to homicide, suicide, or self harm. That could be addiction or other means. So for me, I see a lot of that in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of misery, and it sucks because it's a place of so much abundance. You're like, "Geez, if this is the future, we're not heading into a good direction right now." But also a lot of panic. Molly:  People are definitely panicking in a lot of ways in America, for good reason. I mean there's like a mass shooting every week. A lot of people don't feel safe going into public spaces. A lot of people don't feel safe walking around San Francisco. A lot of people suffer from anxiety disorders, so people are turning to these medicines for panic and to feel ... For the tryptamine, they want to feel held and loved. For the ketamine, they want to feel like they can disassociate from reality because it's too much for them to handle at the moment. Molly:  So that's not necessarily a good thing. I mean it's not necessarily a good thing that we have an environment and society that's suffering so badly that people have to disassociate from it in order to maintain their sanity. But it's definitely a better option than taking opioids and dying from an overdose, which are killing a ton of people. Purdue Pharma basically said that they were going to be paying out something around the number of like $11 billion to 2,000 people for this class action lawsuit against them for especially misleading people about the addictive nature of Oxycontin and other Purdue Pharma opioids. Molly:  So shit's hitting the fan in America, and things are not good. So what I'm really interested in and fascinated by, and I just did a tour of New York, LA, and San Francisco, I live here, is just the number of people that are coming together in community and experiencing psychedelics in a space of ceremony. Which is really the traditional format of psychedelic use, in most indigenous communities and societies, is using them in the context of connecting with community. Frankly I think that's really a healthy and safe way, as long as the Shaman that's administering these knows what they're doing. Molly:  It could be transformative, but it could be problematic if people don't have a resource for integration or if they take the wrong dose in this environment. Which I recently saw happen, and I know a person who experienced a psychotic breakdown. So I think it's always important when we talk about these medicines to recognize the benefits and the risks, because they definitely go both ways. At the same time, I would say that largely what I'm seeing is 99% of people who are using these that I know personally, are using them in positive and healthy, fruitful ways. About 1% of times you're seeing casualties and you're seeing damage and you're seeing problems. Molly:  So I think they're largely carefully dosed and administered very safe, but if they're not, they can be really damaging. So it's important to mention that 1%, because that's what everyone sees in the news. But I just read a great article in Vice about how if everybody were to take psychedelics and think about the environment, we wouldn't be in this huge problem we're in right now, which is people not thinking about the effects of their actions on the environment. What's happening in Brazil is a great example of a lack of awakening in a large population of people. Mason:  Yeah. I think it's really important to remember just how low impact and low risk these psychedelics are, but that's in comparison to the gnarliness of the pharmaceutical industry of course. I think that's pretty evident at this point. It's not paranoid. I mean there was, just released in a journal was a study just on Paracetamol here in Australia for the 10 years, I think ending in like 2017. I'll have to look it up and see if I can find it, but I don't know exactly what the numbers were, but it was in that ballpark of like 400% up in heavy liver damage and deaths massively on the rise, and that was studying hospital administered levels. So that's happening here in Australia. Mason:  I think that kind of stuff hitting the news a little bit more is great, but then if we start looking at upgrading towards the use of psychedelics in many fabrics of society, I think the duty of care, I like that you mentioned that 1% because the medicine is in the dose and the medicine is in the efficacy, in the style of dosing. Whether it's going to be in a hospital setting hopefully eventually, but then outside when we're looking to psychologically center ourselves, most of the time people in a proper dosage and a proper environment are going to be able to find that. But I quite regularly ... It's been awhile since I've been in that world, since I've been in the Amazon experiencing [inaudible 00:10:48] up in the hills of the Andes and so on, so forth. Mason:  I've heavily integrated them, but I just think ... I don't know whether I've just got that, people have the memory of me doing that, but I still quite regularly get people writing to me who have gone way too far down the rabbit hole and essentially end themselves disassociating from reality. Which I definitely felt, I wasn't excessive, but I definitely felt myself having a disassociation from reality and just essentially flying with the condor most of the time. Molly:  Right, but you can see the same thing in meditation and- Mason:  Oh, for sure. Molly:  Any type of spiritual pursuit- Mason:  Dude, when you mentioned it on stage, I don't know if you heard, I was the one that cheered. [crosstalk 00:11:36] Molly:  Oh my God, I [inaudible 00:11:37] that was you. Mason:  We know people that have got into vipassana... Molly:  I'm in this whole place right now where I'm really on this spiritual path and I'm experiencing some really profound spiritual experiences, but I'm also aware that I need to keep one foot in reality. I've got a life to live, I've got patients to cover. I've got a book to write. I've got goals to achieve. So I think the real dance of this modern sort of enlightenment movement is figuring out how to be in the state of enlightenment and an effective person in real life. I'm like, "That's my goal," is I'm having these breakthroughs and I'm also getting back into my email and I'm getting back into my life. I have all this work to do, and it's like I want the work that I do in my spiritual life to benefit my actual life, and I want them to be integrated. Molly:  This word integration keeps coming up a lot, and I think it's this concept of psychological and spiritual balance, with what's happening internally and what's happening externally. That's the way that I would describe it, and I just made that up on the spot. But there's definitely a desire for spiritual pursuits in a world that's feeling really uncertain. Frankly, everyone's turning to astrology apps because they're all so confused about religion and who to trust and which institutions to talk to and what- Mason:  Yeah. What should I do with my life, there's an app for that. Molly:  Yeah. Exactly. And should we even reproduce in a world that doesn't seem like it's going to be around in 20 to 50 years. There's a lot of real serious scary questions happening right now in reality, and I think there's a desire for ... There's kind of two types of people. There's people who are going to seek answers, and there's people who are going to be like, "Whatever. I don't know if I'm ever going to find them. I'm just going to try to live my life as it is." Whatever way is fine for you to live. Molly:  I dated a guy who was the latter, and I'm more of the former. I think former's first and latter's second, right? Mason:  Yeah. I mean that's something interesting as well because I'm really, again, I don't know why I found myself doing that 1% as you are, trying to do that duty of care without trying to come across as a stickler. So I love the ability to seek, but then this is where I think people enter into that spiritual world, and I'm going to be very general here, I do love both of these realms where you're seeking spiritual growth and possibly heading into that psychedelic space. Again, the medicine is in the dose. How much seeking you're doing verse how much are you ... Even outside of hardcore, gnarly, long term mindfulness meditation camps, outside psychedelic world, how much are you doing your chop wood, carry water every day. Mason:  This has been something I kind of have struggled with is having my practice somewhat daily, that solid space where I'm consistently learning to come back to my center. What is my center, coming back to a state where I can possibly be parasympathetic when I'm activated, yet my muscles are calm. This is something I'm personally working on at the moment with my friend who mentors me in movement and everything that comes with it, and really expanding that capacity to not be permeated by all these external opinions and really find a place that's tangible and palpable you can sink your teeth into making those decisions. Mason:  Will I have another child, you know, and feel comfortable with those decisions. Because that incessive seeking, you know going to the app, going to astrology, what everyone is doing is just trying to scrape off the top without going right down to the source. Where is this, what the fuck is this philosophy? What does it mean? Molly:  Right, yeah. Right. They've got to take a lot more work to do that. Mason:  A lot of work, and it's not Instagram-able a lot of the time if you're going that deep, and there lies the problem. Molly:  I mean I'm going on a meditation retreat in two weeks, and I'm basically going to meditate for five hours a day. I'm not going to have a phone or a journal, and I'm going to have to deal with all of the desires that I have to write and to think and to produce and to integrate and to analyze, and all the things that drive me on a daily basis. I have to confront those and basically be like, "Molly, you just can't. You're just going to have to sit here. This is what you're supposed to do. This is a challenge, and it's going to be probably one of the hardest challenges." Molly:  I'm not fully prepared for it, but I'm also the kind of person who just likes to do things that she's not fully prepared for, see what happens. Mason:  Yes. Oh I love it. I'm like, "Can't wait to hear about it." Before we- Molly:  Hopefully I don't lose my mind, but I'm pretty sure I won't have one. Mason:  Maybe lose it just for a little bit. That's okay. Molly:  Usually what happens is I end up in a blissed out state and I'm just like ... Everyone's struggling and I'm like, "Ah." But I think this might be harder. I think this might be really hard, so we'll see. Mason:  I do love it. I like the integrated approach, to use the I word. Again, I'll just quickly leave, because since we talked about that psychedelic community, I absolutely love, don't get me wrong, I feel ... I don't know, I can speak for myself anyway when I was deep in it. There is somewhat maybe a subtle that, you know, we found the superior healing method. So whatever you seek, we will seek it in this world with the medicines that we drink. The plants will heal us. I guess you can sometimes maybe see a bit of disdain for any other healing modality kind of come up, that it might be supplementary but it won't be the biggest thing. Mason:  I think something as simple as therapy can be ... In meditative work, yogic work where you start really un-rustling everything, your plant medicine work, and if it really comes up, this work where I think it's going to take time to integrate that. I think for a lot of people, I think finding a nice level therapist or some other modalities to really bring you back off that arm of development that is the beautiful teachings of the plants and come back to your center. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  Anyway, just wanted to kind of touch on that because I feel ... Yeah, I've had increasingly recently a lot of people are honestly on a soul retrieval journey after going down the rabbit hole. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  So this kind of is all coming into a wider breadth of work that you do. Molly:  Sure, yeah. Mason:  You're an MD. I was talking to you about how your style of work ... Well, you mentioned it's really old school. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  It's an old school kind of doctor. So you have a select amount of patients. You have a few patients as well you said who you've taken on special cases. Molly:  Yeah. I mean I basically have two types of patients. I have the personalized medical research on one end. These are like the weird cases that I just get paid to figure them out and figure out why they're sick and why they haven't been fixed yet by the healthcare system. Usually it's complex chronic disease, so it's got its roots usually in a severe health breakdown that was proceeded by usually some psychological stress that really damaged their immune system. Molly:  Usually when someone's under a significant amount of stress and physical threat or psychological threat, if it gets to a certain level, your mitochondria get damaged to a point where they can't defend you anymore. So your immune system is downstream over your mitochondrial function. It essentially just throws off your energy production systems. It throws off your immunity, and infections get in. Then they can further damage your body. Molly:  So usually it's always this horrible stress, massive infection, and then they were never the same after. So now you have to sort of reverse engineer their bodies to get back into a state of balance and health. It's a lot of work, but it's like the most satisfying work to do, because you're dealing with somebody who may have been sick for years. You're like, "Okay. I'm going to fix this." Or somebody who's got something that no one's figured out. You're like, "All right, we're going to figure this out together and we're going to get you better." Molly:  So I love those cases, but then I also have cases of people who ... Frankly, everyone in America wants more energy, okay? So I figured ... Funnily enough I was trying to study health over the last 10 years, like what is health, how do you define it, how do you measure it. In the process of studying health, I discovered that health is about capacity, and capacity is about capacitives. Capacitives is literally making and storing a charge in your cellular membranes, in your mitochondria, that is an electrochemical gradient generated by the food you eat and the way that you live your life. Molly:  It literally charges your cells with energy. That capacity enables you to do work, to run your genetic functions, to express your genes, to produce proteins, to do anything else that your body needs to do, like make hormones. So I've kind of just been going back and back and back and back ... First principles, like what is health, what is energy, what is capacity, and how does that relate to our daily life and our daily function. What are the things that damage that function? Molly:  So that's really where my research has come into play and why I started teaching at Stanford, because they were like, "Hey, our students are some of the most talented in the world, but they're also the most stressed out. So how can we give them a course that could actually help them produce more capacity to do greater and better work?" So I had a class of about 23 people, and it ended up being 20 hours of lectures. I read in I think the last two years I read about 1200 papers. So I've been digging deep into understanding how is energy made, how is it used, how are your energy systems destroyed, and really trying to marry this Eastern ancient philosophy of Chinese medicine and Qi, and then marry that with Western science and come up with my own beliefs around what I call and what's known in the literature as health span. Molly:  Which is how do you extend life as long as possible without disease. To me, it's all about understanding what are the major causes of disease, what are you most likely to get, and what are the things that you can do in your daily life now to avoid these things from happening. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I test everything on myself first. So I've learned about what it means to make a lot of energy, which is essentially making money in your body, but I've also learned how to spend a lot of energy and burn yourself out. Molly:  So I have had multiple rounds of burnout in my life. I had a pretty close call this summer where I was really overdoing it, and I had to take a step back and say, "Oh shit. I'm not living the example right now. I'm really doing too much." Funnily enough, the biggest signal to me this summer was actually the people I was working with were not feeding my energy, they were draining my energy. The thing that people mostly don't realise about health and life is that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. So if your relationships suck, then your life is going to suck and you're going to die young. If your relationships are healthy, you're actually going to live a longer life. Molly:  So it's so fundamental to aging well, is like surrounding yourself with people that nourish you and doing work that makes you come alive, you know? Mason:  So yeah, hell yeah first of all. Molly:  Yeah, thanks. Mason:  I'm keen to dive a little bit into it. You know, well health span I like. I like that you bring that up. I mean that's something that everyone just looks at life in a block term. I don't know when I started hearing that term, maybe in the tellomere books, when that was getting really trendy. It was at the end of that term of life for the [inaudible 00:23:48] when you no longer can reproduce cells a lot of the time, along with other degenerative diseases, you enter into the death span. That's for the last however many decades of your life that the medical system can keep you alive. You're in the death span. So I like that, that's a very tangible goal, to keep yourself in that health span. So we'll get into those principles, but in terms of your work, I mean you work for like year long blocks, like a lot of- Molly:  Six months to a year minimum usually. It's because you need that amount of time to change someone's life. You need that amount of time to take someone around the corner, because behavior change is hard. Mason:  And you go to their homes and work, right? Molly:  Yeah. I go to them. I go to their offices. I email them every week. I talk to the client that is sickest on the phone every week. I just literally created a nine page report on the fly for a client who had like 10 questions for me. She's fairly healthy, but she just wanted some answers and she wanted to understand Ayurvedic doshas, and she wanted to understand ... I was like, "Well here, let's talk about why Ayurvedas might be useful. Let's talk about why it may not apply to a Western body, and why there's some major issues in some of the nutritional recommendations that they have. Also let's talk about how, no offense to India, but they're not doing so well in health." So if this worldview is so effective, why do I see so many sick Indians? I'm just not convinced that tons of grains and tons of dairy is the answer to health. Mason:  Well especially like it's not going to be raw dairy, right? It's not going to be raw fermented dairy. Molly:  No. We're not getting raw fermented dairy. We're not getting non GMO grains anymore. We're getting all this garbage food, so you can't always apply these ancient technologies to modern life unless you can actually have ancient traditional food preparation. And you need to soak and sprout those grains too, and people aren't doing that. So I should've mentioned that in that report, but yeah. It takes a lot of work to do. I'm not against it, and I actually think that the doshas are really valuable for fitness recommendations, because the endomorph, ectomorph, mesomorph is very similar to the ... The ectomorph is very similar to the ... I have to- Mason:  Kapha, Pitta, Alpha. Molly:  Yeah, exactly. So you can actually look at these types and you can- Mason:  Is it, no, not alpha, vata. Kapha, Pitta, Vata. Molly:  Yeah, Pitta is more like mesomorph. Kapha I believe is more like ectomorph, and endomorph is like the last one. Point is that there's body types, and there's those skinny people who have these amazing metabolisms who could literally just crush carbs and they're fine. Then there's the people who are like they even look at a carb, they gain weight, right? Those people legitimately have slower metabolisms than the person who's got the faster metabolism. Then there's people like me who are in the middle, where if I eat carbs I gain weight, if I cut the carbs I lose weight like that. So it's literally I'm lucky. If I lift weights, I get muscular. If I don't lift weights, I get lean. If I do cardio, I get lean. Molly:  So it's all about this balancing of your energy and your metabolism with these patterns that we're seeing with people, that can change by the way, depending on your genetics and your location where you're living in and what you're eating. But anyway, so yeah. So there you go. Mason:  Well I like that you're working ... So you're obviously working, because you've got executives and tech people and kind of high flying CEO kind of clients as well, so it's a nice balance. But obviously they're going to be dealing some of the time with something debilitating. But as well, like if they're not going to- Molly:  Oh yeah, sometimes they just want to be really healthy. So I was writing this book called The Hour Between the Dog and Wolf. It's about the biology of trading, and I am working with a hedge fund founder who is kind of like a character off of Billions, except for a lot nicer. So he was having a bad year, and when you lose, you have high cortisol levels and you're in a fear based state and your testosterone levels tank. Molly:  When you win, your testosterone levels go up and it's like, "Boom." So there's this effect on your body and your biology that can literally change your performance, and your performance can change your biology. So I was trying to get this guy back into a state of high testosterone. So I was like, "Look. Your testosterone sucks. You've had a bad year. We want to get you back into a place where you're winning again." Molly:  So I got him to start weight lifting. I got him on a different type of dietary style. I got him to start doing certain things with his supplements, and low and behold, his testosterone doubled and he's in a much better place right now. So it's cool when you can teach a person about what's going on inside their body, give them certain behaviors to do, have them implement those behaviors, see the labs change, and then the person's like, "Oh my God. This is fucking awesome." Now this [inaudible 00:28:45] Mason:  So with the initial testing, because I think it's like a lot of people ... As we talked about before, I like that you're offering somewhat of a bridge, but a legitimate bridge. Not just like a, "I'm a health coach," bridge- Molly:  I'm a data driven ... I mean I am looking at the body as a very complex machine that needs multiple ways of attacking different problems and balancing different energies. Some of the energies by the way are not always physical. Sometimes this stuff is spiritual, and I have a questionnaire to identify where in your health do you have the biggest problems. Sometimes a person's health is actually, it's a spiritual problem. They really have had some sort of awful life event that has just set them on a course of really bad luck and bad experiences, and they need to focus on that and not on biology. But a lot of what I do and what my bread and butter is is biological health optimization. Molly:  So looking at the body from a molecular perspective and saying, "Okay. This is your lipid panel. This is what your LDL particle numbers look like. This is what your diet looks like and this is why your diet has changed these numbers. This is what your carbohydrate metabolism looks like. This is what your amino acid metabolism looks like. This is why you have an imbalance in amino acids. This is why you need this one specifically versus that one. This is why your cortisol levels are off and you're completely exhausted and you need some Jing herbs to revitalize yourself because you're literally burned out." Molly:  Or maybe a person needs detoxification because they've gotten super high mercury levels from eating way too much sushi, which was me last year in Japan. Then sometimes I'm looking at the microbiome and saying, "Okay, we need to get you on some personalized probiotics because your microbiome is totally imbalanced and we need to get you back to a better state. If you don't get into a better state, you're gonna develop inflammatory bowel disease because you have early markers of that." So it's a lot about prediction. Molly:  This concept of P4 medicine, which I really like, that Leroy Hood coined, and it's personalized- Mason:  What's this called? P- Molly:  P4. Personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory. I really like it because it's a framework of thinking about medicine before things become full blown disease. Full blown disease is hard to reverse. I mean you are dealing with pathology on a molecular level that is like a broken building. It's a lot harder to fix that than a building that's got a water main leak that you're like, "Oh shit. We got to fix that water main leak, but if we fix it it's not going to completely collapse." Or like a building that has, like you're in the kitchen and there's a grease fire. You got to put that out now, because if you don't that's going to set this whole thing on fire. Molly:  It's really about ... Or maybe the building just has some ice and you're like, "Okay look, this building needs some upkeep. It needs some better cleaning." Just go fast, fast more often. Clean out the garbage and you won't have all this crap growing that shouldn't be growing. So I really look at the body as architecture, and I look at the architecture as like are you building your body out of marble and really good quality steel or crappy materials that are going to break down once a big storm hits. It's about looking at the parallels between nature and your own physiology, because you are a microcosm. You are in yourself a living, breathing organism that is basically changing constantly. Molly:  If you're not doing regular tuneups, you're not going to know when things are not working out well. So I did my own labs this summer because it'd been about six months since I'd done them. I was like, "Ah shit, my microbiome has been definitely affected by my stress levels and my diet. I need to increase my protein. I need to decrease my saturated fat. I need to change my probiotic regimen and I need to detox." So I started doing that about a month ago, and I'm already feeling like holy shit, so much better in one month. It's astonishing how just knowing what to fix and going after those areas is so much more effective than throwing darts at a wall and hoping something sticks. Mason:  Well I like that you're providing that service that's that bridge between you taking it on yourself and understanding the patterns of your body and being able to affect it, and basically get on top of little symptomatic responses and grease fires that come up. But the other side of that is where most people are trying to bridge between, is like the practitioner office, whether it's a naturopathic office or even possibly with a GP. Is MD just like, or is it GP? I don't know if you have GPs. Molly:  General practitioner. I'm a general practitioner. Mason:  Oh you are? Okay. Molly:  I'm the most general of practitioners, because I literally do so many things. I'm super broad. Mason:  Yeah. I think GP is that 15 minute stint in the office [crosstalk 00:33:44] Molly:  A primary doctor for the most part, but also anybody who's not board certified in one area is a GP for the most part. So I'm not a primary doctor. I'm not the doctor you call when you've got the flu. I am the doctor that you deal with when you want to improve your health or dig real deep into why you are so sick. Mason:  Well that is something I think a lot of people, yeah, you're providing that ... The amount of data that you go into, that bridge to go, "Right, you don't want to end up in any of these clinics or offices. You want to be taking complete understanding and responsibility for the patterns of your health." So you take people essentially through that program, and then when they come out the other side, from the sounds of it, they're incredibly informed about the way their body works. So I think- Molly:  Yeah. It's a lot of education. Mason:  Yeah. So you're using a lot of testing, which I really like. I think perhaps people listening ... I think it's something that is quite available. I think DNA testing, microbiome, and you're doing hormone panels, is that right? Molly:  Mm-hmm (affirmative). Hormone panels, microbiome testing, nutritional testing is probably the most valuable thing I do is literally just testing the body for vitamins and minerals and neurotransmitters and carbohydrate metabolism, fat metabolism, markers of dysbiosis, markers of oxidative stress. Like looking under the hood. Then just basic labs, like organ system function, anemia, hormones via blood and urine, and the whole hormone cascade. Then looking at certain specialty labs if necessary, like immune system function. What else am I doing? Molly:  I do some panels of infectious agents, just because viral infections are pretty common and yet overlooked by a lot of doctors. They just did not teach us to test for viruses when we were in medical school, even though they're super common. Mason:  Well I think that body of work is coming up in the literature. It's like there's been a lot on stealth infections recently. Molly:  Oh yeah. Mason:  The amount of times that it is going to be a stealth viral infection- Molly:  Oh yeah, or intracellular bacteria. Like syphilis, Lyme Disease, mycoplasma, those are nasty. Mason:  Well and I think what's happening a lot of the time for people who ... I was speaking to a practitioner over here, and she kind of solidified the idea that you start getting better on one front and you start feeling fantastic because you've gone after perhaps the spirochetes involved in Lyme, but then you've had a viral infection that's been sitting there dormant waiting for the health of a cell to get to a particular point that it can use it to reproduce its agenda. Then all of a sudden you start going down again. So that's for a lot of- Molly:  These things are nasty. You got to get their whole life cycle. You've got to look at the life cycle and be like, "Okay, how can I interrupt this? How can I interrupt this?" That's why antivirals concurrently with Lymes treatments are really important, because as your body starts activating and your genes start getting expressed, those viruses get into your genes. They get into your own genetic code, those assholes. Mason:  Yeah. Yeah, they are. They're opportunistic. Molly:  They're so smart. Mason:  That's why I think even with Lyme, it's like Astragalus, Japanese knotweed, Cat's Claw, that's why they're constantly being thrown out there. They have that cross section where they can be such effective antivirals. Even just having- Molly:  That's amazing. Mason:  It's just like even having that in your lifestyle, speaking of getting to understanding symptoms and understanding- Molly:  What are those called? Which ones did you mention? Mason:  Astragalus or astragalus. Molly:  Yeah, astragalus and- Mason:  And Cat's Claw. Molly:  Cat's Claw. I didn't realise Cat's Claw was an antiviral, but I think that makes sense. Mason:  Yeah, big time. I mean you can think like especially in the Amazon, if you're going to need an antifungal in your diet because you're going to have fungus bringing you down. So that's the Pau D'Arco. Then you combine that with the amount of viral activity that's going on there within that sopping wet jungle, that's where the Cat's Claw is probably ... It's one of the primary medicines if you get in there, especially one of the primary clinical medicines, but also for me it's one of the primary preventative medicines that I just kind of keep on rotation. Molly:  Amazing. Mason:  It's like I had to take it off SuperFeast, and this was- Molly:  Why? Mason:  It's just really hard to get a good source at the moment. Yeah, the quality's just getting a bit crap. I've now found someone that's working with some small tribes who are basically doing Cat's Claw in that Di Tao style. That's how we source herbs, Di Tao. It just means getting it from their spiritual homeland and crafting it in a way that leaves the environment better than when you found it, and also just like- Molly:  How do you pronounce that? What is that thing you said? Mason:  D-I, Di. Molly:  D-I. Mason:  And then Tao is T-A-O. Molly:  Tao. Mason:  Yeah, Di Tao. Molly:  Oh wow. That is the greatest thing. Mason:  Well I mean it's just a sourcing philosophy, I mean just being able to get the wild thing and procure it yourself, that's like if you're doing that yourself then that's essentially the most ... That's Di Tao to the absolute extreme. You don't need to label it Di Tao, that's just you getting your herbs. But in trying to describe to people how, like say we're sourcing Chinese tonic herbs, Di Tao it's kind of more of this living and breathing sourcing philosophy that's ever moving. It's not like organic is static. You tick boxes and then you can put a stamp on. Mason:  Di Tao, you're in constantly trying to get the growing or sourcing, whether it's foraging wild or growing it in a farm, closer to its original state. You're ensuring that you're not using irrigation, definitely not using anything like a pesticide or external soils or anything like that. But has a lot to do with making sure that you're in regions, whether they're mountainous or valleys or whatever it is, to atmospherically just make sure, and temperature wise to make sure that you're going to get a herb that has the most punch. Basically ensure that the herb has the Jing, Qi, or Shen within it. Then you constantly go down to make sure that you have the full spectrum extraction of the herb that just keeps it all together. Molly:  Amazing. Mason:  That's kind of like Di Tao. So yeah, hopefully we'll have a Cat's Claw soon, because we found someone basically doing it in that style over in Ecuador, which is like [crosstalk 00:40:29] Molly:  I mean, so I just got into Chinese herbs a couple years ago because I went to Erewhon Market in LA, and I was having a really exhausted week. I was just so tired, and I saw these elixirs. They were selling them for like $16.00, and I was like, "All right, well I'm in town. It's a fun thing to buy, an elixir from Erewhon, so we're just going to- Mason:  It's the funnest way to break the bank when you're in LA. Molly:  It's so great. You just drop $100 easy, like no problem. All the prepared stuff they make, that's the best by the way. They bake the best kale chips in the world. But the point is I had this elixir, and I remember just being revived, like totally revived. I was just like, "This is absolutely astonishing how good I feel right now." So I ended up buying all the separate ingredients of this elixir because I was just like, "I'm just going to have to make this regularly to get my Jing back." It was all about Jing herbs. I remember just feeling like, "This is the answer." Like as somebody who has the tendency to ... When I make energy, I just want to go and spend it. I mean my sister said, "Molly, if you're not working, you're partying." I don't party that hard anymore, but I have had a tendency to just burn the candle on both ends because I really enjoy life and I really want to feel alive. Molly:  I try to simmer down a little bit, but then I end up going back and doing stuff. But man these Jing herbs, it just revived me. I remember thinking, "This is so incredible that I just discovered this whole new world of medicine." There's apparently 50 Chinese herbs that are like the traditional- Mason:  The tonics. Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  A few more but there's like [crosstalk 00:42:09] It depends. There's a few official stories and things people have picked up and run with. Tonic herbalism and superior herbalism, it's wider than just like, "These are the top 50." It's a system. There are herbs which are considered superior that are there to basically ... That's about nourishing life, but some of them aren't the absolute top. Some of them are just somewhat supporting and bolstering to those and make it possible in that tonic herbal system. But basically, yeah. [crosstalk 00:42:41] Yeah, coming from that world of like Truth Calkins put together that Erewhon tonic bar. He worked with Ron Teeguarden. So yeah, that's like I definitely know that well. Molly:  Yeah. But I mean the hard part was, is actually I couldn't get ... For this tonic I couldn't get deer antler velvet. I was just like ... This is how I found out about your company, as I was like, "I can't get any deer antler velvet. There's literally no one in the world that I can get this from." Then I was like, "SuperFeast." I remember when a friend of mine from Byron Bay told me about your company. So I went online and I bought it and had it shipped. I was just like, "What is this magic?" I don't know the shelf life of it. Do you know the shelf life of it? Is it pretty decent? Mason:  Two years. Molly:  Okay, cool. I can still use it then. But yeah, it was this magical ingredient that I wanted to find. Then I saw you guys at the conference and I was just like, "Oh my God. His mushrooms are here for free. There was this whole room of free swag." I was just like, "Mason's Mushrooms are free? Like how come he is giving these away. This is so valuable. This is the most valuable thing in this room." I took like three bottles. Mason:  Yeah, good. I was hoping you would. I'm glad you got the deer antler. Molly:  I have a story for you. Mason:  Oh yeah? Molly:  I had a girlfriend who had not had her period in like a year because her husband is dealing with cancer and she was in a really serious stress state. She started taking your mushrooms and she got her period in a month. Mason:  So good. I love those stories. It almost brings a tear to your eye. Molly:  I know. Mason:  Because when you understand the repercussions of that that actually means- Molly:  Yeah. I was just like, "She needs adaptogens. She's in way too much stress. She's not in a state where her body can reproduce and she needs to get into a state of calm again." Honestly I saw her in a few weeks after she started the supplements I gave her, and she was like a totally different looking person. It was amazing. People don't realise that the stressed state, the body will always prioritize survival over reproduction. So there's a lot of women complaining of not being able to reproduce and having all sorts of hormonal dysfunctions, and you ask them about their lives and they're like, "Well I'm not stressed." It's like everyone is so complicit with the level of stress that we have that no one believes they're stressed anymore. Mason:  Yeah, that's it. Molly:  It's like, "I'm super high stress." Even I was in the state of denial even six months ago. Because I was doing a startup, I was working as a doctor and I was teaching at Stanford, and I was just like, "Yeah I'm not going to lower my stress anytime soon because this is what I do. I'm a top performer." There was a point where the world, the universe, my body was just like, "Oh just wait. Just wait. Give yourself a couple more months of this." I got around to the summer and I remember looking in the mirror being like, "You have exhausted yourself. You look exhausted, and it's time for you to take a step back and start recalibrating this stuff you're doing because you just performed a lot, but you just ran a marathon. You need to chill." Mason:  Yeah. You can never stop recalibrating and reading those patterns man. Molly:  You have to keep listening and listening. Mason:  There's so much clinically about stealth infections, stealth inflammation. Stealth stress isn't something, and you exactly said it, and I kind of sometimes just ... There's so much going on and I'll just run at a million miles an hour, and I know I have had the capacity to do that in the past, and especially when I've had my practices in place that I've been able to maintain that level, and at the moment ... I'm really reevaluating at the moment, especially I'm at the back of three weeks just with Aiya while Tahns is over studying in the States. Just with that, little things just get lost within the personal practice, and yet I don't take ... I just allow them to be eliminated and just, as you did as well, just a million miles an hour and all your projects and everything, and bit by bit that stealth stress starts to creep in. You go, "You know what? I'm okay. I'm actually not that bad." Mason:  Then the accumulation that starts to occur within your nervous system, within the endocrine system, and then if you have a high standard, which is what I like about your work in teaching this, understanding that optimal general high standard that you have for yourself, and that reading these subtle symptoms and then knowing that you have the ability to utterly change the flow of your lifestyle, that's where it lies in the begining. Molly:  This is the power of, and this is really the whole aim, is recognizing that there is no magical day where you're going to be optimally healthy. There's this constant rhythm of life which is always changing, and there's going to be times where you're going to be pushing it hard, and there's going to be times where you have to recover. If you don't, it's like athletes. I told everyone, "Look everyone, I'm on an off season right now." My off season involves writing a book proposal, traveling, speaking abroad, running my practice, but frankly, and I'm going to incorporate a company and get it started, but I'm not going to be overextending myself during this two month period. Molly:  This is about restoration. This is about recalibration. This is about reconnection with my community and my family, but it's not about always being go, go, go, go, go. It's about recognizing everybody can take a break. You can take a week long vacation once a quarter. You can take a day off once a week. You have to give yourself time to recover. That is the natural style of life. Life is not constantly always stormy. There's times of calm and there's times of stress, and if you don't follow those patterns and you're always in the storm, then how are you ever going to recover? Molly:  You're going to use up all your resources. This is really the core of health. It's about recognizing that you're going to build capacity and you're going to spend it. You're going to build it and you're going to spend it. It's like having money in the bank. But your major goal should always be, "How am I making compounding interest decisions that lead to better and bigger capacity so I can handle more and so I can actually do more without breaking?" This is how you level up in your life. It's like you don't push yourself and waste your energy completely, you reserve some of it in the back and you invest that energy in things that are going to build you up. Those adaptogens, the food ... They're not cheap, but they're worth investing in. Molly:  The food you eat, like I spend double what most people spend on food, and I also fast more often than most people do, so I probably spend about the same. But I'm doing these practices to build my capacity, and I'm doing these things that I know are going to lead to better health long term. So that's really the main message of what I'm trying to teach people. It's really about what is the minimum number of healthy things you can do to optimize your health so that you have this constant state of, "I'm still in the process of moving in the right direction of health," even though you're not always going to be at the highest performance state. Mason:  I completely agree. I always, again, whenever I talk about this ... It's absolutely true, and it doesn't matter how many times people hear this simple message, and I feel like you've put it quite a bit differently. But I always, I hear within myself the not possible-ness. I've worked with a lot of mums especially over the years, and you're feeling that's like ... If anyone's feeling that, it's not just mums of course, it's everyone, but that bogged down. For me it was a young man wanting to not grow a business but go and create the best educational resource. Mason:  I realised for me what was making it not possible, which was I feel like most people needed to kind of have on the side as an acknowledgement, when they hear this ability that you need to be able to maybe take a day off, do these kinds of things to keep you at optimal, is that you really need to go in and do some work to see where your societal or family programming has really put in some values that aren't actually yours. Because that's where, like the moment me and Tahns really realised that just, or for myself as well, I was just set to maximum velocity. Just in the business for example, I'm just like, "It's not possible to just slow down." It's just like there's so many things to do. It's just like, "Well how about we just don't do them as fast." Mason:  It's like with expanding to America, this is ... Tahns is like the GM of the company. She's copping that burden essentially if we go really quick, and for us to get to the point with a bunch of other decisions, we've over the last years realised, "Why are we trying to go so fast? We're not compromising our sourcing or anything like that, but why don't we just slow the fuck down? Why don't we just learn the real why of why we actually want to do these things?" I immediately just realised that that programming from the current entrepreneurial scene that I'd decided to take on myself, and it's- Molly:  Totally. It is. And everyone's miserable and they act like, "Oh look at me on my Instagram how fucking awesome my life is." Everyone's so unhappy underneath it all. You're like, "Actually the people I want to spend my time with are those entrepreneurs that are content, those entrepreneurs that are saying 'I do this because I love the work,' those entrepreneurs who basically inspire me to continue to grow in every direction and not be ..." The thing that really sucks about the entrepreneurship sort of mentality is that there's a lot of people who are just dopamine and novelty driven. So there's a sense of like it's never enough, and if you let that permeate your life of it's never enough, then you'll never be happy with your partner. You'll never be happy with any company you've built. You'll never be happy with your cofounder, and you'll always find a reason to find something wrong with your reality. Molly:  Frankly, no matter how big of a success you can have, you'll never be happy with that level of success either. So like when I finished teaching at Stanford this year, I thought, "Okay. The next obvious thing I should do is just found a tech company, because that's what you do in the Valley. You just found tech companies." I immediately- Mason:  That's so wild to me. Molly:  Oh totally, right? I was like, "Okay universe, I need this type of cofounder. Give it to me. I need literally someone to do this and this for me," and the next couple days I found these guys. They actually contacted me and they were like, "Hey we're looking for a doctor like you to work with." I'm like, "Well funny, I'm looking for co founders like you." You've got to be really careful with how you ask for things, because you may get them, and then when you get them you may not actually like them. You can end up ... I just think that there's this super fast mentality of everything has to go so fast, everything has to be so so quickly found. A lot of things in life take slow and tender caring and nurturing to build. Molly:  There is this desire I have of building something slowly and methodically, carefully, and not being chained to venture capital money, which I think is part of the reason why everything is so ... People think that they have to grow so fast, and they're so unhappy. There's frankly an unhappy relationship with venture capital. But at the same time, I think there's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, so I'm not telling people not to do it, but I think the thing that I've learned from watching people is seeing who's doing it right and then who's maybe not doing it so right. Maybe who's doing it in a way that just isn't actually bringing them life satisfaction, you know? Mason:  Yeah. I like to think of it like who's doing it unique, because of course everyone's going to be [inaudible 00:54:48] Molly:  I love that, because I mean there's definitely enough people doing it in a way that's like, "Drain your energy. Drain your capacity. You'll deal with it when you exit." There's a lot of that. Mason:  I love it. Hey, since I've got a bunch of other things I want to talk about, but I know we're probably like- Molly:  Part two? Mason:  Yeah, maybe like ... We'll do a part two for sure. I've never done like this before, but how about like a fire found? Is that what they're called? Molly:  Oh yeah, sure. Mason:  All right. So everyone just know that these are huge topics and probably maybe on another podcast we'll get a little bit further into it, but I just want to get fire round recommendations and takes on first bone and teeth health. Molly:  Oh yeah, okay. Your bone and teeth health has everything to do with your diet, so if your diet is high in sugar, you're going to decay your mouth because you're going to grow the wrong bacteria in your oral microbiome and they're going to produce acid. That acid's going to break down the enamel, and that's how you're going to get cavities. So cut the sugar out of your diet. If someone hasn't told you to stop drinking soda by now, give me a fucking break. I'm sorry for cussing, but soda does not belong in the American diet or the Australian diet or any diet of human anywhere in the world, period, end of story. Okay, off that rant. Molly:  Minerals are really important. You get them from usually high quality sources of water. You get them from fruits and vegetables. You get them from meats. You get them from healthy foods. You need minerals. Shilajit's a cool source of minerals that I started taking, just be careful with the dose because if you have too much Shilajit you will get way too energized. [crosstalk 00:56:23] Mason:  Yeah, I mean it's a weird industry as well. It's getting pretty unsustainable that one as well. There's a couple of good ones, I think like Omica. But yeah. Molly:  Does Shilajit go bad, because I feel like it looks like it never goes bad like honey. Mason:  Yeah. I mean it's kind of like that. If you have the tar, then it's got like a long shelf life. Molly:  I don't think it goes bad. I feel like it's got to have years. Okay, other teeth things. People don't floss. Flossing is the key to good teeth. If you don't floss your teeth, you're going to have basically a large amount of surface area that's never been touched. So that's like not brushing your teeth. That's gross, so gross. I love oral health. I could talk about it for hours, but the quality of your diet will determine the quality of your teeth. Mason:  I love it. I saw on your Instagram that you're just making up a nice juicy broth for yourself, always going to help as well. Molly:  Yeah. Broth is so good because you need those minerals from the bones. Mason:  Well let's look really quickly, let's just like ... I wanted to talk about this a little bit more, but one of the things I really love about your, especially your Instagram, is your focus on food preparation. I assume it's something that you focus a lot in the work that you do. Molly:  Yeah. Food is everything, food prep. I mean sourcing, I source like a chef because chefs know where good food is made and sourced. So people don't understand that there's markets everywhere. Go to the market, get your best food, and then keep your plants alive. Plants want to live. Certain plants want to live outside the fridge, certain plants want to live in the fridge. Most plants that have stalks want to be in water, so you should put them into water and then put them in the fridge, because they want to stay alive. Molly:  Other plants like leaves want to be in like a greenhouse, so you put them in a bag with a piece of paper towel, and it'll keep them alive in a way that won't let them die. Make some sprouts. Sprout your own sprouts. They're super easy to do. Ferment your own foods. Mason:  Just get in there, yeah. Molly:  Just get into your community and get into local eating. Local produce is the highest quality nutrient value for your buck, and eat organic. Frankly it's just better for you. It doesn't have as many pesticides. But if you can't eat organic, still eat fruits and vegetables because it's still better for you than not. Just avoid the dirty dozen in America. Then with meat it's all about the sourcing. It's all about the quality. Grass fed, pasture raised, grass finished. Do not eat grain finished meat. Wild fish, know your fishmonger. Talk about where the fish comes from. Molly:  Choose sustainable fishes and don't over consume. We can all fast more. We don't need to eat every day, turns out. Humans don't have to eat every day. You can cut your grocery bill just by not eating as much. Nuts and seeds generally like to be soaked and sprouted, just be aware that you're going to get a lot of anti-nutrients. I overdo the nuts and seeds. This is a known problem. If somebody out there wants to give me advice on how to stop doing this, I don't know how ... I don't have the answer because it's my biggest issue right now and I still consume lots of nuts and seeds, and my Omega 6s are too high because of that, so that's a problem. Mason:  A lot of almonds in there? Molly:  Too many almonds. Mason:  Almonds, I think it's a thousand to one ratio of Omega 6s to 3s. Molly:  All right, I'm just going to cut out almonds. I'm going to cut out the almonds. That's the key is the almonds. Mason:  Yeah, just try the almonds and then see how you go. I love it. I mean I hit that message every time. Here everyone's integrating, like listening to the SuperFeast podcast, a lot of people are integrating tonic herbs into their kitchen. But what I like is for them to ... It needs somewhere to land within the kitchen. It needs a real culture. Just on, like crossing over to even psychedelics and Michael Pollan. His later book kind of rocked the world to change your mind, but he's a food journalist. I think we spoke about him. Are you a fan of his work? Molly:  I know him. Yeah, he's awesome. Mason:  You know him? Molly:  Yeah. Mason:  He's the legend, right? He's such a- Molly:  He's a legend. Mason:  After everything that he's researched, his whole thing comes down to just prepare your own food and know where it comes from. Molly:  And eat mostly plants and a little bit of meat if you want some meat. Mason:  But yeah, eat real food. Not too much, mostly plants. Right? I think that's it, unless ... Yeah, I mean I know there's a lot of contention in the diet scene no matter what, but that personal food preparation you can never come away from it. Molly:  The key is learning these basic techniques, like basic techniques. Get a blender, blending ... Everyone likes baby food, I don't care what you say. Purees make everything delicious. Broth plus vegetables equals magic. Just make baby food, just make it. You'll love it, I promise you. Just make purees. Mason:  I got to use my blender for something but hot chocolates one of these days. Molly:  Right? Make your own cacao. Make your own ... I don't know, just make your own stuff. It's not hard to make. Just learn to use a blender, learn to boil water, learn to roast, learn to saute. These are basic techniques. Mason:  Learn to slow cook. Molly:  Slow cooker. Oh yeah, slow cooker's got to be the easiest thing in the world. Mason:  Got to be the easiest thing. Molly:  Honestly just follow a recipe. Once a week learn a new recipe. Just teach yourself. Then make salads. Salads are dumb, I mean you just got to chop shit and make a dressing. Mason:  I love it. Look, final question before we bring this home. If people are going to start getting to understanding the patterns of their body, the symptoms of their body, I know you work with a lot beyond that. You look at emotional reactivity. There's a lot here for people when taking sovereign control of their own health to get on top of. Molly:  Yes, sovereign control of your health. Mason:  We've talked about the testing which people can go and find a practitioner. I know I'm kind of like back ... Need to kind of get on top of that, it's been a while since- Molly:  Try to find Genova Diagnostics. They're my favorite company. They're a global company. They're easier to find in England.

Sage Dammers is the co-founder, CEO, product formulator, and chocolatier of Addictive Wellness, which makes my favorite sugar-free, keto, paleo heirloom raw chocolate with powerful adaptogens. See previous episodes and show notes on wokeandwired.com. Addictive Wellness Discount Code for my community:  If you love chocolate and want to add more adaptogens to your life, get yourself some Addictive Wellness and make sure you use code BREAKFASTCRIMINALS to get 15% off. If you want to keep eating chocolate and reduce the amount of sugar you consume at the same time, this is perfect! I love the Addictive Wellness subscription with a variety of chocolate flavors, and my favorite flavor at the moment is BEAUTY with Mucuna, Tremella Mushroom, Chaga Mushroom and Blue Butterfly Pea Flower. This chocolate suits most dietary restrictions as it is vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, paleo, keto and nut-free. In this episode, we discuss:  What is conscious entrepreneurship?  How social media played a key role in growing Addictive Wellness online business  How Sage met his life and business partner Anna Blanca (an expanding story if you’re ready to meet a partner who sees the highest version of you!)  How Sage and Anna Blanca started Addictive Wellness What are adaptogens? (Some adaptogens we cover are schizandra, chaga, reishi)  How to take adaptogens consciously All about chocolate:  Conventional chocolate VS heirloom chocolate The difference in cacao strains (GMO vs non-GMO) The benefits of chocolate Cacao as a “gateway health food” The kind of chocolate you can eat while on a candida diet What is MAO inhibitor and how does it work  Why cacao can make adaptogens more effective Is cacao psychedelic? The components in chocolate that make you feel bliss Is chocolate environmentally friendly? How to shop for consciously produced chocolate cacao products   Is “fair trade” and “organic” all that it’s hyped up to be?  And more: Sage’s go-to practice for expanded consciousness – mantras Silence and presence as a way to connect to divine guidance  What it was like growing up in a meditation center How Addictive Wellness gives back  How to heal candida, balance blood sugar and clear acne the natural way (based on Sage’s personal experience).* *Medical Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and not intended to provide medical advice or to take the place of medical advice or treatment from a personal physician. Please consult a doctor with any questions specific to your health.  Mentioned in this episode: Gurumayi Chidvilasananda Holographic Kinetics healing modality Paul Stamets: Website, Save The Bees initiative, Interview by Tim Ferriss, Interview by Joe Rogan  Some adaptogens and supplements for skin that Sage recommends: Pau D'arco, Vitamin B5, Chaga.  Topical solution: A mask made with Apple Cider Vinegar, Rhassoul Clay, Bentonite Clay and French Green Clay (you can buy a bundle of all three here); Rose Water and Witch Hazel. CANDIDA RECOVERY - The Complete Guide on the SuperFeast Podcast About Sage Dammers: Sage Dammers is the co-founder, CEO, product formulator, and chocolatier of Addictive Wellness. Fueled by a passionate desire to help people live the ultimate life and create a better world, Sage began as a teenager seeking out information that no mainstream school could offer in the areas of nutrition and traditional herbal systems of indigenous cultures. He has developed products internationally and given lectures on peak performance nutrition in Australia, Bali, America, and France. Connect with Sage and Addictive Wellness: www.AddictiveWellness.com  www.SageDammers.com  www.YouTube.com/AddictiveWellness  www.Instragram.com/AddictiveWellness Connect with Woke & Wired: If you enjoyed the podcast, please share it. Subscribe, rate and review the show on iTunes. Your rating and review help more people discover it. Join the private Woke & Wired Facebook group. Tag me on Instagram @wokeandwired and let me know your favorite takeaways!  

Ready to take your brain health to the next level? Ready to be proactive, or even reverse, the signs of brain aging? Then this episode is definitely for you! We are fortunate to have “Amazon” John Easterling, Plant Medicine Formulator, with us again this week. He dives into the plant medicine treasures he’s found in the Amazon Rainforest that beautifully support healthy brain function and help you ward off brain aging.   * * *   ABOUT "AMAZON JOHN" EASTERLING Since 1976 John Easterling has been an explorer and treasure hunter in the Amazon Rainforest. It was there, after a personal health crisis, he was introduced to the traditional use of medicinal plants by the Indigenous People in Peru.  Since then his passion for plant medicine has only accelerated. Easterling's original degree is in Environmental Studies, he founded the Amazon Herb Company in 1990 and serves on the board of the Amazon Center of Environmental Education and Research.  Amazon John’s 28 years of Plant Medicine experience have been profiled on TV and Radio including "Good Morning America" and "Fox and Friends".  His product formulations have sold over $100 million worldwide. John has been featured in two PBS documentaries, World News Report "Amazon John and Rainforest Medicines" and Jean Michel Cousteau's "Return to the Amazon."  Easterling believes the dramatic growth and interest in plant medicine is still in its early stages and will continue to significantly improve life experiences and healthy outcomes into the future.   Causes of Alzheimer’s and Dementia Beta amyloid plaquing. “So when you get plaquing, your spark plug would foul, and you couldn't start your engine. So same thing here. You get that plaquing in there, and it just can't transmit to the next one, and you don't remember. You can't access that data where you put your keys.” Tau tangle, where you get the neurons that really just become tangled. Inflammation is a really big deal, and actually these other factors are really caused by it. It's a kind of inflammatory response from your brain to protect itself sometimes, developing this amyloid plaquing to seal off what it sees as an insult. Involvement of Candida in brain issues. Recent research showed was that people did not think before that the Candida could cross the blood brain barrier. Now they found that it actually can. It travels through your body doing that, looking for a place to reside where the biological terrain is right. If you introduce a lot of sugar and a lot of carbs into that terrain, they really love that. When these Candida cross that blood brain barrier, the brain recognizes that as an insult, and then you have this coating process. The brain will try to coat that to seal it off.   Prevention Lifestyle and diet - low sugar, more green vegetables Probiotics after a course of antibiotics - maintain a diverse colony-forming units of probiotics. Maintain healthy inflammation levels throughout the body. Exercise - improves the microcirculation to the brain. Sleep - get quality sleep each night (7-9 hours). Lower your exposure to environmental toxins.   Botanicals to Improve Brain Health Una de Gato - Cat’s Claw Primarily known for its ability to stimulate the macrophage phagocytosis activity, which is our immune system. Source of epicatechins and the brain derived neurotropic. Stimulates neurogenesis - the creation of new brain cells. Camu Camu Tremendous source for a whole food vitamin C. Powerful anti-inflammatory. Increases the proper cycling of serotonin. Potent source of polyphenols, quercetin, and resveratrol. Bacopa Reduces brain amyloid levels in mice by as much as 60%. Increases cognitive function in humans. An ayurvedic plant. Cinnamon - cinnamaldehyde Able to break down tau tangles. It’s anti-inflammatory. Balances sugar levels. Cacao Is anti-inflammatory. Helps increase microcirculation in the brain. Contains epicatechins, which have been shown to be very helpful for brain chemistry and to help to slow down the death of healthy brain cells Pau d'Arco Many medicinal properties include antifungal, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antiviral and anti-parasitic. Scientists have found that Pau d'Arco has a unique, two-pronged effect on fungal infections. ... In this way, it is able to kill off a variety of bacteria, fungi, and yeast, including Candida albicans. Good source of polyphenols. Anti-inflammatory. Dragon’s Blood - Sangra de Grado Pure antioxidant by dry weight. Great source of proanthocyanidins. Anti-inflammatory. Helps facilitate the breakdown of plaquing in the brain. Guayusa Substitute for caffeine. Enables ‘first time’ memories to be recalled. Anti-inflammatory.   Signs of Alzheimer’s and Dementia People may experience: Cognitive: mental decline, difficulty thinking and understanding, confusion in the evening hours, delusion, disorientation, forgetfulness, making things up, mental confusion, difficulty concentrating, inability to create new memories, inability to do simple math, or inability to recognize common things Behavioral: aggression, agitation, difficulty with self care, irritability, meaningless repetition of own words, personality changes, restlessness, lack of restraint, or wandering and getting lost Mood: anger, apathy, general discontent, loneliness, or mood swings Psychological: depression, hallucinations, or paranoia Also common: inability to combine muscle movements, jumbled speech, or loss of appetite     Deeper Dive Resources   Camu Camu https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/camu-camu#4%E2%80%937.-Other-potential-benefits   Cat’s Claw, Uña De Gato (Uncaria Tomentosa) https://wholeworldbotanicals.com/cats-claw-una-de-gato-uncaria-tomentosa/   Sangre de Drago - Dragon’s Blood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croton_lechleri   Brain-derived Neurotrophic Factor And Its Clinical Implications https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4697050/   Bacopa monniera Extract Reduces Amyloid Levels In Psapp Mice https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16914834   Why Cinnamon May Hold Secrets to Alzheimer’s Prevention https://www.alzheimers.net/cinnamon-prevents-alzheimers/   Cacao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_bean   Pau d‘Arco http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/pharmacy/currentstudents/OnCampusPharmDStudents/ExperientialProgram/Documents/nutr_monographs/Monograph-pau_darco.pdf   Proanthocyanidins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proanthocyanidin   Guayusa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilex_guayusa   Raphael Mechoulam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Mechoulam   Alzheimer’s & Dementia Resource Center https://adrccares.org/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5-i54vnU4QIVnLjACh161gXdEAAYASAAEgJ3NPD_BwE   Alzheimer’s & Dementia Facts & Figures https://www.alz.org/media/Documents/alzheimers-facts-and-figures-infographic-2019.pdf https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/facts-figures   Tau, tangles, and Alzheimer's disease https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925443904001619   Amyloid Plaques and Neurofibrillary Tangles https://www.brightfocus.org/alzheimers-disease/infographic/amyloid-plaques-and-neurofibrillary-tangles   Candidiasis https://www.health.harvard.edu/a_to_z/candidiasis-a-to-z   Plant polyphenols as dietary antioxidants in human health and disease https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835915/   Anthocyanins https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/anthocyanins/   Epicatechin https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology-and-pharmaceutical-science/epicatechin   Caffeine Reverses Cognitive Impairment and Decreases Brain Amyloid-β Levels in Aged Alzheimer’s Disease Mice https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/22236175/jad_arendash_caffeine.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1555534722&Signature=n916JYzngT0Ze610mx1uCDNHAJs%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DCaffeine_reverses_cognitive_impairment_a.pdf   Organixx’s NEW Ageless Brain - Nutrition for your brain. http://www.organixx.com/ageless-brain

Ready to take your brain health to the next level? Ready to be proactive, or even reverse, the signs of brain aging? Then this episode is definitely for you! We are fortunate to have “Amazon” John Easterling, Plant Medicine Formulator, with us again this week. He dives into the plant medicine treasures he’s found in the Amazon Rainforest that beautifully support healthy brain function and help you ward off brain aging.   * * *   ABOUT "AMAZON JOHN" EASTERLING Since 1976 John Easterling has been an explorer and treasure hunter in the Amazon Rainforest. It was there, after a personal health crisis, he was introduced to the traditional use of medicinal plants by the Indigenous People in Peru.  Since then his passion for plant medicine has only accelerated. Easterling's original degree is in Environmental Studies, he founded the Amazon Herb Company in 1990 and serves on the board of the Amazon Center of Environmental Education and Research.  Amazon John’s 28 years of Plant Medicine experience have been profiled on TV and Radio including "Good Morning America" and "Fox and Friends".  His product formulations have sold over $100 million worldwide. John has been featured in two PBS documentaries, World News Report "Amazon John and Rainforest Medicines" and Jean Michel Cousteau's "Return to the Amazon."  Easterling believes the dramatic growth and interest in plant medicine is still in its early stages and will continue to significantly improve life experiences and healthy outcomes into the future.   Causes of Alzheimer’s and Dementia Beta amyloid plaquing. “So when you get plaquing, your spark plug would foul, and you couldn't start your engine. So same thing here. You get that plaquing in there, and it just can't transmit to the next one, and you don't remember. You can't access that data where you put your keys.” Tau tangle, where you get the neurons that really just become tangled. Inflammation is a really big deal, and actually these other factors are really caused by it. It's a kind of inflammatory response from your brain to protect itself sometimes, developing this amyloid plaquing to seal off what it sees as an insult. Involvement of Candida in brain issues. Recent research showed was that people did not think before that the Candida could cross the blood brain barrier. Now they found that it actually can. It travels through your body doing that, looking for a place to reside where the biological terrain is right. If you introduce a lot of sugar and a lot of carbs into that terrain, they really love that. When these Candida cross that blood brain barrier, the brain recognizes that as an insult, and then you have this coating process. The brain will try to coat that to seal it off.   Prevention Lifestyle and diet - low sugar, more green vegetables Probiotics after a course of antibiotics - maintain a diverse colony-forming units of probiotics. Maintain healthy inflammation levels throughout the body. Exercise - improves the microcirculation to the brain. Sleep - get quality sleep each night (7-9 hours). Lower your exposure to environmental toxins.   Botanicals to Improve Brain Health Una de Gato - Cat’s Claw Primarily known for its ability to stimulate the macrophage phagocytosis activity, which is our immune system. Source of epicatechins and the brain derived neurotropic. Stimulates neurogenesis - the creation of new brain cells. Camu Camu Tremendous source for a whole food vitamin C. Powerful anti-inflammatory. Increases the proper cycling of serotonin. Potent source of polyphenols, quercetin, and resveratrol. Bacopa Reduces brain amyloid levels in mice by as much as 60%. Increases cognitive function in humans. An ayurvedic plant. Cinnamon - cinnamaldehyde Able to break down tau tangles. It’s anti-inflammatory. Balances sugar levels. Cacao Is anti-inflammatory. Helps increase microcirculation in the brain. Contains epicatechins, which have been shown to be very helpful for brain chemistry and to help to slow down the death of healthy brain cells Pau d'Arco Many medicinal properties include antifungal, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antiviral and anti-parasitic. Scientists have found that Pau d'Arco has a unique, two-pronged effect on fungal infections. ... In this way, it is able to kill off a variety of bacteria, fungi, and yeast, including Candida albicans. Good source of polyphenols. Anti-inflammatory. Dragon’s Blood - Sangra de Grado Pure antioxidant by dry weight. Great source of proanthocyanidins. Anti-inflammatory. Helps facilitate the breakdown of plaquing in the brain. Guayusa Substitute for caffeine. Enables ‘first time’ memories to be recalled. Anti-inflammatory.   Signs of Alzheimer’s and Dementia People may experience: Cognitive: mental decline, difficulty thinking and understanding, confusion in the evening hours, delusion, disorientation, forgetfulness, making things up, mental confusion, difficulty concentrating, inability to create new memories, inability to do simple math, or inability to recognize common things Behavioral: aggression, agitation, difficulty with self care, irritability, meaningless repetition of own words, personality changes, restlessness, lack of restraint, or wandering and getting lost Mood: anger, apathy, general discontent, loneliness, or mood swings Psychological: depression, hallucinations, or paranoia Also common: inability to combine muscle movements, jumbled speech, or loss of appetite     Deeper Dive Resources   Camu Camu https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/camu-camu#4%E2%80%937.-Other-potential-benefits   Cat’s Claw, Uña De Gato (Uncaria Tomentosa) https://wholeworldbotanicals.com/cats-claw-una-de-gato-uncaria-tomentosa/   Sangre de Drago - Dragon’s Blood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croton_lechleri   Brain-derived Neurotrophic Factor And Its Clinical Implications https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4697050/   Bacopa monniera Extract Reduces Amyloid Levels In Psapp Mice https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16914834   Why Cinnamon May Hold Secrets to Alzheimer’s Prevention https://www.alzheimers.net/cinnamon-prevents-alzheimers/   Cacao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_bean   Pau d‘Arco http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/pharmacy/currentstudents/OnCampusPharmDStudents/ExperientialProgram/Documents/nutr_monographs/Monograph-pau_darco.pdf   Proanthocyanidins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proanthocyanidin   Guayusa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilex_guayusa   Raphael Mechoulam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Mechoulam   Alzheimer’s & Dementia Resource Center https://adrccares.org/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5-i54vnU4QIVnLjACh161gXdEAAYASAAEgJ3NPD_BwE   Alzheimer’s & Dementia Facts & Figures https://www.alz.org/media/Documents/alzheimers-facts-and-figures-infographic-2019.pdf https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/facts-figures   Tau, tangles, and Alzheimer's disease https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925443904001619   Amyloid Plaques and Neurofibrillary Tangles https://www.brightfocus.org/alzheimers-disease/infographic/amyloid-plaques-and-neurofibrillary-tangles   Candidiasis https://www.health.harvard.edu/a_to_z/candidiasis-a-to-z   Plant polyphenols as dietary antioxidants in human health and disease https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835915/   Anthocyanins https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/anthocyanins/   Epicatechin https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology-and-pharmaceutical-science/epicatechin   Caffeine Reverses Cognitive Impairment and Decreases Brain Amyloid-β Levels in Aged Alzheimer’s Disease Mice https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/22236175/jad_arendash_caffeine.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1555534722&Signature=n916JYzngT0Ze610mx1uCDNHAJs%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DCaffeine_reverses_cognitive_impairment_a.pdf   Organixx’s NEW Ageless Brain - Nutrition for your brain. http://www.organixx.com/ageless-brain

In today's podcast the boys come together to discuss candida overgrowth, its frequency within the population, the varied symptomatology associated with this common yeast-like infection and the strategies you can use to bring the body back into balance. Mason, Dan and Sage draw on their superior knowledge of this condition from personal experience, sharing their wisdom from a traditional Taoist tonic herbal perspective and a functional naturopathic approach.   The gents discuss: The fact that Candida albicans is a naturally occurring organism within the body and only becomes problematic when imbalance occurs how chronic use of antibiotics can contribute to the condition how diet and lifestyle practices can help to bring things back into harmony the common symptoms that candida overgrowth is present, e.g. chronic fatigue, brain fog, digestive disturbances, weakened immunity, oral thrush, fungal infections within the the skin and nails etc the particular clinical tests you can use to investigate and diagnose candida within your body how you can use your symptoms and health history to identify whether candida is a problem for you foods that aggravate the immune system and exacerbate candida overgrowth the importance of food combining in regards to candida candida from a naturopathic perspective and the clinical markers used to identify the condition the importance of normalising the body's circadian rhythms and adrenal response is in regards to healing candida from a Taoist perspective and what's happening within the organ systems, particularly the spleen how candida leads to jing depletion and exhaustion within the system as a whole the correlation between candida and leaky gut the Jing herbs you can use to rebuild your foundational energy stores, these include he shou wu, cordyceps, rehmannia, morinda etc the importance of lifestyle factors such as sleep, rest, breathing practices, nature time and reduced caffeine and sugar intake to bring combat candida overgrowth the lifestyle tweaks you can use to bring the body back into its parasympathetic mode so you can heal. Reishi and Ashwagandha are game changers here how cutting carbs and sugar can help manage candida symptoms using fats (ketones) as fuel how herbs such as pau d'arco, chaga and reishi can assist healing the benefits of probiotics and fermented foods such as sauerkraut and coconut kefir  the Body Ecology Diet the importance of sunshine and vitamin D, sweat and movement the herbs and nutraceuticals you can use to break up stubborn biofilms the importance of supporting the liver with herbs such as schizandra, burdock and dandelion root and st mary's thistle  the importance of full body detoxification in healing from candida overgrowth the three phases of liver detoxification and the nutrients your body needs to successfully complete them the immune boosting powers of medicinal mushrooms when healing from candida, particularly chaga, reishi, turkey tail, maitake, Mason's Mushrooms the difference between ground dwelling mushrooms and those that grow on trees e.g medicinal mushrooms  bringing awareness around the glycemic load of gluten free products when working to heal candida overgrowth the tests you can use to distinguish candida from other bacterial loads within the body, particularly the OAT (organic acids test)   Who is Dan Sipple? Dan is a also known as The Functional Naturopath who uses cutting-edge evidence-based medicine. Experienced in modalities such as herbal nutritional medicine, with a strong focus on environmental health and longevity, Dan has a wealth of knowledge in root-dysfunction health.   Who is Sage Dammers? Fuelled by a passionate desire to help people live the ultimate life and create a better world, Sage studied raw and superfood nutrition and traditional herbal systems, especially Taoist tonic herbalism. He has worked with and trained under the world’s leading master herbalists and nutrition and longevity experts in Costa Rica, Australia, Bali, China, and America. Sage has developed products internationally and given lectures on peak performance nutrition in Australia, Bali, America, and France. His years of experience in this unique arena have allowed him to cultivate an unparalleled combination of cutting edge nutritional and culinary expertise. Sage has started tonic elixir bars in 5 star luxury hotels in Paris and Sydney serving longevity elixirs disguised as gourmet treats, introducing the novel concept of healthy indulgences to the market of world travelers.     Resources Clearlight Saunas The Wim Hoff Method Body Ecology Mason in China at the Poria Farm Benny Ferguson Movement MonkDan InstagramDan Email Addictive Wellness  addictivewellness Instagram Addictive Wellness Choccies on Amazon   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify and Soundcloud!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: Hey, everybody! Welcome to the SuperFeast podcast. It's Mason here, and I've got an epic conversation coming for you today with some of my favorite men in the health space. I've got two names and faces you're going to recognize. We've got Sage Dammers from, you're joining us from over in LA, Addictive Wellness. Incredible tonic herb-infused, sugar-free chocolates as well as smoothie elixir packs, and all infused with all these beautiful tonic herbs and mushies we're going to be going into and as well as tonic herbs on their own. Mason: And Sage is one of my absolute favorite voices coming out of that like, gnarly melting pot of LA with this absolutely next-level in health and this integration of health systems from all around the world, and Sage has been in it for so many years and you've heard him talk on it before, and you've heard his wealth of knowledge. It's always surprising to find out what he's going to be able to come up with. And today, talking about candida, is going to be no different. Mason: And I've also got Dan Sipple, friend, functional naturopath down the south coast of Sydney. Dan is absolutely my favorite go-to naturopath, we've been friends for a long time. He is now officially my mother's naturopath and mine and Tahnee's naturopath, and so that's a beautiful little evolution that's going about. Mason: Boys today we're going on a deep dive, three way conversation around the yeast-like infection candida albicans. Welcome guys. Dan: Hey, hey. Sage: Thank you for having us, Mason. It's a pleasure to be here. Mason: Yeah it's going to be so good, so fun. Alright, you know I don't know how many other people are going to be having the best time absolute ever having a conversation around a gnarly infection that's become ... I guess it's not as trendy, I'd say? As it used to be? But it's definitely still a hot topic, especially a hot topic in the west. Mason: Candida albicans, yeast-like fungus within the body that, as I mentioned, now it's absolutely a normal part. These candida cells are a normal part of our body, of our flora, exists within our mucus membranes, our skin, mouths, genitalia, vagina, intestines and other organs. We're going to be talking about this phenomena today where we see some kind of environmental, or maybe lifestyle, or maybe it's been a modern medicine antibiotic that's then led to an upset within our microbiome and basically in many other areas, including immune deficiencies. That's led to this fungus, yeast within the body then overgrowing and getting what many people have experienced, which is fungal overgrowth. Mason: First of all I just want to go to Sage. Just going to go to you and say hey and give people a bit of an insight with your history of candida. Sage: Yeah, absolutely thank you Mason. For me personally, I dealt with candida first hand. When I was growing up I was a vegetarian but not a healthy by any means. I was just on carb overload throughout my whole Childhood of like rice and pasta and pizza and any carb I could get my hands on. Was very fortunate not to be eating fast food, but still was not the most ultimate diet ever. Sage: So when I came into my teen years, about 15 and a half, I started developing chronic acne, probably more to do with my diet than anything else. Diet and combination of hormones and things like that. I didn't know what to do with it at the time, you know? I tried lost of topical things and things of that nature but nothing was really making an impact in helping me, and that's such a stressful thing as a kid to be going through. And I resorted to taking antibiotics, because it was the only thing that was going really do me any good at the time in terms of the superficial results that I was looking for. I didn't understand the whole repercussions and the future downsides of it, I just knew, this is going to help me in the short-term not to be so self-conscious. And I had no other solutions. I didn't know of all these other things I know about now. I wish I would've. Sage: So I was on twice-daily antibiotics from age 16 until 19 and a half. Mason: Gnarly. Sage: So these years of antibiotics, as you can imagine, wreaked havoc on my microbiome, and left me ripe for candida to come in and take over. So it was a thing where in the beginning I enjoyed fruit so much, and even as I was getting healthy and getting onto much more of a natural diet I still really enjoyed fruit. So I didn't want to give that up, and that was the one thing holding me back from really making progress against candida, where I couldn't make the jump to go fully into what was necessary to push back on the candida. Sage: And eventually it got to the point where I got real mentally strong about it and got strict and went through the Body Ecology Diet, Stage One, where it's really strong. Cutting out carbs, cutting out sugars, bringing in probiotics and fermented foods and some of the most powerful antifungal and immune-enhancing herbs, and over the course of a couple years that really got me through it and got me to a much better stage of health. Life has been much better ever since. Mason: Yeah, I mean to the extent that where I think that history of yours has played such a huge part in your life that it's absolutely entwined in your philosophy, the ways that you make your chocolates and your elixir blends, right? Sage: That's why I have sugar-free chocolate, is because I [inaudible 00:05:25] but still have a sweet treat, while I was in the candida recovery stages, and it didn't really exist. It wasn't out there. All, you know there's all these chocolates made with agave and coconut palm sugar and all that, and regardless of where somebody may stand on those things, they are still gonna be feeding bacteria, fungus, yeast and molds in the body, and it's not going to be your friend most times and especially not on recovery from candida where you need to not be feeding these guys. So I made it out of necessity, and it's turned into a beautiful life of being a chocolate maker. Mason: Yeah, I love it. The fruit of the healing journey and I still attest that it's the only sugar-free chocolate that I can really thoroughly enjoy. Sage: Thank you. Mason: Dan you've had quite a history with candida, now you've really had this firsthand clinical experience for a number of years now. I'm interested to hear what your path with candida has been. Dan: Yeah sure, and not too dissimilar to Sage. IT very much came as a result of antibiotic exposure, and so I've talked a couple of times on previous podcasts. In my earlier years, 17, 18, 19 I had issues with viral load and autoimmunity, which kind of set the scene for other opportunistic organisms to take over, and it was a course of about five or six years where I was kind of floating in that space where my immune system was compromised to the point to where I would actually need antibiotics by the time these bacterial infections would take over. It was like a vicious cycle that got set up, and I see that often in clinical practice too, where once that cycle starts it's very hard to get off that train. Particularly if you are being dictated to by the western medical model, which at the time I was heavily under the influence by. Mason: [inaudible 00:07:19]. Dan: Yeah, absolutely that's right. So lots and lots of antibiotics, I'd get better. I'd push my body a bit, the infections would return to the point where there was clear and overt infection. Not knowing anything about herbal protocols or functional medicine or naturopathy or anything of that kind of world at this stage, but it was very much a long road to try to undo that vicious cycle and get out of that loop? And incorporating things like Sage is talking about with diet and lifestyle and cutting the alcohol and the sugars out, you know. Optimizing vitamin D status and restoring the microbiome. So it was definitely one of those things that didn't go away overnight, and I think that's really important to drill into the listeners as well is that once you get traction with something like candida you really need to set up a lifestyle that facilitates long-term resistance against that so that these opportunistic organisms can't take back over. Mason: Candida's such an interesting one. The level of symptoms that arise from a chronic infection are so vast, and it's one of those ones where if you read the list you go, my gosh; I don't know if that list is very useful because there's so many other infections or deficiencies that can give rise to it. But then there are, of course, some specifics. And so looking at the list, you've got chronic fatigue, brain fog, digestive issues. Then when you start getting down a little bit more the reoccurring yeast infections, oral thrush. Even going into sinus infection, you can start seeing candida is being implicated when there's food allergies, when there's intolerance. Of course, dead giveaway is fungal infections on the skin, within the nails especially within the feet, and then a weak immune system. Quite often is it a chicken or an egg, you know? You can see that when there is weak immunity, especially when you see medications in particular like antibiotics and chemotherapy, and then hormone disrupters like hormone replacement therapy ... what is it? Corticosteroids, then? Am I saying that right? Dan: That's right, yeah. Immunosuppressants, corticosteroid-based medications because they're basically squashing the immune response, which, although ameliorate symptoms, allows these guys to take an even stronger hold. Mason: Mm. Oh and then you even see joint pain and definitely the alteration of moods coming about from candida. And so we go, okay. Unless you've got some of the telltales, like reoccurring thrush, fungal thrush in the mouth and fungal infection coming up on the skin, how do you clinically hone in on a diagnosis that in fact we do have candida cells proliferating in excess in the body? Dan: Is that question directed at me, Mason? Just to clarify? Mason: It is, and I will just make ... And I don't think you have clinic, Sage. I don't know maybe you didn't know that Dan. Sage: No, no clinic for me. So if I hear the clinically word in there just [inaudible 00:10:22]. Dan: Yeah, so to answer that question. That's a really good question, Mase, to really sort of hit on the head in the forefront. I think with an issue like candida it's very, very rare that I see that alone. What I usually find is that that's there in concert with just a good old dysbiosis where you'll see bacterial pathogens that are overgrown, you may or may not see parasites as well. So I don't think I've ever seen just one clean cut, pure case of candida without all that going on with some sort of viral load or bacterial imbalance. And so what we find is, is that the best kind of treatment is not just to isolate the yeast in this case and attack the yeast. It's to nurture that whole ecosystem, to treat it like an ecosystem where you're setting up a new environment basically, to where it's not conducive for it to thrive, which as we say does incorporate diet, lifestyle, herbs and the whole concert and symphony of things. Dan: But in terms of testing, you can do blood testing for antibodies to see if the immune system has actually seen the candida albicans and made antibodies against it from the base cells? The only downside to a test like that is that you don't whether the immune system has made those antibodies 10 years ago or if it's happening right now and that's where the symptoms really need to guide you. If there's overt signs of candida as is like on the tongue, the toenail, the respiratory issues and what not, then you've got more of a case for that so that's where usually doing the stool test and looking at candida markers in combination with that blood is a really good way to back that up. Because if you're seeing it on both, if you're seeing it in the stool, antibodies, then you've got quite a good case for it being currently present. And in that case, you know, obviously, you want to make the protocol more specific to yeast in that case. Mason: Sage, how do you go about this? Because I completely ... I like the fact that I've got access to Dan's knowledge and can get a little bit more specific, and I know you recommend this a lot, in getting some testing, getting some panels done so you're not just, like, shooting in the dark. But how do you, dare I say kind of like, I know I can definitely say that I come from a more folky perspective when it comes to gentle diagnosis? But from your perspective how do you go about that in really identifying that candida is in fact present? Sage: Yeah, I don't know exactly what your health care system is like in Australia, but I know here in the US it's expensive to do lots of testing. Very often things will not be covered by insurance so you'll have to pay them out of pocket, so I always find it's really nice to be able to at least somewhat get a little bit of progress in terms of a self-diagnosis before you go investing in testing so at least you know what tests to go do, so you don't have to spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. Because it can get real expensive. Sage: So with candida, as you mentioned, you're looking at a lot of symptoms in terms of recurring infections, oral thrush, fungal issues. And then it's a combination of looking at your symptoms and then looking at your history in terms of antibiotic use. If you've had extended use of antibiotics, especially if it's for two weeks or more in the past, your odds are going to be pretty high that at some point candida has taken a good foothold in your system and started to really proliferate beyond the natural levels that you'd find. Candida at small levels is actually a good part of a healthy microbiome, good for nutrient absorption and beneficial in that way. But when things are thrown out of balance you're going to get in a lot of trouble. Sage: So there's many really good questionnaires up there online that people can do just to get an initial idea, just to get a rough feel? Then from there you can progress to testing, which I think is incredibly important. If you can afford it, whether it's this kind of testing or whether you're looking at your thyroid or hormones, rather than just experimenting without data indefinitely and maybe five years from now you finally figure out what's really going on. Save yourself a ton of time and a lot of trouble and probably save yourself money in the long run in terms of being able to spend money on the right supplements and herbs to help you out, and foods, rather than dealing with misdiagnoses for an extended period of time. Mason: Well let's say just getting to the food here. Often we know, that yeah we've had a look at kind of the pharmaceutical angle, the antibiotics especially. Especially going in and nailing the microbiome and causing our ability to actually create the environment where we can naturally regulate healthy levels of this, this and candida cells being within the body. Let's have a look at the food that you see as being an accumulative force or an aggravator, that leave our organ function, immune function, the microbiome function to getting to the point that candida can actually take hold. What are the, what are these nasty ones or excessive ones that get nasty when they're excessive? Sage: Yeah I think it is many things that happen in conjunction. Probably, if you had never taken antibiotics, and you've got a really strong immune system, you could deal with having some of the wrong foods coming into the body, right? Even if you never did antibiotics, but you're having tons of sugar, but your immune system's really strong ancestrally? Maybe you're okay and maybe you can pull it off. Or if you're having lots of sugar and in combination you're having, say, ground mushrooms, like culinary mushrooms that haven't been properly cleaned and tend to be very contaminated and nasty. And these are different from tree mushrooms, I want to be real clear about the distinction- Mason: I'm going to leave a lot of time for us to get into that distinction, thanks for bringing that up so when we- Sage: Yeah yeah. So we'll come back to that a little bit later. Patience everybody, we'll get there. Mason: Patience, you mushroom fiends! Sage: Depending on the individual, right? Because everybody's got a bit of a different setup in terms of the microbiome and adjusted powers, but for a lot of people I think also: poor food combining. Especially having lots of, like, leafy greens? That take time to digest and they're very fibrous? And combining that with really sugary starchy fruit. I've found that for a lot of people the fruit wants to burn up fast and move through, and it's like rocket fuel. But then you have, you know. It's like a Ferrari on a freeway, wants to go, doesn't like being driven slowly. And then you have these green leafy vegetables that take time to digest, they're very nutritious, they're like a big rig carrying lots of, you know, nutrition on them and fiber and what not. And they slow down the traffic, and the Ferrari is getting into road rage. It's like it develops into a situation where it's a ripe breeding ground for proliferation as things start to ferment in there. Sage: So that could also be a situation that, while it may not specifically cause, it wouldn't be a root source of candida? It would not be supportive or helpful if it was something that you were dealing with. Mason: Mm. Love it. Hey Dan what about you, in terms of dietary lifestyle factors that are really going to come in and, you know, if ... I like what you said there, Sage. There's going to be different constitutions at work here. You're going to have an ancestral ... It might be the difference being breastfed or not being breastfed, in terms of whether your immune system is strong or just ancestrally whether you've got that strong gene expression within the immune system, and then acknowledging that. Because long-term, I think you've definitely seen it over in LA, I definitely have here in the health, same way. You almost get to a paranoia of candida becoming crippling to your lifestyle. Is that something you see happening a lot? Sage? Sage: A little bit. It's not people, the awareness of it in the community is not as strong, I would say, as it was in like, 2011, 2012? There was- Mason: Glory days. Sage: ... back then? You know, these trends and focuses always kind of come and go. I don't know, it's weird because it's still as much an issue as ever, but people kind of feel the need to talk about something new, so they can sell new books and post new videos. So. As we move more further beyond some of the basics than we really need to, the solution was often right at hand. Mason: Yeah, very funny. And I agree. I think candida is having a PR nightmare right now. I think- Sage: [SIBO 00:18:45] has stolen all the attention from it. Mason: Yeah. And so Dan what's your take on this? Dietarily, lifestyle-wise, what are the conditions that you see as precursor to, especially if someone has the constitution that is ripe for the picking for candida being an issue. What do you see those being? Dan: I completely agree with Sage, and I think I'd add on to that what I find really prevalent is when people's circadian rhythms are out? When they're using, you know, dietary sources to jack up their adrenal response. So caffeine, you know, refined sugar obviously. Nailing the circadian rhythms and leaving space between meals sounds really, really simple, but it is quite pivotal when you're dealing with any sort of dysbiotic environment when it comes to the gut, or the respiratory system, or any immune suppression. Getting the circadian rhythms locked in and normalizing the nervous system, and the adrenal response is huge. Dan: Because if you think about it, if you've got fire going on in that digestive system or anywhere in the body that's of a yeast or a general viral origin or whatever, your adrenals are seeing that and are constantly trying to put out those flames with a fire extinguisher, hence the adrenal fatigue phenomena. So normalizing those rhythms and supporting the adrenals can't be understated. Mason: Yeah, I would definitely attest to that. I mean, we've spoken about ... I think I've spoken to both of you previously on the podcast talking about digestion in case people aren't realizing digestion has a huge part to play with candida albicans. Especially from a [Daoist 00:20:29] perspective when you start seeing weak spleen Chi. Mason: That can really be the feeding ground from a triple burner perspective. That middle burner really emerging with whether it's just dampness or weakness within the spleen and therefore that whole spleen and digestive network through the stomach, then allowing strong digestive function, strong governance of your bacterial levels. What we see there is that can be the catalyst to then going down into the lower burner where we see damp heat emerge, and we start seeing yeast infections within, basically throughout the entire sexual organ system. And then also moving from that middle burner to the upper burner, where we see heat and fire through the lungs with all those allergies and all those respiratory issues and through the heart as well. Mason: So basically I'm going to pause it there because I think if I open up that can of worms and make a distinct ... in these treatment protocols it's going to take us in a completely other direction. Mason: But there's a few things then that you were touChing on that I want to leapfrog off, and that was definitely the Jing and exhaustion aspect here. You talked about the fact that, I like seeing the Jing as the pilot light for digestion. If you are exhausted, if you're adrenally exhausted, if you're leaking that essence, if you're relying on coffee, if you're mentally stressed and you're in emotional patterns that continue to make you, you know. Those things that make you emotionally excessive. You're going to see that you don't have the foundations and roots within your body, within the core energy centers of the kidneys to really stabilize you. And to that, you're going to see a thorough endocrine disruption go on at that stage, because you are overly adrenalized. And you can't produce natural cortisol, you can't get down to, like you have to rely on these cortisone creams and all that kind of stuff. But then at the same time you're not going to be able to lead to that real healthy sex organ function. Mason: And so, basically, that core is ... You see that consistently, I do as well, Sage, where that exhaustive, gene-depleting lifestyle doesn't allow for the pilot light to go on so that the spleen can actually turn on that fire and appropriately- Dan: It can probably become, I think it can really become a vicious cycle, because with the candida, it's creating higher levels of permeability of digestive lining. So you're getting, essentially leaky gut, and this is releasing bits of food and digestive materials into the bloodstream, which is causing inflammation and autoimmunity. But it's also releasing the toxins, which are being produced by the candida. Its own, basically the candida poo being released throughout your body. Dan: So now you've got systemic inflammation firing away, and that is going to be a major leak of Jing. So that in itself is depleting the adrenals, and it's a vicious cycle because okay now your adrenals are depleted, now you can't fuel your immune system because you're experiencing exhaustion, and the candida can even grow further. And it's really unfortunate. But at the same time if you can get in there with a little bit of action and start making some moves on it, you can slow down that cycle and start to spin it back. Mason: Well let's start here, in terms of looking at treatment. Once we've identified that perhaps we have an environment, and as Dan was saying: you're not going to be able to just isolate candida. There's most likely going to be a number of coinfections, and you're definitely going to see, I'm sure you're going to see a bunch of worms of various types being present at that time because we're going to see a repressed immune function. But starting off the bat, quite often we're looking at removing the excessive candida from the body, cleaning up the diet, and I guess loosely saying this is going to be a cleansing or cleaning aspect of the protocol. Mason: Now at this point, I'd like to get both your two cents. We'll start with Sage. Do you like to bring in, of course lifestyle factors, and I think it's obvious that are going to reduce stress, but do you like to bring in herbs or other practices to, for lack of a better word, tone our ability to store and restore Jing? Sage: Yeah, of course. So naturally, you and I and I bet Dan is into these as well, you want to look at your top Jing-building herbs. Things like He Shou Wu, Cordyceps, [inaudible 00:24:58], Rehmannia, Morinda. And so I think building that base of core vitality is an essential component of any healing program, basically. Because without that your body just does not have the energy and the safety. When you're in such a Jing-vulnerable state? And you're prepared to run out of fuel and die at just about any moment? Your body is afraid and not going to divert resources to dealing with your fungal issues because it's just concerned with not, like, crashing and burning and that being the end of the show. Sage: So absolutely, building the Jing is essential, so you can build ... you're kind of simultaneously wanting to build the Jing, and address the candida itself to stop the Jing leak, and then you can start improving at like, twice as fast. Mason: And Dan, what's your take on that? Dan: Yeah. 100%. Nervous system and adrenal support is absolutely necessity initially before you, I think before you even go in thinking about using the big guns to break up the biofilms and reduce the candida load with strong antimicrobials, which are all part of the protocol. But it really depends on the person in front of you to. So for example, if I've got someone who's burning the candle at both ends, doing the 75-hour work week, and only wants to take antimicrobials it's like, ha ha. No, no, no, no, no. We have to nail the lifestyle first. That is absolutely essential. And so sleep, blue lights, EMFs, all of that stuff comes into it. Diet, you have to have the foundations ready and ripe for the body to go, aha! Now I can enter healing mode, now I can switch over to parasympathetic. Because the foundations are there. Dan: What I often do in those cases, too, with someone who is really on this end of the spectrum and is part of that go-go-go lifestyle? Is just little simple tweaks, like green tea. So instead of coffee? It's green tea. It's anti-strep, it's anti-candida, it boosts [inaudible 00:26:58] bacteria, it's antioxidant, it's lymphatic. So little tweaks like that. You know, removing the sugars. You sort of stage it out. Dan: Then you might bring in a probiotic, and you'll use a strain which has been shown to reduce fungal load and boost natural killer cells and various components of the immune system. And you step it up. And you step it up. And you step it up. And you carefully watch for reactions, because that's another part of it with any sort of protocol where you are reducing microbial load, because you are obviously going to run into potential detoxification issues if that person's ability to clear out these metabolites can't keep up with the front end. So that's something that you really have to be careful navigating. Dan: And like Sage said earlier, this can take a long time, people. This can take, if it's been a long time it can be up to one or two years. And then once you're there to have to maintain where you've got to, and in my case I got there a long time and ended up, a little while later, in a moldy apartment over on the northern beaches and it all went out the window. Those things come up, so you have to be really on to the environmental side of it too. Mason: Okay, and let's just, before we move on, I want to touch on the nervous system and supporting the nervous system to getting into that parasympathetic state so we can actually get to resting, digesting, and healing. Some of your favorite methods, distinctions whether they use technologies or whether they be something simple that we can access through nature. Dan: Yeah, nice one. So I'm sure we've touched on it before Mason, but just barefoot earthing. Getting back into nature, a very simple thing to do. Slowing the breathing down, doing diaphragmatic breathing, not breathing shallowly from the chest. And doing that as often as possible, making that really, really priority. I often team that up with the blue light blockers, which you can get now. Get people to slap those on at like 7 PM at night every night leading up to bed. SwitChing off wifi at night, that's really good for the nervous system. Dan: So all these little tweaks to get you over from fight-or-flight over to the parasympathetic side of the nervous system. You can also pair that up with a few gentle botanicals like chamomile, passionflower, and Reishi mushroom for example. That trio works fantastic. Mason: Yeah, like a beautiful moon milk at night, maybe with a bit of a ... well I like doing a chamomile, lavender infusion within the milk there, been doing that for retreaters recently and getting those Reishis in there. Beautiful nightcap. Mason: Sage, I know there's like a crazy crossover of what you do and love and recommend there, with the breath and the barefoot and getting the blue light out. Sage, one thing I'm going to have to do and put in the notes here is get the instructions on how people can completely get the blue light off their phone. Everyone's like, oh night mode. It's like, no, no, no; I'm like, Sage has got this beautiful hack for getting all the blue light out. Sage: Deep in the settings you can modify it so it glows all red at night, and you can still fully text and stuff. It gets weird if you're trying to, like, check out Chicks on Instagram? Because they don't look good. Mason: And that's you, man. I imagine it gets weird for you all night. AnnaBlanca's like, "What you doing?" Mason: "No I'm just doing some, looking at like, photography development, old school style, so weird." Sage: But other than that, it's great to be able to flip on all red at night, and it's just, everything in your phone, the only colors are red and black, for everything. And there's a shortcut you can set up where all you have to do, and I'm not sure exactly how this goes on with iPhone X and past that where there's no home button anymore. But with the older ones you just tap the home button three times for the shortcut, and it'll put it right into the red. So it's easy to turn on and off, so it's great. And then even for some random reason you need to check the time in the middle of the night, it's all red, so. It's ideal not to use it at all, but if you have to look then at least you're not messing up your melatonin levels and shocking your system in the middle of the night. Sage: And other things that I like for getting into that parasympathetic state is, Reishi mushroom has been mentioned. Ashwagandha is another one of my absolute favorites because it works on so many aspects of health that people are struggling with these days. Mason: It goes right in that moon milk as well, the Ashwagandha and Reishi with that infusion. Oh man, it's so good. Sage: And then also, infrared saunas are great to put you back in that parasympathetic- Mason: Oh yeah. Sage: ... state because you're being surrounded by the infrared, which is that heat signature that we as humans give off. That's why you look through night vision infrared goggles, and you see people. So if you think back, and this is a theory my dad first shared with me, and this is not scientifically based, really; it's just a theory, and you see if it resonates with you. But if you look back at when the last time was that you were fully surrounded with infrared heat in somewhat of a dark and fully safe place was in your mother's womb. Mason: Oh, true. Sage: And so it is getting you back to that place of being fully provided for, fully safe, everything take care of and everything's okay, all you need to do is Chill out. Mason: And you know what I'd probably put there, like, putting those ocean sounds on. Like over when Tahnee was pregnant we were listening to the placenta, and it had this woosh, woosh. So getting those sounds in there at the same time, those ocean sounds while you're meditating in that infrared sauna. And we should put some links, just here on this call we've got some incredible resources for people to go and get a clear light sauna. I mean, your folks offer them over there in the States, and we're both friends with Sebastian here who owns the New Zealand, Australian, and European and UK branch, so basically no matter where you are in the world we're going to be able to basically get you hooked up in- Sage: We've got the connections [inaudible 00:32:52]. Mason: Yeah, we've got the connections. We'll put some links in though depending on which continent you're on and give you some ... you know. Just give them the old, Sage and Mason ... and Dan. Well let's throw Dan in there as well. Sage, Mason and Dan sent me. So get you hooked up because I agree that is one of the absolute, ultimate technologies, having an infrared sauna in my house for getting the nervous system toned up. And we could just do a podcast on that, I'm sure. Mason: Now let's start- Sage: Real quick, if you don't mind, just to finish on the nervous system. I'm a huge fan of the Wim Hof method for this. Breathing and the super oxygenation? For strengthening the nervous system and gently building up to cold exposure. People get intimidated because they see people do it on Instagram in the beginning, but it's just like lifting weights. You train your nervous system, you don't jump in and do something super challenging, you know? Go to try to bench press 200 kilos on your first time going to the gym. Sage: You do the 30 seconds of cold water at the end of a hot shower or after taking a sauna, when it's not going to be that crazy. And from there you gently build up. Eventually you're doing 10 minutes of a cold shower, or you're doing a five or ten minute ice bath and it's not that big of a deal anymore because you built up to it at a sustainable level. Of course if you hit it too hard in the beginning, that's why people catch a cold. Their nervous system's weak and it can't handle being out in the cold if they hit it all at once, and it overwhelms them. It's like if you try to do too much at the gym, you're going to injure yourself, it happens. So I think that is one of the most incredible tools that I've experienced, and now that I've been doing it for, almost four years. And it's been, yeah. So powerful for me. Mason: Yeah and I think that's a good distinction there because when you look at the branding and what works is seeing Wim walk up and down in his shorts, and it's covered in snow. And basically it's very important for us to remember that these aren't systems of fanaticism. These are systems of appropriateness for you to build that core function. So I definitely throw my support behind that. Wim's a great guy and also for those of you that are maybe wanting to go even deeper through a process with your breath, if that might seem a little bit unobtainable? I'll also put a link, um, Benny Fergusson, my friend, the Movement Monk, has a really amazing, gentle breathwork practice that is very intricate and very much takes into account these, the mental and physical unification that's going to have to go throughout that process. Mason: So you've got lots of resources there, everyone, for getting that nervous system toned. Then we start moving into how are we going to get ... We've got the baseline. We've got building back our Jing, getting our nervous system toned, and I think we've kind of talked about it's the bread and butter. And maybe bread isn't the best example here because it's got the yeast raising factors, that are actually going to be implicated when it comes to candida. Sage: Non-starchy, gluten-free bread and butter. Mason: Mm, mm. Grass-fed butter. Sage: There you go. Mason: Basically now I want to get into where we're getting into the clearing now. Getting into the clearing, starting to bring some herbals, start bringing in some compounds that are going to start building back our microbiome, start countering this intense leaky gut that we can start seeing and that permeability that we've already touched on. Sage, you're starting out. What are your pillars for starting to clear the body and get it back on track in those initial stages, which may be for three months or a year. Sage: Yeah, yeah. It is a bit of a journey, and that was the most intimidating thing to me in the beginning that actually stopped me from starting for a couple of years, after I kind of knew I was going to have to do this. But I was super intimidated by the fact that I was really going to have to be serious about cutting down on carbs and sugar for anywhere from six months to two years, and I wanted to figure out any other way. But in the end it came back to this: you've got to deal with these basic things. Sage: So you really want to minimize carbs, cut out all forms of sugar, because all of this is beating the candida. Eventually, one day, you will be able to bring it back in moderate amounts, as you've rebuilt your whole gut microbiome. But for now, you really want to cut it down. And you're going to see tremendous ancillary benefits from this, aside from just the candida? You're going to be able to start burning ketones as a fuel source and start burning fat, so you're probably going to experience some great weight loss, some people are probably going to enjoy that. And when you're burning these ketones for fuel and burning fat as fuel, healthy fats, you're able to produce far more ATP, which is your pure cellular energy, than when you're burning glucose as fuel. So you're going to have a lot better energy, once you transition. Sage: It can be a little challenging as your body first is transitioning to burning fat as fuel. But once you get there it's pretty amazing. And you'll learn to get creative with stevia and things like this that can still give you the pleasure of sweetness in your life, you don't have to say goodbye to that. There's many ways, we put tons of recipes on this stuff on our YouTube channel. And so that's the first step, is cutting out all these things that are feeding the candida. Sage: And then, what are you going to go after it with? One of the best that I found was Pau D'arco tea. It's one of the most powerful, natural, antifungal herbs coming out of the Amazon. You can make a really nice tea with that, it goes great as the base of any hot elixir, or you could just be sipping it on its own, all the time. And then two of the other very powerful herbs for me, the tonics that we all know and love are Reishi mushroom and Chaga. Sage: Chaga for me was especially impactful. I was doing some nice tinctures and capsules but where I really started experiencing the benefits of it was when I would get the raw chunks of Chaga mushroom and cook them for three hours into a real strong water extraction, freeze it overnight so that the water gets inside the cell walls, these cell's walls that are super hard that you can't digest? Actually busts them open as it freezes, then boil it again the next day and make it super strong, and I was getting into drinking it regularly. That was a huge assist in my journey against candida. Mason: So ... Yeah, go for it. Sage: Oh I'm just getting on a roll. Mason: So, well actually before. I want to keep you going, but I just want to comment on two things there and Dan, get your two cents in. Mason: That's a really appropriate use of the ketogenic diet. I really like ketogenesis as a distinction in what's ... in a way to possibly get us losing weight that's excessive and actually shouldn't be there? And also getting our mitochondria rocking to the extent that we can, for a time, get off sugars and get into this state where our metabolism can get a bit of a reset and it's a little bit of a breath of fresh air for our immune system for a time as well. Rather than just, go after it, get shredded, nonstop, don't ever not be keto. Mason: I don't know what your sense of that is, but we've discussed it a couple of times on the podcast and it's come up with one of Tahnee's conversations with a practitioner in terms of like, for women. An appropriate time to use ketogenesis and when it's not actually that useful? And we've spoken about it, Dan, in terms of what that excessive fat can do to go and contribute it over too much of a long period to gut permeability thanks to the off-gassing that that excessive fat gives through the bacteria. Mason: But I just wanted to really like ... I like that distinction that you just made there, Sage, I think that's for most people as casting a wide net. That seems like a sensible time to be using ketogenesis. Sage: Yeah. I think, you know there are anti-aging benefits of it in terms of minimizing glycation and things of that nature. And I think it's a transition diet, something you do for a time period to really change your inner terrain and external appearance and everything. And then probably long-term more of a cyclical ketogenic diet is probably the more beneficial thing, where you go in for a bit and out for a bit. And it's more of a natural flow. Mason: And of course, Pau D'arco. I think we're three massive Pau D'arco fans, coming from the lapacho tree in the Amazon. Heavily a part of my healing protocol. I hit it for probably a couple of years I had it constant rotation in strong amounts before it was time for me to then cycle off. Sage: You get to where you don't even want to think about it anymore. Just, you hit a point where, okay. I've had enough, I'm good. Mason: Yeah, I've had it absolutely enough. And that is, I think that's a really appropriate way to let your body govern, you know? Because of course, with any herb, especially a herb that has strong antifungal, antimicrobial actions, you're going to want to cycle off that at some point. Because your body's going to want to have the breathing room to go and do its thing and regulate. Mason: I just wanted to throw my support behind those. Pau D'arco had such an incredible, such an incredible impact on me moving ... I don't think I even mentioned the fact that I did, that was my catalyst, was candida, in getting into this. I was having fungal eruptions on my skin and a suppressed immune system. I've told the story I think on the podcast a couple of times, but it was definitely for me likewise, that combination of Chaga mushroom and Reishi mushroom, but then I'd use a base of Pau D'arco tea, and that's a very simple herbal approach. Mason: Then I had He Shou Wu coming in and nourishing my kidneys in the beginning, and that was the beginnings for me. Getting off the, of course I got off gluten, I got off the grains. I got off the conventional western diet, which is very suppressive to the spleen Chi and it definitely was to mine, and it was really suppressing my digestive capacity. And I was able to bounce back pretty quick, especially with those three primary herbs, the two mushies, and the Pau D'arco bark, and then the He Shou Wu coming in and supporting. Mason: And after I want to hear all your awesome rambling Sage, but I want to let everyone know that after this we're going to dive into the mushies. Sage: Yeah, so those are my first two pillars really, is starve the candida and get in the beneficial herbs that are going to help clean things up in there. And then you've cleared it out, and what are you going to put in there? You're not just going to leave a blank slate and let the candida come back in all over again like you did with antibiotics. You messed up once, don't do it again. So now, we want to introduce really great bacteria into the gut. So it's good to be taking some probiotics. Sage: I'm really a fan of taking spore based probiotics, or ones that are shown to have efficacy in actually making it through and setting up shop in the gut, rather than being killed off somewhere higher up? Maybe in the stomach by digestive acids and things like that? SO rather than just looking at the number of colony forming units, which is what's advertised, you actually have to do a little deeper digging to see if the company's actually had testing done, to show the level of survivability, which makes a huge, huge difference. You can have a trillion-strain probiotic formula that all gets killed off in the gut. You don't get anything from it, or you can have a 30 billion and all 30 billion survive and make it through and set up shop and are doing all sorts of work for you. So it really makes a big difference, whether it's surviving or not. Sage: And then getting on fermented foods, was a big part for me. Tons of sauerkraut, fermented vegetables ... Drinking coconut water kefir was really supportive for me, and yeah. That's the fermented side of things, and those for me were the three main pillars. Sage: You know a few other herbs that were beneficial were, like occasionally using a aged kyolic garlic extract was also supportive for me. One time early on I heard someone say, oh yeah you should juice a whole head of raw garlic. Candida will freak out about that. Holy crap, I had the worst burn, I pretty much gave myself an ulcer in the stomach from that. So don't juice a whole head of raw garlic and try drinking that. It's not a good idea. Learn from my mistake. Mason: Yeah, you lose your friends, you lose your intestinal lining. Sage: It was painful, man. Mason: That's so good. But hey, I think it's awesome that everyone can learn from our fanatical mistakes. Because I've definitely gone down that road. Mason: Yeah, I love it. I love that it's simple, I love that it's methodical, I think that it's really ... Over the years I've seen that same combination coming up again an again and again when you go through all the complexity and all the confusion in terms of what you should and shouldn't be eating and drinking, basically these are the core pillars in terms of what's going to get you from A to B in terms of healing as soon as possible. You mentioned Body Ecology, I think that's really ... I think you kind of consider that the Bible of the anti-candida diet, is that right? Sage: Yeah. It's a great place for anyone who's thinking they might be dealing with a candida issue to start out and get a good set of basic information and approaches and what foods can be beneficial and what not. Because they'll get a taste of things, and a feel of things I think from listening to us today and get some really good ideas. But it's good to have a kind of a manual, that you can really pore through and refer to and can address it from all sides. SO I highly recommend it to anyone that things they may be dealing with candida. Read the Body Ecology Diet book. Mason: Love it bro. Mason: Dan, what's your take? When you're entering into this what foods are you bringing in, what foods are you eliminating, are there any distinctions in terms of any particular constitutional elements that you like to take into account? Dan: Yeah, definitely and I'm one of those practitioners where, I probably do the least amount of dietary manipulation compared to a lot of practitioners. What I typically do is, apart from the obvious things, things such as alcohol, excessive caffeine use, refined sugars. Usually if we can take dairy and gluten-containing grains out of the diet and lower the amount of starches? I generally don't do too much above and beyond that in the initial stages. A, because of the amount that it puts onto the patient who is already compromised to some degree under this burden of stress, and so we just want to take out those really common sort of insults to allow the inflammation to kind of just settle down in the gut. Dan: But I think probably what we perhaps should've mentioned a little bit earlier is just movement and sweating, and we talked about sauna of course. But sunlight and movement are massive for candida. When I treat people that have chronic yeast issues, they're different people when you consider how they're presentation looks in winter compared to summer. And that I attribute largely to the upgrade they get from their immune system when their vitamin D level are optimized? Because we know that with optimized vitamin D levels we're producing higher amounts of our body's own antimicrobial substances like [inaudible 00:47:54]. Which has been shown to be stronger than many, many, many botanicals when tested in terms of destructing biofilms and getting viral load and bacterial load down and so forth. Dan: Movement's huge. You know lymphatic detoxification, that's massive as well. To ensure the person is moving and sweating and getting adequate sunlight. Dry skin brushing, that's effective as well. But at particular sort of point in treatment I like to then depending on the person's constitution introduce some gentle biofilm destructors as well. It's one thing to bring in antifungal herbs, but if the immune system can't see them, the shell of these critters isn't cracked up to allow their contents to be exposed to these botanicals or our immune system, then we're kind of not getting as much bang for our buck. So compounds like N-Acetyl Cysteine, absolutely brilliant for breaking up biofilm, really good for supporting the liver as well and glutathione production, which is our body's master antioxidant and you want prime levels of that anytime you're doing any sort of changes to the gut ecosystem or detoxification. The good old, Pau D'arco and cat's claw tea combo I found to be personally really successful and I think that's probably one of the first things you and I ever jammed about back at the markets years ago. Mason: Yeah man. For sure, and I think I can attest to Sage's love for cat's claw, una de gato, as well. Everyone's like, oh my gosh you guys are eating cat's claws? It's just a bark, everybody. I've got to just mention that. Sage: [inaudible 00:49:31]. Mason: I get that every now and then. Mason: Yeah sorry Dan, I had to get that little joke in there. Dan: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. So, yeah. In addition to that, pomegranate I have found to be just absolutely magnificent when it comes to any pathogenic overgrowth. I can't speak highly enough about that particular herb. I haven't found any other botanicals that simultaneously lower things like bacteria and candida, whilst up-regulating good bacteria at the same time. So pomegranate tincture is definitely going into the protocol for anyone who has any sot of fungal overgrowth. Dan: Apart from that, once you're doing the biofilm work, the person's moving and sweating, the vitamin D is optimized, and the dietary foundations are on point, you do have to think about the liver and all the metabolites that you're breaking down. Because the liver ultimately has the job of buffering and keeping the oil clean. And again, that feeds back into using things like N-Acetyl Cysteine, Alpha-Lipoic Acid, good old and St. Mary's Thistle, burdock, dandelion root just as teas can be really pivotal as well. Dan: Just, garbage in, garbage out. Just get people thinking about the more you're killing off, and the debris you're producing that has to be exiting the system because you can get that enterohepatic recirculation, and you don't want that, because the bugs will just set up shop in a different area of the body. Mason: So can I, I'm just going to before we move on. I just really want to bring a summary to this aspect of treatment, where we've identified that perhaps we do have an overgrowth of candida. We get into the tweakings of the diet, whether we do it gently, and I would agree that it's a psychological conversation of whether someone's going to go down the hardcore, phase 2 Body Ecology when it's like no sugars whatsoever. Maybe some green apple, I think at this stage- Sage: It's Phase One, Full Intensity. And then Phase Two is, like, gentler as you've gotten better. Yeah. Phase One is the Full Intensity. Mason: And also just making distinct what Dan was saying there, what are the core things that I'd be introducing if they're in a state where it's just not possible for them to make those changes? And that would be, again, whether it's going to work or not, these are ... this is what everyone's going to have to have that real dance within themselves, I think that's safe to say, and what's possible for you. And then you're going to have to manage your expectations with that. And as you said, Dan, I don't know, what were you saying dietarily with your core? Refined grains, excessive sugars, definitely getting off processed sugars, I think that's ... if you're on processed sugars you're going to basically be shooting yourself in the candida foot every single time you try to jump at him. Mason: So we've got that aspect, you know? Possibly looking at ketogenesis for a particular time, and so basically we've got that dietary component. Within talking, within a herbal sense and a treatment sense of getting our nervous system really toned and getting us in a calm place where our body can actually heal, getting our foundations of our Jing through Jing herbs. Like you mentioned, He Shou Wu, Rehmannia, Cordyceps, Eucommia Bark, and I think you mentioned Cistanche as well, Sage, and also you're going to get a good crossover there. And you don't have to have all of these, you know. You pick your herb, and Ashwagandha is also a beautiful one that's going to have those jewel effects on the nervous system and on the kidneys. Mason: Then we've gone to talk about, right. What herbs are we starting to include and what supplements are we starting to include to actually start clearing these out. Medicinal mushrooms we're going to go into next, but that's a huge aspect of building up basically the Jing of the immune system, which is always implicated. I can definitely always ... Definitely always, that's never the case. But I can generally say that you're going to see an immune suppression when it comes to candida. I think that's a fair thing to say, would you guys agree? Sage: Absolutely. Because you're very vulnerable to other things happening and taking place. Mason: Absolutely. So then we see both your suggestions in terms of what we're going to be getting coming in. We're going to get the herbs like Pau D'arco, the Chagas, the Reishis, Maitakes, and turkey tails are always going to be wonderful bringing those in to fortify the immune system. And you've talked about N-Acetyl Cysteine and started talking about this other aspect of this phase, which Sage, I know you're all over. And now that we're here Dan I really appreciate you bringing up the biofilms, the ability for us to actually break down. I don't know where you're atin terms of just describing what these biofilms actually are. I know there's a bit of calcification involved in them and I know the immune system especially has a hard time identifying that there is something there behind this little encasing, or this little barnacle, in which the infection lies beneath. It's one of ... Its survival, opportunistic mechanisms to not become identified by the immune system. Mason: And at that time so I just want to talk just a little bit more on that stage within this protocol, of actually knocking out these biofilms so our immune system can start getting this candida infection under control. So I just want to reiterate: your favorites for breaking down these biofilms, and then I just want to have another quick little conversation around opening up detox channels, supporting liver, and also my favorite, including binders, like clays within the diet to help moving these things out. And then also inclusive in this conversation is going to be, the saunas. We don't have to go too much further into it, but if you've got that going on, you're going to be definitely opening up that channel of detoxification through the skin. Mason: So in terms of knocking out these biofilms, your faves Dan? Dan: Pomegranate first and foremost. N-Acetyl Cysteine which we mentioned, and another one from the silkworm, Serrapeptase, I'm sure you guys are quite familiar with as well. Sage: Yep, absolutely. Mason: Another big favorite. Dan: Yeah. The only caution with Serrapeptase is long-term, it can ... Let me rewind a little bit. Good bacteria as well do form biofilm, and so there's a concern that long term use of agents like Serrapeptase and N-Acetyl Cysteine can also crack up good biofilms, which you don't want. Mason: Mm. And that's like, it's natural with anything that's a treatment protocol or enzymes therapy, with the Serrapeptase, you want to make sure that you're cycling it and respecting the treatment period, and you're not going in an “altering” the system of the body too long-term. Would you like the use of MSM in there? Have you ever found that useful? Dan: Yeah I do, I do like MSM and that's a big one I'll use in conjunction with this protocol particularly if people have joint-related issues. Which as Sage said, we often see that with candida, these fungal metabolites get passed around and float around through the body. It can cause quite painful and swollen joints and brain fog. That's another thing, with brain fog the components that get broken up with candida compounds actually form acid aldehyde, and that's why you get people who say, I feel like I'm drunk; I'll go to work and I just feel like I'm wasted and I can't think properly; my short-term memory's gone. And that's because of this acid aldehyde that the candida produced. Dan: SO yeah, sorry. Kind of went off on a little tangent there, but- Mason: No it's really funny when you see those news articles of people who they found had so much fermentation going on in the gut they were tested to be drunk and they hadn't had any alcohol at all. So bizarre, but it's true life. Dan: Next thing we know there'll be pulled over and getting breath tested and being fined as having [crosstalk 00:57:19]. Mason: Soon enough. You want to get tested for candida? Get pulled over and the cops [inaudible 00:57:23]. Dan: Yeah, imagine that. Imagine we get to the point that we're really concerned about the immunological health of our population. Random candida testing everybody. Pull over, like, parasite testing, you know? We've just got your back, everyone. Mason: Concerns your driving safety. Sorry Dan. Dan: Do not operate maChinery while candida is present. Mason: Yeah. Dan: But yeah, so to summarize. N-Acetyl Cysteine, Serrapeptase, the pomegranate. Good old green tea. Sounds very boring and we're used to hearing that but that is so, so good for candida in particular. We can talk about things like lauric acid and caprylic acid, they're often good additions to do particularly in those stubborn cases. Dan: The other one I didn't mention is berberine. Berberine is really efficient at cracking up biofilms and getting on top of ... And this is what I love about herbal medicine. It's like we're isolating candida but we know we're going to have a good effect on viruses and bacteria at the same time. So if someone does come in and they've got known candida issues, but they also have [inaudible 00:58:32], we know that using agents like berberine and pomegranate we're hitting both on the same head, if that makes sense. Mason: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). Mason: Absolutely. I mean, yeah, it gets a little bit different when you're using herbals rather than isolates. Beautiful list there, Dan. I really like the Serrapeptase- MSM combination for breaking down those biofilms and definitely going to have to get a little bit more into pomegranate, definitely through my support behind the berberine. Mason: Sage, in term