Gina Bria:       Dr. Joseph Mercola, the Hydration Foundation is delighted to interview you today. It feels like a kind of completion circle because you have opened so many healing doors with your own series of interviews. Your own interviews on Mercola.com have reached millions really.

Dr. Mercola:   Actually, hundreds of millions.

Gina Bria:       All right then. Yes, those give numbers so people know that the credibility is spreading, the voices are unifying, and you’re not only bringing new information but better information. So if we move into this through our joy tank instead of our anxiety tank …

Dr. Mercola:   Good strategy.

Gina Bria:       Yes, it’s a beautiful strategy. So it’s a circle and it’s even spiralling upwards because many of your interviews, Dr. Mercola, have presented breakthrough science.

Dr. Mercola:   That’s particularly appropriate because circles are vortex of that energy.

Gina Bria:       Exactly, I love that you get that. Yes, breakthrough science hydration. You’ve actually empowered our work here at the Hydration Foundation and we’re very grateful for that. And you’ve done that in really specific ways that I just want to call attention to those. How you’ve impacted our work at the Hydration Foundation is these memorable interviews, particularly with Dr. Gerald Pollock, one of our closest colleagues; Dr. Stephanie Seneff, one of our closest colleagues; Dr. Zach Bush became a colleague through you, Martin Paul, and Dr. Tom Cowan, just to name a few. So all these credible voices are beginning to overlap and it is really helpful for people to hear that the hydration story has made major changes, major shifts are going on, and we really want to be able to bring that to you with a chorus of voices that are all beginning to land on very specific strategies so that you can get this information and know how to embody it and live it and enjoy it. You’ve even interviewed, Dr. Mercola, my co-author on Quench Dr. Dana Cohen. Our book features the new science of hydration through fourth phase water, water identified by Dr. Pollack in his own laboratory. And our work at Quench was to take his science and turn it into recipes. That’s basically what we did in that book and it was so important we found over 50 hydrating foods, hydrating recipes, and then we packaged that in a five-day plan on how to increase your hydration without drinking all that plastic bottled water. This just got to change. We’re going to stop plastics going into the ocean and we’re going to do it in part through stopping people from drinking, not stopping, inviting them into a way more interesting way to hydrate that’s going to be joyful. So just imagine if we can get people to replace one plastic bottle a day with an apple or a cucumber. I mean, that’s just such straight up great information. So better hydration, better nutrition, better planet. We all seem to be coalescing from many fields now on what action we can take. And that’s why your work matters so much to us, Dr. Mercola, here at the Hydration Foundation which is a nonprofit public education on hydration. That’s our job – spreading better hydration.

So today we’d love to give you the mic on your latest interview with Dr. Tom Cowan. I know you’re interested in talking about that and cytoplasm and we’re going to just get really meaty on that. Dr. Thomas Cowan is someone also a colleague here at the Hydration Foundation. He’s another leading thinker on water inside our bodies. So just reminding you that you are a body of water, 99% water by molecular count. Dr. Zach bush says we’re 100% dehydrated in this culture. We got to take action. And we’re excited to have Dr. Mercola share … Look at the lineage you brought to us. That’s what I really want to land for people.

Thank you.

Dr. Mercola:   No, you’re welcome.

Gina Bria:       Yes, amazing. And we’re benefiting from it. So we want to keep spreading it.

So before we invite you to talk about your interest in cytoplasm and Dr. Cowan’s work who, by the way, not only is he a family physician of the highest ilk, beautiful stuff, trained at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, a great institution, he’s also a superb gardener. I don’t know if you know his garden is beyond belief and all food, all beautiful, hydrating food but before we commence on that, I really would like to ask you why hydration is way more important and urgent than we thought? What is essential? What does it do for us? Help us get that frame first and then let’s talk about the cytoplasm and your work here.

Dr. Mercola:   Yeah. I mean, other than drinking enough water, making sure it’s clean and pure, and eating hydrating foods that are full of water, I didn’t really have anything more to add but then when I interview with Tom Cowan for his new book Cancer and The New Biology of Water, he has some interesting insights on structured water in the cell. What Tom helped me understand is that he believes, and I think there’s likely some good support for it, that the key is the structure water inside the cell.

Gina Bria:       Inside our bodies.

Dr. Mercola:   Well, it’s not your bodies but specifically intracellular as opposed to extracellular, so on the cytoplasm essentially. And he believes there’s these proteins and, I think, speculation has a protein specific protein called Actin that serves the function of another protein of collagen that everyone here on this call understands what happens when you put collagen as jello in hot water and then you let it solidify in the fridge. It turns into essentially structured water and has this shape. Well, the same things happen inside your cells, except the protein is Actin. And by itself it doesn’t work. You could have the Actin in the cell but you’ve got to energize that cell. And the way this is done typically is through energy produced in your mitochondria. So the foundation, really the crux of my focus for the last few years has been on understanding the dynamics of what is responsible for increasing human health span and essentially being able to live well past 100 with all the function of a 30 or 40-year-old and none of the disabilities. So I think that’s possible and as an artifact of those practices, I think, you’re going to incorporate lots of structured water in your body because I think it’s a key vehicle and does many magical things. So how do you do that and you improve your mitochondrial function? And when your mitochondria are working better and they’re not dysfunctional, they’re going to produce the ATP. And ATP provides the energy, sort of the heat to change that Actin to a molecule that facilitates the improvement of structured water. And, interestingly, Tom gave an analogy that sort of extended Tom Seyfried who’s a major cancer biologist, probably the greatest cancer biologist in the world, he’s a professor of biology at Boston College. He has the theory, the mitochondrial theory of cancer, where it’s dysfunctional mitochondria that contribute to cancer but then Tom brought up the other consideration, and I don’t know that Tom’s considered that just to the mitochondria could be the structure of water within the cell. So maybe the combination of the two that contributes to the increase of cancer. So it’s really a fine detail that doesn’t really change the treatment because the same things that are going to create structured water improve mitochondrial function. So it’s an interesting aside though and I thought it was an intriguing discussion that we had and that interview will be airing later, actually, I think later this year because I think his book comes out in October. So we should have it next month. And I don’t know when this is going to air.

Gina Bria:       We have combined interviews so we are supporting your interview with Tom as we can release ours around the same time too.

Dr. Mercola:   Yeah, he’s got a great book. I mean, Cancer and the New Biology of Water, which fits in quite well with your topic. And it really expands in more detail than I just summarized here. It’s a very interesting book. Tom’s a good author. I’ve interviewed him multiple times for the last three books he had and always learned something from him. And he writes his book in an engaging storytelling way so it’s not boring unlike a lot of other books I read that’s hard to get through. So Tom’s are fun to read. Anyway, what improves mitochondrial function or actually what causes mitochondrial dysfunction is even more things. And that’s what I wanted to focus on. Now the other things that mitochondria do and the topic that Robert Slovak’ going to talk about, is deuterium depleted water, which deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. It’s also called heavy water. And it substitutes for water in many biological processes. It’s not healthy water. It’s unhealthy water. And we find low levels of deuterium or deuterium-depleted water in some healthy water source like glacier ice or some of these things that are traditionally thought as very healthy waters but your body also makes deuterium-depleted water and it’s made in the mitochondria because what happens is your food is a source of calories and ultimately supplies molecules that your body uses as a source of electrons and it passes into the mitochondria through a sophisticated series of complex biological processes and transfer these electrons through this chain in the inner mitochondrial membrane that ultimately results in the production of ATP, carbon dioxide, and water. And that water is deuterium-depleted water and really the highest quality water you could possibly get. Now you can buy deuterium-depleted water. It’s very expensive and Slovak actually has a company that markets that water and it’s less expensive than the alternative that was out there, which was from someplace in Europe. I don’t think it’s Germany but somewhere near Germany. He would know where it comes from but I think it was like 40 dollars a quart. The machinery required to produce it is expensive but the bulk of that cost is just shipping. It’s one of the worst things you can do selling a product is shipping water. That is like the dumbest thing to do.

Gina Bria:       We’re trying to get out of that.

Dr. Mercola:   Yeah. So it’s just a foolish business model because most of the money goes to pay for shipping. That’s crazy. No one [inaudible][14:56] except for the shipper. So Slovak has a concentrated form which is very low like five parts per million of deuterium that you can mix with other water. So it’s a little better model. so it’s less expensive. Anyway, even better yet is to train your mitochondria to make it so then it’s free.

Gina Bria:       And it’s your body in health, your body doing that.

Dr. Mercola:   Yeah, the only way you can make it is if you’re healthy, at least in significant amounts. I mean, everyone’s going to make it because their mitochondria work. If your mitochondria didn’t work, you would be dead literally in seconds. They’re really important for your function but the key is to get them all working and aligned and doing the right thing. So what does that, what improves mitochondrial function is going to improve your ability to hydrate, no question, outside the basics of making sure you’re drinking enough clean water every day. That’s a key component. Then structuring the water is something you want to do inside. So one of my favorite ways of structuring water inside the cell is to induce external energy. And there’s two primary ways that you can do that that are useful. One has two options, one of which I don’t believe is unhealthy and the other one is better. So the first one is sunlight, regular exposure to sun on your skin. So walking outside of your car from your car to the office and then back to your home with your long sleeve shirt on and long pants is not going to cut it. You’ll get some benefit but virtually none. I mean, less than one or 2% of the benefit you’re supposed to get. So you need to be outside on a regular basis. If you’re fair skin and a redhead and you don’t have a lot of potential to absorb sun, then just maybe it’s a few minutes but for most of us it’s closer to 20 minutes or an hour or even two hours, pretty much when the sun is up like solar noon. And then you’re going to get enough radiation into your body to help produce the structured water. And it of course makes vitamin D too and that’s sort of a universal understanding of one of the benefits of sun is that with sun on your skin you’re going to make vitamin D because that is really probably one of the most important vitamins/hormones in your body and it’s been well proven that low levels will increase your risk of cancer by double, double, which is crazy but an interesting aside from that, before we go to the other veersion that you can produce the heat into your body, would be that most of those original studies were done epidemiologically. So they were doing correlations. And it was not what people who were taking vitamin D supplements. It was people who had sun exposure because there’s something else magical in sun aside from the ultraviolet B which generates vitamin D. It’s also near, mostly near infrared. About 40% of the radiation and sunlight is near infrared. So that does magic to your cells. There are specific frequencies and we know around 660 nanometers and 850 nanometers and probably some others that have not as well studied in there that will activate the specific proteins in your electron transport chain. There’s two or three of them that could activate and resonate with this frequency, and that increases their ability to produce ATP. So that’s free. There’s no charge for it. You just have to go outside at the right time of the day. Now I know that’s impractical for most people during the winter if you live up north. That’s one of the reasons why I chose to live in Florida so I can do this pretty much year round. And even in the winter you get some near infrared. You don’t get as much ultraviolet B because of the angle of the light penetrating the atmosphere but the near infrared does penetrate that but not so much ultraviolet B. So that is sort of an essential and one of the basics if you want to live happy and healthy is just be in the sun. Now you never want to abuse that. You never want to get sunburned and you don’t want to get too much sun because it is an oxidative stress, there’s no question. Too much sun will cause damage and age you prematurely but it’s a Goldilocks dose you’re looking for.

So any questions on that before I go to the next?

Gina Bria:       I just want to bring what you’ve said for our listeners so they understand that the sun isn’t just about making vitamin D.

Dr. Mercola:   No, it’s not. It’s hard to determine what is the most important role it plays it but clearly it may be vitamin D or maybe near infrared, we don’t know, and maybe some as yet undiscovered aspect that we don’t fully appreciate at this point in time because the science is too unaware or not evolved enough to comprehend that at a quantum level. The next step is near infrared and you can get that at home pretty much all year round. Now many people, they aren’t careful with the adjective with the type of infrared and they think about infrared sauna. And almost all, I would say, well over 95% of the saunas are far infrared. That’s a different animal than near infrared, completely different animal. And it has frequencies or wavelengths that are much higher than near infrared, double, triple the wavelengths and it doesn’t penetrate as easily into your body. So the near infrared goes in pretty deep. It goes in several inches, which is pretty surprising. It will penetrate. I mean, that’s why you can put even a red light and it’ll light up your whole hand because it is penetrate into your tissue where far infrared does not do that. It only goes like a few millimeters, I mean, fractions of an inch into your body. So it can only heat your body by convection. It doesn’t heat it directly like near infrared can. And that’s why when you go into a far infrared sauna, you have to turn it on for like 30 minutes before you go in if you’re going to get heated. Otherwise, you’ll be cold because it has to heat up as opposed to a near infrared sauna which is essentially heat bulb or heat lamp that you can go into it, turn it on and literally in minutes you’re sweating because most of the energy is going into your body and it’s able to heat your cells and provide the energy source to convert that Actin inside your cells into structured water. And not only that but it also helps your body to detox and helps liberate some of the massive exposure to chemicals that we have, which is well over 80,000 chemicals, many of them just introduced this last century. So it’s a pervasive exposure that virtually is impossible to avoid. So you need a regular system to detox that and that’s why I do near infrared sauna pretty much every day.

Gina Bria:       At the Hydration Foundation we try to help people who can’t move up to Florida, taking care of their elderly parents or something, get a near infrared lamp for them

Dr. Mercola:   Yeah, near infrared.

Gina Bria:       Don’t keep them there at the nursing home without some kind of …

Dr. Mercola:   Yeah, Dr. Cowan reached the same conclusion that we selected the same source of near infrared which is a company called SaunaSpace, Brian Richards.

Gina Bria:       [Inaudible][22:40] beautiful stuff.

Dr. Mercola:   Yeah. And he not only addresses that but he can address the next topic we’ll talk about but his saunas are no EMF because in addition to the frequencies in near versus far, almost all the far infrareds, even though they advertise themselves as no EMF, they’re somewhat lying essentially because they don’t have a shielding in the sauna to shield themselves from the Wi-Fi routers in their house or their cell phone. So the radio frequencies are coming in. Now that’s the same inside as outside of the sauna. The sauna is not producing that but it’s still leaking into that causing activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which doesn’t allow them to detox properly or optimally.

Gina Bria:       Dr. Mercola, if I can just put a pin in this and remind people that, I’m speaking as an anthropologist now, we do not live in a biologically safe environment anymore. We don’t live in a biologically save environment matched to our dynamic needs. Our biological needs aren’t taken care of by the environments that we live in every day. So we must adapt. We’ve got to find great strategies like you’re suggesting. And I think you’re going to go somewhere else with this too, I’m waiting, but the place of bringing infrared techniques and technology into the artificial environment we live in is an important one, as the nomads originally did follow the sun.

Dr. Mercola:   Yeah. Well, you could structure your life to kind of migrate down south in the winter, which is a healthier option, especially if you’re in a state that is taking 10% to 15% of your income like California. So there’s a big difference there but the primary reason I moved here was really for the warmth and regular exposure to sunshine. So in addition to the sun, I mean, it’s not cloudy most of the time. Visible light is healthy for you if you can expose yourself to that regularly. Anyway, he doesn’t have any EMFs in his sauna. The far infrareds not only do they have radio frequency fields, most of them have learned to appreciate that they should have no magnetic fields and that’s pretty easy to do if you implement the right technology but they still have electrical fields. So there’s meters that measure all three of those. There’s very few meters that measure all of them at least well. So that’s something you have to pay attention to. And Brian’s saunas are EMF free but they’re kind of pricey and you can get just one bulb and get the benefit of that, and in fact he calls it the photon beam. And I use one of those too. Even though I have the sun, I use it at night before I go to bed right on my skull.

Gina Bria:       I will give one to my elderly mom.

Dr. Mercola:   Yeah, it’s great. It’s a powerful, powerful tool. And if you get injured … I had an insect bite. I walk on the beach every day for grounding which also helps structure water, but I will actually walk in the ocean up to my ankles in the water. Coming out of the ocean I stepped on a patch of weeds and there was a bee or something, a stinging insect in there. So it stung me. It didn’t hurt a lot. I mean, it stung a little bit but then my foot swelled up, it was like twice the size normal. The reason I’m sharing the story is I used the infrared bulb on it and it was like magic, the swelling disappeared. It’s crazy because you put the energy in your body and use that energy to heal. So if you get an injury, if you’ve bruised yourself or something, even injured your head like in a traumatic brain injury, TBI, it would be a very useful strategy. So it’s a very powerful healing tool and it’s not terribly expensive. That thing is only about 300 dollars or so as opposed to the sauna which is a few thousands. So that’s something that everyone can pick up.

So the EMFs, Tom describes some very elegant work in his book about structured water where they had this setup that could actually measure the amount of water that was being structured in alkalinity in cells. And when they introduced or exposed the cells to electromagnetic frequencies like your cell phone or Wi-Fi, that production of structured water was diminished dramatically. So my next book which comes out in February is called EMF’d and it goes into this in great detail. And we have a limited time to discuss this in depth. So clearly the best strategy is get the book but if you want a summary of it, we have a whole load of articles that go back many years and some really great tools. In fact, we created a PDF with some of the highlights from the book and how to reduce your exposure to it. And you can get that for free just going to EMF.Mercola.com. That’s a really great strategy, or tool you can have to limit your exposure to EMF. You can get that PDF and you can know how to reduce this but some of the primary points are that your cell phone is a big issue. Most people don’t realize. They know but they don’t really remember what it was like 20 years ago. I’ve been watching some documentaries recently in July we had the 50^th Anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. So I’ve been watching a lot of Armstrong videos and NASA landings. And then I also watched an NPR review of Woodstock which happened about the same time in ‘69. And it was interesting. And these are videos, these are actual recordings. These aren’t simulations. These are actual videos that were done, films at the time, because they didn’t have digital videos back then but it’s interesting to know that every one of those people in those videos, none of them had these radio frequency exposures that we do today. No one had cell phones. They didn’t exist. There was no Wi-Fi. There was no cell phone tower. They didn’t exist. Yes, we had radio, we had television signals but those were enormously low in magnitude, to now and it’s orders of magnitude higher. The exposures are pervasive and they’re getting worse because we’re launching satellites now that are distributing 5G and SpaceX. I’m a big fan of Elon Musk but he’s putting up 13,000 satellites to saturate the earth with these frequencies. And it’s not just humans that are impacted. It’s animals and plants and insects and birds and bees and it’s pervasive. So it’s a big issue and you can’t protect the Earth. You can protect yourself pretty easily if you’re careful about what you do to your home and your bedroom and sleep in a relatively free-EMF environment. So it’s a powerful strategy to improve your health and improve your body’s ability to keep your mitochondria working well and making that structured water and deuterium-depleted water because that’s the key.

So any questions on that?

Gina Bria:       Well, I’m delighted to hear you’re working on the EMF issue and how important it is for us to recognize and we’re going to need to take time to unhook, we need that time for our consciousness for our body recovery. It’s so important to put that phone away some part of everyday a part of your day. And I think water has an important part of helping us buffer those EMF waves. I think the work of Martin Paul showing that the electromagnetic works on gated channels right in that cell and that cytoplasm to let in like a garage door. Those frequencies can open doors that shouldn’t be open or open closed doors that should be closed. So the EMF is an important part of how we keep ourselves safe cellularly and well hydrated and also part of that cytoplasm connection. So I’d love to return to the conversation about the cytoplasm.

Dr. Mercola:   Yeah. I’ve studied Paul’s work quite a bit and spoken to him many times. And I’m not convinced of that association you just said. I’m very familiar with the mechanisms he proposes and it’s not proven but it’s certainly an interesting one for sure. Essentially when those calcium channels open, you have an influx of calcium, which causes an increase in super oxide and nitric oxide which combine to form peroxynitrite which then causes a cascade effect of free radicals that can cause oxidative damage to the nucleus, which, essentially, it’s pretty similar to what we get from ionizing radiation. It doesn’t break the DNA bonds directly but it breaks it indirectly through free radicals and specifically carbonate free radical. So that’s one of the reasons why this exposure is so dangerous and it’s so pervasive and we’re not told about it. There’s this collusion, this revolving door between the industry and federal regulatory agencies. So you just aren’t told the truth and it’s very similar to the tobacco industries. In fact, the cell phones are indeed the cigarettes of the 21^st century.

Gina Bria:       Let’s return to recipes for protective strategies.

Dr. Mercola:   Yeah. So the cell phone itself, I mean, that’s the key, most people’s largest exposure. So never wear it, put on your body, unless it’s in airplane mode. That’s a simple strategy. You don’t have to be available 24/7. It should be turned in airplane mode and even put into a Faraday bag when you’re sleeping. That’s just insane and sadly a large percentage of the adolescents are putting that in their pillow which is just blasting their susceptible brain and thin skulls with this radiation and causing probably significant potentially irreversible damage. So that’s a big strategy. Turn off your Wi-Fi, at night for sure, and ideally get rid of your Wi-Fi. There is nothing wrong with the internet. Just access it through a wire. You contract out a home theater company to put Ethernet cables in your house and you get some Ethernet adapters to your notebooks and your computers and the other devices you want to use and you access the internet through a wire, which is not a problem. It’s actually a better connection. It’s faster. It’s not as convenient but it certainly works better than the wireless connection because wireless can only get as fast as the cable. I mean, it can’t be faster. Wireless is never faster than the cable coming from the same source because it has to distribute it. That’s the fastest connection. So that would be one thing. You can kill the electric electricity to your bedroom at night because it’s not just radio frequency fields. It’s also magnetic fields and electric fields. So shutting off the electricity will have an influence on both of those typically, and especially if there’s some wiring errors. And you can get shielding paint. And so probably you can paint your bedroom. One of the my favorites is Y-Shield. It’s kind of pricey. It’s graphite paint but it would work especially if you have some real high exposures. And the other thing is to get a meter. They’re not too expensive, maybe 200 dollars or so to get a decent one to see what your exposures are, see exactly how high the levels are and are you guessing because one of the reasons these are so dangerous is you can’t see, hear, or feel them and though they’re there. It’s similar to x-rays. And from that respect you can’t see, hear, or feel an x-ray, you just can’t, but you think, “We know.” That’s non-controversial that they cause damage, oxidative damage, and the damage is pretty similar to what the non-ionizing radiation causes. So that’s a big issue.

So you’ll probably say “Well, what do you do when you travel?” Well, if you’ve signed up for my newsletter on Mercola.com, we’re going to announce, it took us three or four years to develop this product, we’re finally getting close to launching it, it’s the Silver Shield Sleeping Tent that weighs about 2 or 3 pounds and you can travel with it. It’s so small that you could actually put it into your carry-on luggage. So it’s not a huge device, it weighs a few pounds, and it expands out and you go inside and you zipper it up and it’s made of this silver shield fabric that essentially almost eliminates the radio frequencies coming out. And it also works for electric fields because it’s a conductive fabric and there is an option there to put a grounding cable to the wall so that that grounded conductive fabric essentially eliminates any of the electric fields that are surrounding you so you sleep really good. And I use this every time I travel. It’s amazing. I have an aura ring to give me my biofeedback as to how well I slept and it’s interesting. I have really good sleeping scores when I’m in that tent, probably even better than at home, because that’s convenient. I mean, ideally you want to remediate your home too so you don’t have to use something like a tent but you could use it at home if you wanted to.

Gina Bria:       So is grounding part of your strategy for structuring water in the body?

Dr. Mercola:   It is and I have some disagreement with Clint Ober who brought quite a bit of prominence to this issue. I’ve interviewed him several times but when I started studying EMFs, I came to realize, and Clint disagrees with this and that’s fine but Dave Stetzer and Martin Graham who are pretty prominent in the field of dirty electricity and even Dr. Sam Milham, he wrote the book Dirty Electricity, he’s an MD PhD epidemiologist and they all agree on artifact of the way they generate and store electricity in North America is such that most of the ground in North America is contaminated. So if you ground, you’re getting these high voltage transients in the grounding. So I am a fan of grounding but not in North America unless, I mentioned this earlier, you are walking in a large body of water like an ocean, which obviously not many people have an opportunity to do. Even if you live near an ocean, it’s difficult to get to the ocean and walk in the water. So that’s what I do pretty much every day. And that’s authentic grounding. And this is not some, “woowoo, unscientific,” you can actually measure this with conventional instruments that aren’t very expensive and you can just measure and measure your body and you can exactly see what the voltage potentials are. So it’s an objective way to identify that and you can figure that out to with the dirty electricity contamination. So I typically do not ground in North America. I used to until I understood this unless I’m walking in the water, big bodies of water. Now big lake like the Great Lakes would work too. Not as big as the Great Lakes but maybe a big body of water would work too. I live on a river and the river has brackish water near coastal and the grounding on there is really good too. It’s really grounding in my pool, it’s the same, it’s pretty similar. So it’s pretty good. So I do ground every day but I do it authentically in a way that really isn’t contaminated with dirty electricity.

Gina Bria:       So if we don’t have the Florida sun and we don’t have an ocean, help us. What do we do?

Dr. Mercola:   For grounding?

Gina Bria:       Well, let’s say …

Dr. Mercola:   So you can’t. I mean, in my view, and I could certainly be wrong, but if you’re in inland … I guess there are some areas in North America where they just don’t have a lot of electric utility contamination, you just have to measure it, but it has to be a very rural area where there’s not a lot of electric wires that are contaminating the ground. I mean, if you’re near a mountain stream or something, I guess, that could work too, an isolated place, but otherwise, if I was living somewhere else, you just don’t do it. I mean, the grounding can be useful because it could form a shield too if you’re in a grounded Faraday cage and it keeps out the fields but it’s not grounding yourself. As soon as you touch the ground, you’re actually kind of connected to it and that’s not a good thing. That is an antenna. The shield becomes an antenna that’s directing the energy into your body, which you don’t want.

Gina Bria:       So what strategies could we use?

Dr. Mercola:   Well, just the ones I discussed earlier and the ones that are in the PDF that I said is on the site EMF.Mercolo.com or the get the book which goes into great detail. I mean, it took me three or four years to write this book and it’s been vetted by a large number of experts who’ve reviewed it and carefully edited it to make sure it was accurate. It’s solid and it’s not some crazy, invented suggestions that’s going to cause you harm or damage. So it’s stuff that will work but the key thing is awareness. I mean, you could radically reduce your exposures by 90% to 95% if you’re not going out in public a lot. Sadly, this problem is getting worse because once 5G is introduced, the number of frequency exposures is going to be radically increased.

Gina Bria:       Well, we have your voice? And what are your favorite ways to increase structured water and health inside our body?

Dr. Mercola:   Okay. So, EMFs. You want to honor your circadian rhythm. So that means going to bed when the sun sets and waking up when the sun rises, not easy to do for many people but it really is what you were designed to do. And the closer you can get to those times, the better. Now, obviously, during the extremes, especially if you live further away from the equator, those times will vary because the further north you live or the further away from the equator you are, the more distorted that becomes at the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice. And the Vernox is autumnal and spring vernox where this daylight is the same and the sun rises and then it’s okay but the further you get to basically Christmas or June 21, then the more extreme that becomes to the point where it’s like sunlight 24 hours and winter is dark 24 hours. So that obviously is not going to work but you essentially want something like a 9-to-5 sleeping pattern. So even if it’s light out at 9 o’clock in the middle of the summer as it as the further north you go, then it’s still okay because you’re still going to honor your circadian rhythm. So that is an important aspect for mitochondrial function because every one of your cells has a circadian clock. That’s been proven. They actually awarded the Nobel Prize for that, I think last year or the year before last. Then making sure you’re eating really good food, non-processed food that most of us know about and eating it in a way where you’re not eating continuously like most people do. The average person is eating probably most of the day for 16 hours. 90% of us eat more than 12 hours a day, more than 12 hours a day, 90%. And I would say the majority eat pretty much as soon as they wake up and before they go to bed and all the time in between. The only time they’re not eating is when they’re sleeping. So that’s a prescription for disaster too because our bodies were not designed for that and you will push your body towards using sugar or carbohydrates as a primary fuel rather than fat and that creates more oxidative damage in your cells, which damages the mitochondria and the ability to produce structured water and deuterium-depleted water. So time restricted eating, ideally 6 to 8 hours a day, even consider engaging regular fasting, depending on your circumstances, if you’re metabolically inflexible maybe once a month; if you’re healthy, maybe once or twice a year or even once a quarter, that would be helpful.

Gina Bria:       We’re grateful for that and we’re so grateful for your reach so that you can create movements around huge issues we have to face but, again, it’s so important that we come together, that there’s collaboration among all of us so that it’s not just one voice but this chorus of voices now having an impact. So we join with you in the work you’ve done and we thank you for it, Dr. Mercola, and may you be richly blessed for your efforts and let us know how we can support you in that.

Dr. Mercola:   All right, thanks. Bye.

Gina Bria:       Bye, bye.

Gina Bria:                 So this is an introduction to Robert Slovak. He is a famed water expert. Really we are so fortunate. Degrees in Mechanical, Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering but his best degree is his heart. He is a senior voice in the water industry and we are very lucky he agreed to this interview with the Hydration Foundation for our Doctors and Scientists Talk, which we’ll launch ultimately as a Hydration Summit, the first ever where we batch multiple voices coming from multiple disciplines talking about the importance of hydration. And we’ll be coming back to Robert, if you’ll let us, sir, to tap your many other fields of expertise in water but today we want to introduce others to your history in a unique area. And one, you have a personal story to share on, I think, to open it I want to say that Robert, you were recently interviewed by fitness advocate Ben Greenfield who, by the way, has been nominated for Podcast of The Year Award, the podcast awards for this year.

Robert Slovak:         Rightfully so.

Gina Bria:                 Rightfully so. He’s doing beautiful work. And you responded to his listeners’ questions with this statement that I would like to read in part so others can hear how we overlap and how our work is beginning to weave a new story of many different experts around hydration. And for Ben Greenfield’s podcast listeners you stated, and I love that I get to read this, “Rethinking hydration, a revolution. The hydration requirements of an individual,” this is Robert Slovak’s statement that I’m reading now, “The hydration requirements of an individual has suddenly become a very, very complex and difficult subject with more twists and turns than to tour the Tour de France. This is because of fairly recent discoveries,” please listen, we’re talking about breakthrough science. It’s so important that we nail this, “recent discoveries made in the area of physiology, cellular biology and mitochondrial biology, two discoveries especially rule out the traditional hydration guidelines that are typically targeted for each specific category of individuals, whether active, sedentary, athlete, pro athlete, office workers, senior anti-aging, etc, etc, etc. One could say that these two discoveries throw a huge monkey wrench into the hydration equation and will forever alter our ideas about hydration and drinking water sources.

The monkey wrenches of hydration originate from two independent discoveries. First monkey wrench. First monkey wrench…” I’m so excited.

Robert Slovak:         Probably your audience knows what a monkey wrench is.

Gina Bria:                 They do.

Robert Slovak:         I was wondered if you’d ask a typical millennial “What’s a monkey wrench?” You nailed it.

Gina Bria:                 Sure. It’s a stick in the spoke that makes the wheel not go around. I can’t believe I’m getting to read this to you. And this is what I’m talking about. Now we’re starting to go hear our messages.

“The first monkey wrench is addressed by Quench’s author Dana Cohen and Gina Bria,” just raised my hand, “showing why we should strive to get our hydration water from vegetables and fruits. And there’s a lot more to it but they claim that it is simply more biochemically effective to eat your water than drink it when seeking interest cellular hydration where it counts. This involves some of Prof. Gerald Pollock’s Fourth Phase Water Science in water structure in cells.”

So thank you for that call out. And, yes, food is going to be a new and important part of the conversation on hydration.

Now we go to the second monkey wrench or the second stick in the spanner, since we talked about the Tour de France.

“This discovery equates to throwing an atomic-powered monkey wrench into the hydration equation. It is so revolutionary that it will likely be met with disbelief.” So often the case, Robert. “I’m talking about 60 years of research that leads to the conclusion that,” and here’s your statement, “some water molecules harbor a destructive cellular contaminant called deuterium and that less is more, less water, less deuterium may be integrated into the new era of hydration guidelines.”

So Dr. Pollok’s science we’re trying to bring forward. Robert Slovaks voice in this new conversation on how hydration should look. We have Robert as an expert in many different areas but in this particular interview we’d like to explore the role of marine minerals in sequestering due to deuterium and other contaminants in the water we are getting and water inside of us, especially to the beautiful spectrum of minerals found in the sea, the very origin of our source of life. So understanding marine minerals is certainly your expertise and your love.

Robert Slovak:         But let’s make sure that we don’t link … it would be incorrect to link the intake of the precious valuable intake marine minerals as connected with the deuterium issue Because all water on earth, including sea water, has about the same amount of deuterium. This deuterium or we’re actually calling it a toxin, is mind blowing that we’re trying to get our arms around it. Who would guess that the most revered nutrient, water, I mean, we would be just water, water, drink more water, it’s always good. Who would think that this nutrient still fully contains perhaps the most destructive toxin known to biological life, okay? Plants and animals. This isn’t just a human thing.

Gina Bria:                 Yes, it’s a present danger and I certainly want to devote an entire interview with you on that topic. It’s going to be important but what I’d love to do is sort of lay some groundwork and thank you for unlinking the two so we don’t make the mistake but I’d love to talk about, and I know you revere the work of revolutionary biologist René Quinton. We’re dealing with a brilliant French biologist. So I’m going to ask you, Robert, to help us keep his work before those listening so we can strengthen credibility around new hydration strategies and thinking about minerals and their role. And we want to hear your story about how you found his work and what has come of it in your life. You’re the perfect person to keep this lineage alive and also extend it for us into our deeply needy environments. So talk to us about your lineage in it, your advancement of it and what has come out of that, please.

Robert Slovak:         I spent most of the last 40 years as a water researcher and technologist and co-developed or co-contributed with my brother very significantly to the development of the technology known as reverse osmosis. And this is a technology that is used everywhere, every place. You can have one under your sink or you can go to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and they make all their water with it. And you can go to Israel and they make all their water from sea water with it. And it’s just become a giant technology over the last 50 years. And Carlsbad California just finished recently their 60-million-gallon-a-day reverse osmosis system to convert the sea water in the San Diego ocean to freshwater for the population because California, as you know, was never meant to be lived in because it has no water. So that was really our major contribution, I think, to the world of technology.

And then when we retired from that, and our company’s products are now owned and controlled by 3M Corporation, so that was a nice place to go with it, we went off and did our own independent research and training and teaching. I mean, I did all the Europe, all the Middle Eastern countries which are also lacking in water and have deserts. I taught there. I taught engineers everywhere, Japan, but I ended up and fell in love with being in Brazil. And Brazil had a unique situation because its water technology infrastructure was so behind its natural resources. And to make use and make money with your natural resources, you have to have water technology. And it was a great imbalance. So I went there and people encouraged me “Hey, you got to help bring up the technology of Brazil.” And I started a magazine in four languages and wrote endlessly to train the scientists and engineers in Brazil. And I taught people how to import products and how to build water businesses but part of it was after the government of Brazil realized who was there, they started to ask “Can you help solve some pollution problems?” because the Amazon and jungle regions, you know industry is just going in there without permission and making a joke of it. They’re polluting the hell out of it. So this pollution ends up through the hydrological cycle and it ends up in the cities. So people are drinking petroleum wastes and toxic chemicals they use for mining, etc. So in one of my research trips I was in a fairly remote area and I should have known better to ask “Are there doctors there?” but, anyway, I came down with severe gastroenteritis, life threatening as far as I was concerned, and I asked about what would it take to get helicopter evacuation to Rio? And it wasn’t going to happen. There was a little laughter like “Do you know the president of Brazil?” – “No.” – “Well, you probably aren’t going to get a helicopter here.” So one of the people on our team, a carpenter, handed me, he said “You must try this. This is our doctor” and he handed me a little box with six glass ampules. And I’m going “What? Oh, my God, I didn’t want to make fun of it but this is preposterous.” And he said “Just take this. This is our doctor. Take one an hour. We use this here. Everybody uses it for children, for adults and I think it will help you. I mean, at least until we figure out a better plan.” And I took those six, one per hour, immediately and I was extremely sick and getting sicker but by about halfway through, things started to change rapidly for the better. And by the end of the six, I didn’t know if I was either good and happy in heaven or if I really was cured. And it turned out when I cleaned up and took the proverbial shower about midnight, I just said “I can’t even believe this” because I knew my health science very well. And I didn’t know what this stuff was. And I’m going “It’s sea water. Seriously?” So I took this and I said “Okay, I’m cleaned up. I’m going to know if this is real. I’m going to run in this village to the only place I know that’s open and that’s the bar where the men are all hanging out.” And this is a kind of bar where people rode horses, scooters, and walking. Well, I ran there and I go “I can’t believe how good I feel.” And I got there and that young man was there and he goes “Robert, I see you’re cured.” And I go “This is like a miracle.” And he goes “Come and have a cerveja,” which is of course the word for beer in Portuguese. And I’m going “Are you crazy? I’m not going to tamper with the way I feel but I want more of this. How can you get me more.” He said “We’ll get you more tomorrow.” And to make the long story short, he said “When you finally go back to Rio, you can meet the Argentine biologist who makes this available in Brazil.” And I said “That would be great” but after I took it and I felt better and he gave me some more, I kind of lost track of it. It’s like “Oh, I’m better now” and you know how life is.

Gina Bria:                 Yeah, I do.

Robert Slovak:         But I ended up going back to Brazil and then thinking “I should meet that guy.” And I actually invited the young man who gave it to me as a treat. I took him on a trip to Rio. And every Brazilian wants to go on a trip to Rio, okay? It’s the funnest city. And so we went and we met this gentleman and got there late, not unusual within Brazil, and we knocked on his door, I think, about 9 o’clock at night and I said “Listen, I am so sorry we’re this late. I don’t want to spend more than 30 minutes with you because it’s inappropriate.” And he goes “No, come in. I’m a scientist too. I work at all hours.” So I went in and I said “just tell me about this.” And he started to download and he downloaded. And I can talk a lot, right? But I didn’t say a word until 7 o’clock in the morning as he downloaded. And my mouth and jaw was opening more and more as he unfolded the true history of the discovery of revolutionary biologist René Quinton.

Gina Bria:                 Okay, tell us more.

Robert Slovak:         So I ended up spending two more years in Brazil to hang with this guy because I just couldn’t believe how it was being used. And the Brazilians doctors were using it in the most advanced way, in the way that that René Quinton did because they were using it as an IV for blood plasma. They were using it by injection. They were using it orally, like I did. They were using it for colonic infusions. They had taken it to the limits. It became so in demand in Brazil that these small and mostly illegal pharmaceutical companies in Brazil had it removed and prevented its further importation into the country, okay? Where it stands at today, they were threatened because of the efficacy of this simple product. And it was totally safe. So this gentleman, he said “You know, you’re going back to the States.” And he said “Why don’t you consider … I’m going to introduce you to the president of the company. Why don’t you consider because the last time it was really in America was in 1908?” I’m going “Whoa!” I guess we can start this again. It was imported in 1908 for the epidemics of child tuberculosis in the clinics of New York, Boston, and Chicago. And Quinton was a curer and actually listed as a pharmaceutical medicine in the European Physician’s Desk Reference. So it was used as a pharmaceutical medicine.

Gina Bria:                 And what do you know about René Quinton’s career?

Robert Slovak:         Well, late 1800s, this is when physiology was taking massive turns. You had Claude Bernard, okay? You had Louis Pasteur. You had the germs really coming through and fighting and going against the Terrain Theory, okay? Antoine Béchamp. Claude Bernard said “Hey, it’s not about germs that come into your body. It’s about how effectively your terrain is balanced and restored to be able to fight any disease and keep you in a state of homeostasis.” So that was the germ versus the terrain fight and that fight was subsequently lost by the terrain theorists and won by the pharmaceutical industries backed Louis Pasteur. If you Google this event, it is mentioned in many places that Louis Pasteur recanted and said kind of in his last days “I think I probably screwed up. I did not really appreciate the efficacy of the terrain.”

Gina Bria:                 The inner terrain.

Robert Slovak:         The inner terrain, yeah.

Gina Bria:                 Another way to talk about …

Robert Slovak:         The terrain is complex thing but it’s the state of your extracellular matrix that really runs the show.

Gina Bria:                 Yes And if we can help people understand that they are an inner terrain and most of it is water, that they’re bodies of water in here and that’s what we’re taking care of, that we are the ultimate arbitrators of our inner terrain that includes our mental thoughts, our food intake, our hydration intake, the way we proceed out into our new modern environments, our external terrains are extremely compromising. People do not realize how compromised and out of our biology we are by living the modern life that we live.

Robert Slovak:         Absolutely. I definitely want to put in the fact that throughout evolution, throughout most of evolution which occurred from, let’s say, the beginning of life, it goes about 3.8 billion years ago with what we call prokaryote, these were the first organisms that fragments the amino acids, that were energized, etc. etc., the building of cellular life, then multi-cellular life. And this went on for more than 2 billion years. And here’s the shocking part. All of evolution for 2 billion, now this is with a B, humans can’t even think billion but for 2 billion years all life evolved only in the ocean. There was no life on land for 2 billion years. Can you imagine … I ask doctors “Well, what is the ocean?” I mean, for something so essential to the structure and function of life, its whole design was based on its environment. And the ocean was life’s terrain, okay? It was extra cellular in the sense it provided everything, because all your body is looking for is to regulate to homeostasis. It wants to be comfortable and safe but in the ocean all this was provided kind of for free. That’s why oceanic life … A dolphin that’s 90 looks the same as a dolphin that’s 20. It’s a whole different game. The osmolality is the same. Temperature’s always the same. The food, all you have to do is turn your mouth and the food is there. So it’s like a very unstressful way of living but when life left the ocean, it had to provide that environment, that safety, that regulation on its own. It had to develop an autonomic nervous system. It had to start measuring temperature. It had to know what’s the pH of the blood, what are the electrolytes in the blood, start putting sodium around the cells, you got to pump out the sodium, you got to keep in the potassium. It had to do hundreds of thousands of actions that weren’t required in the sea. And this was a major change in thinking and your terrain has to be set up to support that regulatory obligation of your body.

Gina Bria:                 I love that you put it this way. And you had another quote when spoke earlier where you said we had to take the ocean with us when we got on land.

Robert Slovak:         René Quinton said something like the only way life could successfully leave the ocean was to take the ocean with it. I mean, it’s like “Yes!”

Gina Bria:                 [Inaudible][35:12] you are a walking body of water.

Robert Slovak:         Absolutely.

Gina Bria:                 [Inaudible][35:19] is everything.

Robert Slovak:         And if you look at the proportions of electrolytes which are foundational in a human body, if you look at the proportion, let’s just pick the top 10 electrolytes in the body. I mean, calcium, magnesium, chloride, bicarbonate, etc. If you look at the top 10 electrolytes, they are in exactly the same proportions as they are in the ocean. That’s why if you take ocean water, which is through geological changes in the earth itself has become more concentrated than it was when life emerged in it, it kind of went from an isotonic solution to a hypertonic solution but René Quinton also said “Once life leaves the ocean, it will carry with it the concentration, the osmolality of the ocean at that time.” And so we did. Our blood plasma is isotonic solution even though the ocean is a hypertonic solution, the modern ocean but if you take the modern ocean and dilute it by about 2.8 times, you can use that ocean water because the portions of the electrolytes are all the same. You can use it as an IV that’s far more effective, I’m sorry to say, than your average hospital saline solution.

Gina Bria:                 I know. That’s why we want this information out there and also, Robert, to help people understand that water isn’t just water. Water is an essence which carries minerals. And when those minerals are missing, we can’t biologically live at a high function.

Robert Slovak:         Now let’s assume you gave me an injury that I started a few minutes ago. When I ask doctors and they’re getting the whole evolution story, they’ve never heard of it. I mean, most of my presentations are made to doctors but I try to teach them foundational science because I think it enhances one’s own knowledge. Most doctors have no idea how old [inaudible][37:50]. They have no idea when the earth started to form. They don’t have a clue when first life appeared or even where it appeared, okay? And it’s very interesting, not one doctor has even come close when I said “How long did life spend in the ocean before they left the ocean?” And then they go like “Oh, a million years.” No, no, it’s about 2000 times more than that but I asked them “What is the ocean to you? Describe it to me.” Then “Salt and water and things” but not one doctor has ever answered the answer I’m looking for and it is a solution, the only one in our solar system, I don’t know about the universe, it’s a solution of the periodic table of the elements. And the periodic table of the elements contains every type of atom that makes up the entire physical universe. And I look at it kind of philosophically, I’m saying “Let’s say, when God thought of making life or allowing life to emerge, like any parent you just give it everything you can, every book you throw at it, every rattle, every little entertaining thing, the best baby food, you do it all. And what could be better than giving life the entire universe of the periodic table because it could pick and choose whatever it wanted, everything.” And it’s a very kind of romantic thing.

Gina Bria:                 It is. I believe biology is a co-creator and that time’s on our side and that we’re in this for the long haul as creatures who are going to be participating in creating out of the evolutionary materials that were a great gift to us.

Robert Slovak:         So the takeaway for your audience is I believe I am 100% convinced you must have in your body the periodic table of the elements available to yourselves. They evolved in it, they were designed in it, they developed their structure and function in it, and they expect it. And there’s more than one way then in Quinton Marine Plasma to do it but do it.

Gina Bria:                 Yes, yes. Thank you so much. This is an incredibly … You’ve landed it beautifully. Inside of us is that inner ocean which has the same needs for that broad spectrum minerals which we can no longer get because of our agriculture and our chemical interference. We need to go back to our ocean roots and find … When people talk about electrolytes I hear maybe they say three things or four things …

Robert Slovak:         [inaudible][41:08] even 10 things.

Gina Bria:                 Okay, you might get an arm out of that

Robert Slovak:         It’s over 70, okay? There’s over 70.

Gina Bria:                 And they’re contained in that ocean in a perfect proportion.

Robert Slovak:         [Inaudible][41:25] gets it.

Gina Bria:                 Yeah.

Robert Slovak:         Can I give a plug for Prof. August Dunning?

Gina Bria:                 Yes, please. We want you to carry forth the lineage of people who’ve been working on it. This isn’t coming out of the blue, people. This is coming out of a very long lineage of people who had to work outside of the institutions which have the voice. And our job is to continue to bring new information to our public with this beautiful lineage of caring people, really extraordinary things like René Quinton who we want to have you know about that guy.

Robert Slovak:         Well, August Dunning is the famous professor and also an astronautical engineer, one of the brainiac designers of the International Space Station and a visiting professor at Caltech, okay? He is a brainiac of the highest level. And several years ago he gets this idea to look into … I don’t know really what the origin is. I’m actually trying to arrange a meeting with August. And August, if you’re listening to this, I want a meeting with you and I’ll bring you two free bottles of Quinton Marine Plasma, but he had the Satori, the awareness, the awakening that holy mackerel! Our origin was the sea and we were evolved in an oceanic environment that, oh my god, it contained the whole periodic table and we really ideally should have gotten it from our soil and early man did because all land was soaked in the ocean and geophysically rose … the continents rose through the ocean through volcanic and geophysical activity. So early man had the entire periodic table soaked into the earth. And that, of course, started to go away one, by natural forces such as the hydrologic cycle, you keep on raining and snowing on the land and it melts and it carries it back to the sea. So he said “You’re theoretically supposed to get it from your plant food but modern agriculture has destroyed that possibility and the land is naturally depleted and they took the easy way out and manufactured a bunch of very limited nutrients to get back.” And he had these magnificent charts that plot the decline of the key elements of the periodic table, key trace elements and minerals. He plots it simply against the rise of chronic disease, okay? I mean, it’s like a mirror image – one’s going down and one’s going up. And he explains it so well. And his videos are called The Habitat Crisis. And I suggest everyone look at that.

Gina Bria:                 We’ll make sure that link is put below this interview. We do want people to be alert to why one of our mantras here at the Hydration Foundation is how you personally hydrate is going to be the first opening towards worldwide solutions, planet solutions, including water consumption, agricultural use, what kind of plants we’re eating. These are all hydration choices. And getting your water from plant food is a very, very important part of this nexus and getting it from plants that have been nurtured with these beautiful periodic table minerals. So your message is our message, Robert, and we believe you’re helping us take a look at the big picture.

Robert Slovak:         The big picture certainly has been eye opening to me.

Gina Bria:                 Yeah, I know. We had a brief conversation on the phone before when we were setting up this interview talking about using mineralized water to irrigate our plants and how to restore that plant vitality through the minerals or the specific kinds of even frequencies in water that can carry that kind of health and information back into the plants.

Robert Slovak:         So there are about six decent sized corporations around the world that take extracts from the sea and make it available to at first it was just biodynamic gardeners, we get all this, but now it’s getting to be used in organic farming, greenhouse farming, they’re using the periodic table. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Gina Bria:                 That’s wonderful.

Robert Slovak:         And also, I’m sure you know this, but the industry of animal husbandry has at least for a hundred years known the value of sea extracts for their animals, see weeds for their animals’ feed, they added them and they do it for selfish reasons because the animal turns out a lot better and lasts longer and has better beef and whatever.

Gina Bria:                 And they have to take it for themselves.

Robert Slovak:         And they fail to take it and assume this is the way the vegetables they rolling for us need to be.

Gina Bria:                 Yeah, yeah. Well, may I end our interview with this further quote from your Ben Greenfield podcast. Hope you will all go listen to also, very valuable. Again, as we link up and become cohorts and we share each other’s work and say thank you to people who have covered this or covered that, I think you’re going to see your health flourish, you’re going to see your families flourish, you’re going to help us help our fellow creatures recover whether they’re creatures like in the animal industry or creatures like our fellow microbiomes or the bacteria so quickly. Yes, those bacteria are going to be a huge army to help us recover the homeostasis of the planet. And our job here is to be smartly enough hydrated that our cognition and our capacities go up as well and those minerals are extremely important.

So here’s the Ben Greenfield quote from Robert Slovak who says, and I think you perfectly sum up all the work we have to do for ourselves to find our own best hydration levels, “To radically change,” this is Robert speaking, “To radically change our dietary eating and lifestyle habits to allow the body to metabolically generate its own deuterium-depleted water and the latter internal hydration strategy may become the golden rule of hydration strategies in that it provides both intracellular hydration while protecting the mitochondria and it will not be measured in just liters a day.”

So, thank you. We’re coming back to you for lots of other things.

Robert Slovak:         You’re very welcome. I think maybe I can’t wait to do a deuterium one. It’s going to be very serious and eye opening and it’s so new that 99% of the doctors don’t know it yet. So you’re going to be a first on the list.

Gina Bria:                 All right but I do think we’ve landed the message today for people to understand your intake is profoundly important in adjusting your inner terrain and that food and minerals, especially minerals from the sea, are urgent part of how hydration happens that we’ve left off the hydration conversation.

Robert Slovak:         All 70 plus of them.

Gina Bria:                 All 70 plus of them. It’s beautiful number, isn’t it?

Thank you, Robert.

Robert Slovak:         Thank you, Gina.

Gina Bria:                 I look forward to sharing more of your knowledge and the Hydration Foundation is grateful to have had someone of your knowledge and information to share with us today. Thanks again. Take care.

Robert Slovak:         Bye, everybody. Thanks, Gina.

Gina Bria:                 My pleasure.

Gina:    The Hydration Foundation is very honored and excited to invite Dr. Linda Lancaster to our Doctors Talk series for the Hydration Foundation, where we provide opportunities for doctors to share their knowledge and their information and their protocols in relationship to hydration. And I’d like to say that Dr. Lancaster is a naturopathic physician. She is an early pioneer of longstanding reputation in the holistic approach to medicine. In 1987 she founded the Light Harmonics Institute. It’s a healing and teaching center and they practice all forms of energy medicine there. She’s also the convener of the Global Forum For Integrative Medicines or Medicines, as she likes to say, which is convened in New York City. And I just have to say that I happen to know, whenever I ask a doctor “Who is your doctor?”, many of them say Linda Lancaster.

So, welcome Dr. Lancaster. We’re excited to speak to you today about hydration and especially its relationship to your new book Harmonic Healing – Restore Your Vital Force for Lifelong Wellness. I think it’s Rodale Press or Harper …

Dr. Linda:    It’s Rodale but Rodin was bought by Penguin Random House. So, Penguin Random House and Rodale, the [inaudible][04:38] is still there.

Gina:    They have a long history of publishing health information that wasn’t necessarily popular and bringing information on holistic approaches out to public. So, they have also great lineage here. So we’re here with some of the longstanding and long-time warriors on, wait a minute, let’s think about medicine and healing from a different perspective.

Linda, I’d love to ask you about your relationship with energy healing, how you came to this, and then we’ll eventually get around to the relationship to hydration.

Dr. Linda:    Okay. Well, I was sick. I was sick at 18 years old, 19 years old, 20 years old, I had colitis and it was diagnosed as colitis from early emotional trauma. And I started looking for the ways. One of the ways was learning to do Yoga and to learn how to teach Yoga and use it in my life but not just the physical but also the practice of awareness and energy. And so, I kept looking though, Yoga was not enough. At the time I had a corporate job and I left my corporate job to work in a health food store. So, I worked in a health food store and I started reading books, all of the great books, and I became the manager. So, I could order any books I wanted. I was a Yogi in a health food store learning about nutrition through books because at that time there was no schools that offered those kinds of studies.

So, when I was practicing Yoga and I started to heal myself, it was still a lot of work – a lot of diet, a lot of taking care of yourself – and there were some missing pieces. I just didn’t know what those missing pieces were at that time but what I did know was that the piece that I felt doing Yoga was a place for me to open up and look for these things in a peaceful way but I also noticed that all my fellow yogis were not living on meditation alone. They couldn’t sustain their energy. It was a great fortune for me to be able to work in the kitchen. So, I learned how to heal through the kitchen.

Gina:    Absolutely. “Learn to heal through the kitchen.” That is a beautiful quote, Linda. I love that.

Dr. Linda:    Well, I noticed and I started to introduce good food to my fellow yogi and people started to get well. I watched people get well from simple foods, especially vegetables, but there was still as missing link but it took a little while for me to find it. A doctor heard about me teaching cooking in my house. And so he invited me to teach cooking in a holistic clinic. And this was in 1981. So, I started doing that. And as I was cooking, I just said “Well, you know, beets are good for this and apples are good for this and we use certain herbs because we’re using the Ayurvedic method, the five element theory” and starting to use the elements of Ayurveda and use the spices and herbs to balance the doshas. And the people in the class said “Where did you learn all this?” As you know, this was not the Google days. This was a lot of study of the ancient texts of Ayurveda. So, he asked me if I would be interested in counseling people on nutrition. I said “Well, I’m not really qualified to do that.” – “Yes, you are.” So, I started …

Gina:    By practice.

Dr. Linda:    Yeah, by practice. It’s always practice. But what I found when I was practicing, teaching them how to cook, teaching them what a good diet is, giving them menus and detoxification through that process as well. I was using homeopathy. Homeopathy was one of my skills. I had kids. So, I knew how to use homeopathy because of my children. I didn’t want to use drugs. So, I learned homeopathy. So, I teach homeopathy at home to mothers. So, so important.

And then after we did that, I realized there was still something missing, something missing. We were doing everything right – meditating, important, cooking food, clean food. I used to go across the other side of Long Island to get organic food because I knew the organic food energetically felt better to me, no [inaudible][10:24] at that that time, as we know. And breathing, we did breathing exercise. I understand water from an Ayurvedic point of view which we are going to talk about because this is Hydration Foundation. So, I started asking around and three times in a row I heard about this teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who was teaching medical radiesthesia which is the evaluation of the electromagnetic field.

Gina:    Oh my goodness. When would this have been?

Dr. Linda:    This was 1981.

Gina:    Thanks for hanging in there.

Dr. Linda:    It’s really been a while. So, now I have the ability to measure energy because that’s what Dr. Purcell taught, how to measure energy. And so, I began to do studies in esoteric work on understanding the subtle nature of man. And I started studying anthroposophy with Rudolf Steiner. I brought in the whole radionics theory, the energy. And so, now I had a platform. I understood that we could with a pendulum measure the energy field, not asking some person from out of our body, but you can hold the pendulum in a closed circle over a piece of food and just hold the pendulum there and it’ll test positive or it’ll test negative. I’m not asking is it good or is it good for me. I am letting the pendulum swing positive or negative. When the pendulum swings negative, more than likely it’s bad food or it’s lost its electromagnetic charge. How has it lost its electromagnetic charge? It lost it because it’s been grown with pesticides. The original pattern is interfered with. It becomes incoherent. You take an apple off the tree, you’ll expect it to have the most fantastic electromagnetic energy and it just emanates. Well, if that tree has been sprayed with arsenic, there will be a negative and a very, very weak flow of energy.

We are physical bodies, right? We have our skin. We have our organs. We are physical. It’s physical matter. However, we’re only alive because of the etheric field that imbibes into our electromagnetic energy. Every cell in our body is both positive and negative and that’s the integrity of the cell. That’s an electric flow which is an acid flow like the battery or it’s a magnetic flow which is the alkaline. Don’t get it confused with let’s get our body alkaline. It’s not about alkalinity at the fluid level. We’re talking energy here. So, we have a physical body and we have any etheric body that emanates and that emanation is the life force. So, this physical and etheric double or blueprint. The matter is dead without that etheric force.

Gina:    That polarization. So, when you talk about the pendulum and people raise their eyebrows, I’m thinking “Yeah, if we [inaudible][14:28] device and laid it over the thing and said it could measure energy, no one would have any problem with that. They would think “Oh, well, machine” but actually the ways that polarization emanate out of living entities, living plants, and waters and minerals, and all of us and allow that polarization to send out signals, that makes so much sense. We’re not dealing with something very new here. We’re dealing with something very old. And actually pendulum finding electromagnetic forces through many forms of … Speaking now as an anthropologist, there are credible and longstanding traditions of identifying electrical forces and density of field of forces all over the globe in every culture. So, we’re here to bring that into our modern context where we have many competing waves now that we didn’t have before that are affecting our health. So, the idea that it’s the life force …

Dr. Linda:    It’s so important. And this etheric field is where we get in trouble in our illness because nothing happens in the physical before it happens in the etheric.

Now, what affects the etheric body? What affects ourselves? Chemical reaction or chemical action or disturbances in the electromagnetic waves, disturbances, whether it’s coherent or incoherent? What are the disturbances that we have in our fields these days? Most of them are invisible. The invisible forces that are negative – heavy metals, chemicals, and all sorts of radiation, especially wireless radiation, because that really is invisible. We’re going to be able to stand on the top of a mountain and talk to somebody in China or in Brooklyn, New York. So, our etheric field of the earth is getting used up. It’s getting full. Ether is the space of everything. And there is very little space left. These waves are penetrating us.

Gina:    That is a fascinating thing to say that the space is getting used up by so many frequencies flowing into … It’s another way to say overload of information but you’ve cast it in a slightly new way for us to think about it and I love and appreciate… Just trying to understand why we feel the pressure of crowding in our lives on some levels – physical crowding, things, stuff crowding, everybody has to purchase extra storage for their phone and their items, their winter clothing, and it’s everywhere that we’re feeling this pressure.

Dr. Linda:    The most important part that we need to understand is that these waves of energy are interfering with our web of the etheric field. And that’s where we get a lot of information. Those light threads through the ether fields of our etheric body give your body information.

Gina:    Yes, and I would just mention that our indoor life, so getting light threads, in other words, angles of the sun and the way that we are in the sun drives a tremendous amount of body information and cellular dynamism. We’re not even in the sun. We’re living indoors. That indoor switch is a biological switch and adaptation that we haven’t even accounted for yet. It’s going to be so serious. And now that there’s one in two of us with some kind of chronic condition, we really have to back up and think, no, this isn’t a personal problem I failed to take care of myself. This is modern context that we’re living in that is so abnormal now to our biology that we now can see around us everywhere, from autism to Alzheimer’s to you pick it.

Dr. Linda:    Indeed. And what I see is that these invisible influences, this invisible pollution is really making us weak. Almost every new patient that comes in to me is fatigued, low energy but the pollution is affecting our adrenal glands. Our adrenal glands are going to shut up from all of the chemicals and pollution. Our solar plexus chakra, our liver where everything is metabolized, liver metabolizes proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and stores vitamins and nutrients but it also metabolizes pollutants, it also metabolizes emotions, it also metabolizes our mental thoughts. That’s why I focus a lot on the liver in my book because we need to do ongoing liver cleansing or at least eat foods that clean the liver on a regular basis. So, we’ve got pollution, we need to clean the liver, and we have lifestyle. Choose organic food.

Let me say one more thing about the electromagnetic field. The earth has an electromagnetic field which has quite a lot of interferences at this time. Our plants have electromagnetic fields. The electromagnetic magnetic energy of the plant is the mineral, the charge, the plus and minus of the minerals. And how we feed our etheric body or our electromagnetic body is through food that has a high vitality of electromagnetic energy. That’s why it’s so important to have organic and not have food that has been sprayed or grown in, according to me, improper ways. We cannot take it anymore. It’s because of the chemicals and radiation and the metals. So, we have to learn how to live in it because we’re not going to change overnight.

Gina:    And a piece of lettuce is not a piece of lettuce is not a piece of lettuce is not a piece of lettuce. They are different entities based on the quality of life that they themselves have been able to draw from the soil and the sun.

Dr. Linda:    So, I say definitely organic food. Cook your foods in a simple way. Prepare them simply. Don’t make your food complex because if you make your food complex, this already complicated system with what it has to process can’t handle. You can’t have the cheeseburger with a bun, just work. I don’t know anybody who really feels good after that. It’s the combination of food. So, I like to teach lifestyle about food but then there are other parts. There’s movement. There’s gratitude. There’s breathing. There’s being in nature. There’s acknowledging nature. If that food is not in high electromagnetic energy, I can tell you, you can pray on it and say thank you with full hearted gratitude that the electromagnetic energy of the food will raise but don’t say it silently. Say it out loud because the voice is the electromagnetic field as well.

Gina:    That’s another quote I’m going to grab from you. That is beautiful and thoughtful and, again, speaking as an anthropologist and our loss of rituals in our culture, they are as debilitating as the kinds of impoverished foods we’re eating. We live in an impoverished ritual condition, we’ve lost so many and saying thank you out loud to your food is a really wonderful thing. We have posted on our website where we have brought forth the Algonquin women’s tradition of singing to water and it’s a four-second song you can learn but we’ve asked them, we had to get permission from the elders, are we allowed to sing this to a glass of water? Is that okay? Can we sing it to our shower? Can we sing it while we’re doing the dishes? And we were glad to find out the answer came back yes. So we could really think about where we’re touching water and how we interact with it but, yeah, it’s a beautiful song. It’s on our website.

Dr. Linda:    And water, the part of the lifestyle [inaudible][24:03] say something about water and how much I believe in the work that you’ve done, Gina, for the Hydration Foundation and how important hydration is and to say “No, eight glasses of water is not enough.” The increase of your vegetables with the high electromagnetic field and the pure water in it is one of the most important ways to hydrate. And then I have a Vedic system of drinking water because we still want to drink water but good water.

Gina:    For our audience that may not know that vegetables, plants, salads, all the things that you’re speaking about have water content within them that is always over 85% to 90% water, some of them achieving actually 98% water. So, watermelon, apples, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, each one of these, especially the vegetables because of their capacity in the chlorophyll to just pull toxins out, they come visit, they drop in water, they drop in nutrients and they are takeout guests, they take out a lot of waste and toxic materials in our system. So, many people are not yet aware that plants are that full of water, that they’re actually nature’s thermoses and that’s your water bottle. It’s a beautiful pair. It’s a brilliant system. Thank you, Mother Nature. It’s [inaudible][25:40] packaging.

Dr. Linda:    As anybody knows me, the most important thing that I tell them is eat vegetables. I don’t think I go through a telephone or an in-office consult without saying it. And what vegetables are you eating, how many vegetables are you eating, because I believe that. I believe that the vegetables are where we’re going to get the most electromagnetic energy. It has the most mineral content because the minerals and the trace minerals are so important. And we need to eat them, not just pop pills. We need to eat our food. We need to be able to digest our food because digesting our food is a spiritual practice.

Gina:    Tell me how you think that. I want to hear.

Dr. Linda:    When you bite into, let’s say, an apple or a carrot and you chew it, there is a process of activating your whole etheric force. It’s a process of understanding that we’re feeding the subtle. The energy that we’re talking about is feeding the subtle energy. It’s a spiritual process because the that the whole activity of digestion is that, how we put the food into our stomach. The stomach is a pot cooking on the stove. So, let’s say we put rice in, then we put water in, then we shut the lid and we imagine that our food is being digested. This idea that we need to continuously drink water is only messing with our digestion. So how we drink water, and I write about it in the book, is we drink water before meals so we can get the water heated up for the food to come in because we’re going to be digesting soon. Then while we’re eating, we can taste. You may need some more water. You can sip your water during but once you stop, maybe you have a cup of tea after but once you stop, stop. Please stop for two to three hours, put the lid on it and let your food digest. That, to me, is the way we drink water. Now, two or three hours later, if you’re working out, if you’re going to the gym and you’re going to be sweating, it’s okay to drink water then but I don’t know that we have to lug bottles around in our purses everywhere we go.

Gina:    Anthropologists of the future are going to be like “What was this thing? Why?”

Dr. Linda:    The last thing that we have wasted in the process is unconscious. So, drinking water … I’ve heard a lot of people say “Don’t drink water while you’re eating” and I disagree with that. I clearly disagree because if we understand the concept of what the stomach ism, cooking the food, then it goes through, then the liver starts to metabolize, and then it eliminates, it’s got enough fiber because of the food, it’s clearing, it’s detoxifying, it’s probiotics. Vegetables are probiotics.

So, I was recently on TV and they said “What’s the most …” I said “Eat vegetables. That’s the most important thing.” I’m a vegetable person. I don’t care if you’re vegan. I don’t care if you’re a vegetarian or meat eater or paleo. Don’t make the steak this big. If it’s going to be this big, you’ve got to have that much vegetable. So, you need to eat the protein the size of your palm and then you have your big dinner plate. Please pile it all up. I love steamed vegetables at night. I don’t like raw vegetables in the evening unless it’s summer because our digestive force is strongest. And why? Because that raw food we have to cook in the stomach. Our enzymes start to go down at night. So, it’s better to have steamed or soups. My favorite is soups.

Gina:    Yeah, soups are awesome.

Dr. Linda:    It’s so much in anthropology. I imagine there’s always been soups. Yogis in the Himalayas, when they would be sick, they would put lamb or some kind of meat and lots of vegetables and make a big soup. Yes, meat. I say it’s our appreciation of the food more than whether you’re meat or you’re eating vegetables – “I’m spiritual because I only eat vegetables.” Some people, they eat meet. Some people don’t. A lot of us can get our protein nutrition out of the lentil or out of the legume. Some do not. And, for me, protein powders don’t cut it because we want to chew our food. We want to chew on our life. We want to digest it. And you know when you’re digesting your food and everything’s moving out properly, you feel good, especially if it’s good food. And what’s good food?

Gina:    I’m going to guess you’re going to say vegetables.

Dr. Linda:    I like to say that I’m a locavore. I like to say that definitely I’m 80% vegetable girl. So, that’s my diet. And I will take in protein if it’s grown in my area. Normally, I don’t have … I live in New Mexico in the desert, New Mexico. I don’t eat fish unless we’re camping up in Colorado and getting a trout but it’s respect for the earth. You know, Gina, it’s not what we put in our mouth and what comes out of our mouth. That’s important.

Gina:    Will you say that again?

Dr. Linda:    What you put in your mouth and what comes out of your mouth, that’s important. So, we want to honor the earth. We want to have lots of vegetables for good hydration. We want to move our body for good hydration too because the water moves with our fascia. We want to understand that we’re in a polluted world.

Gina:    Yes, that’s key.

Dr. Linda:    And it’s invisible. So, we can be naive about it. Please don’t be. When I used to go to New York, on my computer I would have three or four different connections. Now we see 80. It’s a lot going on.

Gina:    [Inaudible][33:19] crowding you’re talking about.

Dr. Linda:    We’re not equipped for it. We’re really not equipped for it. So, we do meditation to strengthen our subtle web. We understand that we have a mental field and that mental field can also … It’s the way we think. So, we can start thinking positive thoughts because we are water and water carries information. I can’t make a homeopathic remedy without water. Those little pellets, you have to spray them with water in order for the information to go on them. So, water carries the information as well and we’re all water. So, we want to … Positive thoughts. Be kind. That’s how we strengthen. Get the oxygen going. Not insane breathing but breathe in the cosmos. Understand that we’re energy. There’s an energy field. I can feel an energy field between my palms. I can go like “Oh, there’s an energy field that comes out.” And this understanding of energy helps us to survive some of the energy frequencies that we’re going to be experiencing. Our skies are full of pollution, radiation is over the top and it’s going to be more. So, as you know, I recommend the sea salt and baking soda bath for radiation. I’ve recommended it to everyone.

Gina:    Give us that formula.

Dr. Linda:    It’s a pound of sea salt and a pound of baking soda in a tub of hot water. Not so hot that you burn yourself. Let’s not get extreme here. But a nice comfortable bath. Put that in the tub, get in, and soak for 20 minutes. It’ll begin to neutralize the radiation that is in your body. I tell people who fly a lot, every time they get off the plane, please do a sea salt and baking soda bath.

Gina:    I always follow your advice. So, I always take that bath when I come home from a trip. It’s very important.

Dr. Linda:    It makes a difference.

Gina:    And it’s not our ritual really, when you think about it. I’m exiting this space. I’m entering this space. I’m now here on this part of the planet. Yeah, I like that.

Dr. Linda:    And seaweed. Include seaweed.

Gina:    Talk about that. Do I [inaudible][35:55] seaweed in my bath?

Dr. Linda:    We used to package it that way. And it makes a mess of the bathtub. And I enjoy it and I enjoy eating it. Yeah, I enjoy eating it. Or put dots on your food. You may say “Oh, there’s so many things to do” but these little things do matter. When we see one little pellet of homeopathy, what that can do, if we’re eating the seaweed with that intention of clearing the radiation, it will happen.

Gina:    Yes. It’s hard for people to believe that their thoughts, they’re invisible thoughts end up as a material reality. I always like to help them just … We have some language we can use now in our culture when we talk about thoughts turning into chemistry like cortisol. People get that. They don’t have any problems seeing how the invisible becomes a material reality. So, I think helping people to step over the idea that how you’re talking about this through just walking through the science chain of the anxiety that people feel and how that turns into a body chemistry or brain chemistry and then floods our system in all sorts of ways that, there’s a lineage there to now to talk about that in some important ways. So, it’s really helpful to recall for people that we really are talking about ways in which the invisible do become material. And when you were talking about …

Dr. Linda:    It’s crystallized. Un-crystallized thoughts can go into the gallbladder and cause a gallbladder attack.

Gina:    Yes, there’s no reason why we can’t follow that chain out now. I mean, it’s pretty straightforward.

Dr. Linda:    So, you start changing your thinking processes. You become more mindful but not mindful to get somewhere – “What if I do this, can I get there?” It’s not A to B. It’s a whole lifestyle of understanding that with gratefulness, with being mindful not to get peace necessarily but also using our mind to be positive because that will create a positive flow of energy within us.

Gina:    Yes, and it’s very protective. It gets us out of the defensive mode that a lot of people living in a world in crisis because we have the language in which it’s all danger, danger, danger, food is danger, the airplanes are dangerous, everything around us, electromagnetic fields. We’re all in such danger that that this message is closing us down and we feel overwhelmed. It’s too much information coming in. So, helping people understand, yes, they do have to adjust to a damaged world, a world that is …

Dr. Linda:    We don’t like to see damage because we can’t fix it.

Gina:    Right? Adaptive …

Dr. Linda:    I think it’s difficult.

Gina:    Yeah. The planet is going through changes and we can change with it and adapt to a new … This is the basis of anthropology is how you evolve into new environments. So, that’s really what we want to talk about. How are we going to do this evolution? And it’s very wonderful to find out that the medium for that is beautiful food, great water, and joyful activities and thoughts and movement through the day. What could go wrong with that adaptive strategy?

Dr. Linda:    And using water in the baths in an energy field in the bath. And there is actually a scientific reason for it.

Gina:    Can you explain a little bit more? I’d love to hear that.

Dr. Linda:    Okay. So, radiation comes in as a high frequency and agitation, it agitates the cells because it spins. And so, it’s very strong waves of agitation or acid or electrical. So, that’s the field that we’re being bombarded with. So, kitchen chemistry tells us let’s use something alkaline. So, sea salt and baking soda are two alkaline substances. So, now we have the spinning up the cells and now we’re using salt and soda which slows it down to get it back to a normal flow again. So it’s actually the neutralization of radiation happens in a field of energy of alkalinity. And through the process of osmosis the radiation is relieved as the water cools.

Gina:    I’m sorry, I have to go have a bath [inaudible][41:04].

Dr. Linda:    That’s because we’re in front of the computer.

Gina:    Yes.

Dr. Linda:    I take soda bath twice a week.

Gina:    Yeah, I wanted to ask you. Tell us a little bit about your practice and what you recommend to patients. So, twice a week bath, beautiful amounts of vegetables in your life, organic, local …

Dr. Linda:    In a very simple way, not high heat, low heat. We’re cleaning the liver I don’t like heated oil. So, forget the sauté with the olive oil because you’re ruining this precious olive oil. When we put high heat on olive oil, the molecular structure starts to get jagged. If we steam the vegetables or cook it in a small amount of water or make it in soups, you then use that olive oil on after and it’s a healing to the liver.

Gina:    So in your vegetables you use steam and water or juices or …

Dr. Linda:    I’ll steam in water. I’m steam in broth or I’ll make soups. It’s very easy to put your vegetables in [inaudible][42:17] or a Staub pot with a little bit of water and put it on low and let the vegetables use its own juices. Then there’s no water at the bottom and they don’t burn if you watch it. Put it on simmer. Those heavy pots are like an oven, a sealed oven. You can do the same thing with parchment paper. So, in the book, part one is all about the etheric energy and the electromagnetic energy and these invisible forces and how to clean the liver. Second part is Dr. Linda’s kitchen.

Gina:    Beautiful. I’m so pleased you’re a physician with a kitchen.

Dr. Linda:    I’m going to quote you. Gina, for the last almost 40 years, I have watched food heal.

Gina:    That’s beautiful, yes.

Dr. Linda:    Nature heals. We have to do some other things like find the right thinking processes, learn how to feel emotions, learn how to listen, meditation but, I believe, most people are doing contemplation, not really meditation. Meditation is really high level of Yoga. Contemplation, however, is where we want to be to find that peace. We’re not looking for medicine that’s trying to kill something or get rid of something.

Un-oh, I didn’t say anything about parasites, did I?

Gina:    No. Would you like to? I know that that’s a worldwide issue and we have more … I mean, if you just talk about Lyme’s disease, it’s very, very difficult and widespread.

Dr. Linda:    I’m most known for the goat milk cleanse and four out of five patients that walk into my office have parasites. I put it in five categories. There are worms, yeah, the wriggly ones. I know that sounds terrible but we are animals and we do de-worm our animals. So, worms are very, very common. Fungus, that’s a parasite. It’s living off of us.

Gina:    Yeah, the molds that were exposed to.

Dr. Linda:    Bacteria. Just go eat at a salad bar or … Bacteria needs to be dealt with in a natural way. Otherwise, you’re going to wind up with antibiotics and then get the fungus.

Then we have what I call microparasites or microscopic parasites. They act like worms but they’re microscopic. That category is amoebas, flukes, and the famous Spirochaetae which we are in big problems, having big problems with epidemics of Lyme’s disease. Those Spirochaetaes, when they get a hold of you, they don’t like to leave. As a matter of fact, none of these guys like to leave.

Gina:    Well, we’re the perfect hosts.

Dr. Linda:    And we’ll never get rid of them all. But who’s in charge of our body? How do we clear these or at least neutralize them that they’re latent and they’re not bothering us anymore so our good bacteria, our soil is rich. The fifth one, which I didn’t tell you, is virus. We’re overloaded with viruses. This was a very bad flu year. Now, what makes it so difficult is the heavy metals in the chemicals and the radiation that creates an environment within ourselves that is a perfect breeding ground. That’s what makes the parasites so, so difficult to clear.

So, I have different methods of clearing each of them.

Gina:    It’s in the book, right?

Dr. Linda:    Yes, yes. And the symptoms of all of them. And I connect it to the five elements.

Gina:    Oh, that’s really good. I imagine that each of them has a unique element that would make sense.

Dr. Linda:    Yeah. The worms have earth. That’s why we use herbal medicine to clear the worms. You’ll like this, the fungus is the water element. As we know, fungus grows in moist conditions. Then there is bacteria and it’s connected to the fire element.

Gina:    Inflammation.

Dr. Linda:    Yeah. And how it can get into the stomach. Bacteria gets into the stomach and then you … It’s the fire element. Then you have the air element to do with the microscopic parasites. Very elusive. Very much works with oxygenation. I use oxygenating herbs specifically for microscopic parasites. And then we have virus. Well, virus is a little more tricky because it’s connected to the ether. And ether is the primordial sound in all the space and in everything that’s alive. So, how we deal with ether and viruses I learned very early on in my practice because when I first started working when we had the HIV epidemic. Now it’s the Lyme’s epidemic but back then it was HIV epidemic and it was quite difficult. And I noticed that the people, the patients that did well was to enlighten them with will for life. Give them hope and say “Here’s the will for life. You go and cook your food and bless it. You want to be here.” And that is really … I’m not saying we have to do other … we had other things, the immune system, immune support and so forth, but the most important was enlivening through the ether and showing them that that ether is your spiritual connection. When we first took our first breath, that vital force came into us and that was ether. And ether feeds every other element. So, it is the etheric force field that gives us life. Plants have an etheric force field. Animals have an etheric force field. We have an etheric force field, so does the earth. Plants don’t have an emotional body. They have an etheric force field but they have some other ways of emoting but an actual emotional body animals do have, we can see that in the dogs and the horses and so forth but people, we have a mental body, and our mental body is our will for spiritual life and it is our responsibility because if we want to be spiritual on this planet, then we have to take care of the animals. We need to take care of the food and grow it in the natural way. And we also need to take care of the earth and stop polluting it.

Gina:    Yes. We have recently expanded our work at the Hydration Foundation to include hydrating not just people but also plants, animals, and soils because some new research has come to light that well hydrated with water, with electric charge in soils revives formerly dehydrated microbes that are dormant in the soil but the soil becomes newly diversified just by proper water. That’s an [inaudible][51:11] information and it has a tremendous information …

Dr. Linda:    We talk about that in the book.

Gina:    Right. Oh, do say more, do say more because if we can revive our microbes in the soils, then that’s the baseline for …

Dr. Linda:    Because nothing lives without water. So, we need water. Plants need sunlight. We need the earth. Water is part of the earth and it’s the biggest part of the earth. And we get it through mother earth. And always we get water from mother earth.

Gina:    Linda, people are using, of course, water filters, right?

Dr. Linda:    I couldn’t wait till you heard.

Gina:    What?

Dr. Linda:    I have been using this little gadget every day.

Gina:    Oh my goodness, it’s one of the spin filters. Yes. Tell me your reaction.

Dr. Linda:    Because I wanted to test the potency [inaudible][52:17] change the water. My water in the office, which is a big bottled water, I think, with it sitting there and so forth, it was never bad but vitality was very different as I’ve been using this little filter. I measured the water before and I measured the water after. When I measured the water before, it was a 120-degree reading, which is sustainable but I always bless my water. So, I would always give it a little enhancement anyway. However, just no enhancement and just pouring the water through this little portable ….

Gina:    It’s a funnel.

Dr. Linda:    It’s a funnel. So, I just pour it in and the water comes down, it’s very nice. 360 degrees. In my evaluation of energy, I use a circle – 360 degrees or 360 units of electromagnetic energy. So from 90 to 120 is sustainable. Anything below 90 is bad – chemicals, heavy metals. It’s really in the alkaline field of the circle, right? And we will find that if we have an apple that has chemicals, it’ll go down to 20. And 0 is death. Okay. So, full healing potential is 360 degrees. In my office programs do not go out unless they’re 360 degrees. I don’t try things. I want to make sure that we have full potential and what I expect it should be. So, I expect that this water will be very good to hydrate. It’s a healing water.

Gina:    It’s a healing water and it works on such a simple natural principle, which is inside the funnel are small spheres which force the water to spin and create new … it’s just like a spinning wheel. We know spinning wheels create energy, right? It’s called a car.

Dr. Linda:    And it’s also a waterfall.

Gina:    A waterfall, mountain stream. So, the principle of spinning water is something water itself uses to create its own level of energy and purification. So, when I saw this device, I knew that I wanted to do some of my own testing work. And the company that makes it, I went to them and I said “Hey, this is really valuable” and they’re like, “Well, we like what you’re saying too.” So, they have helped me provide broader information. In fact, they’re sponsoring this Doctor Talk series. I’m really grateful because they have the wherewithal to really help us move these messages about … And, of course, always the first is what can I do for nothing? How can I help my water have some salt crystals? How can I take a bath after traveling on plane? How can I eat more vegetables? All these are essential interventions but then when it comes to what water are you drinking, it’s a little bit harder to just tell people “Well, you just need to just keep eating that cucumber” because we do need water and we need water for drinking and we need water to bathe in. So, delighted that you found that useful.

Dr. Linda:    Well, that’s my job.

Gina:    Yeah. I love it. There are those of us who are equipped to vet on behalf of other people.

Dr. Linda:    It’s quantum physics, really, that we’re analyzing. So, I’m sure there’s lots of different products out there that are going to come to the surface one by one but if you don’t have an apparatus …

Gina:    Yeah. We’re trying to provide a whole menu of resources for people. So, some people like portable. Some people are willing to buy the 4,000-dollar and I’m just not there yet. It’s like “Okay, well, I’m sure you guys will go work that out.” I’m really looking for affordable solutions for families and for travel and for the kind of life and work style that we have in our particular pathways that we have to move through. Go to a restaurant, they put a glass of water in front of you … I personally carry pink salt with me. And so, I always throw a dash of that if I’m going to take that water because I often will leave it unattended or ask them “Don’t pour my glass. I’m cool.” I’m hydrated from other sources but, Linda, I do want to make sure you feel like you have said about your book, sort of a summary of the three most important recommendation of things that you want to say from this extraordinary body of work that you have carried and now have packaged in a book. Books are so essential to educating on a much broader basis and helping people find their way. So, love to hear you say “Look, here’s the three things I want you to walk away with.”

Dr. Linda:    Okay, one is a I’ve learned that the lifestyle I wrote about in the book is the way people get well in a natural way. So, I wanted to share that with the world. If they are receptive to it, great, but I can tell you after 40 years of practice exactly what I do every day is in the book.

Gina:    Great.

Dr. Linda:    Then I wanted to, also most important, I think, even more important for, is understanding energy. So, I hope that we have terminology … if you read the book, you’ll have the terminology to explain energy and understand that our molecular structure is electromagnetic and that’s the life force.

The third thing is the importance of the liver and cleaning of the liver.

Gina:    Especially in today’s world.

Dr. Linda:    In today’s world and also what I see is we are in a time where there’s so much pollution and yet we’re in a time when there’s so much movement to spirituality. So, if we’re going to actually be spiritual, then we need to clean the liver.

Gina:    I love this embodiment thought of spiritual is the material is the essential. That’s our launch pad. Look we got to do it.

Dr. Linda:    While we’re here, let’s do it what’s meant to be. When did you start to ask the question why am I here? I’ve been saying it since I’m a child. Why am I here? Why am I here? And I feel that the first step was to write the book so I can share what I do every day with my patients because I only have two hands. Those two hands can only one on one. You can’t reach masses. And the people who can’t afford to … everywhere, in third world countries, wherever, don’t have these tools and they’re not aware of what’s going on on the earth as well. So, education, understand the invisible forces. And there’s tools. It’s not about getting afraid. This is not fear. It’s maybe a challenge on our fear. Maybe it’s challenging us or maybe we’re oblivious to it, I don’t know, but it’s all pollution – “Hey, negative people to me is pollution.”

Gina:    If you look at what that word means even the Mary Douglas’s sense, the great anthropologist who talked about pollution of thought and … What is that beautiful song “Create in me a clean heart and renew in me a right spirit.” I say that every morning. It’s an important [inaudible][61:15] and it took me … I don’t know, I had to get like into my 50s before I realized that a clean heart is also a heart that’s free from anxiety. And that was like such a big aha moment – “Oh, I see it’s necessary to know that the culture we live in the world as it exists now is a world that we’ve never really seen before. We need to adapt. We need our spiritual qualities, alert and alive, and well stocked to be the body that we are secure as a body and we need to complete that task well.” It’s so important. I know one of the big rituals of my life, I think, it’s such a fun thing because rituals sometimes come and get us. We don’t make them. They sometimes come and get us. And I remember on my 60th birthday I was riding alone on a sailboat and had this amazing moment of realizing “Wow, my death is drawing near. I don’t know how long it will be but it’s drawing near to me. And what do I want to do between now and when that moment arises?” And I thought “Well, what’s going to arrive at that moment, I’m going to lose my body. So my task is from now until I lose that body to be as much a body as I possibly can to go and explore that. It’s a tremendous adventure to be a body.” And there’s a quality of spirituality where people want to exit the body but I think that it’s becoming as embodied as possible. That’s really health.

Dr. Linda:    For me, that is too, embodiment and having a vehicle that can carry a big soul.

Gina:    I love that. That’s beautiful. I’m going to quote that. I think you’re amazing. I think this has been a cherished interview. I know you have a repertoire of years and years of recovery and healing and it’s so valuable to have it now put into a book where people can find it. The book is Harmonic Healing – Restore Your Vital Force. I think You’re going to find a lot of healing techniques and recipes from our physician with the kitchen.

So, thank you, Dr. Linda Lancaster. We love and revere you here at the Hydration Foundation. Thank you for helping us spread our message.

Dr. Linda:    I will see you at GFIM.

Gina:    Yes, indeed, we’ll be there this year. That’s great.

Okay. So, I’m going to end the interview here. And, Linda, that was just wonderful. I mean, just wonderful.