In this episode of The Thermo Diet Diet Podcast Christopher Walker and Jayton Miller sit down and talk about micronutrients, some of the reasons that they are important, how doctors might not be looking at them, their important in pregnancy and more!
Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments below!
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Full Transcript:
Christopher:
What's up, everyone? Christopher Walker back again with the Thermo Diet Podcast with my cohost Jayton Toothpick Miller.
Jayton:
How's it going?
Christopher:
We got toothpicks too? It's going good. It's going good. So today we're going to be talking about micronutrients. So we're going to talk about vitamins, minerals, amino acids, but also kind of a little more of a background about like why they're important because they are extremely important, far more important than most people think. And that's part of what we're going to be discussing today. Because it's interesting how a lot of ... There's a few, I don't know, there's a couple of like really interesting things we'll be talking about today is just one, how most people actually became deficient in the first place. And it's not really what you think. Statistically, most people are deficient because of one thing that is completely out of their control, which we're going to talk about.
Christopher:
Then we're going to also going to talk about doctors, how there's a lot of interesting information out there about medical school education, how really, how little education there is in medical school about nutrition and about the importance of micronutrients in the human body and the role that they play, especially when applied to the nutrition aspect of it. You could say like, "Oh, magnesium is used as a enzymatic catalyst for this reaction in some biochemistry class. But most people aren't actually making the rubber meet the road in terms of the academic aspect versus the realistic aspect. Especially when you have a patient and somebody who needs help, who you can teach how to get more magnesium in their diet or in their body. So we're going to talk about that stuff today. I think it's really interesting and kind of a new take. I haven't heard many people discuss certain things that we're going to be discussing in this episode.
Christopher:
I guess let's just get started in terms of the ... Let's talk about the medical school stuff.
Jayton:
All right.
Christopher:
I think that's really fascinating. I've found some videos about like there was a bill that was trying to get passed in California, for example, where they essentially wanted to mandate that medical schools in California required 14 hours of nutrition education throughout the entire curriculum. So if someone was in med school for four years, they had to do 14 hours of nutrition education. And people went nuts. All the medical associations and stuff went nuts. And they knocked it down to seven hours and they still were going crazy about it.
Christopher:
And I found this hearing video from the government hearing. And there was all these different clips of the different medical associations like the California Association of ... I think it was California Medical Association, the California Association for Family Doctors, the Surgeon Association, whatever. They were all like adamantly against having any sort of mandate for nutrition in med school. Even like a seven hour thing for four years, like seven hours. Are you kidding? So that's, I think, fascinating about the fact that these medical associations are so against teaching nutrition in med school.
Jayton:
And then what's interesting is that, for instance, in my nutrition class that I've taken, they don't go over the different forms of a lot of these micronutrients either, and the actual compatibility that a lot of these nutrients have with the human body. And for instance, the vitamin A that's found in different milks or the calcium that's fortified in a lot of different orange juices and stuff like that, it's not in the right form that your body's going to be able to actually be able to use it. And so, I think that's also another aspect that a lot of people need to look at whenever they're looking at their micronutrient intake as well.
Christopher:
Yeah, there are basically different forms of all of them, especially minerals. I was actually having a discussion, I was flying out to Miami last week and I was sitting next to this guy on the plane. We were just talking about stuff. He asked what I did and I talked to them about UMZU and stuff. So he was asking these questions about, "Oh, do supplements even work? And do they even absorb in your body?" And I was like, "Yeah, well, if you look at, for example, magnesium, there's going to be certain forms of magnesium that are more bioavailable than others. So if you see a label that says magnesium oxide, you should probably run the other direction. Like you don't even waste your money because it's got what, like a 2% bioavailability or something on it. It's just a waste of money. However, if you had like a glycinate or an aspartate or a citrate, those are going to be much more highly bioavailable." And he saw the pattern right away. He's like, "Okay, so stay away from the ides and go with the ates on the minerals?" I was like, "Yeah, actually, I never really thought about that. But yeah, you're right." That's like an easy way to think about it, I guess.
Christopher:
Because it's the same thing with selenium or zinc or other minerals like that. If you go with the ates, you're going to have a higher bioavailability. Don't go with the ides, the oxide. Oxides just rust, basically.
Jayton:
Yeah, pretty much.
Christopher:
So yeah, that was interesting. In terms of bioavailability, it's like a little mental hack reading the label. With the med school stuff, essentially, I think it's important to look at that because most people go to their doctors. However, like in our new ... I think in the younger generations right now, they don't trust the, really, even just like outside of a medical system, they don't trust the medical system as much as our parents did or grandparents did. And then, it's the same thing as with political stuff and really any establishments. It's almost like these new ... Our younger generations right now don't really trust it. Mass media, whatever. There's this general lack of trust in it. So I don't know if this will be a problem forever, but currently there's this ... A lot of older generations like our parents and our grandparents, they go to their doctors for health advice and they have regular checkups. They're going like once a month or whatever. They're getting their prescriptions and they ask the doctors for health advice, nutrition advice. The problem is that doctors really don't have nutrition education and there's a lot of data to back that up.
Christopher:
The other issue is that doctors aren't interested in nutrition and don't trust the education that they do receive about nutrition. And there was actually a study done on US med schools that showed that since the 1950s, fewer and fewer med students have any sort of interest in nutrition. And they correlated it with the fact that they think that the education that they get on nutrition while they're in med school, whether it's two or seven hours or whatever it is, like woefully low amount, they think that it's wrong. So therefore, if they're like, "Well, this is nonsense. I don't trust the quality of this education, this nutrition education that I'm receiving in med school, which I'm paying a lot of money for. Therefore, I don't want to even learn about any of this because this is just bad material, clearly." So even if they don't trust in the first place, they just don't even want to learn about it. And that's probably because they probably have good reason to not trust it because it's probably bad information that they're being told.
Jayton:
They're conditioned to look at the body with a very reductionistic view. So they're told to look at all these different symptoms and be able to name one thing that's going wrong and then be able to cover that up with a bandaid, whether it's a pharmaceutical or a surgery or something like that, rather than looking at the body as a whole holistic self healing organism and then just being able to fill in the gaps that are not allowing it to function at its optimal capacity.
Christopher:
Yeah. And one of the issues that kind of spurs that sort of thinking in the medical establishment is just the fact that it's all specialty based. So you spend all this time learning about one area of the body as a specialist or one system in the body as a specialist. And therefore you'll only ever see the body through that lens because that's really all you have a good grasp on, which makes sense. I mean, logically, it's like, "Oh, I spent $200,000 going to med school and becoming a hematologist. So everything I think about is going to be in the view of the blood." Which, I mean, it's logical. Also for reasons of ego protection from just like a basic psychological standpoint. It's like, "Well, I invested all this money into this. I am a hematologist. Therefore, if I start actively questioning that decision or the validity of viewing the body through that lens, then, as like a total health solving system, then I'm really questioning my own ego, my own psychology, my own existence, my own identity."
Christopher:
So it's just a bad way, I think, that it's been set up. It doesn't really serve the patient very well and it doesn't serve the doctor that well in order to help the patient become healthy. There's a lot of the great things about doctors and the skills that are developed as a doctor, as well. I mean, I've got several doctors in my family who they help a lot of people do things. But part of the problem is that the way that the education system is set up doesn't really end up serving the customer very well. The client, the patient, whatever. And a lot of people have theories about why that is in the first place. And I mean, part of it, it just seems very, extremely obvious that a lot of it is based on the big pharma lobby, really. The fact that the textbooks are funded by pharmaceutical companies, the fact that pharmaceutical companies are a huge part of the hospital as a business, the fact that they ... I mean, they've been caught a million times doing this stuff, but all the backdoor things that the pharmaceutical companies do for doctors in terms of money, it's just clear that that's really what is underlying all of the education in the medical establishment right now.
Christopher:
And it makes sense why that wouldn't involve nutrition. It wouldn't involve things like focusing on vitamins, minerals, and amino acids and nutrient therapy because nutrient therapy is very inexpensive and it can solve the problem. So if you can affordably solve your problems by measuring deficiencies and correcting them and finding imbalance patterns and that sort of thing, where do the drugs come in? They don't. You don't need them.
Jayton:
And that's one thing that a lot of these doctors do is that they're not necessarily ... Their main priority is not necessarily to cure you, it's to make you feel better so you can survive another day, so you can continue to take all those different pharmaceuticals that are getting their paycheck.
Christopher:
Yeah and I think most doctors are good people and I think they go into medicine to help people. But I think the way that it's set up, it's not them that's the problem, really. It's the underlying pharmaceutical control over the medical establishment right now. But I don't know if it'll always be that way. So I have hope. Especially with the fact that people can now ... Like, we can sit here and talk about the truth about this stuff and send it out to people that want to listen to it and then it changes, helps fuel the way that they're thinking. So eventually, enough people will be aware of this stuff that I think it could change over time.
Jayton:
Definitely. Another thing is the farming practices that they use, soil degradation, for instance, results in a lot of food that could be very nutrient dense in an ideal scenario. But because of these chronic crop rotations or even like monocrops and things like that, all of the nutrients that's within the soil that's supposed to get into the fruit of the plant is deficient. So we're not even getting as many micronutrients as we could within our diet.
Christopher:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you look at regenerative farming practices, there's a clear intention to restore nutrient density back into the soil and do rotations, whether it's livestock, rotating livestock is a good way to do it. But also using soil in a certain way that you can actually have the nutrients, bring nutrients back into the soil. Or composting and basically having that circle of life with certain stuff. So it makes total sense that when it's like a commercial operation with as the sole intention or the highest intention that doing those sort of things kind of can easily fall by the wayside in terms of ... Because they're not necessarily efficient for the operation itself. They make the food taste better, they make it more nutrient rich. But if you compared it to commercial pricing models and distribution through grocery stores and that sort of thing, it just doesn't make any sense for the average farmer to do that. You know? So that's why we kind of get into this situation where the soil that all of our food being grown in is completely stripped of the nutrients. It's not nearly as dense as it was a hundred years ago.
Jayton:
And like with the commercial farming, I think I saw a statistic that, in the US, a third of our food just goes in the trash because through transportation and storage and things like that, it'll rot or it'll bruise. And if the foods bruise, for instance, they won't put it out because it's not going to be attractive to the buyer so they're not going to be able to sell it. So it's just going to sit there and rot anyways. So they toss out a third of the food in the US, which is insane. And it just goes in the trash.
Christopher:
They should just put it back in the field somewhere if it's produce or something, have some sort of composting initiative.
Jayton:
Yeah.
Christopher:
Yeah, interesting. So the combination of a few things, I mean, the nutrient deficiencies become very, not just extremely common, but easy to accomplish because our food doesn't have as dense of nutrient density as it used to. And that's why we, with Thermo, we advocate food quality above a lot of other things. It's extremely important to get the highest quality stuff that you can find and afford because it matters, in this sense. The foundational element of the micronutrient density in the food is very important. And then you have the fact that the people that we generally go to for health advice as a culture don't have any education on nutrition and they don't think it's important because of the low quality of education in the med schools about it, which totally makes sense.
Christopher:
And then, the big one that we mentioned in the beginning of the episode that kind of sets everyone up to be deficient period is the population wide, and they've studied this not only in the US, but across the world in different countries, different regions, everything. The fact that people are deficient, they get the deficiencies while they're in the womb, from the mother. So a deficiency is passed to the child through the pregnancy. And that absolutely also is completely logical because if a lot of people are deficient, if the mother's deficient, there's no way that it's possible that the child could not have that deficiency because it's literally like a physical lack of that nutrient in the system. It's not there. You can't just make it out of thin air.
Jayton:
Some of the most common manifestations that I have seen from that is different kinds of mental disorders. So they'll be deficient in vitamin B6 their entire life. And so they'll be depressed, have anxiety. And you gain a lot of respect with that lens from the book Nutrient Power from William Walsh. Even things from Autism Spectrum Disorder, he's been able to correct certain aspects of that with nutrient therapy.
Christopher:
Yeah. And schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, obviously. Yeah, they're all ... There are patterns. There are nutrient patterns in all of those symptoms. And that's what they are, they're symptoms.
Jayton:
Yeah. And so, yeah. And a lot of that can be from birth too. And I think that a big one that we see today is things like the inability to focus, like ADHD and ADD, being prescribed to all these different kids. And then they're putting them on pharmaceuticals whenever they're probably just deficient in a micronutrient that puts them in an anxious state.
Christopher:
Yeah, yeah. And this worldwide study basically found that, I think it was by the World Health Organization, that the half of the entire world, 50%, is deficient in several different nutrients by the time they're six months old. And essentially, these deficiencies concentrate on iron, iodine, vitamin A, folate, and zinc. These government bodies, they know about this stuff. The information is out there, but you never hear about this stuff. There's no headlines in the New York Times being like, "Hey, if you're pregnant, you better pay attention to the nutrients that you're consuming and go and measure your deficiencies and correct them because your kid's going to be deficient. He's going to have a lot of problems." And statistically like half the world has that.
Jayton:
One of the things is it goes back to the perception of those nutrients too because, for instance, the carotinoids. So vitamin A in plant form actually inhibits proper thyroid function, but then whenever you have the animal form version of that vitamin, which is like the retinoids, it's highly active and it helps with various processes in the human body, like steroid synthesis, things like that. So that's very important to note, as well.
Christopher:
The plant source of vitamin A is interesting because it actually can cause a lot of, like you mentioned the thyroid issues, but it can also cause like psychological issues in people that have too much of it. It's been linked to causing anorexia as a behavior pattern, which is interesting. So yeah, it's like, don't overeat the plant version of vitamin A for sure. But the animal version being extremely helpful, it's just confusing for a lot of people because they see the term vitamin A, but not knowing the difference between carotinoids and retinoid or sources of it and that sort of thing. It's confusing.
Jayton:
Yeah, definitely. And if you eat too much of it, you'd start to turn orange.
Christopher:
Yeah, you do turn orange.
Jayton:
That's another thing to note.
Christopher:
Look like Donald Trump.
Jayton:
Yeah.
Christopher:
Let's see, right here. So iodine deficiency being a big one. The maternal iodine deficiency has been recognized by government agencies as quote, "Recognized as the greatest cause of preventable mental impairment in the world."
Jayton:
Dang.
Christopher:
Yeah. 38 million newborn babies every year have iodine deficiency. And 18 million of those born yearly have iodine deficiency caused mental impairment.
Jayton:
And a lot of that is probably linked to the hypothyroid state of a lot of those people too.
Christopher:
Yeah, it's probably the cause of the hypothyroid state. Like, as a child, you're immediately at this disadvantage.
Jayton:
And you found that article that showed that the average core body temperature is slowly declining over time.
Christopher:
I've seen it now all over Facebook. Wall Street Journal just posted it today.
Jayton:
Really?
Christopher:
Yeah. So now it's going mainstream.
Jayton:
Nice.
Christopher:
Yeah.
Jayton:
Heck yeah. But I think that that's probably one of the core reasons for a lot of these issues that are happening too.
Christopher:
Yeah, it's kind of crazy. No one talks about the fact that as a child, when you're born, you're deficient. Statistically, you're probably going to be deficient in a handful of things because your mother was. And when you have that understanding, it's very foundational and logical to be like, "Okay, well I need to fix that." And just the understanding of a deficiency being a problem is also empowering because you're like, "Okay, well I'm probably deficient in a handful of things at any moment just based on like every month you go through life, you're eating different things, you're taking different supplements, you're having different levels of stress or whatever." So you always have to be kind of like paying attention to this. And if you start to experience symptoms, especially, then it's something that people ... I think it's the first thing people should look at in terms of helping them overcome certain symptoms.
Christopher:
The other aspect of it is anti-nutrients. The anti-nutrients, they're the hidden problem in terms of what people think are health foods typically contain high amounts of anti-nutrients based on culturally what we accept as being a healthy food. So you want to make sure you pay attention to that.
Jayton:
Definitely. Nuts, seeds, cruciferous vegetables.
Christopher:
Grain holes. The easiest thing to do is avoid things that are high in anti-nutrients. But another thing that you can do is certain cooking techniques for a lot of this stuff that'll break down the anti-nutrient effect. And that's what you see a lot of people doing like with sourdough bread, for example. Or if they're consuming cruciferous vegetables, just to kind of overcook them essentially. Yeah. Boiling things, high heats can typically break it down.
Jayton:
Sprouting them.
Christopher:
Sprouting them.
Jayton:
Silking them.
Christopher:
Yeah. But then you get kind of in like ... It becomes really complicated if you're doing that for all your food and you're trying to figure all this up.
Jayton:
It's a chore.
Christopher:
I think it's really a lot. It's simpler to just avoid most of them.
Jayton:
Yeah.
Christopher:
And again, it's more about the load. And then certain anti-nutrients have ... The way they work is based on charges, ionic charges. So they will bind based on it's literally like a magnet effect. So they'll bind to certain minerals like charged minerals or charged ionic compounds like electrolytes. So that's really what to pay attention to, to kind of look at your diet and be like, "All right, am I consuming like a large amount of certain anti-nutrients? And if so, what am I going to do about that? Because I'm probably going to be deficient in the things that it's going to bind to. Naturally, that makes sense."
Jayton:
And a lot of these things also inhibit proper digestion too. So even if they are bioavailable, it's not necessarily going to be optimal because you're not going to be able to digest and actually absorb a lot of these different nutrients.
Christopher:
Yeah. That's the other aspect of it. You could eat the perfect diet, but if your gut's all messed up, you got some work to do, still. To get the ability to digest things.
Jayton:
Definitely.
Christopher:
Think that's it for today, that hopefully you guys learned something about really the pandemic or epidemic proportion of what we're dealing with here with micronutrient deficiencies and really the foundational level of health importance of having a focus on micronutrients in your body. It's vital. It's like the base of the pyramid, holds everything up.
Jayton:
Definitely.
Christopher:
Yeah. So thanks for listening to this Thermo Podcast. Subscribe wherever you're listening to it or watching it and we will see you on the next show.
Jayton:
Have a good one.
