Anti-Establishment
Food Revolution
BY ROB SIDON
Born in 1970 to two medical doctors, David “Avocado” Wolfe is the author of nine books ranging from Amazing Grace to Superfoods: The Food and Medicine of the Future to Longevity NOW and has emerged as one of the trusted rock stars of the food revolution challenging the status quo of the food and pharmaceutical industries. An unstoppable world forager, he has been dubbed the Indiana Jones of the superfoods and longevity universes. He federates millions of dedicated followers via social media and through having hosted over 2,575 live events, including as the lead educator at the annual Longevity Conference put on by the Institute of Integrative Nutrition.
An articulate and ardent seeker, David was raised in the Baha’i religion but found being an Essene and directly experiencing the mystic shaman traditions more simpatico. Despite being born into a world of hospitals, medical tradeshows, and house calls, David opted not to follow in his parents’ footsteps but instead earned degrees in political science and mechanical and environmental engineering (UC Santa Barbara), law (University of San Diego), and nutrition (University of Integrated Sciences). Given his frenetic travel schedule, we were grateful to be able to speak with David on the phone, the same day he declined several interview requests from prestigious media outlets such as Forbes.
Common Ground: You’re popular as the young antiestablishment health food authority, but for those who don’t know about you, how would you describe yourself?
David Wolfe: One claim to fame is that I have not been in one place for more than four weeks in over 20 years. I am a nutritionist-educator. My passion is cracking the secrets of the universe and nutrition. I was basically born on an airplane and am always on the move, on the hunt for superfoods and solutions. Adventuring and foraging is part of my makeup. And I haven’t been sick in over 20 years.
I associate you as part of the “food revolution,” loosely dubbed. What is this food revolution, and is it being won?
The food revolution is the transformation of our consciousness around food to understand—or re-understand—that food quality matters. And we are definitely winning that war. People are waking up to the fact that food matters. Food can influence your well-being, your state of consciousness, your attitude. By eating the best food ever, you can transform your life and achieve clearer states of consciousness and get to a state of peak performance with more effective results in work and in life. It has been a war, not on our side, but on their side. They have done everything to brainwash us into thinking that GMO junk that has been sprayed with 30 chemicals is good for you. People realize they want something different. It’s an interesting war, but we are really winning.
Lysenkoism—that’s a term that you’re known for exposing. What is Lysenkoism?
Lysenkoism is the distortion of the scientific process in order to arrive at a predetermined conclusion based on a bias created by economic or political interests. It’s when you run an experiment, but if you disagree with the results then you change your theory around. It’s not real science or the scientific method. Lysenkoism is what we’re being sold as science. That is what Monsanto does, and government bureaucrats at the FDA do, what pharmaceutical companies are pushing through. People take a couple studies with agreeable results and say, “Okay, this is good; we will stamp this.”
You have a giant following on social media. I was amazed to see on Facebook that you have over four million followers. You post something, and within minutes there are thousands of “likes.” Care to brag?
It’s grown as an authentic, organic following. I have always done all my own social media from the beginning of social media. I thought, “One day this is going to work out and people will appreciate this—or maybe they won’t, but I don’t care. I just want to do this.” Last December it started catching fire. In my posts, I try to remind people of what might help, to give a quick uplift, to raise consciousness, or to remind people what the challenges are, of what Monsanto is up to, or the latest and greatest from the pharmaceutical giants. It is a passion and a joy.
Is your following from millennials? What’s the common denominator of your admirers?
In the old days it was mostly women in the 35 to 60 demographic, but today it’s more from women in the 25 to 34 demographic, which is an incredible turn of events. The common denominator? I think I speak up on issues they care about. I will lay it down. You don’t want Big Pharma or Monsanto hunting you down? Screw Big Pharma and Monsanto. Look what they have done to our earth. The whistle needs to be blown, and I don’t hold back, and people appreciate that. It comes down to the same thing you see with banks and other giant organizations like governments—power and control. I would rather see the power and control go back to the people, and food is one of those mechanisms.
I reached out to one of your associates yesterday, who warned me that you were really busy and might not have time to talk to me. She said you had just turned down Forbes and the Guardian (UK) and some other prestigious outlet. But apparently, while she and I were on the phone, she texted you, and you immediately responded. In the text you apparently said, “Yes, Common Ground is cool.” Thanks, that felt good.
You get it. You know where I’m coming from. So cool. Glad you appreciate that.
You don’t wear a lab coat like Dr. Oz on TV, but both your parents are doctors, and you have a lot of advanced education. What kinds of degrees?
Both my parents are medical doctors, and going back five generations my ancestors were into medicine—maybe a different herbal, grow-your-own-food kind of thing, but I am very familiar with science and other academic disciplines. I have a law degree from the University of San Diego, as well as political science and mechanical and environmental engineering degrees from the University of California Santa Barbara. I have a master’s in nutrition from the University of Integrated Sciences in Southern California.
How did you land on this path after earning engineering and law degrees?
The whole nutrition and adventuring thing was a complete hobby, as my goal was to get into patent law. I was one persona by day and another by night. At some point along the way—I think it was the summer before I started law school—it hit me that I am supposed to be doing the nutrition thing, although I didn’t know how to get there, so I thought, “Let me do this law school program while I figure out how to do nutrition as a career.” By the time I graduated law school, I was already doing what I do—traveling, doing the adventuring, writing the books. I got my best grades that last semester at law school but then literally closed that envelope and never looked back. I went full-time into nutrition. Interestingly, I paid off all my student loans before anyone else in my class. I believe the reason is because I was doing what I love.
You’re only 45, so what’s the timeframe when all this got started? When did you graduate law school?
This pattern of life kicked off in 1996; I graduated law school in 1998.
Have you ever considered becoming an MD? Has not being an MD been a handicap?
I grew up in hospitals and going on house calls with my dad and to medical pharmaceutical tradeshows since I was zero. I have many friends who are MDs and many times discussed whether I should get a medical degree. The conclusion from all of them is that there is no reason for it and to not waste my time, so I am settled there. I do have a master’s in nutrition; otherwise, I’ve been through their system enough with all those other degrees. And it really is their system. It doesn’t teach you how to think, it teaches you what to think. I would rather spend the rest of my life doing things in alignment with what I enjoy. I went through it and did what they told me and did it well, but it wasn’t an enjoyable process.
Can you share about how you grew up?
The thing that is unique about my childhood is that I was born traveling the world; it’s just in my blood. My mom, who is Baha’i by religion, is from Tehran originally. She came to America when she was 16. My father is from New York City. We used to go back and forth until the Shah was overthrown, and we had to flee Iran. After the overthrow, being Baha’i we lost everything there. Most of my family came to America, and I used to stay with relatives in Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, Toronto, New York, and San Diego. So the world of traveling and adventuring is part of my makeup.
You travel the world on the hunt for superfoods?
That is right.
The conventional family, raising kids?
That is not my path.
The Baha’i is an intriguing faith, of which I am a bit familiar since I made special visits to the big temples near Chicago and Delhi, but it’s not a broadly known religion.
The Baha’i faith originated with the prophet Bahaullah, who was Persian and preached of unifying religion and everybody getting along together and not fighting each other. It’s kind of a Unitarian religion in the Judeo-ChristianIslam approach, less related to Hinduism or Buddhism. We grew up with that as the family religion. My spiritual path is shamanism, yet if somebody were to pin me down to ask what my religion is, I’d say I’m an Essene. I’m a bishop in the Essene church, which I feel most in alignment with because they were plant people who lived in community close to the earth near the Dead Sea 2,000 years ago. They took care of their bodies, fasted.
The shamanic is more your spiritual path?
Yes, that is what switches it on for me. I’m into Amazonian shamanism. I love the history of American shamanism—North, Central, and South American in particular. I have a deep love for that subject matter and for the people who still live that way. Someone asked Terrence McKenna, who is one of my role models, “What do you think is the best way to figure all this stuff out?” He said, “Get the plants and start growing them. Figure it out.” I took that advice. Getting plants and growing them has been a big part of my life. As far as nutrition goes, I don’t feel it is ethical or in integrity to talk about any food or herb or plant unless I have grown it. That is my personal morality as a nutritionist because there are things you learn from growing plants and foods that you can’t learn from books. If I’m going to talk about something, I’ve either wild crafted it, grown it, tried to grow it and failed—that has happened too—or had friends who grew it, and I helped them. The shamanic part my meditation is gardening, growing cacao, vanilla, Surinam cherries, and pau d’arco and that kind of stuff.
It brings you closer to God?
Yes. It connects me with Source. Much of the stuff that goes on in people’s minds is but phantom, not real. We get worked up and want to go to war with an ex-wife or with a neighbor or whatever. I find that if you are upset, if you are angry, there’s an important spiritual message and solace in gardening. Take a few deep breaths and grow some tomato plants. Historically, this is what has kept humanity in check. One of the biggest challenges of the modern era is this loss of connection with farming, with the earth itself. We focus on the stars, the sun, the moon, or whatever. Let’s get back to earth.
You remind me of one of my favorite literary messages from Voltaire in Candide. It’s about a hapless Utopian who after being worn down by war, deceit, heartache, and philosophical contradictions, concludes his life search by saying, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” which simply means “we must cultivate our garden.”
That’s great. I don’t remember that from Candide. I will make a meme out of that one. Thank you for that.
How did “Avocado” get to be your nickname?
There’s three parts to that. One is that I’ve been growing avocados since 1977. I have 40 trees currently; it’s a passion. Also, with my cousin and friend, when we first started doing this in the early days, we envisioned being like in a rock band, like Kiss, except in the health field. We needed superhero names. My best friend’s name is “Captain Wheatgrass.” My cousin’s is “Raw Courage Vegetable Man.” We couldn’t come up with something for me until my cousin was brainstorming and showed up with a list of names, one of which was “Fats Avocado.” I said, “That’s it—that’s the name!” I’ve been associated with it ever since. The third reason goes back to the old days, when we used to go into abandoned avocado orchards in San Diego County and come out with Army bags full of avocados. We couldn’t pay the bills, but that would be our food for the next two or three weeks. That’s how we did it.
You mentioned the shamans and Terrance McKenna as role models. Any others?
Many. In the early days, Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Les Brown, Marc Victor Hansen, Wayne Dyer. As far as permaculture goes, I am strongly influenced by my friend Tanya Leilani, who was Bill Mollison’s right-hand woman for 10 years. We work a lot together. My current business partner and his family are big influences on me. They are Buddhists who are religious about meditating every single day and having that lifestyle with their baby. In the area of GMOs I am educated by Jeffrey Smith, who with his book and films Genetic Roulette is extremely skilled at detailing the problems and where it is going and what the bottom line is for these companies.
The folks at Monsanto don’t like Jeffrey Smith because he is foiling their master plan. Have you ever had any incidents with those folks? It gets pushy with them sometimes, no?
They already infiltrated one of my old companies years ago. I battled them in court for years. I will fight them, and they know that so they won’t touch me. I have such a loud voice that they leave me alone because they know that if they engage me it will backfire. The best thing for them to do is to ignore me or send trolls or shills at me. By the way, the difference between a troll and a shill is that a shill is paid to troll you. We have evidence that this is going on in social media, of Monsanto paying people to come after people like me and Vani Hari the “Food Babe” and others in order to create dissent among the ranks and trouble in our world, so that maybe people will say, “Oh, maybe GMOs are okay.”
I’ve seen it on the web where they tagged you as a pseudoscientist but on the same site they sell T-shirts saying, “GMOs are safe.”
I know what you’re talking about. What these big boys at Monsanto and Big Pharma do is saddle you with a label. If they want to play that game, they will get that game. I’m saddling them with their Lysenkoism. They do not do science; it’s fraud, but that is what they do. That is how they became so big and powerful. Fortunately, with social media we have the opportunity to break up those monopolies and dilute their power.
Vaccines are a hot button for you.
I think vaccines are extremely dangerous, so my main work is to alert people so they aren’t ignorant of the dangers when they vaccinate their children. I compiled a massive document on this and put it online for free where you can search vaccines and vaccine safety and find every hyperlink you could ever want, including about herd immunity. Herd immunity is a red herring they throw out—that we need 90% of the population to be vaccinated in order to essentially wipe out a particular disease. There’s no evidence in any scientific journal of place bo-controlled double-blind studies that show vaccines cause or create herd immunity. I can go on about this.
First off, there is no such thing as a vaccine that lasts over 10 years. So how come we aren’t getting polio right now? It’s been at least 40 years since I was vaccinated against polio. How come I’m not getting measles and mumps and rubella? I would like anybody in the vaccine industry to explain that to me.
Another fact is that there are “hot batches” of vaccines that are known to be contaminated, that never get talked about in the media. It happens all the time where kids are injected with a bad batch of vaccines and suddenly develop blisters and sores and rashes and all kinds of problems. It happened just yesterday where I am staying with this family that has a 2½-year-old who plays with this other kid who was injected in his arm with an MMR vaccine and a few others on the schedule. His arm blistered up and became rashy days later. The vaccine issue is a symptom of a very big problem, which is our complete misunderstanding of nutrition and herbalism and herbal medicine.
There are more people who get polio from the vaccine than get polio from without the vaccine at this stage. It makes you wonder what the best approach is. Is there a better system Big Pharma doesn’t want anything to do with? For example, ozone kills every virus on contact. Ozone therapies can systematically destroy infectious diseases and be replicated and available to kids for pennies on the dollar versus the vaccine store, where you have all these weird animal products such as desiccated monkey and kidney cells and all this bizarre aluminum Polysorbate 20 and Polysorbate 80. There is mercury in some vaccines—not all, but still in some. It is a slippery slope. My feeling is that the whole vaccine agenda is about deception and about crippling the immune and nervous systems of children so they never develop into very functional, highly capable individual adults. I think that is what is really behind this.
You much catch a lot of shit for that one.
Oh, man. I do catch a lot of shit but not from the people whose children have been injured by vaccines. At this point I know hundreds of people personally, and they love me. They absolutely love me. But I see what has happened to their lives. They didn’t know. All of a sudden their kid has a vaccine injury and becomes a nervous wreck or autistic when they never had problems before the vaccine. The CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has done everything to disconnect vaccines from autism. It took them seven or eight years to arrive at the result they wanted. Again, Lysenkoism. The main scientists involved at the CDC left. They said it was bullshit, that they basically faked the information in order to get rid of the problem. In their own words they said, “We just want this to go away.” I mean, what kind of CDC says, “We just want this problem to go away?” The corruption is so deep on this one, it bothers me.
What’s a better solution?
I’d prefer better technology. For example, let’s say somebody got Ebola or Zika virus. Is the best thing to vaccinate them? No, the best thing is to give them ozone. Direct ozone gas into the blood or autohemolytic ozone, which is where you take a small amount of blood, like a half pint, and then ozonate it and then put it back into the body. Those are extremely efficacious, extremely safe, and very low cost methods. This is what I advocate, but I must be ahead of my time because when you start talking about this stuff to people, they are still trying to figure out if GMO foods are any good or not. I am privy to a lot of information in the health field. I have done ozone myself a hundred times and have seen what it can do for people with lung cancer, herpes, chronic degenerative conditions. In alignment with good nutrition, in alignment with stem cells, with herbalism and a healthy lifestyle, sunshine, fresh air, we can heal ourselves but not the way they are telling us. Unfortunately, if you speak the truth in our world, you are usually targeted because the people running these big enterprises don’t want to hear about it. They’ve got bills to pay and their bottom lines to feed.
You’ve been the poster boy for the raw food movement. Is that what you advocate?
Not really. I am past that stage at this point. I think raw food is great, and raw food transformed my life. I’m glad for the education that I put out there that could help others the way it helped me. I started in the raw food field and then got into superfoods and superherbs, and then shamanic studies.
Do you realize how confusing it is for people trying to nail down a trustworthy diet? It’s more difficult than choosing a religion. There are so many different health proponents, and sometimes they speak like zealots, putting other ideologies down. What do you say to my readers, many of whom are frustrated and confused?
Confusion is a great place because it means you are about to learn something. I like confusion, and when I find myself there, I remember, “Oh, this is good.” So I start there. One thing I can say is that we have to get back to what is natural and normal. For example, when you grow your own food, you want to eat it as is. You don’t want to cook the tomatoes you just grew. Raw food has that angle that I like. I also like the paleo-diet concept for the same reason. It goes back to simple traditional wisdom and the way our ancestors were eating and what they could access. They couldn’t have 16 tablespoons of sugar a day. Then there’s the problem of mixing everything together. This idea of mixing sweet potatoes with fish and bread and cheese and salad and then mixing that with Coca-Cola, or whatever. Just too many things; better to keep it simple. At this stage I am a massive proponent of food quality. Whether baked or fried or eaten raw, or part of a Mediterranean diet or paleo diet, food quality matters. The love and energy that is put into food and the soil counts. That’s the biggest thing I have learned and my biggest message today.
The question of eating raw versus cooked is where a lot of people get stuck. What do you say to detractors, many from ancient traditions such as Ayurveda and macrobiotics, who argue that food is best absorbed when cooked?
It depends on the state of your digestion. If somebody has poor digestion and can’t process fiber, plus they have had a lot of infections like dysbiosis—meaning they have candida or other fungal infections, then they should be careful with raw food and proceed with caution, especially with all the bacteria. The best way to deal with raw food is to blend it, to break down that fiber into small particles so it doesn’t overwhelm your digestive system. The traditional Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine approaches—I take them with a grain of salt because they cook everything. Since I grew that food, I want to eat it raw. There’s an energy to raw food that’s important to experience. It’s not a stimulatory energy, or a protein energy, or carbohydrate energy, it is something else. Most people get that experience when they start drinking green juices. When it becomes dogmatic and judgmental, then we’re getting into trouble. We have to remain open to other possibilities and experiment.
I have seen it with people experiencing what I call diet stress. They walk into a food store or restaurant and start stressing about what they can or can’t eat. It’s as though the stress outweighs the diet benefits.
[Laughs] You are right on, and I have seen so much of that too.
For those of us who are lazy, it’s frustrating because first we had to avoid candy and junk food and then processed food and then conventionally farmed food. Then it had to be non-GMO. But nonGMO is still not enough because of the pesticides; it needs to be organic. Now I learn that just organic is not enough. I am learning that optimally, to capture the prana, the essential energy of food, it should be freshly harvested and eaten quickly, otherwise the food energy disappears. So the farmers market version of organic is best. The ante gets raised higher and higher.
Good point. One of the things I love about the food quality thing is that it keeps going up and up. In the permaculture world I live in, we are deep into composting with innovative companion planting and nurse plants. We are deep into chopping and dropping and using the existing biomass. There is no end to food quality. It’s a tremendous experience to feed people that kind of food that you’ve grown when you know what’s gone into it.
Wow. There’s no cap on this. Where is this all going? Are we all going to live to be 100 or 1,000 years old? You have a big focus on longevity, right?
Can we live to be 100 years old or 1,000 years old? Yes. I do like what the comedian George Burns said: “If I’d known I’d lived to be 100 I would’ve taken better care of myself.” That really stuck with me. But yes, there has to be a way. Nutrition, detoxification, and stem cells are my three areas of focus for longevity. The stem cell area is a game changer. Let me tell you a story about my mom, who was arthritic and in a wheelchair. I landed on a treatment in Mexico—you can’t do this stuff in this country—where they capture stem cells from your bone marrow from your hip. Twenty percent they freeze for future use and analysis, and the 80% left over is put back into your bloodstream. It’s an intense treatment, putting a syringe into your hip and extracting the bone marrow juice, but within four hours of the treatment, we were out to dinner with Hulk Hogan and his wife, who are friends of the family, and my mom was literally climbing up Hulk Hogan’s back. No kidding. In four hours. It was the most incredible transformation from crippling arthritis, in one treatment.
It’s kind of fun to picture your mom climbing Hulk Hogan’s back, but wow, how does this work?
Your bone marrow contains all the progenitors—basically, the precursor cells that will become you. It will become your nervous system, your stem cells, and your immune system. As we age, there is a defect in the way those cells migrate from your bone marrow into your body. It’s probably caused by the calcification of your bones that become less pliable and more brittle and less porous. So the bone marrow juice doesn’t get into the blood like it did when you were 16 years old, but you can bypass that scientifically and pull it out of the bone marrow and put it right into the blood. To me, that is the most profound medical breakthrough ever, and remember I grew up around hospitals since I was born.
What do you say to people who want to be healthy but struggle to afford it? Is optimal health only a privilege of the privileged?
We always have the option of growing our own food. Even if you live in an apartment you can sprout. There was a great book written back in the ’70s about how to live on 10 cents a day. It was about sprouting and how to sprout your own food. Seeds are inexpensive. Sprout sun-flower seeds, for example. One of my favorites is to eat the little green plants that grow out of them. Anytime you can grow food yourself, you are saving money and reconnecting to nature. Some people don’t have a green thumb for plants but have an incredible ability to grow bacteria or have a talent for fermenting things like sauerkraut, kimchee, and yogurt. You can’t completely outsource food. At some level, in order to deal with quality issues, you have to take it on, growing your own, especially if on a budget.
What would you recommend people not compromise on?
I would say you have to go organic. There’s just too many chemicals in the other food. Back when I had no money and living on almost nothing, I had too much month at the end of the money. I said, “Hey, you guys in the produce section, are there any cabbages or lettuces you are throwing out? Throw them in a black trash bag, and I will swing by the health food store at 7 p.m.” I would go back to my house with a friend, who used to be a heroin addict and then got into being healthy, and we would make vegetable juice for free. There’s a lot of organic food being thrown out. Jump in the middle of it, get some. Another big one for me is making sure you get a measured hour in nature every day. If you live in a city, get to the park. If you live near the beach, get to the beach or the forest or the garden. It’s an important part of staying balanced and healthy in our world.
You’re open to a lot of different diets for different people, but you are a vegetarian, right?
I am a vegetarian, yes.
Why?
My position is that vegetarianism is our own spiritual choice. I’m glad that vegetarians came before me and created the opportunity to make that choice. So I will make the choice for others who are interested in vegetarianism. I don’t think it is right for everybody.
What are the pros and cons of eating meat, in your view?
Meat is a very powerful source of protein and energy, an explosive energy, which you might need if you are an athlete or a weekend warrior, or that kind of personality. As a general rule almost every professional athlete is meat eater; it’s probably for a reason. But meat is death. The animal had to be killed for its meat, and that is the downside to me. I don’t want to be involved in that. I don’t need to kill to live. I have been a vegetarian over 25 years and very happy. So what if I don’t have enough explosive power for sports? There are vegans and vegetarians who do. Vegetarianism is part of my spiritual belief and where I want to go with my life.
You’ve not been sick in 20 years; that’s a great track record.
I don’t get sick; I don’t want to. Sickness is a symptom of me not taking care of myself—that I am not up on my protocols. I have done so many events over the years that I don’t have time to be sick. I had to be on a stage or doing something, or helping somebody open a restaurant. I want people to know that it is possible to not be sick through healthy lifestyle and by nourishing your immune system through herbalism.
You’re big on hunting for spring water. What is the distinction between filtered and spring water?
If you don’t use filters you are going to become the filter. If you have tap water coming into your house, you should have some filtration mechanism because the pipes are old and the systems do not filter out the many contaminants. You don’t want to bathe in those chemicals. Of course I love the way the earth filters water for me. What are these little water filter cartridges anyway? Charcoal, calcium, pebbles, sand—it’s just earth. There is definitely a noble energy or a spirit that comes from a spring. In places like Western North Carolina and the North Georgia mountains where there are incredibly ancient ecosystems, the water is really something special.
What do you say about fluoride?
There was a recent article that one of the major scientific bodies declared fluoride a neurotoxin, which is really a big breakthrough. It’s fantastic. I believe that we get fluoridated water because it keeps the people docile. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not, but I have found that in Washington, DC, the chlorine and the fluoride in the water is intensely high.
Isn’t there a theory that fluoride muddies the effect of important master glands?
That is one of the theories, that it affects the hypothalamus in the brain and that it interferes with the pituitary, eventually leading to the calcification of the pineal gland. Somewhere early on, I got turned onto the fact that the Nazis were using fluoride in concentration camps. That says something. I am against it. It’s a battle we have to keep fighting because we have just got to get fluoride out of the water supply.
What are xenoestrogens? What should my readers know about them?
Great question. Xenoestrogens are fake estrogens, and there is an enormous amount of them in our environment, in our food. They are used as fillers in plastics and petroleum byproducts like BPA and have entered into our systems, creating imbalances between the anabolic [which build up] and catabolic [which break down] hormones. From longevity research we know hormones play a strong role in how long we live. As we exit the child-rearing years, nature is selecting us out, saying, “Okay, you are done here. We need to get to the next generation.” That is when our anabolic ormones fall off. In men it will be testosterone and DHEA and vitamin D3. In women it’s mainly progesterone. The main reason women outlive men is because progesterone is more stable; testosterone is more volatile. As we age, men become more like women, and women become more like men, hormonally. We have less protection from the anabolic hormones, and these estrogens play the role of catabolic hormones—aging us, breaking us down, causing weight gain. It happens naturally, but the environmental toxins are increasing this imbalance.
You do everything you can to remain anabolic. I avoid plastic water containers. It’s a big subject, and I can go on about this, but in order to maintain youthfulness, at some point one will need to make a decision whether or not to use a bio-identical hormone. One molecule of progesterone will cancel out, or agonize, 300 molecules of xenoestrogen. My recommendation is for men to use progesterone cream five days a month once they reach their 70s or 80s and for women to use it 14 to 15 days a month in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Progesterone is a woman’s hormone, but men can use a little bit too because by canceling those 300 xenoestrogens, it basically converts to testosterone.
What do you recommend for men combating andropause, which is like male menopause?
This is fascinating because the media is telling 50-plus men they just don’t have the testosterone as before, and it’s true that men can feel that. But according to the research, it isn’t that testosterone is low, it’s more that the estrogens, including these dangerous xenoestrogens like 16 alpha-hydroxyestrone and estradiol and stress hormones like cortisol are too high. I differ from most nutritionists and recommend a strategy to get the estrogens down before ecommending raising anabolic hormones. If cruciferous vegetables agree with you, it’s a good strategy to go after those toxic estrogens with 3 to 5 servings a week. This can have strong effects hormonally and make you feel like you do have testosterone all of the sudden. It’s wise to get capillary testing, where they prick the end of your finger to see how many hormones are making it into the blood of your capillaries and then go from there. A lot of people are guessing and taking HGH [human growth hormone] or testosterone, cycling on and off steroids. That is a slippery slope and a dangerous game.
Is there an across-the-board recommen dation for general health that you can recommend to most people?
In terms of the tonic herbs and superherbs, I’m a huge advocate of medicinal mushrooms. They changed my life and my immune system—flipped me right around. The king is chaga, and reishi is the queen. I recommend B vitamins for people; they are a good stress buffer. I love vitamin C but recommend getting it from plants and berries and vegetables. I like vitamin D3 a lot, but I recommend getting that from lichen. I like the fish oils a lot and algae oils, which are good sources of DHA, EPA, and a lot of phospholipids. Flax, hemp, and chia are important.
What makes you happy? What pisses you off?
The vaccine thing pisses me off—the forcing everybody to be vaccinated. I really love in formation that upturns and breaks down my belief systems. I love investigating those mysteries and get a lot of energy from that. I love studying and researching and writing.
Any final words to share with our readership?
Relationships. One important thing we haven’t covered—maybe the most important thing for health—is based on the quality of our relation ships. Maybe somebody can prove me wrong on this, but I don’t believe in just food nutrition and water and fresh air, but I think the quality of our relationships is going to determine a lot about how healthy we are. There’s something about a loving and supportive home environment—not only between people but also with animals and pets. When you love your partner or your pet and they love you. When you love your kids and they love you—if you’re in that vibration, you are healthy.
Rob Sidon is publisher and editor in chief of Common Ground
.