This week, we are joined by Daniel Roytas from Humanely to discuss many fascinating topics! Daniel is not shy about pushing back on modern conclusions and provides fresh, logical takes on ever-seen observations. Daniel addresses what health means to him but also tackles the question: What is disease?
This leads us into a much deeper dive into topics such as the true causes of disease. Daniel provides a beautiful explanation as to why vitamin deficiencies do not have much evidence to back them up and may not be a cause of disease. We go over the specifics of how 'deficiencies' actually manifest as toxicities.
We cover specific examples such as Pellagra (16:30), Beriberi (20:30), Scurvy (28:50), etc.
We delve into the differences between minerals and vitamins and how vitamins may not actually exist in natural products. Vitamins may be much like viruses, in that they are laboratory artifacts.
We also talk about our soils and the problems in our modern agricultural practices. This leads us into discussing food processing and the optimal human diet.
This is a significant episode! I hope it provides insight and areas for further research for you all!
I hope you enjoy it!
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What is health? What does it mean to you? What does it feel like? What does it look like? I like to ask this question because it gives us a good foundation to work off of.
Daniel
It's an interesting question and I know that a lot of people have posed this over the years and certainly more so in recent times. I was having a discussion with a group of people today about this very topic. So, it's uncanny that you should bring this question up. I think health is a feeling. So, you may not at first glance or at face value really understand what that means. But when you go to your doctor and there's something not right? What do you usually say to your doctor, ‘I don't feel well, I feel like there's something wrong’. So, we describe Ill Health as a feeling, we can feel pain or discomfort, or there might be something psychologically we don't feel is right. We might have anxiety or depression. We might feel our heart beating in our chest, or our blood pressure going up, or we might feel itching, or something like this.
When you're feeling Sick. What is it that you want to achieve? You want those symptoms to be gone. Why do you want those symptoms to be gone? So that you feel good, both in your body, in your mind, spiritually, mentally, emotionally. So, it's a feeling that we're after. The feeling of well-being, the feeling of joy, the feeling of happiness. The feeling of not having any pain. We should be able to live relatively comfortably, and not experience pain in our day to-day life. So, it is the feeling that we're chasing, and this is why people take pain killer medications and certain medications, is to dull the pain. Because they don't want to feel it. This to me is the closest explanation I can come to as to you know what health is.
Because it doesn't matter what you look like in a blood test or go to your doctor, and they do a barrage of tests. How many times have you heard people going into their doctor. They feel fine. They are going in for a health check, doctor runs a bunch of tests, and comes back and goes ‘oh geez I'm really sorry Mr. Smith I've got some bad news for you’. You go ‘what are you talking about I feel fine’. ‘Oh no, no, no, these blood tests tell us otherwise’. So, then you change that person's state of mind from feeling well to ‘oh my god there's something wrong with me’. And then it all goes downhill from there.
So, if that person didn't go to their doctor and they never had the blood test done. Would there be a problem? Maybe if it went left unchecked something would develop but at that very point, they felt fine. So, when you have a disease that is what you're trying to achieve. So, one thing that we must take into account when we're trying to heal ourselves, is to feel the feeling of wellness. Even if you're not feeling great, you want to try and recreate that feeling of what would it feel like when I am healthy. You try and recreate that feeling inside you. And that then starts you on your journey back to good health. Because you can do all the right things, you can eat well, exercise, blah blah blah. But if you never truly believe that you can heal, and you don't ever manifest or recreate that feeling of what good health feels like, you'll never get there. So that's my take on it. It's a little bit different. But yeah, it's a good question. Thanks for asking.
Liev
Well, thanks for that beautiful answer and it is a different take I've never heard before. But you articulated it so very well. Your approach to how you explain it, just makes a lot of sense. Because you also see the other side of the coin, people feel unwell and then they go, and they get the blood tests and everything's fine. And maybe that's a positive affirmation they needed to feel well. And they're ‘oh you know what? I'm fine’. And then they start feeling well. So, then we start thinking of what role the mind plays in in Disease and well-being as well. And of course it's all connected for sure.
Daniel
Well, here's just another thing to consider, Live. Is that the counter or the opposite to Health is disease. So, when we ask the question what is disease? That's when things really start getting interesting. Because disease is actually, healing. It is the body in an active state of either trying to return back to balance or trying to maintain some semblance of homeostasis in a less than optimal situation. So, For example. Think of your body as a body of water and if you drop a stone into the water. What happens.
Liev
A ripple effect.
Daniel
You get the ripples. So, the ripples are the effect of dropping the stone into the water. Yeah, they are the effect. They are the symptoms of dropping the stone into that body of water. And what are those symptoms or what are the ripples there for? What are they trying to do.
Liev
Balance out.
Daniel
Yeah, because you create the disturbance first, and then the rock is gone. The rock's at the bottom of the of the pond, it's out of sight. So, the rock is the cause of the disease. It's there for a moment. It causes the imbalance, the dysfunction, and then it's gone. And then you get the effect after that which is the ripples in the water. And we see that, and we feel that, we experience that. And we misattribute symptoms, which are actually the body's healing response, as the disease itself.
So, something easy for people to understand is, heart disease. So, we get elevated blood pressure, we get inflammation, we get a rapid heartbeat, for example, maybe elevated cholesterol. Those things aren't the disease. They are all the body's mechanisms of protecting itself. So, the cholesterol, the body produces, to protect itself against the threat. Whatever it is that's causing damage to the cardiovascular system. Now the arteries aren't so elastic. They don't allow the blood to move through it as well. So, there's reduced perfusion of the blood to the peripheral tissue. So now the heart must work harder to achieve that. So, what happens when you have impaired flow, the blood pressure goes up. Yeah, and then we see all these inflammatory markers and we say, ‘oh the inflammation is a problem’.
The inflammation is the body’s healing response. The inflammation is the so-called immune system coming along to repair the damaged tissue. It is not the cause of disease. These are all the symptoms that the consequences of the rock that got dropped into the water, which might be you've been a pack a day smoker for 30 years, or you've had chronic stress, or you're eating a process and refined diet, or you've been poisoned, or whatever it might be. The underlying cause is the problem and then everything else from that point on that we experience as human beings, is the body's healing response, trying to get back to a state of homeostasis and balance.
Liev
Yeah, well put once again, that's great. So, I guess the question I want to ask is causes of disease.
Daniel
There's only 3. There's not thousands like we're told. So, what are the causes of disease? There are deficiency states, toxicity, and a trauma. So that trauma can be emotional, or it can be a physical trauma. So, with deficiency, I'm not talking about vitamin deficiencies here, because I don't think those things actually exist. Which is a big claim, but we'll hopefully get into discussing that. By deficiency I mean, a deficiency in clean water, a deficiency in physical activity, a deficiency in love, a deficiency in sunlight, a deficiency of connection to the Earth, a deficiency of all of these kinds of essential things that a human being needs to survive. So, if you don't have one of those things there's going to be a consequence and then the body will have to develop symptoms to try and maintain homeostasis.
We also have toxicity so we're just talking about literally poisoning here, or excess of something, so too much water, too much sun, I don't know if you can get too much love, but maybe you can. So, it's like the opposite to the things that I just mentioned about deficiency.
And then trauma so you fall off a ladder and break your leg while you're painting the house, or maybe your best friend tells you that you're ugly and they hate you when you're 10 years of age. And you carry that as an emotional disturbance for the rest of your life and you believe that you're ugly and a worthless person. Holding on to those emotions, manifests as a physical disease later on in life. And that's it. They are the three causes of disease. There are no others. Not the thousands and thousands that mainstream medicine tells us that there are.
Liev
Yeah, yeah, well I had the exact same answer in my introductory episodes. Literally to a T.
So now is a good time. Let's get into the to the vitamins. You made a bold claim there, back it up.
Daniel
Yeah, I guess people who've never heard me speak before or even heard of who I am. Just for a bit of background, I would like to think I have some kind of expertise in this area. Not that that really matters when it comes to looking at science because I think anyone wants to understand the scientific method, you can apply this to any field regardless of what your level of education is and it either adheres to the scientific method or it doesn't.
But in addition to that I spent over ten years lecturing at universities and colleges around Australia, much of that was as a senior lecturer. I developed curriculum and taught in student clinic and educated students and practitioners at a undergraduate level. I spent many years working at nutraceutical and pharmaceutical companies. I got close to 15 years of clinical practice. Authored or co-authored chapters in complementary medicine textbooks, which have been published by really well-known public publication companies and publishing houses.
So, I've done a lot in this field, and I was always under the impression that what I was teaching students and clinicians was that there are things called vitamin deficiencies that you get when you have an improper diet and that causes disease. And the best way to deal with that is to take supplement, a high dose vitamin in isolation, to address the deficiency. And that was basically how I practiced for most of my career until early 2020 when I realized that what was wrong. I don't actually think there's anything called vitamin deficiency disease. I actually think we've confused it and it's a toxicity disease.
Liev
Yeah, so how does it become a toxicity disease? What's the confusion there.
Daniel
Yeah, so why do we think there are these things called deficiency diseases. We'll use pellagra as an example. So, pellagra is a so-called deficiency of Vitamin B3 or Niacin. And supposedly people got it when they ate lots of corn, because corn is supposedly deficient in B3. And you end up with this disease where you get rashes, and you get neurological impairment, and cardiovascular problems, and it can lead to death if left untreated. Now what happened was that they found that when people had pellagra and they started taking them off a diet that mainly consisted of corn and they fed them other foods that disease went away and they, the scientists at the time, took some food and they added a bunch of chemicals to it and said ‘this food reversed pellagra’. Say something like nutritional yeast.
So they gave the yeast to people and the pellagra went away. And then they took the yeast and they added a bunch of chemicals to it, and they did a whole bunch of what I call witchcraft to this substance, and they ended up with a white crystalline powder that when they gave to people with pellagra, their symptoms went away. And the claim was that the white crystalline powder, that they had after they added in things like formaldehyde, and acetone, and Hydrochloric acid, and heavy metals, and petrochemicals, the addition to all of those things into the food. You end up with this white Powder. You give it to the person with pellagra, and symptoms go away. They equate that with, whatever that white crystalline powder is must be the same thing that was in the food. So, they said ‘well that's a deficiency disease’ or deficient in whatever this substance is that is the white powder.
So how is it being misconstrued as a toxicity disease. What I think is going on here is that when you have a whole food, and you ingest it, and it's not processed, it's not refined, it's in its whole fresh form, there's everything contained within that food for the body to metabolize it completely, so you can absorb it, metabolize it, utilize it, and excrete it entirely. There's no residual waste left over. Because the food is a complete food. It's a perfect food designed for human consumption. When we meddle with it, so by meddling with it, I mean we process, refine, adulterate it, store it improperly, keep it for too long. Or if you don't process it or cook it in the right way. We eat that food, it's no longer in its natural state. If you process it and refine it and you strip things out of it, now the things that are lacking for that food to be metabolized, a hundred percent completely, are gone. So, you may only get 85% complete metabolism of that food.
So now you've got 15% of this waste product in your body that's going ‘all right we're waiting for the other component that was in that whole food to come along so we can metabolize it and excrete it out’. So, if you're only having a small amount of that, it's fine. It won't build up into high levels, in your bloodstream, or into your tissue. But if you're eating a lot of that processed, refined food, it will build up and eventually the body's going to have to try and get rid of it somehow.
So, what happens in a lot of these nutritional deficiency diseases is we see vomiting, diarrhea, and skin diseases like skin rashes and dermatitis and this kind of thing. Which are all symptoms of poisoning. When you get poisoned, your body produces vomiting or diarrhea. Or you have things coming out through your skin to eliminate said toxin. So, I think that's possibly what's happening and, this is not just pure speculation like there is data and research in the literature where Japanese research actually proved that Beri Beri which is a vitamin B1 deficiency is a toxicity disease. If you're happy we can go down that route, or if there's something else you wanted to discuss I'll hand it back to you.
Liev
Yeah, no I mean it might be helpful to go into another example. So why don't you continue, that was great.
Daniel
Yeah, Beri Beri is supposedly a deficiency in thiamine, B1. And B1 is meant to be found in the bran layer of rice. Now when you take whole rice and you process it, and refine it, and you strip away the outer layer, you're left with the grain, the white endosperm bit, and you eat that. What they found, scientists back in the early nineteen hundreds, was that when people subsist on a diet mainly of white rice, they get Beri Beri. And at the time the guy who found the cure for Beri Beri, who's like ‘oh if you eat whole brown rice, you don't get it and it reverses the disease’. Eichmann was his name, a Danish physician, he actually believed that Beri Beri was a toxicity disease as did many of the people who discovered the cures to these diseases. They all thought they were toxicity diseases.
But anyway, the scientists like Casimir Funk, for example, who supposedly isolated B1 from rice. He said it was a deficiency disease, because when he got rice bran and adulterated it added all these chemicals into it, and gave it to people, and their symptoms went away. So, he said well this is the thing they're lacking therefore, it's a deficiency of this particular substance that's not present in white rice. The Japanese in the 20s, 30s and 40s actually believed that Beri Beri was a toxicity disease. And obviously it's pretty relevant for the Japanese to be looking into Beri Beri because a lot of people in that area were affected with this disease, in World War 1 and 2. Just by very nature of it being difficult to get access to a lot of food, because supply chains and things were disrupted during those times. So, we have a population eating lots of white rice.
The Japanese found that infants who were drinking mother's milk, started getting Beri Beri. So they said ‘is this because there's something deficient in the milk that the child's not getting?’ or ‘is there something toxic in the milk that's causing Beri Beri in the infants?’
They were pretty clever, and they devised some controlled experiments, where they took infants and then fed them other foods also devoid of Vitamin B1. So, they took infants who were breastfeeding, took them off the mother's milk, and then fed them a diet solely of sweetened condensed milk, which supposedly has no vitamin B1 in it. Guess what happened to the Beri Beri? It went away, disappeared very quickly. Which they concluded was due to the avoidance or reduction of the toxic substance that was present in the mother's milk. So, when you avoid the poison and now you start to eat a different food of course the symptoms are going to go away now.
That is impossible if the current accepted paradigm of it being a deficient deficiency Disease is true because there is no way that you can reverse a deficiency disease with another deficient diet. And this wasn't the only example, there are many examples published in literature where they've done human controlled experiments, people with Beri Beri, Pellagra, Scurvy, etc. Many dozens of these experiments actually. And they fed people on deficient diets in that particular vitamin, and their pellagra just mysteriously reversed in quite a high percentage of cases sometimes up to 50% of people, diseases went away. Again, an impossibility if it was a nutritional deficiency disease.
So possibly what's happened there is they've eaten the particular food. The incomplete metabolism of that food has resulted in a buildup of a toxic metabolite or substance in their but body, then they go and eat another completely different food, which is also supposedly deficient in B1. But now that food, this starting from scratch. That incomplete metabolism of that food is going to start from 0% and it's going to increase over time. Whereas the toxic substance from the other food they were ingesting, which they're now not. Well that slowly gets metabolized out of the body. So, the symptoms go away.
Now obviously, if you were to stay on that diet for a prolonged period of time, that new food that you're eating is deficient, will then recreate the symptoms some point later in time. These are inconsistencies with the model, that cannot be explained by it being a deficiency disease. It is very different to the nutritional science that I was taught at university and what's in the textbooks. So, I hope I've explained that clearly, because it can be a little bit tricky to understand.
Liev
Yeah, definitely. That was clear. So, let's talk about minerals. What about mineral deficiencies? These to me seem more like base blocks. Maybe we could talk about trace minerals. Maybe the discussion is different for something like magnesium or things like this. So maybe you can elaborate on your thoughts there.
Daniel
Yeah, so that I think there's a big difference between vitamins and minerals. I'm not convinced vitamins exist because no one's ever demonstrated the existence of a vitamin in nature. So, what they do is they take some orange juice and the first thing they do is add lead acetate to it. That's the first step in isolating vitamin C. But if it's a scientific experiment, you have to control for each step along the process to show the methodologies that are being used do not confound the end result. So, scientists have to show that the addition of lead acetate does not change the outcome of the experiment and not once have they ever controlled for that ever. There is not one controlled experiment that's shown that. And this is just one step in the process. There's probably like 20 to 30 different things that they do to isolate, say vitamin c and you end up with this powder substance at the end you say that's what's in the orange because when you take it your symptoms go away.
I think what's actually going on there is that it's working like a drug and drugs suppress symptoms. And remember at the start of the conversation I said the symptoms are the answer to the problem. The symptoms are the healing response. The symptoms that we see in these so-called deficiency diseases aren't the issue. So, when you take the substance. You take the drug. You're getting symptom suppression. So, it's very hard to actually prove the existence of a vitamin. Because you must have the thing to start with, to do the analysis on it, to show that it actually exists. You must have the baseline to work with.
Minerals are different because I can go out into nature and I can find a rock of magnesium or some iron ore, or some calcium rock or whatever it might be. These things exist in nature. So, you can get your baseline and you can say right? This is calcium. This is magnesium. This is zinc. This is iron. You've got your baseline and now I can compare that to the amounts of these things in foods.
So, is it worthwhile then taking a supplement of something say like magnesium? I don't think it's worthwhile taking any supplement, regardless of whether it's mineral or vitamin. Whatever because as I mentioned before, food is completely metabolized when we take it as a whole substance. So, you need the whole food for it to work and interface properly with the body. As soon as you start meddling with it, things start to become a problem. So, magnesium for example, is found in the chlorophyll of plants. It's like the plant blood has got magnesium in it. It's like hemoglobin in human blood, it’s got iron as the central mineral in the hemoglobin chain. Plants have just got magnesium in in their chlorophyll molecule.
Now when you eat a plant. There's everything in it, for the body to absorb, metabolize and utilize everything in that plant to its full extent. So, for magnesium to do its job in the body, it needs all the other 999 chemicals in that plant for it to work. If you just give magnesium, the body is like ‘fantastic, we've got magnesium and now I don't have any of the other 999 things that I need that should have come with that food to use it’. It's like walking up to a builder and saying, ‘hey man, can you build me a house? here's a hammer, off you go’. People looking like you’re crazy. Same thing with what we're doing to the body when we handed a single mineral and go ‘okay here you go’.
I've sort of likened this is this is a thing called food synergy or it's also known as the food matrix. Which is a concept most easily explained by the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So, let's say the food has three parts to it. Most foods have got hundreds if not thousands of so-called chemicals in them. Let's say this one's got three. You can take the food, we can do the analysis, we find three things in it. We add them all together, one plus one plus one equals three. But in nature it equals four, or five, or six, or seven because there is a complex interrelationship that's going on with all those chemicals working synergistically together. They're in the right ratios, at the right concentrations, in the presence of the right enzymes, and cofactors, and everything else for that food to work perfectly in the body.
If you take one out, it's not going to work. It's like a fine watch. You open up the back of a fine watch and you're going to find dozens of these cogs in the back of the watch. So, a pharmacologist would come along and say ‘which cog's working there? Which is the one cog that works? I want to know the 1 substance in that food that's having the effect. Oh, it's the vitamin c, it's the magnesium’. That's so reductionistic. It's none of them. It's all of them, right? Similarly, you can't take 1 cog out of the watch, and go and put it into another watch that has no cogs and expect that watch to work. So, this is a way to understand the beginning of food matrix and food synergy. I think this probably answers any mineral, you could throw Zinc at me, or magnesium at me, or calcium at me, or whatever, I'd answer it the same way. You need the whole food.
Liev
Yeah, definitely. To challenge a little bit, to play devils advocate here. I've looked at the state of food, and the state of agriculture quite a bit, and I think there's a case to say that our soils are deficient. You might have a different take on this, but it certainly seems like with the monocultures, that the food may be deficient since the soils deficient. Now you may be able to work that through a little different. But also, with the hybridization of plants, we've changed the state of plants.
I wonder, what are your thoughts on that, because in my mind I think there's no doubt that a carrot a thousand years ago is definitely different than a carrot now. Is this something that's problematic in your mind? or has the food just caught up? or does it depend on how it's grown? like maybe if the carrot was grown in the deficient environment, it creates the imbalance within the food already. So, the plant as a being itself, is a little bit toxic and then moving through us as well.
Daniel
Yeah, so it's a good question. Some people say they want to take whole food supplements because the soils deficient. So, what you're just going to take 50 deficient carrots and then powder them down and now you've got a powder of 50 deficient carrots. It still doesn't address the problem which is, you're right the soil is being destroyed. But we can deal with this problem. We can't deal with it as long as these things called vitamin pills stand in the way. Because it's a red herring. This is a sleight of hand trick, where they say that ‘the food is deficient, so there’s a way that we can address this, we've got the answer’. And the answer is these shiny little pills that we can give you to address the deficiency.
But if it's a toxicity disease then that argument doesn't hold weight anymore. The essential problem is, the cause of the problem is, that we're using pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. We're not planting crops the way we used to. We're doing monocrop farming. We're not rotating Crops. We're not planting food plants with other companion plants. Were just not doing things the way we used to do it. We're not putting animals in on the land and getting them to fertilize it. So by very virtue of doing those things, plants start to get sick. And they put signals out to pests and whatever and the pest comes to break them down to return them to the soil.
The pests aren't the issue. They tell us there is an issue. And if they are the issue then you use the pesticides to fix the problem. But if you do things the right way, you don't need pesticides and herbicides, it’s almost nonsense. So those things deplete the soil. Those things are poisonous, and they leach into the food that you eat. And then naturally you're going to need more of the good stuff in food to get rid of the poisonous stuff that you're eating. And I think people have accepted the way that modern agriculture has gone. Because they're under the impression that it's not so bad. It's just that my foods don’t have quite enough of what it should have in it whereas if they knew that, actually we're messing with the food and it's having a much different effect in my body and it's causing poisoning or toxicity. People wouldn't stand for that as much. It's not as easy to sell right? You're being poisoned rather than you're just deficient.
So, this is it. It's kind of like supplements are like, if you move to Hawaii and you built your house on a lava flow. And this guy comes to you, and he says ‘hey you know what? your house is probably going to catch fire at some point. So, I've got some really amazing buckets. They're the best Buckets. And they can hold an extra 2 litres than the stuff you get down the road’. Like that's what we're doing with supplements. There's a problem and the problem is where we're effing with Mother Nature and she's going to fight back and bite back hard and we're just turning a blind eye and going ‘ah, it's all right and fine. We just got the supplement here, just take that, it addresses the deficiency’. We're not looking at the cause of the problem we're not saying ‘hey maybe we shouldn't build our house on the lava flow. Maybe we should move the house completely. We don't even need the buckets’.
So, it's the same thing if we look at the true cause of the problem and we go right. We don't need Pesticides. We don't need Herbicides. We do not need fungicides. We don't need Antibiotics. We don't need any of this crap. Yeah, when the soil is healthy, when things grow where they should be grown, when we harness Mother Nature and work with her rather than against her. All these problems sort themselves out. When we put animals on the land, the animals take the plants and they put it through their digestive system, and they put out fertilizer. They wee and poo and they put the fertilizer back in the plants get healthy. They don't need these other things.
We have certain trees growing that send roots really far down into the soil and they start pulling up nutrients from deep down near the bedrock. So, we get this flow of minerals and things from the rock upwards into the upper layers of the soil. The soil holds water better. It doesn't become dehydrated as easily. So, you don't have to come along and now water the soil and start causing erosion and you get underground unnatural water flows that causes erosion in things, and it messes up the whole system. All these problems go away, when we stop relying on the pill, on the vitamin, on the supplement, because it forces our hand to deal with the problem to deal with the underlying cause. So, hopefully that answers your question.
Liev
Yeah, my thinking based on that is, it's not the food being deficient, that's the problem. It's the processing of the food that's the problem. The same as, it's not the soil being deficient, that's the problem. It's the processing of the soil. Like the way that we approach agriculture now we've gotten so far away from a natural design of something like a permaculture, this would be closer to what nature intends. Because you have the different root levels.
And we're growing these massive monocultures and it's funny because there are rocks in the soil, right? There are rocks in the field and rocks are minerals, and they have trace minerals. They're just inaccessible from plants directly. So, this is a very known thing that microbes are a very necessary component of mineral uptake in plants. So, what happens when you have 10 generations of glyphosate killing microbes in the soil. Well, the plants can't access the minerals. So, it's a disconnection.
Same with fungicides, like I'm sure they're non-specific to the ones that we consider pests. But the fungus, some scientists demonstrate that fungus may be able to communicate between trees and share nutrients in that manner. And I'm sure that when you have a tree whose roots go so far down next to a food source, that you have greater fungal connections in the soil. You can access the minerals. Like you’ve been saying, it’s about how we're preparing the food and processing the food. It's also how we're going about farming. So, I think you did a great job explaining that.
So, is there any type of processing that's acceptable? When you cook your food, you're processing right? So, we've talked a lot about consuming raw meat and the benefits of that and raw milk and raw animal products was big topic for us. Because it's funny. Everyone will admit that raw honey is better for you. But then when you talk about raw meat being better for you. People kind of go ‘oh that's unacceptable’.
What are your thoughts on that? is that an acceptable way to process food? to cook it? or even what about a fermentation? Like a sourdough bread, is that a better way to access nutrients or is that a helpful thing? Maybe you can elaborate on a couple of those examples.
Daniel
This sort of cuts to the point of what is the optimal human diet? and how should we prepare it? I think all of this stuff is actually very simple and I think all of the answers to the questions that we seek have already been answered for us by our ancestors. I don't think we have to rediscover the wheel here. I think all we need to do is look at where did we come from. What is our family lineage. What did my great grandparents do and theirs before them, and theirs before them, to survive in the environment where they were living. What foods did they eat, what foods were local and seasonal to that area.
These principles we hear about them all the time. Local seasonal, fresh prepared, fresh eaten quickly after they've been harvested. We hear them, but we don't actually give them any credence because when you're living in a certain area, you're obviously excreting waste, sweat and skin cells, and hair, and feces, and urine, and that would all be going back into the soil. So, then that feeds the plants in the area that you and your family, and tribe are living. And then Mother Nature's like ‘hey thanks for that, we're going to give it right back to you’. So, It's cycle. Mother Nature gives you what you need, and you give her what she needs, that cycle is perfect, and it just goes on and on.
But if you then start to go and eat something from five thousand kilometers away that's been put in deep freeze and shipped on a ocean liner, and then put it into a truck, and then sent to you. You're now getting all of the things. In that food that was designed for someone living five thousand kilometers away. You're not getting the things that you need to maintain balance in the place that you're living in. So, there's now an imbalance. Causing disharmony, causing disruption causing dis-ease to the whole cycle, not just your body, but the Mother Nature as well.
So, the answer is what do we eat locally, seasonally we eat fresh, what is available in the area to us, what did our ancestors eat, why did they eat it? Because it was obviously there. And it was what you needed to survive optimally in that environment. Their environment will give you the things that you need to thrive and survive. But now we subsist on less than a dozen main foods. This monocrop, western, toxic, sick diet that we're all surviving on. So, I think the answer is really simple. Those things that I've mentioned.
And if you want to cook it or you want to eat it raw, that's up to you personally. I don't know the answer for each individual, they can test it out on themselves and see what works for them. But certainly, our ancestors cooked food and they fermented things, and they made things like Sauerkraut for example because they kept for a long time. So that's how I approach that answer.
People might think that's a really hard thing to do, it is because we're so disconnected from how we should be living. So, to actually make things right on the ground level. We need to try and do as much as we can, which means getting in contact with local farmers, supporting the people who are doing the right things, growing the food the right way, growing food seasonally, growing foods locally, not putting poison on your lettuce. So, these are the steps that we take as individuals to start creating meaningful change.
If everyone went and did this tomorrow, a lot of the big chain supermarkets would need to change their ways pretty quick smart. Because no one wants to buy poison lettuce anymore or out of season lettuce. So, it forces their hand to then having to source their produce from the farmers that are doing the right thing. And by virtue of doing that, now we start to get right with nature, and we start to correct some of the issues. This isn't something that we fix tomorrow or next year, but it is certainly the way forward, I think.
Liev
I agree. Definitely, well put. So, we had a fella on back episode eight or nine. Mr. Ryan Aleckzander and he has the exact opposite view of you. He attributes most, if not all diseases to deficiencies, mineral deficiencies, vitamin deficiencies. And it was really interesting because we talked about toxicities a little bit and he really paid no mind to toxicities either. His philosophy was to give the body what the body needs and the toxicities will deal with themselves. Which is not a statement I think you'd necessarily disagree with, but giving the body what it needs is maybe where you guys would differ.
You obviously thinking whole fresh local foods. And him, he treats a lot of his clients with like a humic shale, so a mineral complex with added vitamins and minerals. His idea was that the blue-collar worker doesn't really care about health, is not too concerned with going to the local farmer and things like this. In his practice and his experience, that your average Joe is going to do a whole lot better on a, in his mind, complete mineral supplement and vitamin supplement. They talk about the 90 essential nutrients which is something that Dr Joel Wallach coined.
Anyways, in his mind, it was giving all the essential micronutrients. And that this is just going to help anyone along. And the results that he has speak for themselves. So, I think there's a degree of truth in what he's doing as well because he has helped many people reverse diseases on these supplements. But he was talking about how he's addressing the blue collar, the one who may not be as in tune with the cycles that we're speaking of here, that may live in a city, more metropolitan areas and things like that.
I guess I'm looking at too big of a picture here, because I think people in this community, and I know a lot of my listeners are about maximizing and we're about integrating with nature and that's our idea here. I would like to hear your take on that, like is there a case where a supplement can be beneficial or is it short-term, like you may see symptom reduction, but then you're going to have something down the line? what are your thoughts on that?
Daniel
Supplements as we know them have only been around for maybe three decades if that. So, what did our ancestors do fifty years ago. And then for every single generation since the dawn of time before that what supplements were they taking they didn't need anything.
Liev
Can I give you his answer on that? He said that they would supplement, in their gardens and in their breads, they would use potash from the wood stoves. They would use the ash and they would put it back into their gardens and within that you have the potassium and the trace minerals. There was also, he said irrigation in fields. Now that we have dams, the water doesn't come down the line and flood the fields every year, remineralizing the soil. They would grind the bones up, and he was really adamant on eating nose to tail as well, which I'm sure you would probably agree with if you're going to consume animals, nose to tails likely best. Minimizing waste, they would grind the bones and use that in their breads or as a supplement. So that was his idea of supplements. Sorry to interrupt. But I just thought that was kind of interesting.
Daniel
Yeah, it sounds very fair to me. These are the things that our ancestors had to do that they learned over many centuries of trial and error, to work out what they had to do to survive in harmony with Nature. There's a big difference between putting some ash, like burning some trees and putting the ash in your garden, then there is popping hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of synthetic pharmaceutically made supplements that don't account for food synergy, that also are acting as a red herring, as we mentioned before, detracting from the true cause of the problem.
Would the blue-collar worker be as happy to take supplements if they knew how they were made? Would they be happy to take them if they knew they were being made from petrochemicals, and formaldehyde, and acetone, and all this crap? People take this stuff under the impression that it's an alternative to medicine. But the fact of the matter is the people that are selling you the alternative are the people that are selling you the drugs. They've got a monopoly on the whole thing. They sell you both of them. ‘Oh you don't want the drug? fine here have the alternative, but it's also a drug that we make out of petrochemicals, but we're going to say it's good for you’.
They've got the whole big marketing thing around it, and they've sort of changed the whole landscape of, particularly natural medicine and nutritional medicine. Away from it being nutritional medicine and naturopathy, or natural medicine. Prescribing supplements is not a aspect of natural medicine, and it's actually not even nutrition. You can only nourish the body with food. So, when you provide supplements, this is its own niche of medicine. It's called orthomolecular medicine. It's not nutrition, it's not natural medicine, it is literally using synthetic substances which are essentially drugs in disguise to elicit certain physiological responses in the body.
So, if people want to use that because it makes them feel better, that's fine. It doesn't matter to me if someone does it or not. It's really up to them, I can only provide the information and what they then do with that, is up to them. A lot of what this guy says sounds reasonable. I've only heard of him like five minutes ago. But I guess my take on all this is to get back to basics. Let's address the root cause, let's not build the house on the lava flow, right? Let's find out why there isn't fertile nutrient dense soil anymore, and let's get to the crux of the problem as I sort of mentioned.
The longer that we support this crumbling and destructive… Because the way that we're making food at the moment isn't going to last. It's failing. And this is only being propped up by this pharmaceutical, nutritional, supplement industry. So once that's gone, people are going to have to go ‘oh shit, what am I going to do now?’ Well back to basics. So, we may as well start educating people now to try and make some small changes so that when the stuff really hits the fan, it's not so much of a big shock to people.
I also think that when people understand the truth about what's going on, the blue-collar joe blow worker, and I'm not discrediting them at all because I do a lot of that, my family were blue collar workers, when they learned the truth about all of these things, I don't think they're going to want the supplement anymore. I honestly believe in my heart they are going to want the real Mccoy, the real food. It's just because we have been disconnected from that understanding that we don't realize its importance.
Liev
Well put. I agree. It's a systemic issue for sure, and you put that very nicely.
Daniel
Everyone's going to have differing opinions, right? And that's the beauty of all this, that we can throw these ideas around and then people can make their mind up for themselves.
Liev
Exactly, yeah, that's it. And getting back to your definition of health too which I absolutely loved, at the end of the day if you're going to feel better, that's it. And so, funny enough in chatting with that fellow that I brought up. We had a lengthy conversation on placebo and it's not something he denies. It's like he knows that placebo is the most powerful medicine out there, and we call it placebo nowadays in our modern, scientific terms. But it's always been around. We talked a lot about the power of prayer, communal prayer and intention, it was a fantastic conversation surrounding that too.
So, I think definitely getting back to what's tried and true, and connecting back to these sources like you were mentioning is something that that I'm on a journey to do. It's not a snap of the fingers either. Connecting with the with the right people. And we're up in Canada here, where raw milk is illegal, and I have to drive like… I'm going this afternoon to go get some raw milk and it's going to take my whole afternoon to do it. Yeah, I chat with the framer for a bit I guess, but it's quite the drive. Like an hour and a half.
It's definitely a long journey to connect back with the food sources because we've been disconnected for a long time. And there's levels to it. It may start with… I know it started with me when I was at university, and I just started going into the organic store and buying organic fruits and veg rather than the more conventional stuff. And then I branched out from there and connecting with people in the local area. So yeah, it's a journey for sure.
And connecting back to the ancestral wisdom is something that we talk about a lot too because when I was chatting with that guy, my first idea was well I got to put the wood stove back in this house that they took out before we bought it and I got to get some ash in my garden. I was like I'll put some ash in my bread, and I'm going to start grinding up bones. That was my first idea. I thought well you start buying half a cow or a whole cow, what are you going to do with the bones? I know my dog will love them. But I can't give them all to him!
So, there's levels to it and I think you put it well, you're putting the information out there. Because there's some speculation that there may be some supply chain issues coming down the road... But who knows right? who knows that too right? So knowledge is power!
Anyways, any final thoughts from you?
Daniel
Our ancestors didn't need dieticians and nutritionists to tell them what to eat. This is a very new profession and isn't it curious that these professions all started popping up after we started poisoning the food supply and we started meddling with it, and getting away from our roots, and changing the way in which we existed harmoniously with Mother Nature. That is when we started to get confused about food. And never before has anyone been confused about food in the history of mankind.
You walked up to a guy in the amazon rainforest a hundred years ago and said, ‘what's good to eat?’ He'd be able to show you. You went to a guy in Canada one hundred and fifty years ago and said, ‘hey mate what's good to eat around here?’ ‘Well, we got this thing over here and that there and that’. ‘Who told you to eat that? Which nutritionist told you to eat that way?’ Like what the heck are you talking about man. So, this is like an innate intelligence, that we don't need anyone to tell us what to eat, this is not something that is a necessary part of life.
We've just been conditioned to think that the government needs to put out certain recommendations about how to have a balanced diet. We've never needed it before. So, why do we need it now. Get back to basics, appreciate your food, be grateful, be thankful, eat seasonally, local, and fresh. Cook your own food, or prepare your own food with love, take time and attention, put good energy into it, and enjoy it whilst you're sitting down with people that you care about.
I Think if we start to get in contact with these old ways. Things will get back to some semblance of normalcy. But until that time, I'm just going to watch and wait and see what happens and do as much as I can personally, to do what I think is right by myself and my family and Mother Nature.
Liev
Beautiful, very well put. Great final words.
So why don't you tell the listeners how they can support you, how they can find your work. You do an amazing podcast. I've listened to quite a lot of the episodes, probably not all of them. But you have I think over 60 episodes and they're all amazing and beautiful takes. It's just such an amazing place to find some information. So how can they support you? How can they learn about your work and what you're doing?
Daniel
Yeah, I can't remember how many episodes there are, sixty, seventy. I've had a break from doing podcasts and putting information out because I've been working on a book, and the book is very close to being ready for publication. It will be out soon, next couple of weeks, maybe a month. It’s called ‘Can you Catch a Cold?’ and it's basically a review of all of the human experiments that have been done trying to prove contagion, with the influenza in the common cold.
And we go through and talk about the history of germ theory, the alternative possible or potential causes of what causes a cold and flu, from psychosomatic illness all the way through to changes in meteorological conditions. We go through everything from the late 17 hundreds, all the way through to the present day. We explore some different pandemics like the Russian flu and the Spanish flu and investigate what might have actually been going on there.
I had it reviewed by a virologist, and a couple of prominent well-known MDs in this field. I think there's over a thousand references, so quite a tome of knowledge. So yeah, people keep their eyes out for that. It's called ‘Can you Catch a Cold? untold history and human experiments’.
If you want more information, just go to my website www.humanly.com and just sign up. You can sign up for free and when the book's ready, I will send out communication that way or jump on telegram, I've got a telegram channel, t.me/humanly. And we have lots of interesting discussions and it's a bit of a community with like-minded people. So hopefully we'll see some people there.
Liev
Yeah, I'll put some links down below. That's great I'm looking forward to that book I'll tell you that! I’ll definitely be getting that as soon as it comes out. Yeah, that should be that should be great.
Daniel
Well, that was really inspired because people keep saying ‘is there a resource where all the experiments are in one place?’ and I put them all in one place. And I basically done a short analysis on each of the studies to explain why or why not it's a valid scientific experiment. So yeah, I think people will find it a good resource and it's a bit of a fun read. It's science heavy but it is fairly entertaining. Hopefully!
Liev
Yeah, I'm sure! It'll be one of those staple books moving forward, especially in the terrain paradigm, which is increasingly popular. Because it's hard to go back once you hear it and you look into it. I'll tell you that I really tried when I was in university, to get back to the germ theory. But it was impossible I really tried, every day I woke up and tried to prove the germ theory right and I failed every day. Every day for a good couple of years there and still I'm open to the idea of disproving the terrain model I suppose or proving the germ theory right. But it certainly hasn't come along yet and can't say that I'm expecting it to come along. But anyways, that's all right.
Liev
Daniel, thank you so much for coming on today. This was a great discussion. Very insightful! I might have been a little hard on you there. But you answered beautifully every single time and the way you articulate your responses, and your approach is just a breath fresh air. It's so inspiring.
Daniel
Thank you I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.
Liev Dalton
