Video: The Doctor Who Refused to Accept “That’s Just Aging”

Good day everyone. I’m Rob from Health Meister. Today we have a very special guest. He is the founder of Body Health. He is also the founder of Life Works Wellness in Florida. He has a tremendous regime as a doctor and as an athlete. Give it up for Dr. David Minkoff.

Hello, Robert. Thanks very much for being here, David. I asked to do this interview because I think you have such a tremendous story. It’s extremely inspirational. Your experience and wealth of knowledge as a doctor and what led you to Body Health is what I’d like to cover today. So firstly, tell us how many years have you been in medicine?

I graduated med school in 1974. So it’s — I’m in 50 years now.

Wow. That’s incredible. And tell us about your athletic resume. How many Ironman competitions have you done?

Done 43 full Ironman triathlons.

Wow.

So it’s a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, full marathon, 26.2 miles. I’ve done more than that. Half Ironmans, and then probably another — I don’t know — 50 or 75 shorter triathons. So this is my 44th year of running triathlons. I got into marathons about five years before that. So I’ve been doing this since — well, for a long time. In my first year of medical school my dad had a near fatal heart attack.

Okay.

And I remember visiting him. He was in the ICU. He was very sick. He was only 52, and his dad had had a heart attack.

Oh wow.

And that I better change my lifestyle, because I was next in line. So I started running.

Wow. Excellent. And what sparked your interest in health?

Well, as a kid, the sports where I grew up were football, baseball, and basketball. And I played all those sports. And I liked them. In junior high school I ran track. I was a high hurdler. I wasn’t an extremely gifted athlete, but I participated. I had fun. I tried out for football, and before the first game got — I was supposedly a fullback and I got tackled and broke my rib. That ended my football career. When I got to college, I’d always been able to do a lot of pull-ups and I had a strong upper body, and I’d been a swimmer. I was a lifeguard. My summer jobs were lifeguard jobs.

Oh, nice.

So in the first gym class we did, they had a ceiling that was probably 30 feet high, and they had a big tall rope that went to the top. And he said, “Climb up that rope as fast as you can, but don’t use your legs.”

And so I just went hand over hand, touched the top, and he said, “That’s the fastest I’ve ever seen for the freshman class. I want you to start working out with the gymnastics team.” So I played with that. I could do bars, I could do rings. I wasn’t good enough to be a really competitive college athlete, but I liked that, and then the running came right after that. So that’s kind of — I mean, health, I didn’t know anything about health. I grew up — I ate my mother’s cooking and I loved Hostess Twinkies, and my mother made the best chocolate chip cookies that ever existed, and I just ate what they gave me. We almost never had salads in our house. It was meat and potatoes. And I remember — my uncle was a physician at the University Hospital. So my dad is in the ICU and my uncle comes by. This is my mother’s brother. He’s a graybeard professor of medicine. And he takes us down to the cafeteria and he says to me, “Your dad likes salted herring and that’s bad for him. And he likes butter and that’s bad for him. And he likes brisket with the fat and that’s bad for him. And from now on he can’t eat any more egg yolks, and he has to switch to margarine instead of butter.”

Wow.

And he sort of laid out the new rules for what health looked like. This is 1970.

Okay.

So there was a lot wrong with it, but it sort of got me thinking about what is health, what is nutrition. That was sort of my early exposure. In med school, you don’t learn anything about health and nutrition. But I got that from him, at the beginning, related to what happened with my dad.

Interesting. Your comments —

It really — well, it’s funny, though, because what happened is that I started to read — I wanted to build muscles.

Okay.

And I was a Boy Scout, and in Boys’ Life magazine — that was the name of the magazine for all the Boy Scouts — there were advertisements for Charles Atlas, the world’s most perfectly developed man. I don’t know if you ever saw this in Australia.

Yeah. Yeah. I know who Charles Atlas is. Yeah.

This is in the late 50s, early 60s. And Charles Atlas had this 52 inch chest and 28 inch waist. He looked great. And for 14 bucks, you could order his program. I had a paper route and I shoveled snow in the winter, so I had some money, and I sent in my money and the program came. And Charles Atlas said, “You know what, to get you cleansed, we’re going to do a milk cleanse. All you do is drink milk all day for eight days. Your only food is milk.”

What?

Yes. Now, I didn’t know it, but I was milk sensitive.

Right. You had a milk intolerance.

Yeah, as I did. And I started drinking milk and I got roaring stomach aches and diarrhea, and by day three on this I was like, “No, this isn’t the right program for me.” But it got me into nutrition. And you’re good friends with my wife Sue, and we had our own sort of universe where we tried everything possible. I actually became a vegetarian because, as a Boy Scout, one of the field trips we made was to a — I don’t know if they have this in Australia, but Oscar Mayer is a gigantic processed meat plant. They make bologna, hot dogs. They were like the biggest in the US,

and they were based in my hometown. So one day they decided to take us to the Oscar Mayer meat packing plant and give us a tour.

And we’re on the tour and we see the assembly line where the pigs are coming down like a conveyor belt,

and they have this gigantic hammer that comes down and whacks them in the head and kills them.

Oh man.

And when I came home from that, I decided I’m going to be a vegetarian.

Wow. Wow.

So I was a vegetarian for like 30 years, ’cause I couldn’t do that. So anyway, we went through our — we tried everything.

Yeah. No doubt, no doubt. So how do you describe optimum health for yourself or for your patients?

So in the United States — I don’t know if it’s this bad in Australia — but about 74% of the population has a chronic illness.

That’s outrageous.

90% of men aged 18 to 20 cannot pass a physical to get into the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Coast Guard.

Wow.

Because they’re obese and they’re pre-diabetic and they’re just not fit. Now this is a catastrophe for society.

Yeah.

Because in the US, Medicare, which is the government-funded insurance, it’s like a trillion and a half dollars every year. And most of that money goes toward people who have chronic health problems — heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, chronic fatigue, arthritis, autoimmune disease. The United States becomes sick. So what is health? Well, health is vitality, and a body that works, and it’s free from pain and has plenty of energy,

and it should go a long time,

right? And Moses — the great leader of the Western civilization, sort of — was Moses. He took the people out of Egypt and he died at 120. So I just say to people, hey, look, go for it. We don’t know,

right?

We know that what’s happening in terms of medical research is that there’s going to be kind of an escape velocity at one point — and it’s probably going to be within the next 10 or 15 years — that you can engineer the body to get younger and live longer, if you haven’t wrecked it too much beforehand. Things like stem cells and genetic engineering, this sort of thing is really on the horizon. But if you’re 50 and you can’t walk around the block, or you’re on half a dozen pharmaceutical medicines, it’s a sad thing, because my whole practice is people who have chronic illness. They have cancer and Lyme disease and chronic fatigue and autoimmune disease, and the average 28-year-old now — you can give them a list of six things, six numbers, give me the numbers back —

can’t do it. So this isn’t everyone, of course,

but it’s a lot of people. And because of the way the food supply is, and the habits are, and the way people are being sort of coached into what they should be doing, and the stress levels —

we’re just trying to get people to say — or I’m trying to be an example for people. I’m 77 years old. Last weekend I did a half Ironman.

Wow.

So I swam 1.2 miles, I rode 56 miles, I ran 13.1 miles. And in two days I was recovered. And this morning I just got back from a 60-mile bike ride. And the body can really — my dad lived to be 74, but barely. He had quadruple bypass and he was not well. And my mom died at 75 too. She had a heart attack and she had a stroke. And I have two brothers and a sister, all of whom are sick. They all have diabetes. They all have neuropathy of their feet. My brother’s had a quadruple bypass as well. My other brother just got out of the hospital because he’s got diabetes and infections in his feet. This is not normal. And the only difference between me and them is I just live differently,

right?

I just tried to figure out what would work for my body, and then explored the area — and I’m in the area, so I have access to all the stuff —

and I’m inquisitive, and I like — how can I make this thing run for a long time, because I don’t want to be a statistic.

Yep.

Before I did this medicine that I’m doing now, I was an emergency room doctor, and the average person coming into the emergency room I worked at — it was a chest pain emergency room, one of the top 100 chest pain centers in the United States — the average number of medicines that these people were on was a dozen. A dozen prescription medicines.

Wow.

And it’s funny, because in the hospital we had a computer, and when someone would log in to the hospital, or the ambulance would bring them in, the computer would log in all the medicines they were on. And if there were more than three medicines, the computer would go tilt, because you were trying to get — was the person’s problem

the side effects from the medication they were taking? But the computer couldn’t handle more than three. And so one of the things we would often do — you have an 80-year-old with a belly ache who’s kind of out of it, and you can’t find anything, and we would just admit them to the hospital, stop all of their medicines. In about three days they’d wake up, because they were just overkilled with pharmaceutical drugs.

Which — I mean, I’m not against medicines. Sometimes medicines are life-saving.

Yeah.

But the way they’re used, or the way people abuse themselves, so to speak, where they go to the doctor and they put their trust in the doctor — “The doctor is going to heal me, and I’m not going to change my lifestyle, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, and he’s going to give me medicines for my blood pressure or cholesterol or arthritis.” Man, you start down that road — it’s not the right solution,

right? All right, so that brings me to my next question. You came out of the standard medical pharmaceutical model, and you’ve done an incredible amount of studies since then. How do you balance what you’ve come out of, which still has tremendous application, with what you know now?

Yeah. Well, it’s what — it used to be called for a while holistic medicine or natural medicine, but the way I frame it is that it’s integrative medicine. There are aspects of modern regular medicine that really work, and they’re good. If you’re having a heart attack, go to the hospital, because they can save your life. You might need a stent, you might need something — that can be workable. You need a C-section, you break your leg and you need a pin put in your leg — these are things that work and can be very good. You rupture your intestine, you go to the hospital, you get antibiotics, you might need some surgery. Yes, because giving you some herbs or some homeopathics is not going to fix you. It’s too extreme. But on the other hand, if you have high blood pressure and you’re nutritionally deficient in magnesium and potassium, and you’re not exercising, and you’re 30 pounds overweight, and all these other things —

then if your blood pressure is way too high, you might need medicine for a while so you don’t have a stroke or something. But then most of these people, if we can get their lifestyle right and their nutrition and supplementation right, they don’t need blood pressure medicine.

Wow.

So I see it as — what is the right thing for that patient, given their condition? And if people in the system in the United States — the system doesn’t pay for the kind of medicine that I do —

so the people we see are usually motivated, and they’re willing to spend their own money to buy supplements, or to get IV treatments, or do the various things we do, because they know that doing the regular stuff, even though insurance covers it, is not going to get them where they want, which is to be healthy. Really, most people go to the doctor — the two biggest things that drive people to the doctor are pain and no energy. Fatigue and pain.

Okay.

And so if I can restore energy and get rid of pain, I’ve got a happy customer.

Yeah. Beautiful. All right, so what’s your approach for helping your patients?

Well, the way medicine has evolved is that with an insurance system, you need to make up a diagnosis that has a code. So the doctor can say, “You’ve got this disease,”

and it’s codable, and that’s what we’re going to treat.

Correct?

And so while that works in a certain sense, when we look at someone, there are sort of three buckets of why they’re the way they are. Because they come in, they’re 50 years old and they have chronic fatigue — well, at 35 they were fine. So this isn’t a genetic, inherited problem. This is an acquired problem.

Okay?

And the things they acquire — the environment is full of toxins. It’s in the food, water, air. I don’t know if it’s as bad where you are as where we are, but most of the food is chemicalized. It’s pesticide. It’s not natural. You look on a box and there are all kinds of ingredients you don’t even recognize. That’s not food,

right?

And people are living this way. They use carpet cleaners, air fresheners, scents in their dishwashing stuff. These are all chemicals and they’re all toxic,

right?

So people have things — basically, people have things in their body that aren’t supposed to be there. That’s category one. Category two is people are missing things from their body that they need to have,

and either they’re not eating them or they’re not digesting them, but they’re not there. Their zinc is low, or their selenium is low, or their amino acids are low. I got into the amino acid business because every patient I tested had low amino acids, including me.

Okay. And we found that if we give people amino acids, we can replace their amino acids. Holy smokes, they get better. There are 10,000 success stories of people who started taking amino acids — my energy got better, my hair started to grow, my chronic feet stopped hurting, my hormones started to work. So that’s the second basket — things are missing that should be there. And then the third basket is sometimes people need structural help. They need a chiropractor, or a massage person, or a physical therapist, or an orthopedic surgeon, depending on what happened. So when I see someone, I’m looking at them through those eyes: what’s in you that shouldn’t be there? What’s missing that should be there? Do you need to see a physiotherapist of some kind, or an exercise physiologist, to get your body mechanics working?

Right.

Right. And then we have a very detailed laboratory and physical exam testing, where I can say, “Yeah, you’ve got parasites in your gut, and you’re missing these two nutrients, and your chronic fatigue virus is on, and it looks like a tick bit you and you’ve got Lyme disease.” And then our approach is: get the bad stuff out, put the good stuff in, see the chiropractor. And then sometimes it’s oral supplements, sometimes it’s IV treatment, sometimes it’s hyperbaric oxygen, sometimes it’s ozone. And people get better — even the really bad ones get better — because the end of the line for most people is either a very devastating neurologic disease. They’ve got multiple sclerosis and they’re in a wheelchair and they can’t move anything.

Horrible.

Even that — two weeks ago I had a patient. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 30 years ago, and when he was diagnosed it also affected the nerves in his eye

and he became colorblind.

Okay. So he comes to me 30 years later. He’s in a wheelchair. He can’t move anything. And in seven weeks of the treatment we gave him, he comes into my office and — it’s a picture like the one that’s behind me now — it had red in it. When you’re colorblind, you see brown and gray. You don’t see red or green or blue.

Okay? He says, “Yesterday, my color vision turned back on.” This guy’s 65 years old.

He’s been in a wheelchair and colorblind for 30 years. So we’ve been able to stretch the ability of the body — when you clean it out and give it back what it has to have — to actually heal, even 30 years later, where every neurologist told him he’d never see color again, he’d never move again. He had to go home for a month in between the treatments, and he sent me a note a week later that said he’s got function back in one hand, and now he can operate a wheelchair and actually get around himself.

Wow.

His brain and nervous system are healing. And if I told this story and there was a neurologist sitting here with me, they just would not believe it. But it’s actually true. And we even see it with advanced cancer cases. These cases are a wreck, but if you do it the right way, and the treatment’s not too toxic,

their cancer starts to regress and go away, and their body comes back. So there are extremes where you’ve actually fallen off the cliff and it’s too late, but for a lot of people it’s not too late,

and if they can mentally and spiritually get behind — this can be done — then they work with you, and they do it, and it’s why I’m still working. It’s too much fun to quit. Every day I can’t believe the things I’m seeing and the effects we’re creating. And people come in and say, “You’ve changed my life. You’ve given me my life back. I can leave my house. I have energy. I can play pickleball.” And it’s just extraordinary. My gratitude to be able to do this and work like this — I haven’t found anything that’s actually more fun. I love triathlons, but I wouldn’t want to make a career out of it.

All right, so how much has it changed for you over the last 50 years? Certainly, it seems like there are a lot more tests available today. Tell me your viewpoint on that.

Well, what’s fun about it, and what’s exciting about it, is it’s changing every day. I study a lot. I work probably 40 to 50 hours a week in the clinic,

and on weekends I read, I study, I talk to people. I’m looking for the innovations that are occurring, and they’re coming at a level that’s just amazing. So I like medical stuff, and I have 40,000 square feet of clinic space where I’ve got about every tool you can have. There were baths in Hungary — I used to have to send people for these oxygen baths in Hungary.

So, hell, let’s just get them here. So I’ve got five baths in my clinic and there are five more coming. And one of the things we can do for cancer is called whole body hyperthermia,

okay,

where you actually heat someone’s body up to 105 or 105 and a half degrees, and it kills cancer cells. It activates the immune system. So we used to have to send people to Germany. Well, we don’t have to do it anymore.

I’ve got four hyperthermia beds and they’re busy all day long. So we have our failures — what could have salvaged this man or woman? Is there some technology out there that, if I had it, we could do it? So I’m always sort of looking for that. And it makes it fun, because I learn, and we have new things to add, and our results keep inching up.

That’s amazing. All right, so tell me, how do you address the mindset of your patients? I imagine because they’re coming to you that they still have hope.

Not necessarily.

Okay.

It seems that most Western-oriented doctors in the US have a conservative, pessimistic view,

right?

And they tell it to the patient,

right?

And so I’ve got someone now — I just wrote about this woman. She has stage four colon cancer. She had colon cancer, it went to her liver. She went through the traditional treatment with the oncologist, and basically at the end he said, “Get your affairs in order. There’s nothing more that can be done for you. You should go on hospice. You’re only 63 years old, but that’s all we’ve got.” Well, her husband didn’t accept it. She accepted it.

Okay.

Her husband loves her very much and he didn’t accept it, and he shows up in my clinic and I see her. Now, I’ve seen lots of stage four colon cancers, and about 80% of the time I can get them stabilized. Their disease isn’t gone, but they can live.

Okay?

They’re not in pain, and the treatment hasn’t made them worse. And I said to her, “This is a steep hill. I’m not promising you a rose garden, but we’ve got a chance.” And then I tell her this thing, which is one of the most interesting things. One of my friends is a hospice doctor.

Okay.

And he said, “When someone gets to be a hospice doctor, the doctors quit, and the patients quit, and the families quit. Your treatment is going to be morphine and Valium. We’re going to give you comfort measures so that you’re not in pain

and you’re not anxious. You’re on the way out.

You’re done.

And we want to keep you comfortable when you’re done,

right?”

And Medicare, the federal insurance, will cover the cost of someone on hospice for six months. So the doctor told me 10% of them get kicked off of hospice and Medicare because they’re not dead in six months,

with no actual treatment.

Wow. So there’s a story change in that, in that being —

right —

you know, the story that was written was, “I’ve got cancer,” or, “I’ve got a terminal illness,” and something occurred in that person that changed that story,

right,

and then they didn’t die. So I know that, and I tell that to the patients. I say, “Look, you, as an immortal spiritual being, have some sway over this body entity.” And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this guy, Emoto — Japanese guy.

Huh?

So he was a Japanese doctor, and he believed that thought might be more important, or more controlling, than structure.

Okay.

And so he did an experiment. He started doing experiments. He took a petri dish and put water in it. And then he typed a label on the water that said “joy,” “hope,” “gratitude,” or “I hate you, you suck,

you’re ugly.”

Yep. He froze the water and then looked at the crystals that formed in the water,

to see what the crystal structure looked like. And with all of the positive-type signs he put on there — joy, hope, eternity — the crystal structure was symmetric, beautiful. Wow. And where he wrote, “Hate, you suck, you’re ugly, you’re stupid,” the crystal structure was this gnarly mess — terrible.

Wow. Yeah, I remember.

So that is thought — he didn’t even think it at the thing, he just wrote the concept on there.

Crazy.

And so this is something — and 70% or 90% of our body is water. Water holds ideas. Water will respond to ideas. And so I tell people this: look, surround yourself with things that are uplifting. Watch funny movies, figure out how you can get life imbued back into these cells, and we can get somewhere. So going back to this guy with his wife — I’m telling her this stuff and she’s like, “Really? Really?”

Yeah. Nine months later, her cancer is reduced to this little area of her liver, and she’s going to have some surgery done on that and take it out. And the husband said to me, “If you wouldn’t have given us the hope that she could get better, she would have been dead in a couple of months. And look at her now. She’s not in pain. She’s walking around. She’s living her life.” So we don’t always win,

right? But that hope factor — I think medicine has really lost its way, because the contact between the doctor and the patient — it’s in a way I see it as a spiritual relationship.

Yeah.

And I care for them, and if they have the ability to be able to — okay, we can — the miracles occur.

Wow. All right, David, I’d like to switch gears now and go to Body Health. Can you tell me the story of how you started the company?

So I got into this field because my wife got sick. I was an emergency room doctor. I started my career as a pediatrician, and then I trained in infectious disease. I was working in a hospital as an infectious disease doctor, and then I switched careers and became an emergency medicine doctor. I was happy doing what I was doing, and my wife is a registered nurse, and she’s learning all the time, and she was interested in health and interested in performance. And she goes to a lecture, and the guy says, “The silver fillings in your teeth are actually not good for you. The way they make those things is they take liquid mercury, and they add some tin, zinc, copper, and silver, and they make this thing called an amalgam, and it’s silver, and it was the standard way you fill cavities in teeth.”

I had them all.

Yeah.

I had them removed.

Yeah. So her dentist, when she was young, filled all of her — you know, four on each side on the top and four on each side on the bottom. She had like 16 mercury fillings. And she opens her mouth and looks and says, “Oh my god, I’ve got to get these out.”

Okay. And so she goes to a regular dentist who doesn’t appreciate that mercury is probably the second most toxic substance in the universe. Probably uranium is worse, but mercury is right up there. Just as an anecdote about this — if you took one of these mercury fillings and ground it up real fine and put it in a 10-acre lake — a 10-acre lake is a big lake,

right —

one filling, the environmental people would put a sign up: don’t eat the fish in this lake, because the mercury level will be too high and you can get sick.

That’s crazy.

So she’s got 16, or 12, of these mercury fillings in her mouth. Later on, what I realized was these things, when you eat something hot, off-gas mercury,

because at room temperature mercury is liquid,

right,

at 110 it boils. Now, a cup of coffee is 160 to 180 degrees, somewhere in there where it’s drinkable,

right.

So every time you eat something hot, you boil off mercury from your teeth. It goes on your palate, it goes in your stomach, it poisons you.

That’s crazy.

I bought this — this is part of the fun of this medicine — I bought this from the Environmental Protection Agency. If you drop a thermometer in a medical clinic — the old thermometers were all mercury.

Yep.

If you dropped the thermometer in the medical clinic, and now there’s mercury there, you’ve got to call the hazardous waste material guys. Everybody has to evacuate the building, and they have to come in and clean it up. And when they’re done cleaning it up, they have a thing which is a mercury vapor meter,

right,

and they go around measuring the concentration of mercury vapor in the room. And it had to be below like 10 parts per million of mercury before they’d allow anyone back into that office space. So I bought this mercury vapor meter, and I’d get people to open their mouth, and I’d just stick the vapor meter in there and say, “Just hold your breath for a second, let me measure the mercury vapor level coming off your teeth.” And it’d be 100, 200, 300, constantly, mercury going into that person’s brain, head, kidneys.

Terrible.

We used to go — so our first product from Body Health, when we started it,

was a product that detoxed mercury. I met a mad scientist who was at Harvard, and he was able to develop a very unique formula that would detox mercury. And we used to go to trade shows with our mercury vapor meter, and people would come around and we’d say, “Open your mouth.” “Oh yeah, oh, you’re 300, you better get some of this product, because it’ll get the mercury out. Go to the dentist, get it taken out.”

Right.

Anyway, so my wife goes to a dentist who doesn’t remove it safely. It has to be done very carefully, because you put a high-speed drill in there and it goes all over the place.

Right.

So there are dentists trained and certified to do this. They put this thing called a rubber dam in the mouth. They protect you,

so — special high-speed suction, so the mercury doesn’t go all over the person. But when she went and did it, she didn’t have that kind of dentist,

right.

And three months later she starts feeling bad. Her thyroid gets inflamed, her liver gets inflamed. And I’m in the emergency room, I know all the good doctors in the hospital. I start sending her to the liver specialist and the thyroid specialist. I don’t know — it’s some kind of autoimmune thing. I’m not thinking about this teeth thing at all. I have no idea. And then one day she wakes up and says, “I can’t lift up my arm.” My wife is very fit. She’s a champion triathlete — her age group, she usually wins her age group. So she’s very fit. And she says, “I can’t lift up my arm.” And then I do some testing on her, and her legs are also weak. So I take her to a neurologist. Neurologist says, “Oh, autoimmune condition. She probably has early MS, multiple sclerosis, and what we need to do is put her on these very toxic drugs — steroids and this other stuff called interferon.” And people just get sick with it. So that starts to bother me. And my wife owns a home healthcare nursing business. And one day I went to pick her up, and in this little bunch of offices in one place, next door a guy had moved in next to her home health clinic — a dentist — and on the dentist’s marquee it said “Natural Dentistry.” And I went to pick her up and I saw “Natural Dentistry,” and then I see him coming out of his office, and I got out of the car and said, “Hey, I want to introduce myself. I’m Dr. Minkoff.” “Natural dentistry — what’s that?”

I’d never seen that before.

Right.

He says, “Well, I’m a regular trained dentist. But what natural dentistry means is we believe the mouth is actually part of the body, and we don’t do things in the mouth that you’d never put in the body. For example, if you put mercury in a filling — well, you would never put mercury in a wound. They’ve banned all that. They used to give this stuff called —

it was a mercury-based antiseptic. They banned all that stuff. They used to have mercury in contact lens solution. They banned it because it’s too toxic,

right?

So why would you put it in the teeth, where it can aerosolize? That’s the idea of natural dentistry.” And then the lights go on, and I’m like, “Wow, my wife had all her fillings taken out by this guy down the street who didn’t do any protection, and now she’s got what looks like a bunch of autoimmune conditions.” And he said, “There’s no doubt she’s mercury toxic, but there’s nobody in this town that’s going to help you. There’s a guy in Seattle. He’s figured this out. He has training courses for doctors. You should go there.”

And I go there, and I learn all his stuff. And I come back and do it on her, and she gets better. And the product that got her better was this product we now call Metal-Free.

Okay?

Because I met this guy and he said, “You can detox mercury with this stuff.” And it detoxed her mercury and she got completely better. And that’s 25 years ago.

Extraordinary.

And it was a way — it didn’t exist anyplace else. We were the first ones to actually put a label on it. And then I started meeting other doctors, going to meetings, who were doing this stuff that I had started to do. And our friends saw her, and they started to call me and say, “I’ve got chronic migraine headaches, I’ve got ulcerative colitis, I’ve got rheumatoid arthritis. I saw what you did with your wife — can you help me?”

And then I just started to dabble. She had an extra room in her home healthcare nursing where I could go on Tuesday afternoons and say, “Come on in, we’ll just play,” because I wasn’t thinking of this as a business.

And the thing just went crazy. Within three months we renovated 3,000 square feet and set up a clinic. And then this was more fun than the emergency room, and I just started doing this, and it’s grown to what it is.

So that’s how I got into it.

So what year did you start Life Works?

And what year did you start Body Health?

And the other thing with Body Health that really happened — so I’m doing Ironman triathlons.

Okay.

And we had a couple products. We had Metal-Free, and then the guy I learned the metal detoxification from — you had to take like 16 different products to make it work. And I thought, God, maybe I could come up with something a little more simple than that. And I came up with Body Health Complete. It’s a multivitamin.

It’s got 16 organic whole food concentrates,

right, but it’s beefed up with all these other things to help liver detoxification, help methylation, help the gut heal, extra CoQ10, vitamin K2, and enough vitamin D that you didn’t have to take another vitamin D product.

Yeah. Where you’d have to spend $300 or $400 on all these other products, and for two tablets twice a day, for 59 or 60 dollars, you could get everything you needed.

So that was the second product.

Okay.

The third product was — I’m training for triathlons and I got injured. I tore my hamstring, and I could not get it to heal. I went everywhere, I did everything I knew to get better, and it just wouldn’t heal. And one day I did a test where I looked at the level of amino acids in my blood, and they were pitifully low. And I thought, maybe the food I’m eating, with my digestion, I wasn’t getting the amino acids I need, because amino acids are what proteins are made out of, and my muscle wouldn’t heal because it couldn’t get the nutrients it needed to make new muscle. And I started playing with amino acids, and I put together this combination of essential amino acids, and in about three months my hamstring was healed.

And I did an Ironman right after that. It was the best time I’d ever had. My leg was completely good. And I had a lot of other body changes — I actually gained about eight or nine pounds of lean body weight with no change except adding the amino acid supplement, and I didn’t really look different,

right,

but my bones filled in, and my organ tissue filled in, and my heart rate — I could beat 12 beats faster than it had ever beaten before.

Yeah.

Because my body’s performance just went up.

That’s extraordinary.

And so what happened with that is I wrote an article — there’s a magazine that triathletes read called Triathlete magazine, and I wrote an article in Triathlete magazine. Now, this is early 2000s. This is before there was really an internet, or any of the way you can expose people to something now. I write it in Triathlete magazine, I get 3,000 letters back from athletes who read it: “Where can I get this stuff? I need this.” And so we added Perfect Amino to the Body Health line. And it’s been an international blockbuster product,

and thousands and thousands of testimonials on how people benefited from it, because they were protein malnourished, just like I was.

Right.

And we find virtually everybody we test — because I do this amino acid test now on every patient —

and virtually everybody needs it. One of the problems in modern society is everybody’s intestine is messed up,

right. And too many people are taking drugs to block stomach acid.

Yeah.

And they don’t digest the protein. So you could be eating a carnivore diet and getting a gob of protein, but I have a bunch of people who see me who are on a carnivore diet and need amino acid supplementation, because they are not getting the amino acids from their food in the quantity they really need to optimize — because proteins — there are about 300,000 proteins in the body. It’s your hair, it’s your nails, it’s your immune system,

it’s your organ structure and tissue, it’s your bones. And many of your hormones — growth hormone, thyroid hormone — these are all made out of amino acids. And if your levels are low, your body is going to compromise somewhere,

and not keep everything at optimum, and then you’re going to notice it,

and all you have to do is replace it. Take 10 tablets, two scoops every day. I take two scoops, 10 grams. I take it three times a day,

because I’m busy, I’m training, I don’t want to ever have a deficiency of this. And about every six months I run my panels. Amino acid levels are all in the nice high end — that’s where you want them.

Wow.

And hormone levels are good. My testosterone’s in the high 800s. There are very few guys at 77 who aren’t taking testosterone,

right,

because their levels — their body can’t do it, the enzymes to make it can’t do it. And so I think if you optimize these things, you can keep healthy, young performance at old age.

Interesting. What’s an optimum testosterone level for a 30 to 40 year old?

I want everybody at least above 500.

Okay. So —

Testosterone levels — genetically, people are different. Shaquille O’Neal, the basketball player — I read once that his natural testosterone level was 1,800.

Okay.

1,800.

Okay.

So the guy is a beast, right? He’s a beast. He’s a physical phenomenon of years and years of professional basketball and gigantic size.

Yeah.

And that’s probably the top I’ve ever seen of someone naturally, because they weren’t allowed to take testosterone. But most of the people we see in the clinic — these people can be 25 years old — they might be 175, 250. In fact, LabCorp, the big lab company in the United States, they’ve lowered — they base their testosterone normals on the people who come in.

Okay?

And they lowered their normals by about 100 points, because the average male now is running 100 points lower than their fathers and grandfathers did. And rather than say, “We’ve got a problem here, Houston,” it’s, “Let’s just lower the level.” And now what happens is the insurance company says, “Well, low for your age is 170, and you’re 185, we’re not going to cover you to give you some extra testosterone,

because you’re in normal,

right.” And you give someone who’s 175 something to boost their testosterone — sometimes lifestyle will do it. Get them exercising, lifting heavy weights, doing some sprints, optimizing their nutrition — it could come back up. If it doesn’t, we can give them things. There’s some herbs — fenugreek, boron — that’ll naturally raise testosterone. Sometimes they just need testosterone. So we give them testosterone,

and then, for a guy, his mood, his attitude toward life, his muscles, his libido — he’s back.

Everything changes.

Yeah.

What else do you take? I imagine you have a smorgasbord of supplements that you ingest.

Well, I have a lady that does it, but it’s — I suffer it, okay? It’s too many things,

okay,

but I figure, the basics for every patient

is: they need — I put them on this Body Health multi, so two of those twice a day. I put them on Omega-3 fats, because these are the things I measure that are missing in people who don’t do it.

Yep. It’s called Omega-3 Health, I put them on that.

Yeah.

In order to get an adequate level of antioxidants in your body. Now, these naturally come from colored fruits and vegetables.

Mhm.

And you have to eat about 10 servings a day of fruits and vegetables to keep your blood antioxidant level adequate, because the oxidative stressors, the free radicals coming in — your body’s ability to protect itself from radiation, Wi-Fi, chemicals in the food, chemicals in the air — if your body has things that can buffer those, can meet them and neutralize them,

they don’t hit you,

right?

If you don’t have it adequate, they’ll hit you, and then your tissues get damaged, and then you age too fast,

right?

We actually did a study in our clinic where this company had a device where you could put your finger up against this photosensitizer. It would measure the level of carotenoids — these are the colored antioxidant substances — and you could get, from the level in your skin, what your blood level was, without drawing blood.

Okay?

So I rented the machine for two months, and for a month I tested everybody in the clinic. Put your finger up against it, let’s measure your level. If your level wasn’t above 50, you were abnormally low in antioxidants. And the people who were above 50 were eating 10 or more servings of fruits and vegetables.

Now, very few people do that,

right.

So we put together this product — it’s a Body Health product, it’s a greens product, a concentrated greens product.

Yeah,

and one scoop of this stuff — there’s a green version and a red version, I take both — is the equivalent of 10 servings of fruits and vegetables. These are organic, freeze-dried, powdered vegetables and fruits. All the green ones are in one set, and all the red ones — you have pomegranate and raspberries in one, and the green ones are all the algaes and kales, all that stuff,

right.

So we just said, “Keep doing the diet you’re on.” You’re way below 50. The average on this thing, for the people we saw — probably a couple hundred people — was 18. In the children it was 12.

Wow.

Because in school they had to have two vegetables at the school lunch meals, and those two vegetables were ketchup and French fries, for the government to cover it. Okay? You don’t see salad bars — I mean, this was probably 15 or 18 years ago, I don’t know what’s happening in schools now, but that was the standard. So I said, “Okay, we’re just going to do an experiment. You put one scoop of the greens one day and one scoop of the reds the next day. You can put it in your smoothie, your soup, your salad, anything you want. Tastes good.” And in a month I want you to come back and I want to measure your level. And 100% of people were above 50.

Wow.

So that’s stupid cheap insurance

on your diet, because the problem with modern foods today is the nutrient levels are not what they used to be. The soil’s depleted, the lettuce isn’t as good as it used to be, the spinach isn’t as good as it used to be. And this is just insurance. Now, I eat a diet that includes a lot of vegetables, but I don’t want to take a chance, so I do that, and I think people need to do that. So you take your multivitamin, you take your greens and reds, you take your fish oil, and then you take your amino acids. And almost everybody we test is deficient in magnesium. We have another product called Body Calm — put some magnesium in there.

Yeah.

Magnesium has hundreds of different functions, from keeping your heart under control to making sure you go to the bathroom every day. So these are the very basic things — I don’t care what you’re eating or what your diet is, these will make your body health better,

right.

And there’s a lot of other things you can enhance this with. The next two I do — most people don’t have enough enzymes in their stomach to digest their food.

Okay?

So when you eat a meal, take two capsules — that’s called Digest — and it’ll make sure your food is getting digested. And then when we measure the levels of bacteria in a person’s gut, they’re low in good bacteria. They got a sinus infection, had to take antibiotics; a tooth infection, had to take antibiotics; antibiotics kill the good bacteria — or they’re on some other pharmaceutical drug that kills the good bacteria. So, take two capsules a day of the probiotic, take the digestive enzymes. Now, if you want to be a minimalist, do that every day and you’ll be better. And combine it with eating as organic as you can.

Eat food that really looks like it — a chicken breast is a chicken breast, a potato is a potato. But whatever comes in a box with a barcode on it is highly suspect as actual food.

Right. And then get some exercise and get some sleep — get enough sleep, get some exercise and sunshine every day. That’s kind of the formula for living long and being healthy, if you’re not already really suffering. And for most people, that makes a big difference.

Okay. Do you advise any particular testing? I know you do them in your clinic, but for those who don’t have access to your clinic, are there any specific tests you’d make part of your regime? I know you mentioned the amino acid blood serum level.

Well, I think the more you can sort of fill in the holes in your body — testing — I do my own panels probably every six to nine months. I always find there are little glitches in it. I noticed my blood sugar was starting to go up. I was like, “What the heck?” And on the test, my chromium level was low.

I sweat a lot. I do sauna four days a week. I’m in Florida in the summer.

Today it wasn’t that hot, but on an average Saturday morning, if I ride three hours, I’m outside, I’m sweating, it’s 90 degrees, humidity is 90%,

and you lose stuff,

and you can’t tell. And there’s a good amount of selenium in our multivitamin, but I was losing it faster than I was getting it in.

And so I added a supplement with chromium, because insulin doesn’t work without chromium.

And another mineral called vanadium. And I added the supplement, and then things just — now we’re back, now it’s working again, now it’s normal.

So I think if you can work with a healthcare practitioner — and I know in Australia there are a lot of doctors trained either naturopathically or more holistically,

right,

and I think you want to hook up with one of those people, because they have access to these labs. They can help you, they can coach you, they can measure these things on you so you can optimize your own condition. They can measure your hormones, they can measure your amino acid levels, they can do a stool test. It’ll cost you some money, but if you’re spending five bucks on a coffee every day, and 15 bucks on a six-pack a couple nights on a weekend, you can afford it,

yeah, it’s priorities, right? And really just changing habits.

It’s amazing.

You gotta want it.

Yeah.

You’ve gotta get ruined on it. There’s got to be a ruin. You’ve got to — like I was ruined when I saw my dad in the ICU,

right,

and I saw his EKG, and half his cardiac muscle was killed when he got the blood clot in his heart. So for me, that was like, “Okay, I’m in.” And now these people are all over the place. Habits are a funny thing, and I don’t care who you are, it’s going to take work. It’s hard.

Yeah.

You try fasting for a few days just to clean yourself out and see what your mind does about food.

It’s brutal.

Like, mine goes nuts. Doesn’t matter how many times I’ve done it.

Yeah.

It’s just like, what the heck?

What are you doing?

I’m supposed to be eating lunch now. Oh man, I might be dying. God, what if I don’t eat for three days? I might get sick, right?

It’s just —

That’s the game for everybody.

Do you fast very often?

I hate fasting. Not too often.

Okay.

But I do it, because I do notice I get a reset. This is interesting — I have a patient now, she’s five foot two and 270 pounds, and she’s eating only carnivore, once a day, about a pound of meat. She’s gaining weight, she’s got very high insulin in her blood, which shouldn’t be, and she’s miserable. And I’ve tried all this other stuff on her, and she’s living with her father, helping take care of him. And I talked to him on the side and said, “I want you to watch her really closely, she’s got to be cheating somewhere.” And he came back and said, “She’s not.”

Wow.

So in frustration I said to her, “I want you to go on a 30-day fast. You can have bone broth, water, and Perfect Amino and minerals.” She said, “Okay” — completely frustrated and ruined, and I was feeling the same way. I saw her yesterday — 28 days in, she’s down 35 pounds.

Nice.

She says, “I think I’m ready to come off.” So I’ve got the book open — the book is called “Fasting Can Save Your Life.” It was written by a naturopathic doctor in San Antonio, Texas, probably 40 years ago. I ran across it when I was in high school. And he said, “You’ll know when to end the fast when the appetite comes back strong, the breath is sweet, and the mouth tastes sweet.” So I read her that portion of the chapter, and she said, “I’m not there. I have no appetite. My mouth tastes foul. My body fluids are foul.” I said, “You’re not ready, keep going. When the body has finished detoxing everything she accumulated, these will be the signs that you’re there.” And he’s got a chapter on how you break the fast.

Okay.

She was way off the deep end,

right — grew up in New York City, her habits were terrible, and she was just very toxic. She’s probably 47 or 48. Her body — nothing worked,

right —

good food didn’t work, the supplements didn’t work. So, okay, forget it, let’s just do this. And she’s unique in that she was willing to do it,

and she’s actually kind of elated at what her body looks like and how it feels compared to what she was dragging around before.

Wow. It must be tough to run a body that size, that height.

Yeah. But now she’s got a waist.

Wow.

She’s still got a ways to go, but she’s sort of got her youthful look back.

Yeah.

Whereas before she was sort of like a police lineup with bright lights.

Wow, crazy. The last thing I’d like to ask you is: what do you advise people to do to get the most out of their body?

Go to bed early, get up early, eat organic, good, real, whole food. Get outside every day and move your body — I don’t care if it’s tennis or you walk, but get your body moving, get some sunshine, make sure you have a bowel movement every day. And take the supplements I suggested, because I think they will definitely make a difference. And be wary of what you’re putting into your body — the organic food and clean water. The city water in America is all terrible.

Invest in a reverse osmosis system

so you’re getting clean water. And sleep is very important. Because medically — in the emergency room, or when I was in private practice, my sleep habits were terrible,

right.

I was probably getting four to five hours of sleep a night. My dad never slept much and I thought that’s just how it is, and I could muscle my way through a day,

right.

And I got one of these — there’s a lot of gadgets now where you can measure what your body’s doing. I got this thing called an Oura ring, and a Garmin watch, and every morning I check: how’s my body doing, how’s my HRV — heart rate variability — doing, and how many hours of sleep did I actually get. And when I first got this thing, the score is zero to 100. If you’re above 80, 85 on readiness, your body is doing well. And I was in the 50s. I was like, “Oh my god” — I wasn’t really in sync with my body, what it was feeling and doing. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to go to bed at 9:30 and get up at 4:30. That gives me 7 hours of sleep every day,

right.” And I just forced myself to do it. And my scores now run 85, 88, 90. My body’s ready for the next day, I got plenty of restful sleep. And these are things that are trackable,

and they give you feedback on how you’re doing,

and you kind of have to take this on yourself, or you can hire a health coach to do it, but these are part of the habit patterns where you can monitor yourself,

right,

and then make changes to affect what you want.

Cool. One final area that seems to be coming much more mainstream is the level of toxic materials inside homes — whether it’s curtains, dish soap, the dishwasher, plastics. Do you put much attention on that?

I think the more you can do, the better. And it kind of has to be a gradual thing,

yeah,

unless you have the resources to just say, “Trash everything, put it in.”

Yeah.

But I think it’s important, and I’m conscious of it.

Yeah.

I don’t like plastic water bottles, right?

I try to be careful of that. I try to buy bamboo clothing, and I never wear a new shirt

out of the box,

right — it goes to the laundry first, because there are flame retardants in there. There’s stuff in there.

Oh, wow.

So I’m not perfect, but I am aware of it.

I’m aware of it. We have a very good air filtration system in our house

and in our office. I don’t let anybody in the clinic with perfume.

Right. Wow.

It’s just like, you can’t come in here.

Wow.

Because it’s toxic, and — you may not know it, but the guy sitting next to you is breathing that stuff,

right,

and it’s poison. Besides, if you come in my room, I’m going to start sneezing and my nose is going to run, because I’m sensitive to that stuff. So go wash it off, and don’t come back with it next time.

All right, mate. Well, we could talk for hours. Thank you very much for your time.

Okay, good. Nice to see you, and we’ll touch base.

All right, cheers. And thank you guys for watching. Please share this video if you found it inspirational, and you think it might help somebody.