In this episode, I’m speaking with Caroline Alan, the self-proclaimed “Mineral Geek.”
She shares her history of serious health problems, including gut inflammation, periodontal disease with bone loss in her teeth, recurring sinus infections, brain fog so bad she left her corporate career, and lifelong insomnia.
But her health completely transformed thanks to a chance suggestion from her business partner to try liquid minerals.
Caroline is now passionate about sharing the connections she’s found between mineral depletion, replenishment, and cellular function.
She’s also a soon-to-be published author; her book, The Mineral Reset: The Essential Guide to Replenishing Your Body and Restoring Your Health, will be available at the end of April.
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Caroline and I discuss:
- How her adrenal health, recurring sinus infections, and lifelong insomnia all resolved over 8-9 months on liquid minerals (even though no doctor mentioned this)
- A healthy body generates about 1,200 watts of electricity daily; most of us only generate 800, maybe 500-600 watts, so the body picks and chooses which tasks are most important
- One heart cell might have 5,000-8,000 mitochondria, one brain neuron could have upwards of 2 million…each organelle continually generates tiny units of energy (ATP)
- When you take a 500 mg calcium pill, only 10% ever gets broken down and becomes available for absorption; 90% is eliminated because the gut says, “This is too much concentration, I have to eliminate the excess.”
- The gut lining has receptor sites in ratios – certain amounts for each mineral – even if you put 500 mg of calcium in, only a certain amount can be absorbed
- Fulvic acid is the only molecule on Earth that can change its polarity from positive to negative…when you study it deeply, you end up in quantum mechanics, Higgs boson, quantum entanglement, and quantum singularity
- Fulvic delivers minerals INTO your cell, changes polarity, picks up toxins, carries them OUT, and changes polarity again; it shuttles nutrients in and bio-waste out
- Humic acid is “Mother Nature’s janitor” – binds waste, toxins, heavy metals, free radicals, nanoplastics, glyphosate – it’s used in Superfund sites to remove toxins from soils
- Since COVID, Caroline has seen the percentage of people with detox responses to humic increase substantially
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Transcript
Ari: Hey, this is Ari. Welcome back to the Energy Blueprint Podcast. With me in this episode is Caroline Alan, who is also known as The Mineral Geek. She is the author of the upcoming book coming out with Hay House at the end of April called The Mineral Reset: The Essential Guide to Replenishing Your Body and Restoring Your Health. She is the co-founder of a company called BEAM Minerals.
Her story is that, as a result of her own personal chronic health struggles, she ended up getting pulled down this path of minerals and realizing how much they had changed her life. This basically led her to study in great depth the science of minerals, with a big focus on trace minerals in particular, and fulvic and humic acid, and the unique effects of those. She’s spent the last several years devoted specifically to the study of this topic.
This was also the catalyst for the formation of her company that she’s the co-founder of, which is BEAM Minerals, and why she is here on the show to talk about this subject. I hope you guys enjoy this. We get really in-depth on trace minerals and especially the unique effects of humic and fulvic acids, or what she calls humic and fulvic substances. Enjoy the podcast. Caroline, welcome to the show.
Caroline Alan: Thank you so much. It’s super exciting to be here.
Caroline's Story: Reversing Chronic Illness with Minerals
Ari: Yes, it’s great to have you. First of all, I would love for you to just talk about your personal story of how you got into doing what you do now, because there’s an interesting background that led to you pursuing this whole body of knowledge around minerals.
Caroline: There is because I’m not a practitioner and I’m not a scientist, but I have become extremely knowledgeable about minerals because of my own experience with mineral depletion and mineral replenishment. About 10 years ago, I was in a corporate career, high-tech, really intense career. I had, at that time, flatlined adrenals. They’d been flatlined for over a year. I had really bad inflammation in my gut. I’d been gluten-intolerant for many years, but I was completely off gluten, but I could never get over the inflammation and the elimination issues.
I had bad inflammation in my mouth with periodontal disease and bone loss in my teeth. I’d been to many dentists trying to heal the problems in my mouth. I also had mold exposure, so I had bad sinus problems, sinus infections recurring every six to eight weeks, really very uncomfortable. I also struggled with brain fog, getting my thoughts together. In fact, that’s the thing that had me actually leave my corporate career right around that timeframe because I literally could not do what I had been able to do for so many years.
I also didn’t sleep through the night. Throughout my life, until I was replenished with minerals, I was always an insomniac, had struggled with getting to sleep and then staying asleep. I’d wake up three or four times a night. This is right also about the time that I was moving deeply into perimenopause. That was certainly part of it. I’d been to many, many different doctors, specialists, all sorts of different people, trying to heal all of these different symptoms one by one.
Around this time, I met my business partner, a man named Dan Howard. He gave me this little cup of liquid minerals, which I thought, “Okay, I trust this guy.” I took them. Tasted like water. I didn’t have a lot of hopes about them changing my health. Over the space of eight or nine months, all of those symptoms that I mentioned resolved. Now, what happened was, after about two months, I went to my dentist. That was the first sign. She looked in my mouth. I had to have my teeth cleaned four times a year because of so many periodontal problems. She was like, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing. The tissues are pink and healthy. There’s no bleeding when you had your teeth cleaned. What are you doing?”
I said, “I have no idea. Maybe it’s these minerals.” Then, four months in, I went to have my adrenal test, a saliva test that helps you understand the status of your adrenals. At my last appointment, my natural path had given me a prescription for hydrocortisone, which I did not want to take, because we’ve been trying with so many other different protocols to try and jumpstart my adrenals for over a year, but I didn’t fill the prescription. At this appointment, my adrenals were one-third of the way up the chart with the proper up and down of a sawtooth pattern.
She was very excited. She, again, asked me, “This is so great, the hydrocortisone’s working.” I said, “No, I didn’t even fill that prescription.” She’s like, “Well, what are you doing?” I said, “I think it’s these minerals.” If it had only been one or two things that had changed, I probably wouldn’t have gone and delved deeply into minerals, but so many things changed. I kept going back to this man who had suggested them and saying, “Really? Minerals?” Not a single doctor, practitioner, any kind of specialist had ever mentioned the word minerals to me, except for maybe zinc. Take zinc for your immunity. That’s it.
So many ahas happened in this process. First, of having the experience of getting replenished and having so many things change. I started getting reflection back from other people as well. Like, “Wow, what are you doing? You look great.” That was the beginning. That was the inception.
The Root Cause of Low Energy & Why Medicine Ignores Minerals
Ari: Got it. How do you make sense of this in the broad sense? Meaning, you’ve gone down this path of minerals. You now have come to the conclusion that minerals are this extremely important and, let’s say, largely ignored or overlooked aspect of health. How do you make sense of that landscape? Why are minerals so important to human health, and why do you think they’ve been overlooked?
Caroline: Yes, that is so great. What a great question. What I’ve come to see is that, in our medical and even our natural practitioner world, we tend to think about our body as parts and pieces. If you’ve got a problem with your liver, you go to a liver specialist. If you’ve got a problem with your skin, you go to a skin specialist. You go on and on. We’re taught to think of our body as parts, pieces, systems. As a result, we don’t think of it holistically. That’s the first piece.
The other pieces that we’re all walking around, I say it’s like if you buy a car and then something goes wrong with it, you take it to the mechanic when something isn’t working because the mechanic, they know all those systems and parts and pieces. Many of us don’t know the simplest, most basic knowledge. You would never buy a car if you didn’t know how to fill up the gas tank, if you didn’t know how to fill up the oil reservoir, if you didn’t know the basic functions of that car.
We’re walking around in our bodies, and we actually don’t understand the simplest fundamental ways that our physiology is fueled. That’s what I recognized through all of my research was, oh my gosh, the entire body is made of single cells. Yes, it’s a liver and heart and lungs and all these tissues and fluids and et cetera. At a very fundamental level, and you know this, I know from your work, at a fundamental level, we’re all made of single cells. Maybe we have 37 trillion to 150 trillion cells in our body.
When I asked the question, “How are these cells powered?” That’s when these lights went off. That’s when the dots were connected between why minerals made such a difference in my body. I learned some really interesting things. If your body is fully powered, it can generate, this is an average, about 1,200 watts of electricity every day. That’s enough to power your blender or your toaster, or maybe both. If it doesn’t have enough power, you might not be able to generate that.
Most of us are walking around in bodies where we’re maybe only generating 800 or maybe 500, 600 watts of electricity every day in our body. Our body can’t do everything. It has to pick and choose what it can do and what it can’t do. In my body, I had all of these chronic issues. What I learned, what I really see is that the huge ramp-up of multiple chronic symptoms that so many people are dealing with, the root cause is that we are not able to generate enough power in our body.
The question is, what powers a cell? You know, because of your work, that ultimately, most of the energy in the body is generated in the mitochondria or via the mitochondria inside cells. The thing that blew my mind is the scale of this. I have 37 to 150 trillion cells in my body, but in one cell, a single cell on the back of my hand, I might have 200 mitochondria. In my heart, in one cell, there could be 5,000 to 8,000 mitochondria. In my brain, in a single neuron, there could be upwards of 2 million mitochondria.
Each one of those organelles is generating these tiny, tiny units of energy continually called ATP. The next question is, what fuels the mitochondria? That’s when the big light bulb above my head just went off. It was this process of going down and down and down and getting micro and micro and micro to really understand what’s the foundation for everything. Really, it’s ultimately this electrical energy.
How Minerals Power Your Mitochondria (The Cellular Campfire)
Ari: Let’s go to the mitochondria level and let’s talk about how mitochondria produce energy. Let’s talk about how you conceptualize how minerals fit into that story.
Caroline: I know, from watching your work, that you explain this very, very well, and probably more technically than I do. I always see myself as a translator. I’m trying to make things super, super simple for people to understand who don’t have a technical background. At the very simplest level, the way I like to describe what’s happening inside the cell with the mitochondria is like a campfire. If you’re going to build a campfire, you’re going to need wood, like some heavy-duty fuel, and you’re going to need some tinder, something that’s going to help that fuel light on fire. You’re going to need a match, something to ignite that fuel and turn it into energy fire.
The fuel, the wood, is the minerals in your body. It is the potential energy stored. Then you have amino acids. Amino acids are like the things that light more easily. It’s like the tinder. Your body has a lot of amino acids in it. It’s a little bit easier to find, whereas minerals have to come from the outside of your body. Then the mitochondria is like the match. It’s the key, the tool that allows you to light this energy on fire so that it can be utilized throughout your body.
Now, how this happens, of course, is through the citric acid cycle, which is a very, very complex set of stages. Each stage is required cofactors of an amino acid and a mineral to help that particular stage complete. There’s many, many in the process. If at any stage there’s not a specific mineral, an amino acid available, then that process can’t be completed. Then this mitochondria that might be able to generate 12 units of energy with all of the fuel necessary and cofactors, minerals, and amino acids, now is only able to generate maybe one unit of energy. It can operate, but just at a much, much lower level. Do you want to illuminate more on that?
Ari: Yes, please. Did you mention carbs and fats in this, how they fit into this picture?
Caroline: Well, it’s an interesting thing. I’ve spoken a lot with people who are, as example, paleo, and they talk about this neoglucogenesis, so this idea of how the macros work related to energy generation. When you look at the way that that process happens, underneath it is minerals, mostly magnesium, potassium, sodium, the macro minerals, but without those minerals available, that process also doesn’t happen efficiently. Do you want to talk more into that?
Macro vs. Trace Minerals & Soil Nutrient Depletion
Ari: Yes, let’s go specifically. What specific minerals are you talking about, and what are they doing in this process?
Caroline: The thing that I want to clarify is that most of us know about the macro minerals, the ones that you might find in an electrolyte stick pack, magnesium, potassium, calcium, sodium, but the body absolutely needs, doesn’t just maybe have to have vitamins. You can live without vitamins for quite a while, but without minerals, you’ll actually expire within several hours. I’ve got some stories of that that we could talk about if we want.
Your body has– there’s about 18 to 22 minerals, depending on who you’re speaking to, that your body absolutely has to have. Now, I actually don’t recall in detail every stage of the citric acid cycle and what exact mineral and cofactor is needed, because I’m really trying to help people understand at a higher level that they are needed. Now, the kinds of minerals that people know about are these macro minerals, but there’s a whole bunch of what we call micronutrients. These are minerals that are needed in much smaller levels, balanced ratios, and they’re things like molybdenum, vanadium, of course, things like copper, selenium, phosphorus, boron, silicon.
There’s a whole host of minerals that your body absolutely has to have, but that most of us wouldn’t go to the health food store and go pick up a bottle of silicon or phosphorus or whatever and try to get all our extra minerals in that way. We would hopefully try to get them from food. Of course, we have a problem with our food supply now, where minerals, the nutrient density of food has greatly reduced, and we literally cannot get all the minerals we need from the foods we eat anymore. That’s the fundamental issue.
Ari: Got it. Can you talk about some of the specific minerals that you tend to focus on or that you think are extremely important in this story? Well, I guess I’ll leave it there for now. I’ll save my other question.
Caroline: Great. Here’s the thing. What I learned in my process is that it’s not just about one mineral or two minerals or four minerals or five minerals. It’s about all the minerals. This is the interesting thing that when I started researching, and my first idea was I’m going to learn every mineral and what it does and how it does it and how much my body needs of it. That’s the natural way coming from our normal background that we’ve been taught in.
What I quickly learned is that minerals work together. Every single mineral has specific balanced relationships with other minerals. One mineral could have relationships with up to 10 other minerals. Those relationships are as important as the quantity. We’ve been taught to think of minerals and vitamins related to these recommended daily allowances or minimum daily requirements. Things like that. You see them on the nutritional facts panels or the supplement facts panels on supplements and food.
The problem is that those numbers actually have no true relevant reference point for you or I. You and I lead different lifestyles. We have different ways of eating. We have different issues in our body, DNA, epigenetics. All of these different things that impact us and that we have to do. Of course, there are fundamental minerals that we need a lot of, like magnesium, potassium, calcium, these macro minerals.
The thing is you can’t just take a pill of them and put them in your gut and expect it to work. That’s the challenge. I think it helps to take you through a process of how I learned about it, because that’s where the aha moments really make sense inside a conceptual framework. When I first started looking at mineral depletion because I recognized that I had been mineral-depleted, and I started learning about all the minerals and what each one of them does, and I quickly learned that was not going to be super helpful.
One of the main reasons is that I recognize that my body is a natural ecosystem, and it works more like a forest than a car. There’s no reservoir for magnesium or calcium or potassium or any mineral that I take. There’s no way that I can fill up my tank of these different elements because it doesn’t work like that. I had to study the replenishment system in the body. How do minerals get from outside my body into my cells, which is their ultimate destination? Because that’s where the mitochondria are.
That’s when I began to really shift my whole thinking about mineral depletion and mineral replenishment. What I learned was this. When you take a pill.
Why Standard Mineral Supplements Don't Absorb Well
When you take a pill of, let’s say, calcium, and let’s say it’s 500 milligrams of calcium, it goes in your mouth, and maybe your saliva starts to break it down, the outside of the pill, and it gets into your stomach, and hydrochloric acid begins to break it down. It ends up in your small intestine, and it starts continuing to be broken down via digestive enzymes and all sorts of different processes inside your microbiome.
If we recognize, again, that our microbiome and our gut really, truly is more like a forest than a car, what happens if I took a wheelbarrow of calcium and I threw it on the floor of a forest? The forest plants would say, “Oh my gosh, this is way too much calcium. This is a concentration of a powerful substance. I’ve got too much, and I need to get rid of it.” The plants in that area, these freshwater plants in a forest, would actually struggle to thrive until that concentration was removed via rain and et cetera, other things that actually work to remove concentrations.
It’s the same in the gut. First thing that happens is the gut says, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got a concentration of this calcium. I have to figure out what I’m going to do with it.” It’s breaking it down, and it’s also trying to eliminate all the concentration, the excess. It brings water from other places in your body. It also brings balancing minerals. Balancing minerals with calcium or phosphorus and magnesium, it pulls those from other places to try and create homeostasis because the mineral balance in your body is extremely important.
A lot of it’s actually eliminated, like 90% of it. Only 10% ever even gets broken down and becomes available for absorption. Now it has to be absorbed into your bloodstream. Let’s look at the lining of the gut. The lining of the gut is lined with these finger-like structures called veli. Each of those veli are lined with these epithelial cells. Each one of those epithelial cells is lined with receptor sites. I like to imagine them like catcher’s mitts, but they’re not actually catcher’s mitts that can catch any ball because they’re actually designed in ratios. You have a certain number of receptor sites for magnesium, and every single mineral has a different ratio of receptor sites in your gut.
You’ve got a lot for the macrominerals, and you have fewer for all the micronutrients. Even if you put 500 milligrams of calcium in your gut, only a certain amount of it can be absorbed because you have certain ratios. First of all, much of it just goes straight through, ends up in your toilet, and then some of it hits those receptor sites, and that relies on all sorts of things.
Of course, the enzymes and the health of your gut microbiome to break it down. Remember, most of that calcium is probably made from bones, which your gut actually doesn’t break down well. You already have somewhat of a mitigating factor there. Then it depends on the health of the lining of your gut as well. Do you have any inflammation? Do you have epithelial cells that are not working well, et cetera, et cetera?
You have a smaller amount that gets absorbed into your bloodstream. Now you have, I say, maybe 7% to 10% that’s gotten actually absorbed into your bloodstream, but that’s only two parts of the journey because the final journey is getting into your cells, and that’s called assimilation. That happens via this process of diffusion, and because of all the balancing processes that we can go into if you want to go into more detail about how things get into the cell.
Ultimately, that calcium has to hit a receptor site on your cell, and your cell goes, “Oh, that’s calcium, and it lets it into the cell.” Now you’ve got this one molecule of calcium in your cell. Woo-hoo, you made it. What I found, and the reason that things were so different with what happened with me, was that I was taking plant-based mineral substances, which had all of the minerals that I needed already in the natural ratios that my body needed to receive them in, actually closely matching the ratios of receptor sites in the lining of my gut.
Extremely bioavailable, also, so ready for absorption the minute I drank it. Didn’t need to be digested at all or broken down at all. It was already in its ionic component size, ready for absorption. Then what’s even cooler is these plant-based substances had the ability to deliver minerals into my cells to make that much more efficient. That’s why I had such an effect over time. Sorry, I talked so long. Yes, a big question. [laughs]
Humic & Fulvic Acid Explained: Ancient Plant-Based Minerals
Ari: Yes, absolutely. Where do fulvic and humic acid fit into this?
Caroline: Yes. Plant-based minerals, I call them plant-based minerals because they are derived from the decomposition of freshwater plants. They are called fulvic and humic. I call them substances. Many people call them acids. Just to be clear, fulvic acid, humic acid has to do with the way that they’re extracted from their source material using hydrochloric acid, which renders them into acid molecules. At their basic, their fundamental level, they really are fulvic and humic molecules or substances.
Where they come from, and really anywhere you have decomposing freshwater plants, you have fulvic and humic in the making. It doesn’t [snaps fingers] happen overnight. It happens over a very long period of time. For using fulvic and humic in the human body, these come from ancient decomposed plants. Imagine 65 million years ago, the earth was covered with rainforests. It was a warm, humid climate. It’s when the dinosaurs lived. A meteor hit the Yucatan, killing 75% of all life on earth in a few hours. All these rainforests around the earth died and slowly decomposed. They deposited their mineral content back into the earth, in a strata of earth in the form of these molecules, humic and fulvic.
Just to be clear, humic is actually the main molecule. Fulvic is another molecule that can be extracted out of humic. They have different properties. We’ll talk about those. What they represent really is earth’s way of storing energy for cellular systems for future use. Out in a forest, when a plant grows, it actually absorbs humic and fulvic through its roots. It uses the minerals in those molecules for its structure and for the energy required to create, to build.
At some point, that plant will die, decompose again, and through this complex microbial process again become humic and fulvic stored in the soil available for future cellular life to utilize.
Ari: You said fulvic is a component of humic acid or humic substances?
Caroline: Yes. Humic is a very large molecule relative to a cell. I’ll give you an idea. Well, actually, let’s talk a little bit more about the substances that they come from. I think let’s go a little bit deeper. In the Himalayas, these ancient decomposed plants became something called shilajit. It’s like a tarry substance that oozes from hillsides and rocks, rocky hillsides. Then, in the Great Britain area, the British Isles, we have peat, and it’s a clumpy soil-like substance they take from the bogs.
In South America, there’s something called terra preta. It’s a very, very black, rich earth material. In North America, we have a few different materials, humate and leonardite. In African continent, there are other materials. This humate, I’m going to talk about humate just because that’s what we use in our products. It’s a very, very black, crystalline, sandy-like substance. We take that substance, and what we do is we actually extract the humic molecules out of it. We use a non-chemical process.
Humic Acid Benefits: Heavy Metal & Glyphosate Detox
The humic molecule, if you put your hand in a fist, just imagine that’s the humic molecule. Now, if you imagine the head of a pin, that would be a cell in your body. The humic molecule is actually a large molecule. It’s a very, very interesting molecule that has some incredible capacities. First of all, it’s called a poly-electrolyte molecule because on its surface, different places are positively charged and negatively charged.
This is a very, very rare kind of molecule. It’s got a surface area like a sponge, so a huge amount of pockets and areas where things can attach to it. This molecule travels through your bloodstream or your gut. It’s an incredibly effective binder. It binds with bio-waste, toxins, heavy metals, free radicals, nanoplastics. Senescent zombie cells, it will pick. It will pick up viral detritus. It picks up things like glyphosate, really, really effective glyphosate binder.
This molecule is really interesting at a certain point. It stays in suspension, and it works with the fulvic molecule in this way that allows it to stay in suspension for quite a while, which means floating in your liquid in your body. At a certain point, it gets so heavy at a molecular weight because all these things are clinging to it that it actually falls out of suspension and leaves your body. It will leave your body through any elimination channel, which is really interesting. It doesn’t just require liver or kidney. It can leave through any elimination channel: your tears, your snot, your sweat, your saliva, your earwax.
Ari: And pee and poop.
Caroline: Yes, and your pee and poop, and even sloughing cells off of your body. Incredibly effective. I call it Mother Nature’s janitor. It’s utilized even in natural– They use it in Superfund sites to remove toxins from soils. It was used–
Ari: What did you say? Superfun sites?
Caroline: Yes, where there’s toxic areas from chemical spills or–
Ari: They’re called Superfun sites?
Caroline: Oh, Superfund, F-U-N-D. Superfund sites are ones that companies have had to pay huge amounts of money to clean up chemical spills or mining detritus, and things like that that have ruined ecosystems. They’re just really effective. One of the interesting things about the humic molecules, if you looked at a certificate of analysis of humic, you’d see heavy metals listed. What’s really interesting about the molecules is that the heavy metals that are in the molecule, they have no valence.
They have no ability to come free from the molecule because it’s so strongly charged, and those heavy metals actually act like magnets in a way. They move through the system, collecting other heavy metals. humic is very well known for its remediation capacities for cadmium, mercury, and lead, specifically. These three are well known for humic’s ability to remove those from soil systems, from water. Systems and from human bodies. Super exciting that way.
Also for glyphosate removal. It has this ability, an interesting thing where it will actually bind with the glyphosate, and then it builds a film around the glyphosate, completely sequestering it from your system. Very, very cool. Now, the humic molecule has another capacity, but I’m going to wait until I describe fulvic so you can understand how these two molecules really represent natural technology both for mineral replenishment in cellular systems and ecosystems, as well as detoxification of cells in cellular systems.
Fulvic Acid Benefits: Intracellular Mineral Delivery
Under certain conditions, the fulvic molecule can come– actually, I call it being birthed, but it’s extracted from the humic molecule. Let’s say you see a pond and the pond is brown water, chances are very high that there’s humic and fulvic molecules floating around in there. Because of certain chemical properties, these molecules will split and become two. The fulvic molecule has really different capacities than the humic molecule.
It carries all the minerals that your body needs, just like the humic molecule, in those natural ratios that your body needs to receive them in, because your cells evolved on this earth. Actually, what’s really interesting is the mitochondria in a redwood tree need the same ratios of minerals as the mitochondria in your body. It makes sense because we all evolved here on Earth together.
First thing is it carries all the minerals your body needs, but it’s a very, very strong electrolyte molecule that has a capacity that no other molecule on earth has. That is that it can change its polarity from positive to negative. No other molecule that they know of can do it. When you actually start studying and going really down the rabbit hole with it, you end up in quantum mechanics, Higgs boson, some aspects of quantum entanglement, and quantum singularity. I call it a quantum molecule.
What this molecule does, first of all, your cells in your body recognize fulvic as a beneficial substance. When fulvic hits up against your cell membrane, the cell recognizes it as a beneficial substance, and it lets it through. This molecule carries a full spectrum of minerals because it’s really highly charged into your cell. Then once it gets in the cell, it changes its polarity. Those things drop off that molecule and are delivered inside your cell for use by the mitochondria.
It’s literally a delivery system for minerals into the cell. Now it’s in an opposite polarity. It travels around in the cell, and it picks up bio-waste, toxins, heavy metals, glyphosate, nanoplastics, viral detritus, free radicals. Again, it’s an intercellular binder. It gathers those bio-waste pieces, those things that your cell needs to get rid of, carries them out of the cell, changes its polarity again, and drops them in the bloodstream.This molecule that’s very, very tiny relative to a cell is this shuttling. It’s a transportation vehicle for nutrients in and bio-waste and toxins out of the cell.
Ari: Did you say that it’s dropping them off? Just a quick note. I think you said intercellular. I think you mean intracellular, right?
Caroline: Yes. Excuse me. Into the cell. Intracellular. Correct.
Ari: You’re saying that it goes inside of the cell, binds to these different compounds, comes outside of the cell, and drops them off, releases it. They become unbound from the fulvic molecule?
Caroline: Correct. It changes its polarity again. This molecule is literally going into the cell, changing its polarity, gathering things, going out of the cell, changing its polarity, dropping. It’s constantly doing this process of binding to things, carrying, and it’s constantly moving things across the cell membrane, creating homeostasis.
Ari: What is the impetus, chemically speaking, in order for it to bind and unbind? Why wouldn’t it still be bound to those molecules inside of the blood, for example?
Caroline: You are asking the question that is being asked all around the world. This molecule is being studied by Big Pharma. It’s being studied all around the world because literally they do not understand the mechanism that has it do this.
Ari: I think of CO2 or oxygen, the way that oxygen and CO2 behave on the hemoglobin molecule. There’s this really interesting association or dissociation depending on the environment it’s in, depending on the pH and the partial pressures of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and that dictates where hemoglobin either picks up oxygen or drops off oxygen at the level of the cells, picks it up at the level of the lungs, and vice versa for carbon dioxide. There has to be some kind of mechanism like that that’s affected by the pH or affected by partial pressures of gases or osmotic gradients. Something has to be going on there.
Caroline: From the research that I’ve done, and again, it’s actively being studied all around the world, what I understand is that pH is part of the story. The interesting thing is that the scientists seem to observe that rather than pH having an effect on the folic molecule causing it to change its polarity, instead it’s actually the opposite, that the molecule is responding to the local pH and changing its polarity to adjust the pH.
This is why we call them effector molecules. Now, let’s talk about the humic molecule a little bit because I want to– now, the folic molecule is truly amazing, and literally, the scientists who’ve been studying this the longest, they only find observations, but when it gets right down to it, they’re like, “I don’t know how it’s doing this. I don’t know how it is deciding.” It seems to be related to pH, but they can’t find the action, the specific, whether it’s oxygen or what it is that’s causing this effect.
The humic molecule also has some really interesting capacities. One of the things that I talked about it like a very effective binder, but it’s really interesting because it also responds to pH. Let’s say you’ve taken a lot of magnesium and you put it into your gut, and a lot of it got absorbed. Now you’ve got a lot of magnesium in your bloodstream, and it’s maybe out of balance, too much magnesium.
The humic molecule actually start binding to that magnesium all the way up till the point where homeostasis is begun to be reached, and then it will slow and stop binding to that magnesium. It’s not just binding to bad substances that are truly not good for the system, but it’s also binding to minerals in the system that are out of balance. It’s like this homeostasis machine. It’s constantly trying to create homeostasis at this very fundamental level of minerals and other chemical agents in the body.
Ari: The behavior you’re describing almost sounds like a form of intelligence, which obviously we would generally not attribute to a particular individual molecule. I would say more broadly, it describes the behavior of something that we have co-evolved with for a very long period of time, that our biology has learned to leverage in a way that is in facilitation of homeostatic mechanisms.
Caroline: Yes. In the research that I’ve done, as I went deeper and deeper into understanding how these two molecules work, what really came clear to me is the problems that we have in our body with toxic substances, with imbalance, with trying to get nutrients from here to there, those are the same problems that exist out in nature. Nature and cellular life and cellular ecosystems have been evolving on this planet for millennia.
It makes sense that nature would have developed tools for doing something as fundamental as getting minerals from outside of a cell into a cell to facilitate that, because out in nature, nature couldn’t say, oh, we need some magnesium over here, we need some potassium over here, we need some calcium, we need some selenium. There wasn’t any mechanism like we take a pill. There’s no mechanism like that.
In fact, all those minerals needed to come into the cell in those balanced ratios so they could be utilized in those balanced ways for that citric acid cycle that the mitochondria was constantly performing. It does make sense at a very fundamental level that for cellular ecosystems to thrive so incredibly diversely on this planet, there would have to be some fundamental tools for removing toxins because there’s also been always concentrations of toxic– whether it was just concentrations of a particular mineral or whether it was a volcanic vent or something. [laughs]
Ari: There is, with a number of different kinds of binders that bind toxic substances in the body, let’s say you’re talking about zeolites, or there’s various other kinds of binders, clay, and charcoal, and things like this. One of the things that emerges in these discussions is the fact that these substances also bind to toxins in the environment outside of our bodies.
Then when you’re consuming them, now there’s a risk of you’re consuming the substance which tends to attract and bind to toxic substances. Now, are you putting in these toxic substances into your body? The question becomes, are you adding more toxic substances in the process of trying to remove toxic substances from your body? How do you make sense of that landscape?
Caroline: Yes. I totally see that when you have a binder like a charcoal or a clay or these things that are– and again, I don’t like to use that word intelligence because it’s not necessarily that the humic is a sentient creature or something. It just has very specific capacities that we may not understand [chuckles] how they’re actually working at some very, very detailed chemical level. That is the really interesting things that are being studied about the humic molecules.
One, that the heavy metals that are associated with that molecule have no valence, they have no ability to come free. That’s when you have problems with heavy metals in your body when they’re roaming free, and they end up in your tissues, and they end up stored in your body, and they’re causing oxidative stress, et cetera. They’re taking up receptor sites for beneficial minerals. They’re doing all sorts of different negative things.
If you’re putting this humic molecule into your body and those heavy metals that are associated with it don’t come free, and in fact, it’s binding to and gathering other ones, it becomes less of an issue. The other thing to recognize is, we’re not talking about humic and fulvic that might be created in your compost heap at the very, very bottom of your compost heap that’s been there for several years.
I’m sure there’s humic and fulvic in there, but you wouldn’t use that because that’s had contact with all of our modern pollutants and environmental issues that we’ve got going. This material comes from 10 to 12 feet below the earth. It’s from 65 million years ago, it hasn’t had contact with the concentrated kinds of pollutants that we deal with, like glyphosate in our atmosphere, or lead from exhaust from cars, or et cetera, et cetera, cadmium, all sorts of different pollutants that we deal with on a daily basis. It’s very pure in that respect. Again, it is a natural substance. It does carry many different components, but its actions, its effect in your system, is to remove toxic substances and to create homeostasis.
Ari: How does it interact with trace minerals? Where do the different trace minerals fit into this story? I’m also curious, you could address this if it fits in the same question or as a separate one. One other person that I’ve had on this podcast that talks a lot about minerals, where their big focus is minerals, is Morley Robbins. His big focus is copper, which I don’t believe you’ve mentioned in this conversation. I assume you’ve looked into his work. I’d be curious what you think of it and where you see copper as fitting into this story.
Caroline: First of all, plant-based humic and fulvic, they are trace minerals. That’s what they are. The difference, many, like say you look at some of the–
Ari: Wait, just one second. Just clarify that for me.
Caroline: I’m going to break it down. Trace minerals, often, people think of trace minerals as being in salts. As an example, your pink Himalayan salt that has some trace minerals in it, or some of the trace mineral products out there that come from salts. These are good sources of foundational minerals. However, they miss two components. The first is they don’t have the delivery system capacities that the fulvic molecule has.
They’re a good way to get minerals into your system. They’re very bioavailable. They’re in the quantities and balance that your body can absorb and assimilate easily. However, they’re not going to be bringing that full spectrum. Most trace mineral products– It depends on which one you’re talking about. I never speak badly about any mineral products in general because I know we need a lot of minerals. I just caution using single minerals is not the way ecosystems work.
That’s the real reframe for this is if you look at your trace mineral product that has maybe five or six minerals, that’s cool. That’s great. You’re getting some mineral content into you, and you absolutely need that. What would be even better would be to get some humic and fulvic into you because that is going to enhance the uptake of not only all of the minerals that are in your system, but also all the nutrients that you’re taking in through your mouth.
They are going to support all the gut microbiome, microflora, because guess what, all that microflora also uses minerals at a foundational level. They’re going to support every aspect of nutrient uptake in your body and that continual detoxification process in your bloodstream and intracellularly. Sorry, I lost the other aspect of the question.
Ari: Copper.
Caroline: Oh, yes, copper. Morley Robbins, great guy, really, really smart. Here’s the challenge that I have, and this is having learned about the relationships between minerals and understanding more and more about how natural ecosystems work. It’s absolutely true that modern humans struggle with iron and copper, and magnesium. Absolutely true, but I don’t believe that the way to supplement minerals is by taking single minerals, because here’s the interesting thing.
We’ve seen this many times over, so we’ll have someone come– We use a particular testing method.
How to Accurately Test for Mineral Deficiencies
Let’s talk about testing for a moment. How would you know if you were deficient in minerals? You could use something called hair tissue mineral analysis. If you dye your hair, you would not want to use that. You’d have to use hair from another place in your body. That’s a good stable method for understanding.
You want to understand what minerals are actually being utilized by your body, not just what’s running through your bloodstream. Sometimes they’ll do microbiome testing, poop test, and they’ll tell you how your minerals are doing, but that’s actually not a good way because that only tells you what you’ve eaten. It’s more ambient in your system over maybe 48, 72 hours. Same with your bloodstream. What you want to know is what’s in your cells.
The best test that I recommend is something called Oligoscan. Oligoscan is from France. It’s not a medical device in the US, but it is in Europe. It uses spectrophotometry, which is a technology used in material sciences. It shines a light into four places in your palm. It takes that information through an algorithm, and it delivers back the levels of all your beneficial minerals, electrolytes, heavy metals, actually vitamin levels.
It also gives you some other information about sulfur conjugation and free radical load in your body. It gives you some really good information. The question is, let’s say I get a test back and it says, “Oh, I’m low in magnesium.” By the way, lots of people who take salt-based electrolytes come and do the test, and they find they’re low in potassium or sodium or magnesium, and here they are taking them all the time. You have to ask, what’s really happening here?
When you take someone like that who has some either deep deficiencies or several, not super deep, but imbalances or deficiencies in some minerals, and you give them plant-based humic and fulvic minerals, it’s not overnight. It’s not days or weeks, but it’s weeks and months, over six months, and you test them again, and their minerals have balanced out. What I always say is if you have a very deep deficiency that’s impacting you right now, like you’re an athlete and you’re very low in magnesium, yes, it might be good for you to take
for a short term to bring that deficiency up.
Ultimately, what you want to do is take the full spectrum of minerals into your body in that balanced formulation, like pre-formulated, not by lab, but by nature into your body. Now you’re really putting small trace amounts, but you’re doing it continually, so your body gets all of the minerals that it needs in the natural ratios continually over time. Then it, this is the thing, is your body is a homeostasis engine. This is something you know very well.
It’s constantly working to gain and maintain homeostasis locally, in small areas, and throughout the entire system. Instead of using single minerals like copper or magnesium, putting those into your system to create balance, what you want is put the whole spectrum in those balanced ratios already, and now your body can do what it normally can do, what it actually has the capacity to do in its truly innate and infinite wisdom.
Ari: Caroline, this is fascinating stuff. I’m sure we could talk for another hour, going into depth on all this. Is there anything you want to leave people with? Also, it looks like you’re drinking your product there. You sent me some of it, by the way. Thank you. I appreciate that. I’ve been using it the past several weeks. I don’t know if I can attribute anything to it because I’m always experimenting with all kinds of stuff.
It’s hard to pinpoint any specific effect. Plus, I generally feel awesome most days. If I feel a little bit more awesome one day, and I’m experimenting with 10 different things that day, who knows what I can attribute it to. I am using it. You want to show people what it looks like there in your glass? It looks like maybe black tea or something like that.
Caroline: Like a dark tea, black tea, yes. It tastes just like water.
The Mineral Reset Book & Where to Find BEAM Minerals
Ari: It does not have a bad taste at all. Let people know what you want to leave them with, and tell them a little bit about your product line at Beam Minerals.
Caroline: The first thing I want to tell everybody about is all of these things that I’ve been talking about, I put into a book. The book is coming out in April of 2026, and it’s called The Mineral Reset. The book has a lot of what I’ve been talking to you about, kind of walks people through a whole new conceptual framework for minerals, how they work in their body, and how they might get replenished in a really effective way. Talks about how to find the right minerals for you. Talks about different chronic issues you might deal with, and how mineral depletion might be affecting that and how you might support those different health issues, as well as a mineral reset program that you can walk yourself through. If people want-
Ari: When does that book come out?
Caroline: It comes out at the end of April, 2026. You can find information about that at mineralresetbook.com.
Ari: Would you like me to try to release this podcast episode close to that date?
Caroline: That would be awesome. I would love that.
Ari: Sure.
Caroline: That would be excellent. I’m going to be doing a program starting at the end of May where I’m going to actually walk people through that in an online program, live. People can do live Q&A. With each book, you will receive an invitation to that as well. Would love people to get the book if they want to learn more about minerals and how they can help them with their chronic health issues, specifically.
They can also go to beamminerals.com. I always recommend to people, if you want to start using plant-based minerals, the best tool is our Advanced Set. That is two tools. One is called Electrolyze. Electrolyze is the fulvic product, and MicroBoost, which is the humic product. We have them separately for specific reasons. The fulvic product is about energy generation in your body. Here’s what I say. If you want more energy, the best energy on Earth is from the Earth, it’s minerals.
You want to take fulvic if you’re really struggling with energy, brain fog, those kinds of issues, because it’s going to quickly, over weeks, maybe in some cases, five, seven days, for some people who are really struggling with energy, they will begin to feel a difference. The humic is more about detoxification. What you want to do is first raise the energy up in your body and then slowly start putting in the humic, the MicroBoost product, over time, because some people who are very sensitive may have some detox responses with humic. It’s only a small percentage of people, but since COVID, it’s actually ticked up substantially. That’s it.
Ari: You said it’s beamminerals.com?
Caroline: Yes, beamminerals.com. It’s the Advanced Set. I can send you a link so we can get people linked directly to that.
Ari: Sure. That’d be great. Caroline, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed this discussion. These are obviously some fascinating molecules. I remember looking into the body of evidence on them a few years ago and seeing what you described here, which is that the body of evidence is somewhat limited. It’s really promising.
There’s some very exciting data, but it still looks like we need several more years of studying this to really identify how it’s working and all the different mechanisms and benefits and all of that. I’m using it myself. Thank you again for sending me some of your products to try out. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your accumulated knowledge and wisdom that you’ve gleaned over the years of studying this with my audience. I really appreciate it.
Caroline: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
02:05 – Caroline’s Story: Reversing Chronic Illness with Minerals
06:57 – The Root Cause of Low Energy & Why Medicine Ignores Minerals
12:19 – How Minerals Power Your Mitochondria (The Cellular Campfire)
15:47 – Macro vs. Trace Minerals & Soil
21:54 – Why Standard Mineral Supplements Don’t Absorb Well
28:09 – Humic & Fulvic Acid Explained: Ancient Plant-Based Minerals
32:15 – Humic Acid Benefits: Heavy Metal & Glyphosate Detox
36:41 – Fulvic Acid Benefits: Intracellular Mineral Delivery
55:10 – How to Accurately Test for Mineral Deficiencies
1:00:06 – The Mineral Reset Book & Where to Find BEAM Minerals
Links
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