In this episode, I am speaking with Dr. Joseph Mercola—a certified family physician and a pioneer in the natural medicine realm. We will talk about the biggest problems with health today, blood flow-restricted exercise, burning fat, deuterium depletion, vitamin D, and more.
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In this podcast, Dr. Mercola will cover:
- The difference between treating disease and creating health
- How his beliefs around health has evolved throughout his career
- The first steps towards a healthier nutrition
- The importance of mitochondria in health
- The SCARY statistics about nutrition consumption in the U.S.
- The potential dangers of EMFs
- How to use blood flow-restricted exercise to build muscle
- The biggest problem with studies on the ketogenic diet
- What deuterium is (and why the quantity of deuterium in the cell matters)
- The importance of vitamin D (and why getting vitamin D from the sun is the BEST way to increase vitamin D levels
- And much, much more!!!a
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Dr. Mercola on Blood Flow-Restricted Exercise, Burning Fat, Deuterium Depletion, Vitamin D, and more - Transcript
Ari Whitten: Everyone, welcome to the Energy Blueprint Podcast. I am your host Ari Whitten and today I have with me someone who is very near and dear to my heart because I have been learning from him literally since I was a teenager, I started following his website, one of the pioneers in natural medicine, Dr. Joseph Mercola. Just some quick tidbits about his background. There is a whole lot I could tell you here, but I will mention he is board certified in family medicine. He served as the Chairman of the Family Medicine Department at the St. Alexius Medical Center for five years. He is trained in both traditional and natural medicine. He was granted fellowship status by the American College of Nutrition in October of 2012. He is a New York times bestselling author and author of over 12 books and numerous peer review journal articles and he has been one of the leading thinkers in the natural medicine community for over two decades now. So welcome Dr. Mercola. Such a pleasure to have you.
Dr. Mercola: Well, thank you for having me, Ari. It is great to be here.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. So, I want to first start off by having you talk a bit about your background. You are obviously trained in traditional medicine initially. I am curious at what stage you sort of found yourself into more natural and holistic medicine. What is the story behind how you gravitated more towards that?
Dr. Mercola: Well, we could talk a long time about that, but there’s more important things to discuss. But briefly, I have always been interested in health. I started exercising in 1968 and have been exercising ever since. Unfortunately the first 40 years I made mistakes and now I think I have got a better strategy, but…
Ari Whitten: We will talk more about specifics there later.
Dr. Mercola: Yeah. So I went into school and I was the oddball because most of my classmates were there to treat disease and get people better from the conventional perspective. And I wanted to get people healthy. Imagine that. I was, I think I was the only one in my class who was like that. So I was really kind of branded an oddball. But nevertheless, I still swallowed the Kool-Aid and I became, came out a drug prescribing doctor. That was my primary modality. I had no natural interventions other than encouraging people to eat healthy, at least what my thought was at that time, which was seriously and fatally flawed and closer to what represents conventional thinking today. So I didn’t know anything about time restricted eating or the importance of a high fat diet and ketogenic diet cycling and all that.
So, but through a variety of circumstances I realized there was a whole network of physicians out there who were interested in natural medicine and had societies and meetings and, you know, basically followed a course of going once a month or sometimes more frequently, sometimes less frequently to these meetings and learning on the weekend. This is postgraduate training, and developing an expertise from that perspective, taking that knowledge back, sharing with my patients, getting them better. And eventually in the mid ’90s letting my patients know that if they were not interested in getting off of their medications, they needed to find a new doctor. So that vacated about 75% of my patients and which is the best thing that could happened. A little bit scary initially. But then I started seeing patients who wanted to get better and started getting a reputation locally and then in the state and across the country.
And then all of a sudden people were flying in from all over the world to see me. So that was the transition. Then I realized, close to the end of the last century that this information needed to be shared. And I have been passionate about technology for about as long as I have been exercising. And I took my first computer class in 1968. And, so I was an early adopter on the web. I was first online at about 1995. Back then when you had to do a modem. Actually, I was first online in 1977 when I was working as a transplant coordinator for the Illinois Kidney Preservation Laboratory, and I was responsible for finding the recipients of the donor, the kidney donors that we were harvesting, the kidneys that we were harvesting for transplant. So I used the internet back then and it was an interesting experience and…
Ari Whitten: I am curious what the heck the internet looked like in 1977?
Dr. Mercola: Well, I can tell you it wasn’t much different than when the first PCs came up. First of all the connection device was not an ethernet cable or wireless like it is today. It was a modem, a phone modem coupling. And typically the connection rates were ridiculously low. It was like 96 bauds per second.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, I remember that even in the ’90s that was the case.
Dr. Mercola: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it wasn’t much different. Was a telephone coupler, acoustic coupler that you had connected. And that was the only way until after, like it was towards the end of the ’90s that they switched to a different, an integrated modem actually within the circuit board. So, yeah, and then you had monochrome monitors, and it was big and it was, you know, there was no web interface. It didn’t exist. It was all just direct DOS prompts. So it was interesting.
The difference between treating and creating health
Ari Whitten: Got you. So, you made a distinction there in talking about your background which I think it is important to build this out a little bit more, this distinction between treating disease versus creating health. I think among the general public today, most people look to their MDs as sort of in possession of, you know, the most advanced knowledge that there is to do, you know, as far as everything, this all encompassing science around how to fix or heal or cure or reverse disease. Yet you are drawing this distinction between treating disease versus creating health. What is the difference for people who don’t understand that distinction?
Dr. Mercola: Yeah. It is an important concept. Thanks for highlighting that. And it is really quite foundational. And the concept is… An analogy might help explain it in a little more detail in that if you consider light and darkness, if you have light, you can’t have darkness. So similarly, if you are healthy, it is really hard to have a disease. So your body was designed by its very nature to optimize towards health. You have to go out of your way to get sick. Now, unfortunately, most of the marketing hype in the multinational corporations are all designed to maximize their profits and to essentially cause a catastrophe to your health with no consequences. All these processed foods and sodas and juices and glyphosate and Roundup and pesticides that are on your food, it is just designed to get you sick. And then the electromagnetic pollutions that we have that is increasing with the introduction of 5G.
So it is all designed… It is not natural. It is all of these unnatural processes. So, but if you provide your body what it needs with respect to the optimal diet, sleeping, times when you are not eating which is almost as important as what you are eating and getting the proper exercise and sunlight exposure and movement throughout the day, your body has no choice. Its genetic code will prompt you to get better. I mean there are some circumstances where you have certainly genetic defects which are not that common. Most of the problems, genetic problems are epigenetic manifestations, which can be relatively easily fixed if you know what you are doing. But there are a few circumstances where you have to have really advanced knowledge and even in those circumstances, most all conventional physicians have no clue. They are beyond clueless because they were never trained in the understandings of fundamental reasons why people get sick. All they are trained in, all they are trained in is symptomatic treatment with expensive bandaids, symptomatic bandaids that no way, shape or form treat the underlying causes of disease and will fail to stop the underlying disease from progressing. And the individuals will eventually die prematurely as a result of not addressing the cause.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Well, so first of all, I agree with everything you said there. I just want to highlight that I think a lot of these physicians are not necessarily going into it saying, “My goal is to, you know, treat symptoms and create bandaids.” They actually believe they are in pursuit and they are on the path to curing and reversing disease. I think that the distinction is…
Dr. Mercola: They are treating disease. I don’t know that they are thinking they are reversing. Maybe they are, I mean…
Ari Whitten: Well, I think they think they are on the path to, let’s say pharmaceutical cures for disease. So the distinction as I see it is like a philosophical, it is at the paradigm level. It is like one paradigm here says let’s study in as much detail all the biochemical mechanisms of this particular disease and then figure out what biochemicals are abnormal, what processes are sort of going awry, and then let’s develop a pharmaceutical intervention that interrupts this abnormal biochemical process. That is kind of that paradigm. And the paradigm you are talking about I think is, which I share with you, is fundamentally different, which is what are the factors that create health? And just as light banishes darkness, when you do the things that create health, you create homeostasis and better function through all of the different nodes of the network of the body and you optimize the entire system and then the body tends to reverse disease on its own.
Dr. Mercola: Yeah. Having gone through the conventional system, I can assure you with the highest degree of confidence that virtually every medical student goes into it for the right reasons. It is very few that want to be scamsters, fraudulent. And they truly sincerely desire to help people and get them better. But the system is absolutely designed to brainwash and manipulate them and push them in the pharmacological model. And they just have excluded all this nutritional, natural approaches from the curriculum over the last century, largely as a result of the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations at the turn of the 20th century in like the early 1900s.
How Dr. Mercola’s views have been changed over time
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Fascinating. So, you have been doing this for a very long time. You have had interest in exercise, natural health since you said the ’60s. I am curious, over that span of time, what have been the biggest things that, you know… Let’s say when you started mercola.com back in 1997, what were some of the things you were preaching then that you feel you were wrong about? And how have some of your views changed over that span of time? And maybe also what were you right about?
Dr. Mercola: I was right about a lot of things. Long before conventional medicine finally caught up, I am sort of proud of the fact that we were the first public voice to announce that Vioxx was going to kill people prematurely. I announced that in 1999 actually before Vioxx was introduced into the marketplace. You may or may not remember it.
Ari Whitten: I do remember it. Yeah.
Dr. Mercola: That was the drug that killed 60 million, no, 60,000 people not 60 million, 60,000 people dead from strokes. And it was very clear from the early studies that were published from Merck that this was going to be a catastrophe. And we warned people not to take it. So we were right about that. It took, of course, it took years before they finally came up and they voluntarily withdrew it from the market. But we actually catalyzed the interest in vitamin D which now is pretty widely adopted by even conventional medicine. Unfortunately they got it screwed up a bit. They are recommending supplements most of the case, most of the times when that is not the way you are supposed to optimize vitamin D levels. It is by exposing your skin to the sun, which the dermatologist will tell you will kill you prematurely by causing you to have melanoma which is…
Ari Whitten: Yeah. I want to flag that as something to come back to and build out more. But I will let you…
Dr. Mercola: So, you know, that is a key point that we were on. And the, you know, my views on diet have changed quite dramatically. In the late ’90s I was unaware of ketosis other than probably hearing about Atkins. Atkins published his main book in the late ’90s, early 2000s. And actually he passed away after I published my first book in 2004. And he was the most visited natural website and then we replaced him right after he passed away, I think. So we have been number one ever since, the most visited even to this day after the Google censure which hopefully we can talk about, too. So, you know, I have switched to cyclical ketogenesis, understood the importance of time restricted eating. I was clueless about and didn’t understand about partial fasting. I thought fasting itself was dangerous and really should be avoided like the plague. But then I didn’t, that is because I didn’t understand autophagy which is just nothing short of magical. And now I only eat four hours a day. And I encourage people to restrict their eating window to at least eight hours and preferably six. So that is almost as important as getting rid of soda and juice and switching over to healthy water. So those are, that is probably a highlight of the major components. There is a lot of other sub ones in there. I mean, I didn’t understand it when I first started. I mean, glyphosate was being used. It didn’t, I probably couldn’t have told you what it was in the late ’90s and gradually came to appreciate that it was one of the most pernicious toxins we have ever applied to the environment at the rate of about nearly 5 billion pounds a year annually, contaminating essentially the entire planet, devastating our environment. I mean, it is just, it can get pretty sad when you think all the things we are doing to damage. The plastic pollution and the microplastics gets into the food chain and eventually into you, which has devastating consequences. And then global warming. And, it is just, I mean we humans have done a pretty good job of destroying the environment and making it an uninhabited or a less than optimal place to live.
How the Google censorship affects health sites
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Your site, mercola.com has been the natural, the number one natural health website in the world.
Dr. Mercola: The most visited. Number one implies a subjective interpretation. But objectively we are the most visited natural health site.
Ari Whitten: Okay. So let’s go with those, a more objective wording.
Dr. Mercola: You can’t dispute the numbers.
Ari Whitten: Right. Now you have had, I think it is something like a hundred thousand articles that you have published over…
Dr. Mercola: Probably. I have lost track and it may not be that many. Sometimes we pull them, the real old ones. But we publish, we post three articles a day. So that is a thousand a year, over a thousand a year. Probably post a lot more than that. So over 20 years, that is 20,000. So it is probably somewhere between 50 and a 100,000 I would think.
Ari Whitten: Okay. Got you. And, so it is the most heavily traffic natural health website. Is it still that, or…?
Dr. Mercola: Yeah, it is.
Ari Whitten: Because what I want to talk about now is basically this massive Google censorship campaign that started…
Dr. Mercola: Yeah, to give you an idea, one somewhat objective barometer of the popularity of a website is as a site called Alexa by Amazon. I think it is alexa.com and you can go and look up the worldwide ranking of a site. So if you use those metrics, at one point we were in the top thousand sites in the world. And when, about that time there was 10 other natural health sites that were in the top 10,000. Now because of the Google censorship, we are the only site that is in the top 10,000 and our ranking is still under 9,000. But you know, we used to be consistently about two or 3,000 for many, many years until Google started hammering us and taking us out of the picture, which is, you know, it is part of their policy. It is not, I don’t want to say, “Woe is me,” because they are not just picking on me. They are doing this to many, many, actually most of the prominent natural health sites.
Ari Whitten: So, why? And it is Google, it is YouTube. I think Amazon has been involved…
Dr. Mercola: That is a good question. Well, Google owns YouTube. And essentially they are the number one and number two sites in the world, most traffic sites in the world, the entire world.
Ari Whitten: And I think Amazon has been in the mix here. So why is it…?
Dr. Mercola: Well, Amazon doesn’t, well they have a minimal amount of censoring with respect to taking some anti-vaccine movies out of their video streams. But they haven’t censored books. They are not at that level yet. I don’t think Amazon even approaches a fraction of the censorship that Google has.
Ari Whitten: Okay. So let’s just talk about Google and YouTube then. Why is Google censoring natural health websites? What is the sort of behind the scenes…?
Dr. Mercola: Well, guess what? I am not behind the scenes, so I don’t know. All we can tell very truthfully is that they are doing it. So the motivations for it, you know, you can only speculate on. It is interesting that now when you type in these terms to search for rather than finding sites like mine or mine specifically, you will find sites that are essentially monetizing Google because they have this, Google ads in them. So they are almost all pharmaceutical sites with Google ads on them. So you could speculate, you don’t know for sure because, you know, you are not in their boardroom why they are doing this. But it appears there may be a financial motivation and there… It is a risk. You know, they even warned of this risk when they first came out. And, you know, my site was out two years before Google started their site, by the way, just an interesting aside. And when they first, it was a very, I mean it really was a magnificent site. It was a world changing site. Because the problem early on, especially pre web, is to find something. How are you going to find it? Especially without a web interface like we have now. I mean, everything is on the internet. They think it is the world wide web, and you don’t say it anymore because it has been around for the last 10, 25 years. But before it was just a command prompt and it was, there was no graphics. It was just a line and you typed and you had to find, so it was really hard to do. And then even when you got the graphical interface, you would have to find stuff in… These original search engines were pretty bad. I mean, Yahoo being one of them.
Alta Vista was another and there was loads and they were just a bunch of garbage. They didn’t really provide good results and Google really changed all that. They had a [inaudible] and they did a good service for many, many years. And, but they ran the… I mean, anytime you, they acquired lots of power. They were probably one of the most, they are the most powerful monopoly, they are a monopoly, in the entire world. There has never been a monopoly in history like Google. Unfortunately, they are very clever, very sophisticated. They control many of the revolving doors meaning the federal regulatory agency. So for instance, the Department of Justice, which would be the appropriate federal agency to regulate them is now headed by one of the former Google lobbyists. So what can you do when the federal government is really manned by their former employees. You know, they are not going to do anything. So you have got the state Attorney Generals all seeking to file suit against Google, but it ultimately has to go through the Department of Justice. So I am not very hopeful that they are going to get very far because Google is clever. I mean they, you are not going to certainly see the FTC do anything from them and they have been fined billions and billions of dollars in Europe. But they have never been fined anything in the U S because they control the regulatory agency.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Now having said this is speculative, I am curious what is, what do you think Google has to gain by censoring natural health information?
Dr. Mercola: Well, it certainly benefits their advertisers. Essentially we are competition to them. The largest industry in the entire United States is…
Ari Whitten: Pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. Mercola: No, it is actually, well more generally it is health. Maybe a $3 trillion economy just in healthcare. Right? So, pharmaceuticals of course is a big chunk of that, but there is a lot of other chunks in there too. And when you have solutions that are relatively inexpensive, simple, effective, and radically reducing the cost, that is a threat to the bottom lines of many of these big companies.
Ari Whitten: Got you. Okay. Well, what do you plan to, I am just curious, what do you plan to do in response to this?
Dr. Mercola: Well, I feel it is my responsibility. You know, we have met, I have heard of you before, but we first met at Mindshare in San Diego a few months ago or less than a month ago, maybe a month or two ago, recently. And I heard a lot of stories there, and somewhat similar to ones you shared where I certainly inspired people like you to go out there and make a difference, make a dent. But then I also heard stories from people who specifically found my site and it changed their lives. It prevented them from a health disaster, from dying prematurely. It helped their child not do the same and recover from autism and essentially it changed their entire life when traditional medicine had failed them. And I have got story after story after story. Every time I go out and get these… I am not saying that to brag, I am just saying that the system works. When it was a free, non censored environment, people were free to choose and understand and try whatever they want. Now, that freedom is gone, it is censored. So the people, unless you knew about these options before the censorship, you are not going to do that. So I am incredibly powerfully motivated because it is not just my site, it is all these others. Your site, I don’t know if you were affected yet…
Ari Whitten: Yeah, I have been hit a little bit by it, but I think I am not… My site does not have enough organic traffic to be really on their radar like yours was…
Dr. Mercola: You will be. Yeah, so they will get all of us, you know? And I am so grateful that there’s many other people like you that have gone out and really spreading the truth. It doesn’t have to be me. It just has to be the truth. That was the intention. The mission was to minimize needless pain and suffering and premature death. I mean, and that is what you can do with these [inaudible] as you well know. So my, one of my new goals, and I think we are going to do it, I have just had a long call this morning with my chief programmer. We are going to spin off a search engine and it is going to be a simple engine. It is going to be by invitation only. So sites like yours can come in and probably pay a minimal fee, like you pay a domain registration fee of $1,500 a year to pay for the cost. And then we index everything. And essentially we will have, every site is invited unless they are a pharmaceutically based site. And it will just be health, that is it. No other things is not going to be [crosstalk].
Ari Whitten: Beautiful. I love that idea.
Dr. Mercola: It has to relate to health. And it could be mind, body, spirit. So it could be meditation, other strategies that you can use. It is not going to be restricted to diet or exercise or anything like that. But any… It is a pretty broad category. And we hope to have some system in there where it could be self policed. And the beautiful thing about this is that there will be no violation of your privacy. Your data will not be sold and it is going to be free to the users. And what was the other component? Oh. And then people can report fraudulent sites or sites that are spamming or doing something illegal so they can be removed. So, that is an issue, unfortunately, you know, human nature tends toward that. There is going to be a lot of, not a lot, but some people who are going to want to take advantage of the system and we have to exclude those.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Beautiful. So basically the vision is like to create THE health search engine for people who are interested in answers to health and have some awareness around the fact that there are natural health options. This is to create a place where they can get those answers.
Dr. Mercola: Yeah. And the other thing I have neglected to mention is there will be no advertising. So you are not going to see Google ads on the side. So no advertising, preserve your privacy. So it is going to be free to user. You don’t have to pay anything to use it. And we are just going to, not monetize it, but we are going to pay for it by charging the people who have websites on there and we hope to have thousands, hundreds of thousands of websites available in it and launch this, I don’t know, it might take a year or two years to put together. But I am pretty hopeful we will do it. Essentially what we are seeking to replicate is Google in the old days. That is what it is. Except only it is restricted to health. So in the old days, Google did not have ads and they didn’t violate your privacy, but you know, they figured, you know, eventually they did. That is where they are at today.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Beautiful. I love that. I am looking forward to how I can support your efforts in that regard in any way.
Dr. Mercola: Well, we will certainly let you know and you can let all your readers know that hopefully within a year, but it might take longer. It might take two or three years. I don’t know. I mean we are just at the beginning stages. Ever since Mindshare was over we have been working on it. So…
How metabolic flexibility fits into health creation
Ari Whitten: Beautiful. So I want to dig into some specific health topics right now. Can you kind of quickly paint the big picture overview of how you now conceptualize kind of the fundamental drivers of disease or the fundamental drivers of health, however you want to talk about kind of the big picture paradigm. And also I am curious, maybe you can kind of put special emphasis on where you see mitochondria fitting into that paradigm because I want to dig into a couple mitochondria specific topics.
Dr. Mercola: Yeah. Mitochondria I believe, and I suspect your viewers and listeners know what they are so I won’t go into a detailed description of what they are, but it is my view that they are pretty much one of the most foundational pieces of why you are healthy or sick. It is mitochondrial dysfunction. Certainly we know from the pioneering work of Dr. Thomas Seyfried, that the primary reason of cancer which is one of the primary killers of people is when you have mitochondrial dysfunction. So I became intrigued with this when I first learned of Dr. Seyfried’s work and started just devouring information and learning this. And every time I see something that improves mitochondrial function I get passionate about it. And there is lots of things that can do that. So what are they? Well, the first thing is that you want to be metabolically flexible.
And interestingly, I have been promoting this for many years. When I first learned about insulin resistance from one of my early mentors, Dr. Ron Rosedale in 1995. That was a long time ago now, 25 years ago. And we had a little lecture, about 20 people in Chicago. And it was a new topic at that time. Virtually no one knew about insulin resistance. We just didn’t. So I had radical improvements when I integrated that concept in the people, in some of my patient population. But, so that is one of the things that will improve it. But essentially when you are insulin resistant, you lose metabolic flexibility, the ability to burn fat or carbohydrates seamlessly and the ability to switch back and forth and to be able to generate a water-soluble fat that can fuel your brain and radically lower oxidative stress, which is ketones. So you can’t make ketones well, if at all, if you are insulin resistant.
So that is the first one. And you do that by minimizing processed foods, which is probably one of the simplest strategies you can have. You know, 95 or 90% of the food people eat are processed and two thirds of the foods that people eat in United States, which is not surprising if you ever go to the grocery store and look at what is in people’s carts, is ultra processed foods. What is an ultra processed food? It is food you can buy in the gas station. Two thirds of what people eat. It is crazy. So I mean that is certainly a fundamental component. And within that food, there is beverages. And so one of the first and most important strategies is foundational, stop soda, stop fruit juices because they are pretty similar. So you don’t want to drink solid sugar like 8, 12 teaspoons of sugar in a liquid because that is even worse than eating it.
Food. So that is a good strategy. But, and food is, or diet is certainly controversial. But what I don’t think is controversial is time restricted eating, is when you are not eating may be just as important as what you are eating because there is loads of animal data that show pretty clearly and convincingly that you can feed the standard crappy American diet to rats or mice and let them have free access to that the entire day versus restricting it to only a few hours a day. And you will see dramatic changes in the longevity and the health of those animals. Same food, same food…
Ari Whitten: I would say, you said it is kind of not controversial. I would say just maybe four or five years ago when I first started talking about that concept, maybe actually six years ago, I was actually encountering a lot of resistance to the idea from people in the evidence-based fitness community, evidence-based nutrition communities where I was hearing a lot of people saying, “Oh no, that is pseudoscience, you know, it doesn’t matter when you eat. Calories is just, you know, overall energy balance. Calories in, calories out is what matters and it doesn’t matter if you eat late at night or how long your feeding and fasting windows are.” And I was like, “You know, we still need more data for sure, but there is a lot of research rapidly piling up that is pointing in this direction and I think you guys are going to turn out to be wrong on this.”
Dr. Mercola: No, they have turned out… In my view, there is no controversy. I mean…
Ari Whitten: Not anymore. Yeah, I agree with you.
Dr. Mercola: If someone is disagreeing with it, I think that the evidence is overwhelming showing that this is true. Satchin Panda, p-a-n-d-a, out of the Salk Institute in California has done some of the most, the best work. I love him as a researcher. Great book. I think he has written on circadian clock, his most recent book. So, you know, so time restricted eating, of course focusing on the foods and then exercise is key. And you know, I have only seen you on Podcasts prior to meeting in person at Mindshare. I was really impressed with how you really understand exercise. So congratulations on doing that.
Ari Whitten: Thank you.
Dr. Mercola: Yeah, it is really in my view one of the key strategies. I mean diet is first, there is no question because you can’t out exercise your mouth is what I was trying to remember. So you could exercise the best way possible and you eat poorly and at the wrong time, you are going to still sabotage yourself. So it is, you have got to get the diet down first. But if you are just doing that and not exercising, you are just asking for trouble. Especially as you get older. The older you get, the more important it becomes. There are a lot of very good reasons, all relating to mitochondria.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Now I want to go on a quick digression about like keto and low carb diets, high fat diets…
Dr. Mercola: Oh, we can go there and one other, something recent I certainly was clueless about, not necessarily clueless because I knew about it in the ’90s, was the dangers of EMFs. Because you know, it is so darn convenient, cell phones and wireless. But you may remember that our access to the internet initially was all through a wire. There was no wireless internet. Now it is almost 99.9% wireless. So there is some dangers in that. And I have written, my next book that comes out in February is called “EMFs.” I talk about 5G and all the biological damage that happens. So that isn’t, the reason I wanted to put that in here, is it another variable that will contribute to your health. So you can do all these things right, have the perfect diet, perfect timing, exercise, eating the right foods and sleeping and moving, but if you have lots of EMF exposure that can absolutely trash your mitochondria and cause massive mitochondrial dysfunction and accelerate disease and death.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. And we will also lump sunlight in here as you mentioned, too, earlier with vitamin D and the importance of exposure.
Dr. Mercola: Well, and even more important than vitamin D may be near infrared, which it powers up the mitochondria through very specific mechanisms.
Ari Whitten: Yes, indeed. I agree with you. I have written a book on it, so…
Dr. Mercola: Okay. All right, we are in agreement.
The science on the ketogenic diet
Ari Whitten: Yeah. So I want to dig into the low carb, high fat, keto stuff. There was, so there has been a number of studies as you are probably aware of, especially in the last few years, for example, calorie controlled metabolic ward studies where they compare like low carb/high fat diets to low fat/higher carb diets of equal calories, equal amounts of fat loss. There was a brand new review of studies that just came out I think last month or maybe even this month, maybe September, 2019, that basically is showing there is no difference in longterm outcomes between low carb and higher carb, lower fat diets in terms of weight loss. And then there is kind of more nuances to it. They can look at risk of various diseases.
There is also potentially, there is some concern being expressed around potentially increased LDL. And I know Dr. Michael Greger has written, you know, there is kind of a lot of people in the vegan community kind of bashing the keto diet, talking about, you know, increases in toxic metabolites like methoxy glyoxal and things like that. So there is widespread disagreement about the value of keto. Everything from keto is kind of a panacea, to keto is really bad for you and it is going to give you heart disease. So why are you such an advocate of low carb…
Dr. Mercola: Let me keep it simple. Most of the studies you cited are fatally flawed because when you go into the materials and methods section, you will find, and look at the details of what they are feeding these animals. I mean, it is really terrible food, [crosstalk].
Ari Whitten: Well, it is humans in this case,
Dr. Mercola: It is still the same. They are eating processed vegetable oils, one of the most pernicious food you could possibly eat. You know, high fat might be sunflower, or corn oil is GMO and loaded with other additives and glyphosate. So you have got to be careful about that. So, you know, I would dispute most of those studies. And then with respect to the saturated fat and the dangers of LDL elevation, because you can get that with keto, there is no question. But here is… I have a good friend whose name is Paul Saladino. He is a physician, I suspect you have heard of him. And if anyone is interested in more details, I would defer to him and he has got some great podcasts. He just recently interviewed Tommy Wood who is an MD, PhD and he discussed this very topic. The problem with an elevated cholesterol, elevated LDL or LPA is that it really almost doesn’t matter because the way that, the mechanism that they cause biological molecular damage only seems to occur when there is insulin resistance. If you don’t have insulin resistance, if you are insulin sensitive and you are metabolically flexible and you have an elevated LDL it is not going to cause a problem. The studies which show those complications were never done in insulin sensitive patients. That is the confusing variable that is never discussed.
Ari Whitten: So, can people identify that, just, you know, a standard blood test tells them fasting blood sugar HbA1c. Can that be, you know, kind of their clue as to whether their elevated LDL is a concern or not?
Dr. Mercola: Actually, the best description of metabolic flexibility, secondary to insulin sensitivity would be the ability to generate ketones. So then if you could measure your ketones, the best way and the most accurate way is by blood, and see what your level is when you wake up in the morning. If it is above 0.3 at least, but ideally above 0.5 or higher, the higher the better. Well, not necessarily, but if it is above 0.5, you are flexible so you are not insulin resistant. There is no way you are going to generate that ketone level if you were. So that is probably the most accurate way rather than… I mean, there are some very sophisticated and some blood clamping techniques that you could use and there is a book written by a deceased, a pathologist called Joseph Kraft, k-r-a-f-t, that you can look up on Google. And I think it is something about diabetes in the title. And he does go through I think a four or six hour oral glucose tolerance test, which you also measure insulin. So it is a six hour pain-in-the-butt test to do and you are swallowing 75 grams of glucose so it is not the healthiest thing. But if you really want to know, you can do it and he has got graphs and tells you how to interpret the test.
The health benefits of deuterium depletion
Ari Whitten: Got you. One of the things you mentioned as we were talking just before I started recording is deuterium and deuterium depletion. And you are very excited about the fact that we can measure deuterium in ourselves now and that it may be a really great indicator of mitochondrial function, which is important because, well, mitochondria, as you said are, I agree with you, are the crux of health and risk of disease more broadly. Of course energy, they are our cellular energy generators so they are very important, you know, for everybody listening in to this. What is deuterium for people who have never heard of it and why would the amount of deuterium in ourselves matter to our health?
Dr. Mercola: Well, probably, well over 95% of people, maybe 99% of people watching this or listening have not heard of it. Deuterium is quite simply something called heavy water, which is essentially a hydrogen atom, a-t-o-m, that has an additional neutron. So it has got two neutrons and it is twice as heavy…neutron?
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Dr. Mercola: I know it is a neutron but I don’t know if it has two.
Ari Whitten: I think it is one, if I remember correctly.
Dr. Mercola: Yeah, one neutron, right. Yeah. Two neutrons would be tritium, I think so. Essentially it is twice as heavy and it is twice as big, physically is twice the size. So why is that an issue? Well, the way mitochondria, most people don’t understand the way mitochondria generate energy. They know they create ATP, but how? Well, carbohydrates or fats are essentially converted to a molecule called acetyl-CoA, and then it is shuttled into the mitochondria.
Then these electrons are shuttled through the electron transport chain embedded in the inner mitochondrial membrane, eventually shuttled down to the last cytochrome which is ATP synthase and essentially creates this hydrogen ion gradient. And this hydrogen ion, which is regular hydrogen, not deuterium, regular hydrogen then goes through this nanomotor, which is the cytochrome 5 and once it pops out of there it creates an ATP because of this hydrogen gradient. Now that is all fine with regular hydrogen. But the water we drink, the food we eat is sometimes higher. But most of it is at least 155 parts per million. So one in every 15,000 of these hydrogen atoms is going to be deuterium. And what happens is these nanomotors scream around at about 9,000 revolutions per minute, and it is kind of like a transmission on a Porsche and putting a ball bearing in that transmission. You can imagine in your mind what would happen.
It just destroys it. I mean it, and thankfully you have got thousands of these nanomotors in your mitochondria and you have got hundreds of mitochondria in your cells. But if you start consistently having or lose the ability to deplete your deuterium, which is a function of how well your mitochondria work, because when your mitochondria stop working well, it can’t create the deuterium depleted water. And that essentially causes the mitochondria to die prematurely and you go into mitochondrial senescence and then you lose them. And once you lose a critical amount, you know, your health declines quite dramatically. So it is not something like cigarette smoking, it kills you after a cigarette or two, but over a lifetime it appears to be problematic. And the healthier you are, the more ability you have to deplete deuterium from the food you eat and the lower your deuterium levels are. And there are very, very expensive ways to reduce it artificially by drinking deuterium depleted water. But for most people, it is just not practical because it would cost you well over $10,000 a year to do that.
Ari Whitten: So let me just, there is a distinction here I want people to get, because there is even people talking about deuterium depleted water now and that might be something someone is aware of. I was just interviewing a cancer researcher yesterday and he was talking about the trials around deuterium depleted water in cancer.
Dr. Mercola: I agree, it will work.
Ari Whitten: But as you said, this is something people may not know, even if they have heard of deuterium depleted water, that our mitochondria in our cells can help deplete deuterium at the cellular level. And therefore the accumulation of deuterium at the cellular level is kind of an indication of our mitochondrial health.
Dr. Mercola: Yeah, I think it may be, the research is in its embryonic stages, but I think, my best guess is it may be one of the best indicators of mitochondrial function. Your ability to take deuterium out of your body indicates how healthy your cells are. And fortunately there are some tests now, some pretty good reliable, consistent labs that can show you pretty carefully what your deuterium is.
Ari Whitten: So this is news to me that you can actually measure it. Do you want to mention the name of some of these labs that you can get this test done?
Dr. Mercola: I don’t remember the name because it is a relatively small lab. It just started and it is out of Denver or Boulder, Colorado. And I am very impressed with it. The other primary one is, I think DDW or DDT Testing, which is the UCLA lab in California with Dr. Que Collins, I think his name is, who does a breath test, which I don’t like as much. The saliva test is much easier to do and it seems to be more consistent and reliable.
Ari Whitten: Okay. Well I will connect with you after the Podcast [crosstalk].
Dr. Mercola: Yeah, I will give you his name and you can put the, post the details on the site. I just don’t remember off hand.
Ari Whitten: We will link to it…
Dr. Mercola: Actually, I mean I only emailed the founder and owner, so I don’t know what his lab is called.
Ari Whitten: Okay. So we will link to it at theenergyblueprint.com/mercola. So if you go there, we will have a link to it on that page. So, what did you find? You did a test on yourself, what did you find about your own deuterium levels?
Dr. Mercola: I just found out yesterday. And the lab, when they reported to me, the results back to me, were astonished. I had the second lowest reading they ever measured. And normally you would only get a reading at that level if you had been on the deuterium depleted water for a few months, like four months. I was only on it for two weeks, so I will probably have the record at least from their lab when I am on it for a longer time. And I think it is because of all the strategies I do and I don’t know which one it is. It might be worth an experiment to see which one it is specifically. Because as I said, I have been passionate about optimizing mitochondrial function because it is, there is little doubt in my mind that is the key to optimizing your health and just essentially immunizing yourself against disease and dysfunction. It is so hard to get sick if your mitochondria are healthy. Now that, you know, that is from a physical perspective. Emotional challenges and stressors are another component and they certainly impact mitochondrial function. But you know, the physical thing…
Ari Whitten: There is a, I did a great Podcast recently with Dr. Martin Picard. I don’t know if you are familiar with him. He is a pioneer in the field of mitochondrial psychobiology, which is the link between…
Dr. Mercola: No, that makes sense. I have never heard of that before.
Ari Whitten: Psychology and emotion. So I will email you some of these studies. You would love them. They are, you will find them fascinating.
Dr. Mercola: It makes perfect sense.
The importance of sunlight
Ari Whitten: Yeah. But it is really interesting stuff looking at the link between the mind and the mitochondria very directly. So I want to loop back to something you mentioned in passing before, which is sunlight and vitamin D. And you mentioned how conventional medicine is kind of more aware of vitamin D, but now they are just focused on supplements and you are kind of pointing out the importance of light exposure on the skin. I am a big proponent of the fact that the benefits of sunlight go way beyond vitamin D only. And so, you know, it is important that we don’t just reduce down the effects of sunlight to just vitamin D. To loop this into what we were just talking about, in the Podcast I was recording with a cancer researcher yesterday, he was talking about the ability of sunlight to guess what, deplete deuterium at the cellular level.
Dr. Mercola: Absolutely.
Ari Whitten: So, you know, just to kind of tie in some of these connections, but can you talk a bit about the importance of, you know, how you see sunlight fitting into this picture of health and why it is, why you can’t just replace sunlight with vitamin D pills?
Dr. Mercola: Well, certainly vitamin D, I mean it is clearly, it is probably one of the most important vitamins, although most experts would not call it a vitamin. It is really a hormone because it is a precursor of most of our steroid hormones. So essential, you got to have that. But in addition to that, as I mentioned earlier, the near infrared, which is about 40% of the radiation of sunlight powers our mitochondria. I believe it is, I used to remember the cytochrome it hit…
Ari Whitten: Cytochrome c oxidase.
Dr. Mercola: Is it c oxidase? Yeah, but I forget the number, I think it is 3. No, I think cytochrome c is the cytochrome and the oxidase is the enzyme that functions on the cytochrome. So it powers up the cytochrome c to essentially improve the function of that electron transport chain to shuttle the electrons through to ultimately generate the ATP.
So that is one thing. And then also additionally, the ultraviolet A radiation, I believe, is what can stimulate the synthesis of nitric oxide, a free radical, but actually very potent and necessary free radical to improve vascular health and improve vasodilation and decrease your risk of blood pressure and stroke, high blood pressure and stroke. So, you know, it is a really good way to do that is just regular sun exposure. And then of course, the photo biology of it going into your retina. We know real clearly from, this is known for decades now that people go through what is called SAD, seasonal affective disorder and that is typically a loss of exposure to enough bright light in the winter. So regular exposure to bright light outdoors, it would be better than inside with artificial light, could go a long way to improving your mental health, too. And it actually seems to be even better than medication if that is the actual cause of the depression.
Blood Flow-Restricted Exercise
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Beautiful. I want to make sure we have time to get into this. One of the things you alluded to earlier is that you were mistaken about the types of exercise that you were doing early on and you feel you have a much better approach now. So, tell me about what you were wrong about and what you are doing now as far as exercise.
Dr. Mercola: Well, I like many other cardio exercisers, Mark Sisson being sort of the classic example, who was pretty much a world class athlete I think qualified for the Olympic trials or I think the Olympic team in 1980 but didn’t go because of the boycott with Russia. Very, very competitive athlete, ran a sub 2:20 marathon, I think. He and many others like him developed, did this chronic cardio. We didn’t know back in the ’70s and ’80s that this was an issue and they developed eventually these chronic cardiac and sometimes even fatal arrhythmias. And you have to go on medications for them because it just, it was a good exercise but it was too much of a good thing. So, and as you age, I mean, we have all seen the classic picture of the marathoner versus the sprinter, which one would you rather look like? Right? Who wants to look like a marathoner? When I looked at this sprinter, like Usain Bolt, I mean, gosh. There is an interesting Netflix documentary on him which is pretty interesting to watch. But, the guy is, he is ripped because he is engaged in these exercises that build muscle mass. And the older you get, the more important that becomes. And if you are just engaging in chronic cardio, you are not going to have large muscle mass. And you will eventually, more than likely, especially if you are a woman, develop sarcopenia.
And what is sarcopenia? Comes from two Greek words, “sarcs” meaning flesh, “penia” meaning poverty. And essentially you don’t have enough muscle mass. And people over 60, it is about 25% develop this. And if you are over 80, it is like 60%. So it is like you are almost going to get it. And why is it important? Because it is not just that you want to look good. It is a metabolic organ. It makes cytokines, it makes myokines. It actually, it holds your glucose after you eat. The biggest deposits of your glucose when you eat is into your muscles, 80% of it. So as a result, it helps improve your insulin sensitivity. So you need a lot of muscle mass. It is actually a reservoir, too. So if you get sick and many people will and they will have to go into the hospital. You know, a lot of people who go into the hospital never come out alive.
I mean, it is a dangerous proposition going in there. And I am not saying it to scare, put the fear of god into people, but you really need to be careful. If you have to go in a hospital, someone you love goes in. Ideally you need to be at their bedside continuously because medical mistakes are a leading cause of death. These people aren’t out to kill those people intentionally, but they happen. And the wrong medication, given in the wrong dose, can easily kill someone and does every day, every day people die from it. And I am sure most people watching this knows someone that this happened to. So, but even if you didn’t have a medical mistake, you are still going to have stress on your body and need a reserve. And if you don’t have this reserve, the likelihood of you coming out alive decreases quite dramatically.
So, and the studies are beyond clear. Those with higher muscle mass do far, far better when they come out on the other side of the hospital. So you want it as protection, it is your bank account. So, and plus it allows you to engage in life and increases your health span. So who cares how long we live if we are crippled up and our brain is gone, you know, and we are in a walker or wheelchair which is even worse. That is not a life. You want to be able to engage in the activities you did when you were 40, 50 years old without pain. And that is doable. There was like not a micro doubt in my mind that it is doable but it is only going to be accomplished if you are engaging in some type of activity that is going to provide you with increased muscle mass. And what we have known is that conventional strength training can do it.
Certainly that 70 to 85% of your one rep max is the typical definition by the American College of Sports Medicine. And that works. That is a lot of weight for most people and most elderly people that have sarcopenia, there is no way in the world they are going to be able to lift that. Or if they are injured or if they are crippled or disabled, paraplegic, quadriplegic, you are not going to be able to do that. So there is an alternative, something I just learned about recently. It is called blood flow restriction training, BFR. Initially developed in Japan about, over 50 years ago and called KAATSU over there, k-a-a-t-s-u. And came to the US literally within this decade, even though it was developed 50 years ago. It didn’t get to the US until this decade. It is literally only seven, eight years old in the United States. So that is why many people don’t know of it. And there’s a lot of derivatives of it.
You know, we only have a few minutes. I mean, I could lecture on this for three hours, but the metabolic benefits are profound. It is just, it is close to magic and only requires like 15 minutes. Instead of using these heavyweights at 70 to 85%, you are using like 20% of your one rep max. So for most people watching this, it might be meaning do bicep curls with 10 pounds. If you are a woman, it might be five pounds, but you do a lot of reps. So instead of doing eight reps, you are going to do like 30, rest a few seconds and do 30 more and do like ultimately like 90 reps.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, we shouldn’t give people too much of an impression that it is just about lighter weights and easier because it is quite painful…
Dr. Mercola: Have you done it before, Ari? Have you done it?
Ari Whitten: Yeah. I bought tourniquets years ago and was doing all kinds of experimenting.
Dr. Mercola: Yeah, it should not be a tourniquet. That is a really important distinction. I am glad you mentioned it because a tourniquet could cause problems. You could actually increase the risk of a blood clot and could also increase a hypertensive crisis and stroke. So this is a restriction. So your arterial flow is only reduced by 50% so it is not a tourniquet. That is dangerous…
Ari Whitten: No, no, no. To be clear I am not saying that I used tourniquets in the tourniquet way. I am saying…
Dr. Mercola: I just didn’t want to confusion you because I don’t want to hurt people.
Ari Whitten: No, I agree. But actually there is a lot of, for example, bodybuilders using, who use tourniquets in the gym, just the little devices. But obviously you don’t use them to completely cut off blood flow, which would be a really bad idea.
Dr. Mercola: Some people do, some of these physical therapists are using them like that. That is a whole another area. But anyway, I have written, I was so massively impressed with the results when I first started it and I didn’t believe what the people who sold me the equipment were telling me, they just didn’t seem grounded in science.
So I spent three months and scoured the literature, read hundreds of papers and wrote a 25 page summary of the science behind it and I am going to get it published in a peer review journal. So I have done that. I have created videos, I have got specific detailed instructions and you can get them for free on my website by simply typing in bfr.mercola.com.
Ari Whitten: Great.
Dr. Mercola: So you can get all of that and I have got lectures that I have done before on this and the paper that I am hoping to publish real soon. So because it is just extraordinary the way it does it. It not only improves muscle mass, but it improves STEM cell activation, STEM cell function. It increases a hormone called vascular endothelial growth factor, VEGF, which is essentially fertilizer for your blood vessels. And it increases another hormone called BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is fertilizer for your brain.
So it just, mental clarity, vascular function, reduces your risk for stroke, Alzheimer’s, heart disease. It is like an, it is a true immunization against disease. It is crazy good. Not to say you couldn’t get the same benefits with conventional strength training. Like Ari, you really wouldn’t need this. I mean you can use it, but you don’t need it. Most of the people watching this need it because they cannot do what you can do.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Dr. Mercola, I want to be sensitive to your time, but do you have five more minutes because there is still one more topic that I would like to cover?
Dr. Mercola: Sure, sure.
The potential dangers of EMFs
Ari Whitten: Okay. So EMFs, you mentioned this in passing already. I really haven’t developed a super strong stance on this because I have seen some just conflicting research summaries, some definitely suggesting harm. Other research basically saying, “Hey, this is benign.” And, you know, some experts basically saying, “Hey, this is all just fear mongering and conspiracy theory.” So…
Dr. Mercola: Like Dr. Oz did today, this morning.
Ari Whitten: Oh really? So why, you know, your next book is on this, so why are you convinced that is a big factor.
Dr. Mercola: Well, Ari, I held exactly your position until about three years ago because it is so darn convenient. And you know, who wants to sacrifice this when it is controversial? You know, they have created doubt. You know, it is, you know it is exactly what they did with tobacco. There is a book and a movie called, “Merchants of Doubt,” and there’s other books that are similar to that, and they describe the whole process. That is what the industry does. The similarities between this and tobacco are so profound and it is actually a whole chapter in my book. And, they have essentially, the wireless industry is huge. It is pretty much the same size as the pharmaceutical industry.
People don’t know that. And just like Google, they have a revolving door and they bought out most of the federal regulatory agencies and the public health authorities. They are not going to tell you the truth because these are conflicted and corrupted regulatory agencies. They are just not out there for your health. And that is why there is this confusion, which is a classic strategy to create doubt and just dismiss it and to use it because it is so convenient. Everyone else is using it. No one is saying about, the media doesn’t tell you, the public health authorities don’t say anything and questioning the science. But if you carefully look at it, you will see there are thousands of studies that clearly document this. And I go into the specific biological mechanisms and guess what they do, guess what they damage the most? The mitochondria. And they do it in a way that is almost identical to the way ionizing radiation, which is x-rays and gamma rays and radioactive isotopes from like radium would do. Is that, and there is no controversy there that they cause damage. People have to wear sensors to monitor their exposure. But the way that that creates it is there is enough energy in that radiation to actually directly break and damage the DNA bond. But most of the damage comes from creating indirect damage to DNA, which is through the hydroxyl radicals in the nucleus itself. But the non ionizing radiation, which is your cell phone and wireless router, it does the same thing. It just doesn’t do it with hydroxyl radicals. It does it with something called carbonate radicals because it increases the level of a free radical that virtually no one has heard of, which is called peroxynitrite. It is not reactive oxygen species, it is reactive nitrogen species.
And it does it through a mechanism that is still theoretical at this point. But objectively, we clearly see this massive increase in oxidative damage that causes damage to the DNA. And there is just no question. And people know it, they just don’t put the two and two together. You know, all the people they know that have had breast cancer exactly where the woman was putting the phone in her bra or the person who died from a glioblastoma, like, the most recent was McCain, John McCain and then Ted Kennedy before him, you know, right where they were putting their phone. So this is, it is not rocket science if you think about it. And there is a very compelling story that I talk about in my book, which is called “EMFs”. It comes out in February. And, so the point of the book is not to create fear in people, but to let them know it is an issue.
And in fact, if you do all these other strategies that we talked about earlier, and you improve your health and you have got good mitochondrial function and you live in a pretty relatively free, EMF free sanctuary and you are sleeping in an EMF guarded environment every night, then when you go out into the world and you are exposed by this unavoidable exposure, EMFs, which is exponentially increasing. And you may not know that SpaceX and I think it is Amazon are launching 15,000 satellites in the next few years to shower the entire country with internet service. It is going to be everywhere. And then you have got the 5G…
Ari Whitten: The entire country or the entire world? Just the United States?
Dr. Mercola: The entire world, but certainly the entire US that, I am sure that is most of your audiences is in the US. I mean, it is going to be, mostly, it is going to hit the Northern countries first and it is going to be the south.
So it is coming. And so the key is to stay healthy and to guard your sanctuary, your home. So I have put together the most important chapter in the book that comes out as chapter seven, which is how to remediate. And I have taken the highlights of the book and I have put it, it is a free report that I have available now literally months before the book comes out. And the publisher provided me the opportunity to give this because I just… The book was primarily written to share the information. It is not a moneymaker. I mean what so they sell… Books are $15. I mean I don’t make a lot of money when you sell a book for $15. So anyway, the report is free. It is at emf.mercola.com and you just go there and get the free report.
Ari Whitten: Beautiful. Well, Dr. Mercola, thank you so much for your time. I have really, really enjoyed connecting with you. Thank you for the work you do. You inspired me 20 years ago when I was a teenager just starting to learn about health and nutrition. So thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Mercola: Well thank you for picking up the torch and spreading the message because it is people like you, that is exactly what we need and that was my hope… I wasn’t seeking to be the white knight in shining armor. I knew this was going to be a collaborative effort. We needed to inspire lots of people like you that knew the truth and spread it in different ways to people that I would never reach.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you for the a few extra minutes here and I hope to connect with you again for part two.
Dr. Mercola: All right. Thanks.
Dr. Mercola on Blood Flow-Restricted Exercise, Burning Fat, Deuterium Depletion, Vitamin D, and more – Show Notes
The difference between treating and creating health (5:14)
How Dr. Mercola’s views have been changed over time (11:19)
How the Google censorship affects health sites (14:12)
How metabolic flexibility fits into health creation ( 24:54)
The science on the ketogenic diet (32:02)
The health benefits of deuterium depletion (46:24)
The importance of sunlight (43:39)
Blood Flow-Restricted Exercise (46:42)
The potential dangers of EMFs (54:43)
Links
