Health & Fitness

The Hollywood star has recently been spotted back home in LA, following his emergency trip to Queensland's St. Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital. 

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If you're interested in healthy living, you won't want to miss this interview with anti-aging scientist James Clement, author of "The Switch: Ignite Your Metabolism With Intermittent Fasting, Protein Cycling, and Keto," While a lawyer by trade, he has since transitioned into a full-time research position, running his own antiaging research laboratory.

From Lawyer to Full-Time Researcher

Clement wrote "The Switch" because he saw that many still don't understand the basics of health and longevity. The "switch" refers to the switch between activating and deactivating the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway, which is the central topic of discussion here. His book also covers how to upregulate your mitochondrial function and other important pathways for health and longevity, such as NAD+.

"For [as long as] I can remember, I've always been interested in longevity," Clement says. "I just didn't know that there was a field that dealt with [longevity] until Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw's book, 'Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach,' came out in 1982.

I happened to be a third-year law student at the time, married to another law student. As soon as I read the book, which I did in like two days, I said, 'I'm going to be a molecular biologist.' She jokingly said, 'No. You aren't.' But I did start reading molecular biology. I became very passionate about keeping up with antiaging science.

I was lucky enough in 2009 to get on the board of the first direct-to-consumer genome company called Knome that George Church had co-founded. I had my own whole genome sequenced in 2009. George was the scientist who read me my interpretation of my genome.

We started talking about aging. I found out that he had this similar passion. We came up with a project called the Supercentenarian Research Study. That sort of launched my becoming a full-time scientist as opposed to a lawyer and entrepreneur that I've done previously …

We were a couple of years into the supercentenarian project. I was starting to open my own lab. I started a vivarium and eventually added 1,200 mice that I raised by myself with a couple of interns. At that time, I approached George and asked him, 'Do you think it would be beneficial to my credibility, career and knowledge to enroll in a Ph.D. program?'

George kind of looked at me and said, 'You're doing projects that grad students would give their right arm for. You're already reading 10 to 20 scientific papers a day. You're involved in writing up research papers. This is what a scientist is. This is what they do. You don't need to go work for someone else to learn these processes.' So, I stuck with what I was doing."

60 Minutes Interview with Harvard Geneticist Professor George Church

What Sets Supercentenarians Apart?

Supercentenarians are the rare individuals who have made it to the age of 110 and beyond. According to Clement, there are only 50 to 80 supercentenarians in the entire world at any given point. In the U.S., an estimated 120,000 people make it to 100, but only 20 of them make it to 110.

As Clement began working with these supercentenarians, he realized that what set them apart was the fact that, up until the age of 105 to 108, they'd really had the health of someone in their 70s and 80s. They have no age-related diseases, and typically die from sudden onset immune failure followed by pneumonia.

This suggests that improving your immune function is an essential criterion to make it past 100. Clement goes so far as to say that, in many respects, supercentenarians age normally, while the rest of us age at an accelerated rate. The basis of his book is essentially how to normalize your aging, thus allowing you to optimize your life span.

It's worth noting that while your lifestyle plays a tremendous role, there's also a strong genetic influence. Siblings of supercentenarians have a 17 times greater chance of reaching 100 years old than the rest of us, for example, and many female supercentenarians have a mutation in the IGF-1 pathway.

This makes them short in stature, so 5 feet is about the size of the normal supercentenarian woman. In men, it tends to be a growth hormone mutation that similarly makes supercentenarian men somewhat shorter than the average man. Importantly, these mutations limit mTOR and turns on autophagy, which is what gives these people such a head-start on longevity. But there are ways for the rest of us to limit mTOR and increase autophagy as well.

The Switch

The target of rapamycin (TOR), from which mTOR derives, is an evolutionary mechanism that started with bacteria. All organisms need nutrition, and the ability to make proteins and reproduce. When nutrition is scarce, as it tends to be from time to time in the natural world, the organism must venture out to seek more resources.

"The organisms that developed ways to hunker down and protect themselves during these times of scarcity are the ones that survived and we evolved from," Clement explains.

"We evolved and carried with us those genes that protected bacteria, yeast cells, C. elegans worms, drosophila, mice, primates, et cetera. They all have a version of mTOR. They all go through this metabolic switch called mTOR and have an anabolistic state, anabolism, and a catabolic state, or catabolism."

Anabolism is what allows you to grow and increase muscle mass, whereas catabolism is the process of breaking down, repairing and removing old worn-out cells. Importantly, catabolism is the phase that cells enter when resources are scarce.

The cells essentially slow down protein production and cell division at this time, and activate the process of autophagy, which gets rid of misfolded proteins and dysfunctional organelles.

These old, worn-out proteins and organelles are recycled by lysosome, which breaks them down into their base component parts and then releases them back into the cell. These components can then be used to make new amino acids capable of rebuilding new proteins.

This natural clean-out and regeneration process is why activating autophagy on a regular basis is key for health and longevity. The same process occurs in your mitochondria, which is called mitophagy.

"Like all other organisms, humans, for most our evolutionary history, encountered this feast-or-famine state. Only recently, like literally the last 150 years, has food production, industrialization of farming and livestock management and refrigeration made it possible … to have a never-ending abundance, mostly of foods that we didn't evolve to eat in the first place," Clement says.

Why Cycling Through Feast and Famine Is so Important

One common mistake, which I also made, is continuously inhibiting mTOR. It's really important to cycle back and forth between inhibition and activation of mTOR. The anabolic state triggers cell growth, and that includes stem cells — cells that can become any cell needed, anywhere in your body.

"If you learn about mTOR and you say, 'I don't want cancer, and turning on mTOR full-time and keeping autophagy off leads to cancer, so I'm going to do the reverse,' then what you end up doing is not having a strong populating of stem cells, not replacing damaged tissue, and you end up losing muscle mass through sarcopenia.

I experienced this myself. I was on a vegan version of the ketogenic diet for five years. I was doing this as self-experimentation … I ended up losing a lot of muscle mass.

But as soon as I recognized what was going on and really thought about the literature and what this meant, I realized that I was foregoing the thing that nature had previously required, which is that you go through this feast [stage]," Clement says.

"We have a whole chapter describing the different ways that you can implement this in your own life. There's no one plan. There are basically guidelines. … You can still have your pizza, your cheese, cake, ice cream, et cetera, but you can't do this day in and day out. You can't leave mTOR on [activated] and the brakes on autophagy full-time."

Meal Frequency and Timing

Based on the evidence, time-restricted feeding appears to be one of the essential keys to optimal health and longevity, as there's no other way, really, to cyclically activate and deactivate mTOR and autophagy. You have to have a period of famine, a restriction of nutrients, to enter into a catabolic state.

The question then becomes, just how long does this famine need to be? To be sure, eating throughout the whole day is a prescription for metabolic disaster. Research by Dr, Satchinanda Panda suggests 90% of people eat across a span of 12 hours a day, and many across even longer timespans, which clearly is not doing them any favors.

"I personally have gone now to a four-hour window," Clement says. "I never was a big breakfast eater. I have a couple cups of coffee in the morning. But historically, breakfast didn't exist until the Middle Ages. We didn't evolve as cavemen eating at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. a breakfast of eggs, toast, jam and milk.

It's literally in the English version of the name, 'break-fast.' It's the period in which you're breaking your overnight fast. This is essential to keeping mTOR down and autophagy on as long as possible.

I would argue that people evolved to have autophagy turned on every single night of their life, not just on occasions when they once a year would go on a fast or try a ketogenic diet for a month and then go back to the normal lifestyle."

I too was on a four-hour eating window for many months, but I'm now starting to think that perhaps this window also needs to change from time to time. Four to eight hours is probably the sweet-spot, and I now think shrinking the eating window down to four hours a few times a week is enough.

How to Incorporate Exercise for Optimal Results

The timing of exercise can also play a role. If you're fasting for 20 hours and eating within a four-hour window, aggressively working out about two hours before you break your fast will suppress mTOR and activate autophagy even further, increasing metabolic markers such as 5 AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) and decreasing insulin-like growth factor (IGF), at least in your muscle.

As noted by Clement, this strategy will actually allow you to achieve the benefits of a two- to three-day long fast.

"By and large, the average person, who is obese and on seven medications by the time they're 70 years old and has hypertension and all these problems, those people got there because they weren't paying attention to this switch," Clement says.

"These discussions about autophagy tell people essentially what to do to turn it on, but hasn't really focused much on the balance — the fact that we need both sides of this. I've also concentrated on the triggers that turn on mTOR, because if we want it on, then we want to make sure we aren't taking supplements or doing something else that tends to inhibit it …

A branched-chain amino acid named leucine, which is four times higher in dairy than it is in human breast milk, essentially locks on mTOR … Leucine is almost like a key that, alone, without any help from anything else, in sufficient quantities, will trigger mTOR activation and turn off autophagy …

Generally speaking, if you are consuming dairy or animal meat, you will likely have sufficient levels of leucine. Now, the cell also needs, for mTOR to be working fully, insulin … which means you need certain levels of blood sugar that will essentially trigger insulin to be relatively high …

Without leucine or sufficient amino acids, mTOR is going to essentially wait. That's what autophagy is actually meant to do — it's to create more amino acids by breaking down organelles and misfolded proteins to supply the cell [raw material to reuse].

It's got the sugar. It's got the energy. The insulin receptor is turned on but it lacks the amino acids. So, through a short bout of autophagy, the cell would most likely have enough to go through with cell division or protein production."

Generalized Rules of Thumb

So, to summarize, having large amounts of dairy and/or animal proteins for 12 hours a day or more is a prescription for metabolic disaster, as it prevents the suppression of mTOR and activation of autophagy.

One of the easiest solutions is to restrict your eating window to four to eight hours each day, fasting the remaining 16 to 20 hours and, ideally, exercising a couple of hours before your first meal.

"If you look at the diets of people who don't have the diseases of civilization, which include the centenarians in Okinawa, Greece [and] Loma Linda, California, you see that what's really happening is that they're running through their glycogen stores in their liver and their muscles overnight.

We only carry about 800 calories worth of energy in our glycogen stores. It doesn't really take that much [to deplete them] … In a deficit state, insulin drops, glucagon goes up, and you enter this catabolic state. That can happen every day. I think it's probably how humans evolved and probably we want to have happen most of the year …

This balance is what people have to find. I personally think that it's going to be somewhere along the ratio of 8 to 4. [You could] make that eight days in a row of turning down mTOR and two days of turning it up, consecutively, or four months on of autophagy and then two months off in a repeated cycle. There are lots of different ways to do this.

In the long run, I don't think we know what's absolutely optimal. We just know that cycling back and forth is the way to do it. Probably, if we keep those periods relatively shorter, especially as we get older, the chance that you're inhibiting mTOR too long goes down … On the whole, we want [mTOR] off more than we want it on, because that's what all the long-lived people have. They all have mTOR more suppressed than normal people."

At present, I'm experimenting with an updated cyclical time-restricted eating strategy that can be summarized as follows:

• Two days a week, I eat all my meals within a four-hour window
• One day a week, my meal window is eight hours
• The remaining five days, my meal window is somewhere between four and eight hours

Each day, right before I eat my first meal, I will do a really hard blood flow restriction (BFR) training workout. Knowing how the body loves variability and uses that to optimizing the whole system, avoiding anything that is too monotonous makes sense to me. Clement is a proponent of BFR as well.

"I'm a big fan of walking," he says. "I go out on 4- to 8-mile walks about once a day. It's really hard to get a power workout in a walk … But with the [BFR], it has an amazing ability to actually stress my muscles in a way that makes them grow and get stronger and larger without having to do heavy weight presses and those kinds of exercises."

The Importance of NAD+

Overall, NAD+ may be one of the most important longevity molecules that we know of. As explained by Clement, NAD+ is a coenzyme needed by longevity-related enzymes called sirtuins. It's also required for DNA repair.

Finding data on NAD+ sorely lacking, Clement began his own research, starting with a clinical trial testing intravenous (IV) NAD+ in elderly people, in collaboration with Dr. John Sturges. Clement also underwent the treatment, which involved an infusion of 1,000 milligrams of NAD+ per day for six straight days, finding it remarkably effective for tremors he'd had since he was 20 years old.

"My hands would shake … It was just some neurological problem. It wasn't the onset of Parkinson's at 20 years old or anything else that anyone could point to. But surprisingly, within an hour or two of starting the IV infusion, my tremors went away completely, which I had had for the previous 40 years.

I noticed later that evening that I fell asleep and didn't wake up during the middle of the night … I woke up way earlier than I normally would, completely refreshed and ready to get back to work. This was the same kind of experiences all of our elderly patients were telling us as well. We had several people who had tremors that went away.

I think [1,000 mg of NAD+] is too much for people who don't have issues that would cause incredibly severe NAD+ depletion … Your body uses copious amounts of NAD+ to detoxify alcohol, for example. In and of itself, drinking every single night of your life will drastically deplete your NAD+ levels.

There are other things that people do that can deplete their NAD+ levels. We've seen that in teenagers who get an infection, influenza or something and then all of a sudden start getting migraines.

NAD+ will totally prevent the onset of migraines for periods of two or three months at a time. People who have had multiple migraines a month who get on these iontophoresis NAD+ patches can go years without having migraines.

There are many, many symptoms of NAD+ depletion that we're just now learning. We're finding that restoring the NAD+ to healthy levels gets rid of these symptoms almost immediately."

NAD Plummets With Age

NAD+ levels plummet by the time you're 60 years old, and is nearly undetectable by the time you're 80. NAD+ is a crucial part of the longevity puzzle, as it's essential for repairing broken DNA. Broken DNA is not something that occurs once in a while.

Single-stranded DNA breaks occur about 125 times an hour in every cell of your body, and double-stranded breaks occur about 25 times per day in every cell. DNA breaks are further accelerated if you're exposed to high levels of electromagnetic fields, which virtually everyone in the developed world are.

"There are lots of lifestyle practices and exposures that will increase [DNA breaks] dramatically, and you need NAD+ in order to turn on gene repair," Clement says.

"If [NAD+] is naturally going down — by the time you're 60 it's maybe 50% of what it was when you were in your 20s and 30s, and then by the time you're 70, it's 10% and then at 80, there's almost none — you can see how this huge build-up of damaged DNA in every cell of your body is potentially one of the driving forces of these morbidities that you see with aging, heart disease, cancer [and] Alzheimer's …"

While IV NAD+ is available, it's cost prohibitive at $1,000 per IV. Fortunately, there are less expensive ways to raise your NAD+. Two precursors to NAD+ are nicotinamide riboside (NR) and nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN), both of which are available in supplement form. NAD+ patches are also available, and all of these are far more economical than IV.

A 1,000-milligram dose of NR has been shown to double your NAD+ level. The problem is that for the elderly, doubling a grossly deficient level is not enough. In people with near-undetectable levels, the NAD+ levels need to be increased by 10 to 100 times.

So, while taking an NR or NMN precursor for six months will double your level, you may still be depleted. Clement's study revealed many older people need 4 or 5 grams a day for a period of time to restore more youthful levels, which could end up being costly at today's price of NAD supplements.

To circle back to exercise and time-restricted eating, both of these strategies will increase nicotinamide phosphoribosyl transferase (NAMPT) by about 30%, and NAMPT is the rate-limiting enzyme for the recovery of NAD+ from its metabolic breakdown product, nicotinamide. In other words, implementing time-restricted eating and fasted exercise will naturally increase your NAD+ levels even without taking any NAD+ supplements.

More Information

Clement also reviews the possibilities of using CRISPR technology for gene editing, so for additional information, please listen to the interview in its entirety, or read through the transcript. He also discusses how his laboratory is pushing the limits to minimize the transitional period from discovery to integration into clinical medicine.

"[Many] for-profit companies that have gone into the antiaging field … have one particular target, one arrow in their quiver, essentially, to aim at [antiaging].

Most … get locked into spending the next four or five years working on a particular antiaging pathway that may or may not turn out to be all that important, whereas as a nonprofit and supported by donors who really want to foster anti-aging, I can say that we're looking at dozens of different completely independent pathways for antiaging," Clement says.

"I've read between 18,000 and 20,000 scientific papers on aging. I've made long notes about the things that were working on model organisms, like flies and mice, for example. In many cases, we know that these same things should work in humans, but the molecules or the techniques used are generic drugs or compounds that you can't patent for various reasons …

Therefore, there's just not a financial incentive for a venture capital company to fund someone researching metformin, let's say, and rapamycin, both of which are generic drugs, specifically for antiaging.

What you see is the venture capital companies are putting money into companies that want to create novel compounds that mimic compounds we already know about.

But no one's really studied or optimized those compounds … and because anybody can knock that off, you might see a pharma company trying to create a synthetic molecule that takes attributes of those and has a particular molecular benefit similar to what they do.

But my parents, my elderly friends, they don't have 10 years to wait. And then, often, these drugs are really powerful. For a lot of people, they aren't appropriate anyway. The natural compound or the generic drug that we already knew about would have probably been a better choice.

What we want to do is take a lot of these compounds that are already proven to work in other organisms, try them on humans, and then if they do seem to work, then we go through a process of optimizing them.

If they don't work, we just simply drop it and move on. Because no one's counting on us turning this particular thing into a product, so we don't have that weight over us that somehow the one and only thing that we chose now has to be [profitable] …

Everything that we've talked about today is a result of decades' worth of very intense research by hundreds and hundreds of scientists that are focused on anti-aging and who are not specifically trying to make a profit from a single molecule or cell line or therapy, but merely doing the hard work of telling us what seems to work and what doesn't.

And then testing those in model organisms, from C. elegans, worms, drosophila, fruit flies and rodents, like mice and rats.

Much of this is already known that we can rapidly, I think, qualify these things in humans using these clinical trials and know, 'OK. This is worth spending more time on because it has profound antiaging effects or it helps one particular morbidity pathology.'"

It was to this end, also, that Clement wrote "The Switch: Ignite Your Metabolism With Intermittent Fasting, Protein Cycling, and Keto," which I highly recommend adding to your library. Reading through it, and implementing the strategies covered in this book can go a long way toward warding off age-related diseases and optimizing your longevity.

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Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt is well known for his successful treatment of neurological illness and Lyme disease with integrative medicine. Originally from Berlin, Germany, Klinghardt has practiced medicine in the U.S. for over 35 years. He also sees patients in England and Switzerland.

In Switzerland, he was part of a group that instigated a change in the constitution, making alternative medicine a constitutional right of all citizens. That includes homeopathy, neurotherapy, acupuncture and all other hands-on healing techniques.

"It's the only country on the planet where complementary medicine or alternative medicine is the birthright of every citizen," he says. "When we managed to do that, I made sure I got a [medical] license in Switzerland, as a possible escape route from the forces that are sometimes very obstructive here [in the U.S.]"

Here, we discuss the importance of detoxification for general health and the treatment of disease, and review some of Klinghardt's top tips for detoxification. Dr. Richard Straube, a German toxicologist, developed a blood-washing procedure (apheresis) where toxins are filtered from the blood and can then be analyzed using affordable lab testing.

"Ten years ago, he found, on average in the population, 20 toxins over the threshold of detection," Klinghardt says. "In just 10 years, that number has gone up to over 500, which is a shocking number … That's an exponential increase that is not compatible with life …

He's actually about to publish this research. He did the research on 1,200 patients. It's one of the largest toxicology studies. Of course, the leaders are aluminum, barium, lithium and strontium. These are the [toxins] in geoengineering. It makes them sort of rain down on us. Because of that — and many of these toxins are specifically mitochondrial toxins — detox … is a survival strategy for everybody."

Toxicity and Infectious Disease Go Hand in Hand

When your body is contaminated with man-made toxins, your body tends to compartmentalize them. Eventually, those body compartments will reach a certain threshold of toxicity, at which point your immune system can no longer control the microbial growth in that area.

"These become the areas where the microbes are domiciled, whether it's Bartonella, Lyme, Babesia or herpes viruses. They're not everywhere, but at the same time they've very strictly set up housekeeping in certain body compartments," Klinghardt explains. For this reason, you can no longer distinguish between the toxicity and the infection, because they go together. As Klinghardt notes, "It's a package deal."

"For 20 years, I've been harping on Lyme disease and developed treatments that do not involve antibiotics, because it's an absolute mistake to treat Lyme with antibiotics," he says. "We know too much about the microbiome now and how sensitive the structures are.

The latest development in the last two years have been my work with Judy Mikovitz. She was part of our think tank that we had in 2006 or 2007, and tried to alert us then to the fact that embedded in our DNA are retroviruses, and that certain environmental conditions disable our mechanisms to silence those viruses, allowing them to become active …

The most well-known retrovirus is the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), but there are hundreds of others. Most of them are immunosuppressive. I'd like to prefer the term 'immune-disturbing.' Some aspects of the immune system are upregulated, others are downregulated. That makes us hugely vulnerable for Lyme's, mycoplasma and Bartonella … Detoxification … is an absolute necessity to survive this insane time."

Toxins can be either water or fat soluble. Two major water-soluble toxins are the vaccine preservative thimerosal (mercury) and the herbicide glyphosate. According to Klinghardt, they tend to be sequestered in areas such as the kidneys, lungs and bones.

Examples of fat-soluble toxins are benzene derivatives, insecticides, pesticides and herbicides. They like to settle in the fatty tissue, which makes them potent neurotoxins, since your brain is composed primarily of fat. Water- and fat-soluble toxins require differing methods of detoxification.

Detoxification Strategy for Glyphosate

While you may have over 20,000 chemicals in your body, two that are particularly hazardous to your brain are glyphosate and aluminum. Glyphosate is an analog of the amino acid glycine.¹ It attaches in places where you need glycine. Importantly, glycine is used up in the detoxification process, hence many of us do not have enough glycine for efficient detoxification.

To eliminate glyphosate, you need to saturate your body with glycine. Klinghardt recommends taking 1 teaspoon (4 grams) of glycine powder twice a day for a few weeks and then lower the dose to one-fourth teaspoon (1 gram) twice a day. This forces the glyphosate out of your system, allowing it to be eliminated through your urine.

I personally have been taking 1 gram twice a day for some time now. The glycine is inexpensive and actually tastes sweet. Ideally it is best to take it around the time you are eating food that might be contaminated with glyphosate.

"At least for a while, we use high doses of glycine. There are no issues with it. There are no problems with it. The other one that has been published is admittedly only a chicken study that shows that humic acid and fulvic acid can completely clean up the organ systems of a chicken …

So, we do the glycine for a while. We monitor the urine output of glyphosate. When that slows down — in some people two months, in some it's six months — we back off on the glycine and go on a smaller dose."

How to Detox Aluminum

Aluminum is even more sinister. Stephenie Seneff, Ph.D., has shown that aluminum, when it gets in the extracellular space, completely changes the voltage on the cell walls — the voltage-gated channels — and has a profound effect on the microstructure of that matrix.²

"It basically impairs the receptors that we have on the cell wall, hormone receptors, neurotransmitter receptors, insulin receptors. They all get messed up by aluminum. It has a really, really strong effect, stronger than any other toxin," Klinghardt says.

"Seneff's work shows that glyphosate is a chelating agent. When you have glyphosate in the food, it binds all the trace minerals. They're no longer available for absorption. It depletes us of trace minerals. However, there's one exception and that's aluminum. It works like a shuttle agent for aluminum. It binds aluminum, takes it across the gut wall into the tissues, and distributes it widely."

One common ailment related to aluminum toxicity is underactive thyroid (hypothyroid), which is incredibly common these days. Aluminum hydoxides — such as that found in antiacids — actually interferes with intestinal absorption of thyroid hormones.³ Being a metal, it also has an affinity for the nervous system, and tends to collect in your brain, spinal cord and the enteric nervous system of the gut.⁴ In all of these places, it blocks vital functions.

To eliminate aluminum, you need to increase your intake of silica. Klinghardt recommends using silica-rich herbs for this, such as cilantro. "Dr. Yoshiaki Omura did a study⁵ 20 years ago where he showed that you could decrease aluminum content in the animal model very quickly just by giving a cilantro extract," he says. Other good options are horsetail (which is also high in silica) and a liposomal silica product called BioSil.

Citric acid has also been shown to mobilize aluminum. An easy and inexpensive strategy is to squeeze some lemon into a bottle of water and drink it throughout the day. Malic acid — apple cider vinegar — is another. You can also buy malic acid in capsule form, or use magnesium malate.

"Medical doctors can use desferal. It's an injectable that's injected once a week subcutaneously. It's an excellent detoxer. However, there is some question as to whether it crosses the blood-brain barrier or not. Silica does. Desferal probably not, but you can debulk the aluminum in the body with a once-a-week injection."

How to Eliminate Fat-Soluble Toxins

To eliminate fat-soluble toxins, Klinghardt recommends a combination of sauna and binding agents such as chlorella, ecklonia cava (a brown algae), and enterous gel such as methylated silica and zeolite. One or more of these should ideally be taken daily. When you do sauna therapy, the released toxins are then bound by these agents, allowing them to be safely eliminated rather than being reabsorbed.

"Do that regularly and watch your bowel transit time; it should be 24 hours or less. That means if you swallow something that's not digestible, it should come out of the other end within 24 hours.

We have some patients where the transit time was 20 days or so. Those people are not able to excrete through the small intestine. They're really doomed. It becomes a priority then to get the digestion going. That's mostly the parasite issue. That is sort of my other hobby — to diagnose and treat parasites."

Address Parasites

Many parasites, especially worms, but also fungi and Candida, can absorb multiple times their body weight in toxins. For example, many worms are able to concentrate lead 300fold compared to the tissues of the host. The parasite load of a host is also a bioindicator for the toxicity of that host's environment.

"Every chronic Lyme patient is also full of parasites," Klinghardt says. "If you don't address those, it's been shown that the worms in the Lyme patient themselves are infected with Lyme spirochete. If you do antibiotic treatment, it doesn't harm the parasites.

The Lyme spirochete simply retreat into the worms, wait until you're done with the antibiotics and then hatch back out. The teaching is to treat from large to small. In a chronically ill patient, always assume there are parasites. Treat them and then kind of slowly go down."

Unfortunately, there are few effective tests to assess your parasite burden. Klinghardt uses autonomic response testing (ART), and prescribes various cocktails of antiparasitic drugs based on that testing. Knowing that parasites are loaded with toxins, you want to coax them out of the tissues and into the gut, where they can be safely expelled.

Klinghardt uses the Gubarev protocols for this. These are enema protocols developed by a Russian scientist. Once no more parasites are to be found, he puts the patient on antiparasitic agents such as Rizol Kappa and Rizol Gamma — ozonated plant oils from BioPure.

"Recently, there's an incredible increase in literature showing that pretty much every medical antiparasitic can also be used for treating cancer. I'll give you an example: Albendazole, a monthly treatment, used to cost $80. Then the articles came out of cancers healing from it. Now, it's $24,000 a month …

We use the antiparasitic drugs, the multipurpose drugs. It happens to be that the internal pathways of a cancer cell are similar to the pathways of the parasite. It's a very good policy to start chronic treatment [of parasites] early on, before attending to Lyme disease or mycoplasma …

The main issue with parasites is this: If you undertreat a parasite, that means if you use a dose of an herb or a medical drug that's not enough to kill it, but enough to make it sick, that parasite will put out huge amounts of biotoxins that make you really deathly ill. The trick with parasite treatment is to come in high and strong from the beginning, so these creatures cannot shoot back at you …

Parasites only come out in the poop if the parasite is sick. Parasites do not show up that way. As long as they still live in the belly, in the gut, you can palpate and you can get certain signs that make it [seem] like you got the right diagnosis. But unfortunately, the larval stages of many parasites stray to the lung, and also end up in the brain.

Cysticercosis is the name given for that larval stages of tapeworms in the brain. We see that all the time. Kids that have seizures, most of the time it's that issue. They're easy to treat … but it's difficult to do it with natural things. We find that the natural herbs that are used are good if we use them in conjunction with the medical drugs."

Rectal Ozone Therapy

Klinghardt also uses ozone therapy, preferring rectal ozone administration to injection. "We have a lot of our patients buy an inexpensive ozone machine and do rectal ozone every day," he says.

Klinghardt has worked with one of the leading parasitologists in India, studying the impact of parasites on illness. Not surprisingly, they found a direct, linear relationship between the colonic count of anaerobes and the patient's health.

The more anaerobes the patient had in their feces, the sicker the person was. At that time, they did not have ozone available, and ended up treating patients with rectal oxygen. "It was very successful as a strategy to get people out of chronic illness," he says. Ozone is an even more effective option.

Avoiding EMF Is Also Important for Effective Detoxification

In a previous interview, we also discussed the importance of avoiding electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation from cellphones, modems and Wi-Fi routers when treating chronic disease, as this exposure will exacerbate illness, including infections. Klinghardt comments:

"I think that is the most important issue of our time … Wi-Fi is destroying life on the planet. There's absolutely no question. Unfortunately, titanium and aluminum in our system act like an antenna for the Wi-Fi. There's a beautiful study on amalgam.

When you have an amalgam filling and you make a phone call on the side where the filling is, the speed at which mercury is evaporated from the tooth is increased multiple times.

Basically, we hold the position that the body needs to be metal-free in order to survive this crazy time … One phone call — I think a seven-minute phone call — activates the Epstein-Barr virus for many years. We have this published. All of us have that virus in us. If you want to have chronic fatigue, that's a great recipe …

[There's a] direct linear relationship between the cumulative exposure to man-made radiation and chronic illness. The more you're exposed to, the more ill you are … This has to be modified when people are metal-toxic. They concentrate radiation in them, and then it goes up exponentially …

The combined effect of the toxicity and the Wi-Fi has unleased these viruses that are called human endogenous retroviruses. That is really, ultimately, what's causing the severity of chronic illness."

To protect against EMF, Klinghardt recommends the Building Biology approach to EMF remediation, which involves shielding your home, especially your bedroom. For internal protection, he recommends taking tincture of rosemary and/or tincture of propolis.

As for addressing retroviruses, Klinghardt has developed an herbal mix called RetroV powder⁶ made by Ki Science, which contains 10 herbs. It's been shown to be superior to the eight drugs available for silencing retroviruses. Citrus tea and broccoli sprouts are two additional powerful tools against retroviruses.

More Information

To learn more, visit Klinghardt's website at klinghardtinstitute.com. If you're interested in treatment, you can contact the Sophia Health Institute, which has clinics in Seattle and Marin County, California.

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Blood is a living tissue made up of red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets and plasma. The main role of blood in your body is to transport oxygen. It also plays a role in fighting infection, regulating your pH level and temperature, and transporting nutrients and hormones. It also has specialized cells to promote blood clotting.

One factor in blood type — A, B, AB or O — is hereditary and determined by the presence or absence of two antigens, A and B. Your blood type is determined together with a third antigen called Rh factor. Plasma, a mixture of water, protein, fat and salts, is responsible for transporting red blood cells throughout the body.¹

Plasma carries proteins that help maintain your fluid balance, while platelets are small fragments of cells the body uses to help with blood coagulation. When your physician orders a complete blood count (CBC), the report includes information about red blood cells, protein content, white blood cells and platelets. A CBC helps diagnose different conditions.

When donating blood,² you’ll answer multiple questions about your health history to ensure the blood may be safely used. The donation process takes about 1.5 hours for whole blood and two hours for plasma. It is safe to donate whole blood every eight weeks, as your body needs between four and six weeks to complete the replacement process.

Vast Volume of Blood Sent Overseas Despite Deficit in the US

Despite many areas of the U.S. struggling to meet the needs of local residents for blood transfusions, an analysis of the blood market shows the U.S. is a major exporter, providing up to 70% of the world’s plasma.³ The majority of plasma exported from the U.S. goes to European countries.

For example, Germany purchases 15% of all blood products exported by the U.S. followed closely by China and Japan. MintPress News reports this is a result of other countries banning the practice on medical and ethical grounds. Of the 1,000 plasma donation centers located around the world, there are 700 in America.⁴ Many of the donation centers allow people to donate their plasma twice a week.

Vermont is one area the American Red Cross identified as experiencing a critical blood shortage in January 2019.⁵ The blood donation center in Burlington had posted signs offering free donuts and movie tickets, hoping to entice people to give blood.

However, the Red Cross reports a mere 3% of Americans routinely do this. Mary Brant, Red Cross communication manager for Northern New England, explains “the need for blood is constant and varies on a day-to-day basis.” Every day the region must gather 500 units to meet the needs of the regional hospitals.

The Red Cross manages 40% of the U.S. blood supply. To meet the need, they must collect 13,000 donations of whole blood and 2,500 platelet donations every day. But despite shortages in the U.S., blood accounts for “well over 2% of total U.S. exports by value,” according to Mint Press News and the Observatory of Economic Complexity.^6,7,8

Blood Centers Focused in Poor Neighborhoods

The short answer for the blood shortage is money. Plasma is a valuable commodity and based on a growing demand has led to a sharp increase in the number of for-profit collection centers that pay their donors for plasma.⁹

Since the U.S. allows people to sell their blood, they have now become the third largest exporter with global sales skyrocketing from $5 billion to $20 billion in 15 short years.

By 2016, the industry was responsible for 1.6% of the total exports from the U.S. To put this in perspective, the export of human blood is currently worth more than the export of all corn and soy products covering much of America’s Midwestern states.¹⁰ 

However, this industry is built on the backs of poor Americans. Two companies, Grifols and CSL, dominate the market by targeting low socioeconomic groups in large cities across the U.S. In Cleveland, the majority of donors make more than one-third of their money from donating plasma.

Andrew Watkins spoke to Mint Press News. He sold his blood for nearly 18 months in the Pittsburgh area. He commented on the process and how the companies target lower socioeconomic groups:¹¹

“The centers are never in a good part of town, always somewhere they can get a never ending supply of poor people desperate for that hundred bucks a week. The people who show up are a mix of disabled, working poor, homeless, single parents, and college students.

With the exception of the college students who are looking for booze money, this is probably the easiest and most reliable income they have. Your job may fire you at any time when you’re on this level of society, but you always have blood.

And selling your blood doesn’t count as a job or income when it comes to determining disability benefits, food stamps, or unemployment eligibility so it’s a source of money for the people who have absolutely nothing else.”

Leveraging Blood Money for Food and Shelter

The reporter for MintPress News spoke to a number of people who consistently sold their plasma and were fully cognizant of how the system was exploiting their position. However, this exploitation also includes serious health consequences that have not been well-studied.¹²

Losing plasma two times weekly lowers protein count in the blood, leading many donors to an increased risk of liver and kidney dysfunction and more infections. Those who regularly donated reported feeling chronically fatigued and some were bordering on anemia. Payment methods were described as “predatory” as the first payments may be $75 but they are subsequently reduced to $20 to $50.

A combination of chronic donations with variable payments leave many in a permanent state of mental fatigue with bruised and punctured arms. The centers are kept at 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit to protect the plasma. Cooled blood is returned to the donor “in a painful process that feels as if ice is being inserted into the body.”

Exploitation of the poor reaches an all-new low in the clinics along the U.S. Mexican border. Each week, thousands from Mexico cross the border on temporary visas to visit the 43 blood donation centers that prey on these individuals.

MintPress News reports a Swiss documentary identified few checks on blood cleanliness accepted by these for-profit donation centers. One social worker from Georgia commented on the situation in which he found himself:

“I’ve known quite a number of people who rely on money made by selling plasma. A lot of times it’s to cover childcare or prescriptions or something along those lines. It’s absolutely deplorable to leverage literal blood money from people who have so few options.”

Seeking Young Blood: Students Trade Plasma for Books

Big Pharma is also going after students. One campaign from Grifols targets working class students, promising them money for books in exchange for their plasma.¹³ The push for young blood is in high demand in Silicon Valley, where companies are focusing on a push toward antiaging technology.

Despite having no clinical evidence the process works, one company charges $8,000 for an infusion of young blood to aging executives. The co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, has become a committed customer. MintPress News reports he is spending large amounts of money to fund startups focused on antiaging technology.

He has been vocal about “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,” claiming humans have been conned into believing immortality is not possible and believes his own ability to live eternally is close.

Liver Disease May Drive Thirst for Blood in China

In a report from WinterGreen Research,¹⁴ scientists found high demand in China, where a major cause of death is liver disease. They identified 400 million in China with different liver ailments including viral hepatitis and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

Nearly 400 metric tons of serum albumin were consumed in China in 2017, accounting for half of the total global use of serum albumin. While this supply could easily be acquired from those in China, many became afraid to donate after thousands of farmers developed HIV from unsanitary needles used to collect blood in the 1990s.

A result of this is the necessity to import 60% of the needed serum albumin as demand rises with an increasing number getting sick and the Chinese population fearful of donating.

Despite Toxic Chemicals, US May Be One of the Safest Sources

The report identified the quality of blood collected in the U.S. is better than what may be collected in China, giving American companies an edge. However, it is important to note while the U.S. may be one of the safer sources of blood, the notation is made as a comparison against others and not based on an evaluation of the source.

In other words, environmental contaminants in the U.S., including known carcinogens and radioactive substances, are part of your body’s toxic burden passed on with blood and plasma donations. This comes from a wide range of sources, including pesticides found in agriculture and in the home, preservatives, industrial chemicals and wastes, air pollution and building materials.¹⁵

In a report from the Environmental Working Group (EWG),¹⁶ scientists identified more than 1,400 known or likely carcinogenic chemicals to which we are exposed on a daily basis.

In their analysis they found 420 chemicals measured in a diverse population and identified nine in nontrivial levels, exceeding EPA safety standards. Author of the report and senior scientist for EWG, Curt DellaValle, commented on the difficulty of associating exposure to disease:¹⁷

“It’s hard to make the connection between being exposed to something and getting the disease because the disease is going to develop five, 10, 20 years later. I hope something like this raises some awareness that these exposures are out there, there are some dangers generally … and we should work to try and reduce those exposures.”

This toxic load is a real concern as questions about how these chemicals react together have not been answered. The most recent general report by the CDC on exposure to environmental toxins was published in 2009,¹⁸ in which they found detectable levels of 212 chemicals in the blood and urine of participants from across the nation.

Exposure to toxins has not declined, as more are released in personal care products, cleaning supplies and building material without adequate safety testing. Take care to reduce your exposure by using products the EWG has tested safe from their Skin Deep database¹⁹ and consider using nontoxic cleaning products.

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Have our bodies and environments become too clean? For decades, manufacturers of cleaning products and chemicals have scared people into enacting a household version of "germ warfare." If you believe the advertising, no kitchen counter, floor or tub is really clean unless all germs have been annihilated with harsh chemicals.

These same companies also exhort people to over-clean themselves with toxic shampoos, soaps and body washes. Yet, daily bathing only became a practice with the relatively recent invention of indoor plumbing; over 100 years ago, many thought wetting the whole body at once instead of taking sponge baths was dangerous and would invite diseases like pneumonia.

The featured documentary, "Washing Away Health: Navigating Cleanliness, Wellness and Resistance in a Microbial World," from Cleaner World Productions, explores the significant dangers of overcleaning our bodies and environments. These risks range from exposing ourselves to dermatological and respiratory side effects from cleaning products to disrupting our microbiomes and immune systems.

We Are Washing Away Health, Says Revealing Documentary

Excessive cleaning is becoming harmful to ourselves, our homes and our environment. That is the message "Washing Away Health" delivers. In it, experts detail the burgeoning microbial resistance triggered by our obsession with cleanliness, and the surprising health ramifications of being too clean.¹

People who grow up on farms or live in developing countries don’t tend to have the food allergies, asthma or other "First World problems" we see in places that are overcleaning, says Laura Kahn, author of “One Health and the Politics of Antimicrobial Resistance,” who is featured in the video.

The reason may be found in the hygiene hypothesis. If a child is raised in an environment saturated in disinfectant soaps and cleansers, they may not able to build up resistance to disease through normal exposure to dirt and germs. This could explain why many allergies and immune-system diseases have doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in the past few decades — we have become too clean.

Not being exposed to microbes and pathogens can create an excessively clean immune system that can actually begin "attacking itself,” explains Kahn. Sarah Crawford, president of Bio Green Clean,² a company that makes phosphate-, fume- and fragrance-free cleaning products, agrees, saying, "There is something to be said for 'healthy germs’."

Ads Mislead People Into Overcleaning

It is no coincidence that so many people overclean their homes with harmful products — the commercials are everywhere, says Alexandra Scranton, director of science and research at Women’s Voice for the Earth.

“Washing Away Health” shows examples of ads for Lysol and Mr. Clean cleaners that could make anyone think their home is teeming with germs, and that they’re negligent if they don't use a harsh chemical onslaught. In actuality, soap and water are just as effective, the narrator points out.

Similar "fear marketing” was used to sell cleaning products with antibacterial agents, which the FDA has since banned from consumer soaps.³ Adding antibacterial agents to hand, body, dish and laundry soaps and other personal care products did not make them clean any better, but allowed manufacturers to charge more for "new and improved" items.

They tremendously worsened antibiotic resistance and, since soap is “by nature antibacterial” anyway — a point Kahn makes — antibacterial chemicals are redundant.

Consider triclosan, one of the antibacterial agents added to soap and found in Colgate's Total toothpaste until recently.⁴ Triclosan not only contributes to the development of bacterial resistance, but also increases the amount of bisphenol-A (BPA) you absorb when handling thermal receipt paper or other BPA-containing products. According to PubChem, triclosan also has been detected in human breast milk. Additionally, triclosan:⁵

"… might cause spontaneous abortion; probably through inhibition of estrogen sulfotransferase activity to produce placental thrombosis … 

In children, triclosan exposure was associated with allergic sensitization, especially inhalant and seasonal allergens, rather than food allergens. Current rhinitis was associated with the highest levels of triclosan, whereas no association was seen for current asthma.

In the North American bullfrog … exposure to low levels of triclosan thyroid hormone-associated gene expression and can alter the rate of thyroid hormone-mediated postembryonic development.”

According to research published in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, triclosan has also been linked to a role in cancer development, possibly due to its estrogen disruption activity.⁶

Resistance, Pollution, Algae and More

The routine and widespread use of antibiotics on factory farms is seen as the primary driver of antibiotic resistance. Because of the extreme crowding of livestock in these concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), antibiotics are used as a "substitute" for cleaning and hygiene, says Kahn.

"These animals did not evolve to live in such crowded facilities," she says: In Scandinavian countries where livestock antibiotics have been phased out, antibiotics resistant bacteria have greatly diminished, showing that a reversal of resistance is indeed possible if you attack it at the source.

In the video, Matthew Wargo, professor of microbiology at the University of Vermont, details factors that affect resistance, such as bacterial competition and how bacteria can confer resistance to each other. A microscope demonstration of such transference is shown in the video.

Excessive cleaning also causes other environmental harm. The single use plastic containers of harsh cleaning products significantly add to global plastic pollution says Martin Wolf, director of product sustainability and authenticity at Seventh Generation, adding that Seventh Generation products are made from recycled materials.

The phosphates in cleaning products also contribute to algae blooms — with huge plumes of discolored water that can lead to fish die-offs and municipalities being forced to cut off water to residents, notes Crawford of Bio Green Clean. Toxic algae is an constant problem in Lake Erie, closing beaches, wrecking tourism, endangering pets and contaminating drinking water.⁷

Cleaning Products More Dangerous Than Many Think

Many don’t give a second thought to cleaning with harsh chemicals, forgetting that when you inhale them or allow them to come into contact with your skin, they will enter your bloodstream directly, bypassing your liver and kidneys, which are part of your natural defense system against toxins.

Also, the more frequently harsh cleaning products are used, the more risks people face, according to medical studies. For example, a 2017 study found that nurses who used disinfectants once a week or more had up to a 32% higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease than those who didn't.⁸

Even if you not do not personally use harsh cleaning products, the buildings they are used in are also made unsafe, “Washing Away Health” points out. Ventilation systems do not completely remove the chemicals, either, warns Carol Westinghouse, president and founder of Informed Green Solutions.

Crawford says harsh cleaners can even be deadly: She recounts hearing stories of cats that, having walked across floors cleaned with Swiffer WetJet, died after licking their paws. Fragrance added to cleaning products, even when natural, can also be harmful, says Wolf.

Less Washing Can Bring Back Balance

Overtreating bacteria, viruses and even fungi results in disruption of natural environments and a paradoxical resistance to the very cleaning products supposed to eradicate them, according to the experts in "Washing Away Health."

A similar phenomenon occurs with personal care items. The natural, beneficial bacteria that live on human skin and the sebum on our hair are also disrupted by excessive cleansing. Our microbiomes and immune systems are also compromised by overcleansing.  

While manufacturers of personal care products have convinced people they will smell awful or will be offensive without the use of their harsh products, the opposite is actually true. It’s primarily overcleansing that causes odor-causing bacteria to overgrow, as it disrupts your body's natural systems of balance.

All of that said, there are instances in which germ vigilance is required. Cuts, for example, need to be properly cleaned, and disinfecting food preparation areas is a good idea. Medical facilities also need to be vigilant about cleanliness and disinfection. In our day-to-day lives, however, we should not go overboard.

Solutions From ‘Washing Away Health’

There are several encouraging trends highlighted in “Washing Away Health” that imply the problem of "too much cleanliness" is being addressed. Michelle Thompson, an industrial hygienist at the Vermont Department of Health, says the Envision Program was created in Vermont in 2000 to create healthier, safer schools with fewer asthma triggers. In 2012, Act 125, a green cleaning law, was passed in Vermont.

Westinghouse speculates that steam cleaning will begin to replace harsh chemical cleaners. Already, she says, there are portable steam cleaners that can be used commercially or residentially. Kahn thinks there is great promise in the use of viruses called bacteriophages to clean. As explained by the Leibniz Institute, phages:⁹

"… exclusively attack bacteria and lyse them ('bacteria eaters'). Phages cannot reproduce alone by themselves, they require the bacterial cell as a host to reproduce within the host ...

After adsorption to the bacterial surface, the phage injects its nucleic acid into the bacterium that will now be forced to produce a new phage generation by using the bacterial enzyme equipment.

One single bacterial cell produces such an enormous number of new phages that the pressure forces the bacterium to burst. The phages will immediately kill other bacteria with a surface matching with the phage."

To prevent further antibiotic resistance, all the experts featured in “Washing Away Health” stress the importance of not demanding antibiotics from a doctor or using antibiotics for nonbacterial infections. They also urge you to vote with your wallet. Do not buy risky cleaning products that overclean and wash away health.

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A new study revealed that one dose of the HPV vaccine may prevent infection from the potential cancer-causing virus, according to new research.

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A research team implemented a robust deep learning approach to predict disease-associated mutations of the metal-binding sites in a protein. This is the first deep learning approach for the prediction of disease-associated metal-relevant site mutations in metalloproteins, providing a new platform to tackle human diseases.

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