Bret Speaks with Nathan Jones, founder of the leading manufacturer of xylitol-based products in North America, XLEAR on the subject of hidden side of human health, the nasal microbiome and other related issues. Find Nathan Jones at https://xlear.com *****Sponsors:Sundays: Dog food so tasty and healthy, even husbands swear by it. Go to http://www.sundaysfordogs.com/DARKHORSE to receive 35% off your first order.Caraway: Non-toxic, beautiful, light ceramic cookware. Go to http://Carawa...
And, you know, and so they, you know, they ended up suing me a year later, but...
Do you want to talk about that?
Oh, I love talking about it.
All right.
It makes me feel so...
So you've been sued.
...gated that I've lived in a country run by bureaucrats that are that dumb.
All right, so you've been sued.
What did they sue you for?
We're still trying to figure that out.
But what they say they sued me for was making false and misleading statements about nasal hygiene and about our products.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I am of course Dr. Brett Weinstein and I'm sitting today with Nate Jones here in person in the San Juan Islands.
He's flown up, no, flown over to do the podcast.
Now, Nate Jones, you and I came to know each other because you showed up to support Rescue the Republic.
Thank you very much for doing that.
But in discussing your support for Rescue the Republic, I came to understand that there was a story involved deeply in the hidden side of human health Well, thank you.
So, let's just say you are an entrepreneur.
You are the head of a company that I now understand that I've been mispronouncing.
It is called Clear, but it is spelled X-C-L-E-A-R. Just X-L-E-A-R. There's no C in it.
There is no C in it.
All right.
Well, I will correct my mental model and maybe even start saying it correctly, which will mean that nobody will know what I'm talking about.
But in any case, do you want to tell me how...
This is not a sponsored podcast.
You're not paying us to be here.
So we're just going to have a discussion about what it is that you know and how it is that you have come to know it about the nasal microbiome and other related issues.
So tell me how that story happened.
Well, how it happened is my dad is a physician, and he started using xylitol, which is a sugar.
It's a simple sugar.
It's a five-carbon sugar as opposed to the ones we're more familiar with, which are six-carbon sugar, sucrose, glucose, fructose, and even sorbitol, mannitol, maltitol, which are six-carbon sugar alcohols.
But he started using xylitol in a nasal spray back in 1998. And why?
And the reason why it goes...
I mean, because...
So the story behind xylitol is they've known since the late 60s, early 70s, that it is very effective at actually preventing tooth decay.
And the way that it does it is completely different than what fluoride does, which the CDC and the FDA and the American Dental Association and all these people, they've hung their hat on fluoride, fluoride, more fluoride.
And then when you...
Still have a cavity after having a gallon of it, have some more.
And it's kind of crazy because the fluoride doesn't even treat the bacterial infection that is tooth decay.
It actually just makes your teeth more resistant to the infection, but it allows the infection.
And when you're using toothpaste with Sorbitol, you're actually feeding the bacteria, the strep mutans bacteria that cause tooth decay.
When you're chewing sugar-free gum...
Wait, maybe I misheard, but I think I heard you misspeak.
You said when you use toothpaste with...
Sorbitol.
With Sorbitol, you are feeding the infection.
Correct.
Okay.
So not fluoride.
Correct.
Well, so the fluoride is just a compound in there that makes your enamel stronger.
But in order to make it tolerable, so you'd put it in your mouth, they put mint flavoring in it, and they use sorbitol as a sweetener.
And the sorbitol is a six-carbon sugar alcohol, and the strep mutans bacteria live on that bacteria.
They thrive on it.
All right.
So xylitol, a five carbon sugar, is not processable by the bacteria that cause tooth decay.
Correct.
All right.
And so that would seem, so it is not processable by these bacteria, but it does taste sweet to us.
Looks like sugar tastes like sugar.
Looks like sugar tastes like sugar.
And how do we process it?
Your body lightly absorbs it, gets a little bit of energy out of it, but most of it you just...
It passes through.
In fact, the big side effect that most people can have, I mean, once you get accustomed to it, it doesn't happen anymore, is if you eat a lot of xylitol, you'll have an osmotic diarrhea.
So don't drink Kool-Aid.
So the reason that we do not use xylitol as an artificial sweetener in food is that it has a negative impact if you consume significant quantities of it.
Yeah.
And I want to clarify something.
It's not artificial.
It's a natural sweetener.
Right.
If you go back, talking about evolutionary biology and stuff, if you go back 300 years, xylitol was one of the major sugars that we ate.
It wasn't until we started processing and refining the six carbon sugars out of sugarcane and sugar beets and adding those to our food That we started eating more 6-carbon sugars than we did 5-carbon sugars.
And where in nature is xylitol produced?
Everywhere.
Your body makes xylitol.
Through the...
What is it?
Something phosphate shunt of the Krebs cycle.
I learned it once a long time ago.
But for commercial purposes, you can take it...
After they've processed out the sap that you get the 6-carbon sugars from, they can even make it from sugar cane.
Really?
Yeah.
But it comes from the fiber stuff.
The most commercial sources for it are actually using corn cobs.
I see.
Because it's a throwaway product, a corn cob.
Yes.
And about 40% of the dry weight of a corn cob is xylitol.
If you, next time you have a piece of corn on the cob, when you're done, just...
Break the corn cob in half and suck on it.
It's sweet, that's xylitol.
Okay.
And so, give me more of a sense of the full implication of xylitol in the diet, in toothpaste, in nasal spray.
What role does this play?
It's working really as a prebiotic.
It really is helping to facilitate some microbiome shift away from bacteria that create acid to bacteria that, you know, three or four hundred years ago, they were the bacteria that kept us healthy.
And so it's the acid that degrades the tooth enamel.
And what happens if you shift over to xylitol from six carbon sugars?
You get healthy.
You get healthy.
You stop having tooth decay.
Your nasal microbiome, your oral microbiome, and if your mouth and your nose, the microbiomes there are healthy, your gut microbiome is going to be healthy too.
So this is the reason that I wanted to have you on the podcast, is I have the sense, having looked at many different realms, that there is...
The mainstream view of health, allopathic medicine, mainstream dentistry, mainstream orthodontia, have a story to tell about where ill health comes from and what should be done about it.
Those stories do not in general stand up to scrutiny.
Many of them are in fact perfectly illogical from an evolutionary point of view.
That said, once you step out of that realm from the mainstream nonsense, you step into an unregulated realm of other kinds of nonsense.
And in amongst those various kinds of nonsense are true stories that you should know.
But from most of our perspective, it's very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Which of the, you know, the alternative medical stories are actually true?
And so anyway, what I'm interested in was it sounded to me when you told me about Xylitol that this was a story that was at least credible with respect to fitting with the evolutionary nature of a human being.
Yeah.
I mean, again, you can go back and listen to...
Who was it?
Socrates or Plato, Aristotle, one of those guys.
Medicine will be thy food.
Hippocrate.
Hippocrates.
That's who it was.
Let thy food be thy medicine.
Yeah.
If you're controlling your microbiome, and I think that we're coming to an understanding now that our microbiomes are really what is dictating our level of health to a large...
Certainly a strong contributor.
Yeah.
Well, we can take all of the probiotics we want, but if we don't change our eating habits, We're going to continue to feed the same bacteria that we had before.
And so, you know, if you take a bunch of probiotics and you're still eating, I don't know if I should say Taco Bell and Wendy's or McDonald's every day, then you're still going to have, if you stop taking those probiotics, you're going to go right back to what you were before.
And so really what they're starting to understand now is you don't even need the probiotics if you understand how to use the food to change your gut microbiome.
Interesting.
Alright, so xylitol, 5-carbon sugar, has a significant impact on the microbiome.
It shifts it in the direction of microbes that are beneficial to human health.
The microbiome having been, I think it's safe to say, radically disturbed by, having been radically disturbed by Modern shifts in the way food is produced.
I think that would be quite the understatement, and I think that the modern microbiome that we have, especially in the United States, is heavily impacted by the amount of antibiotics that we give our children.
Yes, so you've got antibiotics, and as you pointed out earlier, you've got a massive shift in favor of six-carbon sugars from especially corn now.
Yeah.
Wherever it comes from, I don't think the bacteria care that much.
I find it interesting.
We sell a lot of our products in natural retailers, and some of the big brands of gum there are out there advertising, we're made with organic sugar.
I'm like, does the strep mutants care?
Are they down there going, is this organic?
I don't know.
Right.
Well, I mean, this raises a larger issue, which is to the extent that six carbon sugars are easily processed by microbes, that forces producers of food then to fend off those microbes in order to make the food shelf stable for long periods of time.
There is an implication of these easily processed sugars that they will force the introduction of chemicals that you have no evolutionary history with that will then do arbitrary damage.
You know, the same thing that causes a food not to go bad sitting on the shelf for months is going to have a negative impact on the things that live in your gut.
Yeah.
I actually stopped buying bread with preservatives in it.
I mean, I love the saying, you know, the best thing since sliced bread, but sliced bread was actually one of the first products that they actually, they had to put a lot of preservatives into it because once you slice it, you're breaking that protective crust that's around it.
Right.
You have a lot of surface area.
And a lot of microbes in it.
Yeah.
And a lot of starch.
Stuff grows right on it.
So, and you know, in fact, I mean, obviously...
Um, yeast is processing the material in there in order to produce the bread.
So this is a readily processable medium.
Our first sponsor for this episode is Maddie's all-time favorite, Sundays.
Sundays makes dog food that is a total revelation.
All of you with dogs, you love your dogs, you want to make them happy while keeping them healthy.
Well, Sundays helps you do just that.
Sundays makes dry dog food, but it's not like any dog food you've seen before.
The standard, high-end, dry food we were feeding Maddie pleased her well enough.
She's a Labrador, and labs will basically eat anything.
But Maddie does discriminate.
She loves the food that Sundays makes.
Seriously loves it.
We run out of Sundays and give her the previous high-end kibble instead.
She is clearly disappointed.
We should be giving her Sundaes.
She knows it, and we know it.
Sundaes is the only human-grade, air-dried dog food on the market.
Air-drying combines the best of cooked and raw approaches.
Air-drying preserves nutrients and taste, just like raw food does, but better than raw.
Sundaes' unique air-drying process includes a kill step, which kills pathogens, so unlike freeze-dried raw or frozen raw dog foods, there is no food safety or handling risk with Sundaes.
And Sundaes has no artificial binders, synthetic additives, or other garbage.
All of Sunday's ingredients are easy to pronounce and healthy for dogs to eat.
It's far better for your dog than standard dry dog food, and apparently it's delicious.
Even Fairfax, our epic tabby, likes it.
And I would also tell you, it's not half bad.
Made for dogs, tested by cats, and husbands.
Nope, that should say tested by cats and intrepid mavericks.
Sundaes is an amazing way to feed your dog.
There's no fridge, no prep, no cleanup, no wet dog food smells.
It's a total pleasure for the human interacting with it, which is a bonus.
In a blind taste test, Sundaes outperformed leading competitors 40 to 0. And our own little anecdote, Maddie, our Labrador, supports that result.
She bounces and spins and leaps in anticipation for a bowl of Sundays, way more than for her previous food.
Do you want to make your dog happy with her diet and keep her healthy?
Try Sundays.
We've got a special deal for our listeners.
Receive 35% off your first order.
Go to sundaysfordogs.com slash darkhorse or use the code darkhorse at checkout.
That's S-U-N-D-A-Y-S. F-O-R-D-O-G-S dot com forward slash Dark Horse.
Switch to Sundays and feel good about what you're feeding your dog.
Our final sponsor for this episode is Caraway, which makes high-quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
We haven't talked much on Dark Horse about the hazards of non-stick coatings on cookware and bakeware, but in our house, we threw out all of the Teflon decades ago.
Teflon is toxic.
Whether by flaking off into your food or releasing its toxins when it gets too hot, people who use Teflon-coated cookware and bakeware are definitely eating toxins.
Caraway makes non-toxic ceramic-coated aluminum cookware, which has a slick finish like that of Teflon-based non-stick pots and pans.
They've also got a stainless steel line.
Caraway ceramic cookware is non-toxic, but also beautiful and light.
And Caraway's colors are lovely and unique.
We've got pots and pans in their iconic black, a beautiful black mat with gold handles, and we've got bakeware in their yellow marigold.
They are nonstick without the toxins, easy to use, and pretty to look at.
And they've got all the pots and pans, baking sheets, and muffin tins you could want.
Caraway's internet famous cookware set comes with their saute pan, fry pan, dutch oven, sauce pan, plus four lids, and storage.
It's the ultimate kitchen setup, and the cookware set will save you $150 compared to buying the items individually.
Plus, if you visit carawayhome.com slash darkhorse, you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase.
The deal is exclusive for our listeners, so visit carawayhome.com slash darkhorse or use the code darkhorse at checkout.
Caraway.
Non-toxic cookware made modern.
Okay, so, you know, you've got multiple...
Should you prefer organics?
Yes, I believe you strongly should prefer them for many different reasons, but in this case not feeding the microbes that then force you to add preservatives would be a smart thing to do.
I think that Switching over, I mean, if you're going to get something that's organic, I would go out and buy a blend of...
The sweetener that I use is a blend of erythritol, which is a four-carbon sugar, and xylitol.
Looks like sugar, tastes like sugar, has about 20% of the calories.
You don't really have any laxative effect with it because you're not eating enough of it to have any problems.
So, I'm trying to recall.
Am I correct that there is a toxicity issue with dogs and xylitol?
Yes, with some dogs.
Some dogs.
And I'll tell you, if that happens, you know, obviously take your dog to the vet.
I'm not saying don't.
But just feed your dog a bunch of sugar.
Really?
Because it drives it out?
Yeah.
Well, what it is, is some dogs eat xylitol and...
Their body, they start producing insulin, but xylitol is not insulin dependent.
So they're making insulin, and if I'm correct, I'm trying to remember if this is the right way, but that insulin is what's killing the dogs because it keeps producing it because it's not breaking down the sugar.
I see.
So they're getting a signal that is causing a pathway to be triggered where the sugar in question is not appropriate.
And so if you just feed, I mean, what they do to treat the dogs is they give them a glucose IV and charge you 10 grand.
Interesting.
All right.
Well, that is a whole other ball of wax.
The fact is the destruction of human health at the hands of allopathic medicine has a mirror in what we are doing to our animals at the hands of modern veterinary medicine as well.
Yes, I agree.
Yeah.
In fact, it's one of the ways that we can actually come to understand what we're doing to ourselves is we can look at patterns that have come to afflict our domesticated animals and see that.
I'm not one of the domesticated animals.
I can't keep any of them alive.
I've had a couple of goldfish and they lasted in about eight months, nine months.
Well, goldfish.
I mean, that's not much of a test, really, but...
All right, so let's talk about your father and how he came to understand what he did.
Your father is a medical doctor?
Yeah.
He's a DO. He doesn't like to be called a medical doctor.
Ah, he's an osteopath.
Yeah.
So for those who don't know, and you correct me if I have this wrong, but osteopathy is the Second most prominent branch of medicine, so allopathic medicine is mainstream medicine.
And when they were originally, and when he went to school, they were getting these schools out there for osteopathic medicine coming back from when, you know, the government shut them all down in the early 1900s after the Rockefellers and the Flexner Report and all that.
But today, I think that the osteopathic The ones graduating today are allopathic physicians.
I mean, I don't think there's that much of a difference in their education.
I will say I have seen an osteopath in Portland who was excellent.
He's definitely old school.
He's not recently graduated.
He's an older guy.
And I learned from him that osteopathy...
Deals with essentially a forgotten system of the body.
That there is a set of connective tissue that basically mediates the interaction between organs, between muscle groups.
And our modern lifestyles actually cause it to be less dynamic than it would otherwise be.
It freezes in place.
And so, anyway, osteopathy...
Because we sit around so much.
Yeah, we sit around.
We don't behave normally.
We don't behave according to our evolutionary design.
And so, anyway, osteopathy has become focused on essentially...
Re-motivating these tissues in such a way that they can do their job properly.
And I will say, as strange as that may sound, not only have I experienced benefits from it, but Heather, who had a terrible...
She was in a terrible boat accident in 2016 that really did a tremendous amount of soft tissue damage from which she still...
out of our osteopath in Portland.
In fact, significant enough benefits that even now that we've moved out of Portland, she still regularly visits in order to be treated.
So whatever you may think about the story and whether it sounds right, it has demonstrable benefits.
I think there's a lot of good doctors that are MDs and a lot that are DOs.
But I think that the ones that graduate, I'm trying to think how to say that.
They don't graduate from medical school being great doctors.
It's what they do after they graduate.
When they graduate from medical school, all they are is pill pushers.
It's what they do after they graduate from medical school that makes them either a great doctor or a drug dealer.
I agree with you, but I would point out that there's also now a built-in structure that disrupts doctors who might otherwise become good doctors in their practice, and it travels under the heading of standard of care.
And so the idea is that standards of care are handed down by our broken medical institutions.
And a doctor is put in a terrible predicament if they have a patient in front of them and they think that they know what it is that they're supposed to do, which is either what they're supposed to do matches the standard of care, in which case they are safe doing it, or it doesn't match the standard of care, in which case they put themselves in danger.
And so the problem is that...
The standard of care effectively overrides medical judgment, which is exactly what you're talking about.
The development of that medical judgment, overseeing many different cases and discovering what actually works, you can't violate the institution.
So effectively, doctors become pill pushers because to do anything other than the standard of care would put them in jeopardy of their license and legal judgments.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of doctors that...
I mean, if all they do is follow the standard of care, I might as well just get a robot.
Right.
Or use Dr. Google.
And that's where we're headed.
What's the protocol for standard of care for a sore throat?
Right, exactly.
Well, which brings us back to...
To Xylitol.
Can you tell me, if somebody is interested in experimenting with, I don't want to say your product, but effectively that would be the easiest way for them to avail themselves of this, what changes would they be able to detect that would tell them that was actually valuable?
Well, that depends on which product.
I mean, so we have three different product lines.
One is the xylitol itself, and we don't really sell that much of it because it's not really, you know, what our goal is.
Our goal is to sell oral hygiene, nasal hygiene products where you're actually using these sugars.
And we do use erythritol in some of our products.
But to shift the microbiome so that you have a healthier, you know, oral and nasal gateway microbiomes and to keep you healthier.
But if you wanted, the one you'll see the difference with the fastest is use a nasal spray.
You know, I mean, there's a study that was published.
It was done by a doctor, Steven Olmos, down in San Diego.
He has clinics all over the world, and they used ultrasound, and they measured the airway volume.
Then they used our nasal spray, and in three minutes, they measured it again.
In three minutes, our nasal spray, drug-free, just using xylitol, had opened the airway by about 20%.
Interesting.
And that's all simply by osmotic pressure.
It's pulling tissue or fluid out of the inflamed tissues.
Ah, so that's interesting.
So let me just translate this.
You have the movement of substances in the direction of How will I say it?
Of solutes of greater concentration.
So if you put, let's say you put something in a environment that has more salt in it than the thing in question, it will pull water in the direction of the concentrated salt to effectively equalize the concentrations.
So sugars work the same way.
The reason, if you think about what preserves are, right?
Like a concentrated preserve, right?
The reason you would think that putting all of this sugar would cause these things to spoil.
But in fact, the concentration of sugar in the jam actually pulls water out of any bacteria that get into the jam and actually preserves it against spoiling, just the same way that salting something would.
So that's why we have this tradition of fruit preserves.
Why can't they preserve them with salt?
They can and nobody will eat them.
But okay, so what you're telling me is that the introduction of concentrated xylitol into the nasal microbiome causes the tissues, which are swollen with water, to lose that water, increasing the volume for air to pass through.
That's one of the things that it does.
It's a very reasonable explanation for why it would have a quick benefit.
Yeah.
The other one that is usually a quick benefit, I mean, it does open the airway, but usually, I'm trying to think, I'll give us a couple of stories.
So my dad started using this in 1998, and he started using it because PubMed, if you know what PubMed is, it's actually a government website where they collate all these research, healthcare, and it was really the first time that dental studies and medical studies were collated together.
And so when my dad went on as a physician and he was searching, you know, preventing ear infections, he had a bunch of kids in his practice who were having ear infections, but he went online and was requiring preventing ear infections and what kept coming up, because doctors, they don't study prevention, but what kept coming up was the dental studies where they were looking at how xylitol prevents tooth decay.
And it was in all the footnotes of these studies, you know, that the kids that use xylitol gum, not only did not get cavities, they were also getting 42% fewer respiratory infections.
And in 1998, there was an article in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy where they actually showed that what was causing that was that the xylitol was binding up on the receptor sites, making it so that the strep pneumo, the H flu, the MCAT, these pathogens can't adhere to the tissue.
Interesting.
All right.
So this matches something that you told me when we first met, which was that you have been using xylitol nasally for how long?
I've forgotten.
25 years.
25 years.
And what has your experience been with respect to respiratory pathogens?
I've been sick one and a half times.
One and a half times.
What's it like to be half sick?
So, the one time that I got sick, and this was back in 19...
I want to say, probably 2012-ish.
I had a sinus infection.
I went to the doctor, and they gave me antibiotics, and there's a whole other story there.
But the other time was like two weeks ago.
A week and a half ago, two weeks ago.
I was at work, and I felt like...
I'm like, I just don't feel good.
And I went home and I went to sleep, but four hours later, I was totally fine.
So that's my half.
Okay.
I don't really know if I was sick.
Yep.
You know, I hadn't been out drinking, so I wasn't hungover.
Okay.
So what was your experience before you started using xylitol?
Oh, I get sick a couple of times a year, just like everybody else.
Okay.
So I will say...
I have been experimenting with this because I have been traditionally very susceptible to respiratory pathogens, and I attribute that to the fact that I am clearly very allergic to wheat, but I did not know that for several decades.
I was diagnosed with asthma, I did everything to try to get rid of it.
Ripped the heating system out of our house and went to hydronic floor heat.
I, you know, put covers on all the beds so that dust mites wouldn't be getting me.
When my cats were finally, when they finally died, I didn't replace them, having been told I was allergic to cats.
None of these things made any difference.
What I finally did was I did some...
Of my own research, I saw that several people were reporting having cured asthma by eliminating gluten from their diet, and I thought, that sounds like garbage to me.
I don't believe this, but I've tried everything else, so let's tick this off the list.
I'll try taking wheat out of my diet, see if there's any effect, and then, you know, what will I have lost?
Well what I was shocked to discover was that having eliminated wheat from my diet for two weeks all sorts of things that I didn't even know were symptoms went away and the asthma did too and I thought I gotta be imagining that and I reintroduced wheat to my diet it all came back and I went to the doctor I said can you test me for a wheat allergy I tested negative or for a gluten allergy I tested negative and I said doc What's going on?
Wheat is clearly the thing driving this.
And he says, oh, that happens all the time.
You know, it doesn't necessarily show up as a positive test.
So anyway, what I've concluded is that actually I'm not allergic to gluten.
In order to avoid wheat, I have to say that I'm allergic to gluten because nobody understands what you're saying if you say you have a wheat allergy.
But it clearly, every time I get a little bit of wheat, it triggers me.
So I know that that was caught and my asthma is now gone.
Can I ask a question?
Of course.
Have you been to Europe lately?
I have been to Europe lately.
And can you eat the wheat there?
I don't know.
And I'll tell you why.
Everybody asks this question.
My suspicion is that I will still be in trouble if I eat European wheat.
And the reason that I have that concern is...
A number of years back, I had a gin and tonic made with Bombay Sapphire gin, which is certified gluten-free.
And my symptoms came and recurred.
And at that time, I didn't even really know that gin had...
So you can't even drink a beer.
Oh, no.
I haven't had a beer in more than a decade.
But...
Anyway, so Bombay Sapphire Gin, which is certified gluten-free, still triggers me.
So I don't think I'm allergic to gluten.
I think I have an allergy to wheat.
And my guess, spelt still triggers me.
So my guess is it's a general enough allergy that European wheat won't help me.
And here's the problem, though.
I don't get to go to Europe very often.
My symptoms are significant enough that if I eat some wheat in Europe and I turn out to be sensitive the way I expect that I will be, it's going to ruin what is a significant investment just to go to Europe.
And I can never bring myself to do it.
What if I just send you, because I buy all of my pasta.
From Europe.
All right.
That's an experimental try.
You know, I mean, I buy my gnocchis and my pasta all out of Italy.
That's an experiment I would try.
But I don't want to ruin a European vacation over...
Just wait until you go and then...
I don't know.
Eat it on the way home.
Well, you know, a number of years back, I went to France, and on the flight back, so I assumed it had to have been made in France, on the flight back, there was a dinner roll.
And I thought, you know what?
This is the perfect chance.
I'm going to save the dinner roll, and I'm going to wait until I get home, and then I'll eat it.
But the problem is, I looked at it, And the symptoms are so bad that I just was like, do you want to eat this poison?
I couldn't bring myself to do it.
But anyway.
I'd like to say that I'm lucky that I don't have any of those, but I've just never thought about getting tested.
Never tested it?
Yeah.
Well, I like to say that there are two kinds of Americans.
There are those that have a weed allergy and those that don't yet know that they have a weed allergy.
Yeah.
I went, I was at the doctor yesterday.
I have to go see the doctor every two years to get a flight physical.
So I went in yesterday and he's like, Hey, uh, you know, are you going to go get your blood work done?
I'm saying, no, I go get my blood work done.
I'm going to know something's wrong with it.
And if there isn't anything, you're going to find something.
And he goes, well, there's some truth in that.
There's a lot of truth in that, that they're, especially given that allopathic medicine has become so obsessed with metrics.
If they just do a survey of you, they're going to see some metric that's far enough out of whack that they're going to assume you're sick, and really the answer is either you feel sick or you don't.
Right.
No, I agree.
In general, you don't want to treat stuff because some metric, according to some model.
Well, it could just be that it's a, what they call COVID, but you didn't have COVID, you just looked like you might possibly have it.
Asymptomatic.
I think I'm an asymptomatic weed allergy.
Is that right?
Well, I'm telling you, the effect on my health was so dramatic.
And, you know, every so often I do get accidental wheat.
And this happens, and it's well known amongst people who have this allergy.
In fact, there's a whole app that I use to find, you know, a restaurant if I'm traveling that is good about wheat.
It's clearly labeled on the menu.
And, you know, they rate the safety of wheat.
Um, restaurants based on how likely you are to get cross contaminated or how likely something that says it's wheat free on the menu isn't.
And anyway, so it's a known phenomenon.
And actually when Heather and I were teaching, On study abroad, there were several people in the class who also had a wheat or gluten allergy.
And we would tend to get symptoms at the same time because we would go and have a meal somewhere and some chef wasn't careful or they didn't understand what a wheat allergy was or didn't care.
And so, you know, a whole bunch of us would come down with our symptoms all at once.
So anyway, it's been kind of an adventure.
I did want to mention this.
You were kind enough to bring me this book that your father wrote.
I don't know if you can see that.
Yes, he published it a couple of months ago.
A couple of months ago.
And yeah, it has a very interesting subtitle.
It's called Common Sense Medicine, Making America Healthy Again.
And apparently he wrote this before that phrase.
Oh yeah, he was writing it two years ago.
Two years ago.
So anyway, he correctly anticipated the mood of the country.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to digging into this.
It's like exactly the sort of...
Text that we need.
He really pushes my dad.
He actually really talks a lot.
I mean, and he's, I have to, you know, he's 87, I want to say, but he still goes out and writes and he still goes out and does a lot of educating, learning on the evolutionary aspect of why we are where we are and how to change that without using pharmaceuticals.
Yeah, you know, I've been on my own little adventure in the aftermath of COVID and it has exposed me to the absurdity of the mindset of modern medicine.
Which I was aware of.
In fact, I became aware of it in graduate school when I discovered a flaw in the drug safety system.
And I thought, naively, that as I revealed this flaw, that as embarrassing as it would be, they would have to take care of it because you couldn't possibly leave something like this in place.
And I was shocked to discover that no, actually, in spite of the fact that it Almost certainly results in deadly drugs remaining on the market and killing people.
Nobody was going to lift a finger over it.
So anyway, COVID reminded me of this lesson.
And you learn some very simple things.
It is almost impossible to improve the health of a reasonably healthy person with an intervention.
And the key to medicine, which as you point out, Hippocrates and others would have You know, rolled their eyes that anybody could have forgotten such a lesson.
I think they roll over in their graves.
Of course.
The fact is, what you want is an environment in which the creature functions because the environment is a good match for their design.
Ill health is the result of a mismatch between these two things.
And the idea that you're going to remedy a mismatch with some sort of lifelong obligation to a pharmaceutical is absurd.
Yes.
So, in any case, the discovery of this hidden world of mechanisms that restore something like a healthy microbiome that then result in significant measurable increases in health is something that I think we should all have expected.
And it's a little embarrassing to have, you know, in my 50s, I'm coming to understand just how important this...
I'm still learning a lot in my 50s.
Yeah, I think we all are, and I think COVID taught us a lot of lessons.
I mean, I'm learning how to fly a helicopter right now.
Does that count?
Right now?
Yeah.
Well, not right now.
You look like you're podcasting, but...
I mean, I was up flying yesterday.
Cool.
I've always wanted to learn to fly a helicopter.
Probably never been.
Then why don't you?
It's expensive, that's why.
It's not getting cheaper.
That's true.
I'm not sure that that's an argument for doing it.
In any case, all right.
So you've got what I think is a strong model about the hidden benefits of xylitol and the hidden harms of six-carbon sugars.
Well, I don't think they're hidden at all.
I think they're out there.
I think people know about it.
I just think that we're so addicted to sugar in our society.
We're about the same age.
I mean, when you grew up, did your teacher give you candy every day at school?
When you went to church, if you did go to church, did your Sunday school teacher give you candy all day?
Did your piano teacher give you candy all the time?
But every time you turn around and everybody's like, oh, it's just, come on, it's just once in a while.
Okay, once in a while, eight times a day.
Right.
But that's, I mean, that's how bad we've gotten with adding sugar to our diet.
And, you know, going back, and I think we touched on it, this whole thing with fluoride and how the dental societies have all put that on there, they should have understood that Back in the 70s, that with all of the sugar being added into our diet, the fluoride was going to stop working.
I mean, it's a fascinating story.
I should say, Heather and I have taken a lot of crap for pointing out the absurdity of our conventional wisdom regarding fluoride.
It's dumb.
It's absolutely insane.
And even if the story that fluoride in the form that we're adding it to the drinking water had the benefits in question, there is no question that there is a neurological risk that comes from it.
And that it's a very foolish way to introduce a remedy because the amount of water that one...
It's stupid.
It's the dumbest thing in the world.
And I mean, they've known that since for decades.
Yeah, for decades.
They really have.
And the fact that we're, you know, for all of those years, you were considered a kook for pointing out what is now becoming conventional.
We actually talked to dentists about it.
And...
You know, I mean, even the ADA, I get the sense they want to go away from fluoride.
But you have this group, it's called the Forsyth Institute, and they are so militant about fluoride that they kind of override that.
They're pro-fluoride.
Oh, very much so.
Yeah.
Which, you know, one wonders...
There's obviously a lot of stupidity in the world.
It's a little hard to calibrate whether the stupidity has gone up, but the fact that we have been widely adding a material to drinking water that does have a demonstrable decreasing impact on IQ, you know, how would history be different if we hadn't been doing this to ourselves is, I think, an open question.
I specifically live in a town where they don't fluoridate the water, so...
Well, I've lived in towns where they don't fluoridate the water.
I grew up in a town where they did.
So are the people in the towns where they don't fluoridate, are they smarter?
I don't know.
I was talking to another entrepreneur who started a very successful business.
I think I'm at liberty to talk about it.
He started a drone and gimbal manufacturing business for cinema.
So when you look at all of these fantastic shots that would once have required a helicopter, and obviously they're now being done in a different way, these guys make the premier set of equipment for such things.
But anyway, he was telling me that the founders of the company all grew up on well water.
Now, that's an anecdote, but there's a question about whether or not the city kids from places that added fluoride to the drinking water have paid a price in the market competitively because there are a few IQ points down.
And, you know, those last few IQ points matter a great deal.
So anyway, how could we have made such a huge error?
And especially, you know, I knew about the fluoride error.
That was obvious enough.
What I didn't know was that it wasn't a choice between, you know, reinforcing teeth with fluoride and, you know, the IQ points.
It was that there was a whole hidden...
address tooth decay at a causal level by not feeding the bacteria that are producing the acids.
You just ship the microbiome.
And the thing is, is that I'm trying to think of how to say this and not alienate all the dentists that I, you know, that I work with.
Up until, you know, two weeks ago, a month ago, I would have suggested using a fluoride You spit most of it out.
It helps with remineralization.
But even now, I would probably say no.
And the reason why is because if your mouth, with all of the sugar that we're eating, if you...
I'm trying to think how to say it quickly.
We wake up in the morning and we have carbohydrates for breakfast.
Then we have a coffee.
You go to Starbucks and get a cup of sugar with a little bit of coffee in it.
Sorry.
And then you go to lunch and you have something and then you have to have a candy bar to tide you over to dinner.
And then after dinner, you have to go down to Taco Bell and get midnight dinner, whatever they call that, fifth meal or whatever.
But we're not giving our mouth time to get back to that basic pH that it needs for whatever product, whether you're using hydroxyapatite, whether you're using trimetaphosphate, whether you're using fluoride, whatever you're using to assist your teeth to remineralize, none of that is going to work if your teeth aren't remineralized.
Right.
And that's the point of it.
The dentists, when they originally did the studies with fluoride 80 years ago, people were eating three squares a day.
It wasn't, you know, grazing all day.
Your mouth, your teeth were remineralizing.
So, to me, a lot of this looks like the downstream consequence of market failure.
And in effect, I don't believe that most dentists understand that they are actually destroying tooth health, which has an economic benefit to them.
I think that most dentists, like most doctors, believe that they are doing the right thing, that their patients are better off with their advice than without it.
But somehow, There is a bias in the direction of a treatment protocol that is lucrative rather than a prevention protocol which puts the people in a position to give the advice out of work.
And I don't know, when we talked about this last, I think you were not very well aware of the work of Mike Mew.
Mike Mew is an orthodontist.
He is, like you, second generation.
And I realize you're not a doctor, but you're obviously steeped in this because your dad pioneered it.
Mike Mew's dad also pioneered an approach to orthodontia.
I actually think I've heard him lecture.
I'd have to see a picture of him.
I'm very visual.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to generate a picture of him at the moment.
But in any case, the thing that struck me about Mike Mew when I first heard him was, in general, when I hear somebody...
Pontificate about evolution and the way it works and how it's involved in some kind of health consideration.
The explanations are terrible, right?
As a rule.
When I heard Mike Mu talk about the evolutionary status of orthodontia, why we have an epidemic of malocclusion, and how to remedy it, actually his evolutionary logic was spot-on.
What did he say?
Did he say processed, soft foods, sucking on?
Yeah, well, his model involves the The failure of us to give kids chewy, resistant foods when they're young.
You know, we puree everything.
And what that does is it causes the skull to form incorrectly.
It collapses the airway, which has implications for all kinds of things, you know, sleep apnea and attention deficit disorder.
All sorts of stuff.
And, you know, yes, you can remedy it, especially if you're young, you can remedy it.
But the basic point is orthodontia is selling a garbage story that what is befallen us that has caused, you know, most children to need their teeth moved is some sort of, you know, bad genes that are spreading through the population, which Couldn't possibly be true.
It would not be moving at the rate of an epidemic.
It's something else.
And that something else has to do with the behavioral, the failure of parents to give kids normal foods that children would have had throughout evolutionary history.
But the upshot of that...
Is, if orthodontia were to recognize that fact...
They'd go to business.
They would.
In a generation, because it would...
You would think that they would, but...
You'd be surprised at how lazy we Americans are.
Well, maybe.
But let's put it this way.
There doesn't need to be another...
If my model is correct, there doesn't need to be another generation of kids who need orthodontia.
So do you expect orthodontia, therefore, to effectively surrender and say, hey, we figured out the remedy?
No.
And so what are they doing?
Of course, they're going after his license.
And this is a story that one hears again and again.
Of course, the doctors who successfully treated COVID have all been fired from jobs.
Many of them have had their licenses gone after.
So there is this perverse aspect to the market where it will...
Cause people who are the go-to experts in a given field to give advice that is upside down and keeps them in business without them knowing that that's what they're doing.
And once you spot that pattern and you realize Okay, then what is the advice?
If you had somebody who really didn't have an economic dog in the fight, who was intelligent, had access to all of the evidence, and could present you a roadmap for life, what would they be telling you?
Well, they'd be telling you vitamin D is the key to fending off pathogenic illnesses, that vitamin D is best accumulated by exposure to the sun, That sun exposure is positive for you unless you burn.
That it's not.
That you should be going out slathered in this, that or the other to bend off the sun's rays.
You know, you'd be told that the spectrum of light that's coming out of your light bulbs isn't good for your mental health.
You'd be, you know, again and again.
Which light bulbs?
Well, the fact is, as we've gotten better, we think of light bulbs as producing light.
And therefore, what we think we mean is visible light, and we treat any light that they put out that isn't visible as a waste.
Do the incandescent bulbs do that?
Incandescent bulbs are vastly better than the fluorescence, especially.
Compact fluorescence are insane on multiple levels.
Yeah, I don't have any of those levels.
And even LEDs, because of course, if the thing that we're measuring the light bulb on is how efficient it is at producing visible light, then any light that it produces that isn't visible, like...
You know, like infrared light, we consider waste.
So anyway, yes, these things have all been optimized in this insane way.
And we don't think of turning on lights at the wrong time of day.
So they send bad signals into our circadian measurement structures.
You know, we don't think of that as a profound intervention, but it really is.
So anyway, there's some roadmap that somebody should be handing us that it doesn't have a perverse incentive and we don't have it.
So what you're saying is the guy that hangs my Christmas lights, he's not going to come and say these Christmas lights that I hang up for two months at your house that ruin your sleep during, you know, from mid-November to mid-January.
Yeah.
I have everything else all done.
I planned it around the house and I didn't, when I was building the house, I didn't think, how do I block out the Christmas lights so that...
Well, I mean, to be honest with you, I do think that this is something that one should keep in mind.
And we just are, we're very badly positioned to make obvious points about, you think that, you know, you need to puree your, you know, child's food, you know, before they're in a position to choose something.
I just gave them food.
But I had the benefit of knowing, you know, there's a doctor that you should get to know him, but his name's Mark Cannon, and he's the...
I mentioned a little bit, but he does a lot of presentations.
He's a pediatric dentist researcher.
About the evolutionary aspect of all that, and even the bacteria, and even tracing back.
I mean, there's all kinds of stuff there.
But I've known him since before my kids were born.
And so, you know, my kids, I think, have benefited from, you know, what I've learned from my dad and also from him.
I think I told you this.
You've met my two daughters.
I mean, the one that's 12 has never been sick a day in her life.
She's never had a cavity.
She's never done anything.
My oldest daughter, I think I told you this, I call her my deathly ill child because she's been sick like 10 days in her life.
10 days, huh?
Yeah, that's not bad.
Well, I guess I do wonder, in the end, if you were to look at all of the harms of medicine and all of the benefits of medicine, What would the ratio be?
90% harm?
I do think, at least I suspect it's more harm than good.
Oh, it's easily more harm than good.
What I think, and I talk about this a fair amount, medicine It has really stolen the limelight, I guess.
You know, we had...
If you go back, and I call this like the golden age of public health from the late 1800s to the late 1900s, people, we...
Our standard of living went up.
Our longevity went up.
All of this.
And doctors, they're like, well, it's because of pharmaceuticals.
It's because of this.
And that's not true.
It's 100% not true.
It's because plumbers.
It's because they put water to our house.
We had clean water.
It's because we had trash guys that would come around and carry it away.
And they were treating this, and we were still eating decent food up until the 70s or 80s when that explosion happened.
And that's when we started eating the garbage.
But even all of the stuff that the doctors, when they started vaccinating and when they started doing all this other stuff, all of that really started in the 80s, and everything's gone downhill since then.
Yeah, and we keep compounding the effects.
So here's one I've been thinking about recently.
Used to be that you could drink the water, right?
When you traveled, you had to be concerned about the water.
But it used to be that you could drink the water.
Now, many of us are reluctant to drink municipal water.
And what that means is that we're doing something, like we're filtering it.
But if you take a really effective filter, like a reverse osmosis filter, Not only are you taking out the stuff that you don't want to be drinking, you're taking out the minerals too.
And to compound matters even further, Because water was inherently mineralized for all of human history, you don't have a detector for that water tastes bad because it doesn't have the minerals in it, right?
So you don't necessarily know.
If you reverse osmosis your water and you're taking out the minerals that you need, you may not know about it.
And so, whereas it should not be the case that In general, people with a good diet have a mineral deficiency.
If you're reverse osmosis filtering your water, and you're eating food that's been grown effectively hydroponically because the soils have been depleted, right?
Then the question is, well, how mineral rich is your diet?
It may be tremendously mineral poor, and you don't know that you have a problem, and so is, you know...
That's why I eat a lot of wheat.
You eat a lot of wheat.
You're eating my share, brother.
No.
I eat many.
I eat a lot of meat, not wheat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's right.
But even that, you know, it turns out, of course, that how the animals are treated has profound impacts, right?
If you're feeding them, you know, corn, that's not a healthy animal.
Yeah, well, I get, hopefully...
Taco Bell gets theirs.
You're not a Taco Bell fan, are you?
You know what?
When I was in college, I used to eat there a lot because it was cheap.
My kids, I've eaten there once in the last 10 years, simply because at one point I wanted to take my kids there and they didn't like it.
They didn't like it.
But they don't like McDonald's.
They don't like...
I mean, they don't...
They'll eat chicken nuggets after school before they go to dance, but other than that, they don't really like going out for fast food.
Yep.
I haven't eaten any fast food in probably...
Probably 20 years.
And my kids, it's possible now that they live on their own that they have visited some fast food place.
You say that like it's a conspiracy.
Maybe they have visited some.
They're not telling me about it.
No, I mean, they're certainly...
that they're certainly not regulars but i wouldn't be shocked you know i i do think you probably need to it's such a phenomenon you You probably need to have tried it so you at least even know what it is.
But no, my kids don't eat fast food as a regular matter for sure.
And fast food, even fast food has gotten worse.
Right?
I mean, for example, the shift from beef tallow to...
Are they coming back?
What?
Are they going to make it from beef tallow again?
I don't know.
It did seem to get a lot of attention when...
I think it was just a meme somebody put out.
I don't think Trump said anything.
I mean, I actually...
Over the last, I want to say two years, the only thing I have in my house now, I don't have any vegetable oil, any of that.
All I have is, I use avocado oil and olive oil.
Yep.
Now the problem with the olive oil is that a lot of it isn't olive oil.
Go to Italy.
Well, okay.
Yeah, no, if you get your olive oil from a good source, it's great.
But the problem is, just as you may remember, that honey...
Has a lot of corn syrup in it.
Yes.
In fact, a lot of it has no honey in it whatsoever, which was...
I remember this from probably 20 years ago.
Somebody did a survey.
They went to the supermarket and they bought all of the different brands of honey.
Making honey without...
It's not honey, right?
And of course, you would expect that because honey is...
The only reason why I mentioned the corn syrup is because just this past week, I had some honey that was crystallized.
Yeah.
And I put it in the water and I was looking up online.
I'm like, how do you stop honey from crystallizing?
Yeah.
And they said, add corn syrup to it.
Well, that's the dumbest thing in the world.
I don't want my kids eating corn syrup.
Yeah.
So, they crystallized honey.
Well, no.
Here's what you do.
There are two things.
One, you'd be amazed.
If you take your glass jar of honey, don't do it with plastic, glass jar of honey, and you put it in a bath of boiling water.
Well, that's what I did.
It'll liquefy.
Yeah.
And if that doesn't do it, the tiniest amount of water in that process.
You just add a tiny bit of water, and that will take it into the liquid phase again.
I'll do it.
I was thinking about just adding some butter.
Well, you can't go wrong.
Butter and bacon make everything better.
Yeah, I wouldn't add bacon to the jar.
But anyway, all right.
Well, what else should we talk about?
Well, what have we talked about?
We talked about...
Oral hygiene, the utilization of xylitol when chewing gum and mints to change the microbiome of your mouth.
Hopefully people buy up my products, but if you don't, just make sure that the gum you're using and the toothpaste you're using That A, they don't have any sorbitol in them, that they have xylitol.
And there's a bunch of them.
I mean, if you're not worried about having a natural gum, you know, there's a number of them that have aspartame and sucralose or regular that you buy at the grocery store.
But if you want a natural one, most of the sugar-free gums that you're going to find in a health food store like Sprouts or, you know, Good Earth or any of these stores like that, they're going to be made with xylitol.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would not advise anybody to chew an artificial gum.
Neither would I. I don't know what they make them with, but the problem is whatever they're making them with chemically to make them have that, you know, it used to be, there's a tree that we encounter in Latin America.
Chicle.
Yeah, monocara chicle.
And monocara chicle used to be, you still see it, there's slash marks.
Yeah.
They use that.
They use some...
There's a tree out of Greece that's kind of the same thing.
There's another tree in Asia, and I can't remember the name of it.
It's not sapodilla.
That's something else.
There's a tree...
There's a bunch of trees that they get that from.
Yep.
So one of those, you're at least in the ballpark of something natural enough that it won't be toxic to you.
But if you take something that's been plasticized in order to keep it in that, you know, gummy form in your mouth, you're also putting a huge amount of energy into this.
So you're going to have these molecules that are not natural molecules that you're going to be liberating.
So you're taking a significant risk.
What the harms are, I don't know.
Even though I own a company and we sell chewing gum, because of that, I actually just use mints more than I chew gum.
Use mints.
Okay.
All right.
So we've talked a little bit about the hidden...
Moral hygiene, nasal hygiene.
I mean, and even going back...
To discussing the importance of oral hygiene.
There's a whole field out there.
There's an organization called the American Academy of Oral Systemic Health.
And it's an organization that is actually trying to get doctors, physicians, and dentists to work together.
Because there's a lot of systemic issues that have their roots in the mouth.
I mean, you have heart disease, you have Alzheimer's, you have even obesity.
And where a lot of that comes from is inflammation.
Because if you have a lot of sugar in your mouth, if you have a lot of tooth decay, you're going to have inflammation.
And inflammation is an immune response.
And acute inflammation isn't bad.
It's your body trying to push stuff away.
I mean, if you cut yourself, it's going to flood that area and wash away any pathogens.
It's when you have chronic inflation that goes on and on and on and on, and it dries that tissue out.
And I use this example a lot, but if you think of your cells You know, as beach balls, and you fill them half full, you can actually take those balls and stack them up and make a membrane that's fairly impermeable.
You can take a garden hose and spray it, nothing goes through.
But if you take them and inflame them, fill them all the way full and stack them up, You have holes that just bacteria and viruses and molds and pathogens, they just go right through those holes.
And that's why inflammation is bad when it's chronic.
And again, you want to move the microbiome in your mouth away from the ones that are causing that periodontal disease.
And just to bring it up in COVID, They knew in early 2020, there was a paper that came out of Israel and another one that came out of Canada, where they pointed out that if people had periodontal disease, easily treatable, brush your teeth, you are eight times more likely to die from COVID if you got COVID. Eight times.
Interesting.
Not 8%.
Eight times.
Yeah.
Because what you're doing is you're allowing it to go straight from here to a systemic infection.
Yeah.
You're not slowing it down in the mucus at all.
Yeah.
And you would have thought that Vivek Murthy, I love saying that name, you would have thought that our Surgeon General or Rochelle Walensky would have come out and said, yo, people, brush your teeth.
Not that hard.
Brush your teeth.
But they didn't.
Which is absurd because I wasn't the only one that read those papers.
Yes, well, the degree to which...
Everything that we were told about what COVID was and how to deal with it was upside down.
It frustrates me to no end because I sit there and you pay attention to the news and everybody's talking about Fauci and Francis Collins and where it came from and how it was.
And we should prosecute Fauci.
And I agree.
Something needs to be done there.
But I think that the bigger crime is our public health response.
Because if they had actually just made one decision right, It would have been a flash in the pan.
It would have been nothing.
Gone.
Oh, there's no question that it was our response that caused almost all of the harm.
Oh, yeah.
Because had, let's say that we had done nothing.
We would have been better off.
At a national level.
We would have been better off because doctors...
Would very quickly, based on the experimentation that is a natural part of medicine, have discovered that we had drugs already in the pharmacopoeia that were safe and managed almost any case of COVID. And we were not allowed to discover that because those drugs were forbidden.
So everything about COVID from the production of the virus to the behavioral modifications, the lockdowns and the masks, especially on children.
And the interruption of the natural relationship between doctors, patients, and pharmacists, all of those things made it vastly worse.
We would have very quickly figured out how to treat it with near complete effectiveness.
And, you know, it's still a tragedy that we had a new virus, but we did not need to turn the world upside down and do all of the harm.
Well, all they had to do, really, Was go to the CDC's web page back in 2020. Because on the CDC's web page, it actually had instructions on how to treat a respiratory coronavirus infection.
And it was by nasal irrigation.
It was by physically washing out the nose and reducing the viral load and You know, with salt water.
Not even using baby shampoo or xylitol or iodine or any of those.
Just salt water.
And in early 2020, there was a study that was done at Vanderbilt.
And you know what it showed?
What worked in 2019?
Still worked in 2020, believe it or not.
How could that possibly be the case?
But they had a study that came out, and they had 60 people over the age of 65, all tested positive.
They all had symptoms.
They just used salt water, and they were all better than under a week.
When we shared that with the government, they told us not to share that.
Not only did they tell us and they sent us a warning letter telling us not to share that, but they also sent them to everybody else in the industry, told them not to share it.
Companies you're probably familiar with, like Neomed, they received a warning letter.
Navage, where they shove it up with a pump and vacuum it out the other nose.
Way too aggressive if you ask me, but they received a warning letter and they all, you know, put their tail between their legs and said, okay, we won't talk about it.
And I'm like, you know, it's because I'm dumb.
I just was like, no, they're, you know, I can't go to the lake.
They're not letting me go out and travel.
I'm going to say something.
And, you know, and so they, you know, they ended up suing me a year later, but...
Do you want to talk about that?
Oh, I love talking about it.
All right.
It makes me feel so...
So you've been sued.
...gated that I've lived in a country run by bureaucrats that are that dumb.
All right.
So you've been sued.
What did they sue you for?
We're still trying to figure that out.
But what they say they sued me for was making false and misleading statements about nasal hygiene and about our products.
And how did they come to the conclusion that these statements were false?
Well, they haven't really shown us any statements we've made that are false.
Really?
Yeah.
I mean, I'm millions of dollars into this in three and a half years.
They still, to this day, have not shown us a statement that was false or misleading.
Every statement that we've made, we had studies backing it up and expertise backing it up.
The very first thing that happened is, you know, I mentioned earlier that in 1998, there was a study that showed that, you know, xylitol blocked the ability of strep mutant, or not strep mutant, strep pneumo H flu and MCAT to adhere to the tissue in the nose.
And when I started the company, And I'm mixing up stories here.
But we learned from that, my dad learned from that, that if you can block a pathogen from adhering to the tissue, you facilitate your body washing it away, you're not going to get sick as much.
So when my dad started using this with all these kids in his practice, they stopped getting sick.
That's what you would expect.
The same effect of soap.
You wash your hands, you soap, you don't get sick as often.
The xylitol is doing the same thing to bacteria in your nose that washing your hands does.
And so when I started the company, You know, I just was an underwater welder.
I didn't know what I was doing.
I put an ad out there that said, wash your nose with clear and your kids won't get ear infections.
Wash their nose.
Well, the FTC, they actually sent me a paper letter back then in 2001. And said, you need to call us.
And I called him and after about an hour on the phone, this is the difference between what it was back then and what it is today.
After about an hour on the phone, they explained and they said, no, you have to have a study backing it up.
Your dad was anecdotal evidence because he never actually did a study and published it.
He tried to, but they laughed at him and said, no, you don't spray sugar water up a kid's nose and have them get better, have them not get sick as much.
So they wouldn't publish it.
And the FTC said, so you can say that xylitol blocks bacteria from adhering to the tissue.
You can say it blocks pathogens, strep pneumo, H flu, MCAT. But you can't say it prevents an ear infection.
Okay?
And so that's the semantics of it.
I understood the ground rules.
For 20 years, we never had a problem.
When COVID came, we weren't making any claims about COVID. We didn't have any data showing what it did.
But we had a pulmonologist that actually said, hey, you should check this product out because I'm using it and I'm seeing good results.
So we sent our nasal spray to the lab.
And the very first time we sent one, we sent one with, you know, we put the kitchen sink into it.
We have a couple of different ones.
We sent the one that had the most stuff in it.
And what we found was that something in our nasal spray was killing off the virus as effectively as a 70% solution of alcohol.
And we're like, well, it's the xylitol.
It has to be the xylitol.
Well, we were wrong.
It wasn't the xylitol.
It was actually the grapefruit seed extract that we use at 0.2% as a preservative.
And that grapefruit seed extract at 0.2% was killing the virus at the same efficacy as a 70% solution of alcohol.
So we sent that to the, you know, this is in, I want to say, April, March, April of 2020. And you would think, you know, you understand that from iodine, that if you kill stuff and, you know, pathogens in your nose, the chances that you're going to get sick go down.
Yeah, let me just explain this to people.
You've got...
A number of processes where the virus is moving, and we tend to think of the contagion where it moves from one person to another, but it also has to spread from one cell to another, right?
You get some cell that is inevitably infected, that cell spills out virus, and the virus then starts attacking adjacent cells.
So the infection spreads within your body.
And if you arrest that process by killing off the virus once it's outside of the cells, you still have that initial infection, but it doesn't get bigger, which means that the number of people that it will affect downstream goes down because the amount of virus that you're putting into the world is tiny.
Basically, it reduces all of the impacts, even though you didn't actually prevent the infection.
So it's a high leverage intervention, which is why, you know, providone...
Iodine works, salt water, sounds like grapefruit seed extract.
Yeah, so that was what it was.
Then, right about the same time frame, there was a study that came out of the University of Tennessee where they looked at iota carrageenan, which is a seaweed extract, and they looked at xylitol.
I don't know why, and I've reached out to them and I just haven't heard back.
In three years, they don't want to tell me, I guess, why they chose xylitol as their placebo.
But the xylitol actually blocked the ability of the virus, SARS-CoV-2, to adhere to the tissue better than the iota carrageena did.
They both work.
They're both effective.
Yeah.
But they both blocked it to where the xylitol at any concentration that they tested blocked the virus from adhering to the tissue.
And they used it as a placebo?
They used it as a placebo.
So we have a name for that in science.
We call that fraud.
And the idea is if you make a highly effective placebo, it makes the treatment look much less effective.
Well, I don't know that I would agree with that because it was done by a company in Argentina who had sold a xylitol nasal spray and they sold, they currently sell one with iotic carrageenan.
And they had one which was, there was another one that was a saline placebo also, but it didn't have any effect on it.
So, why do you think they would have used xylitol as a placebo if it's highly effective?
Interest, because they'd had a nasal spray with xylitol, but in Argentina, and I wish I could remember the name of the company, but in Argentina and a number of other countries, you can go out and make claims for nasal sprays that have iotic carrageenan in them, that they help with colds and flus and stuff like that because of this same effect.
But they don't have that for xylitol.
But if you wanted to make a claim, if you were selling something with carrageenan in it...
You would want the full effect demonstrated, so you would want to give a placebo that had no effect.
In fact, they actually went.
We, at that point, and all this is before, because in June of 2020, the pulmonologist that we were working with, he actually approached the FDA and said, hey, I want to do a study using xylitol nasal sprays in COVID. And the FDA wouldn't let us do one.
one.
They turned it down and said, no, we don't allow drug action studies to be done with cosmetics with whatever pathogen level that the COVID virus was.
But there was a study, someone else did one in India where they used a xylitol nasal spray.
And first of all, they use a 5% solution of xylitol.
They used it three times a day.
We use a 10% solution of xylitol.
And they did a study in India in hospital workers with the Delta during the Delta wave.
And it reduced transmission of that, of those patients by 62%.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the better that the other thing is, is that in Argentina, they did a study with iota carrageenan in hospital workers with the Delta wave.
And again, they had them use it four times a day.
It reduced it 80%.
So did anybody in any of the protocols, the COVID protocols pick this up?
What's his name?
Zelenko?
Yeah.
We had a lot of people start calling us in early 2020, and he was talking about it, but he also went with iodine.
And the iodine issue, if I was sick with something that I thought was going to kill me, I would use iodine.
But for somebody to use iodine on a regular basis is pretty retarded.
Yeah, it's not something you want to do.
It's killing everything and everything and everything, and you shouldn't be doing it.
It's overkill.
That's interesting.
So Zev Zelenko is dead now, so unfortunately you can't ask.
And I know that Peter McCullough talks about it, and I know that the FLCCC, they don't have it listed, but I have...
Many, many people who call in and say, yeah, I was told to get up by the doctor.
We're following this, the protocol we're doing.
So I know a lot of them are recommending it.
All right.
Interesting.
Well, I will ask them about that.
But it does seem very promising based on the studies you've referenced.
And, you know, we shared all of this data with the government.
And they just told us to shut up and not to share.
Which is, this is a very conspicuous pattern.
The fact is, there were interventions that were demonstrably valuable.
And to an intervention, they were all demonized.
Every single one.
Every single one.
You know, we were told that, you know, they closed the beaches, the hiking trails, even though the best thing you could do was be out of doors, right?
Be out of doors, especially if you were in the sun, right?
These things were demonstrably positive and they forbid us to do them.
They did not talk about vitamin D and its implication across many different pathogens, but including and especially COVID. I got stopped once.
I have to tell you this because this is so dumb.
I got stopped once by someone who said, a ranger, a forest ranger, he goes, you can't be here because of COVID. And I sat there and I said, I looked around and I said, you realize that I'm all by myself on a snowmobile in the middle of the mountains.
And he looked at me and goes, yes, but you can't be here.
And really what I said was, then catch me.
Because I knew my machine was faster.
Look, I don't know what to make of it.
I'm sure your ranger had no idea what he was party to.
But the idea that every single thing they told you to do made the problem worse.
And that the obvious things that you had at your disposal you were forbidden to do.
That's a conspicuous pattern.
I've had this conversation with so many doctors that it's crazy that all you had to do was anything.
Right.
Anything.
I mean, as far as washing your nose out, I mean, the CDC was telling you, all you had to do is go there and say, hey, CDC, what do you tell me to do for a respiratory coronavirus infection?
To the point of that, though, when we pointed that out to the FTC, that they, you know, hey, right here on the CDC's webpage, this is what it says.
Two weeks later, that was taken down.
Interesting.
I'm not saying there's a connection.
Right.
But it's an observation.
So, do you expect your lawsuit...
It sounds like an absurd one.
It sounds like lawfare.
Beyond absurd.
So, do you expect that lawsuit to disappear in the Trump era?
I don't.
And I kind of don't want it to.
And the reason why is because...
What they have now is when we were, I mean, I very much remember when I decided that I was going to let the government sue me, that I was not going to, you know, bend over and kiss, you know.
And I was sitting on a boat at Lake Powell, and I had to go out to the middle of the lake, so I had good cell reception.
And I'm on the phone with all these FTC lawyers, with my lawyers, and we're trying to find a way.
And going back to that study that was done at the University of Tennessee, that xylitol blocked adhesion of...
The FTC came and said, you can't say that because it's not on human airway tissue.
And I'm like, okay, so you're telling me that it's good enough for all the pharmaceutical companies, but a hygiene product, we have to go a step beyond what the pharmaceutical companies are being held to.
They said, yeah.
So I said...
Well, okay, so we'll go do that on human airway tissue.
And I'm actually glad they did it because we actually looked at erythritol, we looked at sorbitol, 6-carbon, erythritol, a 4-carbon, we looked at xylitol, a 5-carbon.
We looked at RSV, we looked at H1N1, we looked at rhinovirus, we looked at a whole bunch of things.
And it was really interesting what we found.
But what we found is all of those sugars took care of COVID. Some of them took care of RSV. Some of them took care of H1N1. And none of them took care of rhinoviruses.
We're trying to find something, because we figured that there has to be something that will work in there.
But we did all of that on human airway tissue.
So I'm sitting on the lake, after we've shared this with the FTC, and these...
I can't think of another word other than retarded lawyers from the FTC. They're actually sitting there and saying, no, you can't say that.
And I'm like, you told us to go do a study on human airway tissue, because that's what we have to do.
And I said, so we have it right here that it blocks RSV. Yeah, you can say that.
We have it right here that it blocks H1N1. Oh yeah, you can say that.
Well, we have it right here that it says it blocks SARS-CoV-2.
No, you can't say that.
Yeah, okay.
And I'm like, at this point, the absurdity, you could tell at this point that it had nothing to do with science.
It had nothing to do with intelligence.
It was more than likely that I stood up to them, and they just wanted to make a case and make a point and say, well, you don't ever stand up to the government.
And why we figured that out, why I decided that that was the case, is because when we were deposing them, I actually had our attorneys ask them, I said, how long have you been working at the FTC? 21 years.
How many times have you sent out a warning letter where the entity, the company, or the person responded and gave you a bunch of studies backing up what they were saying?
It's sufficient to where you resented that warning letter.
Never.
Never happened.
So you either have people working at the FTC that are so amazingly brilliant that they've been batting a thousand for a quarter of a century.
Or they're just a bunch of bullies that are out there using the government to steamroll the people they don't like.
Yeah.
That they're...
Those are the only options.
They're read-only.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's incredible.
And, you know, it's...
But, and so going back to it, when we decided to do that, we wanted to take a chunk out of that whole Chevron deference.
That was what our goal was.
We didn't think we would, you know, overturn it.
Yeah.
And, you know, the fishery people, they beat us to the punch.
The Supreme Court threw it all out.
So, the next case that goes through is the case that is going to really set the standard of what the FTC can require.
And I think that we have a phenomenal case because we can show that the FTC, that Richard Cleland, Mike, whatever his name is, Delores Montemores or whatever he's, that these attorneys The censorship that they caused killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.
Because if Neomed and Navage and all these companies have been able to go out and say, hey, use irrigation, a lot of people would still be alive.
Yeah.
And that should piss people off.
Oh, it should absolutely piss people off.
This was...
So that's why I would like to see it go is because it will set the standards.
It's an excellent test case.
Yeah.
Oh, I like it.
All right.
Great.
Anything else you want to cover before we close this out?
No, just that...
To tell people that whether or not you use our products, I think they're the best, obviously.
But people should start thinking about nasal hygiene and oral hygiene, not just for the little bit of it, but...
Think of all of the pathogens that enter your body and where do 90 plus percent of them enter through?
They enter through your mouth and your nose.
So we should be very hyper-focused on making sure that those gateway microbiomes are very well balanced, that they're in a state of uiosis balance.
You know, because if they are, you're not going to get sick nearly as much, and you're going to save a crap ton of money.
Yeah.
A minimal intervention that seems to correct a distortion of modernity is...
And one other thing, if anybody you know, anybody that anybody knows can, you know, one of the...
The University of Michigan Dental School, going back to the dental aspects of it, that where they went down to Belize and they gave kids three pieces of gum a day, xylitol, and One in the morning when they came to class, one after lunch, one before one, they went home.
And the kids that used xylitol gum changed that microbiome and they had a negative incidence of tooth decay during the time of the study.
The biggest thing is that the University of Washington right here Mm-hmm.
Because you're changing the microbiome.
You're actually treating the illness as opposed to just saying, okay, let's make your teeth harder and let the bacterial infection fester.
And our public health agency should be implementing xylitol gum chewing programs in elementary schools.
Yeah.
Yes, I'm concerned that public health has been hijacked.
Very much so.
For purposes that are not in the interest of citizens.
And the amount of good that could potentially and has historically been done by public health is tremendous.
But the degree to which it is now net harmful is, I think, quite clear in the post-COVID era.
So one more quick story, because it makes you cry almost.
But I want to say in 2022, we were throwing out like...
A million bucks worth of gum because it was in little blister cars.
People weren't shopping in the checkout aisle, so it was all expiring out.
Still totally good.
We went to the schools in Utah, to the Public Health Department in Utah, and said, hey, we'll donate it to the school.
Pick the school where most kids, an underprivileged school, where kids have a lot of cavities, where you're spending a lot of money, and we'll hand it out.
And the people in public health, they knew about the studies.
And the lady that was there, you know, it's ironic that I'm sitting there with a, you know, a pulmonologist that's in, he's actually a week younger than I am.
And, you know, a pediatric dentist is listening in on this who, you know, is now retired.
But all of that expertise, we're sitting here on a Zoom call with this young lady who was probably in her late 20s with the Utah Department of Public Health.
And we're like, we'll donate the gum.
All we want you to do is give it out to the kids.
You can give them a pack a day.
Just tell them to chew it.
And at the end of the year, just see how much the difference in what the state is spending.
And the girl goes, well, so if it works, who's going to pay for it next year?
And I just said, I look over at guys and I'm looking over and I'm like, Are you kidding me?
If you can take an intervention that costs $25 a year, because we've done the numbers, $25 a year per child to get rid of tooth decay and reduce respiratory infections by 40%, and it costs $25 per year per child, You're telling me that that isn't something the state would want to do?
And her answer is, well, no, because we have a budget and we want to make sure that all of these children have equal access to see a doctor and a dentist if they need it.
So we want to keep the money for the doctors.
So they wouldn't take the money they wanted that they had set aside to pay the doctors.
They wouldn't do that, even if they were saving money.
Yes, this is a frightening lesson in public health and the horrors of bureaucracy.
Terrifying.
All right.
Well, Nate Jones, it's been a pleasure and very educational.
I hope people will think carefully about this next frontier in making America and, frankly, the world healthy again by paying attention to the distortion of microbiomes in the nose and mouth.
It's not your book, but it's your dad's book.
People might want to check out Common Sense Medicine, Make America Healthy Again.
