Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified non-force doctor of chiropractic and practitioner of
functional medicine.
I identify conditions other doctors miss by doing tests that most other doctors don't
do, usually because your insurance considers them medically unnecessary and doesn't want
to pay for them.
But it doesn't cost as much as you might think to get comprehensive testing to identify conditions
that get overlooked and underlie a lot of misery and pain and suffering or just minor
symptoms even, things that you'd really rather not have to deal with if you've been to a
doctor and told there's nothing wrong with you but you don't feel right, there probably
is something wrong with you, you just haven't identified it yet.
And there is a safe, effective, natural solution for almost any health challenge.
We're going to talk about supplements today.
I get a lot of questions about, you know, what's the best supplement for this or that?
And I'm going to describe a really exciting case about an 82-year-old lady who we were
able to get her blood pressure to drop 30 points.
That's a big deal.
It's not easy to produce someone's blood pressure by 30 points in their 80s with no medication.
When I talk about functional medicine, a safe, effective, natural solution to almost any
health challenge, there are three main things that I use to achieve that and they are better
food, exercise, and supplements.
There are other things that are important, getting a good night's sleep, doing things
to reduce stress in your life, having a good spiritual practice.
Most of the listeners here probably have that covered or doing something as simple as meditation
and deep breathing exercises.
Also releasing physical stress from your body by having a good stretching routine.
But the most important things that I find that make the biggest difference when people
come to see me are counseling them on how to get better food, exercise, and supplements
in response to the testing that we do to identify what their body needs.
This is the most important thing.
I cannot stress this enough.
You are as different on the inside as you are on the outside.
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions for any health issue.
The medical profession standards of care tries to do a one-size-fits-all treatment based
on tests that show that the drugs they give you are not dangerous enough to kill you but
helpful enough to solve a certain crisis, acute condition, or manage a chronic condition.
But there's a big difference between drugs and supplements.
So that's a common question I get.
What is the difference between drugs and supplements?
Drugs are essential when you need to intervene now and get a quick, specific, controlled,
reliable response to something that's ailing you, maybe to save your life even.
And drugs work by altering and manipulating cell receptors and biochemical pathways in
your body.
They block receptors on cells or increase cell receptor activity.
They directly alter enzymatic and other chemical pathways that immediately change your physiology.
And they're often essential.
If your heart is stopped, an injection of epinephrine directly into your heart may get
it started again and save your life.
Or if you have anaphylactic shock from some form of allergy, opening your airways with
an EpiPen, also epinephrine, adrenaline, can save your life.
If you have a stroke and your blood circulation is cut off to parts of your brain, getting
to the hospital as quickly as possible to take something that will reduce the clotting
that's blocking those arteries and restore blood flow to the brain before too much damage
is done.
Obviously, these things are all essential.
But none of these drugs do anything to improve your health.
There's a bold statement.
I'm going to say it again.
Drugs don't improve your health.
They may save your life.
They're amazing at treating disease.
But they don't improve your health.
The only things that improve your health are things that enhance the internal mechanisms
that your body was designed with to use to heal and maintain itself.
Better, good food, full, nutrient rich food, exercise, moving your body the way it was
designed to be moved, the way we've been moving our bodies most of the time for most of our
existence on a grand scale, and where necessary, based on comprehensive testing, using supplemental
nutrients to fill in the gaps that you're not getting from your food.
So drugs are essential when you need to intervene and get a quick, specific, controlled, predictable
response.
But they're all toxic to the body precisely because they interfere with normal human physiology.
Normal control mechanisms are overridden and consuming too much or too many drugs can easily
kill you.
Properly prescribed medications, not medical errors, not some instance where the pharmacist
couldn't read the doctor's handwriting, properly prescribed drugs kill nearly 100,000 people
every year.
By contrast, nutrients are foods that our bodies have evolved.
The ability to assimilate and utilize for sustaining life.
I'm going to say that again.
Nutrients like food are things that our bodies have been experiencing and learned how to
utilize for healing and repairing cells.
They're raw materials for building and maintaining every tissue and organ in your body.
They're non-toxic because they support normal human physiology, innate control mechanisms
are maintained when you eat good food and take supplements that have been identified
as missing on comprehensive testing.
If you consume more than you need of most nutrients, your body will simply excrete them.
Well, if supplements are so great, why do you always hear these news stories continually
coming out saying this vitamin or that was proven to be useless for this or that condition?
The best advice I can give you is if you hear a two things I can say.
If you hear a study slamming some vitamins saying it's useless for them proven to be
not effective for this or that.
Number one, email me that and I'll give you a response.
I'll look up the original data on that study and explain to you why that study was probably
doomed to failure at the outset.
So much money is wasted time and money is wasted by myopic medical researchers trying
to study supplements, nutrients like they were drugs.
Nutrients do not work like drugs.
And most of these studies use insufficient dosages, inferior forms and most importantly,
they're just idiotic by design because they test nutrients in isolation.
Supplements don't work in isolation.
They're synergistic.
They work in combinations like the nutrients in foods, supplements.
And these studies also test them in isolation and never consider the diet and lifestyle
of the person who's taking them.
Supplements are called supplements because they're meant to supplement a good diet.
They do not replace healthy food.
So when you hear about a study that declares conclusively that vitamin D doesn't work for
this or that or vitamin C or coenzyme Q10 or fish oil or anything else, probably the
best thing to do is just ignore it because almost all of these studies are poorly designed
from the outset or biased or basically useless.
But if you want to know more, please, I invite you to email me any such study that you hear
about and I'll look up the base data and reply to you and explain it on air why such studies
are so misleading.
There is one common thing you hear all the time though that is absolutely true.
Most multivitamins are useless or nearly useless.
I'm Dr. Todd Bankley discussing with you safe, effective, natural solutions to almost any
health challenge.
And yes, I just said it.
I'll say it again, most multivitamins are nearly useless.
Why is that?
The main reason is because most multivitamins are one a day multivitamins.
Everyone wants one pill.
Just give me one pill.
I'll take it.
Store shelves have always been and will always be stocked with one a day multivitamins.
Most one a day multivitamins are nearly useless.
And the reason for that is because the purpose of taking them, I recommend that all of my
patients take a multivitamin and it is never a one a day multivitamin.
The main reason to take a multivitamin is not for the vitamins but for a mineral.
So we call them multivitamins but all multivitamins are multivitamin and mineral supplements.
And you can get vitamins from food.
If you eat any decent amount of vegetables, you can get most of the vitamins that you
need, many at least, of the vitamins that you need from food.
There's exceptions.
No one gets enough vitamin D from their food, for example.
But you can get vitamins from food.
But you can't get, most people do not get after testing thousands of people myself and
with my colleagues, hundreds of thousands of people around the country, most people
do not get enough minerals from their food.
Most people do not get enough calcium and magnesium and manganese and selenium and chromium
and zinc and molybdenum and germanium.
These are essential cofactors and enzymatic reactions in every tissue and cell pathway,
chemical pathway in your body.
You need minerals to function and most people do not get enough minerals from their diet.
Well, why is that?
The food we eat comes from soil that has been so depleted by conventional farming that there's
no minerals left, not enough at least, minerals left in the soil.
So how are they going to end up in your food?
Unless your diet includes a lot of super greens, unless you're eating a lot of kale, spinach,
broccoli, anything dark green in abundance every day, then I can guarantee you when we
test you, you will show functional deficiencies of many, many minerals.
So there are three common supplements I recommend to almost anyone.
The best thing is to get proper comprehensive testing done to identify your specific needs,
things that are missing from your diet.
Think of your bloodstream like this, your bloodstream, I like to call it a river of life.
Imagine your bloodstream is a river that is constantly coursing throughout your entire
body and there are construction crews waiting on both sides of this river.
The guys are there.
They've got their tools.
They're ready to rebuild.
They're ready to heal and repair tissues throughout your body.
They're waiting.
All they need is the materials.
They're waiting on something to be delivered that they need, that's essential, without
which they cannot heal and repair that tissue.
So that river of life is your bloodstream and if those nutrients are not in your bloodstream,
when that cruise, they're waiting to heal your kidney, some part of your liver, repair
your joints to reduce or prevent arthritis, especially provide nutrients to your brain
to prevent catastrophic neurodegeneration that is just getting worse and worse every
year in our society.
As we get older, people didn't used to live that long, so neurodegeneration in your brain
that causes Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases was less
of a problem.
But the river of life in your body is your responsibility.
If you want those construction crews that are waiting day after day to repair the parts
of your body that need attention and maintain them, then you must provide that supply.
You must provide them with the nutrients necessary.
So one of the most important things to make that happen is to take a good multivitamin.
A good multivitamin is almost always four capsules a day.
Three or four capsules.
If you weigh less than 120 pounds, three might be enough.
My favorite multivitamin, it's not the only good one.
I tell my patients all the time the supplements that I stock in my office and most commonly
recommend to my patients are not the only good ones.
They're not the only ones that work.
They are ones that I've been giving to hundreds, thousands of patients.
My colleagues that I speak with at seminars several times every year have collectively
given to hundreds of thousands of patients, tested them before and after to prove that
they achieved the desired result.
The only way I know to find out if any particular supplement, product, nutrient works is to
give it to several thousand people and test them before and after and see if it achieves
the intended result.
So Alpha Base by Ortho Molecular Products is the multivitamin that I recommend to all
of my patients.
And again, I recommend it not for vitamins, but for the minerals.
It has minerals that are as close as you can get in capsule form to the plant-based forms
that we would all ideally get from our diet, but usually fail to do.
So these plant-based, plant-like forms of minerals in these four capsules are bulky.
They take up space.
Most multivitamins are just made from minerals that are mined from the surface of the earth.
And so you can put a certain amount of zinc, chromium, magnesium, calcium, etc. into one
pill and test it.
They have to be tested.
That's one thing the government does is make sure that what's on the label is in the tablet.
But does that mean it actually enters your, does anybody ever test to see whether those
one-a-day useless centrosilver multivitamins, Kirkland vitamins from Costco, you know, you
get what you pay for.
One-a-day multivitamins, the minerals in one-a-day multivitamins usually just pass straight through
your body and into this, into the toilet.
So the most expensive vitamin you'll ever take, the most wasteful, the most money you'll
ever waste on a supplement is the one that just passes straight through your body without
any benefit.
So the forms of minerals that are like the ones that plants make, instead of just mining
minerals directly from the surface of the earth, isolating them, grinding them up and
putting them into one tablet that everyone wants.
If a spinach plant or a broccoli plant in that same dirt and those minerals are absorbed
through the roots of that plant and then bound up in the leaves and the fruit and the stocks
of whatever vegetable it is, informs that our bodies recognize that we, that they automatically
understand how to break down and easily assimilate and utilize for all those so important pathways
that are required to heal and maintain our organs and tissues.
So to get, plant, to get something like that in a multivitamin, manufacturers that make
the best quality multivitamins have figured out ways to develop minerals that are bound
up in forms similar to the ones in plants and they're bulky.
They take up space.
They just will not fit in a decent daily dose to keep you healthy, to keep most people healthy,
will or give you a chance of being healthier than you otherwise would be.
Keep that river of life flowing with the materials.
Those construction crews need to heal and repair every part of your body.
Those plant like based minerals will not fit into one capsule.
They're bulky.
They take up space and usually they take the space of about four capsules for most people.
So there's two other nutrients that I can recommend to anyone without any testing because
again these are two other things that I continually see no one gets enough, almost no one gets
enough from their diet and they are fish oil and vitamin D. So fish oil, everyone's heard
about the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids for cardiovascular health, for raising your
good cholesterol, for your brain.
Your brain is mostly made of water and fat and 25% of the fat in your brain is made from
docosa hexanoic acid DHA, one of the two omega-3 fatty acids that you can only get from the
ocean.
The other one is EPA.
So whenever you look at something that purports to be a good source of omega-3s, check and
see how much EPA and DHA is in that product.
And these are things that are only available in the ocean.
There is no DHA or EPA.
These most essential omega-3s that you hear all the health benefits about, there are none
of those in any vegetable based source.
There's no EPA or DHA in walnuts or chia seeds or flax seeds.
These are all good things that are nutritious, that are absolutely fantastic to include as
a part of your diet.
But you want to think of flax oil or flax seeds or chia seeds the way you think of olive oil
or sunflower seeds.
Just they're good additions, they're great things to put on your salad.
They're nutritious, but they do not produce the benefits that you hear about for omega-3
fatty acids, which mainly only come from, get from the ocean.
So most people to get adequate amounts of that need to either eat a piece of salmon
every day or some sardines or supplement.
I recommend a gram and a half at least for most people, about 1500 milligrams combined
EPA and DHA in supplemental form because most people don't get enough of it from their diet.
The third nutrient I recommend everyone supplement because no one gets enough of it from their
diet and the most important of the three is vitamin D, but it looks like we're not going
to have enough time to cover that today.
I could do a whole show just on the importance and benefits of vitamin D, but let's just
do a quick overview.
Most adults need to supplement 5000 units of vitamin D per day.
You hear all the time, oh my God, you can take too much vitamin D. It's dangerous.
Most medical doctors are worried that if you take too much vitamin D, you're going to get
kidney stones.
It's possible, but it never happens.
Look in the literature.
It's just really, really rare.
It's very difficult to take too much vitamin D.
Meanwhile, thousands of people die from cancers and colds and flus that could be prevented,
end up in a hospital and die from infections and cancers that could have been prevented
if their immune systems were working properly by virtue of having adequate vitamin D.
Most adults should take 5000 units of vitamin D a day.
If you weigh less than 120 pounds, maybe 4000 might be enough, but the most important way
to ensure that you're getting adequate vitamin D is like with everything else, get tested.
The lab range for vitamin D on most standard tests is 30 to 100.
Most doctors will order your vitamin D test for you, but they'll also egregiously, in
my opinion, tell you that you're fine if it's 30 or above.
That's just not true.
Your immune system will not function at its peak unless your vitamin D level is between
50 and 90.
Get your vitamin D level tested, take enough vitamin D. You're never going to get enough
from the sun or doing gardening or walking around in short sleeves and short pants.
You need to supplement 5000 units a day, sometimes more, and get your blood levels tested to
make sure that they're in between 50 and 90 so that your immune system is functioning
at its peak.
Do this and you can prevent a whole host of diseases, especially you just, most people
who do this never get colds and flus anymore, or if they do, they last for a couple of days
instead of weeks or months.
Your immune system is totally dependent on adequate levels of vitamin D.
So let's talk about that case study I mentioned previously, an 82 year old, lovely 82 year
old lady whose blood pressure was consistently running around 157 over 90.
She was otherwise fit, she was an orchestra conductor, a concert violinist, she was a
force of nature.
In her 80s she was still running a school play at her church every year and directing
this orchestra at her church.
And you'd look at her and she just looked to be amazing, and she was in really phenomenal
health for her age.
She was thin and tall and had just an abundance of energy and she had high blood pressure
for over 20 years.
And she refused to take any blood pressure medication because when she did, it made her
dizzy.
And she had had, she had bypass surgery two years ago and her other doctor was strongly,
constantly urging her to take medication to keep her blood pressure under control.
So she asked me, you know, is there anything that you can recommend?
And I said, have you ever tried taking fish shell?
Yep, didn't work.
I said, have you ever tried taking pomegranate juice because pomegranate juice can actually
reverse arteriosclerosis in high concentrations, especially if it's not too sweet.
Yep, tried that, didn't work.
Have you ever tried turmeric?
Yes.
Have you ever tried taking any kind of systemic enzymes like seropeptase or natokinase?
Yes.
Have you tried taking CoQ10?
Yes.
Are you taking a good multivitamin with all the minerals your body needs to heal and repair?
She says, yep, I've tried all of those, none of them worked.
I said, have you ever taken all of those things at the same time?
Well, no, she says, almost indignantly.
Of course not.
Why would I do that?
How would I say which one was working if I took them all at the same time?
And I carefully explained that supplements, nutrients are not drugs.
They do not work by themselves.
They work synergistically.
They work in combinations, just like all the nutrients in your food.
Everyone knows that there's a lot of nutrients in broccoli.
We've only identified a small portion of them, but trust me, they work in combination.
So she started taking fish oil, pomegranate juice, turmeric, natokinase, Coenzyme Q10,
and a good multivitamin.
And I also recommended that she do some stretching for flexibility, relaxation, and stress relief.
And in six weeks, her blood pressure went down to 127 over 80.
From 157 over 90 to 127 over 80, her top number dropped 30 points and the bottom number dropped
10 points to well to nicely within the healthy range with no medication.
That's really hard to do in an 80 year old, especially a go-go active person like she
was, which can create a certain amount of stress.
We dropped her blood pressure 30 points without drugs and she was elated.
Remember the condition of your body is always far more important than the name of any disease
you've been diagnosed with.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You've been listening to safe, effective, natural solutions for almost any health challenge.
Tell somebody this weekend what you're grateful for, especially maybe someone you haven't
talked to in a long time.
That can be an amazing stress reliever.
I'm grateful for you.
Thank you very much for tuning in.
Please tell all of your friends and family to tune in next Friday right here at 4 p.m.
for the fabulous rest of your weekend.
You've been listening to safe, effective, natural solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for safe, effective, natural solutions right here on 98.3 The Word,
KDAR.