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 hope you had a fantastic holiday season.
Happy New Year.
We're here to talk about how to start the new year off right.
Make 2024 your best year ever, especially as regards your health.
The most important investment you can make for your retirement is investing in your health.
Early detection of disease is what most doctors do so they can provide medical care earlier.
Well, that's better than doing nothing.
But wouldn't it be better to actually prevent disease?
Instead of early detection of disease that already exists, why not go for early detection
of the factors that cause disease?
Why not do more advanced testing to identify signs of stress on your organs and tissues
that will lead to disease early enough that you can reverse them with better food, exercise,
supplements when necessary, and actually prevent the disease?
This is functional medicine.
This is true prevention.
Finding early signs of stress on your immune system, your digestive system, your respiratory
system, your cardiovascular system, your liver, your kidneys, your pancreas.
If you identify these things early enough, then you can remove that stress and heal those
organs and tissues and actually truly prevent disease so that you can live long and live
well.
Those of you who have visited my website will have seen the banner at the top of the page
which says Binkley Healing Center.
Then live long, live well.
When you come to the office, you'll see it painted right on the building next to the
door just above the Verdant herb garden.
I love that word, Verdant.
Picture over a dozen different fresh organic herbs bursting with flavor and scent.
You're welcome to come by any time and clip a little fresh mint or tarragon, rosemary,
dill, cilantro, parsley, basil, what else is there?
Thyme.
Come by and clip a little bit for whatever you're making for your dinner anytime you
like.
That's why I put it there.
It's to educate people on how you can grow a sizable amount of food in a small space
with minimal water.
With the rains we've had, everything is just looking amazing.
When you're standing in front of the herb garden next to the front door, if you look
up you'll see right below Binkley Healing Center it says, live long, live well.
That is the tagline for my business.
Now a lot of people say, you'll hear people say ridiculous things like, oh, I don't want
to live too long.
I don't want to live to be 80 or 90 or 100.
What I hear when people say things like this is that they don't want to be miserable.
They don't want to tack on an extra 10 years to their life that aren't going to be as enjoyable
as the previous 10 years or the 10 years before that.
And here's the kicker.
People who are 70 years old who say they don't want to live to be 80 or people who are 80
years old and say they would never want to live to be 100, these are people who are convinced
that they'll feel terrible, that they'll feel encumbered by increasing decrepitude and disability
and frequent visits to the doctor to get more and more prescriptions for toxic drugs with
horrible side effects.
I understand that.
Here's something that a lot of people don't consider.
There are a lot worse things than sudden death.
So people that say, oh, I don't want to live to be X number of years.
I think a lot of those people imagine that they'll just die in their sleep one day.
That's the nicest way to go.
That's the goal.
You know, natural cause of death, die in your sleep, pain free.
And far too many people do not have a nice peaceful transition at the end of their lives,
pain free, but rather suffer the consequences of neglect and poor decision making and, you
know, just life.
I'm not trying to make anybody feel guilty.
Everyone's day fills itself up, right?
No one can't figure out what they're going to do with their time.
We always are complaining that we don't have enough time.
So you know, the day just fills itself up and you have intentions to do this and that.
But the problem is, my goal is to give you some information you can use to maybe alter
your decisions a little bit, because people who think that their body's not going to last
another 10 or 20 years, you know, think that it'll be fine.
It'll work out.
And for far too many people, it doesn't work out that way.
They have a chronic disease with debilitating symptoms and I'm going to say something now
that's a little graphic so you can cover your ears if you want.
But here it is.
This is the most vivid image that I can give you to inspire you to do something else, to
take better care of yourselves.
And here it is.
If you don't want to spend your golden years drooling in bed while someone else changes
your diapers, then it may be a good idea to come in and get checked to take inventory.
If your body, for example, was a used car, what would the blue book value on it be?
How many miles does your pancreas, your lungs, your digestive system, your heart still have?
Do you have any idea?
Did your GP when you went in for that annual physical last year, did he or she even check
to see how many miles your kidneys have left on them?
No.
Conventional medicine practiced by 99% of doctors is the diagnosis and treatment of
disease.
Disease that you already have.
If you want to find out how many miles you have left on your liver or your hip joints
or your knees, you need more advanced testing.
Testing that will identify earlier signs of stress on any of your organs and tissues early
enough that you can stop the damage, maybe even reverse the damage before it's too late.
Why shouldn't your 90s be better than your 80s or your 70s be better than your 60s?
So here's a question.
Raise your hand if you've ever let the following phrase pass your lips.
It feels like I'm getting older.
Okay, if you're driving, don't raise your hand, keep both hands on the wheel.
But for those of you who are at home who have raised your hand, who have said, it feels
like I'm getting older, keep your hand up.
If when you said that, when you said it feels like I'm getting older, if you were thinking
about how much worse you'll feel five or 10 years from now than you feel today, if you've
still got your hand up and you're nodding your head, I've got news for you.
That's not whenever you like and please share them with your friends and family.
I love questions.
Email me a question about any health related topic you have.
You can even text me at 805-218-3939.
You can leave a voicemail as well.
Voicemails take longer for me to get to, but I love answering your questions.
Let that be you.
Don't let that be the fate of your mother or your grandfather or your sister or your
son.
Disease and disability are rarely inevitable.
There are exceptions, but they are rare.
Most disease and disability, chronic disease and disability that occurs later in life,
most of this is the result of neglect.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley sharing with you safe, effective, natural solutions for any health
challenge.
Remember, the condition of your body is far more important than the name of any disease
you've ever been diagnosed with.
Please check out my website, binkleyhealingcenter.com to see the past 12 episodes of this show that
you can listen to whenever you like and please share them with your friends and family.
I love questions.
Email me a question about any health related topic you have.
You can even text me at 805-218-3939.
You can leave a voicemail as well.
Voicemails take longer for me to get to, but I love answering your questions.
There are some exciting things coming out in the medical literature.
This is from a study that was just published in November, 2023 in microbiome.
The research was done at the University of Western Ontario talking about can a healthy,
the headline is can a healthy gut microbiome, healthy bacteria in your intestines, can a
healthy gut microbiome prevent kidney stones?
So the bacteria in your gut play a key roles in the development of kidney stones, suggesting
that if you avoid such things as poor diet and antibiotics, you could reduce the recurrence
of kidney stones because kidney stones are formed by calcium oxalate produced by the
body.
But as with so many things, the reason some of us survive these things just fine, or as
other people get sick and even die, is because our guts and the beneficial bacteria in our
intestines break down these things, break down toxins that would otherwise damage organs
and tissues of our bodies.
So it's really, really important.
Did your doctor, the last doctor you went to, did he ask anything or do any testing
about your, to see if your microbiome and your intestines were healthy?
That's usually just not part of a conventional medical workup.
To really check out your gut, you have to do a specific type of case history.
And ultimately, if you have a condition that strongly suggests a disruption in your microbiome,
too many bad bacteria, and as importantly, often the problem is just not enough good
bacteria.
I had a patient, for example, a few months ago who came back from a vacation in Thailand
and was having just horrible diarrhea for weeks.
And it was a real struggle to get her regulated.
I gave her some supplements that help most people with that, some things to kill off,
various types of bad bugs.
And I said, you know, we really need to do a stool test, but the good stool test that
really checks everything, which you'll, again, your insurance won't pay for most gastroenterologists,
the best gastroenterologists at UCLA or the Mayo Clinic probably doesn't order this stool
test, at least not as a first line means of diagnosing your condition.
But a good stool test costs about $400.
And she just, you know, she didn't have or didn't want to spend the $400, so she suffered.
Finally, she agreed to do the test.
And I was expecting to find some horrible bug because she wasn't responding to, you
know, natural bug killers like oregano oil and loracidin, which is a form of monolaurin.
I'll talk about that later.
But there's a handful of things that generally work pretty well if someone has diarrhea or
other signs and symptoms, gas bloating or the vacillation, you know, the seesaw between
diarrhea and constipation can be caused by the same thing.
Too many bad bacteria, not enough good bacteria or some other kind of bad bug in your gut.
And, you know, that's what a stool test will show.
And oftentimes, you know, I can help people figure out something they can take or something
they can stop eating or start eating in combination with a couple of supplements and get that
result.
But this is a really stubborn case.
So she finally gets the stool test done.
And I'm expecting to find a parasite or because she had just come back from a vacation in
Asia and I thought, you know, she's picked up something really exotic.
The test will show it for sure.
It tests for this test tests for everything.
And lo and behold, she had no horrible bad.
I was thinking maybe I'd have to send her off to, you know, a conventional practitioner
to get a prescription for some kind of antiviral or antifungal or anti parasite drug or something
like that.
But she had no bad bugs, no evidence of any bad bugs on the best tests that you can get.
She was clear.
But what was very clearly indicated is that she had very little good bacteria in her gut.
Her normal flora, the technical term for do you have adequate good bacteria, not just
to fight off the bad bugs, but to perform all the myriad of things that we rely on for
the healthy bacteria in our guts to digest and assimilate nutrients and to process things
that there's a whole, I could do a dozen shows on just the importance of the microbiome.
And this is becoming mainstream medicine.
You see it in the, in the, in the regular medical press all the time.
The problem is what do they do with it?
That I don't, I don't hear a lot of solutions in these articles apart from just waiting
until it's bad enough to take some kind of drug.
So the solutions, if you have insufficient good bacteria in your gut and or too many
bad bacteria in your gut, first of all are to look at things like, do you have adequate
hydrochloric acid in your stomach?
This shows up on a blood test.
Do you have, are you eating fermented foods?
You know, most people think, oh, do I need to be taking a probiotic and I'll just, I'll
just go to Costco and buy a probiotic.
Maybe that'll help.
Well, don't do that.
That's a waste of money.
You know, the most money you'll ever waste on a supplement is one that does nothing.
That just passes through your digestive tract from your mouth to the other end with no effect.
So don't buy cheap probiotics.
A good probiotic is always going to cost you probably around 40, 50 bucks a month for a
month supply or more.
The ones that cost less than that don't have enough organisms or don't have the right strains
or just, you know, generally in testing hundreds, thousands of people, my colleagues testing
tens of thousands of people, they just, they don't do the job.
The ones that do do the job, i.e. restore the proper balance in good bacteria versus
bad bacteria, you know, usually run you more like 50, 60 bucks a month or more depending
on how bad your system is.
But anyway, back to this woman who we finally did this dual test on, what it clearly showed
was that she severely lacked enough good bacteria in her gut.
And so she didn't get some horrible infection when she was on her vacation in Thailand.
I think it was Thailand.
She just got a random infection, you know, a random introduction of bad bacteria in her
gut that was an accident waiting to happen.
She could have got it here and we had to slowly rebuild the beneficial beneficial bacteria
in her gut.
So to start out, the solution wasn't to take some hugely expensive billions of organisms,
strong probiotic, but rather prebiotics and some other nutrients to feed the bacteria
that live in her gut.
And it took a few weeks.
But after that, after taking some prebiotics and some other nutrients that are kind of
technical to explain right now, send me an email if you want the specifics.
We got her gut back to where the healthy bacteria that live there started reproducing and becoming
strong enough again to fight off the bad bacteria and keep the bad bacteria in balance.
And then I put her on a good probiotic to sustain that balance between good and bad
bacteria and she's feeling great.
So how do you tell if you don't have a healthy microbiome?
Well, the typical symptoms are gas, bloating, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, feeling miserable
after eating.
If you know after eating, you should feel good.
You've supplied your body with essential nutrients.
If you ate good food and you have reserves, it takes a lot of energy.
This is what's something that people don't realize.
One of the worst things you can do is eat the biggest meal of the day and then go to
bed.
And hello, a lot of people do this, right?
We a lot of people skip breakfast or have a tiny breakfast, skip lunch or have a sandwich
and need a huge meal at night.
And then an hour or two later, go to bed.
This is the worst way to give your body the nutrients it needs to heal and repair all
of your tissues.
You don't need food to sleep.
It's our culture, you know, and it's important to have, you know, if you have a family to
gather around and, you know, talk about your day, et cetera.
But it's just not a really good idea to eat a whole bunch of food, especially high calorie,
low nutrient food like potatoes and rice and other forms of starch and sugar right before
you go to bed, ice cream, popcorn.
If you're going to eat that stuff, don't eat it and then go to bed immediately because
your body is just going to convert it into fat and create, raise your triglyceride levels
and wreak havoc throughout your bloodstream, creating inflammatory debris, exacerbating
every chronic condition, diabetes, heart disease, increasing your risk of cancers, Alzheimer's,
dementia, et cetera.
So the worst thing you can do if you want to have a healthy microbiome is eat a lot
of grains, starch and sugar.
The bad bacteria in your gut love starch and sugar.
It's their favorite food.
So see if this helps you remember this.
It's always tempting, you know, sugar and starch.
It's our favorite food, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, even sweet potatoes.
Starch and sugar is the staple of most people's diets, unfortunately.
So here's a way to kind of a little visual to maybe remember why this is bad.
Imagine you have ever been to a restaurant and, you know, it's a nice place.
Maybe you're out with your favorite person in the world and you're going out on a Friday
or Saturday night for a nice quiet meal.
Maybe a little some candles somewhere, some great food someplace, and you're enjoying
yourselves and all of a sudden you hear this table over there across the room.
It's with a bunch of people who are being loud and obnoxious and, you know, probably
are consuming a little bit too much wine, whatever.
And they're just ruining it for everybody else because they're talking so loudly, even
if they're not saying anything rude or offensive, they're just so loud that now everyone else
has to scream just to be heard.
Or if you spend enough time, maybe they are becoming obnoxious.
Well, here's what you do.
Get the bartender or the waitress over and say, hey, send that table over there around
the shots, around the tequila shots.
Pour some gas on the fire.
That's what it's like if you have excess bad bacteria in your gut that are making it impossible
for the good bacteria to do their job.
Eating grain, starch and sugar is like pouring gas on the fire.
It's like ordering around the shots for the drunk crowd in the corner of the room that
make everybody else miserable.
So instead, what you want to do is eat natural fibers and not metamucil, natural fibers,
fibers in vegetables like spinach and broccoli and cauliflower and tomatoes and carrots and,
you know, whatever the best vegetables are just, you know, the ones that you like.
And if you don't know how to cook vegetables, sometimes a lot of people ask me if I'm a
vegetarian and I say no, and depending on who it is, sometimes I'm a little snarky about
it and I'll say no, I'm not a vegetarian.
I eat a lot of vegetables.
And I say that only to people that I think won't be offended by it because a lot of I
test hundreds of thousands of people and a lot of vegetarians that I test and take case
histories, they don't eat very many vegetables.
They eat mostly pasta or tofu or bread and or rice and not a lot of vegetables.
But I think if you're going to call yourself a vegetarian, that should mean that you eat
mostly vegetables.
So I eat a lot of vegetables and that's the best place to get fiber to keep your microbiome
healthy is vegetables.
Just in case I've offended a few vegetarians out there.
Here's the reason I bring this up.
Most people, well, people who don't eat enough vegetables, even if they say they want to,
I strongly suspect it's because they don't know how to prepare vegetables properly prepared
vegetables taste delicious.
The worst vegetables I can think of that people just see all the time are like raw broccoli
or cauliflower, carrots, crudités in French that you see at parties that you're supposed
to Duncan ranch dressing to make them palatable, you know, or raw vegetables that a salad bar
most not all, but a lot of vegetables should be cooked.
Broccoli should be cooked.
You know, tomatoes are fine raw, but they actually release more lycopene, one of the
most beneficial nutrients from tomatoes.
If you cook them, that's why Italians cook tomatoes and make pasta sauce out of them.
So if you don't like vegetables and putting air quotes around that phrase, if you think,
oh, or if it's just a fit, or if you, if you honestly want, if you know, yes, I'd like
to eat more vegetables.
I know it's good for me, but I don't know.
It just seems like so much work and they don't taste great.
If you want to know how to make delicious vegetables by vegetarian cookbooks, they have
amazing recipe.
And you don't even have to buy anything, just Google vegetarian recipe for something, you
know, pick a vegetable and Google recipes to cook artichokes or mushrooms or broccoli
or kale or spinach or chard or collard greens or, you know, any type of vegetable, cabbage,
whatever it is that you're, you know, you think, oh, I've heard this is good for me,
but it tastes nasty.
How could I make it taste good?
Google vegetarian recipe for red cabbage or something like that.
And you'll get these amazing ways of preparing vegetables that taste delicious without the
savory deliciousness that comes from fish and chicken and other types of animal protein.
Most of us are used to getting most of the flavor in our meals from savory animal protein,
chicken, beef, pork, ham, bacon, et cetera.
That's okay, you know, in moderation for most people, not for some people.
But what I like to do, I'm not a vegetarian.
What I like to do is use vegetarian recipes to make delicious vegetables and then make
those dishes even better by adding a little bit of chicken or a little bit of prosciutto,
a little bit of ham, a little bit of something savory makes vegetarian dishes delicious.
So apologies to all the vegetarians out there.
It is actually, there's lots of great data to show that the healthiest diet you can possibly
eat is a purely plant based diet.
But I'm a realist, I know a lot of you are not going to do that.
And I'm also a fan of being honest, I don't do that.
My body type is one that just requires massive amounts of protein.
I don't feel good if I don't eat a lot of protein.
So that's just me, I'm being honest.
So there's my bias as well.
You can incorporate that to anything else I say.
I think it's really great to eat a plant based diet and mostly plant based diet.
I think if most people would eat 75% of their food, vegetables, then the other 25% could
be dark chocolate and you'd be way healthier than most people.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, you've been listening to safe, effective natural solutions to almost
any health challenge.
And I'd like you to know, I keep forgetting to mention this, for those of you who have
relatives in other states, I can help them.
I have patients in dozens of states around the country, in New York, in New Jersey, in
Colorado, in Florida, in Arizona, Nebraska, Kansas, Washington state, Oregon, all over
California, even Alaska and Hawaii.
And you could help someone you love start the new year outright.
So I'd love an opportunity to help you or someone you love make 2024 their best year
ever have a fabulous beginning of the year.
I look forward to speaking with you next Friday, right here, 4pm on 98.3.
Have a fabulous 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 4pm for safe, effective natural solutions, right here on 98.3, the
word KDAR.