Useful Links

• Akasha Naturals
• Akasha Naturals at the FiP Store
• Fip Podcast Ep 18: The Science Behind Anxiety and Depression
• LabDoor
• “What’s In Those Supplements” from the New York Times
• “The Definitive Fish Oil Buyer’s Guide” via Chris Kresser
• “The Crazy, True, And Scary Facts About the Supplement Industry” via Ben Greenfield
• My Nutritional Panel Results

Transcript

Zack Arnold: We’re just going to go ahead and jump right in today. What I really want to talk about specifically on this episode is supplements and supplementation. And for anybody that is listening, I talked to Dr. de Mello a little bit about this on previous podcasts. He’s actually been on three previous shows before. A two-part introduction about himself and his practice, and you can view those in the show notes. I’ll have links to them. And I also had him on a show fairly recently about the science behind depression. That was a very popular episode as well. But now I want to talk about supplementation. So before I start talking even more, which I have a tendency to do, I wanted to say hello, Dr. de Mello, and thank you for coming back.

Dr. Edison de Mello: My pleasure to be back with you again.

Zack Arnold: So first of all, I just want to point out that about 90-7% of what I know and what I’m going to be talking about today, I’m basically just stealing from you. So I’m going to take very, very little credit because I’m essentially here because of the work that you’ve done specifically with me and all the things that I’ve learned. So I’m going to give credit where credit is

Dr. Edison de Mello: Due. Thank you.

Zack Arnold: And the response that I get a lot on Facebook and social media, and even over emails, and I’m sure you see this all the time too, is there are people that say, “Well, you shouldn’t take supplements, you shouldn’t drink your meals, you should just be eating real food. And in an absolute perfect world utopia, I agree with that. However, there are so many factors externally that influence our health and our behavior that we have no control of, especially if we live in big cities or we live in populated areas. There are so many things that contribute to the toxicity in our bodies and our environments. My feeling is that supplementation is pretty much necessary. So I wanted to talk today about the science behind supplements, why you think we need them, because obviously you’re in the camp of supplements are something that are very beneficial to people’s health. Because full disclaimer, you have a full supplement line. So I just want to talk about supplements today.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Okay.

Zack Arnold: So where I want to start is if somebody came to you and said, “Well, I’m just going to eat real food and get all my nutrition from real food. I don’t need supplements. What would be your general basic response to that?

Dr. Edison de Mello: Well, my first response would would be to get a pretty good history on the eating habits of that person, and honestly, if that person lived in a farm somewhere or out in the mountains with fresh air, and had very little stress in his or her life, and grew their own his or her own food, and ate at least 10 glasses of water a day, and was able to exercise at least about four to five times a week for 45 minutes to an hour, and if that all proved true and good, I would say you don’t need supplements. And pending that that person did not have any medical conditions, that would be absolutely true. But the reality is that’s not the world we live in. So your nutritional needs should be met primarily through your diet. In a perfect world. There’s no question about that. Supplements are not intended to be a food substitute, nor can they replicate all the nutrients and benefits of whole foods such as fruits and vegetables. Nor can they replicate certainly the benefits of clean air, clean water, good exercise, decreased stress, meaning decreased cortisol, and all of the above. But as you said in the beginning, Zack, that’s not a perfect world. Maybe that’s the world where our great grandparents lived, and so for a lot of people, supplements are a very useful way to get nutrients that they might otherwise be lacking, and so who needs supplements? Right, usually somebody who is very very busy, somebody who does not have enough time to spend time out in the sun converting vitamin d2 that your body makes to vitamin d3 which is incidentally converted through UV light. But as a testimony to the many damages that we have done to our planet, we’ve put a hole on the ozone layer, which means that UV light comes to us in most forms unfiltered, and that is not safe because, of course, the the unfiltered, so to speak, UV light leads to cancer, skin cancer. So now we have a big problem here, where your body does what it needs to do. For instance, it produces vitamin d2 Vitamin d2 is the inactive form of the vitamin that your body needs. The body needs to convert d2 to d3 d3 need sunlight. You cannot be out in the sun. And when you are on a beautiful summer day or spring day, most of us should be wearing sunscreen, which means that it’s blocking. The very uvulites that you need to transform the d2 into d3 so it’s a catch 22 So a great number of Americans or people all over the world now are deficient in d3 vitamins, and that vitamin is essential for bone health. And in later years, it prevents falls because it gives you better strains, and it’s a great vitamin for metabolism, for skin care, and so vitamin D. Even though, even if you’re eating the most amazing healthy diet in the world, would still be a vitamin that is a must for most of us, including children. That’s why milk has vitamin D in it. A lot of products for children are infused with vitamin D. The same is true for folic acid. Every woman who is consider getting pregnant at one time in their lives, if they are of childbearing age, should be folic acid because it decreases the risk of certain birth defects. Omega three, for instance, there are present in fish oils. Unless you eat three or more servings of fish every week, you are going to be deficient, and the omega threes are essential for the health of your heart. So, just here, just three examples of the fact that even if you were again living that utopia world that you talked about, you would still need very basic vitamins to be able to live a productive, not only a long life, but a very productive one.

Zack Arnold: Well, and you hit on the the two that you kind of taught me that it doesn’t matter who you are, what you do for a living, what your lifestyle is. If you’re going to just pick two supplements, it’s vitamin D and it’s fish oil. So I want to go down that road even a little bit more because now when people email me or contact me via social media, they say, “Well, if I’m just going to take a couple of things, where do I start? Without question, without even asking a really detailed history, like you said, vitamin D and fish oil are kind of no-brainers, and they’re safe, and it’s not the kind of thing where you need to worry about. It’s just one of those things where pretty much everybody needs it. So, I want to go even a little bit further down the road of vitamin d3 because what I’ve learned in all of my research in the last year or so that I didn’t realize is that from a technical level, vitamin d3 isn’t even really so much a vitamin as it is more a hormones. So can you talk to me about how essential vitamin D is just for so many different metabolic functions in the body.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Oh, it’s a it’s it’s it is a vitamin that should be called hormonal or hormone D. It’s an amazing vitamin. Most metabolic processes in our body are dependent on cofactors, and a cofactor is here’s an example. If I gave you a key and I didn’t show you a lock. I didn’t give you a lock for that key to open. That key would have absolutely no function, and so the body releases incredible hormones every day, incredible vitamins that sometimes are produced. Like I said, like d2 for instance, that that needs UV light, that becomes then the cofactor for d2 to go into d3 Vitamin D, once in its active form, it then becomes a cofactor to so many other metabolic processes. It allows your body to metabolize its food in a more efficient way, so it allows the skin, the cells in your skin, to continue to reproduce in a very, very efficient, constant way. It gives bones the strength that it needs by helping to metabolize calcium and what else that it does. It helps with cardiovascular and lung health, so if I were strained on an island and there was only one vitamin that I could bring with me, that would be vitamin D.

Zack Arnold: So now I want to go down the same path, but with fish oil. Can you speak to how fish oil and the essential fatty acids that are in it actually work to increase cognitive function and memory, and how they work so specifically is energy for the brain.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Yeah, so the brain is actually a very selfish organ. The brain will take everything that you ingest or that the body produces for for it to stay alive must go to the brain first. The brain is that organ that says me first, you second, and so it needs. It’s constantly working. It needs a lot of fuel, and even when you sleep, your brain is still working, right? It slows down metabolism, but it’s still working, and so it’s it’s the organ. And it’s the it’s a machine that never never stops working, and it’s always preparing itself for the next day, for the next event, for the next cognitive function that you’re going to have. What the omegas do is they penetrate the cell and they provide this very fuel that the brain needs to be able to operate. Now there’s other forms of vitamin of omegas, you know, such as in chia seeds, for instance. There’s fruits and vegetables that have omegas in them, other grains, but fish oil, that is the omega three that comes from fish, is the most readily available in the body or easily digestive in the body, and it penetrates the brain in such a way that it really gives it like what it needs without much effort, and so it is indeed the one of the most important fuels for the body because it penetrates the cell and it goes right into the machinery of the cell function and gives it the fuels that we work, and that’s why it’s also very important in heart function because your heart needs to, like the brain, needs to be working nonstop. Except the heart slows down a little bit, metabolism goes down, and the heart is able to decrease its metabolic needs. But in the morning, the moment you open your eyes and you need to get up to do what what you’re what you are meant to do that day, your heart, like your brain and everything else, goes into gear again in a higher metabolic rate than it was before. In the heart, where omega three is very important, is that it allows the body to the blood to circulate more easily, and that it gives it it decreases a little of the viscosity that the blood has, and so it is a natural blood thinner. By being a natural blood thinner, it’s able to then let the blood circulate through the heart in an easier, smoothier way, and if the blood is circulating through the heart in a in a less workload way, it’s also providing that same mechanism to the brain. So, a natural blood thinner it is, which allows then both the brain, the heart, and other organs to be able to receive the antioxidant effects of the blood that is always cleaning your body. That is always helping you exchange, you know, the all the nutrients that it needs not only to absorb it but to also excrete it. So what the omegas three do is basically allow that blood circulation to be enhanced in perhaps a higher way that would be if you were not taking the supplements or eating the fish or eating the fruits or these grains that you need. They are rich in the omega three fatty acids.

Zack Arnold: Now, I promise to my listeners that this isn’t going to become the vitamin D and fish oil show. However, I do have one more thing that I wanted to add even further, just because I actually enjoy geeking out on this stuff, and I’ve just become a total supplement and nutrition nerd. So, before we move forwards to the the next items and the next points, can you explain how these two work so well together? Because vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin. My understanding is that when you have a fat-soluble vitamin like vitamin D, it’s absorbed better in the presence of fat. So, for example, if I took vitamin D at an empty stomach, it might not be as absorbed as efficiently as if I took it with a fat like a fish oil or some other form of fat,

Dr. Edison de Mello: Right?

Zack Arnold: And maybe I’m wrong. It’s just that my understanding was that if you were to say, “Well, I’m just going to take vitamin D or just fish oil, there’s actually a benefit to taking them both simultaneously because the vitamin D will be more absorbed because it’s a fat soluble vitamin.

Dr. Edison de Mello: That’s correct. I understand. Yes, you’re absolutely right. So there’s there’s two kinds of ways that the body can metabolize vitamins and minerals through fat soluble mechanism and non fat soluble mechanism. Taking fish oil and vitamin D together, because vitamin is fat soluble, would be an incredible benefit in that it enhances the metabolism or the absorption of fish oil, and so one of the best things that that a patient can do or anybody can do is actually find a time in the day where you can take these vitamins, these supplements together. And I usually recommend that you take it with food in the morning. Vitamin D can only be; it should only be taken once a day. So take your vitamin D in the morning with your fish oil with food, a little before breakfast, right after breakfast would be fantastic. And the fish oil should also be taken at night, twice a day. Because, like I said, it gives the brain the fuel that it needs, and during the night, it provides the kind of blood thinning, natural benefit that is essential for easier metabolic function in the body.

Zack Arnold: Sure. So, before we move any further, I just want to make a full disclaimer and say that I am an affiliate for Akasha Naturals, and if you think that the the intention behind the show is that I’m just dying to get that 35 cent commission from you buying vitamin D, that’s definitely not yet. But I wanted to let you know that if you go to fitnessimpost.com/akasha aka s h a, that will take you to the Akasha Naturals store, which is basically where I get the vast majority of my supplements, and the reason that I do that, and I want you to speak to this more, Doctor de Mello, before I start to hit some of the more specific ones, is that there are so many supplements on this planet that seriously, if you don’t have guidance, it is impossible to know where to start or what to buy, and when you really start to dig into the research and you look at the business behind supplementation, the vast majority-I think the statistic is like over 70-5%-are basically fillers and garbage. So the reason that I’ve gravitated towards you guys, number one, is because I know you personally and I literally trust my life with you, and you’re the guy that’s formulating these supplements, so can you talk to me a little bit about just some of the the supplements that are out there and the fillers and the things you need to look out for and what it is specifically about your line of supplements that makes them one of the purists that are on the market?

Dr. Edison de Mello: Thank you, Zack. So yeah, I love talking about this because there’s two side of the camp. There’s the side that says you know vitamins are essentially what’s going to make you live a productive and long life, and there’s the other side of the camp that says it’s garbage. It means absolutely nothing, and both sides are actually wrong. If a patient feels that you know the vitamins and supplements, or anybody doesn’t have to be a patient. If anybody feels that vitamins, minerals, amino acids are you know is the answer to longevity and a productive life, they’re really cutting their their their life short, because without exercise, without healthy eating, without stress management, without drinking a lot of water, these supplements will do absolutely nothing. It may give you a little bit of boost temporarily, but it will not really influence the longevity or the very good life that everybody strives to live, and so when people say vitamins is not the answer, they’re right. They are not the answer, but when combined with lifestyle modification, good health diet, stress decrease, like I said. Then what you’re doing is you’re really enhancing a lot of those metabolic functions that your body need needs to be able to operate. Sort of like, how long can your car run without you stopping and taking it to be serviced? How long will the oil be good in that engine without it being changed, and that’s what vitamins will do for your quote-unquote car, for your machine. We you lubricate. We will increase the productivity. We will conserve energy, or you will increase the work that the machine has to do to be able to operate. So because of that, and because you know, 90-five and above percent of Americans have, at one time or another, taking at least one supplement. That’s the latest statistics. Used to be 70-eight, but recently I read that it’s up to 90-five. If you consider one supplement, meaning one or more, I think it’s a big industry, and a lot of people have got have jumped at the industry. The pharmaceutical companies have gotten into that. Places like you know CVS and and other big big pharmacy retailers, and when they do that, the quality control, the research behind the the the raw material that they use to produce those to those vitamins and supplements is actually poor, and so there is not evidence that a particular supplement will increase your lifespan or will give you a better productive life. What it is is that people like the Akasha Naturals. We look for the raw materials that we want to use, and we research the benefits of that particular raw material. Echinacea Golden Seal is a is a perfect example. It’s an herb. Now, how the herb. Is harvested is really going to tell us the quality of the particular batch that is being used, and so we go to the people that we trust. We know the we go to the to the which to the sources that we know have been around for a number of years. We know to to we go to those sources where they have a third party lab looking at the quality of their products. We want people they provide us with these raw materials to show or to show us their own quality control, how long they’ve been in business, and then based on that we then formulate some of the products. Some of our products are formulated by us. Some of them are private labeled from companies that either have been around for number, number, number of years, or companies that are new in the market but have a track record in other healthcare products that lead us to believe that this is really a company that we can trust, and our quality control is one of the highest. Most of our staff, including myself, we use the very supplements that we are putting out there in the market. The quality control for us starts at home. In fact, when somebody comes to work for us, we want them to do our product, to use our practice, to do our plans.

Dr. Edison de Mello: We want them to be familiarized with what what it is that our patients do, so that they can not only the so that their staff can not only benefit from the benefits themselves, but they can also be ready to answer questions that may come their way from a place of knowing, from a place of their own personal experience. And so, when you go to akashanatos.com, there will be some research that that we put on the website that is based on the quality and of the the herbs or the particular minerals that being they’re being used and what research is saying about them.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and you couldn’t have said it better. And that’s really why I am so passionate about these specifically. It’s like you said, like you yourself, you’re reading the quality control reports. You’re giving yourself the supplements. I’m assuming your your kids are using the supplements, so people that work for you are using the supplements, and I gravitate towards smaller boutique operations that are real people that are just trying to make a difference, trying to run their own small business versus the megalomaniac giant corporations that are seeing that there’s tremendous potential to these supplements because people think, oh well, the supplements are you know all the hippies that are putting their bottles of stuff in Whole Foods and guys. That’s not the supplement industry anymore. The supplement industry is giant, giant companies that are putting pretty little labels with green flowers on them, with the same garbage in them as everything else that they make. So it’s it’s a really complicated industry. And what I will do is link in the show notes to several podcasts, not of my own, but of other people that have done interviews with experts that work in the supplement interest industry and talk about all the different scams in the industry and how you can tell the difference between a reputable company and a non-reputable company. So there’s a lot of great resources that you can find in the show notes. There’s also a company that I use a lot called Labdor. L-A-B-D-O-O-R. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them or not, but what they do is they are an independent company. It’s just a guy that decided to start his own business, and they test supplements off the shelf and they give them a grade. So if you’re watching television and you see something for a Centrum multivitamin, you say, “Oh, well, Centrum, I know that name. They’re a big company. Well, then you go on their website and you see that they got an incredibly low rating based on the quality of their product. So there’s so much more to it than just brand names or you know even ingredients. It’s so much more about the formulation and the quality of the ingredients.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Yeah, I’m familiar with that company, and I think they’re doing a phenomenal job. I think what your listeners, your who are like myself, consumers need to start doing even more than we may already been doing. Is reading the label. We don’t read labels, you know. We go for the pretty pictures, like what you said, Zack, on the bottles. And the marketers up there know that that’s what will attract people to a particular product. It’s the visual part of it, and so the visual may be nice, but what is in the in the back on the back of the bottle? What does it say? And if you don’t understand what it’s saying, talk to somebody who understands it. You know, talk to a nutritionist, talk to your doctor, who who may be open to the idea, but the same way that I tell my patients to make sure that they’re reading the label on the packages of the food that they’re buying, they should also read the label on everything that goes into the body. If there is artificial in there, it’s. No, no. So you have your kind of set of of buzzwords that will decide whether or not you’re going to buy that supplement. One should be artificial. Anything that’s artificial, artificial is a is a code word for chemical, and you don’t want to put a chemical into your body. So if it’s artificial, that goes off, you know, should go off your list. If you look and and and you see that there’s the word processed, or that you know there’s the word too much sugar, or if you see the word fructose, and sometimes you have that in both supplements and packaged foods, you know, that’s coming from corn syrup, and and corn syrup today is you know 90% of up to 90% of corn in this country is GMO. So do you really want to put that in your body? So do research on your own. Find ways that you can be educated with people that you trust about how do I do this, and it’s no different than when you go buy a car. Again, we research sometimes more about the the automobiles, the furniture, the houses that we buy for ourselves. Sometimes we do that with more with a high intention that we do with the very thing that we have to even to have even a higher intention put onto it, which is what am I ingesting? And ask yourselves: Is this something that I want to give to my children? If you have children, or is this something that I want to give to my parents, or is this something that I want to recommend to my friends? So, reading the label and understanding most of what it’s saying is of paramount importance. The second thing that I that I tell people to do is look at the cost benefit. If it’s too, it’s very inexpensive. If you’re getting a huge bottle of fish oil for a price that you cannot believe it, that is so inexpensive, then take a step back and say, I wonder why, you know, what is the shelf life of that product? What is in it in addition to fish oil? Unfortunately, the industry is very, very lightly regulated, and so fillers, like Zack said, are present in most of supplements out there. We’ll have fillers, so they have a little capsule that has a minimal percentage of fish oil, and the rest of it is other oils. And it’s legal to do that. They have to disclose it on the back of the bottle what percentage of that fish oil actually has fish oil. But you, like most of other the listeners, may not have the time to stand there on the aisle of this particular store where you’re buying your supplement, and read the label and look at the percentage of the fisher that is in there. You go for the visual, you go for the name, you, and so most of the times we leave a store with a product we really don’t know much about it, but somebody told us it’s good.

Dr. Edison de Mello: There was some great advertising about it, and that’s the reason why we buy. I’m saying, take a step back, talk to somebody before you’re gonna do that. Read about the supplement. Ask yourself the question: Do I need it? Number one. If the answer is yes, then what is the best brand that I can buy that is gonna give me the best benefit without less side effects or less junk in it.

Zack Arnold: From everything you just said, I literally have like eight follow up questions because you hit so many good points. The first one that I want to hit is what you’re saying about cost efficiency in looking at something because a lot of times when I post something in my challenge groups or even online and you know talk about supplementation or fish oil, somebody will email me or put a post up saying, “Oh yeah, I have this great fish oil. I get this giant bottle from Costco. It lasts me forever. And I’m thinking, “Well, that’s probably not even fish oil at all. And there’s so much more science behind fish oil than just it’s got omega three or it doesn’t have omega three and I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole because it would take a while and I can link to an article that describes it specifically but kind of the short version is is that there are two different types of fatty acids there’s EPA and DHA and there’s a specific blend that you need to have and a specific amount and some of the forms of fish oil don’t even have one, or they don’t have both of them. They might have one, they might just have the other, and then the rest of it is just junk. And I’ve done a lot of research about the scientific formulation that makes the most sense because I’ve even verified your stuff. Like I’m, I’m just going to verify everything I’m putting in my body, and I say I trust Doctor de Mello with my life, but at the end of the day, I want to double check this, so I did all the research, and I couldn’t find anything that was more scientifically formulated as far as EPA to DHA ratio than your stuff. So I’m like, well, the guy knows what he’s talking about.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Yes, and you’re doing your due diligence, and I also want to say to your listeners, Zack, to everybody out there that. It can be a bit overwhelming, and that you know if you go down, if you pick a supplement that you’re going that you’re gonna read about, and you hit EPA DHA on your Google search, you’re going to have an n number of of research or or articles out there. I I want to be very obsessive to the fact that we all have very busy lives, and we are life is happening very fast these days. So pick one supplement at a time. If it’s going to be DHEA, EPA, or omega three, find a site that you like. Find a trusting kind of publication. They’ve they’ve heard of it before. It can be a number of publications. Akasha Naturals is just one of them. There’s some great the great websites out there that I trust. One of them is Metagenics. That they have some great products. Sometimes I find great information on the Mayo Clinic website. Sometimes I find great information even WebMD. They’re very much they play very much on the safe side, and so sometimes the information is more about don’t take any supplements. And depending on who you’re reading, it’s going to say, “Wait a minute, vitamin D is important. And so, when you want to know the other side of the story, why is it that you should not be taking a particular supplement? Read really very scientific, evidenced websites. Most people make decisions to take supplements based on what they hear that is good, so they don’t do the due diligence. Or the opposite is also true. They decide that it’s not good for them because somebody told them of some horrific things that happened, or some bad companies that put some bad products out there. What I’m saying is take a midpoint, a midline approach. Read a little bit about it. Find some sites that you like, and then do research. And if you’re not going to take it, ask yourself: Is it true? Is it true that I don’t need this? And is it if it’s true, why? What is the evidence showing that I don’t need this? And I, if you use that approach, I think you are you’re going to be ahead of the game in most cases.

Zack Arnold: Absolutely, and that’s kind of what I’m trying to do is just take away that horribly overwhelming feeling you get when you go to Google and say, “I want to take healthy supplements, and then you get 487 million results, and you’re like, “Oh my God, where do I start? I’m really trying to distill it down because that is where I started nine or 10 years ago, and then I found you, and then you really broke it down to the basics. And since then, I’ve branched out and learned so much more. But the only person that I listen to is mr. Science. If the science doesn’t line up, then I just don’t get it. Like everybody that listens to the show regularly knows that I talk about Shakeology on and on and on and on. I’ve literally spent over $100 buying research reports and science lab tests to make sure that it’s legitimate. Because if it’s not legitimate, number one, I’m not going to spend my money, and number two, I’m not going to recommend it to people. So it’s not just oh wow, they’ve got a really cool website, and oh look, it has probiotics and prebiotics. Like that’s what some people do when they spend their money. And I say no, no, no. I want to see the verified science. I want to see independent lab tests. I want to know what it’s formulated with. I want to know if the the claims for what is on the label are true. And if those things aren’t true, I don’t buy stuff. So I’m very very fastidious about making sure that the science lines up with the claims. And when it does, I go ahead and and do it. And another point that you made a little bit earlier that I really want to hit is you mentioned something about going to your doctor, and that to me is a very double-edged sword. As you know, like me going to you as a medical doctor makes complete sense because you understand this stuff. What I didn’t know, and what I think the vast majority of our population doesn’t know, is that nutritional training is not part of becoming a medical doctor. Most doctors literally don’t take one class in basic nutrition, and people hear that and like, well, that can’t be. Doctors learn how to treat illness. So talk to me a little bit. How if I go to just a general Western medical doctor and I say, well, should I be taking vitamin D and fish oil. How just hearing it from a medical doctor doesn’t actually verify whether or not something might be good for you.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Yeah, well, it’s so unfortunate. That’s an excellent question, and I I hit on that question every time I do a little teaching or present at a seminar because it is unfortunate. You’re very right. Most medical training do not include nutritional training, or for that matter, how to meet the patient. It’s a system that is that is geared on boxing people into particular categories, and. And he doesn’t know how not to be individualistic about a patient to personalize a plan. Now we can go into the reasons why, and I’m not blaming the whole discipline of medicine for that. You know, there’s the insurance model that forces doctoring to a pigeonhole. There’s you know there’s time spent with the patient. There’s other economics. There’s sometimes even the issue of safety, depending where a doctor is practicing, where you need to get the patient in and out. So there’s an n number of factors that may contribute to the fact that nutritional assessment is not part of your everyday medical practice. And so what you want needs to do is to ask themselves the question again. If I’m not going to get it from my doctor, which you probably won’t, and especially it’s very geographically based as well. Depending where you are in the country, you may in California. I know that we are a bit spoiled because we have quicker access to doctors or to practitioners who really embrace their approach of nutritional care and nutritional health. So, if you’re not going to get that in your everyday, you know, life, or if you’re not going to get that when you go to your doctor, where else can you get that? And so, you know, fitting post is a place where you can get that. Other websites is another place where you can get that. Getting a nutritionist that you trust, or even sometimes working with a with a a fitness expert, a coach can help you at least sort out some of the information that you have. It’s very unfortunate that in this country and most of the Western world that doctors do not meet their patients. Doctors are trained to meet their disease, and the patient becomes secondary to the disease. And so, at Akasha, for instance, what we train our doctors to do when they come in, and they may have the highest training out there, but we train them in our mat or in our model, which is who is this person sitting in front of you who happens to have this condition. And so let’s start that. Who is this person? What’s this person’s lifestyle like? If I get somebody like Zack, for instance, who right now is very busy, and tell him you have to exercise five days a week, and you and it has to be for two hours, and you’re gonna have to meditate every day, and you need to eat every three hours only wholesome food, I’m actually setting him up for failure because it’s not going to happen, and so what? What one needs to do is find a doctor, practitioner, or a support system that will really say to you, “Okay, now where are you in your life right now? What are the hours that you work? What is your responsibilities that may prevent you from doing that which you know that you need to do. I haven’t yet met a patient who told me I don’t know what I need to do in terms of lifestyle changes to help me get better. Most patients know. Most people know what they need to do. The question is why are they not doing it? And so what we do is we meet the patient. We say, okay, so given that you only have perhaps half an hour at your disposal on an everyday basis for now, for the next three months, what can you do in that half hour? If I were to take that half hour and assign a few things that you can do health-wise. What would that? What would that be? And so, and what is it that you can do during those half hour? People may say things that will surprise a doctor.

Dr. Edison de Mello: They may say, “Well, I guess I’ll just need to go for a walk around the block, or I’ll need to really make sure that I remind myself to be well hydrated, or that I will really make sure that during that half hour that I have, I will chew my food instead of just swallowing cold down my throat. Chewing your food is truly important for metabolism, and so really it starts with you. If you are dependent on a doctor to tell you what are the steps that you need to take to change your health, to optimize your health, to improve your longevity, to improve your energy, then you’re cutting yourself short. Maybe you will find a doctor who will be part of your team. But if you don’t, then what else can you turn to? What books can you read? What videos can you can you watch that will help you take one step at a time to be able to get to that level? Remember not to rush things out. The biggest mistake that we make is that suddenly we wake up and we realize. Oh my God! I haven’t drank enough water. I haven’t exercised. I haven’t eat, you know, wholesome, wholesome foods. I’ve been very stressed. I need to change it all. And again, you may you may be able to do that for three days, and then the system will not allow you to continue because you haven’t changed everything else around you. Rather, make a list of the steps that you need to take, and then see. Okay, what is the one thing that I can take on right now for the next two weeks, and what is after that? What is the next thing that I can take on for the next two weeks? And it may and it may be something very simple, such as I will be very conscious to drink water on the hour. Every hour, I’ll be drinking water, and it will be of eight, you know, ounces glass of water. I will do that, and then the next thing will be okay. I’ll make sure that I will be more aware of sugar in my diet, and do I really need all this sugar? And then you keep adding little by little, bringing with it the awareness that it’s a cumulative effect that everything will finally come together once you dedicate enough time for each one of those things slowly to really lead you to the life that you dream to live health wise.

Zack Arnold: Absolutely, and that’s certainly what I advocate in my program. As I say, the all-or-nothing approach just does not work, and I do the polar opposite, and we go baby steps, and it’s one little change at a time, one thing after another, and they start to add up, and then cumulatively you start to feel better, you have more energy, you want to take on more steps, and then you’re kind of off to the races. So that’s really where I stand as well. The last thing that I want to get into because I know that you you have people that you need to you have lives that you need to save in a world that you need to change. So I don’t want to keep you too much longer. But the last thing that I really want to hit, and we could go through specific supplements all day long, and I mean literally we could have a 10 hour podcast going one by one by one. That’s how how passionate I am about this. But what I want to talk about now is going back to the science of it. Rather than learning about all the supplements that are out there and what’s good for you, I think it’s important for people to understand that they can learn what their specific body needs, and it’s really really easy. And that was something that you taught me, where you just take a blood panel and you literally get page after page after page of every single micronutrient and whether or not you meet it, and that’s how I know that the supplements that I’m using are working. Because if this had been the SATs, I pretty much would have gotten a perfect score because I hit every single micronutrient, and it’s virtually impossible to do that on just food. Like you, you just can’t do that with the quality of the food that we have in our world today, in our environment, and I pretty much nailed every single one. So, can you just talk a little bit about the quantification process and how you can learn specifically what your body needs?

Dr. Edison de Mello: Yeah. Well, again, depending on who your doctor is or who your medical team, health and wellness team is, he or she may be able to lead you the right way, but it shouldn’t be blindly whenever possible. Even with vitamin D, you should know where your levels are. So there’s a blood test that shows you where your vitamin D levels are. Usually, most labs have a range of 30 to 100 So what does that mean? Well, 30 is probably good for our grandmothers or our elderly person in a nursing home, so that number even for them would be low, but we wouldn’t be so alarmed. We will start supplementing she or he and the nursing home with vitamin D so that we can decrease the risk of fall. But if you have a 30-something-year-old who has a vitamin D of 30-230-five, that’s really, really an indication that action must be taken right away. And so then you will take your vitamin D, and sometimes you’ll take what I prescribe as being d5 1000. You take 5000 and you take it a day, and with food or with fish oil, like I said in the beginning, and then you do it for three months, and then your doctor check it again, or your healthcare professional, and then let’s say for some miracle that your levels are now 70. It’s not going to happen in three months, but for the sake of discussion, let’s say that it did. Then you don’t need vitamin D every day. You would take it three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and you would check it again. Let’s say after another three months, and say, oh, now it’s it stays at 7070, to 80. It’s good. So vitamin D for me would be three times a week. You will need vitamin D to to be able to. You need to take it to be able to keep the levels optimal. Unless I said you will spend a lot of time in the sun, which will be unsafe. Other vitamins like B 12, you can also get a blood level of B 12, and it’s going to determine the lab is going to determine where you are at, like B 12. Ranges from some publications report as ranging from 350 300 to 909 50. And again, the more stressed you are, the more vitamin B 12 you need because it’s also a cofactor for stress and it’s a cofactor for to decrease inflammation. In fact, homocysteine, which is a mineral acid in high levels in the body, is an indication of inflammation. And the treatment for high levels of homocysteine, which we know is an indicative of inflammation, is actually B12. And so you need to know where your homocysteine is at, and you need to know where B 12 is at, so that your practitioner can then make a well-informed decision with you. In addition to that, you also look at your calcium, your magnesium, and all the other electrolytes and all the other metabolic factors in your body. But sometimes you it it shows in there where you at, but it doesn’t show you the percentage that is needed for you to really be at its optimal level. And so, what I recommend is a test called Nutravel from a company that we use. And what it does, it takes your blood and then it goes through all your minerals, all your antioxidants, all your vitamins, and it tells us where you are at on the percentage that is recommended by the American Society of Nutrition. And so you look at that, and then we say, let’s say your B 12 is which needs to be between 350 and 950 and now let’s say you are 30 something, and a bit 12 is 400 I would say, well, how can you you increase your B 12 with food first? What kind of leafy greens can you take, and what other vegetables they are known in B 12 can you include in your diet? Before we jump on the wagon of take a B 12. Can you exercise the decrease inflammation in your gut? Sometimes people get inflamed when they eat something that is not good for them, like you know fried foods. It will inflame their gut, so B 12 cannot be absorbed. So the answer is not to take more B 12.

Dr. Edison de Mello: The answer would be to decrease the inflammation in your gastrointestinal tract to then optimize the B 12 that you already taken, and so really looking at an an assessment of where you are nutritionally, which starts with a very good assessment, written assessment questionnaire of what you’re eating and what your lifestyle is is the first step. The second step then is to find a practitioner that can work with you and meet you where you are in not only your lifestyle but also in your goals for health and wellness. A year from now, three years from now, five years from now, this will be no different than talking to a financial planner. When you sit with a financial planner, you want the question that he or she is going to ask you is where you are right now financially, and where do you want to be when you retire? Okay, so you are here, you want to be there, but how are you going to do that? So what are you gonna do for the next two years? What you’re gonna do for the next three years? What you’re gonna do for the next 10 years, and so on and so forth. Medicine should be the same approach. In fact, I often use the the the analogy of Are you banking in your health? Are you banking on your health in that you’re you need your health now, but you’re also going to need it even more when you are above you know the age of 65 What are you doing now? How are you banking on it now to be able to get it at the most optimized way when you are 65 Yeah,

Zack Arnold: And it’s so bizarre that you made that analogy because I’ve never heard you give that analogy before, but the one that I always tell people is that you have to look at your health like a 401k because people people will look at a supplement or something and be like, “Oh, well, it costs money, and I’m like, “Well, yeah, right now when you’re investing in your 401k you are throwing your money away because you will never see it. But guess what? You wake up when you’re 65 years old and you’re a millionaire. Where did all this money come from that I now have? Right, your health is the same way. You may spend you know $100 a month on supplements, and yes, you’re going to feel better. You’re going to perform better. You’re going to be better at your job, and all of those things can lead to just exponential changes everywhere. But at the end of the day, yes, you’re spending money on a supplement. But when you look at how you’re going to feel and function as a human being when you’re 65. When you have your 401k, it’s the same thing. So I, it’s so bizarre that you have that analogy because I swear to God, I’ve never heard you say it, and I use that every day. I’m like, look at your health like a 401k. Nobody my age wants to put money in a 401k because we’re not going to see it for 30. 30 years, I’m like, yeah, but I kind of really want to use this money now. But I’m looking down the road, and that’s kind of the the catchphrase of fitness and post is that you have to invest in yourself, and some of those investments cost money, but they do pay off, and there is compound interest, and it just does exponentially grow the way that a 401k would. So I I love that you and I are on the same page because

Dr. Edison de Mello: There you go, Zack. We should be leading more workshops. I know it’s crazy,

Zack Arnold: Right? Well, I’m going to let you go, but what I what I’m going to do is long as we have have money on the brain here, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, and on the show notes, I’m actually going to post my actual lab results of all of my micronutrients to show people that with the supplementation that I do, I am hitting all of my micronutrients, with the exception of being a tiny, tiny bit deficient in choline, which means that I just need to eat a little bit more eggs. I mean, that and we we could go down another road about what choline is because most people don’t know, and we don’t have the time to do that today. But I’m actually going to show people that the supplementation that I’m doing is working from a quantifiable scientific level, and show you that it’s very inexpensive to see this information and make your decisions based on it. Great. So, so that being the case, I just wanted to thank you immensely for coming on the show once again. Even though I know they have like 50 sick and dying people that are waiting for your treatment as we speak. So, this has been a tremendous pleasure.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Absolutely. And just before we go, I just want to hit home on a couple of things, and that is that the term “natural” doesn’t always mean safe. When you read the word “natural” in a bottle, just ask yourself, “Do I need this? You know, the safety of a supplements depends on so many things, such as the chemical makeup, how it works in the body, how it’s prepared, and all of the above. If you have a healthcare practitioner, always try to bring to his or her attention the fact that you are consider taking a supplement. Supplements in there are other than, for instance, vitamin B12, vitamin D, they’re pretty safe. But even those should be discussed with your healthcare practitioner if you’re taking any medication. Ask yourself the questions again that we talked about. You know, is this supplement safe? Do I need this? What are the benefits for me? What are the possible risks that I can have? Right? If you’re already taking something to thin your blood than fish oil, who is a blood thinner, maybe may may need to be taken in a smaller dosage. So you need to know that supplement like medications, depending on what is on board in your body, may actually have the opposite of the benefits that you’re looking for.

Zack Arnold: Absolutely.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Thank you for having me, Zack.

Zack Arnold: Yes, absolutely, of course. And I just want to let people know if if this has been an intriguing discussion and they want to know where to start, they can either go to fitnessimpost.com/akasha and then we’ll redirect you right to the Akasha Natural site. I have an entire page on the Fitness and Post store, so if you go to store.fitnessandpost.com, you’ll see all of the Akasha Natural supplements that I have personally used, or other members of our program have used, and we recommend because if we don’t physically use it and put it in our bodies, it doesn’t go in the store. And there are Akasha Natural supplements that I have not used, and I don’t put them on the store because until it’s been in my body, I can’t recommend it. So you can go there as well, and if you want to learn more about Dr. de Mello in general, or you want to learn about his work at the Akasha Center, just go to akashacenter.com. So thank you, sir, once again, and it’s been an immense pleasure.

Dr. Edison de Mello: Yes, have a wonderful day, everybody out there, and thank you, Zack. Okay, bye bye.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Kristin Martin, and the show was executive produced by Kanen Flowers. We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.

The music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Dorian Cheah from his brilliant album ARA.