Transcript: #103 Rethinking Vitamin D with Morley Robbins

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• 02:59 About Morley Robbins
• 06:58 The Truth about Vitamin D
• 13:48 You MUST take Vitamin A and Hormone D in the proper Ratio
• 17:58 Renal Potassium Wasting
• 19:48 The Impact of Vitamin D on Other Nutrients
• 21:22 The Myth About Cholesterol and Heart Disease
• 24:10 Harmful Effects of Vitamin D
• 27:04 Effects of Vitamin D on Adrenals and Thyroid
• 30:22 Calcification
• 34:30 The Right Vitamin D Tests
• 38:14 Correct Reference Ranges for Vitamin D
• 41:42 Vitamin D in Hair Mineral Analysis
• 42:53 Copper Dysregulation
• 45:38 Different Forms of Vitamin D
• 49:31 Foods Rich in Vitamin D
• 53:01 Three Most Dangerous Kitchen Appliances
• 55:43 More About Morley Robbins

Wendy Myers: Hello! Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and you can find me on myersdetox.com. Why Live to 110? Because LiveTo120.com was taken, and I personally don’t want to live past 110.

Today, we’re going to be talking to one of my very good friends, Morley Robbins. He’s one of my favorite people, and we will be talking about a very controversial subject, whether or not you should be taking vitamin D. Morley does not think that the majority of people taking vitamin D should be taking it.

This is very controversial because everyone in the blogosphere and medical doctors, and pretty much on anywhere you read, it’s common knowledge that everyone needs vitamin D. This could not be further from the truth and Morley is going to tell you why and the potential health conditions that can be caused by excess vitamin D supplementation.

This podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional, medical advice. Please consult your health care practitioner before engaging in any treatment that we suggest today on the show. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only.

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Our guest today is Morley Robbins, also known as the Magnesium Man. He’s the founder of The Magnesium Advocacy Group. You can join that on Facebook and view his website, GotMag.org.
He has a mainstream medical industry background. Morley was a hospital executive and consultant for 32 years, but left that to become a Wellness Coach and health practitioner, and he uses hair mineral analysis in his diagnosis with clients.

Mr. Robbins has completed the Well Coaches Training Certification as well as the Institute for Integrative Nutrition Health Coaching Program, like I did. Mr. Robbins received a BA in biology from Denison University in Ohio and holds an MBA from George Washington University in healthcare administration.

Morley is an expert on minerals and uses hair mineral analysis, HTMA, in his health coaching practice.
He has co-consulted on 21 books and written 12-hundred articles on magnesium and magnesium deficiency. And after all of this, he’s come to realize that magnesium plays a role in all metabolic systems and is, therefore, a contributing factor in nearly all major health issues.

Magnesium deficiency or insufficiency is at the center of so many common diseases due to its central role in activating over 3700 proteins and thousands of enzyme systems.

So through the Magnesium Advocacy Group, he has committed to educating as many people as possible about the magnificence of magnesium and ending the epidemic of magnesium deficiency plaguing the health and well-being of human beings on planet earth.

Morley, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Morley Robbins: Happy to be here. Happy Saint Patty’s Day to you.

Wendy Myers: Yes, it is Saint Patrick’s Day. I have no plans. Nothing green for my day.

Morley Robbins: Nor do I. I’ve got a little bit of green on my shirt.

Wendy Myers: Well, why don’t you tell the folks who aren’t familiar with you why you are known as the Magnesium Man.

Morley Robbins: Well, I used to be a hospital executive, and then after 32 years as both an executive and a consultant. And about six years ago now, I had very bad experience with a frozen shoulder that forced me into the world of natural healing with me kicking and screaming all the way. I suddenly realized that there was more to healing than what we have been led to believe via the allopathic community.

And so I became an expert in minerals when I discovered that that’s really at the root of all this dysfunction that we’ve been conditioned to believe. I guess my party line is that there is no such thing as medical disease, there’s only metabolic dysfunction that’s caused by mineral deficiencies.

And when you really get into the world of enzymes and what makes enzymes work and what enzymes not work, it’s all about the availability of minerals. It’s actually striking when you really get into it.
Now, I’ve read too many articles. I’ve read about 1500 articles now on minerals and mineral deficiencies and metabolic dysfunction and they all have the same theme. Enzymes stop working because minerals are missing. That’s it!

And so the key is figuring out why are the minerals missing and what it’s going to take to restore mineral levels and mineral ratios. It’s hardly a straight line as you well know, but it is absolutely the antithesis of what we’ve been trained to believe since we were little tykes.

Wendy Myers: I agree with you. I think minerals are the foundation of healthy. You got to re-mineralize and balance them, and the magic happens.

Let’s talk about vitamin D. But before we start our D-iscussion, I want to talk a little bit about what your thoughts are on why maybe we should be rethinking vitamin D. Everyone is so trained to think that everyone needs vitamin D across the board. And you hear on every website, article, podcasts, everyone is touting vitamin D. What is the problem with that?

Morley Robbins: Well, it’s very distressing. We need some context here. Context is really critical. It’s all about being able to distinguish between social construction of reality versus the truth.

Let me give you some examples of social construction of reality of a historical context. One of the first things we learned is that it was a famous fire in Rome where the whole city was pretty much engulfed in fire, we learned that Nero was fiddling all the while.

Well, in fact, in truth, he was actually 35 miles away at his summer residence and didn’t learn of the tragedy until it was, in fact, engulfed. He rushed back with his aides, and in fact, did extensive work to save people despite what the history books tell us. But also that it then paved the way for him to completely rebuild Rome.

So he was anything but fiddling during the burning of Rome.

Another great example is we’ve been led to believe that Woodrow Wilson is this prince of peace, that he was the former president of Princeton and then went on to become whatever number president he was, and that his great claim to fame was setting up the League of Nations following the first World War.
Well, the truth of Woodrow Wilson is very different. He was the guy who got us into the first World War to begin with. He also was the one who enabled the creation of the Federal Reserve System, which is a private, for profit entity that has nothing to do with the Federal Government. And on his inauguration, there were over 2,000 African-Americans working in the Federal Government at the time and eight years later, when he left office, there were only two. They were both chauffeurs.

So in fact, Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist.

So the truth is very different than the social construction of reality. And that applies to our discussion of hormone D. It’s not a vitamin. It is, in fact, a hormone. I think that’s the most important foundational point is stop calling it a vitamin. It is not a vitamin. It is, in fact, a hormone.
But what’s behind my issue of what’s the context? Well, there are actually several different components I would like to chat about.

One is hormone D is the oldest hormone on the planet. Wow! How many people knew that? It’s been around a long, long time. And we can argue, are we 6,000 years old? Are we three million years old? But the point is that the historical context of planet earth is one of a magnesium-rich environment that is very calcium-core.

The proof of that is that the mineral content of the ocean, of sea water, is three times more magnesium than there is calcium. That’s interesting. Most people don’t know that.

But then you’d understand that Andrea Rosanoff who was a celebrated magnesium researcher did a study in 2012 to look at the calcium-to-magnesium ratio in the American diet at that time. I think the reference point was 2010. And what she learned was that we were eating five times more calcium today than magnesium. So that’s a 15-fold differential from where we started out because we evolved from the sea, at least that’s what anthropologists tell us.

So we went from a 1:3 ratio of calcium to magnesium, and now, we’re at a 5:1 ratio of calcium to magnesium, which is a little striking. But I think it’s important that people understand that from a long range historical context, the body was designed to protect the limited calcium that was in our environment. We don’t have that situation anymore. We don’t have this absence of calcium in our environment. In fact, we’re swimming in it. And the last thing we need is more hormones to protect that.

Wendy Myers: For those who don’t know, vitamin D is used to retain calcium in the body. That’s its whole purpose.

Morley Robbins: Absolutely! Not just retain it, but it’s to put calcium into the bloodstream. Its real job is to make sure that the intestines absorb more calcium and that that calcium gets put into the bloodstream. That is its job first and foremost.

The second issue that’s important from a contextual standpoint [inaudible 00:12:47] is that I don’t think the batting average of doctors and dieticians is very good over the last 60 years. We have been told to stop eating eggs, stop eating red meat, don’t eat fat, get cholesterol out of your diet, get as much calcium, get as much iron as you possibly can. They’ve been silent on little things like mercury, fluoride, sugar, high fructose corn syrup and the favorite, glyphosate, otherwise known as RoundUp. And they’ve also been silent on the important of vitamin A and E, the importance of magnesium and the importance of copper.

I don’t know, they goofed. And so now, they’re telling us, “Get more vitamin D.”
Quite frankly, I’m running the other way. Their batting average is zero. Now, they’re telling us to take more hormone in an environment where we’re swimming in calcium. It makes absolutely no sense at all.

Then we come down to the ratio. There’s a very important ratio of vitamin a to hormone D that exists in the liver.

Let’s look up a historically important source of nutrients in our ancestor’s diet. It’s called beef liver – or we could talk about chicken livers or we could talk about goose liver. But let’s just stay with beef liver for a minute.

We find out that, in fact, when you’re looking at beef liver, particularly, raw beef liver, there are 13,000 IUs of vitamin A and there are 1,300 units of vitamin D. That’s a 10:1 ratio. Wow, that’s interesting. No one ever talks about vitamin A in the context of vitamin D. And in fact, that’s the way Mother Nature intended it, to always have, at least those two together. And very often, Mother Nature likes to have all four of the vitamins A, D, E and K together, such as in grass-fed butter (that’s a great source).

We have been led to believe that it’s okay to take vitamin D alone and in isolation of its biological antagonist known as vitamin A. And that’s a significant thing that people are completely unaware of, the vital need of vitamin A to be present to keep that hormone in check. And this goes way back in time.
I think another important key piece of information is that the testing for this particular nutrient is completely flawed and too narrow.

So within your listeners and your audience, who would honestly base a thyroid decision on just TSH? You wouldn’t do it. In this day and age, people are too smart and too aware of the need to have T4, T3, free T4, free T3, reverse T3, thyroid antibodies or thyroid peroxidase, as well as knowing the RBC levels of selenium, iron and magnesium.

People just don’t base their decisions on TSH. And yet, when it comes to this hormone, suddenly, we’re supposed to suspend all rational thought and say, “Oh, yes. I’ll just base it on this storage form of the hormone.” And in fact, there is a storage and an active form. As there is with all the hormones, there’s a storage and an active form.

Storage form of cortisol is called cortisone. It’s interesting. Not many people talk about cortisone. But the important point is that when it comes to hormone D, it’s very important to understand what is the level of the storage form of the hormone, the active form of the hormone, called calcitriol. That’s 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D. You also need to know what the magnesium red blood cell is, what the potassium red blood cell is, what the ionized calcium is.

And what I have just discovered today is that zinc is very much affected by our calcitriol. It would be important to know either the plasma zinc or probably the red blood cell level of zinc as well.
So it’s important to create a testing context, to not have the forest for the trees, and stop isolating the storage hormone in isolation of all the other factors that [inaudible 00:17:56].

Then we come to the other point that there is complete silence in the mainstream literature, whether it’s medical or media literature, about a concept that was identified in 1962 called renal potassium wasting.

I don’t know what your experience is,Wendy, but every air test that I look at where someone has been mega dosing over a thousand IUs of hormone D have a potassium of one or two.

Wendy Myers: That was me, for sure, taking vitamin D for years and years.

Morley Robbins: It’s a rampant issue. What are people dealing with today? They’re dealing with arrhythmias, they’re dealing with anxiety, they’re dealing with constipation. Guess what? They are all related to the bioavailability of potassium.

And it’s all being affected by this overuse of this nutrient because what happens is in the liver, if you don’t have that one part D to ten parts vitamin A, what happens is the D burns out the A in the liver, which then sets the stage for the potassium to leave the body. There’s a very tight connection between vitamin A status and potassium.

In fact, all the electrolytes have a relationship with the fat-soluble vitamins. Just as were pointing out that vitamin D is linked up with calcium, well, vitamin A is linked up with potassium, vitamin K is linked up with sodium, and vitamin E is linked up with magnesium.
And that’s why you don’t take these things in isolation. It’s really important to keep that perspective in mind.

I think the ultimate is I’m really troubled by the overall silence about the impact that vitamin D has on magnesium, has on potassium, has on vitamin A, has on ceruloplasm, a key protein to keep copper happy, and what I learned this morning, is that calcitriol increases the absorption of zinc.
They will say, “Wow, that’s great.”Maybe. Because when you increase the absorption of zinc, it leads to more metallothionein. What’s metallothionein job? It’s a heavy metal binder. And what’s its affinity for? Copper.

Wow! So we’ve got this situation where because we’re taking calcitriol, we’re creating more calcitriol because we’re taking more calcidiol, the storage form, we are increasing the zinc level, we’re increasing the metallothionein, we’re binding up the copper, and we’re preventing the production of ceruloplasm because one of the critical precursors to ceruloplasm is vitamin A.

Oh, my gosh! No one’s talking about all these switchbacks that are a result of this one nutrient. And I think it’s an outright travesty that we don’t know more about this.

But then the ultimate issue from my standpoint is that we were led, for probably 50 or more years, to believe that cholesterol caused heart disease. We were raised on that. I was born in 1952. [inaudible 00:21:41] heart attack in ’55 and that’s all we were ever raised by was, “Oh, my gosh! Booga-wooga! Get the fat and cholesterol out of your diet” until a few weeks ago. And what did the government say? “Oops… Sorry we made a mistake about that.”

Well, it turns out that all of the research that connected cholesterol as a mechanism for cardiac heart disease is called correlational research. It wasn’t causal. It was correlational.
So let me ask you a question, Wendy. Do flies cause garbage?

Wendy Myers: I don’t believe so.

Morley Robbins: No, I don’t think so either.

So the cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease. And now, we’re being led to believe that vitamin D is the panacea for every issue that exists on the planet as it relates to disease. And in fact, it’s correlational redux. We’re getting hosed by the exact, same research strategy because most people are lemmings and don’t question the research or question the information coming out of mainstream media, “Wow, I got to take more D? Okay, I’ll take more D. And the test says I need more D.” No! No. The research is all bogus because it’s all correlational.

I’m not questioning that vitamin D is important, that hormone D is important because it does serve a purpose in the body. But it is being completely distorted because of this – I don’t know what the force is behind it.

Wendy Myers: Mercola is behind it.

Morley Robbins: Yeah, right. Well, it’s the bandwagon of more calcium on steroids because that’s all hormone D is. It’s calcium on steroids. And so people are not aware of the mineral price they’re paying or the metabolic impact that is happening.

So all of that is a very long-winded backdrop to the key question, “Should people be taking vitamin D?” No, I don’t think they should.

Wendy Myers: Unless you need it. Unless you have testing that shows you need it. We’ll get into that in a few minutes.

But what are some of the harmful effects of vitamin D? If someone is taking vitamin D when they don’t need it, what are some of the health conditions that can be caused by that?

Morley Robbins: Well, I think we’re seeing an uptick in kidney stones, in seizures, in heart-related events. The whole dynamic of a myocardial infarct is here’s the heart in an ideal state, it’s relaxed. Here’s the heart when there’s too much calcium. It gets really stiff. You get too much calcium in the heart, your heart is going to start to shut down. You’re not going to be able to make energy to allow it to beat to move the blood on the body. I think we’re seeing an increase in anxiety. I think we’re seeing an increase in arrhythmias.

So I think all of these are related to this blind intake of this nutrient with people not knowing the whole story. They don’t know the all the prices they’re paying.

And when you are taking a nutrient, such as hormone – and let’s put this hormone in perspective. If a hormone were a salt, a pinch of a hormone would salt nine tons of potato chips. That would fill the average football stadium full of potato chips. That’s pretty powerful.

And so people aren’t just taking a pinch of hormone D, they’re taking 5,000 units, 10,000.

Wendy Myers: 50,000. 50,000. It makes me insane when I have clients coming to me and their doctor is giving them 50,000 IU of synthetic vitamin D. It’s vitamin D3. It’s insane.

Morley Robbins: Right, right. Yeah. I have several clients who’ve had 50,000 a week, but I have one client who was getting 30,000 a day. She’s a very sick puppy right now. And now, she understands why. Because she knows, she can see on her hair test the impact that it had on her electrolytes, the impact that it had on copper and zinc.

It’s mindboggling that more people don’t know this. But the conditioning of society, the social construction of reality is you are low on vitamin D and you need more. No one talks about it. People just focus on that message and they don’t open up and say, “Are there aspects to this that I need to know?” “Was Nero doing more than just fiddling? Was President Wilson more than a prince of peace?” People don’t take the time to question that. And that’s part of the challenge.

And I guess there’s opportunity for folks like you and me to help educate people and make them more aware. That’s obviously the purpose of this conversation is as well.

Wendy Myers: Well, let’s talk a little bit about how vitamin D can affect the adrenals and thyroid because a lot of people don’t realize their adrenal and thyroid problems can be worsened by taking vitamin D.

Morley Robbins: There is no question about it. The adrenals are run by the ratio, sodium-to-magnesium. Not a lot of people know that, but those are the two electrolytes that are running the adrenal gland. And the thyroid is run by the ratio of calcium-to-potassium. Interesting!

So if you start pumping a lot of hormone D, you’re going to affect at least three of those four electrolytes. You’re going to increase the level of calcium, you’re going to lower the level of potassium. So right away, you increase the thyroid ratio dramatically. And when the number of calcium-to-potassium gets higher and higher and higher, it slows the thyroid more and more and more.

And now, we got the drain that hormone D puts on magnesium, which only agitates the adrenal glands because when you look at the metabolism of Hormone D from the cholesterol under our skin (that’s where it starts, cholesterol under our skin), it becomes cholecaliferol, and then the cholecalciferol becomes calcidiol in our liver, and then the calcidiol becomes calcitriol in our kidney, and all of those transactions are brought to you, courtesy of magnesium.

So once you start dropping in this bolus of calcidiol, the storage form of the hormone, the body is wired to act on hormones because they’re so powerful. And so right away, the body starts draining magnesium to try to flip that.

Now, the other part of this is when people don’t know that there is a storage and an active, they just know that their storage is low.

Well, a very [inaudible 00:29:24] internist, he’s actually an endocrinologist, Kenny Vandermeer located in, I believe, Norway (he’s in Europe), he’s the one that introduced me to this notion that the number that is associated with your active hormone D should never be more than one-and-a-half to two times the number associated with your storage hormone D.

And what do I find with clients when they do that blood testing? On average, most people are three to four times different in terms of active to storage.

It’s frightening. And he very openly talks about this on his YouTube video, his interview then, where he says, “I don’t understand this obsession to take this nutrient. It’s only increasing the level of calcification in the body.”

That’s what most people don’t understand. There is a price to be paid for this nutrient and that’s a very important piece for people to walk away with. Everything, every front has a back. Well, a front of 5,000 units of calcidiol is a dramatic increase in the amount of calcitriol and that then is going to increase the amount of calcium in your blood and that’s not a good thing because it’s calcification that’s behind a lot of chronic disease.

Wendy Myers: Yes, hardening of their arteries that causes high blood pressure, calcification in the liver and kidney, gallbladder, your whole body. I used to have a lot of calcifications in my body as many of my clients do on their hair mineral analysis. So many people have very high calcium or they start releasing all the calcium on future hair tests.

My body, my muscles literally used to be calcified. They were so tight, I’d have to get a massage once a week to break it up because it was excruciating. And a lot of people don’t realize when they have really tight muscles and they have high blood pressure, et cetera, it’s a slow process of calcification.

Morley Robbins: It’s a fascinating concept.

And maybe just a quick digression, Dr. Fiedler who was a famous Viennese physician came up with the theory of stress and how it led to calcification. He theorized this in 1899. It’s very simple. Stress causes magnesium loss, which leads to electrolyte derangement, which leads to the loss of cellular energy, which leads to cell death, which leads to the need for inflammation to clear up the dead tissue, which then leads to fibrosis or we know it as calcification to patch up the mess.

Now, the interesting thing is that theory was lingering and it was Hans Selye who decided to prove whether Jake Fiedler was right. And so he did 30,000 animal experiments to see, “Gosh, was Dr. Fiedler right?” And in fact, he proved that he was absolutely correct in that there is this very predictable process of stress in the body where the first thing that gets affected is the adrenals. The adrenals get bigger because they are under stress and then they collapse. And when they collapse, guess who takes it on the chin? The thyroid. And it’s never the other way around.

The body doesn’t focus in on the thyroid and say, “Come on, adrenals. What’s the problem?” The adrenals are the first line of defense.

And again, that’s the antithesis of a conventional world of medicine. If my goal were to be a very busy and successful, allopathic physician, there are three things I would focus on. I would focus on the thyroid, I would focus on calcium, and I would focus on iron. And when I focus on those three, I would have patients for life. My waiting room would be full.

So what’s the connection?

When you focus on the thyroid, you’re ignoring the adrenal glands. When you focus on calcium, you don’t let the body absorb magnesium. And when you focus on iron, you’re shutting down copper metabolism. It’s the perfect storm. And the average person doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. That’s the strategy behind conventional medicine, to focus on thyroid, calcium and iron. And they’ve got waiting rooms full of people.

It’s intriguing when you look at it from the context of minerals and it plays right into your question just a few minutes ago.

Wendy Myers: Let’s talk about some of the distinctions about vitamin D testing. What does someone’s testing need to look like in order for them to supplement vitamin D?

Morley Robbins: I’m not trying to do testing to encourage people to take hormone D. I am doing testing to prove to them that they are turning to stone. That’s what most people are doing.
So the bare minimum testing that I do is the 25-hydroxy, which is also called calcidiol, which is also the storage for liver hormone, and that’s why it is routinely done in doctor’s offices all across America and around the world for that matter.

In addition to that what I look at is the 1,25-hydroxy also known as calcitriol, also known as the active form of the hormone. Then I look at the magnesium red blood cell because that’s the most accurate dip stick for what’s the magnesium status in this person’s body.

And then I look at the ionized calcium in the serum. I would love to look at the calcium red blood cell, but three years ago, both Quest and Lab Corp stopped making that available to anyone. Very interesting that they would just bar that from use except in research labs, of course, where it’s done under very tight control because they don’t want us to know how calcified we are inside ourselves. This is the truth. It’s very simple why they don’t allow it.

Then on occasion, I would also ask clients to get a potassium red blood cell test because that allows us to get an idea of what’s happening to the two critical intracellular minerals, magnesium and potassium, because of the intake of hormone. They’re both affected by it.

And if they are intracellular minerals, it only makes sense to use an intracellular blood test, which is what the red blood cell is.

When you’re baking cookies, do you care what the kitchen room temperature is, which is akin to the serum or do you really care about the oven room temperature, which is akin to the red blood cell? It doesn’t matter whether the room temperature is 68 degrees or 78 degrees, but it sure makes a difference if it’s 325 or 425. You need to know that because you don’t want to burn the cookies. You want to bake the cookies.

And that’s why the red blood cell measurement is so important for both magnesium and potassium, particularly if you’re ingesting too much – what I think is too much hormone D. Probably about 150 people have now completed that blood test under my tutelage and only one client had a legitimate need for more hormone D – one out of 150.

And in fact, using just the storage test alone, the 25 hydroxy, all 150 would have said, “Oh, my storage level is too low. I’ve got to take more of this hormone.” No, you don’t, not if you do the full blood test. And that’s really going to encourage people too.

Wendy Myers: Let’s talk a little bit about the reference ranges. As we know, big pharma, their scam is to lower the reference ranges for people to make them look healthier than they are. So let’s talk a little bit about what the actual reference ranges should be for RBC magnesium and calcitriol and calcidiol.

Morley Robbins: I believe the reference range for storage is anything over 30. Thirty to a hundred is considered normal. And on the active, I believe it’s 25 to 75. Storage is measured in nanograms per deciliter and the active is measured in picogram per deciliter.

So when I get back on the blood test, usually people are somewhere in the 20s and 30s (that’s 20 to 30 nanograms per deciliter). But on the active, they’re usually over a hundred.

I’ve had clients come back with over 150 on the picograms per deciliter. It’s so far beyond the realm of reasonable [inaudible 00:39:38].

But the point is that the storage in the research that I had done – maybe because I’m from Baltimore. My son calls me Balitimorley, by the way – John Hopkins did a study several years ago looking at what’s the clinical benefit of different levels of this hormone. And what they discovered is that there is no clinical benefits when hormone D is above 21 nanograms per deciliter. That’s very different than the message you get from the vitamin D council or Michael Holick or the AMA or whoever is tooting that horn. There’s no benefit over 21. Wow, that’s really different.

And then that syncs up beautifully with what Kenny Vandermeer is saying that two times that would be about 45. And that’s right in the middle of the reference range for active, 25 to 75. Isn’t that interesting?

So this whole dynamic is because of a misunderstanding about what is the need for storage level in light of the active?

I think people have to be very careful and very cautious about a) what’s the credibility of the individual who is telling you take this hormone? What’s been their track over the last 60 years? It’s dismal at best. And do they really have a full accounting for blood markers that are related to hormone D status? And if you’re just basing it on 25-hydroxy, you’re getting a very narrow, a very distorted and a very dangerous picture of your hormone D status.

Wendy Myers: Let’s talk a little bit about hair mineral analysis. You use this in your practice. I use it. It’s a requisite for any clients that I work with. Let’s talk about some of the issues that are routinely seen in hair mineral analysis, the HTMAs, when people are taking a lot of vitamin D.

Morley Robbins: Hands down, what I see right away (and made reference to a minute ago) is almost without exception, every individual who has been taking hormone D supplements has a very, very, very low potassium. And almost without exception, I am able to also correlate that when I do blood testing for copper status. I always look at, not just the mag RBC, I look at plasma zinc, and I look at serum copper as well as serum ceruloplasm.

Everybody who has low potassium on their hair test, almost without exception, has very low ceruloplasm. Isn’t that interesting?

And that syncs up with the research that says that hormone D kills vitamin A. Vitamin A is a precursor to making ceruloplasm.

Why is ceruloplasm important? Because it makes copper bio-available. If copper is not bio-available, it goes rogue. And a lot of people that you and I are spending time with via hair test have all sorts of copper dysregulation.

I don’t think that very many people even knew what that was, but they are swimming in what I call conundrum. And conundrum is too much unusable copper (because it is not bound in ceruloplasm) and too little usable copper.

And people say, “How could that be?” Because copper is a wild horse inside the body and it needs a bridle. The bridle is, in fact, ceruloplasm. That’s the protein that makes copper usable. What happens is if the body stops making the bridle, simultaneously, it’s adding to the number of unbridled horses and there aren’t enough with-bridles to go around.

And that’s where the whole copper dysregulation starts, inside the liver because people are swimming in hormone D. And they don’t even know about it.

And so that’s the connection on the hair test. Very often, you’re going to see on a slow oxidizer, typically you’ll see this very low copper. You and I know that’s code for a lot of hidden or stored copper. And then on a fast oxidizer, when we see the low copper, we know, “Oh, my gosh! They’re a copper dessert. They need more copper” because they’ve been taking hormone D and their body wasn’t able to make it available to them.

It all ties back into the spectrum of nutrients that shows up on the hair test, but it’s very carefully hidden because it doesn’t jump out at you. There’s no marker on the hair test that says ’hormone D status’. You have to be able to step back and say, “How’s magnesium doing? How’s zinc doing? How’s potassium doing?”

Well, it could have been aspect of this copper dynamic that might be affected by the Hormone D as well.
So you have to be a little bit of a mineral detective, and that’s what I would like to call myself. When I’m not Magnesium Man, I’m a mineral detective.
So that’s part of the process.

Wendy Myers: Let’s talk about the different forms of vitamin D. There’s vitamin D2 and there’s vitamin D3. Can you tell us a little bit about those and which one do you prefer?

Morley Robbins: Well, let’s pull the foci now just a little bit more.
So when you read articles about hormone D, they actually talk about cholecalciferol, which is the cholesterol that’s being turned into the precursor to the storage form of hormone D. So cholecalciferol, calcidiol, the storage form of the hormone and calcitriol, the active form of the hormone, are all referred to in the literature as vitamin D.

I want to pull my hair out. What little is left, I want to pull it out. Are they kidding? They ought to be a law that says you cannot refer to vitamin D in the abstract. You must identify, are you talking about the pre-hormone? Are you talking about the storage hormone? Are you talking about the active hormone?

That’s the first distinction. You need to understand that this hormone exists in different states.
D2, which is, as I understand it, a synthetic form of the hormone and a very dangerous form of it, my understanding is that it’s as caustic as fluoride is inside the body. It resets some of the research that I’ve read.
But when people are taking vitamin D2, they have no idea what they’re doing to their body. And the tragedy is one of the highest sources of vitamin D2, I believe, and please correct me if you know differently, but I believe that milk, commercial milk, has a regular habit of adding vitamin D2.

Wendy Myers: I was just about to mention that. That’s where people are getting this conventional, pasteurized milk, this toxic vitamin D2. When I used to be a vegan, I was fretting in my psychotic state about whether I should be taking vitamin D3, which is processed using animals or vitamin D2. Luckily, I didn’t take the vitamin D2, but there are a lot of supplements out there with the synthetic vitamin D2 in them.

Morley Robbins: Correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t think there is a natural form of vitamin D2, is there?

Wendy Myers: I don’t believe so, no. From my understanding it’s synthetic.

Morley Robbins: That’s my understanding. But hopefully, if we’re wrong, someone will correct us, but I think that’s my understanding as well.

And so you want to avoid D2 like the plague. And what you really want to do is make sure you understand
that — again, think of hormone D as a transformer. A lot of us grew up with Transformers or our kids grew up with Transformers. I think it’s a great way to look at it. This object starts out as a car, turns into a plane and actually becomes a rocket. And that’s important to understand, that there are different levels of intensity and burn rate and impact inside the body when it moves from one state to the next.

Maybe that will help people understand that it’s actually all the same parts, but it begins to take conformational change inside the body as it’s mixed with magnesium, ATP and other factors that come into play in converting the cholecalciferol to the calcidiol to the calcitriol.

Wendy Myers: So you’re not saying avoid vitamin D in foods. So what foods can people eat that are rich in vitamin D say if they wanted to get some vitamin D?

Morley Robbins: Well, probably the richest source that people are maybe familiar with whether they’re using it or not would be cod liver oil. And certainly, historically, our great grandparents used to have a tablespoon of cod liver oil every day. I hated it. But they were getting about 400 units of hormone D. About 10 times that, about 4,000 or 5,000 units of vitamin A. That’s the natural formulation of A and D in the liver. So I think that’s probably the easiest way for people to do it.

But an even easier way (and what I recommend to clients as well) is make sure they eat more cholesterol, make sure that they eat more magnesium, and make sure that they go outside in the sun more. It’s not complicated.

Our ancestors have been making this hormone for a long, long time. And part of the deception and [inaudible 00:50:54] is that because of a lack of sunlight in our body, without exposure to sunlight, we can’t make hormone D. That’s not true at all. It’s actually not true.

And so I think people have been choraled into a belief system that is very distorted and I think it’s very dangerous as I said it at the beginning of the conversation.

Wendy Myers: And so, for instance, I have a lot of clients that live in the northern latitude, it’s snowing, it’s grey. So how are they able to make vitamin D? Can you just explain that a little bit?

Morley Robbins: Drive one to the lake, cut a hole in the ice and fish.
Wendy: Eat fish!

Morley Robbins: Eat fish, exactly. What do Indians eat? They eat whale blubber. Then what do whales eat? They eat plankton. Where is the plankton? Well, the plankton has been kissed by the sun. This has been going on for a long time and so you look for the food-based sources of these nutrients.

Weston A. Price learned this when he traveled the globe back in the 1920s, with his wife, Isabella. And they learned all the different ways that these indigenous tribes kept their bodies healthy by eating really nutrient-dense foods in a very simple fashion.

And we’re led to believe that we’re so much more sophisticated and that we have so many more advancements. No. The way those indigenous tribes were eating is 100 times healthier than what we experience today. One thing that I do know in reading a book that Dr. Price wrote is that nowhere in his research did he discover one indigenous tribe that was using blenders to make breakfast. And no one was using microwaves.

And so the three most dangerous appliances in the kitchen that destroy health are the refrigerator because we use less salt than our ancestors used before that; the microwave because it destroys the proteins in food; and the blender because we’re led to believe that we’re supposed to swallow our food and not chew it when in fact, chewing activates the parotid glands which increase the release of amylase and the enzymes that break down the food that we’re trying to digest.

I know I sometimes come off as an old dog, but those are not advancements if the objective is to improve one’s health. You have to think like your ancestors and go back, “How would my great grandmother, how would my great grandfather have made this meal? What would have we done to ensure the nutrient viability of these foods?” And we’ve totally lost sight of that.

Wendy Myers: I do what the French do. They eat foie gras. So that’s what I do.
I was very, very upset when Arnold Schwarzenegger outlawed it saying it was cruelty to animals. He outlawed it in California for a couple of years. And just a month or so ago, it became legal again to all the happiness of all the French chefs in Los Angeles. I’m sure they were mortified that they couldn’t serve foie gras in their French restaurants anymore. But now I can get my weekly dose of liver.

Morley Robbins: It’s a great way. If you’re looking for a really rich source of copper, there’s nothing better than goose pate. I think it’s five or six times higher than beef liver. It’s enormously high in copper.

Wendy Myers: I couldn’t eat enough of it when I was pregnant. I could not stop eating foie gras. I don’t know what it was.

Morley Robbins: I think there’s a very – and I know I digress, forgive me, but just to make a point, I think there’s a difference between the copper that’s coming in our diet via plants versus the copper that’s coming into our diet via animals because I believe the animal-based form is already attached to the bridle. It makes a difference when it comes in our body.

That’s just a theory. I could be all wet. But I really believe that there’s a difference in how we’re exposed to that particular metal. It’s a very dynamic one. As you know, causes a lot of problems. But I think a lot of people who avoid animal food ultimately end up with copper issues. I think it’s a result of the lack of a bridle.

Wendy Myers: And if any of you listeners want to learn more about copper, Morley and I did a two-part series on copper dysregulation. It was very, very eye-opening for so many of the listeners and for my clients and Morley’s clients. Definitely give that a listen.

Morley, thank you so much for coming on the show. Can you tell the listeners a little bit more about where they can find you and your Facebook group, et cetera?

Morley Robbins: Absolutely. I do have a Facebook group. It’s called the Magnesium Advocacy Group. Two years ago, there were three people. We’re marching it up on 30,000 right now.

Wendy Myers: That’s amazing.

Morley Robbins: We got 500 or 600 a week. So it’s grown beyond any realm of reality that I ever thought it would be. But that’s a very active and very positive forum.

I have a website GotMag.org. I have blogs there and some information. And people are very welcome to reach out to me via e-mail. It’s my first name, [email protected]. My cell is area code 847-922-8061. Those are the different channels that they can reach me.

Or they can just beam up something into the sky that says, “I need help, Magnesium Man.” And I’ll respond to that as well.

Wendy Myers: You’re a brave soul for giving out your phone number. I couldn’t do that. Prank calls.

Morley Robbins: I actually do it all the time. And what I find is that people are very respectful of it. I’m very willing to give it. All I ask is that people respect that if they have a problem, call me. If they don’t, don’t call me.

Wendy Myers: And do not call at 2 a.m.

Morley Robbins: It’s not like I sleep with phone under my pillow.

Wendy Myers: I do. I sleep with my little baby. I love it so much.

Again, Morley, thank you so much for coming on. You’re always such an informative guest and I’m sure this podcast is really eye-opening and mind-blowing for all you vitamin D addicts out there. And question your doctor. Do not take vitamin D under doctor’s advice. This is the one time I’m saying don’t follow your doctor’s advice on this because it will lead to health problems down the road.

Morley Robbins: I think the key is do your homework on this one. Be very careful. It’s been a delight as always, Wendy. Thanks for the opportunity and I look forward to continue the dialogue on future topics to be determined.

Wendy Myers: Yes. And stay tuned for two seconds. Guys, if you want to learn all about detoxification and how to heal your health conditions naturally, go to myersdetox.com. You can also check out my healing and detox program, MineralPower.com and my new online health program, BodyBioRehab.com.

That’s where you get the five pillars of health. They teach you all about diet, exercise, stress, sleep and detox. It’s a 30-day program with meal plans and a cookbook, et cetera, so that you can learn how to heal your health and live a healthy life.

Listeners, thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 podcast.