Anemia Fix: Increase Copper (not iron) to Restore Energy
with Morley Robbin
Dr. Wendy Myers
Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and on this show, we talk about everything related to heavy metal and the chemical toxicity and the health issues caused by toxins, which are many. We also discuss more advanced topics on the show than other podcasts. We talk about anti-aging, bioenergetics and all kinds of really interesting things. Today, we have my very good, old friend, Morley Robbins, on the show. I’ve known him for almost 15 years now. I trained with him a long time ago when I was getting started. I knew he was onto something. I knew he had really hit the nail on the head with discussing iron and copper metabolism and magnesium, and how that relates to magnesium as well.
We’re gonna be talking about why you need to reduce the level of iron and increase the amount of copper in your body, and why doing this fixes so many metabolic issues in your body. Copper is essential for increasing energy levels, absolutely essential. It’s really important for iron metabolism as well. Morley mentioned something interesting on the show. He said that the World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the population in the world is anemic.
He talks about why he thinks that’s complete BS and what’s really going on with people and why we are on such iron overload with all of the fortified cereals and grains and breads that people are eating every single day, and how that’s making you iron toxic, how that’s leading to dementia and so many other health issues and the very simple things that you can do to correct these issues, which will correct so many downstream metabolic issues and improve your health and energy. It’s such a good show. You need to tune in.
Our guest today, Morley Robbins, is the creator and founder of the Root Cause Protocol. Morley received his BA in biology from Denison University in Ohio and holds an MBA from George Washington University in healthcare administration. Morley has trained in wellness, coaching, nutritional counseling, and functional diagnostic nutrition. He’s known as the magnesium man due to his extensive research into and understanding of Magnesium’s role in the body and the body’s stress response. Today, Morley’s research is in the intricate relationship between the three-ring circus, copper, iron, and oxidative stress, and their impact upon mitochondrial function and immune response.
He’s a firm believer that we’ve been misled and misfed as it relates to medicine and nutrition. As a certified health coach with an expertise in HTMA or hair tissue mineral analysis, Morley has performed over 7500 one-on-one consultations, helping people feel better by empowering them to get to the root cause of their symptoms. You can learn more about Morley Robbins and his work at therootcauseprotocol.com. Morley, thank you so much for joining the show.
Morley Robbins
I’m thrilled to be here, Wendy. Yes, I can tell you without any reservation, there’s no other podcast host who has done more to promote the RCP than you. I’m still getting people who’ve heard our very first conversation. It’s gotta go back 10 years and it’s unbelievable. So, thank you. Yes, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, I feel very honored that I think I was the first person to go through the root cause protocol training.
Morley Robbins
Yeah.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I was able to do it one-on-one with you. It’s through our conversations and our friendship that I knew that you were onto something. I just wanted to do a brain dump and just learn everything that you had to offer. I wanted to do this podcast with you again and just kind of do an update on all of your new research, all of your new findings, and what you’re learning. But why don’t you just tell the audience a little bit about yourself first?
Morley Robbins
For those who may not know the story, I’m a former hospital executive, then became a consultant for, did that for 32 years. Pulling a suitcase behind your back for 20 years does something to your shoulder and it locks mine up, which got me to a chiropractor who’s now my wife. But she used a phrase in that very first encounter. She talked about the innate healer. I’d never heard that phrase used in 32 years of working in health, the conventional medical world. And as I stood there with this shoulder recovered from just one adjustment, which was amazing, she did it by adjusting the torrid muscle in my jaw. I vowed that I was gonna figure out who this dealer was. And I’ve now spent 16 years reaching, researching about three hours a day. I’m convinced that it’s copper. It’s the most overlooked, misunderstood, abused mineral on the planet. But it’s behind all the energy production.
All of the exhaust that’s produced in the body is cleared by copper dependent enzymes. There’s just a wholesale list of pathways, metabolic pathways, immune pathways that are copper dependent that no one seems to know about. Oh, or they’re not putting it together in a cohesive way. So what I’ve elected to do is really devote myself to spreading the word. I created the root cause protocol many years ago to really laser focus the direction of our diet and our supplement to increase the copper protein, ceruloplasmin. It seems to help a lot of people when they do that, but I think what’s of some controversy is what you have to stop doing as well as what you have to start doing. I think therein lies the opportunity for dialogue and greater understanding.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I think for many people that are not, well, it’s really about just clearing the pathways, like stop doing some things that are screwing up the metabolism and do just a handful of things like taking minerals, for instance, to facilitate the body just working naturally on its own. And that’s what you design very elegantly with the root cause protocol. It is just kind of optimizing the body’s mineral metabolism, so to speak. When you first started, you were the magnesium man, right? You’re very, very focused on magnesium and I’m still shouting for the rooftops. Everyone needs to take magnesium, but it’s not as simple as that. You’ve gotten more into iron metabolism and copper metabolism. Can you kind of explain that a little bit and how they interact?
Morley Robbins
Well, in the world, according to the RCP, there’s a three-ring circus. You have copper, iron, and oxygen, and they’re very powerful elements. Copper is the only element on the planet of earth that can regulate iron and oxygen at the same time and not create static. What’s important for people to know is, for example, the Merck Manual, many people have heard of that. It’s, if you will, the bible of conventional medicine list, 20,000 different symptoms in the Merck Manual. They all begin with one thing, oxidative stress and oxidative stress we would call it rust outside of our body. But the way our mitochondria work is that oxygen that’s brought into the mitochondria needs to be turned into water, two molecules of water, and that chemical reaction, which I think is the most important on the planet, is what releases a DP three molecules of a DP to go over to complex five, where it becomes magnesium, ATP, and that’s what gives us energy.
Our body runs on energy. We make our body weight in ATP every day, a constant process of recycling. Where I really began to refine my thinking was the research of Douglas Wallace, who’s a world renowned geneticist and biologist at Children’s Hospital in Pennsylvania. He wrote a very important article in 2005, where in the very first sentence, he was challenging and admonishing his clinical colleagues saying, you don’t understand how energy is made. And that’s really the basis of life, is creating energy and sustaining that process of creating energy. Within the paradigm of the Root Cross protocol, we ignore the enemies and we ignite the energy.
When you’ve got energy, the immune system has a lot more cachet inside the body. But I think what really became very clear to me is that there is a pecking order of the minerals, depending upon the source, 82, 92, I’ve heard as high as 102 in CMOs. But the bottom line is they’re only probably a half a dozen that really matter inside our body and making sure that they’re kept in balance. But the part that most people don’t know about is why does magnesium constantly get lost during the course of the day? ’cause we’re all under stress and it’s really the oxidative stress that burns up magnesium. You’ve gotta have the right amount of copper in your diet to regulate the iron that’s in your body to prevent excess oxidative stress causing the magnesium burn rate as I call it. It’s an interplay. Taking magnesium is very important, but you’ve gotta solve the copper problem to solve the iron problem, to solve the runaway magnesium loss. That took me a few years to figure that out. I think it really hangs together and it certainly makes sense in the context of what most people are dealing with in the course of their day.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s not as simple as measuring copper and then supplementing with copper. Can you talk about that? Because I think where a lot of people get tripped up, especially conventional medical doctors, is doing blood testing for minerals or other types of tests for nutrients and have this very simplified concept of, oh, it’s low. Let’s replenish that. And the body just is not that simple. The body is incredibly complex and so that’s why when you take vitamin D, your vitamin D doesn’t go up. There’s a lot of different things happening in the body that you need to fix before you can balance your minerals. Can you explain that?
Morley Robbins
I think the word that’s missing in most people’s lexicon is enzymes. And these are amazing components of our metabolism where they’re low engines that they get the work done. I can’t think of enzymes that are more important than the copper enzymes ’cause they’re making energy, they’re clearing exhaust. They’re making sure that neuropeptides and neurotransmitters and hormones are being activated. That’s really important. 45% of human tissue is connective tissue. So ligaments, tendons, the fascia, I mean the blood vessels, all of that is connective tissue.
It’s made possible by one enzyme, and that’s lyal oxidase. I think there are these profoundly important enzymes that are not understood. I’ve probably met scores of chiropractors who don’t know what lyal cell oxidase is.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Is that copper dependent? I’m assuming that it is
Morley Robbins
It’s absolutely copper dependent. In fact, I was just talking with an orthopedic surgeon at the Western Enterprise meeting. I’m not gonna name names, but she was completely unaware of the fact that there was a copper mechanism to drive the connective tissue that she’d spent her whole medical career working in and had no awareness of. I think the tragedy is that there isn’t sufficient emphasis being placed on how things work. When you get behind the physiology of the human body, it’s absolutely fascinating, but it’s not that complicated once you understand the lay of the land.
Again, the whole framework of what we teach is that there is no disease. There is stress induced mineral loss and mineral dysregulation that then affects metabolic function. There are a lot of people that love to talk about metabolic dysfunction, but then you ask ’em, well, what’s behind that? And you get these blank stares. Well, we can, we can take ’em through a complex by complex within the mitochondria. We can tell people exactly why the Krebs cycle’s not working. We can get very grainer about how when you’re under stress, as most people are, that dysregulates iron metabolism as soon as you have chronic stress. It’s the stress model called chronic social defeat stress. The other model is called repeated restraint stress. Those were both developed during the 1980s and they seemed to play out pretty heavily in the year 2020. Chronic social defeat, stress, and repeated strange trust.
Oh, I can’t leave my house. I feel completely defeated. Well, they send hepcidin into orbit, and hepcidin is a very important iron hormone that prevents the recycling of iron in the human body. And when it can’t be recycled, it gets sequestered. It gets walled off to keep it away from the pathogens, and the iron starts to build in the tissue. And then people look anemic on paper. The blood test says, oh, you, you have low iron in the blood, but there is no blood test. There is no tissue test for iron. Stop and think about that. Only a blood test, no tissue tests. There are compelling research studies that highlight the fact that under stress, iron accumulates in the mitochondria.
As soon as iron’s building in the mitochondria, you can’t make energy ’cause you’re altering the availability of oxygen in that organelle. It’s just this profound aha moment of like, oh my gosh, we’ve gotta deal with the stress as well as deal with whatever the symptoms are. We put a priority emphasis on the emotional issues and the variety of stress issues in the RCP as we do on the diet and the mineral supplementation.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about anemia ’cause that’s something a lot of people are diagnosed with and the doctor says, oh, the iron’s low. Let’s just flood their bodies with iron, right? Tell us why that is probably not a good approach.
Morley Robbins
Well, it doesn’t make sense. At the very outset, what doesn’t make sense is we live on a planet where iron is the number one element. On planet Earth, iron is 36%. So it’s the number one element on the planet. Let’s assume that we are the most evolved species, right? That’s a safe assumption. And so then anemia means that the number one species on the planet can’t metabolize the number one element on the planet. It doesn’t pass the sniff death. If you talk to people from the World Health Organization, they’ll tell you that a third of the Earth’s population is anemic. That’s a very condemning statistic. Then we find out that we’re fortifying iron everywhere.
Iron is throughout the diet, it’s in the flowers. They are modifying products for preferential uptake of iron to make sure that we deal with this anemia issue. And what is completely silent is copper’s role in regulating iron. The part that people don’t typically know about is that you cannot make a molecule without copper. That’s the very essence of hemoglobin. You cannot knit hemoglobin together without copper. You cannot mature a red blood cell. The red blood cell starts to take on more and more heme and iron, but there’s a point where, or it’s full maturity, it needs to release the excess iron. Well, the doorway to release that excess iron requires copper.
It’s a copper dormant. And then the process of recycling the iron. The red blood cell lasts on average 120 days. But every second of every day, we have to replace two and a half million red blood cells. That requires a tremendous recycling of iron release of iron out of the recycling macrophages and get it back to the bone marrow so they can make two and a half million new red blood cells every second of every day. No one is taking account of this recycling process and the fact that 95% of the iron we need daily to support this recycling process comes from this recycling system. We only need one milligram of iron a day from our diet. And yet they’re massively fortifying it on the dietary side. But in order to have healthy and optimal recycling, you have to have optimal copper in your diet.
The whole world is completely silent. There’s a very interesting case study that I came across. He’s a Greek engineer. His name was Constantine Tis. He was born in Athens in 1940, came to the States to get his bachelor’s and master’s from MIT. So he is a pretty smart guy. He went back to Athens and he actually developed the first electric car on planet Earth and was very successful, but in his seventies, he developed something called MDS Myelodysplasia Syndrome and his hematologist decided to approach it differently. He decided to chelate the excess iron from his body, which is very innovative.
What was fascinating is after a very aggressive program of iron chelation, this copper came back to normal. This plasm came back to normal without even supplementing on that. It’s absolutely stunning. He lived for about 10 years after all of that, and passed away in 2020 at the age of 80. He’s sort of a bellwether of where the problem is, again, I’ve been chasing magnesium, as you well know. I’ve been chasing all of the nutrients and the support for making copper bioavailable. But this case study reveals in a very graphic way, ’cause it was meticulous in charting his progress.
We have too much iron in our body and we’re very aggressive about getting people to donate blood on a quarterly basis, if you’re postmenopausal, if you’re a man, and certainly a couple times a year, if you’re a woman, if you’re still cycling. But I think what his example points out is that there is benefit in lowering the iron footprint in humanity. We’ve gotten lost in this mindset that everyone’s anemic and the mantra is anemic. You’re copper toxic. People think nothing of taking more iron. They’re terrified of taking copper. And I think it’s a meme that has had a significant impact on people’s health because what I’m able to document in the research, this is just the opposite.
There’s vacuous levels of copper in our diet and there’s this massive fortification of iron. People don’t know that those are related. People don’t know that copper’s the general, that iron’s the foot soldier. A graphic example would be General Patton who moved a lot of iron during the second World War. That’s what copper is in our body. I think people need to become more aware of the metabolic and immune functions of copper in the body. I think it is one of the best kept secrets on the planet.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
The fortification of cereals, greens, bread and the things that people are eating all day long, every day for decades absolutely has a devastating effect on our health. Can you talk about that form of iron and why that’s so problematic and what that’s doing to us, including promoting dementia and other health issues, the oxidative stress or rusting of our body essentially?
Morley Robbins
There’s actually two forms of iron. There’s heme and non-heme iron. Heme comes from animals. Non-heme is coming from plants and chemical substances. What’s really intriguing, Wendy, is when you get into the research, you’ll find that about 95% of the research is on non-heme iron, and a very small percentage is on heme iron. Well, our body knows exactly what to do with heme iron.
It’s a very sophisticated system to work with heme iron, both from an absorption standpoint as well as a recycling standpoint. It seems like all the attention is put over on the non-heme side. Heme iron is gonna be composed mostly of, I guess exclusively, Ferris iron. So the body would recognize it immediately, but the nuance of our body as a biological system is that it must turn that Ferris iron, which has a plus two valence. It must turn that Ferris iron into ferric iron, which is a plus three valent valence in order to be attached to transferrin to be a part of the recycling system, or to go into storage to go into ferritin.
Again, you can’t do that without copper. It’s absolutely an obligate function of copper enzymes to turn that Ferris into ferric iron and get it into storage or get it into transport.
The supplementation that you’re referring to, the fortification that you’re referring to is typically done with the plus two forms. But it has different properties than what you would find in heme iron. Heme iron is called organic iron, non humus, inorganic iron. They have very different properties. There are different doorways to let those irons in. They’re not the same doorway at all, but it’s not whether it’s coming in or going out. What’s fascinating is this concept of getting back to my earlier point about the stress that causes this buildup of iron in the mitochondria. It’s a very, very significant event. But I think what people need to understand is that there is a recycling system. It’s a very central part of our physiology that isn’t emphasized in conversations with your doctor.
They don’t segment a recycling side versus the absorption side. Everything is put in the context of absorbing or you’re not absorbing your iron well. You can’t absorb iron without copper. The actual absorption of iron is a two step process. It can get into the inter site, which is the cells of the digestive tract, but it’s gotta get out of the inter site into the bloodstream. And that requires a copper dormant to open the door up to let the iron through. If that doesn’t happen, the iron starts to accumulate in the digestive tract, but it also begins to build up in organs all over the body if this recycling system isn’t allowed to progress and sustain itself.
There’s no real mainstream attention given to that. At the Western Egg price meeting where I gave my talk just a couple days ago, a chemist came up to me and said, you know, there is something called nuclear magnetic spectroscopy. I said, well, I’ve heard of it. He said, good, that’s good. He said, you can actually measure the copper in bone marrow. You can measure copper all over the body using that technology without having to invade the body. The real dilemma is that if you truly wanna understand the mineral balance, you need to be doing needle biopsies with different tissues.
Well, that’s very painful. It’s also very problematic. But if this technology exists, I didn’t realize it was on the scale that you could, what he implied was you could almost point to different organ areas to determine what’s the copper content versus the iron content. So I’m very fascinated by that. I’m gonna look into that deeper. But I think what the public needs to understand is there’s more to the story about anemia. I just recently published two courses in this. One’s a starter course, it’s 90 minutes long, and the other is a three-hour course and it gets into a lot of detail.
I wanted to make that available so that the public and their practitioners could find out what are the other aspects of iron metabolism that no one’s talking about? Because I think the conclusion that I’m coming to now, 16 years into this process is that iron is creating all the problems, whether it’s genetic defects, metabolic dysfunction, immune dysfunction, autoimmune conditions, we can go all the way down the list of problems, neurodegeneration, you name it. I think that the public needs to realize that this unchecked intake of iron in our diet, because of a misunderstanding about low iron in the blood test, is causing a lot of iron accumulation in our tissue that isn’t being properly addressed through mainstream or alternative approaches.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You mentioned giving blood, which makes so much sense because evolutionarily our bodies are built to really hold onto iron. Our body does not wanna let go of iron. So it’s very difficult to get rid of. So, you found no other way, no kind of chelation or supplement or anything other than giving blood to release that excess iron that we have.
Morley Robbins
Well, there are iron chelators. IP six is a known iron chelator. I detox is another good product that will chelate iron. And then you have a much more aggressive form. Wait, I guess you have three. I kind of dove in the middle of that. So you have herbs and nutrients that will naturally chelate iron. Think of wormwood as a classic example, as it’s known as an anti-parasitic. But what it’s really doing is it’s chelating iron. Lyin would be another that people would recognize. There are probably dozens of these bioflavonoids as a group typically helping to manage the status of iron because of what you just said, the body retains iron at all costs.
It’s not designed to let it go. There’s no enzymatic pathway. There’s no hormonal pathway that says let’s get rid of some iron. It’s only the physical event of blood loss. We do have these food sources of natural chelation. We have these others that I mentioned, the I detox and the IP six, Anatol exo phosphate. It’s a very powerful molecule that loves to grab iron both inside the cell as well as outside the cell. And then we get into a series of chemical chelators, DFODFX, de defer prone. I think there’s four in total. But the point is, these come with a price, they typically have some barb at the end of them.
Clinicians are very hesitant to use them because they don’t pull iron out easily. There’s always a price to pay for that. So this mechanism does exist, but it’s very rare to find a practitioner who’s had awareness of it, who has experience with it, who would know about the other side of it, which is the copper side of it. That’s really what we’re up against. There’s no question in my mind that the iron status in our body is at an all time high and there isn’t a general awareness in the practitioner community about the relationship between copper and iron and how interdependent they are. So the process is just this nonstop promotion of understanding to get more people to be aware of the fact that there are options, but that there is a very simple approach, and that’s really what we tried to capture within the RCP.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Giving blood is so much easier and you’re helping another person as well, especially if you have unboxed blood like myself, right?
Morley Robbins
Well, no, it’s actually four people who benefit from a blood donation, three other people, and then the person who’s doing the donation. So that’s not a bad return. There are those issues now with tan blood that are becoming a bit of a challenge. I heard some really wonderful comments about my presentation and I don’t say that to be braggadocious. It’s just nice to have people wake up to this information and really see the value of it. But a colleague of mine happened to go out to dinner with a homeopath who was at the meeting and the homeopath was just like, well, there’s no way that copper can be that important. And this woman who follows the RCP, she’s taking the training. She’s like, I think you need to look into it.
I think it’s very unsettling for practitioners to go through a formal training to realize they weren’t taught something. Here’s the case in point. A neighbor of mine, a friend, is very adept at AI REO medical textbooks used around the world and scans the top 10 nutrition searches. About two months ago, I said, let’s ask perplexity to scan the top all textbooks used around the world. And we’re looking for two phrases, Ullo plasma, and that’s the copper protein that’s so important in, or it’s the master antioxidant in our body that most people don’t know about. They think glutathione’s where it’s at. Well, glutathione is important, but xop plasma is the big dog and nutritional immunity.
It’s a very important term that was coined by Dr. Ed, oh my goodness. He was not Indiana your first time. Ed Weinberg. It means you don’t ingest a substance that feeds the pathogens iron. What came back was a big fat goose egg. These 20 textbooks didn’t have any meaningful treatment. There was no mention of nutritional immunity. I think three of the 10 textbooks made reference to lop plasma, but did not explain its importance. The blind spot is there isn’t sufficient awareness given to the natural mechanism of regulating our metabolism, iron, and immune system.
There’s no mention of the danger of taking unnatural forms of iron in our diet. The significance of the whole concept of stress as it relates to recycling is that, if you will, it’s a kind of immunity. The body says, okay, we’re really under stress. I better make sure that we pull the iron out of the blood to keep it away from the pathogens. It’s a primal response to stress that if it becomes chronic, that’s when it really begins to show up in the blood work. No one’s accounting for this stress side has nothing to do with iron. It’s because we don’t have adequate testing to get into the tissue. It was Bruce Ames, who recently passed away about a year ago, he was a legendary scientist at Berkeley. When he was doing this research, at that point, he was the most quoted scientist on the planet in 2004, 2005. He said, well, there’s 10 times more iron in the tissue than shows up in the blood. Well, that’s a light bulb moment, let that sink in and come to realize what does that mean for all this blood testing?
We’re completely missing the mark ’cause we don’t have the capacity to go into the tissue and say,what’s the problem here? It isn’t just this idea that you’re either bleeding it out in your digestive tract or as a woman, your monthly menstrual cycle is causing excess loss or you’re not absorbing it properly. It’s a very pedestrian response to a very sophisticated problem.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You mentioned donating blood. Yeah. So how often should one donate blood optimally?
Morley Robbins
Quarterly, I think is a good regimen. If people have known elevations o, ferritin or their hemoglobin is high, or their serum iron is, they probably can do it every other month, every 60 days, which I think would be beneficial to get an understanding of why those different markers might be elevated. Sometimes all three are elevated. Sometimes only one of them is elevated. But to give the listener a context, when you account for hemoglobin and myoglobin, which basically is a protein that stores oxygen in the muscle.
Well, 70% of iron is in hemoglobin and 10% is in myoglobin. So 80% of iron is tied up in these two proteins. Another 10% is in the storage protein ferritin, which is supposed to be inside the tissue. It’s not supposed to be in the blood. That’s not my opinion. That’s the work of Harrison, Rosie Kel, these mega iron scientists. It was never designed to be elevated in the blood. When it does elevate in the blood, then that means that the liver is breaking down. There’s a substantive inflammatory process taking place. And then the third marker, the serum iron is less than 1% of the iron in the body. But it’s a very important 1% because it reveals how well the iron recycling system works. For women who are interested in understanding their iron status, they should be doing a blood test at the midpoint of their cycle,Day 14 or day 15.
Guys don’t have that restriction, but the ideal serum iron for adults would be around a hundred. The lower that number is, the more inefficient the recycling is. The higher that number is above a hundred means that there is inadequate recycling of the iron in the body. So it’s important for people that have that wherewithal to know the boundaries of how their body’s working.
Dr. Wendy Myers
If someone wants to work with one of your root cause protocol practitioners, they could help them decipher their blood work which their doctor wouldn’t, because they wouldn’t have this knowledge.
Morley Robbins
Well, it’s how to fix it. It’s not rocket science. It really isn’t. But I think it’s familiarity with the markers and being comfortable with the interpretation. I’ve heard from probably dozens of clients. The doctor was uncomfortable ordering the tests because they’d never seen these markers before. They didn’t know how to interpret them and I respect that. I think it’s a valid pushback.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s something they’re not really taught. Doctors can’t know everything, but there are a lot of things they’re not taught how to test for or fix
Morley Robbins
The beauty of this test, we call it the Full Monte Iron panel, but the beauty of that test is it really reveals at a macro level, how much symmetry and balance is there in the body, particularly as it relates to key minerals like zinc and copper and iron and magnesium. What’s the relationship of iron A and D and then what’s really happening with the iron? The iron markers are classically studied. It’s very revealing, and it’s only 13 different markers. It tells a lot about how well the body’s responding to stress. It’s fascinating.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Let’s talk about copper. How do we get copper in our diet and optimize that? Should we supplement with copper? And if so, what form?
Morley Robbins
I think a lot of things changed back in 2020 for a variety of reasons. But it was very early on when I realized people were taking high doses of ascorbic acid, high doses of vitamin D and high doses of zinc. I realized, well, that’s the perfect triad to kill copper in the body. Well then I renamed COVID, COV stands for coppers Vanished Iron’s Dysregulated. It was about 2021 where I realized we need to start to develop a more bioavailable supplement for copper. On the heels of that was an increased awareness about the impact of farming and food processing on copper status so that historically the richest sources of copper were organ meats, especially beef liver, grass fed beef, liver, not grain fed, but grass fed and grass finished.
It’s amazing how finishing with grain destroys all the effort that was done with grass before it. I just learned that over at this meeting at Western Price. But beef liver is a particularly rich source. Nuts and seeds, leafy green vegetables, mustard greens, colored greens, wheat greens and then shellfish are very rich sources of copper. I think all are under attack because of either the environmental forces of glyphosate, because of farming practices. What people may not know is that there’s a lot of research being done on glyphosate or Roundup, as some people call it, but that it chelates minerals, but it chelates minerals on a logarithmic scale.
So we know that an earthquake of three is not a big deal. Dishes rattle and you’re gonna get through it. An earthquake of 12 is very different. No one survives an earthquake of 12 because it’s orders of magnitude. It turns out that glyphosate, chelates, calcium and magnesium at a three key and what we’re talking about is that three is referring to the speed with which the minerals are taken out of the soil.
So it’s coming out, but it’s coming out slowly. It’s chelating iron and zinc at a nine to zipped up many notches, but it chelates copper at a 12. So what is that saying? Well, this is the work of Don Huber at Purdue University, but what it’s telling us is that glyphosate is chelating copper a billion times faster than it’s chelating calcium and magnesium. It’s chelating copper a thousand times faster than it’s chelating zinc or iron. The difficulty we have, Wendy, is when you’ve got big numbers like that that go over our head, I don’t really understand that. So it can’t be that important. Now, this is really important.
To give some sense of perspective, when I was in college, my mom had a Mercedes three 50 sl. It was a fun car to drive, and I remember driving it to Florida and at one point I decided to see what this car could do. I was going 140 miles an hour. So twice the speed limit, it was a wall of green going by as the grace of God, it didn’t get caught. but that was only 2x. When I was a little boy, Chuck Yeager decided to break the sound barrier with the X 15 rocket. It wasn’t a plane, it was a rocket. He went 10 times the speed limit, 750 miles an hour. That’s pretty fast. But this thought of a thousand times faster or a billion times faster, we can’t relate to its reverb.
Where it becomes significant is in Europe. The country that was probably most opposed to the use of glyphosate was France. So this goes back 30 years. In 2022, some scientists decided to study what’s happening? How are the French citizens bearing this restriction of glyphosate? What they discovered in 2022 is that 99% of French citizens have glyphosate in their urine. They’re peeing glyphosate in their urine, which is a staggering statistic. So the conclusion from that is glyphosate is in the air, it’s in the rain, rainwater now. To your earlier question, what do we do? How do we get in our diet?
I think it’s important for people to realize that we live in a different world now. Post glyphosate and the food system doesn’t have rich sources of copper, which is really why I encourage people to supplement with. But it’s also why I inspired the creation of at least one product called Recuperate. But there are dozens of products now that are available, but what I think people need to be mindful of is that if you are gonna work with a copper supplement, the importance is having the co-factors and in the recuperate that we developed, you’ve got desiccated beef liver, you’ve got spirulina, you’ve got turmeric, and you’ve got boron.
These are all very synergistic with the copper. I think it’s important for people to realize that there are components that are needed in the diet to make sure that these types of supplements are gonna be beneficial to get the full benefit of the mineral. So, we’re in a kind of a difficult time now that ideally I would love to have it in the food system. I would much prefer to have it in the food system, but I don’t think we’re gonna stop farming practice anytime soon. I’ve actually talked to three different soil scientists and as we get into the conversation, they’re saying, wait,, you think you’re gonna get rid of glyphosate?
I said, well, I’m not thinking about it. I think it would be the right thing to do. They said, it’s never gonna happen. The global economy of agriculture is so embedded now with glyphosate. They said it’s impossible. I said, well, sometimes anything is possible, but I think people need to wake up to not just that chemical, but the use of high fructose corn syrup. It is very, very prevalent throughout the food system. What it does is it changes the sugars in your body. High fructose corn syrup is an ethanol that becomes sorbitol. Sorbitol is an alcohol sugar, but it chelates copper. 98% of the copper around it disappears when sorbitol is present. So again, it doesn’t take long to wonder if copper is in the crosshairs?
When you think about the farming side of it and you think about the food processing side of it, and then you begin to look at the pharmaceuticals that are available, many of them are fluoride activated, but what does fluoride do to copper? It binds it up. How about that? That’s why I think we put such priority emphasis on trying to address people’s overall diet. Address their stress, but have this nutrient program that we’ve developed to bring balance back into the body and make sure they’re getting. The right kind of minerals and nutrients to support their overall metabolism.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
How much copper do you think people should take per day? So when you recuperate supplements, just in general, people just wanna start supplementing. Everyone’s different.
Morley Robbins
Well, I always like to put it into context. Studies from the 1930s clearly showed that there was four to six milligrams of copper being ingested daily by the sixties. Those same studies said that the level of copper had dropped to a range of two to five milligrams. The current RDA for copper is nine tenths of one milligram. So we’ve come a long way in the wrong direction. But the key is within the use of the recuperate product. We recommend that people start out with one capsule, which has two milligrams. We know you’re gonna get two milligrams of copper bis glycine.
I encourage people to work with that for a week to 10 days, get it up to two capsules. So then you’re getting four milligrams. And then I say, you might even try a third capsule. I have clients on their own. I don’t recommend it, I don’t promote it, but I’ve got clients taking five and six capsules a day. The upper limit identified by the NIH is 12 milligrams of copper is considered what would be the max of pupil should be taken. But I know that I’ve got clients who exceed that and they’re doing fine if they don’t have an untoward effect. The whole notion of copper toxicity, I think, is more narrative and mythology than real.
There’s a lot of compelling research to back that up. But I think it’s prudent to start low and slow and build gradually. You’ll see how the body responds. Again, if people are gonna work with that supplement, take it with meals, you’ll have a much better result. It just seems to have far better availability with a meal as opposed to just standalone.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What do you think about copper peptides like GHK CU?
Morley Robbins
I’m very aware of them. I never could get just a straight up GHK peptide to work from the clients that I was working with. That’s the discovery of Lauren Picker back in the seventies. It’s a naturally occurring peptide in our body. I don’t know if the synthetic form is as effective as maybe the in vivo form. The part that people are most fascinated by are the patches that are relying on that technology. I think the patches are fine, but once you stop taking the patch, you’re back to where you were before. The patch does not restore the underlying physiology. I think people need to be mindful that we were not born with a patch deficiency, and we were not born with a stem cell deficiency.
Another very popular thing to do is get stem cells replaced. Well, guess what stem cells must work with copper in order to be a factor. I think there’s some very sophisticated technology out there that can really help people. But what we’ve tried to do within the RCP is get back to the basics, get back to the primal foundation of human physiology and restore that and build it up from there. It’s very tempting to pursue this alternative technology. And do they get results? Of course they do. I know they do. I’ve witnessed it within my client community, but I don’t think it’s sustainable, or newer, is it the natural solution? I think that’s really what I think we’re trying to emphasize within the RCP.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What do you really want people to take from this interview?
Morley Robbins
That’s a great question. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked that. So simply, what I would want people to take away from this conversation is that there are very basic nutrients that need to be in our diet and in our supplement routine that keep us in metabolic balance. If you don’t know about those nutrients, you are left with the impression that your body is broken and that perception that my body is not responding or my body is broken, creates a sort of fear in people. And that fear creates this chronic stress that we were talking about earlier that’s gonna destabilize the iron metabolism.
I think at the end of the day, what I want people to walk away with is a feeling of hope that there is a process that you can engage in that takes some discipline, but it also just takes devotion to the process and to take account of the fact that you can’t heal yourself. I really developed the RCP to democratize healing. I wanted people to have the ability to take care of themselves. Think about our ancestors. They didn’t have an ologist, a fairly large part of their body. That was unheard of. And we live in this very broken down world now. I’ll be 73 in a couple weeks. Someone my age is, is taking six to seven medications. The doctors on the rare occasion that I go to a doctor, they’re shocked that I don’t have any medications. I’m like, I don’t need them. I’m feeling just fine. I have the vitality and the computing power that I think is where I want it to be.
I’m really excited about that. But I want people to know that they have this natural capacity to bring themselves back into balance, but they’ve gotta address both the emotional and the physical side of their imbalance. We have two diets every day. The food we eat and the words we eat. People need to realize that this negative self-talk that we all engage in has a price too. It affects our physiology. It’s just important to have the listener know that there is a process that they can engage in and experience what natural healing is all about. As Dr. Liz said, there really is a healer within an innate healer, which is important for people to know.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You use hair mineral analysis, correct?
Morley Robbins
I can still do it. We balance it with the blood testing. So we do the HTMA and the Full Monte panel. The combination of the two brings a lot of insight to what’s going on with the individual. What I think is important is the testing is done more so for the client than for the practitioner. We know where the problem is. We know what the macro imbalance is. I don’t want people to think that we’re using the HTMA or the blood tests as like a Ouija board or we’re reading tea leaves.
We’re using the results to get the attention of the individual. We don’t diagnose anything. We don’t treat anything. All we do within the RCP is dispense common sense. The testing is useful. Well, that’s really what it is. What we’re trying to do is guide people in this process of understanding of how they’re not in balance because of the stress that they’re under, the diet, and they’re dealing with their negative self-talk, the fact that the supplements that they might be taking are conflicting with the synthesis of copper-dependent mechanisms and that the prescriptions they’re taking may be working against them.
We’re just letting people have a broad scale understanding of what is working for them and what is working against them and then let them come to the conclusion about what they need to do. We always encourage them to go back to their practitioner and work through the fine print. But I think it’s really key for people to know that the body has incredible powers of resilience, just unbelievable capacity to respond to the environment with energy when it’s being fed the right nutrients.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Now you’ve had tens of thousands of people go through the root cause protocol and so everyone listening, you can go to their website and you can order the testing work with a practitioner, but you can also become a practitioner
Morley Robbins
That’s exactly right.
Dr. Wendy Myers
You’ve had thousands of people go through your root cause protocol training as well. That’s also an option if you wanna learn these foundational principles in working with your clients and patients.
Morley Robbins
We’re very excited about that. The big change we’re probably gonna make next year is that the RCP institute that does the training has always been a live class. It’s online, but it’s live. I think what we’re gonna do is experiment this coming year with just the facts. Just give people the content and see how they respond to that as an alternative. We’re not gonna do away with the In vivo classes. Those are just too much fun. There’s a lot of spirited discussion that takes place. I just wanna see how people respond to, if you had access to the information, would that be enough? And we’ll just see what the response is in the community.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, great. Give us the website again to go to
Morley Robbins
rcp123.org or the longer handle is therootcauseprotocol.com. I just like the first one. It’s as little as a rhyme. You like rhyming.
Dr. Wendy Myers
I absolutely do.
Morley Robbins
The really exciting thing is we’ve got the second edition of the book coming out, that’ll be in just a couple weeks. I should have gotten one out of the box, but this is what it looks like, folks. It’s a different cover design. It’s more copper than the purple one. But we’re really excited and we sold a ton of these at Western Egg Price. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of orders from Amazon, so we’re looking forward to a nice launch from November 11th.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Your book is Cure Your Fatigue.I love the book cover. It’s nice.
Morley Robbins
Again, the whole emphasis around the cure for copper. I remember when we were first doing the book several years ago, the publisher said, are you sure you wanna use the word cure? I said, yeah, I do. I absolutely do. I don’t know that it’s ever gonna be a bestseller, and maybe it will, who knows? I don’t wanna count that out. But there is a definite cult following, I love that word because it’s got a CCU-L. Uh, I’ve been accused of leading a cult, and I said, that’s great. I love leading a cult. But I think it’s helped a lot of people. You talk about a community of people that give a shot in the arm, old fashioned healthy shot in the arm.
I got that over the weekend in Salt Lake City with all the attendees from there at Western egg price. I was really taken aback by how many people were familiar with the work and how supportive they were. It was really an honor to be there.
Dr. Wendy Myers
It’s been amazing to watch ’cause when I first met you, you were getting started and you had your roster of clients that you are working with, but it’s just beautiful to see the people really come together to help create the platform that you have or are you creating the platform and just so many people really being so passionate about it and you have so many followers now. So many people are engaged in doing the root cause protocol and spreading the word.
Morley Robbins
Well, the fun thing is, one person can make a difference and you know that in your work, many people that do this type of work see the impact that we have and as the expression goes, it takes a village and we all have a different part of the perspective, and I think that’s great. But I think what is unique is the emphasis on energy. That’s really what we focus on and it really helps people overcome that sense of fatigue and the formal term is cellular energy deficiency, but it’s the same thing, fatigue. Once you get the fatigue outta the way the body snaps back. That’s the exciting part.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, Morley, thank you so much for coming on the show. Always great to have you on. I’ve had you on many times if you guys want to go back and search the podcast and listen to the older podcast. But we discussed the same concepts, but today it’s a little bit more updated based on what you’ve learned over the past few years since our last podcast.
Morley Robbins
No,we took a much deeper dive in Copper with the book. We introduced a chapter on women’s health, and I think the footnote section in this book is compelling. It’s a book that you could hand to your doctor and say, if you really wanna understand this, this is a great resource. I think people might have the breakthroughs that they’re looking for with their practitioner for this kind of textbook.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, Marley, thanks so much for coming on the show. Everyone, I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Thanks for tuning in to the Myers Detox Podcast, where I just really love bringing you guys experts from around the world every week to help you feel the way that you deserve to feel. I just hope that I helped you make some differentiations and gave you a few tips that you can start employing today to feel better. Thanks for tuning in.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
