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- Find out what’s in store for this Myers Detox Podcast with Wade Lightheart, Co-Founder and President at BiOptimizers, 3-Time Canadian national All Natural Bodybuilding Champion, and one of the world’s premier authorities on Natural Nutrition and Training Methods.
- Three major things started Wade down his path to working in the health field. Find out what these three things and learn more about his fascinating journey.
- There are five important stages of digestion. Learn more about these 5 stages and why there is an increasing number of people suffering from digestive issues.
- The first key step in finding a solution for your digestive issues is to take ownership in identifying the causes with techniques like food journaling. Find out more about how to begin your digestive healing process.
- Cravings to eat can be attributed to several things including the stress, hormone disruptors, and agents disrupting our natural development of health. Learn more about these factors.
- Probiotics can be essential in maintaining good digestive health, but many are ineffective, or do not work to help one of the most important processes of breaking down undigested proteins. Learn more about the different levels of probiotic efficacy.
- There are three things Wade recommends you look for when purchasing probiotics. Find out what these are.
- Wade challenges people to not get swept up in their health drama, and to not expect miracles overnight. Learn more about what he means.
- biOptimizers has a well trained staff and offers sophisticated programs people can follow to begin their digestive health journey. On top of that, Wade personally will answer any of your questions along the way. Find out more about biOptimizers and the probiotics they offer.
- To learn more about Wade’s incredible probiotics and purchase BiOptimizers’ products at a special discount for Myers Detox Podcast listeners go to www.bioptimizers.com/myers and use coupon code MYERS10 for 10% off!
Wendy Myers: Hello, everyone, I’m Wendy Myers of myersdetox.com, welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. Today we have a great show. We have Wade Lightheart on the show talking about digestion breakthrough and how to detox your gut. We’re going to talk about everything from hydrochloric acid, to probiotics, to enzymes. We’ll discuss the number one mistake that people are making in their digestion and how they’re doing this kind of piecemeal approach. Maybe trying some probiotics here, some enzymes there, and what they really need to do to get their digestion back on track. Why so many people today have digestion issues, diagnoses, they’re not absorbing their food, they’re gaining weight or they can’t gain weight. We delve into why all these things are happening, why people are so prone today, 25% of the population has a digestive issue on any given day and there’s solutions here.
Wendy Myers: I also wanted to talk about this because if your digestion isn’t really on par, you probably shouldn’t be delving into detoxification. I mean, we do have heavy metals that affect your gut and your ability to digest food, but you really want to at least get some basic digestion improvement before you embark on a detox program. So, I had Wade on to talk about his story, and how he helps so many people get their digestion on track. I know that you guys who are listening are concerned about heavy metal and chemical toxicity. You’re curious about how to do testing and have a lot of questions. Well, I created a quiz at heavymetalsquiz.com. It takes two seconds and after this quiz you get your results that show you have low, medium or high toxin levels based on a bunch of lifestyle questions. Following that, you get a free video series that teaches you all about the basics of detox, where to get started, how to do testing, how long does detox take? I answer a lot of your frequently asked questions. So, go take that at heavymetalsquiz.com.
Wendy Myers: Our guest today, Wade Lightheart, is a three-time Canadian National All Natural Bodybuilding Champion, who competed as a vegetarian. He’s a former Mr. Universe competitor, host of the Awesome Health Podcast and he’s one of the world’s premier authorities on natural nutrition and training methods. Having majored in sports science at the University of New Brunswick, he has authored numerous books on health, nutrition and exercise, which have been sold in over 80 countries. Wade also serves as an advisor to the American Anti-Cancer Institute and is the co-founder and president of BiOptimizers, a digestive and health optimization company. He’s been in the health industry for over 25 years, has coached thousands of clients and is sought out by athletes and the high performance oriented individuals, worldwide, for his advice on how to optimize their health and fitness levels. You can learn more about him at bioptimizers.com. You can learn about him, his work and his amazing line of supplements, there. Wade, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Wade Lightheart: Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Wendy Myers: So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your story and how you got into health?
Wade Lightheart: Well, I’ll try and be condensed because I think like everyone else, it’s kind of a journey that has some key points. For me, when I was 15 years old, three distinct things happened in my life, all in a very short window of time. One was that my parents moved to a very rural area which was five miles to my nearest neighbor on a dirt road, an hour to get to school, 15 minutes to get to the road, actually. I was kind of ripped out of my normal social circle and my normal connection, my peer groups and all that, so I had a lot of time by myself. It was beautiful wooded nature, but I didn’t want to be there when I was 15.
Wade Lightheart: Second thing at that same time, within weeks, my sister was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease which is a form of cancer of the lymph nodes. Over the course of the next four years, I watched her go through the medical model before she died at the age 22. This set me up to kind of realize that, “hey, you know what? Your health isn’t a guarantee, and your life isn’t a guarantee.” That had a big impact on me at an early age.
Wade Lightheart: Then, the third thing that happened also within this timeframe is my sister gave me a bodybuilding magazine. It had a picture of Troy Zuccolotto who was a blonde bodybuilding champion, who just won Mr. California, and these pretty girls on it. All of a sudden this dream of having muscles, living in California, going to Muscle Beach, being like Arnold Schwarzenegger and all this came to me as an idea. Having a lot of time on my hands and nothing else I could control, I began to discover. I built my own gym in a barn that was there and started training, kind of like a Rocky movie or something, and reading books and learning.
Wade Lightheart: That was the one thing that I could take control of in my life, in a very limited area. I think anybody that’s suffering from any kind of health condition or whatever, that might be a way to detox. You have to realize, as bad as the situation might be at the time, that you do have the power to take some control. By doing that, that starts to open up things down the road. Later on, I went on to study exercise physiology and nutrition in university, which gave me a good background of the mechanics of everything, but it was very compartmentalized. In other words, there was no unified theory, there was no systematized processes and stuff. So, I was a little bit disappointed with that. What I did after that point is I started looking for mentors in the health industry who were producing extraordinary results, because I said, “Well, at least they figured out something.” That became kind of my de facto model over the years.
Wade Lightheart: I also developed a bodybuilding career after 16 years of training and working with some of the best. I had the best bodybuilding coach in the world, I got to represent my country at the Mr. Universe contest, which sounds great. I got to go to the World Championships, it’s my dream come true of all these things that you want, the pictures look wonderful. Guess what? After that contest, I gained 42 pounds of fat and water in 11 weeks. I went from Mr. Universe to Mr. Marshmallow. Yeah, exactly. I was left there going, “How is this possible? I’ve got the background, I’ve got the training. I’ve got the best coaches in the world. I’ve got extraordinary levels of discipline”
Wade Lightheart: I had recently run into a fellow by the name of Dr. Michael O’Brien, who was world renowned for helping people recover from a variety of extremely severe conditions using things like detoxification, through enzymes and probiotics, and digestive health. Recognizing that, all disease starts in the gut and that you needed to get this in order to recover. So, I followed his system, made the lifestyle adjustments, went through his process and six months later I got my physique back. I felt better than I ever had in my life. I began sharing this message with the world, and we’ve been doing that for the last almost 20 years, since that point.
Wendy Myers: Because I mean, a lot of people that are bodybuilding or trying to lose weight. They can really be destroying their body following crazy diets, crash diets, things to purge water and other things that they’re doing. It really takes a toll on their health.
Wade Lightheart: You’re right, one of the things that we’ve developed at BiOptimizers is, we have what we call the BiOptimization triangle. On that triangle, there’s one side of it which is performance based, one side of it is based on aesthetics and the other side is based on health. Typically, the cycle of life as we go along is that most people are kind of motivated early on with either aesthetics or performance. Maybe if they were a football player, they don’t really care so much about how they look, but they’re concerned about how they perform. If they’re more in a cosmetically-oriented world, there’s so much emphasis on how we look in today’s world, especially with social media and the pressures of all that. Most people start out in aesthetics. In either case, oftentimes, people will make decisions based on what’s the cosmetic ideal. In my case, I was in a cosmetic sport, essentially, bodybuilding is a cosmetic sport. It’s how you look on a certain day.
Wade Lightheart: I was realizing that that was only one side and there was disbalance in this process. Then, you kind of go, “Well, how do I hit this performance?” But then all of a sudden, I’ve now compromised my health and so the attention goes back on health. What we do is, we help people navigate those various issues with our company. We also identify where people could be making critical mistakes that could be setting them up for failure. Or, if they’ve gotten themselves in a little bit of trouble, how do you pull yourself back to kind of bring balance within those components of what we call the BiOptimizer triangle?
Wendy Myers: Yes, I mean, so many people have issues with digestion today. So many people are having gas and bloating, or they’re eating food and they can’t gain weight, or they eat normal diets and they gain a lot of weight. A lot of people aren’t absorbing their nutrients. I think that’s one of the hugest wrenches or bottlenecks in people achieving their health goals. They’re eating all this healthy food and they’re just not absorbing it. So, talk to us about your philosophies about the five stages of digestion.
Wade Lightheart: Yes, I’d be happy to do that. There’s a couple caveats before we get into this because people are like, “Well, why is this happening? How come all of a sudden my digestion doesn’t work? Why is everybody having these problems?” You’re right, there’s 100 million people on any given day in the United States that are suffering from digestive conditions. 25% of the population is either on over-the-counter or prescription medication for digestives. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, said that all disease begins in the gut. It’s interesting that that was thousands of years ago. I’m going to get to the stages of digestion, but first I want to paint the picture of why this is happening. Over the last 100 to 150 years, particularly accelerated in the last 50 years since World War II, we have modernized food production and distribution on an extraordinary level that dealt with the starvation factor.
Wade Lightheart: Starvation is one of the biggest killers of humans, even today, and has been throughout history, especially in the developing nations. We’ve covered that in most of the industrialized world. The problem is what we’ve done to the food with the addition of the monoculture fibroning, stripping the nutrients out of it, genetically modifying foods, adding things like; herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, various insecticides, preservatives and dyes. Then creating kind of hybrid versions of food that don’t have the normal digestive components with the extreme sugars, flours, all these other chemical agents and things that we add to it. We have created a mosh pit that our human biology hasn’t been able to adapt to in that stuff. Through billions of years, none of this stuff existed through all of the animal kingdom. Although we’ve solved this problem, obviously, we didn’t understand that this is happening and so what we’re seeing is a widespread amount of digestion issues.
Wade Lightheart: To go into the specifics of your question, the five stages of digestion, first there’s the taste, touch, smell of the food, that actually starts to activate our digestive response. For example, if I say sauerkraut and dill pickles, you start to get a salivary response inside your body just from the words. Or if you smell your favorite food walking by a bakery, there’s an instant thing. Or, the memory association with sights and smells and taste and touch and these types of things. You can remember, “oh, this reminds me of a cake that grandma baked when I was eight years old”, and instantly there is actually a biochemical response with this inside our bodies. As we bring the food to our mouth, we start to chew it and masticate it and we break that food down. Some carbohydrate digesting enzymes called ptyalin are released, and the food travels down the esophagus.
Wade Lightheart: Basically, your body is starting to prepare for, what do I need to do in order to convert this into food? As the food goes down the esophagus to the stomach, the stomach is divided into two stages, there’s the upper cardiac portion of the stomach, which the food will stay in for the first 30 to 60 minutes. Now, this is where the enzymes present in the food are supposed to start breaking down in the warm, wet environment that is inside your body. Unfortunately, humans are the only species on the planet that eat enzymatically deficient food. In other words, when we cook food, there are no enzymes. A lot of the processed foods don’t have enzymes. Actually, all the processed foods don’t have enzymes and the way we grow our food is much more enzyme deficient than say what grandma and grandpa were getting 50, 60, 70, 100 years ago. So, just to give you an idea, a peach in 1955, the nutrient quality that you would require for one peach in 1955 is something like 100 peaches today. That’s how much they’ve changed.
Wade Lightheart: Even if you’re eating healthy food, oftentimes, it doesn’t have these key components. Enzymes are required from critical parts of digestion to everything from thinking to blinking, they are the catalysts of the body, the workers of the body. After that first 30 to 60 minutes, you go to the next stage of digestion, and this is where hydrochloric acid is going to be released into the stomach, by your body. In order to produce enough hydrochloric acid, you need to have proper levels of hydration. Almost everybody that I tested in my holistic health clinic for years in Vancouver, were chronically dehydrated. Meaning they would need weeks to properly hydrate themselves, really going at it, because many of the things that we drink today are actually dehydrating. Coffees, teas, alcohol, beers and many of these sports drinks, juices, sodas and things that people like to have because they taste good, actually don’t hydrate us inside our cells. That interrupts our hydrochloric acid production.
Wade Lightheart: Hydrochloric acid produces two important components in our body. Number one, it is the frontline defense for all of the pathogens, viruses, bacteria, parasites, you name it. Things that can screw you up are killed off by hydrochloric acid. It’s a disinfectant. That’s its job. If you don’t have enough, many of these organisms can survive and get through the body and cause all sorts of problems. The next thing that hydrochloric acid does is it begins to change the pH of that food chyme that you’ve just chewed up and mixed up and all that sort of stuff. When it does that, some enzymes will become activated and some enzymes will become deactivated as that pH goes from either slightly alkaline all the way down to something around 2 pH. Very, very highly acidic. This assists in the digestive process. When that stage is complete, your body releases what’s called bicarbonate buffers, which is a fancy name for alkaline minerals to buffer those acids.
Wade Lightheart: If you do not have enough hydrochloric acid, oftentimes people will feel a heartburn or acid reflux, which is interesting, because the esophageal sphincter at the top of the stomach will stay open because there’s not enough hydrochloric acid. Of course, you go to a doctor and they give you a proton pump or an antacid over-the-counter, because they think that you have too much acid. 99 times out of 100, you don’t have enough acid, so it’s kind of a counter intuitive component that people need to address. The easy way to test for that is you can take a half teaspoon of baking soda, throw it in six ounces of water, stir it all up and drink it. If you don’t burp within five minutes, you are not producing enough hydrochloric acid. That’s a quick and easy test to find out whether you’re producing enough. Most people, probably 70 to 80% of the population by the time they’re 40, are not producing enough hydrochloric acid.
Wade Lightheart: So, the minerals buffer these acids. If you don’t have enough minerals present in your body, what happens is you can get a little acid getting into the intestinal tract. This is where you get things like perforated ulcers and gastritis, and these types of things. Assuming everything is working right, that food will now go into the final stage of digestion, which is inside your intestinal tract. Inside your intestinal tract, there’s anywhere from 200 to 500 different strains of bacteria cultures. In fact, I call them the good, the bad, and the ugly. 10% of them are good, 10% of them are bad and 80% are opportunists. Based on the diet that you’re following, your lifestyle, your individual genetics and epigenetics, all these things will determine the quality and the amount of bacteria that are inside your stomach.
Wade Lightheart: For example, my business partner is a ketogenic, he’s on a ketogenic diet. I’m on a plant based diet. We’re as far apart on the dietary spectrum, we’re dietary agnostic, we think you should select the diet that’s based on your lifestyle, what works for you, what’s been guided by your professional to determine that. But I can tell you for a fact, his bacteria culture is going to be radically different than mine. This is called the microbiome. His are going to be radically different than mine will, because what you eat will feed some of them and starve others. Again, based on the diet that you have, your lifestyle, your genetics and epigenetics, are going to determine what strains of bacteria you have present. That’s why typically, when you switch over to a new dietary protocol, or you go through a detoxification process, you’ll experience sometimes some disruption or some discomfort for those first few days, as the microbiome starts to change. This is natural and normal when you’re engaging in any health altering program, whether that’s a diet, whether that’s a detox or any of those components. Some people start to panic and freak out.
Wade Lightheart: Basically, what’s happening is just that these bacteria are incredibly intelligent. They interact with our central nervous system, they create cravings, they create desires for food, they can produce toxins that give us gas and bloating, we can get brain fog, or crusty eyes in the morning, or bad breath, and they are the result of the bad guys creating problems. They’re also cooked into our brain chemistry, in fact, 95% of the neurotransmitters that allow your brain to function properly, or to feel happy, or to feel good, or to feel connected, are actually manufactured by these bacteria in your gut. There are bacteria in your gut and they’re essential for converting that food into the energy units or the building blocks that your body requires in order to function. So, without these bacteria, you’ll be dead.
Wade Lightheart: One of the concerns that I have specifically right now is, we have this whole antibacterial kind of craziness going on, excessive washing, excessive disinfecting and all of these things that we’re doing actually impacts the microbiome inside our body. Normally, we would pick a carrot out of the ground, it had bacteria on it, some of that bacteria is good for us and we eat it. Our interaction with other people, there’s a natural thing that we build and develop our immune systems and our functioning.
Wade Lightheart: So, there is a very important symbiotic relationship between the bacteria in our guts, our overall health and our ability to offer it to the world which is very misunderstood. It’s certainly misrepresented by many people in what I would call the conventional medical establishment. That’s why they need people such as yourself, people such as myself, who are in the naturopathic industry, the ND industry, the holistic health industry, who are trained and study in these areas. We understand that, wait a second, you have got to make sure that you’re putting enough good bacteria inside your system, so that you are able to digest your food and you’re able to eliminate properly.
Wade Lightheart: If you get that bloating, if you’re getting a lot of gas, if you’re waking up with the grogginess, the brain fog, chances are you’re getting undigested proteins that are being eaten up by bad guys. They’re pooping in your blood and they’re causing this discomfort. That’s why you need to go through some sort of detox to clean these things out, starve them out, get rid of them, eliminate them, so that your body can get back to operating properly. Of course, the final stage is through a process called peristaltic contractions, which is the smooth muscle along the intestinal tract which kind of moves your food along. It will contract and eliminate the waste out of your system. Now in North America, because we sit a lot, which is not how humans are designed, oftentimes we have low muscle tone that’s inside our intestinal tract.
Wade Lightheart: This is where things like enemas and colonics, and things like that can help rebuild the tone if you’ve lost that. There’s also all sorts of training that you can do to activate your pelvic floor and connect with your core muscles. These types of exercises that you can develop with a professional practitioner to help you strengthen that up. If you’re having trouble with constipation or you’re getting a lot of diarrhea, these types of things, oftentimes there are some peristaltic contraction issues that can be corrected with some concentrated professional effort and doing some quick exercises.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s a great tip. I mean, you really went through that very, very thoroughly and I really liked that explanation. So, talk to us about, maybe the number one thing people need to be doing to fix their digestion. You talk about a lot of things, what the thing where people can start.
Wade Lightheart: Yeah, first thing first, I would say, start journaling. If you’re having chronic digestive issues, you need to start connecting the food that you are currently consuming and what’s causing the disruption. Does this cause heartburn? Do you feel bloated after this meal? Are you constipated? Are you getting diarrhea? Are you feeling low energy? Are you getting a lot of food cravings? By just taking a journal over two weeks to look at what you’re doing, you’re going to start seeing patterns in what happens in your life, very clearly. You’ll notice that if you eat this at night, you feel crappy and tired in the morning. If you eat this when you go out, or you have this drink or whatever, oftentimes, there’s an interaction with the microbiome. That doesn’t cost anything. But the first level of addressing a problem is, number one, taking ownership of it and starting identifying. At that point, you would probably want to get in contact with a professional who can help you navigate and isolate, what is the particular problem that you’re dealing with?
Wade Lightheart: The reason why is that most of these challenges are so common, they’ve been solved by quality practitioners, and they can say, “Well, you know what? We’re going to start here, we’re going to start here, we’re going to start here.” There’s three areas that 95% of the people are having problems with. It’s either, number one, they don’t have enough enzymatic digestive power to break down the food that they’re consuming. Number two, they don’t have enough hydrochloric acid production in order to further break down that food and disinfect from pathogens in the body. Or number three, they have a disbalance in the microbiome. For a lot of people who have had chronic conditions, it’s actually all three, you’ve got to cover that. If it’s all three, my suggestion is to go on an intensive 90 days using enzymes, hydrochloric acid and probiotics, in combination with your meals, in order to clean up the gut and reset it. If you can, add an elimination diet and do some detoxification during that time.
Wade Lightheart: Most people, within a relatively short period of time like 30 days, they feel good. In 60 days they start to feel like their old selves. 90 days is usually enough that they start to go, “Wow, I can’t believe how much my digestion was impacting my brain health, my sociability, my cycle, my sexual health, my connection, my vibrancy, my energy.” The bottom line is, this is a very critical component that people today have to address because it’s so widespread.
Wendy Myers: Yes and your gut plays a huge role in your immunity too, which is a big, big concern. Right now, you have to have a healthy gut to have immunity. A lot of people do it piecemeal, they’ll try enzymes or they’ll try hydrochloric acid or they’ll try different things like probiotics and whatnot. If people have tried those different things, what are they doing wrong? Why isn’t that working?
Wade Lightheart: Great question, there’s a couple of reasons why that’s possible. Sometimes, if it’s a chronic condition, usually that’s not their first choice. They’ve probably gone down the medical route, they probably went over-the-counter and tried some digestive aid, which is oftentimes actually compromising another area. So let’s say, for example, someone was suffering from a heartburn or acid reflux. What happens is they say, “You know what? I’ve got this burning, I’m going to go get the pink fluid, or I’m going to go get the little candies over at the market that’s going to take that away.” It works, but what they don’t realize is they’ve now allowed some pathogens to get past that defense mechanism. They are now starting to grow in their digestive system. That gets worse. So, they go to the doctor, they get a prescription, they take care of that, but then they start to notice that they get sick every time a bug’s coming around, because their immune system is compromised.
Wade Lightheart: They can’t eat as much, so now they reduce their foods to something really sugary, or something very processed, because that’s the only thing they can get down. These things start to compound. At that point, what happens is, they’re taking kind of random potshots, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. What they really need to do is, I always say that they need the come-to-Jesus moment and say, “My digestive system is screwed up.” They have to look at it and recognize, it’s a single canal from your mouth to your bum. Just because food enters into the system doesn’t mean it’s inside your body, it’s inside this tube. If this process of turning what was on your plate into energy units or building blocks is disrupted, or these pathogens can get in your body and disrupt your health, you have to go, “I need to do the whole thing.” I can’t replace one shingle on the roof if there’s a hole in my roof. Oftentimes, I’ve got to do the whole thing. If my transmission is going in my car, I’ve got to take something else.
Wade Lightheart: If I’ve got split ends on my hair, for example, and half of my hair is blonde, or half of it is purple, or half of it is red, who knows what my original color is. At a certain point, you’ve got to just start all over again, get the expert and say, “All right, I’m doing the whole thing, I’m going to go in.” From my experience, the sooner a person gets to that component, the faster they can turn things around. You know what? You’re going to have to take massive action, you’re going to have to do all of the things I suggested. Guess what? Once you get the results, it’s very easy to maintain.
Wade Lightheart: But trying to do a little bit at a time often just extends or prolongs the period of dysfunction. The other thing is, it often discourages you because maybe you were getting a partial result from that one item, but you weren’t getting the full benefit of what you had. You lose face, you get distracted, you go down another route and you start thinking this person said this and this person said that. Then, what happens is you get left in the state of, there’s nothing I can do. My experience over the last 15 years has told me, there’s a lot that you can do, so don’t get discouraged. Get the right people in your corner to help you navigate it.
Wendy Myers: I know a lot of women are discouraged because they eat healthy diets and they find they’re just gaining weight, and they’re having voracious cravings. A lot of them, they’re just not absorbing the nutrients from their food even though they’re eating a healthy diet. Their body just calls out for more nutrients, more minerals, and they just have these cravings and eat, and eat, and eat. It’s just a vicious cycle. What is going on there?
Wade Lightheart: Well, there can be a variety of things going on. We’re entering into a very interesting time, and I want to caveat this as well, particularly for women, because one of the things I love about women is they tend to do better at doing their research and getting the instructions, and sharing personal information with other women, and I think that’s a really wonderful thing. But there’s a couple of things that we have to realize that also can impact your digestive health. I think for women today, they have never been under more pressure and stress. The other thing is, we’re 60 years into what I call the greatest biological experiment in history. That is, now women can control their birth cycle for the first time in history. That’s allowed women to participate in society in a way that they’ve never been able to participate before. Women are having children later or choosing not to have children.
Wade Lightheart: People are developing careers that were maybe not so available to them because they were child-rearing all the time, and all these sorts of things. What’s happened is there’s been a proliferation of both opportunities, but concordant pressure. A lot of women are feeling that they need to look like a supermodel, they need to be a supermom, and they need to have a billion dollar brand as well. Of course, they’ve got to be the tantric sex lover at home, and then they’ve got all this information coming in from Facebook and social media. They walk by the magazines and there’s just all these airbrushed supermodels all the time. Then, they read the psychological thing that was on the latest Oprah Magazine about how they need to do this and that. The sheer amount of intensity, pressure and things coming on would stress out anybody. Coupled with that, we have all these hormone disruptors in the road and we have all these chemical agents. Then, we have the time pressures, where people are not eating.
Wade Lightheart: If you look at all these things, it’s no wonder we’re trying to figure all this stuff out. You have to give yourself a break, and say, we’ve never lived in an environment like this as humans, we’ve never had so many options but we’ve also never had so many pressures. So, first and foremost, you have to be realistic and say, “Okay, obviously, I’m not able to do all of this at once.” So, what are the priorities in my life that mean the most to me? Is it my kids? Is it my career? Is it my husband? Is it my own personal health? The second thing is, you do need to have your personal health really high up on that list. That means that for a period of time, you might have to take a step backwards from some of the other areas and tell the people around you, “listen I’ve got to take care of my health.” At the end of the day, if we don’t have our health we’re not able to do any of that.
Wade Lightheart: Our health is not a guarantee. It’s not something that just automatically comes with us. Especially in today’s world, we have to recognize that there’s a lot of agents that are really disrupting the natural development of health. Without a concentrated and focused effort and an allotment of time, energy, and resources to it, the chances of you overcoming this over the long term, I think are very, very low, unless you’re super genetically blessed.
Wade Lightheart: We all have a friend who just seems to be able to get away with everything, and everything is just tra-la-la-la, you’re like, “Well, why can’t I be like her?” Well, you just can’t, okay? She’s lucky. I would love to be 6’8″ and LeBron James, I think that would be really cool. Guess what? It’s not happening, I’m not playing in the NBA. I am not going to slam dunk a basketball, and I’m not going to make 100 million dollars a year. God gave me what I have here, and I’m just going to work with that and do the best I can with that.
Wade Lightheart: So, give yourself a little break, give yourself a little bit of pressure relief. It could be 1000 generations before we figure out the whole new world with men and women and how things are going, I don’t know how long that’s going to take. It’s been billions of years to get to this one, we’re only 60 years in. It probably won’t happen in my lifetime, so I don’t have any expectations, I’m just trying to work through it as well. I think we have to just put into context first where we are in the health paradigm, and give ourselves a break. Not be a victim and just say, “Here’s where I’m at, here’s what I’ve got and let’s go after it.”
Wendy Myers: That’s why I want to do this podcast with you because people have so much stress. That’s the number one thing I address before I do anything with people. This stress has a huge impact on your ability to digest food. If you can’t digest food, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. A lot of women and men are eating food, and they’re really good at breaking down the sugar and their body is absorbing that, but they’re not able to break down proteins and break down fats and absorb those properly. Their digestion is a mess, their liver is a mess, they are not producing enough bile, they don’t have enzymes and whatnot. There’s just a lot of things working against people. It’s so important to work on fixing your digestion. Probiotics are super, super popular. There’s a wide range of quality of probiotics. Can you talk a little about that, the mistakes people make with probiotics and what they need to do instead?
Wade Lightheart: Yeah, great question. Here’s what happens. You read an article, you see a thing, you do an interview, and they go, “You need probiotics.” Well, there are literally hundreds of strains of probiotics. What people really need is the right probiotic for that particular person based on their diet and all these sorts of components. If you walk into your typical health food store, you’re going to see probiotics on the shelf for $9, and you’re going to see probiotics on the shelf for $119. You’re like, “What’s the difference?” We largely impart that most of the products on the lower end are taking advantage of people’s ignorance.
Wade Lightheart: People don’t know. They’ll cite some research or they’ll cite some information. They’ll get some, you won’t even have living strains, you don’t know if they’re sustainable. You don’t know if they’re maintainable in the gastrointestinal tract. It’s just banking on that because people go, “Well, I think I’ll just get the $10 ones, or the $20 ones, that that’ll probably work.” They take them, it doesn’t work, and then they go, “Yeah, I tried probiotics, and it didn’t work for me.”
Wade Lightheart: Well, they didn’t know that there weren’t any live probiotics in there, or there wasn’t enough prebiotics. What you need to do in order to choose the right probiotic is this, I’ll give you a couple of tips. First and foremost, you need to know that the product is maintainable in the gastrointestinal tract. So, I’m a big proponent of shelf stable probiotics in capsules, not in caplets. It shouldn’t be a hard cap, it should be in a capsule and it should be dry.
Wade Lightheart: A lot of the ones in the fridge, the refrigerated ones, the problem with those are and I’m in the industry, I’ve worked in every part of the industry of nutrition. I’ve owned my own stores, I’ve been in distribution, I’ve manufactured my stuff. They’re dependent on temperature, the variances that can happen between the actual production and then actually sitting in the fridge and from those actually sitting in your house, the likelihood that you have what’s inside of that is almost zero. It’s a variance that I don’t think people can afford.
Wade Lightheart: Oftentimes, those ones in the fridge, they’re even more expensive, and people say, “Oh, they’re in the fridge, they must be really good.” There’s some brands that are, they’re okay, but again it’s a hit and miss. The second thing is, the number one disruptive component inside of digestive distress is undigested proteins, inflammatory proteins, so allergic response and histamine response, the bloating, gas and all that sort of stuff. All of that is related to usually undigested proteins which are causing your body to attack it as an enemy, or it’s feeding some bad bacteria that’s producing some sort of toxin inside your body. You want something that can break down undigested proteins in particular. There are specific strains that can be developed for neurotransmitters, but I think that’s a little bit beyond this right now.
Wade Lightheart: And the third thing is, if you can find a probiotic that is maintainable in the gastrointestinal tract, in other words, they have a patent, or there’s some research studies that have supported that. They have evidence to indicate that that bacteria has done that. Typically, those are going to be on the more pricey side because in order to do this kind of research, it’s not inexpensive to get the information, to prove that it works, to demonstrate that the product has efficacy. It allows you to be able to have a probiotic that you know that you can trust, and that will actually work. Those are the standards to select a probiotic that I think are really, really important.
Wendy Myers: So, you have been in the supplement industry for a long time, you mentioned, is there anything about it that you would want to change? Like you mentioned, there’s a lot of companies that take advantage of consumer naivete. I saw a product yesterday that was a $300 bottle of silver, completely taking advantage of people. Is there anything that you would change about the supplement industry right now, and the nutrition industry?
Wade Lightheart: Oh man, I would love to do that. Again, like I said, I’ve worked on all levels that you could imagine, from farm to table and everything from formulation. I’ve seen the good and the ugly. Typically, I’m going to be conservative here, I think that 90 to 95% of the supplements that are being produced today are absolute rubbish. It’s a total waste of money. I have a policy, I say “there’s nothing more expensive than a product that doesn’t work.”
Wade Lightheart: First and foremost, if you’re going to select the product, select from a company that’s on the premium side of the equation. You’re going to have much more likelihood of success. Number two, that company should have a 100% guarantee on your product from the original purchase. If you purchase a bottle and it doesn’t work, or you don’t get that benefit, that company should provide you a 100% refund. They should be so confident that when you buy that product that it’s going to work, that they’re saying, “You know what? I’m going to give you your money back if that doesn’t work, let us know, we’ll give you the money back.”
Wade Lightheart: That way you remove a lot of your risk, particularly if you’re purchasing what I call a premium product. Third, go with a product that has been recommended or suggested by, I would say, high level influencers. Whether that’s your personal professional that’s kind of being your guide through your holistic health journey, or whether that’s maybe someone on a very well respected podcast like a Dr. Mercola, or a Dave Asprey, or a Ben Greenfield, or any one of these individuals who get access to the best of the best. These guys get to curate everything that comes in. They’ve spent 20, 30, 40 years sometimes, being able to get exposed to so many more products than you’ll ever be able to. When they give a recommendation or a suggestion, they’ve already done the heavy lifting, because most of those guys don’t want to damage their brand by recommending products that don’t work. That’s another area that can really really help you.
Wade Lightheart: I’m not a big fan of getting whatever the retail agent tells you in the store. The reason being, there’s often kickbacks involved, there’s promotional issues, there’s margin components that make the store push certain products versus other products. That well meaning person may inadvertently be giving you information that is not accurate. Do use, whether that’s an MD or a nutritionist, or an advocate online at the highest levels, to give you your guidelines and make sure you have those money back guarantees on that first bottle. Those things will protect you so that you don’t waste your money, because there’s nothing more expensive than a product that doesn’t work.
Wendy Myers: I just don’t understand the people buying supplements at warehouse, clubs, and the groceries, or the drugstore, and these kinds of chain vitamin stores. It’s just complete garbage and some of it is so expensive. A lot of people think if they’re paying more, they must be getting better quality, and it’s just not always the case.
Wade Lightheart: Well you bring up a very good point, particularly in the drugstore brands. You have to realize that a drugstore is in the business of making money from selling drugs. I find, for the most part, many of those institutions have absolutely the poorest quality supplements in the marketplace, because guess what? They don’t want that supplement to help you fix. They’re just happy to take your money, see you get disappointed, because you’re coming back for the more invasive drug, or the one that has more complications.
Wade Lightheart: There’s a great book called An Ill for Every Pill, and it was the CEO of a very large pharmaceutical company back in the ’80s who said, “Hey, you know what? We’re doing a great job getting the sick people on our medication, we need to come up with a way to get the healthy people on our drugs.” That is when they started to manufacture all these different illnesses that they had pills for. You see that commercial, “Are you tired? Are you shaky? Are you feeling bad? Is your leg bouncing? Are you blah blah blah? You may have some complications from this, ask your doctor about X.”
Wade Lightheart: The next thing you know, you’re in the loop and you’re taking one thing to the other, and it’s a prescription. There’s a couple things about that. Number one, when you enter that model, there’s a certain specialness that we can take on about how I’ve tried everything. No, you haven’t tried everything because if you tried everything, you’d be fixed.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, very good point.
Wade Lightheart: Number two, if you’re inside of those areas, you get a lot of attention. A lot of people aren’t getting the attention in today’s world that they would like. They’re not getting the connection from their partner, or their job, or their family, or their whatever and all of a sudden you have a professional, someone in a position of power, who is giving you undivided attention for your situation. On some level, that can feed a certain part of us, and getting out of that cycle oftentimes is hard from a psychological component.
Wade Lightheart: I do not underestimate what it’s like to get the attention, to get this kind of stuff, and to be going back and forth, and having a discussion with your friends, “Oh my God, I’ve tried everything. The doctor said this, and the doctor said that, now I’m going to another specialist.” This whole story, you become this health soap opera and it’s the never ending thing. Then, there’s highs and lows, we got this person and that person. Now we’re going here, and we’ve got the Kumbaya cleanse and all that, it just gets kind of crazy.
Wade Lightheart: There’s a drama, and there’s attention, so we need to get rid of the drama. You need someone to give you straight up stuff. You need to not be a victim. You need to take control of your own health, do your research and try different things. Maintain an open mind but ask the tough questions. Then, mitigate the risk by having these safety things about people who are going to back up the drugs or the nutrition. Ask the pharmacist, “Well, if this doesn’t work for me, are you going to give me a refund?” Ask about if this doesn’t work and all of a sudden, you start putting people on the spot.
Wade Lightheart: Ask questions, be direct. Don’t expect overnight miracles. Yes, sometimes, and a lot of times people will take one of our products, for example, and they’ll go, “Oh my God, this fixed everything overnight.” And it did. They had some particular digestive problem, and yes, they took that supplement and it fixed it. But oftentimes, it didn’t. We’re not able to deal with those underlying lifestyle issues that led to the problem in the first place. So, it might be an alleviation for a short term.
Wade Lightheart: Don’t use that as a crutch and get yourself into trouble later on. I always say you can’t supplement yourself out of a bad diet, you can’t cleanse yourself out of a completely bad lifestyle, you are going to have to make the judgement. You definitely can’t medicate yourself out of one of these things. That should be the very, very last resort. Even if you have to go down that resort, oftentimes you can rebuild your body by using these things, like going through these detox protocols, changing up your diet, getting some professional and doing some of these things that will ultimately lead you to a lifestyle that will lead to health and vitality.
Wendy Myers: One of the biggest things that really bothers me when I’m talking to someone and they have a digestive issue, they’ve gone to their doctor and the doctor says there’s no treatment for this, there’s no cure, they have Crohn’s or they’ve got diverticulitis, or whatever is going on with them. So, they think there’s nothing that can be done for those. Any problem that you have, there is always something that you can do. Always, it’s just your doctor who has a limited toolkit, or limited viewpoints, or lack of training. They’re not God, they don’t know everything, or have learned everything. So, be aware of that, there’s always something that you can do. Do you have anything else that you want to talk about, anything that we may have left out of the conversation regarding digestion so far?
Wade Lightheart: Well, I think, you bring up a very good point. That is that no matter how smart someone is, they only know what they’ve been taught. With our medical industry, and it is an industry, they have a very sophisticated system of putting you from one expert, to the next expert, to the next expert, and it’s very compartmentalized. In order to recognize what health involves, there’s a holistic component. You need to understand the whole workings of the whole big picture.
Wade Lightheart: Many of us don’t have the time to go through all these parts to get the nuances, and that’s where you need those trusted professionals, the people who have been there and done that, people like yourself, who can provide insight with all of the people that you’ve seen over the years. You see patterns and you see components that that person isn’t going to know, or are going to understand, or the doctor is not going to be exposed to. Those, you need to keep positive. You need to keep moving forward to getting the things, try something, see if it works, mitigate the risk, go on to the next thing and take ownership.
Wade Lightheart: The worst thing that you can do is become a victim of your condition. Life is what it is, and whatever you’ve been given, well, that’s the hand of cards that you’ve been dealt. That’s not going to change. How you play that is going to make all the difference in the world. What I can say when it comes to digestive health, we’ve got wonderful programs that you can follow. We’ve got a lot of experience. We have a very well trained staff. I actually personally answer all of the questions that come into us, into our company. I’ve got thousands and thousands of responses that come back to you. We also have guarantees on our products. For example, let’s say you tried a product, and it didn’t work for you, not only will we give the money back, if you contact us, we’ll say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have tried that. The enzymes are not what you needed, you needed hydrochloric acid. Let us send you a bottle of that and try and see if that’s going to help you.”
Wade Lightheart: We also have some more sophisticated programs that people can follow, and then how to select a qualified practitioner to help you with that hands on, one on one guidance that can direct you. We’ve got a course as well, that you can learn all about these little nuances on your phone while you’re at soccer practice, or gymnastics, or waiting in line at the bank or whatever. You can put on these five to 15 minute videos which aren’t about supplements, but are teaching you the essential lifestyle components that allow you to integrate these things, step by step at the pace that you want, so that you can achieve what we call “awesome health”. It can be done, and that’s your natural body state. It wants to be healthy, it’s developed to be healthy, it’s a wonderful machine. All you need to do is put in the components and that’s a process. It may take you a month, it may take you six months, it may take you six years. At the end of the day, it is there for you if you’re willing to go for it and you’re willing to do it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s why I want to have you on. I mean, you’re such a wealth of knowledge. You’ve been through this, you’ve been there done that with your digestion and you have amazing supplements for digestion. You have just a fantastic enzyme, a hydrochloric acid, which so many people are deficient in, and you’ve got a fantastic probiotic. Can you tell us about some of those? And you guys can learn about these at bioptimizers.com/myers, and we have a 10% off coupon for you guys if you use Myers10, M-Y-E-R-S10. You guys can get a discount and try some of Wade’s products.
Wade Lightheart: Yeah, I mean, thank you so much for bringing that up. I’m so passionate about this because I really understand how changing your digestion can really set the course of your life. There’s nothing worse than suffering the embarrassment or suffering the fear about having a disrupted digestive system and all the components that come with it. Also, all the health challenges that can lead to down the road. I mean, right now, a large number of the patients that are going into emergency hospitals are due to gastrointestinal related issues that could have been stopped early on by these preventative measures that we advocate. Yes, we do have probably the world’s most potent digestive enzyme, this is what I started with years ago. We’ve got a third generation of it. Breaks down just about anything in anybody’s diet. We have a Gluten Guardian product for people who have trouble digesting gluten, we have an enzyme that actually breaks that down. We’ve got a very curated hydrochloric acid, it contains enzymes, it contains hydrochloric acid, it’s got the minerals to buffer the acid.
Wade Lightheart: Then, we have a patented probiotic. This patent is actually, what we’ve done is we’ve taken a bacteria string, and because we’ve heard about these superbugs, these super probiotics and all of these kind of conditions, what we realized is that in today’s world, we needed to cultivate something that was even more potent than anything else. We took a very robust strain of probiotics and we threw it in a toxic soup, ran a sine wave through it to help some of them survive. It’s like the Navy Seal’s training. The remaining survivors, which only about 5% survive that process, mutate and become these kinds of super probiotics. We grow them on very special mediums. These bacteria were able to be proven in a patent, that they had capabilities that far exceeded anything else. So, check out the patent.
Wade Lightheart: With all this kind of COVID stuff and all these sort of things with YouTube, I was like, I’m not able to say what that probiotic is actually able to do. When you read about it online and read the patent, you’re going to be able to say, “Holy crap, I can say that it is maintainable in the gastrointestinal tract. I can say that it makes digestion better and I can tell you one thing for sure, it is absolutely fantastic for fighting off pathogens that could enter into your system.” We’ve been using this for years and years and years, and it’s one of the reasons why our company has been around for 16 years. Everything that we do is backed by our 365 day guarantee.
Wade Lightheart: Your first bottle is on us, if you don’t feel an effect right off the bat in the first few days, few weeks, whatever, call us up, you get your money back. We take away all the risk. If you have questions, we have thorough processes, we provide you an excessive amount of information that you can use to pick what you want, how to use it, how to stack it, or how to really take it to the next level to really launch a super level of health.
Wade Lightheart: And I love education, I love what I do. I feel so passionate about it. We read out the testimonials of all the people that have recovered each week to our whole entire team at the company every Monday morning. I love hearing about the little old lady in Nantucket that suffered from IBS for 25 years, the person that had been everywhere with acid reflux, someone who was gassed and bloating or felt embarrassed going to her child’s events because they couldn’t stop farting for Pete’s sakes. Yeah. We’ve also got an education program where I interview our top researcher, Katrine Volynsky, on all of the different things you can imagine, like the specific conditions, whether it’s acid reflux, whether it’s gas and bloating, and we go into an interview where you actually can hear her break it down. It’s like having a $500 consultation with a world class naturopathic doctor, right there on video. You can save yourself a lot of money, get the facts so that you can go in and ask the questions and understand the situation.
Wade Lightheart: I love it. We’re so passionate about it. We’re having so much fun. We’re helping so many people. I’m just so blessed to be connected with you, because I know the work that you’re doing is so critical. I’ve done detox protocols like the Myers Detox, and I think it’s a wonderful program. I think it’s an amazing thing for people to engage in during their health journey and an essential component at this time in the world. I’m so appreciative of you bringing me on here, I really appreciate it. Hopefully, some people will give our stuff a try and correct their conditions.
Wendy Myers: I wanted to have you on because digestion has to be working well for you, not just for detox vacation, before you start on a detox journey. If you’re wanting to detox heavy metals or chemicals but you have fundamental parts of your health that aren’t working, organ systems that aren’t working like your liver, like your gut, et cetera, that’s throwing gasoline on a fire. We’ve got to get these basics onboard, hydration, minerals, digestion, liver support, so that you’re functioning on a pretty good level. Then you can start working on the detox stuff and going to that next level, and reach that next level of health. We have got to get back to the basics, you have to fix your gut. I tried your products that you sent me some, they are unbelievable quality. They are top notch. I take some enzymes here and there, but I hadn’t been taking much else for a while.
Wendy Myers: I hadn’t really been taking any probiotics for a while, but I’ve been eating fermented foods, and I feel like my digestion is pretty good. Then I tried all of your hydrochloric acid and other products, and it made a huge difference. I was really surprised because it’s one of those things where you don’t know, like you’re a fish swimming in water, just kind of like you’re existing. When you can take something that takes your health to the next level, then you realize, “wow, my digestion wasn’t really as good as I thought it was”. I just feel like I’m having less cravings and I’m having less gas. I just feel a lot better taking your product, so, I wanted to have you come on and share that with you.
Wade Lightheart: Well, thank you so much. I think a lot of people don’t know how great their physical vitality can actually be. I’ve seen over and over and over again that people start off on a detox program, or they start off with one of our products, and they start to learn and they start to assemble as I call their Jedi Council of Experts to help guide them. It becomes addictive, and it becomes addictive in a positive way, not in a negative way. It’s not like getting addicted to drugs or something that’s kind of numbing you out. It actually starts to turn you on, you get switched on to life, you get vibrant in life. You get that kind of childlike, “Hey, I’m so into this.” I’m almost into five decades on the planet here, and people are going, “How do you have so much energy? Why do you have so much zest for life?” I say, “If you spent a day in my body, you would understand.”
Wade Lightheart: It wasn’t always that way, I had to make those changes. I had to go through that recovery process, I had to make those changes. For myself, and all the 10s and 10s of thousands of people that we’ve been able to help, I’ve seen people go through that journey. Your body is incredible at its ability to heal, its ability to regenerate and its ability to have that zest for life. If you want that zest for life back again, invest in your health. Believe me, it’ll carry over in every area of your life on such an incredible level that you realize it’s the best investment you could possibly make.
Wendy Myers: Yes, hallelujah. Well Wade, thanks for coming on the show. Everyone, you can learn more about Wade’s work, his business and company, at bioptimizers.com/myers . For a great deal if you guys want to try his stuff out, just use coupon code, Myers10. Wade, thanks for coming on the show.
Wade Lightheart: Thanks for having me.
Wendy Myers: Everyone, thank you so much for tuning in to the Myers Detox Podcast, where every week we explore all kinds of topics related to heavy metal and chemical detox, and just really trying to optimize your health in every way possible. This show isn’t just about detox, you need detox, it’s that missing piece of the puzzle for so many in their health journey, but we have to get back to the basics. Digestion is certainly one of those basics you have to fix in order to detox successfully. Thanks for tuning in, I’m Wendy Myers of myersdetox.com, talk to you guys very soon.
