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Transcript
- 03:23 About Pam Killeen
- 06:43 What is Adrenal Fatigue?
- 09:17 Factors causing adrenal fatigue
- 16:22 Causes of adrenal fatigue
- 21:47 Managing Adrenal Fatigue
- 23:41 Copper Toxicity
- 32:37 Coffee and Adrenal Fatigue
- 41:04 Hormone replacement therapy
- 44:06 Menopause
- 50:44 Healing Adrenal Fatigue
- 55:57 Nutrients that the adrenals need to function
- 58:54 Sleep
- 01:04:15 The adrenals and heavy metals
- 01:08:35 How long to heal adrenal fatigue
- 01:10:22 More About Pam Killeen
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and you can find me at myersdetox.com. I’m really excited today. We’re going to be talking to Pam Killeen of PamKilleen.com.
She is a fellow mineral balancing practitioner who’s an expert about adrenal fatigue and using this kind of program that uses a hair mineral analysis to heal adrenal fatigue. We’re going to be talking about why it is such a plague in society today and what you can do to heal it.
It does take time to heal it, but it can be done – without hormones. Doctors love to give hormone to correct this condition because those glands, the adrenal glands make about ten different hormones including estrogen and testosterone, but I assure you that it is not the answer for long-term health.
But before we get started, I have to do the disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. The Live to 110 Podcast is solely informational in nature and for your entertainment purposes, so please consult your health care practitioner before engaging in any treatment that we suggest on the show.
I’m really excited. I’m going to be talking at the Bulletproof Conference this weekend. Probably by the time this airs, it will be last weekend, but I’m going to be speaking about infrared saunas and how to detox 100,000 chemicals from your body and heavy metals as well. It’s one of my very favorite, most effective detox tools that you can use (aside from my Mineral Power Program, of course).
I’m going to be there taking with Abel James and Dr. Sara Gottfried and so many people in the health panorama, all the experts in the field. They’re going to be converging on Pasadena, which is the community outside of Los Angeles, September 26th to 28th. So definitely join next year because by the time this airs, it will be over. I’m very excited about that.
So today, we’re going to interview Pam Killeen. She’s the author of ‘Addiction: The Hidden Epidemic’ and co-author of the New York Times’ bestselling book, ‘The Bird Flu Hoax’. I have seen that book. I did not know that you wrote that.
She has been independently studying nutrition and natural health for over 20 years and her interest in this area stems from overcoming her own lengthy battle with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and multiple chemical sensitivities. A lot of people are dealing with those today.
And as a nutritional consultant, she offers her clients a very comprehensive program, which focuses on restoring our biochemical imbalances. Her program is called ‘Nutritional Balancing’, very similar program that uses mineral balancing using a hair mineral analysis.
She’s also a dynamic and diverse public speaker and radio personality, which is why she’s coming on my show. Her website is PamKilleen.com.
Thanks for coming on the show, Pam.
Pam Killeen: Thanks for inviting me, Wendy. It’s great to be here.
Wendy Myers: Yes! So we were talking a little bit about the show and you were telling me your story. Why don’t you tell the listeners about why you’re so passionate about health and how you’ve found mineral balancing using hair mineral analysis?
Pam Killeen: Yeah! It was a total fluke. You know what it’s like when you’re out there and you’re spinning your wheel trying all sorts of stuff that isn’t working. I was fortunate, however, that I found the work of Weston A. Price prior to finding nutritional balancing.
So I did have an advantage I think in that department in that learning about animal fat with someone is just so crucial for my adrenals to recover in the first place. And then finding nutritional balancing, that was just the icing on the cake so to speak. That has just done nothing, but fine-tune myself.
I absolutely love what I do, but my clients and I can all vouch (and you can vouch) for the fact that when you’re not feeling quite well, if you’re running on zero cylinders or one cylinder, two cylinders, four cylinders, something is just not right. You go out and you try all sorts of things to get yourself back to running on all eight cylinders. It can be so infuriating trying all that hocus pocus and never really feeling like it’s amounting to anything.
And then when you find nutritional balancing, yes, it’s overwhelming (or if you’d like to call it mineral balancing). It’s extremely overwhelming simply because the journey is so long and it’s a lot of work, a lot of application, a lot of frustration. But in the end, of course, it’s extremely rewarding because you can get your health back using this modality. But you have to be extremely committed and focused and very patient as well.
Wendy Myers: Patience is the hard part.
Pam Killeen: It is! And unfortunately, you see that people drop out of the program and it’s really heartbreaking when that happens because it generally happens for two reasons. Number one, people go through the detox. I mean, my clients jokingly call themselves ‘toxic cesspools’. It’s a very good description of what’s going on.
And so when we start stirring up what I call the hornet’s nest inside of people, it doesn’t feel good. And unfortunately, pretty much everybody is going to go through it. You have to be willing to go through it before you actually enroll in the program.
Wendy Myers: I tell people that they’ve got to deprogram themselves that they can’t take a pill and feel better. That’s what the doctors do because they’re covering up symptoms. But then like you said, they go to doctor after doctor after doctor and they don’t get well and so they still have this expectation. You’ve got to let that go. It’s not reality.
Pam Killeen: Right! They really don’t think the detox should be happening to me or they can’t stand the detox and they quit or they are new at natural health and they believe all the claims that they’re hearing in what I call the ‘candy store’, the candy store of natural health practitioners and supplements. People believe the claims that they’re making and they go out and they want to keep trying something that’s going to help them feel better faster.
It’s heart-wrenching for me to see people do that because I’ve been through it, my clients have all been through it. But the seduction process of really believing that things like chronic fatigue, depression, brain fog, anxiety, OCD, insomnia, low libido, the utopia is that these things can go away quickly, but it takes time to get the body back into balance so that all of these systems are functioning properly.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: And so let’s talk about adrenal fatigue. We’re going to talk about how these kinds of mineral balancing programs – there’s different programs that have a very similar premise, balancing the body. So we’re going to talk about how those heal adrenal fatigue. But what is adrenal fatigue since so many people are afflicted with this and don’t know it yet? What exactly is adrenal fatigue?
Pam Killeen: Well, I call it the body’s battery is worn down. That’s how I like to describe it. The batteries are just not working properly and the batteries are the body’s adrenal glands. When the adrenal glands are being overly stimulated, day in and day out, year in and year out, they’re going to wear out.
Because the adrenal glands control the balance of minerals in your body (and that includes their ability to kick out unwanted metals), when the adrenals lose their ability to do that, of course, we become these toxic cesspools.
So the healthy minerals fall out of balance. The unwanted metals move in. And because our minerals are our spark plugs, this will influence neurotransmission. This will influence hormones, blood sugar control, thyroid function and so on.
So a lot of people will come to me and they just want to blame the problems on their neurotransmitters or they want to blame their problems on their thyroid. It’s very myopic. It’s just too simplistic an approach. You have to look at all systems together in order so that people can return to running on all eight cylinders.
But the core is always going to be the adrenal glands. So whatever I’m working with – I mean, it’s interesting to know people’s diagnosis. It’s interesting to know their labels whether they have Parkinson’s, whether they have epilepsy, whether they have chronic fatigue or insomnia or infertility issues or low libido. Whatever their label may be, it’s interesting to know their label.
But what is more important for practitioners like you and me is to look at their biochemistry because that’s really the underlying factor we have to look at and consider in order to essentially rebuild that human like a bionic person.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yes. In my understanding, historically, cavemen and Paleolithic men, they worked a 17-hour work week. They did their hunting and their gathering and they relax with their family. That’s not happening today. So I think our adrenal glands are really wimpy. They’re not set up for modern life and someone’s lucky if they work 40 hours a week. I don’t work 40 hours a week, I work seven days a week. But I like what I do, so I’m lucky that way.
Wendy Myers: So what are the factors that are causing adrenal fatigue in addition to people working way, way, way too much?
Pam Killeen: Okay. So in my last book, I talked about that term, the ‘fast, new world’. We’re living in a fast, new world. It’s a synthetic new world. We’re just not designed to be busy, busy, busy, get up at seven in the morning and go until midnight. That’s just not how we’re designed to operate.
But another thing that’s wearing down the adrenal glands is this high carbohydrate, low fat diet because the best fuel for the adrenal glands to keep the adrenal glands strong is animal fat.
And so if you look at the history of chronic fatigue and depression, don’t get me wrong, I know they’ve been around for a long, long time, but the epidemic really began more so in the 1980s and I was in that first wave when people started collapsing with things like chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and so on (or mood disorders in general).
But if you look at the history, what happened in ‘70s that led to that epidemic becoming worse in the 1980s. And in the 1970s, that’s when we went really hard core with the low fat diet. I can tell you in the 1970s, I went hard core with the low fat diet. And of course, by the ‘80s, I collapsed with chronic fatigue.
So I was in my early twenties when I collapsed with the chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. And if you look at the numbers, you’ll see that it’s no coincidence why this tsunami has been getting worse and worse and worse because so few people still really know about the importance of animal fat in the diet. And as a practitioner, you know, Wendy, it’s really difficult to get people stabilized without the animal fat.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. My vegetarian clients, forget it. It’s very difficult for them to heal their bodies without more animal fats – the vegans. Vegetarians get by eating dairy and things like that. But the vegans, it’s difficult for them.
Pam Killeen: Oh, yeah. No, I don’t work with vegetarians and there’s other reasons. I mean, I want my clients eating red meat and it’s just going to be easier to stabilize them if they’re eating enough red meat at least one serving of bread meat a week. I mean, I have clients that eat way more than that.
But as an addendum here, when you transition to what I call the ‘three square meal’ model where we’re turning to getting about 70% of our calories from animal fat (which is what your ancestors and my ancestors had adopted to), when we return to eating animal fat in the diet, it can be problematic. I’m sure you’ve seen this with your clients.
So even if people aren’t working with people like you and me, Wendy, they’ve got to realize it could be a bumpy ride returning to animal fat in the diet simply because, as you know, as the adrenals get weak, this adversely affects digestion, things like the production of hydrochloric acid in the stomach and bile. And for hydrochloric acid and bile to communicate properly, it takes time because it relies on the strength of the adrenal glands and the balance of minerals.
So when you return to animal fat in the diet, you have to put things in your stomach to help support your digestion. I tell my clients, “I need you to trick your stomach into thinking it’s acidic because right now, it’s not going to be acidic enough.”
So they have to do things like raw sauerkraut, lemon water, apple cider vinegar, pickles, pickle juice, sauerkrauts. They have to do things in order to trick their stomach into being acidic .
Wendy Myers: I’m all about the pickle juice. I love me some pickle juice.
Pam Killeen: Isn’t it fantastic? You sip on some pickle juice and it really helps settle the tummy. It’s incredible. It works really quickly.
And then you have to use a specific digestive aids in order to get the bile going. But even more importantly than that, the coffee enemas are just magical.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Pam Killeen: I make the coffee enemas mandatory for my clients. It’s simply because I used to be lenient about using the coffee enemas. And back them, I had like a 95% dropout rate because people couldn’t handle the detox. So now, I make them mandatory.
It’s just not worth my while for people to do a year on the program and ten quit. A year in nutritional balancing time is not very long. So people are still going to be sick generally speaking a year into the program. That’s just not uncommon.
Wendy Myers: And so, you listeners out there, if you’re not familiar with coffee enemas and you’re like, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! What did she just say? Coffee enemas?” These are something you can learn about on my website, Pam’s website and we’ve got a podcast about coffee enemas and the amazing unbelievable benefits of coffee enemas and how to make you feel like a million bucks.
That’s something that we both use with our clients because they get that bile flow going. They stimulate bile flow and you have to have that for digestion and to detox metals.
Pam Killeen: That’s right. And it’s mythology (as you know) that fiber is going to help us with our digestion. I mean, that’s just sheer mythology. I have books listed on my website and I highly recommend the book, ‘Fiber Menace’. I was one of these ones that got so fooled into thinking fiber was going to help my digestion. It’s really about getting the bile going.
So if you want to have good elimination, you need to get your bile going. And bile becomes extremely stagnant without enough animal fat in the diet because why should bile show up if there’s not enough animal fat on the diet? So bile essentially goes to sleep.
And on top of that, it gets thick like toothpaste. And so it’s going to form gall stones in the bile duct system.
So this is a big hurdle that a lot of people have to overcome. It can take a year, two years, whatever the case may be in order to get the bile to start behaving properly.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And there are people where their gallbladders were removed, which is insane, craziness when they just need to take some Ox Bile or another kind of supplement or eat bitter/sour tart foods to get it going.
Pam Killeen: Yeah, it can be difficult. I think the gall stones that can form in the gallbladder can be enormous and in some cases, cannot be overridden. I’ve rarely seen people who have to get their gallbladders removed.
A lot of the times, what it is is there’s hundreds (if not thousands) of gall stones trapped within the bile duct system. And oftentimes, my clients might do a liver/gallbladder flush and see nothing come out at all. That’s how incredibly blocked up the highway systems is with their bile ducts. They may need to do three, four, five six liver/gallbladder flushes just to explode out those stones. And mark my words, there’s going to be a lot there.
Don’t go running – you can go running to the doctor anything you want to for testing, but generally speaking, when you go for testing to see if you have gall stones, you can pretty much bank on the fact that the test will not show the gall stones. Usually, the tests come back negative.
Wendy Myers: Ah, that’s interesting.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t we go into some of the other causes of adrenal fatigue? What are some of the things people are doing that just wear those things out?
Pam Killeen: Right, yeah, things where we’re obeying mother nature. Being excessively busy is one thing. You wake up in the morning and you go until midnight, just a workaholic type of lifestyle. That’s going to wear down the adrenal glands.
A low fat diet, that’s going to wear out the adrenal glands. But another big, big subject that nobody likes to talk about, Wendy is exercise.
Wendy Myers: Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes. I have a lot of exercisaholics because it’s healthy, right?
Pam Killeen: This is taboo for us to be talking about this right now.
Wendy Myers: Yes, exercise is so healthy.
Pam Killeen: No. Vegetarianism is so healthy.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So what’s the problem? What’s the happy medium? You always can get too much of a good thing. So what is the happy medium that people should be doing?
Pam Killeen: I call it ‘smart’. You want to do ‘smart exercise’. I’m not anti-exercise, but it can be excessive. Our adrenal glands are not designed for doing spurts of cardio, for example.
If you look at the work of Dr. Hans Selye (who was the foremost researcher on the world on the adrenal glands), he actually did this research right here at McGill University, we ran for two to three minutes at a time to eat or avoid getting eating. We didn’t over-exert our adrenal glands in human history. This phenomenon of exercise is only very new to humans.
And I’m a recovering over-exerciser just like I’m a recovering vegetarian as well. You get up and you do lapse in the pool up at the university and then you go jogging and you run on the treadmill and you do all these exercises – aerobics classes, whatever. So I really did my adrenal glands a lot of damage.
Now, when I exercise, I do smart exercise I don’t push my adrenal glands. I actually play tennis and I usually only play doubles because it’s not…
Wendy Myers: That’s less work.
Pam Killeen: …and you get to laugh and giggle and socialize, get some fresh air and sunshine. So it’s a really smart exercise for me I find.
Another smart exercise might be golf because you’re really not stressing yourself and you’re still out in the fresh air and sunshine and socializing and smiling with your friends, which is very therapeutic I feel.
Other things like yoga, pilates, qi gong, simple stretching, maybe light weight lifting (just light). These are all acceptable forms of exercise. If you have adrenal fatigue, you absolutely need to consider, if you are going to exercise, that these are basically the exercises you might be able to do.
But I will tell you that I have clients (even myself included years ago), I had no business when I was really, really sick. I used to play tennis and do all these things. I should not have been doing any of those things. Even yoga would’ve been too much for me.
I wasn’t paying any attention. I didn’t know about the exercise equation. So I do have clients that I work with who couldn’t even fathom going out to do a yoga class. They can’t even get off their coaching. That’s how incredibly fatigued they are.
So what I tell them is, “I want you to be a couch potato. You need to celebrate this. I know it’s boring as heck.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah, watch a movie. Relax.
Pam Killeen: We’re all big movie fans and documentary fans, watch golf on television. We’re turning into golf fanatics just vicariously through television because it’s relaxing to watch golf. But they have to watch relaxing media if they’re going to do any kind of television. They have to be relaxed.
Wendy Myers: Yes. Yeah, that’s why I don’t watch the news because I just get stressed out. I could feel my adrenalin going and I’m like, “This is not healthy. I just need to be ignorant and happy.”
Pam Killeen: That’s right.
Wendy Myers: …and healthy.
Pam Killeen: That’s the trick. I’ve had some clients who have been watching thrillers or horror movies. I’m like, “No, no, no. That’s going to overstimulate your adrenal glands and they’re too weak right now. They won’t heal if you overstimulate them.”
And even people, I’ve had some musicians who continue to drum more or play their guitars. That’s too stimulating for them. They have to go on hiatus from anything that stimulates their adrenal glands.
I tell my clients, “I want you to imagine that your adrenal glands are in a cast, broken like a broken arm or a broken leg. Just like you’d heal a broken arm or a broken leg in a static position, that’s what has to happen with your adrenal glands in order so that they heal.”
The rest of it, as you know, Wendy, the whole program together works synergistically. But honestly, if pp are not resting, if they’re still overstimulating their adrenal glands, I don’t see great results with these people.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Pam Killeen: They’ll get better eventually. It’s just going to take them a lot longer.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it will take them a lot longer, yeah. And also, people that are really copper toxic. I know that some of my clients, they use exercise as a drug, that the only way some of these really copper toxic people (the metal that really drives them), the only way they feel good is if they exercise.
And so they exercise six days a week and it’s kind of this vicious cycle. Because of adrenal fatigue, they become copper toxic. And because of the copper toxicity, they continue to over-exercise.
Wendy Myers: And so how can someone manage that, stop the exercise? And then probably their anxiety is going to go through the roof or their adrenals are going to freak out? How do they manage them?
Pam Killeen: They’ll be exhausted when they stop their exercise because they rely on the exercise as their crack/cocaine/caffeine/sugar, as their stimulant. This is a dilemma, Wendy that I run into every single day.
When I work with people, my clients call me Sgt. Pam because I’m so incredibly strict because I don’t want to monkey around in their health and their time and their money. They have to sign a contract to work with me. And in my contract, it says right there, you are not to do any aerobic activity.
But I know people, I have friends, I have family that over-exercise. Honestly, there’s just no way to get through to them about the dangers, the risks in their behavior. They’ll go on a bike ride for 50 km., “Oh, I feel so great! I had adrenalin rush. The endorphins, it feels so good.” That’s their drug. You can’t take a drug away from somebody who’s an addict.
That’s how they get through the day. Without bike ride, they don’t feel like they could function. But they don’t understand that it’s counter-productive, that in order for them to feel that good, they’re actually robbing Peter to pay Paul. So they’re just wearing their adrenal glands more and more and more.
And what’s going to happen (and I know and you know what’s going to happen to them in the long run) is they’re going to start accumulating more copper, more metals in general. By the time they’re getting to their fifties, their sixties or their seventies, they’re just going to continuously degenerate.
My heart goes out to them, but I can’t take the candy away from the baby or they’re just not going to believe me.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Yeah, it’s hard because we’re so conditioned that exercise is so healthy. Everyone needs more and more and more.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk a little bit more about copper toxicity. It’s something that not many health practitioners are aware of, but it’s one of the main causes (at least in my clients) for unwanted health conditions. It’s a huge problem. It causes their symptoms as well, the symptoms they don’t want.
Can you explain exactly what copper toxicity is and how it is promoted by adrenal fatigue?
Pam Killeen: Oh, yeah. Essentially, our adrenal glands are responsible for controlling the balance with minerals in the body, but that also means they’re responsible for taking out unwanted metals. It also secret a protein into the body to grab the copper, take it to the bile and then out into the toilet it goes.
But because of the low fat diet, why does bile have to show up? It goes to sleep. So now, the exit route for the copper to blocked essentially. And because there’s not enough animal fat in the diet, the adrenals keep getting weaker and weaker and weaker. So you see why my clients call themselves ‘toxic cesspools’.
And when we stir up the copper, it’s an interesting cause and effect relationship. When people start taking the supplements, what they do is essentially release what I call the hornet’s nest, copper included. Other metals are going to be moving as well, but copper is a big culprit.
So as we stir up the hornet’s nest and people feel the copper moving, you know it and I know it, they feel it.
Wendy Myers: It’s fun stuff.
Pam Killeen: They end up with what is known as a very distinctive copper headache. I mean, it’s unmistakable when you start getting a copper headache. It’s a very metallic horrible feeling in the brain. Oftentimes, a lot of nausea and vomiting accompanies it.
And so it’s a shock when people go through the detox. I’m oversimplifying the detox here, by the way. But it’s an episode that can happen here and there while people are on the program.
But as the copper cleans more and more and more, over time, over several months, the brain starts getting sharper and sharper. Moods starts getting enhanced. Sleep improves. Libido improves. It’s a cause and effect relationship because as people hear you and I talk about copper toxicity or even the entire program, it’s all intangible because we can’t see copper, smell copper, taste copper.
When people are smoking cigarettes, you can see the toxicity, you can smell the toxicity. We know it’s toxic. But when we start talking about copper or lead or mercury, adrenal functions, all of these things are intangible to over 90% of the population.
So as hard for people to understand when I tell them about the copper toxicity issue, only until they actually move the copper do they say, “Oh, my God! This is really what my health problems are all about. It’s this copper.” It’s so incredibly powerful as the copper clears and you could feel the cause and the effect relationship.
And so you have to be in store for the feelings associated with moving the copper. You have to be ready for it. The coffee enemas are there in order to help ‘soften the landing’, so to speak. Not all my clients go through a horrible, horrible detox, but a lot of them do.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Not everyone does. Everyone’s different. Everyone’s different. Everyone has different – I think everyone has all the metals in them. It’s just a matter of to what degree and what’s going to come out, in what order. So everyone’s a little bit different.
Pam Killeen: That’s right. And a lot of it depends on their age when they start the program, how sick they are when they start the program, their level of compliance when they’re on the program. It also depends on whether or not they were ever a vegetarian. If they were ever a vegetarian, I noticed that they have a way tougher time on the program because they’re more toxic. They have more toxic.
And also, if they have trauma during the program. So if they have death in the family, a divorce, a geographical move, if something goes on while they’re on the program, some kind of stress like that, oftentimes that delays their progress as well.
Another thing that will delay their progress is if they don’t switch to bottled spring water. If I have clients who don’t listen to me and they continue to drink well water or distilled water or filtered water, if they don’t believe me when I tell them about the water problem, a year and a half into the program, I’ll say, “You did switch to bottled spring water, didn’t you?” and then they’ll tell me no, they didn’t, I’ll say, “Ah, that’s way. That’s why things are going slowly here.”
Wendy Myers: So do you not even like the carbon-filtered water? It doesn’t have the minerals. Yeah, I’ve got it over here. It doesn’t have the minerals. Filtered water doesn’t have it.
Pam Killeen: Yeah, the problem with the carbon is it’s not going to rid of the artificial water fluoridation. Now, you’re opening up a huge can of worms for me because I work on getting fluoride out of our city water locally here where I live in Ontario. I mean, we can do a whole show on fluoride.
Seventy percent of the United States is artificially water fluoridated. In Canada, our numbers are going down dramatically. So we have less artificial water fluoridation in Canada. We are working very hard to stop it.
Experts that are working on getting rid of artificial water fluoridation, they’re saying that probably it should be done and over with over the next two years.
I’ve also seen water tests of tap water. I know a girl here in Canada that I collaborate with and she shows me water tests. She shares a lot of information with me about water tests. Water tests are inconclusive. What is most important is what you and I see in the hair analysis and what the body is holding on to.
So even if you test your water and it shows according to government regulations, it shows that it’s okay, please don’t believe it because what’s most important is what you and I see in terms of what the body is holding onto.
That’s what the trouble is, the water test. When people take their water in for testing, they come back to me and they say, “Pam, you’re wrong” and I say, “No, no, no. Please don’t drink that water. Even though the test look okay, what’s most important is for me to see what your body is holding onto.”
Wendy Myers: It was interesting when we had talked at one point and you had said that mercury is a big issue in well water in the western United States. Can you explain that a little bit?
Pam Killeen: Right! Because the coal-burning power plants in China, the drift is going towards the west coast of Canada and United States. If you’re drinking rain water or well water from rain, there’s a good chance it’s going to be contaminated with mercury.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and iron and manganese too. I see that toxicity in all my clients that are drinking well water.
Pam Killeen: Well water, you’re dealing with iron, manganese and aluminum, which you’re going to see over time especially if they stop drinking their well water. Now, the contamination has stopped coming in, so the body will actually let go of the toxicity.
So the hornet’s nest should stir up after one or two tests. You should start seeing the manganese, iron and aluminum coming up as long as they’ve stopped drinking the well water. If they haven’t stopped drinking the well water, chances are they’ll still stay down because the contamination is coming in, so mother nature just keeps sequestering and hiding the metals.
Well water is going to be a problem for those three particular metals. Sometimes, you’re going to see arsenic because of the agricultural sprays. Sometimes you’re going to see the mercury. We don’t test for fluoride, but there’s a chance. You’ll see that person will be affected from even high levels of naturally occurring fluoride, not necessarily always the artificial water fluoridation coming from municipal sources.
And copper. In city water, they’re adding copper as an antifungal and also, they’re adding aluminum to give water that crystal clear look. And because all water is connected, that is also going to affect the wells.
Wendy Myers: It just sounds delicious.
Pam Killeen: Water is the big issue with me. I wish people didn’t have to drink bottled water. Obviously, the plastic, it’s the lesser of the evils.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s what I tell people. Proper hydration and minerals is much, much more important to your health than avoiding plastics and BPA. It’s a reality in modern life.
But I think you just detox it in the sauna. You sweat those things out. You sweat out phalates, you sweat BPA and residues of plastic in the infrared sauna.
Pam Killeen: But the xenoestrogens are going to come out through the bile. So if you’re doing the coffee enemas, you should be able to pull out the xenoestrogens from the plastic.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: And let’s talk about what people are putting water in, which is coffee and how coffee causes adrenal fatigue because that’s a big one for a lot of people.
Pam Killeen: And again, it’s a stimulant, so you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, right? And so when people start my program, I tell them, “It’s interesting to know what drugs you’re using. That’s interesting.” I never take drugs away from anybody. So if somebody is using meth or crack or nicotine or sugar or Prozac or caffeine, marijuana, I never take anybody off their drugs because as long as their biochemistry is a mess, they can’t get through the day without their drug.
And just because their drug is legal or illegal, it doesn’t matter to me. A drug is a drug is a drug. Why are people taking drugs? Because they feel lousy.
Wendy Myers: Yeah! And they want to increase their energy. They want to change their body chemistry.
Pam Killeen: I mean, the drug part is a joke because if people feel lousy, they’re going to climb a mountain to get a drug.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Pam Killeen: And if a pharmaceutical drug isn’t working, then they’re going to go out to the streets to find something that does work. The drug war itself is going to fail. As long as people feel lousy, they’re going to seek out drugs.
I’d like to solve the drug war by getting to the root cause of the problem and that is to getting people feeling like they’re running on all eight cylinder because then you don’t need to have caffeine to get through the day, you don’t need to have sugar to get through the day, you don’t need to have Prozac to get through the day. You can use what mother nature gave us.
Wendy Myers: You need minerals. That’s what we need.
Pam Killeen: Yeah. You feel happy and healthy and wholesome without having to rely on any kind of drug.
Wendy Myers: And so let’s talk a little bit more about coffee and how exactly that fatigues the adrenal glands. What is that whole mechanism?
Pam Killeen: What it’s going to do is essentially is it’s going to step on the gas. It’s going to just push and push and push tons of adrenalins out and even cortisol. That depletes your magnesium, for example. So that just causes a cascade or a domino effect in the body.
So you see that inescapable effect of drinking coffee. As long as you’re drinking the coffee, you’re going to keep pushing out the adrenalin and the cortisol and keep depleting your magnesium, which has a spillover effect on your other minerals, right?
I’m oversimplifying it. There’s more to it than that, but off the top of my head, that’s the way I would describe it. And so you have to keep going back to the coffee simply because what coffee does is it makes you feel wired and tired at the same time, doesn’t it? It makes you feel wired and tired.
So you can’t escape that feeling as long as you’re using a stimulant and depending on a stimulant for energy, but it’s a fake energy. It’s a synthetic energy and it doesn’t feel good in the long run. You just keep depleting and depleting and that’s depleting your battery.
So then you have to increase your dose over time because the fatigue gets worse and worse and worse and worse. But again, I never take anybody off of their drugs. Very few of my clients actually drink coffee, which I’m really grateful for. But if they do drink coffee, it’s a very small amount.
And what they do is they consciously – say, for example, if they drink one cup a day, I think the most any of my clients ever used to drink was four cups a day.
Wendy Myers: That’s a lot.
Pam Killeen: You know what it’s like for those people out there. But there’s people out there drinking a pot or two pots of coffee a day. I think the most any one of my clients has ever consumed was four cups of coffee a day. Most of my clients may be one or two, three cups a day.
What they do is they cut what they’re used to drinking and have and they stay with that for a while. And then they cut back dose in half. And then they might switch to tea, which has its own problems, but it’s got less caffeine in it.
We have to watch with tea because of the cadmium and the nickel and the fluoride, which are going to be picked up from the soil. You have to be careful with tea. I’ve tested tea toddlers and the cadmium, their nickel can be very, very high.
So you can kind of dose down on the coffee, but I never take it away from people simply because it may be the only thing they have to get through the day. Just try and keep the consumption to a bare minimum. And then as your biochemistry gets stronger and stronger and stronger, you should be able to notice you can walk away from the coffee and don’t need it to get through the day.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I think people, once they start getting energy, their habits just naturally fall away. They don’t need it. They don’t need it as much when they have natural, authentic energy with minerals.
Pam Killeen: That’s right.
Wendy Myers: And so let’s talk about adrenal fatigue and thyroid issues. Is it true that when people have adrenal fatigue that they typically also have thyroid issues in conjunction with that since those two glands work together?
Pam Killeen: That’s right. The adrenal gland and the thyroid work like a gas and a brake pedal. In our fast, new world, our synthetic, fast, new world, we’re pushing…
Wendy Myers: …regular push to the gas.
Pam Killeen: Right? We’re pushing on the gas. And so essentially, the adrenals – I know we call it ‘burnout’ or ‘adrenal insufficiency’ or whatever. But really, what’s going on for most people is the adrenals are in overdrive. And so as long as the adrenals are in overdrive, then the thyroid shunts. That’s what’s essentially going on.
So 80% of your clients are probably going to tell you that they think they have hypothyroidism. They either think they have hypothyroidism or they’ve been diagnosed with it. Most of the time, they’re not diagnosed with it. Most of the time, they just think they have hypothyroidism. It’s really not a problem with the thyroid. It’s a problem with the adrenal glands.
And so in order to get everything functioning normally, essentially, you got to take the garbage out. You got to get the manganese and the copper and mercury, you’ve got to get these metals out of the body or ‘in balance’, if you will so that the thyroid will work properly.
So one of the culprits I’ve mentioned is manganese. Manganese is a healthy mineral, but when people become manganese toxic, that’s when it’s going to interfere with the thyroid glands. Mercury, we just want to get it out of there. We want to get aluminum out of there. We want to get lead out of there. We want to get the toxic metals out of there completely.
But for the thyroid to work properly, the healthy minerals (which if you have your bar chart in front of you, the ones on the top part of your bar chart), those are the minerals that need to be in balance so that the thyroid turns on.
The analogy that I use here is when you get your minerals in balance, that is now like the key fitting the lock. Now, the thyroid will work properly. Because minerals are catalyst, because they are our spark plugs, that’s why the thyroid is not working.
That’s why when you go out and you take all sorts of thyroid supplements or medication, you still don’t feel right. It is because you haven’t deal with the underlying cause of why the thyroid isn’t working properly.
In terms of your biochemistry, in terms of your test results, if you look at your Ca to K ratio (your calcium to potassium ratio) and then look at the top part of the page and you look at your levels, that’s what has to be fixed in order so that your thyroid turns on properly. That’s dependent, of course, on the functioning of your adrenal glands.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I love. That’s what a lot of people don’t understand. They think that, “Oh, I need to fix the thyroid” and the doctor gives them something for the thyroid or they think they have adrenal fatigue.
It’s not isolated. Those two work together and it’s all being caused by the underlying imbalances in the body chemistry. You can’t just fix one things and expect miracles to happen or take and adaptogenic herb or hormones to make up for what the adrenal glands aren’t making.
That’s what my naturopathic doctor recommended for me. I was like, “No, no, no, no. I am 40. I don’t need to have bio-identical hormone replacement.”
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk a little bit about that and how that really doesn’t work at all to heal the adrenals and how the adrenal health continues to decline as you are taking bio-identical hormones, be it synthetic or bio-identical. They’re the same thing in my book.
Pam Killeen: Yeah, I almost fell into the trap and I’m glad I didn’t. I was going to write my last book about bio-identical hormones because I thought, “Oh, great! They’re going to help people yada-yada-yada…” Now, I’m so much happier that I found nutritional balancing.
Now, the problem with using bio-identical hormones is number one, they can actually increase your chances of developing cancer. Number two, they’re not dealing with the underlying reason why the hormones are not in balance in the first place.
As a segway (because we were just talking about the thyroid gland), it’s probably one of the top prescribed drugs here in North America especially women, thyroid medication.
What happens is as women get their thyroid medication (whether it’s Synthroid or whether it’s Armour or what-have-you), they feel better for say two or three months on the thyroid medication.
But then what happens is they plateau. Nothing seems to happen after that. They still don’t feel quite well. But they remember feeling better for about three months. So they’re going to stay on it because they remember having some improvements on the thyroid medication.
Wendy Myers: …or they increase the dosage.
Pam Killeen: They just stay on. If they’re trapped in taking thyroid medication for potentially decades, which is really very tragic because it’s really not fixing the problem. They’re still going to have a lowered quality of life simply because their thyroid hasn’t been properly addressed.
Wendy Myers: And doesn’t that cause adrenal fatigue? Doesn’t the thyroid hormones, the supplemental ones really push the adrenals as well?
Pam Killeen: Yeah, it acts like a poison on the body. So sometimes, if people are taking thyroid medication, I can actually see the sodium, the potassium pushed up because of the poisoning effect of the thyroid medication – sometimes, not all the time.
But that said, if somebody needs thyroid medication, they should take the thyroid medication. I have a few clients who absolutely have to take their thyroid medication. Because they’ve had surgery, part of their thyroid has been radiated or removed or whatever the case may be.
So some people actually do need bio-identical hormones, Wendy. But I will tell you, it’s actually relatively rare and it has to do with surgery. I can’t take the bio-identicals away from those people. They have to take their bio-identicals.
Their goal in doing mineral balancing though is they want to take as low a dose as possible. That’s why they do the mineral balancing. They don’t feel quite right yet. They know that the bio-identical hormones aren’t ‘cutting the mustard’, so to speak. They know there are risks involved with taking bio-identical hormones, but they want to take as low a dose as possible.
But if you’ve got all your body parts, you shouldn’t really need to take bio-identical hormones.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: And so can you explain the mechanism behind when women go into menopause. A lot of women think, “Oh, my ovaries aren’t making estrogen or other hormones as much anymore.” They don’t understand that they feel like crap in menopause because their adrenal glands, which are normally supposed to take over in making those hormones (the adrenal glands, they take over when the ovaries aren’t producing them anymore), but they can’t usually because they have adrenal fatigue.
So a lot of menopausal symptoms are actually from adrenal fatigue. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Pam Killeen: That’s right. But the other thing is because bile is so stagnant, Wendy and copper and estrogen have a very tight relationship in the body – copper goes up, estrogen goes up. What is the term that you hear very commonly among the hormone doctors? The term ‘estrogen dominance’ and the importance of getting progesterone and estrogen in balance.
Now, I’ve yet to see anybody who really knows how to balance the hormones, per se.
Wendy Myers: It’s too complex. It’s so complex.
Pam Killeen: And so why don’t we just give the body what it needs so that it balances the hormone on its own. That’s my approach.
And so when I learned about copper toxicity and copper’s role with estrogen and when you see somebody who’s copper toxic because of environmental exposures or because they’ve been a vegetarian, you know there’s going to be an estrogen dominance problem.
But let’s not forget this very important point. Bile gets thick due to copper toxicity. Copper pushes estrogen up, which pushes progesterone down. When progesterone and estrogen go to balance, bile gets thick. So now, how are you going to get rid of your estrogen because estrogen needs to come out of the bile too just like copper does.
So when we use our estrogen, it needs to be used and then you evacuate it. But we can’t forget that there’s all these environmental estrogen out there as well. And so those two, because of mimicry, you’re going to confuse the balance of estrogen to progesterone.
So when I have ladies who are going through, for example, hot flushes (perimenopause), yeah, we got to get the minerals in balance, but they have to work really hard to get their bile going. And that’s really what it comes down to.
I’m menopausal, but I don’t have any symptoms. My peers are all symptomatic. They’re all going through insomnia. Their hair is all dry and brittle. Their hair is falling out. They have all sorts of symptoms, low libido, et cetera.
Now, I’m fortunate because I’ve done so much work, I don’t have menopausal symptoms. It’s all just a nice breeze for me. It’s like nothing’s happening. But I’d say the vast majority of women out there are struggling going through menopausal, which is not normal.
And unfortunately, in today’s day and age, a lot of these symptoms have been normalized by society. That’s the problem because most women are going to just say, “Oh, it’s insomnia. I can solve this on my own. Who cares if my hair is getting all dry and brittle? That doesn’t matter. I don’t love my husband anyway, so I don’t care if I don’t have a sex drive.”
I think all of these things should be rectified to have a full quality of life. People don’t have to suffer. But without understanding bile, they’re going to continue to suffer. You’ve got to get that bile going. And to get that bile going, it means you have to get rid of the copper because as long as the copper is there, the bile is going to be thick.
Wendy Myers: And also, the liver metabolizes excess estrogen. So it’s important again to do coffee enemas. Get that liver working. Get that bile flowing so that you can get rid of that excess estrogen.
Pam Killeen: That’s right, that’s right. And it sounds easy to do, it’s just not.
Wendy Myers: And what drives me nuts also is when people go to their doctor (if it’s a naturopathic or whatever doctor that they’re worshiping at that moment), they test the estrodiol or the other estrogens in the blood, but they’re not testing for the xenoestrogens, the pesticides and all these things that are locking in to the estrogen hormones, so people, even though they’re testing really low on estrogen are actually estrogen dominant because of all these xenoestrogens in the environment.
Pam Killeen: Yeah, yeah. You have to assume you’re estrogen dominant. That’s safer. You can test and test and test some more, it’s just like going for gall stone testing, you can keep going for tests, but chances are you have gall stones.
So yeah, you’re better to assume that you have a lot of estrogen in the body and that your bile is thick. You’re better to assume that. I tell my clients all the time, I tell them just all the time that we do not have the cooperation of the medical world on this. We want to know how much bile we’re producing so that we know we have an exit route, a really powerful exit route for metals when we stir up that hornet’s test.
We can’t go to the doctor and say, “How much bile am I producing?” You’re supposed to be producing about a liter or a quart of bile a day. That’s a lot of bile.
Wendy Myers: Wow!
Pam Killeen: And on top of that, the bile ducts need to be cleared. You don’t want to have hundreds of thousands of gall stones trapped inside of you. We do now have non-invasive, inexpensive testing to tell us the answers to those questions
So I tell my clients all the time that you have to assume that you’re producing maybe a quarter of bile a day, if that. And you have to assume that you have hundreds, if not thousands of gall stones trapped in your bile duct system.
It’s worst if you don’t assume that those things are going on; it really is. I wish doctors would wisen up on this issue and help us out, but they just don’t have the tools and they don’t have the understanding around the importance of bile.
As soon as my clients get their bile going, I’ve seen their brains start clearing up, they start having energy, they start sleeping at night. It’s not enough to just have the metals just circulating and circulating stuck inside of us. They’ve got to come out into the toilet where they belong.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk about how to heal adrenal fatigue. We’ve talked about a lot of the causes and what-not. How does one heal their adrenal fatigue aside from just sitting their butt down and relaxing?
Pam Killeen: And turning into a couch potato.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Pam Killeen: I tell all my clients they have to become couch potatoes.
Wendy Myers: Sit down already.
Pam Killeen: Learn to say no. Learn to set boundaries in your life. You can’t volunteer for this organization and that organization and have pot lucks here and pot lucks there. You’ve got to rest. You’ve got to learn to say no.
That’s difficult to do in today’s day and age when there’s so many expectations on busy women, busy dads, busy kids and so on. That is one important thing. It’s probably one of the most important things to do.
If you are learning to say no and set boundaries, you’re going to spend more time hopefully preparing healthy meals because another crucial thing you have to do is to learn how to make three square meals a day.
Now, in 1800s when we had very little in terms of kitchen apparatus, they knew how to do three square meals back then. They didn’t have cooking shows and they didn’t have a lot of cookbooks.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, they had to wing it.
Pam Killeen: So I always tell people, “If they could do it in the 1800s, then we can do it here in 2014.” Three square meals a day, it is so simple that it’s embarrassing.
Wendy Myers: Throw some vegetables into a pot with a fire underneath it. That’s all you’ve got to do.
Pam Killeen: And have some proteins the size of the back of your hand, fatty protein regularly. If your bile production is impaired dramatically, you may not handle the animal fat at first, so you may gradually have to increase your intake of animal fat. It may take a few months. That’s a relative thing, individual by individual.
But three square meals a day is so crucial because you need that animal fat in order to stabilize your blood sugar. If you’re waiting too long in between meals, if you’re eating too many carbs at your meal, you’re going to put yourself on a blood sugar rollercoaster ride.
You do not want your blood sugar crashing because when your blood sugar crashes, this turns on your adrenal glands. And what did I say about resting the adrenal glands? You want to make sure the adrenal glands are resting.
So if you’re eating too many carbs or if you’re waiting too long in between meals, it’s going to turn the adrenal glands on. We want them turned off. We want them resting.
So that is one of the very critical things people can do in order to help overcome adrenal fatigue.
Before I found mineral balancing, I was teaching the classes of Weston A. Price. Sally Fallon very generously gifted them to me many, many years ago. So I’ve been teaching Weston A. Price’s classes now for many, many years. I can’t tell you the number of people that I taught who felt improvements, just returning to that premise, just returning to eating a bacon & egg style breakfast and a meat & potato style lunch & and dinner.
Wendy Myers: And that’s how people intuitively ate. It wasn’t that our grandparents were ignorant of the new science of nutrition and what-not. They instinctively knew how to eat.
Pam Killeen: That’s it. They saw it was around them in the land. I tell people, “Watch ‘A Little House on the Priarie.’ Tell me what you think they ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.” If you take your breakfast, lunch and dinner to the Ingalls family in the 1800s and they recognize everything on the plate, then you’re probably doing okay.
Wendy Myers: That’s how I based my nutrition on, this Little House on the Priarie.
Pam Killeen: We ate pretty well back in the 1800s when most of us lived on a farm.
Wendy Myers: And that’s why a lot of people today are living a really long time, the people that are living to 110. That’s probably not going to happen to a lot of people today unless they follow a mineral balancing program and eat right and live by Weston A. Price’s principles. These old people grew up eating whole foods their entire lives. That’s why they’re alive today.
Pam Killeen: That’s right. I’ll tell you a really cute story. I was doing a book signing in St. Catherine’s where I’ve done a lot of radio. So I was in a big store. A lady came to see me. She knew I was doing this book signing. She came to see me with her daughter.
She was in her ‘90s. She didn’t have a cane. She was absolutely stunning, just in her 90. She wanted to come and see me because she’d been hearing me on the radio talking about eating liver and butter and eating bone broth and lacto-fermented foods. She said, “These are the foods that I still eat today that I never stopped eating.”
Even when the dietary dictocrat said to stop eating these foods, she never stopped. And here she was, just as lucid as lucid could be without a cane, walking tall, just striking. She had came to thank me. She said, “I know you’re right, Pam.”
Wendy Myers: Mm-hmmm… yeah.
Pam Killeen: That was a great validation. And the daughter just stood there, just glowing. She’s so proud of her mother because she’s in her nineties and she’s ‘fighting fit’ as they say in Australia.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wendy Myers: And so what are the other nutrients that the adrenals need? What do adrenals need to function?
Pam Killeen: Well, they need the animal fat. They need the animal fat because within the animal, you have nutrients that help to support the adrenal glands. Animal fat bar none is the most important fuel for the adrenal glands.
Wendy Myers: Red meat.
Pam Killeen: And for energy, red meat. You need the carnitine. The carnitine, the CoQ10 and the B vitamins. You need the red meat absolutely. But that’s essentially in terms of all sorts of systems in the body. Specifically for the adrenal glands, I usually pinpoint the animal fat. But as you know, animal fat is present with protein and the whole foods.
I hate to isolate as well because I don’t want anybody just going out and taking cod liver oil and thinking that’s all they need to do because it’s so much more than just that. I’m a big fan of cod liver oil, but I want people to understand that everything dietary-wise works together. And so yes, the red meat is crucial.
And what I was saying earlier about the Weston A. Price classes and just seeing people return to eating those basic principles. I would teach over four Saturdays, so I see people evolve over four weeks. One week after the next week after the next week, just doing Weston A. Price’s principles, people would come to me and say, “Pam, I’m already feeling better. I’m already feeling better.” I’d be like, “That’s great!”
If you can get back to running all eight cylinders or go from one cylinders to four cylinders following Weston Price’s principles, all the power to you. But generally speaking, I find that people need mineral balancing on top of doing what you and I would call a ‘perfect diet’. And the reason why is because the bile chemistry is so stubborn. Once it falls out of position, it doesn’t want to go back into position.
And so for a lot of my clients who had been doing Weston Price for even ten years, they still needed mineral balancing because the diet was just not enough to get the adrenals to essential turn back on again.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and that’s what I talk about a lot as well. A lot of people do a Paleo type diet or Weston A. Price, whatever you want to call it, an ancestral type diet, they see some improvement, but it’s just not quite. A lot of people don’t see amazing disease-reversal. They still have health issues and that’s why.
Pam Killeen: That’s right. And it’s not their fault. It’s not the fault of the diet. I’ve seen people who come to my classes who are on four cylinders and then they get to eight cylinders, so it can be done. It can be done. The diet can be enough, but it really depends on how much damage they’ve done to their biochemistry to begin with and how many interferences they have while they’re doing a Weston Price or Paleo-type diet.
So if they’re still drinking that well water, for example, it’s not good. They’re going to have trouble getting back to all eight cylinders.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: And so what about sleep? How much sleep should people be getting? People don’t like to sleep for some reason even though it’s so relaxing and enjoyable. How many hours of sleep a night do people need to heal their adrenals?
Pam Killeen: Well, part of that is the misinformation. I don’t know if you’ve been seeing in the news, they’re trying to say, “Oh, you only need five hours or six hours a night.” Part of the problem is the misinformation.
The other part of the problem is that as the body becomes more and more toxic, as there’s more and more copper build-up in the body, the copper is pushing and pushing and pushing on the adrenal glands like a crack cocaine.
And so 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you feel like you’re running away from a lion internally. So when you’re running away from a lion, there’s no time for eating, sleeping or sex. These three systems become impaired.
Wendy Myers: Certainly no time for sex.
Pam Killeen: No energy for it, right? I mean, essentially, that’s a luxury. So when your body is on its way out, no time for these luxuries.
But the sleeping becomes impaired because you’re just on alert all the time from the copper stimulating the adrenal glands. I’d say 95% of my clients start off with me with some kind of sleep issue. They can’t fall asleep. They can’t stay asleep. They wake up totally unrefreshed. They don’t dream. A lot of them don’t have dream recall. That’s a big symptom. As the minerals balance out, their dreams come back and that’s part and parcel to having a better quality, deeper sleep at night as well.
So the sleep issue is huge, Wendy. There’s no question about it. It can take a long time to resolve based on how toxic that individual is, based upon how cooperative their bile is. If their bile is being stagnant, if the liver is very toxic, it may take a year or two years before their bile starts to kick in. And then the copper makes its way out and then maybe they can start sleeping at night.
But yeah, I want my clients sleeping nine hours a night, maybe even more. Nine solid hours. It’s not sleeping now for three or four hours, waking up, staying up for an hour, maybe falling back asleep if they’re lucky. No, they have to have nine solid hours of sleep a night. They may have to get up to go to the bathroom, but hopefully, they can go right back to bed and fall asleep again.
But nine hours, absolutely! They need their nine hours to sleep at night, they need to chill a lot during the day.
Wendy Myers: That’s hard for people to accept that they need to sleep that long. But you pay for it. You pay for it. A lot of these people, there’s a lot of health labs that are like, “Oh, you can biohack your sleep and do all these stuff.” You can’t. No one is smarter than mother nature. You have got to sleep and make the time for it and go to bed earlier.
I find, even with myself, if I’m being naughty and I’m on the computer and I’m really on a tangent writing or whatever and I stay up until midnight, it’s harder to fall asleep and then I still wake up at the normal time. I usually wake up at 6 a.m. (or sometimes, earlier). I still wake up at that time. You shortchange yourself and it shortens your life. It absolutely does.
Pam Killeen: It’s going to throw off your hormones, your ability to control your blood sugar. It’s going to adversely affect you in many, many ways.
But you bring up a good point, Wendy and that is the inverse relationship of the circadian rhythms associated with adrenal fatigue. What you just mentioned is a classic symptom of adrenal fatigue and that is people get their second wind at 9:00 at night. And so, intellectually, we know they should go to bed at 10:00 or 11:00 or whatever the case may be, but they get their second wind, so they actually have energy at that hour of the night. And then they wake up exhausted if they were lucky enough to fall asleep anyway.
But what has to happen in terms of getting the minerals in balance, getting the hormones in balance is getting them to the point where at 9:00 at night, they start getting sleepy. They can fall asleep relatively easily at 10:00, get up at 6:00 or 7:00. That’s a nice rhythm to be in.
But I can tell you – oh, my gosh! – the torture that my clients go through just to get into that rhythm. It is not easy to do. You first have to embrace the fact that that’s the goal, to get into that kind of sleep rhythm.
To help, by the way, just a little trick is to make sure your room is as dark as possible, to use white nose like a fan running in the background, use ear plugs, taking a little bit of salt before you go to bed. That can help relax you enough to fall asleep.
Wendy Myers: I take calcium and magnesium.
Pam Killeen: Yeah, that can help.
Wendy Myers: I take that to relax my parasympathetic nervous system.
Pam Killeen: That’s a good thing – or even having a hot bath or a sauna before bed. That can help people who are having sleep trouble. Again, it’s an oversimplification because there’s so much behind the insomnia, but these are tricks that can sometimes help.
Wendy Myers: For me, a big one were sleep masks. It’s the same concept as darkening your room. But if you’re not able to darken it, a sleep mask for me is huge… huge, huge, huge.
Wendy Myers: And so let’s talk about some of the metals that irritate the adrenals. This is the last question. A lot of these heavy metals that are inside of us are irritating and stimulating the adrenal glands. Can you talk about some of those?
Pam Killeen: It’s a cocktail. It’s really a cocktail. The adrenal glands are saying, “They’re invaders. Get out!” That’s the adrenal gland’s job. They’re saying, “There’s an invader here. It’s my job as the adrenal glands to kick that baby out, to kick that out” to whatever is in excess and isn’t supposed to be there.
So the copper is constantly, constantly on alert to send out those signals, to grab at the unwanted metals, send them to the bile and then we’re supposed to eliminate them into the toilet.
So any metals really, it’s just a cocktail of metals that are going to be there to irritate the adrenal gland, but the most invasive one is going to be the copper simply because copper is so incredibly ubiquitous because of copper pipes, because of copper being added to city water as an anti-fungal, because people have become red meat phobic. They’re not getting enough zinc to counteract the copper, so copper will over-accumulate, birth control. There’s just so many ways.
I completely agree with Dr. Eck when he said that copper toxicity is the greatest scourge on society today. I completely agree with him on that. But because we don’t see it, smell it, we take it for granted. I do classes on copper toxicity. Obviously, I know what’s going to happen. Their eyes are going to glaze over because they’re hearing it for the first time and it’s like, “No, that’s just too complicated. I’m not going to do it.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And because copper is a nutritive mineral (or metal, what-have-you) and it’s in all the vitamins, especially prenatal vitamins, people think that they need to be taking it.
Pam Killeen: It’s confusing. There’s no question. Most of my clients are referrals. You’re probably getting a lot of referrals. People who do the program, they feel the result on the program and they tell their neighbor, their sister, their father or their mother or whatever. It’s very difficult.
I tell my clients, “One percent of the population will find out about mineral balancing. But of that 1%, only 1% will actually do it.” So it takes a very precious person to surrender to do this program. It takes somebody who is extremely motivated, who is tired to listening to hocus pocus and false promises and that candy store of supplements that is out there. It’s not easy to do this. It takes a lot to surrender to it.
When you start mineral balancing, you will not understand in three months. You will not understand it in six months, probably not even in a year. It takes a long time to totally understand what mineral balancing is truly all about.
Wendy Myers: And it takes a leap of faith as well for people to surrender all the knowledge they know and all the programming they’ve had and what their doctors are telling them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera that’s just shining right directly in the face of the program. It take a certain person to be able to let go of that and stop trying to change it or not do parts of the program, “I’ll do this, but not that” and what-not. And so it is challenging.
But it works. For the people that do it, wow! They have amazing results.
Pam Killeen: Oh, it works. It works, but they do have to be ready for it. I can vouch for that. I used to think I knew a lot about natural health and nutrition. I used to think I knew a lot about it until I learned this and I went, “I knew nothing.”
Keep in mind, I collapsed in the ‘80s. So I’ve been in this field for a long, long time. And so when I found out about copper toxicity, I went, “Oh, there was stone I didn’t look under.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmmm… exactly. Yeah, I feel very fortunate I found it early on – very, very, very fortunate. A lot of people do a lot of different kinds of things and so I’m very thankful I found it.
Wendy Myers: So how long does it take to heal the adrenal fatigue?
Pam Killeen: It depends on the individual. It depends if they’ve ever been a vegetarian. Vegetarians are going to take longer to heal. You can give it a 2-year window. I’m fortunate that I understand the importance of animal fat. My clients have an edge over others who may not understand the benefits of animal fat and how it relates to adrenal function in general, but also in terms of getting the bile going.
So I think two years is a good window. It may take three or four years. If somebody’s working a full-time job, the program, they may take longer just because there may be stress at work or they may be not getting enough sleep or rest. It depends on every individual.
So there is no answer to that question unfortunately. There is no absolute answer.
Wendy Myers: So between two and five years roughly?
Pam Killeen: Probably. Probably, yeah. It depends. It depends. And I tell all my clients, a lot of them take what I call the ‘slow train’.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Pam Killeen: …because they don’t want to provoke too much of a detox for whatever reason. If they take this slow train, it’s going to take the window that you were describing, two to five years probably.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, okay. Well Pam, thank you so much for being on the show. That was amazing! So informative. I love you and I’m so glad that we connected and I had you come on the show.
Pam Killeen: Thanks so much for having me, Wendy. And keep up the great work. You’re doing some fantastic work.
Wendy Myers: Thank you.
Pam Killeen: I do hope we could meet at a conference in-person and not just thousands of miles away.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, the Weston A. Price conference, yeah.
Wendy Myers: So do you have any closing thoughts you want to tell the listeners or where they can find you and buy your books and things like that.
Pam Killeen: Yeah, if people want, I have an open Facebook group where I just post the occasional article or radio show. So Facebook is the place to find me. I do a lot of radio, so I have multimedia pages where I post a lot of my archives show.
You’ll find I don’t talk a lot about mineral balancing when I do other radio shows simply because I find it too much for people to understand. Their eyes just glaze over. I tend to talk more about Weston Price’s work and other subjects.
But yeah, I have a lot of radio shows on my multimedia pages that people might enjoy. Feel free to send me a friend request at my main Facebook page.
I do have another book that I’m working on that will be coming out hopefully by the end of this year as well. It’s another call-to-action like my last book, which was a call-to-action about the addiction epidemic that we have. This next book is a call-to-action as well because I just don’t see how our children are going to be able to have children unfortunately based on how incredibly sick they are.
I think we need to start that discussion. It’s a very important subject that’s very near and dear to my heart when I look at our children today and I see how much they’re struggling. It’s pretty serious stuff. I hope to have that book out by the end of this year.
Wendy Myers: Do you have a title yet?
Pam Killeen: Yeah, it’s just ‘Survival of the Unfittest’.
Wendy Myers: I like that.
Pam Killeen: I just started my Facebook page for the book the other day. Now I’ll just have to decide what it’s like or how do I do it, sell it as an ebook or a hard copy. There’s almost too much choice in terms of getting a book out there today.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yes. Yes, there is. I understand.
Pam Killeen: I just have to make that decision next. But the book is basically written. It’s just all these little intricate details that have to be worked out from here on end.
Wendy Myers: Okay, Pam, thank you so much for coming on the show. I definitely, definitely want to have you come on again and talk about addiction because that’s a huge problem.
Pam Killeen: Huge, huge.
Wendy Myers: Let’s do that next.
Pam Killeen: A big problem as well. So yeah, let’s give these people some hope.
Wendy Myers: And listeners, if you want to learn about detoxification and my version of the primal diet, the Modern Paleo Diet (very similar to Weston Price), please go visit myersdetox.com. I talk all about detox, you can learn all about my Mineral Power program and how it can heal your health and reverse disease and detox you and experience all the lovely detox symptoms that we talked about today on the show. Visit myersdetox.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.