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Transcript
- 03:35 About Dr. Greg Tefft
- 16:49 Brain Fog
- 19:06 Boosting Brain Function
- 23:19 Copper Toxicity
- 26:51 Mercury Toxicity
- 36:49 Coffee Enemas
- 39:57 Hair Mineral Analysis
- 52:15 The most pressing health issue in the world today
- 52:42 Dr. Tefft’s book: Your Personal Life
- 01:03:35 More about Dr. Greg Tefft
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. I’m your host, Wendy Myers. You can find me on myersdetox.com. You can watch this video on my YouTube channel at wendyLiveto110 or on the blog post on the website, myersdetox.com.
Today, I am really excited. We have got Dr. Greg Tefft. He is a DL, a naturopathic doctor and a PhD. He’s going to be talking to us about how to improve your brain function.
I know a lot of people out there have brain fog. It starts to set in in your thirties and forties and it gets worse. I know that I had a big problem with it. So I’m very, very interested personally in how to improve your memory and improve your brain function. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today on the show.
And first, we 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. This show is for entertainment purposes only. You should consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment or diet that we suggest on the show today.
I had such a good time this weekend. I went to the Bulletproof Biohackers Conference put on by Dave Asprey every year. On Friday, I was talking about infrared saunas. So many amazing luminaries in the biohacking field converged on to the Pasadena Convention Center to talk about all the ideas. So many amazing ideas and lecturers at this conference. I ate it all up and we were just drinking bulletproof coffee the whole time. Everyone is buzzing at the conference. Everyone is all wired on bulletproof coffee the whole time.
I got to meet Dr. Sara Gottfried and Donna Gates and JJ Virgin and Abel James and Dave Asprey himself. I met so many amazing people. I was just really honored to be a part of it.
I believe the videos are going to be available for sale at some point. They’re going to make all of the conferences, all the presentations available for sale. So you can go to Dave Asprey’s website, bulletproofexact.com and find out more information about that, when they’ll be available.
So let’s get on with the interview.
Dr. Greg Tefft is a drugless physician who specializes in orthomolecular medicine. He is also a naturopathic doctor, a chiropractor and renowned clinical bionutritionist and wellness practitioner. He’s also the author and founder of personalized nutrition consultants.
Dr. Tefft is also a former sports medicine staff member for the U.S. Olympic team, the U.S. National Swim Team and the Race Across America and other elite sports organizations. He has written two books and today, specializes in his practice of personalized medicine using hair mineral analysis.
I just brought his book on personalized nutrition and I’m really excited to read it next fall in a few weeks. Also, I’m really excited to learn about Dr. Tefft’s nutrition program and that’s part of what we’re going to be talking about today on the show to figure out how to improve your brain function.
So, Dr. Tefft, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Hi, Wendy. Thank you for having me.
Wendy Myers: Yes! So why don’t you tell the listeners one thing about yourself?
Dr. Greg Tefft: I’d like to say one thing before I start.
Wendy Myers: Yes!
Dr. Greg Tefft: According to UCLA and the Arizona [inaudible 00:03:42] experiment, we should all live to be 166 if we can balance our body. How about that? A hundred and ten is just warm-up.
Wendy Myers: Well, I looked at 120.com, Liveto130, Liveto140.com. They were all taken! I couldn’t quite get up there, but I thought myersdetox.com – it was taken too. I still had to buy it. But I thought it was kind of funny, so I bought that.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Well, either way, we’re not getting our life expectancy. But just on that, just to throw a tidbit out to you and your audience, we have gone from 1969 from being 5th in the world for life expectancy – can you imagine? – to 39th now. We are losing it. So just to throw that out there. This is an issue. And life expectancy has to do with everything about health and well being. We’re getting sicker now. We’re degenerating quickly or premature aging or any of the things we’re going to talk about today like neurodegenerative problems and such.
People just don’t know we’re slipping. And then we’re told everything is okay because we’re all drugged out.
It’s unfortunate, but people are living on drugs when they need to be living off of the right foods and maybe vitamins and other helpers along the way that can help you to put things back in balance in a day when the food is deluded, the environment is corrupted, there’s all these toxic stuff – the stress, the drugs. Oh, my gosh!
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I think people are under the misconception that they think we have the best medical care in the world. I was really surprised and dismayed when I read in Consumer Reports on health that our healthcare system actually rates no. 17. We have a high infant mortality rate. It’s all due to poor nutrition and heavy metal and chemical toxicity.
Dr. Greg Tefft: And I work with people out of the country. We send tests to them and we do consultations with this means. And you know what? Other countries, in fact, statistically rate much better on nutrition tests than we do. The statistics are there.
This country, I don’t know what your statistics are for the hair test that you do as an example, but I would say almost 99%, 99.5% or so of the people I test just with simple mineral analysis, about a third of what we test or more is out of order already causing all these little problems they never knew are going to build up to the big problems.
Now, you can fix it if you jump on it soon enough and know what the heck to do.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. Well, why don’t you tell us how you got into it, how you got into hair mineral analysis and how you got all these degrees?
Dr. Greg Tefft: Well, you know, it’s just that I like school.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I do too.
Dr. Greg Tefft: No, just kidding. But the way it really started for me was I was supposed to be in the ’72 Olympics and I had beaten [inaudible 00:06:32] who beat Spitz. I don’t know if you remember Mark Spitz. He won seven gold medals in swimming. His coach was my part-time coach, Sherm Chavoor. I was on the east coast. Spitz was from the west coast more or less. I actually went to Indiana. He was Midwest.
But, nonetheless, on my way. I was only 17. In high school, I actually swam at UConn, the University of Connecticut as part of my prep because they thought I was going to make the ’72 Olympics in Munich.
All of a sudden, it was the year just – it was maybe about seven months before the Olympics. My two best buddies were killed in a car accident. I pulled them out of a car. It’s a very sad story. Almost from that moment on, I had the worst asthma you could ever imagine.
I went to the docs. They said, “Well, you know, it’s stress-induced asthma. You’re allergic to chicken feathers, dust and dust mites.” That’s all they could find with the test they used.
So I missed the ’72 Olympics because I couldn’t breathe and you can’t use the medications that they give you for asthma at the Olympics. They improve performance because they’re stimulants.
So I passed up, “Okay, I’ll pick it up on the next run. Maybe I’d make it again.” If I never overcome this asthma and they’re telling me, “No, you can’t. You can’t. You’re stuck. You got to take the meds,” it was really a sad situation.
A fellow by the name of Dr. Carlton Fredericks had a radio show back in New York. He was talking about all these tests beyond what they teach medical doctors that you can do to pinpoint all these problems in the body like hair testing as an example, looking at things that the regular docs aren’t looking [inaudible 00:08:14].
My dad was looking to try to help me and he actually called and he got Dr. Fredericks on the phone. He says, “Here, tell him all your problem.” I got on the phone and Dr. Fredericks said, “Hey, tell me about you.” I was telling him, “Well, you know, I got this horrible asthma. I had to be hospitalized three times because I can’t breathe. I’ve dropped out of school for the year. I had to go back in.”
And he said, “Well, you probably have not enough magnesium. Maybe you’ve got some toxic metals in you. Maybe there are a couple of other things. Maybe the chlorine in the pool has created a copper-zinc imbalance.” I mean, all these things I’ve never heard before. The regular docs are just saying, “Ah, you know, you’ve got asthma. Take some drugs. That’s it. You’re stuck with it.”
So I went to a research clinic in New York. He gave me the information and they had all these tests I’ve never seen before – nutrient [inaudible 00:09:02], all these nutrients, minerals, vitamins, amino acids, fatty acids, vitamin-like substances, cell regulators, transcript proteins and hormones (stress and sex hormones) and also, toxins. There are 400 toxins out there.
And what they found; we don’t have time for the show. All this stuff in me, mercury and all this crazy stuff (and magnesium deficiency, absolutely). I went on a diet – not a drug, a diet that was made customized to me and customized vitamins. Within a year and a half, I never had an asthma attack again. How is that?
So I had put it to the test. I went to three other sports. I tried to get back in the Olympics, 5th in the Junior Olympics in track & field using personalized nutrition. I was there because I was strong. I went into power lifting. I became a super power lifting. And then, at last (my last, but not least there), I got into natural bodybuilding and became Natural Mr. America three times, which nobody else has done.
I tried to win the regular Mr. America, which is two weeks later I guess and could only manage – what was it? Eighth, seventh, and sixth. But that’s not bad for the whole country.
Wendy Myers: You mean the guys on steroids?
Dr. Greg Tefft: Yes, guys on steroids. So it really worked. And mentally, my IQ has gone up. I mean, I’m 61 now.
But nonetheless, I wanted at that point, along the way, I got to devote myself to this. That’s where I put my curriculum focus into. The first thing I did when I was able to treat people was get them worked out.
As Hippocrates said, “In all disease, look to the spine first.” That’s where your bodywork comes from. “Let thy food be thy remedy.” That’s my second layer. And then “treat the individual, not the disease.” He said that back in 2500 BC. That was my mantra.
So I did that holistic at its best. And just through a series of, I guess just good luck and getting some great results, I ended up in Malibu like you, Malibu Health & Rehab. I was on CBS this morning talking about how I helped all these celebrities in record time turning themselves around using all these new-fangled technology.
Wendy Myers: Hair mineral analysis, yeah.
Dr. Greg Tefft: And from there, I decided, “Let’s get it to the masses.”
So I put together an Internet company in 2001 and we’ve been doing this ever since and running strong.” And now, of course, we’re actually merging with another company called ‘Only Nature’s Finest’ to even get bigger and more out there and working with rehab centers, the addicts who have all kinds of – oh, my God! Toxins and all kinds of crazy stuff.
And along the way, of course, being an athlete, being Mr. America [inaudible 00:11:40], whatever, it really got me into a lot of places. I even got a [inaudible 00:11:43] card. I get a lot of TV and brought in a lot of information. I was on Fox. I don’t know if you saw the Fox video on..
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Fox loved it. They checked this out. They said, “Nah, this is too good to be true.” And it’s not.
So I devoted my life to this more or less. I even said in the book, every test you name, I’m an expert at. And I could build a lab from the ground up because the whole secret to knowing what’s really going on with you is to reach inside and see all the stuff that everybody else forgets about.
Like Dr. [inaudible 00:12:16] says, “The average physician only looks at maybe 5%” or even less, “than what’s really going on in your body.” And 99% of what’s going on, you can’t feel until it reaches a certain point anyway. So you can’t always go by symptoms either. And regular medicine is there to catch you when you fall, not prevent you from falling.
So the whole thing came together for me. The rest is history, working [inaudible 00:12:37]. All the people, by the way, at the top do these tests. No exceptions. [inaudible 00:12:44], one of my protégés, Fabio Manzoni [inaudible 00:12:47]. They love this.
Wendy Myers: Good! He’s got a lot of hair to test.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Yeah, I don’t want to advertise, but these famous bodybuilders in the world have these tests sitting in front of them. When Fox had pictures of the people at the Emmy Awards, a lot of those people were on my program.
And so the whole point being that it always seems the rich and famous find out about these things before everybody else. But part of the problem was it was more expensive. It was more complicated. All of these things are super less expensive.
And the beautiful part is with the hair testing (since we love hair testing), it’s [inaudible 00:13:23]. So if your calcium is higher, it showed low in your mineral test, it means that maybe vitamin B6, you need more of. It tells you all these other information.
And I used to do that in Malibu. Put them all side by side and then say, “Oh, my God! When calcium is up, neutral amino acids are higher.” So really, for a lot of people, it changes their lives automatically. I love it! That’s kind of my story.
Hopefully, someday – I have a new book called ‘How to Fix the Broken Healthcare System’. I’m going to tie these all together into an incentivized program where you actually get paid to be well.
We actually test you completely. We design a wellness prescription for life and then we provide a discount and payback system for everything you need that’s specific to you through all the sources.
It’s an amazing idea. That’s my big goal. Maybe we can actually revamp the healthcare system.
So all these, the story I’m telling you leads up to, “Hey, maybe there’s something we can do to make this insurance system, which is so broken work again.”
Wendy Myers: Well, that’s a fascinating concept. We need that so badly. I fear the big, powerful pharmaceutical companies aren’t going to let that happen, but I think that’s amazing. I think we need that so badly.
But I think as foot soldiers for hair mineral analysis and personalized nutrition, I think I really want to get the word out on that because I think once practitioners find hair mineral analysis, they don’t go back. They don’t look any further because I feel like it’s the holy grail.
Once I found this; it’s really the key to health, balancing your minerals. That produces a tremendous amount of health in balancing your biochemistry.
Dr. Greg Tefft: You’re absolutely right. It gives you so much more for so much less. They figured it out. They put all the tests side by side. I agree with you 100%. It surprises people when they have such poor test results, it really does.
But either way, it’s a major tool. And it’s a self-help. It’s really outside of the doctor’s office. You got to help yourself. You have to choose different foods. We already have people on one-size-fits-all diets like we were talking about, from blood type to you-name-it. But without testing, you can’t tell really what your body needs.
I mean, that’s the predication for all of medicine. You don’t just go to the doctor and he looks at your sheet and doesn’t test you to figure out what drugs you need or what’s wrong with you. He’s got to test you.
You are not what you eat. You are what you retain and utilize from what you eat. That’s the thing. And that varies from person to person to person. It’s all about digestion, absorption, utilization, elimination.
It doesn’t matter what your genes say because your ability to adapt to the environment can throw your metabolism off and your genes wants one thing, but metabolism can only deliver another. And that’s where the breakdown of disease go.
So in the epigeneticist’s world and the geneticist’s world, what we’re trying to do is create harmony between the internal environment and the external environment – and not everybody is the same. So an Eskimo needs maybe a whole bunch of [inaudible 00:16:21]. Everything is in the middle for us.
So testing is the only way to sort this out unless you’re part of a primal tribe like [inaudible 00:16:32] or something. They have the best nutrition test (hair and otherwise) of all by the way.
Wendy Myers: Wow! Well, that’s interesting. I hadn’t realized there had been testing done on them.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Oh, yes! That’s why it looks too much information. How are we getting it out there?
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk about brain fog a little bit. A lot of people suffer from brain fog. It’s not something you can go to your doctor and get tested for or they can relieve in any way. They’re just going to look at you like you’re nuts like “Join the club! Everyone has brain fog.”
So what causes brain fog? And what reduces brain function?
Dr. Greg Tefft: Well, water for one thing. A lot of people don’t drink enough water. Water slows your whole body down. And let’s just say about brain and body. They work together. You can’t separate them out that much because what you put in your body gets into your brain and what’s in your brain feeds back to your body.
I know there’s that blood-brain barrier, but just general things like protein, not too much carbohydrate, not enough protein, water like I said, not getting enough sleep, allergies. There’s a whole host of things.
Nutritional imbalances of all kinds like copper (which I guess we’re going to talk about some more). These are primary reasons why – And then of course drugs. Drugs can create all kinds of stresses that affect neurotransmitter, that affect the integrity, the structure and the function of the brain in so many ways that’s not funny. We have almost half of America on a drug right now and a lot of their brain dysfunction is just from the medications’ side effects too.
So the thyroid being slow, the adrenals being slow all increases brain fog. Obviously, allergies and toxic metals. Toxic metals, that’s a big one. Poor digestion, constipation. There’s a connection from below to above that people don’t realize.
So people have to realize that sometimes simple, little things that they’re not doing like drinking water and eating properly, getting food, preservatives and of course, toxins (there’s a lot of other toxins that can affect you), they might be causing the problem.
Meds, hormones, stress hormones, stress, of course. If you put out a lot of cortisol, it affects the way your brain works. Low or high selenium levels, blood pressure, heart disease, poor circulation. I mean, all of those things add to the problem. Not enough oxygen to the brain. Exercise helps to clear you up. Norepinephrine from your adrenal gland will open everything up. So if you’re all clogged up, that’s part of the brain fog problem too. So there are a lot of things going on here.
Wendy Myers: So what is some of the best ways that people can boost brain function?
Dr. Greg Tefft: Well, for one thing, do all the stuff we’re talking about…
Wendy Myers: Do the opposite of what you just said.
Dr. Greg Tefft: So there’s a list like getting the right aminos in. I actually put together a hit list here. I was just saying, “Okay, what have I used in the past?” I’m going to cheat. I have a little cheat sheet here. These are some of the things that help.
Realize that the testing sets the pace for getting your body to work better under its own power. That’s what we really want. So before anybody does anything, they need to get at least the hair test to see where they stand because you have a battle of the sedative versus the stimulating nutrients.
By the way, copper is sedative. It puts your brain to sleep. It just interrupts. It’s just the way it functions in so many ways, whereas something like potassium is stimulating. You got to get the yin and the yang balanced out throughout your body and it will work through all the tissues in the body.
Just because you eat something that you think is good for your body, don’t think it doesn’t affect your brain. Too much sugar is something that really clogs the blood-brain barrier. So I looked down some of the stuff I’ve used – alpha-GPC, pantothenic acid. I’ve measured people with pantothenic acid deficiencies. You get what? Choline utilization based on pantethine. And if you have a pantothenic acid deficiency, you’re not getting enough choline, [inaudible 00:20:29] choline, which is the most common neurotransmitter in the brain. You can’t get everything to communicate if you don’t have that.
There’s a lot at stake here. There are biogenic amines. There are amino neurotransmitters. And then there are peptide neurotransmitters. There’s only a few neurotransmitters that are responsible for connectivity in the brain. Everything is connected to the next thing. There’s a feedback mechanism. You’ve got the enzymatic make-up of each brain cell. You have enough iron for the cytochromes. They’re going to make energy [inaudible 00:20:58]. And then you’ve got the structure like the myelin sheaths, cerebrocytes phospholipids. I don’t want to throw too much out there. But you’ve got to consider structure and function.
So something like alpha-GPC helps the neurotransmitters to work there, something like pantothenic acid that helps the neurotransmitters, something like DHA helps the cerebrocytes so you have better build up of lipids. And copper. Copper is involved with lipid utilization too. So you make collagen. There’s a lot of things that copper does. And if you have too much of one thing, it can cancel out another thing.
Other things, I guess, folic acid. Everybody talks about folic acid. It’s a biggie with addicts, by the way, folic acid. Something else, impositing. You’ve heard of impositing circulation. It opens up the blood vessels. Hawthorne does that too. Just like it does work for your heart, it works for your brain. Arginine. Everybody is talking about nitric oxide. It enhances circulation. Exercise increases oxygenation. If you do all these things at the same time, it’s almost like [inaudible 00:22:02].
I also put the whole [inaudible 00:22:03]. I think you had sent me something about phosphatidylcholine. Well, I find that phosphatidylserine helps in cell communication. Again, it helps neurotransmitters to be more effective so you can remember easier, things like that.
The DMAE. Have you heard DMAE?
Wendy Myers: Yes.
Dr. Greg Tefft: It forms a acetycholine, again, which you need. CDP-choline. You’ve heard of [inaudible 00:22:27]. That also helps neurotransmitter synthesis in general. It helps dopamine, it helps them all. I don’t want to give too many details.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, you’re going to give the transcriptionist a run for her money.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Oh, yeah! Omega 3’s of course, phospholipids like choline is really good.
Oh, a couple of things that I’ve used really helped as adaptogens, ginseng and bacopa monnieri. That was my kind of wish list. If I ever make a grain product to boost things on top of balancing things, I’ll probably put all those in there if I can get them to measure it.
So some are just in structure, some are just in function. Some are inside the cells. Some are between the cells. The idea is just to kind of wake up the brain. The rest of the body thankfully doesn’t all use up all these stuff. The brain will get enough if you put enough in.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about copper. I know with all my clients, every single one has overt or hidden copper toxicity. It’s such a huge problem. None of the doctors (or very, very few) are aware of this issue because they test copper in the RBC test and the copper is usually low when we want to be testing the tissues because that’s where we’re going to get our information and reveal copper toxicity in somebody.
So why don’t we talk about how copper toxicity affects the brain negatively?
Dr. Greg Tefft: Well, when you have too much of any nutrient like copper that’s very powerful, it does a few hundred things they know about in the body. It forms collagen. It helps to form dopamine. I mean, it’s countless, what it does.
The problem is in hair particularly, when it’s higher, it means it’s not being utilized properly. It’s really deficient in the place it needs to be. So you’re robbing the places that need the copper and it’s ending up interfering with other functions in the brain like zinc and iron.
Your brain needs iron to run monoamine oxidants as an example. If there’s too much copper, the iron can’t bind with the monoamine oxidates and it cuts your serotonin down, which can throw you off balance. It can cause mood swings, memory impairment and all kinds of stuff. When you look at what all these neurotransmitters do, it’s amazing – and where they come from.
So as with anything, I tell people, “It’s bad enough to have a deficiency.” So if your copper is low, you can have – you’ve heard of steely hair disease. I mean, there’s a lot of things. Copper being high can be anything from leukemia – I mean, serious stuff to neurodegenerative problems.
And it’s because it gets in the way of other things and collects in tissues it doesn’t belong and weakens it because there’s a displacement effect between – particularly minerals. They’re very powerful. If you took all potassium out of the body or all copper, you’d die instantaneously. If we took all vitamin D out of the body, you’ll probably never die. You have just kind of spongy bones. Vitamins aren’t as powerful.
Teaming up the two – and realize minerals really set the pace (they’re the spark plugs for the whole operation of the body) – you can start to knock down the displacement problem. So you can put more iron and zinc as an example and methionine to knock the copper out of the places it doesn’t belong.
Just think of maybe rust. Copper, even though we’re talking iron, we think of rust, yet copper in a place where it’s too much and it interferes with the cross-linking and zinc and iron being used in building tissue. It just overwhelms them and it stops the process so it weakens the tissue as an example.
So in the way of the enzymes like serotonin (the precursor to that monoamine oxidase), the copper gets in the way of iron doing its job. So it’s really a matter of copper getting in the way of zinc and iron and a lot of other things that it affects.
A high calcium with a high copper, real bad. That adds up to more problems. When calcium gets stuck in the brain and copper gets stuck in the brain, you can develop (along with a little aluminum to boot) Parkinson’s disorder. These excesses are far more dangerous are deficiencies and deficiencies are easier to fix than excesses.
So just to give you a couple of ideas, I mean, there’s lots more if you want to go there.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, I love that. I love that explanation because it’s just so good. I just love it so much. There’s so much to this, the depth that you can go to in interpreting a hair mineral analysis just blows your mind. So I love your take on it.
Wendy Myers: But I want to talk a little bit about mercury. A lot of proponents of hair mineral analysis say to avoid fish that have mercury in them because we see higher mercury levels in people that eat fish.
But then there’s other proponents that say like Chris Kresser and Dr. Jack Kruse who’s a neurosurgeon that talk about how if you eat fish with enough selenium in it that that will counteract the effects of the mercury.
I’m wondering if you think that if you eat fish that have adequate selenium – of course they all have mercury, but if they have adequate selenium, is the selenium detoxing the mercury and that’s why we’re seeing elevated levels on the hair test?
Dr. Greg Tefft: Well, that’s the issue. Is the mercury being cast out at the moment when it’s high there out of the body? Maybe that’s a good thing. I mean, that’s why you need to test to see where you’re at.
I mean, obviously, lower levels are always desirable. Although when you have a low finding in hair as an example, it might be stored somewhere. Mercury loves the uterus in women. It loves the prostrate in men. It loves your brain. It causes funnel headaches. I mean, there’s a whole list of what mercury can do that’s making people miserable.
So it’s really a function of what’s already in your body that keeps it in balance. If you have enough selenium and sulfur as an example, enough zinc and iron, the mercury and methionine (because a lot of people don’t have enough methionine, believe it or not), the mercury will collect easily, more easily especially with high calcium, which likes to keep mercury in. Potassium, phosphorus, iron, zinc, they all keep it out. Selenium is a good one too. It’s not just onesie and twosie. See, this is the problem. It’s not all one or the other day. It’s the combination and it’s the balance in your body.
So you and I, let’s say we both were eating fish that’s high in mercury (and who knows what else is in there, but it just happens to be high in mercury). If your body is more in balance than mine, then chances are you won’t retain that mercury as easily. Your body will be able to eliminate. Whereas in my case, it might build up. So we have to figure out is it coming in or is it going out?
And you know, the funniest thing – it’s not funny, it’s sad. I met a lot of people on migraine medication and they are getting headaches, funnel headaches, which is classic for mercury. All they’ve got to do is clear the mercury out and they’ll never need a medication again. Stuff like that happens all the time talking about the brain and other things too.
So we need to know what’s going on and we need to fight it. More fiber helps. You can’t control what’s in the fish and you can’t just indiscriminately take selenium and expect magical things to happen because you got to weight one nutrient against the other. We’ve got to see the overall effect because it’s the patterns of things. They work together. They don’t work independently of one another. They need each other.
So you need to deliver it to the body in the way the body needs it on a specific level at the moment. And then as you put it back into balance, you will find that it doesn’t take as much to keep you there and it will define what you can eat more of and less off.
Maybe only about a third of the food out there is really what your genes are looking for and you’ll discover it because you’ll basically have omnivores and all types, vegetarians and all these subtypes and carnivegans. And of course, carnivores are Eskimos as an example and [inaudible 00:30:05], things like that.
So you’ve got extremes and you’ve got mix-ups of what the different dietary patterns are and it’s just not fair to just try to relegate it to simplicity. It’s called ‘diagnostic reductionism’. We’re trying to go down onesie, twosie when really, everything is weighted against the middle. Balance is the key.
So you shouldn’t be worried about eating fish. I mean, yeah, what are you going to do? Stop eating fish because maybe 10% is tainted out there? How about building up your body so even if you do eat it, it doesn’t do anything to you. That’s the way to go.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. That’s what I’m leaning towards. I was taught by Dr. Laurence Wilson, “Avoid all fish” and I just don’t buy it. I don’t buy that because it’s like you have selenium in the fish, you will detox it out. The more and more balanced your body becomes, you have a greater resistance to building up toxins in your body and detoxing them better.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Well, it’s what’s in your body that counts, I tell people because stuff will stick to your ribs or not depending on your balance.
I’ll give you a quick example, something really interesting. A guy that lives on Lake Erie – you’ve heard of the great lake, Lake Erie, which was known for mercury problems. He’s a long-term client of ours. He became a fast metabolism. You know how that is. He was really balanced. He was doing great. He’s a super athlete.
All of a sudden, he sends in a retest to us and his mercury was right off the chart. I said, “What the heck was that about?” He goes, “I have no idea.” And we figured it out.
You know what had happened? He bought a whole freezer full of [inaudible 00:31:39] from a fishermen on Lake Erie. I told him there’s [inaudible 00:31:45] we found. He took the fish down and they found it was full of mercury. That’s where his mercury came out.
But I’ll tell you this. Within the next three or four months from that test to the next, that mercury was right down to zip again. It was just in and out so fast especially with the change in the hair test recommendations. Bingo! Now, some people, the stuff hangs around forever because they never balance out.
So the bottom-line to me is getting your body in balance is the best protection against any kind of environmental irritation.
Wendy Myers: So do you think that people, maybe when they’re starting out on a mineral balancing program like what we do that maybe they should avoid fish in the beginning? And then when their body is more balanced, then introducing more? Or do you think it doesn’t matter? Just go for your fish and your sushi?
Dr. Greg Tefft: If they’re doing the right vitamins, if they’re being good on their diet, I don’t worry about it as much unless there’s something really obvious.
And remember, I’ve tested hairs, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff going on. If people respond to the hair test within the framework that we’d call acceptable, that’s one thing.
But if some things doesn’t happen, the test can point out the little things that are going on that might more or less lead you to the conclusion that there’s something wrong here. There’s maybe a parasite or there’s an infection. High copper shows the inflammation and infection. It’s also one of the biomarkers for leukemia. You got to keep an eye on all these things when they get really extreme.
So the point being that we need to put it all together and not worry about the little details as much until we get from test to test. And then we say, “You know what? That mercury is not moving. Maybe we’ll cut down your fish on the next phase until your body catches up.”
Everybody is so different than the next that even the test, you got to be adaptable with and you’ve got to troubleshoot as you go along with your clinical expertise on top of what the lab is telling us. It’s really the lab that knows more than you do.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes total sense to me, much more sense than everyone across the board not eating fish.
Dr. Greg Tefft: And these docs, I mean, I love docs. I work with all types of medical professionals, but quite frankly, they like to go to the reductionist theory. There’s that one thing that does it all. I tell them, “No, there’s a number of things going on here.”
It’s usually a multidimensional problem that people have. You’ve got to look at the bigger picture quite simply. You’ll always see more than you thought you could see.
Just taking one thing out of context doesn’t get you anywhere in this life. It just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work that way in medicine. I mean, it does for them because they’re dealing with symptoms.
“My head hurts.”
“Here’s a painkiller.”
“My cholesterol is high.”
“Here’s a…”
I mean, to them, it’s a reductionist way of going about fixing you because it’s a quick fix and it doesn’t take all of these others into account. No, 99% of what’s going on that got you into a crisis, that put you in that office [inaudible 00:34:38] nobody is looking at. And when you look at that, the more you can set it straight from the start, the less likely that you’ll die prematurely. You will make the 110 or more.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Greg Tefft: And you don’t want to get drugged up. You know what the number of premature preventable death is right now?
Wendy Myers: What?
Dr. Greg Tefft: Premature preventable deaths, side effect complications of correctly prescribe medications interacting and compounding over time.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yes.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Drugs aren’t the answer either. They can get us by in the short term, but we want to get off of them as quick as we can, but most people aren’t.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s what I think. Medication do save lives. We do need them. I have some of my clients on medications that bring them back from the brink of death, keep them from high blood sugar, high blood pressure damaging their body because nutrition is slow. It takes time for the supplements to start working and for the body to accept them and detox. Nutritional programs can be slow.
So I always advise my clients to stay on their medications just for a little while until we can fix the underlying root cause.
Dr. Greg Tefft: And people that go off too fast – I had a follow med who had asthma, 50. He tested and his magnesium was low, which was typical. He had some toxic things in him. He was all balanced. He was a slow metabolism [inaudible 00:35:53], but then he slowed too quickly.
Slow means [inaudible 00:35:57] food we eat, we release less energy, we get less of the nutrients from that food – digestion, absorption, utilization, elimination and all that.
With him, he was just so anxious to get off his inhalers. I said, “Don’t. Just stay with this for a while.” But he went off anyway.
And then he calls 5 ½ months later. We had already done the tests, we’re in the second phase. He calls, he says, “My asthma is coming back.” So I asked him, I said, “What did you do?” I said, “Have you been following your program?” He goes, “Yeah, I was doing great. And then all of a sudden, I got it back.” I finally got it out of him that he had stopped the medication from day one of being on this program. I said, “You can’t do that.”
So I got him to start using a lesser level. And then over time, it took about a year and a half that he was able to stop. It was kind of like me with my asthma. And then that was it. I went pretty much almost cold turkey when I was treated by the doctor, by that research center, down in New York. It was very interesting.
Wendy Myers: Are you having your clients do coffee enemas at all?
Dr. Greg Tefft: When I was in Malibu Health & Rehab and the things we did, we had three different types of naturopaths, we had different types of chiropractors, osteopath doctors, Dr. Steinkampf, we used to do just everything we could do to get these darn celebrities looking good in record time.
They say, “I got to go to a reunion and lose 50 lbs.” I go, “When’s the reunion?” “Oh, it’s about two months from now. I’m hooked on drugs.” They used to live with this. That was an amazing program.
But this all accelerated. Something like a coffee enema would accelerate elimination. We did all types of different enemas with herbal blends. I had a gal that was a specialist with that that could just figure out from the other test what do we have to clean out? Do we need to stimulate bile?
Of course, we fixed digestive systems. A lot of people have pancreatic problems. They had low stomach acid, weak stomach acid. I mean, it’s amazing what we’re running. It’s amazing we were as healthy as we are sometimes when you think about it, all the things that could go wrong.
But the way they keep me from going wrong is the balance for each of our unique biochemistries. That’s the real trick, which is where the test comes in – unless you’re a [inaudible 00:37:57] or something, then you don’t have to do that. You just go back from where you came from.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yes. We don’t know what foods we need to eat. That’s the problem if you don’t know your lineage.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Yeah. And copper, too much copper and calcium, that’s a recipe for constipation. You can’t think straight when you’re constipated. Copper increase cortisol. It cuts down on epinephrine and norepinephrine, which your brain needs like the fight-or-flight.
And even, we talked about allergies, when you look at the mechanism of histamine. Histamine is actually a neurotransmitter. It’s an excitatory neurotransmitter. But you need zinc to control it and you need histadin, the amino acid, to make it.
So if you fix histadin, you can usually fix histamine, so it’s just at the right level for your brain. But if it goes too crazy, you could have brain allergies and all these other allergies. It’s amazing.
Something like GABA, which is an amino acid neurotransmitter that calms you down. A lot of people need more GABA. That’s why they’re like, “Oh, my God! The stress gets to him. They need more GABA.”
Everything that stimulates, there’s something to bring it down. You get tryptophan-forming serotonin and tyrosine-forming dopamine. Those are opposites. I mean, tyrosine is yang. It’s a stimulant and tryptophan is a sedative.
And that’s the effect. You can always read back to the amino properties that make it up. If you look at vitamins that are made of minerals, if you look at aminos (which are going to be smaller than some minerals than others), that’s what gives them their properties in the first place.
That’s why the hair test is so fundamental. It gets to the core of what’s in you and what’s really your body functions are all about inside the cell and outside the cell.
Something like sodium not being in proportion to potassium ruins the way things move in and out of cells (brain cells included). You just can’t take it as onesie, twosie. I’m sorry, one-size-fits-all.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk a little bit about hair mineral analysis and the accuracy and validity of it.
One thing that I’m trying to do is communicate to all the listeners and the world out there that hair mineral analysis gets a bad rep especially from the medical community, there’s a few totally junked science, bogus studies out there that have ruined the reputation of hair mineral analysis with many medical doctors. So they don’t use it, this very valid and inexpensive tool.
So how many studies are out there that support the validity? I know we talked earlier, you said you’ve written a paper on this. And so why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about that?
Dr. Greg Tefft: About 7000, I counted, that back it up. There’s only six that question it.
But you have to realize the government already went through this. That’s why they licensed the lab. That’s why they created the whole technology and gave it a license. It’s just like any other medical lab.
So anybody that refutes the validity don’t know what they’re talking about. They might as well taking lab test for blood, anything because the hair test has already been proven.
It was really for animals, to help animals. It was only in the forties that Dr. Roger Wings said, “Hey, why don’t we do this on people?” Good idea! Then the government did a 21-year study called ‘An Evaluation of Research in the U.S. on Human Nutrition’.
They concluded that all diseases [inaudible 00:41:22], the solution in this can be found in nutrition. By the way, that was a half a billion dollars in fifties dollars versus a few million in today’s dollars. They concluded that we needed the hair test and they’re effective on setting the pace for developing new technology to do the hair test and the other tests too. The problem is – you talked about it earlier – politics. Politics really kept it from going out as quickly.
Now, what people don’t know is that when I looked at the research, the six tests – one of them in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which by the way, it doesn’t belong there.
The guy took different hair samples from different places and either mixed it up and didn’t do the crap right for one thing. And of course, you’re going to get mixed results because if you’re going to take a whole bunch of different – you know, from the front of the head, long hair and he’s not cutting it where you’re supposed to. I mean, there’s a whole new trick for getting this to be perfect.
But even when those studies were done, he was still looking at 5th generation ICP mass spectrometers. They’re 10th generation now. They’re so damn accurate – pardon my French. It’s not funny.
I know because I understand labs. I was going to set my own lab up once, so I really got into this. It’s bogus. And unfortunately, a lot of times, people believe rumors before they believe facts.
Now, the plain fact of the matter is in other countries outside the U.S., 70% of the medical doctors outside of this country use – this lab has its members. Seventy percent of the docs outside of this country are medical doctors whereas only 30% in this country are.
It’s all because of one guy that actually tried to set up the labs for being wrong. There was a consorted effort – And by the way, he didn’t stop with hair testing. He hates naturopaths, he hates chiropractors. He hates everything that we would call alternative or complimentary medicine. Everything, but what your doctor does, this particular group – it’s Dr. Stephen Barrett by name, they hate.
And he’s going to be hopefully taken off of the Internet. But right now, he’s losing a huge case by the Homeopathic Association of Canada. He hates homeopaths. He hates – come on! He’s working against what’s been proven, what’s licensed. You can’t do that. If you can’t see the guy is a nut, I’m sorry, but you don’t get it.
When I wrote this paper, I was just fascinated with – I mean, all the agencies and the government that rely on this test, all the licensing boards that run the health and human services of all these countries, come on! Trust me, if there was any question about this thing, it wouldn’t be on the books. It wouldn’t be as it is. And so people have got to realize that.
If they don’t like the test that you’re administering, then I would suggest if they don’t believe it, then they should stop doing all the tests that are being done by labs. I’ll tell you why (and I’ve seen this time and time again), believe it or not, blood tests, we get more mistakes on than any other type of tests – not hair test, not urine test, but blood test.
I’ve seen it happen. I had a woman, AST and ALT, the two liver enzymes, she’s in perfect health. This woman, I had been working on this for years. Her regular physicals are near perfect, her hair tests are near perfect. She’s almost 92 now and is not on any meds.
This woman goes in and, all of a sudden, those two enzymes in her liver; which could mean she has cancer, or a terrible infection, or the liver is just a mess. The doc says, “Oh! You’ve got cancer. We’ve got to put you on chemo.”
She calls me, she goes, “You just had the test. Get them to repeat the test because when they take that blood sample, they have to spin it and put it through the ICP mass in 15 minutes. They only have a window of opportunity for 15 minutes.” I’ve seen this happen time and time and time again.
They all take a break and there’s a whole bunch of these samples sitting in the air for more than 15 minutes. And guess what? When they put it through, it’s always wrong. I mean, I could talk about every sample there. They make more mistakes.
That’s why they repeat the test so quickly. When was the last time you had a repeated hair test? I can’t even remember. They’re that good. And then the mass spectrometers, they can work through it. They can burn right through it.
So just conclusively, people, we’re scientists, we’re clinicians, we’re in the know. It’s just nonsense. Anybody that doesn’t understand that a lab is a lab is a lab (and this is the law because it’s been checked out for you) and anybody that says that it isn’t, I don’t know what they are. They’re not from this planet, I’ll tell you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Greg Tefft: They’re just completely ignorant or they have an agenda.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Yeah, I know when I first was considering getting a hair test, I asked my naturopathic doctor about them. She’s like, “Well, they’re not really all that accurate.”
I asked another person, a homeopath that runs the Sta. Monica Homeopathic Pharmacy (very, very intelligent person) and she’s saying, “Oh, they’re not that accurate. You may not want to bother.”
They just aren’t aware of it. They just don’t know how accurate and valid and the decades of research that is behind interpreting this hair test. It takes years to learn how to do it. It’s not simple. You’re not just looking at your mineral in one level. That’s not what you’re using it for. But that’s what most people think.
Dr. Greg Tefft: You know, what we do – I mean, it makes so much sense. We use the law of opposites to fix them. I know Dr. Wilson doesn’t get it, this part of it, but if your body is high on certain nutrients and low on others, you need to feed the opposite into your body. It works every time. I’ve done it 300,000 times almost either directly or indirectly.
So the idea is if your body gets too much calcium building up in the wrong place and not enough potassium, you got to fill yourself full of foods that are high on the potassium and low on the calcium until it sets itself straight. And again, it’s not just those two, but a lot of things. It gives you a good basis.
Nobody else really does that. You can’t predict the diet from that, from any other test that could come with the hair test. You can’t even predict your daily vitamins as well because the amino test just tells you about aminos. A test from blood for fat-soluble vitamins just tells you about fat-soluble vitamins. The urine test for water soluble ones only tells about –
This kind of pushes it all together, a more holistic, a more complete way to approaching this thing. And if you fall through the cracks, you’ve always got other places to go. Maybe you need more digestive enzymes. Maybe you need to clear a parasite. Maybe you need to go on super chelation.
Whatever it is, we’ve got an indicator that starts you off in the right direction and directs you from there.
So we’re still back to that same program and hey! I even have an award because of saying that.
And I have as my mentor, Dr. Abram Hoffer who was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. He came out and he says, “You’re darn genius! How did you know hair tests were so important?”
I go, “I don’t know.” I said, “How did you know?”
He goes, “Well, I’m from the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. We catalog all the studies on it.” He says, “I moved to Canada from the U.S. because I used to treat schizophrenia without drugs and they hated me here. They wanted me to use drugs. So I ended up retiring in Canada. The heck with the place! They just want to drug you up.”
When they start [inaudible 00:48:23] two Nobel Prizes. I used to know him from Cancer control. He and Hoffer worked together in figuring out a lot of the technology on top of what the labs are doing. He was [inaudible 00:48:33] consultants.
These guys, they run journals. They are the highest scientific authority you can go to. You can even listen on my website to the radio show with Dr. Hoffer. I have radio shows [inaudible 00:48:44].
These people are the ones that are writing the books, [inaudible 00:48:48]. They write lab manuals. They have it right there, “Hair tests are good for this… that and the other thing.” Bingo! It’s not good for everything, but it’s good as a panoramic view of where everything is going.
So maybe that’s what the homeopath is saying, “Hey, look. It’s part of the deal, but not the whole deal.” Well, is stabbing with a homeopathic here or there and forgetting the rest the right way to go or giving you an herb as an herbologist works or a little acupuncture? No! you got to balance the system out. You probably won’t even need to go to a homeopath or the herbalist or anybody else if you can get your own metabolism under control.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Greg Tefft: See, they don’t even realize – well, maybe they don’t. They’re shooting themselves in the foot if they like hair analysis in a way. So they’re medical doctors. That’s why the medical profession doesn’t like anything that works naturally because generally, they’re losing clients.
And unfortunately, our system is based on making more money off of our sickness, not on our wellness. There’s no incentive to keep us well because the doctors make more money when we’re sick and companies make more money when we’re sick. Almost a quarter of the economy is based on sickness, not wellness. Where’s the money in wellness? You don’t need much when you’re well, right?
So people have got to realize this. I’m sorry to be so philosophic in this zone with this, but hey! I started the ‘say no to prescription drug’ campaign in Washington. You would not believe the resistance. I know Hatch and some of the other congress people that are fighting against this. And trust me, it’s a real problem. We have special interest that would just as soon keep us sick because that’s where the money is. Steven Seagal said in one of his movies, “Western medicine prolongs sickness.” But in other countries, it’s completely the opposite.
I have a fellow in South Africa. He’s a great guy. He says to me, “What is wrong with you Americans?”
I go, “What do you mean? What’s wrong with us Americans? You tell me.” He goes, “Whenever I get WGN via satellite, whenever I get WGN, all I see is drug commercials. What the heck is wrong with you? Don’t you listen to what they say? Why would you take that stuff…?”
Well, it’s because airtime marketing is what runs the country and then legitimate things that can really help you are up-ended. They’re put to the side. The other problem is two, the supplement industry goes crazy. They don’t like this either. Health food stores don’t benefit when you test because that means you buy less. They can keep on talking you into more and more vitamins and other things that you don’t need because there’s no accountability.
And the doctor actually is the meanest doctors I have met – and there’s a few. Although most aren’t really as mean or they’re just ignorant unfortunately. I love docs, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve met a few that I swore to God, if I could just tape them, you wouldn’t believe what they say. They’d go, “Hey, if everybody was well, I’d be out of business. It’s not like I want everybody to be well, so I don’t have as many patients because then I can’t [inaudible 00:51:35].” There’s that issue going on. People have just got to cut to the chase. All it takes is driving us down [inaudible 00:51:42].
Wendy Myers: No, I am right there with you. I’m 100% with you. I’m actually going to do a podcast on that, on the whole conspiracy theory about big pharma, big chem, the big agra and the government, how they’re conspiring to keep us sick because they make money off of us and it makes me sick.
That’s one thing. I’m just trying to help people get better doing natural means and prevention. There isn’t a lot of money in it frankly, but it’s something that needs to be addressed and voiced. So thank you for that.
Wendy Myers: So what do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Dr. Greg Tefft: In the world? Starvation.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Greg Tefft: You know what? We have the poor countries starving and then we’re overfed with the wrong things. It’s one extreme to the next. In this country, we’re eating a whole bunch of stuff that’s bad for us that’s causing malnourishment. And in these other countries, they don’t have enough, they have under-nourishment. So I’d say that in general.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your book, Personalized Nutrition.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Yeah, I just tried to put it all together. You mean ‘Your Personal Life’ book?
Wendy Myers: Yes, yes.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Yeah. The book is really cataloging – the first book was more about the history of how we used to try to personalize from the organ types and the Egyptians and the constitution types of the Asians. And then of course, with the Greek, they had four [inaudible 00:53:10] core personalities and two body types. I mean, ways to try to differentiate from person to person that eventually led to all these tests that we’re talking about like the hair test and everything else.
The second book really talk more about how the test readings and all the tests at the time – so all the metabolic tests, the nutrient cell regulators, toxins and genetic tests there are and basically how to put it together, so that we probably know instead of knowing maybe only four or five percent of what’s going on in the body (which is what regular medicine does), now we know 95% of what’s going on in the body when we add those in.
So I just try to talk about it and try to show how to systematize it because it lends itself to the next. You don’t have to put it all – you know how people, they tend to fragment and specialize?
“Well, I’m going to be an allergist.” Well, fine, but allergies, just avoiding those foods doesn’t straighten out the rest of your metabolism. Maybe it prevents the allergy [inaudible 00:54:05].
“Oh, I’m going to be a toxicologist. I’m only going to look at toxins.” Well, cleaning toxins is a great idea, but what about all the nutritional elements. You got to kind of put it together, so you’re stuck with putting things together. I try to get that part in the book and show that there’s about ten levels of testing that you can go through that just put everything on the table.
Back in Malibu Health & Rehab, we would have a whole plan laid out in the moment and fix the people, lose the weight, get them off the drugs, fix your metabolisms, all that and then try to set them up for life from that point on so that they could know that they were eating the right thing, they could forevermore be taking the right vitamin and be that much better for it.
We’ve made such improvements in people. It’s amazing! I think our oldest right now is 98 – no meds, can do 50 push-ups. That’s the way I want to be, right? I know it’s not 110, but we’ll get there someday.
Wendy Myers: He’s probably going to make it.
Dr. Greg Tefft: I hope so.
Wendy Myers: As long as he’s under your care.
Dr. Greg Tefft: I hope so. And you know, I wanted to use my mother as an example because she did everything that I wanted. I tested her.
She was a metabolism and she died at 90 because she fell – not of old age. I wanted to prove – and I can’t do that because she’s passed away. I just thought it would feel horrible. But I wanted to put her on the website and say, “Guess the age of this woman?” You would’ve never guessed. She looks so much younger.
And even when I go to class reunions – I’m sure you’ll see this as you age because you’re so young. You go to these class reunions and you’ll see what repetitive stress of improper eating, the drugs, the stress, you can’t even recognize some of your own friends. They look so bad. And then the ones that really look good are usually ones that have taken care of themselves over time. So it’s sad.
I’ve got a lot of my friends, they go, “Well, what’s your secret? How come you still have muscles and you look pretty young and all that stuff? Your hair is still there,” I do these tests. I take care of myself. “Yeah, I should do that.” No, you do it and you’ll be surprised when it works. It really works.
Hair tests, no matter where you see it in the book, every section (whether it’s organic acids, amino acids, all these stuff people probably never heard of, it’s all in there), it always starts out, “You’ve got to have a hair test first to compare everything else.”
So why not? Let’s get it out there. Let’s get more people doing it. Let’s get people taking more care of themselves. Let’s stop fooling around with guesswork. No more guesswork. And although the hair test isn’t the end-all, it’s really a large part of the puzzle. You’ve got a major part of the puzzle covered. So why not?
The way we’re doing it now, ninety-nine point something percent are failing the test so miserably and all those little upsets, all those nutritional imbalances, all that toxic infiltration, all the disparity between the autonomic nervous system and the body and the stress glands and the hormones is killing us. One of the answers to this, quick fix, “Here, take this drug… take that drug” and then you’ve got to take another drug when the side effects of that drug have built up.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, they’re destroying your liver.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Yes! And then the liver can’t even use nutrition right. You’re stuck! I’ve had a couple of experiences at UCLA where I’ve had two people that ended up there that collapsed – one of them a doctor by the way.
They say, “Wait! This guy can’t do your tests and take your vitamins. We don’t approve it” The doctor got on and he goes, “You better do this.” He told them. He says, “I’m doing it while I’m in the hospital because you’re going to make me sicker” and he’s a doctor. He knows.
You see, it’s funny because I’ve had a few people that were in injuries and other stuff and the stress is really bad. There are eight different metabolic types that the hair test people put together. Very real!
I know for myself as a fast metabolism, there’s been twice when I’ve been made into a slow four because of stress. My mother died. That was one of those things. In other words, arsenic poisoning. I got poisoned by arsenic. It changed me right in front of y face. Of course, I had a list of symptoms I didn’t have and I had this blotchy skin. Wouldn’t you like going in to see the doctor and he’s got these big, red blotches all over him. What do you do? Take acortisol shot? No, no. No. You got to figure out what it is and fix it. That’s the way. That’s real healing. That’s really preventing things before they happen whenever you can do it.
Now, if you’re already on a drug, you have a condition, when can ever balancing nutrients in your body ever do anything but help? When can cleaning out the toxins ever do but help? That’s something we have to look at. And what’s the downside of this? Well, according to the Haynes 1, 2, 3 and 4 studies, 58% of America are taking so many of the wrong vitamins, they’re actually doing more harm than good. That’s a huge 40-year government study. So you just can’t wing it. Centrum or whatever is not going to do it for you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Greg Tefft: You got to go inside and see what you really need because even with the multiple vitamins, with one of each like if calcium is high and potassium is low as an example and B6 is low and B1 is low and your copper’s high, your body is just going to take the copper and the calcium out of the pill and dump the rest.
You see, you’ve got to bring those up in proportion to it. This is called quantum physiochemistry where you put more of something in, it forces others out. They see that in B vitamins, but they don’t seem to get it with minerals.
Even with the trace elements, it’s nice to have like a 72 some odd minerals [inaudible 00:59:15] formula like a trace mineral kind of thing, but realize that’s just to try to make up for what’s in the [inaudible 00:59:21]. After that, you’ve got to add more of certain things in higher amounts until we can get your body back into balance.
But once you’re there, maintenance is a breeze. Less vitamins, more of the foods that your genes are really looking for, less of the ones that you know are going to hurt you period. And you’ll know because as you get more balanced, you become more sensitive to what’s around you. You’ll make better choices. You’ll feel bad when you eat too much ice cream or whatever.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Greg Tefft: You don’t get away with it.
Wendy Myers: No, you don’t! I know when I have a glass of wine, I’m completely hung over. I don’t do it very often, once every couple of months, but I’m completely hung over the next day from one glass of wine because my body is so clean.
Dr. Greg Tefft: Well, and that’s the way it should be because we need to have the best defense mechanism. That’s part of being defensive, being sensitive. And most people, the more out of balance they get, the worse the choices they make in life are.
You probably heard of that study where they had little babies that they put certain foods in front of them and nine out of the ten babies always pick the healthiest food. Well, they did that with the adults and it was the other way around.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, of course.
Dr. Greg Tefft: You’re addicted to things you may be allergic to or to sugar or to other things. Addictive behavior is a big problem. Your neurotransmitters go off when you eat too much sugar. Sugar interferes. Your brain cells need sugar, but they need a steady flow, not spikes. So you got to make sure insulin is working right.
You know, insulin resistance. We have a diabetes problem too. So it’s either way – too much insulin and not enough insulin. Whatever it is, we’ve got to keep things steady. Most people, their systems are already stressed out because they’re out of balance. It’s like your body is a chemical factory.
Think of an automobile factory with all those assembly lines. If you don’t have everything in place, at the end of those assembly lines, you’re going to have only partial completion of the final car that you’re making. “Oh, where are the tires?” “I don’t know. That line is all backed up.” It’s the same with your body, structurally and functionally.
And the net effect of that is it wears on the rest of the body and it blows your bone reserves out. A lot of people get by doing the wrong thing for a long time and they think they’re very clever. “I’m going to eat pizza. I’m healthy. I’m not on drugs.” I’ve got news for you. Every time you use something like that as an excuse, you’re being self-destructive because little by little, the nutrient reserves in your body will be depleted and you will fall off the cliff. I’ve seen this many times.
In fact, I’ve worked with a couple of people that were models that had leukemia and had no idea, “Leukemia? How could I have that?” I say, “Sorry, but the tests are the tests.” I send them to a specialist. And you know what? Both of those people, their lives were saved because we pinpointed the copper early on before the darn thing really got going. When you’re blowing copper at the bone marrow because you’re making too many white blood cells, you start blowing up copper, it’s the first chemical sign that you might be developing leukemia. And the regular tests don’t even pick it up for a while.
So in the case of these three people, they were dexa-scanned. All these other tests were done. We found a tiny bit in the bone marrow, zapped it. They’re alive to this day. That was seven or eight years ago.
Wendy Myers: Wow! So knowing this can save your life. Maybe you’re not going to save your life just in the moment, but you are for the rest of your life. So the steps you take today determine your wellness destiny tomorrow, how far you get before breaking down. And let me tell you. I don’t care how rich you are, how good-looking you are, how happy you are. If your health falls apart, that all goes away.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Greg Tefft: You’re going to want that health. So people should really be more in tuned. The most important thing of all is feeling good – we call this ‘the science of feeling good’ – being healthy and not being dependent. I hate having to be dependent on bad opinions. Everybody’s got opinions, “Well, this works for me. You should have it.” I go, “But maybe I’m different than you. Maybe it’s not going to help me. Maybe a little bit would help, but the way you’re doing it, how do I know it works for me?”
Let’s be scientific. Let’s stop making it up as we go along and let’s stop using silly logic that’s not based on facts. It sounds logical, so people do it. “This worked for me, so it should work for you.” That sounds logical, but that’s just not the way it works.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Greg Tefft: What works for me could be damaging to you and vice versa. It’s really a case of getting down and dirty and seeing what’s inside of you. That’s how we’d like to say, “What’s gotten into you lately?”
Wendy Myers: Well, where could people find you? I know there’s probably a lot of people that are going to be chomping in the bit wanting to work with you. Do you work with clients all over the world or where are you located in the U.S.?
Dr. Greg Tefft: Yeah, we’re mostly Internet now. I’m not [inaudible 01:03:48] Medical Group. We can work with anybody anywhere to some extent. And so I guess we have two websites. Now, you’re going to see a change because we’re in transition with the company, ‘Only Nature’s Finest’. They’re putting together an incredible presentation. So it’s PNCScience.com. That’s the old PNC like Personalized Nutrition Consultants and ‘science’, S-C-I-E-N-C-E dot-com. That’s the old one. That’s going to have me on Fox please.
Fox thought this was the greatest thing since sliced potato. They put us in the news for four minutes. My gosh! They thought it was great. And this woman lost all these weight. Of course, we can use hair testing for losing weight not just mental problems.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Greg Tefft: And then the other one is personalized-nutrition.com. That’s the new website. It has me. It has a lot of my celebrities that I’ve worked with, pictures of them. It has a lot more of the flash. I don’t know what they’re going to do with the two websites, but we stopped right there. So we have two websites, not to be confused, but PNCScience and then Personalized-Nutrition-Consultants.
Wendy Myers: Okay. So listeners, if you like what Dr. Tefft had to say today, you can go to his two websites and learn all about him and then contact him. It has all his contact information.
And Dr. Tefft, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was so informative. Thank you so much.
Dr. Greg Tefft: My pleasure. Thank you for having me and keep up the good work.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, thank you.
And listeners, if you want to learn more about detoxification and my mineral balancing program called Mineral Power, go to myersdetox.com. You can learn all about that. Thank you so much for listening to the show. I how you heard something that helped you improve your brain function today.
