Daniel Vitalis – How To Build A Strong Foundation For Your Hormone Health In 4 Simple Steps

Episode 178—Daniel Vitalis—11-14-2013

Bradley: This is Dr. Bradley Nelson, author of The Emotion Code: How to Release Your Trapped Emotions for Abundant Health, Love and Happiness. You’re listening to Justin and Kate on Extreme Health Radio. For more information about the Body Code, visit ExtremeHealthRadio.com/BodyCode.

Justin: Oh, Kate, you’re so funny. You’re dancing. So you like the new music, huh?

Kate: You threw a curve ball at me this morning. Gosh, I love this music. I feel like we’re back to our roots.

Justin: Back to our roots.

Kate: Yeah.

Justin: Yeah, it’s good, isn’t it?

Kate: I love it. Good for you.

Justin: Yeah, you know, I just felt the old intro was a little explosive and like the pyrotechnics that we should have been…

Kate: It wasn’t really us.

Justin: I feel like we should be an ‘80s rock band, like Twisted Sister or something like that.

Kate: Some hair? Hair bands?

Justin: Hair bands. So my name is Justin. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. This is going to be a really, really great show with Daniel Vitalis today. We’re going to be talking about hormone health. I don’t know how we go from Twisted Sister and Quiet Riot to hormone health.

Kate: Maybe they needed more. Maybe they had a lot because they had a lot of hair.

Justin: Maybe they were dominant in estrogen. Who knows, right?

Kate: Right. Spandex pants. You never know.

Justin: So we’ll be talking with Daniel Vitalis and introduce him in just a moment. It’s going to be a great show. If you have any hormone issues or if you’re trying to regulate your hormones, you’re definitely going to want to stay tuned to this show. And this is Episode 178, so you can check out the show page and make any comments, anything like that, in the future on ExtremeHealthRadio.com/178 and we’d be honored to have you do that. If you like to follow what we’re doing on Facebook, we’d love to have you join our community. You can go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Facebook, oddly enough.

Kate: Oddly.

Justin: Shockingly enough. And you can click the “like” button on there and join our community and stay up to date with our shows. And for reference… What is this—Thursday…?

Kate: November 14.

Justin: November 14, 2013.

Kate: You got it.

Justin: Yeah, time is flying by, isn’t it?

Kate: As always.

Justin: It does not feel like Thanksgiving though, does it?

Kate: It’s probably 80 degrees here. We’re having a heat wave. And yesterday we laid out on our patio, in our swimwear.

Justin: Yep.

Kate: So yeah, this is not feeling like…

Justin: Not feeling like November.

Kate: No. But I’ll take it.

Justin: But we’ll take it. We love it.

Kate: We’re thankful.

Justin: And this is, like I said, Episode 178. If you’d like to join the show, there are lots of different ways to do that. We are now live. We’re not sure how good we sound live yet, but we are live. If you go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Live, there is a chat room there. You can ask your questions on that page and listen to the show live as well. So make sure to do that. if you’d like to send an email to us, you can just do that at justin@ExtremeHealthRadio.com.

Kate: Or kate@ExtremeHealthRadio.com.

Justin: And if you’d like to support our work and make purchases on Amazon—I know a lot of you guys are doing that now for Christmas—feel free to go through our link. That would be a really, really great thing. You go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Amazon and that would be very, very helpful. And we’ve got some great guests coming up, Kate—Katie-Kate.

Kate: I know. Katie-Kate.

Justin: Dr. Morton Walker is going to be talking about cancer and he is a prolific guy—Dr. Morton Walker. And then we’ve got… I’m not sure how we say her name—Vani Hari from FoodBabe.com—and we’ll be talking about a lot of the toxic ingredients and she does a lot of almost like investigative work on what’s going on with our food supply and all that kind of stuff. And then we’ve got Sydney Ross Singer and we have to raise our beds, don’t we?

Kate: Oh gosh.

Justin: We’re supposed to be doing an experiment and we haven’t done it yet.

Kate: Oh.

Justin: So he’s going to be talking about sleep and that will be Part 2 of his sleep series that he’s doing. He’s got a lot to say about sleep, so that will be a great show. And today, we have Daniel Vitalis and his website is DanielVitalis.com, as well as Surthrival.com, and my favorite one, FindASpring.com—so really, really great websites. He’s a leading health motivator, nutritionist, herbalist, educator, and creator of those websites I just mentioned, and he teaches people all over the world, doing lectures and seminars. He’s spoken at the Longevity Now Conference and there’s probably no end to the things he’s doing. He’s always working on new things and researching and just a really great guy, and he’s going to be talking to us today about hormone health. So thank you, Mr. Vitalis, for being on the show today.

Daniel: You’re quite welcome. I’ve got to say, we’ve been doing shows somewhat regularly and as we have the season has been progressing and you guys just keep reporting the same weather there, and here it’s kind of like Game of Thrones, man. It’s like winter’s coming. It’s getting dark at 2:00 in the afternoon here. We’re starting to batten down the hatches. So listening to you guys over there talking 80s and bikinis, man.

Justin: Oh, we’ve got to invite you over and go to the beach.

Daniel: I know. That sounds pretty juicy, I’ve got to tell you.

Kate: I get kind of upset about it, to be honest. Like we haven’t had any seasons since… It’s been the same since about February.

Daniel:

Justin: Yeah, of last year.

Kate: Weirdest year ever.

Justin:

Daniel: You know, there’s like that “grass is greener” thing that really… I mean you can apply to almost every aspect of life and I’m sure you’re wanting to wear sweaters and feel cozy, but I’ll tell you, grass is always greener.

Kate: No, I know. You’re right, and I’m trying to embrace it, so…

Justin: Hey, are you going to be going to Arizona this year?

Daniel: You know, I think… You know what? It’s really… This is a very up in the air year for me, so I’ve got no definitive statements to make about my whereabouts.

Justin: Oh, okay.

Kate: You never know where you’re going to be.

Justin: Yeah, never know where you’re going to end up.

Kate: It shouldn’t be FindASpring—it’s FindDaniel.com.

Daniel: It’s like Where’s Waldo?

Kate: Where’s Waldo? Where in the world?

Justin: I love it. I love it. So what have you been up to lately with your work?

Daniel: You know, I’m really in a phase, I think, of consolidating my work and really… I’ve really touched in on so many areas over the last six or seven years, talking about so many different aspects of health. Now I’m looking at it and just asking, “How do I simplify this so that I can hand it off to people?” I personally feel that a lot of the little details are just not that important. I think that we overanalyze so much of what we do in health, and so I… A metaphor that I like, I love to talk about paintings and how the impression a painting makes on us… When we’re looking at a painting that really affects us emotionally, we’re not really thinking about technical things that that painter did, right? We’re taking the whole thing in. Health is like that. It’s like we need a whole health approach and we sometimes get caught up in the little details, and I know I’ve done that over the years, so I’m looking at “How do I hand this information to average soccer mom? How do I hand it to average football dad? And give them something that’s useful to them?” And so I’m really in a consolidation phase, I’d say.

Justin: Interesting that you would say a lot of the technical details, because it seems like a lot of the stuff going around in the health world these days, especially in the circles we run in, the same kind of thing is going on, you know? People are becoming less polarized and sort of meeting more in the middle, aren’t they?

Daniel: Yeah. Well, and that’s one of the wonderful things that I’ve seen happen in my own journey through this information. So when I first got into the health world… When I first got into it, it was the no-fat phase. That was like the stage of nutritional excellence at the time. And that was prior to the explosion of the internet, so information didn’t get out as quickly. And then over time, I watched that move into a vegetarian dominated sort of health paradigm and a grain dominated paradigm, and then I watched the carbohydrate paradigm shift to the protein paradigm and then I watched that shift to the fat paradigm and I watched the primal thing come in and the Paleo thing come in, and finally, I think, we’ve exasperated all this. It’s like starting to find some kind of peace in what makes sense and I think what we’re seeing is that modern living has a lot of flaws to it that we haven’t adapted to yet and we have to figure out how to adapt to it. We’ve got to take into account how our ancestors lived and we’ve got to filter that into our modern lifestyle, and we’ve got to accept that our modern lifestyle is not going anywhere. So we have to learn how to adapt to it and how to make it healthier.

And it should be really simple. It should be simple, like we’ve got to make sure we’re putting the right stuff in; we’ve got to make sure we’re keeping the bad stuff out; and we’ve got to do the things to keep building and moving towards our goals. It should be that simple. And anything else that gets too technical, unless we’re having a very specific health crisis, can really send us far off track and we can actually find ourselves really far away from our goals, like moving away from our goals, because we’re getting too obsessed with a rabbit trail. So we’ve got to keep our eyes on the big picture. So if we get too close to the beautiful painting and we start looking at each brush stroke, we lose the ability to take in the whole thing. And that’s really important when we’re talking about our hormones today, right? Because hormones… these are very specific molecules with very specific functions, and we can get really caught up in it. Most of us who are listening… I myself—not an endocrinologist, right? I’m not a biochemist. And so I need a big picture approach that works wen it comes to hormones and I can’t get caught up in all the little details because I’ll actually lose sight of the big picture and the goals.

Justin: Do you think that a lot of these different diets that have come out—like the raw food diet and the Paleo and the primal—do you think some of these are damaging, in terms of if someone switches on from one diet to the other diet, do you think…? Obviously, that’s got to affect hormones, just switching from one diet to the next, couldn’t it?

Daniel: Certainly does, especially when we want to talk abut nutritional extremes. And so the two extremes that I’d like to give would be on the one hand, raw food veganism is a total nutritional extreme, and some people might be offended by that, but I’m willing to go there and just say, hey, this is a really extreme approach. It’s never appeared on the planet before. It’s totally new. It’s untested in 200,000 years. It’s really extreme. The other extreme, let’s say right now, currently, would be the Paleo kind of diet extreme that people are taking that one to. And so let’s say we’re just eating raw meat, drinking milk and eating bone marrow. That’s another nutritional extreme, right? That hasn’t existed on the planet since our cousin species Neanderthal did something even less extreme, actually. But these are two extremes. And yes, swaying ourselves from like all fat to no fat, plant fat to animal fat, all protein, no protein—those things throw our chemistry way out of balance and all over the place. The other thing is those diets aren’t sustainable for anybody long term. They are too extreme. So we’ve got to find… It’s like the Buddha, right? He first lived in total opulence and then he lived without anything as an aesthetic, and then he brought an approach forward and said, “Hey, there’s a middle path.” And that middle path has endured. So we see 1,000+ years later people still walking that path rather than trying to follow the extremes that he did.

Justin: What are you finding in your work that damages hormones the most, do you think?

Daniel: Well, I think… All right. So let’s actually back that up for a sec, Justin, because I think that we could go almost a little too fast here. When we say… I don’t know if you guys have ever seen… There is a fabulous movie called “Idiocracy,” and I don’t know if you’ve gotten the chance to see it, but if you haven’t, I really want to recommend it to you or the listener. If you haven’t seen this film, the guy who made Beavis and Butthead made this film and I think it’s like what he finally, after all the damage he did in the world, he wanted to give something back, and so he gives us this great film. The concept is like a zombie movie, except instead of zombies, everybody has just been dumbed down. It takes place 500 years in the future and people have become so stupid and their language has become so dumbed down, that a really average person today would be the smartest person in the world then. And when you watch the film, what you realize it’s about is actually… It’s about being a smart person in the world today and how rare that is and how a thinking person is very rare and an educated person is very rare. There is a theme in there that reminds me of this thing with hormones. It’s this. When a person says “hormones,” they don’t usually really know what hormones are.

Kate: I agree with that.

Daniel: It’s like saying “Smurf,” right? It’s like if you’re a Smurf and you just say “Smurf,” it’s just a filler word. It’s just a generic placeholder. So if you ask somebody… I mean this would be fun. Next time somebody’s telling you about their hormones, be like, “Which hormones?”

Kate: Totally.

Daniel: “What hormone? What is a hormone?” So we hear this all the time. In the nutrition world people talk about “minerals.” “Oh, you’ve got to get more minerals.” Really? What is a mineral? Which mineral are you talking about? Right? You see how that works? It’s sort of like the same thing we hear with “toxins.” “Oh, we’ve got to avoid toxins.” Oh? What’s a toxin? Which toxin? What toxin are we talking about? Interestingly, all medicines are toxins, so obviously we don’t want to just… That doesn’t really make sense. We’ve got to get more specific. So hormones are chemical messengers in our body and they’re produced by our endocrine glands. You remember when you were younger, you’d hear this thing—you don’t hear it so much anymore—but Grandma would see an overweight person and say, “Oh, they have a gland problem.” And they were talking about our endocrine glands, which we’ll get into a little bit more here as we go along.

But our glandular system is a sort of loosely organized system, so when we look in the body and we see the different anatomical zones of the body… We could see the skeletal system is really easy to look at and see how it’s all connected. The vascular system—the veins, arteries, heart—it’s easy to look at that and see how that’s all connected. Even the respiratory system, with the lungs. But when we look at the endocrine glands—the pituitary, the pineal—those are in the brain—the thymus, the thyroid, the parathyroid, the adrenal glands—those are like the little hats that sit on our kidneys—the pancreas—that’s sort of wedged up near our stomach—the testes and the ovaries, right? For the man, the testes are an external body organ. How weird is that? We have basically… a man’s ovaries hang on the outside of his body. How strange. And the female version of the testes—the ovaries—they’re tucked up inside the pelvic cavity.

So we don’t look at these organs and see how they’re all connected. The way they are connected is through hormones, which are the chemical messengers. They’re almost like emails and text messages being sent from these master glands to different places in the body, causing different effects. And it’s a whole communication pathway. And I’ll tell you this up front—I don’t understand it very well, and I would say because we don’t understand it very well. So people at large, science at large, medicine at large does not well understand the endocrine system yet. We’re in the infancy of our understanding and we need to be very humble as we approach the topic because we are still learning about it. In fact, when it comes to this whole idea of excessive estrogen or low testosterone or low progesterone, we’re just learning about that. In the last decade or so that information has become publically available.

Justin: Gosh, that’s crazy. With all the science and all of the testing and all the doctors and everything, it’s crazy that we are just becoming into this knowledge now. Isn’t that crazy?

Kate: Yeah.

Daniel: So it’s very new for us and what we don’t understand well are the effects of adding in artificial hormones or what happens when we become deficient. We’re just starting to understand that. And if you think about the application or the use in medicine of bioidentical hormones, that’s very new. When did you guys start hearing about men getting bioidentical testosterone or women getting bioidentical estrogen or progesterone? Like how long ago did you start hearing about that?

Justin: I mean… You know, within the last… less than ten years.

Daniel: You got it. So we’re just sort of learning what the effects of that are and bodies are so different and so diverse. And the thing is too is we don’t have like a control group of people living a perfect lifestyle we can test upon, right? So we’re not like lab rats. So everybody who gets given these things, of course scientists are recording data, but we don’t know what factors are also affecting a person’s health. Do they get a lot of sunlight? Do they get a lot of exercise? Are they having a robust sex life? Are they getting enough sleep? So without that, we don’t really know. So here’s my point. We want to be careful going into this thinking too specifically about hormones and we want to be thinking more about “How do we create balanced hormonal health in our bodies?” So not “How do I crank this one up and turn this one down?” That’s getting into some very specific science and that’s above most of our pay grades.

Justin: It’s almost as if we get out of the entire idea of hormones altogether and live the kind of life we’re supposed to live, and it’s almost as if if we do those things, we’re going to naturally fix our hormones and balance out our hormones altogether, isn’t it?

Daniel: Wow. I mean is that why I love coming on this show or what?

Kate: Because we get it?

Daniel: Because you guys are so smart. That is really what it is, because even if we see an elevation in a specific hormone, we may associate that with a health issue, but it might not actually be the cause. So for instance, if I’m trying to figure out what causes bar fights and I start traveling around cities to bars to see what causes bar fights and I start to notice that there always seem to be cops there right after the fight, I could come to the conclusion that cops cause bar fights, but you guys know that would be inaccurate, right? The cops are responding to the bar fight. So it would be silly for me to draw the conclusion “Oh my God. Every time I see these cops, there must be a fight about to happen.” That’s sort of backwards, right? If I associate skid marks in the road with causing car accidents, that would be a mistake because the skid marks are there as a result of the car accident, not causing it. So we need to be really careful too of saying, “Oh, every time this cancer is present, this hormone is there.” We don’t know if that hormone is there as a result of or if it’s a causative factor. We would be smarter, unless we really want to delve specifically into this subject, doing the things that build health and trusting that our hormones are going to follow suit. But then with that said, there are some good general guidelines that we know build hormonal health and balance.

Kate: Well, that sure paints a great picture of what’s going on, truly.

Justin: We have a lot of people on the show that will say things like “There is a relationship between this and that” or “this disease and this particular hormone” or whatever, and I’m always trying to figure out, like you just said Daniel, “How do we know that this thing actually is the causative factor?” because that’s the real thing. Just because, like you said, there are firemen at a house that’s burning down, doesn’t mean that they caused the fire.

Daniel: Sometimes they do, but usually they’re responding. I work at a fire department part time, so I…

Kate: Okay, bad example.

Justin: Bad analogy.

Daniel: No, great analogy, actually. Perfect analogy. So I just totally agree with that. We need to be really careful about this and the thing is too is we need to step back again, look at the big picture, right? It’s almost cliché. It’s like if I’m standing on a mountaintop, looking out at the vista, maybe it’s less important that I focus on individual trees in the distance and instead try to take in the whole panorama, right? We’ve got to be careful of that. So let’s take a step back, look at the big picture, and what we’ll find is that dealing with hormone health isn’t really different than dealing with other kinds of health. That wouldn’t make any sense. Like imagine if the things that built bone health didn’t affect hormone health and the things that affected hormone health didn’t affect bone health, like they were in opposition to each other, and you had to like pick one like, “Well, this is bad for my hormones, but it’s good for my bones.” That wouldn’t make any sense, right? Doesn’t it make sense that what builds health in the body should be congruent throughout all the systems?

Justin: Yeah, we have this idea in our culture, as you know, where everything is separated and categorized and put into a little box and everything is like a discipline, sort of like doctors, like oh, you’ve got one doctor that deals with your left toe and you have another doctor that deals with your right toe. But in actuality, everything works together is what you are saying.

Daniel: It is. Now here is the thing about hormones, right? So here is the caveat. Certain areas of our health are a little faster to respond to good living. Certain aspects of our health are faster to respond. It’s maybe a little easier to clean up our digestion than it is to get our hormones back into balance. So what can happen a lot of times is that we start making changes to our health approach because we changed our paradigm about health, and that’s how changes get made, right? They don’t get made by forcing things into existence. They get made by changing what we believe about the world and that changes how we behave and that’s the only thing that’s really going to last. So we make a health paradigm shift and we start to live a little bit differently, and then what we notice is “Okay, I’m starting to lose the weight. Wow, my digestion is getting a little better.” But we might feel a little lag time in the hormone health piece.

So we’ll get more specific about it, but people need to be patient with this piece and right now you need to be aware that right now, more than ever before—this has never been like this before that I am aware of, at least in my memory—right now there is so much focus on hormones that everybody’s promoting things that really get in there and change your hormones and more than ever, doctors are prescribing bioidentical hormone therapy. Now that kind of therapy is not well tested. The results are not in on that. They will make you think they are in on that because it’s a sales program for those products. So we have to be really careful and know that your doctor has been enlisted into a marketing program for bioidentical hormones and you’ve stepped onto a car lot and they’re going to try to sell you the car. So be cautious. If you get too focused on hormone health, it could be really easy to fall into some of these sales schemes right now, particularly bioidentical hormones, and you would be a guinea pig with that. So we just need to tread really lightly here.

Now there are some supplements that I believe can really help us with this, but the big stuff isn’t in supplements. There are supplements that can really help us, but the big lifestyle pieces are never going to be… The supplements can’t just cover for a lack of sleep; they can’t cover for a lack of vitamin D; they can’t cover for a lack of minerals, right? They can only assist us once we put all the other pieces in place.

Justin: Wow. Good stuff. We’re going to take a little break and after the break, I want to talk a little bit about some of the individual hormones that we’re dealing with that people want to modulate and some of the factors in our lives that are causing this imbalance. So good stuff, Mr. Daniel Vitalis. His website is Surthrival.com, DanielVitalis.com, and FindASpring.com. We’ll be right back after this break.

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Justin: I have to say I have been absolutely loving this product by Tristan Truscott and Peter Ragnar called Good Morning Good Evening Qigong. If you want to listen to the interview we did with Tristan, you can go to www.ExtremeHealthRadio.com/127. And Qigong is a great way to distress the body and as you know, there is a huge component to disease caused by stress and stress is a huge factor in how we live our lives and the amount of energy we have and the amount of vitality we have. And so Dr. Shade, what do you think about Qigong?

Shade: People come to me and they’re really sick and they’ve got this blown-out neurological system and all this toxicity and I tell them “You need to do Qigong Tai Chi. You need to do these things that settle down and restore your neurology because it puts together all the parts. It puts you back into that state where you can start to detoxify. And so I highly, highly recommend all that.

Justin: And what about you, Kit Campbell? What do you think about Qigong? Do you like it as well?

Kit: Qigong is amazing and the reason that I believe it to be amazing is everything here is energy. That is a scientific fact if there ever is one. So when you’re practicing Qigong, you’re actually drawing energy into your body. Your intention—whatever your intention is behind any action—will determine the level of energy… type of energy… that you absorb into your body. So your intention behind you is very important, just like thought. So when you’re practicing Qigong, you’re actually bringing energy in and you’re bringing out the stuff that might be a bit stale. With Tai Chi it’s totally different. The energy runs underneath the skin because it’s more of a—this is a Chinese understanding, by the way—it’s more of a martial art. So Qigong is very, very good for bringing that energy into the body and just fantastic.

Justin: If you’re interested in picking up this Qigong course by Tristan Truscott and Peter Ragnar, go to www.ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Qigong and you can learn more about it. There is a great video on that page and you can learn more about it on that page and I highly, highly recommend this product. I love it myself, so go ahead and check that out at www.ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Qigong.

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Justin: So we’re doing a little experiment and now we’re keeping Maggie in the studio and if she pipes up and barks, we’re going to have to kick her out.

Kate: She gets kicked out, yeah.

Justin: She’s going to get kicked out.

Kate: She loves laying on the BioMat. It’s adorable.

Justin: So if you guys are interested in that Qigong course and you have any questions about it, please let me know. You can listen to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/127, as well as 139, I think, are the two episodes we did with Tristan and Peter Ragnar—a great, great course. So make sure to check that out. And as the lady said, don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and keep up to date with our shows and all that good stuff. We’d love to have you join our community that’s growing every single day, so don’t forget to do that. And Daniel, before the break, you were making some good points about how there’s not really a supplement or dietary nutritional thing that can account for poor lifestyle habits, and I thought that was really interesting because a lot of times people want to make up for their poor lifestyle by taking a supplement or by taking a vitamin or a mineral or something like that, but these things are the most critical, right? Like a good sleep and living in a healthy way—all these things are the most critical things we could do, aren’t they?

Daniel: Yeah, they are the foundation upon which our nutritional house is built, so if we don’t have those things in place, we have a poor foundation. We can’t really build the house of good nutrition on top of a poor foundation. So we can try. It’s attractive, the idea that you could just purchase this instead of having to do anything. I mean who is not attracted to that idea? We’ve been sold on instant gratification for a long time. But realistically, yeah, we’ve got to be conscientious. And here is what I like about this. I’m going to share some of the things that really, I think, build the foundations of hormone balance, and I’m pretty sure you guys will have a show on just about any of these topics so that we don’t have to spend the whole show exploring these individual topics. Again, they’re just brush strokes in the painting. We’re trying to see the painting right now. We’re not trying to figure out technically how the painter did it. We’re not trying to figure out which direction the brush strokes went in or which colors were chosen. We’re trying to see the big picture right now on this subject of hormones. So when we step back and we look at “What do we need to know about in order to have good hormone production and good hormone balance?” I think the first piece I really want to hit home—this is really an important one—our hormones are made out of something, right? They’re not made of pixie dust. They’re not made out of stardust. Well, I guess technically, we’re all stardust.

Justin: Yeah, right.

Daniel: They’re made out of cholesterol. I’m going to say that again. Your hormones, your sex hormones, they’re made out of cholesterol. There is a great saying in the Weston Price Foundation community where they say, “Cholesterol is for lovers.” Cholesterol is present in cardiovascular disease the way police are present in bar fights.

Justin: I see.

Daniel: And because people see cholesterol present when there is damage to the cardiovascular system, it got assumed at some point that it was responsible for cardiovascular disease, when in fact, it’s like saying Band-Aids are responsible for cuts.

Justin: Okay, that makes sense.

Daniel: Cholesterol is a fantastic tissue repair molecule. And so when we damage our cardiovascular system, cholesterol shows up. Cholesterol got demonized and there was a lot more to it as well, because there was a movement away from good quality animal fats like tallows and lards, which were heat stable, towards these really rancid, light and heat instable fats—polyunsaturated fats—like vegetable oil. And in order to sell crappy vegetable oil to people, they needed to demonize cholesterol, and they did that, and they did it effectively. To this day, people hear the term “cholesterol” and they immediately… It’s like that thing before. People don’t know what cholesterol is. Who knows what cholesterol…? Who do you know who could define cholesterol? Who can even define that? It’s like asking a Smurf what “Smurf” means, right? It’s just a word people use. I saw a film recently that really had me laughing, where a guy was talking about gluten and the other guy said, “Do you even know what gluten is?” and he said, “Yeah, gluten is a generic term for stuff that’s bad. Fat’s are a gluten. Salt’s a gluten. Toxins are a gluten.” So I think that’s what people are doing. They’re using cholesterol as a catch phrase for things they think are bad in their body, when in reality, cholesterol is crucial.

Kate: Right. But they all run out and stop… They don’t buy eggs anymore and they cut out all these things and they don’t have a clue.

Justin: Yeah, because if you can change the levels of your cholesterol with a pharmaceutical chemical, then why not demonize it? You can make a lot of money there, you know.

Daniel: Right. So if I convince you that toenails are bad… If I just start removing your toenails, that’s going to seem weird. If I convince you that toenails are causing diseases, then I could implement a toenail removal program, and if I did it well enough, I could go around the world selling my toenail removal program and people will never ask why. If they think toenails are bad, they’re not even going to look into why they should have them.

Justin: Right.

Daniel: So similarly, as absurd as that sounds, people are trying to remove the cholesterol from their body when it is the substance that you build… It’s the play dough that you build your hormones out of. How ridiculous. So what happens is as they do that, their sex drive goes down. As they do that, their hormone production goes down. As they do that, the body tries to scrape together what it needs to make progesterone, what it needs to make testosterone. You know, when we look at vegetarian diets through time, we see that they are primarily monastic. You guys know what I mean by that? Monks use them, right? And why do they do that? Because it reduces your sex drive. Obviously, right, if we’re going to be sitting around meditating all day, probably don’t want a jammin’ libido, right?

Justin: What a good way to put it.

Daniel: If we’re going to be a bunch of dudes in a monastery, if we’re going to be a bunch of women in a monastery—a bunch of monks or nuns—we probably don’t want a raging libido. So through time we see things like vegetarian diets employed for their low cholesterol, their low hormone producing qualities. We see foods like soybean being used because it’s rich in estrogens and it reduces testosterone, right? Does that make sense?

Justin: Yeah.

Kate: Yeah.

Daniel: Now here’s what happened. Again, because people just love sound bites. They just bought into it. Vegetarian diets are better for you. Hey, of course—they’re low in cholesterol, and we all know cholesterol is bad. They’re low in fat. We all know that’s bad. So people got on that and they don’t realize that they’ve taken a libido reducing diet on, and then they spend a lot of time later on down the road, because it takes a while for the hormone stuff to start working… Like I said before, there is lag time, so people start trying to figure out “Oh my God. How am I going to get my sex drive back? How do I get my hormone levels back up? Wow, I feel like I’m really out of balance. Wow, I’m not having a menstrual cycle anymore. What’s wrong with me? I’m on this great vegetarian diet.” See how that could work?

Justin: Right.

Daniel: So we need to be really conscientious about making sure we get enough cholesterol. Along with that, we’ve got to make sure we’re getting enough vitamin D. I mean this is just so obvious. Let yourself get pale this winter. See how you feel. See how people respond to you. See how your sex drive is when you are pale. How is your hormone production? You don’t need a doctor to tell you this. How is your hormone production when you’re pale and pasty? Not real good. You can feel it, right? You can feel it. So we need to make sure we’re getting sufficient sun exposure and we’re cranking up our vitamin D levels. Our liver is like this amazing bank where we deposit… We literally put deposits, like cash deposits, of vitamin D. Now here is the thing about vitamin D. Listen up, folks. Vitamin D is a hormone. It is no longer considered a vitamin. We just call it vitamin D. It’s like a crappy name that got stuck onto it, because a vitamin is something that you’ve got to put in your body because you don’t make it. Vitamin D is a hormone. It’s a chemical messenger that travels around the body doing all types of things and we need to start understanding that it’s a hormone.

So again, like I said before, hormones are like this catchall phrase. People don’t really know what they’re talking about. So some people, when they say “hormones,” they might mean their melatonin and serotonin. Somebody else might be struggling with thyroid issues, so they’re actually talking about metabolic stuff like thyroid hormone. Somebody else is talking about hormones and they’re talking about getting pregnant; they’re talking about progesterone. A guy is talking about hormones; he’s talking about testosterone and his sex drive. So there is a lot to this subject of hormones. Vitamin D is crucial to not only producing that hormone but also insuring that our body keeps its hormone production high. I think of it like this. When nature sees you’re getting pasty and pale and your vitamin D is low, it starts weeding you out of the gene pool.

Justin: Right.

Daniel: You’re not even fit enough to get sunlight? We’ve got to weed you out of the gene pool. Does that make sense?

Justin: Right. And so what are the main hormones? Like you just mentioned a few—testosterone…

Kate: Progesterone, estrogen…

Justin: Are there many others? I’m sure there are many of them, right?

Daniel: Well, there are, and there are far more than I am an expert on, for sure.

Justin: Yeah.

Daniel: But yeah, there are a lot of classes of hormones. So again, this is the field of endocrinology and this is like me showing you a beautiful painting and you asking me how many colors there are.

Justin: Okay.

Daniel: Does that make sense?

Justin: Yeah.

Daniel: So it would get us a little bit off track. But to give some general guidelines, like I said before, vitamin D is a hormone; it’s a master hormone. We have the neurotransmitter hormones, right? So those would be like melatonin and serotonin—those are hormones, but we think of them as neurotransmitters. There are the gonadal hormones—those are our androgens and our estrogens, right? So androgens are a big class of what we typically think of as male sexual hormones, but they are in both bodies, and our estrogens are a big class of molecules of what we tend to typically think of as female gonadal hormones or sex hormones, but there are many of them and they are in male and female bodies. So there is a lot going on in the hormone realm. There is the thyroid thing. So we’re hearing a lot more about that, right? Our thyroid hormone, which regulates our metabolism. So that’s a whole other class. Again, if we get too focused in on specific hormones, we’ll lose the greater plot, so let’s back out. We’ll zoom out a layer and we’ll look at things that help to insure that we’re getting good hormone production.

You guys—and I hear you talk a lot about it on this show and I know you have upcoming shows on it as well—sleep is crucial. Sleep is crucial. If we’re running a sleep deficit, our overall hormone production goes down. Our overall hormone production goes down. Now again, there is always lag time. So that’s the thing, right? The guy who sleeps five hours a night because he’s a super driven, workaholic doesn’t feel it in the first little while. It’s ten years in that he starts to see his hormone production go down. And he’s been living on this schedule so long he doesn’t make the connection.

Justin: Right.

Daniel: We need to make that connection now, so we need to understand how important getting sufficient sleep is. Now we all keep hearing it. I know it’s a very popular topic now. It’s really important that we go to bed before midnight. But here’s the thing. I’ve realized realistically, in my own life and for a lot of people I know, we just don’t. We just don’t. So if you don’t, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got that time in the morning to sleep in. If you’re going to stay up late, you’d better be sleeping in. If you’re going to go to bed early, you can get up earlier. But don’t think you can go to bed late and get up early and maintain that for very long. Your health will deteriorate and your hormone production will deteriorate and you’ll be spending time one day wondering where all the belly fat is coming from, “Why don’t I have any energy? Where is my drive? I can’t come up with goals. I have no motivation. What’s happening?” Well, you’ve gotten into a bit of an estrogen dominance there. So we need to be careful with that.

Justin: Yeah, I’ve heard recently that every hour of sleep before midnight is worth two as opposed to the one after midnight, like it’s really important to get those hours before midnight, from what I understand, isn’t it? If you can.

Daniel: Yeah. The thing is that midnight is not an arbitrary, made-up thing. Clock time is a bit arbitrary, but true midnight is when the sun passes 180 degrees from where you are on the planet. So it’s when the new cycle begins. It’s an actual, astronomical event. It’s not an astrological event. It’s an astronomical event. It’s when the sun passes the nadir point on the planet for you, where you are. So your midnight is important to you and so yeah, I would second that. But I’d also say I know that it’s not always easy, especially for us who are excited and doing things all the time and living fun lives. Let’s face it—we stay up late. So we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got sufficient darkness to sleep in and that we give ourselves sufficient time to sleep. Personally, for me, anything less than eight hours has never been enough.

Justin: Yeah, that’s how I am too.

Kate: Yeah. I can attest to that.

Justin: Yeah. Gotta have more than eight… at least eight hours, for me.

Daniel: Yeah, I agree. And a lot of health gurus will tell you otherwise. They’ll claim… I think a lot of health gurus love to claim that they sleep less than that and I don’t know what that’s about, but I’m here to tell you that I think they’re lying. So the next piece is making sure that we reduce our stress level, that we reduce our cortisol level, that we reduce that level of inflammation in our body that’s all related to our stress. Again, I know this is something that you guys have talked a lot about on the show, and I heard the commercial at the break about Qigong and Tai Chi and I would fit those into a broader category of parasympathetic nervous system stimulating practices.

So we have this thing—our sympathetic nervous system—that’s our fight/flight/freeze kind of pathway. That’s what happens when we get jacked up and excited. We activate the sympathetic nervous system. When we relax, we activate the parasympathetic nervous system. We do that with things like real yoga. We do it with things like meditation. We do it with things like Qigong or Tai Chi. We do it with things like breathing exercises. We do it with things like sauna. All of those things activate parasympathetic nervous system. That relaxes the body. Think about for a moment this word “relax.” It means “to make something lax again” or “to take the tension off of something again.”

So the idea is like you couldn’t live relaxed. That wouldn’t be relaxed—that would be “lax.” We don’t want to live lax, right? So imagine right now if the two of you were holding a cord between you—a piece of rope—there needs to be dynamic tension to keep you both interested in this game of holding the rope. So if Justin pulls a little bit one direction and Kate pulls back a little bit, there is some push and pull. Now if one of you just goes lax and just stays limp and lax, well, it’s no fun. And if one of you just keeps pulling and pulling and pulling, well, it’s no fun either. We need to be able to be in tension and then relax, in tension and then relax. That’s the dynamism of life, right? So we need both the sympathetic nervous system… We’ve got to get jacked up. We’ve got to get excited. We’ve got to go for runs. We’ve got to do explosive things. We’ve got to tackle projects. We have to learn how to relax as well. Our culture doesn’t promote that as much. It promotes staying jacked up and that reduces our hormone balance and our hormone production, so we need to be careful about it.

Justin: Wow, interesting stuff. We’re going to take a little break here. Sorry, Daniel. This is time for a break here. This is really, really good stuff. We’re with Daniel Vitalis, Surthrival.com, DanielVitalis.com, FindASpring.com. Really great stuff. We’ll be right back, right after this break.

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Justin: The history of heat therapy dates back over 2,400 years and it was Hippocrates who said, “Give me the power to produce fever and I will cure all disease.” This FDA approved medical device called the BioMat is a mat that you can lay on, read on, sleep on, do yoga on, sit on and it can be used on office chairs, massage tables and the like to help the body heal itself. It’s inlaid with 30 pounds of healing crystals using amethyst and a rare black tourmaline, producing negative ions and a healing electrical field. These healing crystals help to restore cellular health by replacing electrons to the atoms, as well as penetrating deep into the body by four to six inches. What can the BioMat do for you? It’ll improve your skin, burns as many calories as if you went jogging for 30 minutes, it improves the immune system by up to 40% or more, reduces stress and fatigue, removes toxins, lowers cholesterol, relieves pain, revitalizes cellular metabolism, it improves cell channels to deliver nutrients and oxygen to every one of your cells, it activates over 3,000 enzymes and even a Harvard Medical study showed cancer cells die at over 42 degrees Celsius, it reduces stress hormones by up to 78%, it allows your body to produce heat shock proteins, which increases endorphins, NK cells, T cells and lymphocytes, it’s very, very low EMF and it’s got a 17 layer technology. Dr. Mark Sircus is the director of the International Medical Veritas Association. Explain to us more about these BioMats.

Mark: These BioMats are these far infrared mattresses. You lay on them or you sleep on them—or both—you do very heavy treatments during the day and at night you sleep at just a nice, comfortable temperature. These BioMats are like these love machines, comfort machines and healing machines because what they do is they just radiate out light—far infrared light—and you can radiate yourself all night long while you’re sleeping and you’re not doing anything else. And what happens is this light penetrates the body and turns to heat. And the first thing that happens when you bring your core body temperature up one degree is your immune system strength increases by 40-50%. They feel, when you lay down on them… You guys know. You have one. So it’s like the feeling is so good. It’s like being… cuddling with a lover—your wife or husband. It’s just warmth and comfort.

Justin: How are you using BioMats for patients in your clinics?

Mark: The cancer treatment using the heat is very aggressive, meaning during the day you sandwich yourself in between two of them, turn it onto high heat and bake the cancer. The cancer will die before you do. No, this is… You can go to England and spend the $20,000 and you microwave the cancer out of existence. These BioMats basically do the same thing. Radiation therapy for cancer is really a solid idea. Unfortunately, oncologists use the wrong radiation. They use radiation that kills you. This BioMat uses radiation that can save your life and make your life more comfortable, keep you warm in the cold and help take care of your kids and all… You know, the list doesn’t end.

Justin: Yeah, because isn’t there some sort of temperature at which cancer cells will start dying?

Mark: Right. And it’s below the temperature that human cells will die.

Justin: So you really like this BioMat far infrared technology, don’t you?

Mark: But it’s really strengthened me. Well, now the kids are addicted to it. They fight on who’s going to sleep on it at night and it not only changed my life, but it changed my medical practice and my books. This is a great machine for anybody who’s usually cold during the winter. Instead of heating a big house, you just heat yourself. The bottom line—it brings good feelings. Just lay on this BioMat and it gives the strength back.

Justin: I can attest to that indeed. Kate and I love ours and we think you will too. Learn more about these amazing BioMats at www.ExtremeHealthRadio.com/BioMat or you could check them out in our store as well. Again, that’s www.ExtremeHealthRadio.com/BioMat.

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Justin: All right. Having a great time here with Mr. Daniel Vitalis and you’ve got a little something in the email, didn’t you?

Kate: Yeah, during the break we got an email here from one of our good friends and listeners, Yvette, and she says, “By the way, you have one of my favorite guests on the show today. I think just about everything he says makes so much sense”—with lots of “Os.” So this is why we have people like Daniel Vitalis on the show. It really does drive it all home. Makes complete sense of stuff that… I mean everything he says makes me think. Like “Yeah, I haven’t thought about it that way before.”

Justin: Such good stuff.

Daniel: The way my brain works, I’m wondering what those things that she doesn’t feel that about are. But anyway…

Kate: We’ll work on that.

Daniel: I do really want to get to sort of the “What can we take? What supplements and foods really help with this hormone balance, hormone production story?” But I really want to hit on one more piece. We could go on all day with these things that build hormone health, but let’s keep in mind they are the same things that build everything health. And so it’s a very simple overall approach, right? And again, if somebody went back through your show archives and just listened to them or if they went through my YouTube videos and just listened to them, I mean we’re hitting on all these things because any part of health is whole health, right? It’s got to be. But there is this other piece… And I know this is a family show, so if it’s okay with you guys, I’ve got to get a little PG-13 here for a moment.

Justin: We allow that.

Daniel: But I think—NC-17—I think that there is this piece that gets overlooked in our culture that we don’t talk about enough for some reason, and that’s the effect of the opposite sex on our hormone production; that’s the effect of eroticism on our hormone production; it’s the effect of orgasm on our hormone production; it’s the effect of lovemaking on our hormone production and sustainment. So I think this is this piece we need to talk about. I got exposed to this study when I was younger showing that women with irregular menstrual cycles would have their menstrual cycle regulated by smelling male body odor. That really kind of interested me and my personal experience says this. If we are around healthy individuals—and I think this is part of the attraction people have to places like clubs or concerts, where people are congregating together—particularly where healthy people are congregating together or people who are looking for sexual mates are congregating together. One of the nice things about that is we get exposed to lots of pheromone. And whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, that’s going to work on our hormone systems.

Justin: So just being around, in that area where these people are, actually has an effect just on our own biology like that?

Daniel: Yes. Well, I mean I think we all know that, right? It’s pretty obvious. And it’s powerful. It’s more powerful than a lot of these other pieces and it’s one of the least talked about. So for me, for instance, several times a year, I visit a hot springs that’s very private, where a lot of my friends from around the world… And I’ve got a lot of beautiful friends. I’ve got some amazing, cool, fun, smart, beautiful, sexy friends. And we get to hang out naked at hot springs for days at a time. The effect that has… What effect does that have on my biological system? What does that engender within me? If you’re able to smell the opposite sex when that person is aroused, what effect does that have on you when their hormone production is high? So what do we do to block that? For instance, again, in the same way that a monk uses soy based diets and vegetarianism to reduce their sex drive, your office place uses antiperspirant and neckties to do it.

Justin: Ah, interesting. Okay.

Daniel: Right? If I put on a collared shirt and I button it around my wrists and I tie it around my neck so my hormones can’t escape the shirt, and then I fill my pores with aluminum so that I can’t release any of my pheromones into the room, see how that would reduce the sex drive of the workforce?

Justin: I see, yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Daniel: Isn’t that kind of obvious? Now what’s the guy do as soon as he hits the club? He loosens the tie and unbuttons the collar; he rolls up the sleeves; he starts to let it out a little bit more, right? I won’t even go into this for women. Women, you guys know what you do to attract the opposite sex or to attract attention or to release your pheromones. We all know that if we put good smells on our pulse points, those start to emit those good smells along with our pheromones, right? We clean up our pheromones with that. So we all know that this is going on, but we don’t talk about it as from a health perspective very much, so I think this is something people can utilize. When you’re with your lover and you’re reaching high points, don’t be afraid to smell your lover, particularly in their armpits or their groin, where they are releasing pheromones. That turn-on is more than just turning you on psychologically. It’s turning on your hormone systems. Literally “turn on,” like a light switch—you’re turning something on. And you want that turned on, right? We don’t want that turned off. That’s our libido. We want that flicked on all the time. So we want to be figuring out how to stay stimulated in that way. If you are in a relationship, usually what you are doing is stimulating your lover and being stimulated by your lover and if you’re single, it’s really great to get around people who stimulate you in this sexual kind of way. Now I’m not saying that we need to go out and be lascivious about it, but I am saying that it’s good to stay in a state that’s turned on.

So it’s going to be very difficult to live a monk’s lifestyle and have strong hormone production. I need to make that really abundantly clear here. So if my lifestyle is all I like to do is yoga and meditation and I like to get to bed really early and I like to do all these health practices and I don’t do anything to turn me on, well, whose fault is it when my hormone production gets low or imbalanced? So we need the push-pull. Now there is this crazy idea that’s infiltrated the health movement that there is something noble about asceticism. Now we have people like the Buddha telling us that there is nothing about that we need to do. We don’t need to cut ourselves off from experience. We need to balance them. So we’ve got to have dynamic tension. So just like you need the things that relax your body, you need the things that turn you on and it’s really important you balance the two. And if you don’t, your hormone production gets out of balance and it gets low and we see that in people in long-term relationships that are failing sexually.

What we see is… You just start watching people. You can sort of see if they have a good sex life or not because you’ll see the man will start to accumulate breast tissue, he’ll start to accumulate belly fat, she’ll start to accumulate butt fat and side fat that are indicative of their hormone production getting low and their estrogen levels getting too high. You’ll start to see his motivation level drop off. You’ll start to see her losing focus and interest. And those are indicators that the sexual hormone production has gotten low, that they are not utilizing each other as nutrients.

Justin: Ah, interesting. What an interesting way to put it—“utilizing each other as nutrients”—I like that.

Daniel: That’s part of why we get into relationship, right? That’s why single people are always looking for a relationship, because they want to consistently be able to get turned on. So if you don’t have that in your life, you need to find that in some way. And if you’re not able to find that, you need to figure out what’s your block that you could overcome so that you could access that more. For some people it’s going to be a religious paradigm that was impressed upon them in their youth. For some people it might be some spiritual thing they think they’ve taken on. For some people it might just be cultural or social awkwardness. But overcoming that will help you to get your hormone production turned up and you’ll see that your life will get better as a result of that. So that may seem like a little weird rabbit trail, but I think it’s the piece that nobody really talks about. We’re afraid to talk about it. It’s so important.

Justin: Yeah. I’m sure you see this all the time. I mean this hormone thing… I mean people are just so out of whack with their hormones. There are so many things that are throwing their hormones out of whack and people don’t realize that every little thing they do in their life, like the simple act of going to work and putting on, like you said, a tie and a suit and all these things. They’re all sort of stacking—like David Wolfe says—stacking the odds in your favor, but when you’re doing these things, they’re almost kind of stacking the odds not in your favor. They’re all these little tiny things…

Daniel: It’s like you have a debt, right? And it’s hard to come back from that debt. You need to put all these practices in place to sort of come back from that. So we want to be really careful about just reducing those things that we’re stacking against ourselves, right? And one of the big ones is the suppression of our sexuality, or like I said, can you guys see now what I’m saying, how there are a lot of lifestyle things that actually suppress our sexuality, but we think that they’re good for us? So then we wonder why it’s not working.

Justin: I can see there are probably a lot more too.

Daniel: Yeah, well, we could go on all day, but we don’t have time for it. So I think that that’s important and I think that we need to… Even if we are in a relationship, it’s really great to socialize more, to get out and to socialize and get around people that stimulate us, because hormone production is a result of stimulation and we want to be stimulated. Now not all the time. Like I said, there are times we need to get parasympathetic and actually reduce stimulation and relax, but once we’re relaxed, we don’t want to just walk around like that. I mean I know Eckhart Tolle does. I don’t, personally. It’s not the path I’m on. I like to live somewhere in dynamic tension—homeodynamisis.

Justin: Interesting. So what are some things that…? I know that we’re going to talk about some supplements or some things people could take if they are low. I guess the first thing people should do is get some sort of blood test, right? And figure out what their levels are…?

Kate: Get a hormone paneling?

Justin: Yeah, to begin with, right? That would be Step #1, wouldn’t it?

Daniel: For me, I would say no. For me, I would say no. Now it depends where somebody is at and how much credence they put in that. For me, no. Why? One reason is because how is your hormone panel going to look right now and then let’s say… Let’s say we take your blood right now and let’s say ten minutes from now we get off the phone, you guys have a little, you know… a little of this, a little of that, things get a little hot and heavy there in the studio, and then I take your blood again. What am I going to see?

Justin: Right.

Daniel: Wow! Jeez! It’s dramatically different. It’s only been 15 minutes. How did that happen?

Justin: Right.

Daniel: You know what? Blood is a dynamic, constantly changing environment. Blood is not like water in a vial and every time we take a little drop out and test it, it’s the same. Your blood has… You have endocrine glands constantly dumping hormones in and those are constantly affecting each other. You take a step outside into the sunlight for a minute, UV light starts hitting you and causing vitamin D production. This is too dynamic of an environment. I don’t personally put a lot of credence in things like that. It can be beneficial to people, but I think the first step is starting to implement these ideas we’re talking about.

Justin: I see. Okay.

Daniel: And if you’re going, “Hey, you know what? I’m already doing the sleep. I’m already doing the meditation. I’m already doing the yoga. I’m already eating the good food. I’m already doing that,” then I’m going to say, “Hey, you know what? Up the meat a little bit and go to a hot yoga class where there are people who stimulate you.” And if you’re like, “You know what? I’ve been living the party lifestyle,” then I’m going to say, “You know what? It’s time to reduce the meat a little bit and get away from the clubs a little bit and it’s going to be time to start doing the meditation and the sauna and the Tai Chi,” right?

Justin: I see.

Daniel: We’ve got to figure out where somebody’s at on that spectrum of extremes and dial them back to center point. So for me, the first point is getting into lifestyle balance. We’re not a car that needs to go—in my opinion—we’re not a car that needs to constantly go get diagnostic tests done.

Justin: So blood tests are really just snapshots in time, right? They’re just really…

Daniel: They are a snapshot in time, but the thing is that it’s like taking a… It’s not like a snapshot in time of some really linear thing. It’s like snapshots in time through a kaleidoscope. One turn on the kaleidoscope dial radically alters it into a pattern that will never emerge again. Does that make sense?

Kate: That makes sense.

Daniel: In a second. It’s not like a flipbook where each page is slightly different than the one before and just slightly different than the one that’s to come. It’s more dramatic than that. It’s way more dramatic than that. So you know that experience where you think for a second you’re about to get in a car accident and then it doesn’t happen and then you get that rush of tingle through your whole body and you get pins and needles in your feet and your hands for a second and you feel a little cold sweat and it only lasts a second?

Justin: Right.

Daniel: But how fast it comes, how quickly… how quickly your body responds. So fast, so dynamic, right? So I know that with these kinds of tests, of course they try to get you to fast first; they try to take the tests the same time every day, and all those things. And there is value there. I’m not saying… Just for me, in my approach, it’s not the first step. For me, that would be more like… that’s a more extreme thing. So if we’re going to start looking up blood panels, we should probably be sure that we have a serious condition first, not that we just have some general malaise we want to come back from, because cleaning up your lifestyle will clean that stuff up.

Justin: Interesting.

Daniel: And blood panels are more extreme and they’re better used when somebody has a really long-term issue they just can’t make progress on. Then it might be time to start looking at “How is my thyroid hormone? How is my testosterone? How is my progesterone?” But if you’re not dealing with something really dramatic, then I don’t think you need to do that right off.

Justin: We have a question from Lisa and she says—kind of directly into the supplement subject—she says, “Hi, Justin. I was wondering if taking a velvet antler could delay the onset of menopause.” I know that’s very direct.

Daniel: You know, that’s a great question because it opens me up to talk about… There are two supplements I really want to talk about today. One is antler velvet and the other one is pine pollen. These are two that I have determined to be really safe and useful across the board. So if we were going to talk about… I love this idea that we can generally break our supplements into those things that are really medicinal and those things that are tonic. Those things that are really medicinal don’t work for everybody. They are for specific problems or specific symptom sets, whereas things that are tonic, everybody can use and you don’t have to worry about them unbalancing you. They are very safe. So what I like about antler velvet is that it’s very tonic. Nearly anybody in the world can take it. Now I’ve been personally selling an elk antler velvet now for probably five years and so I’ve got literally thousands and thousands and thousands of customers who have purchased it and a lot of them write back to tell me dramatic stories or they come to my events and they tell me dramatic stories. I have personally seen women who have been menopausal for multiple years take antler velvet and begin to have a period again.

Justin: Really?

Kate: Wow.

Daniel: I’ve seen that happen. Now it’s certainly not “Oh yeah, it happens every time.” I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen women who thought they were going into menopause back out of it. I have seen women who can’t hold a baby and keep miscarrying—because their progesterone levels are too low and they can’t maintain that baby—I’ve seen them get on antler velvet and then be able to have a healthy, full term pregnancy. I’ve seen people whose libido was tanked and nothing was working and it brings them back. So yeah, it’s a very powerful substance. Why? Mammals—we are mammals, right? We produce milk. We have live birth. We have hair. We’re mammals, just like an elk is a mammal. And the chemicals—the hormones—the substances coursing through the blood of an elk are very similar to the ones coursing through your body. And a male elk—of course it’s just the males that grow antlers—a male elk goes through a sexual cycle where what happens is he begins growing antlers in the spring, he grows them out to full term, he mates, they fall off, and the next year he grows them back. So once a year, elk from the farm that we maintain have—or at least the large, alpha elk—have their antlers trimmed off and a supplement can be made from those. Now basically, when this elk is getting ready for his explosive season of sex, he is producing all of these hormones and they’re in his bloodstream and because his antlers are vascularized, they are in there too. Now these antlers are these quickly growing tissues. They are growing two inches a day.

Justin: Wow.

Kate: Whoa.

Justin: That’s incredible.

Daniel: That’s hard to… That means you could sit there and watch it happen.

Justin: Yeah.

Kate: Oh my gosh.

Daniel: Two inches a day. Now if you get online and you do a little Google Images of “velvet antlers”—not antlers like you think of, the hard, bony, spiky stuff—when they’re growing, they’re fuzzy, they’re furry, they’re warm, they’re enervated, they’re vascularized, they’re an organ like a leg, almost. And they’re growing at two inches a day. So there are all of these hormones in there and all of these growth factors, these protein messenger chemicals that initiate growth in the body and repair. There are all of these hormones there. This animal is getting ready for a truly explosive season of sex. He’s going to battle off other males to prove his dominance and his worthiness for mating and then he’s going to mate. And then those antlers are going to fall off.

Now if we can get a hold of the growing tips of those antlers and we can get that into our bloodstream, it essentially inputs or uploads those same molecules into our body. One of the major ones is IGF-1, and IGF-1, like cholesterol, has been really demonized for the last couple of years and I think people are just really wrong on this one. IGF-1 is what your body takes HGH and turns it into, so human growth hormone gets processed through the liver and it gets turned into IGF-1. Now we know a lot of bodybuilders and a lot of people who are into longevity who are using these things maybe as an anti-aging kind of chemical. They use HGH when HGH just gets turned into IGF-1 anyway. We want to upload IGF-1 into our body. When we do that, that cranks up our hormone production, that increases our free testosterone levels, and by the way, whether you’re a man or a woman, you need to know this. Estrogens don’t do anything for your sex drive. Libido comes from androgens—testosterone and other androgens. So we want to increase our testosterone levels. If we’re not feeling we have full focus, if we’re not feeling we have full drive, if our libido feels like it could be stronger, we need to increase our testosterone.

Justin: It’s important for women to understand this too and not be afraid of testosterone, right?

Kate: I know. You hear that and you kind of back away.

Daniel: Yeah. Right. And Kate, maybe you could help us explore that a little bit for us, because what I’m guessing—in my rudimentary sort of male understanding of female psychology—I’m thinking a horse jaw, mustache, beard, chest hair, deep voice, Adam’s apple, right?

Kate: Completely.

Daniel: Yeah. So really what’s going on…

Justin: Hey, Daniel, really quickly—we are starting to get this weird noise here. Would you mind if we call you right back?

Daniel: Please do.

Kate: Okay, thanks. Sorry.

Justin: So sorry about this. Okay, we’ll hang up the call with Mr. Daniel Vitalis.

Kate: That was strange.

Justin: You know, it’s interesting. That’s happened on a lot of the shows near the end—we start to get this weird thing with Daniel. Interesting, isn’t it?

Kate: Yeah.

Justin: Okay, let’s try this.

Kate: The hormone gods are not having it.

Justin: No, they don’t like this one bit. Okay, so let’s try to call him back here through the magic of Skype.

Kate: Right. Much better.

Daniel: All right. Great. So we were just joking about this idea that women are afraid of testosterone getting into their bodies and rightfully so, particularly with a bioidentical male testosterone, like a pharmaceutical one—you don’t want that anywhere in your body. However, we’re starting to see that when women get into menopausal stages in their life, the issues aren’t just with low progesterone or estrogens; it’s also testosterone. And testosterone’s effects of people really have a lot to do with our libido and our sense of clarity, our sense of focus. When a woman’s testosterone is low, she feels anxiety. Her bone density decreases. She may become a higher risk candidate for breast cancer. And this stuff can start as early as age 30, so I don’t want to just say, “Oh, this is just menopausal women.” This is premenopausal women as well. This kind of thing is happening earlier and earlier. So women need testosterone just like men do.

Now for men, it’s a really similar thing. It increases our muscle mass. It reduces our body fat. It increases our bone density. It protects our heart and our cardiovascular system. It really enhances libido. And it’s really crucial to good moods. So when testosterone levels are adequate in people… I don’t want to say high, because I don’t want to give the impression we want to jack them up past normal, but we just want them to be normal, and when they’re normal, we have good moods. We feel driven. We feel focused. We feel goal-oriented. And you know what? I know as public speaker—I mean I know this because I get to observe how people respond to what I say—my words are much less effective than my delivery. I just know that. It’s the passion, not the words, right? I could say something ridiculous and stupid, but if I say it with passion, people will become entranced by it. People feel goal-orientedness. People feel focus. They feel drive. Why? Because it indicates a high level of androgens and a high level of androgens indicates health or breeding quality.

Justin: Interesting.

Kate: Real quick, Daniel. I just got a chat message for you. It was interesting. She writes in “He mentioned the woman in menopause who took the antler velvet and started menstruating again. I know he sells different strengths of this product. Is it only the strongest version of the product that could do this?” That’s an important question.

Daniel: Really good question. So at Surthrival, we carry a really unique product. So we compete in the community that sells deer antler. We sell elk antler and we do that because we can work with US farms, so we’re not having to import the material and we work with really ethical farms, because you can imagine, when it comes to removing antlers from an animal, there is some pretty sheisty stuff going on in the world. We really work with a beautiful, sustainable operation with really healthy animals and animals that are never killed or turned into venison or anything like that. And what we do is we clip the male antlers from certain males one time a year and those antlers are then turned into a freeze-dried extract. So they are concentrated 40 times. So we end up with this material that’s ground down and concentrated down, like space food—freeze dried—all the water removed. And then we suspend that in an alcohol—an organic grape alcohol. Now we then put that into bottles—one-ounce bottles.

Now we have several different strengths. We have one we call “Silver.” It has 450 milligrams of the antler in it. We have one we call “Gold.” It has 1,000 milligrams of the antler extract in it. We have one we call “Platinum.” It has 1,500 milligrams of the extract in it. And in fact, we have actually recently come out with one called “Essentia,” which is a little bit less concentrated even than the Silver. So we have four strengths, but they are all made of the same stuff and to be perfectly honest, they are all… It’s sort of a better buy, the stronger it is you buy it, because the more you get for your money, but they are all the same thing. They all do the same thing. And this effect in this woman was actually at a lower strength and in fact, a lot of women find they prefer the lower strength variety. They find that the stronger—the Gold and Platinum—can sometimes be a bit too stimulating. And so a lot of men prefer the God and the Platinum and a lot of women prefer the Essentia and the Silver. But again, these are all the same product. They are all the elk antler extract. It’s just that each bottle has a different amount of water in it, if you will.

Justin: I see.

Daniel: It’s just a little less concentrated. But they all do the same thing. I’ve got to tell you too, I’m aware that… I am sometimes a little delicate about saying this woman got her cycle back because some women are like, “I don’t want that to happen to me.”

Kate: Right.

Daniel: “I’m done with that,” you know? And I want to point out that I don’t think that it goes in and reverses it. I think this woman’s body… In the same way that a female athlete will stop mensing because she doesn’t have a high enough body fat levels—her hormone levels get thrown off by her low body fat… Let’s say an Olympic track runner. You get those Olympic female track runners—they’re not having menstrual cycles. They’ve made their bodies too masculine, so they are not able to mense. They’re not fertile anymore. But that can be restored in the same way I think this woman wasn’t actually menopausal; it was rather that she had prematurely stopped mensing. So I think it helped to restore that.

Justin: Oh, I see.

Daniel: But my point is that all of our antler extracts do the same thing; they’re just at different concentrations. So the other piece I want to add is that there is a lot more going on than just these growth factors and there’s a lot more going on than just the IGF-1 and the hormone substances and the increase in free testosterone. There is glucosamine and chondroitin and collagen and a few other connective tissue materials in there—collagens. And so this is the thing. When we’re talking about hormones, it’s kind of obvious subtext that we’re talking about an anti-aging thing here, because we know hormone production starts to taper off as we get older. And nature basically says, “Okay, you’re sort of moving away from breeding age so you don’t need as much of this stuff” and a lot of us are like, “No, I want to stay at breeding age!”

Justin: Right.

Kate: Right.

Daniel: So we need to supplement beyond just the hormones. We need to make sure we have the stuff to maintain the body repair.

Justin: I see.

Daniel: So I have mentioned before that I work on an ambulance from time to time and part time, on like a volunteer level. I work with a lot of geriatric patients—older patients—and the really obvious thing, in addition to their low hormone levels, is that their collagen levels are so low that their bodies are crumbling. They don’t have the juice, the connective tissue, the collagen, the gelatin. Think about gelatin for a second. Think about a block of clear gelatin—not Jell-O—but gelatin. And you touch it and it sort of wiggles and jiggles and it’s juicy and jellowy, right? That’s the stuff we want between our layers of skin. That’s the stuff we want between our bones and our joints. That’s the stuff we want all throughout our muscle tissue. And when that stuff’s gone, we look wrinkly, baggy and saggy. So we need to make sure that we’re getting enough collagen in. So one of the reasons I love antler extracts is they increase the androgen levels, the sex hormone levels, and at the same time, they get our tissues repairing themselves by feeding in all of these collagens. So it’s like a very concentrated bone broth.

Kate: So you’re saying keep it juicy, in more ways than one.

Justin: I like it.

Kate: Keeping it juicy.

Daniel: You got it. It’s holographic. You’ve got to be juicy on every level.

Kate: Yeah. Completely.

Justin: I love it. So can people take this particular deer antler—can they take it if they’re pregnant or is there an issue with that?

Daniel: Well, you know how the FDA is and what they want me to say is that my following statements have not been approved by the FDA.

Justin: Right.

Daniel: But I’ll say this. Antler extract is nothing new in the world. It’s been used throughout time. It’s been used for thousands of years, all the way back into the early stages of human civilization in Asia, so some of the earliest human civilizations. And it was used by everybody, including children, including pregnant women, including lactating women, menopausal women, men—pre and after andropause. So everybody has used it all through time. Now any woman who is going to do anything while she’s pregnant, she needs to check in with somebody besides a radio show about that.

Justin: Right.

Daniel: Right? But I would say that I don’t know of any ill effects and there has never been any reported that I’ve ever seen. So yeah, so for me, what I love about it is it’s a supremely safe supplement. Now we suspend our antler extract in an alcohol base and the reason is this. The alcohol will carry a lot of these substances into the bloodstream so that you don’t swallow them. So when you put this tincture in your mouth and you hold it under your tongue, it gets absorbed right into the mucosa of the mouth—the buccal membranes—and it goes right into the bloodstream. Now if we swallow it, the body thinks it’s food and breaks apart the delicate proteins that are the growth factors.

Justin: Interesting.

Daniel: So we don’t get them. It actually won’t work.

Justin: Wow.

Daniel: We’ve disassembled them. So it’s like I take a book that contains lots of information. If I put it in my stomach, it’s like it cuts up all the letters so that it’s no longer recognizable as words. Does that make sense?

Justin: Yeah.

Daniel: So we want to get this stuff directly into the bloodstream, so that’s why we put it in alcohol. So one of the things is that anybody who’s going to use that product needs to be aware that it’s in alcohol and that might affect how you give it to a child or a pregnant woman, but I think it’s such a tiny amount of alcohol, you can usually dilute it in water or something like that if you need to.

Justin: So if someone is looking at getting some of these products, would like a bottle of it…? I guess there are different… Are there different sizes? How long would one bottle last a person?

Daniel: Good question. So it comes in a one-ounce bottle—one ounce Miron glass bottle—with a dropper. Now the way that we market it is we say that that’s a one-month supply. Now the reality is—and you guys know this because I’m sure you’ve bought thousands of supplements now—some supplements you buy, it’s a month’s supply and you use it in a week.

Justin: Right.

Daniel: Sometimes you buy a month’s supply and six months later, you’ve got half a bottle on the shelf because you don’t really use it. So it’s going to last as long as you make it last, but if you were really, really wanting to be active with it and you really want to get the results—and this is true of most supplements—you want to go at least six weeks at the recommended dose.

Justin: I see.

Daniel: So my recommendation would be to get two bottles and my recommendation would be to take that for the full course—the two months—before you start to try to really gauge the effects too much because you need to give your body time to really respond to this. However, my experience with elk antler extracts that are really high quality—not just mine but ones that are high quality in general—is that there are immediate effects but those are different than the long term effects. So there is an immediate kind of stimulating effect and that’s really nice. But the long-term effects are what you really want to go for. And so you’re going to need to get enough. Now here’s the thing. You could buy the Gold or Platinum product and if you stretched it three months out, it would be just as strong as the Silver product if you took it in a month because they’re just different concentrations.

Justin: I see.

Daniel: So when you’re looking at the website and you’re going, “Oh jeez, which of these do I want?” the Essentia and the Silver are a little easier on the wallet, and so you can get in there and start using it at a lower price, but you’re going to want to take it more frequently, whereas if you bought the Gold or the Platinum, you’re going to spend a little more up front, but you could stretch them out and make them last longer. You could take half doses and it would be just as strong as the Silver product.

Justin: So with the Essentia and the Silver, do you have that also—changing topics just a little bit—do you have those strengths in the pine pollen tinctures as well or is that just with the elk velvet?

Daniel: All right. Now we’re talking about a completely different creature here when we get into pine pollen. Pine pollen is… I want to almost say that’s a whole different animal, except it’s actually a whole different plant. So what we’re dealing with here is one of these supplements comes from the animal world, and that would be our elk antler extract, and one comes from the plant kingdom, and that would be our pine pollen. Now the pine pollen is just… And I know a lot of listeners have heard me talk about this ad nauseum, but I just am so fascinated by the idea of testosterone being in a pollen, in a plant food, because pollen is sperm from plants.

Justin: Right.

Daniel: Right? So if you walked outside and a pine tree in the spring drops pollen on you, you won’t be offended, but if a person did that, boy… So what’s going on is plants—some plants—put their sperm out into the wind. That’s how they pollinate. And pine trees do that. Now pine trees produce a lot of this sperm—a lot of pollen. We’re talking each full grown pine tree is producing buckets of pine pollen, and it’s literally putting this stuff out like rain, out into the ecosystem and it falls on everything. Now it contains testosterone and two other androgens that I know of. These are those libido enhancing, focus enhancing, growth enhancing, energy promoting androgens. But then it also contains the plant version of androgens—these things that we call phytosterols. They are steroids for plants. So it contains both. And what the pine tree does is it puts out its pollen and pollinating its species, but it’s also getting its pollen—its sperm—onto animals, where the testosterone goes to work in their bodies because they breathe it in and they get it in their mouths and it goes to work in their bodies. And it gets on plants and it causes plants to grow more vigorously because of the sterols. So pine trees are like these… I think of them like great, sage grandfathers who just pour androgen out into the ecosystem.

Justin: Yeah, they’re magical, aren’t they? I mean people use the bark and the needles and everything. They’re just amazing.

Daniel: We could go on all day about it. Yeah. And from a primitive skills perspective, there are a lot of really great survival techniques that we are dependent on pine for as well. So pine is the state tree up here where I live, in Maine—the pine tree. So this is the pine state and I absolutely love this organism. Now its pollen can be eaten whole, like a flower, and it’s very rich in vitamins, very rich in minerals, very rich in antioxidants, and increases our internal antioxidant production and opens our detoxification pathways. So just eating it is really valuable and we do absorb some of the androgens that way. If we tincture it in alcohol, that’s how we really start to absorb the testosterone and the androstenedione and the DHEA. That’s how we start to get those benefits. It’s like taking a very subtle, very natural steroid. But because it’s a whole food, it doesn’t have the pharmaceutical side effects that we get from taking steroids, so we get a whole plant steroid. Now for a young woman or a young man, what I’ll typically recommend is that they take the pine pollen as a powder.

Justin: Okay.

Daniel: Because their hormone production is still fairly good, and we don’t want to start to tell the body that it doesn’t need to produce testosterone because it has plenty from outside, right? We don’t want to give it that message. We want to allow our own hormone production to stay strong while it’s strong.

Justin: Okay.

Daniel: Then when we start to get into our 30s and we feel our levels starting to wane down… We don’t need a blood test for this. We can feel it. Our energy level, our focus level, our accumulation of body fat, the reduction in muscle mass—all these things that kind of come along with aging, and start at different ages, dependent on our lifestyle. When that starts to kick in, that’s when we can start using the pine pollen as a tincture. That’s where we get those really strong benefits. Now I like to recommend this to people, that if you’re going to take the pine pollen tincture, you want to take it at three times in the day. You don’t have to take it at all three, but you only want to take it at these three times—upon waking, at noon, before bed—because that’s when our natural testosterone production spikes happen and all we want to do is amplify our natural production. We don’t want to try to get high testosterone at times when the body wants to have low testosterone.

Justin: Is it too much, do you think, for someone to be on both those products or do they work well together?

Daniel: I’m on both of them.

Justin: You’re on both?

Daniel: Absolutely, yeah. No, I think together is really amazing—really synergistic. Remember these things are foods. These are foods. And so there are benefits far beyond just these benefits. But these benefits are synergistic and they work through different pathways. So one of them is increasing our IGF-1, our collagens; it’s feeding our blood cells—that’s the antler—it’s feeding our connective tissue and it’s increasing our own production of steroidal hormones. The other one is actually introducing steroidal hormones, along with all the molecules we need, all the vitamins, all the minerals we need to support that synthesis that’s happening from the antler, so it’s very synergistic—very synergistic. So I think both are wonderful.

The only caveat to that is that for young people, they don’t need to take a tincture of pine pollen. They’ll get great benefits from taking the powder, which they can blend into smoothies or into food however they want. I carry the pine pollen in a couple ways. So we of course have it as a bulk powder and just like chlorella, we crack the cell wall. There is about 25% more absorption that way. So we crack the cell wall to make the nutrients more available.

The other way we carry it is as a straight tincture, so we take grape alcohol—organic grape alcohol, basically a wine distillate, very high grade—and we extract the pine pollen in that through a percolation method, and then we put that into a Miron bottle to preserve it. So that’s one way that we carry the tincture of pine pollen. And that product I sell a lot to clinicians and people who work with people specifically on hormone issues. They use it that way in a clinical setting.

The other product I produce—and this is in a two-ounce bottle—we call it, at the office here, we call it P4 or our Pine Pollen Pure Potency, and that’s pine pollen extracted with the root of stinging nettle and Siberian Ginseng, and the three of those together is I think one of our greatest formulas at Surthrival. What it does basically is supports your own testosterone production via the Siberian Ginseng. It introduces testosterone into your body via the pine pollen, and then stinging nettle maintains free testosterone in the blood. So now we have a complete package. That product I sell to any man over 30 that I can. I believe it’s great for any man over 30 and I’m starting to really believe that any woman over 30 as well, seems to me pretty universal benefits.

You know, we’ve sold thousands and thousands of bottles to thousands and thousands of women and initially I was kind of curious, like “How will they be affected by it?” We would always warn people before they took it. We’d say, “Hey, just to be aware, I’m not sure how this is going to affect women.” And we’ve consistently had really excellent feedback in almost all cases. So my recommend would be if you’re a woman over 30 or a man over 30 and you’re concerned about your sex hormone levels, this would be a great product for you. And both the pine pollen tincture and the antler tincture are taken the same way, just a few drops under the tongue, and we sort of hold that or swish that around in the mouth, let it absorb, and let it go to work in your bloodstream.

Justin: And so would you take the deer antler three times a day as well, like at the same time you’d do the pine pollen?

Daniel: You know, I think taking it three times a day might be a little bit… It’s a little powerful.

Justin: Oh, okay.

Daniel: So you could do that, particularly if you were a bodybuilder or incredibly active person. I think if you’re somebody who is a little bit more sedentary, that’s a lot to take. So the stimulating effects might crank you up a little bit, so I would recommend you take as much as your body feels comfortable with. Usually when I get a new supplement, it’s a tough one because as somebody who owns a business in this arena, we tend to want to follow the industry rules, but the reality is when I take a supplement home, I don’t care what the… I want to know what the dose is recommended at, but then I’ll take twice as much and see what happens. I’ll take half as much and see what happens. And I figure out what my body actually wants. We’re not cookie cut, right? It’s different than… You know, working on bodies is different than working on a computer or a car, right? Every car, every computer, they’re interchangeable. People are not. We’re all unique. So I find what dose works for me. So I’ve taken a bottle of our strongest antler velvet in three days. Actually, I’ve taken it in one day. I’ve sat down and drank the whole bottle.

Justin: Oh my gosh.

Daniel: I’d recommend doing that on a night you’re going to be out doing things, not a night you plan to stay home and read the Bible. But you know, I’ve also made a bottle last me two months. So we’ve got to find the dose that feels really good, really accurate in our body. If there is anything I can do with my work, it’s like I want to empower people to decide for themselves.

Justin: Right.

Daniel: You don’t need me sitting back here, deciding for you what’s right for you. I can’t feel what you feel in your body. All I can do is make recommendations, but you’re the one who feels inside your body. You’re the one who knows what’s right for you. So I always like to leave it open to people to really play, to experiment, to see what lights you up and what doesn’t, and to make your decisions based upon your own feedback and less upon what people tell you to do.

Justin: And I would imagine these would be good for people that are a little more advanced, maybe 70s and things like that—60s, 70s. I imagine it would be good for them as well.

Daniel: Okay, so in your 20s, you don’t necessarily need this stuff. In your 30s, now you’re getting to that sort of change, where you start to understand… It’s like when you’re in your 20s, you don’t know like, “Why are guys taking Viagra? That’s never going to happen to me. What are you talking about?” You’re on top of the world, right? People don’t get that in their 20s. Then your 30s come and you start to feel some changes happening, right? 40s, okay, now it’s time to get on this stuff and have a plan. You don’t want to get into your 40s with no plan for this.

Justin: Right.

Daniel: Right? It’s kind of like… I had a brilliant thing said to me about people when they have a baby. I was told by a woman called Elena Tonetti—she’s a brilliant woman in the world of natural birthing—and she said that couples who are going to have a baby need to have a sex plan for after the baby is born. Don’t go into birth thinking you’ll just wing it after, because what ends up happening, for so many couples, is it destroys their sex life. So she says, “Go into it knowing that happens and make a plan so that you kind of know how you’re going to deal with these massive hormonal changes that happen within the relationship dynamic so that both parties can stay happy and satisfied.” Similarly, going into your 40s, you want to have a plan. “What’s my plan to maintain my sexual vitality?”

Unless you do want to be a monk or a nun, in which case, you want to figure out how to depress that. But for most of us, we want to figure out how to keep it strong. Once you’re in your 40s, supplements like this become crucial. They need to be part of your program. 50s—it’s a no-brainer. It’s a no-brainer. You want to be on this stuff. 60s, 70s, 80s, the rest of your life, you want to be on these things, right? You don’t want to be on drugs. You want to be on foods—again, concentrates of foods—that help to—and I include herbs in that category—concentrates of foods and herbs that help us to maintain youthfulness, because nature stops doing it, because you’re not really part of the breeding population at that point.

Justin: Right, makes sense.

Daniel: We need to tell nature “Hey, I want to be part of the breeding population,” even if you’re not looking to breed—just because you want to stay vital, you want to stay youthful, you want to stay healthy, you want to stay excited, focused, driven.

Justin: And I imagine the sooner you start planning, the easier the transition would be for anybody.

Daniel: Yeah, start thinking about it now, right? So Kate, when you were a little girl, did you have in your head certain age dates like, “Okay, when I’m 27, I want to have three kids”? Did you have any of those kinds of things?

Justin: Kate actually had to step out. She had…

Daniel: Oh, she’s not there? So one of the things that I have learned with women is like that. It’s like they decide these things at a certain age like, “When I get to this age, I’m going to do this, I’m going to have that.” A lot of guys have that like, “I want to have my career set by age whatever.” You need to have a plan like that—“Okay, when I get to age 35, I’m going to start utilizing some of these techniques that older men have told me about. When I get into my 40s, I want to have a daily supplementation—rigorous supplementation program—that I stick to.” Here’s one I have. When I get into my 50s is when I plan to use strong Red Ginseng every single day. I don’t do that currently. I love Ginseng. In fact, I wish I could take it every day, but the Chinese masters admonish me not to take it daily until I’m in my 50s and I’ve got to think there’s a reason they say that.

Justin: Interesting. Okay, so that’s part of your plan.

Daniel: So I’m waiting. But that’s part of my plan, part of my vigorous plan. Develop a plan. Re-listen to this cast and go back through the things that I listed off before and ask yourself “What’s your plan for sleep as you get older? What’s your plan for sexual stimulation as you get older? What’s your plan for vitamin D as you get older?” Put this stuff together and start to strategize and come up with a strategy and then implement the tactics.

Justin: I like that a lot. And you know, I like just your approach too, Daniel. You’re not telling people to really load up on this stuff or take this stuff at any age. I really like your approach. You’re really giving people an honest opinion and you’re really talking to them like a friend saying, “Hey, if you’re 20 years old, you don’t need this stuff,” you know?

Daniel: Yeah, supplements are like icing on the cake, right?

Justin: Yeah.

Daniel: It’s the icing on the cake, but for a lot of us in the business, it’s how we make our money and it’s important to us that we sell this stuff, and there’s a tendency then for people to over-sell things and under-sell all the really big, important, foundational stuff. So we need both. We do need these foods and supplements. I mean people’s diets are horribly deficient in things that they truly need. Yet, those foods—and I’ve given this analogy on your show in the past—when we’re taking care of a fish tank, the water, the air and the light are much more important to the fish tank than the quality of the fish food.

Justin: Right.

Daniel: So if we don’t have those other factors taken care of, really good fish food doesn’t help. Similarly, in your own body, which is like an aquarium, if you’re not getting the sleep you need, if you’re not de-stressing and decompressing, if you’re stimulated and interested, food is only going to help so much. So we need to make sure we have all of the pieces in play.

Justin: Interesting. Yeah, very, very fascinating. We have one final question. This is sort of off topic from the chat room. “Just curious if you’ve heard of a product called Rest Shield. It’s shaped like a pyramid, they say, and it’s supposed to de-stress you through scalar energy and it’s supposed to help with Earth’s human residents.” Have you heard of such a thing?

Daniel: You know what? That particularly product, no, but I’ve been in a lot of these pyramid… Is she talking about a pyramid that goes over the bed? Is that what it sounds like?

Justin: Yeah, that’s what it sounds like. I’m not sure if it’s a supplement, but it… She says it’s shaped like a pyramid, so it must be something like that, yeah.

Daniel: Yeah, so I’ve played a lot with that kind of technology and actually really love that kind of technology, and the term “pyramid,” it means “fire in the middle,” so “pyre,” like “pyromaniac” and “mid,” “middle”—it means “fire in the middle.” And there is this concept that’s very ancient that at the center of the pyramid, inside—three-dimensionally, at the center—that there is a concentration of energy that happens because of the geometry of a 3D pyramid. And so a lot of people have played with everything from storing food in the middle of a pyramid to sleeping in the middle of a pyramid to putting one on your head to leaving your razor blades in there to keep them sharp. And there is some evidence that that stuff works. Again, this is icing on the cake stuff, in my opinion.

Justin: Right.

Daniel: Right? So it’s more important that I shut the Wi-Fi off. It’s more important that I have a quality organic bed. It’s more important that I get to bed on time. It’s more important that I get eight hours of sleep. Now once I’ve got all those things in play, cool—a pyramid—icing on the cake. But if I don’t have those other pieces in play, I’m not going to expect a pyramid… You know, if pyramids were that magical, the whole world would already be onto it, right? They’re just icing on the cake. They add benefit but not at the expense of like quantity of sleep.

Justin: I see. I see. I really like this… what you were saying throughout the show—I know we’ve got to wrap it up here—but developing a protocol, developing a strategy for your hormones and so it starts with a foundation, like you were talking about with the sleep and the vitamin D and the low stress, and then you can add pieces to it that sort of float around the outside, like the supplementation. And so I think it would be helpful for people to sit down and look at their life and what stage in life they’re in and figure out “Okay, where am I in life? I’m 35. I’m 55. How am I going to build a hormone strategy and a hormone system, protocol that I can really build my whole life around?” I really like the whole approach to having supplements be part of it, because a lot of times, as you know, being in the supplement industry, people just think that the supplements are everything, don’t they?

Daniel: They do. They do. And there is a tendency, again, to use them at the expense of what we actually would be more benefited by putting in play. So again, now when somebody goes to calculate their strategy, let’s take two extreme characters. Let’s take the dedicated vegan yogi who goes to all the raw food potlucks and wears only organic pants and drives the Prius and is in bed at night by 10:00 and on the other extreme, let’s take the crazy partier, stays out super late, and is meeting lots of single men or single women, is constantly on the go, has tons going on, a really active social life and eats a little bit of whatever. Okay, two extremes. Now that person who is the yogi, they may need to look at “How do I get more stimulated by the opposite sex? How do I get a little edgier so that my body stays hormonally responsive?” They’ve already got the sleep piece dialed. It would be silly to put more energy into that. Conversely, the party kid needs to go “Hey, you know what? I’ve got all this stimulation. How do I relax more? How do I get a little more meditative? How do I get in better sleep?” So we need to determine where we’re at. You know what we tend to do though? And people… I know everybody listening is going, “Well, obviously, Daniel. That’s really obvious.” But look what people do. Well, the guy who has really big biceps, who goes to the gym and he’s got really small calves, what’s he like to work on? His biceps. Why? Because he’s good at it.

Justin: Right. Right.

Daniel: And he wants to avoid the thing he’s not good at, right? So when we do yoga and we’re really good at down-dog, we revel in the opportunity to do down-dog because it’s what we’re good at, and we want to avoid the thing we’re not good at, especially in public. That’s just how we tend to be. So when somebody hears this list of things that are good for their hormones, if they’re somebody who is already really good at going to bed by 10:00, well, then they’re going to latch onto that because they’re good at that, and they might not want to hear parts that push their comfort zone. So we have to look at, when we make a strategy for what we’re going to do for our health as we age, we need to look at the areas that we don’t have any points in yet and we need to start dialing that up and we need to be less concerned… we can be much less concerned about the things we’re already good at. So we want to grow in every area of our life, not just certain areas of our life. That’s not a well-rounded person.

Justin: I love it. I love it. Well, thank you, Daniel. I know that you are a busy guy and you’ve got stuff to do and so thanks for staying on for a few more minutes. I appreciate it.

Daniel: Hey, I love this show. It’s great to be here with you guys. Thanks for everything.

Justin: Yeah, thank you so much. So there you have it—Mr. Daniel Vitalis. What did you think about Mr. Daniel Vitalis? Isn’t he great? I just love how simplistic he makes everything and that whole talk about hormones, just so important, I think, in today’s culture. It was interesting too when he said, “What hormones are you talking about?” or “What minerals are you talking about?” It’s really interesting where you get this idea that you think you ought to raise your hormones, but really, there are tons of different types of hormones and all used for different specific processes in the body. So I really liked that—the way he kind of made that finer distinction.

I talk a lot about that in some of the articles I wrote for this website. I talk about when people say, “Oh, cooked food is bad” or they’ll say, “Meat is bad” or “Veganism is bad,” but it really depends “What type of meat are you talking about?” and what form it’s in—“Is it cooked? Is it raw? Where is it coming from?” and there are so many more distinctions that we can make, I think. And so it was cool that Daniel brought that up and I really loved just his delivery and how simple he makes it. I tell you what. I am pretty excited about starting the deer antler and the pine pollen. I’m going to be getting some of that and seeing how it affects my body because I really think that that is a good thing.

I think one of the cool things too about what he talked about is having a hormone protocol set up in your life and like he talked about when he is 50, the Chinese doctor told him that that’s when he needs to start doing the very powerful Red Ginseng. I just thought that was really cool. If you can prepare for your hormonal changes throughout your life long beforehand, long before they come, in a gradual, easy, progressive way, it’s going to make the change and transition in life just so much easier and probably less dramatic, and maybe even a lot less of a drop-off altogether of your hormonal levels and balances and things. Really cool stuff. Yeah, I really encourage you guys to check out the pine pollen and the elk velvet deer antler for hormones, as well as setting up a foundation in your life that supports hormone health, like he talked about sleeping well and coming up with a sleep strategy and a sleep protocol where you’re getting a solid eight hours or more every night of deep, relaxed, restful sleep and then getting the vitamin D and all of these different types of things that you can do. Lowering your stress, because that screws up your hormones. So coming up with a foundation and then adding some supplementation in like the elk velvet and the pine pollen and things like that to really help fortify any of the missing gaps that could be happening in your body. So pretty cool. I thought it was pretty cool.

Daniel Vitalis is just a great guy and we love what he’s doing at Surthrival. I don’t know if you’ve ever checked out some of his products or his website, but what he’s doing there is just offering some really unique supplements and really unique things in his product line that I think would really, really help you. These are top of the line, high quality stuff, dual extraction mushrooms and bottled in spring water and Miron glass and organic grape alcohol. I mean this is just stuff nobody else is doing, so I really like supporting him and his work. I’m going to be getting on the elk velvet and the pine pollen here and see how that affects my hormones. I think that would be great. Yeah, I think maybe you guys should try that—see if it helps you guys. And also, if you do those things, especially the sleep and the vitamin D and the stress and then the food, the diet and then some of these supplements, let me know how it’s affecting you. I’d love to hear how this stuff is affecting you and if you’re getting good results with it. Lots to try out, isn’t there? I swear, with every guest we have, I just want to try every single one of their products. It’s a crazy thing, you know? It’s like you just get so turned on to trying all these new things. We’re going to be the guinea pig for you and let you know how this stuff works.

It was really cool too, what I thought that was really great in the talk that he gave is it was not until the very end of the show that he actually brought up any of his own products and he kind of downplayed them in the sense that they support an overall foundational structure of having a good lifestyle that supports hormones. But he didn’t say that those products that he sells are the foundation itself. So I just like him a lot. He’s so good and he’s just willing to offer so much good information before he starts talking all about his own products and that kind of stuff, even though he’s got, I think, the best products on the market for this kind of stuff. So yeah, good stuff. Good, good stuff.

So if you have any questions about this show, this is Episode 178, ExtremeHealthRadio.com/178 and if you want to make any comments, you can put your comment in the box below that particular episode and we can talk about it and you can help the community that way. As we mentioned before, the shows are now live, so you can always go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Live at 9:00 am on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and soon to be Friday, so you’ll be able to check out our live shows that way, listen, and you can join the chat room. And then if it’s a Friday show, you can call up at 949-505-9585. So some good things happening here and we’re always going to be growing and offering better stuff for you and then let the chips fall where they may, and you can decide what to do for your own health. So hopefully you enjoyed this episode.

If you would, we would be so, so grateful if you would share this episode with your friends on Facebook. If you’re running or you’re doing some errands or whatever and you’re not at a computer or not at a smartphone or anything right now, would you do me and Kate a huge favor and when you get back to those devices, if you could share this particular show page with your friends on Facebook, I would be so grateful. It would help us so much if you would do that. As you know, all of our shows are free, so since we’re not charging anything for these shows, we’re really, really relying on you guys to help spread the word for us and some of you guys will end up donating or buying some of the products. Like I mentioned before, if you’re interested in the pine pollen and the deer velvet antler, you can go to ExtremeHealthRadio.com/Surthrival and you can check those out there and make a purchase and that’ll help keep the show free as well.

In any event, I hope you’re doing well wherever you are in the world and wherever you’re listening to this. I hope everything is going great in your life and if there is ever anything we can do for you, please let me know. I’d love to help you out. We do read every single email that comes in and do our best to respond to everybody, so please send in your emails and we’d love to connect with you. Thank you for listening and we are so grateful for you guys. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you guys on the next episode.

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No material on this blog is intended to suggest that you should not seek professional medical care. Always work with qualified medical professionals, even as you educate yourself in the field of life through nutrition and alternative medicine. I’m not a doctor, nor am I offering readers or listeners medical advice of any kind. None of the information offered here should be interpreted as a diagnosis of any disease, nor an attempt to treat or prevent any disease or condition. While information in this blog and during this podcast is discussed in the context of numerous conditions, it can be dangerous to take action based on any of the information on this podcast or in this blog or to start any health program without first consulting a health professional. The content found here is for informational purposes only and is in no way intended as medical advice, as a substitute for medical counseling or as a treatment or cure for any disease or health condition and nor should it be construed as such. Always work with a qualified health practitioner or professional before making any changes to your diet, prescription drug use, lifestyle or exercise activities. The information is provided as-is and the reader or listener assumes all risks from the use, non-use or misuse of this information.