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| Show Date: | 9/26/2012 | ||||||||
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| Show Guest: | Sean Croxton | ||||||||
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| Guest Info: | After graduating from San Diego State University in 2001 with a Bachelor’s in Kinesiology (emph: fitness, nutrition, and health), Sean began his journey as a certified personal trainer. After years of study and a litany of classes and course, Sean works with clients to uncover the root cause(s) of their health challenges. He works with individuals from all over the world by phone/Skype from his home office in San Diego, CA. | ||||||||
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| Topic: | Digestion, Detoxification, The Immune System & Hormones | ||||||||
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http://www.undergroundwellness.com/
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| Items Mentioned: |
Websites & Info http://www.naturopath4you.com/ http://www.paulcheksblog.com/ http://www.westonaprice.org/ http://www.acam.org/ http://seancroxton.com/ http://www.chriskresser.com http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/ http://www.fdn.tv/ Dr. Hal Huggins on Cholesterol Chek Institute Kim Schuette Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Just Eat Real Food Video Cosemtics Database Sean’s Video On The Gut Connection to Health Article: 10 Ways To Improve Digestion Books Products |
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| Duration/Size: | 00:58:01 / 53.11 MB | ||||||||
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Podcast Transcript:
JUSTIN: What’s going on everybody? I hope you’re having a good day with whatever you’re doing out there. I know I’m having an awesome day so far. Thank you so much for joining us, as we really appreciate it. Just for reference, this show is on Monday, September 26, 2012 and this is episode #13. Just so you know, all of our shows are transcribed, which means that anything a guest says or I say during a show is searchable on our website. If you’re ever looking to do research on something like ‘rheumatoid arthritis’ or ‘Parkinson’s disease’ or maybe just a product or anything like that, any conditions, you can search for it on our website. So please take advantage of that. You can find out what all of our guests are saying about certain subjects. There are ‘show notes’ too for each episode, so if Sean mentions a book or a website or anything like that, and you’re driving along and can’t write it down, don’t worry about it, just visit extremehealthradio.com/13.
If you have any questions, please email them to justin@extremehealthradio.com or you can call our voicemail line and we will play your question on the air, to our guest, which is (949) 391-7363. I want to let you know that this episode is brought to you by the Vitamix blender, which is my favorite blender. That and the Blend-Tec are my two favorite blenders. If you’re looking to buy a Vitamix, please buy it through us and we will get a little commission. You can check that out at extremehealthradio.com/vitamix and we would appreciate that.
Before I introduce Sean Croxton today, I would like to just talk a little bit about our show schedule this coming week. We are booked all the way up until the end of the year and have some great guests coming up. We typically do shows on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This Saturday, we have Dr. Bruce Shelton, who is a homeopathic physician and doctor out of Arizona. He has a clinic healing people from incurable diseases and working with things like ozone and oxygen therapies, and all kinds of amazing things. So, check out that show.
We also have Barry Carter coming up next week. He is a researcher on the subject of ormus, so I have to learn a little bit more about that. We also have an herbalist, Dr. Wendy Wilson and she is going to be talking about herbs and how to incorporate herbs into your diet. We have Dr. Gerald Smith coming up, who is a holistic dentist out of New York. He has been talking a lot about the connection between root canals and cancer. If you have never heard about that, you might want to listen to that show, as I know we’ve all had root canals. I have had one, so listen to that show and learn about that.
With that said, I want to introduce our guest, Sean Croxton. I will just read a short little bio and then we will just start chatting. After graduating from San Diego State University in 2001 with a Bachelor’s in Kinesiology with an emphasis on Fitness, Nutrition and Health, he began his journey as a certified personal trainer. After years of studying a litany of classes and courses, Sean worked with clients to uncover the root cause of their health and challenges. He worked with individuals from all over the world, by phone and skype from his home office in San Diego.
Sean takes a holistic functional approach to rebuilding health from the ground up. As a functional diagnostic nutritionalist and certified metabolic typing advisor, and currently enrolled in the functional medicine university program, Sean does not focus on symptoms, but rather his focus is on uncovering the root cause of health challenges. He is a video blogger with over 42,000 Youtube subscribers. That’s crazy. And a radio show host. He has the undergroundwellnessradioshow program. He is an educator and author. He is the author of a book called The Dark Side of Fat Loss. He is also the creator of the underground Workout Manual and The Real Food Summit, as well as The Paleo Summit, all of which you can find links to on this page. If you purchase from any of those links, we will get a little commission also.
Thank you so much for joining us today and I really appreciate it Sean.
SEAN: Thanks for having me Justin. I really appreciate you having me here.
JUSTIN: So, you are calling in today from San Diego, California. Right?
SEAN: Yes sir, SD.
JUSTIN: Nice. I know you’ve told your story 1000 times, but just for our listeners, who may be new to you, can you just tell us a little about your story, how you got involved in health and nutrition.
SEAN: It’s a story of failure, really. I went to a California State University and studied kinesiology with an emphasis on fitness and health and did really well in all of my classes. I was that guy who, you know, on test day I would be done in five minutes. Everyone would look up and be like ‘where is he going’ you know. I thought I knew everything there is to know about fitness and nutrition. I graduated and was ready to become a personal trainer and thought I was going to save the world from obesity and what not. Then I went ahead and became a personal trainer and applied what I had learned in my classes, especially from a nutritional angle, to my clients and failed miserably.
Those things I applied to them were food guide pyramids, eating all these servings of bread, rice, pasta and grains and all that stuff, starches, low fat diets, eat lots of soy, foods that are low in cholesterol, and on and on and on and on. Obviously, it didn’t work. It wasn’t working with my clients and it wasn’t working with myself, as I had problems of my own as well. I was never overweight, but just had depression and anxiety issues, as things just weren’t working properly.
So, I went on this journey and this journey was all about reading books and learning from people who were getting real results from real people. I stumbled upon people like David Gettoff and Paul Chek and Weston A. Price, and his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, completely changed the way I thought about food. The Paleo Diet by Lauren Cordain, the Metabolic Typing Diet by William Wolcott really helped me understand that there are different diets for different people and that we’re not all the same. So, I started taking that information and this was when utube was fairly new. I started making Youtube videos from home. It just kind of grew and grew and I remember that Youtube was relatively new and I got 600 subscribers really fast, like in a week. It was a big deal and I was like, there is something to this.
I kept on going and a year later I said ‘hey, I’m this guy in this room, with his Yankee’s hat on backwards, talking about this really important health stuff, and I may not be the most credible source in the world. I started interviewing authors, whose books I had been reading, and practitioners’ work I had been studying on
underground wellness radio through blog talk radio so I’ve been doing that for about three or four years as well just to add that third party validation for the things I was saying on Youtube and from there, you know, started working the clients, doing one on one coaching over the phone to great success, and then eventually wrote my own EBook ‘The Dark Side Of Fat Loss’ and did a couple of summits and now we’re here.
JUSTIN: Wow! That’s amazing. So it’s just amazing how you could find that kind of nutritional lack of information coming from conventional schoolings. I mean it’s crazy, they were teaching you how people eat soy and low cholesterol and all these common things. They’re just complete myths aren’t they?
SEAN: Yes. They’re absolute myths that are really based on zero scientific evidence at all. I recall reading Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories, which definitely isn’t an easy read. I had to go through it several times to fully get it, but you learn that there is no scientific backing for any of this stuff, and you know, in hindsight, graduating from that program, I feel bad. I sound like a bitter person about my college education. I don’t like that I sound that way, and stuff that I learned gave me a good foundation for things that I teach these days, but I feel like I was more of a representative for the food industry, the processed food industry more than anything else when I graduated from that program. There are a lot of people out there who feel the same way. There are a lot of registered dietitians out there who don’t believe in what they’re teaching their clients, but they are just kind of trapped. Do you know what I mean? To say things that are counter to what we have been taught, especially from a professional level, can be frowned upon at times. It’s not cool for a registered dietition to say ‘you know what, saturated fat isn’t really that bad for you, and maybe you should drop the soy milk and drink some real raw milk with all the fat in it, you know the fat is in there for a reason. God didn’t put the fat in the milk to kill it. God didn’t put the yolk in the egg to kill it. You know what I’m saying?
I kind of took it back to common sense, in the way that our ancestors, of not so long ago ate, and I don’t think it’s any different for us now. And the question that I pose to a lot of people is ‘how does some old school food cause a brand new disease? If you read the works of these missionary doctors, the missionary doctors who I see live with these indigenous populations who have never been exposed to processed food. You will find that there was no cancer there. The people lived to be 70, 80 and 90 years old and they died of something called ‘old age’. You know at the turn of the 20th century, the early 1900’s, heart disease wasn’t even taught in Medical School. People just didn’t die of it. You know what I mean? And of course, there’s a lot of money and politics behind it. Unfortunately, it’s hurting a lot of people.
JUSTIN: Yes, that’s for sure. In this show, I want to focus on some of the subjects I know you are really well versed in, like digestion, detoxification, hormones and the immune system. Before we get into that though, I want to ask you a little bit about what your thoughts are about the, I know we touched on it briefly, whole cholesterol myth. People think, oh, I’ve got to bring my cholesterol down to 110 or 120 or some crazy low number, because doctors are telling them that. What do you tell people who ask you about that? Or ask for your advice about what you think they should do?
SEAN: Cholesterol is a very interesting topic, because it’s so driven by fear. If your cholesterol is over 200, then you need to be on a Statin drug. This is a great way to sell drugs man. Give it a couple of years and that number is going to be 180. Give it a couple more years and that number is going to be 160. They are just looking for a bigger population. Cholesterol is partly what your cells are made out of, and is really important. It is also a repair substance. When you encounter some type of oxidated stress, nicks and scrapes within your arterial lining, cholesterol comes there to repair the damage. You know it’s kind of analagous to saying hey whenever I see a fire, like a house on fire, I see fire trucks outside. So, I must assume that the fire trucks caused the fire. No, that’s not the case. Something else caused the fire and the fire trucks and the firemen are there to repair and put the fire out. That’s what natural cholesterol does. A really interesting fact about cholesterol
is that 50% of people out there who have heart attacks have ‘normal cholesterol levels’. You know what I mean?
That are below 200, so we have to stop really vilifying cholesterol as it’s a very important substance for the body. It always befuddles me how cholesterol yes, is found in the plaque and arteries, and again it is as repair substance, but there is a lot of calcium in there as well, so why don’t we vilify calcium at the same time. Do you know what I’m saying. It really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, so we should start to question our doctors.
Another fact that is kind of mind-blowing is that women, I believe it’s over the age of either or 50 or 60, I can’t recall, the higher the cholesterol, the longer the life span. So, we have all these older women out there who are on Statin drugs to drive their cholesterol down, as actually shortening their life span. So, that is something that really threw me for a loop at first and I really had to dig deep and read a few books, like The Great Cholesterol Myth or The Great Cholesterol Con by Anthony Colpo. Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. You can actually find out that this stuff is really backwards and it doesn’t make sense. Cholesterol is very, very important.
I can’t give you all of the details behind this because I haven’t studied. I don’t want to say that cholesterol is no problem for anybody, because when cholesterol is really, really high, and if you have familial hypercholesterolemia, your cholesterol is 300, or way up there, that’s a problem. We do have a lot of people saying don’t worry about cholesterol at all, and I don’t agree with that. There’s a happy medium there about where it should be. It shouldn’t be too low and it shouldn’t be super sky high, so we have to take that into consideration.
One more thing that I got from Chris Kresser, who was a participant in The Paleo Summit and his presentation was on cholesterol, was that when you have your cholesterol taken, your doctor will just take one cholesterol measurement and then say, oh, it’s 201 and maybe we should consider getting you on a cholesterol lowering drug. If it’s higher than that, he will scare you into getting you onto a cholesterol lowering drug, because if you don’t take that drug you’re going to die of heart disease. The thing is, a standard deviation for that cholesterol score is like 35 points. So we can swing 35 points either way at any time of the day. There is a 70 point swing there on both sides. We have to keep that in mind, so I highly recommend that people go and have their cholesterol rechecked. Get it done at a different time of day. Go in three or four times and see where it is. Just don’t depend on one number to get you onto a cholesterol lowering drug.
JUSTIN: Wow, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that. I’ve heard recently that cholesterol is a result of sugar and insulin, causing inflammation inside the arteries. Is that what you’ve been able to determine as well, or what’s the connection between sugar and cholesterol? A lot of people think that it’s the cholesterol foods, like the egg yolk and things like that. I’ve heard that it has more to do with insulin and sugar. Is that kind of what you’ve heard?
SEAN: There is some truth to that. To be honest, it’s not really. This is something I know a little bit about. I would recommend that you talk to Kresser or Chris Masterjohn. Talk to one of those guys and they will give you the full detailed analysis on that. I haven’t truly studied cholesterol for about two years. It was something that I was really deep into for a while, but since then I’ve kind of simplified my approach and have just gone to a more eat real food kind of approach, so I can’t fully answer that question for you, but I do recommend Kresser or Masterjohn who will be all over that.
JUSTIN: Yeah, that’s cool. I have emails into both of those guys to be on our show, so that will be good.
SEAN: They will lighten you up for a good hour and a half about cholesterol, so I think they will do it better justice than I can ever do.
JUSTIN: Nice. I’ve also heard to, or read somewhere, can’t remember where I get all of this information, but I’ve heard that in order to make hormones, your cholesterol needs to be at least 150.
SEAN: Yes, that’s one thing that people forget about. Kim Schuette who is a practitioner and health coach out here in the San Diego area, had a presentation with The Real Food Summit, where she talked about erectile dysfunction and how she has been able to correct erectile dysfunction with her clients with adding traditional fats to their diet. So, eating the skin on the chicken and eating the fat on the beef, consuming more butter and coconut oil, because at the root of your hormones, is fat and cholesterol. If you have a diet that is low in fat and cholesterol, or if you’re not making the precursors to your hormones, you will find that your hormones will go askew. It is certainly something that you don’t want to have.
I did hormone testing with my clients for a good three years. I really don’t do much one-on-one coaching anymore, but looking at people’s hormones, looking at the cortiscol curves, looking at their estrogen levels, the DHEA, their testosterone and their progesterone, I never saw a normal test, ever. Everybody was way off, and of course, there is going to be some stuff going on with people, but these huge imbalances that I saw, can be attributed to many things, but one thing certainly is the low fat, low cholesterol mantra that has been handed down from these dietary associations, as well as our government, is absolutely backwards, and is just a great wy to sell Viagra. It’s a great way to sell Statins. It’s a great way to sell drugs for diabetes, for people are replacing the fat with sugar. It’s not really working too well. People’s insulin is out of control, their blood sugar is out of control and I think the stat is that one in two non-African American babies born in the year 2000 are going to get diabetes at some point in their lives. Two out of three African-American babies born born in 2000 are at some point going to get diabetes in their lives. It doesen’t really have to be that way.
We have just totally vilified fats, and actually while we vilify the saturated fats, we have promoted these polyunsaturated fats, which are the rancid oxidized dangerous fats in vegetables oils that are the cause, or one of the many causes, of a lot of the issues that we have right now, including cancer and heart disease. So, it’s totally backwards and we need to kind of flip it around and get with it and educate people.
JUSTIN: I hear you. I’ve heard from Dr. Hal Huggins that, according to him at least, the optimal cholesterol levels are what he says, around 220. Each doctor has their own opinion, but whatever the case, that’s way higher than the 140 or 150 they’re trying to get people to.
I want to take a quick break here, but when I come back, as you know, it all comes down to digestion. Almost the whole thing comes down to digestion, and that’s one of the first things I want to talk to you about when we come back from this break. How to improve people’s digestion and how digestion causes breakdown all over the body. So, we’ll get to that with Sean Croxton right after this break.
Hey, what’s up everybody? I just wanted to talk to you a little about the Paleo Summit, which was put together by our man Sean Croxton. This is a summit that took place live over eight days and I believe there are 23 video presentations, 23 audio files, 18 hours of cutting-edge information and 300 pages of transcript. This program is really an amazing program if you’re looking to making some permanent changes in your diet, if you’re tied of struggling with fat loss or weight loss, and you’re struggling with food addiction and are just looking for a permanent solution, this is definitely something you want to check out. You can find it at extremehealthradio.com/paleosummit.
They talk about things like gluten sensitivity, how to curb food addictions and cut back on food cravings, how animal foods and things like cholesterol do not cause heart disease or degenerative diseases, as well as how to deal with things like bone loss, cancer, muscle pain, autoimmune diseases, how to burn fat and all that kind of good stuff. If you’re looking to change your diet once and for all, definitely check that out. It’s on extremehealthradio.com/paleosummit. Now let’s get back to this interview.
Okay, we are here with Sean Croxton, the creator of Undergroundwellness.com and, on this showpage, which is extremehealthradio.com/13, you will find a link to his Youtube channel, his Twitter feed and his Facebook account.
So, please follow him, if you can, on any one of those three outlets for him. Visit his website, undergroundwellness.com
I wanted to talk with you Sean about the number one problem, I think, is just about everyone on earth is having, whether they know it or now, is the inability to digest the food they’re eating.
SEAN: Huge, huge, huge topic and it’s one that people don’t address enough, because they don’t like to talk about it. People just don’t simply like to talk about their poop. I’ve had so many clients who, during our consultations, I’m the first person ever to ask them ‘how much are you pooping, how often are you pooping, what does it look like and what’s going on’? They are kind of thrown off by the question and I go ‘this is extremely important’. You can have the greatest diet in this history of the world, but if your digestion isn’t working properly, then what good is that diet doing for you.
There are many things that can go wrong with digestion. I think the quote from Elizabeth Lipski’s book, called Digestive Wellness, is that 60% of the American population has some type of digestive dysfunction, whether it be bloating, gas, belching, constipation, diarrhea, fluctuating back and forth as well, bacterial overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, food sensitivities, leaking gut syndrome and it goes on and on and on. In my practise when working with clients, I would do a particular test called the Mucosal Barrier Screen to kind of see what was going on in that gut. To see what was going on with the levels of good to bad bacteria. To see if the body was making anti-bodies to a particular food. To see if that lining, what I like to call that window screen in the gut, that’s supposed to allow the good nutrients through and to get into the blood stream and circulation, to keep all the bad guys and bugs out, keep them in the gut so that you can poop them out, and to see if it’s working well enough. Most people out there, when I tested, had leaky guts. That’s not good, because do you know what happens when you have a leaky gut? You have poop in your blood stream. You’ve got indigested food particles getting into your blood stream directly and your immune system goes ‘what is this, what is this piece of apple, what is this indigested piece of bacon doing in this blood stream’ and we need to fight this off. So, what you end up getting is food sensitivity, which isn’t good.
And then, you know, down the line your body says ‘hey, I’ve been fighting off this piece of bacon for the last few years, and you know what, such and such is thyroid or their cartilage or their brain tissue or their muscle tissue really looks like the protein strain that makes up that bacon you’ve been fighting off. So, now you’ve got autoimmune issues where your body starts to fight itself. It turns into this massive dominoo effect that can be a really big problem for a lot of people, and actually is a really big problem for a lot of people. They are just not addressing it because they don’t know what’s going on.
Just real quick, again when I was working with clients, I would say 70-80% of them, when we ran a stool test, had some type of parasite or h-pylori infection, or some type of pathogen going on their gut that was causing their symptoms. Again, it was a domino effect. It’s a stressor, it’s breaking down the immune system, it’s causing stress to the body, which has an impact on the hormones. I will tell you this, my book is The Dark Side of Fat Loss, and it most emphasizes getting healthy as the way to losing fat. But I’ll tell you guys, if you want to lose fat, you want to have healthy testosterone levels. If you don’t have healthy testosterone levels and are trying to burn fat, I’m not sure it’s going to happen for you. So, when I would test my client’s hormones, the ones who had the long-term digestive issues, the ones who said ‘yeh, I’ve been dealing with this for 5-10-15 or 20 years, since that trip to Thailand back in the day’. Those are the ones who always, except for this one young guy, had low testosterone levels.
You want to see how all of these things connect, it’s just not about your diet and your exercise program, there’s also some hidden stuff that can be going on with you that’s causing you to gain weight and causing you to be unhealthy.
JUSTIN: What would you suggest people to do. If I’m sitting here listening to this, or someone else out there is driving around in their car and are listening to this and they’re saying, ‘you know what, I’ve got IBS and was diagnosed three months ago, or I’ve got gas and bloating’ and they know they’ve got digestive problems. What would suggest for the first thing they should do? What books should they read, or should they go get their blood tested?
SEAN: First of all, of course I’m going to say ‘read my book’. I think the longest chapter is that they could read a 30-page chapter on digestion in The Dark Side of Fat Loss and of course they can get that on my website. Another book would be by Digestive Wellness by Liz Lipski. If you really have some issues, I would certainly recommend contacting a holistic practitioner, at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com, a Chek practitioner at Chekinstitute.com, a naturopathic doctor, a functional medicine practitioner in your area, or even somebody you can talk to over the phone, to help you investigate, lift up the hood and see what’s going on in there, so you can really get to the root cause of the issue. I mean, there are a lot of people out there who just may go to the supermarket and grab some probiotics, which is great. I have no problem with that. I think most people should do a round of probiotics as this is good bacteria for your gut, for a good two months. I think that’s really important, because there are so many things that throw off our ratio good to bad bacteria. Somebody else might go out and get some digestive enzymes from the store, and that’s great as well. If you do have some type of parasitic infection, if you do have an h-pylori infection, which I think 30-40% of the population has, band-aid approaches are not going to work in the long run. We want to make sure we get to the root cause.
Due to the fact that the medical system is the way that it is, with a band-aid approach kind of focusing on the symptoms and making them go away so that the person can kind of move on, but, at the same time, you’re just stuck on this medication forever. I think we’ve gotten out of the mentality of actually finding out what is the cause, so find a practitioner who will help you find what that cause is. It may cost you a few bucks, but it is actually going to save you money over time, because if you nip this thing in the bud, do your protocol and you can be done in 3-6 or 9 months and not have to buy all the band-aid approaches and supplements that you have been buying. You are going to be buying these supplements for the rest of your life if you’re doing it that way. Then, at the same time, you can fix it and move on with the rest of your life. There are people out there who have health challenges and they just want to fix it and want it to go away so that I can just move on and live happy and not have to deal with it anymore. You can’t do that with a band-aid approach. You have to work with somebody to get down to the root cause.
JUSTIN: I hear you. A lot of people are not interested like we are in this kind of stuff. They just want to be able to live their lifestyle. What do you think about, as far as the band-aid approach is, I’ve heard of things like matula tea, mastic gum, alglutamine and things like that. Are they good things that can help people’s digestion?
SEAN: Yes, they can. Matula tea is great. If you’ve got a h-pylori infection, matula tea will knock that baby out every time. I’ve gotten 100% success rate using matula tea, in combination with mastic gum to knock out a h-pylori infection. I would say that person doesn’t have h-pylori, they are just guessing. I’m not sure if matula tea is going to help them very much. Alglutamine is critical. When I’m repairing guts with my clients, we use alglutamine all the time. Some people, there is a population out there who shouldn’t be on L-glutamine, but most of my clients will be on L-glutamine and they’ll stay on that for 6-9-12 months, or even maybe two years, depending on all the damage to their gut.
So, that’s where it’s really key for the testing to occur. There are a lot of practitioners who say ‘you don’t need the testing’, but I love the testing myself because I can run an intestinal barrier screen and see what the environment in the gut is. To see what that secretory iGA is which is basically another way of seeing the gut lining. I can see what it looks like. I can see what that score is. Six months later, as the client has been doing that protocol, which includes the alglutamine, I can test it again and see where it’s at. If it’s where it’s supposed to be, I can say ‘we’re done, protocol over’, let’s move on
If somebody isn’t really getting better, or they’re not to where they should be, then we just say ‘okay, let’s do another six months and keep going’. You know, that’s as opposed as to doing it blindfolded and say ‘okay, I’ve been on this protocol for 90 days or six months, I figure I’m done’. I like to see a number and the client likes to see a number as well, to make sure things are going in the right direction, and knowing when the job is done.
JUSTIN: I hear you. For those of you who are listening and just thinking about how they can find a person in their area, Sean mentioned a few websites that we will have on our showpage at extremehealthradio.com/13 if you’re interested in finding a person in your area. I think there’s a website called acan.org where you can find practitioners in your area.
One last thing on digestion. It’s interesting that people think that when we eat food, we actually absorb the food, but it really doesn’t work that way. Doesn’t the food get broken down by the beneficial bacteria and then what that excretes goes into the villi, is that right, and through the villi into your blood stream? Is that kind of how it works.
SEAN: Yes, yes and no. Of course you can consume the food. I think a lot of people need to realize that your teeth are part of your digestive system. They help to break down the food and a lot of people aren’t chewing their food enough. So, make sure you chew your food so that it’s liquid and then swallow it down. It just makes it so much easier for your body to break down. “The hydrochloric acid that’s produced in your stomach, via the parietal cells, they’re going to break down the protein and then it’s going to go into the small intestine. If that “kime” basically that’s just the juicy friggin food that comes out of the stomach. If that kime is acidic enough and this takes us to low stomach acid issues, but we’ll skip over that for now. If it’s acidic enough, then what happens is that your pancreas squirts juices at it, your gallbladder does a little squeeze and the bile that comes out helps to break down the fat. Of course, the bacteria. You don’t have a whole lot in the small intestine, it’s mostly in the large intestine, but that’s going to break down some food as well.
The thing is here, your villi in your gut, the cells that line your gut, the digestive structures that are in your gut, they look like the fingers on your hand, the fingers would be the villi. If you can imagine your fingers having hair all over them, those would be microvilli and the microvilli, those hairs, make additional enzymes in order to break down the food, such as lactase breaks down lactose that’s produced by the microvilli. Or Sucrase which is sugar and the microvilli make that as well. So that helps to further break down your food and the food is absorbed, the proteins, amino acids and carbohydrates are absorbed through those villi. And then those fingers are something called lacteals. It’s like if you put a flashlight on your fingers in a dark room, you will see the bone in there. Just consider that to be your lacteal and that absorbs the fat. The proteins and the fat don’t actually go directly into your circulation. They actually go into something called the hepatic portal system and that takes it to the liver to be further processed and filtered to get the toxins out. Then it goes into the circulation. So food and the foods we digest don’t go right into the blood stream. It’s not like, hey pow, right into the blood stream. It doesn’t work that way. It actually filters out in the liver and then goes in there.
JUSTIN: So, for all of you who are listening and have gotten your nutritional advice from commercials or the food pyramid from school, just know that it’s probably not what it seems. There is a lot more going on and it’s not just about calories in and calories out. There’s a lot going on in your body, and, as you can tell, Sean knows so much. I think I remnember watching a video with you Sean, a few years ago, or I don’t how long ago it was now, where you were talking about The Gut and Psychology Syndrome and that whole book about digestion. It’s just amazing.
I wanted to ask you too and want to move on a little to detoxification and some things that you can talk about in terms of how people can detoxify. Some of these chemicals man that we’re getting exposed to, just breathing the air inside of our house.
SEAN: Real quickly, I was right about that lymphatic system. I’m a little rusty and this is what happens when you spea year putting together products. Yes, fat is transported by way of the lacteal lymphatic system as opposed to the amino acids and sugar going to the hepatic portal system to be filtered by the liver.
When it comes to detoxification, I very seldom put my clients on actual overt detox programs. What I really like to focus on first is removing a lot of the toxins in their environment. Getting them to buy different personal care products, getting them to buy different household cleaning products, getting them to filter their water, getting them to buy foods that are organic and not sprayed with toxic chemicals and pesticides. I think the best detox ever is just eating real food, you know. People when they starting real food they do start to detoxify and the body starts to let go of a lot of crap. We’re exposed to far too many chemicals. Now they say, if I’m taking my Jeep Rangler out 4-wheeling every day, there’s no point in me washing it all the time. You know what I’m saying? It seems like that’s what a lot of us do. We do need a detoxification program, while at the same time we’re living in this toxic environment where our air quality sucks. So, if I can get somebody to go to Cosmeticdatabase.com and take all of their personal care products and put them on their desk and punching them in to cosmeticdatabase.com to see how toxic they are. This data base is actually run by the environmental working group, which is like a watch dog for the environment. They have a ranking system of 1-10. You will be surprised by how many of your personal care products come out as a 9 or 10 being highly toxic.
I really focus on getting myself, as well as my clients, to go ahead and purchase personal care products that are 4 and below, or 5 and below. If I can get to that I feel like I’m winning, as I’m reducing their toxic load. Household cleaning products, I mean if you’re cleaning, here’s what we do. We spray toxic chemicals all over our furniture and our counters in order to clean things. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because at the same time we are rubbing it in to our skin while we’re applying it. We’re inhaling it while we’re applying it. The smells and all that stuff linger in the room. These plug-ins, these air fresheners, these are all toxic.
And, I think another thing that we need to recognize is, hey, if your testosterone is low, your doctor may give you, if they’re not looking for the root cause, is a cream to rub in and that will raise your testosterone. If you’re trying to stop smoking, what do you use? You use a patch. It’s a transdermal patch that absorbs the nicotine through your skin, so we forget that all of these things we’re putting on our skin. All of these soaks, these creams, these shampoos and deoderants that we rub all over ourselves, those chemicals can be detected in your blood stream within about five minutes and we do this every single day to ourselves. We have to stop, because your poor liver is taking a beating. It was never designed to deal with the environment that we live in right now, and if fat loss is one of your goals, we have to recognize that 60% of your thyroid hormone conversion from the inactive T4 to the active metalbolic driving T3. That happens in your liver. So, if your liver isn’t functioning well, hey we’ve got a problem here with your thyroid hormones.
Let’s get back to the gut for a second. You know, the bacteria in your gut is going to convert about 20% of that thyroid hormone to its active form, so if you have bad gut bacteria, you have thyroid hormone and a metabolism issue there as well. Why I’m saying this is because I want the audience to kind of connect these dots. Again, as I said before, it’s just not about diet and exercise, there are these other hidden things going on. The toxins that you spray around your home and that you rub into your skin every day, those can be contributing to weight gain or the inability to lose fat. Your digestive issues can be contributing as well. The water that you drink, the water that you bathe in, those are the things that need to be filtered out and purified in order for you to be a healthy individual, because as I always say, we don’t lose fat to get healthy, instead we have to get healthy iin order to lose fat. I think a lot of us have that backwards.
JUSTIN: I hear you. When we come back I want to ask you, gosh we have so much to get to, I want to ask you about testosterone, how to increase your testosterone and I want to talk to you about adrenal health, maybe the immune system and hormones, if we can get to all that. We only have about 20 minutes left, but I know they are huge issues that we could spend hours on alone. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that when we come back.
We are with Sean Croxton from undergroundwellness.com. As you can tell, he’s a wealth of knowledge in this area. So, visit his website at undergroundwellness.com and we’ll be right back with Sean Croxton.
I hope you’re enjoying the interview so far and getting a lot out of it.
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Okay, we are with Sean Croxton from undergroundwellness.com and we have about 20 minutes left. I just wanted to ask him a couple more questions about, let’s start with hormones and if we can somehow get on top of this hormone issue we have today.
SEAN: That’s a big question and I could go on for an hour on that one. I know I give these big long answers. Well, hormones as I said earlier when I was testing hormones and running saliva panels, gosh everybody’s hormones were absolutely askew, to say the least. I think with hormones really, it’s about finding why your hormones are out of whack in the first place. You know, if it’s just due to the fact like we talked about earlier, if you diet isn’t where it should be, are you not giving your body the ingredients it needs in order to make those hormones. Again, a lot of the people I’ve worked with have been on low fat diets for the majority of their lives, out of fear that eating fat was going to give them heart disease, so that’s critical.
These things we talked about as well, digestive stuff. As I said, everybody I’ve known, except for one person who had long term digestive issues, has had low testosterone. Why is that? It’s because of the stress. You know, the stress is going to cause the hormones to go askew. You’ve got a couple of hormones that your body makes, cortisol is a primary stress hormone. There is another one called DHEA as well, and one thing about this is that cortisol and DHEA come from the same place. They come from another hormone called pregnenolone. If you think about pregnenalone kind of being on the top of a triangle, and on the left hand quarter down, is your DHEA. Just think that that side of your triangle there is the sex side of the triangle, what the pyramid will say. So, it makes the DHEA and the DHEA makes your testosterone. Okay? Now go back up to the top of that pyramid, where you’ve got the pregnenalone and go down to the other bottom point of the pyramid and now you’ve got all of your stress hormones. So, you’ve got stress on one side and you’ve also got sex on the other side. They’re fed by the same thing, which is pregnenalone.
Now, if you’re body is under stress, do you think it really cares about sex and reproduction? Not so much. It cares about you fighting off stress, you being able to handle that stress. Now, we have to think about what is stress? Stress can be linked to emotional, it can be financial, it can be relationships, but it also can be internal stress that’s going on, digestive issues, toxicity, immune system problems, food sensitivity, poor diet and on and on. We also have to consider that over exercise can be stressful for an individual. There are a lot of these stressors sitting on top of each other. The pregnenalone at the top of the pyramid starts to favor the stress side. So it starts to feed that cortisol and the stress side at the expense of the DHEA and testosterone. The cortisol comes up to fight off the stress and the DHEA goes down as a consequence, as that side is not being fed. If your DHEA is going down, and DHEA again is the precursor to the testosterone, then your testosterone is going to come down as well.
This is why, when you’re under a considerable amount of stress, like when I was doing the Paleo Summit and The Real Food Summit, I had no libido period. It didn’t even care about women it didn’t even cross my mind, as I was stressed beyond belief. We have to find again, why you have hormonal problems in the first place, why is that testosterone low. Instead of going to a doctor and saying ‘I need some androgens to pump up my testosterone, that actually can end up becoming a problem. I have had experience with clients who have done that.
Again, just find out the root causes. There are some supplements that you can use out there. There is one called Libido Stim that I have used with a couple of clients. I have used another one called Adrenal Response for the adrenals themselves, to kind of help pump them up a little bit and give them some support. Tribulus is another one. But, the thing is that with those particular supplements, which some people, including myself because I’ve tried these before, can make some people a little bit mean. And so, I would use those with caution for sure, and again, get to the root cause.
JUSTIN: Yes, I hear you. Taking those supplements, I’ve heard of things like Deer Antler and Colostrum and things like that. That’s all great, but like you were talking about earlier, if you have a fire raging you want to get to the cause and get rid of the fire. Ahead of taking those supplements, it would maybe be better to do some exercises like yoga or Qigong or do some meditation or prayer, and slow your life down to stop that stress. That’s probably the #1 thing to consider, right?
SEAN: I’m really, really glad you mentioned that. That’s one of the first things that I talk with my clients about, is what are you doing to reduce your stress load? Are you in go, go, go mode, or are you giving yourself time to yourself? Are you hanging out with your friends? You would be surprised when I ask somebody, ‘when was the last time you saw your friends’ and they would go ‘a few months ago’. You know, get out and make that part of your day. I have always said that I’ve kind of become this google calendar instructor, like teaching people how to schedule their days and how to make time for simple things like eating food. You know, we do all of these things back to back, to back, to back and we’re like not taking care of ourselves, because we’re going all the time. Or we’re trying to exercise. As Paul Chek says, you know if you think about exercising demons, it’s like taking demons out. Exercise is taking energy out of your body and we’re not spending time putting the energy back in, through things like Qigong, Tai Chi and Yoga. I know a lot of your listeners are going to be like, that’s just sounds weird, but for some people it does sound weird at first, but once you try it and you feel it, you’ll be reinforced and you’ll want to do more of it. I really focus on this myself, especially the last several months. I really focus on doing new things. I think change, variety, as they say, is the spice of life. In order to reduce stress, we need some new things in our life and I really encourage you to try new things that you will benefit from. Go on a hike, hang out with new people and do some water sports, like I’ve been doing lately. Just do something new to change things up a bit, so that your life isn’t fricking ground hog day.
JUSTIN: I’ve been learning about this too. Recently, I’ve just been realizing what kind of people am I hanging out with and when I talk with them, or am interacting with people, sometimes I’m forced to at work, I’m wondering
‘okay, do I feel more relaxed after hanging out with these people, or do I feel depleted’. You know, some people can just deplete you. Then I think to myself, who is robbing and stealing energy from myself, versus who is putting energy into me after I’m done hanging out with that person. Some people feel really energized and then some people feel really depleted.
What do you think about stress in terms of being more important than diet and exercise. I’m starting to think that maybe if we get all stress out of our lives, it wouldn’t really matter what we eat.
SEAN: There is some truth to that. I did a video last year called Just Eat Real Food, and I think that our mentality that we’ve gotten, especially in our communities, has kind of taught people to….we’ve gotten to the minucha so much, you know and I don’t want to say over analyze so much but over analysis can just be regular analysis for some of the nutrition nerds out there, and that’s great, but for the average person out there, diet has become kind of a stressor. They’re wondering what the heck should I eat, is this right or is this wrong. Am I doing something that’s good for me or not. That’s why I kind of simplify it and say just eat real food and listen to your body. I outline all that in my e-book. To be honest, I think stress is the killer out there and maybe we can get away with eating not so real food, if we reduce our stress levels considerably.
Personally, when I got done with the Real Food Summit, I took six weeks off man, and I did nothing. It was great. I feel healthier than I’ve felt in a long time and I just feel good and more relaxed. As you said earlier, hanging out with friends, not hanging out with people who drain the heck out of you, I’m very, very cognizant of who I hang out with and am very picky about who I spend my time with. I remember reading The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, who is the editor of Success Magazine. He says, you’ve got your three minute friends, you’ve got your three hour friends and you have your three day friends. A lot of my three minute friends I’ve cut back on their time considerably I would spend with them. One thing that I’ve learned is that your income, which is really important when it comes down to your stress level, because most people out there are stressed about finances. This is why our days are go, go, go, go, go because we’re trying to make ends meet to stay afloat here. Your income typically is the average of the top five people you’re hanging out with. So you have to kind of look at that and say, hey are my friends supportive of the things I do, or are their expectations of me and themselves, kind of holding me back. That’s been another big thing that I’ve changed personally in the last maybe year and a half. It’s hanging out with different people who motivate me and uplift me, and it’s turned into a quite successful endeavour to be honest.
JUSTIN: Yeah, I hear you. We only have a few more minutes left, but I want to ask you, really quickly, about adrenal health. A lot of people have adrenal stress. What’s the role of Leptin with adrenal health? What are some of your thoughts about how to restore adrenal health in some people.
SEAN: That kind of goes back to what we’ve been talking about for the last 20 minutes, restoring adrenal health is removing stressors. Again, whether it be improving your poor diet, whether it be backing off some the exercise you’re doing. 50% of the people I work with are exercising too much. They’re going to spin class, you know, five days a week, killing themselves. I go, yo, you’re adding to your stress level, your adrenals can’t take it, back off. Got to spin class once a week instead of five times and on the other days, go to yoga. People go, oh my gosh, I’m losing weight after a couple of weeks. It’s amazing as they feel so much better. Again, finding those root cause issues and nipping them in the bud by doing the proper protocol that’s key. In terms of Leptin, Leptin is going to take me about 10 minutes to cover.
Real quick though, I’m not sure if this is live, but tomorrow we have a free webinar going on all about adrenal dysfunction. If you go to fdn.tv you can register for that free webinar on Thursday at 5:00 o’clock pacific time, 8:00 o’clock eastern time, and that’s Thursday, 27th. If you miss that, it’s going to be posted on my blog, undergroundwellness.com as we’re going to record it and put it up on the blog, probably next Monday. So, be looking for that. It’s the latest and greatest on adrenal health, so we’re really going to be getting into that.
JUSTIN: That’s awesome, so we’ll just refer people to that at undergroundwellness.com and check Sean Croxton’s website. As we’re kind of wrapping up here, I want to ask you about what kind of things do you have in the works, in the pipeline, what kind of things are you working on and where do you see yourself going in the next few years?
SEAN: I’m not working on a whole lot right now man. I think really just focusing and relaxing. I am launching a new website in the next month or so. It’s done. It’s seancroxton.com. I have to just put it out there and putting content there. The focus is, what I call, becoming a professional human being. You know there are four quadrants to that, self-mastery, wealth mastery, health mastery and help mastery, in terms of community service. I think that people have to get their minds right. I mean that’s how myself and my clients have been able to succeed in all of this. It’s having a mind first approach is key. Getting over some of that self-sabotage stuff that a lot of people have going on, including myself at one point.
Giving back is key. Having enough money, wealth management, wealth mastery is key, because you have money in order to be able to afford a lot of this healthy stuff out there, you know. That’s what I’m really going to be focusing on for next year, maybe backing off a little bit from undergroundwellness.com and focusing on that. I just got a new office I leased in downtown San Diego, so I’m going to get back into doing Youtube videos. I haven’t done Youtube myself in a little over a year. I think a lot of people miss that, so we’re going to be shooting video out of there. I’ll do a couple of Summits next year, probably a Functional Medicine Summit, another Real Food Summit and that’s really it man. Just living life and having a lot of fun.
JUSTIN: That’s awesome, lowering that stress, that’s what it’s all about.
SEAN: Time, my friend, time is the new currency. You know, I have a lot of good time on my hands and I’m using it well, giving back and also enjoying life.
JUSTIN: Nice, would you mind just hanging out while I close out the show.
SEAN: Absolutely.
JUSTIN: Okay, thank you so much everybody for joining us today with Sean Croxton. I really, really appreciate your time. As you can tell, Sean knows a heck of a lot about health and well being and all that good stuff. So, make sure to visit his website, undergroundwellness.com and, in the future, seancroxton.com
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Again, thanks for joining us and we will catch you on the next episode.
