Beta Glucan: The Secret Immune Booster & Inflammation Blocker

A.J. Lanigan

It is great to be here. I came from the center of the State, Columbia, South Carolina. It was a little chilly down here today in the 50s, but, Hey. It is great to be in the South.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I just love it. AJ, we have you on this project with us because you are pretty smart about a pretty important topic. You are an immunologist. You are an expert in beta-glucan. You helped create the purest and most potent beta-glucan in the world. We are here talking about Silent Killers, the root causes of chronic inflammatory diseases, and beta-glucan. We could put it in the bucket of solutions. It is one of the things that will help people resolve inflammation and solve a bunch of the problems that are going on in their bodies. 

We have done a lot of talking with other speakers about chronic infections, toxins, nutrient deficiencies, stressors, and traumas with beta-glucan. It is going to be a huge support for the immune system. We are going to talk about that today. I would love it if you could just start by saying, We are going to get into inflammation and the nitty-gritty of that. But why would I bring an expert on beta-glucan to talk here? Let us just unpack what that is quickly, and then we will go into inflammation. But just give us an overview of what this thing is.

A.J. Lanigan

Got you. When you talk about inflammation, you will have your cardio guy, you will have your thyroid gal, you will have a geneticist, and you will have all these folks out there on the spokes of the wheel talking about their areas of expertise and how inflammation has affected different organs and systems. But what is down there at the hub? The hub is the immune system. The immune system is where the inflammation comes from. Once it has been triggered by the aforementioned toxins, bacteria, mold, mildew, fungus, or a splinter in your toe, too much stress accelerates, etc. 

My area of expertise from an immunology standpoint is to figure out what the textbook is inside all of our immune cells. Because, as I say, the immune system is the only thing that stands between you and all those things. You will hear it around you, trying to get you all the time. We need to understand, according to the textbook, what makes these cells do what they do. Also, the metabolism once they are triggered downstream. We get the release of histamines, for example. Well, the typical doctors are going to say, You have got histamines; you have got a runny nose. We have to give you a bunch of antihistamines. We cannot stop it. We have to give you steroids. 

My work is important because we want to get ahead of that. We want to keep you out of the hospital. We want to keep you from having to sign up for a monthly subscription to antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, steroids, and all these things. Understanding the immune system is what led me to beta-glucan. Because beta-glucan is in a lot of the literature, particularly the early literature, and I am not talking about Reader’s Digest for those older folks that might listen to you; I am talking about peer-reviewed medical studies that talk about it being a biological response modifier. 

We are not going to shut it down using steroids. We’re not going to ramp it up using certain herbals like Astragalus or something like this. We are going to let that system work at its very best at modulating itself because it is only when the immune system gets out of whack that we start running into problems. We get a splinter in the toe as I mentioned. Some viruses come. Do you want to ring the bell? You want an immune system. No, but a can of whoop ass in a hurry and get whatever that is out of you. Okay.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

We are happy over here. You just whoop ass, and that is so good.

A.J. Lanigan

You are in California. What can I say?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You could say anything you want, AJ. With your accent. You can get away with murder. You just keep talking. It is so good.

A.J. Lanigan

Yes. But then, once the battle is won. You want the immune system to go back to a state of rest. This is what an immune system does when it is properly functioning and competent. Again, beta-glucan is known now for that. Immunology is not a very old science compared to chemistry and biology that is thousands of years old. Immunology, by comparison, is only decades old. As we develop technology, people are smart enough to use that technology and be able to look at the textbook. Inside these cells see what they do and why, they follow the metabolism once the immune system is triggered. We can predict what is going to happen now, we can start testing substances in beta-glucan, which happens to be one of those substances. They are complex carbohydrates with a long chain. Think of all the chains of pearls. You would look great in pearls. You have got a beautiful long neck and a dark. I am not going to be sending you pearls, by the way, at the end of things.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is so funny, all my East Coast friends wear pearls. The West Coast pearls, but not as often as the East Coast girls. I have noticed that.

A.J. Lanigan

Well, it is. There are a lot of things we grit up here. What can you say? Shrimp and grits are our thing. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. We eat shrimp on a nice spring salad.

A.J. Lanigan

Okay. You eat a lot of what food eats. I am with you. That is okay. If we take a look at a microscope, we can now watch these immune cells visibly and see how they respond to different stimuli. We sprinkle a little bit of beta-glucan into a test tube with white blood cells and say, Hey, come over here. Look at how busy these boys get. That is actually what happened with Pillemer and his group back in the 1940s. Now, fast forward to around 1968 at Tulane University, and Nicolas de Lucio and his team figured out the actual molecule that was in the cell wall of this baker’s yeast that was responsible for getting all those white blood cells busy. As we move forward, we have improved technology. Not only can we now see the cells and what they do, but we can also measure different chemicals. I call them chemical facts, messages, and emails. Again, your older listeners will know what the effect is. But yes.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I still use my fax machine. I do. I still have one hooked up.

A.J. Lanigan

Just to keep the wind from blowing paperwork.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Every once in a while, we still need to send one, but yes, I know what you mean.

A.J. Lanigan

But you must correspond with people in Kazakhstan or someplace. Everybody else has eased up. But no, it is a must to understand how important your immune system is. You’ve got beautiful teeth. Okay, tell me this. What would happen if you did not floss and brush your teeth?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Well, your mouth is a doorway for infection and some bad stuff when it happens. But I might not have this beautiful smile if I had not done that.

A.J. Lanigan

Periodontal disease is one of the most diagnosed diseases. Yes, the bacteria they eat and go to the bathroom just like we do. That causes the immune system to trigger the release of these pro-inflammatory cytokines that may raise cholesterol. Certainly, you get your teeth. It is in bad enough shape. You are going to see redness, and you are going to see the destruction of tissue again because we think of the immune system as an army. What do armies do? What are they supposed to do? They are supposed to kill stuff and blow stuff up. But you do not want them doing that to your healthy tissue. Again, you brush, you floss, and you mitigate those kinds of problems. 

Beta-glucan, we find, can help that process out. We do not want you to wait till the house is on fire. Go ahead now and start to help that immune system stay in balance all the time. You want it to work quickly to get rid of stuff that does not belong there. Again, it could be a toxin. It could be a poison. It could be a critter. Who cares? You want it out of their way before you even get symptomatic. But if the immune system gets out of whack the other way around and stays old, now you have the pro-inflammatory activities, the autoimmune disorders, the arthritis, and the psoriasis. There are currently 80 ongoing and 100 diagnosed inflammatory conditions. He wants to shut down the immune system. Well, I say, well, wait a minute now. Instead of going out here, let us get to the core and see what we can do to keep that immune system working the way it is supposed to work.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thank you for giving us such a simple and easy explanation of why we would bring a discussion about beta-glucan here. I think this is why we want to get people moving the needle towards a reduction in this inflammation and taking these flames down. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in the body. It is not ever just one thing that is going to solve it. Several things are going to help you get better. But I would like to dig deeper now that we have an overarching picture here. Could you talk a little bit about polysaccharides, how they affect the gut and the immune response, and bring us into more detail about beta-glucan?

A.J. Lanigan

Absolutely. Again, from the field of immunology, we did not even know where antibodies were. These little orchid sticks that are floating around—you cannot see them—tag and slow down viruses and so forth so that the rest of the immune system can find them and get rid of them. We did not even know that those came from what we call B cells. Why do we call them B cells?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Why?

A.J. Lanigan

Because they came from the bursa of the chicken. They sent it back into the chicken butt. My colleagues ran up the road at Clemson University and were on the team that discovered the B cell. These are the revelations that are coming forth literally every day and talking about beta-glucan. When I started this work some 25+ years ago, there were like seven or 800 peer-reviewed medical journal articles on PubMed. Today, Laura. They are over 200,000.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You cannot even keep up with this. You cannot keep up.

A.J. Lanigan

When I was in school with kids, I said I could occasionally sail from the cup of wisdom and stay ahead of the game. Now it is like a firehose of information that pours at you. God bless. There is a lot of misinformation out there on Reddit. The reason that I often mention PubMed is that it at least reduces a lot of the misinformation. If you have a good peer-reviewed medical journal that is published, then this was before it went into print, except maybe during COVID, when a lot of stuff went into print that should not have gone into print. You’ve got other people just as smart as you are, smarter than a review, and the word may repeat itself. Then, and only then, will they go into the Journal of Immunology, the Journal of Cancer, or whatever. You can rely on those facts to then make your decisions. 

If we have it, just give me a prime example. What would you say? One of the top problems that you are asked about is inflammation. Well, what would we look at besides the gut? Again, I will discard that question. The gut is probably responsible for, give or take, 70% of these B cells that produce antibodies. If you have a gut that is in disarray, then one of your frontline defenses is that those antibodies are going to be insufficient. If they got them, there were not going to be enough of them. Beta-glucan is a complex carbohydrate. If you say a large sugar molecule, your gut bugs, your friendly gut bugs, like to munch on this stuff. Now, when we take a capsule of our material, most of it is taken up in the gut and into the bloodstream, and immune cells are using it to do what they need to do. But that does not get taken up; it serves as food, a smorgasbord, and helps those good gut bugs thrive, which keeps the bad gut bugs at bay. They simply get crowded out, and that is a good thing. That is one of the side benefits of this material.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

In the time we have left in this first half of our talk here, I would love for you to touch on a little bit more about these large sugar molecules. Right off the bat, the word sugar freaks people out. I want you to explain that there are good sugars. Bad sugars. This is not like you are putting table sugar into your body, but the word sugar has been demonized. There are some benefits to this. 

You can talk about how these large sugar molecules when we put them into the body, how do they help with lowering stress on the cells and cellular health. I think that in terms of the big questions that I get from my audience, they are quite advanced in their knowledge. Many of them have followed me for a long time and watched me do projects on mitochondrial energy production, mitochondrial health, and cellular health. They are pretty savvy, and they know that they need to work on healing their bodies at the cellular level. Can we talk about these sugar molecules and how they help at that cellular level?

A.J. Lanigan

Most people can do this. They sit down with a piece of paper, and they draw what we call a hexagon molecule. It has six sides and six corners. That is your basic glucose. We hooked two of them together. We have sucrose. That is your table sugar. We turn it this way. It is lactose. We turn it this way. It is fructose. Depending on which way is twisted and little dangly is coming from here and there, we have sugars that are still simple sugars. They cleave, and they break down glucose very easily. Those are the ones that we need to stay away from. The longer chains, and I will just generally refer to them as complex carbohydrates, you might refer to them as fiber. These are the ones that, if you take in too many sweets, slow down the process, and you want to keep that glucose index down. By taking it a lot of bulbs, I and a great friend of mine is a dentist, John Tate. It was great that he said, Just treat white sugar as poison and stay away from it. But God put the antidote for this stuff out there for you. 

That is fiber. When you reach up on a tree, you pull down the apple, eat the apple, and do not squeeze the apple juice out and drink the juice because you get a lot of water and a lot of simple sugars. It is okay to eat some fruit beneath the high-fiber fruits, the high-fiber vegetables, and the dark green leaves. We can go on and on about food. It is a matter of whether these molecules all serve a purpose. We want the purpose to be good. Not bad. We do not want those simple molecules to create pro-inflammatory activity.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Exactly. I love what you just said. There is an antidote to sugar.

A.J. Lanigan

Jimmy comes from the tree, from the vine. You are not getting it out. A few cans of mosses. Okay, great. Empty buddy of mine. He said, Look, AJ, when you go to the grocery store and you just shop around outside, do not go up and down the aisles because that outlet stuff will kill you.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. In the last couple of moments we have here, any final comments you want to make about the effect on cells, decreasing stress on cells, cellular health—what is happening here in terms of supporting the body?

A.J. Lanigan

Well, again, simple sugars. As an example, trade is poison, and there are other poisons. There are, quote-unquote, all these little tags they put on the fruits and vegetables about being all-natural or whatever. But down the road from me is the testing center for the South Carolina Department of Agriculture. I know several of their sites. In there, they put a tag. If there is not a certain limit on insecticides, pesticides, fungicides, and so forth. As you are eating that good fruit, that good vegetable, and so forth, you are still getting mona doses, and so toxicity poison is all relative to dose if you are consciously staying away from the big doses, the same thing if you are staying away from the simple sugars, then you are going to be going a long way to mitigate the underlying trigger for inflammation. If I stick my hand into the fire, I am going to get burned. I am going to pull it out. It is going to be red. It is going to be inflamed. My immune system is causing that to work. The flame was the trigger. You see, I want that immune system to quickly fix it. But two or three days later, I stuck my hand back into the fire again. I am sorry. My pills just will not fix stupid things. It is just something you have to learn about. then you have got to take control of it, and many of these things are things that you can take control of.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Excellent. AJ, I want to thank you so much for joining us today for this talk on the benefits of beta-glucan. We are going to dive deeper into this in just a moment, and we are going to talk about how we can mitigate inflammation. We are going to get some deeper science and physiology out of this. But real quick, before we do that, tell us where our audience can find high-quality beta-glucan.

A.J. Lanigan

Down in Kennesaw, Georgia is a group of one of my finest distributors, Better Way Health. You can go to Simply betterwayhealth.com to tell them that you saw the show. They have all the special deals I know about lined up for your crew, and they are some of the best-trained customer service people in the industry.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. We will make it simple for people. You can find a link to Better Way Health on the pages where you are viewing this summit. You can click that, and there will be some special information and offers there for you. Beta-glucan can be a great way to support you in your quest to lower inflammation and reduce the underlying causes of chronic health conditions. 

This has been fantastic for our audience. I hope you found our conversation insightful and helpful thus far. If you are a summit purchaser, stay here because we are about to dove even deeper into this discussion with A.J. 

If you are not, click on the button here on this page to get access to a continuation of this conversation. Many others get all the tools you need to reclaim your health. If you are watching this continuation of my talk with A.J. Lanigan, thank you for being a valuable member of our community. We are going to dive right back in and continue talking about beta-glucan, its health benefits, and how this can support you in your quest to reduce inflammation. Now there are specific ways that beta-glucan is made. You extract it from a certain bacteria or a certain fungus. Help me understand here how you get it and how that can then benefit in mitigating the inflammation.

A.J. Lanigan

Again, beta-glucan is this huge, long-chain polysaccharide, a very complex sugar. You will find it in the cell wall of what you would call baker’s yeast. I need to know that it is Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Try to say that 10 times real quick before you get a beer today. You will also find it in the cell walls of other fungi, such as mushrooms. Now, people have heard that mushrooms are good for you. They have been in the cornucopia of the Far East for probably 3000+ years. Mushrooms are very, very popular as a source of beta-glucan. They work well as long as you can take massive amounts of them. Probably 30 years ago, there was a mushroom extract called PSA Creston that was approved as a treatment for cancer in Japan. It comes in little sachets. It is about one gram. You take 3 to 6 per day, mix it in hot water, and it smells a little bit like dirty feet. That is the way it is. Prescriptions only hook up. Balsam mushrooms are sometimes a snippet of good, but they are delightful.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

When you say you have to eat large quantities of mushrooms to get the benefit of beta-glucan, I think if I am at the grocery store, like not having access to this fancy cancer treatment, but if I am at the grocery store and trying to buy, how many mushrooms would I have to eat per day or how many cartons of mushrooms each day?

A.J. Lanigan

A lot of them, the little white, what we call button mushrooms. Yes. Okay. That is about as cheap as you can go. If you have a cupful. Okay, and if you ate a cupful every single day, it would move your immune response just a little bit. I think that is just a little; we can measure it now. We got all these great tools from the immunologist so we can see the difference. However, you can take one of our little capsules for about a buck a day. I suggest you buy too many mushrooms for a buck. You are going to increase the immune response by over 50%.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That is a big thing.

A.J. Lanigan

This is key because, on the surface, whatever car you drive is still the champ car in California. I have heard stories.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. Well, my husband is a contractor. We have a fleet of regular trucks. I drive a Cadillac.

A.J. Lanigan

I drive a Tundra. But now we will get along beautifully. The key that cranks your Cadillac, even though it is a motor vehicle, is not going to crank my Tundra, and my Tundra, it will not going to crank your Cadillac. Think of our beta-glucan molecule as a key that fits the key switch on the surface of your immune cells and turns your Woody Allen immune cells into Schwarzenegger cells. How about that for a Californian? I will be back. You have now got an army of Schwarzeneggers, okay? They are doing what they are supposed to be doing. These cells do not particularly care about the flavor of ice cream. In other words, they do not care what brand of virus, what brand of bacteria, or what the toxin is. They just like to eat ice cream when you have an injury from an insult, somebody is wacky in, you get the splinter, and you get a scraped elbow. Again, you want that immune system to jump into action. 

By the way, Laura, you cannot heal effectively. You cannot heal quickly and completely without inflammation. The inflammation that is coming from the immune system. I tell people who are slow healers or do not heal completely that they have probably some issues with their immune system, and they need me to address those. Keeping that immune system strong is the way to shortcut inflammation, regardless of the source. These immune cells do not care. Beta-glucan does not care. We refer to these as the nonspecific immunomodulators we want. We want the immune system to be properly modulated. Is there a reason to go to war? Or if not, we want it to go back to rest. This molecule takes those things and causes them to happen based on the triggering of these receptors.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Once you have taken the beta-glucan and you have turned your Woody Allen cell into a Schwarzenegger cell, can it go back down?

A.J. Lanigan

Absolutely. The same cells here we can talk about macrophage genes or macrophages depending on which side of the Atlantic you are educated, neutrophils, natural killer cells, dendritic cells, all of these cells, again, have a textbook of how they are to operate. We now have copies of that textbook. We can follow and read what is to happen based on certain stimuli. We also know, based on understanding the metabolism of these cells, what happens once the battle is over, and you will have new signals produced that will bring those cells back to a state of rest. This is important. You will still regulate the immune system. You do not want some doctor to guess what is sticking in your real bone here, whatever. You just throw a wet blanket on the immune system because that then leaves you prey to the next challenge. It comes along. Did you ever read the book by H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh, I do not think I read that one.

A.J. Lanigan

Yes, probably.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I listened, so I listened to the radio show, but I did not.

A.J. Lanigan

That was incredible. Back before television, people who came into life thought that it was going to be an invasion. Yes, we were in trouble. Then, what was the mission of Mission Impossible? Boy, that is jumping around buildings. Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise, yes. He needed a speed bullet, so he came into a later version. If you remember, this foreign invasion wiped out all the defenses of this world in a matter of two or three days. But after two or three days, what happened? They started dying and collapsing. From what? Microbes—things that you could not even see—were causing them to die at sea. 

We are born with an immune system that is going to keep us safe. We do not have to worry about some foreign widget coming in here and taking us over the same immune system, though, which is going to be a problem if it gets out of whack. Just like you have to continue to floss and brush your teeth, you also need to steadily support your immune system to make sure that it is self-regulating. You are not going to have any problems if you find something that is out of whack. I would hate to think you got in a situation like that. Maybe you need to take a steroid. I played semi-pro football for several years and carried a lot of back injuries from that. There is no pill going to fix it, but every once in a while something will happen. I will have another pretty bad injury and cannot move. They will say, Look, we are going to put you on 10 days of steroids. I feel like I can strap on those little shoulder pads and go back three plays. 

That is what steroids do. They erased the pain. The injury is still there. Do you want that immune system to constantly repair what is wrong? I am 71 years old. I am in pretty good shape. The shape of me. I am a little bit thick in the middle. I do not mean being so good, but inflammation should probably fly on the tongue sometimes. I will swell up a little bit if I have to flat-coach. But if you use this material again, you are already aware of what to do. That textbook is inside. We know what is supposed to be happening, and we can measure it. We can observe it. We got some good results today with our material. We can tell you, based on your body weight, what the proper dosage is for you so far. Yes, that is a good thing, as opposed to a lot of people saying, The workout will take twice as much work. Take four tests, but we know the dose. It works.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Now I like to take beta-glucan when I am traveling and when I feel like I am maybe coming down with a cold. I do a bunch of preventive things. When I am going to be flying and traveling, I know I am going to be exposed. I know my immune system is going to take a hit because I am going to be exposed to toxins. I am not normally exposed to it. I am going to be exposed to potential pathogens and microbes that I am not normally exposed to because I am eating different foods. There is a whole attack on my immune system when you travel, Can you explain to our audience why? I have the little regimen that I do. I generally never get sick when I travel. Beta-glucan is part of that regimen. What is happening in my body when I introduce that to support me when I know that I am going to be in an environment that could compromise me?

A.J. Lanigan

Okay, let us say, just as an example, that this is your baseline immune system, okay? If you are perfectly healthy, eat. No stress, drinking good water, breathing good air. Your immune response is going to be about 30%, meaning about 30% of your white blood cells will come to your aid in the face of a challenge. If you take two milligrams per kilo of body weight. I am sorry, but America is one of the last in the world, not even in the metric system. 100 milligrams per 100 pounds of body weight. That immune response will go up by over 50% from where your baseline is. This takes about 72 hours, Laura. You need to start taking your dose about three days before and then three days after your travel. Now that single dose takes 72 hours to peak and then an end of about two weeks. You are back to baseline, as some people say, I cannot afford a buck a day. Well, you need to move out of California first. But if you take the dose lower every other day, take the dose we recommend now, but take it every other day because it does take so long to fall back down to baseline, you are effectively keeping your immune response up higher and effectively cutting the cost of your dose in half.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Now, let me ask you this: We are talking about using a couple three days before travel. Keep using it while you are traveling. Keep using it after you finish your travels. What about people here who are viewing who say, I am in a chronic inflammatory state? I have been working on this for a long time. I am doing all kinds of things to support my health. I am working on getting rid of parasites. I am working on getting fungus out of my body. I am working on getting heavy metals out; I am getting radioactive elements out. I am working on environmental toxins. I am working on the nutrients. What about the long-term use of beta-glucan? Is it recommended? Is there any danger to having that immune system ramped up to 50% long-term? How would somebody use it in a chronic state?

A.J. Lanigan

Well, first of all, the safety of the windows is so wide, it would be difficult to express. We have given mammoth doses for long periods. I have customers who have been out there for 25+ years, taking doses just like you describe a couple of grams a day. They are doing great. A lot of them should have been at room temperature years ago with inflation.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

They are on borrowed time. 

A.J. Lanigan

The system. It is what it is. The people need to understand that we have enough work now and then. I want to emphasize that there are over 200 thousand studies on PubMed about beta-glucans in general. A lot of those studies are on the material that is in my bottle. Many companies cannot claim that they can go and look up our material and the work that has been done on it. 

For the person that you are talking about, the person is trying to throw the kitchen sink. They would take a 500-milligram capsule for every 55 pounds of body weight that was going to put them at their peak. That is going to put them roughly two and a half times the immune response; the more they can take, the more they are getting no benefit. I have an ex-wife. I got a daughter, and I got grandchildren. I would appreciate the sales. But I have to tell you, we know what our dose ranges need to be to be safe and effective.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

More is not better. It is like you are not going to get the immune response if you take it.

A.J. Lanigan

Well, you can get, I think, up around 70%. That’s it. At 100%. Your eyes are popping out of your head.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I believe you are bionic at 100%. You are Superman. 

A.J. Lanigan

You are also on fire. When the immune system is revved up past a certain point, it will not shut off again. What is a job? It was the job of the army.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Kill and destroy.

A.J. Lanigan

Kills and destroys. It does not discriminate.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Let me ask you this. If somebody has an autoimmune disease, can they safely take beta-glucan?

A.J. Lanigan

There are a lot of people with autoimmune disorders. Again, you are talking about what is going on—80 to 100 different autoimmune disorders.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That we know of.

A.J. Lanigan

That they have names for. A steroid to address, some a chemo agent. This is, again, where the immune system has not figured out how to come back to rest and say they should not have been attacking cells to start with. That is the golden rule. Do not attack cells. This is a rule that is broken when people have the proper diagnosis of an autoimmune disorder. We found it again, though; there has been some trigger. You pick your nose; you pick your navel; you cannot pick your parents. Is genetics part of it? Okay. I am sorry. I just live in the South. You have to take pictures of people.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Oh, it is so good.

A.J. Lanigan

You get whatever this trigger is, and if you have genetics that get you to start with, it does not take as much of a trigger. Others, it is, we like to say, come from good stock. It may take a boulder to roll you over into this like I can walk through poison ivy, poison oak, get beat on, and so forth. I do not bruise. I do not have wheels, and other people can lie down on the grass and get up, and they look like they have been horsewhipped. Again, their immune response is not very tolerable. A good immune system will learn to tolerate dust mite poop. Nobody likes to be breathing in dust. My poop. But you go to a lot of hotels you have to get to. That should not trigger all this, redness, slobber, down the nose, and so forth. You ought to make sure that your immune system can work the way it needs to, but then come back to a state of ease.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Back to my original question, just to make sure we answer this. It is okay to take beta-glucan if you have an autoimmune condition; it is not going to worsen the condition.

A.J. Lanigan

We have no reason to believe it will. I want to be completely clear: millions upon millions upon millions of dollars have been spent on this product for infectious diseases, cancer, allergies, in other healing processes. Anti-Aging. Not a lot of money has been spent on autoimmune disorders. There is no data showing, that it would be harmful. But unlike with these others, where there is tremendous data showing safety, I cannot make that claim. 

Here is what I have told people: Believe me, hundreds of thousands of people over the last couple of decades have asked that very question. You are already seeing, I hope, a qualified healthcare professional. They are already looking at things like your inflammatory markers. Take the product at a low dose again; maybe start with 100 milligrams daily. As you are visiting your medical professional, have that. But let us look at things like MS as an example. Many people are with MS here. They may not do anything, and that condition will ebb and flow on its own. You have not done anything overtly to try to fix it, so why did it get better? Why did it get worse? Etiology unknown.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. Take it, and then keep measuring your markers and keep going. I think that is what you were about to say. 

A.J. Lanigan

Yes. I do not like to use anecdotes, but we have plenty of them. But I have seen so many people with things like lupus, skin disease, and other things that fall into the category of auto-immune disorders who used to have to take steroids now or take Calonal, something much milder or nothing. Rheumatoid arthritis. People that could not open up a bottle of pop and now they are, but again, they changed their diet, their lifestyle, stress, all these things. It is not like we have a silver bullet here.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

No. I think this is important to share it. When you start on this journey of solving your health crisis or your symptoms, it is never just one thing because you are doing other things to support yourself. It is interesting. I was with my mom last week, and she asked me, so I just make my water coherent before I drink it. I use an Analemma wand water to create coherency in my water and make a little vortex in it. She asked me, Do you think it is changing things for you? My answer was, Mom, I do so much for my health that I have no idea which thing is making me better because I have not done it in a controlled study. I have not just done one thing and had control over that. I cannot even answer. I do not know. But I like how it tastes. My body seems to, and I get an intuitive yes. When I do this, like yes, I like that. Please keep doing it. It is the same thing. We cannot tell you exactly which thing made the R.A., the rheumatoid arthritis, get better because you are doing so much.

A.J. Lanigan

We cannot explain why. Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice have rheumatoid arthritis; why lupus; why M.S.; why Lou Gehrig’s? All of these different things tend to bubble to the surface. He said, Oh, well, that is your history. Let us talk about kids with autism. There are all kinds of things, and we have no idea what caused them. We know a lot about the symptoms, and we know if we throw certain things at them, those symptoms may ebb and flow. You talk about your taste in the water. I used to get a funny taste out of a brand-new hosepipe. When I was drinking out of it, it would take a while for that hosepipe to still mature. I was vaccinated early; I was born on a little farm, and I will not take anything. I used to have no idea what glutathione is. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. 

A.J. Lanigan

Okay. I used to take the Malathion out of the bag and sprinkle it on the base of the beans and peas. Yes, I got smart, and I found some of my mama’s old pantyhose and put the poison in them. I can shake it out. But if I go wash my hands and drink out of that, whatever.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. I drink out of a hose, too. I grew up in the country, and I am a child of the early seventies. I had all the yes; I know what hose water tastes like. I can smell it, and I can taste it. It is a whole thing. It is different when the hose is warm and when the hose is not warm.

A.J. Lanigan

No, doubt about it.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is more toxic.

A.J. Lanigan

But I come from good genetics. Okay. I think my mom and dad are enough for whoever stacked their genes. But some people are not as lucky. I am sure that you will have a geneticist come on. Or some of these other folks who will explain certain areas. But my steak is okay. Let us get down to the herb. Let us learn as much as we can about the herb. There are a lot of things that affect that herb. But one of the beautiful things about beta-glucan is that you cannot overdose on it. You cannot ever harm anybody; even with the autoimmune disease, there is nothing in the literature that suggests it is going to harm you. I just cannot say with the same authority not to worry about it, and so therefore be there, especially if you have genuinely been diagnosed with me in this area.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

As with anything, we cannot get medical advice on this topic, so talk to your doctor.

A.J. Lanigan

Well, that is.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

True. Yes, well, this is it. This talk has been delightful. Just delightful. It is so fun with your stories and the way that you explain things in such a simple way. I know that we have a mix of viewers and listeners here. We’ve got practitioners; we have health consumers. I will tell you, as a practitioner, that I do appreciate the stories and the analogies. It is a nice way to learn, and it seals it in your brain. Thank you so much for the time that you spent talking about this. I feel like people are thinking now, Okay, I have the vitamin D that I take. I have got my, people have their rituals, They take their vitamin D, they take their multivitamins, and they take the well. But people are going to be adding beta-glucan. I know that just in a few moments if you can do it in just a couple of minutes, explain that not all beta glucan is created equally and that quality matters. If you can, you can discuss that just real quick, and then tell us where we can get a high-quality beta glucan again.

A.J. Lanigan

Again, when I refer people to PubMed, the medical journal, we have had six different peer-reviewed medical journal articles addressing that exact issue of quality, actually comparing our material versus cocktails of other what would be called immune support materials, vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and hundreds and hundreds of other products that are out there on the marketplace today. It is not that they do not work, Laura. It is just the enormous dose that you have to take to move the needle just a little bit with us. A small dose again, 100 milligrams, for 110 pounds of body weight. Anybody should be able to deal with that and move forward, in my opinion, best taken on an empty stomach. Wait 30 minutes. If you forget to take it 30 minutes before lunch or dinner and people say, Well, what? What about IQ? Well, I cannot say it is going to help you get smarter, but if you hold it in one of my bottles, you will look a lot smarter.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Well.

A.J. Lanigan

Contact my friend, Dan of Better Way Health. It is betterwayhealth.com. There is a lot of fun. Not as cute as me, but they are a lot of fun, and you will get good information. Try to stump up some time and they will put you through to me.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Good.

A.J. Lanigan

When do you move to South Carolina? When will your husband work for you out here?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is so funny. I do have people who work for me who live in South Carolina. One of them is the person who runs my shop, my supplement shop; she is from South Carolina. She has been with me for close to seven years. She is amazing. I get to visit her at some point. It would be nice.

A.J. Lanigan

What city does she live in?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is a little town. I cannot remember which city it is.

A.J. Lanigan

Everything in South Carolina is a little town. A little. But if it were not for Fort Jackson, the University of South Carolina, Columbia would not have a single stoplight.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I will tell you. She lives in Anderson. 

A.J. Lanigan

Yes. Tell her you want to come see the Anderson Jockey lot. That is one of the biggest flea markets. They bus people from all over to see the jockey line. I will meet you there.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I love it. I am going to tell her to listen to this interview because she is going to like listening to your accent. It will feel like home.

A.J. Lanigan

She is next to Clemson University.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Well, thank you so much for your time, for your expertise, and for the delight that you have given everyone with this talk. Until next time, everyone. Take good care. Bye now.