Who Decides What You’re Allowed to Know About Your Health? How to Take Back Control

The Deeper Healing Podcast

Founder, Executive & Scientific Director of the Alliance for Natural Health International
PFAS in the water. Pesticides on the plate. Plastic in nearly everything. Rules about what you’re allowed to buy — and even what you’re allowed to read — that seem to change every year.
The more you learn, the easier it is to feel like nothing you do could possibly matter.
Dr. Robert Verkerk has spent roughly 40 years working where health, ecology, and policy collide. His answer isn’t to fix everything. It’s to start with the one thing you can reach: yourself.On this episode of The Deeper Healing™ Podcast, host Danielle Howley sits down with Dr. Robert Verkerk, founder and Executive and Scientific Director of the Alliance for Natural Health International (ANH), for a conversation that moves from the halls of regulators to your kitchen table.
Robert pulls back the curtain on what he describes as regulatory overreach — the restrictions he sees affecting natural health products, practitioners, and even access to health information — and explains why he believes informed choice is worth fighting for.
Then he brings it home. Using the familiar oxygen-mask analogy, Robert makes the case that caring for yourself isn’t selfish; it’s where every bigger change starts. “You can’t help someone else in that condition.” He walks through the basics he considers foundational — sleep, nutrition, movement, stress, food and water quality, and everyday environmental choices — and explains why trying to change everything at once tends to backfire, and why finding your biggest “levers” and building tiny, sustainable habits may get you further.
Robert also shares his framework of four foundations of health — energy, structure, environmental information, and gene expression — and how he connects them to resilience, adaptability, and our relationship with the natural world.The takeaway is a hopeful one: you don’t need a perfect environment to begin. You need a first step.
This episode shares professional perspectives, commentary on health policy and regulation, and general information about environmental health. It is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Individual experiences and outcomes vary. The discussion does not establish any environmental exposure, supplement, natural health product, dietary practice, or other approach discussed as a cause, prevention, or treatment of any disease or medical condition. No statement in this episode should be interpreted as a recommendation to start, stop, or change medical treatment.
Full Transcript
Opening on Health Freedom 0:00
What's at stake? Essentially, if we don't battle to save all of these natural health choices, you're only going to have one choice, and that's to be going your family physician, being prescribed drugs or surgery at the moment. If you look at outcomes from that approach, we can see the prescription medicines are about the third leading cause of death in society. So it's not a good option, it is not good for you. It's least of all good options for your children or your grandchildren because it a very slippery slope once we become disconnected from nature.
If we lose freedoms, its much harder to win them back. The best thing we could do is protect them while we still have them. Welcome to the Deeper Healing Podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Howley. This is for everyone who's been dismissed, misdiagnosed or told to just live with it and refuse to accept that answer. You're going to hear amazing patient recovery stories, raw and real in their own words. People who found answers after everything had failed them. you're gonna hear from medical experts we trust that are pioneering new approaches to healing the body because we deeply know we're designed to heal.
Let's dig in. We have an amazing guest on the Deeper Healing Podcast today. I'm excited to introduce Rob Verkerk. He's the head of the Alliance for Natural Health, and they are out there fighting the fight to keep health freedom and natural remedies available to everybody in the world, which is really quite a job, quite job in past couple decades. And I know you started this in 2002. One thing I was wondering was, You know, did you get dragged in here personally to start this organization? It's amazing.
Well, I'll let you know that the organization in the U.S. has been around since 1992 and we were the American Preventative Medical Association that then became the America Association for Health Freedom.
Rob Verkerk and ANH Background 2:00
But after the organizations that I'd set up internationally based in Europe and were fighting some of the most restrictive systems in and I set up ANH, Alliance for Natural Health in 2002. There was strong interest in the US organization to invite me onto the board and to use our name. We basically, in 2009, American Association for Health Freedom became Alliance For Natural health USA. And then I was on the Board for 17 years until in 2023. I was asked, Rob, can you head up also the U.S. because you understand all the pieces of the jigsaw.
And, you know, I'd also worked very, very closely with Jonathan E. Maud, the FDA dragonslayer, who's now our general counsel. So he'd been our external lawyer really from the beginning. And Jonathan and I, even when I was in Europe, we were, you know, I do the science, he does the law. And we, as a lawyer, He understands a hell of a lot about the signs. As a scientist, apparently do understand a fair bit about law because it's this juxtaposition between these two ideas, both of which have been railroaded by, essentially the medical industrial complex.
Call it what you like, but, there is a, shift to control things in a very specific way. And so censorship, the inability to speak openly and freely about the science that is published. I mean, even, you know, so-called authoritative claims that the FDA has basically been asked by Congress to allow since 1997, there's still no nutrient disease claims that can be made. In fact, we've got a lawsuit pending at this moment to try and open the door on that. Freedom, wherever you look at it, has always been a struggle and a fight.
And that's what we're been doing really as an organization for over 30 years and as ANH for now. well over 20 years. Once we've got those four things focused, we look at them as part of the human terrain and we have connection, coherence, resilience, and build our adaptive capacity. The problem is that many people think health is just the absence of disease or even just preventing disease, but we got to work on co-creating health at the individual level and the community level. Do you know what I thought you were going to say?
I though you're going say clean air, clean food, and clean water. You went right to the body. But one thing that the founder of Deeper Healing says all the time, if genetics is the gun, environment is a trigger. Absolutely. We have no control over the gun. That is our book of genetics, our Book of Life, but we have a whole lot of control, over our environment. So that's the bit that we've got to work on. And that means working on all parts of it, chemicals, EMFs, water, food quality, the air we breathe, and of course how that responds to our body, which means managing stress.
And I find a lot of patients looking at their genetics and I say to them, you know, if I even look at just even one generation, like my grandmother, my grandma was cleaning with vinegar, vodka, and lemon. My mother was clean with Pledge and Lysol and had margarine and it had frozen food boxes. And it was the 70s, the seventies. I was a Similac kid. You know it the beginning of They told my mother breast milk was bad, Similac was good. That's basically the formula of the 70s. We started this better living through chemistry, which has done nothing but grow exponentially since the seventies.
we're seeing every disease category off the charts.
Environment, Genetics, and Modern Toxins 6:00
Are we so different than our grandparents? No. We're not. What has happened? The environment's gone haywire, right? And as an ecologist, you know, I'm sure this is what brought you here. As the world suffers, human suffering is the symptom. We have lost the connection. I can't help but look at people's carts when I am shopping. I look at their health, their body shape, there skin, and I looked at what's in their cart. And I think to myself, you know, one of the big things here is like the Big Laundry Tubs.
You know it's a big plastic tub. It's blue thick goo. Its going right into the drinking water and we're doing that by the millions every day. But we don't connect clean water to any decisions that we make. We're just literally so far away from it. Being in sink with nature. If I try to simplify it greatly, I'm like, if you had to bury every piece of plastic in your backyard, you'd stop using plastic tomorrow. Where are you going to put it? Where do you think it's going? I mean, all of that is a result of people having been disconnected and essentially having moved that locus of control from themselves to a physician.
Sadly, in the training that your family physician has had is almost nothing about environmental chemicals, let alone EMF risks. The difficulty is that we're seeing a complex of factors that are unique in this second millennium that where we looking at chemistry, we are looking energy systems, electromagnetic energy, systems. We're looking pharmaceutical insults because now the pharmaceuticals, many of these, I mean, if we look at Xenoestrogens and, you know, through to industrial chemicals like plasticizers and obviously pesticides like glyphosate, they're now ubiquitous.
PFAS is ubiquitous. The US Geological Survey has found 46% of the US water supply is now contaminated with PFas. And so they're working out that, well, those were the, you know, PFOA, the longer chain PFAs compounds. So we'll just create shorter chain ones, but we use more of them because they don't work quite as well. Essentially, there's a problem with the chemistry. I worked in the 80s. in Australia to ban organochlorine compounds. So this is because they were so persistent and problematic. Now we live in a world in which we're contaminated with organofluorine, compounds that are even more dangerous.
And there are relatively few people who've woken up to the fact that their tefal Teflon coated pans, I mean, if you were to cook on it with one of those pans and put a budgerigar in your kitchen, A number of people have reported this, the budgerigar will fall off its perch because of the volatile fumes that you are then inhaling that will probably never get rid of for the rest of your life. So you toss that pan away because it's no longer working as a nonstick pan in two or three years, you buy a brand new one, but then you decide to bring in a new A new sofa in your lounge or new carpets or curtains again loaded with PFAS.
So it's this cumulative effect and the mixture of chemistries and energy sources that we often use the term new to nature. When something is new, we're not generally well adapted. are dealing with it. So, you know, if we look at a digital signal from a cell phone, it has a completely different wave pattern to an analog wave that is the way in which cosmic energy or geothermal energy, all these natural energies, even energy from the forest, issues energy all the time. That's how systems communicate with each other.
It is information, but it is in a pattern that the body doesn't recognize. And then, you know, we have the same problem with chemical safety. They study one chemical at a time, but we're all exposed to thousands of them. So the thing with the cell phone manufacturers, they look at one cellphone at the time and they say, try and use a speakerphone because they now know that if you put it against your head, it'll increase your risk of cancer. But it doesn't take into account the fact that you might be living in an apartment block with maybe 30 or 40 routers just dishing out huge amounts of radiation into you.
So we can't all choose to live in the middle of nowhere, but that's a choice in my mid-60s that I've made to reduce my exposure to some of these things. What is the most underestimated exposure? At the moment, I think it's new to nature EMFs. There's a huge cover up looking at what is going on with the fact that one of the reasons that the birds and the bees, you know, birds, and insects are highly sensitive to electromagnetic radiation. And we've been exposed for eons to very specific kinds of EMS.
We now live in a technosphere. in which everyone has a cell phone. huge numbers of satellites being sent up into orbit. There are some 30,000 satellites, many of them are now low orbit satellites beaming radiation down, people jumping into EVs and being irradiated by very large lithium batteries. This is a huge unknown quantity. We know from people who are electro hypersensitive that there are massive problems and there's almost certainly an interaction between these new to nature electromagnetic fields and also all the industrial chemicals that we're being exposed to.
You know, it's funny, for all of the people that I talk to, they don't question the chemicals. They don' question all different toxin categories. The always question EMFs. Their always like, oh what, my phone's hurting me, or oh my wifi's hurtin me. And we are like yes. because it's been less exposed. I've been very involved with the Bioinitiative Reports. In fact, I chaired one of the meetings in the Royal Society of Medicine in London a few years back. One of extraordinary things was the suppression that all the leading scientists had dealt with, that had all had their funding cut.
So there was a massive cover-up. And when that happens, you know there's a problem. So you asked me, what is the biggest underestimated risk? And that's why I said EMFs. I think it's been a matter of time before. We are energetic beings. If the energy is out of whack and isn't coherent, we actually don't function well at all. And I think as we move more to energy medicine being a new frontier of medicine, We will start to see the harms more clearly.
EMFs, Chemicals, and Hidden Exposures 13:00
We are constantly educating and teaching people the biggest thing they need to do is avoid, avoid toxins and reduce toxins, and fight the battle. And that's why we're talking to you. Do you feel hope? I absolutely do. I've always been half glass full person, not a half-glass empty person. In essence, we talked about it earlier, COVID kind of backfired on the system because there was such a rapid gathering of energy that this system, they said trust the science, trust governments. The level of trust in science that comes out of, you know, top level universities and that it comes at a government's now has the lowest level trust at any stage.
So finding trusted sources of information, your podcast, our nonprofit, these are the places that people need to go where we still really value science, but we look in our view at much broader range of sciences out there. So, yeah, I have hope that more and more people are waking up. I hope more more start to get incredible results. If we look at the Blue Zone work, for example, looking at five areas that have been delineated, have had populations that live to become centenarians with very little in the way of chronic disease.
All of those areas are now going the other way, incidentally. So this is a blip in time when things went quite well, but most of these areas now open to the same industrial pressures. Okinawa, I've been to three or four of them. you know, subject to modern industrial pressures. But there are blue zoners who live in the middle of cities all over the world, who are living in middle-of-rural areas all-over-the-world because they have chosen to reduce their exposure to certain compounds. They've chosen eat more whole foods.
Have chosen manage their stress better. So once people realize that they will not... I just want to put the mic on that for a minute. That's huge. Because people have this idea that there's somewhere out there that's better, different, figuring it all out. But you just said it. We have the power within ourselves to do it right where we are every day with our choices and our decisions. That's huge. Exactly. There was a big study done in 2016 by Hood et al. in the U.S. looking at county health rankings, trying to understand what were the main causes of particular health outcomes.
And they looked at all the US counties, pooled all of the data together. What they found that is clinical interactions, clinical interventions were only responsible for 16% of outcomes, 16%. The vast majority was linked to behavior. and then environment. There are parts of our environment that we can't change very easily. If we live in a particular area, it may be difficult to move out, but there are ways of changing our exposure within that environment But there are huge numbers of ways in which you can change your behavior.
And that's why you look to people like BJ Fogg and his book, Tiny Habits. It's one of the things that works with many people because it's simple and it also helps them to understand how we need to start rather feeling overwhelmed. We look at a specific healthy habit. that we can start to attach a positive emotion. We do a tiny version of that first and that becomes then integrated into our daily patterns. It becomes a routine, it becomes the habit. And that is easily the most important thing that need to do is change how we live on a day-to-day basis that can be transformational for health.
So one of the resources I want to make sure for the audience out there, sign up for The Pulse Alliance for Natural Health. You're going to get regular news alerts on action you can take and educating yourself on the deeper healing side for your audience. We have a toxin quiz that is meant to educate people on their own decisions, their day-to-day decisions. What is my body carrying and what can I do about it? It's all free. It is on the Deeper Healing site. Take the toxins quiz. it takes about a few minutes.
You get an instant report. you don't have to wait and it gives you all kinds of free resources to take the steps towards clean air, clean food, and clean water. And the greatest bit of hope that you just gave is you can make those changes right now, wherever you are. When you're making yourself better, you make the collective better. You're putting the oxygen mask on, then you survey the field and say, okay, how can I help in a bigger way? And if we all made that change, those tiny habits, which we're going to put that book in the show notes as well, this is how we make massive impact.
Absolutely. The other thing I will say is that, you know, I mentioned we've got 30 different actions. Many of them are lawsuits in action in the US at the moment. And obviously our lifeblood at ANH, we're funded exclusively on donations. So if you're able to donate, that makes the world of difference to us. These legal actions are really expensive. We are working around the clock on them. We are trying to pull in more people to help us with them because the need to be extraordinarily thorough in our data evidence base is crucial to success.
Hope, Blue Zones, and Small Habit Changes 19:00
Our general counsel who's leading the legal charge is none other than Jonathan E. Maude, who is an extraordinary constitutional lawyer and he holds a record for the most FDA wins. six of which he's taken on behalf of our organization. So we've got a hell of a track record behind us as well, but we do need funding. Well, it's amazing work that you're doing. We're huge fans. Thank you. One thing that I think, I always say this, if there was ever a gift of COVID, COVID was just a massive, massive awakening, at least in America.
I can't speak worldwide, but where people have really woken up to the censorship that was probably always going on, you might know that better than anybody. But what do you feel like? especially for the audience, like a lot of our audience is going to be patients, people who've been failed by conventional medicine, who have hit a wall, and who are starting to connect the dots that environmental medicine might be the root cause of what's going on with them. What do you feel are the big heavy hitters right now?
In terms of taking freedoms away, I guess the most peculiar part of it is it's very, very nebulous. So it was all very easy for us. I mean, Jonathan and I wrote a book before RFK Jr. was standing for Secretary of HHS. And, you know, many of us fell into the trap thinking this one person could sort of unpick a lot of the rot. We worked closely with Bobby Kennedy, as part of Children's Health Defense. And we were super excited thinking that the floodgates would open and everything will be done. But of course, it's a very nebulous control system that we're dealing with.
Right at the heart of it is actually a middle management bureaucrats. This is the administrative state that has built up. A lot of people don't know exactly what their job is about, but they've been told they're going to do it. And that involves enforcing or very often going beyond the rule of law. So we see this regulatory creep, this bureaucracy growing and growing to the point that overreach is now a blatant problem. So if you look at, say, the 200-year-old modality of homeopathy, home opathy in the United States is technically banned.
It's technically ban because of a piece of guidance that was published in December 2022 that said, if he's selling homeopathic products and they haven't gone through a new drug application process, they're illegal. But it completely ignores the historic process by which, you know, essentially since 1938, since Congress basically allowed a fast track system for homeopathic drugs to not require an NDA process. And of course now FDA has fudged a bundle of data that there have been a couple of instances of products that had some safety concern.
One absolutely was not a homeopathic product. That was the Zicam nasal spray saga where, you know, 10 milligrams of zinc was going into people's nasal epithelium. that is going to hurt. It's going harm for sure. And there's no way that that was ever approved. as a homeopathic remedy. It's not part of the homeopathy pharmacopoeia of The United States. And the other one was a Belladonna problem for teething tablets. If you look at the spike of adverse event reports, there was definitely a spike in 2016, 2017. We've analyzed all of those data as part the lawsuit that we're involved in at moment.
I've prepared an 85 page scientific analysis of this. And it's a classic case of them having fudged the data when you look essentially, I mean, you know, all about root cause healthcare and essentially what they've done is that they have confounded patients who happen to be on a homeopathic remedy, but also on the number of other drugs. And they've called it an injury from homeopathy. So that's how they got to these large numbers and this justification to say homeo pathetic drugs are dangerous. Therefore, they gotta go through the NDA process.
How do you unban something. And of course, the other way the regulators work is that they create this notional ban, but then they don't enforce it. So what does that do for the patients who want to buy the products, more specifically the companies who make the product, prevents them from innovating? It is as if you've got this big stick over your head saying, how can you take in new stuff? How can grow your business when you know that there's been a piece of government guidance that says your products are illegal.
So yeah, there are so many issues, but it is the bureaucracy that affects it. And of course, essentially they have a loaded gun that they can use completely arbitrarily and that's what they do. I mean, they pick off individual physicians where we have fight on at the moment with cancer patients who are using essentially mistletoe extracts that are legally drugs in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, completely written off by conventional oncology. You know, there are a number of cases that we're working with at the moment where people have gone into full remission having been given up completely by mainstream oncologists and now they're being forced to come off the mistle toe and their tumors are growing again.
Regulatory Overreach and Homeopathy Battles 25:00
and they will die unless they can get the mistletoe again. So these health freedom battles are not theoretical in any way. They're very, very real. And many people regard the United States as the kind of epicenter of freedom. But if we are going to have a battle anywhere to protect freedom, we need to do it in You know, in the U.S. as well as in Europe and the US and European regulatory systems are the most influential worldwide. And that's one of the reasons that I head up our organization, both sides of The Pond, so that we can learn from the, the wins that make, you know in both jurisdictions.
How can we help as individuals? I mean, this is just a big battle. And I talk to people constantly and there are people like me, like deeper healing patients that are very aware of environmental toxins. So my audience might be more knowledgeable, educated than the average person, but I feel like the Average Person is really waking up. I think RFK did that. Food Babe, Vani Hari, the Kellogg stuff. You know, just the general climate, the just general, climate in the U.S. People are like, get off my food, Get off of my water.
I want clean. And I think people are feeling angry, frustrated. What can I do about it? What Can they do About it. So I Think the first thing is the kind of oxygen mask issue. You've got to look after yourself first and sort of getting your health care sorted. Basically getting yourself care. as good as it can be, which definitely means clean environment, clean inside, and clean outside. Looking at the way you respond to stress and looking at physical activity. One of the most dangerous things that we do that public health doesn't even talk about generally is we spend inordinate amounts of time sitting.
And sitting is the new smoking. The data is very clear on that. So, I mean, there's a bunch of things that we can do. We then need to choose our, we often use the term health guides. That's health professionals. This is everyone from a fully fledged medical doctor through to a health coach. You know, that there are different health professional that's we need at different times. Health coaches often have more time to handhold than any other kind of health profession. But there are very often specific needs where you need someone who is highly specialized, but you often don't want to just deal with a hyper specialist in the absence of someone.
Look after the basic stuff, how you sleep, you eat, move, think, and respond to stress. So cleaning up that hole and then obviously looking at the water you drink and the quality of your food is critical. Looking at what chemicals, industrial chemicals. Many of us are exposed to some 20,000 industrial chemical every day. Bottom line is we need a really good detox system to be able to manage that. So ensuring that we are on NAC, our glutathione, and you can do blood tests to manage all of this. Nature's treasure trove is there to support.
If we look at any of the ancient traditions, whether we're looking at Ayurveda or traditional Chinese medicine, they are so focused on liver and kidney because that's where the real work goes on, as well as the bloodstream with glutothione and even uric acid. Uric Acid is regarded as The big baddie for many people because it's related to high levels, hyperuricemia causes gout, but too little of it is also problematic because its one of the body's most important antioxidants. So many of these industrial chemicals are oxidants and we need a bunch of polyphenols in our diet.
But you can get a uric acid meter and measure your uic acid levels. This is all good self care. I love this. So put the oxygen mask on yourself because so many people I talked to are just completely sluggish, no energy, stressed out, not doing well. Their brains aren't working. I see it every day. You can't help someone else in that condition. If you can fight battles when you're unwell. And so that's a really good point. For those of us that are doing, well, how do we help fight the battle that the Alliance for Natural Health?
Okay, so the next thing is just being up to speed on what is actually going on now. Probably the easiest way to do it is to sign up for our Pulse of Natural Health newsletter. So we have a newsletter going out every week. It's free of charge. There's a bundle of information. We have around about 400,000 people on our subscriber base. I will say most, probably over two-thirds of our news reports also have an action alert and those action alerts go straight to the political targets. And those targets might be FDA bureaucrats.
One of the difficulties with the whole environmental health thing is you're not dealing with one agency. So you're going to be dealing with the FDA when it comes to, you know, drugs, medical devices, foods. You're gonna be deal with EPA as an agency when you are dealing environmental chemicals. So if you concern about glyphosate in your food, which we all are, this is one of the absolute biggest ubiquitous toxins out there. Or if your concerned about PFAS, peri- and poly-fluoro compounds. Yeah, forever chemicals, um, You've got to deal the EPA.
And they can be a nightmare. There is a little bit of linkage now happening because Bobby Kennedy is pushing it and understands the environmental chemical issue. But you also got to deal with the FTC when it comes to claims, because if you look at what happened during COVID, one of our corporate members is clear. Many of you may know clear nasal spray. They decided in the middle of COVID to publicize the trials that they had been doing and basically suggested that it may be helpful during COVID because
What Individuals Can Do Now 31:00
it was an airborne virus, and they had a lot of data with their xylitol-based spray. And FTC came down on them with a ton of bricks. Instead of going, sorry, FDC, we'll pay the fine, will go to jail, whatever, they decided to fight it in the courts. They won. They're really on the front foot now. They are a platinum plus member of our corporate leadership circle. We've got a group of key companies that are really prepared to put their heads on a chopping block. And we're moving into a proactive space now, we have 30 initiatives in action now that about reframing the whole regulatory environment around everything from environmental chemicals to supplements to food to bioengineering.
I mean, let's not forget the risks posed by essentially playing with God in the way that biotechnologists aim to do that. If you look at the manipulation of soil organisms, the manipulations of plants, we're now in a sort of GMO V2 phase where they've learned that we can't call these things genetically modified organisms but they are gene edited plants. Gene increasingly moving to gene edited animals and gene-edited microbes. That completely changes the environment that we live in. It changes to food that eat and frankly, it changes air that breathe and there's a big risk with the water we consume as well.
So, you know, our environment is changing because of these corporate interests that basically they work in a very specific way. They identify or manufacture a problem and they say, hey, we've got the solution. And then they create a sort of Teflon coated marketing publicity track that everyone goes, We got to do this and we saw this in COVID, getting You know, over 90% of the adult population to take an untested vaccine, you know that wasn't really a vaccine took some doing. And that is just a master stroke of public relations, behavioral psychology, and the rest of it.
It all came together, but COVID isn't the only place that these approaches are being used. That's being use across the board in healthcare, even to something as different, for example, as if you look at say the C-section rate for women having babies. That's another promoted route that is taking people away from natural childbirth. So we're being stretched increasingly away, from nature and being pushed down this sort of technological route and sometimes a little bit unconsciously. How do we solve that problem through education?
And that's really what our newsletter is all about. Well, I'm going to be pushing at joining the newsletter to our audience big time. I think when, you know, we tend to do a deeper healing, it's diet, emotion, environment, physical elimination, rebuilding. That's the foundation of what we do. And we're looking at all aspects of a human being and unraveling their onion to get them well. One of the things that we hear often are people are very overwhelmed, even what you're saying. We didn't even talk about the AI component of, what's coming.
People ask me all the time. They're like, wait a minute, did they genetically modify the mosquitoes? What are they doing to the water? what are you doing? To the food? Everything's bad. And they literally just want to, where's ignorance and can I stick my head in it? You know, they have fatigue. And I like to tell them, I'm like, ignoring it doesn't make it less truthful. And you can choose just one aspect of this that's important to you, whether it's red dye 40, because you have children or it, you know, any aspect needs addressing and needs attention.
How do you speak to the overwhelm? I think by finding the levers that make the biggest difference. If you look at how we're going to deal with complex neurodegenerative problems like Alzheimer's, So Dale Bredesen came up with this big list of over 30 possible mechanisms and of course has realized that many people just don't have the capacity to make those kinds of changes. If we look at the Stanford behavioral psychologist, BJ Fogg, who wrote the fantastic book, tiny habits, he gives us an insight of how, you know, through neuroscience, how we can make changes that make a difference and attach a positive emotion to them so that we actually rewire the parts of the brain where those levers really work.
So, I mean, there is a system here that we can work with this programmable interface. So we sometimes like to, you know, we do a lot of education on what health is or what life is. And we often talk about these two programmability interfaces that human beings have. One is the brain and the others are genome. The epigenetics, where we live, how we lived, We have a huge amount of data in from twin studies that show Essentially, if we break down our life into the things that we spend most of our time doing, that will tell you the pattern that's going to program your gene expression pattern over your life.
So you've got to think carefully about your behaviors and the thing you do most the time. The second interface being the brain, again, we've got to be very wary of how our brains have been programmed during our childhood. Sometimes we need to do some reprogramming and that positive psychology is a part of that whole process, but finding levers that give us change is really crucial to the process. We've been looking at how we can maybe move towards a kind of unified theory of health. What are the things that are most fundamental to health?
And actually we've broken it down to four things, that people need to focus on. And of course, within that, there's over a hundred different factors that we easily discern that affect all of that. But we got to think of energy firstly. So how much energy is in our system? And that is going to be, you know, involve our mitochondria, how biochemical energy and ATP. So, How much muscle do we have? Are we working on increasing our muscle mass? So we got more mitochondrion, are we making our Mitochondria more efficient?
Health Freedom Advocacy and Closing Remarks 38:00
There's lots that we can do in terms of intermittent fasting and the way in which we exercise where we don't combine strength training with endurance training. We look at people who are elderly, finding ways of them maybe exercising for brief periods of just 30 seconds at a time, but doing that, say, six times a day, focusing on energy. The next thing to focus on is structure, and that's looking at membranes, it's the blood-brain barrier, the gut barrier but also looking in a muscular skeletal system.
If we don't have a solid muscular-skeletal You know, everything falls apart. We can't build a house that doesn't have solid foundations. The next thing is this critical piece of environmental information. And we use the term specifically, we talk about information, if we think about chemicals, you know people they will, is it a good chemicals or bad chemicals? Does it work with us? What does that information do when it interacts with our bodies? That's everything from light to food to microbes to toxins to stresses.
you know, any of these signals that are coming in. And the fourth thing is, you what about gene expression pattern? That's the thing that really governs our health. So, what is our exact environment, our behavior? What's our immune system doing? How much are we in repair mode, anabolism in building mode? what Is our current operating mode. Is it optimal? What's at stake? People don't realize that they may lose supplements, natural therapies, and their practitioner choice. Essentially, if we don' t battle to save all of these natural health choices, you're only going to have one choice and that's to be going your family physician, being prescribed drugs or surgery at the moment.
If you look at outcomes from that approach, we can see the prescription medicines are about the third leading cause of death in society. So it's not a good option. It's a least of all good options for your children or your grandchildren because it is a very, very slippery slope once we become disconnected from nature. If we lose freedoms, it much harder to win them back. The best thing we could do is protect them while we still have them. I say this all the time to the moms, the crunchy mom groups that we've had in here.
I'm like, you gotta watch every inch that gets moved. You've got to hold onto the health freedoms. What would you say to Americans? How can they fight their health freedom? The biggest thing that anyone can do is to not be a passive bystander. You've got to be an active by stander, so as soon as you see any, we know it from racial discrimination or any form of discrimination, if we don't stand up there and then and deal with it. it becomes a sickness in society. And at the moment, health freedom is something that many people are just sitting by allowing it to happen.
So we have to stand up and be counted. A&H is probably the leading organization in the world. doing this work. So we would love you to have you on board to stand shoulder to shoulder with all the initiatives that we're taking in the US, where we have currently over 30 different actions that are really there to make a huge difference to health freedom. Absolutely. Thank you, Robert. We are championing the work that you're doing. Thanks you so much for your lifetime of work on behalf of the Alliance for Natural Health.
I mean, this is where it's at. Who we need people to fight the fight. So yes, donate. Join the newsletter, make individual decisions to help your life improve. Make your own little blue zone. I love this. So much. And thank you, Robert, for joining us today on the Deeper Healing Podcast. You're incredible. It's been amazing, you know, and what we've got to work with the health ecosystem. We are, completely part of nature and it is our increasing separation and disconnection from nature that creates so many of the problems.
So it's fantastic to see you taking this ecological perspective because that's how we find the ultimate solutions. So thank you so much for your work too. Thank you. We hope this episode inspired you, here's How to Go Deeper. Visit deeperhealing.com to become a patient. Online we have loads of courses and a free toxin quiz. Subscribe and please, please share this episode with someone who needs it. It's always that one-on-one support that really gets people to find deeper healing. Remember, this is educational content, not medical advice.
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