Clark Englebert | Mitolife Radio Ep #201

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
copper, test, metals, people, elements, ratio, sodium, supplements, hair, mineral, copper toxicity, balancing, manganese, zinc, essential elements, potassium, magnesium, minerals, eck, clark

Matthew Blackburn 00:18
You're listening to Episode 201 of Mitolife radio. I am Matt Blackburn your host, and today I have returning to the show, Clark Engelbert to analyze my HTMA results, Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis. If you're fascinated with minerals like I am, and their connection to hormone production, energy production, enzyme pathways, and even the vitamin connection, then this shows for you. Clark is so knowledgeable. He is very inspired by the work of Dr. Lawrence Wilson, which was inspired by the late Dr. Paul Eck. And so this is a very specific philosophy on nutritional balancing, or some people call it mineral balancing, or heavy metal detoxification. And whether you think this is the right way to do it, or the wrong way to do it, or you're still learning about it, I think it's more information, it's one more perspective to consider, especially if you've done an HTMA or if you've been dealing with a chronic health condition, I think it's worth it to go down these rabbit holes of self discovery, and experimenting and seeing if you notice results, because with a lot of things in natural health, the results can be very quick, if not within hours, within days or weeks. A lot of the things that I've integrated over the years have bred almost instantaneous differences in my cognition, energy levels, sleep, pretty much everything. So it's a fun journey and I've been really enjoying this journey of researching copper toxicity, and mineral balancing and hair tissue mineral analysis, which I now believe is legitimate science, thanks to Clark. He has a lot of great research on his website about HTMA testing and its validity. And I think it's important to emphasize to people in the health community that you can have too much or too little of so many things, whether it's copper, or iron, or zinc, you can have imbalances anywhere. For the last couple of years, I was involved in these circles of community echo chamber, where everybody's iron toxic, and everybody's copper deficient. And it could actually be the exact opposite for many people. A lot of people could actually be copper toxic and iron deficient. And I don't think you could really dial that in until you get bloodwork hair tissue mineral analysis tests, big fan of testing now, I think it's more information, the more information the better. And it could show you how well you bounce back from recent stressors, whether that's moves or quitting your job, or travel or breakups or whatever it is. These are all traumas that really affect our mineral status. And so you can use HTMA in that way to see how you're recovering from these traumas, which I think is really fascinating. So enjoy the show here is Clark Engelbert.

Matthew Blackburn 03:57
Clark Engelbert, welcome back to the show.

Clark Englebert 04:00
What is up, Matt? How are you?

Matthew Blackburn 04:01
Great. Yeah, I'm really excited. I have a couple of HTMA friends and they've been messaging me over the years like Matt, you should really get a - Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis test done, and I just poopooed it for years thinking it wasn't valid, and it just wasn't completely accurate because I had heard that from a few people. And then finally talking with you, finally got it done and took five snips from my scalp and my test directly matched the supplements that I had been taking for the last several months which was lithium and copper. So, and then based on my symptoms and stuff and just looking at the different ratios that you've talked to me about, it just really clicked that, "Wow, this thing is accurate." It's an amazing tool, especially if there are people like you out there to help you kind of read it based on Dr. Wilson and then Dr. Eck's work. So, yeah, just really, I've just been going really deep into this research and not just copper toxicity because I think a lot of people hyper focus on that. But also the different ratios, sodium to potassium ratio is big, which I'm sure we'll talk about, and how just, it's a whole new world, it's pretty fun. It's definitely a different philosophy from a lot of the health community.

Clark Englebert 05:27
Totally. And that's the thing that I try to tell people, all my clients and in the content that I make for Instagram is that, just getting a hair test and having it and interpreting it in the old method that most people are using, this is a really insufficient way to interpret the test. So the test itself has like inherent characteristics to it that make it quite special. But really, what makes it an incredible test is our interpretation method, the way that we're interpreting the test is quite special and it's really based on the work of Dr. Paul Eck. Dr. Lawrence Wilson has continued a lot of that, so but it's through that interpretation method that we can give people like some significant insights that they otherwise wouldn't be able to glean from just looking at it in a sort of way that is still widely practiced and widely used out there in the alternative health space, which is, you know, maybe we can just get into it, when people get a hair test, most practitioners are thinking of the test in terms of the individual elements. And so, when they see a hair test, what they're looking at is what they think they're looking at is 21 or 23 discrete entities, where calcium is separate from magnesium, is separate from sodium, is separate from potassium, is separate from copper, is separate from zinc. And they're reading the individual levels as separate and distinct from one another. And the biggest difference between that approach, this old approach, and what we're talking about with Dr. Eck's work is that Dr. Eck saw the tests in a completely different manner, he thought of the entire test, as one whole discrete entity. And this lines up with a field that's cropped up in the last 20 years in human beings called, Ionomics, which is basically describing and trying to formalize the study of the interactions of the elements. And essentially what ionomics is saying is that the minerals, and the essential nutrients exist in a system inside of you. And meaning that they all interact with each other. And so that's really quite an important understanding because what that leads to is, is an understanding of, sometimes an element will be high or low, not necessarily because of too much or too little in the diet but because of antagonisms and synergisms with other elements. And so that's maybe the most important reframe that I can try and impart on people with respect to understanding the test. And it is a more complicated way of looking at it, but then if you break down the entire test into some of like its component ratios and patterns, which are what we call combinations of ratios, then you can glean a lot more information from the test than simply, "Is sodium low is calcium high, is copper high is copper low?" It's much deeper than that and part of like - to give you a concrete example of what I'm saying, like the first four elements of the major electrolytes the calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium, these elements have significant relationships with the hormones, with many different hormones, thyroid hormone, parathyroid hormone, the adrenal hormones, there's bidirectional relationships that exist between these elements and these hormones. So, I'd like to give you an example, sodium is regulated by aldosterone, so in knowing that the hair test is a biopsy or cellular test, when we look at the sodium level, it's actually a measure of the cellular effect of aldosterone; And not necessarily like the sodium or potassium in your diet, but it's measuring that cellular effect of that hormone. So like when we see a low sodium level like we do on your test., it's not necessarily that sodium is low on the diet, it's that you have a harder time hanging on to sodium because aldosterone, the cellular effect of aldosterone is suboptimal. And so there's many examples like the ratios that we use, the major mineral ratios that we're using, like the sodium potassium ratio, the calcium potassium ratio, the sodium magnesium ratio, these are correlating to the cellular effect of the hormones, like the calcium to potassium ratio as an example, that's really a measure of the cellular effect of thyroid hormone. And this is because calcium is used by the body to desensitize your cells to thyroid hormone. And then potassium is similarly used to sensitize the cells to thyroid hormone. So we know that the hair is a biopsy test, it's a cellular test. And then we know how those elements are used, right? For sensitization of the cells to thyroid hormone so we can make this inference that the calcium to potassium ratio is a measure of the cellular effect of thyroid hormone. So in some ways, it's a much more sensitive measure for how thyroid hormone is working than like getting a blood test for TSH. Who cares if you have circulating levels of TSH, I mean, it's in some ways it is clinically significant or relevant, TSH, but it doesn't tell you about is thyroid hormone getting into your cells and is it actually being used and bioavailable?

Matthew Blackburn 11:27
That was awesome. Yeah, it's about relationships and I found that mineral wheel years ago and that's been super useful but it goes, I think, a lot deeper than that, because that's not even showing all the relationships. So I wanted to ask you, Clark, you said something about, it's not just about, mineral being high or low. I've heard it said about HTMA, that high levels can mean your excreting it so it's like a good thing. What are your your thoughts on that, when people say that about HTMA? Like, for example, my copper is through the roof, it's a, "Oh, good, that means you're excreting a lot of it." Is that - how do you figure that out, or?

Clark Englebert 12:09
Right, right. Yeah, it's a very good question. So there's a delineation between what we're doing with an initial test interpretation, and a retest interpretation. So on an initial test, we're interpreting things slightly differently than on like a retest, if you've been on a mineral balancing protocol. So you can use on an initial test - well the copper is being excreted through the hair; However, you have to ask the question, why is it being excreted through the hair? And in most cases, it's being excreted through the hair, because tissue stores of copper have sort of been saturated. And the body is trying to get rid of this excess copper in whatever way that it can. So it's not - the hair test is not measuring directly the total body stores of all of your copper, a test like that doesn't exist. But it's more of like an early indicator, especially on the initial tests of likely copper toxicity, when that copper level is very, very elevated. And so that's one way to assess copper toxicity we can get into, there's a lot of different connections that exist between copper and other elements, and copper and hormones as well. But there's a concept in the literature called the poor excretor theory, which is another very interesting idea which gives us another way or tool to assess metal toxicity and in this case, let's say individual copper toxicity. When copper is much too high, like it is on your test, or when it's much too low, let's say copper was at like this point five milligrams per cent level, that's what we call, in the poor eliminator range. And both of those situations are indicating a similar phenomenon. Where you have high tissue levels of copper, for whatever reason on this first test, you're showing high levels of it. Sometimes people don't always show on the first test, but there's many other indicators or what we call biomarkers for copper toxicity based on the other mineral levels and ratios and some of the metabolic patterns as well. So this poor excretor theory, which is a very, very important one for assessing metal toxicity was sort of discovered in the early to mid 2000s and I'll bring up on the screen here. The study where - one of the landmark studies where it was sort of discovered and let me see if I can pull that up.

Matthew Blackburn 14:48
Yeah, cuz I have to pull up my test. I think one of my - let me see here. Yeah, mercury and cadmium, antimony, arsenic were super low, which, how can you If that's a good or a bad thing?

Clark Englebert 15:01
Exactly, well, you want it when you when you're assessing a little bit, like a little bit of some of them, some of the metals is okay, if it gets like to zero, then that's when you're looking at a poor eliminator. But here's the study, I'm gonna pull this up here and we can read some of the quotes from the study, it's very, very interesting. Okay, so a bunch of researchers started to look at autistic kids and developmentally delayed kids and the early to mid 2000s. And they started to notice on the diagnostic tests that they were running, that the developmentally delayed kids, the autistic kids actually had much lower levels of some of these, especially the toxic elements; This study was looking more at the toxic elements than anything, not the essential elements. But what they started to find was, and this is what they say here, "Our study found that arsenic, cadmium and lead were significantly lower in the hair of children with autism than in matched controls." They know that many of these metals are implicated in the pathogenesis of these disorders. And so they know that the body burdens of these kids are very high in the tissues, there's been post mortem studies of autistic kids in their brains actually, and they found really high levels of aluminum in their brains. So they know that the metals are involved in the pathogenesis of these conditions but on the diagnostics, the kids show very low levels of those elements, in certain instances, like very low - zero, almost basically zero. And I'll show you another quote here from that book, I think I recommended last time, called the essential - "The Toxicology of Essential and Nonessential Metals" And what the explanation for this phenomenon is that metals and minerals above certain concentration thresholds, inactivate detoxification enzymes. And so the metals bioaccumulating to such a degree over a certain concentration threshold, starts to inactivate detoxification enzymes. And what you will see is in the autistic kids, we have many on our program, they have very low levels of these elements. And it can confuse people sometimes, but it's another way - it's kind of another biomarker or clever way that we can use a hair test to assess metal toxicity. So high levels of the element on an initial test, that's sort of a very straightforward way to assess metal toxicity but it's not always straightforward, especially if the toxicity is much worse. And like you're autistic and the detoxification enzymes are so impaired that you can't excrete these elements in any appreciable amount.

Matthew Blackburn 17:55
Yeah, I was listening to Dr. Wilson and it finally clicked, and you probably told me this before but I think you did in our first chat that the toxic metals can jump in as a replacement if you have deficiencies and zinc or whatever it is. And Dr. Wilson made the analogy, it's like if your belt goes bad on your car, you can put it back on and kind of just rig it up to get to the dealership, but it might slip off and it's not the same as a new functional belt. And that's kind of same thing in our body, that basically like you just said, the detoxifying enzymes, or the enzyme pathways in general will be hindered or fully impaired because of these metals being a surrogate for the things that were deficient in. So they're playing a purpose, the toxic metals in our body, and that finally clicked for me, I'm like, "Oh, that's really fascinating."

Clark Englebert 18:55
It's an adaptive mechanism. It's the body using these elements to keep you alive in the face of those mineral deficiencies. Not only to the metals substitute for those essential elements, but kind of what you're hinting at, the metals are actually being used on those enzymes and proteins that don't really have anything else to be used for, or used on. So like in the case of, let's say, low zinc, lead, cadmium, mercury can all replace zinc and it's actually that those metals are being used to power enzymes, and in other processes that zinc is used for. So it's sort of - we hinted at this but in the last talk that we had, this is one of the reasons why chelation is so harmful is it can just rip out you can you can target metals with chelation, but if you just rip them out and you don't take care to - not only have to replace the minerals that the metals are being replaced by, but you have to do so in such a way that doesn't unbalanced your other elements and this is where Dr. Eck's work is so important. Strategically balancing the mineral levels and ratios is really the safe way to detoxify your metals. Because you're taking care to balance or to put back the minerals that are being replaced by the metals, but you're doing so in such a way that isn't going to unbalance the other elements at the same time. And that's where the interactions really come into play and is really, really key. Because if you take individual nutrients for some indiscriminate period of time at high levels, you run the risk of imbalancing other elements.

Matthew Blackburn 20:40
Right. Yeah, the manganese connection was interesting to me, because over the years, I've heard of that, you know, being toxic manganese and tap water showers in the city. But, again, different forms, and it's all about relationships, and that - I just never had thought of supplementing that one, which you have me on this program, which I'm feeling great. Just to say the results so far, so I use an aura ring in airplane mode when I sleep and I had the highest deep sleep I've had in over three years. I don't know, I couldn't remember how long, it was about three and a half hours of deep sleep.

Clark Englebert 21:22
Wow.

Matthew Blackburn 21:23
I don't know if that's a good thing. It seems like a good thing. I think I slept for like 10 hours that that night and that was like two or three nights ago. And my REM was like two hours, so that was super restorative night, something happened there. Yeah.

Clark Englebert 21:37
So you got started on the supplements then - that we recommended?

Matthew Blackburn 21:40
So far just the limcomin - but two, two, two, so three times a day, but it's already making huge difference just in the three or four days I've been on it, it's incredible how quickly my body responded.

Clark Englebert 21:57
Right, right, exactly. When you're sort of taking these elements in ratio with one another based on on the hair test parameters, it's kind of, it's pretty crazy how quickly, you can improve, so that's, that's amazing to know. So why don't we get into, like some of the specific things that we found on your test, if you're okay with that.

Matthew Blackburn 22:23
Let's do it. Time to get vulnerable.

Clark Englebert 22:24
You know, it's not all terrible, and some good things, some bad things. But the one of the key things that I hope people understand is that you do have copper toxicity, you're showing them very high levels of copper, the ideal copper level in the hair is 2.5 milligrams percent and yours is at 7.4. So it's basically - it's pretty up there, it's basically three times normal essentially, 300% of normal. And on both charts, on the trace elements chart on the analytical chart, it's basically off the charts. So that's one of the most important things, but really our focus with the interpretation revolves around the metabolic patterns, and the metabolic parameters that we're seeing, which are basically -- we're assessing from the mineral ratios of the first four elements.

Matthew Blackburn 23:26
Really quick, just to interject on the copper, because I'm sure a lot of people are wondering this. They know that I was mega dosing it for a little while, I don't know, two, three months, I was on 100 milligrams a day, which maybe I was absorbing 60 - 70 milligrams. Will this second test show whether it was just my megadose and copper that caused this, or whether I've had it for my entire life?

Matthew Blackburn 23:29
That's a very good question. So I think it's likely actually going to reflect still - your entire or the lifetime or cumulative exposure to copper. So it's hard to disentangle those two things because if you're saturated with copper, because over the years, you were on a vegetarian diet, or iron deficient, so if you were zinc or iron deficient for a very long time, you'll still have copper toxicity, even if you weren't megadose in copper for just two or three months. So it'll still probably reflect that I think.

Matthew Blackburn 24:31
Interesting, because I've been telling people, taking - mega dosing a mineral for two or three months isn't likely to cause long term changes in your HTMA, right? This is kind of a long term view of what's going on your body.

Clark Englebert 24:44
Yes, it's sort of like the first layer of your biochemistry that we're seeing right now and as we go back through and correct some of these parameters, we'll see deeper layers of what was going on before.

Matthew Blackburn 24:58
Awesome. Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah, I was surprised to see him a slow oxidizer, which I think that they have a certain response to caffeine and there's all these things that go along with that, right?

Clark Englebert 25:10
Yes, so slow oxidation, or the oxidation rate is the first thing that we're assessing on the hair test. And you can think of the oxidation rates sort of like the balance between calcium and magnesium, and sodium and potassium. So calcium and magnesium are sort of like the brakes on your metabolism. And then sodium and potassium are kind of like the gas. And so the oxidation rate is a higher level, more advanced concept than just saying like, well, calcium is high, magnesium is high. The oxidation rate is trying to ask the question, what is calcium and magnesium look like relative to sodium and potassium. And we asked this question in the first place, because sodium and potassium are antagonistic to calcium and magnesium, sodium and potassium are your body's main monovalent elements, they can dissolve out the divalent elements all across the mineral system. So when sodium and potassium get high, calcium and magnesium will by default get low and vice versa, when sodium and potassium are low, calcium and magnesium will get high and precipitate out into the hair, and other places they shouldn't be and that's what we call slow oxidation.

Matthew Blackburn 26:26
So according to my test, I have more brakes going on than gas.

Clark Englebert 26:29
Exactly, exactly. So to bring it back to another car analogy, it's sort of like when you're in your car and you're driving somewhere, you need to use your gas, and you need to use your brakes, sort of maybe equally, roughly throughout the trip, in order for you to get there safely and for things to operate smoothly. If the brakes are engaged the entire time you're in your car, you're not going anywhere. If the gas is engaged, you're going to crash into something the entire time. So you want the balance of those elements in your body for optimal or peak enzyme efficiency and energy efficiency in the cells.

Matthew Blackburn 27:05
And these relate to - like I know Dr. Lawrence Wilson talks a lot about adrenal - was it the adrenal fatigue or the adrenal burnout is how he turns it. Do I have that according to the test? Because I was trying to read my own tests based on listening to him and it seemed like I have minor it's not severe, like adrenal burnout but from what I can see my test, there's some signs of minor.

Clark Englebert 27:28
Yes, exactly. So that is also coming into play - these first four elements where sodium and potassium, we're interpreting it in kind of a special way where sodium, like I said before is correlating to the hormone aldosterone. And the potassium is correlating to the hormone cortisol because cortisol regulates potassium retention in your tissues. So when we look at this test, and we're looking at the sodium potassium levels, we're actually looking at the cellular effect of those hormones. So sodium is very low here, it's at 5 milligrams percent, ideal is 25. So that's indicating to us a poor cellular effect of aldosterone. And then potassium is slightly low. It's really not - it's actually in a pretty good range. Where potassium is at 9 milligrams percent ideal is 10 milligrams percent. So it's just slightly low on the cortisol end. But there are multiple parameters that we can use to assess adrenal function and adrenal health by looking at the hair test. The first is just the raw levels of those elements, then we can get into the ratios like the sodium magnesium ratio is a measure of the cellular effect of the adrenal hormones, because those adrenal hormones regulate sodium and magnesium retention in your tissues. So if we were to look at the sodium magnesium ratio, the ideal for that ratio is 4.17. Yours is at 0.62 right now so it's quite low. Yeah, it's quite low. It's like at maybe 15 or 20%, of where it should be. So that's, that's an adrenal burnout indicator for sure.

Matthew Blackburn 29:22
Yeah, and I was telling you before I started recording, there's so many life events that can cause stress, moves, breakups, just any kind of psychological emotional stressor, can really put a dent in your minerals. And what my belief the last few years was, it's just immediate drop and sodium and potassium, and copper and magnesium, but it's much more than that, opening up to these ratios. It's not just about taking them in, like 4700 milligrams of potassium a day, it's not logical.

Clark Englebert 30:00
Right and so like adrenal function is dependent on much more than just like the levels of those elements, like adrenal function is dependent on cholesterol, protein, sufficient saturated fat. Also many of the other micronutrients, B vitamins are very critical for adrenal function. So there's a lot of practitioners out there who are sort of like, recommending that you take a bunch of sea salt and like cream of tartar or something, or the adrenal cocktail and it's like, that's okay, that's like a start. But that's not going to resuscitate adrenal glands that have been burned out and sort of run to the ground over many years. And that's maybe why a lot of people who do those protocols, they don't notice a big difference and you can take sodium until you're blue in the face. But it takes much more to resuscitate and restore adrenal function than just taking sodium by itself.

Matthew Blackburn 30:54
Yeah, and that's another layer to this, like the vitamins. I noticed in the nutritional balancing protocol you guys utilize vitamin A, vitamin E, vitamin D6, B vitamins in general. And that's just that adds another layer of complexity to this, because it's not just about taking minerals to balance, it's about taking the right vitamins, and with the minerals to rebalance.

Clark Englebert 31:19
Yeah, so the vitamins and the other micronutrients, aside from the essential elements, the minerals, they interact in that system as well - of elements, where you have the essential elements and that's referring to a class of all of the essential elements like the macro elements, the electrolytes and the micro elements as well. But then the metals exist in that system as well. Along with all the vitamins, the water and the fat soluble ones, part of what we're doing is trying to understand how all those elements interact with each other, and then giving you strategically balanced supplements to manipulate these mineral levels and ratios into balance. So in order to like raise a sodium level, low sodium on your hair chart, you have to give a couple sodium synergists, like the essential elements, manganese, copper, B6, are sodium synergists, but so are some of the B vitamins. B5 is a sodium synergist, because of the way that it nourishes the adrenal glands, B3 as well, B2, B1 is more of a magnesium synergist so it's less important for sodium specifically. But it really is about understanding how all of these elements interact with each other. Not only to glean as much information as we can from the hair test interpretation, but in order to set up a protocol that is much more strategic in balancing all of these critical parameters on the test, it's all at one time.

Matthew Blackburn 32:58
Right and since I have high copper, and you said copper is a sodium synergist. I think the supplement im on is an eight to one zinc to copper ratio, so eight times the zinc to copper, because that's the thing that confuses a lot of people. It's like wait, Matt has high copper, but he's still on copper. It doesn't make any sense. But it's all because these relationships, right?

Clark Englebert 33:20
It's because of these relationships but also, we're using copper in that limcomin supplement to help raise the sodium level. So copper and manganese are sodium synergists. What we're doing is and along with your adrenal glandular and the B vitamin, the D complex with the B's and specific ratios, what we're doing is we're improving adrenal function significantly, and improving adrenal function will have downstream consequences for ceruloplasmin because the adrenal hormones send signals to the liver to activate and use ceruloplasmin. There was a really interesting study I was reading, kind of just brushing up last night because I knew we were going to talk about this. But I'll read a quote here, talking about the relationship between the adrenal hormones and ceruloplasmin in copper. This is where things get really interesting and this is where the genius of Dr. Paul Eck really shines through because he was recognizing these things back in the 70s, and 80s. Where when you have adrenal fatigue, this will predispose you to retain more copper and not be able to utilize copper as well in the doses that you're getting in your diet and maybe supplementally. So what this, this study, just to give people a little background on it, it's called, "Copper: toxicological relevance and mechanisms" It's in the the archives of toxicology, and this was published in 2014. So fairly recent research and this is section three of this. So if anyone wants to look this up, they can look at this study. They can look at some of the mechanisms for copper toxicity. It's real, for those people out there who think it's not.

Matthew Blackburn 35:11
What's the name of the study? You can click, I'll put the link in the show notes here.

Clark Englebert 35:14
Yeah.

Matthew Blackburn 35:16
Oh, toxicological-

Clark Englebert 35:18
Relevance and mechanisms.

Matthew Blackburn 35:22
Awesome. People will just say, "Oh, that's only one study though."

Clark Englebert 35:26
Right. This one, I believe is a review. So, it's - they're looking at more than one study. Yeah, this is a review. So not an umbrella review. The umbrella review is kind of like the gold standard when it comes to literature, but it's still the reviews are better than any individual study. So in section three, they talk about this connection between the adrenal hormones and ceruloplasmin in the liver. What they say is in addition to dietary intake, and environmental exposure, copper status can be influenced by other factors, including supplemental vitamins and minerals, as well as the activity of the adrenal gland. Adrenal hormones, for example, promote hepatic production of ceruloplasmin, the main copper binding protein in the body, thus, malfunction of liver and adrenal gland insufficiency can cause copper to accumulate in the tissues. So in adrenal fatigue, like you have the sodium magnesium ratio is very low. Your sodium potassium ratio is very low, that's another indicator of adrenal function. The raw level of sodium is low. There's many indicators here for adrenal gland insufficiency. So that will make it so that you don't - if you're not making ceruloplasmin because of this adrenal gland insufficiency, you could actually be making yourself much worse by taking high doses of copper because your body doesn't have the mechanisms for controlling, partitioning of copper.

Matthew Blackburn 36:58
Fascinating. I feel so good on cod liver oil, I'm still taking that and I'm wondering if that vitamin A, because I know there's a ceruloplasmin relationship with that vitamin A, I think it's ATP7A and ATP7B? So I wonder if that's part of why I feel so good taking the Rosita of cod liver oil is because of this.

Clark Englebert 37:21
It's definitely possible that that's at play. I think with respect to your copper toxicity, a lot of it is related to the adrenal glands. We're seeing those biomarkers for adrenal insufficiency. And the thing that a lot of people don't understand is that - if you have adrenal insufficiency, and you're megadosing copper, well, that copper is not going to be bound by anything. It's not going to be able to be bound by ceruloplasmin because ceruloplasmin is not working the same way that it normally would. And it's similar to iron toxicity where if the iron transport proteins are not working well, for whatever reason, there's many different reasons that could happen. We talked about this a little bit on your last show, but aluminum, cadmium and lead can occupy transferrin and ferritin and and make it so that iron cannot be bound by those proteins. So you end up with a lot of unbound iron if you have toxic metals, taking up those spots on transferrin and ferritin. So similar, not exactly the same mechanisms, but it's sort of like second and third order effects which are affecting the partitioning of those essential elements. It's one thing I feel like certainly, certain people maybe like Morley and Jason don't really understand. There's there's other things at play other than just the intake of copper.

Matthew Blackburn 39:01
What about albumin and I know this transcoopering, there's like other things that bind to ionic copper when it enters the plasma. Maybe those are subpar as well.

Clark Englebert 39:14
Exactly, exactly. So in the case of albumin and transcoopering, there's actually a few other copper binding proteins so it can get fairly complicated, fairly quickly - ceruloplasmin is just the main one. But if those proteins are affected, you could have metal toxicity causing issues with those other copper binding proteins. So yeah, it's definitely more complicated than just intake of copper.

Matthew Blackburn 39:48
Right. And I just, I like looking at my history just thinking back to - I told you not liking red meat growing up, but I didn't start eating beef until really, like three years ago, it was very recent that I started consistently eating red meat.

Clark Englebert 40:06
That's a huge risk factor for copper toxicity even before supplementing. The thing is, is that your copper systems would be impaired to such a degree at the point that you probably started taking high dose copper, that the high dose copper was sort of maybe like the straw that broke the camel's back, where under normal circumstances, you may have been able to eliminate that excess of copper through the biliary excretion pathways. But if you've been iron deficient, zinc deficient for your entire life because of that vegetarianism, that would definitely make those systems impaired.

Matthew Blackburn 40:47
An iron deficiency to which you said the HTMA isn't like there's a few elements or is it just one? The iron that's not - you said that it's better to look at blood?

Clark Englebert 40:59
Yes, exactly. I think iron is better - it's better understood by looking at the blood markers, we can kind of assess iron toxicity, through looking at very low levels or very high levels of iron. But when it gets into the reference range, and you're kind of close to it now, it's less clear, really delineating iron status from the hair test.

Matthew Blackburn 41:23
Interesting. Cool. So where should we go next here?

Clark Englebert 41:31
Yeah. Okay, so we went through some of the ratios, the adrenal ratios. Another really important ratio that we can talk about is the sodium potassium ratio. And I think this might be the most important finding, there's actually a couple other things like your aluminum is pretty elevated. It's more clear from looking at this - this is the corrected version of the chart, from TEI. It's a little easier to see on this ARL chart, but-

Matthew Blackburn 42:04
I drank a lot of sodas growing up, bashing my parents, but we're kids, and I loved my my colas, and phosphoric acid aluminum cans.

Clark Englebert 42:16
I know. It's true like, we're in the same generation, I'm only two years older than you so we were drinking soda like it was going out of style when we're growing up. And well, I think I mentioned this on the last podcast, that's a big risk factor for aluminum, especially if those cans are sitting in like warmer environments, the acidity, the pH can change and the aluminum can leach into the actual soda itself. But Mercury was used to synthesize and make high fructose corn syrup for many decades after they discovered it. So soda - drinking soda is a huge risk factor or consuming any any high fructose corn syrup, huge risk factor for mercury toxicity. So on your test, we're not really seeing super high levels of mercury, it's more on the poor eliminator range. But I would suspect a mercury toxicity - also when the copper and zinc ratio is off, that can be used as a biomarker for mercury toxicity. So very high copper to zinc ratios, there's some literature I can forward to you. I did a couple posts on this actually on my Instagram. But you can use mineral ratios in interesting ways as sort of like biomarkers for certain metals. So the copper to zinc ratio is significantly off, the mechanistic relationship is that copper replaces zinc, and can drive down zinc. Mercury also replaces zinc when it gets low. So that's the connection there, how you can actually use that as a biomarker. But like there's other like the calcium magnesium ratio being off is a very good biomarker for aluminum toxicity. And your calcium magnesium ratio is not too crazy off. It's a little low. It's like one point the lowest ideal so that one's not too out of balance, but you are showing aluminum toxicity, which is significant, it's likely aluminum is replacing either the iron or the calcium or magnesium in your body. So, and we talked about that concept before, which is that aluminum or the metals can replace those essential elements and through a process called ionic mimicry. And that happens mechanistically because aluminum and some of the other metals have very similar ionic radii or sizes to these essential elements like aluminum, magnesium and iron are all very similar in sizes, so they can easily fit into places where those essential elements should normally be.

Matthew Blackburn 45:07
You said aluminum, iron and-

Clark Englebert 45:09
Magnesium.

Matthew Blackburn 45:11
Wow. Interesting.

Clark Englebert 45:12
Yep. All very similar sizes or ionic radii.

Matthew Blackburn 45:17
Wait, what about my uranium? Is that high, or?

Clark Englebert 45:22
Yeah, it's a little elevated, which uranium - it's harder to pinpoint an exposure vector for uranium. Radioactive fallout from maybe atomic bomb testing? Who knows? I think you grew up in San Diego, right? So there might have been a little bit of that stuff floating around in the air, coming off the Pacific.

Matthew Blackburn 45:49
Yeah, there was actually a nuclear reactor in Southern California that is not an operation anymore but I wonder if there's some residual?

Clark Englebert 45:57
Yeah, yeah, that could definitely be part of it. That's sort of how a lot of the metals since they're not biodegradable, they just persist in the environment, even after like that nuclear reactor was shut down. Similar idea with like lead paint, in lead homes, if a home got knocked down that had lead paint in it, that lead is still in the soil, it's not going anywhere, so that's another big problem, we touched on, on the last podcast, where metals are not biodegradable so when they're in the environment, they're there. And that's a huge issue with the toxicity these elements. They're cumulative year over year because they're not biodegradable, they're persisting in the environment. So that's a really, really big problem. To get back to the sodium potassium ratio here. Okay, so the sodium potassium ratio - to use another car analogy, is sort of like your cellular battery. Where in your car, if your battery - if the charge across the battery runs down, it doesn't matter if your engine, if all the parts in your engine are connected, doesn't matter if your tires are aligned and have plenty of air doesn't matter if you have plenty of fuel in the tank. If there's not a high electrical charge across that battery, your car's not going to start, it's not going to work. And similar principle applies in your cells, where a lot of your cells are running off of electrical signals. And this is one thing I love about the light and health people, the light water magnetism people, they understand like redox potential, and electrical potential is driving a lot of biochemical reactions. So that is what the sodium potassium ratio is a measure of, because sodium and potassium are - your body's two main electrical conducting elements, they control electrical potential across your cells through certain gradients on the inside and outside of the cells. So the sodium potassium ratio is like your body's cellular, or reading of cellular electrical potential. And so the ideal for that ratio is 2.5. Your sodium potassium ratio is pretty low here, it's at .56. So it's telling us that the battery, the cellular battery in your cells is sort of running down. And that will impact a lot of different functions, certainly related to the sodium potassium pumps that control the flow of those two elements and other nutrients in and out of your cells. Very important for that. There's a connection between the sodium potassium ratio and aluminum. Aluminum can disrupt NA, K-ATPases. So when you have aluminum toxicity, that can impair this ratio.

Matthew Blackburn 49:03
Interesting. I was telling you before we started recording, like, I think I feel good overall. And it's it's incredible to think how many people go through life, their whole life with imbalances like this, right? They never get an HTMA, are never aware of it. Because I, for the most part, I have energy for the most part, I sleep well. I get stuff done, I'm productive, I'm creative, but I got into this for optimization. I'm interested to see how good I can feel the next six months to a year from balancing all this stuff. It's going to be really interesting to see what happens to my creativity and mental power, physical energy, all that stuff.

Clark Englebert 49:41
Exactly. And that's, a lot of clients that I have are people who are ill and sick and they're not doing well and they're looking to heal heal, but a certain percentage of people that I'm working with are also looking to optimize, they feel pretty good at a baseline level. But we can use this program and this test to optimize people to such a degree that they weren't really aware of, of how good you can get things to be. Especially if you have metal toxicity, because metal toxicity sort of induces a silent reduction in function of a lot of different pathways related to enzymes and other things. So the toxicological profile of metals is such that, most people are being exposed to low levels of these elements, and they're being affected in in ways below their perception level. So it's sort of like maybe you just have a slightly lower IQ than you would have, if you didn't have aluminum toxicity. If your memory doesn't work quite as well, right? Maybe your IQ is 10 points lower than it could be, or 15 points lower. Maybe you don't sleep as deep. Maybe your energy isn't quite as high throughout the day. And a lot of what people think of as aging, is really just a wearing out process through these mineral imbalances and metal toxicities that are occurring. So there's so much that we can do to optimize, it's a little - people don't really have any idea.

Clark Englebert 49:56
Makes sense. And this is way beyond just taking a multi mineral or multivitamin, like most people are on because that's either keeping them where they're at, or making them worse, right? It's like a blanket that they buy from the health food store or multi mineral or multivitamin, it's unlikely that it's going to match their HTMA results, right?

Clark Englebert 51:49
Yes. And that's a critical piece I feel like a lot of people don't understand is that, for certain people, high dose copper supplementation can save their life and it can be quite beneficial. That's not you, though, so the bio individuality component of all of this has to be considered. And many people in these groups that are promoting one size fits all approaches aren't considering that bio individuality sort of component. If you were in fast oxidation, this is what's happening, I think in some of these groups, the copper (unintelligible) group, that Jason runs is that - if you had very low levels of calcium and magnesium, and very high levels of sodium and potassium, that would actually indicate a stronger need for copper, because copper is a calcium synergist. And so we can use copper to raise calcium, when it's very, very low, relative to sodium and potassium. And that's very important for balancing those elements against each other. And so that's a really important idea is that one size fits all does not work and you have to get a baseline of your current element status before you go down the road of mega dosing or taking nutrients really, at all.

Matthew Blackburn 53:16
What are your thoughts on lithium, Clark? Because I was - so this is a really interesting subject, because about a month or so ago, I'm always going down all these rabbit holes all the time, and I went down a B12 rabbit hole. And I've been getting various bloodwork tests done, I'm all about testing right now and B12 was pretty high. But my transcobalamin was actually low, it was in the two hundreds, which is low. And so I was reading about getting B12 into the cells and I came across - I can't remember the doctors work, but she had a protocol, and she used lithium orotate to drive B12 into the cell. And so I started taking it and it felt like when I started taking copper, it felt like a nootropic. And I think I spoke to you about it and you said lithium could kind of help a low sodium potassium ratio, right?

Clark Englebert 54:12
Exactly. Lithium is a sodium synergist.

Matthew Blackburn 54:18
Hmm. Okay, but it shows high here, which means that I overdo the supplement.

Clark Englebert 54:25
Yeah, how much lithium were you taking?

Matthew Blackburn 54:26
Uh oh, well. So I started off I think, I always start low even though it's me, so first day or something, but I think I started with like 10 milligrams and moved up to 20. I think, in my max, I got up to 40 or something a day, maybe 60. But always split up not all on one dose. I take most of those capsules are either five or 10 milligrams and like five years ago, I experimented with lithium for the nootropic effect. I heard about it from John Gray, I was like, this sounds good, let me try it. And it's definitely a nootropic but I guess you have to be careful, even if you're having those B12 issues like I have, because I got these results and I immediately stopped that same day. I'm like, Okay, I'm going to take a break.

Clark Englebert 55:15
Yeah, yeah. With any of the elements, you can overdo. Like your protocol, I think it's very interesting because you were on the high dose copper protocol before, which is definitely contraindicated for some of your imbalances. Slow oxidizers don't need a lot of extra copper because calcium and magnesium are higher than sodium and potassium and slow oxidation. That's the characteristic definition of slow oxidation and when you take very high dose copper, you're driving calcium up in the tissues, which will have that antagonistic effect on sodium, potassium. So your protocol, however, your sodium potassium ratio, being low, still calls for some copper. And it's in that liquid supplement, where we're giving you about, total for the day, 4.5 to five milligrams of copper, it's balanced against zinc and magnesium, which is very critical. But we're using those elements, not just to correct low levels of those elements, but to correct the critical mineral ratios that we've been talking about. And that's through understanding how those elements are antagonistic and synergistic to other elements. So that I think with the lithium, it could have been that maybe the copper, if you were taking the copper and the lithium at the same time, was that going on?

Matthew Blackburn 55:24
They were separate because I stopped the copper and then I started on the lithium. And that was just an intuitive thing to stop the copper and like my body has stopped asking for it.

Clark Englebert 56:42
Right, right. Exactly.

Clark Englebert 56:44
Yeah, the lithium one is fascinating. I mean, from what I was reading, it's kind of hard to become like lithium toxic. But I guess like you said, you can overdo anything.

Clark Englebert 57:02
Right, right, exactly. So yeah, we are seeing pretty high lithium levels, it's certainly outside of the reference range on your TEI test. So part of why analytical doesn't measure some of the ultra trace elements is that they're less reliable to measure using the analytical technique that's being used by TEI and ARL. So just meaning that the analytical technique atomic spectroscopy, basically, what they're doing is they're burning the hair at very high heats. And each mineral gives off a characteristic characteristic light frequency. And that's how we're actually measuring minerals because these elements, the ultra trace elements are in such low amounts in the hair in the body, it can be kind of hard to get valid reading for those elements. However, it's still interesting that your lithium is high when you were taking pretty high doses of lithium. So I think that's probably correlating to, maybe just taking that lithium at that time.

Matthew Blackburn 58:09
Interesting. And those those arrows pointing to the left, does that mean it's equal? Or what do those mean?

Clark Englebert 58:15
Non detectable.

Matthew Blackburn 58:17
Oh, okay.

Clark Englebert 58:18
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, like your tungsten, thallium, platinum, bismuth, are all sort of non detectable.

Matthew Blackburn 58:25
Is that a good thing?

Clark Englebert 58:27
Well, it's less, it's less valid, I wouldn't put too much stock in a lot of these ultra trace elements. The reading of these, to be quite honest. I think until the technology has to improve, has to become much more sensitive. Like the technology that we have now is quite incredible, it's quite good but it's still very difficult to measure these ultra trace elements with a lot of validity.

Matthew Blackburn 58:54
Interesting. Okay. Did anything else jump out on my test to you, that we didn't cover?

Clark Englebert 58:59
Yes. Okay, so let's see. So we went through the copper toxicity piece. The adrenal component - Um, yeah, that might be it. The metal toxicity-

Matthew Blackburn 59:14
Is my selenium and chromium kind of low, or?

Clark Englebert 59:17
Yes, yes, those two elements are kind of low as well, which is, I would say, somewhat significant. Your zinc level is actually in a very good range, however, that's attenuated to some degree by that very high copper level. So, the zinc to copper ratio is very poor, even though the zinc level itself is in a good range. So manganese is somewhat elevated here as well. That could be from a couple different things, well water, manganese is used in the gasoline now. So having grown up in a big city or something you were probably breathing in those fumes of the manganese and the gas.

Matthew Blackburn 1:00:03
I used to love the smell of gasoline growing up.

Clark Englebert 1:00:07
I have no idea why, me too, it's totally weird. But yeah, they took lead out, which is an improvement, certainly but they're using a toxic form of manganese, sort of.

Matthew Blackburn 1:00:19
I wonder if we like to smell because I was reading about copper and people with copper toxicity - Dr. Walton was saying tend to crave, like chocolate and copper sources. So I wonder if the gasoline thing is the same thing with manganese.

Clark Englebert 1:00:33
It could be. Absolutely, so it could - yeah, it could be related to that. Manganese is also used in the water supply in the East Coast. I forget for what purpose, but that's done sometimes I think to clean up the water.

Matthew Blackburn 1:00:52
Is it? I mean, I'm sure there's utilization of manganese, because that's in the supplement that I'm taking to balance out.

Clark Englebert 1:00:58
Same thing, same exact principle is like the copper and iron idea where adrenal function and thyroid function is a very critical component of those proteins working well. And those manganese transport proteins, and antioxidant enzymes, like superoxide, or it's not - it's not super superoxide, it's catalase - uses manganese. So yes, it's about getting bioavailable forms of those elements, while also at the same time strategically, correcting adrenal function. That will help to your body to use manganese better. Manganese is the main sodium synergis that we're using to bring your sodium up. So that'll help to correct your sodium potassium ratio. So it will help to detoxify the bioavailable forms of manganese and copper that you do have.

Matthew Blackburn 1:01:54
Interesting. Wow. And we were talking about coffee enemas a little bit. So on this program, you guys recommend those often to - that's to do with the bile dump, right? And make the process smoother of getting these toxic metals out?

Clark Englebert 1:02:12
Yes, yes. When you go through metal eliminations, part of what we want to try and do is improve the organs of elimination at the same time that we're doing the mineral balancing. So we're not using like chelating agents or binders, we're trying to improve the underlying mechanisms that control your detoxification, your endogenous detoxification systems. So that sort of includes incorporating, like we're giving you a kidney glandular as well in the renamide. Anything that we can do to improve the organs of elimination, the kidneys, the liver, the skin, will help to speed up and make the detoxification process of these metals much more smooth. So that's one of the reasons why we recommend a near infrared sauna -- really, really critical piece of what we're doing. The near infrared sauna is very powerful, or very, very good for your kidneys, and your skin, because you're sweating out all of this stuff that normally your kidneys would have to process. And then the coffee enemas along those same lines, the caffeine helps to stimulate bile flow, which triggers the liver to dump or eliminate anything that it's holding on to. And that's particularly helpful when you're going through a metal elimination. And you have to eliminate those metals through the liver or the kidneys, basically, or the skin.

Matthew Blackburn 1:03:37
I wonder if that's why I felt so good with my first blood donation, because I've been trying to figure that out, I'm sure I will someday. And I thought it was dumping excess iron but now I'm wondering if I was dumping excess copper

Clark Englebert 1:03:50
Could have been .

Matthew Blackburn 1:03:51
But I also dumped a lot of important stuff too.

Clark Englebert 1:03:53
Yes, yeah, yeah. And I think we touched on that in the last call, which is that, blood donation - you're losing, maybe some toxic stuff that's in the blood, but you're also losing a lot of really important essential elements that you may need as well.

Matthew Blackburn 1:04:12
So with the coffee enema, it's way less gentle than a blood donation but it almost seems like a similar kind of idea, but less harsh on the body.

Clark Englebert 1:04:23
It's yeah, it's less harsh, and we're still sort of trying to just facilitate and switch on your detoxification systems a little more than what they are. So we're still - our approach is basically, mineral balancing is the trigger to improve aspects of your detoxification system. And through that balancing process, that's how we're actually triggering the detoxification of the metals and with the coffee enemas and with like the saunas. We're just trying to facilitate the function of those organs that are bearing the burden of those detoxification, basically.

Matthew Blackburn 1:05:04
Did Dr. Paul Eck or Dr. Wilson ever use nutrient IVs? I think I read that Dr. Wilson wasn't a fan, but I'm curious because it seems like you could use intravenous delivery of nutrients to kind of speed - I guess it's a biohacking, perspective to speed up the process. But I wonder if that, tailoring an IV drip, which I did a few weeks ago, based on my HTMA results could be beneficial.

Clark Englebert 1:05:35
Well, yeah, Dr. Wilson and Dr. Eck were never big fans of the IV nutrient delivery system, because you are bypassing the body's digestive buffering mechanisms. And those are actually kind of important for restoring function of all of these different systems at one time, where part of what's going on in the digestive system is that the buffering mechanisms are there to protect you in some ways from digesting or assimilating too much of any individual nutrient at one time. So that sort of falls very much in line with our approach, which is that we don't want to focus too much on any individual nutrient, but we want to use nutrients synergistically to improve all of the parameters on the test at one time. Where the IV stuff I think you can get to focus on individual nutrients, and it bypasses that natural buffering mechanism that your stomach provides.

Matthew Blackburn 1:06:35
Interesting, that makes sense. Another interesting question that I thought of once, I don't know if there's a place to get where you're optimally balanced with everything, if that's even possible or somewhat possible. If at that point, do you think it's possible to use chelaters in a strategic way? While you're eating grass fed beef and you're getting your nutrients in, just to keep those toxic metals down? Like just, not mega dosing EDTA suppositories or whatever, but just kind of like, here and there using chelaters just in low doses, to kind of keep those down once you're balanced.

Clark Englebert 1:07:26
Yeah, I mean, once you're balanced your endogenous detoxification systems, unless you're exposed to high levels of these metals, like occupationally, should have the resources to ward off against any metal toxicity. There's a lot of people out there, professional athletes in particular, who are exposed to some metals, but their body's detoxification systems are so robust, that they don't really, they don't bioaccumulate those metals. So I don't really ever think chelation is necessary, especially after you've been on a mineral balancing protocol for a long period of time, your endogenous detoxification network is going to be working so much better, that as long as you maintain nutrient density in your diet, and you're relatively careful with exposure vectors in your daily life, you really shouldn't have to worry about even using chelating agents - at really any time.

Matthew Blackburn 1:08:27
Interesting. Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting philosophy, it's fascinating to me, I've been having just so much fun diving in and every day I'm ordering new books on on minerals, and just trying to learn more about it, because it's so surface level, I think you said that in our last show, like how mineral balancing is talked about and minerals for health in general, just very surface level discussions that are going on. Rare to hear stuff that you're saying, there's so many layers to it.

Clark Englebert 1:09:01
Yes, there's not only the hormonal component that we have to pay attention to, but the binding proteins, you know, those and all of these things are interacting at all times to try and really maintain homeostasis. So being exposed to stress in whatever form, whether it's relationship stress, or financial stress, or maybe you had trauma in your childhood, that's still affecting you, all of these things come and play into account. And it's it can be exceedingly complicated to try and take all of these things and try and synthesize them into something that's coherent. It's very, very difficult, but that's part of what we're trying to do with the hair test. Is take into account a lot of these different things, and then use not only our interpretation method, but findings from ionomics and soil science, William Albrecht's work to understand how these minerals interact so that we can really set up a protocol that is balancing all parameters at one time, which is, most people are looking at individual mineral levels and they're trying to correct for one thing at a time, and it's really just an insufficient approach. I tried that, I went the orthomolecular route myself, and came up empty after a lot of years, and tens of thousands of dollars later.

Matthew Blackburn 1:10:27
So how often do you recommend people get an HTMA? Is it like every three months, the thing or?

Clark Englebert 1:10:33
Yes, so when you're on our protocol, we're making recommendations for a trimester or three to four months. And we're doing so because we know that the supplements that we're recommending, are going to manipulate these mineral levels ratios into balance. And you can overshoot on correcting for those imbalances if you stay on the supplements for too long. So the retest serves a dual purpose where, not only do you get to see the changes that have occurred from the program that you've been on but if you're eliminating toxic metals as a result of those parameters coming into balance, you get to see the metal eliminations, too. And that's really, you know, I'm sure you've seen some of these that I posted on Instagram, I'm posting like client case studies all the time of people eliminating their copper, their aluminum, their mercury, I went through a huge lead elimination earlier this year. And with the retests, you're able to actually see those things occur in real time. So you have validation that this is actually happening, so much of the alternative health space is, well Here, take this supplement for metal detoxification. And it's like, okay, well, how do I track that that's actually going to happen?

Matthew Blackburn 1:11:56
Yeah, they're not trying to go by how you feel, which can be okay, but I'd rather have more data to look at.

Clark Englebert 1:12:05
Yes, you want diagnostics, you want the proof and I don't know if anyone's gonna be able to see this. But I can show you right now. There's a really cool document that I created. Let me see if my Mac is like, oh, it's running so slow.

Matthew Blackburn 1:12:20
I see a lot of stuff on your desktop.

Clark Englebert 1:12:23
I know dude, it's like out of control right now. I gotta get the upgraded storage. But, so I have this on my Instagram on a highlight. But I have a ton of case studies showing exactly, really how this process works. If people want to check that out, I would highly recommend that. But there's a lot of case studies that show, like this guy has some adrenal burnout indicators on his first test. Actually, sodium is in the same range as yours. Calcium and Magnesium are a little lower. He's in the four lows pattern, showing some mercury and aluminum but the key thing to understand here is that we put him on a mineral balancing protocol and a second test three or four months later, look how balanced these big mineral levels ratios are.

Matthew Blackburn 1:13:13
Wow, that's quick.

Clark Englebert 1:13:14
Quick and what happened as a result of this balancing process is aluminum shoots up from .55 milligrams percent on his first test, to 2.06 on the second test.

Clark Englebert 1:13:26
So huge aluminum elimination and it's occurring because of the balancing of all the mineral parameters on this test. So this is just a beautiful visual example. There's a couple more, I'll show you one other one. This guy is in what we call fast oxidation. So this guy actually needed a lot more copper in his protocol. And a lot of the people who I suspect do well on Jason's protocol, are these fast oxidizers who have just a stronger need for copper. He has a low NA to K ratio, which is what you have. But he was in fast oxidation, where calcium and magnesium are much lower than sodium and potassium. And so he also had a low zinc level. He came to me for mercury toxicity and his Mercury is in the poor eliminator range. So he was like, What's going on here? I know I've got mercury but on the first test, it just wasn't showing. And so on the next test, couple months later, look how beautifully balanced this is. All of these big four elements are almost perfectly at their ideals, and as mercury shoots up 800%

Matthew Blackburn 1:13:26
Wow.

Matthew Blackburn 1:14:37
Wow.

Clark Englebert 1:14:38
So that's just to give an idea of really how the process works. We're using mineral balancing to trigger the detoxification of the heavy metals basically, and the toxic ones of the minerals.

Matthew Blackburn 1:14:52
Wow. And switch had gone enzyme pathways, right?

Clark Englebert 1:14:56
Exactly.

Matthew Blackburn 1:14:57
Impaired. That's really cool. Yeah, I'm excited. I know, Dr. Wilson focuses a lot on the emotional and I think I read an article where he was talking about low sodium to potassium being tied to like, I don't know, it was like a certain emotional like giving up pattern, I think it was - called it giving up.

Clark Englebert 1:15:18
Yes. So you're in what we call a double low ratio pattern, where the calcium magnesium ratio is low. And I'll bring your tests up here. So if you'll see here, calcium is low to magnesium, that ratio is low, and then the sodium potassium ratio is low. And when these two ratios are low, we call it a double low ratio pattern. And in a low sodium potassium ratio, you kind of feel a little more resentment, frustration, hostility, like chronic anger, just frustrated. As a result of that ratio being low, The calcium magnesium ratio, when it's low, you're more prone to openness and you're more open to those feelings of resentment, frustration, and adrenal burnout. So those two feelings from those two different ratios can combine and make it so that you almost want to throw your hands up and just like give up, just say, like, fuck it, I'm done with this. But that's, it's important to know for people that, many of the feelings that they're feeling are related to these mineral patterns that they're in. So it's pretty wild but like with the low sodium potassium ratio, when it dips below one, it's a really good indicator for trauma. And we actually call that low ratio under one a trauma, sodium potassium ratio. It's indicative of basically some traumatic events affecting the sodium potassium ratio. And it can, at that point, like lower your sense of awareness, as well. So and it can cause these resentment, feelings, frustration, hostility, our approach to resolving this stuff, is a bioenergetic approach. So by virtue of correcting these mineral levels and ratios, were helping to give you the vitality to process these emotional states that are associated with these mineral patterns.

Matthew Blackburn 1:17:18
Make sense, yeah. Or it might be more than one trauma, right? There's like, major traumas, micro traumas.

Clark Englebert 1:17:25
Yes, 100%.

Matthew Blackburn 1:17:26
I think mine started after elementary school, it was like, seventh grade, that's probably when, just being forced aggressively to memorize things. I don't know when Abraham Lincoln was killed or whatever.

Clark Englebert 1:17:42
We're really using that information now. Yeah you're completely spot on. Trauma affects your biochemistry in profound ways. And we can use the hair test to measure those changes in those parameters. That's the wild thing about this test. If you know how to use it correctly, you can track all these different things.

Matthew Blackburn 1:18:07
Wow. I love it. Well, yeah, we'll have to do this again Clark, after my retest, I'm really curious to see what happens because I'm going to stay on it and see and - yeah I know the nutrition aspect like I was, I was hearing Dr. Eck focus less on the diet influence on nutritional balancing, and then Dr. Wilson puts more emphasis on specific diets. What are your kind of thoughts on that? And then nutrition in combination with this?

Clark Englebert 1:18:42
Yeah, I think the nutrition is as important as the supplements. They sort of work in tandem, where the supplements are going to forcibly manipulate mineral levels and ratios and the balance, thus triggering detoxification of your metals. Part of the reasoning behind why we want to include a lot of cooked veggies in the diet, along with like high quality meats, it's an omnivorous diet, basically, is that the soluble fiber in the cooked veggies helps to bind out some of the metals that the supplements will be triggering, detoxification of, so they sort of work synergistically. And I think the problem, the toxic metal problem is worse than when Dr. Eck was alive in the 70s and 80s. really doing a lot of this work. It was bad then, but it's certainly worse now. So, part of what we're doing is, we're trying to re-nourish people. And this is an idea that gets lost on many people in like that biohacking alternative health space is this idea of being well nourished. Everyone's talking about like methylene blue and veganism and carnivore it's like, what's a diet that's just very nourishing that you're getting a high level of a lot of these micronutrients consistently every day. And that diet is basically an omnivorous diet that includes raw dairy, high quality animal products, and a lot of different veggies as well and some plant foods. So that's really what we're going for when it comes to the recommendations for the diet is cooked veggies, especially when you cook them, it makes the minerals more bioavailable. In raw veganism or whatever, human beings aren't really designed, you can digest plant foods that are raw, but it's just easier to digest, cooked veggies, especially with the way that people's digestion now today is so messed up. You have to take that into account as well.

Matthew Blackburn 1:20:52
Right? Yeah, I think the fiber is super underrated. I was low fiber for a couple years and I feel like that messed me up, or just relying on the raw carrot salad, which to me was not enough, myself.

Clark Englebert 1:21:05
100% and, and the thing is, is that plants and animals both have components or aspects of their, of their being that really facilitate detoxification. So many of the animal foods have like the sulfhydryl groups and those proteins, or amino acids, I should say. And a lot of the plant foods have other sulfur containing amino acids that are very important for detoxification, the cruciferous veggies are very good for phase one liver detoxification. So they sort of work together and it just goes to I think, on the internet, things are so polarized and extreme, so people can get attention that people think that because someone is saying this thing the loudest that it must be true. Probably not in reality.

Matthew Blackburn 1:22:01
I'm glad I didn't swing to carnivore because my last - when I tried vegetarianism, like six times, and then I finally got over all diets, once I found Ray Peat, I was like, okay, let's just get back to balance. And I noticed it's a huge trend for the last three years for raw vegans to go raw carnivore.

Clark Englebert 1:22:22
Right, right. Yeah, you're swinging from one extreme to the other and - carnivore is certainly better than veganism, I think, but they're still kind of, they're both extreme. And the carnivores, I'm sure are just seething and upset I'm even mentioning that, but there's a lot of published literature on people who consume higher levels of fruits and vegetables, do have better mortality rates. So there's a guy who I love to follow, he's actually quite polarizing, biolayne. He's a phenomenal, he's a little antagonistic, which I can kind of be a little bit, so I kind of like those types of people. But he's definitely talking about a lot of that data and calling out the carnivores recently, on some stuff, there's actually hair test patterns that would predispose you towards wanting to be on or doing better on a carnivore diet. So there's really interesting ways that we can use the hair test and there's carnivore hair test patterns when people come to me and they have certain hair mineral patterns, it's almost a guarantee that they'll be on a lower carb approach. And there's also vegan hair tests as well, where if they've been vegan for a long period of time, they almost always have low zinc, low phosphorus. The carnivores almost always have low calcium and magnesium and have poor tolerance to carbohydrates.

Matthew Blackburn 1:24:01
Interesting. Wow. Yeah, I still need to dial in my nutrition because I'm kind of a unique case, living way out in the boonies.

Clark Englebert 1:24:10
Right. Are you near a grocery store or what?

Matthew Blackburn 1:24:13
It's almost an hour, it's quite a drive. But once I have my greenhouse up next spring, finally, I'm sure I'll be growing lots of broccoli and healthy stuff. And I'm sure my health will go through the roof when I'm growing my own stuff here. Make it so much easier.

Clark Englebert 1:24:30
Yeah, exactly. Agreed.

Matthew Blackburn 1:24:32
But awesome, Clark. Well this was really fun. I took so many notes. And yeah, it's just so fun to research this because it's a whole new world for me and there's just so much to research.

Clark Englebert 1:24:49
Yes, well, this whole approach is a different paradigm almost completely, so there's so much content and there's so much to dig into.

Matthew Blackburn 1:24:59
Totally, yeah. I just ordered, have you heard of Andrew Cutler? My friend, Tyler's really into him.

Clark Englebert 1:25:07
Yeah.

Matthew Blackburn 1:25:07
He does mercury detox and felt good so I ordered a few of his books just to check out.

Clark Englebert 1:25:13
Nice, nice. Yeah, Andy Cutler has some interesting things to say, he - I will put him in the Ray Peat category. Where obviously they're very smart folks. I think that their application of their ideas is not as good as what we're doing. But I still think that they are relevant and those and people should if they're really interested in all of this stuff. Take a look at those folks as well. See what rings true for you.

Matthew Blackburn 1:25:41
Yeah, yeah - well, like you said the results speak for, speak for themselves. So if you're getting results with clients that says everything, so.

Clark Englebert 1:25:49
Yeah, exactly.

Matthew Blackburn 1:25:51
But awesome, Clark. Well, yeah, we'll end it here and I'll put the link below where you guys could could check out his program. Like we said, in the first show, they can just do a one off but ideally, they buy a package deal right where they can, because it's all about the retest, because you're - can only get so far with the initial.

Clark Englebert 1:26:11
Exactly, exactly. So yeah, there's different, we've got different options on our website, nutritionalanalytics.com, you can order the one off, which is just an initial hair test, and you get, it's a very dense interpretation report, along with the actual hair test results, along with a solutions report detailing the protocol that you should be on based on your unique care tasks. And then you get a guide on how to avoid metals in your everyday life. And then there's an introduction, an audio introduction on this paradigm and this approach. We did kind of go through some of it today so if people do order that package, there'll be somewhat familiar with it. But that's kind of the intro approach, some people just want to dip their toes into the water. Totally understand that. But we do have packages with more tests for people who know they want to be doing this for like, a year or something. And so the retesting every three to four months takes care of that.

Matthew Blackburn 1:27:08
Yeah, I had a lot of people ask me today, if you need to go through a practitioner to order an HTMA, the answer is yes, right?

Clark Englebert 1:27:17
Yes. Yes. Analytical NTEI you have to go through a practitioner, they won't just give you a one off to order the test. And it's for safety reasons, basically, they don't want people misinterpreting the test. And part of the reason why I get these questions all the time on like, how do the mineral interactions work? I don't like giving out a lot of that info, unless it's in the context of like, a client relationship that I have. Because people can sometimes take something wrong and misapply the advice or what they think the interactions are. And you can hurt yourself with this stuff. If you're - there's great power in using nutrient therapy. So there's two sides of that coin, you can heal. But you you can also hurt yourself. So but yeah, you got to order it through practitioner basically.

Matthew Blackburn 1:28:14
Awesome. Yeah, it's like high dosing copper. Like, I experimented, I tell people, this is what I'm doing. I'm currently feeling great on it. But since getting my results, it's not like I'm blaming the high copper guy and saying, you hurt me, I did it to myself. We're all responsible for what we take so I think that's lost on a lot of people that, in the end, we're the one that's putting that capsule in our mouth or that tincture, whatever it is.

Clark Englebert 1:28:41
Yeah, exactly and I went down the road of, I tried 20 different approaches before I landed on mineral balancing. And it's like, at the end of the day, we're responsible for our own actions. So the fact that you own that, that's, it just is what it is, sometimes things don't work out. And Jason has his perspective and I respect that 100%. I don't think anyone should be silenced. Certainly, he should be able to speak freely, completely, just like I should and anyone else, but at the end of the day you're responsible for you, and that's all you can control.

Matthew Blackburn 1:29:20
Right. And so those two, so analytical research, has its laboratories and trace elements, are those the only two labs that don't wash the hair? Is that where you use those, or?

Clark Englebert 1:29:32
Yes, so with commercial - so we could almost do a whole nother show. On the issues of hair analysis like in the literature. That would be really interesting. But when it comes to getting valid results, you don't want the hair samples to be washed at the lab with heavy solvents or detergents like acetone. Because the acetone washes out the sodium and potassium, the water soluble elements. So that's a big problem, it can skew the readings of the sodium and potassium and those are the most important readings on the hair test. And so I get people all the time who have tests from like doctors data or other commercial labs that wash the hair with those heavy solvents and detergents. And there's a reason for why they do it. It's their opinion that they want to control for exogenous deposition of metals into the hair from the environment. And that's what the acetone is doing is washing out exogenous deposition, the ARL approach, the Dr. Eck approach, and this is something that I've discovered recently is that, you can control for exogenous deposition of the metals when you get the sample from the very proximal end or as close as you can get to the scalp. The exogenous deposition of the metals from the environment is not nearly as significant right at the scalp, as it is for at like the distal end of the hair. So there's ways to control for that while also maintaining the integrity of the sodium and potassium levels by not using those heavy solvents and detergents.

Matthew Blackburn 1:31:11
Interesting, but yeah, I was wondering why they did that, like what what the reasoning was, so that's, that's pretty fascinating. And for men that don't have hair on their scalp, they can use pubic hair, you just said it's less accurate, I think?

Clark Englebert 1:31:26
It's slightly less accurate. For whatever reason, the phosphorus level is almost always elevated in pubic hair. We still haven't figured out the mechanism for why, but it's still more or less like 95% a still, a good sample to get if you don't have head hair.

Matthew Blackburn 1:31:45
Okay, great. Awesome. Well thanks, Clark. Yeah, I'll put the link below so you guys can check out his his program. And this was a blast. Thanks so much.

Clark Englebert 1:31:56
Yeah, Matt, thank you so much for having me. It's been an honor to be on your podcasts and maybe looking forward to - it would be fun to do another one.

Matthew Blackburn 1:32:05
Let's do it. Right on. Thanks, Clark. Stick around as we close it out.

Clark Englebert 1:32:09
Okay, cool.

Matthew Blackburn 1:32:15
That is all for today's show. What an interesting philosophy. Even if you don't agree with it, you have to agree that is quite fascinating. And it's an interesting way to go about solving physical issues, mental issues, emotional issues, whatever it is, using nutritional balancing. And I think it's a good message to get out there in general, that we can cause imbalances by taking the wrong ratios of things, especially in high doses over a long period of time. When I first learned about this approach, this philosophy that comes from Dr. Wilson, and further back from Dr. Paul Eck, I didn't know that there was a very specific supplement protocol that went along with it. So that was a total curveball to me. And it was compounded when I learned that I actually can't take other supplements on the protocol because they will imbalance the ratios of the prescribed supplements on this protocol. So ethically, as a supplement company owner, I don't feel right, not taking my own supplements. So all of the Mitolife supplements I take and have been taking, since I started the company, and even before that, I took the forms that I have in my supplements. And I would not feel right, not taking them, especially the Shilajit, which has been a tremendous benefit in my life. And so a lot of this comes down to just different philosophies on natural health and how to go about solving problems. And the whole chelation thing is a really interesting discussion/debate to me, because you have one camp that is very anti-chelation, no EDTA, DMPS, Shilajit, which is a very effective chelater. And Dr. Wilson, in one of his articles goes as far as to say even ascorbic acid, vitamin C, which is a weak chelater, but used over time in high doses, he was not a fan of so again, who do you believe? What do you believe? To me it comes down to experimentation, trying different things. That's what I've been doing and just sharing my journey. And I think overall I'm doing okay, even though my sodium to potassium ratio is super low, and I'm not retaining sodium, I think just being aware of that is really beneficial because I can start focusing on that to rebalance it. And can you do it with isolated supplements? I think so. It just takes another level of awareness. So we'll see if I stick to the protocol. As Clark said, it's every three months you retest, and it's very strict as you only take those certain supplements. So I'd say if you're dealing with chronic ailment, you had metal exposure, it might be something that you want to try, it does get expensive with those supplements, so that cost is a factor to consider. But I think if you just got one test, or one test and a follow up, and use Clark to analyze it, I think that alone would be super helpful, even if you don't want to go all in with a year or two commitment, only taking those specific supplements. But like I said, it's really valuable information. I thought HTMA was inaccurate, and pseudoscience and I was totally proven wrong on that, it's very effective way to see very quickly your ratios, which is not about high or low, like I don't have low sodium, because I'm not taking enough salt. It's the ratio, as he mentioned, of the aldosterone and actually retaining the sodium that I have an issue with, currently. And I really think that goes back to stressors - the last three years. I think the last several years have been super stressful for everybody, families or infighting; Fortunately, I didn't have to deal with that, with having so my family getting jabbed and some not, didn't have that issue at all, my family is all unjabbed, which I think is awesome. But a lot of people are not in that situation and I've heard so many stories where families get split in two, because of these different really health philosophies that you need to get this jab to be healthy, instead of just taking zinc and vitamin E and vitamin K2, ascorbic acid consistently, and methylene blue, those are all things that I prioritized, and they made a huge difference in my recovery. I've had it three times so far and it wasn't too bad. I was just down and out for a few days. So if you want to check out Clark's work, you can go to nutritionalanalytics.com. The science tab is really great, he has articles posted about minerals and metals and health and disease, hair analysis, science, and even photobiomodulation, light therapy and the scientific benefits of that. He also has a blog and of course, if you want to work with him, you can sign up there. Take clippings of your hair, send them in, sit down with Clark, look over your results. And if you want to form a long term plan with him, you could do that as well. My website is matt-blackburn.com. I have my CLF protocol up there at the top of the page. You can read all about my philosophy and what I think about calcification, lipofuscan, and fibrosis, those three accumulations and what we can do about them. And if you click on shop, you can see all of my recommended products. I haven't been updating that page as much as I like because I've been going through - I call it a generator curse on my fully off grid property here, my third generator because when there's no sun, I don't have solar power and I have to rely on my propane tank, which uses a generator to charge my batteries and I've just been having issue after issue so today was really a milestone finally just going with the Kohler and forgetting Briggs and Stratton forgetting Generac and just moving right to one of the best brands which is the Kohler generator. So totally random interjection in this show but if you're on grid and you're looking to get a backup, if the power goes out, like a transfer switch setup with a generator, I would highly recommend against Generac, against Briggs and Stratton, go with Kohler or really any other brand other than Generac and Briggs and Stratton because my experience has been pretty bad, but it's all worth it. It's moving towards self sufficiency and all the blood, sweat and tears I've put into off grid living, I would not take it back, it's been super rewarding. My brand is called Mitolife, go to mitolife.co. I sell grounding sheets and various oral supplements, mostly in pill form, I have a tablet form of a product, which is purified Shilajit resin from Russia. It's been a labor of love to import that straight from Russia with all of the politics going on. And just recently, we posted updated heavy metal analysis on the websites, we used a third party lab called Micro Quality Labs out of Burbank, California. And not only did they look at the heavy metals, but they also looked at the iron, copper, zinc, manganese, selenium, chromium, fulvic acid percent, looked at a lot of different things in the Shilajit. So it's really interesting information, it's a fascinating substance, I think it's beneficial for most people and it's been a huge help in my life, if only is a nootropic. Taking that with coffee, and goat milk, definitely gives me a boost that I feel in my brain almost immediately, we're working hard to get some products back in stock before Christmas, the systemic enzymes will be backed by then, Dissolve-It-All, the magnesium, the elk antler, and the vitamin K2 should be back by Christmas. So look forward to that. And Black Friday's coming up so we will have a sale Thursday through Friday, for Black Friday. So look forward to that, if you follow Mitolife on any of the social media channels, we will post about that there. And last thing, if you're not aware, I have a private academy, it's called Mitolife Academy on YouTube. It's only $15 a month and if you pay that you gain access to the previous couple of years of videos. And it's quite interesting because that kind of catalogues my journey and my former beliefs about copper and iron so you can kind of see my previous beliefs and my beliefs now, I've really looked at both sides of the argument with copper and iron, and a lot of the subjects in the natural health world. And I like to do that to see both sides really understand both sides before making a decision. Ultimately it comes down to helping others, ultimately it comes back to balanced perspectives, realizing that both things can occur in the same planet, iron deficiency, iron toxicity, copper deficiency, copper toxicity, it just makes sense that both can be happening on planet Earth at the same time and that's where I've come to today. And also realizing that no one supplement is inherently toxic, because that is a very unbalanced perspective, in my opinion as well. It's all a matter of ratios and balancing things out. As we know with Omega3 intake and vitamin E intake, which are directly connected. So that's it, I will see you guys next Friday. Stay supercharged.