369: How To Eliminate Cancer-Causing Chemicals

Troy Reicherter And Ashley James

Highlights:

  • Toxicants that bioaccumulate
  • The body is not able to recognize the chemicals in our environment
  • Activated charcoal and detoxification
  • Gene expression
  • Troy Reicherter's experiments
  • Fasting
  • Re-feeding after the fast

Ever afraid to try fasting? In this episode you will learn about the benefits of fasting in detoxifying the body. Know what toxicants are and the damage they can do internally. Troy Reicherter will also share with us his fasting journey and reintroducing food after a long term fast.

Intro:

Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today we have a really interesting guest coming back on the show. In the last two years, he spent over $20,000 in lab tests to determine whether he was detoxing chemicals, like he calls them toxicants; artificial pesticides, you know, chemicals, environmental pollutants, basically, which are very hard to get out of the body – PCBs. These fat soluble toxins that accumulate in the body and that are now known to cause cancer once it reaches a certain threshold in the body. So in the last two years, he has done numerous things and experimented on himself. He's done supplements, he did 109 sauna sessions, and several long water only fasts. Then he took his blood tests every six months to determine what works, what doesn't work. And today, he's here to share his results, his ongoing results, as he's been on the show before, and he will come back every few years because he's going to continue doing these experiments, and he has people who want to participate with him. So it'll just keep growing into case studies. It's amazing that no one around the world is doing this research. Because if you think about it, research dollars come from wanting to invent a medicine, right?

Universities so far has been willing to experiment on how to detoxify the body naturally of these horrible chemicals that get accumulated in our body and cause disease and wreak havoc on our health. And so he's basically the first person that he knows of, that is doing these types of experiments. So it's really cool to learn from him today. One thing he mentions, because again, he did 109 sauna sessions, and tested his blood levels to see if it was working among all the other things he was doing. I want to let you know that my favorite sauna, and I've been using it with great results for the last year and a half. It has been the Sunlighten Sauna. I absolutely love it, I really noticed the difference.. And if you've been a longtime listener, you'll know my story. I was having this toxic overload happen every time I went to lose weight. So as we you know, we store these toxins, these toxicants in our adipose tissue, and my liver was not able to handle it to manage it. And so anytime I went to lose weight, I would get very sick, my liver would become inflamed, I went and got liver tests and ultrasounds and blood tests and determined that it was a very, very angry liver, and my body would just become so sick that I would be almost bedridden from this toxic overload. So I got a sauna after being recommended by several Naturopaths that the best way to remove toxins from the body is to bypass the liver and the kidneys is through our skin. Our skin can sweat out even these fat soluble toxins. And so I've been using the Sunlighten Sauna successfully. I've been having amazing results. The first thing I noticed my skin became very soft. Because it has the anti aging properties.

The Sunlighten Sauna, which is the three in one sauna has near mid and far infrared and these rays will stimulate collagen production. So it's great for beautiful skin. But I noticed that I slept better, I had more mental clarity, I had more energy, I was so much more relaxed, and my body started to shed weight without having the toxic overload that I had before. So I'm very excited to tell you that I believe in the Sunlighten Sauna, it's ultra low EMF, it is non toxic. It's very easy to assemble. My husband did it single handedly. And so you can get the wooden one or you can get the one that is a solo system, which you're able to put in your closet when you're not using it. I recommend that you call Sunlighten and talk to them, see which unit is best for you. And make sure you get the Learn True Health listener discount, you get free shipping, that's about $500 off because these units are quite heavy. So you get free shipping. And right now they're giving us an additional… It's hard to explain but it is very relaxing. It's it's a machine that they put in the sauna and it uses light and sound to turn on the healing response in the nervous system. And they're finding it works really well with people with anxiety, high stress, and even post traumatic stress. So that is something that is wonderful that they're gifting us as well. So give Sunlighten a call. Mention the Learn True Health podcast with Ashley James for those wonderful discounts. And if you have a Sunlighten Sauna and you're having great results we want to share with me please feel free to email me ashley@learntruehealth.com, I'd love to hear your experiences. I've had dozens of listeners contact me and tell me that they're having such wonderful results with it. And also because you can even sweat on lower temperatures. It's great for kids, my back when he was three and now he's four, he sits with me in the sauna till he's ready to get out. I don't keep him in there for a whole half an hour, but he will sweat in the sauna, which is so great to help the children to detox as well. Excellent. Will enjoy today's show. As I know you will have yourself a fantastic day.

[6:10] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 369. Well, here we are in my backyard garden, sitting here with Troy Reicherter and we've had you on the show before you came over to my house for Episode 138. So listeners can go and check that out. And since then many things have happened. And I'm excited to uncover them here today. Welcome back to the show.

[6:45] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. Thanks, Ashley. Thanks for having me. It was two years ago, wonderful to be back.

[6:49] Ashley James: It's amazing how time flies. It's pretty crazy. But that was just two years ago. So, what interests me the most when I met you at the Unity Church, you were doing an experiment, you like doing experiments. Do you consider yourself a scientist?

[7:08] Troy Reicherter: Well, I have a master's degree in traditional Chinese medicine. Technically, that's a Master of Science degree. But no, I'm not really a career scientist or anything. I'm kind of a citizen scientist, if you want to put it anyway.

[7:23] Ashley James: I like that citizen scientist. So you were experimenting on a few things, you were looking to form enough people to come together in the Seattle area to pray and meditate on peace over the summer, two years ago to see if we could impact the amount of crime or the crime rate in the area. And you've also been experimenting for the last few years on fasting, water only fasting and testing your different levels of pollution, chemicals and pesticides that are really hard to get rid off, to see if you could use fasting and a clean diet and some supplements even talk about today to help to eliminate the body of heavy metals and pollution. And so now it's been two years later, you have some remarkable information to share with us.

[8:20] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. Well, this experiment started back in 2015. When I had read a lot of articles about the things in the body, including heavy metals. I had to pick and choose what I could test for, I would have loved to have tested for heavy metals for flame retardants. But I finally had to narrow it down to two main things. So what I was testing for was pesticides. I think they measured 13 different kinds and then PCBs, of which there are I believe 207 different varieties. So it's not exactly water only fasting, it's a modified fasting, and I can describe the things that I did. And I started out just believing that there must be a way because mainstream medical science right now is telling people that there's no known way, or no safe way to get these chemicals that do bio accumulate out of your blood. Now some chemicals don't bio accumulate. And so like the phthalates, plastic softeners for example, within a few days they leave your system or the stuff that you get from those plastic water bottles or from receipts, you know.

[9:45] Ashley James: Bisphenol A?

[9:46] Troy Reicherter: Bisphenol A, yes. That leaves your body within a few days, depending on how it's taken in, maybe a week. So some things do leave the body like arsenic, but then other things do bio accumulate like heavy metals, and DDT, PCBs. So those are the things I'm testing for, and decided to do this fast to see if I could get it out of the body. So that was my whole thesis is that there must be a way to do this. And actually, I am the first person to prove that this can be done. So this is pretty remarkable. Everybody said I was crazy to do it. Everybody said this, how is this going to work? These these things are so lipophilic. And that means that they bind with the fats in your body, and they're just not going to be released. Because of my experience with fasting that goes back to 1993. I was just very convinced that when you're fasting, so much of the fat is lost, and it's throwing toxicants out into the body. And by the way, the word toxin is used by most people to describe these things. But that's not actually correct. A toxin is actually a toxic substance, that's made by a living organism. So like a spider's venom, that's a toxin. So I'm going to try to use the right word toxicant, which is either either an element like a heavy metal that's toxic, or else a man made chemical. So these toxicants get thrown out into the blood and I was thinking they must be leaving the body at pretty large rate during a fast. So I was just sure that if we did this and measured, because these tests are very expensive. I've spent over $20,000 so far on the eight tests that I've done on my blood, and I could use some help pay for the rest. With the donations I have. I've set up a website and a nonprofit called Holistic Health Research. But these tests haven't been done before, and the assumption was fasting wouldn't work. So that's what I was trying to prove. So in 2015, I began the whole thing with three-week fast. And you met me in 2017, I guess it was after my second fast. Yeah. So to go back to I guess, to just kind of recap what I knew then, when I saw you last time I had the results of the first four blood tests in. And they're interesting, but they're a little bit confusing. I discovered later a little bit misleading. Because what happens is more complicated than I realized. So my initial blood measurements for the PCBs was 71,000 parts per trillion.

They give some of these numbers in parts per billion, and I'm adjusting by adding, you know, adding three zeros. So 71,000 parts per trillion, was actually much lower than what most people seem to get. The other results that I've seen, for people's blood is usually much higher than that. There was a test in a family in Oakland back in 2005. And the littlest boy in the family, he had 355,000 parts per trillion, a little girl, I think she was like eight; 207,000 parts per trillion. And then dad had like 200,000 parts per trillion, mom was the lowest she was actually a little lower than me, 67,000 parts per trillion. Can you guess why the mother might have had the lowest rating?

[13:24] Ashley James: I'm gonna guess because she breastfed. And so she gave the toxins to her kids.

[13:28] Troy Reicherter: Exactly. Yeah, that's the theory anyway. We don't know what she had before that. But that's the only known way right now that scientists or doctors will tell you to get rid of these things from your body is to have kids and to breastfeed. Which, of course, is horrible, right? I mean, who would want to do that? You'd rather keep it all yourself, or even intensify your own levels than to give it to your poor child. And what's doubly worse is the kids are more vulnerable to these chemicals as they're developing. So it may be that they're 10 times more vulnerable, we don't really have a way to gauge that yet, you'd have to do all kinds of experiments. That would be totally unethical. But the funny thing is, we're doing these experiments on ourselves right now. And there is no known way besides that to get rid of this stuff. So, so these were my beginning levels, which were pretty low compared to other people, 71,000 parts per trillion for the PCBs. And then for DDT, it breaks down into a bunch of smaller groups of chemicals. And the largest group by far is called 44DDE. So it's basically DDT with a slight change in its molecular structure. And my numbers there were not quite as high, it was 56,000 to start out with. Again, which is about like one quarter, or one fifth of what the average person seems to have. And I can only guess that's because I've tried to eat vegetarian for a long time. Tried to eat organic for a long time. And I've done a lot of fasting in the past. So that's my best guess as to why my numbers are lower than other people's. Because these these toxicants – they definitely are higher in meat, especially seafood, and dairy products, for sure.

[15:13] Ashley James: Right. And the understanding is that when animals consume, so let's think of a cow, a lot of people eat beef. We now raise corn to feed the cows. It actually really disagrees with with the cow's stomach. Some people have even said cows are allergic to corn. And so then they have to be put on a lot of antibiotics because they constantly get infections. So they're eating all this corn that we've raised. This is not organic, just talking about standard, you know, fast food, hamburger kind of meat. We raised this cow on the corn that is latent with pesticides and heavy metals. It's all concentrated in their fat and their meat – significantly concentrated through a few years of eating pesticide latent corn. And then we slaughter that animal and turn it into a hamburger and you go through the drive-thru. And you're eating that patty and the fat in that patty is concentrated pesticides. And so no wonder when we eat meat that we're eating concentrated toxicants. We're eating concentrated toxicants. We're eating the flesh of animals, because we've been feeding them toxicant latent food for years.

[16:41] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, that's right. I mean when you when you delve into the subject, you'll really feel that we should take just a fraction of the money that we spend on the military or sports and do some real research into these things to find out how bad is it? What are the levels and all the foods that we eat and the animals and ourselves? What are the effects of these things on us? What can we do to avoid it? If every time you went to the store, there were numbers of PCBs and heavy metals printed on the food you bought. You think twice before you got that seafood. Because like the one of the articles that inspired me was the 2006 October National Geographic article about the levels of toxicity inside of a Bay Area reporter. And he just went out and had, was it swordfish, I think that he caught off the Golden Gate and his levels of some heavy metals doubled just from one meal. You know, so this is very dangerous stuff. But we don't think about it. It's not talked about much.

[17:49] Ashley James: You're sharing with the numbers with us. I know they're on your website too. What's your website again?

[17:55] Troy Reicherter:  Well, there's my author page is www.troyreicherter.net, and also there's Holistic Health Research, it's www.hhresearch.org.

[18:16] Ashley James: I'm going to make sure the links to everything you do are in the show notes of today's podcast. But before we continue, I want to ask, in the last two years, I know you're going to share with us your results of lowering these levels. Do you do feel a difference? Do you feel healthier? Can you noticeably say that since lowering your levels of these chemicals that there's been a shift in your health or your life?

[18:46] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, you notice it most the first couple months after the fast, you just feel like Superman basically. I just turned 51. And I remember last year when I turned 50 and I did that fast. It was grueling. I did a 40-day fast last summer, but I could have gone for another 10 days. And then when it was over and I got back into the routine of eating again, slowly. Like I say, I mean your human growth hormone levels they're just through the roof. For a man, they may be 22,000% higher than normal. So I really felt like I was 20 years old. Really.

[19:24] Ashley James: You look early 40s. You don't look like you're in your 50s. I'm sorry. You said that the human growth hormone in men after doing a fast is how much higher?

[19:36] Troy Reicherter: I've read that it can be up to 2000 times higher. For women I think the number was about 1300 percent higher, depends on the person I suppose. But that's linked directly to testosterone and tissue repair, energy, vitality, all those things that make you youthful and feel good.

[19:58] Ashley James: In Episode 230. Interviewed Dr. Alan Goldhamer. The whole episodes about fasting. But he talks about on on day five of a water only fast, you have a huge spike in human growth hormone. And that is linked to preserving your muscle tissue. Because people are always afraid they're going waste away, their muscles going to waste away. But the spike in human growth hormone preserves our muscles. So you can do extended fast and not have that loss of muscle mass.

[20:36] Troy Reicherter: Interesting. Yeah, I need to learn more about that as well. And I need to talk to him. So what I discovered, I'll just quickly tell you what I learned up to the point where I was basically blind for two years where I didn't have any results coming in because this laboratory that I send my blood samples to, like I say they they do them in large batches and it costs a fortune. So I had to wait a while. I did my first blood drawing in May of 2015, and had those numbers that I just gave you the 56,100 parts per trillion for the DDE and 71,000 for PCBs. Now when I got my results back, first I did two tests. And the second blood drawing was January of 2016. So seven months later, I had only a 12% drop for the DDE and I had actually a little increase in the PCBs. 71,000 is it? I can barely read it there, 900 I believe. By the way, all my results, I use a snipping tool and I took all of them and I put them on my website. So you can see what I see. You don't have to go through something that I've typed up and perhaps you know, made some kind of typographical error on. I mean they are the original results, they send me Excel sheets, then I requested a printed version, and they got kind of irate about it because they don't usually do that. And then they basically just printed me the same thing that they sent me. So there is no difference. There's no difference between the report that I got on paper and the report that I got electronically. So what you're seeing is really all there is. And so I was disappointed way back in 2016, that it hadn't been a bigger drop. But I've learned a lot more in the meantime, which I'll explain. So all I saw then was it a moderate drop of 12.48% for the for the DDE, an increase.

[22:35] Ashley James: Let me just clarify 12% drop from doing two fasts?

[22:40] Troy Reicherter: This was from just the the 21-day fast.

[22:42] Ashley James: So you do one 21 -day fast and you drop which chemical at 12%?

[22:47] Troy Reicherter: DDE dropped 12% after seven months. These these are blood lipid measurements, by the way. We measure the lipids in the blood, because if you measure the total blood volume, that is very dependent on how much water is in your system, so it throws the whole thing off. So blood lipids are pretty constant. There is a whole other aspect of this, which is the fact that your fatty tissues – we're not testing. That would require something else, you'd have to do liposuction or something and decide where you're going to do it, which part of the body. And then you know, it brings up a whole lot of questions as to how that would be accurate. I'd have to check with the company if they could do this. But if you wanted to know a person's total body toxic load, you'd have to consider the blood lipids as well as adipose tissue. So that's a really good question as to what's still in there. However, this was what I did get, I got the 12% drop after seven months and a slight increase in PCBs, because I assumed you know, the fat cells are throwing out their toxicants into the bloodstream, and it was still elevated. Now remember, my experience at that time wasn't just fasting. I was doing saunas. I did over 100 saunas, I believe 109 saunas, it's all in my book in great detail. And there's a case study online. But I was taking supplements, like 30 different supplements, they're all in my case, study online, Sam E and everything I could think of to try to make more of the enzymes that would get those chemicals out of my body. So I was doing all kinds of stuff. And it's all documented there. I was meditating on it, I was walking in a circle, because in Chinese medicine, they say that there's a way to get rid of, expel bad things from your body by doing that I and I recorded all of that stuff. So, that was an unknown how much that did along with fasting itself. I was drinking pretty much pure water during the fast and taking those supplements, along with the vitamin.

It's all documented carefully. So I had hoped way back then that I was going to have this great drop and I'd be done with experiment. And then I suspected, I thought oh, I'll get, I didn't know what I get. But I was hoping for this huge drop. And then I could get some funding and do more experiments with simpler model so that we could really prove this intervention had this effect. So I realized I was going to have to go for at least another year. So I did not do a fast in the summer of 2016. I just kind of wanted to see whether or not the level would continue to drop on its own. I was thinking perhaps there would still be a spike in the toxicant levels in the blood. So I did a blood drawing and July 6 of 2016. And I didn't get the results back till the next year. But that one was almost exactly the same level. So it was 49,100 parts per trillion for the DDE for January. And it was only 48,600 parts per trillion for that same chemical in July of that year of 2016. So almost no change at all. And then for the PCBs, there was a bigger shift. The PCBs had peaked after the fast at 71,900. And then they dropped down to 64,400. So from the baseline measurement, it was a 9.3% drop. But of course I didn't have those results till the following year. Now in the summer of 2017 right before I met you last time I had done a 30 day fast. So yeah, let me see.So 30 day fast. But I had only had the results from prior to that fast. So in January of 2017, the toxicant levels for the DD dropped a bit. So they had leveled out and then they dropped a bit. But see, I had done one additional intervention. It was the one I wouldn't tell you about last time because I wanted to see the results first. Do you remember what it was?

[27:21] Ashley James: Are you talking about the supplement?

[27:23] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, it was activated charcoal. So what happened was, I was troubling over my results, because I was disappointed that I didn't have a greater drop. So in 2016, I went to the University of Washington, and I emailed all the professors of toxicology, and one person got back to me, a dean named Professor Eaton. So he met with me and he was saying, “Well, the reason why fasting doesn't seem to work for this is because of the enterohepatic pathway.” And I only had basic physiology. So I didn't really know what that was. So it turns out what's happening is, inside your body, we talked already about how there's some chemicals that can be removed from your body naturally. But then there's others that bioaccumulate. Well, even the ones that bioaccumulate, like PCBs and DDE and PBDEs, all those things, your body is not blind to them. There are enzymes in your body that can detect these things. So what's happening is, your body has enzymes, cytochrome P450 family, and specifically there's one called P450 43A. It's abbreviated to CYP3A4. And this enzyme, you can see if you type that number, and you can see a picture of it on the internet it looks this, it's just a giant mess of proteins, just a big ball of proteins. It reminds me of the Borg spaceship in Star Trek the Next Generation. And so that thing, it's the enzyme is like a biological machine, it goes around and it acts on the body, it speeds up or changes cellular processes in the body without being changed itself. And so it can recognize these chemicals that don't belong. I don't know how. But it can do that. When it finds one that doesn't belong, it bonds it to hydrogen. And then it just kind of moves on and finds another one bonds into a hydrogen.

So as these hydrogenated molecules are passing through the liver next time, the liver has special cells, they can sense them. And they use that hydrogen as like an anchor point. And they can grab onto it and bond them in with water or whatever is in the bile. So they put them into the bile, and it goes out the bile duct into the duodenum and into the small intestine. So the body has this amazing tool that almost none of us know about or think about to catch these molecules and get rid of them. Problem is, we didn't evolve with these chemicals present. We evolved millions of years ago in Africa mostly, right? So everything that we encountered back then we had a pretty good way to get rid of, you know, the toxins of animals and plants and whatnot, that weren't in such great amount that they killed us right away, right? But we've never seen these chemicals before. So even though our body can recognize them, in terms of these enzymes, the small intestine has no way of knowing what they are, it doesn't have any detection system. So once they get into the small intestine, where all your food is passing through. The gates are open, it just comes right back into the body.

[30:37] Ashley James: So to recap what you've just said. Because it's there's a lot there, I think we really want to make sure that that it's understood. It's a lot for me too. So going back to the Borgh shaped enzyme, there's this enzyme, and where does it come from? How does the body created it? Do you know?

[31:02] Troy Reicherter: Good question. I should look that up again. It may be partly the liver and then other places in the body, other special tissues that make it. But the main thing is that it's there. It's like a superhero that's constantly on the lookout for these bad guys, and it catches them and it throws them out the door. But the problem is the doors a revolving door.

[31:23] Ashley James: Yeah, so I want to talk about that. So our body, like you're saying, 100 or 200 years ago, we did not have any of these chemicals in our environment. But this is very, very new. Having PCBs, and all these all these things that we're facing now, I think there's something like 30,000 new chemicals every year being created and put into our environment, and our body just doesn't recognize them. But this enzyme, when it senses something that's not supposed to be there, so a toxin or toxicant, it will attach a hydrogen to it so that the liver can identify – it's like tagging something and because all the blood is passing through the liver, and the liver goes, “Hey, you over there with that hydrogen, come over here, I gotta put you in the bile. You're not supposed to be here.” And so it just knows. So it tags to this little really cool Borg like thing in our body is tagging all that stuff that we don't want in our body with the hydrogen and the liver goes, “Okay, come on over here. We're putting you in the bile.” And then because bile is meant to help emulsify fat so that we can digest it, but it's also filled with toxins to get out of our body, including hormones as well. This is one thing for women, is that all the estrogen once the body is done with it, puts it in the bile to be eliminated. And so it breaks it down and puts it into like a form and puts it into the bile. So now it's getting, like you said, excrete it into the duodenum to the rest of the small intestines and going to go into the big colon. And hopefully we're going to have a bowel movement. And the problem is that bile is also a very precious substance. So the body will reabsorb as much of it as it can in order to reuse it. And thus, all the toxins that it was eliminating, are going to be reabsorbed because the body cannot tell the difference between the toxicants because we didn't evolve with them, like you said. And so we need a way to bind in the colon, or in the intestines to bind. And I know, people who eat a very high fiber diet versus no fiber, so the standard American diet are even more toxic, because the fiber helps to bind I've heard especially if someone has constipation, that then the toxins will get absorbed quicker and for women will reabsorb the estrogens that have become unhealthy. They're unhealthy levels of estrogen, that will reabsorb them. So we have to make sure that we're not reabsorbing these chemicals. So you've you've started experimenting with activated charcoal in an effort to bind to the toxicants. And you got this idea from this professor.

[34:11] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, he didn't mention that part of it. But he told me about the enteropathic pathway, which is like the circular thing going from the enzymes to the liver to the small intestine and right back into your blood. So then I immediately thought, “Okay, this seems like the logical weak link in the chain that maybe I can fix.” So I started thinking of what I could do to interrupt the enterohepatic pathway. I'll call it EPI enterohepatic pathway interrupter. So I did a little research. And there's a number of things out there, there's some clays you could take that some people are saying will get rid of toxicants. Well, no one was talking about the enterohepatic pathway, though. It was known for quite some time that taking activated charcoal, which is an interesting product, it can come from different kinds of woods, coconut shells is one way, bamboo, all hardwoods, but it's made in a very high temperature oven. And sometimes they use high pressure, high temperature steam. And it produces these tiny little granules that have incredible amounts of surface area. And so it's not absorbing them, it's ‘adsorbing',  it's adsorbing these little chemicals as it passes through. It's been used in emergency rooms for people who have overdosed on drugs or alcohol, it will get a lot of things right out of your in your alimentary canal quickly. But again, no one that I saw on the internet was using activated charcoal for the purpose I was talking about. It's kind of fashionable now to bake cakes or pies, or even put activated charcoal into drinks, you know, putting in all these food and drinks with the intent of getting rid of some of the toxicants that are in that food, it may do that too. But I think by far the largest amount you're going to be finding is what's coming out in the bile, my own suspicion, but tests will have to be done to really prove this. So after doing research, I started with the activated charcoal in 2016 in August.

So from that point on, that was my main other intervention. And I didn't get my results back from my January 2017 blood drawing. And I got those results back by the time I saw you. So, there was a drop in the DDE, it was about it was a little over 7% from the previous. So if you recall, the DDE had dropped 12% and then it had leveled off for two periods. And then it dropped about 7% down, it's minus 20.68% from baseline – 44,500 after starting at 56,100. So it looked like a very clear step, as if it had if it had plateaued, leveled out and then dropped again. And for PCBs, it was an added drop, it went from 64,400 parts per trillion down to 59,700 parts per trillion. So it went from 9.3% drop from baseline to a 15.92% drop from baseline. So I couldn't really tell as much with the PCBs since they had dropped for two periods in a row. But with the DDE, it appeared that it was the added intervention of the activated charcoal that was doing the trick. But there's more on that later when I get to my next results. So then I was blind as to the results for two years, because I had to wait until I had four batches of my blood collected to send in for testing.

So in the meantime, I did a 30-day fast in the summer of 2017, right before I met you. I started about the last week of school I think. I'm a teacher, so I try to time it around my summer break. And then I did a 40-day fast last year. That was really interesting. And you can see the YouTube videos from that. If you go to YouTube, it's Holistic Health Research YouTube channel. I've got videos showing most of the days of the last fast. And right up till day 40 I was out and about doing things, shopping, able to function. And as I said, I really could have gone for another 10 days. I was getting pretty gaunt. It looks a little scary. But I felt like I could keep going. Yeah, you reach a point where you know what you're doing. And it's just mind over matter. As long as you've got fat to burn, you can keep going. There's lots of prohibitions about fasting, I should say don't go off half cocked, you always want to talk to your doctor first, you definitely want to be over 21 before you do any fast, read up on the subject, start small start with a two or three-day fast. I started with a two-day fast you can read about all this in my book. I think my book is a great place to start because I go through all of my experiences, as well as talking about the history of fasting, physiological research into fasting, scientific discoveries about the health benefits of fasting, I have references to all the other books that I've ever heard about fasting. So you can read those yourself to all the considerations you have to make before trying to fast, all my own experiences with problems that I had. It's all in there. And at the moment it's on Kindle for just $5.

[39:38] Ashley James: It's nice.

[39:39] Troy Reicherter: Good introductory low price. So what I did for this period, since my thesis then was I was thinking that all those other interventions I'd done – the sauna, the supplements. I had no reason to believe that they worked at all. You know, so I thought I'll simplify  the experiment from this point on and just restrict it to the fast which I just took some electrolytes and vitamins. I didn't do all those other supplements to try to increase the enzyme levels, MSM and all those other things that you can take. They're all listed on my case study, I think I had 30. But I didn't do that this time around for the 30 and 40-day fast. I tried to keep it very simple, didn't even do any saunas for a year and a half. And so I did blood drawings in June of 2017, December 2017, June 2018, December 2018, the first Saturday of those months. And I was hoping or I was expecting I guess, my hypothesis was based on all that I knew that I was going to see a big drop after the fast each time and then a smaller drop over the period when I just took the activated charcoal based on what I saw before because there was no big spike after a fast. There was a tiny little spike with the PCBs, if you recall, just like 1.27% the first time after the three week fast. And there was a drop of 12% with the DDE. So I was not expecting any spike after the fast. I thought it'll be a big drop after the fast, little drop, big drop, little drop. I was hoping that all together it might wind up with a 90% drop.

[41:21] Ashley James: And during the fast you're consuming the activated charcoal.

[41:25] Troy Reicherter: That's right. Yeah, during the fast itself, I was taking activated charcoal. Another important point which I mentioned in my book, you have to do colonics if you're going to do a fast of I would say over a week. I wouldn't go more than a week without doing colonics and they're easy. I use a Colima board and just follow the instructions. I would do it every other day. I used to try getting away with every fourth day. If you're taking activated charcoal, that's a really bad idea. Because the stuff, it accumulates down there and your large intestine very good at drawing things out. So basically, just imagine trying to pass charcoal briquettes kind of what you're doing. And so you don't want to do that, just every other day, I think is a good idea for for that. So yeah, I did. Because I was reasoning that the enzymes would be at an elevated state. When you stop eating and you start fasting, what happens, one of the many things that happens is your body stops producing digestive enzymes. And so all those little proteins that go to make enzymes, they get rearranged into different legos down there, and your body starts pumping out way more of those CYP3A4 to go and search and destroy and tag things for elimination and your liver is working overtime. It's getting lots of energy to do this, you know, to filter through the blood more and get that stuff out through the bile. So there's no food at all, your body's kind of shut down that whole aspect of itself. And it's just repairing things, all the cells are throwing out the toxicants for removal. So I thought that would be the perfect time – that time and then immediately after the fast. I was almost tempted to take an extra dose of the activated charcoal, but I just kept it the same every day for simplicity's sake, because someone could always say, “Well, it wasn't the fast that did it, it was the fact that you took more of the activated charcoal maybe.”

So anyway, I didn't know until this year in April, what effect any of this had. So what's really funny is everything I expected was backwards. But it was actually better than I expected. So the big shock was the time period in early 2017 between January and June of 2017, I didn't do any fasting. I took activated charcoal. But you see, I didn't take that much of it because I was waiting for my results. I sent in the blood sample in January and I didn't get the results back until March. So I took a break from everything, because I was really sick of taking all the supplements. And I didn't know if they were working. And I just thought I'll just wait and see what my results are. So I really didn't take activated charcoal. I think I only took it March, April and May. So it's only about three months of it. The exact dates are in the book, and in the case study. But I had no reason to believe there would be any drop at all, or just I thought maybe 3%, maybe 5%? No, it was a huge drop 59.71% drop over baseline. So it went from 44,500 down to 22,600. And so that was for the DDE. And then for the PCB, it's the same thing, it went from 59,700 parts per trillion down to 30,500 parts per trillion, it was a 15.92% drop from baseline down to a 57.04% drop from baseline. So it was humongous. So the only way I can account for this after thinking about a lot is gene expression. So we know from test on by Valter Longo at USC and elsewhere that the gene expression accounts for almost everything in your body.

[45:24] Ashley James: You're talking about epigenetics, the ability for genes to turn on and off, right?

[45:28] Troy Reicherter: Well, I don't know epigenetic, I think that's a slightly different definition, something beyond genetics. It's something we don't understand about genetics, that's for sure. And as a history teacher, I like the analogy or just a story about how they've recently discovered that the base pattern of DNA that makes your hand, or my hand or a dog's paw, or a fish's fin is the same. It's the same base pattern. And what's really affecting this is the gene expression. There's big huge parts of the genome that we don't understand at all. We used to think it was like garbage DNA. Somehow something in there is sending a signal to these patterns to say switch on and off here, switch this on, switch this off. So it's like, just imagine the same piece of music, winding up being all the music that we hear, but it's the same on the sheet. And it all depends on how the conductor chooses to play it. That's almost what's really happening with our DNA.

[46:25] Ashley James: Right. We have all the same notes. And you could have Mozart or AC DC, and it's just all the same notes.

[46:31] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, you could say it that way. Or like this, if I have the same recipe, and then just depending on which chef makes it, you know, it turns out to be all the different foods in the world. That's kind of what's happening. So we're just at our infancy and understanding how gene expression works. But gene expression changes when you do most anything like if you stand in your head for a while your gene expression is going to change if you go hiking, get up and higher altitude flying an airplane, your gene expression changes. There were a couple of twins recently, there were one was in space and one was on the earth. And it was in the news that even a year after the one twin came back down, I'm not sure exactly how they can tell. But when they take your DNA out, they can analyze it, they can tell which genes are being expressed differently. And they said he is the same. And yet he's not the same because it's identical DNA, and yet it's being expressed differently.

So the only way I can explain that big drop is it's not the activated charcoal alone doing that. Because I was taking activated charcoal during that time period, not for a very long time only maybe three months, like I said. So for less than the previous period in which there was a smaller drop. So I think what happens is, when you do an extended fast like I did – the 21-day fast or a longer one, you're making the cell gates open to dump the toxicants into the bloodstream. And they're not really going back to their default setting of collecting it back for at least two years it looks like, somewhere in that last six months. And I'm not even sure if that was going to be the bottom. I mean, if I hadn't done anything else, maybe it would have kept on falling. I don't know. So this is a huge question. And I think I'm the first person to discover this. Because no one else has done these kind of blood tests along with fast, right? So this is amazing to think that the body has this ability to do this. So many questions here about what did the activated charcoal do? What did the saunas do? What did the fasting do? What did these things in conjunction do? Okay, so the next big surprise, almost as big as the first one was the second one, you can see all this on my website, www.troyreicherter.net or www.hhresearch.org, all the graphs are there. So for the December 17 test, this is about six months after I did the 30 day fast.

[48:45] Ashley James: And just to clarify. So the next results that you're going to give us, what did you do in those six months?

[48:55] Troy Reicherter: Right. So I tried to keep it simple. I tried to eat mostly vegan, although sometimes I fall off the wagon. But definitely vegetarian. And I just did the fast. I didn't do any saunas. I didn't do any of those supplements and none of those other fancy interventions that I did the first time, I didn't meditate on it, I didn't walk in a circle, and all those all those many, many things that I tried. I did acupressure. You can see all the list of the things that I tried, everything but the kitchen sink approach. I didn't do that. So it was just the fast and then regular eating without any trouble all the way through.

[49:38] Ashley James: So it was six months?

[49:41] Troy Reicherter: I tried to do it. Yeah, exactly every six months. So it was like the first Saturday of June and December for two years.

[49:47] Ashley James: So for six months, there was no fasting it was just eating as clean as you could and some activated charcoal. But what you're what you're looking for is how does the body respond over time even six months after a fast?

[50:00] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. I had started the fast right after the previous blood test. So the previous one was the first Saturday of June. And it was later that month that I did that fast for 30 days. So the fast ended in July sometime. And then I had all those months. So here's the funny part, based on my first fast back in 2015, I had no reason to believe there was going to be an elevation in the toxicants because I didn't see it before. Well, this time I did see it. So it jumped up. So it went from 22,600 for the DDE parts per trillion, it jumped up to 34,200 parts per trillion for DDE. And for the PCBs – almost exactly the same thing. It jumped from 30,500 up to 51,900. So now, there was a spike. So the question is, was there a spike because I did a longer fast? Or probably more likely there had been a spike the first time back in 2015. But I didn't see it because I did all those saunas, all the supplements and who knows what else? So to tease out what exactly is doing what will require a lot more experimentation. I mean, I did, I think it was 109 saunas. So when you think about it at the time, I was wondering, is this doing anything? I was hoping it was, but I think it was now, because I was just taking it for granted all the time. “Oh, there was no spike after the past.” I think there was a huge spike. But I reduced that all the way down through those other methods. And maybe the supplements had, maybe they had a huge effect. I can't say for sure. But we won't know unless we keep doing more experiments. It's going to take a lot of people to experiment, and a lot of different places under a lot of different conditions and reproduce those experience before we really understand what's doing what. But the way I looked at it was it's a crash course, I had to figure out how to make those numbers go down as fast as they could and try everything I could. I mean, in this country, there's over 4000 people every day that are being told they have cancer. And there's over 500,000 people a year that are dying of cancer. And I can only imagine what it's like. And if it were me, I would do everything I could, I would try everything I could to get rid of it. Or if I had a reason to believe I was at high risk, I would do everything I could to lower that risk. So I wouldn't just try one intervention and wait 10 years and see what happened. And we can't afford to just try one intervention at a time. I mean, sure, if you work in a big university, go ahead and do it that way. But since no one at big universities and institutions was doing this research in the first place, this is why I took it upon myself to do this. And they're telling us that there's no way to get these chemicals out of our body. So it is messy, it is complicated. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But the big, amazing thing is that I got these numbers to drop massively. And I've learned enough now to see that if you did these interventions within the first year and a half to two years, did them all up front, then within two years you're going to see that adjustment, and then you'll find out how much you got rid of.

And I am doing another experiment right now with a friend. I wish I had 10 friends and I could afford to have 10 blood tests. But a friend of mine, he's just he's doing nothing different all year, except he's taking activated charcoal. So six months out or a year out and God willing, we will do the follow up and see what his numbers look like. So of course, it's only one person, and what we need our clinical trials to do, you know, for men, for women, for older for younger, all different kinds of people. And then we'll get some real, real hard data that we can use because different people could react totally differently to these things depending on their their genetic makeup and whatnot in their environment. But I'm trying to find that out as well about the activated charcoal and what effect that has all by itself. But that was my second big shock. First of all, there was this huge drop when I didn't really do much of anything except the activated charcoal when I wasn't expecting. So as I said, everything was backwards, I thought there'd be a little drop, there was a huge drop, then I thought, oh, there won't be a spike, there was a big spike, which leads me to believe there probably had been earlier. But the sauna's probably were very effective, and maybe the supplements and maybe something else. I mean for all I know, maybe the acupressure acupuncture that I did, might have added another 10% on top of it. All these things need to be researched.

So I think that's the takeaway, I hope I can change culture to get people to start doing these things, and start researching these things and pushing other people to research these things. Because right now all the people with the big funding, they're just, I don't know what they're doing. But they're doing maybe drug tests, they're doing anti cancer tests of this type, of that type. But this is your body's main way to detoxify itself, heal itself and keep you from getting sick. And it's being almost completely neglected, except for a few people out there that did you hear about every now and then. So okay, not to digress. But as I said everything after that was kind of backwards from what I expected. There was a there was there was a spike after the fast, then then the numbers dropped down to their lowest level but it wasn't much lower than the June 2017, because it was still on the way back down. And obviously, you're gonna have to wait a year and a half to two years after your last big fast to see that gene expression come to an end. Or you're going to get your lowest reading, so it's kind of frustrating, but you don't see it right away. And now if we were doing like I said, the test right on the fat tissue itself, you will probably see a bigger drop right now before it readjusts and then you'd know, but that's a whole nother kettle of fish. I didn't start with that. I can't jump into that now, because we don't have a baseline measurement. I haven't even talked to the lab to see if that's possible, but I suppose it probably is. So then the numbers dropped down for the DDE. It spiked in December 2017 at 34,200 then it dropped all the way down to its lowest measurement of 22,000. And then the PCBs dropped down from a spiked high of 51,900 dropped down to 29,200. So this is the lowest measurement right there, was the measurement from one year ago before I started my 40-day fast. So remember I have these numbers in hand.

[56:35] Ashley James: Okay, got it. Let's back up because I got a little confused there. So I want to make sure the listeners understand. So let's, let's tell it like a story. Because they can go look at the numbers, let's tell it like a story. So the biggest drop that you had was after, I'm looking at the graph here that's on your website. He's showing me his laptop. We're out in the garden sitting under a beautiful 10 by 10 tent that I once used with my husband to sell our handcrafted bat hoses at a farmers market 10 years ago. And it's since been our our shelter, it's our outdoor living room. So we're in the outdoor living room, I buy the garden, and he's showing me his laptop and I see this graph. And the graph is also on your website, which we'll have the links to it in the show notes at learntruehealth.com. And here we have, I'm seeing the graph and it comes down and then the biggest drop is after – what did you do here to have the biggest drop?

[57:37] Troy Reicherter: Nothing. That was a surprise. I didn't even take as much activated charcoal as I did the previous time, maybe only three months. And it was when I expected to have the least drop. I had the biggest drop. I think again, it was the gene expression coming to an end. That's the only explanation I can think prior to this.

[57:52] Ashley James: But all the things you did prior, how many fasts were leading up to this?

[57:58] Troy Reicherter: Well, from beginning in 2015 till prior to the 30-day fast in 2017. I only did the one 21-day fast.

[58:06] Ashley James: So you did a one 21-day fast, a 109 saunas, took supplements, you meditated, locked in a circle, and colonics?

[58:16] Troy Reicherter: It was on the first six-month period.

[58:17] Ashley James: Okay, so you did a ton of stuff. And then you kept taking your blood every six months. So from here when you did all those things, how much time went by to the biggest drop?

[58:29] Troy Reicherter: About two years.

[58:30] Ashley James: Two years. Okay. So two years after the huge amount of detoxing, you spent a whole summer detoxing.

[58:36] Troy Reicherter: Activated charcoal began in August of 2016. And I've been doing it pretty much ever since except, as I said, I took a little break in 2017 because I was burned out. And I didn't know what my test results were. I didn't know if I was doing anything.

[58:51] Ashley James: You added the activated charcoal and you didn't do much else and then you saw the sudden drop. But you really believe that that's from the gene depression?

[59:00] Troy Reicherter:  It could be part of the activated charcoal definitely. But I took more activated charcoal in the previous period where there was a tiny little drop. So there's something else going on. I think gene expression is…

[59:11] Ashley James: It makes sense. Because like you said, Yeah, you took activated charcoal, and you even stopped all those other things, and you weren't doing much. And then you got the biggest drop, but you had done a bunch before. Saunas could change our genetic expression, and the fast can change our genetic expression. And so you're looking at accumulation of all these things could have done it. So you've got this big drop and then six months later, it goes up a little bit. I mean, it's not up like it was at the beginning, but it goes up a little bit. And then it comes back down. What happened here to have it come back down? What did you do in this six-month period?

[59:53] Troy Reicherter: Just the usual. There was no other special intervention. I think after the spike it just naturally starts to come back down.

[1:00:04] Ashley James: Why did it spike?

[1:00:05] Troy Reicherter: Because when you fast again, remember the fat cells are shrinking. And so they're basically going into emergency starvation mode. So they're throwing out everything that they don't absolutely need. Your body is just conserving everything it can keep and it's throwing away everything I can throw away, gobbling things up, catabolizing things, breaking them down and you know, your body has more enzymes to work on them, but they're overwhelmed by the amount of toxicants being tossed out by the fat.

[1:00:34] Ashley James: So this spike right here in December 2017 was after a fast?

[1:00:39] Troy Reicherter: Yeah.

[1:00:39] Ashley James: And so you're saying that it's actually a good thing that you have a spike there, because your body was in the process of releasing the toxins?

[1:00:47] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. It would be wonderful if we could do this for every one of those chemicals out there. And also if we could do a separate test at each point in time from the fat cells themselves. So because you probably see the opposite. You know, if it goes up here, well, it's probably because it just got dumped out from somewhere else where it's mostly stored.

[1:01:07] Ashley James: Yeah. And so now in June of 2018, you have a drop again, what is this? Did you do a fast here?

[1:01:16] Troy Reicherter: The fast? There's a tab at the top, indicating where the fast were.

[1:01:20] Ashley James: Oh, okay.

[1:01:21] Troy Reicherter: So this is between fasts, it appears that by a year later, that was June 2018, prior to the fast of 2018, it had gone back down slightly below the level from a year before.

[1:01:33] Ashley James: Now what I'm seeing here, I just realized, because you pointed out where the fasts are – I'm seeing that after every fast or at least after these fast, it looks like there's a little bit of a spike, but it's always lower. So it's like constant, like little steps, but it's constantly getting lower, which is cool.

[1:01:55] Troy Reicherter: That was my last big takeaway. So for the DDE, it went from 22,600 in June of 2017. Then after the after a 30-day fast, it spiked up to 34,200 in December, then it dropped back down all the way down to 22,000 and then after a 40-day fast. So this is a fast of an extra third in length, an extra 10 days, it spiked much less, it only spiked up from 22,000 up to 25,600. So you see, you would expect, if I had lots and lots and lots of fat reserves, or toxic reserves in my fat, like bottomless, you would expect a longer fast to make a higher spike. But the reverse was true, it was a lower spike. So that's showing that I really am cleaning out the bottom of the barrel. And there's going to be this huge, huge drop is going to follow almost certainly. I don't know exactly how long since I did two fast within two years, or within one year, and I did a longer length of fasting. It may be the gene expression will take longer to go back to its default settings. I hope not. Because I'd really like to get the data out there. But I'm continuing to take blood measurements or blood samples, which I will send in when I get enough together for the lab to do it. And so I took blood in June of this year, I'll take it in December, and then again next summer. I think looking at all these numbers, if a 21 – day fast caused about a 60% drop, then an additional 70 days of fasting, along with another two years of activated charcoal, I think we're going to see probably greater than a 90% drop for both these chemicals. But we won't know until we have the numbers. I mean these are not just speculation, these numbers are real from lab – an independent lab. They have no way of knowing what I'm doing. All they do is just do a mass spectrometer test, which is why it costs so much. You know, they're testing individual molecules as they pass through and weighing them to tell you which one is what size and everything. And they couldn't care less what I'm up to or what my results are, they're just giving me the absolute fact on this. So I'm speculating that we're going to have a greater than 90% drop in the end. It would have been nice if a 21-day fast all by itself had done that. But it obviously didn't work out that easily.

A 21-day fast plus all the other interventions did over two years make a 60% drop, which is pretty astonishing by itself. The two year delay was a big surprise. I in the beginning, was thinking I should try to test as soon after the fast as possible thinking, “Oh, I don't want to contaminate myself by eating stuff.” I was completely wrong in that. And the activated charcoal has probably changed everything even with no other interventions, seeing a gradual decrease over time, if the theory is correct. Which we're not sure of now, we can't really be sure of anything. So like the January 2017 drop from 13.37% from baseline down to 20.68% from baseline, which I assumed had been due activated charcoal. I can't make that assumption anymore, because it could very well have also been due to the change in gene expression. We don't know. These things have to be done separately and repeated over and over by different people and then we'll know more. So I do believe the activated charcoal is working. But I can't say for sure from the data that I have proven that it is working. We can't say for sure that my blood lipid levels have dropped a lot as far as my total body toxicity, that would require more testing.

[1:06:05] Ashley James: And you've got your friend who's now just taking activated charcoal. So we're going to figure out whether just activated charcoal alone is going to help. Now how much is he taking? I talked to poison control a few weeks ago about… and that's a funny story for another time, but I talked to poison control and they said you'd have to take like a cup of it a day to actually absorb, it's not like just take two capsules. It's a significant amount of activated charcoal someone needs to take to absorb toxins. How much do you recommend people take? How did you figure out how much to take?

[1:06:45] Troy Reicherter: Well, first of all, poison control is dealing with someone who's just massively adjusted something that's about to kill them, right? So they're giving them massive amounts to try to save them, that's an emergency situation. What we're talking about is over prolonged periods of time taking activated charcoal probably as directed, and trying to interrupt the enterohepatic pathway. So you can read my book about what we know about activated charcoal, you can do your own research, there are some downsides to it, it will interfere with certain drugs like birth control pills, things like that. Maybe headache medicine.

[1:07:23] Ashley James: Because it absorbs those toxins.

[1:07:25] Troy Reicherter: Right. It will absorb the toxicants that you don't want, but it will also decrease the nutrients in your food, because some of those will get taken out, they won't make it to your intestine.

[1:07:37] Ashley James: So you take it in between meals?

[1:07:39] Troy Reicherter: Personally I started out taking it kind of staggered throughout the day. And then after that I just simplified it and I take it with meals, or maybe right after a meal. The amounts I was taking in the types is kind of complicated to go into, you can read my book about my experiences. I tried to make my own capsules, I would not recommend doing that. The stuff is more powdery than you can believe. It gets in everything and you're gonna have a hard time not breathing it in, just buy it already made, it's way better. So I use different kinds. It's all in my book. And one of the kinds I was using got discontinued. So I couldn't take that even if I wanted to. Right now, the kind of that I believe my friend is taking, I think this is what we agreed on, is activated coconut charcoal. They're 1200 milligrams per capsule. And it says to take two to three hours before a meal. And anyway, so I think he's taking the recommended dosage. I'm pretty sure I took more than the recommended dosage myself because I was the guinea pig and I wasn't too worried about it. I just wanted to get those levels down. It's all in the book how much I took. But definitely there's every reason to believe that it's getting things out of your body. The question is, is there any harm in it? There's some speculation that there may be some acrylamide in it. But from what I can tell the acrylamides are formed from incompletely carbonated substances like burnt toast, you know, meat burned on the grill, but you didn't burn it completely. So those are cancer causing, very carcinogenic. So I think it's probably not that way because these are baked at a very, very high temperature. And so I think it's completely carbonized. That's the whole point of it. Don't try to substitute anything else for activated charcoal, it's got to be real activated charcoal. It's completely different from the kind of charcoal that we cook with. That's a whole different.

[1:09:47] Ashley James: Don't try to make your own activated charcoal with burnt toast.

[1:09:51] Troy Reicherter: Exactly. So I've had a few friends who I I asked about if they wanted to be my guinea pig and volunteer to do this. And they said no, not enough is known about activated charcoal. But I suspect that just eating falafel or hamburgers or french fries is probably way more dangerous for you than activated charcoal.

[1:10:09] Ashley James: I think it's hilarious when people get freaky about supplements like a vitamin C. They just go, “Well, there's not enough research.” And yet they don't think twice about taking a pharmaceutical. No, no question about taking pharmaceutical. Just think of all the drugs that have been taken off the market for killing people, were all drugs that were first approved to be on the market and approved to be safe. So we have to like, really remember that. Yes, it is up to us to advocate for our health and to look into the research. Don't go blindly taking drugs and don't go blindly taking supplements. Do your Googling and look into it for yourself, you can look at NIH, you can see that there's so many studies, I'm sure there's so many studies about activated charcoal. There's so many studies about many things that we can look into before we jump into it. But to just blindly go, “Well, there's enough studies about this. So I'm just not going to do it.” But I'm sure that your same friends will go to the drugstore and take an Advil without questioning it.

[1:11:12] Troy Reicherter: Right. Yeah. And like I put in my book, those warnings with the drug commercials that we see on TV, they're frightening. And yet they just say it as if, “Oh, it's no problem. Maybe you know, you'll die you bleed to death. Yeah, you might be suicidal and on and on.” And oh, but talk about fasting and people freak out. They just make it sound as if “Oh, it's the end of the world you want me to die, I'm going to die.” You could die if you fasted long enough or in the wrong way, you could also die if you just walk across the street without looking, you know.

[1:11:45] Ashley James: Let's talk a bit about fasting for those who've never done it. I've only done it for almost three years, like a 2.9-day fast. I haven't gotten to three yet, and I want to do more. But one of my Naturopaths scared me, she goes, “My boyfriend in college, I had to take him to the hospital after five days because his electrolytes were off and I'd basically pick him up and carry him to the hospital.” So she was so afraid, she tried to talk me out of it or she basically said you need to find a different doctor to monitor you for your fast because I won't do it. And that kind of put the fear of God into me, and I know fasting is healthy, but it's also, we got to take precautions. So let's talk to the people who've never done fasting. Give us some advice.

[1:12:35] Troy Reicherter: Well, I can't give medical advice, per se.

[1:12:37] Ashley James: So maybe based on your experience.

[1:12:40] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. I just want to be careful how I phrase it. So well I I'm a historian and history teacher. And so I have known for a long time about all the fasting that has gone on throughout world history. And in my book there's one section about a brief history of fasting where I give an overview of this. So I've known people have done enormously long fasts, I mean 40 days is like the gold standard. You know, the Pythagoreans used to do it. They say Moses did it. You know, Jesus did it. The Buddha did it. It's on my website. And so I have always wanted to try a 40-day fast. Fear is a huge, huge part of it and not knowing what's going to happen and the strangeness of it all. Plus the fact that, well, your body produces a chemical called ghrelin and ghrelin makes you hungry. And we've all had the experience of maybe going all day without eating. And at the end of the day, you're irritable, you're frustrated, you got a headache, you just feel like you're going to die. And it's like give me some food right now before I kill somebody.

[1:13:41] Ashley James: It's called ‘hangry.'

[1:13:43] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, right. So we've all been there. And then people imagine, “Oh, my God, when you fast, it must be like that only worse.” Well, it's not exactly. It depends on how much you had to eat the day before. There was one time when I I've had a huge meal. Probably shouldn't have. But I had a huge meal before I believe it was the 2015 fast. I didn't feel anything the whole next day, I wasn't at least bit hungry. It wasn't till the second day, that I started to even feel like hey, I'm hungry. But generally speaking, the first day after you don't eat anything, you don't feel very good. It's like the experience we've all had of having to help someone move and there was nothing convenient, and you just don't eat until really late. But it's that next day after that usually is the worst day. Usually that's when, I just refer to it as hitting the wall. This last time even though I did a 30-day fast two years ago, last year I did the 40-day fast and I still felt that way. Maybe it's not going to be as bad as the first time you do it. The first time will be the worst time probably. But I honestly felt like someone had just hit me right in the head with a sledgehammer, just right between the eyes. And I don't recall if I took anything for it. But I mostly just laid on the couch all day and just moan and groan because I felt horrible. But the day after that, it passes – ghrelin, your body basically says, “All right, you're obviously not getting any food. So stop making this stuff.” It's just like, you know, you get a bad injury and after a while it goes numb, because your body's to stop sending that pain signal. So you stop feeling hungry in the ordinary sense. There's still a certain sense that, “Hey, I should eat something.” But it's not that urgent need that you're used to. And I'm not going to say the rest of the fast is fun or easy. But it's not nearly what you think it is. You feel euphoric sometimes, you feel light, it has to be built up too though.

Like I said, begin with two days, or three days. I mean, if you're going to go ahead and do two, why not do that extra third day, which feels a lot better than the second day. And that's the day when your body's really, I think getting the most work done to repair and rebuild and rejuvenate anyway. But I will just stick with that. What I did in Taiwan, I was reading a lot about fasting and I knew people that required me to fast before I went and did their meditation. So I tried to fast all by myself. And it was like abortive two-day fast and I thought I was going to die. Literally, I thought this is it. My parents are going to read about in the paper, where they're going to get that call, “Your son died over here in this apartment in Taiwan.” What a bad way to go, right? Just you all alone. Scared to death, your hearts palpitating you're thinking, you've never had that feeling of hitting the wall before and you've never gone for more than a day without eating. So fear is making all these hormones come out into your bloodstream and freak you out. But after that, I did another attempt and I made a three day fast. And I just did a whole bunch of three-day fast. I don't remember how many, five or 10. I mean I did a lot of three-day fast before I dared to go for four and five days. And then you start to have some experience built up. You know what to expect. I think your body learns too. I can't really explain how, but you feel like your body is just not panicked. Not just your mind, but your body kind of like, “Okay, I see what's going on here.” And I think there's a deep learning in the cells that takes place where you don't feel that bad. You're okay with it. Plus, you know, also the experience and the sense of not being freaked out. You start to really feel like you can do anything. You're walking around after 10 days of not eating, 15 days.

Last year, when I did my long fast, I went to a Vietnamese temple, I actually put that on my YouTube channel. And afterwards, I was talking to the monks and nuns and the person who had invited me to the temple told an elderly monk passing by that I hadn't eaten for however many days – it was 27 days, he just laughed and shook his head. He said I don't believe it. And I said, “Look at how thin I am.” So people even in traditional like that where fasting is a big part of what they do, they still don't believe it. It's like you can't go that long. You can if you have the fat reserves that it takes. And you know, if you've checked with your doctor, of course, you're not pregnant or expecting to be pregnant, you're not breastfeeding, you've checked with all the contraindications that there could possibly be with your with your physician, definitely do that. And then take it slow. As I said, as long as you have fat to burn and you're a healthy adult, you can keep going lot longer than you'd think. It's a great feeling. It's a good feeling to feel like, well, you almost feel like you're in heaven or something. It's like, whatever happens in the world around me doesn't matter. Because I'm okay, I'm up on this other plane floating around doing things just the realm of pure energy. It's a pretty cool experience, but it is grueling. I'm not saying it's easy. I mean, 40 days, every day, it was like, “Oh my God, I'm only on day 25. I'm only on day 26.” Time seems to fly ordinarily. Like my summer is flying by this year. I can't believe we're almost halfway through the summer. But when you're fasting, it doesn't feel that way. It's like it takes a long, long, long time to get to eating again. And you have to try really hard not to think about eating. It's not easy. You know getting up, sometimes it's hard, you have to really just get up slowly so you don't get lightheaded. You're not going to get much sleep or at least I don't, a lot of insomnia, weakness, you have to really plan what you do, you can't plan to be doing heavy labor, or running a marathon. Walking is pretty strenuous, you can do that. But I wouldn't ride a bike up a hill at that time. If you can do that, more power to you. But I wouldn't recommend planning on it. Just doing the fast by itself is grueling enough, it's hard to take a lot of willpower. But once you've done it, I mean, I've never run a marathon. And I've never given birth, you know, I've never done those 24-hour training things they do in the army. I've heard people talk about it. I've never climbed Mount Everest. And fasting is kind of like that, I think. When you're done with it, you feel like nothing. If I can do that I can do anything, nothing can faze me. And then of course, you know the great feeling that you get knowing that you're detoxing. And a lot of health professionals like to say there's no proof that any detox works, well check my numbers, check my website, because I can prove that it does work. Exactly which components of my plan work to what degree it still remains to be seen. But definitely, it is working. And I think fasting is the main component – supplements along with it, activated charcoal I believe are making a big difference as well. If I was doing this without fasting, I don't think you'd see these drops at all. I have no reason to believe that. It's a great feeling. When you're doing it, there's there's moments of feeling great, there's moments of feeling lousy. And when it's all done, yeah, you feel much, much, much better in practically every way. And read my book about all the research into fasting. I mean, it's one of the only ways known to grow new stem cells, to rejuvenate stem cells. Definitely, it's been found to grow new brain cells in rats. So there's a dispute now over the growing of brain cells, how much is really happening when you do other things, but I think fasting definitely appears to be doing that as well. HGH levels go up, all kinds of brain chemicals that stimulate your brain increases, it appears to be helping with increasing longevity and a decrease in pathology in every way across the board. Yeah.

[1:21:54] Ashley James: Yeah, Dr. Goldhamer has a fasting clinic and so he studied well over 30,000 people. And he's been publishing but he doesn't study what you're studying, which is to see the decrease of these toxicants. But he's studying like, whether cancer goes away and heart disease goes away, and diabetes goes away. And he's published and he talks about this in Episode 230. He published this one woman came in with cancer and 30 days later didn't have cancer anymore. But they've accumulated so much information about the benefits of water only fasting. And he says that on day three, something really amazing happens in the body, and you mentioned this, the body starts digesting its own pathological tissue. So the body starts digesting cancer and cysts, you know, ovarian cysts go away and scar tissue and just the not needed tissue in the body. And even on a cellular level, they're seeing that the cells kind of clean up. So it's like a house cleaning for the body. And then on day five is when they see the spiking human growth hormone and they see the spike in stem cells. So even in adults, which, you know after you're about 24 years old, there's very little stem cells in your body. But after a five-day fast, the body has a huge spike in stem cells. So by day three it starts cleaning up the junk and then by day five, it starts to regenerate new healthy tissue. I mean, that's how you'd clean your house, right? First you take out the junk then you sort everything and clean it. So it's like Marie Kondo for yourselves. We're just cleaning everything and reorganizing everything and you're seeing great results. And I love your first big result, which is, you did everything. And now you're like, “Okay, what worked?” Right? And you published it in your book. Of course, they can go to your website to get the link to buy your book, of course, we're gonna have the link to it as well, in the show notes. What's the name of your book?

 

[1:24:09] Troy Reicherter: Detox Fast.

[1:24:10] Ashley James: Got it. So simple, easy to remember. You had mentioned the family that was back in 2005. Back in 2005, you mentioned a family that took all of their levels of, was it PCB?

[1:24:27] Troy Reicherter: They mentioned the PCB levels and also the PVDE levels, maybe some other things. It was an Oakland Tribune article.

[1:24:34] Ashley James: And I remember seeing that on Facebook. It's kind of a video that circulated around or a story that circulated around. They didn't do a fast though they just went organic, right? Do you remember the results from just going organic?

[1:24:49] Troy Reicherter: Well, I think they had been eating organic, basically, you know, shopping at Whole Foods just as a custom. And they didn't do a before and after, they just did the one measurement just kind of to see. I think the reporter was Douglas Fisher, and they just got some grant money to just see what's in people's blood around here in the Bay Area, an average family.

[1:25:11] Ashley James: There's a different story, I'll see if I can find it. But there's a different story of a family. It was like in the Midwest, and they went from eating the standard American diet too and they did a blood test. And then I guess a month later, a few months later, they are just eating organic, they saw a decrease, not levels, like you're seeing with everything you're doing. But they saw a decrease. And it's substantial, I mean, we need to as a baseline, eat organic, it just makes sense that it's so easy to choose the cheaper option, the conventional grapes versus the organic grapes, because you can't see the chemicals, the toxicants you can't see them, but they're there. So we have to choose organic because if you choose the cheaper food, they call it conventionally grown, which is silly. Conventionally grown should be organic, because that's what it already always has been. But if we choose the cheaper option, we're paying in our health, we're still paying. My husband said yesterday, there's no free lunch, you can't get a free lunch in life. You're just robbing Peter to pay Paul. So we've got to choose organic. That's the number one thing that we need to do every day.

[1:26:21] Troy Reicherter: Try to be vegetarian.

[1:26:22] Ashley James: And try to reduce or eliminate meat as much as possible. Because again, what's contained in the meat is all the toxins that the animal ate, right? My husband who went vegan just overnight, he was the biggest meat lover to all of a sudden, completely vegan overnight, which surprised me. I came kicking and screaming into eating whole foods plant based, but he but he did it overnight. And he said you know pigs don't sweat like you know, like a dog pants, right? But we sweat, at least we're sweating out toxins, but pigs don't. Pigs – they'll store toxins much more in their meat. So just considering it for those who eat meat. If you're going to eat meat, hopefully you can eat less of it or choose more vegetables, choose organic vegetables or choose organic, free range meat. But just know that in the food, there are these chemicals, right? And then how we can get rid of them is by reading your book and experimenting ourselves. Doing small fasts working up to maybe bigger fast, sauna, taking activated charcoal. I really like chlorella. Have you experimented with chlorella?

[1:27:38] Troy Reicherter: It was one of the things I took that first. Yeah, the first year yeah, it would be great if we could do tests on all the different chemicals that are in us because there are so many that we know are there. There were some other results that I got back that were interesting. There were seven pesticides that had blood lipid concentrations high enough that they gave me a before and an after number. And they are a little bit uncertain because they're in such small amounts. When the lab gives you back the results, they put a little marker J next to it saying that it is basically an amount less than the lowest calibration equivalent. So this is the best they could do though with a mass spectrometer there was six of the seven that were measured all went down.

[1:28:22] Ashley James: And what are these?

[1:28:22] Troy Reicherter: So one was called nonachlor trans. So this was 8,910 parts per trillion in my initial measurement. And then in the June 2018 measurement, it was 4,250 parts per trillion. So that one decreased by 52%.

[1:28:40] Ashley James: What is it?

[1:28:41] Troy Reicherter: Oh, these are pesticides.

[1:28:42] Ashley James: Okay.

[1:28:43] Troy Reicherter: Six of seven different pesticides.I think they tested for 13. Some of them were in such small amounts that they just kind of said can't even detect it, or don't even know what to say.

[1:28:52] Ashley James: Is that before? Because you you pretty much always eat organic.

[1:28:58] Troy Reicherter: It's complicated because when they do these tests, they have to have a – what do they call it? A lab blank. So you have to pay for it too, the same amount is for your blood. Suppose I had two samples there, there'll be your blood before or your blood after. And then there's a third thing that they have to test, which is a substance where they put in a known amount, so that they can use that to calibrate the machine, and you have to pay for that the same as for your blood. So that's part of why the tests are so expensive. And it's better to do bundles of four instead of bundles of two. You know, then you're paying for five measurements and four of what you want, instead of paying for three, only to have what you want. So sometimes the lab blank amount determines the detectability amount. So it's complicated. And these were the ones, going through the numbers that I thought were impressive. There was the nonachlor trans, which went down 52.54%, hexachlorobenzene – you might have heard of, this one started at 7,840 parts per trillion, and then its lowest was June 2018 – 3,250. So that's a 58.54% decrease. Then there's chlordane oxy, started at 3,380 parts per trillion and it went down to 1,460 parts per trillion in December of 2018 measurement. That's a decrease of about 56.8%. The halogen went up a little bit, it started out at 2,920 and it was 3,000 in the end. Maybe because the spike last longer, maybe it has something to do with the way the enzyme receptors act on it. And then HCH beta started at 1,840. It went down to 573, so a 68.85% drop. Chlordane alpha cis started at 1,540 and it dropped down to 833 for a 45% drop. And then mirex started at 1,230 parts per trillion went down to 517 parts per trillion, 57.96% drop. So these are some of those pesticides whose residues are not only on the food, but just scattered throughout the whole world now in the dust and we breathe everything. They don't break down, they don't go away.

 

[1:31:28] Ashley James: So you eat primarily organic, but we're still exposed to them. You're saying it's like through water and air and contamination of soil sometimes. And what about glyphosate? Did you test for that?

 

[1:31:41] Troy Reicherter: No, unfortunately. I do have quite a bit on that in my book. But glyphosate, it appears that its water soluble. So what everyone is saying, although I'd like to see more proof of this is that it does not bioaccumulate, but that it passes through your body quickly. Recently, there was a study done, you can find online down in Southern California, where they tested people in the 90s. And then again recently, and they were testing the urine. So it had gone up dramatically, dramatically over the last 20 years, because there's so much more of it in the environment, apparently. But it seems to be that it's more like the phthalates, it's the plastic softener is that pass through your body in a short period of time. I did find some evidence online that that might not be entirely true. And glyphosate is just one of the ingredients in roundup, although that's the main one. So there may be other things going on there, probably it's a much more complicated story. It's been implicated in non Hodgkin's lymphoma, for sure. So it's probably causing cancer, even though they're still spraying it everywhere. I would love to see more testing on all kinds of things like that. And then like lawns, whenever you see a beautiful lawn with no weeds in it, almost certainly they're putting down products that have 24D inside of it, which is one of the main ingredients in Agent Orange, you know, and if I said I'm going to come and spray Agent Orange on your lawn, you'd freak out. But if I say I'm going to use Scott's organics and such as Scott, such and such product, and I have some of the product names listed in my book, then you'd say, “Oh, yeah, sure everyone's doing that.” Why not? I want my lawn to look nice. I don't want to go pull weeds, I'll just put this down. And then all the things with leaves naturally just die. Well, they're growing themselves to death because of this chemical, which is no good for people. And it's been found in streams all over the place. It's been proven that people who apply it, you know, it gets on the kids, because they play in the grass.

[1:31:55] Ashley James: Oh, yeah. And the pets.

[1:33:45] Troy Reicherter: Pets.

[1:33:45] Ashley James: We have a big spike in cancer for dogs. I think it was like one in two dogs get cancer. I heard some crazy number. But just think about it, your dog basically lives in your house almost all the time and then when it gets out, it's running through pesticides.

[1:34:01] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, exactly. So there's so much stuff out there that we don't think about, it would be great to test for all of it. And I don't know what levels we would see. I don't know if anyone knows that. Like, I was testing these because they're famous. And we know they're in the body in large amounts. But it could be the 24D is in my blood lipids to a higher degree than then PCBs. I don't know. It's all around us. But it's been noticed in Canada. I think almost 200 municipalities have outlawed it. Whereas here, they're just spraying it and not thinking anything about it. And those are just a couple of examples.

[1:34:38] Ashley James: Yeah, I had Dr. Stephanie Seneff on my show a few times. She's a PhD, MIT top research scientist. And her background is not in the body and understanding the body. But she understands how to look at research. She is just like seeing the matrix, right. And she can see all the data and be able to understand it. And so her and a bunch of other researchers have been looking at glyphosate and its correlation with other diseases, Well, it's interesting, and she talks about this in our interviews that glyphosate binds to heavy metals, and will release the heavy metals. So let's say mercury or aluminum, right, it'll bind into aluminum, and then it'll release the aluminum when there's a pH change. So let's say we eat the glyphosate because we're eating the hamburger, right, and the cow ate glyphosate, because it was on his corn that he was fed. And so now we're eating concentrated amounts of glyphosate, which is bound to heavy metals. It gets into our digestive tract, and now we're ready to urinate it out. When blood changes to a different fluid -so cerebral spinal fluid, or when blood changes to urine, it changes pH. So they're finding that glyphosate releases heavy metals in the brain, and heavy metals in the kidneys. And in Sri Lanka, they banned glyphosate in the rice paddies when enough of the farmers got kidney disease from it. And that's because there's accumulation of the heavy metals and the kidneys as the body was trying to expel the glyphosate. So it might be water soluble, but what it's leaving behind are the heavy metals, it's depositing them in the kidneys and the brain. So there's a little tidbit of information about glyphosate and one of the many reasons why we should eat organic and also advocate for our neighbors, and our schools, golf courses near you, but all the properties near you to not use these chemicals.

You know, I wish we could create a movement where weeds are beautiful, you know. I mean, they're beautiful flowers. They're nice and yellow. You're looking across my lawn, you probably see about a million tiny little Buttercup flowers, and you know they're beautiful. Why can't we just love weeds and not poison our body by poisoning our planet. You know, if we think about our planet, and our body are one, everything we're doing to our planet we're doing to our body. You know it's amazing that we have the separation of church and state in our head, we have this amazing like idea that we are somehow completely separated from what we're doing to our environment. It's just crazy. It's, we are poisoning ourselves by poisoning our environment. So I love the research you're doing. I love your passion about it. I love that you are an educator and an explorer, and that you want to help just give this information to as many people as possible. So hopefully we can start to create a movement around it. I urge listeners to donate because you take all those donations, and you pay for these labs yourself on a teacher salary. So there's a Donate button on your website. Right? Can you talk a bit about that?

[1:38:03] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, yeah, the money would all go, there's no administrative costs. It's just kind of a side project, there's no staff or anything like that. So it's not like giving to the Red Cross, or you don't know how much of your money is actually going to get to where you want it to go. It all goes in, that's all I would pay for is just for more research, you know, I've got my blood tests that I want to do. My friend, just one person also doing the activated charcoal only intervention. And I'm interested to do clinical trials with all different aspects of this, and set them up with advice from professors that they could help, make sure that I don't make any mistakes. And not just for toxicity, but also all aspects of fasting and holistic health, including, I think heart disease is a huge killer. And I would be willing to bet you anything, based on everything that I know that if a person does extended fast, and they do a before and after coronary calcium scan, which is a lot cheaper than these blood tests I'm doing. I think they're only $200 each. I'd like to get a group of people to volunteer to do some… someone who's got like a number of 50. Mine was zero, by the way. I was going to do myself, but I was already zero. So I think the fasting has a lot to do with that. And of course eating vegetarian and everything.

[1:39:31] Ashley James: My husband just did one, you know, he's been vegan for a year and a half. And his was 02. And we're like, oh, this is great. It's pretty awesome what you can transform with this natural living, right?

[1:39:47] Troy Reicherter: Yeah. So I would love to do those kinds of experiments and then get in the news more and get more exposure and have more people start to donate. So please, if you're interested in this kind of thing, don't just trust that the big institutions are going to do this kind of research, because they don't seem to be that interested in it. So it a little bit goes a long way. I mean, I was able to come up with two different chemical panels on my blood for eight different points in time for just $20,000. So if people were to give a few hundred thousand dollars, we could do quite a bit more than that.

[1:40:25] Ashley James: Yeah, and start getting volunteers to work with you and do a bigger study.

[1:40:30] Troy Reicherter: Definitely, yeah. Not just one person, because there's going to be some  kind of a spectrum out there of responses, you're going to get to any intervention. So, you know, the more times you reproduce the experiment with different people, the better then you can really tell – how men do it, how women, how women react to these interventions, how older or younger people have different body types, and you name it. And then we can start to fine tune it and experiment with other things that may be going on in the body.

[1:40:57] Ashley James: So at the beginning, I asked you how you felt, like what the difference is? You said you felt like a superhero, like Superman after doing these fasts. But how do you feel like today, right now sitting here versus two years ago? You know, what's your date? I mean, you were already healthy, right? So it's not like a huge night and day, but you have significantly removed these toxicants from your body in the last two years. Do you notice a difference in the day to day quality of life for you?

[1:41:33] Troy Reicherter 

I wish I could say yes, but I don't know that. It's that simple. I think what I would say is, I mean, I had been fasting for a long time, and I had been exercising and had been healthy. As you age, you start to notice aches and pains and maybe slowing down of energy. But I think that that's happening at a much slower rate than it would be happening otherwise. And I think it's not so much that, it's just that I'm almost disappointed this summer that I don't get to fast again.

[1:42:05] Ashley James: You could always just stop eating if you wanted to fast.

[1:42:08] Troy Reicherter: But that would throw off my experiment. Because you see I'm waiting. I'm going to wait a good two years from last year's fast because I want to see those numbers drop. If I was to do it now, that would interfere with the gene expression and make a new spike. And you'd have to wait for all that to level out. So I can't really do it.

[1:42:25] Ashley James: You're making a sacrifice for us.

[1:42:27] Troy Reicherter: Well, not fasting is not exactly a sacrifice. But it's just that I used to dread it. I mean, when I had to do that 21-day fast, I dreaded it and the 30 day fast. I really dreaded that. But then it got to be last year, and I was almost looking forward to that 40-day fast. And now I kind of feel like, “Hey, where's my big long month of not eating?” I'm used to this now. And so it's the first year and you know, for three years that I haven't done a month or more of not eating. I have some Muslim friends. And when I hang out with them they do their Ramadan and you know I was doing my fast at the same time they were doing some of their Ramadan. And they were like, “So you're eating at night, right?” I said no. Like, “Are you serious?” So they got quite a bit of respect for that. But of course, I was drinking all day, I'm drinking lots of water. But it's like that. Even though it's a it's an ordeal, they look forward to it for the cleansing that they get from it and the spiritual satisfaction and I kind of miss it. I mean, I don't know, it's almost masochistic maybe. But but it's pleasure and pain. It's sometimes awful, but sometimes euphoric. And the whole process, you know, it's just become a part of my life. And I think after this experiment is over, I might do a month a year of just no eating. I don't know, because it feels so good. It feels so right.

[1:43:56] Ashley James: Yeah.

[1:43:57] Troy Reicherter: It's not that everything changes for me and I was healthy before. It's not like everything for me changed from night to day. But it could be that way for someone else who was pre diabetic and has all kinds of other issues going on. Definitely, it could make that kind of change for them. For me, it's just been more of keeping things better than the average person, I guess. Yeah.

[1:44:23] Ashley James: And you're preventing cancer, and other diseases from accumulated toxins.

[1:44:29] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, I like to think so. You know, scientists always say how do you know, where's the evidence? So until we have a lot of people to do these tests, you get a number. Here's that number 20 years later, but you know, 20 years later, how old will all of us be 20 years older, right? So we can't always wait for all of that empirical data from all of these peer reviewed clinical trials to come out. Otherwise, it might be 100 years before scientists can agree, “Oh, this is a good thing for you.” In the meantime, we're long gone, and our grandkids are alive, you know, or our great grandkids. So we have to make decisions based on the best evidence we have available right now. And a lot of times that flies in the face with what mainstream medical reputable people are saying, because they have to be careful of their reputation, and they don't want to get sued. So they say what everyone else says, what seems to be safe, and they're going to tell you fasting is dangerous. Don't do that. How much training do they have in fasting? Zero, right. They've never done it. They've never seen anyone do it. They've never heard about it in med school. Of course, they're going to say not to do it. But so that's another caveat to the whole thing is pick a good doctor. I picked a doctor who's into this kind of stuff. If you pick someone who's not very open minded to it, you're going to get told don't do that. And, well, I'm not going to tell you to fast without talking to a doctor. But it's up to you to choose a doctor. Just like choosing your own religion and choosing which church to go to, right? Choose a good doctor to go to. Well, I mean, if doctor says not to do it for a good reason, then yeah, if there's something about your health, that definitely precludes fasting, then don't do it. But if they're just against it in general principle, then I'd say maybe you should shop around some more.

[1:46:13] Ashley James: You know, Dr. Alan Goldhamer, the fasting doctor. He has this story he tells about his mom. He got her to eat wholefoods, plant based no salt, sugar or oil years ago, and she tried to convince her friends to do it. And they all said she's crazy and they kept eating the standard American diet. And now she's, I think, gosh, she's in her 90s for sure. And just doesn't look like it. She looks like she's in her 70s, she has energy like she's in her 70s, she's just running around, and super healthy. And she goes, you know, the worst part about this is, is that I can't tell them, I told you so because they're all dead.

[1:46:54] Troy Reicherter: That's funny. That's kind of how it is. Yeah, it's like, if you wait till the end to tell someone that, then they're not going to be there. So you have to be the one that does the right thing. Even though you get flack for it the whole time, you get told you're crazy. And that's another thing about fasting is if you choose to fast in a house where everyone else is dead set against it. And you go through that period of fear where you hit the wall, you're going to be 10 times more scared. So if you choose to try to do this, after doing the research and checking with your doctor, it's good to be surrounded by people that are supportive of what you're doing.

[1:47:31] Ashley James: Yeah. Yeah.

[1:47:31] Troy Reicherter: Otherwise, it's going to be very negative. Very scary. You're probably going to get freaked out you're never gonna try it again.

[1:47:36] Ashley James: Yeah, that's why I like the True North Medical Center, which is Dr. Goldhamer's place, because I think staying there's like the cost of staying at a hotel. I think it's something like $180 a night and includes all the lab tests, all the doctor's visits, and they monitor you during your fast and then they help you refeed. That's another thing before we wrap up the interview, how do you refeed safely?

[1:48:03] Troy Reicherter: Very stupidly, as you'll see from my book. Yeah, I made some mistakes over the years. And and actually the worst mistake was last year after my 40-day fast. Yeah, it's easy to sit back and say I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, this is the right way to do it. Even with all my experience, things come up and my son's birthday comes up and we were taking a trip to Taiwan and so I was I was kind of in a hurry. And so it wasn't that I ate too much, although I did. What really hurt me was too much salt, you have to be very careful about dry things, anything the least a bit spicy because your stomach lining is very thin. And as I learned to my pain and suffering, and a story about near death experience almost. Well, that wasn't maybe that bad, but it it's in my book. I ate, I forget how many days after I'd broken the fast but there was some chips that I bought. And I was stuck in traffic and I was really hungry and I had one and then next thing you know you've eaten half the bag. And later that day I had some Mexican food, some some salty foods. Well, when you finish it fast, basically, your body is holding on to any salt that it can. It's just clinging onto it. And so when you stop eating your body stops producing insulin. But then you start eating again, it over produces because it hasn't done it in a while. And that makes your body hold on to salt, like you wouldn't believe. And the salt makes your body retain water. And so my feet started to swell up. And then my leg started to swell up. And if that had gone all the way up to my heart, well, yeah, I would have had to run to the emergency room. And the problem is you don't notice it until too late. So it's like hours and hours and hours after you've consumed the thing you start notice how it's funny, my feet are a little bit swollen. And then and I had to get on a plane to go to Taiwan. So which is you know, you're going to be immobile in a seat where people tend to get edema anyway. So it was a really bad, perfect storm. So be very, very, very careful about all of that. And that would be the gold standard, is to stay at a place like that where someone else will prepare your meals for you. Because I'm telling you, you think you have self control. And I have self control to do a 40-day fast. But it's when you're told you can eat but only this much.

[1:50:32] Ashley James: Yeah, the True North Medical Center, I have the printout. And they say like for every seven days you fasted you get one day of juicing. And then after that for every seven days you fasted, it was like one or two days of juicing and then one or two days of just soups. And then you do just raw vegetables. And then so it's like this gradual process and it's only certain kinds of vegetables. If you did a 40-days fast, you could spend like the next week, just just gently, slowly refeeding into it and they deliver the food to your room. So that you don't have to go to  the cafeteria and then get tempted by the food. But that's really important. The refeeding part is to be gentle and slow and have that level of self-control. And I love that you pointed out about salt. One thing that Dr. Goldhamer says is that you could quit salt after a fast because you have retrained your tongue, basically to taste salt. So now all of a sudden you eat some celery and you're like, “Oh my gosh, the celery is so salty.” Or you just eat a salad with nothing on it, no dressing and you're like bursting with flavors, because you've retrained your your tongue and your brain to sense the flavors in food that you never sensed before. So after a fast it's like you get this reset, and all sudden food tastes amazing. You don't add any seasoning to it. So he encourages people after a fast not have any salt in the house and don't add salt to your food. Because you'll be able to taste foods, I mean, no one can hear you're nodding, but you're nodding and smiling. Did you notice that after a fast the food tastes so much better?

[1:52:21] Troy Reicherter: Yeah, definitely. Your tongue is much more sensitive. If you just have a piece of bread, you can taste the sugar and the salt in the bread, you don't have to put anything on it. I wish that I was as scientific as they are about breaking the fast. I I've had my own method, which is in the book, which is not advice to others, but just explanation of what I did and why and how it worked out for me and what I think for the future. I usually break it fast with a smoothie but a warm one, never cold. You know, that's the Chinese medical thing, and then lots of soup, vegetable soup, I'd go very light on the seasonings. And then as far as the length for myself, I think my gut feeling was after this last time that I would basically take the length of time that I fasted in the future, cut it in half and add one day to it. So for a 40-day fast, I would take 21 days to get back to eating a normal meal. And then I divide that up into three parts where, you know, three different stages, stage one, stage two, stage three of equal length. Each one would be about a week long, if I was to do another 40-day fast, that would I think be very safe. And I don't know if it would be as perfect. I'm sure a century from now, they'll be so scientific about all of these things. They'll know exactly what to do. And all kinds of new products will be available, but for myself doing it at home and not having someone else prepare things for me. That's what I came up with for myself that I think will work well. And as I say, not not perfect by any means. Not something that won't be changed in the future. But I wrote it down in the book, so I just had such a strong gut feeling that this is the way I will do it in the future. Even though I haven't done it yet. I thought it would be important to mention to people that that's what I'm telling myself for now. I should have done.

[1:54:18] Ashley James: Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Is there anything you'd like to say to wrap up today's interview?

[1:54:23] Troy Reicherter: Well, just to mention, you can read the case study online at www.hhresearch.org. But to really understand what it was all about in terms of the history of fasting, the physiology of fasting, scientific discoveries, about the health benefits of fasting, all the considerations you have to make before fasting, and then all of my experiences from my very first fast 1993 up till now including all the lessons I've learned the hard way, all the modifications I made in my fast, and then just what it's like day to day, because I have a log for each one of the fasts, even going back to the fast in 2007 that I did – what it's like every day, you know, from beginning to end, how much weight you lose, what you feel like, it's a lot more than you can put into a simple case study. And then at the end of my book, there's also a history of toxicity. It's a brief history, but it's everything that the average person needs to know. And there's quite a few practical tips about avoiding toxins and toxicants in your daily life. So I think it's a good place to start, that was kind of my whole intent is to take a person from zero to 100. In terms of their understanding of this, you know, you may know nothing about chemicals and how big they are, how they interact with your body and other chemicals, where they are. And by the time you're done with my book, you'll be at the cutting edge, you'll be ready to read any other book, and you'll be able to have a conversation with anybody about pretty much anything on this topic. And you'll know things that very few people know about fasting.

 

[1:55:53] Ashley James: That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for sitting with us here in the garden, in the backyard to discuss fasting. I'm very fascinated with it. And I love that you're doing these labs to determine how fasting and all the other things you're doing to detox is helping. And this hypothesis about gene expression is wonderful. So it's great. And we're going to continue to follow up with you and hopefully, listeners will donate to help pay for the labs. And if anyone's super interested in working with you, they can contact you. I'll have all the information in the show notes of today's podcast where they can reach out to Troy and then get your book also so for only $5 so that they can be well informed about detoxing toxins and fasting. So wonderful having you here. Thanks for following up with us. I look forward to hearing more interesting information in the future as everything unfolds.

[1:56:57] Troy Reicherter: Oh, thank you so much, Ashley. You know, I did think of one last thing I should have mentioned is that while we've seen a 60% drop in the blood toxicant levels for these chemicals that we measured, and we might see a 90% drop later, that doesn't necessarily equate to the percentage drop you're going to have in your chances of getting cancer, because it would appear from talking to the professors at UDub, that the way it works with these chemicals is not like other ways like asbestos and other types of things that induce cancer. What seems to be happening is there's a certain threshold that gets crossed. And if you're if you're across that threshold, then there's a chain reaction starts in the body, which basically creates antigens that make a chain reaction that cause – it's as if you got stung by a bee and some people just pull up the bee and they're fine, other people are allergic to it, and then they'll have an allergic reaction and they'll be unable to breathe, right? So it's basically your body's overreaction to detecting the presence of these chemicals in the first place. So when they cross that threshold, that your body detects them, not the enzymes I'm talking about, but different enzymes, then that causes cancer. So it may be that even a slight decrease. If you cross that threshold and get below it, then it may be that your chances of getting cancer, because of these chemicals has gone from 100% to zero percent, just like that. It's like a light switch. It's either off or it's on. So you get below that level and stay there. And as far as cancer goes, it would appear that you're not going to get it. So again, this is like the only way right now that is known to do something that that we've been told up till now can't be done to reduce the level of these chemicals that are giving people cancer. So if you are interested in this, and you want to give it a try, or just find out more about how you can reduce the levels of these toxicants in anyone in your family, especially, especially the unborn, the babies that are on the way, you know how you could maybe get rid of some of this if you're a woman of that age, before you have your own child, that could be all the difference to save them from some kind of problem later on.  

[1:59:18] Ashley James: Yeah.

[1:59:18] Troy Reicherter: So that's the bottom line that I think is so important. So thank you so much for having me. It's been wonderful.

Outro:

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How To Eliminate Cancer-Causing Chemicals – Troy Reicherter & Ashley James – #369

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Ashley James

Health Coach, Podcast Creator, Homeschooling Mom, Passionate About God & Healing

Ashley James is a Holistic Health Coach, Podcaster, Rapid Anxiety Cessation Expert, and avid Whole Food Plant-Based Home Chef. Since 2005 Ashley has worked with clients to transform their lives as a Master Practitioner and Trainer of Neuro-linguistic Programming.

Her health struggles led her to study under the world’s top holistic doctors, where she reversed her type 2 diabetes, PCOS, infertility, chronic infections, and debilitating adrenal fatigue.

In 2016, Ashley launched her podcast Learn True Health with Ashley James to spread the TRUTH about health and healing. You no longer need to suffer; your body CAN and WILL heal itself when we give it what it needs and stop what is harming it!

The Learn True Health Podcast has been celebrated as one of the top holistic health shows today because of Ashley’s passion for extracting the right information from leading experts and doctors of holistic health and Naturopathic medicine

 

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