401: The Benefits of Taking Aloe Vera Gel
Dr. Michael Haley And Ashley James
Highlights:
- Benefits of ingesting Aloe Vera gel
- Elimination diet to determine the good and bad foods for you
- Aloe’s outer leaf acts as a laxative
- Filtered vs. Unfiltered Aloe Vera gel
- Look at what's in the food
- Always ask: Did that food exist 100 years ago?
- Grow your own food
- What the GAPS diet is
- Powdered foods vs. whole foods
- Heal from the inside out with the help of Aloe
- Aloe is not a magic bullet, sometimes medicine is needed but Aloe speeds up healing
- Gut people: keep it simple on everything
Nowadays, Aloe Vera has become a popular hit because of the benefits it can give especially when it comes to beauty. But did you know that Aloe Vera also contains medicinal properties as it contains powerful antioxidants? In today’s episode, let us all listen as Dr. Michael Haley how to heal the body from the inside out with the help of Aloe.
[0:00] Intro: Hello true health seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of Learn True Health podcast.
This interview blew my mind. I’ve really been looking forward to publishing this episode with Dr. Michael Haley who stumbled upon this one plant, this one plant that studies are showing doubles healing time, doubles healing time. Can you think of anything on the market, drug or natural that offers that kind of amazing support when it comes to healing? They’re seeing that it doubles the healing time of the digestive tract, that is also helping with skin and there are people with cancer for whom it is helping, acne, eczema, their type 2 diabetes that are seeing fantastic result. So you’re going to love learning more about this great plant from Dr. Michael Haley today.
I want to let you know that he is offering us a fantastic discount. I love asking my guests for great specials for you guys. I love you guys and I want you to get the best deal possible because we’re all going to be trying his amazing juice. I am absolutely sure of it. I love it. I was able to get some from him and it really does live up to its name. So enjoy today’s interview to get all this great information. Then when you’re ready to check out his offer, he’s actually giving us something for free as well. You can go to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That’s learntruehealth.com/aloe. He’s giving us a free cream that is very healing as well as his particular juice and he explains the difference between his and others. I highly agree, everything he says has been my experience as well.
Use the coupon code LTH for an additional discount for the Learn True Health listeners. So go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and use the coupon code LTH. Excellent. Enjoy today’s interview and please, share it with those you love who want to heal their gut and no longer have heartburn.
Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 401.
Photo by pisauikan on Unsplash
[0:02:33] Ashley James: I am so excited for today’s guest. We have on the show with us Dr. Michael Haley, who is an expert in many things, in healing the gut and in Aloe Vera. I am really intrigued about this topic. I actually use Aloe Vera in my early 20s to heal a persistent GERD. I had really bad heartburn. I couldn’t figure out how to heal and I healed it by drinking Aloe Vera juice every day. Ever since then I’ve been such a huge fan. So when I saw that there’s an expert out there in Aloe Vera I said, “Man, we have to get him on the show.” Welcome to the show.
[0:03:10] Dr. Michael Haley: Ashley James, thank you so much for having me. I am just finding this out for the first time that you had GERD.
[0:03:17] Ashley James: Yeah. Way back in my early 20s. I was in an emotionally abusive relationship. I just lost my mother to cancer. I was incredibly stressed out. I was eating the standard Canadian diet which is similar to the standard American diet. My health was just spinning out of control. I had tons of inflammation. I obviously was eating foods that my body was reacting to negatively. I was taking over the counter little purple pills to just make the heartburn go away then one day a naturopath was on the TV sharing ways to heal GERD, heal acid reflux naturally. I thought, “Oh my gosh. That makes so much sense.” I threw those little purple pills right into the trash and started chugging the Aloe Vera every day and apple cider vinegar, I did that a few times. Aloe Vera was really what did it for me. I was so impressed.
Obviously I needed to get out of the abusive relationship and heal the emotional stress that I was going through and also correct my diet. There were many steps along that journey. One of my first steps into holistic health in my 20s was the results I got from drinking Aloe Vera.
[0:04:41] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. Wonderful. I’m glad to hear this from you because what you just described is probably one of the most common health conditions, not GERD specifically. That’s just part of the digestive tract that you experienced your symptoms in. But people make wrong choices. You’re not hiding that from your listeners. You’re open about that. You started out your life eating pretty well. You then kind of threw caution to the wind and enjoyed the pleasures of life when it comes to the foods that are available to us thinking they are foods because everyone else doing it and they’re still alive, right? It’s not killing them, right? It is.
You start realizing. It’s like, “Okay. I’m starting to look more and more like them as I’m making the same dietary decisions. Something’s not right here. My skin doesn’t look healthy anymore. My gut’s not healthy anymore.” More and more, as people are eating this, they call it food, it’s not food. It’s not. They think it’s food but it’s not. Real food is real food. It grows on trees and we pull them out of the ground. There’s real food and there’s things that people think are food but they’re filled with chemicals that are killing the digestive tract. Some people experience up on the front end and we call it acid reflux, GERD, heartburn as we start getting a little deeper, bacterial overgrowth as we getting to the back end we start calling it things like colitis or if it’s all systemic all over the place irritable bowel disease. There’s a hundred names for it. You called yours GERD because your symptoms was more on the front end.
[0:06:48] Ashley James: Right. The same damage if it’s experienced lower in the gut is going to just be called a different thing but you’re saying the location the damage determines the diagnosis but it’s all the same cause, the same damage, the same root cause.
[0:07:05] Dr. Michael Haley: Exactly. It’s funny because what you just said, that right there, let’s lock in on that for a minute. We call it something different, why? Because we need a medical diagnosis so that we can treat it when we’re a physician, right? Then we have our treatment protocols. But if you think about it it’s all inflammatory, irritable bowels. It’s all inflamed intestines somewhere between the mouth and the anus. Now, the reality is we have all these different diagnosis depending on where it is and what we think caused it. For instance, if we think it was caused by gluten we might call it this name and if we think it was caused by eating too much Mexican food we might call it that. You eat you’re too much Mexican and you have this heartburn, right? We call it heartburn. You eat too much wheat and we call it, is that celiac with the wheat and the dairy? So all these different names but what is the one cure for all of them?
Well, the cure is in the prevention. First, don’t get it to begin with. It’s easier to prevent than it is to cure. But once you have these, it doesn’t matter if it’s acid reflux or Crohn’s. It doesn’t matter which end it’s on or what the cause was. The cure is the same. Stop eating the things that are killing you. Start eating the things that are good for you.
[0:08:41] Ashley James: That’s such a tricky wicket though because something that is good for you may not be good for you, cooked a certain way or not cooked a certain way when you have inflammation. So for example kale, such a great superfood but if someone with inflammation in the gut eats a raw kale salad that’s just going to tear right through them because it’s already inflamed. I was telling a client this just the other day that the gut when someone has all that inflammation, imagine you have sunburn or you’ve been burnt in a fire. If you put vinegar on that burn or salt in that wound basically it really hurts. When you’re arm, let’s say the skin in your arm is intact and it’s totally healthy and you put some vinegar on your skin or some salt in your skin, you don’t feel anything.
We can’t see our digestive tract and how angry it is but imagine we have a sunburn, a really really bad sunburn with blisters on our arm or on our skin, that’s how angry the digestive tract is when we’re constantly eating foods that are harming it. So then, when someone is transitioning to eating foods that heal the gut, they have to pick the foods that are healing for the gut now and then as their gut is healed then they can eat foods that are in a sense of prevention. Does that make sense?
[0:10:11] Dr. Michael Haley: Absolutely. One of the greatest things that I learned along the same lines of what you’re just saying is from Dr. Natasha McBride. She has this concept that helping people identify the foods that are right for them because everybody is different. One of the things she’ll do is an elimination diet. Then you start with foods that are probably good for most people, adding them one at a time and seeing what happens.
Now, if you add one of those good foods that’s good for most people and it doesn’t work for you, well you take it back out. In this process, there’s this journal. Imagine three columns. On the first column is date and time stamp, the second column would be what you ate and the third column is how you feel. Now, you don’t always need a “what you ate in the” entry. You don’t always need a how you feel in the entry. You might just do an entry and this is just a how you feel entry. “I didn’t eat anything but for some reason, I’m just bubbling with energy. I’m thinking clearly. My thoughts are just firing like, the synapses are there.”
Well, if they’re not normally like that then maybe you’re eating things that are fogging you. What did you eat? What was your last meal? What have you been eating up to this point that’s giving you all this energy, making things fire properly? That’s probably a good food for you. “I feel strong. I feel weak. I’m fatigued.” What foods did you eat? The last time you ate that food, look back in the journal. When you follow it in the journal and you look at your symptoms do you see fatigue about those same number of hours after you ate it? We’re now developing a pattern when you eat this starchy food: the potatoes, the pasta or whatever it is and a couple of hours later or an hour later or a half-hour later, again everyone’s different, you crash. That’s probably not a good food for you.
[0:12:33] Ashley James: I love that you are teaching this in such a straightforward, succinct manner. The food-mood journal is one of the best tools that we can use. But how long should people wait before they start judging foods? Because my understanding is if let’s say someone is allergic to dairy and they’ve just recently eliminated it. Doesn’t it take like a month for the body to really recover from that inflammation before they can really start to decipher what foods are helping and what foods are not helping? Is there a certain period of time of an elimination diet that one must complete before the food mood journal is more accurate tool?
[0:13:15] Dr. Michael Haley: You know what, Dr. Natasha McBride, let’s go back to her. Since she’s the one that came up with this concept. I don’t know if she invented it but she sure is teaching it to thousands of practitioners around the world right now. Her concept of elimination diet is going to something so basic and simple that what most people can consume and meet most of their needs with one food. For her that would be bone stock soup. How long are you on that? Until your body stabilizes. Is it a day, is it three days, is it a week? I don’t know but conceptually there’s enough healthy fats and healthy amino acids and everything that you need to sustain you for that period of time until you figure that out. Then once you stabilize, now we’re going to start building on that diet and adding one thing at a time.
Working from her list she has groups of foods. This is the first food group that you’re going to play in as we build your diet and then we’re going to go to these foods, you can start working from this list after that but that first list is the things that most people can tolerate. I wouldn’t say it’s a time period because everybody is different. I do know this, there’s foods that will make me crash. They could be pretty healthy foods for most people. I’ll notice that I’ll crash maybe 45 minutes after eating them and then about an hour later I’ll be fine. So for me to get over that crash from that food that I ate, it’s about an hour.
[0:15:02] Ashley James: Have you gotten testing and saw that you have like an immunoglobulin response to those foods? I mean, is there something you can see in blood work to confirm, “Oh yeah. My body, my immune system is reacting in a negative way.” Is this something that no blood test can pick up and really it’s about listening to your body?
[0:15:20] Dr. Michael Haley: I did get the blood testing years ago and it wasn’t necessarily matching up with me symptomatically. This is one of the problems I have with it. I think it’s beneficial information but I don’t think it’s a 100. Think about allergy testing. Think about egg albumin as an example. Are eggs good for you? Forget about what you think from a diet perspective and the general health belief system that you have. That’s commonly tested as an allergen. Well, where did you get that albumin from? What kind of eggs did it come from? Was it grass and insect truly pastured hens or were they fed chicken meal from a bag of wheat and corn, which is inflammatory? I don’t know. So the material that you’re using for the allergy test that you’re testing it against, where did it come from? We don’t know. It’s just called albumin.
[0:16:32] Ashley James: So you’re saying that some people who have egg allergies may not react to eggs if they’re fresh off of a farm that’s pasture-raised but they will have allergy to eggs that are factory farmed?
[0:16:44] Dr. Michael Haley: I’m suggesting that it’s possible. That’s something that I just kind of made up as a possibility. The point being is that the eggs are definitely different. I remember the first time we ran out of eggs from our backyard and I did my best. I ran to the store and studied all the labels and came home with the best organic pastured eggs I could find. I remember cracking them in the pan in front of my kids. I remember their reactions because one of them especially went, “Eww,” based on sight, “what is that?” Because he never saw a pale yellow yolk before. When they were eating them they go, “Oh. These are disgusting.” Because it was this maybe similar texture but it had no flavor because the flavor comes from the nutrients and it was missing the nutrients.
So the eggs were definitely different than what they were used to. Our chickens, we did not feed them period, ever because if we did, they’d get lazy and they’d forget how to survive. They need to know how to survive and eat what they’re supposed to. So their eggs were absolutely amazing. What was their diet? Insects, grass, lizards. If they caught a lizard, it was on. It was a fight for that steak. Contrast that to what you see on the TV. You’ll see such and such farms, “Our hens are fed a vegan diet of corn, soy and marigold.” Well, let me tell you something. Chickens aren’t vegans.
[0:18:37] Ashley James: Also, even if they say the chickens are pasture-raised it actually means that they’re in a giant football stadium-sized indoor building with a tiny porch basically that’s only 50 chickens can fit out on the porch that’s all caged in. There’s 20,000 chickens inside this giant container and there’s no room for them or the regular factory-farmed chickens are born and raised in cages with no room to move. We’re not feeding them the nutrients they need but we’re also torturing them and giving them a horrible existence. All that energy, that suffering goes into their meat and goes into their egg versus if you eat something like you said you’re backyard eggs. Just even the energy, the vibration of that food is displayed in the happiness and the whole life that that animal’s been given. We have to look at the quality of everything that goes into our food.
Imagine all the people that touch our food. I’ve often thought about this. When I eat, I often think about the farmers, the pickers who are out there really early in the morning sometimes really bad weather. They spend their entire day bent over, picking that food for me so that I can eat it and thinking about the quality of all the lives of all the people that touch our food. I like to support farms that treat their workers well that all the people were happy who touched my food. If a farmer really really loves what they do like they’re doing biodynamic farming, organic farming, they’re putting so much of their energy into making sure that soil is healthy, that their animals are healthy, that the workers are happy and taken care of. Even that energy I feel goes into the food and I feel better for it versus going to a restaurant where you know that they’re cutting corners to save money and they’re going to buy ingredients that are the lowest quality possible so that they can make the biggest profit possible.
Getting back to talking about healing the gut. I love to know what happened along your journey as a doctor that made you really excited about healing the gut because you didn’t start off as wanting to be a gut expert. What happened?
[0:21:18] Dr. Michael Haley: Oh my goodness. My journey is not based on personal tragedy. I don’t say that to boast. Certainly it would’ve been a lot easier to learn it if I had to but I was forced into it. It’s a unique set of circumstances. You know, since we’re touching on this, can I talk about one thing real quick? Right now, we’re talking about eggs. I’ll be honest, half of the healthcare professionals will say eggs are a healthy food and half of them will say they’re not. There’s a difference in belief systems and if somebody’s hearing me talk about eggs right now and they’re uncomfortable with that, I do want to address this. Why do we have different belief systems about what a healthy diet looks like? You don’t have to have the right answer to this. I think I know what the answer is and I want to address that because it does lead into why I help people get well.
[0:22:17] Ashley James: Right. Let’s address it. Why is it that we have so many conflicting diet dogmas out there?
[0:22:26] Dr. Michael Haley: Let’s look at it from the dogma of someone who’s trying to help heal guts and contrast that with someone who’s trying to heal cancer. You see, in a gut-healing diet, I want growth and repair foods but in an anti-cancer diet, if I give you growth and repair I might actually be supporting your tumor. So these diets are going to be different.
If I was coaching someone to play the line in the NFL and I want them to have maximum power and strength, which is different than say being a safety that needs to be able to fly up and down the field like a gazelle just incredible speed and light on his feet and be able to jump up to stop a pass. The lineman might be more of a, well both of these would be a type of survival diet. Survival of the fittest out in the wild. You might have to fight off a lion. That’s different than a detoxing, cleansing diet to get well from cancer.
So, as we’re talking about gut-healing foods and to the raw vegan, don’t look at it like you’re raw vegan perspective is based on cleansing and detox. So understand there’s a place for those things and we’re not contrasting, we’re not saying that you don’t have a healthy diet. We’re just saying it’s a different purpose than what we’re talking about here.
[0:24:19] Ashley James: Right. Also healing the heart. If you have a patient with heart disease with clogged arteries in the heart you want them on a cleansing and detoxing diet to help the body heal the heart versus if you have someone with an inflamed and angry gut. You’re not going to put them on a raw vegan diet because raw vegan diet is really really really nutrient-packed but it’s really not appropriate for a gut that’s inflamed and angry.
So you’re really looking at food as medicine and what’s the medicine that person needs and understanding that through our life. We should change our diets based on our needs.
[0:24:59] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you said something interesting before and you were talking about sunburns. Aloe Vera is tremendous on sunburns. I like something like a friend of mine, Robert Scott Bell, talks about the tube, the digestive tube between the mouth and the anus. This epithelial tissue, which is the same kind of tissue that your skin is. As we’re formed in embryology, we start out as ball of cells. Essentially, it’s like it gets pushed in from two sides and it meets in the middle and there’s now a tube running through the ball of cells. It’s kind of the same tissue that’s originally on the outside of that ball of cells. It’s almost as if that’s really the same organ, the skin and the gut. When you’re in that gut, when you’re in that tube, you’re actually really in a protected environment inside the body but it’s really still outside of the body. Because when you eat stuff it actually has to pass through that later to really get inside the body where the body can use it.
You see, this epithelial tissue, the gut, eats and drinks just like the skin. People say, “Well, your skin doesn’t eat and drink.” Yeah. That’s why doctors will actually give drug patches, pain patches and hormone patches and help you quit smoking patches. They put these on your skin because your skin will absorb and it goes into the bloodstream and it actually eats and drinks through your skin and your skin excretes waste just like your gut.
So, we start thinking about this more of the same organ, which is important because as we talk about healing the gut, we actually do have a somewhat of a visual look at what your gut might look like. The gut’s much more mucosal and probably a lot more angry than what you actually see on your skin. So the changes might be subtle on the skin but they’re there. You just have to know to look for them and say, “How’s my skin doing? I think my gut’s actually getting better,” or “this doesn’t look good. I wonder what’s going on inside?”
Well, Rodney Stockton – ah, going back to the Aloe. Aloe helps heal the sunburn. You have a sunburn, you put it on there. If you put a handprint of Aloe and take your hand off, the next day you notice where your hand was it’s all of a sudden white while it’s still red around on the outside.
[0:27:40] Ashley James: That’s so cool.
[0:27:41] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, it heals things faster. It’s scientifically proven to cut the healing time of burns in half. Now, if it does that on the skin and the gut is the same organ, can that do it inside? We’ve never actually done that kind of science to know for sure but a lot of people will say, “Absolutely. I’ve had this problem. I drink Aloe. You said it and things did better.” Well, I hear it all the time.
I talked to someone on the phone earlier today, one of our customers, and GERD was her complaint. She placed her first order a month ago and went through two half gallons of our Aloe and she was calling to reorder because ever since she's been drinking the Aloe she hasn’t had to take her, I forgot what’s the color of the pills were that she said but she said hasn’t had to take them anymore to control her GERD.
Well, this guy Rodney Stockton came into my office. I’m a chiropractor and he used to take this Aloe door-to-door in South Florida. He ships some to New York because he had friends there but it was kind of a small business and he insisted that I put all my patients on it, which I did not. But when I destroyed my hands as a chiropractor. Accidentally I got some bad burns on them by accident. He gave me this Aloe cream to on them and that’s when I said, “Oh my goodness. My hands look better now after three days of using this Aloe cream than they did before the injuries. What is this stuff?” That’s what got my attention.
Well, my family was using it. The topically and internally and at some point I had my first patient that had cancer drinking it. Rodney used to tell everyone, “Cancer. It’s like a common cold. Just drink three glasses of Aloe a day. A couple of weeks it will be gone.” It’s kind of funny. That’s how he actually really talked. I don’t talk like that. I think that it could be helpful and beneficial and part of an anti-cancer healing plan but and yes he did get some kind of results.
Well, I did have one of my patients on it that got well from a very serious cancer. To me it was like, “Wow, there’s something to this.” Well, Rodney had died and I realized how important his product was and all of a sudden my supply was going, it was going away. The company was crumbling without Rodney. So I stepped in and took over. Now, this is a long answer to a real short question.
The question was about gut-healing and where did this come from? I realized that people needed this Aloe Vera. My customer base of a company that stepped in to save was people that either have or once had cancer and swear that Aloe was the only thing that got them well. In my research I realized that it was accepted for people that have gut conditions medically, FDA. I’m not going to get in trouble talking about it for the gut. I knew that I had to save the product for the people that knew they needed it regardless of what their condition was. I just knew I couldn’t talk about this one condition but I could keep it alive by helping people that have another condition that needed it.
So, that’s kind of how I got so familiar with all of the digestive problems and what was causing them because if you have irritable bowel, Aloe Vera is not the cure. It’s a Band-Aid. It’s like a drug if you’re just taking it to get well because as soon as you stop, you’re problems going to come back if you haven’t made any changes.
[0:32:00] Ashley James: It’s like taking, like you said, drugs. Drugs were created 100 – 150 years ago. They were created at first out of a need to patent natural medicine. “Oh. See that plant over there in that field that helps XYZ problem? Well, how can we molecularly make a compound so that we can administer this as a pill? When we go back and we say, “Well, now we have to reverse engineer.” We go, “Okay. You want this pharmaceutical,” well, over the counter let’s say pharmaceutical. Well, what’s the natural alternative that it came from originally? So why don’t we go use that instead?
[0:32:47] Dr. Michael Haley: I agree. I completely agree. The nutrition, the medicine is in all the things that are growing around us but what I want and if anyone hears us and thinks, “Oh. I can get well by drinking Aloe.” If you have inflammatory bowel conditions, you could probably get symptom-free drinking the Aloe because what we’ve done is increase the speed of healing and now you’re healing faster than the new damage you’re creating. So it’s no different than a medical mindset because you’re taking it for a desired effect. The people have to really realize, if that’s their mindset, I’m sure your listeners have a different mindset but the people that have that mindset, what you really have to do is say, “Wait a second, how did I get this to begin with? Because I fix it but don’t change the cause it’s coming right back.”
Photo by William Farlow on Unsplash
[0:33:55] Ashley James: So how long have you been using Aloe Vera in your practice and with clients and also helping this company? How long have you been diving into the world of Aloe Vera?
[0:34:07] Dr. Michael Haley: You know, Rodney Stockton first came to me and I want to say it was 1996 as a patient. He brought a half-gallon of Aloe with him. He said, “You got to start drinking this. Recommend it to all your patients.” At first I thought he was crazy. I hadn’t quite evolved yet. I’m still evolving, we all still are but at that point in time, to me it seemed crazy. I was at that point in my life where I thought I could eat anything and just exercise into good health.
When I had that experience, the injury to my hands I realized the power of the Aloe and started recommending it and seeing it work in people’s lives. My family and I have been consuming it since about 2000 so about almost 20 years now. We use a lot of it. We really use a lot of it. I think it’s neat. I remember Rodney and he was so proud of how he looked in his 80s, “Can you believe I’m only 87 years old?”
[0:35:22] Ashley James: I’m really glad you say that because you said he died. I’m like, “Oh God. What if he died of a heart attack at 40 or something?” This doesn’t really play really well for a great health story like, “Hey. Drink this guy’s Aloe Vera. He dropped dead at age 40.” So he was like he lived a very long and healthy life, right?
[0:35:38] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, sort of. Yes. It’s interesting. I have a picture of him in the newspaper in 1958. The newspaper stamp 1958. This was shortly after he discovered Aloe and he’s in the Aloe field and he’s researching it and making it his life mission to make this available to everyone throughout the world. Well, I’m looking at him and I’m thinking, “Wow. You look old in 1958.” So he obviously didn’t do that well up to that point when he discovered Aloe. Now, here I am. He’s in my office in the later 90's not looking much different than that newspaper.
Now, he still was TV dinners, fast food, French fries, cheeseburgers. He still did not eat healthy. He did drink one glass of Aloe Vera every day. Now, when he was in the, he did die of a heart attack. He was 96 years old and I remember going to see him in the hospital when he was in all the machines keeping his body alive but his brain was gone. I remember looking at his legs. I was squeezing kind of his lower you know where his shins are and stuff. No pitting edema, plump white skin. You know how most people of that age they have like black and blue at the further parts away from their hear down near the wrists and forearms and their ankles. He had this amazing plump, white, healthy skin that just blew me away. That’s one of those things that I’ll never forget. He did not live a healthy lifestyle. He did drink one glass of Aloe every day.
Our new customers say, “How much Aloe should I drink?” I say, “Well, our smallest order’s at two-pack. Get the two-pack. Make sure you drink that whole first bottle in the first week and then look in the mirror.” I told you about the woman I spoke to earlier who had GERD today. It’s funny, she was talking about skin conditions. I said, “Actually, you might see a difference in your skin.” She was only drinking three ounces a day for the last month.” She said, “It’s funny now that you say that people have been telling me I look really good lately. How can that be I’m so sick but yes, they keep telling me I look good.”
Aloe Vera as your gut gets better, she’s the one that hasn’t had any GERD problems hasn’t needed the medicine, when your gut is getting better, your skin looks better. It’s an external picture of the inside.
[0:38:33] Ashley James: Yeah. There’s a direct link between skin health and gut health. Absolutely. On so many levels and the fact that the microbiome which is keeping us alive is in there and that the inflammation, the leaky gut, the immune system is all around the gut. The gut converts 25% of our T3, it makes our serotonin but also if we’re not digesting and absorbing nutrition we’re going to see that on the skin. We’re just going to look pale. We’re not going to have that glow. Some people look grey in the skin or have dark circles into the eyes. We can really tell. I think unconsciously, we can pick up a lot by looking at someone’s face in terms of their health. It really does show. I love that you’re saying that within days of someone focusing on healing their gut that it starts to become noticeable in their face.
I have a friend who has been coming to me for some health advice. I kind of have that reputation with my friends as being the one to go to. After talking to her, I see in one of her children, I can see in his face he’s allergic to dairy. It’s just so obvious when I look at his face. It looks like he has lupus. His body is very inflamed and his cheeks are red like lupus red. I talked to her. I had a very gentle conversation about doing an elimination diet and eliminating wheat, sorry, gluten grains and dairy and just doing an experiment with her family.
They did it for one week and I didn’t know that they were choosing to do it that particular week. I saw her and I said, “What has changed? Your face looks something looks so good. Something looks so different.” I was like, “Did you get new glasses? Did you get a haircut?” I couldn’t figure it out but she looked so good. Then she finally said, “It’s because we tried going dairy and gluten-free for a week.” I could tell her her son also didn’t have any of that redness like they’re really really – the rosacea in his cheeks are completely gone. It’s interesting that quickly that within a week of cutting out barley, wheat, rye and cow dairy that you could see it on their face. But not only that, they could feel it. They were both having some success already in their physical symptoms.
So, yeah. You’ve been drinking Aloe Vera, you and your family, for 20 years now. You’re seeing it yourself. I want to dive into the science a bit and understand why is it that Aloe Vera has this ability to speed up healing and decrease inflammation? What is it about it? Also, I’d like you to differentiate between whole Aloe Vera and just the gel because I know there’s a big difference in the juice. Should one drink a whole Aloe Vera plant versus drinking just the gel of the plant?
[0:41:47] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. If I was to take a leaf and shove it in the blender and turn it on high and pour it into the glass, we would probably call that Aloe Vera juice but Aloe Vera juice is also if you buy a juice like a fruit juice with sugar in it that has Aloe in it. So, that term is used kind of loosely and be careful when you see Aloe Vera juice. It may or may not be beneficial for you. Whole leaf is generally considered juice. Now, I personally don’t like the outer leaf. Why is it used medicinally? Well, it has laxative properties.
[0:42:32] Ashley James: To put it nicely.
[0:42:35] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. And we are in a backed-up nation which because people are clogged, their intestine are clogged, I don’t think adding drain-all is the solution. What we need to do is get our diets right so our intestines work like they’re supposed to. But Aloe Vera has that bowel-loosening, the outer leaf part, the Aloe and the yellow, the bitter stuff, it’s absolutely disgusting. So what they’ve done medicinally is put in the capsules and people would take that as a laxative. Well, eventually the NIH and the FDA kind of teamed up and did a little research on Aloe Vera extract which is the outer leaf stuff and they gave it to rats until the rats got cancer, which is another interesting topic here because what’s cancer?
Well, in the case of the rats, the cells of the intestines that make mucus grew so that they could make more mucous because they were being fed this continuous flow of irritant because they got the extract without the gel which was the opposite, healing part of the plant. Well, in other words for the rats it was actually an adaptive protective change that we call cancer, which cancer’s often an adaptive change.
All right, rabbit trail here but those are the different parts of the plant and I don’t think we should be using the outer leaf. I think we should fix our diet. The inner leaf, that’s the part where if you put it on a sunburn it calms it down and heals it faster. We are confident based on all the clinical case studies where people get well. Anyone I’ve given it to where they had bleeding bowel movements within three days the bleeding has stopped regardless how many days, months or years they’ve been bleeding. That’s what I have seen. So somehow what it’s doing on the skin on burns it’s also doing on the inside and I don’t know why. I can’t tell you why that happens. I don’t know. I can’t tell you why it heals sunburns. I can’t tell you why it heals the intestines but we’ve definitely seen it happen.
[0:44:54] Ashley James: Well, I mean it’s known. It’s just absolutely known. Ever since I was a kid we’d be down at Mexico, I’d get a sunburn and there’d be this giant Aloe Vera plant. My mom would crack it open and squeeze out the gel and rub my body with it and the next day I was good to go. I mean, it’s just known that it heals the skin. Very interesting about the irritant that if someone were to drink the whole plant, the juice of the whole plant, that the rodents would eventually develop cancer. Like you said it is an irritant so it’s forcing the body to have diarrhea or it’s the laxative effects.
I remember doing that once buying the wrong kind of Aloe Vera at the store and suffering for it. It’s not a pleasant experience but if you drink the gel, the pure gel of Aloe Vera it is an enjoyable experience. What’s the difference between your company and the ones that are sold like at Whole Foods or at other health markets? I won’t name names but there’s a variety of them. Some of them, many of them have sugar. Many of them do but there are a few that don’t. So what’s the difference in quality between yours and those other brands out there?
[0:46:19] Dr. Michael Haley: Okay. I’m going to give you a short answer on this and then tells you a story that explains it. You can apply this, don’t just apply this to Aloe Vera. Take this in for anything that you might purchase that is like a juice beverage because this is what happens in the juice industry.
Imagine that I was to purchase orange juice and I went to the store and there’s all these different labels. Lots of those different labels actually all come from the same farm. It doesn’t mean that they’re all the same though because we have big companies in the United States that will purchase up big 55 gallon drums from main farms, from maybe one or two main farm sources. Then sell those barrels to the various companies throughout the United States that reprocess them.
There’s a good chance, well those barrels have been pasteurized and they probably have chemical preservatives in them. But the companies that buy the big drums then reprocess and they might add new preservatives. Those are the preservatives that you’re actually going to see on the label. They might add flavors, they might add water, they might add other juices. They do what they want to make it their own. They might add thickeners.
In the case of Aloe Vera, because it’s no longer Aloe Vera because it’s been filtered down so much and changed so much they actually might add thickeners to thicken it up like guar gum or something like that or a carrageenan so that you think that it’s actually Aloe Vera gel. If you read the labels you will see these things and it will say carrageenan as a thickening agent.
This is what happens in the industry. There’s various levels of filtering and there’s various levels of adding things in. Now, let’s focus just on Aloe for a second. Not just all juice products but in the case of Aloe Vera, there’s unfiltered which is what we are and there’s ultra-filtered which is what another brand is that tastes like water. I promise you, if you find a brand that you can pick up and shake and it splashes and it sounds like water and you drink it. If you give it to someone with a blindfold on, they will tell you it’s water. You cannot taste the difference between that and water. It’s very filtered. Is it Aloe? Yeah. 100% comes from the Aloe plant. But you can take something and filter it so much that the only thing you have, you can purify it to the point where it’s only water. I don’t know that that’s what’s happening in this case but it’s super filtered.
Everything else is somewhere between what we have and what that is. Our brand is the only one that I’m aware of that is not pasteurized. It’s not filtered. How do we do it? How do we not filter? People say, “How do you take the Aloe in? What’s the outer one? That’s the very bitter stuff.” Well, we never let it in to begin with. Our aloes are hand-cut, hand-filleted. We bleed out the Aloe in and then we skin it. Then that gel, that inner fillet runs through a grinder, runs through a chiller, goes into the containers that goes into the freezer. We freeze it. We don’t filter it. We don’t pasteurize it. We don’t add preservatives. We don’t add thickeners. We don’t do anything. The only thing that’s in there is the ground up fillet from the Aloe plant.
So that is kind of the difference. Now, you had a similar experience as one of my patients. This was actually an employee of mine. She came to me on her second day on the job, came in sad. I said, “What’s wrong?” She said, “Well, I found out that I probably have breast cancer again.” I said, “Okay. Don’t freak out. We know how to fix this. We’re going to make a lot of changes but the first thing I want you to do is start drinking this.” I gave her two bottles of our Aloe gel and I said, “I want you to start drinking three full glasses every day.” I was going to continue to make other changes in her diet and take things away from her.
Well, the next day, she was literally in the bathroom half of the day. After I think it was the second day of being in the bathroom all day long she came to me and said, “Dr. Haley, is it possible the Aloe is running right through me?” I said, “Not a chance.” Well, I shouldn’t say that. I said, “If you got Aloe Vera from Whole Foods, yeah but not what I gave you.” She said, “Oh.” I said, “What do you mean oh?” She said, “Well, before drinking the Aloe that you gave me I thought I would drink Richard’s. He’s drinking it for his diabetes.” That is her husband. I said, “Oh no.” She said, “Yeah. I got it from Whole Foods.” “Oh no. How much were you drinking?” She said, “I couldn’t drink three glasses a day. I could only do two.” To which I respond, “Thank God. Three could have killed you.” Meaning, she was getting so much of that outer leaf.
See, that particular brand that she was drinking had so much outer leaf that the serving size is a tablespoon not a glassful. Its intention is to loosen the bowels when you have constipation, lower and stabilize blood sugar levels. Those kinds of things. It still has those properties but I wanted her to drink a whole bunch because I wanted her to have the extra anti-cancer benefits. It could’ve literally depleted her of all of her electrolyte minerals and dehydrated her. She was in the bathroom all that whole time because she was drinking another brand using this serving size recommendation based on ours.
I learned that people might do that. I’ve never made that mistake again. I never said, “Oh, yeah. Just go drink a glass of Aloe every day.” No. Only if it’s our brand. Every bottle is different. Every company has their own purpose for what they’re putting in their bottle.
Gut health is one thing I’m talking a little bit about anti-cancer. Can I do that? Can you talk about Aloe Vera and anti-cancer properties? Yeah. I’m not saying we’re curing cancer but I will tell you some science to why someone with cancer should have it. One of the neat things is – well, let me give you a whole bunch of them actually. I’ll build-up to the bigger ones.
There was a study done at Hippocrates Health Institute. They gave one group Aloe Vera with their supplements and the other group didn’t get the Aloe. When they tested their blood, the group that got the Aloe Vera with their supplements, their blood tested higher for every single nutrient that was tested. So, conclusion was, well, people that are using Aloe Vera they’re gut must work better and absorb more nutrients from the food. That’s a good thing.
We also know it helps make the gut healthy which is where the immune system is and helps heal guts. It also helps lower and stabilize blood sugar levels in people that have diabetes. Well, cancer is an obligatory glucose metabolizer and if you’re lowering blood sugar levels that could be a really good thing. Well, there’s also something in Aloe Vera called acemannan. This nutrient is known to cause the macrophages of the immune system to secrete three very important factors. I’m only going to talk about one. It’s my favorite just because of the name. It’s called tumor necrosis factor, TNF. What does that do?
Tumor necrosis factor, tumor = cancer, necrosis = death two. It’s the factor that causes death to cancer. What it actually does is helps the immune system to see the cancer cells so that it knows to kill them. But, there’s still an even more exciting thing in Aloe. Those slimy mucopolysaccharides. What’s a polysaccharides? Well, you have sugars. Join them together you have carbohydrates. Join those together you have complex carbohydrates. Join those together and make them really big and bulky we have mucopolysaccharides. The mucopolysaccharides in Aloe Vera is made up of a sugar molecule called mannose, which is the one sugar molecule that we know to be toxic to cancer cells.
It’s kind of like the cancer cell locks on to it because it wants to eat the sugar molecule but it can’t. So now, it can’t eat anything else because it’s like got its mouth stuck with mannose but it can’t eat the mannose. So it essentially starves itself by holding on to the mannose and not being able to eat it.
[0:56:08] Ashley James: Cool. That’s so cool. Tell us more. I love this stuff. I’m totally geeking out on this fun little science things. You said you’re only going to tell us one of the three but can you tell us more?
[0:56:24] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, that was a whole bunch of them right there meaning making the gut healthy which is where the immune system is, lowering the blood sugar levels, causing your got to absorb more nutrients. The tumor necrosis factor interferons and interleukins were the other factors that increase with the Aloe Vera. Then the fifth one was the mannose being that thing that the cancer cells can’t eat because it can lock on to them but it can’t actually consume them.
That research was actually done by a, if I understand it my impression of it was that it was done by a company that is manufacturing a chemotherapy because there conclusion was consume mannose with the chemotherapy. I think they said that the mannose stops the cancer from growing and the chemotherapy kills the cancer. That was their conclusion.
[0:57:27] Ashley James: What about helping people with dysbiosis or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth? Does it have any anti-parasitic properties or help to starve the candida or starve the bad bacteria or feed the good bacteria? Is there anything around those lines?
[0:57:50] Dr. Michael Haley: Good question. We’re going to go into some stuff that I don’t know all about but I’ll tell you what I do know that makes sense to me. Aloe Vera is a food and bacteria can grow in it but it’s not bacteriostatic. It doesn’t stop the growth of bacteria but they grow very slowly in it compared to other foods. Kind of like honey is a food. Honey can sit in your cabinet for a very long time. That’s more bacteriostatic compared to Aloe Vera versus table sugar that can ferment into alcohol very quickly.
So, different things are more of a food source for bacteria than others. In the case of Aloe Vera and I think that’s related to that mannose sugar molecule that some things just don’t really love. So, it can be a food item. I cannot tell you that it won’t feed candida. I don’t know that. What I do know is that there’s lots of good fiber in it that could be prebiotic in nature. I know that it helps heal the gut and people that have either too loose of bowels or too stiff of bowels it seems to normalize both ends to the more normal perspective.
I know that people who had bacterial overgrowth, some of them their bowels are moving too fast some are moving too slow. Probably more often too slow which kind of gives bacteria more time to multiply and overtake the intestines. It seems those slow-moving bowels, sometimes the bad bacteria can work its way up towards the front in a sense.
Now, why do I say all that? I don’t always think that the bacterial overgrowth is a diet problem. It could be a slow-moving gut which might be a neurological problem. Possibly you need chiropractic massage, yoga, acupuncture something to destress the spine where the nerves go to the intestines and get things functioning more like they’re supposed to. When we talk about a condition like that, Aloe Vera is not the cure, it might be part of the diet plan to help the plan get better but we have to step back and look at the big picture and say, “Okay. Let’s look at this from the nutrition, exercise, rest, mental well-being.” You know how the mind controls the chemistry of the body? You’ve alluded to that earlier with toxic relationships.
So you really have to step back and say, “Okay. Is Aloe going to help this?” I don’t know. It might but we got to really look at the big picture here.
[1:00:54] Ashley James: Can you tell us some stories in your last 20 years with experiencing the healing benefits of Aloe Vera that were just mind-blowing. You’ve mentioned some common things that Aloe helps with but what’s some really far out there like, “Wow. I never thought it would help with that,” kind of stories that you could share with us?
[1:01:14] Dr. Michael Haley: I hear that stuff all the time from healing people’s gums to headed for dialysis and God lead me to consume Aloe Vera and from 30% to now 68% kidney function and the only change I made was Aloe Vera. Well, that’s pretty cool. We’ve heard everything from decreased pain, which I think when people have less pain, I think it’s because their pain is probably auto-immune related. By healing the gut we’re calming down the immune system that’s causing the inflammatory response that causes the pain because other people with pain don’t notice any difference.
When you heal the gut, it can affect everything. So we’ve heard every condition under the sun people saying that they got well from it. I don’t think it’s a cure for every condition under the sun. I think it could help the gut get well and I think that it’s important for most people.
Ultimately, again, I always tell people that you got to look at the other side of the equation. You got to look at what’s in the food. The food is full of antibiotics and drugs if you’re eating animal foods and pesticides and preservatives and artificial flavors and colors and sweeteners and trans fats and they’re partially hydrogenated and they’re GMOs and we got chlorinated watering, there’s mercury in the fish. There is so much crap in the foods that’s killing us and we have to stop consuming it. You got to look at the other side of the equation.
I’ve seen a stage for pancreatic patients get well and stay well for ten years. How does that happen? We didn’t just give her Aloe. We said, “You can’t eat sugars anymore. We want you to juicing fruits and vegetables and growing sprouts.” We changed her lifestyle and she ended up losing weight and at first feeling she was going to die of starvation but eventually getting her energy back and feeling better than ever before. That was my first significant patient that I recommended three glasses of Aloe a day for. It just so happens that she got well from stage 4, worst kind of cancer you could have. Did the Aloe cure her? No. I think her lifestyle change cured her and I think Aloe Vera was one of her things in her lifestyle change.
Photo by Yuval Zukerman on Unsplash
[1:04:30] Ashley James: Well, you said that it’s been proven that Aloe speeds up healing by 50%. So if you could take anything to speed up healing while you’re on a healing protocol I mean that just makes sense.
[1:04:43] Dr. Michael Haley: Absolutely. Yeah.
[1:04:46] Ashley James: I interviewed one of your mentors, Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, episode 385. She has an amazing story. She helps to reverse autism. She’s made a link between the GAPS diet being the gut and the psychology diet linking that there is a direct link between gut health and psychology and to brain health and showing that if she can get children before the age of five on the GAPS diet who are on the autism spectrum or displaying symptoms of autism that they will no longer be autistic. She makes that bold claim based on her clinical experience over the last 24 years where she has seen thousands of children to reverse autism. She says if it’s caught after the age of five they still have some quirks but go from low-functioning to high-functioning basically.
That was a really interesting interview. So you stumbled upon her work in an effort to find tools in your tool belt to help people with healing the gut. What have you seen in terms of psychology, in terms of mental health and emotional health? How have you seen Aloe Vera help in that aspect?
[1:06:07] Dr. Michael Haley: I’m going to tell you about a friend’s child that has autism. He as an older teenager struggling to maintain his job because of his emotional outbursts, having meltdowns in the home and talking to the mother. I remember the conversation quite well because sometimes people can look at you like you’ve got three heads because of what you say. “Yeah. You shouldn’t be drinking Coca Cola.” Really? They look at you like you have three heads. “No. That’s not going to be good for someone that has autism.” It’s not going to be good for really anybody. The point being is I gave her a whole diet plan that included Aloe Vera and eliminated a lot of stuff. He had the absolute best week of his life with very normal functioning.
But he had a meltdown. I said, “What happened?” She said, “He couldn’t do it anymore. He had to have his sodas again.” He went back to his soda. Had a meltdown that day on the job, lost his job. It’s funny. He went from having the best week, most normal week of his life with normal functioning in society to “I can’t do this. I need my sugar fix, my caffeinated sugar fix.”
We’ve seen it with kids. You give the kids sugar and they get all crazy. What you eat changes the way you act, the way you feel. It changes you. I can give a grown adult a couple shots of whiskey and within minutes he had changed. What goes in your mouth affects the way your body works.
[1:08:23] Ashley James: I love that you’re bringing this up. I actually have a study, I have two studies right here printed out. Parasites, nutrition, immune responses and biology of metabolic tissues and the other one is Signaling in Parasitic Nematodes: Physicochemical Communication Between Host and Parasite and Endogenous Molecular Transduction Pathways Governing Worm Development and Survival. Basically these two and there’s a ton more studies about the connection between what is living in our gut and what our cravings. They’re showing that parasites and it doesn’t have to be like a giant tapeworm. Whenever someone says parasites that’s all I think about is these Dune like the giant worms from Dune. I’m just imagining them.
Most parasites are microscopic, one cell or a few cells, candida, yeast. This dysbiosis basically they’re finding now that let’s say you have a dysbiosis or you have these parasites, you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or whatever it is that basically things are living in your gut that shouldn’t be there and the things that should be living in your gut are not in a healthy proportion. It’s kind of like the gangs have moved into the neighborhood and your gut.
These entities, these creatures, when you stop feeding them the sugary beverages for example that this person you’re talking about was craving, which is the food that they live on. So the donuts and the pizza or whatever it is. The food, the simple carbohydrates that they live on. If you stop eating the foods they live on, you start to starve them. When you start to starve them, they will actually produce a chemical. It’s been proven in these studies. They will produce a chemical that is absorbed into your bloodstream, go straight to your brain and takes over your brain and makes you crave the foods that feed them.
So how much of our cravings and our control over our own behavior and our mind is us versus the parasites? Who’s controlling this body? Is it the parasite controlling us? They’re showing now that there’s a direct link. So when you go on a detox, when you go on a cleansing diet or a cleansing protocol or a negative parasite killing protocol, you will have cravings and those cravings are not you. You’re body’s not saying, “I really want a brownie and I really need a brownie right now.” No. That is the bugs in your gut trying to hi-jack your brain. Luckily we have the ability to overcome those cravings. We can go for a walk, drink some water, do some deep breathing. We can overcome. It takes a few days to let it pass but just sharing what you’re sharing is that the Aloe Vera and the change in the diet helped him gain control over his psychology and then he gave in to those little worms or whatever, those little parasites were starving so they hi-jacked his brain.
We also know that sugar is addictive and we do go through a withdrawal from caffeine and from sugar. So it’s kind of a one-two punch. We’re sort of up against it when we’re looking to make changes like that and cut out sugar. It’s also helpful to know that this craving isn’t what my body actually needs even though my body is telling me it needs it. If you’re cravings foods that are full of sugar and full of chemicals and are highly processed or baked goods or whatever. If we’re craving something from a package or a can, it’s not in our highest interest. When we shift our diet and we start craving kale and carrots and zucchini, we start actually craving our apples, we start craving whole foods, that when we know that the good bacteria is replenishing itself because it’s starting to send signals to the brain., “Hey, give me more of that pineapple. Give me more of that leafy green salad you had the other day. That really fulfilled us. Give me more of that Aloe juice. I really love those polysaccharides in the Aloe juice. I want some more of that to feed us.”
So the good bacteria, the good microbiome can also communicate with us and help our body to feel really high in a good sense on those foods. I have a friend who gets high off of kale smoothies now. Her body just buzzes and she's like, “It’s like my drug. I get high off of it.” So it’s fun when we shift our diet we could start to get really high off of these whole foods. That’s our bodies saying, “Yes. We’re feeding the good bacteria, everything’s healing. The nutrition is being absorbed and utilized. All the 37.2 trillion cells in the body are being bathed with this green, gorgeous nutrients and all the toxins are being pulled away. Everything is just running on the right path.”
That’s how we want to feel every day. If we’re not waking up in the morning and bouncing out of bed full of energy and full of life and then having good stamina throughout the day and never a dull moment. Never like we’re at 3 PM and we’re kind of like, “I need a coffee,” or “I need a whatever.” If we can just go all day feeling great, having mental clarity and then our body around 9 PM goes, “Okay. It’s time to wind down. All right. I feel like reading a book in bed. This is good.” That’s health right there.
So I just look at the quality of the day-to-day. What’s the body giving me? The day to day quality of how it feels. Instead of medicating, self-medicating with sugar and caffeine and stimulate that little pleasure response temporarily, right? Because those forms of self-medication mean that we’re really masking the body’s language which the body is telling us, “I’m sick. We’re going the wrong direction. You’re not feeding me the nutrient it needs.”
Did your friend’s son ever get back on track? I feel for him.
[1:14:55] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. Not something that I followed too much. I know overall and it was a few years ago, overall he’s definitely doing better now so something’s different that I do know.
[1:15:10] Ashley James: I’ve seen that before. I have a friend with autistic twins. He went totally clean diet and then he went to a friend’s house and we watched him jump into a bag of Pringles and proceed to kick holes through the walls. Time and time again, if he eats what he’s allergic too there’s just almost an immediate violent, he just gets very violent. It’s hard though to tell a teenager, “Don’t eat the foods that your friends are eating.”
[1:15:42] Dr. Michael Haley: Or don’t eat the stuff that your friends are eating because it’s really not food.
[1:15:46] Ashley James: It’s not food. It’s not food. Don’t eat the chemical bag filled with crap. Yeah. Exactly.
[1:15:54] Dr. Michael Haley: The GMOs, do people really understand what GMOs are? Do they really understand how many chemicals are in that? The modifications really means round-up ready or pesticide manufacturing? I don’t think people have any clue how many chemicals. Do people realize, I love this, Ashley, what is, don’t answer though, what is the purpose of a preservative? I have asked this question so many times and the answer I always get is to make the food last longer. That is not true. The purpose of the preservative is to kill mold, yeast, fungus, and bacteria.
[1:16:50] Ashley James: Right.
[1:16:53] Dr. Michael Haley: When you eat it does it know to stop killing? When we manufacture products, we add preservatives, we add chemicals to it and we measure the logarithmic reduction of the bacteria so we can measure its killing potential because that’s its purpose. The foods are filled with chemicals that are designed to kill.
Why do they put chlorine in the water? To kill. That’s the purpose of it. We got to wake up and realize what’s really in the food. They give an antibiotics to animals. I’d like the way Jordan Rubin put it. He said – because we don’t take antibiotics. When we get sick we don’t take antibiotics. Do we eat conventional food? You’re eating antibiotics. Jordan Rubin said, “People think that they treat animals with antibiotics. He said they don’t treat them with antibiotics. They give them antibiotics so they can mistreat them.” Let’s just include it in their food to continuously try to kill off these infections. Guess what, that becomes a part of them.
Another thing he said that was wise, when it comes to animal foods he said, “You heard it well said that you are what you eat but I say when it comes to animal foods, you are what they ate.”
[1:18:28] Ashley James: And what drugs they were given.
[1:18:30] Dr. Michael Haley: Exactly.
[1:18:32] Ashley James: I did an interview on GMOs with Jeffrey Smith.
[1:18:38] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. I love Jeff.
[1:18:40] Ashley James: Yes. I recommend everyone listen and learn more from Jeffrey Smith. He has a course you can take on his website that teaches you how to become a GMO educator. It’s just fascinating. So great episode. It’s 133 of Learn True Health Podcast.
He would talk about how the Bt toxin, what they found is that in this GMOs, one of the GMOs are designed for the Bt toxin to be produced in the plant. But when we eat that plant the Bt toxin then actually the genes of it get into the bacteria. They hi-jack the bacteria in our gut and our bacteria in our gut starts producing the Bt toxin.
[1:19:23] Dr. Michael Haley: AKA the sharp protein because its purpose is to essentially explode the guts of the bacteria.
[1:19:32] Ashley James: Why is it that all of a sudden, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and now small intestinal fungal overgrowth is a thing? I had a doctor on the show who discovered small intestinal fungal overgrowth. He is a very allopathic mainstream doctor. He’s a PhD, he’s a professor, teaches at a teaching hospital. He is well-educated. Just the credentials are coming out of just like they’re a mile long. The thing is he’s now being rejected by the mainstream medical system, the same system that he comes from and he embraces. He’s not a holistic doctor whatsoever. But because he is saying, this is what he’s saying is that small intestinal fungal overgrowth is a thing. He has discovered it and he says it’s a 100% man-made because of the medical procedures we are now doing, because of the amount of antibiotics we’re giving people, because of the standard diet, because of everything basically. But he said 20 years ago this didn’t exist. And now it’s rampant and he’s seeing it everywhere.
I thought that was really interesting that he’s actually trying to make a change in the medical system and the medical system is trying to silence him, which is really interesting. They just don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear that there’s small intestinal fungal overgrowth that’s rampant in patients and that’s totally man-made because the system is broken.
[1:20:59] Dr. Michael Haley: You know, I think I misspoke on something. I think I said that the Bt toxin was exploding the guts of the bacteria. I mean the insects that ate the plant food that has the Bt toxin in it, which you got to think if it can damage those little insects guts what can it do to ours? If it’s exploding theirs, we’re thicker, it might not explode them but it’s got to be jabbing them. Is it possible that that’s why so many inflammatory bowel conditions are existing today? It’s not exploding the bacteria, it’s exploding the insects that eat the Bt toxin, the sharp protein.
[1:21:40] Ashley James: Yeah. Jeffrey talks about a study in Canada where they found that after eating GMO, the Bt toxin GMO plants, the bacteria in the person who ate it then their gut basically started to reproduce Bt toxin. So it hi-jacked the genes, the genes of the GMO hi-jacked the gut biome.
[1:22:05] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. I would see it as now having this little tiny daggers that are continuously in you. You have this thick intestinal wall but a bunch of tiny little daggers just kind of jabbing at it, gradually irritating it more and more and more. It’s definitely a problem. That’s what’s happening and you got Bt toxin in your gut not only do you want to be consuming the Bt toxin but if you’re manufacturing it, we got to reprogram that gut flora quick.
[1:22:43] Ashley James: So, for those who are listening who decided to join us and listen to this because they have gut issues to heal. You mentioned IBS, Crohn’s, colitis, GERD. Can you imagine that we’re sitting there with you as your patient or in a lecture, you’re educating us on what we can do. What steps can we take to heal our gut?
[1:23:10] Dr. Michael Haley: Let’s throw a wind with that because we just named a bunch of gut conditions. Let’s throw in all of those skin conditions, auto-immune skin conditions from the psoriasis, eczema or whatever it is because it’s all the same. What actionable steps, acne, what actionable steps can we take to start healing the skin and the gut because we’re looking at that as one organ?
Obviously, number one stop eating the chemicals, the inflammatory foods. Inflammatory foods are one thing and then chemicals are another. Sometimes they are the same food, you’re getting a double whammy. The preservatives, the things that are killing your gut flora. The genetically modified foods. The unfiltered water filled with chlorine. The animal foods that have antibiotics in them or that are fed inflammatory foods. If you’re eating beef and it’s not grass-finished it’s going to be inflammatory. It’s different. It’s a different kind of meat. All the artificial flavors and sweeteners. You see in the ingredients red and yellow and blue number this and that, it’s not real. Partially hydrogenated foods or things that we know have been radiated and killed off. If it’s not food, let’s stir away from those things and get back to the real foods.
Then the other side is when we’re looking at real foods, what are the real foods that are real good for me? Now, we talked earlier about the diet log, the mood log or symptom log the what you eat and how you feel log. This is another one that I got from Dr. Natasha McBride. The skin test, back in the day they didn’t take blood and work from the blood. They would actually maybe scratch your back and then put an antigen on it and then if you got a little bump there we knew you were allergic to it. You can do that at home yourself. Whether or not you choose to scratch yourself, that’s up to you. You’d probably get a better response but you can actually take the foods that you’re eating and put it right on maybe the thin part of your wrist there and make a little paste out of it or whatever and leave it on there for an hour or so. Then wash it off if it leave you a red spot.
If it did, you probably have an allergy to it. It’s probably inflammatory for you. Maybe stay away from that food. Then we start consuming more gut-healing foods that make sense. Bone stock makes sense. Aloe Vera makes sense. Both of those make sense if you don’t have allergies to them. Fermented foods probably makes sense. It’s funny when you think fermented foods people say, “Yeah. I’ll just get a bottle of wine.” Rethink that one unless it’s natural wine, homemade wine. Did you buy raw grape juice and it fermented and it became effervescent by itself? Well, then it’s probably truly probiotic. But if it’s a bottle of wine where they fermented it and then they added sulfites as a preservative to stop that fermentation so they can stop the flavor where it is right there and then, it’s probably not really a live beverage. Maybe try something more simple like sauerkraut, homemade sauerkraut if you can find it or you can have a –
[1:27:19] Ashley James: Make it yourself.
[1:27:21] Dr. Michael Haley: Absolutely. Or if you have a source at a farmers’ market where someone’s making it and it’s not pasteurized, does not have chemical preservatives but it’s actually a live culture. When it comes to dairy, we can get in trouble talking about this because some people think dairy is the devil, but there is different kinds of dairy. You can have cultured whey which is if you ever eat yogurt you don’t finish it all and then you go back the next day and you see that liquid there, that’s the whey where it’s separated. It could be very good, very probiotic and it could be well-fermented where a lot of the things that might cause problems that you have your allergies to are already consumed by the bacteria. Cultured dairy, especially if it’s from the right kind of cows or goat milk, can be very probiotic and very beneficial for some people, not for everybody. But it could work.
So, as we start getting back to our roots eating – I like this one question too. When you’re thinking, “What about this? Should I eat this?” Did that exist 100 years ago?
[1:28:53] Ashley James: Right or 500 years ago. I think they had Coca Cola I don’t know. They had something like that 100 years ago. It did have like cocaine in it so it was a little different.
[1:29:08] Dr. Michael Haley: It was probably better for you.
[1:29:14] Ashley James: That’s really funny.
[1:29:16] Dr. Michael Haley: That’s also a trick question too though. “Well, yeah. This is a hamburger. That existed 100 years ago.” Let’s dig in a little deeper. What did they feed the cows 100 years ago? Where did the cows live 100 years ago? In the fields eating grass. So you might have to dig a little deeper to understand if it really exists at 100 years ago.
How was it processed? Get as close to the real food as possible. Grow your own food for heaven’s sakes. If you really want to understand food, grow your own and start learning. “Oh. Wow. I treat my soil good and make it more nutritious and it becomes this wet, moist, microbiome of its own. I get some really good fruits and vegetables. Isn’t that amazing?”
[1:30:17] Ashley James: There’s a free documentary on YouTube I highly recommend watching that teaches you basically you can turn your backyard into a thriving garden. It’s called Back to Eden Gardening. It’s a man who moved here 30 years ago into Sequim, Washington on the banana belt. So we get a lot of sunshine, a lot of rain. He bought this big property. He basically want to make a homestead and live off a land and never go to a grocery store again. Dug a well and there is so low pressure that he just started crying and he said, “Why God? Why?” He spent his whole life savings to buy this beautiful property. He thought this was it. This is where he was going to live. He is a very religious man and a very spiritual man and he prayed. He got a message from God who said, “Go into the forest and see how the forest can be lush and beautiful after 60 days with no rain.” Because that’s often what happens here in the summer, we get 60 or 90 days with no rain. It’s sunny and hot every day. The forest looks beautiful. It’s pristine.
So he goes into the forest and he looks up and he sees all the trees with all their leaves are doing well and all the bushes are doing well. What’s going on? They didn’t need any water but certainly I need water to water my crops every day. I’m going to need that much and my well won’t provide it for me so what am I going to do? He starts digging in the mulch which is very dry. Two, three, four inches down, down to like nine inches down of mulch, it’s moist. It’s so moist it’s like it just rained.
Then the light bulb went on that he was going to recreate how nature grows in his garden. So there’s no-till. No upturning of the soil, no-till whatsoever which means that he’s not disrupting the microbiome. He uses wood chips, which you can get for free and he teaches you how to do that. So he covered a few acres, if you have a backyard whatever the size of your backyard you could do a 5×5 space, it doesn’t have to be acres. He covers it with inches of wood chips and then manure which he gets from farms nearby. Find some people with horses basically. Then he got some chickens and uses their chicken manure also.
Because he’s trying to mimic nature he planted a bunch of apple trees about 10 – 15 feet away from each other. His squash will actually grow because he plants everything really close together. Relatively you can still walk around little plants. There’s’ no weeds. So the squash will climb up the apple trees and it looks like he has a squash plant. Like butternut squashes are hanging down from the apple tree. He does free tours in the summer and you can come and spend two hours with him on a Saturday or Sunday and eat from his garden. He says he hasn’t been to a grocery store in 12 years. All he eats is what he grows and what he produces on his homestead.
He doesn’t have a computer or internet so I wrote him a letter old school and he called me back. We had a nice like 90-minute conversation. He’s really nice. People are recreating how he does it and how he teaches it. I did it in our backyard with a 50×25 foot pot. I couldn’t believe it. The food we grew, oh my gosh. You get a high off of gardening when you can just- you’re hungry you walk into your backyard, pick a few things, come into the kitchen and I didn’t have to drive anywhere. The food is so mineral-rich. The enzymes are still alive. I mean, eating live food, there’s nothing like it on the planet. You feel so good after eating something that’s live.
I love the advice that you’re giving. That’s really awesome. Now, in terms of healing the gut and the skin conditions, do you have any books you can recommend or resources you recommend? I know you like Jordan Rubin’s The Maker’s Diet and of course Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, her book The GAPS Diet. Are there any resources that you’d recommend beyond that?
[1:34:43] Dr. Michael Haley: Those are two of my favorite resources. Those are probably the two that had the largest impact on me personally. I also love YouTube. I love my friend Chris Wark at chrisbeatcancer.com. Wonderful resource when it comes to healing the gut and strengthening against cancer as well. You mentioned Jeff Smith. He’s got a lot of great content that helps you understand how we got in this problem to begin with. There’s guys like Sean Croxton who focuses on gut health. There’s so many resources. I loved a lot of the work that Ty Bollinger has been doing in – well, Truth About Cancer was a big start that really launched him into that health and healing. Again, he’s always a part of the big health how do we live to maximize our lives? That always involves gut health.
There’s just so many resources. When it comes to the books my favorite are Jordan Rubin’s who really has probably 30 books or more now. They all talk about gut health because that was his big issue. The GAPS diet is one of those things where it’s not the most exciting read but the further you get into the more it makes sense. It just really help shape my understanding. How about yourself? I bet you have a couple as well.
Photo by Henrique Félix on Unsplash
[1:36:48] Ashley James: When it comes to healing the gut, I’m such a believer in eliminating the foods that are harming it. I learned from Dr. Joel Wallach who’s a naturopathic physician. He’s been preaching for almost 20 years now going gluten-free: barley, wheat, rye and oats because oats contain gliadin. He thinks 100% of the population should be without because he says it’s not that it’s an immune issue it’s a mechanical issue. Mechanical you’re not designed to fully break down the proteins so they end up causing damage to the microvilli as they go through. Now some people have an immune component in addition to that and it’s more obvious but he sees that when he gets 100% of people off of barley, wheat, rye and oats that he sees improvement in digestion.
He believes in making sure that we are minerally rich. He thinks that all of our food supplies void of minerals because of the last 100 years of farming practices that have led to depleting the soil. It’s very rare that you can find foods that are grown in minerally rich soil. So he’s a big believer in making sure we’re taking supplements to fill in those gaps. I’ve seen a lot of results from following that. I mean, it’s undeniable the GAPS diet although it’s very strict and hard to follow, the results are undeniable, which is amazing, right?
Now, what about powders and stuff? This day and age people are – now we’re seeing everything’s powdered and packaged and you can buy bone broth powder versus the actual bone broth. I’m imagining someone’s invented Aloe Vera powder out there. What’s the difference? Is it one-to-one? Could you really get the same healing benefits from powdered bone broth versus making it yourself in the Instant Pot or on the stove? The same with Aloe Vera, once it’s powdered. Aren’t there some components removed, some of this components removed when it’s been powdered?
[1:39:18] Dr. Michael Haley: You know, oddly I’m going to give you the answer that you’re probably not expecting.
[1:39:22] Ashley James: I’m ready.
[1:39:23] Dr. Michael Haley: We’ve seen people get amazing results with powdered foods. To me, it’s not the best solution. Real food is real food. Powders are a convenience and sometimes they help us get well because it’s just more convenient and easier. If that’s what’s going to take to get you well, okay. If harvesting your own Aloe Vera and filleting your own leaves isn’t something you’re up for and ordering raw or frozen Aloe Vera is too expensive or you live in a part of the world that you don’t have access to it, well guess what? Powdered Aloe could definitely be a benefit to you. In the same way powdered greens. If you’re not getting your ten servings of fruits and vegetables every day. Is a scoop of powdered greens bad? No. It’s probably going to really help you get a lot of nutrients that you’re missing because you’re not getting ten servings of fruits and vegetables representing all the colors every day.
So these powdered foods can certainly be a lot more convenient and help you get the nutrition that you should be getting from your food.
[1:40:42] Ashley James: I like it. So it’s better than not doing it at all. If someone’s like, “I am too busy.” Or maybe they’re too tired or too sick or maybe they’re just starting off and really instead of juicing their own juices or making their own smoothies, if we could just have them throw some of these dehydrated vegetables and fruits into a blender then just have them drink it, that’s better than nothing. That’s better than not doing it at all. You are seeing good results. That’s good. I like it because you prefer whole foods in their unadulterated state but you’re saying that a powder is an option if it’s the difference is not doing it and doing it.
[1:41:25] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. Absolutely. Juicing isn’t a whole food. Juicing has its benefits of being able to get a whole bunch of nutrients in your body quicker and faster which could be beneficial. When you juice your fruits and vegetables, you’re getting rid of the fiber that your gut can use for good health unless you’re not tolerating the fiber at the moment because you have an issue there. You’re also missing the beginning of digestion which is mastication which infuses the nutrients that you’re consuming with the digestive enzyme initiation, that whole process. It’s part of digestion and you’re skipping it because you’re running your fruits and vegetables through a juicer and you’re drinking it.
Now, I still juice. Is it a bad thing? Well, I eat a lot of really good food too and I chew my food 50 times like Jordan Rubin told me. Not always but we try to chew our food better and do things right. A lot of times, if we juice the fruits and vegetables we’ll actually take the pulp and make crackers out of them. So we’re still getting that benefit in an enjoyable way. But remember, the best thing is probably if you can do it a lifestyle that includes eating real food. Most of the time. Most of the time or all the time if possible.
[1:42:57] Ashley James: Let’s get into dosages of your, let’s just assume that everyone’s really excited and they want to try your frozen Aloe gel that’s been unadulterated and it’s the closest thing to them actually just being out in the Aloe field, cracking open an Aloe leaf and sucking out the gel themselves. That’s the closest thing they can get to that freshness. Tell us about the dosages and tell us how to take it because this is like a gel. So what am I, how am I drinking this?
[1:43:28] Dr. Michael Haley: Okay. Hold your nose, tilt your head back. No.
[1:43:34] Ashley James: Like an oyster? Just let it slide down your throat.
[1:43:39] Dr. Michael Haley: I actually can say that with a little humor because the reality is it could be like that for some people that aren’t used to the texture or the taste. Now, our Aloe Vera doesn’t have much taste to it because we’ve done a good job at eliminating the outer leaf. If you have ever made your own Aloe gel and you just got a little dab of that yellow sap on the tip of your tongue, it’s like eating a raw garlic clove and you just taste it on your tongue for the rest of the day. It doesn’t go away.
So that’s how Aloe Vera can be. Ours happens to do a really good job at eliminating more than 99% of that so you can barely taste it but it does have that little bit of a taste. Healthy people generally say, “Oh. This tastes good,” or “doesn’t taste like anything at all.” People that don’t have much concept of what healthy foods are say, “Oh. I could never drink that.” But the easiest way is to just drink it. You don’t have to mix it with anything. Just drink it.
As far as the serving size, I recommend all of our new customers drink a full 8-ounce glass every day for the first week and then look in the mirror. Pay attention and say, “what’s different?” Not everyone notices a difference. Most people seem to actually do notice a difference. It’s like, “Wow. I really really look different. My skin is really doing better. My heels aren’t as cracked and dry. My skin looks better. People are telling me I’m glowing and ask me what I’m doing.” Okay. Something’s changing on the inside then.
For some people, if you’re having real serious problems like bleeding bowel movements, I’m going to probably tell them drink three full glasses a day for a few days. Put the fire out. Front end load. How much can you drink a day? Don’t do that with other brands by the way because if it has the outer leaf in it you’re going to have problems.
How much of our brand can you drink? Ours is this thick, mucousy kind of, you know, it’s right from the plant. It is thick. How much of ours can you drink? When I’m in the Dominican Republic supervising the harvest, I have eight checkpoints. I drink eight ounces at each checkpoint. I’m drinking a half gallon a day. There’s a point of diminishing returns. If you drink twice as much, you’re not getting twice the benefit. But you’re not going to overdose on our brand. If you’re drinking one that has the outer leaf in it, yes you can. Be careful.
So, hope that makes sense and it depends on the problem why you’re drinking. Lower and stabilizing blood sugar levels. You know, have an ounce two or three times a day and measure your blood sugar for the next couple of weeks and see what happens.
[1:46:50] Ashley James: Can I add it to a smoothie or can I water it down? Can I add some lime or lemon juice to it? I mean are there any other ways of taking it?
[1:47:00] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. But it doesn’t seem to be the most pleasant thing for a lot of people. As you’re adding things to it you’re just increasing the amount of something you don’t like. No. Something like myself, I kind of like it now. I didn’t always like it. So if I juice my carrots and celery and maybe a little apple and lemon or whatever and pour a few ounces of Aloe in it, to me it just adds some texture and thickness. I like it because it makes it for me more satisfying.
[1:47:37] Ashley James: Yeah. I like the flavor. I especially like it with a little bit of lemon or lime. That’s me. I like it cool. Like I like it over ice or something if it isn’t – with yours it’s already frozen then we thaw it. Do we just put it in the fridge and let it thaw there or how long until we can drink it from frozen?
[1:48:01] Dr. Michael Haley: Yeah. Just leave it out of the refrigerator for about six or seven hours. Give it a shake, pour your glass and then keep it in the refrigerator the rest of the time. I would say up to a couple of weeks in the refrigerator. If you’re not going to consume it within a couple of weeks, as soon as you melt that whole bottle pour some in the smaller containers and refreeze them.
[1:48:21] Ashley James: Got it. Got it. Very cool. There’s no diminishing of the health benefits because it was frozen?
[1:48:31] Dr. Michael Haley: The only thing I’ve ever measured was the acemannan content and we did not see a diminish in that. What we do know is it’s viscous and we know it’s not filtered. So it’s probably way more nutritious than those that have been filtered. Why do they filter? Because they have too much outer leaf and they have to take out the irritant. So how do you do that? You use diatomaceous earth and activated carbon. Stir it into this big slurry and then you push it through a filter and this clear, thin liquid comes out.
The question I have is, “Okay. Does carbon know what the difference is between the good nutrients and the sucker you’re trying to take out? Of course not. So what you’re getting is a diluted product. You’re getting less nutrients. If ours does diminish, I’m certain it’s better than having them filtered, pasteurized and preserved.
The ultimate would be hand-fillet a fresh Aloe leaf. What’s that? What’s a fresh Aloe leaf? It’s not one you buy at the grocery store. By the time you see it in the grocery store, there’s a video on my website actually. On my YouTube channel, rather, that shows that it’s probably already a month old. It gives three reasons why. How I came with that I think is pretty accurate.
A fresh Aloe leaf. Grow your own Aloe plant. Take one off, hand fillet it, run it through a grinder and drink it down. That would be the best. I think the next best option to that is raw frozen Aloe that someone else did that for you. The freezing is really the only way we know how to truly preserve it in its natural form.
[1:50:26] Ashley James: Very cool. Now, you’ve seen people reverse psoriasis and other skin conditions drinking Aloe. Of course making lifestyle changes, we’ve already discussed that. Let’s say they’ve already made the life choices, I know so many people who have these skin problems and the itching and the bleeding and the cracking. They’ve changed their diet but inflammation’s a tricky thing. It’s this domino effect. There needs to be a break state. There needs to be something that comes in because sometimes it can kind of be in a vicious loop. Even things like stress or no sleep can set it off so people might have already made lifestyle and diet changes and then they bring in your Aloe Vera gel. Now they’re speeding up the healing and decreasing inflammation and they start to see results.
They’re drinking it. They’re not applying it on their skin directly or are they doing both?
[1:51:20] Dr. Michael Haley: No. Well, some people would definitely use Aloe Vera externally but it’s so much better if it works from the inside out. Yeah. You got a burn and you want some relief, go ahead put some Aloe on it. You got a cut or a scrape and you want some maybe scar prevention, go ahead put some Aloe on it. But you got a chronic condition, okay if you need a little bit of relief with your eczema or your psoriasis, go ahead put some Aloe on it but heal it from the inside out.
[1:51:55] Ashley James: That’s where it started and that’s what's having it continue.
[1:52:01] Dr. Michael Haley: Now, with that, there is a time for medicine. I’ll give you an example that most people could probably relate to. If we look at a common skin condition cracked feet, cracked dry feet. Dr. Natasha had always talked about parasites entering through the feet, through cracks in the feet. Once they get in one now you got something else to deal with. A lot of people will have fungus infections, athlete’s foot in these deep cracks. It’s not like you can moisten the feet enough with Aloe Vera, you get a pedicure and file the hard stuff off and keep on treating it. You’re not necessarily getting rid of the fungus infection.
There is a time where you might use a medicated cream or maybe an Aloe with some anti-fungal essential oils.
[1:53:07] Ashley James: Like tea tree oil.
[1:53:09] Dr. Michael Haley: Yes. You might actually medicinally in a sense treat that fungus infection with something natural or medicated. Whatever you choose to do. It’s not always just, there’s not a magic bullet. “Oh. Let me just drink Aloe. Let me just put Aloe on it.”
[1:53:28] Ashley James: Or using as a tool to speed up healing and decrease inflammation. Like the five things you said: helps blood sugar, it’s helping feed the good gut bacteria, I love the fact that it speeds up healing because if we’re doing everything else right then why not just get in a time where Aloe Vera is like a time machine. Let’s just get in the time machine and get some faster results. In order to get those faster results we have to change, we also want to do stuff at the root level: change the diet, change the lifestyle.
I’m actually really excited for my listeners to try your Aloe Vera because this is the best brand that’s the best quality. Like you said, we can grow our own Aloe plants. Not in all climates, maybe indoors. Spend the time growing them and then squeezing, bleeding the stuff out and then squeezing the gel out ourselves, which we wouldn’t be drinking the amounts that are going to be part of a healing routine. That just needs really cumbersome. So getting your Aloe seems like absolutely the best way to go and I’m really looking forward to hearing from my listeners how implementing your Aloe has helped them.
Now, you’re giving us a special bonus. Listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and with their order they’re going to get your Aloe cream as well which sounds wonderful. That’s made with your special Aloe gel right?
[1:55:01] Dr. Michael Haley: Yes. Absolutely. In fact, 70% of what is in the tube is our Aloe Vera. I didn’t tell you. We’re doing this with a sunscreen that’s coming out soon. It’s going to be a natural formula. I did not know this that pretty much all of your sun protections are mostly water. Ours is going to be zero water. Everywhere water would go we’re putting Aloe.
[1:55:33] Ashley James: That is so cool. The fact that it’s an all-natural. Right now we’re getting into the season where people are flying down south for winter break or spring break. So even though it’s winter up here, so people aren’t necessarily thinking about wearing sunscreen on a day-to-day basis. Many people go down to a tropical area, more sunny area over the holidays. We can all buy your sunscreen especially for when springtime comes. I am very picky when it comes to sunscreen because of how much heavy metals and chemicals and cancer-causing chemicals and also environmentally. There’s some sunscreens that harm the environment as well and kill the coral reef which was just a shock to hear about.
So you have an all-natural sunscreen coming out that is healthy for the body, healthy for the environment and contains Aloe instead of water so it’s medicinal sunscreen. I’m very excited about that.
Now you’re giving our listeners a 10% off coupon. That’s coupon code: LTH. That’s for all of your wonderful products. Your flagship is the Aloe gel that we drink but you have these other products. Tell us a bit about the other products so we know. I know you have some CBD. Tell us about your other Aloe products.
[1:57:01] Dr. Michael Haley: Well, the Aloe products pretty much two skin formula right now until we have the sunscreen as well. The one is the Youth-Derm Aloe Cream which is your plain formula which I recommend for most of our customers. It’s actually the better value. You get a lot more for less money. What’s the other one and why is it so much more expensive for half the amount? It’s more of an anti-aging product with things that I’ll call synergistic ultra-healing ingredients. So we call it the Ultra Healing Youth-Derm Aloe Cream. What do I mean synergistic ultra-healing ingredients? Things like tremella mushroom and shea butter and lavender essential oil and manuka honey with bee venom and propolis. It’s the exquisite formula that people are using for anti-aging.
For our customers, if you are someone with a gut problem and maybe have more sensitivities, go with the plain formula. Keep it simple. You want less things. Even though it’s filled with natural things like the lavender essential oil is organic. Well, that’s just one more thing that you might be sensitive to. So I always want our gut people to know keep it simple on everything. Those are our two main skin formulas.
We have other things. The CBD oil we’re not manufacturing. Again, there’s thousands of brands but only a few really good manufacturers. What we have found in our research is that most of these products don’t work. That bothered me. In fact I was completely down on the industry until I found out the why to that and found out about the differences based on laboratory testing. Even now, if you’ve been watching the news you realize that lots of the CBD products out there not only don’t have the amounts of CBD in them that’s contained on the label but some don’t have any at all.
I actually went and visited the factory in Colorado and got the tour, saw this massive bales coming in which just blew me away. Incredible experience. A robot and the – it was just neat. Well, the final products were very different color, much darker than things I have seen in the past which okay, that color is nutrients, aroma is nutrients. It’s part of a plant. I gave some to my wife. Actually, a sample at the factory. Gave it to my wife and by that night she was saying that her sciatica pain was gone that she has struggled with for so long. I said, “No way,” because I’m still skeptical. There’s no way because everything we’ve tried in the past didn’t do anything. There’s no way or maybe we really landed on something here.
Well, we had them made one that was twice as potent as the one that she had taken at the factory. The results we’ve been getting have been freaky. So how come we were getting no results with trying all these different brands? I understand. I get it. These other ones were very weak. There was not much CBD in them that’s why they didn’t taste like anything, didn’t smell like anything. Here we’re actually getting results. People sleeping better.
I actually injured my shoulder and after two weeks I was screaming. I remember leaving the office one day. I said, my exact words which this is not like me to say something like this. I said, “I’m going home before I shoot myself.” For some reason I thought about it, “wait a second.” I took a dropper-full of the CBD and then I squirt some on my hand from the same bottle and rubbed it on my shoulder. I woke up that night after sleeping for about five hours straight, which was a record in a couple of weeks, I woke up sleeping on the shoulder that hurts so much. I could not have done that. I was struggling to get a comfortable position for two weeks and I woke up and I thought, “Wow. I barely feel it.”
Of course that next day when I went to work, I had another dropper-full because I still only had a tiny tiny bit of pain, never had it again. So this is doing something. The difference is in the quality of the manufacturing what’s really in it and what the lab reports are showing is really in it. CBD works. If you’re trying one and it’s not working, you just don’t have the right product or it’s not the solution to your problem. But we are seeing some amazing results.
Photo by CBD Infos on Unsplash
[2:02:23] Ashley James: It really is you get what you pay for. Buying CBD at the drugstore because it’s now just everywhere. It’s good and bad, right? People say, “Well, why isn’t the supplement industry regulated?” You don’t want it regulated because then the pharmaceutical companies would take over. It is the Wild West, it is buyer beware but that’s really to our advantage if we are smart about it. So we have to hunt for the companies that produce quality and sounds like you found one.
[2:02:56] Dr. Michael Haley: If you’re getting CBD 1000, 1500 or more mg per bottle, understand the difference per bottle. If you got a bottle that says 200 mg you might get confused because you might buy a bottle of ibuprofen that says 200 mg. Guess what, ibuprofen that’s 200 mg per capsule. CBD it’s 200 mg per bottle. “Oh. How many servings are in there?” Well, 30 droppers full and a serving is a whole dropper full. 200 divided by 30 servings, that’s what you’re getting each serving size. Or your issue, okay one option is take five servings at a time then. So you get the serving size that you would if it was a 1000 mg bottle.
[2:03:52] Ashley James: So one problem is the concentration but also the quality because of how the plant I mean it depends on the strain. It depends on how it was grown. Was it indoor? Was it outdoor? Do they use chemicals or natural fertilizer? Was it grown in hydroponics or in soil? All of that plays a role in the medicinal qualities.
[2:04:16] Dr. Michael Haley: How did you take out the THC to make it legal and what else did you take out with it when you did that process?
[2:04:23] Ashley James: Or whether it was hemp or cannabis? Is it whole plant extract like you said? Yeah. There’s so many variation that goes into the quality of the medicine. The more process the more likely we are going to remove things that are medicinal. It’s just the beginning. It’s the Wild West. We’re just at the beginning. It’s very very exciting. It should never have been illegal in the first place. This medicine. It’s all political. So it’s very cool that now hemp is coming back because we can use it for building supplies, food, textiles. It’s so good for the environment and it’s so good for our bodies. I love hemp hearts. I eat them weekly. I cook with them and eat them over salads and smoothies.
[2:05:21] Dr. Michael Haley: They’re delicious.
[2:05:22] Ashley James: Yeah. Full of omegas. So good. I have episodes, we have several episodes just on the endocannabinoid system of the body and understanding that there are receptors in the body for CBD that our body actually makes it. When we’re deficient and healthy fats our body can’t make it enough of it. That’s why people such good benefits from taking it externally because it’s a nutrient the body is deficient in and that blew my mind. Yeah. It’s wonderful. I’m really glad that you found a quality source of CBD.
So you sell the tinctures, you sell any creams or salves? How does that work?
[2:06:01] Dr. Michael Haley: No. we just have the ingestible in the dropper. Why? Well, my experience I realized that we don’t have to make it in a wonderful cream because you can use it topically or ingest it. You know what I mean? It’s the same thing either way. What is it when we make it a topical? Well we use the same stuff and we just mix it with other things which really dilutes it.
[2:06:26] Ashley James: No need to.
[2:06:27] Dr. Michael Haley: To me it’s pointless. If you want to use it topically just use it topically.
[2:06:32] Ashley James: Right and we could take your Aloe Vera cream which is 70% Aloe Vera gel and mix it in with the CBD and rub it somewhere if we wanted to or just ingest it. Very cool. I love it. Is there anything else we should know about the products that you sell or about being a customer? The experience being a customer with you that we should know about.
[2:06:53] Dr. Michael Haley: I am available to answer questions. We have a wonderful staff that answers most questions. When it gets in the medical questions they put it through to me. You’re listeners, you have access to get your medical questions answered. What products you should use and how much and things like that. Feel free to call.
[2:07:18] Ashley James: Awesome. Awesome. The listeners can go to learntruehealth.com/aloe to get the special gift that you’re giving Learn True Health listeners. Thank you so much for that. Use the coupon code: LTH for 10% off for your first purchase. I greatly appreciate your generosity today both of your time and also the discount and the free gift that you’re giving us. Dr. Haley, is there anything else that you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[2:07:43] Dr. Michael Haley: I want to thank you for all that you are doing because your listeners are getting a wealth of information. I can’t believe who you have interviewed in the past and how much quality content is there on your channel. So thank you for everything that you are doing.
[2:08:01] Outro: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview as much as I did. Go to learntruehealth.com/aloe. That’s learntruehealth.com/aloe. He’s giving us a free cream that is very healing as well as his particular juice. Use the coupon code: LTH for an additional discount for the Learn True Health listeners. So go to learntruehealth.com/aloe and use the coupon code LTH.
Thank you so much for being a wonderful listener. Be sure to join the Facebook group if you haven’t already. We have over 3500 excellent, wonderful, amazing Learn True Health followers, true health seekers. Together we create a beautiful community that is very supportive and loving. So coming into 2020, launching your health to a whole new level. If you want a wonderfully supportive community, come join us. Learn True Health on Facebook. Join the group and ask questions and join the discussion. I’d love to see you there. Have a fantastic rest of your day.
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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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