Avoiding and Reversing Disease Through Alternative Health Therapies with John Bergman

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Hello and welcome to Get Yourself Optimized! I’m your host Stephan Spencer, and today my guest is Dr. John Bergman. He’s amazing. I’m so excited to have him on the show today. He has been my chiropractor for many months now. He has done an amazing job for me. He was highly recommended by several previous guests on my show including Jaiya and also including Jay and Joy, the Jingslingers, so I couldn’t say no to going to go see Dr. Bergman, and he’s already had a profound impact on my spinal health but not just my spinal health. Everything is interconnected and he is just a genius on a lot of alternative therapies, different ways of dealing with disease, and maintaining health. We’re going to talk about some of the various popular diseases, and the allopathic approach, and how that might not best serve you. We’re going to talk about all sorts of powerful secrets to unlock your best physiology and your best health.

Dr. John Bergman is the author of 11 books, 3 of them are Amazon bestsellers, they include How to Reverse Arthritis Naturally and How to Correct Blood Pressure Without Drugs, and How to Correct Fibromyalgia. He has a practice in Huntington Beach, California, but his patients travel all over the world to see him, including Switzerland and Dubai. I travel from Santa Monica, which can be an hour and a half depending on traffic, some days even two hours each way, totally worth it, and going on a regular basis, getting multiple adjustments per week, absolutely worth it. He gives weekly health talks, and these are broadcast on his Youtube channel, which is very popular. Many of his videos have hundreds of thousands of views. He has a show on blog talk radio. He has an annual health cruise, like a week-long cruise that is chock full of powerful content. He speaks, he brings amazing guest speakers. He in general travels quite regularly, teaching. Many of his weekends he’s on the road to various exotic locations such as Toronto and Florida within the last month, he’ll be in Chicago in a couple of weeks, he makes the rounds. So with all that, welcome to the show, John.

Thank you so much for inviting me out here. To get this information out is vital, we’re going to actually change the world.

Yes, we’re going to save some lives today. So let’s start off with the thing that people travel the world to get worked on with you, and that’s their spinal health.

So a lot of people don’t understand the power of Chiropractic and why they would need it. They don’t necessarily have back problems or nothing debilitating, they might have stiffness or whatever but it’s not like “wow I really need to get seen because I have this major chronic illness”-which is usually the way you end up getting seen by a doctor or a health practitioner is you’ve got something that’s become basically debilitating. It’s not so much health maintenance, it’s more like we got to fix a symptom. So, let’s talk about the spine, how it works, how it’s core to your overall health, we’ll talk about sub exactions and all that, so let’s give a little primer to our listeners about spinal health.

Yeah, the biggest thing is the nervous system, and you literally live your life through the nervous system. It’s really more like adaptive physiology. Now let’s say that you’ve got some type of physical, chemical, or emotional stress. Your body is going to respond correctly to that, and the body is self-healing and self-regulating. Let’s say you’re dealing with traffic. Your body is going to go into this flight or fight mechanism, and you basically have two nervous systems that are called Autonomic or Automatic nervous system, and so the spinal health is really secondary to that healthy nervous system. If you’re in a flight or fight state, or what’s called a sympathetic dominant state, your body is going to get ready for battle. You literally have blood that flows from the organ system to the extremities. Your heart rate is going to be elevated, your liver is going to start to break down more glycogen and glucose, so energy level goes up. And since you’re in a stress state, blood supply to the gut is going to be shut down, and this is a normal physiological response. This is how your body is supposed to function.

The problem is, if someone is in a chronic stress state, they are going to be misdiagnosed with high blood pressure, or high blood sugar, or they’re going to have chronic gastrointestinal problems such as leaky gut or diverticulitis. Their reproductive organs are also going to be altered, which like endometriosis, or difficult menstrual cycles. There’s going to be all sorts of different physiologies that are misdiagnosed today in healthcare as pathologies like high blood pressure, high cholesterol-those are not diseases. Those are adaptive physiologies by your normal response to stress. That’s why most people come to see me, to find the physical, chemical, or emotional stressors and balance out their nervous system.

Right, so many folks will not necessarily know what the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems are about, so without them having to get a degree in medicine, what’s a quick little differentiator between those two?

Kind of like the best way to do it is those systems are always activated. The parasympathetic is also called the rest digestion repair mode, and that’s generally activated at night. And the sympathetic, which is also called the flight or fight, is generally activated during the day, generally. Now you need both of these systems to work in harmony, for you to survive on the planet. Now the immune system is governed by the parasympathetic, which is also, its got a location in the body. It’s also called cranial sacro which means-now I taught human dissection and anatomy for eight years and I could take a cadaver and show you exactly where this parasympathetic rest and digest system is. Its actually located in the sacrum, which is right around your butt area, at the base of the spine, and also in the upper neck area. Now what’s interesting is, if this area is impinged, and that’s what subluxation is, where the bones are slightly misaligned and they can alter the function of the nervous system.

So imagine if you work at say a computer. You’re going to be sitting on your butt and your head is going to be forward. Those are two things that can impinge or negatively affect parasympathetic activity. And when you say negatively affect that, oh my gosh, you’re talking, you’re altering nerve supply to the gut area, you’re altering nerve supply to the immune system, you’re literally limiting how you’re body digests and processed nutrients. This causes a long-term devastating effect. So people with sedentary lifestyles or office jobs, they’ll typically come into me misdiagnosed with chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or higher blood pressure or high cholesterol. And we look at the nervous system, which controls those systems, and find the impingement or the abnormal function. And the sympathetic nervous system is located in the middle of the ribcage area. And so any trauma to that area, such as the top of the rib cage area, that’s the nerve supply to the heart. So typically cardiac arrhythmias, chest pain, even heart attacks have their origins in altered nerve supply.

Wow, this is serious business. We need to make sure that we take care of our nervous system because the ripple effect that it can have on our health is very serious. Actually, one thing that I forgot to mention in your bio that I definitely want to highlight is, you just didn’t make a decision one day, “oh I think I’m going to get into chiropractic and help save some lives” you had a major accident. Could you share a little bit about what happened with that, it was an auto accident, you had broken both of your legs, had organ injuries and so forth and that really started you on this journey of looking into health and alternative therapies and chiropractic and so forth. Let’s share with our listeners a bit more about that.

Oh yeah, that was, what I thought was devastating, but it was really an enlightening action. I’m walking across the street and I was literally hit by a car and had my legs broken, sternum fractured, a bunch of organs bruised. So I got a chance to see the philosophy of the different systems. Now the medical system is the best in the world in emergency. They kept me alive, they patched me up. However, their therapies, to get me to work better, was non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, like Advil, Motrin, Aleve to decrease some of the symptoms. And then they did some operations on my knees and the first one felt good and the next one felt unstable and the third one felt more unstable, and the fourth operation it felt more unstable, and I started to think well, just common sense when they’re operating, they’re not putting stuff in-they’re taking stuff out. So the lack of stability I was feeling kind of made sense. And then I was seeing a chiropractor at the time and he said “no, your body is designed for health, health is your natural state, and your knees and everything will regenerate if you have a healthy immune system and a healthy nervous system.

So I’m getting these two massively different philosophies. And so I thought, I gotta study this. I respected my medical doctors, I respected my chiropractor, one of them had to be right. Then when I found out that the drugs that the medical system was giving me to decrease my symptoms, the Advil, the Motrin, the Aleve, the ibuprofen, those inhibit what’s called proteoglycans, inhibit the building block of cartilage, and that was like a light bulb moment. I thought, “oh my gosh, they’re giving me a drug that destroys my body’s ability to heal so that I could be more comfortable, while my body decays. That was, that was just impossible. So I decided to go back to school, and I was drawn towards Chiropractic because they kept on telling me my body will heal. When I got to human dissection class, it was, the world opened up, and I started to dissect different parts of the body such as the knee joints and the hip joints I mean everything. Then I realized that arthritis is not decay or degeneration even though its called degenerative joint disease, its actually adaptive physiology, where your body is adapting to instability and laying down extra bone.

And I’m looking at arthritis in 20-year-old cadavers and no arthritis in 80-year-old cadavers. So the one thing the medical world says is that as you age your body decays. And that’s not true, it’s totally not true. And so then I started to look further into this, that the body is constantly regenerating joints. If you take a joint out of an 80-year-old person, that joint is only about 14 months old. So the body is continuously regenerating bones, it’s regenerating cartilage, it’s regenerating discs, and all the structures of the body including organ systems. So then I thought, what if we came up with a way that we could re-generate every joint in the body, every nervous system, every organ system, is that even possible? And then, sure enough, I developed certain techniques. I went to the diplomat of neurology and that was completely enlightening. I realized to regenerate joints, to reverse arthritis, you had to cause inflammation. And when I talked to some of my friends who were medical doctors it was almost like I’m telling them the world’s round when they believe the world was flat. To reverse arthritis you got to cause a healthy inflammatory response of the joints and you can literally reverse arthritis.

Wow, and many people don’t understand what the point is of inflammation. It’s an important health response to a stressor, to a problem. So what is healthy inflammation and what’s unhealthy inflammation?

Stephan that is the best question in the world! Oh my god, just to get people to realize that there is a healthy inflammatory response. And you can look at inflammation in every aspect. So the way the body regenerates, if you look at just like two main cells, like let’s say we take cytokine 6 and those are types of cells that are involved in inflammation. And let’s take the other cells, called Cytokine 10, and there are hundreds of different cytokines but let’s just take those two for example. The cytokine 10 literally rebuilds tissue, and this could be inside the gut. Let’s take Ulcerative Colitis for one. Ulcerative colitis means there’s been some type of an inflammatory response, some type of damage to the tissue. And this is typically systemic inflammation, and what systemic inflammation is, is the body starts to get pathogens, or trauma, or things that are starting to break down tissue throughout the entire body and that’s a pathological or systemic inflammatory response.

The things that can cause that-the analogy I use is that I used to have an old torture, called “The Death of a Thousand Cuts” and you can physically repair 100 small cuts, you can repair maybe 500 small cuts, but at a death of a thousand cuts means the inflammatory response you’re experiencing from the tissue damage has exceeded your body’s ability to repair. So when you start looking at, take ulcerative colitis, you want to increase inflammation of the intestinal tract so the body can heal. But what are the common therapies used for ulcerative colitis? First, they give you an anti-inflammatory, and again that stops the body’s ability to repair. Then, they give you a steroid which weakens the body’s ability to regenerate your tissues, but it makes you feel more comfortable. So they’re stopping the body’s ability to repair in order to make you more comfortable. And our approach to ulcerative colitis and this is extremely common, and I bring this up because I’m seeing more and more younger patients with this disease that used to affect only adults. It’s funny I just had two patients in the last couple of months, eight years old and ten years old, one was from Colorado and the other one was from Chicago, both with ulcerative colitis. And I mean here are these kids, they’ve been pooping blood for like three and five years, almost half of their lives.

Our approach is first, you live your life through the nervous system, knowing that they sympathetic, or that rest digest and repair mode initiates and helps nerve supply to the intestinal tract, it helps the immune system we start to look for the imbalance in the nervous system. And knowing that that imbalance is going to either limit tissue repair or initiate tissue repair, so you literally watch the body regenerate healthy tissue in an area that it wasn’t able to. The results are phenomenal, we had this one kid, eight years old, within two days his bleeding had stopped, and it was only because we got his nervous system starting to balance. We put hot packs on his tummy area to increase inflammation. And also what would he do? If you look at this, we’re going to increase blood supply, we’re going to increase nerve supply, they’re called macrophage, these are little tiny cells that eat up abnormally placed tissue, viruses, funguses, and bacteria die at a higher temperature so if there’s any virus, fungus, or bacteria, leading to this poor kid’s problem, they’re going to die at the higher temperature. Within two days of getting his nervous system healthy, doing the most heat his bleeding had stopped, he got healthy fast, his gut was healed within about two weeks, and the kid is fine.

That’s amazing. And that gets me thinking about, a lot of people try and stop, not only inflammation but they try and stop fevers. And again, this is an important body response, it’s potentially there to help them. And yet, they suppress that with various headache medicines and that’s not necessarily what they need right then and there.

The body is smart.

Oh my god, absolutely. And you’re even seeing the medical community wake up because the whole idea of the allopathic approach or the medical approach is if you have a symptom, then you alter the physiology to correct that symptom, and fevers, for every one-degree increase in temperature, the speed of the immune system doubles. So if you have somebody with a 102 fever, that’s a 64 times faster immune system. And even there are certain thermo therapies that they’re doing in Israel and Mexico where you heat the body up to 107 degrees and you literally can wipe out certain cancer cells. And you can also do it locally, they’re doing for leukemia, they’re heating up the blood and pumping it back into the person. And it’s wiping out certain blood-borne diseases. So we’re starting to realize that the body is smart. And if we work with the processes of the body most diseases can be reversed.

Amazing, so we have fever inducing therapies of sorts as you described, there is also Cryotherapy which many folks will have heard of. You go into a machine that, it’s like standing on the surface of Neptune or something, it’s -200 degrees, something of that sort for a couple of minutes, have you done that?

I haven’t done it, but I’ve suggested it in certain cases, but you have to have heat before, then cryo, then heat. And what this does, this causes a massive constriction of the blood vessels, but it also causes the blood flow to change. And it puts you in a certain nervous system state that can stimulate areas of the nervous system and increase lymph flow and lymph is kind of like the sewer system of the body. It doesn’t have a pump like the blood has a pump, you’ve got the heart and it flows the blood cells and the capillaries and it flows back in the veins. But the lymph is kind of static and it only flows through movement. One of the things that a lot of people have is lack of movement. And this forces the body to get rid or remove that stasis or that stillness of that toxic fluid out of the system.

One thing you can do as part of your morning routine is getting a rebounder, a small trampoline, and jump on it, as a way to move the lymph around, do some lymphasizing first thing in the morning.

Oh yeah, that’s fantastic, we recommend that all the time, and that’s even really good for osteoporosis.

Gotcha, so let’s talk about that for a minute. So that’s a severe problem for the elderly. They break a hip and they typically go downhill and end up dying from it because it sets off this cascade of lack of health and I’ll let you elaborate more on that in a more medically correct way but how does one prevent the osteoporosis from happening in the first place, or somebody who already has the initial stages, building bone density, what are some of the approaches that you would recommend?

The neat part with osteoporosis is that its correctable so quickly, the problem is the cause of osteoporosis is virtually completely ignored in the medical community. They think it’s a disease of the elderly and its really not, I’ve had 16-, 17-year-old kids that have osteoporotic fractures, and it’s just like wait a second, how could this possibly be. Well when you look at the structure of bones, and this is going to sound odd, they’re phenomenally flexible, and they have cells that live on the bone, ones that are called osteoblasts and the other are osteoclasts and one lays down bone tissue and the other breaks up bone tissue. You need this constant remodeling of the bone in order to maintain integrity. Now if your blood is acidic, and acidic blood could be from lack of water, it could be from a diet that’s like the standard American diet which is high in fast food or processed food, or let’s say you do something crazy like take medication. The average person over 60 in America is taking at least 12 prescriptions, so you get this acidic toxic blood.

You need constant remodeling of the bone in order to maintain integrity.

Well, the body has to live off of a very narrow pH, and this is the acid-based balance of the blood so in order to maintain that acid-based balance of the blood to maintain life it has to go to the bone bank and withdraw calcium. Calcium is a positive ion so it will alkalinize the blood. So you get people with this incredibly toxic deficient acidic blood and the body is obviously going to withdraw some calcium and then that’s going to cause a thinning of the blood, or a thinning of the bones. Now in the insane world, the medical people will provide a drug called the bisphosphonate, which is Boniva or Fosamax, and even on the label, they say don’t take this drug for longer than five years cause it can increase fracture rates.

And I don’t know if common sense is working yet but if you give a drug to someone who has thin bones, that’s going to increase their fracture rates, that doesn’t make any sense at all. What those drugs do is they actually stop the activity of the osteoblasts and osteoclasts so the bones appear thicker on a densimeter, however its like building chalk, so instead of having the strong, flexible, almost like a tree limb type bone that’s flexible and strong, you turn it into something that under a force load, it breaks. It literally turns it brittle. So the way to solve osteoporosis is to correct the acidity of the blood, and this could be a simple as digestive enzymes to help break down healthy nutrients, a plant-based diet to where they’re only eating healthy animals once a week to once a month, increasing their water, and increasing their activity level to such a simple level like walking a half-hour a day or like you suggested, rebounder, phenomenal. And you’ll literally reverse osteoporosis in between 30 and 90 days

Conventional wisdom says that milk is a good thing for building calcium and that could be helpful for somebody with osteoporosis, that’s not actually true!

Yeah, I love those milk mustache commercials. What’s unusual is traditional raw milk from a cow in the wintertime you can actually get a lot of helpful nutrients from it. It is not a good bone builder. But you can get healthy fats that will help with hormone production. Raw milk, and from a healthy animal, is good. The problem is what we’re exposed to is a completely toxic product.

What they used to do when the milkman would come, he would bring you the glass jars and the milk, and the people that would get the milk would look at the cream that’s at the top because cream would always float. And if there was a lot of cream, the milkman was nice to you, if there was little cream, the milkman was gypping you. What they finally found is that you can blast the milk into a stainless steel plate at 5000 psi and break up those fat globules so it would homogenize the milk, it would blend the fat globules where you turn these healthy globules of fat into something that can damage the arteries.

And if you take the commercially produced, homogenized milk, it is going to literally cause that systemic inflammatory response that we talked about that can be bad for the immune system and bad for the nervous system. Then, you pasteurize it and then that kills the healthy enzymes in the milk and the healthy bacteria. Now let’s say you got the milk – because animals, cows, human beings, they only give milk for a short period of time after they are pregnant and after they give birth. Well, in modern – and that’s why milk cows would live about 20 – 25 years before the advent of these modern milk-production facilities. Now the cows die after about 5 or 6 years because we give them these massive amounts of hormones to have them produce milk no matter what. So now you get this hormone-laden milk product in America that we can’t even sell in other countries because it is so poisonous and so damaging to the physiology. Modern milk products are devastating. This is why if you are going to drink milk, you should at least make sure it is organic, non-homogenized, or at best bet, is raw. This is why you should always look for raw cheeses. That’s a product that is going to be beneficial.

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Gotcha, and if somebody is taking protein powders, like when I make a protein shake, I am using grass-fed whey protein and really high quality. And you mentioned, make sure it comes from healthy animals because what you do and put in your body when it comes from animals, then they end up with acidosis, they have to be treated with antibiotics or they die from being fed all the grain, which they are not supposed to be eating, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, you don’t need a lot of protein. The protein you need about 5 – 7% of your diet as protein. And protein is kind of unusual. A plant-based protein is much better for you to ingest than an animal protein base source. Because plant-based, you can actually get better absorption of it. Your body only requires 5 – 7% and you find out that everything has protein in it. Grass has protein, cauliflower has about 30% protein in it. If you want to really protein up, do a plate of sauteed cauliflower. You’ll be amazed because there are a couple of studies. One of them is called The China Study. This is the biggest study the world has ever seen. You’re talking about a billion people studied, there are about 800,000 researchers over 40 years, and they found out the healthiest diet on the planet is plant-based.

So protein shake, if you want protein, great. A pea-based protein, a rice-based protein from – Sun Warrior is a good brand. Or an animal-based form such as gelatin, one of the best ones we recommend is Great Lakes gelatin, you can get it online, and this gives you complex amino acids that are already broken down, so it doesn’t take a lot of stomach acid to break them into the amino acids, and that’s the biggest kick. To utilize nutrients, we have to break them down. To utilize carbohydrates, they have to be broken down into sugars. Fats have to be broken down into fatty acids. And proteins have to be broken down into amino acids. If you get the standard person bulking up on protein and eating a steak, it’s really hard to break that steak down into the amino acids. So it typically doesn’t really have a beneficial effect. This is why like the Atkins diets that were really high in animal protein and animal fat, it is really hard to break those down so you end up with almost what’s called protein starvation, so it causes your body more energy to break it up. However, those type of diets tend to tax the kidneys a lot, and that’s not healthy.

A plant-based protein is much better for you to ingest than an animal protein base source.

Right, it causes ketosis, correct?

Right, and oh, yeah, yeah, that’s not healthy. Actually, there are some keystone-based diets for certain diseases that are out of this world, that are super high in fats. And we use a lot of those with our really neurologic vaccine-damaged kids. And with the vaccine damage that is going on in our society with our children, in particular, we use a lot of healthy, high-dose fats such as coconut oil or palm oil and we are seeing phenomenal results in them being able to recover certain aspects of their brain function.

Yeah, coconut oil is great. And definitely come back to the topic of vaccines because that is an important one. But going back to protein intake – what about collagen powder?

As long as it is from a healthy source.

We talked about having acidic blood and how that is not healthy, it creates this imbalance in your system. How would you recommend somebody keeps track of their blood pH? Do they do a blood test? Do they pee on a pH stick and kind of get an idea that way, but it is not really their blood? What do you recommend there?

This is kind of a thing for all tests because blood tests are really inaccurate. A live blood cell analysis is accurate, but even then – because a blood test or a saliva sample test – those are just a snapshot in time. Any test is going to have you alter your approach or alter your therapies then do the test. But when it comes to blood acidity, assume you are acidic, then go on a plant-based diet, eat nothing but organic food, take 50% of your body weight in healthy water every day, and your system is going to alkalinize, it really will.

In fact, I take alkaline water, that’s all I drink. We have a local place called Beyond 02 and that’s where we get our water, it’s all ph9 or something so yeah, that’s just the water that we drink. It’s alkaline water, some people have a machine, that – oh, what’s the name of that machine – Kanga. So listeners, really pay attention to what you are putting into your system. Alkaline water, healthy fats, the Wesson oil that’s all clear and pretty looking that’s been essentially draino-ed and bleached, that’s not really good for you, from what I understand.

Polyunsaturated fats causes high blood pressure to adapt to the sick, toxic blood.

Yeah, all those vegetable oils, corn oil, soy, canola oil, even flax oil unless it is ground fresh. Those can rancidify. Those are basically polyunsaturated fats and that slows down the thyroid, it can cause a systemic inflammatory response, but it also clumps blood cells together and that can give you high blood pressure because if your blood is not healthy, there’s a function of blood where you have got to – blood has to carry oxygen, deliver nutrients, and eliminate waste products. So if you have a diet high in polyunsaturated fats like corn oil, canola oil, soy oil, then blood pressure has to increase in order to adapt to that sick, toxic blood.

So coconut oil is really good for you, in what sort of quantity? Do you take a couple of teaspoons a day? I hear that is good for your brain health, for somebody with Alzheimer’s, that might be a therapy to offer your loved one. How much coconut oil, and what sort of uses?

Well, what’s neat is when it comes to a kind of candida or fungal infection, we’ll recommend 10 to 15 tablespoons a day depending on a person. For Alzheimer’s or brain damage, particularly when you look at kids and with a lot of kids who have damage like that, even with adults, they are very sensitive with food. We’ll say, “Look, give the kid a half a pint of coconut plant-based ice cream. And make sure there is no carrageenan which is a preservative that is not good for you.” To give a kid ice cream as therapy knowing that healthy fats can help heal is the brain – oh my gosh. I get good compliance.

I bet. So we briefly glazed over this concept of live blood analysis. Could you elaborate a bit more on that?

If you’ve never done one, you need to get one. And it is very hard to find a practitioner that does it. Typically you’re going to find a Naturopath we have a Naturopath that comes by our office every other month. He’s busy literally from dawn to dusk. But they take one drop of blood and they put it under a microscope and they blast it up on a screen so you see what the blood is doing. In one drop of blood, you’ll see the blood cells all moving in one direction. You’ll see macrophages, you’ll see white blood cells. From this, you can actually see what the body is doing inside itself. For me, it was enlightening, because I was doing about two and a half liters of water a day and I was healthy, and I found out that my blood cells were sticking together, and I thought “Oh my gosh, I’m dehydrated!” So I had to increase even my water intake, which was enlightening to myself. But it is the only way to identify the real function of the body and even nutrient deficiencies.

Yeah, I’ve had it done multiple times and it is amazing the impact of just cutting sugar out of your diet for example, because the impact on your lifeblood is noticeable when they show it to you under a microscope that you end up feeding these nasties in your blood and there’s a lot more of them. Where you cut sugar out of your diet and in pretty short order next time you get your live blood analysis done, your blood health is markedly better. I actually cut sugar out of my diet for the most part – I don’t have desserts or anything. I did have a small piece of cake on my birthday. Other than that, I don’t have any desserts since July, and it is December now. That’s pretty good for someone who was a sugarholic. Do you have any thoughts on sugar intake?

Oh yeah, sugar intake, almost everything turns into carbohydrates. The thing about people who eat sugar is they are typically craving more energy, their body has like a digestive tract not breaking down long term energy. And if you put them on like a coconut fat-based diet where they are getting healthy amounts of healthy fats, that’s a long-term energy source and that can satisfy a lot of their cravings. But the simple sugars are absolutely horrible. However, healthy sugars, oh my gosh, when you look at the benefits of organic coffee with a simple carbohydrate, it’s phenomenal for thyroid function, for adrenal function, it’s incredible. There are certain benefits to some simple carbohydrates or energy sources that’s something that’s a stimulant, like coffee with organic sugar is actually beneficial.

Right, or if you are making a healthy smoothie or shake in the morning, putting a date in there can be a great healthy sugar for you.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah. Cool. You mentioned cranial sacral a bit ago, there’s a whole therapy around that, I’ve gotten some amazing cranial sacral therapy. In fact, one of our previous guests, Tim Hodges, talked about cranial sacral therapy. What’s your take on it?

Anything that is going to stimulate the nervous system is going to affect the body long-term.

It’s actually really, really good in a lot of different areas, and anything that is going to stimulate the nervous system is going to affect the body long-term. A lot of times, people don’t pay attention to that. The only part that it’s missing, because it’s got like a piece of the puzzle, but if let’s say the pelvis is unstable, or a person sits a lot, they don’t really get into the biomechanics of feet, or the knees, or the legs, or the stability of the pelvis in order to maintain the correction. Aside from that, the cranial sacral therapy, we use it for Parkinson’s patients, for ADD, ADHD, Endometriosis, difficult menstrual cycles, virtually every gastrointestinal problem. It is one of the most valuable therapies out there.

People who sit a lot, and I sit a lot, I also have now standing desk so I will go out of my way to crank it up to make sure I am standing for a while and get back into sitting after I am tired of standing. Right now, while we are recording this, I am standing at my standing desk. Do you have a standing desk, or do you recommend them?

I definitely recommend them, but I’m not at the desk long enough for me to sit or stand.

Gotcha, and what about adrenal stress with our busy, hectic lifestyles and always running around, because I run around a lot too, as you do. How do you address adrenal stress?

What’s neat is when you look at the adrenals, they’re the pharmacy of the body, and this is something that there’s not really an accurate blood test to show adrenal stress, and if you look at the standard medical world, they won’t even address it. Look at the main function of the adrenals, they produce every glucocorticoid steroid, every menica corticosteroid, every sex hormone, I mean-these little organs, they produce estrogen, they produce progesterone, they produce cortisol. And cortisol is the greatest anti-inflammatory ever. Now the material that the adrenals produce every hormone out of, it’s cholesterol. And cholesterol is mainly manufactured and stored in the liver. People with high cholesterol actually have a systemic inflammatory response, or adrenal stress. In the, how many millions of people are taking cholesterol drugs, it’s not really high cholesterol that’s an issue, it’s adrenal fatigue or damage. And this is also where a lot of thyroids are misdiagnosed as low functioning thyroid.

Now, let’s just take, for example, let’s say someone has a toxic lifestyle where they’re eating processed foods, polyunsaturated fats, or they are taking medication that’s going to cause a systemic inflammatory response. Well, the body is going to go to the adrenals to have it make cortisol, and cortisol is the best anti-inflammatory known, and when you start looking at this, the cholesterol is going to go up, the thyroid is going to go down because cortisol decreases the thyroid. And the person is going to feel low energy, they’re going to feel tired, they’re going to go to the standard medical doctor and he’s going to give them Synthroid and diagnose them with a low functioning thyroid. That’s absolutely not true, it’s all adrenal stress. To solve adrenal stress, you have to go back to the nervous system, you’ve got to check the parasympathetic, that cranial sacral area, you’ve got to check the sympathetic, find out where the stressors are, you’ve got to check the gut to make sure they are getting healthy nutrients, you know, healthy fats, healthy carbohydrates, healthy proteins. And then, make sure they have a normal functioning organ system, a normal functioning thyroid, and then the adrenals are going to work just fine because the adrenal stress only-and I’m talking over 90% of the time-comes from some type of systemic inflammatory response.

Now you mentioned thyroids. Iodine is a good thing to take apparently if you are needing to boost your thyroid health.

The quality of your life depends on the quality of the questions you ask.

Oh, absolutely, and there’s like an iodine phobia in the medical world. We used to have, in fact, in the bread, they used to use iodine in bread making. There’s a thing called the goiter belt around the Great Lakes that all these people were using land-based salts without sea salt and their thyroid would swell up and be negatively affected. People are afraid now, particularly in the medical community, if you have a hyper-thyroid to give iodine. Well, the body’s not stupid, if you give the body a nutrient it’s not going to use that nutrient to make an excessive amount of thyroid hormone, so iodine is absolutely essential for a healthy thyroid function, but you have to look at what causes a depressed thyroid function first. Polyunsaturated fats, that depresses the thyroid, so corn oil, canola oil, soy oil, soy products will depress the thyroid, and again, inflammation will depress the thyroid. So instead of just passing out a drug for the heck of it, the quality of your life depends on the quality of the questions you ask. If you ask the doctor, particularly the 35-55-year-old person who goes to the medical doctor who’s feeling low energy, and they say “Oh man, you’ve got a low functioning thyroid, here-take this Synthroid, or take this drug”, you know, ask why. Why did my bodywork fine for the first 30 or 50 years, and now it’s not working right? If the doctor can’t answer that question, fire the doctor.

These doctors are also giving cholesterol-lowering medicines, like I was given Statens, so yeah, this is just a big problem. I’m off of the Staten drugs, and I’ve changed my diet, I’ve also incorporated iodine into my daily intake of vitamins and minerals and so forth. What would you tell people who are on Staten type drugs or cholesterol-lowering meds?

Oh, get educated immediately, and stop them. Because, if the medical system is giving you a drug to alter your physiology without taking into account why your body requires higher cholesterol, that guy’s just-he’s not a physician. He’s a drug pusher. Cholesterol-lowering drugs are one of the biggest crimes against humanity because, for one thing, your body requires cholesterol. If you are taking a cholesterol drug you have a 30% increased risk of diabetes, you have a 40% increased risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia, this is going to alter your hormone production, it’s going to alter your ability to adapt to any inflammatory condition. There is one good book called The Cholesterol Myth, which is brilliant, there’s a video called The Statin Nation and it details out how this was an invented disease. It’s just mind-boggling that these popular drugs have no basis in science. When you look at it, there is no data that a cholesterol-lowering drug will make you live longer, healthier, or have less heart disease, and cholesterol doesn’t even clog arteries, or it doesn’t clog veins. If it clogged arteries, we’d be walking around with black fingers and toes.

Right, so it’s like there’s a correlation, but there’s no causation. And back in the day, they had to decide between do we lower fats, or do we lower sugars, which one is the devil here, and they picked the wrong one. We talked a bit about some different diseases, kind of in passing, like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, leaky gut, Fibromyalgia, heart disease, and so forth. Let’s go through kind of a lightning round of each, some of these different diseases that we haven’t gone into much detail. Some we did, I think sufficient coverage of ulcerative colitis. Kind of in a lightning round here, what would you recommend for someone with diabetes do?

95% of all diabetics are type 2. Realize that that’s a response, an intelligent response, to toxic, deficient lifestyle. It’s 100% curable, and I mean curable, check out Dr. Gabriel Cousins, he’s got a good protocol but he is a little restrictive, you to go to a plant-based diet, eliminate all animal products, find out why your body’s increasing in energy and one of the main causes of diabetes type 2 is going to be toxic food and medications. Cholesterol drugs will increase Type 2 Diabetes, blood pressure drugs will increase Type 2 Diabetes, and toxic food will increase Type 2 Diabetes. To treat it with drugs like Metformin or Glucophage, you actually increase death if you are lowering blood glucose with a drug. It turns out that those drugs do lower glucose and you’ll look better when you check your blood sugar, however, insulin levels remain high and there’s an increase in death if you try to alter blood sugar with a drug like Metformin or Glucophage. So, find the problem, fix it.

Wow. How about cancer? Because that’s the major killer.

It’s extremely popular now. When you look at it, they just renamed two of the most popular cancers in 2013. One of them, Ductal Carcinoma in Situ, and that’s breast cancer, and the other is high–grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia, boy that’s a mouthful, and that’s prostate cancer. They just renamed both of those, no longer cancer. And when I’m reading the article on it, I’m going, wait a second, how can you, how can the authorities on high come down off of their mountain and rename it not cancer. Well, they said cancer should be reserved, the term cancer, for something that will kill you or metastasize. So this means 1.3 million women have had their breasts cut off, were exposed to radiation or chemotherapy, which increases secondary cancers, for something that wouldn’t harm them in the first place. So realize that cancer is a temporary state of the body, and your body can do it by strengthening the immune system. There are thousands of cancer therapies out there that are effective in eliminating cancer. The ones that are not, or in this country, are chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation.

In fact, they are so ineffective in eliminating cancer, that they put an arbitrary five-year mark that if you survive cancer therapies-the standard chemotherapy radiation-for five years, then you were considered cured. So look, if you have cancer, look at the cause, which is going to be a toxic deficient lifestyle, it’s not hereditary, and look for the source of it, because if you are taking say, high animal products or high meats, high chickens, things like that, if you take chicken that’s not organic, that stuff has been exposed to what’s called a cold pasteurization product which creates benzene, and that’s a cancer-causing agent. If you take drugs that limit your body’s immune system response, that increases cancer. If you take flu shots, flu shots were changed back in 2013 to where they are injecting you with neoplastic cell growth, they are injecting you with cancer cells. A number of vaccines are made with cancer cells. To eliminate the cancer-causing agents, look for the actual solutions, and I mean the real doctors that are causing solutions.

Right, and in fact we all have cancer cells floating around in our blood and our immune system takes care of that. If our immune system is compromised, that’s when cancer can really set it, from my understanding.

Cancer is a normal occurrence in the body and with a healthy immune system, it never becomes a problem.

Absolutely. And Stephan, I wish more people understood that cancer is a normal occurrence in the body and with a healthy immune system, it never becomes a problem. And so it’s really an immune system issue, and all you’ve got to do is strengthen the immune system and the body takes care of it. A good person to look at is when I started to get into cancer research, Dr. Lorraine Day, and her website is drday.com, she had a teacher in a medical college, head of Orthopedic Surgery at San Francisco Memorial, developed breast cancer that metastasized to her chest wall and lung. She cured herself using no radiation, no chemotherapy, no deep surgeries, I mean, amazing. And when I read her book and listened to her tapes, the solution was beyond simple, there was no exotic herb or anything else, you allow your immune system to function correctly and it goes away.

Alright, let’s keep going with this lightning round – Alzheimer’s

Yeah, a plague on our population now which never needed to occur. The brain needs stimulus and it needs nutrients. If you lower oxygen to the brain, it’s not going to function correctly. So this means blood pressure and cholesterol drugs are leading to Alzheimer’s. Unhealthy fats, such as corn, canola, and soy oil are leading to altered brain function. If you look at unhealthy stimulants where these people are not getting movement, it actually causes the brain to function correctly. The brain functions like a battery. So alterations and movement, chemicals assaulting the brain, aluminum, which is in virtually every vaccine around actually can cross the blood-brain barrier and leave deposits in the brain, causing brain damage. So we’re looking at the causes of Alzheimer’s are unhealthy nutrients, toxic components in the vaccines and drugs, and lack of oxygen from blood pressure medications.

Yeah, in fact, I stopped using antiperspirants and switched to healthier deodorants because the aluminum is very toxic and that’s in pretty much every antiperspirant you get.

Oh yeah, my wife makes our antiperspirant. She uses coconut oil, baking soda, and arrowroot. It works great all day, and it’s good for you.

How about Autism?

There’s another plague. Well, we have until 2025 before 1 in 2 children are autistic. The latest estimates are 1 in 28. So it’s continually climbing and this is just a crime because it’s kind of like vaccines don’t cause autism, they don’t. Cigarettes do not cause cancer. But both cigarettes and vaccines can pre-dispose damage to tissue and we’re looking at a population that’s never had this exposure to neurotoxins. I mean if you figure the adults now, the 18-20-year-old kids, they had about 45-50 vaccines. Their parents had about 4-5 vaccines. The kids today are going to get 69 doses of 16 different vaccines. And so you get parents mating with a weakened immune system and they give birth to a child with massive neurotoxins and then you expose them to the most popular herbicide out there called glyphosates, and this is in every packaged food, every non-organic food, it’s also called Round Up Ready but that’s a mineral key later.

So you get nutrient and mineral deficient soil, on top of that you get a herbicide that depletes the minerals out of the human being, and then you give them neurotoxins, you’re done. And we’re talking currently there’s 13% of America’s kids are in Special Ed. We’re talking 50% of America’s children have a chronic illness or disease. And 1 in 28 have autism. And so when you go in and you shoot that kid with vaccines, you got a 1 in 28 chance of winning the lottery, of getting that kid autistic and that’s just criminal. So we need to stop this plague, this plague is going to wipe out not just economy and our population but I’m 55, there’s no way possible I can retire. There’s a thing called the autistic Tsunami that’s going to wipe out Medicare in the next four years, where you’re seeing these kids that are currently in the school system, but when they leave the school system and 96% percent of all autistic people can’t work, so we have this massive population that’s going to be a drain on society, to say nothing about the emotional drain on their families.

So we need to stop putting neurotoxins in the human body. Anything that is toxic to the nervous system, is not good. You know let our kids have measles and chickenpox, it’s ok. You know they used to have chicken pox parties when I was a kid, this is a crime against humanity, and other countries that have half the vaccine schedule that we do, they don’t have more disease rates. So we need to take a step back and the damage from the vaccines that we’re causing, Autism and massive neurological damage, paralysis, and death, was so great in the 80’s that they had to pass a non-liability law, where the vaccine companies have no liability, no liability whatsoever. You cannot sue a vaccine company for damage that the vaccines do, and in fact, you can’t even sue the doctor so this liability protection was passed in 1986, and vaccines immediately, the next 3 years, went from 10 vaccines recommended, to 36-now its 69 and why? Because they’re forcing you to get a vaccine, without liability protection, so it has no incentive for making a safe product.

Wow, that is criminal, really criminal. Reminds me of the egg-gag laws where they do these horrible things to our food before it ends up on our tables and nobody is allowed to do any kind of investigative reporting or they go to prison.

That’s similar to the vaccine thing now, if you come out you’re labeled anti-vaxer and anti-science. Which absolutely isn’t true there are thousands and thousands of medical doctors, scientists, chiropractors that are educated in this and they realize that injecting something in a body triggers-and this again is why we’re seeing so many low functioning thyroids and adrenal fatigue. The way you’re supposed to be exposed to viruses is through your nose or mouth. And that delivers what is called a TH1 response and you develop cellular and humeral immunity in your immune system, you can actually pass that education on to your kids. The vaccines are shot in the arm or butt or leg, which triggers a TH2 or an inflammatory response. So we’re seeing, we’re actually training the immune system to respond with the inflammation, and this is why we’re seeing a massive rise in inflammatory diseases like asthma, allergies.

Heck now, this even blew me away- you remember the ‘Take me out to the ballway” song? “buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks…” there’s now, so many peanut allergies now that they have peanut free days at the ballpark. This is because a lot of vaccines are suspended in peanut oil. And so you get his, you get a foreign protein injected into your bloodstream, your body recognizes it, has a pathogen and builds antibodies towards it so if you actually eat that protein, you’re going to mount a defense against it, and this is why we’re seeing epi-pens in schools, we’re seeing a massive rise in illness and disease. Literally 1 in 2 kids has a chronic illness or disease in America.

Wow, I was always wondering about the peanut allergy, what was u with that, why so many peanut allergies and not, let’s say, cashew allergies, or pistachio allergies, that explains it.

You can’t start asking questions like that cause you’re going to question the entire system.

Yeah, right, and then they’ll lock you up. So heart disease, of course, we have to talk about that one. Lightning round so we’ll do a quick one.

Yeah heart disease, the theory of heart disease is that I come from clogged arteries, and that theory is not true. We’ve known since the 70’s that only 20% of people that have heart attacks, on autopsies, have arteries clogged sufficiently enough to limit oxygen, but the infrastructure in hospitals is all based on stents, arterial grams, I mean on everything, bypass surgeries, huge money tin that. But heart attacks are coming from an altered nerve supply and altered parasympathetic and sympathetic activities. So, heart disease is absolutely reversible, in most cases. The problem is, they think, the medical world thinks, by giving you lower blood pressure, so this is giving a beta-blocker, diuretic, or inhibitor, all the drugs they give you to slow your heart rate down to slow your blood pressure down, that it gives you a longer life, that it taxes the heartless.

The opposite is true though. And a study involving, I think it was 144,000 people, they found that people with heart damage, lived longer and healthier and had less death rates if they had blood pressure over 168 systolic. So that would be considered high blood pressure but when you look at it, it makes sense. If you’ve got damage to the heart, you’re going to need higher blood pressure, in order to keep oxygen flowing to that heart muscle. So the main causes of heart disease now is the medications and the toxic environment. It seems that all disease are from toxicity deficiency and the entire medical community is slowing down the metabolism or changing the metabolism, with a chemical. And even though all the responses like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, are the body adapting to a toxic, deficient, lifestyle or environment. It’s really heart disease is from toxicity, deficiency, and medical care to solve that adaptation.

Okay, so I think we are about out of time here. Let’s do one last topic, I know it’s near and dear to your heart, we’ll just cover it very briefly and we’ll wrap up with a few more details on how people can contact you and so forth. So, Obamacare.

Yeah, that’s a fun one. The system is so broken that they’re trying to find people to join this medical system that isn’t going to utilize it. So they’ll be paying in, so there will be more money available for people who are costing too much. And what’s wild is Harvard Medical School and multiple journal articles, even the journal of the American Medical Association, says we have to move away from the fee for service medical system. That means doctors get paid for doing their job, ordering tests, and prescribing drugs. It turns out the more money you spend in the medical system, the less healthier you are.

We spend the most money and have the sickest population in the world. So this means that the medical doctor, their tests that they run, and the studies that they do, and the medication they prescribe, don’t give you a longer healthier life. And when you look at the annual physical exam, that is no longer being recommended, because they say if you go to a medical doctor asymptomatic, where there are no symptoms, the medical doctor is going to do tests on you to see if you have anything, and then give you drugs for preventative stuff. So the medical world is saying don’t go to a medical doctor for an annual physical. The government is saying, we have to change the ‘fee for service’ method, and when you’re looking at it, it’s just like, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

Yeah, oh boy, so what is somebody to do, other than move away, I don’t know, go hide in New Zealand and avoid all these toxins and so forth. What can somebody do to reduce this massive toxicity that we’re bombarded with just by the fact that we live in the United States. We go eat at restaurants, we go breathe the air, and we can’t avoid that, so do we just move away?

No, we got to stay here and fix the system. When the law was passed in California that forces parents to vaccinate their kids, and that’s going to go in effect next year. So the state is now taking over your medical, or your actual children, a lot of my patients were saying, what do we do, do we move to another state? No, we have to stay here and fix it. You can live a healthy, long life here, just realize that the medical system is broken, don’t get any vaccines. If you’re taking prescription drugs, find out why your body is adapting, and fix the problem. Don’t cover up the symptom. When you’re eating, eat organic, healthy, plant-based diet, and you’re going to be fine. Don’t eat any commercially produced animals. Don’t eat any of the toxic oils, eat healthy saturated fats. Exercise, just a half-hour walk a day, every day. And make sure that you get your nervous system checked. And take appropriate supplements. You don’t need mountains and mountains of supplements. You need Vitamin C every day, you need iodine every day, you need Vitamin D every day. You need healthy omega-3’s every day, and a good mineral supplement and a good vitamin and you’re going to be fine, you’re going to adapt here just wonderfully well.

The more money you spend in the medical system, the less healthier you are.

And what about a probiotic?

Probiotics are great. If your diet is mainly plant-based and organic and raw, you’re not going to require them. But as we get older, you may require digestive enzymes, and you may require healthy probiotics. Probiotics are interesting, they don’t really grow in your intestinal tract, what they do is they make the environment healthy for the natural bacteria that you’re getting through the food to grow in your intestinal tract. We need healthy bacteria, so taking a probiotic, particularly on someone that’s going away from restaurant food and fast food, that’s going to be essential.

And also you can get your micro-biome checked using Ubiome, send a stool sample in the mail and they tell you what your micro-biome looks like.

Yes, isn’t that cool? That’s the wave of the future, where we check your natural immune system.

Alright so how does somebody contact you, what if they want to become a patient, even if they’re not in the Southern California area and they want to travel to see you, where do they go to find out more to potentially work with you?

The best site that we have, we got a couple of different sites but the owners-guide.com, that’s owners-guide.com is phenomenal. Everybody on the planet can get on there for at least 7 days for no charge, so this way you get access to all our videos, powerpoints, our data, cause I’m seeing some radical stuff. Every time I make a statement, I back it up with data, so that its not my opinion, this is what the medical journals today are stating. Our other website is bergmanchiropractic.com, and that one is excellent, and we’ve got a number of other different sites for teaching doctors.

You have a YouTube channel as well, as mentioned.

Oh yeah the YouTube channel thanks for reminding me, it’s John B. Chiro, and we have a little bit over 550 videos now. And they’re all on education, all on exactly what we’re talking about. How to avoid disease and reverse disease, and maintain health.

Love it, cause health is not the absence of disease, I hope all you listeners have really gotten that through today’s episode. So John thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, and experience, and passion for health with all of our listeners today. I want to encourage you guys who are listening to go to Get Yourself Optimized website, download the transcript, and there will be a checklist as part of that transcript so that the downloadable PDF is definitely something you’re going to want to grab. That’s at getyourselfoptimized.com. Again go visit bergmanchiropractic.com, owners-guide.com, and the Johnbchiro YouTube channel. We’ll catch you on the next episode, thanks for listening.

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About Dr. John Bergman

Dr. John Bergman became a chiropractor after an auto accident left him severely injured, but thanks to the therapies of alternative health, he made a full recovery. Inspired by the power he saw in the body, he now passionately advocates for alternative health practices.

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