Ella Magers, MSW (00:07):

Hey, Shohan. So good to have you here.

Shoshana Chaim (00:10):

Thank you, Ella. It’s wonderful to be here with you.

Ella Magers, MSW (00:13):

Yes. You know what? I don’t know why, but I just thought let’s start with a lightning round. Are you up for that?

Shoshana Chaim (00:19):

Let’s do it. Get me warmed up. Oil. Oil oil,

Ella Magers, MSW (00:24):

Man. That’s what I say to myself. Every time I go to yoga, it feels like I’m oiling my joints. Right. So yes. Let’s get you oiled up. Okay. Five questions. If you knew it was your last day on earth, at least in your current body and lifetime, I have to put that in there. What would you choose for your last meal?

Shoshana Chaim (00:43):

Oh my gosh.

Ella Magers, MSW (00:44):

I know

Shoshana Chaim (00:45):

I would want a toughest style picnic with my kids and my husband at the beach. So whatever beautiful plant-based bounty comes my way. That’s what I would have.

Ella Magers, MSW (00:57):

Beautiful. The first thing you do when you wake up in the morning.

Shoshana Chaim (01:02):

Gratitude. Before my feet hit the floor every morning.

Ella Magers, MSW (01:07):

Do you have any regrets?

Shoshana Chaim (01:10):

I do, but I know that they’ve helped me learn and live better.

Ella Magers, MSW (01:15):

So are they still regrets?

Shoshana Chaim (01:19):

They’re lessons, they’re, I’ve turned my regrets into lessons, so maybe, no. Got

Ella Magers, MSW (01:25):

It. Okay. A quirk or fun fact that most people might not know about you.

Shoshana Chaim (01:31):

Okay. I hate when there’s any stickers on bananas other than the banana sticker that has the number on it. When they put the organic tape all around it and the gross paper at the top to make it from turning gr yellow, it grosses me out and it’s totally disgusting and everybody in my house knows they need to remove it for me as soon as I bring groceries.

Ella Magers, MSW (01:57):

I love this. Okay. If you could gift all humans one thing, what would it be?

Shoshana Chaim (02:07):

Just amazing mental and physical health because from there they can do everything and anything else they want to do.

Ella Magers, MSW (02:15):

And that’s a great segue into your story. I would love, I think your story and the story of your husband and how plant-based living really infiltrated your lives is really fascinating. Would you mind starting there? I, I’d like us to go through your journey and along the way, kind of make little pit stops and explore deeper as we go, if that makes sense.

Shoshana Chaim (02:39):

Sure, no problem. So jump in anytime. It is a story filled with pit stops for sure. A lot of people know that the first 15 years of my professional life, I was a kindergarten and phys ed teacher, which was super fun and exactly right for me, exactly in that moment. And it was a great job to here in Canada, have children and be on mat leave and all of that. And while I was pregnant with my second child, so I had a one-year-old at home and I just became pregnant with the little one. Adam, my husband, had a pain in his chest and his arm, and he thought he was having a heart attack at the right page of 36, 37. So he went to the hospital, they did a whole bunch of tests and they said, no heart attack. You can go home now. But a few weeks later, the phone rang and we were basically told that he had a tumor that looked really scary.

(03:38):

They thought it was malignant and we needed to escalate things and go into surgery and all of that. And it didn’t really sit well with Adam because we were young, we were thin, we were athletes, and we thought that we ate a lot better than most of our friends. And we thought that we actually ate a really good, well-rounded, healthy, clean, standard American diet. And for us, that’s exactly what we should have. We knew we should have been doing at the time without much evidence, just that’s just what you did. And then he started to ask questions like, well, why is this tumor growing inside my body? And then from the tumor, we found out that there was heart disease starting as well. So why at this age is there a tumor? Why at this age is there heart disease? It doesn’t run in the family, it’s not indicative to our lifestyle or so we thought.

(04:30):

And he started to ask a lot of questions and do a lot of research. Well, we found out indeed that the tumor was benign, thank goodness. But he was still left with the heart disease. And we had lost a friend a couple of years before who went out to play floor hockey and had a heart attack and left behind a young family. And Adam really want to, he didn’t want that to be his story. So through his research, he found prevent and reverse heart disease in Dr. Stein. And he decided that it was time for him to go to go. And he came home one day after asking for more meat, why are we having so many vegetarian meals asking for more meat? He’s like, I’m now. And I’m like, what’s that? And he’s like, well, I’m vegan. I’m like, that’s some kind of vegetarian.

(05:16):

I didn’t even know what vegan a hundred percent was. And he’s like, I’m not eating any more animal products. He’s like, here’s the reas. He kept showing, he didn’t shove it down my throat, but he kept showing me the research. And then we started to realize what was going on in the whole world to be able to get animal products in our home, in our cars, on our sofas, on our plates and all of that. But he decided that he was done. And I was an overwhelmed young mom, and I said, well, I don’t know what else to make you so you’ll eat fish once a week and chicken on Fridays like a good Jew, and we’ll move from there. But Friday came and he couldn’t eat the chicken. So he went completely punt based and he felt great. He lost a lot of weight, which looked weird at first, but it was a normal body weight.

(06:09):

It just wasn’t heavy, but it just wasn’t what we were used to seeing on people. And then I had finally lost all my baby weight going vegetarian over the course of the next eight months, and we were both feeling really good and had lots of energy. And after a year, his doctor looked at his arteries again and said, the heart disease is completely gone. And then he went back for another follow up with the oncologist and he said, there must be some kind of mistake because the tumor is shrinking. What were you doing? What trial study did you do in the States? What were you smoking in Mexico? What you know, anything. But he was willing to accept anything but diet, but it was all about the plants. So from there, we really took a good look at our life and said, what types of things, what types toxicity are we bringing into our life to cause us to age faster than we should for a body to break down faster than it should and for disease or disbalance or dise to be happening within our bodies?

(07:16):

And we made a lot of changes, and that’s when we started the Plant Trainers podcast because we wanted other people to never be in the situation that we were in. Families look a lot of different ways. Some have children, some have pets, some are partners, some are individuals, some care for elderly parents. We just wanted other families to never have to go through what we went through and should they already be in that situation to really have the tools and the information and inspiration to reverse things the way that we were able to do with Adam.

Ella Magers, MSW (07:52):

And what about the kids? How has that been for them? This, so

Shoshana Chaim (07:59):

They were quite young. Sage was about six months old, so that meant that Russell was about two and a half. Russell had just become gluten free because he was allergic to gluten, not in celiac, but allergic to gluten. So he had just gone through changing his diet and then figuring out what else are we going to cook? But actually Adam was really good about it. He’s like, you got enough on your plate, I’ll figure it out. I’ll eat all the side dishes and if I need more, I’ll make more. And things happen for a reason. There was a chef in Toronto who is wanted recipe testers, vegan chef. So Adam found somehow connected with him on Twitter, and we ended up doing recipe testing for him. So that was a new way to just be excited about making new meals. And of course, I love vegetables.

(08:47):

So his meal was my side dish and my side dishes became his side dishes. But the kids, they were ve, I was vegetarian. Adam went overnight. I was about eight months vegetarian, letting go few things at a time. And the kids kind of were a little bit behind me in that vegetarian transition. And then it was about an extra five, six months that they were just eating eggs and a little bit of cheese sprinkled on some food here and there enough so little cheese that I kept it in the freezer because I wasn’t going through it fast enough from the fridge. And then it was just time to let it go. And it’s just what they knew. They knew that they had to bring their own cupcakes to birthday parties. They knew that they had their own pizza either at the time I had to send them with pizza because there was no pizza at the regular pizza places that you could order vegan. And they kind of liked it that way because while they were waiting for everybody else to pass out the cake or they had their own lunch boxes, they just ate their cupcake as soon as the candles were blown out. So it was just their way of knowing things. We were very lucky in terms of the way our family worked and the age group worked, worked really well for us.

Ella Magers, MSW (10:00):

The other question I have is a lot of people that go vegan or plant-based for their health, a lot of them end up falling back into eating animal products. What do you think was it about your transition and Adam’s transition that kept you moving? So moving forward so powerfully on that path that you found actually some purpose, life’s purpose in it and went so far as to have a podcast around it?

Shoshana Chaim (10:34):

So there were a lot of things. Adam’s very black and white, and he’s just like, let’s do it. And I’m a rule follower, so I’m like, we’ve decided this, so this is what we’re doing, and I don’t want to upset Adam kind of thing. Not that I ever wanted to go back, but he was very patient with me as I made my transition. But the evidence was just so hard in front of our face. His heart disease went away. He had this fear of what happened to his friend. He was a hockey player happening to him, getting on the ice, your heart rate’s going up and down and up and down. You’re frustrated with your teammates, you’re fighting with other teams. There’s a lot there. And then the tumor shrunk. So the evidence was just so hard. My baby weight went away. I was able for the first time to be rid of acne in my whole life since teenagers.

(11:41):

It ended up coming back for other reasons, but it was the first time that I had clear skin. It felt really good. And we very quickly ended up in the spotlight. So once we started the podcast, there weren’t many plant-based podcasts eight years ago. So we started getting invited to speak at Health Fest. And before we knew it, we were opening for Gregor or opening for Stein. And it was like, okay, well this is just our life there. I never really had to grapple with, oh, but I want something else, but what will people think of me? But I was kind of in the spotlight that I’m like, oh, well, I can’t let people down by having a piece of cheese. And the reason I say that is because when I finally made that decision, I think it was a make first kind of thing. I said, the summer’s coming, and if there’s a cheese platter, I’m not going to buy the cheese. But if there’s a cheese platter, which is my weakness, I will have a few pieces of cheese if I want it. And my birthday’s in November and I like steak on my birthday every year, a nice steak. And I’ll just have that steak and then go back to normal. So I allowed myself the ability to be flexible if I needed to be, but I never did again. Yeah,

Ella Magers, MSW (12:59):

Got it. So you didn’t put that pressure on yourself of this has to be or all or nothing, but that allowed you to just move forward with it being all?

Shoshana Chaim (13:10):

Yeah, personally, I didn’t have a lot of pressure, but I guess I did maybe feel some pressure just from being in the spotlight.

Ella Magers, MSW (13:19):

Sure, sure. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you’ve got the podcast, you’re moving forward in your life. If things are good, what’s next on What was the bump in the road?

Shoshana Chaim (13:32):

So as we started to build the podcast and as our lives started to change and we started to help people just not unofficially started to help people and see their changes, we really decided that this was something that we wanted to do. We wanted to be able to jump in and help people. So I got nutrition certifications. And part of that was also for the kids. It was okay for me to, it was still so early this, he made this decision before forks overnights. So it was okay for me to mess up my body by not eating meat, but it wasn’t okay for me to mess up my kids. And I’m saying that sarcastically for those listening, nobody’s going to be messed up. But that was my way of thinking. So I got nutrition certifications, I got lifestyle coaching certifications, and I started to love doing that. And I left teaching and teachers in Canada make a hundred thousand dollars. We pay a lot of taxes, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a good paycheck. Coming home for 10 months, it isn’t it. But walking away from that and thinking that, Hey, I’m going to jump into health coaching and my podcast and I’ll make that back. And that didn’t happen.

(14:55):

So I was stressed about not being an independent strong woman, but not being able to support my family independently. I was staying up until one, two o’clock in the morning writing copy and working on sales because I had no background in that whatsoever. And waking up at 5 30, 6 o’clock in the morning to do all the things, the journaling, the meditation, all the things that you’re supposed to do to be a good entrepreneur. And I was burning it at both ends, but I was also still dealing with some mental health issues and some P T S D from Adam’s situation thinking that I will lose him or I will lose something at some point. And all of that together played a huge part on my body. I had been on antibiotics my whole entire life, just about some years, 12 times a year, I, I’m pretty sure I was allergic to dairy.

(15:48):

So ear infections, from the time I was three weeks old, I was 23 years old, married, working. I had to take a week off of work for double perforated eardrums. Adults don’t get ear infections that happened, but I did strep throat, sinus infection, all the immune issues, all the puss and mucus was always happening to me. So I think my whole gut was still off. And they say, you are what you eat, but you are what you ate. And it’s not just what you ate physically in terms of food, it’s your emotional wellbeing. It’s the environments that you grew up in, mold or metals or anything that you’ve been exposed to your whole entire life. So although my health did improve at first, it really started to unravel with the stress and anxiety and all of that coming on after. So I was left in a place with huge hormonal issues, d h EASs, adrenal, cortisol.

(16:49):

I had really bad inflammation throughout the body, especially my wrist and my shoulder. But I couldn’t feel anything throughout my arm. And over the course of the year, I tried everything. I did three different naturopaths, Chinese medicine, acupuncture, chiropractor, superfoods. Because of the podcast, I had access to some of the biggest and greatest nutritionists and doctors. And I would say, these are my symptoms. This is what I’m already doing. And they’d be like, well, I don’t know what else you should do. I would, for what? I knew I was doing it all. And then, so by the end of the year, I was sleeping almost 18 hours a day. My kids were late for school every day. Cause I couldn’t get up in the morning to get them to school on time. So I was signing them in late. I had to read the same sentence eight times over.

(17:43):

My brain fog was so bad to even get some information from it. I was falling asleep at the wheel. I was falling asleep at red lights. And that was a big wake up call to me. But I didn’t know what else. I didn’t know what else to do. I was, nothing I ate was processed. I was meditating. I was doing yoga. I could do yoga, light yoga and walk. But if I tried to run, if I even lifted one set of weights, one, if I did reps like 24 hours, my whole immune system would be blown and I’d have a full blown cold. So I was just, yeah, I unraveled. I completely unraveled.

Ella Magers, MSW (18:24):

I can only imagine. I mean, I’ve been through some of my own health challenges here in the last couple years. But to be eating the way you were eating and for having it worked so well for so long and doing all the things and meditating and sleep hygiene and acupuncture and all the alternative medicines, and you’re doing all this work and still struggling just to get through the day. I mean, wow, what was going through your mind at that point?

Shoshana Chaim (19:00):

A lot of negative. So you’re a fraud, you’re helping other people and for some reason they’re getting all of these amazing results. But your tools that so well and that are working for them are not working for you. So how dare you show up and help other people when you can’t help yourself? So a lot of that, and I hadn’t worked for almost a year, and most of it was because I couldn’t stay awake and needed to take care of myself to at least take care of my family. But some of it was a lot of that. Who am I to help them too? So that was huge. It was dark for a while. I had been through dark moments before and it was really dark for a while. I was like, do I just need to check myself in somewhere and just sleep for days straight?

(19:55):

Sometimes my mind didn’t even work. Yeah. What was going through my mind was what can I possibly do to not screw up my kids? How can I just give them their mother back? Because again, I was the perfect student following all the protocols properly and nothing was working. So it was scary because, and I see this and I see this all the time. I’ll get messages from people that’ll say, I don’t understand. I’ve been plant-based for eight months. I’ve been plant-based for a year. I’ve been plant-based for three months. Everybody else in the Facebook groups are saying, this happened to them and they snap their fingers and they were better. They ate a kale, a piece of kale, and they were better. I’ve been doing it longer, or I’ve been doing it better, or I’ve just been doing it and how come I’m not getting those results? So yeah, just a lot of that. But the truth is that not everybody gets those results right away, but the people who do scream the loudest. So we hear them. So it’s not to say that this is definitely the best way of life, a hundred percent, but it’s not necessarily going to be the complete answer for everybody because we are what we ate.

Ella Magers, MSW (21:17):

Explain that

Shoshana Chaim (21:18):

Different people.

Ella Magers, MSW (21:20):

We are what we ate. So what made you bring that up?

Shoshana Chaim (21:24):

Well, because why wasn’t all of that working for me? Because I had been on antibiotics for so long. So I have dead sedentary antibiotics sitting in me, toxicity sitting in me dead cells that were probably never taken out of me because I ate dairy for so long and was probably allergic to it because I was the kind of kid where I was. Every mother’s dream, you put food in front of me as long as it wasn’t shellfish, cause I was allergic, I would eat it, but I would eat any vegetable cooked anyway. But I would also eat every Oreo stuffed every way and gut bacteria from eating that way and from antibiotics. And I was still on antibiotics three, four times a year when all of this was happening. So just my body got tired, my body stopped talking to each other, to it to itself. My body stopped there. You talk about fight flight, but there’s flight. Flight or freeze, right? My body was really just in freeze. My adrenals were shot. They were shot. And the healing that should have been taking place in my body, my hair was going gray at such a young age. Yeah.

Ella Magers, MSW (22:48):

So what happened next? I mean, you were at a loss at that point. So what turned the corner at a

Shoshana Chaim (22:54):

Loss, and I was also sitting on a really big ego. I was like, but I know everything, but I didn’t necessarily know everything, but I didn’t know that there were things that I didn’t know. So my husband’s friend who he worked with, the family’s very well known in our area. The parents were doctors in Russia. When they came to Canada, they became naturopathic doctors. So I think that’s kind of really the best of both worlds, especially because the medical system here is not like it is overseas. And so she introduced this, I’m going to call it a supplement for this time in the story, introduce a supplement to us. And we just thought it was another like, okay, take your turmeric or take your B12 or take your, but it was something completely different. So when I knew what, who the family was, I was like, this has to be something different.

(23:53):

This is something that I do need to look into because they’re the miracle makers in this area. And I started to, I said, okay, tell me what you’re talking about. Because they wanted my athletes to do better. They wanted my people with diabetes, all the diseases, they wanted them to heal better, but like I do that with food. But then I kind of said, but what if this is my answer? So I said, sure, tell me about it. And what I learned is that inside our cells that are little sacks of salt water, we have our mitochondria that is creating many different things. It’s creating our energy system and it’s creating something called redox at the same time. And these redox molecules, they reduce the oxidation in the body, but they are the messengers of the body. They communicate between the cells to say, there’s a problem with the adrenals. There’s a cut on the finger, there’s a scar on the face. And they’re responsible for sending the proper healing. And when the healing’s done to stop the healing from happening, and they, it’s the intercellular fluid that we have lots of when we’re born and every 10 years after puberty, we’re making 10% less. And that’s why young kids have really tight skin. And although Ella and I, who we’re doing really well, not everybody is blessed at our age to have skin like we do. We start to get wrinkles and all the things.

(25:29):

But what made sense to me is my body’s not communicating anymore. My cells are not communicating anymore. And that’s why all of these other techniques and all of these other therapies that I’m trying to put into my body are not happening, are not taking place like it does for everybody else because my body is so fritz that it’s just in freeze. Everything was in freeze. So I heard that the molecules were a hundred percent, there’s no lethal dose. It can’t interact with any medications. Not that I was on any at the time. And just that it can never hurt. Nobody’s gone to the hospital for it or died because of it or anything like that. And I said, I’ve spent thousands of thousands dollars on other therapies. What’s another couple of hundred dollars? Let’s go. And well, within the first two months, I started to notice that I was waking up to the alarm.

(26:24):

I was putting my feet on the floor again before the kids in time to get the kids to school. I was starting to read again. I wanted to blog again. I was excited about the podcast again. I was able to drive without falling asleep. And things just slowly, slowly started to say, Hey, it’s getting better. Hey, it’s getting better. Hey, there’s hope for the future. And things started to really progress in a positive way. And there was significant difference within those first two months. I went back to the naturopath. She couldn’t understand how my adrenals had gone from over 35 to a 17 on the adrenal scale. She had never seen that happen before. So it wasn’t fixed completely, but the progress was just amazing. And before I knew it, I was able to be doing hits again without having a full blown cold and everything.

(27:18):

Just my hair stopped turning great because the cells in my body were so happy and healthy and absorbing all the nutrients. Again, we stop absorbing nutrients when our cells are just trying to keep us alive, trying to just keep our lungs breathing and our heart beating. We become depleted because we’re not absorbing. And all my iron levels went back up. All these wonderful things started happening again. So that was really my saving grace. It was me getting off my ego box, getting off my soapbox and saying, there’s more out there that I don’t know about. And if I don’t try than what you miss a hundred percent of the shots to never take. I owed it to my, I always say I owed it to Adam, I owed it to my kids. But the truth is that I owed it to myself. I owed it to myself to try. And from there, yeah, I mean it, it’s just been incredible. And it was like discovering plant-based nutrition all over again.

(28:20):

You know, could call it the miracle of plant-based nutrition. It’s not a miracle, right? It’s not a miracle just doing and the body doing what it’s meant to do. The what? It’s amazing what the body does when you fuel it with the proper F foods. Well, when you refill your cells with its own intercellular fluid with zero toxicity, so you could start to detox the old medications that never left your body so that you can balance your gut flora so that you can break that brain blood barrier, reduce the oxidation, blow up free radicals when your body’s working properly, it, it knows exactly what to do on its own without needing ingredients for everything where you could be allergic to ingredients or there could be contraindications between them. It was just a really, really amazing discovery for me.

Ella Magers, MSW (29:18):

And I think this is so important also to kind of highlight the empowerment piece of this, how you, yes, you kind of acknowledge your ego and then you put it aside and you said, well, what I’m doing now is amazing, and it’s what helps a lot of people get super healthy, and it got me healthy. However, at this point, there are that, I don’t know. I don’t know. And how can I open the door to discovering what this solution is for me? And you kind of open the doors in your mind to saying, there’s something out there. I don’t know what it is, but I’m open to finding it. And you found it. And so this is really intriguing to me as well, having gone through something very similar last year and having gotten to a place where my body was just not feeling like my own, even though I was eating an anti-inflammatory, vegan, healthy plant, whole food plant, exclusive diet. And I was training and doing my yoga and doing my meditating and all that thing. And my body just didn’t seem to be, like you said, there was something about it that wasn’t cooperating within my body. And I know stress for me is big, but also thinking about all the toxins in the environment that we just can’t avoid no matter how careful we are in this world today, that is so polluted. That is so toxic. There are things we can’t avoid.

Shoshana Chaim (30:46):

There are things that we can’t avoid and we can do the best that we can with our nutrition, but some of it’s still going. Either we can’t afford it or it’s not, organic’s not available or organic still has some toxicity in it as well. There’s mold in the walls that we might not know, not to scare people, but there’s mold in the walls. We’re breathing things. I lived in Hong Kong for two years. We have no idea what the smog is like there. So there’s just so much that we’re exposed to on a regular basis. And the truth is, most of us do live a life where we’re going to have, maybe it’s vegan, but we’re going to have the ice cream every now and then, or we’re going to have the cookie every now and then, or we’re going to have a glass of alcohol. It’s hard for most of us to be perfect all the time too. So knowing that there are things that can help your body, maintain communication, maintain detoxification, keep your electrolytes up without having to drink all this sugar. I don’t know what word you’re to use on your

Ella Magers, MSW (31:54):

Podcast, whatever you want,

Shoshana Chaim (31:56):

Sugar, crap and whatever. We’re still going to be exposed to things. And then the more you’re exposed to, the more you’re genetics stand up. So even if you eat all the kale in the world, if your family is more predisposed to this, some things that you’re out of control of can still make that happen. Or if all the healing’s trying to keep your heart from clogging up, well then what about your adrenals? Or what about your kidney function? Or what about the gout in your foot? There’s something eventually starts to go, unfortunately, not with everybody, but with a lot of people. And what it’s funny to say, not with everybody, because a lot of my clients came to me because they had somebody in their own life who they wanted to help. And my clients, I’m talking about post issue that I had. So in the last five years, they come to me and they’re like, oh, I’m concerned about my husband’s sister or my husband’s that, or I never thought I could work with you because I was never willing to go.

(33:06):

But what do you have now? Or I’ve always been plant-based and I’m still not getting enough results. What do you have now? So I’m helping the partner or the spouse or the parent or the sibling, and they tell me that there’s nothing wrong with them. But then if they start following my protocol too, and I check in with them a week later, two weeks later, maybe a month later, and they’re like, oh yeah, I used to have to lift my foot to get into the car because my hip hurt me so much. Or I always had these cuts and they never healed. Or I would get headaches five times a five times a month, and now I’m not getting them anymore. We all have things that we’re living with that we just think that’s just our age, or that’s just what happens in my family, or that’s just what it is. And you learn to be used to it and to live through it instead of be depressed in it and get worse. But when they start to melt away because the body’s working so much more efficiently, that’s the best. That’s just as fine as helping somebody who has huge disease going on, who really needs to make improvements in their health.

Ella Magers, MSW (34:16):

So it sounds like you, you’ve living is like a foundation. However, some people aren’t ready to go there. Sounds like you’re really meeting people where they are. And this you’ve, you called it a supplement for now. Let’s talk just for another few minutes about what this actually is, what this redoc actually is and how it helps people.

Shoshana Chaim (34:41):

Yeah. I mean, guess in a way it is a supplement and it’s been put into the supplement category. However, the only way that most people know supplements are ingredient based, right? We’re getting more vitamin D or we’re getting our turmeric or our iron or whatever it is, St. John’s word, whatever kind of supplement we’re using as medicine or because we’re not getting it in our diet. But again, when we’re born, we’re born with these big beautiful cells, and then the body naturally starts to break down. So every 10 years, we’re making 10% less of that intercellular fluid. But then if we’re living really great lives and eating all the vegetables and meditating and being out in nature and moving, the outside layer of the cell is going to stay nice and thick. So 10% every 10 years, for you, it might be 8%. For your father, it might be 12%, right?

(35:41):

Because you live different lives. So he’s losing it at a faster rate than you are, let’s say. But what happens is you’re then you’re exposed to all of these other environmental factors. So your cells really do begin to break down. And this supplement is not something that we ingest to utilize, because when we take food in or ingredients in, the body needs to break it down, and we need to create enzymes and break it down and absorb it and all of that. This gets absorbed directly into the cells. The second it touches your cheeks. So for scarring or fine lines, the second it touches my skin, it gets absorbed and those cells are becoming nice and full again. And then it start, the whole body starts talking. It cascades through every cell of your body. So even though you’re putting it on your face from let’s say scars or wrinkles, your ankles are getting the benefit too after a hard day of volleyball or martial arts or whatever it is that you’re doing the day before.

(36:45):

Now, these same molecules are in the body to help reduce inflammation and to help repair cells. Its main job is to detect, repair and replace damaged cells and protect the healthy cells. So if you have a sore muscle or if you have bone on bone, or if you’ve got a ligament tear, by putting more of this redox back into the body, these redox signaling molecules back into the body, the body’s going to repair itself faster. It’s going to reduce the inflammation. You’re not going to, you’re have better range of motion. It’s not going to hurt as much. The ligaments are going to start to repair faster. I’ve had so many clients come out of casts weeks early, three, four weeks early because their redox levels are high, they’re over 60, and they’re coming out of their cast three to four weeks early because the body’s just working so much better.

(37:40):

Every single cell in the body has this. Every single piece of tissue in the body is made up of cells. Every organ is in the body is made up of the tissues. So if we can get down to the most root cause, yes, when we look at plant-based nutrition, root cause is we’re putting inflammatory foods into our body. We’re putting carcinogenics into our body. Therefore, inflammation and damage splitting cells are happening because of what we’re putting into our body. Absolutely, that’s our foundation. But even take that away for people who are still maybe eating those foods, the redox signaling molecules are even more foundational because we make them in our body and they are part of the cells. We cannot live without air. We can’t live without oxygen. Our cells can’t live without redox. If there’s no redox, the cells die. If there’s the cells die, we die.

(38:36):

So this is even more root cause. You never have to be a hundred percent plant-based eater to be able to put more redox into your body by supplementing it. The only other way is through exercise. You still have a limit of what you can replenish, but you can’t exercise 24 hours a day either. So whether you’re plant-based or not putting it, they can be separate. They can be separate. So I’ve like myself, at the beginning, I had a lot of clients who came to me and said, I don’t understand. I’m doing all the things. I’ve been eating plant-based. I’m meditating. I’m writing in my journal. The toxic people are out of my life. Why is my autoimmune disease still keeping me down? And I would be like, well, it’s not going to sound too professional, but I’m taking this stuff and if you want to try it too, let’s see what happens.

(39:25):

And boom, amazing things happen. So there are a lot of people like me where plant-based just wasn’t enough. But there are a lot of people who said to me, I can never work with you because I’m not willing to go. Not for me. My blood type doesn’t support it, or my lifestyle doesn’t support it. Or my partner would divorce me, whatever it is, whatever reasons they have, find reasons. I had them at the beginning too. I’m like, I was just like, what? Are you crazy? But I had them too. But now all of a sudden they can feel everybody deserves to feel good. So they could have more energy, they could sleep deeper, they can reduce inflammation. They can use limbs the way that they’ve never been able to use them in five, 10 years again. And when they do feel better and their mental health is better, when they do feel better, what happens is I start to get emails saying, oh, I haven’t had red meat in a few weeks.

(40:19):

Oh, I haven’t had chicken either in a few weeks. Oh, I found this amazing kale recipe. I’ve never made kale before in my life. When people feel better, they start to make healthier choices. And you cannot deny the power of plant-based nutrition. And it’s all around. It’s not like it was 10 years ago. It is all around us now. So when they do feel better, they want to make better choices too. So you get people moving more, you get people outside more. You get people eating better, and then they just come into a balance in their own life and find things in their own time. So it’s really nice to be able to have that. It’s not even really a yin and yang, but it’s those two real parts of what we do in our life to make our body better. But what we actually can do to start at the very most foundational level of ourselves and refill it with something that is not possible through food,

Ella Magers, MSW (41:19):

Are we going to start seeing this? I mean, it just seems to me like there’s all this talk from longevity experts and around rapamycin and different kind of biohacks.