Podcast 481: Understanding Inflammation Beyond Arthritis

Life Enthusiast

Podcast 481: Understanding Inflammation Beyond Arthritis

In today’s episode, Martin delves deep into the complex world of inflammation, revealing its root causes and examining powerful, evidence-based strategies to help relieve symptoms. Join Martin as he breaks down the science of inflammation and arthritis, providing clear insights and practical tips to help you take control of your health.

Download our FREE Chronic Pain Manifesto.
Subscribe to our newsletter, so you are always up to date with new health information, product tips, podcasts, webinars, and much more.

Follow Life Enthusiast Podcast on Amazon Music and get new episodes when they become available!

Find us on Telegram and catch our live show every Sunday @ 9:00 am PST

Good morning. This is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast. Today’s topic I wanted to raise arthritis. Arthritis is an interesting word. Itis, otis, etes, at the end of a word in medical terminology, signifies or means inflammatory. Like diabetes is an inflammation, otitis media would be the infection of the middle ear. Gastritis would be inflammation in the gastric stomach. Colitis would be the inflammation of the colon, and on and on and on. Names like that. So arthritis specifically is the inflammation in the joints.

The mainstream medical people like to use geography to name things. They do not concern themselves with the cause of the disease. They just simply describe it as where it is and what the symptom is, which is very deceptive, because it causes the illusion that the illness is caused by where the symptoms are. But sort of like a mushroom – if you go in the forest and see the fruiting body of a mushroom that pops up somewhere, that is just the reproductive organ of the mycelium, and you have this mycelium throughout under the ground, around the roots. And then this thing just pops up. That’s just where it reproduces. That’s just where it shows its face. Or maybe another metaphor I would use would be an iceberg where you see an iceberg, whatever you see above water, that’s only 10% of the total mass of the thing. Arthritis as such, of course, is a nasty thing because it makes us uncomfortable, gives us pain.

In its latter stages, it causes a great deal of discomfort and loss of mobility. That’s the story with inflammation. It has five important symptoms. Redness, swelling, heat, pain, and importantly, loss of function. Of course the acute that’s that’s easy right. Like you twist your ankle, you can’t step on it because it’s painful. It’s there for a reason. The pain is there so you stop using it. You can’t use it, that’s the loss of function. It swells up because the cells are broken and fluids are filling in and making it swollen, and the redness, well, sometimes you can’t see because it’s on the inside, but the swelling is obvious. And the heat, it’s there because with heat the body can restore cells, replace the bad or worn out damaged ones with good ones. Now, in case of arthritis you will see swelling of the joints, like for example, you can see it on the fingers. You would see that the knuckle will swell in size. When you see that, then that’s a sure sign of arthritis. On the knee, it’s often obvious because it’s a swollen knee. On the hip it’s seldom as obvious because it’s inside, hidden by a lot of flesh, but all the same, it’ll give you discomfort. It’ll give you an inability to move. But before we get to that stage, the body process that takes us there is running. And it’s running for a good while before you go all the way to loss of function and the early stages, we call it stiffness on rising.

You could probably relate, if you’re taking a drive in an automobile, you’re sitting in the same position for maybe an hour or two. And then when you try to get up or out of the seat, it takes you two, 4 or 6 steps before you can straighten out, before you can start moving. This same thing is also experienced, like you’re sitting in a chair, reading a book or watching something on television, and then you get to get up. Now young folk, they just leap up and run. The older folk, they get out of the chair, and then they slowly kind of straighten out and move a little. And then after about 3 or 4 steps, they’re kind of able to walk straight. Well, this stiffness on rising is essentially a sign of body-wide inflammation underway. Well, it may end up in arthritis, but it may end up in other symptoms too, right? Because the process that’s behind it, which is inflammatory in general, is caused by either lack of circulation that would be stagnation or it’s caused by toxicity, presence of things that should not be there, or malnutrition, which would be absence of things that should be there, but aren’t. And the toxicity that could be of two kinds. That could be the metabolic toxicity, which would be your body’s inability to just maintain the life processes themselves and becoming self-toxified by not cleansing well enough.

And then the second part would be the industrial, external toxicity, which has a little to do with the metabolism itself. It just arrives and stays because the detox pathways are not able to get rid of it well enough. All the same, it just is. So if we go back to the geography, we can start thinking that we could have arthritis in the neck, or we could have a pain in the head where it gets to be a headache or a migraine or something like that. Or we could have arthritic stuff happening anywhere on any bone. And some of it has to do with calcification. The two minerals that control the autonomic nervous system are calcium and magnesium.

Calcium activates the fight or flight, Magnesium activates the rest and repair – sympathetic and parasympathetic. And when there’s not enough Magnesium, calcium when it’s taken out of places, wherever it may be. The most obvious storage place for calcium is the bone. The large bones of the body, the femur, the pelvis, but all the other bones as well. So the calcium is stored in the bones of your body. It comes out of solution when it’s needed for whatever physiological effects for functioning. And then when it’s not needed, it should be returned back into the bone. But oftentimes because of imbalances, it’s deposited in wrong places. You end up with bone spurs or bumps, or instead of the bone being smooth, it’s got little bumps in the wrong places.

Having enough magnesium is important because it supports the return to the parasympathetic, the repair. It also, magnesium, if you could think of the bone as a brick wall, the magnesium molecules would be like the mortar and the calcium molecules would be like bricks. Maybe I should call them ions, since that would be more appropriate. The magnesium ions would be the mortar and the calcium ions would be the bricks. Then the reason I’m saying ions is because these ions, when they are in solution, they are moving freely and they have electric charge on them. I’ll give you an example. For example, salt, you put salt in water and it dissolves. And salt is sodium chloride NaCl, one atom of sodium, one atom of chlorine. They are joined together to form sodium chloride. What’s interesting is that sodium by itself, sodium metal Na2 is super reactive and highly toxic, but as an ion, it’s not. Similarly, chlorine, chlorine is Cl2. Chlorine gas is exceedingly toxic and very harmful. And yet the single ion of chlorine, chloride now, is really important and involved in great many transactions, metabolic functions in the body. One of them is the regulation of the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the tissue. Calcium and magnesium containing mineral is dolomite, which is a combination of calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate, which is CaCO3 and MgCO3. [Note: it is written as CaMg(CO3)2]

And CO3, that’s actually the carbonic acid ion. So when you take them apart, you have carbonic acid and you have the calcium ion. And the carbonic acid can be taken apart into water and carbon dioxide. That’s how this works in the body, is that you can actually become more acidic by pulling more CO2 into yourself into solution, and then becoming less acidic by getting rid of that CO2. And there’s a very simple method for that. It’s called breathing. So as you exhale you can exhale more and more of this carbon dioxide and get rid of it. And that way you get rid of a lot of acidity.

The other way you get rid of acidity is that your body can make baking soda. Your pancreas makes that. Anyway, again, combination of hydrogen, carbon dioxide and sodium bicarbonate comes out of your body. So that’s another way of getting rid of acidity. But the minerals calcium and magnesium are actually the alkalizing minerals. They are involved in keeping your body alkaline.

So where am I headed with this? With arthritis, you are getting inflammation in the joint for one of many reasons. As I listed it, it could be toxicity, it could be lack of circulation, lack of movement. It’s bizarre right? That the best thing you can do for arthritis is to actually move the joint. But you also need to not be in pain. So what would you do in the for a shortcut? Well, if you’re in pain here now, three things, one, you need better water. You need more water in the body. And it should be the structured water that allows you to move things around. You need some kind of a transport mechanism to move the minerals, to move all the tissues. And structured water helps. And that’s where we come with the devices that help us do that. You can find that category in the Home and Skincare. But anyway, devices for water and food or structured water, you can buy structured water ready to use or you can use a device to make your own. Actually, I have a device right here. This thing is called ADR-4 and it’s a simple disc. You can see it’s about five inches in diameter or about half inch thick, about my fingers’ thickness. And whatever you put on top of it like an example is going to get structured, harmonized. And the other tool I have, you can see these in the bottom of this bottle. These are ceramic blobs that we sell in the store as Crystal Pearls. And the crystal pearls are able to break up and discharge the energies that are causing water to cluster, thereby causing it to be more absorbable and thereby being better able to carry nutrients in and toxins out. Important, right?

The other part is getting the balance right between calcium and magnesium. For the most part, in most people the balance is too much calcium, not enough magnesium.

There are some people who need more calcium, but most seem to get enough from food. What there is a lack of is Magnesium in food, and so supplementing that is very wise, especially if you’re suffering from stiffness on rising or enlarged joints and the likes. So that would be the mineralization. And that’s super important because when you get that balance off, then you need to have the nutrients that can bring the balance back in.

The second common reasoning on that is the inflammation that comes from the food we eat. The most common foods that people have joint issues from are called nightshades, solanaceae. Solanine is the alkaloid and you probably have heard about leptins. These are made in the plants with the intention of hurting you, the person or the animal that’s ingesting them so that you don’t eat too much of it. Because if you eat too much of it, you’re essentially overharvesting the resource. And that plant is allowing itself to be eaten, but doesn’t want to be completely eaten or eaten in excess because that would cause it to die off.

I just see that in the chat there are a couple of questions, so I’m going to answer those. So returning back to the water, do the Prills and Pearls make the water structured? The structuring of the water is that every molecule of water is a polar molecule. It has a H and an OH and the positive and the negative. So it acts as a miniature magnet. And this magnet strength is related to how the angle between the two hydrogens is wide or the width of the angle. And so if you could visualize the water molecule, it would be like if you draw a cartoon of a Mickey mouse head, this would be the head, and the two atoms of hydrogen would be sitting on top one here and one here. And the angle of it either widens or narrows. And if it narrows, the magnetic field goes down. And if it widens, the magnetic field goes up. And the structuring that we’re talking about has to do with the electric potential that is in the water. And as we use these ceramic devices, we’re discharging the stored potential, which causes the water to become less charged and the latent water crystals fall apart and the cluster size of the water decreases, thereby making it more hydrating at the cellular level and also making it more alkaline, making it more ORP into the alkaline again into the negative voltage which is more compatible with the human body. Your ORP at the cells should be -25 milliVolt. That would be the natural electric potential of the cell. And when you go into inflammation, you push it all the way to -50 or 70 milliVolt. And when you push toward cancer, you cross over from the negative into the positive. And at about plus 20 milliVolt, the cells start losing their integrity. They start losing their ability to continue to exist as a functioning cell. So it’s a fairly narrow range.

And the other question here is about the ADR. This ADR-4, it’s harmonizing the water. It takes maybe two or three minutes. Like, if you put a bottle this size on it, you need about two minutes. Bottle of wine, maybe five minutes on the plate. And then the water in this vessel that you put on top of it is harmonized. And it will remain that way for some time. The warmer the fluid, the faster it’s processed when you put it on the plate, but also the faster it returns into random because the water molecules move quicker and they start bumping into one another and start building or losing the harmony again, I would say maybe a day you have a day or two, and if you put it in the fridge maybe three days before, the water is kind of back to as it was random rather than organized. Although we have found that we can, and we do make the water so structured that it seems to last for months afterwards. We sell this thing called magic water. Yeah, that’s what it’s called, magic water. And that seems to last indefinitely.

Now let’s talk about what happens, why? So it could be an injury. Wherever there is an injury like you twist your ankle, that’s probably going to be the arthritic the soonest. And if you start getting arthritis or you either tear it or overuse it in an activity and you end up with some sort of injury, some sort of a repair, and the repairs that the body makes are not necessarily done with the native cells. It is often done with fibrin, which is the scar tissue. So as we go along, we may become more and more stiff because the repairs are more and more extensive, and these repairs could be happening in your arteries, making your blood vessels stiffer. They could be happening in your joints, making your joints stiffer, or any other soft tissue.

And like fibromyalgia, it is a famous name. It is another interesting word, right? Algia or alg that has to do with pain. And fibro. That’s fibrosis or fibro tissue. And myo that’s like anything muscle. There you have it, right? Muscles bound up with fibers giving you pain. That’s the plain translation of the fancy word fibromyalgia. Anyway, why am I up on that? Well, so the fiber is binding things up. It’s stiffening things. So undoing that would logically lead to reducing the stiffness of things. And for that we have fibrinolytic enzymes. The most famous one of the lot is, or the most commonly used one is Serrapeptase or serrapeptidase. We have that in several products, Zymitol, Vitalzym, Fibrenza. These products are very effective and efficient at helping to undo the damage done through injuries and repairs. So if you end up with what’s known as calculus, calculus means calcium deposits in the wrong place. Like you probably are familiar with calculus on your teeth. When you go for dental hygienist cleaning of the teeth. They are scraping this calculus off of your teeth because it’s the calcification that’s a deposit that causes some irritation to the gum. And if it’s at the gum line, the gum line starts receding in reaction to the calcium deposits. And that’s most undesirable because you need to keep the gum line as high on the tooth as possible. That’s the calcification, that’s the calculus.

Well, you can have that same thing happening on a joint, like for example, this joint here. If the calculi are depositing, you’re starting to see a swelling of the joint. And we do have a really interesting product called Arthritis-Ease, which is very good at stimulating the body to undo this calcification. And you’ll speed it up even more if you raise the available Magnesium, because Calcium and Magnesium are each other’s antagonists. So when you push the magnesium, that will also speed up the removal of calcium from places where it shouldn’t be and moving it to places where it should be.

There’s one other one called TMJ-Ease temporomandibular joint. That’s the joint that you would find just in front of your ear down here. If you open your mouth, you will feel where that joint is. And that joint, some people end up with calcification there, and that happens because of some misalignments, right? Like if you have a misaligned bite or something else going on grinding teeth, tension, you may end up with inflammation in this joint, TMJ. And if you have that, it can be exceedingly painful. And the TMJ-Ease is a herbal tincture that helps us reduce that calcification, thereby reducing the friction, thereby improving the function and so on. But it doesn’t fix the mechanical problem. So if you develop that problem because of a misalignment, you need to first have a bite adjusted to make it work. Or you may need to get rid of your grinding of the teeth.

Speaking of which, two major causes, one of them is parasites. If you’re finding yourself grinding your teeth at night, you may have parasites that you should get rid of. And the other one is tension. Just unresolved stress and anxiety. Taking a Magnesium soak before bedtime, foot soak or bath soak is a grand idea, because it will help to relax you and your body and help you sleep. I was actually in the middle of mentioning the Solanaceae when I bumped into a sidebar. The nightshade plants for some reason affect the joints more than anything. These plants are, the common ones are potato as in white potato, not a sweet potato, but just a white potato.

Which actually could be red and purple. Tomato, eggplant, bell pepper which could be green, yellow or red cayenne pepper. Same deal, chili pepper. And of the more exotic ashwagandha is on the list, goji berry is on that list, so there’s a bunch of them, but the most common ones are the ones I just mentioned. So for example, a Greek salad with tomatoes and bell peppers is definitely and tomatoes on the side. That’s a nice heavy hit of the nightshades. Now, what’s interesting is that nightshade plants were not in Europe until the 1700s. Tomatoes and potatoes were imported from America. So even though they became the staple diet, not that many generations back, there was no exposure to them. But the best way to find out if you have a lot of European heritage rather than Aztec, native Mexican or Peruvian, if you don’t have that genetic heritage and you likely don’t, because poor Incas, after the visitation of the Spanish conquistadors in first visitation 1490, so it would be early 1500s. When the Spaniards showed up on the west coast of South America, the Incan empire was strong, but they brought with it smallpox, and the smallpox was deadly, and the Incas had no immune defenses against it. The Europeans had the smallpox infections, and they had natural immunity all along. So anyway, 94 out of 100 died, which was awful. Anyway, point is, so try two months, maybe three, without nightshade plants in your diet if you’re having arthritic issues and you will find yourself possibly pain free.

The other common irritant is grain, wheat. So if the nightshades didn’t cut it, try eliminating gluten from your diet. That would be especially wheat. But you need to be a very good detective these days to discover what is or is not gluten free. Gluten these days is found in many things. It’s in ketchup, it’s in mustard, it’s in all kinds of other condiments. And of course, it’s in all the baked goods. Unless you specifically buy something that’s gluten free. But a lot of these gluten free flours will have potato starch in it, which may trigger you with the potato. So you need to kind of pay attention.

There are three things about grains. Number one, they are estrogen promoting until they’re sprouted. So we want to be using sprouted grains rather than not sprouted when we make baked goods. Ezekiel bread is made with sprouted grain and it’s also an unleavened bread, so there’s no yeast in it. So there’s a good chance that it’s healthier for you, but it should be made with organic grains rather than with the ones that have been treated with glyphosate. Because if you use regular grain, you may have a problem. And if you have a gluten problem, then even Ezekiel bread is going to be bad for you. So if you’re okay with wheat and if you use a decent grain, then the Ezekiel bread is the best option.

The other good option is called sourdough. Sourdough is also reducing the negative effects of the grains that it would have on us. So those two would be great. So sourdough is made with sprouted grains or Ezekiel style. As time goes, as we age, we typically lose our ability to repair. The immune system does decline somewhat. The way it works in the human body is that you have the villi in the small intestine, and the villi are covered with a single cell layer of a protective permeable barrier. And this barrier is keeping the sensitive inside from the assaults of the dirty or non-sterile outside. So if you visualize your mouth, it’s the beginning of the pipe that goes through your body, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and out. That actually is the outside running through the middle of you. So when you ingest food, the food is outside and it’s got bacteria on it and it’s got nematodes on it and maybe fungus. And it may have all kinds of things, some which are useful nutrients, but some which are toxins. And in the process of digesting it, the system is supposed to sort it out and allow only the stuff that we want to come and pass through the villi into the bloodstream, and everything else should be in that brown banana that you push out of your anus every day, hopefully every day.

So if the small intestine gets damaged, the covering is really only one cell thick.

So wheat with its gluten and its zonulin tends to punch holes in this covering. So it’s as if there was a separation, right? Like all of a sudden, there’s this gap that allows stuff to come through all the way down. By down I mean all the way into the bloodstream. So that allows under digested bits, clusters of amino acids, peptides, bits of protein that they get into the bloodstream. And all of a sudden the non-me, the foreign external stuff that shouldn’t be there is circulating. And your immune system has to deal with it. Well your liver, your kidneys, your immunity and all of that, that all gets affected.

So I remember I could eat wheat until about 15 years ago. Yeah, that would have been what it was 15 years ago, 2005 or so. Yeah, about then, and then I started having health problems from it. So I stopped eating it. And then I went on a business trip to Italy, I think it was 2012. Yeah, 2012. So I was well into not being able to eat wheat. And in Italy you get the spaghetti and you get the bread and whatever, whatever. And I thought, well, what the heck, I’m here only for three days. I just have to eat something. So I ate the Italian wheat. Nothing happened. So I’m asking my host, tell me about Italian wheat.

And he said: “Grano, which is the Italian word for grain in Italy, is defined as the old wheat that is still four feet tall when it’s grown, not the 18 inch hybridized selected stuff that’s grown in North America. And it only has 6% of gluten and not 13 as it has in America. The researchers here were so proud of themselves, telling us that they have created varieties that have more protein in it, as if we needed it. Also, in Italy, they’re not allowed to use herbicides and pesticides, so it’s naturally organic. So I experienced it myself. No problem eating Italian. I surely hope to God that they get to keep that rather than getting overrun by the World Trade Organization, and it’s machine that causes the others to push their engineering ideas onto others. So I’m contemplating moving to Italy or importing Italian pasta or Italian flour. I should try, I don’t know, I have been afraid to try because the side effects are usually not fun. My face breaks out, I hurt and all that. So not funny.

The other thing that you should be aware of is glyphosate. Roundup, as such, is used on wheat fields in America now to not control weeds because herbicide that’s a weed control, right? But in wheat they don’t control the weeds. What they do is they spray it on just before harvest because in the process of killing the plant, as the wheat is dying, it’s pushing maximum energy into the seed, trying to preserve the next generation.

So it increases the yield, and it also dries the plant. And as the plant dries up uniformly, it makes it easier to harvest. So they spray it. And then a few days later they come in with the combine harvesters, harvest it and put it away.

And there’s only a trace amount of this glyphosate on the grain, but it is enough to accumulate and cause damage in our gut. It doesn’t kill the human cells, but it kills the microbes that live inside our guts. And that is a major problem because with the microbial terrain breaking down, we are seeing more and more inflammatory disease. And that’s what this is. There used to be 1 or 2% people in the society with an inflammatory disease long ago. Now 40, 50% of people now have one or more inflammatory conditions.

I mean, it starts with circulatory health, right? Like, if you have inflammation of the cardiovascular system, especially vascular, that would be vasculitis, right? That would be stiffening of the arteries. With it comes either high blood pressure or less effective heartbeats and less effective thinking because there’s not enough oxygen getting to tissues. So that’s number one. And then number two would be all these illnesses of the structure. And that, my dear friends, should be the end of the sermon today. Thank you for being here. This is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast, life-enthusiast.com

The post Podcast 481: Understanding Inflammation Beyond Arthritis appeared first on Life Enthusiast.