Podcast 193: Bowel Cleansing

Martin Pytela, renowned founder of the Life Enthusiast, is back with his co-host Scott Paton for this week’s exciting podcast about Assimilation and Elimination – two extremely important key stones that make us tick. It has been suggested that if these two aspects of our bodies could be properly regulated, we could extend life as far as we wanted.

So just what is assimilation and elimination? Assimilation can be thought of as the body’s ability to utilize the nutrients found in the foods we eat. Unfortunately, most people in our society think that large quantities of food equal more nutrients. This is quite misguided as it completely ignores the body’s ability to take this nutrition and put it to good use.

Typical absorption rates of nutrients range from 20-80%. This means that you might be only assimilating as little as 20% of the nutrients you are feeding your body. You need to make use of what you’re putting in. Micronized nutrients are absorbed at a better rate.

Elimination, on the other hand, might be more known to the general public, for it is simply the way the body removes waste and eliminates toxins. While we might not think about it, every activity the body does produces waste. This waste is eliminated through the skin, lungs, kidneys and intestines. If any of these channels aren’t functioning properly, there can be major problems.

This really only scratches the surface of this fascinating topic. Be sure to check out the podcast for yourself!

Podcast 193: Bowel Cleansing

SCOTT: Hello everybody, welcome to the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet! I am your co-host, Scott Paton, along with the founder of the Life Enthusiast, Martin Pytela! Hey Martin, how are you doing today?

MARTIN: Full of it, Scott, full of it!

SCOTT: Well, we are going to talk about how to make that move smoothly through the system! But before we do, I have to say that I just finished doing one of my hot yoga sessions, and it was wonderful! The elimination and the detoxing that was going on, wonderful. I don’t think I mentioned this to you before, but I have two hot yoga towels, and when I get home from hot yoga, I take those two particular towels and my other stuff, and I wash them, and I’ve gotten in the habit of leaving them in the washing room until I am ready to do my next hot yoga session, then I put them into my bag and I take them with me, and I do not use those towels for anything else. Can you guess why?

MARTIN: They could be smelly!

SCOTT: They are incredibly stinky. Not so bad that someone in the hot yoga class who’s working out next to me is going to notice in that environment. But if you were to come over, have a shower, and use one of these towels, you know, you’d be smelling that, they have a very distinct odor, and it doesn’t seem there’s anything that could help, and I don’t want to put bleach on them…

MARTIN: Well, it is time for you to discover Oxybleach!

SCOTT: Oxybleach?

MARTIN: Yes, sir, oxygen bleaching. You don’t have to use chlorine, you can use oxygen.

SCOTT: Okay, good. Well, maybe I will try that.

MARTIN: There are some really cool things, one of them is known as DD7, but Oxybleach is out there, it is essentially ozone, it releases ozone into the water, and ozone is very aggressive, and it will oxygenate away all of the contaminants, so it will be as fresh as new.

SCOTT: Cool! Well, I don’t get it, you know, because I go into the hot yoga place, it is hot, I lay down my mat, I lay down my towel, I perspire a little bit, and then after a while, I’ve got these stinky towels, and I don’t understand, because it is just my nice salty sweat that is going on there, so I don’t get where these distasteful odors come from.

MARTIN: Well, I mean, you are eliminating something! This sweat that comes out of your pores is very close to your urine in its structure.

SCOTT: Oh, so you are telling me it is not just water and salt?

MARTIN: Well, it is mostly that, but there are, of course, all of the metabolites that your body is trying to get rid of!

SCOTT: Oh, you mean toxins!

MARTIN: Toxins, definitely.

SCOTT: So as I am doing the hot yoga and I am sweating, I am getting rid of stuff that my body doesn’t want to have in it as well?

MARTIN: Absolutely.

SCOTT: And I can tell that I am getting rid of a lot of it because my towels are basically garbage.

MARTIN: Yes, but you could try and bleach them back to health.

SCOTT: Well, I am thinking this is really doing me a lot of good, doing all this hot yoga stuff!

MARTIN: Oh, absolutely it is! Yes! I mean, there are several elimination pathways – through your bowels, through your urine, through your sweat, through your lungs…

SCOTT: Right! So the elimination of toxins is really, really important, as well as the assimilation of our food, what I mean by that is being able to actually use the stuff we put in our mouth, as opposed to it just flowing through our gut.

MARTIN: This is a major point because it doesn’t really matter so much what is ingested, but what is retained. Can you actually make use of what you are putting in? We run into this with the superfoods that we make. We use the micronization process when manufacturing these. The particle size is important because your digestive system only extracts nutrients at the surface level. If you visualize things like particles, imagine we have marbles, and we have tennis balls, golf balls, bowling balls… so if you are ingesting small particles, your body is going to be able to extract more nutrients out of that, because it can only extract on the surface of the ball, not from the inside of it.

But let’s go back to the elimination! I am going to quote something. There is this really cool article on our website titled ‘Assimilation and Elimination,” and it says: “Imagine not cleaning up the kitchen very often, leaving the waste that would happen. Your kitchen would become literally alive with all sorts of creepy bacteria. The same can be said about your body. The fact that poor elimination is the most cited cause of disease within the Edgar Casey research papers, totaling over 14.000, gives you some idea of how important this aspect really is. It gives you an idea of the importance of getting rid of toxins, rid of waste, and everything else that shouldn’t be there from our bodies.” And then they throw this list of conditions, in which elimination problems play a big role. Arthritis, acne, anemia, stroke, appendicitis, asthma, atrophy, balding from poor circulation, bladder stricture, boils, brain tumors, cancers, sores, herpes, cataracts, cirrhosis, I mean, I am only at the letter C, but the list goes on and on, all the way to ulcers, vaginitis, varicose veins, vertigo.

SCOTT: Wow.

MARTIN: Not a pretty lineup, is it? So let us talk about how to detox. I think that is more important. Yes, we can make a case that elimination is important, we can make a case that we should have things running well, but how do we get rid of stuff that we don’t want?

SCOTT: How do we do that?

MARTIN: We have to do that in the correct order of things. It should be bowel first, then liver, then kidneys, then blood. The reason you do it in this order is that you want to be sure that when you push on your liver, it is not going to get stuck in your bowel. And when you push on your kidneys, you want to be sure that it is not going to get stuck somewhere else. When you push on the wet side of elimination, you don’t want it stuck in your kidneys. And then finally you want to purify your blood because that is where it all needs to end up, your blood should be the picture of your health.

SCOTT: Yeah. Some of the benefits of detoxing your body are both long-term and short-term, and some of the things you may notice are increased mental awareness, more energy, more comfortable digestion of foods, better absorption, and overall feeling of better health, and a reduction in chronic illness potential, as you grow older. I think it is really important that we tie these sorts of things in because if we are not assimilating, we are not eliminating, and we are not detoxing, usually, the result is less energy, problems with constipation, skin problems, and chronic disease.

MARTIN: True, very true. So we can either slow down aging, or even perhaps reverse some of the chronic diseases that may have come about, and so on. There is a really cool page in that same section called Eating and Cleansing, it opens up with: “The diets of the average North American,” but they should really say the average industrial society dweller, “consists of food that is over-processed, low in fiber, and high in refined sugar. We also consume large amounts of red meat, dairy products, and wheat. According to a 1977 Journal of the medical association, this article says that the diet results in fewer friendly bacteria in the intestinal tract.” The digestive tract must have the right kind of fauna and flora, the critters that live there. That is probably the biggest challenge, where we have the wrong balance of the creatures  We all have two to four pounds of bacteria living in our guts. Contemplate that, four pounds of bacteria! That is about the size of your forearm, right? It is like six steaks or a half of a chicken. But if they are out of balance, then things don’t work.

SCOTT: So they can be the wrong bacteria, and if there are too many of the wrong bacteria, we are going to have candida, and fungus, and stuff like that in there as well, and that is all going to cause us problems. It is like having a garden full of dandelions when you don’t want them.

MARTIN: Yeah. That is right. Exactly. In 1986, when I was quite ill, I picked up a book about attaining health through bowel management, and it explained that the best thing you can do is clean out your bowel. I read that when John Wayne died, they found 40 pounds of fecal matter in his body: his lower intestine weighed 40 pounds.

SCOTT: I heard the same thing.

MARTIN: He did have this huge, protruding stomach. It was protruding because there was no room for all of that stuff on the inside. It had to push out. But anyway, we are trying to give people some hints as to what they could do. The number one is maintaining your gut flora. I guess it starts with what you don’t do, right? You don’t eat that over-processed, over-sweetened diet, and then you don’t drink chlorinated water because chlorine will kill off the friendly gut flora. What you should be doing is taking fulvic acid, humic acid, and eating fermented foods. We actually talked about fermentation not long ago, when we were introducing the Genki foods product line. We have also talked about Strata-Flora many times, which is probably the most potent broad-spectrum restoration product that we know of that helps to rebuild and restore healthy function in the bowel. There are essentially two approaches to bowel cleanse. One is – do it sort of an avalanche style, all at once, just purge. The other one would be an ongoing, daily, incremental change.

SCOTT: One of the things you often say to me, Martin, and I always remember is “When you are in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.” One of the things we can control is what we put into our bodies. The average person sits down, they will have a chunk of meat with some rice or potato, they will have some vegetables, they will have a little bit of salad, they might have a piece of fruit there, some bread… it is a whole pile of different foods there. And I was just thinking that 10,000 years ago, when we were foraging for food, if we came across a bush full of berries, we would eat that, three days later, we might find some root or something, and we ate that, but we never sat down and said: “Wow, look, there’s a whole bunch of carrots, there’s a bunch of rice, and there’s a bunch of berries, and there’s a cow, let’s put it all together and make a meal.”

MARTIN: You know, if you follow a gorilla, which is really close to us, except bigger, they are actually fruitarians. They eat mostly fruit, some veggies, and hardly any protein. Strange, right? An Orangutan is about our size, he is about two or three times stronger, and you know, how they move through trees, right? A single overhead grab, and effortlessly, swing to the other branch. Which of us men are able and willing to just do a single overhand grab, and swing our entire weight to the next branch? I am ashamed that I am not capable of such a thing!

SCOTT: But you don’t spend all day doing that either. I mean, if you started as a baby, and we had you on the swinging bars at the local gym all day, you would be able to do that! Look at all the amazing things some of the gymnasts do! I was at Cirque de Soleil a couple of months ago, I was absolutely astounded at some of the artists, the balancing that they were doing. We saw two guys on a bike, 20 feet above the ground, on a wire! So practice really helps!

MARTIN: Yeah, when I was 12 or 14 years old, I could pull myself up to the ceiling of the gymnasium on a rope just using my hands. Anyway, what I was hinting at is that the natural diet that our closest relatives are living on and developing on is largely raw, it is reasonably varied, but it is mostly raw plant-based food. So there we have it. If you want to have a healthy colon, eliminate refined sugar, flour, refined salt, and refined oil, eliminate meats that were treated with synthetic hormones or chemicals. So that is goodbye, hot dog. Goodbye, smoked meats. Goodbye all beef from North America, because it is legal to use RBGH hormones in America. Go into your store and ask: “Is your meat certified as non-hormone treated?” I don’t want to buy hormone-treated meat. We as consumers have all the power! I saw a phenomenal movie called Food, Inc., it shows that Walmart has completely banned milk from cows that have been treated with RBGH. It is phenomenal. Walmart?

SCOTT: Walmart, where you can buy any Mr. Christie’s cookies you want?

MARTIN: Right! But the milk is healthy! Anyway, more power to them, hallelujah. The next thing to eliminate is hydrogenated fats.

SCOTT: Stick with the coconut oil, right?

MARTIN: We will stick with the coconut oil, we will stick with olive oil, and raw butter. Raw or clarified butter is fine!

SCOTT: Can you get raw butter at the grocery store in the regular dairy section?

MARTIN: No, it is pasteurized.

SCOTT: I just wanted to make that distinction, because I was thinking raw butter is probably not going to be very easy to get.

MARTIN: Nope, find yourself a farmer, and beg him to spin off a part of his produce and get the raw butter. There have been such witch hunts on the raw milk. The reason we have to pasteurize the milk isn’t that the milk itself is inherently bad, but because we are mixing so many different sources into one big vat, we need to just ensure it is not contaminated.

SCOTT: So let me put it this way: We have farmer Joe and farmer Sam, and let is say each of them has three cows. Each of the three cows’ milk gets mixed up together, and then if they want to mix these two big batches together, they pasteurize it because there is concern that the milk might react with the other milk?

MARTIN: No, not like that. It is not the reaction, it is that we don’t know whether farmer Joe or Sam failed to wash the cow’s udder. If we have one bucket that is contaminated, we will just throw that one bucket away, but when we have this contamination in 10,000 gallons of milk, we now have to sterilize it because we just don’t know. It is a convenience issue from the manufacturer, they are able to get us inexpensive milk, but the price we pay for the inexpensiveness is that it is denatured.

SCOTT: There’s an issue here, which I want to bring up since we are now talking about milk, there are farms that would like to sell fresh unpasteurized milk, raw milk. They are not allowed to. This is where it gets really ridiculous. I know that there might be some concerns, I know the reasons why we want to pasteurize, but I am just getting it from this local farm for my own use, I am not reselling it or anything else, but they won’t let me buy it from the farmer, they won’t let the farmers sell it. So what this farmer did was he sold shares in the farm, he sells shares in the cow. I think it should be allowed because of the market…

MARTIN: Let the market decide, right?

SCOTT: Let the market decide, yes! We have carrots that are way more expensive than other carrots in the grocery store because they have the word ‘organic’ in front of them, so why can’t we have the same thing for raw milk?

MARTIN: Well, I guess in the case of the marketing board that controls dairy, they have decided to take this particular approach, which is very hostile towards the not-pasteurized.

SCOTT: Almost all of my cousins grew up with dairy cows, and they just went in, had this barrel, milked the cows, and just drank the milk out of the barrel.

MARTIN: Do you remember drinking that?

SCOTT: I kind of remember, it was different, it was very good.

MARTIN: Well, it would be better to eat raw in general, rather than cooked, but humans are the only species whose adults would be eating or drinking the milk of another species. There is something inherently weird about it.

SCOTT: Yes. So getting back to elimination, I noticed on one of the pages you referenced Dr. Bernard Jensen, an American naturopath. After working with more than 350,000 patients over a 50-year span, not one of them was free from some form of bowel disorder. So he concluded that all sick people have bowel problems, and all sick people are tired and toxin-laden. I just wanted to say: Think about how you can make sure you have a healthy bowel. Are we doing everything we can to have a healthy bowel?

MARTIN: Yeah, we go back to that three-headed monster that you and I talked about at the beginning of the year, which was either you are in the presence of toxins, the absence of nutrients. or a lack of movement and circulation. With the colon, we now end up with the presence of toxins. The bowel could be either distended, ballooned out, which means that it will be storing stuff in it that shouldn’t be there that long, or it will have a stricture. Imagine a rubber band around a finger, that sort of blocks smooth transit. This sort of thing will happen with the bowel. The worst ones are called diverticula, which are like these pockets, like a dead-end cutaway swamp on a river. It is a dead zone. The flow is slow. I think we should return to this in our next episode, we are getting all this argumentation why it is important, but we are not telling people what to do. We just told them what not to do, which is: Don’t eat refined food. Don’t eat too much meat. Definitely don’t eat hydrogenated fats.

Avoid canned, packaged, labeled, barcoded… Well, that is not a correct statement, really, there are different levels of food preservation. The friendliest preservation is just refrigeration, you just keep it cool. Freezing is the next one, that makes your food last longer. The next one after that is freeze-drying, these foods stay very fresh and viable for a long time until you rehydrate it. The less friendly ones are pasteurization, where you kill off all the enzymatic action, or canning, where you kill off all of the enzymatic action as well. And then beyond that is the preservations of fat, you either have to refine the oil, or you have to add things to it to make it stable. Hydrogenation is one of the methods. That is why your crackers don’t go bad because they used hydrogenated fat to make them. But anyway, I would like to break off here now, so that we can return to finally talk about elimination and detoxification in our next episode of the series.

SCOTT: So Martin, if somebody wants to talk to you about some issues they have with their health, and maybe more about these particular topics, how can they get a hold of you?

MARTIN: Please go to www.life-enthusiast.com, we have a really well-researched website with a lot of articles that have been checked for factual integrity. If you get lost in that, you can call me at (866) 543 3388. We are restoring vitality to you and to the planet. Thanks for joining us, everybody. See you next time!

Note: the information provided are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with your medical professional(s) if you are dealing with a specific medical issue.

Author: Martin Pytela