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Podcast 207: Metabolic Typing and Healthy Pregnancy

Martin Pytela and his co-host Scott Paton are by now very well known for their informative Podcasts which deal with all kinds of alternative health issues.

Scott recently had an experience with a young girl that went crazy after eating the wrong foods for her particular metabolic type. There are 2 major metabolic types: one type is alkalized by fruits and veggies and the other alkalized by meat and protein. Eating for your specific metabolic type can make a very big difference in your state of being! Eating the wrong foods can give way to any number of health problems.

The next issue Martin and Scott talk about is pregnancy and how folic acid is so very important to prevent birth defects. One great source of folic acid is dark greens like Chlorella and
Spirulina. And consider how iodine deficiency can get in the way. Whatever the mother is deficient in before pregnancy, she will be really deficient afterwards!

More and more, research is showing that most Americans are iodine deficient. There would be a far lower rate of breast cancer as well as fibrocystic disease if iodine supplementation were known as much as it should be. Competing halogens such as fluoride and bromide, when combined with insufficient iodine intake, are the root of this deficiency problem found throughout the USA.

The other aspect of this is oxidative stress. In other words, the body produces an excessive of free radicals when there is greater stress on its metabolism. Antioxidants are the best way to combat this problem, and there are many of them available, like MegaHydrate that really works wonders for iodine deficiency.

Podcast 207 about Metabolic Typing and Healthy Pregnancy

SCOTT: Welcome back, everybody! You are listening to the Life Enthusiast Podcast, restoring vitality to you and the planet! I am your co-host Scott Paton, and joining us, as usual, in this wonderful new year, is the founder of the Life Enthusiast, Martin Pytela! Martin, happy new year!

MARTIN: Happy new year, Scott! 2011! This is amazing!

SCOTT: We are off to a new start and some new beginnings! And I had a very interesting thing happen over the last couple of days, that I wanted to share with you because to me, it was an incredible example of the power of what we put in our mouth. And I am really curious to hear what you think of this, and your opinions on it. So a few days ago, I had to take my car in, so I was basically without transportation, and I had a couple of meetings that were very close to the workplace, with my girlfriend. So we decided that I would just stay there for two days during the week, which is unusual, but not dramatically unusual.

MARTIN: You have stayed overnight before?

SCOTT: I have. And she has a young daughter, who is 7 years old, we get along great, we know each other very well. So one day we pick up her daughter from school, and her daughter is as the absolute worst-case spoiled brat you could ever imagine.

MARTIN: You are kidding!

SCOTT: She is yelling and screaming, I am always an evil man, nothing that happens is good, she is picking fights with her mom, she is being disrespectful, slamming the door, when her mom tells her to go have a shower and get ready for bed, she tries to get out of it, then she goes to the shower, but is yelling and screaming and crying at the top of her lungs for what felt like hours, throwing a massive tantrum for hours.

MARTIN: Would you say this was out of character for her?

SCOTT: I would say generally ‘yes,’ but not really. I had never seen her before going to this extent, these behaviors have sort of popped up in minor doses in the past. It is not like: “Wow, we have never seen her like this,” but it was ramped up more than I had ever experienced. So then the next day we pick her up at school, and she is the most angelic kid you could ever imagine. Loving, kind, and peaceful.

MARTIN: Just a quick question, is she born in Gemini? (laughing).

SCOTT: She’s a Taurus.

MARTIN: Nevermind.

SCOTT: And her mom is a Taurus as well. So from that perspective, it is very interesting. So, as you can imagine, the difference between the two days was amazing. On day one, she ate nothing for breakfast, and she ate nothing for her lunch. She had her lunch, but she refused to eat it because she didn’t like sandwiches, she didn’t like this and didn’t like that. So what do you like, right? She said she likes pasta, so her mom had made up some pasta. So the first night, after the whole tantrum, she had some pasta with some meat and sauce, and by the time she went to bed, she was embarrassed about the way she had acted, and felt sorry, and was calm again. So then the next day, her mom gave her some of the leftover pasta for lunch, which she ate. 

And it was interesting because we ended up having a bit of a discussion and I said: “Well, I grew up on Kraft Dinner,” and of course the little girl was like: “Oh I love Kraft Dinner!” and she wanted some, but her mother was like “No no no, it is just garbage!” And I said: “Well, I grew up on Kraft dinners, and I survived!” And I am thinking, you know, there is this little girl, who we know is very stubborn, and you give her food to eat, and she refuses to eat it to the point where she doesn’t even know she’s hungry. But then you give her something she likes and you know she will eat and not turn your day into hell, I would kind of go with that and work with that, so at least she is calm, and then I would give her some better food. But anyway, what she put in her mouth had a huge impact on her emotional state.

MARTIN: So the second day she ate something different?

SCOTT: Yeah, the second day she had a little bit of breakfast, and then she ate her lunch, which was pasta, and then she was a little angel.

MARTIN: Do we know her blood type?

SCOTT: I think it is O+.

MARTIN: The reason I ask it is that there is this magical thing in the human design called biological individuality. We have two major types of physiology, and it is 50:50, maybe more like 60:40 split in the population. One group gets alkalized by fruits and veggies (carbohydrates), the other group is alkalized by fats and proteins. Now, when I say ‘alkalize,’ that means that if you are eating the wrong kind of diet, it is going to push your blood and your body fluids in the wrong direction on a pH scale. If you are eating against your type, you are going to make yourself feel miserable. And if you are eating with your type, you are going to make yourself peaceful.

And people with blood type O typically should be eating very little carbs, and they should be eating more of the hunter-gatherer diets, more meat, healthy sources of protein. They could be eating some quality dairy, but these days it is nearly impossible to get good dairy because it is all pasteurized. So anyway, let’s just pretend that this would be the little hunter-gatherer daughter. We should really just have a fresh-killed deer, that we would maybe prepare with some veggies and berries and send her off to school with that for lunch, in an ideal world. The sort of stuff that would really slay her is indeed too much pasta, bread, chips, and soda, all of that. And here’s how it would go. It would give rise to fungus, candida, and other nasty fungal growth in her digestive system. 

When this person has an overgrowth of candida, has overpopulated body terrain with the wrong kind of bacteria, she will be craving carbohydrates. But the carbs she will crave will make her mad. When you do feed her the carbs she wants, it calms down, but in the long run, it is not helping. Okay. If I were advising the situation there, I would be recommending that you make a very, very conservative effort into eating the primal diet, and slowly but surely wean the child off of the carbs, so that the candida dies off. And I would really promote some fermented, cultured veggies, like sauerkraut or kimchi, as a source of decent probiotics and prebiotics that the digestive system requires.

SCOTT: Interesting! So we have a case here where what looks like solving the problem is actually making the problem worse.

MARTIN: I wouldn’t say worse, I mean, in an emergency, you need to do what the emergency requires. This sort of reminds me of how the medical system works. They do the right thing for you in an emergency. They are fantastically good at that. If you are in an emergency room with a heart attack, they can save you. They will fix your broken bone. They are really good at solving acute crises. What they are not good at is preventing the crisis from happening in the first place. The prevention. And of course the chronic issues. So the pasta meal was a decent solution to the problem, actually eating anything was a decent solution to the acute problem.

But what it is pointing at is that going hungry is causing her this phenomenal mental distress, which I would really suspect is caused by the overgrowth of the wrong kind of creatures in her system. This is really a big deal. I just recently lost some data, because I didn’t make a backup, and I lost my hard drive. How ridiculous is that? I am an IT specialist! So last night, I ate some Christmas cake that my wife made, and I feel horrible today. But I know exactly why I feel horrible. But I was standing there in the kitchen with my desire for some oral pleasures, and the cake just called me. It just said: eat me.

SCOTT: Yeah, who can resist that?

MARTIN: Right. So I know I am not holier than anyone, but I certainly know the answer.

SCOTT: Yeah, that is funny. Well, that is very interesting, and it gave me some insight, I really wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your insights there because I was thinking the opposite way! I was thinking: “This is great, just change your diet, feed her lots of pasta.” And of course, her mum is saying no, that is not the right thing to do. But I am going: “Well, look at the difference.”

MARTIN: The best analogy I can give you is when you have a heroin addict, who is just shaking, is in horrendous trouble, the nicest thing you can do for them is to shoot them with more heroin, but it is not the long-term strategy that is going to get him off of that. So next time he’s going to run out, it is going to be even worse.

SCOTT: Interesting. So we’re off to a great start in the new year, and one of the things that I also wanted to ask you about, because I don’t think we have talked about it at all, well maybe we did and I just don’t remember, but I wanna talk about pregnancies!

MARTIN: (laughing) I love it when it happens to me.

SCOTT: What, pregnancy? (laughing).

MARTIN: No, no, no, (laughing) when it happens to me that I cannot recall whether we did or didn’t talk about something. And of course, after three years together, what have we not talked about?

SCOTT: Well, I don’t think two guys usually spend much time talking about pregnancies.

MARTIN: So this is a good topic. My friend is practically a legend because when he married his first wife, he was younger than her, and she already had a 15-year-old kid. This kid is now 50 years old. Then he had two kids with the first wife, but unfortunately, she passed away. I was actually instrumental in introducing him to this much younger woman, she is 17 years younger than him, they had one kid, and now they have a second one on the way. So now this guy is a stepfather to a 50-year-old, a father of a 33-year-old and a 30-year-old, next is a 5-year-old, and a baby on the way! He is now 58. So we talk a lot, he trusts me a lot, because I have really been instrumental in helping him turn his physique around, he was in trouble and isn’t now, he’s doing fantastic. In fact, the reason for this pregnancy is because he has improved his hormonal function so much, that he has become very interested. (laughing)

Anyway, that is not the point. So here we are with a pregnancy, and they asked me: “What do you suggest? What do you want to tell us that we would not hear in the mainstream?” And that was the cutest thing. I went online and I typed in ‘nutrition in pregnancy,’ and ‘holistic pregnancy.’ I chased this thing around the internet to see what’s out there. I clicked on many articles, and I am so disgusted because there’s just so much crap! I mean, these sort of the mainstream lies that just babble about how you are supposed to avoid wine and eat a rational, reasonable diet, you know? That sort of platitude stuff that is without substance, you know, just babble. I found that just disheartening, to see that if a person actually wanted to get educated out there, it would take a phenomenal amount of effort. So instead, I sat down and started writing the diary from the trenches of the alternative health, as to what you need to know, because in our industrialized society, it is pretty much everywhere now, whether you are in Germany, in The United States, or Australia, you are probably going to be in the same kind of situation.

SCOTT: So what do you do if you are a woman who’s pregnant and wants to make sure that her baby is born healthy and strong, and she is without defects she is not dismantling her body in the process?

MARTIN: Yes, exactly! Excellent point! The first thing that comes to me comes to mind is folic acid. That is one thing that I did read: “Supplement with folic acid.” But here goes again the mainstream pharmaceutical approach, they have isolated this one thing, because they always liked to isolate one thing and present it as the silver bullet, that is going to solve everything. So they have come up with folic acid being the most important component of this, and that is what we are going to recommend and sell. But if you deconstruct it, folic acid really is the main component of folate, and that is the dark green stuff in leafy greens, it is just food, the green stuff!

SCOTT: So what you are saying is rather than just eating the rainbow, as they say, mainstream is kinda recommending to just pick one color.

MARTIN: Yeah, because they noticed that this one color is important in this one situation.

SCOTT: Right, whereas the whole rainbow is really what you want to get.

MARTIN: Well, if we were supposed to be eating folic acid supplements, then that is what the gorillas in the mist on the mountains would be eating. They would be picking off the folic acid capsules off the trees because that is what the doctor says. But that is not how we are built. We are not designed to graze in a pharmacy. We are designed to graze in a natural environment, and that means that things come together for a reason. In an apple, there is fiber, water, vitamins, and minerals. It is all there for a reason, we are designed to ingest it all together, not separate. Do you want to have more folic acid? Well, eat dark green things! You know, chlorella, spirulina, barley, kale, dandelion, Swiss chard, go for it! That is the folic acid I would recommend!

SCOTT: Yes, as you said, alfalfa, spirulina, barley grass, sweetgrass, dark leafy vegetables. Eat a salad, or make a juice! I use carrots and beets, maybe I should put the beet leaves in the juice too! I always cut them off and put them in the compost, so my compost has lots of folic acid!

MARTIN: Yes! (laughing)

SCOTT: No wonder I thought I was seeing little capsules starting to grow on the trees around here. (laughing)

MARTIN: The reason folic acid is important is that it prevents birth defects. Especially in older people, older women, if you are over 30, you should start worrying about birth defects more than if you are 20 years old. What is also really important, perhaps even more important, is iodine. Because if you are suffering from a deficiency in iodine, you have a high probability that you will miscarry, lose the pregnancy, or you can have complications with childbirth defects as well, low birth weight, low intelligence. Optimal iodine intake ensures that your child is not stupid, literally. That is amazing. It is just insane that this is not pounded into the population from every corner. I mean, have you heard of it in the mainstream?

SCOTT: I mean… no.

MARTIN: If you are contemplating pregnancy, make sure that you are loaded with iodine. No one says that. And yet, it is out there! The research is readily available! You can find it on our website. There are studies that have been conducted, and they’re quoted in the scientific literature, and all health practitioners have access to this information, it is not a secret! This is well known! So if you are a woman, if you’ve had difficult periods, if you experience things like bloating, emotional difficulties, pain, swollen breasts, those are all signs that you need more iodine. So that was the second thing I said to my friend, to make sure his wife has enough iodine.

SCOTT: So from a guy’s perspective, we’re kind of short on this iodine stuff too, right?

MARTIN: Oh yeah, a man who is short on iodine for 25 years will end up with prostate cancer. Don’t leave it just to the girl, take some iodine with her. And then the third really important thing is minerals. You are going to be building a new body from the reserves that you have in yours. So, you are going to be actually pulling calcium out of your own bones, as well as magnesium and potassium, and all the other minerals you need, they will be coming out of your reserves to build the fetus. So whatever you are deficient in now, you are going to be really deficient in later. Of course, we know that the common deficiency is magnesium. 60% of the population is clinically deficient in magnesium. So assume that you should be supplementing it, you should be bathing with magnesium salts, or using magnesium oil on your skin. It is very relaxing, it is very calming, and it is building a strong, calm baby.

SCOTT: Why don’t I just go and get a magnesium pill?

MARTIN: It used to be, and it is documented again, that there was magnesium in carrots or the other vegetables. But we now know that carrots in 1995 only had 30% of the magnesium that carrots in 1927 used to have. In the 1930s, when they did research, they were already alarmed about the decline in the magnesium content of the produce. The point is that there is no chance that you can have enough natural minerals in the food because it is not in the soil anymore. Now, you are saying, why wouldn’t I just take a pill. You can take it in a pill, it is not a problem, you can go and buy magnesium citrate, but at about 2000mg a day, you are going to reach the limit of your bowel tolerance. You are going to have diarrhea. So you can’t really get enough magnesium orally.

SCOTT: Because your body will purge it.

MARTIN: Yes.

SCOTT: Okay, and you know, it is a great de-stressor, just laying in a nice hot bath full of magnesium salt.

MARTIN: You mean de-dash-stressor, right? Because I heard distressor, I don’t want to be in distress. (laughing) Anyway, it is the most wonderful thing. So that is pretty much the three major things I would recommend for a healthy pregnancy. There are other things, like collagen, silica. These are important for building the connective tissue, essential fatty acids are important, vitamins B and C, of course, some superfood blends… if you eat a healthy, real food diet, you don’t need to worry. But there are some universal supplements, like the Mega Hydrate, that is a fantastically useful product, that is a universal electron donor, so if you are suffering from oxidative stress, you can use that. Well, if you are confused, contact us about a consultation! If you are having difficulty getting your way around it, give us a call! Call me directly, the number is (866) 543 3388, we are available, we are compassionate and caring, and we take the time to explain things.

SCOTT: Right! I think that is really important because just like I did with the pasta thing, you might be thinking: “Here I am, getting the result I want, doing the wrong thing, which is just going to make future results much worse.”

MARTIN: Yeah, you might be postponing the disaster.

SCOTT: We don’t want to postpone the disaster. We want to make sure that disaster doesn’t happen.

MARTIN: That is it! So, Scott, it was good to talk to you again! Thank you, and thank you guys, for listening! 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.