Podcast 359: Actions vs. Consequences

Global warming, forest fires, rising levels of toxic compounds in the air, beaches covered in plastic, more and more people suffering from immune-related disease… that is just a tip of the iceberg. We have to think about not just the future of us as individuals, but also about the future of our planet. There is no Planet B for our grandkids and their grandkids to turn to.

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Life Enthusiast Podcast 359

Scott: Welcome, everybody! This is the Life Enthusiast online TV and radio network, restoring vitality to you and the planet! I’m your co-host, Scott Paton, and joining us as usual is my co-host and good friend, Martin Pytela, Life Enthusiast health coach. Hey, Martin, how are you doing today?

Martin: Hello, Scott! I am actually well! Personally, I’m happy to be alive. I have been operated on, so I am a bit in pain, so if you see me grimacing, it’s going to be that, but it’s ok, I’m getting better.  I had a minor operation, praise lord for the medical system being available to me, when I needed it.

Scott: Yeah, absolutely. So what’s been happening? One of the things that’s been happening in the world is a ton of fires in British Columbia where we live. It was awful in the summertime, and then when we thought the fire season was over, it just moved South to California. Things were blowing up unbelievably in that area. And Martin, I can’t help it, but when we talk about health, we’re usually talking about what you drink and what you eat, but not as much about what you breathe. But when you have all of this very fine ash in the air and you’re breathing it, that’s going to cause problems down the road, won’t it?

Martin: Oh, gosh, it will! There are two issues with the particulate stuff in the air, right? One is the little charcoal bits that get in the air and they’re microscopic, but they are quite sharp, so you could get a small, microscopic bit of carbon embedded in your lung tissue,  and it’s just like having a sliver in your lungs! And that’s not fun, because your body doesn’t know how to get rid of it. It will try to encapsulate it… there could be all manner of trouble coming from that. And the other thing, of course, is the irritation. It may be causing mild allergic issues and asthmatic issues for sure. So, vulnerable people are always under stress, right? We will be dealing with the very young, infants, or the very old. Basically anyone who has breathing conditions will be seriously impacted. You can see that on all the government sites, they will tell you: “Protect yourself.” Number one: don’t go out if you don’t have to. Number two: if you do have to, don’t do serious exercise where you have to breathe with your mouth wide open. All the logical things, you know, behave smart.

Scott: So, before we get into this any further, as you were talking, I was thinking about all of the Japanese or Chinese tourists that I have seen in different cities who, when they come to visit, they have these white masks over their face. And I’m just thinking: do you think that’s a good idea? Do you think it actually does stop some of the particles getting into the lungs?

Martin: Well, the white masks that we see are practically useless against the smoke from the forest fire. They are really good to protect you from being coughed at, protect you from getting saliva from another person on your face, which may or may not be a good thing. Personally, I’m a strong believer in making my immune system strong enough, that I don’t have to worry about somebody coughing on me.

So I am skeptical about that white little mask. It helps, you know, especially the ones that are tight enough to filter out the particles, those might be useful. But I doubt that the typical painter mask people are running around with is going to do a lot of good.

Scott: It’s like with anything else, if you’re going to get one of the top of the line mask filters, it might be okay. But it is quite likely that they bought it at the dollar store.

Martin: Yeah, I think it’s a symbolic gesture that gives them some level of emotional comfort.

Scott: Yeah, and that’s an important thing to think about, because we have a lot of beliefs. And when we believe that we’re in a safe place, we act a lot differently than when we think, well, maybe this isn’t very safe. And just because you believe it’s safe doesn’t mean that it actually is, and just because you think something is not safe, it doesn’t mean it really is as dangerous as you think.  And I’m a firm believer in what you’ve brought up, Martin, that if we are sterilizing everything so much, we’re not really doing a favor to ourselves.

I mean, a hundred years ago, kids were playing in the sand and in the dirt and sticking it in their mouth, they were getting all the good bacteria and everything that was helping plants grow, so to speak. And today, they are playing on a bleached tile floor, and all you hear is: “take that out of your mouth!” These sort of things prevent us from naturally building up our immune system. And if you get a cold or a flu, the reason you don’t worry about that virus is because your body has developed immunity to it.

I want to talk about Zika for a second, because it just popped in my head. Zika was this awful virus that was going to go around the world, destroy everybody, and we were going to have babies with weird shaped heads, and all the rest of it. So three or four big pharma companies went out and made vaccines for the virus, and then they wanted to test it. So they said: great, we’re going to go into Zika territory, and we’re going to collect some blood samples, see how many antibodies people have, and then we are going to give them the vaccine, and we’re going to see how many more they get. Evidently, there is a certain number of this type of antibody at which the zika virus will not make you sick, or your baby. They could not find one person that they could give the vaccine to, because all of them had enough antibodies to fight off the zika virus.

Martin: Let me just add something to this. The people that were getting sick with zika were malnourished, poisoned people in Brazil. The statistical sample of the people who were getting really ill were weak, toxic, malnourished people with broken immune systems, those people were getting sick. If you try to make a healthy person sick with the zika virus, you just already said it, the immune system of a healthy person is strong enough to deal with it.

Scott: So we need to work on our immune system, that is the message we are trying to give you.

Martin: It’s a lot like exercise. If you want to maintain your physical ability, agility, flexibility and strength, you need to push against resistance, you need to actually work it, exercise. Because if you’re going to just lay down and sit back and do nothing, within not that long, you’re going to atrophy. And that’s what will happen to the immune system, if you do not expose it, to things that it needs to actually apply itself against, you are going to make it weaker. Hence, I allow people to sneeze on me, instead I just support my immune system from within.

Scott: Let’s get back to the fires.

Martin: Right, the fires. There is this physical, acute danger. If you are in the area with smog or smoke in the air, you definitely need to be rational. You need to be not doing stupid things, and causing yourself to be poisoned by it, immediately. However, there’s more to it. There’s the issue of chronic exposure, the long term exposure to what has been burned. So first of all with the forest, there have been years and years and years of rain falling onto these forests. Whatever has been deposited into the air that has rained down onto the forest is in the forest floor and has probably been absorbed into the trees.

So if there was radioactive fallout from something, or if there was some other chemical pollution, or any other toxicity that has been pushed up into the air, it rains down on the world. For example, 50,000 tons of mercury is release into the air every year. So if it rained down on the forest, all that mercury is now in that forest, and when you burn wood from that forest, it all goes back up into the air. You might think: “Oh, it’s just a campfire, no big deal, we are just burning a few sticks.” It is a big deal, because the toxicity of the planet itself is being re-circulated back up. It’s the opposite of filtering. It’s re-exposure.

Scott: The opposite of filtering. That’s such a good way to put it. We are just piling on more mercury, aluminum and all these other chemicals we are creating, and we are putting it up into the air for us to breathe in. With mercury for example, you can’t normally get rid of it, it’s quite a bit different than a virus exposure. This isn’t something that’s going to improve your immune system when you expose yourself to it, and we can see a lots of mental problems coming out of this, because that’s one of the things that mercury does, affecting our brain, our nervous system.

Martin: Yes, it’s tragic and it affects many things. So burning the forest itself or the field itself is not innocent. Let me just mention burning the car for example. What does that do to the environment? You are burning the paint, that’s a volatile organic compound that isn’t friendly to the existence of a healthy human. You’re burning the tires, similar idea, and then you’re burning the plastic. You know, the bumper and maybe the plastic car parts, whatever that is.

And then have the inside of the car, the seats and the stuffing and whatever else on the dashboard. So that is a lot of weird chemicals being burnt, stuff we’re not allowed to burn. I’m not supposed to take my old furniture and burn it in the garden, right? And yet, here I am, burning it.

Scott: Yeah, we don’t go and take all the old tires and burn them, we put them off in the field somewhere and hope that the sun doesn’t start them on fire. But we should store them. And the old car, you take it to a crusher, you don’t take it to a place where they melt it all down and burn it all up, right?

Martin: Right, and when you’re burning that, you want to burn it with the temperature that’s high enough to actually break all the chemicals into their constituent components rather than just the semi-burned things that are going to linger in the atmosphere. So, it’s not innocent and it puts out all kinds of chemicals in the air.

Scott: And we won’t necessarily know the impact those chemicals have immediately, because they are in the body for a long time, they work long term.

Martin: Yes, there are trace amounts that go into the air. These trace amounts will be accumulating in all of us, slowly. They’ll be accumulating in the cattle that’s grazing on the meadow that’s down wind from this fire. Then we will butcher the cattle and turn it into hamburger and then we eat that. And recycle again and again.

So burning a house is somewhat similar to that. There are all kinds of materials, for example, treated wood, you know, arsenic and sulfur and who knows what else that’s been applied to the wood, to make it not rot quickly. Well, now that you’re burning it, you’re putting all of that chemical soup in the air. Of course, the furniture that was in it and all the paint that was in it, all the appliances that you’re burning. I mean, it’s a complex chemical toxic soup that’s going up into the air when you’re burning a house or an office.

Scott: And we just have to look across the street to know that it didn’t go anywhere, it’s what you are breathing.

Martin: Yeah, it did go up in the air, and it’s being washed down somewhere else. You might be somewhere in Minnesota, snickering about how the Californians got it hard. Well, we just sent you the jet stream full of this stuff to cope with. So it’s complicated.

And then, of course, industrials, things like the old transformers. They have used PCB, the oil that was used to cool the old transformers has toxic elements in it that are no longer used. But the old transformers are still installed, so when you burn them, cause them to blow up and burn, it’s all in the air again. Anyway, I just wanted to lay it out in multiple layers. There’s a lot of undesirable stuff in the air, and so every time there is a forest fire, or a city fire or whatever fire, up it goes. Expect more trouble rather than less.

Well, let’s not doom and gloom all over it. I would like to say this: in an acute situation, it is wonderful to have an air filter device on hand. We do offer the AirPura filters on our website, and we have a filter configuration for every situation, whether it’s a typical household with pollen concerns, or with pet dander concerns, or medical office with chemical smells concerns, or automotive repair shop with the petroleum and who knows what exhaust concerns. There’s a configuration for every situation. These are highly efficient, high value products. No, they are not the cheapest,  they started around 600 dollars and go up to maybe 1200, which is not your typical 200-300 dollar home filter, but they are worth it, they do deliver. They’re not just re-circulating things around. So if you have an acute problem, consider one of those. For a chronic problem – we have it in our environment – we need to support our body to be able to detox itself, so we need to support the skin detox, the lung detox, the urine detox, and the fecal detox. All of the pathways need to be running well to get rid of things that we need to get rid of.

So, of course – heavy metals. We talked about heavy metals in our history many times. I find the Zeolites to be really effective, because they’re so innocent, so easily administered and yet quite effective, especially cost effective. And then we have Fulvic and Humic acid. They are really helpful to the body to get rid of things. We can probably point to a page on our website where they are, but you can look up humic and fulvic, those things are wonderful.

MSM supports detox pathways really well. Everything that’s toxic in your body before it can be safely eliminated needs to be methylated, and the methylated sulfur supports the methylation in your liver and then getting rid of these toxins. Consider that.

Scott: I think the fulvic and humic acid along with the Zeolite are probably the best interior cleaners that you can get, because they will just get right into the cell, right into the blood, and they’ll just come onto the particles that are not good and basically neutralize them and then take them right out of the system.

One other thing that is probably worth mentioning is this. A lot of the organic compounds, the volatile organic petrochemicals that get into our body are fat soluble. So they will be sequestered, pushed aside into your body fat, the body points them into places of slow circulation, low circulation. So this could be either our body fat, our cartilage, the bones, or the brain. So you want to have something in your body that’s going to help to move these things around and the thing that does that is an emulsifier, lecithin. Well, actually, Phosphatidylcholine is the one that you want to use, but lecithin is loaded with it. So that’s what we want to have. Supplement with lecithin, it’s such a baseline element. It’s function is so important.

And also, sweat a lot. Sweating is wonderful for getting rid of things. So if you do that through exercise or sauna, that’s great. If you don’t have access to that, get one of the biomats, the heated electric blankets that cause the body to heat up when you lay on it. Make yourself sweat! If you can do through exercise, it’s the best. If you are not as mobile, do it another way. And drink good water! Structured, energized water. Very helpful.

Scott: You know, you don’t want to be drinking water that’s full of all the things that went into the air and came down in the rain water.

Martin: Yeah, you definitely want to have it filtered. So for that, we do have some. Some supplements like DeutOxyCell, which is a sulfur based water detoxifier. It’s just an additive, you add it to the water and whatever is dissolved in the water settles down to the bottom so you can avoid it, filter it out.

Scott: You can actually see it! When you put a couple of drops in your water, a little while later you’re going to be able to see what was in your water that isn’t anymore.

Martin: It looks like clouds. It looks like snow in your water for a while, and then it settles to the bottom. So we have all of these available on the website, of course, you can contact us and get specific information, if you want.

Scott: I was just thinking, when you’re talking about this water filtering don’t use a straw, if you are going to get all the nasty stuff at the bottom, don’t drink it, just keep the filtered top part. So, Martin, if somebody wanted to know more about this… we haven’t obviously done an exhaustive discussion of everything that could go on from the fires and the environment to your own personal environment, but if people wanted to know more about this, how can they get a hold of you?

Martin: I am easily accessible at www.life-enthusiast.com, by phone at (866) 543-3388. Actually, I have another thought. I wanted to get on a rant about global warming. Do we have time to talk about that?

Scott: Sure, sure! Let’s talk about global warming!

Martin:  I hate the term global warming, because I think it’s a total mislabeling of the situation. It’s not really about warming, it’s about extreming. When we put more carbon dioxide and methane into the air, what happens is the extremes are accentuated. We have more summer, and more winter at the same time. We have less spring and less fall. The summer is more intense and the winter is more intense. We have crazy storms in the summer and crazy snow falls in the winter. That’s what we have – extreming is what we should call it. Maybe somebody can come up with a better term, but calling it global warming is making it easily exposed to people who want to make fun of it. They can say: “What about the winter? What happened to your global warming, son? Look at the snow storm that’s just freezing.” Well, it’s the other side of that same creature. You have more extreme on the summer side, and more extreme on the winter side.

Also I would like to say that I don’t think that humans are the only cause of the rising levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. For example, methane is the swamp gas and found in cow farts. So yes, there’s more of it, and the global warming or global extreming is proceeding because of that. Help me here, I’m getting a little brain freeze on where I headed with all this…

Scott: Well, you said, it wasn’t just the humans and then you blamed the cows! And I thought, well, there’s a lot of cows because humans are raising them to eat them, so that’s kind of an indirect result. When I think of the global warming issue, I also think it’s a crazy label because the problem, in my opinion, is that we’re not looking after the planet. And we spend all this time arguing whether it’s warming or cooling or whatever, and we stop thinking about the fact that our cities are so full of garbage, and we are trucking the garbage hundreds of miles away, our seas are filling up with plastics, every time a whale comes ashore and they cut it open to see what’s wrong, they find it’s full of plastic.

So we’re just creating this massive garbage pit, and we’re not thinking about the consequences. We have these manufacturers that manufacture things, they sell them, and then they think: “Oh, we are done!” They look for the cheapest, fastest, easiest way to go, which typically is petroleum product type stuff which lasts forever. When you think back to the 40s and 50s, that was what they were selling. They were selling a plastic wrap that you could put around something, and it would never break down. Now we’re at the point where we have so much stuff that doesn’t break down that we’re choking on it.We need to look at how we can make something that keeps something safer and nicely packaged, and then when we’re done with it, we would just sort of decompose and feed the plants with it. That would be what I would hope for.

Martin: That would be nice. Yes. You’re saying it right, the externalization of consequences, right? The manufacturer gets to keep the profit, but unloads the consequences to the greater society. So then, the consumer in general, through the government has to deal with the consequences. The classic plunder of technology. We extract the gold from the mine and leave the settling pond behind. Who cares that it’s full of cyanide, who cares that it poisons ten rivers and the generations of people afterwards? Or nuclear power plants! Who’s to worry about the fact that who knows how many miles of terrain will be polluted for twenty thousand years?

Scott: Yeah, yeah. The sad part of it is that thousands of years ago when we created a mess, a couple hundred years later it was all grown over, nobody knew. Now we create a mess, and it’s not a thousand years for it to get cleaned up, it is twenty thousand, or a hundred thousand or however long. We are really causing long term problems. Where are we going to be in twenty years?

Martin: Right, so we need to come up with solutions, and we need to come up with changes pretty quickly. And I mean, I’m aware of one of the wonderful solutions that a friend of mine has through, thermolysis he’s able to convert anything that has organic material in it into innocent, reusable, high value carbon.

Scott: That is not dirt, right?

Martin: No, that is not dirt. That’s the humus, the part of soil that that you would desire the most. The stuff that plants love to convert back into.

Scott: So it converts it into something that is the best part of dirt?

Martin: Yes, that’s correct. And yet he’s having the hardest time getting financing. Oh, anyway, that would be another long rant. So about this climate issue, I would like to implore everyone to make their footprint smaller and consider the consequences of leaving stuff behind. That’s important, because we are going to run into the capacity issues. I don’t know if we have already overrun it or not. I think for the population that’s currently on the planet, we need about two and a half planets to keep it running at the rate we’re going, otherwise it’s going to just run into a significant crash.

Scott: Oh yeah, it’s definitely going that way. I read an interesting article about a month ago, which suggested that, these big plastic masses in the ocean, a lot of it is coming from Eastern Asia, so China, Vietnam, Philippines, that area. And when I was in Kenya, I was in Mombasa and there are beautiful beaches on the Indian ocean, and it was really interesting walking on the beach, because I’m looking at the sand and everywhere I go, there are little pieces of plastic! You know, the plastic has been ground up and it’s in the sand! It’s not like: “Oh, there is a Coke can that somebody left,” it’s plastic bottles that have been crushed up and chopped into teeny weeny pieces and put into the beach, it’s part of the beach!

Martin: Yeah, it was plastic confetti in the sand, right!

Scott: Exactly! And it was just full of it! In ten years, there won’t be any sand, it will just be the plastic that pretends it’s sand! And when I was in Costa Rica a few months later, it was such a contrast. There was nothing but sand on the beach, like I was actually shocked.

It seems like everything goes West, so that part of the pollution from Asia didn’t hit those beaches. And I guess it didn’t come down from the States either. It was a real shock.

Martin: Yeah, I think these pieces are carried by the ocean currents. So if you do understand where the currents are, where they come from, where they’re headed, that’s where it’s going to end up.

Scott: And what’s interesting, Costa Rica has really reved-up, it’s all green, all about renewable resources and recycling, they are just massively into this whole movement. I have a friend who said: “I never thought my city was dirty, until I walked my dog and my dog was constantly picking up and chewing on something that I have to take out of his mouth, because he was going to eat this plastic thing.” And it was quite interesting because, one of the towns in Costa Rica I was in, where you would normally expect to see a lot of garbage lying around, I didn’t notice. I can’t say that I was specifically looking and inspecting, but I really didn’t notice any garbage on the streets, it just seemed like everybody was picking up after themselves, thinking “we’re this jungle paradise, and so we need to keep it nice.”

Martin:  Yes, so it’s possible to educate an entire nation. So here’s our contribution. We are trying to convince you that you need to clean up after yourself.

Scott: That’s right.

Martin: Well, on that cheery note…

Scott: Yeah, we have polluted beaches and we have unpolluted beaches. We have people that throw stuff overboard, and we have people that pick up after themselves. So we want you to be one of the people that picks up after themselves. And that’s the start. You know, I have friends that take a garbage bag and go down to the beach and they take garbage off the beach, take a picture and share on social media and say:  “I did it, can you do it too?” My other friends will just walk the beach, and if they see some cans or something, they’ll pick them up, take them off. So whether you’re helping a little bit or you’re helping a lot, it makes a difference. And what are you teaching your children? If they see you picking up after yourself, they are going to think: “oh, that’s normal behaviour.”

Martin: Interesting that you’re mentioning it! My wife and I, we go for walks and we pack a bag with us, and we usually fill one or two shopping bags of stuff every time we go. It’s usually the worst around bus stops. People just leave whatever they were holding and just drop it.

Scott: So there needs to be education, right? We’re kind of like two guys in the wilderness, you know, shouting out our message. We need you to share this show, we need you to share it with your friends, we need you to talk to your school teachers, who are teaching your children, and principles, congressmen and senators, whoever else you can talk to and say: we need to do something about this problem. It’s a problem with what people are manufacturing, and it’s also a problem of what people are buying. And it’s also a problem with what people are doing with the stuff after they finish using it. And we really need to change the way we look at things.  Do you need seven cars in your garage? Probably not.

Martin: Probably not. Well, that’s a separate issue. It’s affordable, or not affordable. Some people have enough money to do it. Let them have their fun that way. The issue for me is that we are going to run into the consequences of this mindset. It’s getting closer and closer. The metaphor I carry in my head is this: visualize a pond. On the pond we have water lilies and they’re growing on the pond. They’re doubling in coverage every day. Now, in thirty days, the pond will be completely covered. On a day twenty nine, it’s half covered. After twenty eight days, it’s quarter covered. You still have 75% of a clean surface at that point. So that’s what I’m trying to tell you. When you notice it, it is going to go like flash toward crazy.

Scott: Yeah, in other words, we don’t have a lot of time.

Martin: Yeah, that’s right. Well, dear people, this was Life Enthusiast, Martin and Scott, trying to restore vitality to you and to the planet! Thank you for being with us. Thank you for listening. Thank you for stopping by the website, www.life-enthusiast.com. If you have a question you want to ask me, call (866) 543-3388. Thank you, Scott, it’s been a pleasure.

Scott: Thanks, Martin. Looking forward to seeing you next time! Bye bye.

Author: Nina Vachkova