How I Reversed My Near-Fatal Autoimmune Conditions | Sina McCullough

0:00I said to the woman, I won't meet her in six months. And she said, we could put you in the waiting list. So I filled out all the paperwork that day, the very next day she called. Cina McCullough is an expert in nutrition, disease reversal, and functional medicine. She's also the author of, hands off my food, how to defend your food, health, and freedom. The Wester system is really great at acute care, like emergency care. Like, if I get shot, I'm going to the emergency room. You know, I'm not going to rub an herb on it. It's not structured to reverse conditions. It's structured to manage conditions. In this episode, she walks me through her story of reversing a near fatal autoimmune disease. And her story is unique. I want to provide people with hope that you can reverse these conditions. And I want to help them take away the fear, because fear keeps you stuck. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellek.

1:00Cina McCullough, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you so much for having me. An increasing number of people are suffering autoimmune conditions of a whole variety of sorts, or a whole variety of reasons. It's not generally known that these conditions can be reversed through things like dietary changes. And this is actually well supported in a scientific literature. You kind of lived this. Tell me what happened. Yeah. So, like most people, I was raised in Western medicine, and I believed that disease was not reversible. Like cancer, arthritis, heart disease, diabetes. So, once you get them, it's kind of like a death sentence. You're going to carry that label around with you for the rest of your life. But when I got debilitatingly sick, I refused to believe that I couldn't heal. So, I spent about 20 years bouncing around from one medical doctor to the next. I saw so many specialists had so many tests done that I lost count.

2:03I mean, I had at least, like, I had several sigmoid osteopes, endoscopies, colonoscopies, breath test, urine test, fecal test. I even had exploratory surgery at one point, because nobody could figure out what was wrong. But what was it? What were the symptoms just super quick? So, I started with severe, like, some gastrointestinal issues. And I was actually born with chronic constipation, but that was my norm, so I didn't really know any different. But the time I got into college, I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome, IVS, which most of us now know that's just the catch-all group. And what it means is we don't know what's causing your problem. The first doctor I saw wanted me to take tagumid, a prescription medication, for the rest of my life, every time I wanted to eat. And I thought, the reason why I'm having gastrointestinal issues is not because I have a deficiency in tagumid or medication. There's something going on. And this is in my early 20s. And I asked the doctors, like, there has to be a reason, like, we have to be able to fix it. And his answer was, we don't know, this is what we're told to give you.

3:07And just, I'm going to briefly comment here, but it's a syndrome. So, syndrome for the benefit of everybody is just a collection of symptoms. The causes are known. It's not a disease. It's just a collection of symptoms. It's just a collection of symptoms. There could be many, many causes, which, in fact, there are. And this is what you're alluding to. But please continue. Exactly. And one reason why, in our system, we have to label diseases, in part, because they need a code so that they can build insurance company. So, if you go to a Western doctor, you're going to get some kind of label at some point so they can, you know, build it. Versus ancient cultures, they didn't describe these symptoms as quote unquote dis-eases. They didn't have that word. They actually used imbalance. And it's, and the reason I'm belaboring that point is because it makes a huge difference psychologically. And this was actually a turning point for me in my healing journey. So, if somebody, if one of your friends goes to a doctor, and they come back, and they say,

4:12I just visited my doctor, and they said, I have cancer. How does that make you feel? I mean, you want to know which type of cancer, but in many cases it's, you know, I don't know, the worst thing you'll ever hear or something like that. It's a big C, the thing that most people are afraid of. You feel sad, you feel devastated, you're thinking, oh my goodness, this person is probably going to die. Now, the same friend goes to the doctor, comes back to you and says, oh my goodness, I just saw my doctor. He said, I have an imbalance. How do you feel? A lot different, a lot better. Correct. We're used to imbalances. We even have like homeostasis. We're used to that. The body knows how to get back into balance. But if you label it as a disease, it's actually a fear-based response that happens versus an imbalance is not. This is a natural state. So, when you are labeled as, I have this disease, then it immediately shifts you into this space where this is a lifelong death sentence. It's not going to get any better.

5:16They're pretty much just going to be able to manage this, manage it with medications for the most part. And so, that's what I refused to settle with. So, from the very beginning, that first appointment, I was like, this is not good enough. Like, I need to find the root cause. The symptoms progressively worsened to the point where I was having, I couldn't even leave the house sometimes because of all the gastrointestinal issues. And it was very confusing because I could eat food and I would have severe bloating within 25 minutes. I mean, I was like, I was five months pregnant. The next week, I can eat that same food from the same company and I had no problem at all. So, it was really difficult to figure it out. Eventually, I ended up having chronic sinus infections, like every six weeks, I was having new sinus infections. I had had bumps on the back of my arm since I was a child, which was another symptom. I ended up having, like, I'd get brain fog, so severe at one point that I was reading books to my child.

6:17And I couldn't even remember when I just read in a children's book. I ended up having five miscarriages and a tumor on the scleror of the white of my eye that no eye specialist could figure out why I was having it, but they could guarantee me that it would continue to grow over my cornea and eventually blind me. So, that was very helpful. And by the end of my rock bottom, I had dwindled down to the list of foods that I could actually eat with having problems without having any problems, was like a half a sheet of paper. I mean, we're talking about foods like apples, bananas, that most people think of as healthy, and they were debilitating me. I got to the point where I had so much pain throughout my body that I couldn't even wrap my hand around a cup. Like, I couldn't, some days, lift the cup. So, just the ulcerative arthritis swelling in the joints and things like this is what you're talking about? Yeah, so it was interesting because the pain slowly crept up and it was, it would move throughout my body. It was seemingly no rhyme or reason.

7:20And I was an athlete for most of my life. So, I was used to dealing with pain and muscle soreness. This was completely different. It was like, I couldn't even exercise because I actually spent most of my time lying on the floor because I was too weak to basically stand up. And the pain would just move. And even if I wasn't eating sometimes, it would just appear suddenly. It's debilitating pain, like wake up a meal the night. There is a point where, and this was really my breaking point. I was in bed and every morning, my husband before he go to work, I would come downstairs and he would basically put food and water on the coffee table. And he'd set the laptop up for me because I was listening to free online health summits trying to figure this out because I'd already seen all these specialists and nobody knew what was wrong. The test was showing almost everything negative. And the last specialist I saw told me that the symptoms had to be in my head.

8:20So, that's when I realized the system has failed. Like, if I have any chance of healing from this and actually surviving, we're going to have to figure it out on our own. That's what I actually did. I set out, I was scouring the scientific literature. I have a PhD in nutrition, I have a bachelor's in neurobiology, physiology and behavior. So, I was very well versed in the body. I taught biochemistry at UC Davis. But did you go into this because of this interest in the first place? Or, you know, it's not a casual thing to have this knowledge base that you had, right? Oh, you mean why I started studying those areas? So, actually, I went to grad school because there was a professor that I wanted to study under. And he was challenging, you know, the crossover concept of exercise that at lower intensity as you burn that and as you increase an intensity it crosses over and you burn carbohydrate. And he was challenging that theory, that George Brooks's theory. And I thought, well, that's interesting. I actually wanted to study under him because I thought he was brilliant.

9:26And I went to him with the idea that I think you can reverse type two diabetes. And I think part of the way you do it is through exercise because it increases your nitric oxide production. And I said, I don't know anything about that, but I think you're a hidden gem. So, I will take you on as one of my students. And he was going to learn alongside me. This is unheard of. Professors do not do that. You usually have to fall into line. But wait, wait, wait, this is this like before you're experiencing all this double edging stuff, you're just into this. And then you experience something that, you know, you're just very naturally deeply curious and wanting to figure things out. You're secret weapon or something, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You're the first person that's ever interviewed me that's caught onto this. But yes, I was always nationally inquisitive. And I was growing up. My mother was chronically sick starting in her 20s. And she ended up having multiple heart attacks. She had heart disease. She had strokes. She had kidney failure. She ended up having a kidney transplant.

10:32Pink retitis, skin cancer, you name it. And I, and I just saw the doctors giving her one medication after the next. And I thought that can't be the answer. Like she's not getting better. And now, not only is she not getting better. Now she's having more symptoms as side effects from those medications. She was on 15 different medications. And she was going downhill. And I said, this can't be it. So I naturally wanted to actually solve that. I thought, I think that they just haven't seen the answer yet, but it has to actually be there. And someone's got to look for it. And one of the one of the conditions she had, it was typed you diabetes. And I looked in the literature and I, because I knew the biochemistry, I said, I think that is a plausible route. Increased nitrogocytes production. So I studied under him my first quarter in grad school. He died. So then I was on my own. And you know, like no funding or anything. Long search shirt. I got through it and graduated. That's how I became well versed in biochemistry because I had to fund my way through grad school. And I had a great professor who let me be his TA for biochemistry.

11:45So I paid my way through by teaching other people biochemistry. And I think God really orchestrates things beautifully in our lives because if I didn't have that experience, which was obviously not an ideal experience in grad school. If I didn't have that experience, it wouldn't have pushed me to learn that much in biochemistry. And I wouldn't have had the knowledge to help me save my life. You have this arsenal though of curiosity, of information, of everything. So, and but it really takes that to trigger it all to say, okay, the system is not going to help me. Is that is that? That's right. So that's right. You were still hoping that there would be something right. I didn't know that there was anything outside of that system. It was what I was raised in. I wasn't well versed in herbals. Like now I'm a master herbalist, but I didn't really know about herbals. I saw what all of my family went through and it was all Western. And once that doctor basically said I had, it was like a psychosomatic condition.

12:45I was, I felt betrayed actually. I felt like the system had abandoned me. That here I am. I am literally I cannot get off the floor. And why would anybody want that for themselves? Like he basically was saying that I was lying. I was making this up. And that to me was probably in those heartbreaking moment because I thought wow, the system I was raised to believe it to depend on is telling me that I'm a liar and that I'm doing this to get attention. And so, right then and there. But this also was what launched your, I don't know your future, I guess, right? Yeah. It did because what happened was I basically handed everything over to God. So as I was saying, every day I'd come down my husband will put food and water on the table. And because I had two kids at the time and I was just just trying to keep them alive during the day while he was at work. And I, he would set the left up for me.

13:47And I would listen to like 40 to 60 hours of online health summits every week trying to pieces together. And there was one particular morning when I woke up and I was two week into much pain to even take the sheet off my body. And that's when I realized, oh my gosh, we may not figure this out in time. And so I laid there crying and I basically just asked God. So I told him I've used every resource I can think of. I use all my education. I'm trying my best. I can't do this alone. Please save me so that my children won't go out without a mother. And I made a promise that if he saved me for my children that I would spend the rest of my life helping the rest of his children find their second chance. That was the birth of what I do know that morning my husband had to carry me out of the bed downstairs because I couldn't walk downstairs.

14:52And the first, you know, if you ever listen to these online summits, there's like tons of speakers every day. You can't get through all of them. I looked at the screen and I asked which one do you want me to listen to? And God directed me to one person played it within the first five seconds. I knew this is the guy that has this missing piece of the puzzle for me. I listened to it. I called his office. He had just released a book. It became a best-selling book. So you could imagine how hard it is to get into his office to see him. Six month wait list to see him. I said to the woman, I won't be here in six months. And she said, we could put you on the waiting list. So I filled out all the paperwork that day, the very next day she called and she said somebody canceled. We can get you in tomorrow. As soon as I got in the phone with him, I was giddy. I was, I mean, you can imagine total pain. I can't get off the floor.

15:54Every time I would try to chew food, it felt like my teeth were going to fall out. When I would breathe, like inhale, I felt like my ribs were going to break. But I got in the phone with him and I'm laughing. Like joyful, elated. And he had looked at all my records, all my tests. And he said to me, I don't think you understand how serious this condition is because you're laughing. And I said, you don't understand. I finally found someone who believes me. And he said, I not only believe you, we're going to fix this. We're going to get you better. It was like a turning point for me. I can't even explain how important it was to actually have somebody look say to you, I believe you. And not only that, you don't have to look like this. And you're not going to die. Like your kids will not grow up without mother. So the suspense is killing me. So what what what was he offering?

16:56He taught me about functional testing. I had no idea. I was using the test just within the Western system. But there are specialty labs out there that do in what are called functional tests. So they'll measure things. Like for example, if you go into the Western doctor's office and you say, I want you to test me for micronutrient deficiencies like you know vitamin like a vitamin or calcium magnesium deficiency. They will do a blood draw, but it's a snapshot of what's in your blood at that time. It's a very archaic test. It's very inaccurate. Most nutrients are dynamic. They're not just floating around in equilibrium in your blood. So you can't actually get a good assessment of your micronutrient status just from doing a snapshot of your blood. There's a function. There's different functional tests you can do. One of them they draw your blood, but then they use your white blood cells and they give it one nutrient at a time. And they see how many times that it can turn over or like it can reproduce itself. And so it actually measures the functional capacity of the cell.

18:02Totally different. So in a Western doctor's office test, I showed up with zero micronutrient deficiencies using this functional test that's now like the gold standard. I showed up with 15 micronutrient deficiencies. And I will say this was shocking because my first job out of grad school was director of research and development for a nutraceutical company. I formulated supplements for that. Like so I knew the best of the best supplements. I was consuming a multivitamin mineral every single day. And I still showed up deficient in 15 nutrients. So severe and 2B vitamins that I was diagnosed as borderline for Pellegral and Barry Barry. These are both diseases that have been eradicated in the US at least since you know the mid 1900s. And both of them can lead to death. We are seeing a resurgence of many of these micronutrient deficiency diseases that we thought were eradicated. We're seeing them research in our modern culture.

19:04So that was one of the tests that we use to figure out I had all these many micronutrient deficiencies. We also realized that I was high in arsenic. So a heavy metal, which is also surprising because arsenic is water soluble. So usually the body can like you know urinate it out. But when you are chronically inflamed what we have discovered is that oftentimes your pathways that help you detoxify from the chronic exposure of toxins, they slow down. So I was not able to actually get rid of the arsenic. And here's one of the kickers. One of the first things I did diet wise was I went gluten free. And so I was consuming these gluten free processed foods for a while before I went totally whole food and all organic. Well, gluten free foods are largely made up of rice and corn. And what we are theorizing is that I got the arsenic toxicity primarily from consuming these gluten free foods. The other part is this is another label lie that I found out along my journey.

20:08I was consuming those foods thinking that I was totally gluten free because they have the label on them that says gluten free. The FDA regulates the definition of what gluten is. Well, come to find out that label is outdated. It came from World War II when there was a doctor who was taking care of children who had siliax disease. They didn't know it really at the time. And these children were wasting away. They were getting sick. Some of them were dying because of the war. There was actually a grain shortage. And so they were starving. These children were starving. Something miraculous happened. Many of the children started heel. They didn't have symptoms anymore. Their energy level returned. And he realized, oh, it was from like the wheat and the rye. So our label today is based on the staple crops that were used at that time that the children then weren't eating and they got better. It's not based on current science. Current science tells us now that all grains contain some form of gluten. There's hundreds of thousands of types of gluten.

21:15And so many of us who know that we can't have gluten or we've been diagnosed with a gluten sensitivity or intolerance were told to go into the store and trust that certified gluten free label. And for many of us, it's actually making us sick because both corn and rice, for example, contain a type of gluten. So it's really. So that's one of my big messages too. It's it's really a big disservice that we do to people to hold on to that label. Kennedy and HHS are looking into that label, but they're looking into it for like cross contamination. You know, they're not looking into it knowing that all grains actually contain a type of gluten. So it doesn't affect everybody with the sensitivity, but at least affects 50% of people they're thinking, which is large enough that we should be telling people be cautious about this. And maybe if you haven't had success yet from going gluten free, try to go completely grain free and see if that might run the use of the symptoms.

22:15I mean, absolutely fascinating at so many levels, you've just I've learned like 15 things just speaking with you here already. Can I add one thing? Of course. One thing that I discovered during this because I healed and it was, you know, it was a multitude of these functional tests that we use to give me the final pieces of the puzzle. One of them was a food sensitivity test and I'll tell you I was trained in how to do diet elimination reintroduction. It was part of my grad work, graduate study work. That got me down to like that short half a piece of paper of foods that were like safe for me to eat, but the problem is there's acute allergies like IGE allergies. These are the ones we think of as like peanut allergy where you're having anaphylaxis or hives, but there's also delayed onset allergies that most people are not aware of. So if they eat, for example, a piece of bread and they don't have any symptoms or they drink milk and they don't have any symptoms, they'll say they'll conclude logically so, oh, that food must be okay for me.

23:25But now we know that there's a delayed hypersensitivity that can actually cause symptoms three weeks later. So there's tests that can now determine if you have these delayed sensitive feedies. That's one of the tests that really helped me. I was actually sensitive to chicken. I know, right? Another food that we touted as being healthy, chicken and bay leaf. What's fascinating about that is that one of the dietary protocols I tried to heal that didn't work was the gapstayet. And most people know about the gapstayet and you consume a lot of broth. What are you usually put in broth? Chicken and bay leaf. I developed a sensitivity from consuming so much of that because I already had leaky gut. So there's all these like little caveats and nuances that you need to know. And I was blessed to have that background in biochemistry that helped me to piece all this together. Since, in the healing was really quick too. This is a great story about how fast the body can heal. Once we found my deficiencies in toxicities because that's what dis-ease is. You look at two main categories.

24:29People will have toxicities and they'll have deficiencies. It's really that simple. You have them on the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual level. And so something like cancer would be a product of those deficiencies you would argue. Cancer's this type of cell replication, uncontrollable cell replication that you will. Yes. So you usually will have some type of toxicity and the toxicity itself can actually create a deficiency. Sometimes you also just have straight deficiencies like a vitamin D deficiency because a lot of people spend their time indoors now and not out in the sun producing vitamin D. Also the soils are soil that we grow our food in is largely deficient in micronutrients. Also glyphosate. Glyphosate is one of the active ingredients in Roundup that's widely sprayed on crops. We have most of the corn that's grown today is Roundup Ridey. So glyphosate is sprayed on it. Glyphosate is the heavy metal a key later but it doesn't just keylate the bad metals. It will also keylate metals that you need like zinc and iron.

25:37So if it keylates it then the plant is staying. Pulling it out of your body. It pulls out our body. It also pulls out of the plant. So nutrition is less. So nutrition of the plant is less not only because the soils are depleted but because the glyphosate binds onto it. It keylates it so the plant can't now take it up. It also affects the micro riser, the fungus that's underneath the soil. The fungus is needed to help give nutrients to the plants and the glyphosate affects the fungus. So there's another route that we're having micronutrient deficiencies. All these things can cause micronutrient deficiencies and it can pull it out of your body if you are consuming glyphosate from conventional foods. Or even now we know some organic foods that have been contaminated with glyphosate. But yes, there's toxicities and deficiencies. That's what we look for. It's the same roadmap for every single chronic or autoimmune dis-ease or imbalance. You actually follow the same roadmap and we know you can reverse all of them.

26:37So that was one of the shocking things that I found out. During my journey as I was healing, I actually started... Let me just jump in before. So this was a functional medicine doctor. That's correct. That had written a very popular book and became famous. You pointed them out. You got the approach. They started. I'm quite familiar with functional medicine. You started a process. You immediately felt started feeling better as some of these deficiencies started to be resolved. But then that opened up your own kind of road to understanding this at a deeper level. I'm just trying to kind of fill in the gap here. Yes. Yes. So, John, the amazing thing is once we knew those food triggers alone, those final food triggers, I removed them from my diet within three days I got off the floor. The pain had almost decided in three days. In three months I was outside pulling bushes out of the ground.

27:40That's how fast the body can heal. Within one year there were no markers of inflammation in my body, a chronic inflammation or any kind of illness. The body had fully healed. So then what happened was I noticed that if I stressed too much or let's say I decided to eat two pieces of cake, I would eat too much sugar. I did notice that I would have some pain here in my forearm. This was what you would call a flare up. In Western medicine you would say that I was in quote-unquote remission. Well, to me that's another fear-based label. And I refused to live in that state of fear. Like worrying that if I stressed too much, the disease was going to come back. So what I decided to do was not accept that label. I just told myself remission doesn't exist. What this means when I'm having this flare up is that there's another trigger that I haven't found yet. Just one quicksack. Typically when I think of remission, I think of that term as meaning the bad thing has gone away.

28:45That's another misdomer. Because even if you look at the cancer organizations, they have a definition of remission. And it even says in there that cancer can still be present in the body, but they still call it remission. So that's why it shocked me that people would rejoice that they would get into remission. And I had friends who had autoimmune conditions and they would rejoice if they got into remission. And I'm not just counting that, like, right, celebrate that you're reversing it, but don't stop there. Like, don't settle for the remission because it just means that there's another trigger that you haven't found. So once again, I actually prayed about it and I said to God, okay, look, my diet is super clean. Like, and I don't have any toxicities anymore. I'm no deficiencies. What is the missing piece of this puzzle? And it was amazing. It was like fireworks going off in my mind and he just showed me the, like this roadmap to follow. The missing piece of the puzzle was the mental emotional component of the development of disease and the ability to heal from it.

29:48It was in large part forgiveness. So I started to look in the literature about the scientific literature because obviously, because I'm a scientist, so I'm like, let me see if this is true. Like, you know, what's out there saying that you can actually reverse the condition if you just forgive. Y'all, it was shocking. There's tons of studies. What? Yeah, there's tons of studies in the scientific literature and in medical case studies. The scientists know the medical doctors know they've reported these. There's hundreds of cases. It's been for over a century. Cases have been documented in the literature of spontaneous healings, in part from large acts of forgiveness. Sometimes it was after an infection. Somebody would spike a fever and then the cancer would go away. But you have, and I actually wrote an article for epoch times on this very subject. As you can find out in epoch times are also on my website. I went through and I put links to numerous studies where they documented reversing cancers, even in stage 4 cancer, reversing diabetes, reversing thyroid disease, reversing allergies, reversing asthma.

30:59Like, it was all there in the literature. So I witnessed it firsthand, how to do it. But it's been known for decades that you actually can do this and there's different ways to do it. That's what really started prompting me. I thought, why don't we know this? Like, why is the narrative in our culture that disease is a death sentence and you can't reverse it? And you're just, you've built this whole arsenal of things, basically, that to, to, to, to, to... I was going to say, put disease into a remission, but I can't say that anymore. Yes, yes, yes. And large part of what I do is I want to provide people with hope that you can reverse these conditions. And I want to help them take away the fear because fear keeps you stuck. Like, ultimately on the emotional level, fear is the root cause of illness. Fear that, there's even a no-cebo effect that if you think you're going to get sick, you will. Everyone's heard of placebo effect, right? That this doctor in a white coat gives you a sugar pill, says it's going to heal you and you healed.

32:04There's a no-cebo effect. So if you think you're going to get sick, you will get sick. The Framingham Heart Studies showed that. Women who thought they were more likely to get heart disease and die of it, they did. It was significantly higher, a significant finding. So we know that's true, but on the emotional level, what I realize is that disease or imbalance comes from the fear of not being loved and accepted. It's the fear that we are not good enough. And it keeps us striving, striving for external validation, striving for that carrot, you know, that one more thing. Everybody who I've ever worked with has come down to the fact that they don't feel loved and accepted. So that's a deficiency. It still fits into the toxicity deficiency overall template. It's a deficiency of love and acceptance and feeling of belonging. Community, having community is another predictor. You look at the Blue Zone Studies. One of the things they have in common is a sense of community because it gives you a sense of belonging.

33:09So that's a blue zone studies. There's just these regions in the world where people are healthier. That's right. And they can live to, it's areas where they're living to 100 or beyond. So yeah, you know, it's one thing to look at it in statistics and in the scientific literature. It's another thing to live it and then to see it lived out. My mother is the perfect example of the importance of emotions in trying to reverse disease. Her husband died. She came across country to come live with me. The doctor said that there was nothing more than they can do for her because she had had a transplanted kidney, as I said, and the kidney failed. And they said that she was going to die. And at this point, again, laundry list of diseases, she had active cancer. She was having grandma seizures. She had like coronary occlusion. She had recently had stroke. It was on insulin for type 2 diabetes and she had thyroid disease.

34:10And they said, you need to fly out because she's not going to make it through the night. I flew out, short version of the story, I said to them, you must release her to me. I had medical power of attorney. I said, I'm taking her back home with me. I brought her home, did the testing I was talking about, put her on my diet. She lived in my house so I control the environment. No EMS, like no Wi-Fi on in the house, no cell phone usage in the house, clean water, structured water, eight all the foods that I was eating, supplemented her, whatnot. She in less than eight months, every single one of her conditions reversed with the exception of high blood pressure, which I get to in a minute, her doctors were shocked. She got totally off the insulin, off the thyroid medication, the cancer reversed. They actually went in and did like a scope of her arteries. But her blood pressure, she had a blood test, black had a reverse. Even though I had her on a high healthy fat diet and she was eating like Red Meat, she was consuming salt again, which is they no know when you have kidney disease right.

35:18The kidney had fully bounced back. And I mean, it didn't bounce back in terms of a transplanted kidney. It bounced back at the functioning level of a biological kidney. She was the healthiest she had ever been since her 20s and yet she died. She died of stress-induced cardiomyopathy, a broken heart. The Western doctors themselves diagnosed her with a broken heart. So even though her body was totally healthy, she chose that she didn't want to live. She wanted to be in heaven with her husband. And so she died. That's why the only medication we couldn't get her off of aside from the transplant immunosuppressant medication was blood pressure. We were able to lower it, but we couldn't stop it. Elevated blood pressure is a sign of chronic inflammation. It was her indicator that she was too far down into the stage of grief to be able to come back out of it.

36:21Fascinating. When you talk with other experts, and people maybe who aren't as... You're developing a field here. It feels like you're on the cutting edge of this set of approaches. How do people react to this? They're just outliers. I'm just trying to imagine what people say. It's anecdotal. You probably hear, I don't know, how do you react to that? Very anecdotal. They're very skeptical. They will often say that it isn't anomaly. They honestly can't believe it. Even the doctors that worked with me to taper off our medications couldn't believe what was happening. They saw the test results. They saw her heal. They had the lab test themselves that they conducted, but they never applied the protocol to any of their other patients.

37:25They never even told them about it. It's like it's a whole different belief system. It's almost like a religion. It's kind of how I think of the Western medical system. It's like a religion. It's like a devout Christian and you tell them that religion is wrong and it's flawed and whatever. Even if you say really nicely and you show them something else, they're not usually going to want to change because it requires them to change their entire perception. Also, I found another sticking point is it requires people to start taking personal responsibility because it means you got yourself sick. It was your choices that led to you and your body getting in balance. I think that's an empowering thing because if your choices led you to an imbalance, your choices can return the body to balance. How much more empowering can that be that your body can heal itself if you just listen to it. But it means that you have to then accept that you did that to yourself or even worse if your child was sick.

38:30Like my child was, you have to accept that you participated in that. Like unknowingly, you know, but you did help with the choices. So my son, my oldest son, you met him today. Would you have ever guessed that he was autistic? Not at all. Wouldn't have crossed my mind. Yeah. He was on the autism spectrum. He had an idiopathic joint disease, idiopathic meaning the medical doctors didn't know why it happened. He couldn't stand in the shower because his joints hurt too much. It's actually a chronic inflammation. Yeah, severe chronic inflammation. He had Lyme, a co-infection from it. All of it's reversed. I just said you can't even tell now. All of it got reversed. But I had to accept that it was my choices. The food that I gave him, the environments that I put him in, these things, you know, my beliefs. Wow. We're part of that. And again, it's not a shaming thing. Like people will tend to think of that as, oh, like you're shaming somebody or I now I have to go into this state of my life.

39:31I'm going to go into the state of guilt and shame because I contributed that. I don't see it that way at all. I think life is really all about perception. I see it as, let's start harnessing our God-given power. We have a culture that wants, for whatever reason, we don't need to get into that if you don't want to. But our culture tries to have us take our power and put it into these supposed experts. It's a very disempowering culture. And my messages don't let them do that. Like, don't just go off and believe them. If I believe the experts, I would most likely not be sitting with you today. Like, I was literally on that point where I was about to die. And they didn't have any answers. So it was because I was unwilling to believe them, unwilling to die that I'm actually here. So I model that for my children as well. My children have no fear of a disease anymore because they've seen it.

40:32They've seen it reverse. In me, in my son, they saw it reverse in my mother. And could you imagine, what kind of culture we would live in? If people were not in fear of getting the big sea, or, you know, like, if they realized my choices matter, and I can live and thrive until the last day. Like, we have a short, we compare to our ancestors, we have a short health span. Like, we live just about as long as our ancient ancestors. If, once they got past childhood, we live about as long as our ancient ancestors. But we have a much shorter health span than they do. And it shouldn't be that way. And this modern age. Explain that to me. I mean, that's not generally what we think is that people in the past, lived a lot shorter lives. And there's, I mean, ample evidence of that. So if you look at the evidence, and I can send you different studies on this too, if you look at the evidence, once they remove the childhood years,

41:36you know, like those early childhood years, they got to like, you know, almost like teens, early 20s, they lived just as long as we did today. There's accounts of people living into like the 80s and the 90s. It's just that most of the statistics that are cited include like that childhood time. So once they got past that, no. So the average, that day brings the average way down. It brings it way down. But there's a lot of people that are older and a lot of people dying very young. That's what you're saying, basically. Yes. And it is shocking when you say that to somebody. Because that is the statistic that is circulated around. And that's what people believe that they died in like their 30s and 40s. So that's one of the hindrances of this modern movement, even the maha movement with Kennedy, when they're saying like, let's go back to our roots. Let's go back to the basics, like the way that we used to eat. Let's go back to no chemicals and whatnot. And that's a recipe for health. Go back to the ancient ways. People will say, well, they still died in their 30s and 40s. But that's like I'm saying, if you break down the statistics,

42:36once they got past that, they did not die in their 30s and 40s. And in fact, many of them lived to the old age and we think died in their sleep. They didn't have like 20, 30 years where they were slowly getting sick with these chronic ailments like we do. Now we have people in their 30s developing arthritis. That's what happened to me. It was actually a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis that I had, along with the berry berry and pylagra and the arsenic poisoning and the leaky gut. But it was arthritis that developed in my 30s. So we're seeing people at younger and younger ages getting sicker and sicker. And that's not normal. And I don't want that to be the accepted, you know, stance or belief in our culture. And so that's why I'm saying, look, that wasn't the history. That's not our, you know, our species historical trajectory. They lived like, if you look at the health, the health span, they lived a long health span and then bam, they died. We will go up, we have this health span and it goes down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Until we die.

43:36So we have a lot of money that goes toward taking care of people like the last 20, 30 years of their lives because we're not healthy enough. And it's a lot of heartbreak, too. If you ever care for somebody who's sick and dying, it's not what our ancestors went through. So it's a very, there's a lot of things that are different now. In addition to this, the physical toxicities and deficiencies, there's a lot of different mental and emotional toxicities and deficiencies that our ancestors never faced. So, you know, as we finish up, I have a few questions. Okay. Number one, are you a medical practitioner? Do you take patients, this kind of thing or explain to me your relationship? If you have an amazing book, you know, hands off my food, you document some of these things and some of the challenges in the food system. Which I'll recommend to everyone, but explain to me what you view your role in here as.

44:36So I like to educate, encourage, and empower people. So I do that through my books. Joel Salaton and I have a podcast called Beyond Labels. And that's where we try to keep people up to date on what's happening with the food labels, where is the corruption, and we always provide solutions, like free market solutions to empower people. I do consult, so I'm not a medical doctor, I'm a PhD in nutrition, and I basically am just a lifelong learner. So I just collect this toolkit of all these different strategies that can be used to help people reverse chronic and autoimmune conditions. So I consult for people and teach them how to reverse disease. I have an online program called Go Wild that walks you through step by step of how to reverse disease. That's when I named it Go Wild because it is going back to our ancestors, is a large way of how you remove these deficiencies and toxicities. But those are the main ways I work with people.

45:36I'll go and give talks, different organizations like here at Polyphase Farm and such. The Amish community seems to love me, so I keep getting asked to go speak to the Amish. But yeah, but I love it. I just want to go out there and provide hope and empowerment encouragement. So now my second question. You have all these strategies. Can someone work within the conventional Western system, which they trust, they think maybe something's not right, some things are off, try some of these strategies, see some impact before or do you have to go kind of cold turkey on the Western system? I don't think anything's like all or none. So I think there's benefits. So the Western system is really great at acute care, like emergency care. Like if I get shot, I'm going to the emergency room. You know, I'm not going to rub an herb on it. But in chronic care, it's not structured to reverse conditions.

46:41It's structured to manage conditions. And I said that there's still benefits that you can utilize from that system. So for example, we use CBCs, like different lab tests. We use a vitamin D test. We use ferritin levels. You can measure thyroid levels. So there's still tests you can utilize in that system that are still accurate. Not every test has to be a functional test. So when I work with people, it's, I like to form a team. You know, like you have the Western doctor. You might have me. You might have a specialist on there. And they work together because I don't work with medications. You know, and you're going to need a Western doctor if you're on medication to help taper you. And tap you off that medication a lot of times. And so that's what they're good at is helping you. Well, I want to say they're good at it. They don't have a lot of practice at it. But they're the ones that are qualified to help you to taper off medications. So I like to work with them instead of like an all or none system, particularly because a lot of the lab tests are not covered by an instruction.

47:41When you get out of the system, at least not yet. Hopefully one day they will be. So let's say someone's watching and they have a long term disability in condition. They're taking some kind of medication. It seems to be helping. Maybe it's helping less now than they thought. Can they use some of these strategies in conjunction and see the benefit and then make further decisions? Is that something that's common? That's what I'm trying to understand. Oh, absolutely. So no one should ever just stop taking their medication. They need to be working with their medical doctor. And when I, so for example, when I work with my mother, I worked with her doctors. And the lab test told us when she should be tapering the medications, like the thyroid medication, for example. The lab tests would show this is her progress. And then the medical doctor decided this is how much I'm going to lower her dosage. So it was. I see. So even he might not believe that what you're doing is actually works for some reason. The condition, the thyroid is functioning better now.

48:43And so he does. So he has to change the medicine. Fascinating. Yes. So that's how it usually happens. Is that they run the test. They see. Oh, that organ is now working better. And now you have to change the medication. Right? Because the status of the organ has changed. So. But that's in large part how I work with people doing it. So these alternative strategies help to bring the body back in balance. The body starts functioning better. And then their Western doctor can actually work with the medication inside of it to taper them off. Another example, my mother was on warfarin, a blood thinner, because of the heart condition. And when I took her in my, you know, under my wing in my house, I said to her doctor, we need to taper her off the warfarin because I'm giving her tumouric for the pain and tumouric is a blood thinner. So you shouldn't take it if you're on prescription blood thinners.

49:43And I told him I want to replace the warfarin with tumour because it's a, it's natural compound. And he said, oh, don't worry about it because the tumouric is not going to be able to thin the blood enough to be able to replace warfarin. We went back and forth on it and he refused to let me taper the warfarin off. He said, go ahead and give the tumouric. I gave her the tumouric and a couple weeks later, well, the pain was getting much better that she was experiencing. She started bleeding from her eye. So I take it to the emergency room. Fortunately, that doctor understood the power of tumouric and that it's a blood thinner. And he was like, you know what, her blood is thin enough because they did a test. Just stopped the warfarin. We stopped it. She never had problems with her blood again. But that's the power of like herbal medicine, for example. But also the caution that you have to work with the doctors and somebody who's willing to work with you. So, you know, to merge the two together.

50:45So there's some people out there who feel failed by the Western medical system. I've come across these people. They've tried the functional medicine, found some credible doctors. Nothing has seemed to work. Is there still hope in your mind for such people through the type of work that you're suggesting? Absolutely. A lot of the people that I see come to me and they say, I've tried everything. Like I've done every diet, I've done all the supplements, I've done all the things, and I still can't heal. And they end up healing. So there's like, let's unpack this just a little bit. There's no certifying body of what a functional practitioner is. So you can just call yourself a functional practitioner. So that's the first thing. You need to make sure you're actually seeing somebody who knows what they're talking about. Number two, there's lots of tests out there. Lots of different functional tests. You've got 23 and me. You've got all these different companies now that are making a lot of money on these different tests.

51:46And a lot of them are not good. A lot of them are not reproducible. We even had somebody here at our polyface farm event that we'd Joel and I host every couple of years. And he did a study where he took the same fecal sample, so the same poop sample. And he sent it to like seven or eight different companies that are direct to consumer marketing. So a consumer can send their feces in, have it tested, and they'll tell you where there's imbalances in your microbiome. Each of those seven companies gave him a different answer. So there is a lot of tests out there. A lot of like false hopes. I think the technology isn't necessarily there yet in all those spaces. You have to make sure that you're utilizing the right test and you're with somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. Having said that, in my experience, and it's some other well-respected functional practitioners that I know in their experience, what we have seen is that about 60% of the time, if somebody does the basics, you're going back to only whole foods,

52:55you're going to eat everything organic, you're going to eat clean water, you're going to take like a multivitamin and mineral, right? You're going to not expose yourself to like any unnecessary EMFs, for example. If you do some of these basic things, in 60% of the cases, they can get into remission just from doing that. The other 40% of people are the ones that we step in and use these specialty tests that I'm talking about. They're the ones that are like, okay, they have, like I had chicken. Who would have, who would have ever removed chicken and Bailey from somebody's diet, right? So those are the ones that we're like, okay, there's something beyond just the ordinary that's too toxic or there's too severe of an efficiency and we need to find that through a test. So we use these tests, we piece together like your own unique puzzle and it tells us your story. And from there we create the most personalized protocol that we can. This is the most personalized medicine at this point. And the big sticklers usually when people cannot reverse a condition fully are two things.

54:02Mold, like they have mycotoxins in their body that they can't clear out possibly from chronic mold exposure, like current exposure or possibly they're out of the mold now. But as I mentioned earlier, the detox pathways have down-regulated and they can't clear the body of the mycotoxins. The second is heavy metals. Practically everybody who I've worked with is high in heavy metals. So those two things together are two of the key tests to the key toxins that we look for. Once we address those and get those out of the body, it's like you remove the roadblocks because the body is designed to heal. We have stem cells, you know, so we know that the body can actually heal itself. It's well documented in the literature. Our job is to figure out what's standing in the way of the body from doing what it knows how to do. You find those roadblocks, you remove them and the body takes over. Well, Cine McCullough, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. It's so great to be here with you too.

55:03Thank you all for joining Cine McCullough and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek. Thank you.