Inflammation And Your Health

Chronic inflammation is a major source of disease in America. In this episode, Bob Gilpatrick, Larry Daudelin, and Rollie discuss the potential hazards inflammation can cause during the show’s Topic and Discussion Segment. They talk about figuring out if you have chronic inflammation and where you could get them. Bob then answers Marlene, one of the show’s listeners, who asks about diabetes and inflammation. Plus, a new tiny habit is revealed that will help you choose better food while grocery shopping.

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Inflammation And Your Health

Is inflammation the Silent Killer?

We’ll be talking about inflammation, free radicals, and how they affect our health. Our Certified Holistic Nutritionist, Bob Gilpatrick, will answer a question submitted by one of our audiences. We will also be sharing life-improving tiny habits for you to try and a new emotional freedom tapping technique from Bob himself. Sit back, relax, and get ready to live forever young.

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I’m Bob, and I am here with Larry and Rollie, who is manning the board. Larry, how are you doing?

I’m doing fine, Bob. Thanks to everyone reading. We’re going to have a good show. It’d be a lot of knowledge shares.

We’re going to talk about inflammation and antioxidants. Some people know of this as free radicals. Free radicals are sometimes misunderstood, and it’s simple. A free radical is either an atom or group of atoms with an unpaired electron on the outside ring. They’re free to combine with something else. What happens is that unpaired electron, atom seeks out other tissue, other atoms, and molecules. It changes and damages them. They now have an unpaired electron, and they create what’s called the free radical cascade.

I thought it sounded more like a crazy guy on a skateboard, a Free Radical.

It’s like that. The skateboard can cause damage if he runs into something, and in this case, that’s what’s going on. This is a natural part of human life and the life of all animals and beings that create this type of free radical. We, as humans, are aerobic life and a natural byproduct of these free radicals. That’s why we only live to be 80 to 100 years old because, over time, we’re burning ourselves up with these free radicals. It’s like a log in a fire. Over time, the log burns itself up. It becomes ash and smoke. A log can burn quickly if it’s a dried out piece of poplar and you got the flu wide open, and someone’s pumping the bellows, it’s only an hour, and the log is gone, whereas if you have things controlled and you’re burning hickory or black walnut, it could burn for 50 times longer. That’s what we want. We want our bodies to burn more slowly.

It’s been out there for millions or billions of years. How come we don’t talk about it more? It comes up periodically, but you don’t hear many health talk about free radicals. A lot of magazines that you’re going to pick up in the store to educate yourself. They don’t talk about free radicals that much. It’s one of the biggest problems out there.

Part of the reason is number one; they don’t have drugs for combating free radicals. You do have a lot of nutrients that we’ll talk about later that do fight free radicals. Still, if you look at the typical food pyramid or supplement pyramid, they don’t include free radical scavengers or antioxidants, as they say, in that basic part. At Boomers Forever Young, we consider antioxidants to be part of the fundamental nutrition regime that somebody needs. That’s the main reason. There’s a lot of people that pay attention to inflammation. Doctors know that inflammation is causing somewhere between 80% and 95% of all diseases. The inflammation is precipitating heart disease, strokes, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease. It’s known to be that. Larry, many people aren’t aware of the powerful antioxidants and some of the new science that has given us powerful antioxidants.

Do you know what else they aren’t aware of? Many people aren’t aware of the reasons why the inflammation builds up, the causes, and the things that you don’t even think of. Many of the processed foods you’re eating are full of inflammation-causing things because you’re not getting a lot of nutrients from that. It’s a lot of fillers and stuff.

Do you want to talk about some of the foods, Bob? There’s a lot that creates them and can get them under control.

The main thing is eating too much sugar. In this day and age, 25% of all the calories consumed in the United States are from drinking soda pop. That’s going to raise your inflammation dramatically. Also, eating processed foods is bad for you. Foods that have been processed with treatments are causing inflammation as well. You also have toxins in the environment that people are breathing in. Tire dust, gas fumes, and there are also a lot of pesticides. Pesticides are sprayed in the grass, there’s a lot of residual that’s on the sidewalks, people will walk around during the day, their shoes pick up these toxins, and then they come into the house, leave their shoes in the house all night long, and their shoes are off-gassing these toxins. The CDC considers this as one of the main causes of cancer along with eating meat that’s overcooked.

I saw this at a friend’s house, and he had his shoes in there. He must have stepped in something enjoyable to his dog. His dog is over there looking at the bottom of his shoe that he had taken off. I thought to myself, “Do you even understand what your dog is looking for here?” This has come full circle now because I was in one of the box stores. This lady was talking about, “Why do you have so much Roundup here on your shelves?” With all the problems that Roundup has had, all the lawsuits, and everything else, it’s one of those things that we’d live with, and then you go on package foods.

25% of all the calories consumed in the United States are from drinking soda pop. Share on X

I was in one of the supermarkets, and from a convenience standpoint, it’s easy to go in and grab packaged foods that are processed. Back when I was much younger, it used to be the Cheese Whiz. I’m not knocking any of that, but can you imagine, it lasts for 100 years. You have to think about that, and the processed stuff is a convenient thing. What is soda? It’s convenient. It’s a satisfying drink. People do things because they’re stressed. Their days are full. You have a 24-hour day, and they already have 23.5 hours planned out.

The big part is not exercising. You’re too busy trying to work, and then you’re eating all this bad food, all these calories and toxins build-up. A big way that you get rid of toxins is how? You sweat.

If you’re not exercising, it’s an issue with the processed foods. When we talk about some tiny habits in the Emotional Freedom Technique, we’ll talk about that more. One of the big things is that they’ve cooked the food at high temperatures regarding processed foods. People themselves, when they’re cooking their own food, they like to barbecue, broil, bake, and fry. What happens is when you cook meat over 300 degrees on dry heat, you have a situation where the sugar that’s in the meat bumps up against the fat, and it creates this glycotoxin.

This is another thing the CDC says is the main leading cause of cancer. People need to learn to cook their meat in slow cookers. If you’re to cook on high heat, say you’re going to bake a chicken in the oven, you need to have liquid. You want to put it into a casserole dish and have chicken broth or some other liquid flavoring. The steam and the liquid blocks the glycation. Those are the main toxic things. Leave your shoes outside the house, don’t overcook your meat, and then we’ll talk about managing stress.

These all sound simple, and they are simple.

I was going to let you guys know while you’re on the topic, you were talking about the things that can cause inflammation, and we’ve got a lot of that down, but a good question I was looking at comes from Marlene. She says, “I’ve had diabetes for years. I’m afraid that I have high inflammation, and it could lead to more problems down the road.” Her main thing is how do you know if you have high inflammation. If you do, what can you do to get rid of it? What can you do about it? Diabetes causes a lot of inflammation. She’s afraid that she has high inflammation, which she does, but she doesn’t know how to figure that out. If you guys want to let them know or Bob if you want to let them know what to do

There’s a test for that.

There are a few things you want to know regarding testing. There’s a test they call CRP, which is C-Reactive Protein. For most people who do not have diabetes, their number on the test will be about a three. You want it to be much lower than that. For people with diabetes, it’s usually more than 5 or 6 or even higher. This is a test that you ask your doctor to do for you, and you want to get your C-Reactive Protein down to 0.5 or below. Larry, when you and I first started working together, yours was up above three, and we got it down by a factor of ten. We did that by reducing the inflammation in your body, and we used anti-inflammation supplements.

There are other tests people should consider getting. If you are not like Marlene, where she already knows she has diabetes, but if you’re someone that doesn’t go to the doctor often, you want to make sure that they test your A1C, which is the measure of your blood sugar over a three-month period. You want to make sure that you don’t have high blood sugar. A third test, in addition to Vitamin D3, we’ve talked about you always want to get that. Still, you also want to check your iron because if you have high iron, Larry, you experienced this before where your iron was above the top of the range. Most people think of iron as, “I’m low in iron. I’m feeling tired. I’m anemic.” High iron can be even worse because it creates more inflammation.

It can be dangerous. I’ve been the big guinea pig for all of our experiments here as we do different things to how we lower or raise certain things. I’m fortunate. I’m 75 years old, and I’ve De-aged immensely because we practice what we preach. This is what’s important. A lot of doctors, Bob, unless it’s a DO or a naturalist doctor, they are going to say, “Why do you want a CRP (test)?” The D3 Tests, they are fine with doing, but why do you want your iron checked? Some of them don’t even do that. They run a basic panel.

It’s fine to say this is important information for me; leave it at that, and they’ll do it. Here’s the other thing, Rollie, regarding Marlene’s question, her second part was, what can I do about it?

The causes or the tests we went over. Let’s figure out what she can do.

In this day and age, it’s important to keep your inflammation down. Inflammation weakens your immune system, and you want to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. After getting the tests that we talked about, you can use them to eliminate these free radicals. For the most part, you can use nutrients. You want to use nutrients like Superoxide Dismutase, which some people call SOD for short. SOD is a powerful antioxidant that is in our Sprouted Barley Seed product. Another one is Trimethylglycine. It’s is in our Boomer Boost product, very powerful, and also glutathione. A lot of people have heard of glutathione is an amino acid.

It’s another essential antioxidant. It’s also in our Boomer Boost product. Minerals as well are important, which are magnesium, zinc, and selenium. People, of course, have heard of the different vitamins that are antioxidants. We call them the ACE vitamins, which are vitamins A, C, and E. There are eight different kinds of Vitamin E, as you know, Rollie. Alpha-tocopheral is the main one you want as an antioxidant. We can make sure that it’s easy, Larry because it sounds like a whole lot of things you have to take. In the case of the Boomers Forever Young Nutrition products, you can get them all in a couple of powders that you mix in water.

Let’s say some people are not taking the products that we have. We’re not here pitching the products, Bob. We’re sitting here talking about health. I’m a living testimonial that the products work but let’s say that Marlene has to go to her general health food store. She’s not going to be able to buy SOD. She can’t do it. It doesn’t exist, but she can do other fruits, vegetables. Green leafy vegetables are one. Berries are another one. Avocados, as we talked about a little bit earlier. These are things that she can do. To understand how much inflammation she has, she does need to get a test, so we see how bad it is.

Remember, getting active too.

Any exercise because exercise is critical. I want to emphasize to people that exercise doesn’t mean joining the gym. It’s all about habit. Take steps; the goal is 10,000 steps. I was thinking, “What did I do?” I looked down at my phone, I did 9,987 steps, and it was 7:00.

That’s how you create it. You have apps like that that help you create a good habit.

Why don’t we talk about that, Larry, because we talked about the food issue before and getting in the habit of buying whole foods. That’s easier said than done if you don’t have a system for it. For someone like Marlene, if she can focus on eating whole foods, that’ll be great. We have a book that is called Vibrant Living: Keys To A Healthy Lifestyle. There’s information in there about whole foods and some recipes for whole foods. There’s a lot of great books about cooking with whole foods. You first want to educate yourself a little bit about this, and we can send a book to Marlene.

If you go to LiveForeverYoungRadio.com, there’s a form that you can fill out there, and you can get an electronic version. An eBook version of Vibrant Living.

Send her a hard copy, and this is a gift from us for calling in. The important thing is when you talk about what to eat. Sometimes you have to take that extra moment and be cognizant of it. When you’re at the grocery store, you need to be thinking about what you should and what you shouldn’t do.

In regard to making a plan for what you’re going to get at the grocery store, for Marlene and the rest of us, if you’re going to use the Tiny Habit System, it’s the system of ABC. The A stands for an Anchoring event. What is this event? In this case, it’s, “I’m getting dressed and ready. I’m going out to the grocery store. I’m going to stop at the grocery store on my way home.” The B is for Behavior, which means the new behavior that you want to create. In this case, cooking with whole food, shopping for whole foods on the aisles around the periphery, not in the center aisles where all the frozen foods are. The C is for Celebration, which is important.

The way it would work is this. You find yourself in your kitchen or at your dining room table, and you are getting ready to go shopping. The first thing you want to do is make your list. That includes the recipes and the whole foods you’re going to use to prepare food for your family. You’re going to say, “My new behavior is I’m going to buy these whole foods that are on my list.” You execute that. You go to the store, you do it, you’re in your car, you’re putting your grocery bags in the trunk, and you want to celebrate. Celebrations are important in behavioral psychology, as outlined in the Tiny Habits book that BJ Fogg wrote. It’s like, “If you don’t celebrate, you’re not reinforcing the new behavior, so you’re not as likely to do it.”

A celebration can be something as simple as pumping your fist and saying yes. Whatever it is that you would do to celebrate is what you want to do at this point, and also think about it. Why are you celebrating? Because you accomplished something new, you created a new behavior, and you’re thinking about how great it is for your own self to be healthier and for your family is going to be much healthier as you take charge of this behavior and take charge of the new system.

In this day and age, it's important to keep your inflammation down because it weakens your immune system. Share on X

It takes 28 days to form a habit. I noticed I get flyers in the mail, and a lot of them are talking about healthy menus. You need to take the time to put it in your phone or write a list. I see it all the time. I’m going down the aisles, and I see many people trying to make good choices. They’re on their phone, and they’re comparing things. You need to applaud them for trying. You’ll see other people reaching. They’re in the cereal aisle. I’m not saying all the cereals are bad. There are some good cereals that had some shredded wheat and such, but there are also other ones that are loaded with sugar. You have to make good choices when you’re doing it, and that’s thorough preparation. Giving some thought to what I want to do. If you don’t give any thought to it, you’re going to impulse buy.

Talking about impulses, how do you control those?

Here’s the next part, Larry. We had decided we’re going to make part of every one of the Live Forever Young Radio broadcasts. That is to help people with what we call the Emotional Freedom Technique or Tapping. In this particular case, what we can do for Marlene is we can say, “We know that exercise is important, particularly for someone with diabetes. We also know that motivation is an issue with exercise.” It’s hard for people to always follow through with what their intention is. People quite often find themselves sitting on the couch, watching TV, knowing that they should be doing some exercise, but realizing that it gets to be 10:30 at night, they haven’t done anything, and they wish they had. This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to teach a little bit about the Emotional Freedom Technique and how to apply it for exercise.

You’re going to see books that say EFT or Tapping.

The tapping is tapping on your fingertips, your thumb, and then you’re tapping on the side of your nail. For people that are reading, you’re going to tap, say, take your left hand and take the middle finger of your right hand, and tap on the side of your nail, starting with your thumbnail. Tap five times and then tap five times on each finger. At the end, tap on what’s called your karate chop point or the fleshy part of your hand.

As you’re tapping, you want to repeat a phrase because this will help you reframe and create a new behavior or habit. The phrase in the case of exercise is going to sound something like this, “Even though up until now, I thought that I had to continue to sit here on the couch and not exercise. I completely love and accept myself, anyway. I’m grateful now that I realize I’m getting up off the couch, I’m putting on my exercise sneakers and clothes, I’m leaving to go, and go for my walk.”

At the end of this, Larry, people should put both their hands across your heart, pushing gently on your chest while you take in a deep breath through your nose. Let this breath out slowly while you put your hands face up on your knees and drop your chin down so that your chin is close to your chest while you breathe out. This makes a very peaceful feeling. This last gesture and you want to associate being peaceful with your new habit, with the new behavior you’ve tapped in using your body’s Meridian system.

That’s your reward, too, because if you do this and try this, the key to it is over your hand over your heart, put your hands out as gratitude, put your head down, breathe out, and don’t take any other thoughts out of your mind. You’ll feel that gratitude.

Not only that, you’ll notice that you’re rising off the couch. Before you even can think about it, you’ve got your sneakers on, and you’re ready to go.

That’s a good technique. We have videos on the introduction to the EFT, which stands for Emotional Freedom Technique. On our YouTube channel, Boomers Forever Young, we have a whole playlist with helpful videos. You can also check out the show at LiveForeverYoungRadio.com.

Is there anything else at all that you can think of that we didn’t cover in regards to inflammation?

Since we got a good question from Marlene, if you guys have more questions on specific topics that you do not see on our website, go to LiveForeverYoungRadio.com and submit a question. There’ll be a way to either call and leave a message or record a question that we can use on the air or even email us. You’ll have our contact information on the website.