Robyn Openshaw: Behind the Curtain of the Supplement Industry - Is What's in that Bottle Eroding Health and Wasting Money?

The label says “natural,” but who’s actually making your vitamins—and what’s riding along inside each capsule? I sat down with Robyn Openshaw to follow the supply chains few consumers ever see, from GMO-corn byproducts turned into “vitamin C,” to deodorized fish oils engineered to hide rancidity, to wool-grease–derived cholecalciferol sold as “vitamin D.” The picture that emerges isn’t a quaint herb shed; it’s industrial chemistry optimized for shelf life, margins, and market growth. If you’ve ever wondered why so many supplements feel underwhelming—or why your cabinet keeps growing while your results don’t—this conversation hands you the map and a flashlight.

We trace how pharma and nutraceuticals became “kissing cousins,” why many ingredients come from the same factories in China or India, and how fillers, binders, and anti-caking agents sneak in under “other ingredients.” We unpack multivitamins and the co-factor problem, show why ascorbic acid isn’t the whole vitamin C complex, and question the over-reliance on the 25D vitamin D test that labels most people “deficient.” Robin shares the eye-opening moment at a Swiss clinic where blood filtration revealed a bag of solvent-like gunk—fueling a methodical, AI-driven investigation into base materials, manufacturing chemicals, and MSDS safety profiles you can verify yourself.

This isn’t a call to ditch everything; it’s a toolkit to cut waste and lower your toxic load. You’ll learn how to read labels, run smarter searches to uncover manufacturing practices, and decide where a thoughtful, targeted support may still make sense. Most importantly, you’ll rediscover the third path between drug and supplement: neither—paired with better food, sunlight, sleep, movement, and stress care.

If this episode challenges your assumptions or helps you save money, share it with a friend who loves “wellness” labels. Subscribe for more candid deep dives, and leave a review with one change you’re making after listening.

• Order Robyn's book - Take Daily: How Supplement Hijack Your Health
• Visit Robyn's website
• Robyn's Substack
• Vitamin D Supplementation: Panacea or Potential Problem
• An Ancestral Perspective on Vitamin D Status
• Are Some People Pushing Their Vitamin D Levels Too High?
• Medical Tests: Who's Interest Do They Really Serve?

Reverse Any Chronic Health Condition in Three Steps - The Simplest Path to Healing You've Ever Seen

Chapters

• 1:43 Setting The Stakes: Time, Money, Health
• 2:30 Why Investigate Supplements Now
• 3:00 Pharma’s Bigger Bet On Supplements
• 4:07 Cultural Assumptions And Blind Trust
• 5:39 Switzerland Detox Spark And Solvents
• 8:36 Food Versus Pills: What’s Actually In Them
• 11:50 China, India, And The Supply Chains
• 15:04 Fish Oil Deodorizing And Rancidity
• 19:36 Fillers, Binders, And Industrial Byproducts
• 23:38 Using AI To Trace Ingredients
• 27:54 MSDS Sheets And “Safe” Solvent Residues
• 33:22 Multivitamins And The Cofactor Problem
• 39:32 Vitamin D Tests, Sheep Wool, And Sunlight
• 45:49 Bioidentical Hormones And Blurred Lines
• 50:43 The Business Of Labs And “Test Don’t Guess”
• 56:42 Practical Takeaways, Book, And Resources

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:52

Hello everyone. Welcome to episode number 58. There is a really good chance this episode is going to save you a lot of time and money and likely improve your health as well. My guest today is Robin Openshaw. She and I have been friends for a few years now, and so I peek in on her work from time to time to see what I can learn from what she has been researching. And one topic I've been noodling on for my new book is that the world of supplements, and trying to give people a grounded perspective on what supplements are and what they can and can't do for you. And in the last couple of years, I've done so many consultations with people who have pivoted away from the medical world only to end up on a boatload of supplements, and many of which I don't think they need, or in the end, they would say didn't do them any good. So when I saw that Robin has been looking deeply into both the supplement industry and the lab testing industry, I reached out to see if she would like to do an episode about it, and it turns out she and her co-author have written a yet-to-be-released deep dive into the supplement industry, and she was kind enough to send me a copy of the book. After reading it, I can say she does a great job of wrestling with the monstrosity that is the supplement world without being hysterical and without calling out any particular companies. But here's a fun data point. Did you know that many pharmaceutical companies make more money selling supplements than they do selling drugs? Think about that for a second. Many companies that are convicted serial felons are behind your supplements. I think for too long the supplement world has been veiled behind a curtain of blind trust, and Robin's new book pulls back the curtain. What I think you'll hear in this interview is that the supplement industry, like vaccines used to be, is so entrenched in our culture. Of course we all take vaccines, of course we all take supplements, that it's hard to imagine asking critical questions about the need for most of them in the first place. And one of the things I appreciated about Robin's new book is that she lays out a method of research that any of us can engage in. So we did our best to give you an overview, knowing that we weren't going to be able to cover it all, but hopefully we wet your appetite to check out the book and give you the tools to investigate your supplements and what they're actually made of and who makes them. So, just as a disclaimer, nothing in this interview is meant to be personal health advice. We are not here to talk you into or out of anything. We are just trying to bring to light some questions the supplement industry and many of the medical or so-called alternative practitioners would probably prefer you not ask. I'm very curious to see how her book and this episode do, because I suspect it will be up to you, non-healthcare providers who don't have a revenue stream on the line to share this message far and wide. So for what it's worth, both Robin and I think there are a handful of good companies and worthwhile supplements out there, but we'd agree that roughly uh sorry, 99% of what you'd find on Amazon or at the typical supplement shop or the supplement aisle is not worth the money and may actually be detrimental to your health. A couple other relevant thoughts for this episode. Robin and I come from different perspectives regarding diet. I think I could safely say that she and I are both in the omnivore camp, but she leans much more toward a plant-based way of eating, and I nudge people toward high-quality animal foods. So I can say, despite our differences in approach to diet, both Robin and I have helped a lot of people find wellness. And if you have a way of eating that makes you feel healthy, I am all for it. So discussing the best human diet is not necessarily the point of this episode, but it is relevant if you want to get your nutrition from food rather than attempting to get it from pills. So if you want to hear more my nutrition philosophy, you can check out episodes six and seven. Uh, also relevant is episode number five. That is a monologue show I did a couple of years ago about the world of supplements. So check those out if you are interested. Uh lastly, and Robin mentions this in the interview, she is currently being sued for, wait for it,$60 million for having the nerve to warn people about a company she believes is putting poison on foods sold at most popular grocery stores. So that is not my story to tell. But what I can say is that Robin would rather the company have to defend their products than to cave to people who are trying to bully others into being quiet. She is not backing down. And we need more people like her. So it is an honor to amplify her work. And one way you can support her is by grabbing a copy of her new book and sharing this episode. So let's make a statement that businesses that care more about profits than our health will get backlash from we the people. Our power comes from not spending money with them and telling others why we choose differently. You can pre-order Robin's new book called Take Daily at greensmoothiegirl.com slash healing united. I'll have a link for that in the show notes as well as other resources relevant to this episode. Okay, without further ado, here is my interview with a fearless deep thinker and a woman of strong conviction who I admire very much. Welcome to my conversation with Robin Openshaw. Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's show. My guest is the lovely Robin Openshaw. So, a few things about this wonderful woman. She is a fellow health guru like me who got into this work to get her own health in order. She had a vaccine injury herself and she had a vaccine-injured son. She is known as the Green Smoothie Girl, and part of growing into that involved a six-year 450 cities speaking to her in the US and abroad. She has a podcast called Vibe. She's been a keynote speaker. She is a wife, a mother of four, a former psychotherapist, former college professor, author of at least 16 books, including a national bestseller. She has also created and hosted international health retreats, which we'll talk about that in just a second. She has a substack for health warriors and preppers, and among other things, describes herself as an accidental activist and a freedom fighter. And you could probably tell by now why her and I get along. But uh last time we interviewed her was during the height of the COVID hysteria, and the content was too hot for YouTube, so they took it down. So I just have a lot of respect for her and how she will stick her neck out to speak truth to power. And today I wanted to bring her on to talk about her latest book, which is all about the supplement industry. So, Robin, welcome to the show. Thanks for hanging out with me today. Anything you want to add to my intro there?

SPEAKER_01: 7:15

That was a great intro. Thank you, Christian, and glad to be here. Good to see you again.

SPEAKER_00: 7:20

You too. Okay. Well, anybody who's followed my work or yours knows that neither of us are averse to talking about controversial topics and doing our best to apply some level-headed critical thinking to hot button issues. So there's a great quote by a guy named Eric Hofer that I thought might set this conversation up well. He says, every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. And I don't think that's always the case with causes, but I think it's definitely applicable to the supplement industry as a whole. So, like you, I originally thought that supplements were the opposite of pharmaceuticals, and neither of us think that way anymore. So you were kind enough to give me an advanced copy of your book, uh, your new soon-to-be-released book, Take Daily, How Supplements Hijack Your Health. So it's a provocative title, but I think the book delivers. You did a great job, and I think it's a much-needed expose and example of critical thinking that I haven't seen applied to the supplement industry yet. So uh if you would, let's start off, I guess, with the story of the new therapy that you experienced at a health retreat in Switzerland back in the summer of 2024. And my understanding is that that experience was kind of the impetus for starting to question supplements and it eventually led to your new book. So tell us that story.

SPEAKER_01: 8:33

Yeah, so I wouldn't say that um over a year ago when I saw a bag of what looked like petrochemical substances come, an entire bag get filtered out of my blood. Then you could tell with it sitting there in the sunlight was petrochemical.

SPEAKER_00: 8:51

Yeah, here it is. This is from your blog post. For those of you watching this, you can see that on the screen now. This is from your blog post why I won't take 99% of supplements ever again. But yeah, tell us about this motor oil looking thing on the screen.

SPEAKER_01: 9:03

Yeah, so that little that smaller bag on top, I mean, that's probably like a pint of basically what looks like motor oil. And then in that lower bag, that's water and then some stuff mixed in, including inflammatory proteins, and there's some heavy metals at the bottom. But I was really shocked because I was seeing everybody who came with me to this retreat that we've held like 15 times annually in Switzerland. I was seeing the same amount of stuff coming out of my blood that other people's were, and I was like, this doesn't make sense. I actually had been down the rabbit hole over and over and over again. So it wasn't brand new for me to question supplements. Like, I think that the Thanksgiving before I sort of fell down the rabbit hole researching AI was new, and I spent the entire Thanksgiving weekend studying cholicalciferol, falsely known as vitamin D. That's a whole chapter. Yeah, we're gonna go back a little bit. Yeah, I mean, we have to be careful not to completely fall down the rabbit hole on just just vitamin D or what you know the supplement is is cholciferol, which is a byproduct of the sheep wool industry. And so, you know, I had taken quite a bit of time. I'd I'd taken days looking at ascorbic acid, falsely called vitamin C. And so I wasn't new to it, but then when I saw that bag of what was clearly petrochemical come out of my blood, I was like, why would I have the same exposure that other people do when I've been eating a plant-based whole food diet for a few decades now, since my vaccine injury in graduate school when I was required to get the flu vaccine and I was in my 20s and I didn't um, you know, I didn't even know anything about exemptions. I had never had anyone tell me that vaccines weren't safe and effective. My gut told me don't do it. I didn't want to do it. If I if they would have handed me a piece of paper that said yes or no, I would have said no. But I went to get that flu vaccine and it changed my life, and I spent four years more or less in bed. So, like I felt like I had already climbed out of a hole, you know, a deep dark black hole, which is what makes the greatest healers, right? The wounded healers. You and I have talked about this before. Um, but when I saw that bag of petrochemicals or was filtered out of my own blood, and I watched it happen, there's no petrochemical solvent product that went in. I could literally see my blood leave my body and I could see everything that happened in that in that machine. It never went inside the machine. Um, there's there was nothing that came out of my blood that wasn't already there. So that's about when I I realized I need to research this, I need to research that. Where are all these petrochemical where are they coming from? And it and I I pretty quickly arrived at solvents. And where am I getting the solvent exposure since I eat organic food? I grow a lot of my food. Um, I don't I don't much even eat animal products because they have, you know, I'm not trying to get anybody to be a vegan, but you know, there's concentrated um in animal tissues if if it's being raised uh in the ways that most people's meat is. Right? There you're gonna get concentrated, you know, herbicides, pesticides, um, steroids, hormones, antibiotics. So I don't I don't even hardly ever eat an animal product. I'm like, wow, I've been doing so much for my health. What why would I have all this? Well, I don't wanna I don't wanna like show any brands here, but I have taken more than my share of supplements. You know, people send them to me for free constantly. And I hear all the marketing for it because of what I do, educating people and writing books about health and wellness. And so probably I've taken 10 times more supplements than everyone else. So every single time I started researching a specific supplement, I discovered the petrochemical solvents that were used in the manufacture of that supplement, which, you know, they'll always tell you, oh, we try to get the solvents out and the heavy metals out, but they can't get it all out. And so, what's the cumulative effect of taking all these supplements? Plus, we all have this like mindset from being conditioned for decades that we don't question that they're natural and that they give us what our food doesn't, even though you can you can if you just think for a minute and you look at pills like this, if our food doesn't have enough vitamin C in it, why does this kind of brown looking or white looking pill like what's in it that costs me 15 cents that makes up for not eating a healthy diet? How does that even make sense?

SPEAKER_00: 13:56

Yeah. All right, well, with that good context, so before we get into kind of the, I guess what I've come to appreciate is the somewhat ubiquitous nature of questionable ingredients and supplements. Let's just talk about what you found about supplements from a business or industry angle, because I think similar to food packaging, we have this where they have idyllic forms and sunsets on the picture and animals out on pasture. There's this idea we have with supplements that the, you know, the average consumer thinks there's this mom and pop organization and they've got a big um field full of herbs and they pick it and bring it into their warehouse and they crush it into a mortar and pestle and squish it into a pill. And that's what how the supplement industry works. So give us your insight, pull back the curtain a little bit onto how these ingredients are procured. Where are most of them coming from? And how consolidated is this industry?

SPEAKER_01: 14:47

To cut to cut to the chase, there's no food involved in the vast majority of supplements. No herbs involved, there's no food involved. And so, like over the course of years, you know, you've probably looked at a lot of labels and you see something that might say like vitamin C and then parentheses, pyridoxine. And so you've come to believe that this substance called pyridoxine is vitamin B. And you just assume in your mind that that is the compound in your body that either your body makes, some people are aware that your body makes some vitamins, um, with a complex interplay of a few different organs that science doesn't really understand, hasn't really studied. But it was literally a hundred years ago that some really early scientists uh actually invented the concept of a vitamin. It's called something slightly different, but it came to be called a vitamin. And then because of some molecular similarity between some substances that you can find and obtain very, very inexpensively, because pretty much all of these pills, it turns out, are made from some byproduct of another industry, and then they end up in a pill being called a vitamin, and we are being told these deficiency stories, most of which are false. Like, like most things, there's a kernel of truth. Like there, there are things that we're deficient in, just not very many. And our body serves us better than we think, and our food serves us better than we think. And our food and getting in the sunlight and being active are far more of the answer than people want it to be because they want it to be the magic pill. So, like, we can't lay all the blame on the industry, we can't lay all the blame on the functional medicine doctors who are prescribing as many pills as the allopathic medical doctors. But basically, it was the pharmaceutical industry that invented this concept of vitamins. Um, not a lot of great research behind it, but they basically have hyper focused on molecules. And if they find a molecule that this, let's say pyridoxine has in common with something that they've decided is called vitamin B6 or B9 or B12 or B1 or B2, then it just became sort of codified in big pharma and big chemistry. And those two kind of got married, and now we have most of our big pharmaceutical companies have a nutraceutical side of the house. And people can hear that and they it doesn't even make them go, wait a minute. Why is there a nutraceutical? What and they don't even really think like what's a nutraceutical? Well, it's your supplements and your vitamins. So to make a long story short, we think of these supplements as being the opposite of drugs and pharma when really they're more like kissing cousins made by the same companies.

SPEAKER_00: 18:23

Yeah. Well, I was surprised to learn from your book that some pharmaceutical companies make more money in supplements than they do in drugs, and that 70% of a lot of different things come from China or India and just giant factories of people wearing hazmat suits to make the ingredients. So give people a little more window into that manufacturing or that the verticals that different pharmaceutical companies have, and um, maybe some of the rigors that uh we think are their packaging natural molecules when that's really just other things.

SPEAKER_01: 18:55

Yeah, remember several years ago listening to a guy with a master's degree in nutrition who had worked for a pharmaceutical company but on the nutraceutical side of the house. And he said that he sat in a meeting well before the year 2000 where they discussed the fact that they anticipated revenue-wise that they would be making more money on supplements after the year 2000 than on drugs. And so they wanted more emphasis there, and they they knew they knew what where the growth was gonna be. And there's been a really fierce backlash against the side effects of drugs, and you know, if you if you see it as two sides of the same coin or the nutraceutical and the drug side of the same company, then it starts to make more sense. There's now so much overlap. For instance, like I feel like drugs are getting such a bad rap that they're starting to call a lot of drugs peptides because peptides are basically it's like protein, like what isn't a protein and what isn't a peptide? And so it's this meaningless word, and they know that the public doesn't know what it is and how ubiquitous it is, and how most of the body is made up of compounds that could be called peptides or that could could be called proteins. And so they've they've just managed to pull a lot of nonsense over on us by, you know, I mean, we could go sideways on the whole protein or obsession with macronutrients, and we could talk about how just about everything is protein, and so you could take some garbage throwaway uh product of some food industry and multi-purpose it and get more profit out of the same industry, such as the dairy industry, that's how whey protein came to be. And then once they could make bags of you know, whey protein was something they used to throw away, because the only thing they could think of to say about it that's good is well, it's protein. So, in order to keep supporting that fiction, we got to like over-emphasize protein and act to everyone out there in the consumer world like protein is better than fats and carbohydrates, and that they're all super different. Not let's let's not let let them focus on the fact that there's proteins, fats, and carbohydrates in every single food. Yeah, and let's just focus on those ratios and get the dietitians and the nutritionists talking about that, and all the influencers and all the doctors, and get everybody obsessed with proteins, fats, and carbs. We need all three. So I probably went aside from from what you originally asked me, but um you're you're doing fine.

SPEAKER_00: 21:34

There's so much to cover, even just scripting out, kind of mapping out what to talk about. I was like, man, there's just we could talk for hours. So I'll see if I can.

SPEAKER_01: 21:42

Oh, I know it was it was the China, the fact that the vast majority are are produced in China and India. So a good example would be um ascorbic acid. So this was one of the earliest vitamins. Okay, those of you who are listening and not watching, I'm making quote marks in the air with vitamins. One of the earliest vitamins discovered is that um everybody listening to this thinks that ascorbic acid is vitamin C. Well, any of you can go use any AI tool and ask it, you know, you have to ask it good questions, but what are all the different components of vitamin C? And you will find that ascorbic acid is one of a whole bunch of different compounds. So saying that ascorbic acid, which is literally made from the byproducts of genetically modified corn made into corn starch or corn syrup, you take those byproducts and you make ascorbic acid. Saying that that ascorbic acid is vitamin C is kind of like saying that the chaff of wheat, which people who read the Bible get this one really quickly. Saying that chaff is bread, or even that chaff is wheat, or that chaff is food.

unknown: 23:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 23:01

Okay, that's about that's a very, very good metaphor for trying to call ascorbic acid vitamin C.

SPEAKER_02: 23:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 23:09

And you should all prove this to yourselves. You should all go research this. I mean, there's a there's a chapter in the book here. Here's my co-author from the UK. He was, I don't know how well you can see this, but he's the only headmaster in the UK. There's 4,500 of them, 30-year headmaster who stood up to vaccine mandates in the UK. And so he's no longer a headmaster. And so, you know, he worked with me on this book. And and I brought him in because it was really great to have somebody who's who wasn't way down the rabbit hole like I was, but he cares about transparency, he cares about consumer health advocacy, he um he hasn't had to get his health back, he just eats healthy food and he's fit and he's never taken supplements. So I took 10,000 supplements, probably over the course of decades, and he took like zero. So he knew nothing about supplements, but I would I would tell him things like, okay, ascorbic acid isn't really vitamin C. So go learn that because he was a good researcher and he'd already written several books of his own. And I was like, and go learn how um and and I'm uh my figures not might not be exactly right, but go learn where ascorbic acid is made. Like I want to say 90% of it is made in Chinese um manufacturing plants and um whether ascorbic acid is really vitamin C. And he just would he kept coming back to me and he would like have researched it deeply and spent a week writing about it. And he was like, Oh my gosh, you were right. Um, this is blowing my mind. So I took my parts and he took his parts, and we just went after one supplement after another after another, learning what it's made of, what its base material is, what all the chemicals are that are involved in manufacturing it. And we give you like, we don't want you to just believe us because you read the chapter on the B vitamins, which are mostly made of petrochemicals and acids and heavy metals, and there's no food involved in 99% plus of the B vitamin, and and this will make people mad. And I didn't even go to Simon and Schuster, who published my last book, or my publisher before that. I didn't even go to them because I don't I knew they didn't weren't gonna want this book, or they would say, we'll publish this book, and then somebody would pay money to deep six this book because you know there's people who are like, Oh, pharma is gonna hate your book. No, farm or pharma is gonna love your book. No, pharma is the supplement industry. Yeah, you everybody has to get clear that they are one and the same. And that doesn't mean that there aren't supplement companies that are mom and pop shops and maybe they really are wild harvesting some herb. I know companies like that. I am a company like that. I only have a couple of supplements because the vast majority of them are just dipping into the supply chains to answer your question, buying the same product from mostly Indian and Chinese manufacturing companies that are selling literally billions of dollars a year worth of just think of them as big wide rivers of supply. And thousands of brands are dipping into that river and taking that preserved lasts years in the supply chain, isn't going to separate out if it's a liquid, all it's all chemicals that achieve those things. You know, even if you find yourself a supplement that's made of all food, and and I know of a brand that seems to be all food, you're still taking it like two years after that plant was harvested. It's been even in the best of conditions, dried, um, bottled, chipped. By the time you're swallowing it, it's probably an average of about two years old. And people know, like it they always understand this when I say if if you're gonna get a salmon fillet out of your freezer and put it on your counter to barbecue tonight, what if you forgot about it and you didn't see it, like for whatever reason you didn't see it till two years from now? Would you be like, oh, I forgot about that salmon fillet two years later. I'll barbecue it tonight. Would anyone do that? No, would you do it?

SPEAKER_00: 27:39

Hopefully not.

SPEAKER_01: 27:40

No, I think you would not, and everybody understands that, but then they don't think about the fact that their fish oil, which was one of my pivotal moments, Christian, does it is going to um Expo West in California. I used to go every year just to see like what new products are. I kept learning more and more about what these products are made of, and I kept asking like more lasered in questions that the average consumer doesn't think of to ask. Well, I came to this row of, I mean, Expo West is one of the 10 biggest trade shows in the world, and it's like everything in the world of natural health, right? Like there's not 1% of the stuff that they sell there that I want to eat. But, anyways, I come to this row and it's all Chinese companies. All the signage is in Chinese, and I was just like, What is this? And I went up to one of the usually I've just walked past it, but one year I was like, I'm I'm gonna find out what it is they sell here. So I went over, found someone who spoke English, and I said, What is it that your company sells? And they said, Well, we sell the chemicals for the deodorizing and purifying of fish oil capsules because it's a multi-billion dollar industry, and we can't have the consumer having that um rancid fish oil burr.

SPEAKER_02: 29:01

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01: 29:02

They said this to me. They like they said this to me, like like, are you are you a fish oil company? Because if so, then we we would sell you these chemicals. And I was like, Really? And asking questions like, how old is the fish oil by the time the consumer takes it? That's how I found out. It's literally years. And then I said, How about all these other companies that are Chinese here on this whole row? And the person said, Yeah, we're all we're all selling chemicals for deodorizing and purifying um fish oil.

SPEAKER_00: 29:35

Well, that leads me to one of the easy ways to find these. And I'm gonna get to how you used AI in a second, but you one place you can look on your ingredient label is other ingredients, and that is where you can find a lot of the binders and coatings and anti-caking agents or bulking agents. And so tell some people some of just what you learned about you mentioned throwaway products of industry, whether it's corn or whether it's dairy, but there are other industries that have some sort of throwaway product and like, hey, there's a molecule similar to this here, and we can turn that into something else. Give people a few more examples of some of the things, some of the raw materials that end up in supplements.

SPEAKER_01: 30:17

Yeah, because if some industry throws it away, like let's just say the ore mining industry, okay? So we're mining for copper or for whatever metal. There's all these rocks that get dug up and they used to have to find a way to dispose of them. So it used to be a cost center for them. It was expensive for them to find a place to get rid of the rocks when they're looking for the metal. Let's just say gold. Just because we all know what gold is. So what do you think happens to those rocks? What if the company mining for metals can find a way to sell that rock, even if it's super cheap, it goes from being a cost center to being a profit center. If you know what it turns out, rocks are super high in minerals.

unknown: 31:12

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 31:13

You know what? And and people are this is one of the actually true deficiency stories. People are mineral deficient because of the way that we've farmed for decades now. We don't leave a field follow for a year and have the cows poop on it and reach. Generate the soil. You know all this. And my guess is your audience is aware of this too. We actually do have a mineral deficiency. I don't think the evidence is there that we have a vitamin deficiency. I don't think that's a true story. Um most of the the the whole vitamin D deficiency story, we can talk about how that fraud starts with the lab test, but we'll set that aside. We'll get there. Okay. So rocks, it turns out, are super high in minerals. And people are deficient in minerals. So what if we just gave or sold for cheap the rocks like limestone that we dig up from ore mining to the supplement manufacturers or big chem, because they're they're all in contracts with each other, right? Like, where's the head of the beast? Kind of hard to figure out. It'll take you a while to figure it out if you care enough. But the point is they work together, big, huge manufacturing companies, big chem, big pharma supplements. They're all married together. And if you grind up rocks, that's where your cost is. Your cost isn't in acquisition of the actual product. The rocks are really, really, as it turns out, cheap to come by because limestone is being dug dug up in quarries every day. But you do have to grind it up, and that's where your cost is. And then you can sell it to the consumer for 40 bucks a bottle. And they feel like they are filling a nutritional deficiency because rocks are actually really high in minerals. Unfortunately, the way God made us, we don't our bodies don't really recognize rocks as food. So we don't really digest or assimilate or eliminate rocks very well.

SPEAKER_00: 33:11

Yeah. Yeah. One of some of the things you pointed out in your book were things like rocks and chalk and seashells, or even they scrape the bottom of a lake bed after they drain it and they just package that into a pill. You also had other things that surprise me, like um fertilizer industry, the sand and glass industry, um, even you mentioned duck feathers earlier, but human human hair and sawdust, all of these things are different ways that they package into the often, these are where they show up. It's not the minerals that they're trying to give you, but it's the other packaging agents or what they make the capsules out of. And so we're hopefully taking a little bit of nutrition. At the same time, we're probably taking a little bit of something that our body has to process. So, anything else in the questionable ingredient area that you want to put on the table just so people are aware of it?

SPEAKER_01: 33:56

I mean, there's so many things. Like once somebody did this successfully, and I gave you for an exit an example of how the protein in a bag industry was born was the dairy industry going, how can we get more money out of our process here? Genius idea. Let's take this throwaway yellow liquid stuff the way, dry it, and sell it to consumers and tell them that it's a health food and that they they need more protein. I mean, there's we don't have protein deficiency problems. We you get from any decent diet as much protein as you can really metabolize. Um, but the protein bagged proteins that you can measure with a scoop, people love that kind of stuff. They can they can quantify it and they can count the grams, and doctors love it. They tell people how many grams to get, and then they sell them their protein, their their bagged protein, uh, the bars. We know exactly how many grams we can get. People like to feel like they have control over their diet, so it kind of hits on a lot of different levels. But yeah, like the wood pulp or the sawdust, to find out that this was a like a base material, not sometimes a filler too, but you know what? They just call it something else. Like I think it's hypomellocellulose. Have you se cellulose? Yeah, guys, look it up. You've got AI now, and you can use you go check it in three different AI programs, just scanning the internet. This information is out there, but you have to ask sophisticated questions, which we just got better and better. And the the industry will eventually shut this information down, which is why I had Mike come in and we just went hard and we both spent hundreds of hours and wrote this book because AI hadn't yet been gatekeeping for the industry. We watched it happen. I watched it happen with Green Smoothie Girl, my website. People used to find my content if it was the best content out there on a topic. And we watched 2007, 2008, 2009, we watched Google eliminate us.

SPEAKER_00: 35:58

You mean eight, 17, 18, 19? Is that what you mean? Sorry.

SPEAKER_01: 36:03

Uh yes. It was 20 about 2017 where we started to see it happen, and it was happening to everybody.

SPEAKER_02: 36:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 36:10

Um, uh a lot of our friends, like their whole business models were really dependent on organic search. And so they would do really high quality content, and people would find them and follow them. And they had grown organically grown their small business that fed their families from doing the best content out there. And this just kind of went away. It went away fast, and we all kind of banded together to go, what happened? Like all of us, I could see all my colleagues. We all lost 80 and 90 and 95 percent of our traffic.

SPEAKER_00: 36:41

Yeah, I saw Killing within a yeah. I think it was one month in 2019. She had like a quarter of a million hits to her website every month, and it dropped to zero the next month. All this right before COVID kicks off. Like all of us naturally minded health people just disappeared from the internet. And you're saying there's a probably a timeline before this, what you've been able to find about the supplement industry possibly disappears from the internet as well.

SPEAKER_01: 37:06

Right. My website, Green Smoothie Girl, was getting millions of visitors a year, and then we saw that they can, through the algorithm, keep us out and prioritize those who are paying Google. And Google became very pay-to-play. And so we we know that AI is going to adapt and try to keep us away from the information that we put in this book. So we wanted to find it, and and we kind of have to like teach people how to find this information because they're gonna try to debunk us when they start gatekeeping, and they already are starting to. It got kind of hard for us to find information, but we just kept going around them and we would call AI out when it would give us information we knew was wrong. We'd say, Stop gatekeeping and give us this. We'd just be more specific and it'll apologize to you. It doesn't have any feelings, so it'll say, Okay, here's the information you want.

SPEAKER_00: 38:03

Yeah, I heard somebody, I can't remember who was telling me this last week or two. It might have been my wife, she was looking something up, and AI just gave a completely fake study. It had a link for it and a little long URL, and then it actually admitted, like, I just made that up, it's not real. Like, there's there's so much in the world of shenanigans, but there it is a a it's another uh client I have who's into SEO said uh AI is replacing organic search, it's got a bigger capability to aggregate data. So let's give the listener a little effort or a little sense of the effort you put into it and some of the prompts you came up with. So, by the way, if any of you listening to this, you might even pause the interview, type some of these in and see what you can find. But you created this series of questions or ways to get around kind of the marketing talking points. So, give them some examples of things you would put into an AI search that helped you get some of the information that you were able to put into the book.

SPEAKER_01: 39:01

So it's 2025 when Christian and I are talking. We spent um the first half of 2025 doing the research, documenting sources, and doing our writing, knowing that someone might hear this interview with Christian and Robin in 2028 and go out into AI and be unable to duplicate what we found. This is very frustrating to us, but since I lived through Google uh eliminating us out of the search results, it's not that they took my website off the internet. It's that when people are looking for the kind of content that I developed, they're gonna have to scroll for pages and pages, which people don't do, and Google knows it. So anyway, uh I'll tell you a magic term for us is a great starting point. And then sometimes we did two and four and eight searches past this to get additional information and context. But we started with and you can write this down base materials and chemicals involved in the manufacturing of fill in the blank ascorbic acid. Okay, so chemicals used in the manufacturing of ascorbic acid. So see what you've done here is you've told AI, so they can't serve you up some marketing word salad. You've told them that you know that it's a manufactured product. You know, then I we we would go past it and we would say things like, what percentage of the world's ascorbic acid is manufactured in China? Because we had figured out that China is where most of this stuff is manufactured. Okay. Kind of easy to import it from China when we have such opacity, we don't have transparency, we can't really look into their supply chains, we don't know much about their corn, we don't know what else is added, and it gets imported into the US and it's super cheap because their labor really like they have cheaper labor. We can't even compete with it. You can't hire someone for minimum wage for what Chinese, you know, Chinese workers will work for far less. And so that's neither here nor there, but all these things are contributing for why um developing nations like India and China have massive factories where they work people very long hours and they can more get away with what we would consider human rights abuses of exposing them to a lot of chemicals and wearing wearing a heavy, hot hazmat suit every day. But you know, people think of vitamin C IVs as being, oh, I'm getting a I'm getting a megadose of vitamin C, which really helps my my immune system. And I believed that one for a really long time. And then I was like, when I was in school year and I would see the the bags of quote unquote vitamin C, I'd think it doesn't make sense to me. I had a thousand thoughts like this, but this is an example. I'd look at that clear liquid vitamin C bag, and I would think every food I've ever seen that I know to be high in vitamin C is really colorful. It's yellow, orange, um, red, right? I mean, oranges and red bell peppers. And I'm like, why is this bag of vitamin C a clear liquid? And it's always a clear liquid. I don't care whether it's glutathione or B vitamins or whatever, it's some kind of very synthetic looking clear liquid that will go through the little tube and then will go through the catheter and into your veins. What is it? So I started researching it, and ascorbic acid, the liquid form, if it went directly into your veins, it would burn so fast that you would start screaming and you would rip that needle out or you would get the nurse to come take it out. And so it's actually this very chemicalized ascorbic acid made in mostly China and 50% buffered with something to pH balance it that's very alkaline called sodium ascorbate. So you're not getting vitamin C in a bag, you are getting a pharmaceutical product made by a pharmaceutical company that is half sodium ascorbate to buffer how acidic the ascorbic acid is.

SPEAKER_00: 43:27

Yeah. Well, and so then you so you've got this first prompt or for a couple prompts where you ask it to what is the base material use or what's the process for manufacturing a given thing. But then you another fun detail was you took it a step further and you just asked it to describe the uh questions or questions about this, what petrosolvents were there and what is the safety profile of you fill in the blank with whatever chemical it gave you. So whether it's hexane or acetone, which in case you don't know is fingernail polish remover. These are the kind of petrochemical solvents that are in a part of breaking apart these molecules. And so you told it to search for a safety profile. And um, so tell people a little bit about that and the material safety and data sheets they can get.

SPEAKER_01: 44:13

Yeah, material safety and data sheets. So MSDS. Just ask it for MSDS on acetone. Okay, you mentioned that as one of the petrochemical solvents that is also sold as fingernail polish remover. It's such a strong acid that it will literally take your fingernail polish off. Now, would you like to drink? Would you like to have a drink of acetone?

unknown: 44:38

No.

SPEAKER_00: 44:39

No? No. There was this side note, but there was a guy, my son was just researching this for his debate about GMOs, but some Monsanto shill was so his job was to convince people that glyphosate was harmless. And so the interviewer asked him on camera if he would drink some of it because it was so safe. Because he had said I drink a cup of it. He's like, actually, we have some here. And the guy who left the interview wouldn't keep going because it's it's something like that. It's the acetone, it's the glyphosate, it's the chemical that nobody would ever touch. That is part of how these products come together. And they tell you that we did our best to get it all out and just we we just have to go with blind trust to believe they're doing it.

SPEAKER_01: 45:19

And they do, they have their, you know, chemical paper towels to try to get the solvents and the heavy metals out. And as you know, Christian, I'm I've been sued for$60 million by a company who is really mad that I'm talking about the fact that their product, which coats our food, is has heavy metals and solvents in it because they want to pretend like it's all taken out, except that it's not.

SPEAKER_02: 45:44

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 45:44

And so I asked you, would you like a would you like a glass of acetone? Would you like a glass of nail polish remover? And you laughed and said, No. How about a how about a half of a thimble full? Would you like that much?

SPEAKER_00: 45:57

There's no amount I would like to adjust.

SPEAKER_01: 45:59

So no, right. So no to the okay, so here's what FDA does because they got like the they got steamrolled and then the truck backed up over the FDA. And environmental working group estimates there's somewhere north of a thousand chemicals that got into our food without the FDA and the public even being notified. So we don't know what all is in our food, which makes it that much more important that we grow some, that we buy locally, that we spend the money on organic. And with this company who is suing me for$60 million and blaming me for all of the damage to its reputation, even though there's literally thousands of content creators out there getting millions of views talking about this product, um, where this company did not tell us what was in its product for years until the came to public attention and public started screaming, and then they disclosed what was in their product, and the public got even madder and has decided that I'm the one to blame, and then send out the lawsuit against me to all the others to tell them to take down their to take down their content. Look what we did to her, take down your content because you know they're they're company, they want to have revenues and they want to have profit, and the the economy is rough. And so let's just shut everybody up. Everybody who's speaking up about it and saying, Hey, I got my health back, uh getting off of these emulsifier fats. That's one of the things that's in supplements. And I don't want to eat them.

unknown: 47:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 47:28

Okay, they can call it food, they can call it edible, they can eat it if they want. I'd love to do an interview with the founders of them and have watch them drink a cup of emulsifiers, then just keep them on for an hour and see how they feel. But you know what? Here's right. And if I eat a pill with some acetone in it, it's probably going there. That manufacturer will make sure that it's below the allowable amount of solvents remaining in the product. What if I take it every day though? And what if my body doesn't eliminate it well, which it doesn't? Then I end up with a bag of solvents that I had to do for a few, I had to do a blood filtering protocol in Switzerland for a few thousand dollars to get all that junk out of my body that was putting putting me at risk for all kinds of diseases. So that's my point, is just that there's no amount of acetone that you want to eat. But FDA and all of our regulatory agencies, EPA, FDA, they just try to keep it minimal, but the effect is cumulative. And that's the problem I have as a mother and as a consumer of food.

SPEAKER_00: 48:35

Yeah, well, and it's the same show with drugs where the FDA relies upon the manufacturer to be transparent and to do their own studies and to tell them how much is left over. And they don't do their own studies, they just rely on the manufacturer. And then it's on us, the public or people like yourself to go do the research to go, oh, there's there's reason for concern here. But stop me if you've heard this before. Safe and effective. Like that's just we just want us to just be repeated enough and and trust us, trust us, and the experts did this, and it's big pharma and it's big chemical that are behind most of your supplements. And does safe and effective sound trustworthy anymore? So it's again, neither of us are telling you don't take supplements or you are crazy for doing it. We're just saying try to ask some critical questions, understand who's making it, and and make your informed decisions. But um, I think hopefully the era of blind trust in pills that we pop has we've peaked and we're coming away from that now. We can start going back to how food should be or used to be. So anything else you want to add?

SPEAKER_01: 49:34

Yeah, I don't think that before COVID that uh the the public could have handled this book. I don't think that there would be the demand for it or the willingness to suspend your belief that these supplements are all natural and filling in for nutritional gaps. The public is ready for this because they got lied to so egregiously in the last six years with the safe and effective story that now that they're now they're willing to listen. Well, is that ascorbic acid actually vitamin C? Is is it do I need a mega dose? Can my body even process or use a megadose? How if so, why isn't that in our food? Why didn't God leave us short? If I can't even eat fruits all day long and get what's in one pill of ascorbic acid, if you're gonna call that vitamin C. I I just the more questions I asked, the more questions I had.

SPEAKER_00: 50:31

And probably the fewer satisfactory answers you had too.

SPEAKER_01: 50:34

Well, and the more I saw the playbook.

SPEAKER_00: 50:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 50:37

And and how you had a quote, and I heard you say it at the very beginning of how it starts as a movement, becomes an industry, and then you can't get rid of it. Like that's why this company, this$60 million company, or not$60 million company, but they're suing me for$60 million. That's why I won't vouch them and I won't publish a retraction and an apology and say that their product is non-toxic because I don't believe it to be non-toxic. I think that there's heavy metals and solvents in small amounts, but that it's cumulative. And so I won't make their statement and I and I won't do the things that they're doing. They also are they they also think that somebody out there is paying us or organizing us, and they accuse me of being the one to organize it. And I'm like, we are consumers, we are moms, we are dads, we are people who have to fight to protect our own health from invisible stuff on our fruits and vegetables. That's why the outrage, that's why you have literally millions and millions and millions of views on this content is that we're concerned as consumers. This is our food you're talking about. Yeah, it's life sustaining. We're not we're not out to get you. There's no malice, which they they have in their lawsuit. Malice and every euphemism in the thesaurus for malice is is what I'm guilty of. Uh no, I just don't want invisible stuff on my food. I'm already having to fight with glyphosate. And so I won't admit, I won't go out there and say this is non-toxic. I retract everything I've said about it. Uh, it's edible, it's perfectly legitimate. I won't do it because that's how glyphosate got in the door. And once it becomes a billion-dollar industry, and that's part of the playbook that I see over and over again is when it becomes a billion-dollar industry, it's going to take an act of God or an act of Congress to get rid of it.

SPEAKER_00: 52:38

Yeah. Well, and that's part of what I admire about you is just the backbone to stand up and say somebody's got to fight this. And you have taken your more than your share of arrows. I know other parts of your story we don't have time for, but yeah, the amount of flack you've gotten for asking the inconvenient questions is high. And just from the rest of us, thank you for doing that. And sorry you have another lawsuit to slug out here, but you're doing God's work and we appreciate it. So um, all right. Well, let's let's talk a little bit. We don't have time to get into all the different chapters and categories of supplements. We've kind of hinted at some of them, but let's let's zoom in on a few of more of the popular supplements or categories. And the first one I wanted to hit is multivitamins. So let me see if I can kind of tee you up from for this one. So I remember umpteen years ago in one of my nutrition courses, I had to memorize every vitamin and mineral and amino acid and fatty acid and what all of them do. And then there was this pesky problem of cofactors. There's this reality that there's no maverick nutrient that does everything by itself, and all you need is just supply that. They all need each other in order to function. And so I originally, my, you know, I'm in that reductionist model of okay, if I've got a client who's got a nutrient deficiency and we can say, oh, they're whatever's low, let's just add that back to the mix, and then voila, their nutrients will be balanced again and health will return. And as I started looking at, wait, vitamin D needs vitamin A and there's calcium at play, and then there's cofactors with each of the other ones that spin off of that. And eventually the brass tacks of how in the world do I help this person, I had to step back and be like, so we we need all of them, and they all need each other. So, how in the world am I supposed to play nutrient whack-a-mole as a health coach, helping people with their diets? And so my thought was, okay, let's how do I just get somebody all of them? And the first thing I came to was like, where I need a good food-based multivitamin. That must be the answer to solving this problem of nutrient deficiencies that we can now question the logic of that. But talk to us a little bit about this concept of multivitamins or maybe burst people's bubble about how they're made, how many ingredients can actually be present. That just the logical question of how in the world would we get that many nutrients and squish them into one thing you can swallow. And maybe we can even touch on the natural versus synthetic. But rant for us a little bit, or just pull back the curtain on multivitamins as a concept.

SPEAKER_01: 55:03

Well, it's funny that you should bring that up because what came to mind when you asked that question is something that I didn't even make it into the book. But I've been questioning the supplement story since I was young, but I didn't have the tools. Yeah. And AI really made it so that I could just ask super ninja questions and get right to the source. And it would basically it'll write you a research paper with references in 60 seconds on so many topics. And I was like, I'm gonna go hard. I'm gonna learn everything that I've always wondered because my mother was a Shackley distributor. I do talk about this in the book. My mom's a Shackley distributor, and Dr. Shacley sort of popularized vitamins, and it was a network marketing company back in the like early 1980s. And every time Dr. Shackley would release a new product, my mom would add it to our cup. So I'm one, I'm the oldest of eight children. And so we would have this cup at at our place at the breakfast table, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. And I remember like Dr. Shackley came out with alfalfa tabs, and my mom became convinced that you just needed lots of alfalfa tabs. And so she added, like, and they're really cheap. And it was probably the most valuable thing, honestly, that the Shackly Corporation made was the horse food that is dried alfalfa that grow grows, you know, 20,000 acres at a time and is like the simplest food, and it's like all that horses eat. And it was probably like the most valuable thing my mom fed us, but I I one time I stuck them in my pocket because it took so long to take them. Like I could eat my breakfast faster than I could take all the Shackly vitamins that my mom gave me because she bought in hard on all the nutritional deficiency stories. And I got to first period, and you know, it's the 1980s, so we wore tight jeans and I had all these pills in my pocket. And I was like, oh shoot, I meant to take these later, but I had to run for the bus. So I took them out and I put them in my desk, forgot all about it. I'm in sixth period, end of the day, and two cops walk in and they're like, is there a Robin Openshaw here? And I was like, What in the what? Like, I was like the good little straight A girl that never got in trouble. So they took me to the office and they showed, because I had no idea what they were even, and they showed me this pile of pills, all these different color pills. And I remember that what I should have been thinking is, Oh my gosh, I'm getting busted for drugs. But what my real thought was, my mom is going to kill me. This cannot get back to my mom that I didn't take all these Shackly vitamins. So then, fast forward, I'm a young adult. I'm I'm I have three little kids. And I this other, another network marketing company in Utah, which is where I raised my children and went to college and grad school, they came out, they bought this technology that could scan your skin and tell you the level of carotenoid antioxidants in your skin. And it took like two minutes, and I would go to like trade shows and I would go to chiropractor's offices where people made appointments. And I have scanned hundreds and hundreds of people in a day. And I loved it because when someone's scan was high for carotenoid antioxidants, which is a pretty good indicator of their overall antioxidant status, which is just nutrients at the endpoints of your metabolism in your skin. I mean, anybody who's like drank a lot of carrot juice knows you kind of turn a little bit orange. I'm a little bit orange because I eat a giant carrot in my breakfast every morning. That's a whole other story. But, anyways, so I was testing people, and if I would get somebody who was over 50,000, I'd be like, What do you eat? And it was always like somebody who juices or eats tons and tons of fruits and vegetables. They're always super healthy looking, just compared to everybody else I scanned all day long. But the average person was about 20,000. So I was so excited about it. I went all in. I had three little kids, but I loved this machine. But the idea was how it monetized, which I kind of didn't care about, is you put them on the multivitamin of this company. It was called Pharmanex. It's owned by a billion dollar, everybody knows this name brand, network marketing company. And you put them on the multivitamins, and then they come back and scan, and they're supposed to scan higher. Here's the problem. They didn't. They didn't. So that I didn't even tell the story in the book. Like that didn't even that didn't even make it into this book. I mean, it's it's a long enough book, right? This is this is as much as most people are going to want to know about their supplements. And we we we obviously can't get to every supplement because it's such a brilliant business model to tell somebody they're deficient with a lab and thousands of new labs are being approved every year. There's a an average of about 10 a day um human genome labs being approved. So the labs industry as a whole related but different too issue. Yeah, so multivitamins, all I want to say about that is there's no way in a hardened pill that you can somehow it's a great, it's a tempting idea. Who doesn't want to think that you can take three plates of food from three meals a day and boil it down to just the good parts and take it as a pill? They are 99 plus percent of them are synthetic, molecularly similar byproducts of industry put together in specific ratios. The the people who manufacture this kind of stuff have to worry about things like shelf life, about it crumbling, it holding together well. It's it's capsule. What's the capsule made out of? Will vegans take it? There's it's it's just really industrial. And you know, the short answer to your question is I don't take them. I didn't take them when I was pregnant. I I was like a running joke with mothers, even though my first baby was born in 1993. That's obviously a really long time ago. I knew that women always said if they took um the prenatal multivitamin that they got constipated, and I just figured out that it was the iron because it's like the wrong compound of iron. It's not the iron that's found in food, it's like the heavy metal iron that constipates you. So I never I I have four kids with like super high IQ and are doing well in life, and somehow I never ate a multivitamin. I never ate a prenatal multivitamin, and I probably saved thousands of dollars too.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:21

Yeah, I would even say on that prenatal note, just for the listener, go look up folic acid and or see what you find on that nutrient as well, so called nutrient.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:30

chapter on B vitamins because B vitamins are terrifying. They they are made out of there's coal tar in some of them. There's um B vitamin B12, which people who don't eat animals are told that they're B12 deficient. Actually there's about as many people who eat meat who are vitamin B12 deficient if you believe the lab as there are plant eaters. But B12 is there's a few different kinds but one of them is um methylcobalamine. And that's the one that they went to when oh what it what's the one cyanocobalamine? Cyanocobalamine was the predominant one. Thank you. And people don't think about it. They just think oh cyanocobalamine that's vitamin B12. Well cyano is that it's from made from cyanide the chemical one and cobalt from cobalt it's made from cyanide and cobalt you must have read my book. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:37

Uh I did know for remembering good job.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:40

Because it's shocking.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:41

Yeah right yeah no but that's the industry and that's just the trust we've had and unfortunately we are we're past time for trust but verify. We've got to do more verification and questioning of of what we're being told and multivitamins is just one of them. So all right we'll we'll let the consumer go to your book and get more details on that. But let's switch to vitamin D because that's another hot button whether we're talking medical doctors, we're talking alternative or we're talking health coaches that seems to be one of those darling vitamins that everybody just that apparently everyone's low. So tell us what you learned about kind of the testing that supposedly proves everyone needs it and maybe what you found about what it really is or how vitamin D supplements are made.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:25

I have to condense this story to be very short even though I had written I think six long blog posts about it before I wrote the book. And so here's the bottom line because you know I didn't really buy it for a long time because I was like how is this hard pressed white pill how does that replace what my body makes my skin makes in contact with the sun which people have been in contact with the sun forever because we used to have to either we went out and grew our own food, harvested it prepared it for a meal or else we didn't have any food. And so it made sense to me that we need sunshine because humans and sunshine just go together but we didn't even get into where did the science come from that our bodies even produce this vitamin D. But anyways bottom line is yes there's a lot of studies about it. Yes the studies if you don't look at them carefully or do the critical thinking that we do for you in the chapter on vitamin D seem to the vitamin D status as measured by the 25 D lab test, which that's problem number one is the 25 D lab test. Not a good indicator of your vitamin D status. Also vitamin D isn't a vitamin it's a secosteroid hormone.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:50

Your body needs cholesterol to make it which is another monkey wrench if your cholesterol is artificially lowered, right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:56

So that's a whole that's a whole other subject but bottom line is cholycalciferol that you are sold is falsely called vitamin D. It does have two molecules that are part of the whole matrix that you referred to before when you referred to cofactors and they all work together synergistically and science really doesn't understand it as well as we wish that they did. And so basically colicalciferol which is made from usually from the grease from sheep's wool although they make a vegan kind that is lab grown industrial algae okay grown in some of these labs where cholicalciferol is made you can get the same molecular compound. But when people are low in this 25D it does correlate to poor health and when people are high in it it does correlate to good health. And so that really throws people off a lot because people don't understand the difference between correlation and causation. But bottom line is we should have more than just the one lab test at 25D but it's cheap and it's easy to do and it's what your doctor understands and it makes 85% of us deficient. I started questioning it many years ago when I had been optimal I'm I was high I was like you don't need to take anything I was the 15% and then on my way out the door my once that I went to once a year hormone nurse practitioner who sold vitamin D, quote unquote vitamin D that's really coldciferol, and she also sold the rancid fish oil on my way out the door she said here you should get some some vitamin D. And I said well you just told me that I was in the optimal range and she said to me wait for it couldn't hurt or could it yeah so I fell for it and I didn't take it regularly but I took it like off and on and then I went back the next year and for the first and only time to this date the only time that I was below the optimal range was that year that I actually took the coli calciferol. So I I can't really prove because nobody's trying to prove this nobody's doing the research studies that if you take choli calciferol there's really no evidence that it makes your vitamin D levels go up. Plus it's only two molecules of a compound that depending on who you're listening to there's lots of different sources. I'm not going to try to pretend that I'm authoritative on this is at least 16 or 18 molecules. It may be as many as 80. But that that's not what's in the colecalciferol the colicalciferol has a Venn diagram overlap of two molecules I believe is all with what in the body is is called vitamin D. So everybody is very committed to the idea that we're I'm but I'm vitamin D deficient. I have been told this hundreds and hundreds of times but I'm vitamin D deficient. Well that's what your practitioner told you by doing the 25 D lab test. And I'm just here to say read the chapter because you will understand it. More and more people are awakening to it. I think it has everything to do with the fact that we learned to question narratives during COVID, even those of us who hadn't been I've been questioning it for well as I look back for decades. It did not make sense to me I just didn't take the vitamin D. I didn't take it when people were in COVID saying well if we all just took vitamin D, if we aren't weren't all vitamin D deficient, then we'd do fine during COVID. I didn't take it then didn't trust it then but I couldn't put my finger on why and having access to the organization of everything that's out on the internet and being able to ask more and more and more ninja questions has helped me put it together. And so I finally went to the trouble of finding the information that I've been curious about my whole life about pills and vitamins and the things that we're told are natural and they are yeah well if nothing else the critical question you guys can just entertain as you're listening to this is who gets to set the standards?

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:59

Who tells us what optimal D levels are? There's one um method of doing it where they use uh lifeguards who are in the sun all day and their vitamin D levels are what gets set for everyone. And it's it's even that data point is a head scratcher to say okay well is that what we should hold up as the standard and knowing that the RDAs often are way below or there even that concept of a recommended daily allowance of anything somebody picked that number and possibly picked it at a in a profoundly sick society and and established what's normal for everyone. So we're just here as much to put some critical questions into the ether and let you guys run with it and do what you want.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:39

But and they'll just they'll just jack it up they'll just increase it. So I think it was 2010. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:45

2010 what happen what happened then?

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:48

I think it was 2010 that they increased the the optimal range for quote unquote vitamin D as measured by the 25d lab test. So you have to put all these qualifiers on it once you learn about it you you can't you can't refer to Cole Calci for all as vitamin D anymore and you can't refer to the 25d lab test as your vitamin D level um but let's just assume those things are true. They got increased by 50% in 2020 which meant that there was just like that much bigger of a majority of us who were quote unquote deficient.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:22

Yeah same way they lower the cholesterol number that supposedly is optimal and just opens up a whole new market of people that now need to have their cholesterol lowered. So yeah just ask the questions friends and see where it leads you. So okay one final one that you had obviously we're not doing all of them but what almost surprised me to find in the book was bioidentical hormones. And so your subtitle for that chapter was rolling the dice between short term game gains and potential health hazards so just so the listener knows, give the uh the story of of your life experience with hormone therapy because I think it adds some weight to the investigation that you've done.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:58

Well I I kind of hate to end on this one we will it's fine but I didn't want to research it. I did because I've been taking biodential hormones for so many years, decades in fact and I didn't want to find out any negative information about them because not only had I been taking them for years, but when I started taking them when I was about 30 and I was really sick, I would say that taking those biodential hormones was about as life changing as shifting to a whole foods mostly plant-based diet was also decades ago. When I was so very sick after the the flu vaccine knocked me on my butt for four years, changing my diet to a whole foods mostly plant-based diet, detoxing following the protocols that I learned to bring the toxic load down in my body and taking biodenal hormones those are like the three big needle movers for me. So you could never talk me out of the fact that I went from having cold hands and feet and um all kinds of weird symptoms that really correlate to low thyroid and I kind of know where my toxic exposures were that suggest that I would probably have a thyroid problem. Getting on biodentical thyroid which is supposed to be desiccated pig thyroid so molecularly identical to the pig thyroid um it was life changing for me turned around literally dozens of symptoms I felt great and then in recent years as I'm almost 59 now I just don't see the benefit and I'll go off of it for months at a time and I'll go and I'll go off of it for months at a time and then go in to my hormone practitioner and my hormone practitioner will tell me that I'm optimal for all the hormones and I'm like hmm but I haven't taken any hormones for months. So I had just kind of been questioning it and I don't I the reason this is an unsatisfactory one to end on is that I don't think that I'm to the bottom of this rabbit hole. So we shared in that chapter what we were able to find out. Um since we finished the book, there's all this hullabaloo about they tried to cancel bioidentical hormones and then Marty McCari head of the FDA stepped in and saved the day and said no we're going to do the clinical trials on them. So all those of you who swear by your bioidenticals and you don't want to be on the syntroid drug, the levoxithine drug, you'll still have your bioidenticals. I just think that they kind of merged and came to the middle and what I found out unfortunately is that a lot of the bioidentical supply chains are dipping right into the same supply chains that the drugs are. And that's another thing that we we won't have time to get really deep into but we talk about in the book is that it's getting really blurry what's a drug and what's uh what's a supplement. For instance, um NAC back in like 2021 they created all this FOMO, all this supplement um people who sold the an NAC or an acetylcysteine were saying you know what Amazon might take NAC down. They don't want us to have it because it's natural. Well here's the thing it really that's not why it's not because they didn't want us to have it because it was natural it's because it's a drug and it's already in most of the psychotropic drugs. It's in a lot of different drugs it's entirely synthetic and there was a battle over whether it was going to be a controlled substance or not. That's what happened and the industry the pharmaceutical industry fought to keep it in the supply chains of the supplement of of the wide open don't need a prescription for it. So just question sometimes your assumptions because we think that if they're gonna get rid of it it must be because they don't want us to have it. That's kind of not always a true narrative.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:50

Yeah well and there are risks of ingesting anything and so again we're not telling you what to take or not take we're just trying to give you some intellectual pegs to hang some questions on and say I wonder if this is a like is the chemical imbalance narrative that we got fed through psychiatry this does it have overlap with the hormone imbalance narrative we're given through the the realm of hormones and that that is there they're questions worth asking where is it marketing and where am I just maybe masking a problem rather than correcting one.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:21

And I'm I'm not saying that I'm to the bottom of the hormone issue there are solvents involved in making some of these hormones unfortunately um there are some companies still using desiccated pig thyroid um maybe partly or completely so it seems to be a truth is the truth lies somewhere in the middle kind of situation. But I just, you know, I'll use it for a while and not use it for a while and see if I even feel any different. I seem to feel the same whether I take thyroid or not. The others I pretty much don't take anymore. I don't notice any difference whether I take the progesterone that's been prescribed to me or not. So I I think they're using a lot of the same tactics a lot of the same supply chains when when the supply chains are super cheap because it's a synthetic material that can be made at scale it's really tempting for these companies to use that instead of having to get some slimy thyroid out of a pig's brain in a some pig farm somewhere, you know? Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:23

Yeah so there you have it that hopefully that teased the listener enough to want to go get the book and see what other things they can learn about that aspect of if that probably was the best example of the blurred lines between pharma and supplements andor between drugs and supplements more specifically. And yeah do do some of your homework there and just be free to question things and ask does my body really need this and what would be the downstream ramifications of supplying a hormone and uh for good or bad. So anyway there you have some questions. All right one other thing I want to tease the listener with just because I know you're working on another book and that's the concept of lab testing. So we hinted at this a little bit but um give people kind of a teaser of what you're what you're diving into now because there are literally thousands of tests out there and there's this fun mantra doctors use now tests don't guess is and I kind of roll my eyes at like as if I heard I ran the test so therefore I know everything and there's no mystery left and and one client whose her poor husband had 86 pages of lab tests they sent over and and it's like Greek and Latin and numerical gobbledygook and you're like how is anyone supposed to make wisdom out of this much math and think that we have a practical path to someone's health where to me it seems more just like it's a here's this is another revenue stream designed with just an with the intent of selling you something. So tell us what you're learning about that industry.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:45

Yeah I mean I went I went from my labs this last year and I went to Lab Core because I didn't want to drive 40 minutes to the nurse practitioner's you know he has his his own uh compounding pharmacy and I didn't want to go there and get the blood draw so I went to lab core and they want to charge me$2600 for the labs and I just started laughing. I was like no I'm I'm a healthy person with no health complaints I'm not gonna pay$2600 for labs. Like that's that's most people's monthly salary you know so I walked out and I just contacted my and I'm still getting to the bottom of how and if the practitioner gets compensated like if they see that if they think you have money like is there a kickback I went in AI and it said yes that both both Lab Core and um the other one is it Quest that they both have had settlements of many millions of dollars for giving kickbacks to doctors. So I don't know how it works. I don't want to accuse anybody specifically all I know is that I told my nurse practitioner I was like I'll just not see you anymore rather than get$2600 worth of labs I don't want so I started writing a book on labs and I got 40 pages in and I quit writing it because I felt like it was becoming a reference manual that nobody would read. And also I didn't really have the confidence that I could decide I was the the authority who could decide which labs are valid and which are less valid and it's probably a continuum. But I mean we know like you're you were talking about how we what we thought we knew 20 years ago about cholesterol turned out to be completely wrong. More and more people are waking up to the vitamin D hoax uh there's a there's a lot like that we know that like one in seven adults in the Western nations are on statin drugs which don't prevent any cardiovascular disease like I could bring a lab number down and people will do anything to bring a lab number down or up because their doctor told them to and they think that this means that they're healthy or not and I just want to plant the seed of do some critical thinking and some research right now you can yeah you can do that research and learn more.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:59

Yeah I don't remember where I heard you mention this if it was in a blog post or a podcast or whatever but you mentioned you did three different food sensitivity tests. So tell people about that experience.

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:09

Yeah just over the course of several years and I don't even remember why I did them because I I don't really have food sensitivities but I did one in Switzerland and one my hormone practitioner had me do or whatever and all three showed that I was sensitive to completely different foods. And one of them I was like I swear those are all the foods that I ate in the last 24 hours which it turns out that may be what what it actually shows is the ant the the antibodies the antigens or some substance that your body produces in reaction to being fed certain foods. So I don't I don't really trust the food sensitivity test. They're super expensive. I remember I had my son do one that cost me over$2,000 and I don't I don't really trust it. I won't even tell you the lab, the lab, very common lab company that you know it was my hormone practitioner and my son was having like acne and I was like how to get rid of the acne when he was a teenager. So anyway just start questioning more things you probably save a lot of money probably I'm not telling people not to take their supplements I'm not practicing medicine without a license. I'm not telling you do take this don't take that this book isn't about the good brands versus the bad brands you're not going to get to the the end and find out what my favorite supplement company is I'm just saying I've had six or eight people even though the book isn't even out yet and you're one of the people talking about it when it's on pre-release right now it's coming out in a couple weeks who but just from reading my blog and my social media posts over the last few years I've had about six or eight women who've said I just quit taking all my supplements and I feel so much better. So we won't know until we have hundreds of people telling us they went off of their and they're not going to go off of their supplements because I told them to I'm just teaching you what those supplements are made out of and how to ask the right questions to figure out what's in your supplement so that you can decide if taking that supplement is right for you. But I think a lot of people are going to save a lot of money.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:08

Yeah I imagine so in lab tests and supplements and I was thinking about it earlier I thought man if we took testing and pills away from doctors most doctors wouldn't know how to doctor they'd be lost they wouldn't know how to help people heal and that's all I've done is no testing and hardly any supplements there's not much in that world that I think is worth the money. And there's so many other ways to heal. So hopefully we've inspired you to just think a little bit more critically or how use the AI search prompts that she mentioned give yourself some a chance to do some research look at the other ingredients on your supplement and just say do I really need this and how could they possibly duplicate or improve upon nature and get something in me that I definitively quote unquote need. So all right well as we start wrapping up Robin give the listener maybe some final thoughts on what they just heard or maybe some of the responses you your book has received or you anticipate it will receive and what do you want them to do with this kind of information?

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:04

I just want you to be empowered I want you to not think of these pills as a replacement for a healthy diet there is no replacement. I think that we have been so mentally conditioned to think that the answer isn't a pill that we've forgotten the power of our own immune system. And a lot of people are now so unwell that they feel very fragile and they think they have to take all these pills even though the they don't notice the pills making any difference for them just in case they'd feel even worse if they didn't take the pills. And so I think knowing what's in them and when you see hypo hypomelucellulose just if it says OSC on the end or cellulose on the end, we're talking about sawdust. You taking a pill made of sawdust or at least with sawdust as a filler in it. So just you know if you have a few things like that in your pocket then you empower yourself and you don't think that practitioners have all the answer. I'm not saying I'm not saying all labs are bad. I'm not saying labs aren't a good guide for some things and I'm not saying that there's no good supplements you know people like people like well what supplements do I take and I said well I I I like to take minerals because I think people are truly mineral deficient or they're deficient in a few because of the soils but I'm not going to take ground up rocks, chalk or seashells like you said or lake beds some kind of rock like material that is high end so anyway just be aware that you actually have a really powerful immune system that might be being bogged down and your liver and kidneys being bogged down with having to filter out things like ground up rocks.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24:43

Yeah right and one of the brilliant points or succinct things you mentioned toward the end of the book was don't fall for the false binary that you have to take either a drug or a supplement. You there's an there's a third option of neither and there's a way to nourish your body deeply and holistically that doesn't require you to try to make getting well a chemistry equation let alone the rest of what it takes to be well and um so anyway tell the people where they can find you how they can pre-order the book or depending on when they hear this where they can order the books uh give them some info to where to find you.

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:16

Christian do you have your link because right now it's on pre-order and I do have a hard stop I'm supposed to be somewhere across town in 20 minutes but you can find me at greensmoothigirl.com also green smoothie girl on Facebook and what what is your link? I guess it'll be down below or something.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:32

Yeah be greensmoothigirl.com slash healing united I think is the link we have so I'll put a link for that in the show notes but that's where you guys can pre-order the book and that way she knows some of you found her through me so um thank you for your boldness Robin thank you for the research you've done to save a bit of us a uh a long slug figuring this out or just giving us discernment to ask better questions. So we appreciate you and I will let you get to your next appointment. So thanks for coming on the show today.

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:59

My pleasure thank you Christian bye everyone