The Missing Element For Your Health

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Our air is contaminated. We’re so disconnected from the earth. We often get more artificial light than natural light in our daily routines. And this situation is threatening our health. What can we do to turn things around? Thaddeus Owen, of the Primalhacker brand and the Corporate Escape Artist podcast, has some brilliant ideas for how to go about it.

He has concrete ideas for upregulating our detoxification pathways, for example, to manage our polluted air. He offers suggestions for finding pristine sources of pure water for our bodies and for recharging ourselves as our ancestors did, with sunshine and earthing, among other ideas. Based on the five elements from traditional Chinese medicine, Thaddeus walks us through how to ground ourselves in more than one sense of the word.

Visit Thaddeus’ websites: primalhacker.com and howtoescapecorporate.com

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Thaddeus Owen.

Water, wood, fire, earth, and metal, these are the five elements in traditional Chinese medicine. Could including one of these elements or related health practices be the missing piece of the puzzle for your health? This is episode 470 and our guest is Thaddeus Owen. Thaddeus has a Master’s Degree in Holistic Nutrition. He once worked in the pharmaceutical industry and is now the Cofounder of Primal Hacker and the co-host of the Corporate Escape Artist with his wife, Heidi.

Thaddeus discusses how approaching our health through the paradigm of the elements can help ground our lives and undergird our health. He talks about what’s going wrong in our environment and what we can do to reverse the damage. For example, he points out that we are breathing in more particulates, heavy metals, and toxins in our air than ever before. He offers solutions for how to upgrade our detoxification pathways to combat these issues.

He covers how to mimic ancestral lighting sources like firelight to counteract the limited blue light spectrum for most of the lighting in our homes and offices. He goes over the toxins in our tap water which are not filtered out and offers best practices for water consumption like drinking spring water and structured water.

He explains why modern shoes are limiting our connection with the earth and how a little bit of time barefoot on the soil outside can be transformative. Before we get into the conversation, I want to remind you to follow this show on the platform of your choice. This way, you won’t miss a thing, or better yet, download the Wise Traditions app to your phone. It’s available on iOS and Android phones. This is Hilda Labrada Gore.

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Welcome to the show, Thaddeus.

Thank you so much, Hilda. It is great to be here again.

It’s been a minute, but here you are back again. I feel like you are one of the people that I most admire, who incorporates ancestral wisdom into every aspect of your being and that leads to optimal health. Let’s talk about a friend of yours who was struggling with weight loss before we get going here.

Ancestral Wisdom For Optimal Health

I love telling this story because ancestral concepts and ancestral practices can be so powerful. In our modern world, many people want a silver bullet or this new technology that’s going to solve all of their problems. I always tell people that if this supplement, not that supplements are bad. Some supplements are absolutely needed but there’s no silver bullet supplement or technology.

If there was, you would stop buying the next, latest, and newest thing because the one thing would work and everyone would use it. I love going back to, what are we trying to mimic with these supplements and ancestral practices and all the latest technology? We’re trying to mimic nature. Our biology is tuned into the natural world. Often, the natural ways of being and upgrading our health can be free.

 

When people hear free, they don’t always value it. I had a friend and he had some weight to lose. He wanted to lose about 40 pounds. He had all the latest biohacking technologies. Tens of thousands of dollars of technology in his home and garage. He was using it all and he came to a retreat. A retreat that you were at.

During the retreat, we would go outside at sunrise every single day. We would see the sunrise. We would expose our eyes without sunglasses, contacts, and glasses to the sun. Not that we’re staring directly at the sun, but we’re getting the sunlight in our eye by being outdoors. He continued that practice after he got home. He lived in California. He always wore sunglasses because his eyes were sensitive to the light but he got out every single day at dawn for months.

He wrote me this long email months later. He said, “Thaddeus, I never believed you but I got out every day at sunrise. I lost 40 pounds and I am no longer sensitive to sunlight. I don’t have to wear sunglasses anymore when I’m outside and I lost all this weight.” He has blue eyes and people with blue eyes are often sensitive. The only thing he changed was not his diet and supplements. It was getting outside at dawn.

Did he lost 40 pounds?

This was incredible. I’ve always known how powerful this is for me, but I don’t have any weight to lose. It just makes me feel amazing. I keep my health at an optimal level from doing this, but he literally lost 40 pounds from getting outside at dawn.

If you were to analyze that scientifically, what was the trigger for that weight loss?

Here’s the thing, when we get outside at dawn, instead of seeing a screen first. I know you like to say sunrise before the screen because I love them. I’m going to steal that but sunrise before you look at your devices and getting blue light in your eyes is allowing your hormones to flow naturally. When we see certain types of light, our hormones are stopped, your testosterone, estrogen, and building your thyroid hormone. Your melatonin that you build up for release at night. Those things are set by sunlight.

Looking at sunrise before you look at your devices and get blue light in your eyes allows your hormones to flow naturally.

Sunlight programs provide free information to our body to become hormones later in the day. We eat protein. The protein is broken down to amino acids. Those amino acids become thyroid hormone, serotonin, and melatonin. They’re programmed to become those hormones at the right time of day by sunlight. If you’re seeing a screen instead of sunlight, your hormones are being programmed by the wrong light.

You’re essentially feeding incorrect information to the body so that the hormones are produced in the wrong amount at the wrong time. When you start to get your hormones right in your body, as we all know, everyone says, “My hormones are all messed up, or I’m gaining weight because I have a thyroid problem.” Your thyroid and your weight are set by melatonin release at night. That all begins at sunrise if you’re seeing the sun.

Our ancestors didn’t have devices, electricity, and things messing with the messages that their brain was getting about what time of day it was.

Every single time you see a bright light that has a blue wavelength of light. It could be super technical but at the end of the day, we have a receptor in our eye to read blue light. Every time you look at a device, your brain says, “It’s noon,” over and over. It’s basically like if you are an astronaut on the space shuttle and you’re seeing the sunrise six times in a day. That messes up your circadian rhythm and your biology.

We know from studies from NASA that these astronauts have all these metabolical problems because their circadian rhythm is messed up. You’re doing the same thing when you look at a screen all day long and after sunset, turn on the screen immediately. Your brain says, “It’s sunrise or it’s noon.” That completely creates chaos in the body.

Sun And Light

How can we mimic ancestral health ways when they would have a fire at night, for example? They’re not getting that blue light.

If we look at all the different lighting sources at night, you basically want to look at what the sources are doing to my melatonin because your melatonin, believe it or not, sleep and melatonin go hand in hand. Melatonin is responsible for appetite, sexual reproduction, and what you’re hungry for. Literally what you’re hungry for the next day and whether you gain weight as fat or muscle is set by the melatonin you release at night. That’s destroyed by normal everyday lighting and devices.

Firelight has been shown not to reduce melatonin production at night, so that’s awesome. Most of us are not going to go back and be an ancestral cave person using fire at night. I honestly know some people that do. They use only candlelight at night. I am not joking and they feel amazing. How do we mimic that? How do we mimic the ancestral pathways at night? What is your fire or lighting strategy for night?

For me, the cheapest and easiest way to address firelight at night is to buy an inexpensive pair of blue light blocking glasses. If you’ve been reading this show for a long time, I’m sure you hear this over and over is to block the blue frequency of light at night and continue to tell your body after sunset that it is dark, release melatonin and heal me during the night. Blue light blocking glasses solve that without making any other change.

 

I don’t understand why people don’t take that very seriously who have heard it before. Maybe they’re not in enough pain like your friend who was having all the weight issues and the other issues.

When you have a medical condition or you’re in pain, you will try anything. Most people won’t do those practices until they’re in pain. I always say, “Why would you wait until you have a dis-ease in the body? Why would you wait until there’s something wrong with you to then try to fix it? That’s the hardest time to fix something.

The easiest time to fix it is preventing it from ever happening before it ever happens. We know thousands of people, and I put this probably in a blog post, too. I got a lot of flack for it because I’m calling people out. There are thousands of people that we personally know that have all the information about how important wearing blue light blocking glasses after sunset is and how important it is to your health.

I would say 90% or more of the people we know that know this don’t wear the glasses at night, even though they have the glasses and they know the information. They don’t wear them. I’ll tell you, I did this when I first learned about blue light blocking glasses. I wore them for two weeks to see if it made a difference and it made a massive difference for me in terms of my sleep. What’s happening with the blue light at night, it increases your cortisol, which makes you stressed, leads to anxiety, and insomnia. How many people do we know are stressed at night and have insomnia?

Healthy Water

This is one thing I like about you. When I first met you, you suggested I do two weeks of morning sun. If you’re reading, I suggest you try this out for two weeks and see what difference it makes for you. I’ve also found that I used to say, “It’s no big deal. I always sleep well.” Now when I wear the glasses, I can tell the difference when I don’t. I want to talk to you about water. We’re in Florida on a retreat and I noticed you’re not drinking the tap water. Talk to us about how we can have the healthiest water in our bodies. We all know that we want good clean water, but why?

The majority of our body weight is made up of water. What we’re learning is it’s not just any water. It’s structured water that we need in our body. Our body can make structured water but we need to put pure water into our bodies. You fill a gasoline tank of your car with diesel fuel and it’s going to completely destroy the engine and never work again. I have a friend who did this and it doesn’t work out well.

If you’re putting junk into your body and I consider tap water, unfortunately, junk. Most of our tap water is considered “clean or safe.” It’s chlorinated so there’s no viruses if we believe in such things or bacteria in it. I look at the bacteria part. The chlorine kills the bacteria. It makes our water safe and we are the only people in the world that put drugs into our water.

Humans, men and women, for some reason, decided that we don’t want to force feed everybody drugs. It should be, “You go to your doctor,” and you consent to being drugged or taking a pharmaceutical. In the water supply, we add fluoride, which is a thyroid drug. We’re adding a fluoride to the water, which is used in the pharmaceutical industry and it’s the only thing we’ve all agreed to put in our bodies as a drug substance because of what we’re told it does to protect our teeth.

Is it true that water processing plants or purification centers can’t get rid of the residue that might come into the plant from someone else’s pharmaceuticals? What I mean is my neighbor is taking drugs, and someone else is on birth control pills. The water goes into the waste center. They try to process it, purify it and put it back in the tap water, but they can’t get rid of these nanoparticles of pharmaceutical drugs. Is that right?

I worked in the pharmaceutical industry for many years and I will tell you, pharmacokinetics is how pharmaceutical drugs break down in our bodies. If you or anyone you know takes a pharmaceutical medication, which even some of us who don’t like the pharmaceutical industry will take once in a while if we have to. When we put those in our body, not 100% of the drug goes into your blood and is used.

Typically, only 50% of the active ingredient is used by the body and the rest is eliminated through the urine. That means we’re eliminating these into the wastewater. The wastewater has a sludge process where it takes out the solids of the wastewater and dumps the rest of the water full of everybody’s non-digested and non-metabolized pharmaceuticals into the surface water, the Mississippi River and the St. Croix River. Wherever the plants dump their wastewater that’s “clean.” It’s cleaned of solids and bacteria. It is not cleaned of pharmaceutical or agricultural compounds.

Those will end up in somebody else’s drinking water and the facilities making the clean drinking water. They filter it through a carbon filter, essentially, sometimes. Not always. They add chlorine, fluoride, and they settle out the solids but they do not remove the pharmaceuticals and the agricultural chemicals. Nor do they remove nitrates which are natural ingredients in the soil and present in the water. When chlorine and nitrates mix, you form chloramine and chlorine nitrate compounds that are carcinogenic. That are the byproduct of two things, adding chlorine and the natural nitrates in the water. Those are also in the drinking water and not filtered out.

There are so many ways I could go with this. I’m thinking if people know about this, the pharmaceutical companies or the waste treatment plants know about this, why aren’t they doing more about it?

The other compound that’s in there now that everyone’s here about are the “forever chemicals.”

PFAS.

Those are perfluoroalkyl substances. I’m very well studied in this at my current full-time job where I keep PFAS substances out of our own products. I’m also familiar with this because I live about three miles from 3M. 3M had been dumping PFAS chemicals into the groundwater for decades. The city that I used to live in has PFAS contamination in the water to the point where they had to shut off our city water because back in 2011, there were no limits on PFAS in water.

You could drink as many of them as you could imagine and it was legal. Only in 2020 did the EPA set limits on the amount of PFAS in water. Many municipalities had to shut down their drinking water and filter those chemicals out. Imagine for decades, everyone was drinking these chemicals they now say are toxic. What do we put in the water that’s toxic that won’t be found out until ten years from now?

Everyone has to filter their tap water if they’re drinking tap water because you don’t want to be fluoridating yourself. If you need fluoride for your teeth, there’s a better way to get it. Even dentists agree that drinking fluoride does not help the teeth. If you apply it topically, there’s some debate if that’s helpful but nobody seems to debate drinking is a bad idea.

Drinking fluoride does not help the teeth.

It’s a neurotoxin.

I was part of the debates in Colorado in Fort Collins. When I lived there back in the early 2000s, they were debating whether or not they should remove fluoride from the tap water. We brought in the most expert dentists and medical doctors from around the world. Not one expert dentist that said we should keep fluoride in the water. Not one of them disagreed that you shouldn’t drink it. They all said, “Don’t drink fluoride. It’s not going to be helpful, but we still think you should keep it in the water.” It makes no sense.

I know your solutions focus, Thaddeus. Tell us what some options are for those who want to drink water but not the tap water.

There’s many strategies like well water. It is typically great and has been tested because there could be agricultural chemicals or somebody buried a drum of PFAS in there in your backyard decades ago. If you have a well, then most of the time that well water can be sent through a carbon filter and it’s extremely safe and beneficial to drink.

Spring water would be another. You can go onto a website called FindASpring.com. If you can find a spring near you that produces water directly from the earth, that’s free and you can fill up a number of containers of that natural living. We call it living water because it’s moving. Finally, if you’re on city water like I am, you need to filter your water. I highly recommend everybody filter the chlorine and the fluoride out of their water. If you can find a system, I can tell you what some of those systems are. Not by name but the process that does it. It will filter the pharmaceuticals and the agricultural chemicals.

All those will be filtered out if it’s filtering out the chlorine and fluoride. My personal water strategy is to make living water like the ancient peoples like our ancestors would have had. What I first have to do is strip out all the modernness of my water then make it alive again. I strip out using reverse osmosis, the chlorine and the fluoride, then I distill the water. I make it not still. Dis is not instill, so I make it living. I distill it so you could use reverse osmosis and distillation. Both of those remove fluoride and chlorine. I structure my water through rocks and crystals so that I make it even more alive when it goes into my glass.

I see because the natural waters and streams that our ancestors drank from were living water. It was getting structured by the sun and it was moving over rocks. It had this structure to it that was easier to absorb by their cells.

The moving water is more vital. They call water under the earth that we tap for city water often like sleeping water. The water is captured by these rocks and some of it’s been sitting there. In St. Paul, they have a real deep well of spring water that anybody can access for a dollar a gallon. You go and fill your bottle up. It’s been untouched, they say, for like over 11,000 years. It’s been sitting under the earth still.

It means it’s not aged and it’s young water. Some people are claiming that when a spring bubbles to the surface, that is now water ready for consumption. It’s living water, moving, bubbling, or in a stream. That stream is structuring the water. It’s making it more alive and it’s now called ready to drink water. That’s the living waters that we want to put into our bodies because we are alive. We want to put living waters into our body to put life into us. We don’t want to take water into our body that we need to use our life energy to structure. We want to put water in our body that gives us life back.

We want to put living waters into our bodies to put life into us.

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Air: Detoxifying Pathways

Let’s talk also about the air. I know that unfortunately it is contaminated as well. What do you know about that?

Most people are aware that we live in this toxic soup, unfortunately, of air, water, and earth. In our air, we’ve got airplanes flying over and some people see things that come out of the airplanes and have names for them. They think some things are floating down to earth from those things that come out of the backs of airplanes. Whatever that is, we know that there’s airplanes flying all over burning jet fuel.

That jet fuel has exhaust and that exhaust filters down to the earth through the air. We also know that we have energy generation centers and factories and that we’re putting this particulate matter. We have forest fires now all over Canada and the United States. We call it fire season now. Those particulates filter to all the places of the United States.

We’re breathing in more particulates, more heavy metals, and more toxins in our air than ever before. As we breathe that in, it goes to our lungs. What do we know about our lungs? We take in oxygen and the oxygen goes directly from the lung into the blood. When we breathe these particulates into our lungs, they have direct access to our bloodstream. That’s not necessarily something that we can change. We can’t change the air that we breathe. I don’t want to breathe like canned gas that I have to pay for, that someone’s going to air and sell it back to me.

I can see that coming down the pike, though.

You’re going to be like, “How can we sell air?” In the pharmaceutical industry, the big joke was, “The more water we sell, the more money we make.” I used to work making children’s products. Think the generic equivalence to big brands like cough and cold syrup or nighttime liquids. I don’t want to say the trade names but you would give a child a liquid cough suppressant or a liquid thing to sleep at night that has like sudafed and acetaminophen.

Those are liquids and they’re like 99% water. There’s like the teeniest amount of drug ingredients in there to do its job, but the bulk of the bottle you’re buying is pure water. We always say like, “How can we sell more water in the pharmaceutical industry because it’s so much profit?” The same with air. Is somebody going to start selling air? This is clean air. Breathe this all the time.

While we can’t change the air we breathe, what we can do is we can upregulate our detoxification pathways. I look around and say like, “What are the most significant ways to detoxify particulates and heavy metals from my body?” Things like sweating. If you’re doing exercise every day and working up a sweat. Sweating is the number one way to detoxify things like phthalates from your body.

We can’t change the air we breathe. What we can do is upregulate our detoxification pathways.

Phthalates are the things that make plastics soft. When plastic is soft and flexible, they add phthalates, get in our body and are potentially toxic. The only way to get rid of them from our body is to sweat. If we’re exercising, we’re sweating. If we’re using the sauna, we’re sweating. What are all the ways that you can use as a detoxification strategy that works well for you to detoxify and keep those pathways open and upregulated so that when you do take in toxins like we’re all going to do. Your body is expert at getting rid of them.

Sleep is a detoxification method also, isn’t it, on some level?

Sleep is very detoxifying as long as you’re getting enough of it and if you go to bed at the right time. We know that deep sleep only occurs between the hours of 9:00 PM and 11:00 PM in the winter and 10:00 PM and midnight in the summer. That is the peak time of deep sleep and it’s when we detoxify. If you’re going to bed super late because you’re a night owl all the time. You might be missing out on the deep sleep portion of sleep, where you get the rejuvenation and the detox.

Somebody mentioned to us during an episode that the brain shrinks at night during deep sleep up to 40%. That’s huge and when it shrinks, it’s to allow detoxification liquid, the glymphatic system, to flood the brain with melatonin to detoxify the brain cell, which we know when the brain starts getting toxic. It can lead to things like Alzheimer’s and dementia. People are claiming that by getting our deep sleep, by using the glymphatic system, we detoxify the brain at night.

Food is also a detoxifying mechanism, no?

Lots of foods can be very detoxifying. Foods can either help you eliminate through what we call the back passage. They can eliminate things through the colon and the intestines. Food can bind heavy metals that are produced or shed by the body through the digestive system. Foods can open up other detoxification pathways and people then will take the food. Our ancestors would have not taken supplements. They would have eaten whole foods.

Now, if you want to detoxify, you might use something like a certain type of B vitamin that helps your body detoxify. You might want to use magnesium that helps you detoxify. There’s all these detoxification supplements. Again, they’re supplements. They are adding to your normal routine to help your body do certain things such as detoxification. All those supplements are in the food in the first place if you’re getting whole foods that are nutrient dense.

Liver is rich in B vitamins. I know oysters have tons of magnesium.

Also zinc.

The highest level of zinc you could find in any other food. I love that you mentioned that because we’re big on obviously food and nutrient dense food. When it comes to nature, by the way, these nutrients are in the right proportions to each other so they’re going to be more effective in the body.

I studied Weston A. Price when I was doing my master’s thesis on holistic nutrition. What I found is not only are these ingredients or supplements or nutrients packed in the right ratios. They are bound to organic amino acids. They’re easier to absorb in the body. Often, when we buy a supplement, the supplement is an inorganic form of mineral or vitamin. An inorganic form of mineral is not easily absorbed and in some cases, not absorbed at all by the body. In food, the plants and the animals put the nutrient in the form that’s absorbable when we consume that plant or that animal product. We benefit of the absorbable form of those nutrients.

Grounded On Earth

I want to pivot now to another element, which is the earth. Talk to us about how connecting with the earth can improve our health.

This is something that most of us have forgotten. In 1950, we moved away from grounded shoes. The earth is grounding. It has electrons in it that have negative charge and when we stand on a barefoot, we get the benefit of absorbing electrons for free. Most of us wear rubber sole shoes and we live in these little boxes we call houses that are insulated from the earth. They’re not grounded. We ride around in a car that’s not grounded. Rarely do many modern people set foot or barefoot on the earth to take advantage of that.

Before the 1950s, shoes didn’t have rubber soles?

Correct. Before the 1950s, shoes had leather soles which were grounded.

I wonder why that switched. It seems cheaper to have rubber than leather, probably for starters.

That’s why rubber can last longer. We used to have these people called cobblers that would fix your shoes.

I’ve heard of that. Not that I saw them with my own eyes.

I have and they don’t exist much anymore because we have these rubber soled shoes and if they do wear out, we buy a new cheap pair of shoes. If you’re buying brand shoes, they might not be so cheap. Shoes used to be expensive and they had leather soles and we were connected to the earth. When we’re connected to the earth, we can dump inflammation. Positive charge that builds up in the body is called inflammation and inflammation leads to dis-ease.

We’re running around all day insulating, absorbing microwave radiation from the cell phones, Bluetooth, WiFi, power lines, and electric currents running through our homes and we’re picking up inflammation. We never get rid of the inflammation and so we have health problems later, potentially. What you can do is stand barefoot on the ground and you release the positive charge from your body, which is getting rid of inflammation. You absorb electrons which are healing. Why? It’s because when your cells have more energy, they can detoxify and heal.

 

Energy does not come from fat, protein, and carbs. It comes from electrons. We break down food in the form of fat and protein to electrons to run through the mitochondria. It’s called the electron transport chain. If you stand barefoot on the earth and get free electrons. Those free electrons can give you energy with no food and you get more energy to detoxify and relieve stress.

We touched on this topic with Dr. Gerald Pollack years ago in an episode I think I called Negative Charge Creates Positive Energy. Meaning that the Earth’s negative charge helps us offload the positive charge that we have and it gives us more energy. I think most adults now would say they probably can’t remember the last time they were barefoot.

Most adults, because I have kids, even tell you, “Why are you letting those kids go out in the yard barefoot? Get shoes on them.” It’s like, where did this programming, because to me, this is a program we’re running. We’re running some programs. I encourage you to ask yourself, if that’s something that you think, “I need to wear shoes, there’s poisons on the ground, or I’m going to get a bee sting.” Where did that programming come from? Where did you learn that?

I spent some time in Amish communities and Up until 1950, the Amish community that I’ve spent time in Mondovi, Wisconsin. They don’t get a pair of shoes until they’re fourteen. They were helping build a new roof on a neighbor’s house and the kids had no shoes on the roof. I’m like, “Why aren’t they not wearing shoes? They don’t get shoes until they’re fifteen.

Most of us before 1950 were barefoot and even in the 1970s and 1980s when we grew up. I was barefoot all the time outdoors. Somehow, we’re now running these programs, “Got to wear shoes. Get shoes on those kids. Make sure they have shoes on their feet.” I don’t know where that came from but it is bizarre to me that we wouldn’t take our shoes off. Think about the last time you wore like Hilda said, when were you last barefoot outside on the earth?

They even sell little tennis shoes for babies that can’t walk yet. Maybe that’s part of the thing like consuming these things and getting it into our mind. Even the kid’s mind, “I got to have shoes on.”

Don’t get me started on most shoes. Even men’s shoes are high heeled shoes. They elevate your heel above your toe. If your heel is elevated above your toe, pick your foot up and point your toes down. You’re shortening your heel cords on your Achilles tendon area. It shortens that forever. We atrophy those heel cords and the muscles in your feet. It’s like putting your foot in a cast. Also, look at even men’s athletic shoes or a men’s pair of dress shoes. Not to mention women’s high heel shoes. It narrows your feet by your toes.

It crunches them together. People have things like, “I have these bunions.” It’s because your feet are unnaturally crunched together. Part of your bone is trying to stick out where your toe should have been and then people get those cut off. They cut off the bunions. If you wore shoes or no shoes. Let’s say you wore no shoes or you wore something called barefoot shoes that allow your foot to expand to its natural length. You wouldn’t probably get those bunions because it’s the natural place your big toe should be.

Going back to having our feet on the ground, how long do you think is good? As adults, we have our jobs, we’re running around and doing things. We’re probably going to be wearing shoes most of the time. How much time should we spend doing this as we start to cultivate this habit?

Even as little as 3 to 5 minutes barefoot outside. For me, when I’m doing my morning sun practice, getting outside at sunrise, I will be barefoot. Now, I can’t do that in the winter because I live in Wisconsin and it’s very cold. Although, this time it’s bizarre, it’s 50 degrees. Normally, it’s 30 below at this time of year. When it’s 30 below I’m not barefoot outside.

You can buy these like static heel straps. They basically are worn in the microelectronics industry to keep microelectronics engineers grounded when they touch microchips in the fabrication plant. If they pick up static charge or positive charge or inflammation in their body and touch a microchip. It’ll fry the chip. They have to be grounded while they work. You can pick up these inexpensive static heel straps. Put them on your boots or your shoes outdoors and winter and be grounded. If you can be grounded longer, like up to a half hour. That’s ideal. The minimum time 3 to 5 minutes has a massive benefit.

Metal: Refinement In Thinking

One of the elements in oriental medicine is metal. I want to start to wrap up with this. Metal can represent refinement. Talk to us about how we refine our thinking to know how to make the best choices with all of the options before us to improve our health.

In Chinese traditional medicine, they have the five elements. One of the last elements is the metal element, which I like to think of as spirit. This metal element is about we do earth, air, wind, and fire. We take all these pieces and we optimize them for your best health and your best life ever. Once you figure out that you’ve optimized a lot of your life and you’re working on the right things. The very last thing most people end with, which probably should be number one that they start with, is their spirit.

We start to refine who we are, how we move through the world, and how we go about living our lives. Once you know, like, “I don’t want to drink tap water. It has all these crazy things.” What we don’t want to do is get stressed, worried, and freaked out about it. The metal element teaches us refinement in our thinking. We recognize what is true then we come up with a strategy. Now we have a water strategy. We have a food strategy.

I don’t go and eat seed oils at the restaurants. I eat whole living nutrient dense foods so I know when I look at a menu, there’s only certain foods I’m going to eat because I’ve refined my food strategy. I know what’s best for me and I’m going to live my best life ever. I know when I travel, I will buy some spring water or I will bring a filter with me so I don’t drink tap water. I have a water strategy. It’s refined and I never have to worry about it again because what most of us do is forget the refinement part. We’re not connecting into some spirit or source or energy that’s greater than us.

We start to get worried and scared all the time without knowing that we can refine what we do. There is a reason we’re doing everything that we’re doing so that we can walk more gracefully through life with less fear. It’s okay to know what’s going on, but we have to stay out of the fear and out of being high in cortisol all the time.

 

I have friends in this health space who are so beyond fear that they’ve gone back to eating things with red dye number 40 and seed oils. Almost with impunity because they’re like, “We don’t care. We’re not afraid.” Is there something to that as well?

I would say, yes. To me, I see it at various levels. You first go to the level of learning what’s out there. You next go to the level of refining your strategies of avoiding the negative and rebuilding your health. First, everyone needs to rebuild their body. Our cells turn over from every second to every seven years. The quickest time they turn over is every second, and the longest time your bones turn over is seven years. We create a new body every seven years.

Let me just say, that’s why I tell people I’m seven years old. I’m like, “That’s the most I can be is seven.”

You could also say that you’re a billion years old because how old are the atoms? Whatever the age of the earth is. I don’t believe anything people tell me, but if your atoms never age, then why are you aging? My cells are ageless because they’re made up of atoms at their base level and atoms don’t get old.

I like it.

I’m ageless or I’m seven years old. When you’ve created a new body, detoxed, and gotten rid of all the junk that was programmed into you from before. At least in my opinion, I’ve created a new avatar for myself years ago. This new avatar has none of the seed oils. None of the junk in it. Next level is we refine our connection with spirit and our inner monologues, what we tell ourselves.

Once you’ve reached that level, then can you program your own mind to take in any as nutrition? We hear of breatharians. They can use sunlight and air and water to survive. Could you survive off seed oils and be optimally healthy because you can alchemically transmute the seed oil to something beneficial for your body? Yes, and I also think you have to reach the level of no fear and believe it and have created and what I like to say a new avatar within seven years. Can you go there to eat anything you want and be optimally healthy? I do think it’s possible. I wouldn’t say I’m there yet, but I would say that it’s possible.

It’s almost like Wim Hofing it. Wim Hof is known as the iceman. A man who is able to literally keep his body temperature stable, if not increase it in the face of ice surrounding him for hours. The scientists have tested this. He’s won some Guinness Book of World Records and awards of recognition because of his ability to do that. I do think it’s possible as well. I love the idea also of living without fear because if we’re living in fear, then is that living?

If you’re living in fear, you’re more susceptible to somebody telling you what to do. Without discernment, you go and do it without thinking about it because we’re in the lizard part of the brain. I don’t like to call the lizard part, but it’s the old part of the brain that just reacts. When you’re in the constant reaction phase because you’re scared. You will do things that are not in your best interest and you won’t have discernment.

 

What we have to do is come out of fear. We can be much more discerning in how we approach the world and ideas. We start to know intuitively what is good for us and what is harmful to us. Coming out of fear is one of the top things that you can do for yourself. A lot of us learn all this stuff that’s going on. There’s PFAS, phthalates, and heavy metals. It’s raining down from the sky and it’s doom and gloom. It’s okay to be scared when all that’s happening, but recognize that there’s not necessarily anything you’re going to be able to do about it.

Come out of fear and know that, “I acknowledge this is happening.” There are strategies. There are ways to overcome this. There are so many of us that know how to overcome what is going on. You can learn from all these great minds that have already done the work and are thriving now and not be in fear. Know that the solutions are out there.

Sunlight At Dawn

Now I’d like to pose to you the question I always pose at the end of the show. If the reader could only do one thing, that is one thing to improve their health. What would you recommend that they do?

I wish they could do three things. If it’s only one thing, I’m going to say that the number one thing you could do is get sunlight at dawn. I almost wanted to say blue blockers at night, but sunlight at dawn because whether you’re in the corporate office, driving in your car at dawn or you’re at home. Even if you can’t set foot outside, most people, especially in your car, roll your window down and get that natural sunlight. Honestly, that dawn light is magical. The more we study the effect of sunlight and sunrise on human biology, the more magical it gets every single year. I do think that there is magic at sunrise and everyone should be out seeing the sun.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thanks Hilda, this was so much fun.

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Our guest was Thaddeus Owen. Visit his website PrimalHacker.com to learn more. I am Hilda Labrada Gore, the host and producer of this show for the Weston A. Price Foundation. You can find me at HolisticHilda.com and for the transcript for this episode, visit our website WestonAPrice.org, and click on the show page. Now for a Letter to the Editor from our Winter 2023 journal.

Crystal from Pensacola, Florida had this to say, “Changed my life. The Weston A. Price Foundation has changed my life and the lives of my family members. When I was 21 years old and a married mom of two small children, I got sick. I got really sick. I was also depressed and had lost the joy of living. To say my future seemed hopeless and bleak is an understatement. I went to traditional doctors and received no help. One doctor took a look into my ears and told me that it appeared that I was having an allergic reaction and to take some Benadryl to see whether I felt any better.

On a whim, I decided to try a weird “witch doctor” to see whether I could get any guidance. I walked into her office and was immediately surprised at her warmth and joy. She informed me that my body was in a whirlwind. The first thing I could do was get rid of inflammatory foods such as gluten, and eat steaks and eggs fried in butter instead while we waited on the results of my blood lab work. I was aghast. Steak and eggs fried in butter, give up healthy and improperly prepared grains?

She also gave me the Nourishing Traditions cookbook to take home and study. This was the beginning of a total transformation in my mind, body, and spirit. I am forever grateful and happy to say that myself and my family are enjoying the fullness of life. The many resources that the Weston A. Price Foundation provides are invaluable and life-changing. Thank you so much.”

Crystal, this is an encouraging letter. If you also have a testimonial that you want to share, please write to us. Write to us at Info@westonaprice.org and put Letter to the Editor and the subject line. We will consider your letter for inclusion in an upcoming journal. Thank you so much for reading. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

 

About Thaddeus Owen

Thaddeus began his journey outdoors, camping and fishing as a boy in the Adirondacks and Central NY forests. After a decade spent developing pharmaceutical products, he just couldn’t face another day adding toxic ingredients into children’s medicine. He shifted gears and engineered a successful transition into a new job keeping toxic chemicals out of products we all use every day. From there, he was also able to find a way to incorporate more movement, nature and sunshine into his work environment.

He spends his free time experimenting on himself in hopes of helping others on their journey. He studies Nature, Sunshine, health optimization and EMF and educates others on how to become optimally healthy using light and avoiding EMF. He gave a TEDx talk on the power of using special glasses to block blue light and how it impacts our health. He is also the co-founder of Primalhacker and HowToEscapeCorporate.com

Thaddeus holds a personal training certification, nutrition certification, Master’s degree in Holistic Nutrition and BS in Chemical Engineering. He teaches others how to optimize health through the online platform Primalhacker and records stories of escape and evasion on the Corporate Escape Artists Podcast with his wife Heidi. He lives in Wisconsin with his children and business partner and wife, Heidi, where they spend significant time outdoors.

 

Important Links

• Thaddeus Owen
• Primal Hacker
• Corporate Escape Artist
• Weston A. Price Foundation
• Nourishing Traditions
• Weston A Price Email
• How to Escape Corporate
• Wise Tradition Podcast App
• One Earth Health
• Holistic Hilda

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