In this episode, I talk to micronutrient experts Jayson and Mira Calton of Calton Nutrition about all things micronutrients, healthy fats and healing from osteoporosis.
After receiving a diagnosis of severe osteoporosis before age 30, Mira set out to find health answers. Her journey lead her to Dr. Jayson and to a complete recovery from her disease with a micronutrient nutrition and lifestyle program.
Their honeymoon involved a 6-year 100+ country journey they call the Calton Project. During this time, they researched and traveled to cultures around the world to see and experience their traditional lifestyles and diets. Jayson and Mira have been to countries that many of us have never even heard of and know the real story about these cultures that we often talk about in health discussions.
Now, Jayson and Mira run Calton Nutrition to help others find their own health answers. They specialize in Micronutrients and have created a specific multivitamin called Nutreince to help boost micronutrient levels with their special non-compete technology.
Get a free micronutrient analysis and other gifts from Calton Nutrition by clicking here.
In this Episode, We Discus
- What a micronutrient is and why most multivitamins don’t work
- Mira’s journey to health
- The surprising things they found deep in the Amazon (hint)
- Commonalities and differences in healthy cultures around the world
- The most important health advice they’ve ever gotten
Resources We Mention:
- Book: Micronutrient Miracle Pre-Order Discount
- Book: Naked Calories
- Book: Rich Food, Poor Food
- Gift: Calton Nutrition gifts for you
- Quiz: Are you Micronutrient Deficient?
- Supplement: Nutrience Micronutrients
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Katie: Hi, I’m Katie from Wellnessmama.com, and I am so excited today to be here with Jayson and Mira Calton of Calton Nutrition to talk about micronutrients and also some off topic subjects like the many places they’ve traveled in the world because you often hear about these traditional cultures all over the world and how they live and what they eat but you guys have actually seen it. And I’m so excited to jump right in. Welcome, Jayson and Mira.
Mira: Thank you so much for having us Katie.
Jayson: Thanks for having us Katie.
Katie: Awesome, well I know that you often hear, and I hear all the time, that in modern times we’re overfed but undernourished. And you guys are the experts in that realm because you specialize in micronutrients. You’ve even written the book on it, “The Micronutrient Miracle” that’s coming out this year, which is exciting. But can you delve into that? What are the role of these micronutrients and what are some of the deficiencies that we’re seeing these days?
Mira: Absolutely. So first of all micronutrients are not scary or frightening. You already know what they, you probably just didn’t use this long, scary word, micronutrients. So micronutrients are your vitamins, vitamins A, C, D, things you already hear about, your minerals like calcium, magnesium, your essential fatty acids like Omega-3 that we all hear so much about, and your amino acids, like you’re taking in your protein powder. So it’s just those four things put in one category. And what they do is they make it so your body can function. Basically without them you can do nothing. You can’t breathe, I mean everything from your breath to your skin tone, to your …
Jayson: Bone structure, cartilage, muscle.
Mira: Absolutely everything requires these in order for you to function, unlike the
macronutrients.
Jayson: Right, so food has two basic units to them. When we eat food, when we want to eat real food or rich food, what we’re getting is that caloric component, that’s the carbs, the fats and the proteins. And often times that’s what we talk about when we think about nutrition. We’re always kind of engaged in whether we should have more carbs or less carbs or more fat or more protein, whatever it is. But food has a separate and equally important component called the micronutrients.
Mira: We tend to think it’s a little more important.
Jayson: And we happen to think it’s more important because it’s easy to get calories, isn’t it? I mean no matter what you do to food you can slice it, dice it, microwave it, not that we recommend that, saute? it or all these other things, and you lose micronutrients. And that’s what people sometimes don’t understand, those vitamins and minerals and those amino acids can be somehow depleted from the food and destroyed often times. But you’re always left with the calories. So we’re big proponents of getting enough of the micronutrients through the food so that your body then can carry on all those functions that Mira said. And literally every system of your body needs these essential micronutrients to even allow for minimum basic health.
Mira: Yeah, so the overfed and the undernourished thing, well here’s the issue, we’re overfed because we’re getting the excess in the macronutrients or the calories, but we’re undernourished because most of the food that we’re eating is what we call naked calories. It’s actually food that has been stripped of it micronutrients from the second that it was planted and picked all the way through traveling to you house, all the way through preparation all the way until after you eat it. So we keep stripping our food so we’re getting actually malnourished. And a lot of times people say, well malnourished? That always looks like the person who you see in those third world countries who aren’t getting enough food. But they’ve actually done studies and those people are actually deficient in the same vitamins and minerals as the overweight or obese in our country who have tons of food but they’re also not getting the micronutrients. So although they look very different, they’re actually the same exact disease.
Katie: Yeah, and I love that you guys delve into this because that’s one of my biggest problems with all these diet plans that you see online and that people get pulled into is it’s all about the calories. But you could eat 1,200 calories of just sugar and you’re not getting any nutrients. You could eat 12,000 calories of just cheese and you might get some calcium but you’re missing out on… and I know from the latest research the majority of Americans are only getting 15 basic foods most of the times and it’s things like potatoes and tomatoes and ketchup and wheat and soybeans and vegetable oils. And those are all pretty much micronutrient devoid. So what are some of the problems we’re seeing and that we’ll continue to see from micronutrient deficiencies?
Jayson: Well you know the interesting thing about micronutrients is, and we talk about this in the new book, “The Micronutrient Miracle,” that you can kind of compare it to an orchestra analogy. So if you have a flute, and a harp and a clarinet and they play their notes together, that creates a very distinct sound. And it’s like that with micronutrients.
If you were deficient let’s say in calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D, you’re going to get a very distinct effect, and in this case probably a health condition. So each health condition can relate back to a very specific grouping of deficiencies in your micronutrients. That’s why it’s so difficult to really define micronutrient deficiency. Way back in the day if you were deficient, and still today if you’re deficient in vitamin C, you’re going to get scurvy. So that was that one known kind of micronutrient deficiency disease. If you’re deficient in vitamin D you get rickets. So there were known micronutrient deficiencies conditions that could be corrected by just becoming sufficient in that one micronutrient. But today, we’re starting to see harmonized deficiencies. We’re starting to see deficiencies in two, three, four, five, ten different micronutrients. And those are creating completely different effects in the body, poor sleep habits, bad skin and hair, stress, anxiety, panic attacks. These are what you’re going to start to king of see at the low level deficiencies.
Mira: It’s actually an interesting point because when you’re just deficient for a short period of time, you get these very temporary things, so for example calcium and magnesium, if you’re deficient you get food cravings. So that’s step one with it. But then of course if you stay deficient in those calcium and magnesium, then over a longer period of time you get long latency diseases or lifestyle diseases. So those could be things like hypertension, or for me it was osteoporosis. So I mean I didn’t realize when I was younger I got advance osteoporosis at 30, and I had no idea what it was from. But looking back at it now and when we first met this is what we were doing, we were looking into my health concerns and trying to fix my body. And what we learned was these small deficiencies over a long period of time had left me with the bones of an 85-year-old woman. When all I thought I was just getting tired and achy and it really is deficiencies over a long extended period of time cause major diseases. And we really just want people to prevent them so they don’t have to reverse it like I did. And they’re all very preventable.
Jayson: You know it was really, hugely eye opening for us after we worked with Mira for over a two-year period to actually reverse this incurable disease known as osteoporosis.
Mira: Incurable.
Jayson: According to the medical world. They thing once the bone is deteriorated then it’s impossible to regrow it, but what we are starting to know now in modern science nutritional medicine is that it’s not impossible to regrow these things. Even thyroid, even hypothyroidism or even Hashimoto’s, they thought once that thyroid was attacked it was incurable. But we’re starting to see remission and regrowth in over 20% of the cases, so the body is a miraculous thing. We just have to give it the right thing, what it needs to heal itself. And what it needs to heal itself isn’t more calories, it’s these essential micronutrients. Modern science now knows that almost every single lifestyle diseases that most people are suffering from, whether it’s diabetes or osteoporosis or cancer or high cholesterol…
Mira: Obesity.
Jayson: Or hypertension and even obesity, maybe most importantly obesity, stems from these deficiencies in micronutrients. You know Mira was just talking about the fact that the undernourished had the same micronutrient deficiencies as the overweight or obese. And when we go to these countries, what’s very sad for us is to travel to these countries and see how these people look. They look undernourished. They don’t have enough calories and they have all these horrible symptoms and you can see that they’re very skinny and their bodies are falling apart and they’ve got these diseases. But the problem is once they start to get these foods that their government subsidizes, these processed foods, often times chips and sodas and candies, very cheap foods. Those calories come in but they stay deficient because those foods are micronutrient deficient as well. But they get the calories. They become the new overweight, obese. That’s why you’re seeing…
Mira: Yeah, they miss healthy altogether. They go from one to the other in a very short period of time.
Jayson: Within a year or so. This is why in India and in China you’re seeing an explosion of diabetes and obesity and they never got to that sufficient healthy range. They didn’t go from being underfed to being sufficient healthy. They went right to overweight or obese. And we’re all kind of missing this middle ground because we’re missing the vital component, the one missing piece that science has been missing out on all along. And that’s becoming micronutrient sufficient is the key to optimal health.
Katie: Yeah, and I think that’s a common factor that you can look at throughout history as we’ve seen these problems start to increase is our food quality has declined progressively throughout those years and it makes perfect sense what you’re saying. And I’m a big fan of saying we should not count calories. We should count chemicals and get rid of those. But also I feel like an important mental shift for people is to stop thinking of food as bad, because I think so many people, if you’ve ever had health issues food is always the bad guy. And so it’s always, it’s like what can I eat. It’s a fear thing. And to switch from that and from making our food choices based on fear to what food can I eat right now that’s going to provide the most nutrients, that’s going to provide the best source of all these vitamins and choosing based on the positive and the abundance side of it rather than the fear of what’s not going to kill me. And I think that micronutrients play a big role in that. Obviously a salad with a good source of maybe grass fed protein is going to have hugely more micronutrients than something with the same calories that’s just a sandwich in a bakery, even if they look the same on the calorie level, so I think that’s so key. And a question that I get all the time from people is is it even possible to get everything from food anymore with the way that our food supply has deteriorated. If someone is eating that perfect diet, that elusive perfect diet is it even possible to get it all from food?
Mira: There you go, there’s that elusive perfect diet we always hear about. And we actually talk about this in the book because people always ask us that. Obviously, talk about micronutrients, everyone’s like, you can get them all in a diet, you don’t need to supplement. Everything is just in there. So we actually started doing research. Jayson did a research paper in the JISSN, in the Journal of…, what does it stand for?
Jayson: International Society of Sports Nutrition.
Mira: And it was just exactly on that topic because we wanted to see is it even possible
to. So we looked at six diet plans.
Jayson: We did, we looked at six different diet plans. We wanted to look at the most popular diet plans, plans that literally millions of people across the world were following. So we looked at Atkins, we looked at the Dash diet, we looked at the Best Life diet that was Oprah’s diet at that time, and we also looked at …
Mira: We looked at Primal Blueprint.
Jayson: Primal Blueprint.
Mira: We looked at Practical Paleo.
Jayson: And we also looked at …
Mira: I think there’s one more.
Jayson: Yeah, and we also looked at …
Mira: Best Diet.
Jayson: Oh, the South Beach diet.
Mira: South Beach.
Jayson: Yeah.
Mira: And what we did was we actually took their menu plan and we said okay if you were following this perfectly, like you were one of the perfect, perfect clients that took every single last grain of salt and put it into the recipes, would what they gave you to do create a state of sufficiency. Because of course it should, I mean that’s the goal, right? You can’t survive without a state of sufficiency. And what we found is they were on average more than 50% deficient. You would be literally 50% deficient in your micronutrients if you followed these programs.
Jayson: Perfectly. And many of these plans were well over 2,000 calories a day. We didn’t restrict the calories and a lot of these plans aren’t about losing weight like the Dash diet or even Paleo and Primal. They’re really about more health.
Mira: And they were at high quality foods too. They’re about really high quality ancestral type diets, so we thought they would do better, but in reality they all came through really, really deficient. And so the American Medical Dietary Association, they actually put a call out to their people and they said, we want you dieticians out there to tell us what the perfect diet is. It has to be 2,000 calories or less and you can use any foods you want. And we even created this really cool database program where you could plug things in and play until it gets right. And what they found was that not one person was able to do it.
Jayson: Not one.
Mira: Not one. So this whole myth of the balanced diet is that, it’s a myth. And one of the steps that we’d like to tell people to do is if you’re going to go on a diet program like Paleo, Primal, low carb, whatever you’re going to follow, whatever you’re heart tells you is right for your body, then you need to know which ones they’re most commonly deficient in. Because diets, by limiting what you can eat, also limit which micronutrients you’re going to be able to receive from those foods. So it’s really important to know that if you’re following a Paleo program you’re likely deficient in calcium. We have all the lists in the book for all the different types of common diets that you follow. But that’s a really good place to understand is that you’re not going to get it through your food. And specifically if you know what kind of diet plan you’re on, you can actually look and see scientifically what you’re likely deficient in.
Jayson: Yeah, that’s not to say that we aren’t food first people.
Mira: Oh yeah.
Jayson: That’s not to say that we aren’t going to really encourage you to go out there
and eat the most micronutrient dense food because that is what we believe.
Mira: That’s step one.
Jayson: But we don’t want you to go out there and think that if I just make this one change in my life, all of a sudden all my problems are going to go away. If they do, great.
But for 99.9% of the people out there, that’s going to be a good first step. They then need to look at their lifestyle and find out how much toxins are in their overall lifestyle. How many over-the-counter prescription medications are they taking? How much stress do they have? Do they live in a polluted city? There’s all kinds of factors that you then have to use a subtraction equation for. So we all talk about how many micronutrients do I eat? But then there’s that subtraction. How many anti-micronutrients were in your food? How stressed are you or like we said, all these different things, over-the-counter medications, exercise. Even good things like that deplete your micronutrients. You must do that part of the equation. And then you look at your overall sum, and if that sum then is equal to or greater than what you need to hit minimum micronutrient sufficiency level, you’re all good. If not, which you’re probably not, then that’s when supplementation comes in.
Katie: Yeah, and I love that you guys are so science backed because you’ve always taken a step and done the actual research. I get a lot of heat for recommending certain supplements online and unfortunately it’s sad, but we live in a world where the majority of us, even if we, like you said do all the right things, it’s not possible from food alone. I mean potentially if we were living out in a native environment, interacting with the soil, getting soil borne organisms, tons of vitamin D, catching our own food, eating 90 different plant species in a given day, but none of us have the time, ability or lifestyle to do that. And you guys mentioned other lifestyle factors and how they depleted and I know that my listeners are pretty familiar with some of these. I talk about magnesium a lot and how if you are under stress or drink a lot of caffeine your magnesium is depleted. But talk about some of the other ways that lifestyle can deplete you micronutrients.
Mira: Well, first of all let’s talk about stress alone. It’s more than just the magnesium. I mean there’s 13 in our new stress guide that we’re building, there’s 13, and actually there’s, I think …
Jayson: Those are the big players. There’s 24 total.
Mira: Twenty-four total that affect stress, depression and anxiety. We’re focusing on 13 because really iron, B6, they’re finding out that most people who get anxiety attacks, those two micronutrients. And these are such simple things when you start to look at the studies and you say okay, but you know what, they’re not coming out in the news so most people don’t know unfortunately yet. But calcium, magnesium are stress eating. A lot of people blame themselves because when they get stressed out or anxious they go grab food. Okay, your stress is being caused by magnesium and calcium deficiencies and those are causing cravings. So you don’t have to feel bad about this. It’s a natural thing that’s happening in your body as a result of you getting stressed out. Vitamin C, they’ve actually proven if you have enough vitamin C, even if that stress trigger hits you, you don’t get stressed. You literally cannot raise your cortisol because the cortisol is going to fight with the vitamin C.
Jayson: That was a really interesting study. Let me just hop in there and talk about study, because it was one that I brought to Mira and I was like, we’ve got to really look at this. Look what they did. So they just made you sufficient in vitamin C, nothing fancy, just that one micronutrient. And they actually tried to stress people out. They would do things to them and they’d do lights and sounds and touch them, and they just wouldn’t get stressed. They couldn’t get stressed. Literally, the body has natural defenses to handle stress, but when we’re deficient in these essential micronutrients, the body doesn’t have what it needs in order to fight that and combat that. So we’re all, do we have more stress than our ancestors? That’s debatable. We certainly have a lot more things out there stressing us, but I think running away from a tiger and living in a hut might have been very stressful too. But if they were sufficient in their micronutrients, they didn’t feel that stress. We have a literal micronutrient deficiency pandemic across the country.
And there’s a million reasons as to why that’s happened, but that’s the reality. And if we don’t become sufficient in those micronutrients, the stress that we’re feeling, even though it may not be more than our ancestors, even if it’s equal, it’s going to feel much more to us. And it’s really going to affect us, affect our mental wellness and affect our physical wellness. And that’s really important to be able to turn that around.
Mira: So stress the B vitamins as well. And then looking at your medications, even over-the-counter medications. And a lot of times people give medications to children thinking okay, the doctor told me to and I understand that there’s a time and a place for all these things. But at the same time you might not necessarily think of what they’re actually doing to their micronutrient levels. So for instance, things you take for a cold or a flu, they actually deplete the zinc and the vitamin C, which are two of your big immune boosters. So you’re taking this in order to feel better but what they’re actually doing is lowering your immune system so it’s actually making it, if it hadn’t quite kicked in yet, it’s really going to kick in and you’re really going to get sick. So it’s just little things like that. How much alcohol you have, too much alcohol, it ruins the lining of your gut so you can’t absorb micronutrients. At the same time, what’s really interesting is two glasses a day of red wine or alcohol actually improves health. And the studies on this …
Jayson: Across the board.
Mira: Across the board. Bone health, they’ve actually shown that if women are actually taking two glasses of alcohol a day, their bones will start rebuilding. And if they stop, it immediately stops, the building stops and it goes away and then they can start again and they will actually start building their bone back. So we did a lot of research about these micronutrient depleters because there’s not always a final answer, like caffeine, it’s not always bad. There’s actually a lot of positive things as well so even these things like exercise that deplete micronutrients, there is a level at which you should be doing these things which actually increases your levels. So we want to make sure that we always go towards that level. And we talk about exercise a lot in this book and the right way to do it so that you’re not depleting massive amounts of micronutrients.
Jayson: Yeah, it seems like there is kind of a natural tipping point where a little bit is good, more is a little bit better, and then there’s somewhere where we fall off and it becomes negative. And that’s with anything in life really. But I think a lot of people don’t think about exercise as being a micronutrient depleter. They think if I’m going to get healthy, I’m going to go on a diet, I’m going to exercise. But when you lower the calories, which is typically one of the first things you do when you go on a diet, and you start to exercise more, remember that with calories also lowers those micronutrients and exercise is going to not only burn more calories, but it’s going to utilize your micronutrients more. So in all reality, it’s kind of a perfect storm for micronutrient deficiency. And a lot of times I think in medical literature we see kind of this rebound effect where people lose the weight, they start feeling great and then all of a sudden for whatever reason they start to crave food and then they fall off and they gain even more weight.
That kind of yo-yo effect or that horrible circle that everybody has seen or certainly heard of, really comes from the fact that you’re depleting your micronutrients. Those crave cycles start to come in with that calcium, magnesium deficiency. We start to eat the food and the body literally is physiologically screaming at you inside your head to eat more food. It wants you to eat food because that’s the only place it knows where micronutrients are. So it’s trying to reverse this deficiency, but in all reality all it’s doing is sending us into this blizzard of eating bad foods, more depletion and weight regain. And it’s really just a horrible thing that can be easily stopped by just becoming micronutrient sufficient.
Mira: Yeah, and there’s one thing about kids. A lot of people think that kids, because they’re small don’t need as many micronutrients. And that’s a huge myth. Their bodies are actually utilizing them so much faster because they’re growing, you know those growth spurts. They need the same levels. Basically almost at the age of four years old and above it’s the same amount of micronutrients. And now think about the portion of your food and the portion of their food. How are they getting these magical micronutrients? Where are these coming from? So first of all, their food needs to be super-duper dense. You really have to make sure they’re getting the best quality foods. But after that they probably need to supplement as well because they’re probably not eating enough of the micronutrients. Even the 2,000 calorie diets weren’t doing enough of that.
Jayson: Right.
Katie: Yeah, and I love that you guys bring that point home too about how the different ones tie into different diseases. And I feel like having that real food diet is kind of the safety net because you need obviously all these things in balance. It wouldn’t be healthy to just go overdose on magnesium. I’ll be like, okay I think I need magnesium so I’m just going to take a ton of magnesium. But obviously you need calcium with it, or if you’re taking vitamin C and iron, you know there’s all these synergistic nutrients. So a real food diet is the safety net there to make sure you’re getting all the micronutrients but then also supplementing so that you’re filling any gaps that you have. I think that’s super important. And can we deviate? Mira, do you mind telling me your story with your osteoporosis because I think that would really resonate with a lot of women? Is that alright?
Mira: No, that’s fine. I mean I have to say something amazing happened this week and we actually talked to one woman who … I do this because it does change lives. A woman just contacted us and she had seen me tell a story on a different show about a year ago and she had advanced osteoporosis. And because of what she had heard, she started changing what she was doing and started supplementing and started working with us. And it’s been a year now and she has reversed her advanced osteoporosis as well. So absolutely I’ll share because every single person can do this. It’s not just me. I was living in New York in my twenties and I thought I had the coolest life. I was doing film premieres and I was dressing celebrities and I was on top of the world. And I was very stressed out. I worked crazy hours, slept very strange times of day just to try to get cat naps in. And I was definitely burning the candle at both ends. And I thought I had a great diet. In fact I thought I was doing everything right because I went to hip hop class twice a day. I was going to have the perfect body hell or high water.
I was also going to eat my spinach salad with fat free dressing and only grilled chicken and clean, clean, clean. And I had my fat free muffin with coffee for breakfast because I couldn’t get fat that way. And I had told myself everything was right and I just started feeling miserable. My lower back hurt. I didn’t have the energy I needed anymore and the pain got so bad that I just literally started popping any pain pill I could find, to the point where I was lying on my sofa and rather than going to the premiers I would send staff members. And I would just literally type my computer like this on the sofa because I couldn’t even walk anymore, it was that painful. For my 30th birthday I decided that it was time where I couldn’t do anything, that I had to go see a doctor. And when he came back in the room he told me I had advanced osteoporosis, he had absolutely nothing positive to say to me. He was dumbfounded. To be 30 and to have the bone density of an 85-year-old woman was something that he had never seen obviously.
I went to specialist after specialist and all they told me was it’s going to get worse. You’re not going to walk. And you go …
Jayson: And really her opportunity to rebuild her health as far as the medical world was concerned was almost zero. They did tell her that you should be taking a little bit more calcium. That was the one thing that they told her. And so she started to do research on calcium and calcium let to magnesium and that led to vitamin D. And so she was really looking for a way to be able to reverse this osteoporosis without using those drugs, because she wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted to have kids or not. And there’s a lot of negative side effects associated with those medications, including not being able to have children that she wasn’t ready to take on at age 30. So luckily for me, and I usually don’t get a chance to tell this story this way, so I’ll tell it my way. Luckily for me, one day I walked into my office and here sits Mira. And she says to me, I am looking for somebody who knows about micronutrients. I am determined to reverse my incurable condition naturally. And are you willing to take something like this on, yes or no? You know, she’s very A type personality. And me, I’m like, well, I don’t know? I don’t know if I can do that. At this point, I’m working with clients mostly on weight loss …
Mira: I was cute.
Jayson: Yeah, well there was that factor. But at the end of the day, I want to make sure that I can really help this person. And I had been focused on, as most nutritionists are, the macronutrients, the carbs, fats and proteins. And I was thinking to myself, well how is manipulating carbs, fats and protein going to help her. What I need to do is start to focus on an area of nutrition that I’ve had some schooling in but certainly never done a deep dive in. Most nutritionists are like this. Some days we talk about our doctors not knowing a lot about nutrition. There’s a lot of nutritionists who don’t know a lot about micronutrients, and that’s another side of it.
Mira: It’s not the sexiest topic out there.
Jayson: It really isn’t. And I didn’t know much about it. In fact I went to medical literature to try to learn what I could about why it was her body wasn’t able to absorb those essential minerals that she obviously needed in order to rebuild those bones. Why were her bones deteriorating so quickly? What was she doing? And that was what really led us into this world of micronutrients. And when we looked back at what she was doing and the cravings she was having and the exercises and the food choices, it’s obvious, you can always look back and see everything very clearly, but working from that point, I needed to find out why it was her body wasn’t absorbing those micronutrients. You talked a little bit about how micronutrients can kind of compete with one another. This was a brand new … supplemental science is brand new. People watching right now may not know that the first vitamin was only discovered 100 years ago. We’re still making micronutrients essential is like 1986.
Mira: McDonalds and robots both existed before multivitamins.
Jayson: So did car radios.
Mira: So this is completely new. So the good news is that by looking at these micronutrients, we went back to my doctor two years later and stood there and said I don’t even have osteoporosis. We took another DEXA scan. No osteoporosis, no osteopenia and to this day they still want me to get on medication because they think it’s going to come back. But we’re very happy to say … like I said, people all across America now and in other countries have contacted us and they’re all reversing it. We’re seeing it … every single days we’re getting other women coming forward and it’s such a pleasure to know that it’s not just osteoporosis. Yes it was my osteoporosis but for somebody else it’s their high blood pressure. For somebody else it’s their thyroid condition. And for somebody else they have never been able to get pregnant. We just had this one woman, now she has two kids because she started working with us and she wasn’t able to get pregnant with her lupus.
And so it’s really just been … we’re doing this because we’re passionate about it and all these diseases really do come down to these deficiencies. And we’re trying to scream it as loud as we can. We actually have Micronutrient on the cover of the new book calling it “The Micronutrient Miracle,” because it’s a word that we really need to start spending a lot more time talking about.
Katie: Yeah, and just shifting that focus, like you say, away from just fat, protein and carbs and into really what is actually in our food. I love that and your story is so inspiring. “You know back when I had osteo,” and I’m like what? Because you don’t look like you ever … you’re thriving and beautiful, so thank you for telling your story.
Mira: Well, thank you.
Katie: I appreciate that. And just …
Mira: If there’s anyone out there, you can go to our website, hit Contact Us and we love to help other people out there so we actually answer all the emails.
Jayson: There’s actually an osteoporosis protocol in the new book “The Micronutrient Miracle,” so if people are looking to, if they osteoporosis and want to know what we did and how we … it’s right in there.
Katie: Awesome, and I’ll make sure to link to that as well so people can find it easily. And to switch gears a little bit, another area that you guys have an expertise in that very, very few people do are traditional cultures around the world, because you guys are probably the most well-traveled people I’ve ever met. And you shared with me your experience with all these different traditional cultures and tribes that you visited. So can we spend a few minutes with you telling us a little bit about some of these cultures and maybe breaking some of the misconceptions about that they eat a certain way or they have a perfect diet. And what were some commonalities you found among healthy natural cultures?
Jayson: Yeah, well what we did was after we were able to reverse Mira’s advance osteoporosis, we both kind of just looked at each other and we were always really inspired by Weston A. Price who had traveled around the world in the 1930’s studying remote people. He was a dentist so he was looking at whether or not the people were healthy as far as their teeth were concerned. But we wanted to look at how micronutrients might be playing a role in overall health. So we did what we named the Calton Project. It ended up being six years, over 135 countries and we were able to travel and really to live with, to sit down and observe the dietary and the lifestyle habits of people from vastly different cultures. And that was really exciting to us. We went to Papua New Guinea, which is probably one of our favorite places. And a lot of people may not even know much about Papua New Guinea. There’s over 800 languages, completely different dialects spoken in this just one small island nation. So you can imagine how many different dietary and lifestyle habits that these different cultures have as well. So we would study what the people were doing in the mountainous regions and their diet was completely different than when we went down on the Sepik River and we studied the tribes and the communities that lived on those riverbanks.
Mira: Yeah, so one was eating all seafood. And basically that’s what they …
Jayson: Very high protein.
Mira: Very, very high protein. And the people up north were eating pork and sweet potatoes, basically. Those were like the main foods that they were living on. The funny thing is the same thing happened to both cultures. This one obviously, first the northern region, Coca Cola decided to move a factory in. And so they of course started stripping the land and building these big factory buildings. And what they decided to do is they were like, oh we don’t want everyone here to hate us, so we’re going to make it so they like Coca Cola. So here’s a group of people who have not even seen people who look like us and they’re not wearing clothing. They’re living primitively. They’re buying and selling their wives still, I mean these are … which is very strange to get used to the concept when you’re traveling there. But these are people who are extremely primitive, and then Coca Cola moves in and says, well how can we make them like Coca Cola? Well, they really like hunting. These people love, great hunters, so we’re going to introduce them to darts so it’s kind of like their bow and arrow. But we’re going to make darts so that every time they hit a bull’s eye we give them a Coke.
Jayson: No, not one Coke. I think they got like eight Cokes.
Mira: So it was like one of these crazy things that like … so they would get these warriors in their skirts and full garb sitting there trying over and over again to get a bull’s eye simply because they want to out macho the guy next to them. But then all of a sudden they’re getting these cans of Coke. Now what happened to them? Well, within a year, they all of a sudden cancer rates skyrocketed. And they blamed it on the betel nut, which is what they’ve been chewing as long as the history of Papua New Guinea they’ve chewed a thing called the betel nut. It’s very high in energy and they said well this is why they’re all getting cancer. And we say, well, there’s no way. As a society they’ve been always doing this. Well what was introduced in the past few years that is giving them the cancer? Obviously it’s the Americanized food. So right after Coca Cola moved in, then all of a sudden white bread became the hottest thing there and they had never seen white bread. So it was white bread for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So this is what they’re eating now and it’s nothing like their tribal diets.
So what we can see from that is that the minute we start bringing in these processed foods and they stop eating the nutrient dense foods that they were eating, that’s when disease sets in. And the same thing happened in the lower regions, not to the greater extent yet because very few people can still get there. But we saw it in the Amazon where we started trading with them, and we started trading what do you think? We started bringing them sugar.
Jayson: Well, let me talk through the story. So we were in the Amazon and it took us a plane, a train, a car, a motor boat, and then after that we had a three hour canoe ride in.
So we’re way deep into the Amazon, right?
Mira: And clearly wet and miserable by this time.
Jayson: Oh, my goodness. And this woman is going to talk to us about manioc. Manioc is their kind of starch, their form of starch and they cook it and they make it into all kinds of different things. But the interesting thing about manioc is that it’s a deadly poison unless it’s prepared correctly. And of course we talk a lot about proper preparation for all foods because as you mentioned, we saw people eating foods across the full gamut. We saw people eating beans and rice and so all food we believe is good as long as it’s prepared properly. So in this particular case it takes, I don’t know, weeks. They have to squeeze the water out. They have to bury it. They have to ferment it. They have to wash it. They have to squeeze it. It takes weeks. And I asked the guy how long did it take you guys to figure out when it goes from being a deadly poison to a nutritious meal.
Mira: How many people lost their lives now?
Jayson: He’s like there were a lot of people who lost their lives on that experiment. So she’s making this for us and it’s this primitive kind of grill situation and there’s this rickety old kind of wooden table with a dirty cloth on it. And she walks over before she pours it on where she’s going to be, the cooking surface, and she pulls up the curtain and she pulls out of a tub of what is I’m saying?
Mira: Margarine.
Jayson: Margarine, margarine. It was shocking, margarine. And I looked at her …
Mira: And we obviously don’t remember very often.
Jayson: And I said where did you get the margarine? And she said, “Well traders, they come way up the Amazon and they trade them the margarine for their coconut oils and for their natural products and they tell them saturated fat’s bad, that the western society, this is going to kill you. What you need is this margarine. Look, it says so good for you and heart healthy. And they literally were using it.
Mira: In the middle of nowhere.
Jayson: Middle of nowhere, I would never even have believed they even had anything processed at all and there it was.
Mira: Yeah, everyone always says what is the one thing that you can teach us from all these different cultures? What’s the one thing that they were all doing the same? Well, there’s a lot of things that they were doing the same and we can talk about that. Here’s one thing they were all doing different, they all had different diets. There’s not one perfect diet. There’s not one perfect diet for him. There’s not one perfect diet for me.
There’s not one perfect diet for everyone listening we could say is one thing that’s going to work for everyone. Because these cultures were living in different areas, so they were eating the most nutrient dense foods that they could find in their surroundings. They weren’t trading with somebody else or from another place because look what happens when that happens. But what they were doing is they were picking things ripe. They were eating them fresh. We went to some cultures where they would actually change where the farming was altogether during different seasons to allow the soil to renourish itself, and to not be doing over farming. So it was really interesting the way that they automatically did these things in their society. What they were doing is they were making sure that they micronutrient rich foods and they were making sure they all had exercise every day. They all naturally had to. It was just part of everyday life.
Jayson: Five to nine miles a day they would just typically walk just to do their daily activities. And I think something else that we found that was really important was the respect for food. There’s a lot of people out there today that are into this food elimination thing. And it has its place and maybe it’s good. But never one culture did we ever go to and saw an abundance of whatever food growing over here and we say, are you going to use that food? Oh no, we don’t eat that. No, no, no. We eliminated that out of our diet. We’re not going to eat that. We were in Tibet, you know a lot of times people think these Tibetan monks that they’re vegan and they don’t eat meat. We’re sitting down with them and they’re eating meat and steak and fish. And I’m like, “Well aren’t you guys supposed to be vegan?” He’s like, “We eat whatever our people give us.” God, or the greater whatever it is, the whatever you believe in, gave us this food and these people donated this food to us. The last thing we’re going to do is say we don’t eat that. We eat everything. We eat everything because we respect the food, we respect the people, we respect the land.
Mira: That being said, do we eat everything? We don’t eat genetically modified wheat. We don’t eat over processed white refined sugar.
Jayson: We’re talking about natural foods here.
Mira: So a lot of times people will hear this and they’ll be like, wait a minute, you cut out a lot of things from your programs. And we’re like, no, no, no. We cut out things that are no longer what they should be. And that’s the problem with it. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with these things when they were naturally created. I mean there’s natural sugars and things, and fruit and other products. It’s this man-made crap that we’re all being served that’s the real problem. But yeah, I mean it’s amazing. We want to go back. We’ve seen a couple of different areas we went to. We went to once and then we want back two years later to see what happened. There’s one group in the Amazon that we’d very much like to go back and see. We actually got their list from the government of what they wanted to be subsidized with. And we actually went through it point by point and told them what things they were not allowed to accept from the government, what things they shouldn’t be allowing into their community. We’d love to go back and see how they’re doing.
So it’s little by little, but it’s a very sad state when you start to travel around to that extent to see how many more places are becoming westernized and the fact that we have all these doctors and we have all this medicine is not making any of us healthier.
Jayson: Yeah, I mean people ask us why did you do this? Why’d you kind of just leave your jobs and go in your thirties and travel around the world. Are you really at the time of life when you could have been really making the biggest difference in your careers? I said, well you know the reason why is because we wanted to learn what these elders had to teach us now before they were gone. And when we would go into a community we would try to find the oldest person in the community and bring our translator and say, okay, how has it changed? What have you seen different? How has the diet changed from what you saw 50, 60, 80 years ago? And how have you seen the diseases change within your community? What’s different? Did you have these health conditions when you were a child? Did anybody suffer from these? How old do people live? And we amassed a wealth of knowledge from these people who we know that we’re going to continue this Colton Project forward over the next 20, 30, 40 years.
But I also know that the ability for us to glean this information from the elders is going to be limited greatly. So that was one of my favorite things about the tribe.
Katie: That’s awesome, so exciting for you guys. And at the end I always ask people after an interview what are the three baby steps? If someone’s just starting out and maybe something you said really resonated with them and they’re wanting to make a change but they’re just starting, what are three baby steps that you get people to start moving in the right direction?
Mira: Well they’re all going to be micronutrient based. Basically probably the three steps of our program because we really say there are only three steps. So first it’s eat micronutrient dense food. Start to do some research. Figure out where you can get them. Our book “Rich Food, Poor Food,” is a very easy one to use because it’s just a point and shoot. You can go down every aisle and see which foods are the most micronutrient dense. But that, try to find ones that are local, that’s the first step definitely.
Jayson: Second step is really to take a good hard look at your lifestyle. Nobody says you have to change your lifestyle habits, but at least evaluate them. Know, be aware, and awareness is really our goal with that second step. Are you exercising too much? Do you live in a polluted city? Are you on three or four medications? Even if you’re not, do you take over-the-counter medications? And all those things that we talked about.
Mira: And the toxins that you talk about a lot.
Jayson: Yeah, if you’re going to have toxins, toxin load. And then our third step is supplementation. I think this is an important point to look at. If you’re going to choose a supplement, do a little bit of research. Don’t use technology from 80 years ago when they first created the multivitamin where they basically just kind of threw it all together in a pot, cross your fingers and hope you absorb some. Use 21st century knowledge about competitions and synergies and how micronutrients work together in that orchestra so that when you’re taking your supplement you’re getting everything that you need to get so that your body can heal itself.
Mira: One thing we can do is probably give them an invitation to the gift page.
Jayson: Sure.
Mira: And that’ll have a lot of things that they can do to take a short quiz to see whether or not they’re micronutrient deficient or sufficient, just ask some simple questions and see where they sort of fit on that sliding scale. We have a lot of stress guide on there which they can learn more about the micronutrients that might be affecting stress levels, because I think there’s six gifts on there that they can kind of enjoy on us.
Jayson: Yeah.
Katie: Awesome, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well as to Calton Nutrition which is your online home. And also I’ll make sure I put a link to “The Micronutrient Miracle” which is coming out in August, is that correct?
Mira: Absolutely, August 11th. We’re really excited.
Katie: Awesome, thank you guys. I know how busy you are. I really appreciate you taking the time. I encourage everyone, go check out Calton Nutrition and learn from the resources you guys have and I’ll have those links in the show notes.
Jayson: Thank you Katie.
Mira: Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Wellness Mama podcast where I provide simple answers for healthier families. If you would like to get my “Seven Simple Steps for Healthier Families” guide for free, head on over to Wellnessmama.com and enter your email and I’ll send it over to you right away. You can also stay in touch on social media, Facebook.com/endlesswellness or on Twitter and Instagram @wellnessmama. And I would also really appreciate it if you would take a second and subscribe to this podcast so that you’ll be notified of future episodes. And if you’ve ever benefitted from something I talk about it on this podcast, I’d be really appreciative if you would leave a rating or review since that’s how others are able to find this podcast and so we can help spread the message. Thanks as always for listening and for reading and for being on board with creating a future for our children that’s healthier and happier. And until next time, have a healthy week.
Thanks as always for listening to the Wellness Mama Podcast. If you’re enjoying these interviews, please subscribe via i Tunes or Stitcher and leave a (5 Star!) rating and review if you haven’t already!
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Thanks as always for listening to the Wellness Mama Podcast. If you’re enjoying these interviews, please subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher and leave a (5 Star!) rating and review if you haven’t already!
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