659: Silica, Salt, and Minerals for Collagen and Overall Health With Eidon Minerals

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and this episode is all about minerals and especially several very specific minerals, including silica, which I have not gotten to talk about on this podcast yet, but which I have been experimenting with and seeing really good results with so far. And I’m here with Rick Wagner, who’s the founder and CEO of Eidon Ionic Minerals, which is a San Diego based company that manufactures and distributes ionic liquid mineral supplements. He is a certified nutritionist and holds a master’s degree from San Diego State University. And he loves, as you will tell from this episode, to educate about the importance of minerals and healthy lifestyle and diet and the crucial role that elements play in maintaining a healthy mind and body.

And we get to go deep on several things in this podcast, including what we are made of and how minerals come into play, how we are a combination of minerals and water, among other things. We talk about the germ theory of disease and the parts of it that are an inadequate explanation, and the things that Western medicine misses through just looking at the level of organ systems or germs and not looking at the cellular level and mineral balance. We talk about the benefits of things like adding sea salt to the soil and gardening, the reason not to take too much calcium and how too much can be toxic.

We talk about the minerals we need that are complementary to things like calcium and especially silica, which I mentioned. I have been taking and noticing really good results, not just for my hair and my skin and my nails, but he also explains how this is part of the collagen matrix of our bones and actually keeps bones healthy over the long term, even more so potentially than calcium, because bone is a collagen matrix as well. And so often we don’t need more calcium, we need more collagen matrix, which requires minerals and silica. He talks about how to supplement with minerals so that they are the most effective in the body, and we get into some specifics on various minerals as well. He’s definitely a wealth of knowledge with many years of life experience and I’m excited to share this interview with you. So let’s join Rick. Rick, welcome and thanks so much for being here.

Rick: Thank you.

Katie: Well, I am extremely excited to learn from you today. I first came across you guys actually at a conference and I spent a lot of time talking to your team about various minerals. And even though I have been in the health world for about 16 years now, I learned some new things that day and I’m really excited to get to share some of those in the form of conversation today. And we’re going to get to go deep on a few topics, including as a preview a mineral called silica, which I’ve been using for the past few months and really enjoying. But to start broad, I know you have a lot of background knowledge that I think is going to be helpful to build this conversation on. So let’s talk in a broad sense about what we are made of and then maybe how minerals come into play there.

Rick: That is the most elemental question to ask. And to start with, if you look around you, and I tell this to people all the time, where do you think you came from? You didn’t come from the star. Well, actually you didn’t come from the stars a long time ago, but everything you see, feel and touch, including you emanated from the planet Earth. We are a combination of minerals and water as a beginning. Now there are other components of the body including sugars and fats and amino acids, but they all also originated from planet Earth. I like to use the phrase we’re children of the stars. And there’s an excellent book out about that discussing this individual’s theory about where we came from. And if you look at what is there in the universe, it’s other stars, planets and then us as a planet. We came from the planet and that is dirt and water. And so the, the significance of them is is beyond. And, and what we’re seeing is the Western medicine today is not addressing it in any cohesive or significant fashion. And so we have to rely on our own intuition and own knowledge and make ourselves aware and knowledgeable of what we’re made up of and how to keep us healthy. A proper balance of minerals will keep you strong and healthy until you aren’t, and then you will pass. And I’ve learned this throughout my life. I’ve had experiences with the minerals to the point where I absolutely recognize that this is it.

Katie: And I have a note from researching for this episode and in the dialogue before we got to record about the germ theory of disease and how this dovetails into the conversation. So for background, can you also explain what you mean by The Germ Theory of Disease and that not being an adequate explanation?

Rick: It’s interesting. If you look back in history, there have been numerous theories as to what causes disease. And I’m going to only take two steps back from where we began. But the, the first one was spontaneous. What was it called? Anyway, it was defined as just a spontaneous reaction of the body to something. And it arose out of, I think, yellow fever and the establishment of yellow fever where they couldn’t figure out what people were getting sick from. They were living though near swamps and so forth, and it was mosquitoes that were biting them and that created this theory.

Then after that it was Pasteur. Louis Pasteur is the one that developed the Germ Theory of Disease. And he was studying how different things like milk and other beer and things that would go bad. And he identified bacteria as the problem. That led into then our current state of the germ theory of disease, that everything is either if it isn’t caused by a bacteria or a virus, then it’s idiopathic and we don’t know what it is. And idiopathic the word to me means I’m an idiot and I don’t really know what I’m doing. But think about it. We are made up of bacteria, viruses and fungi in the gut.

To think that for some reason we’re going to be done in by another bacteria doesn’t make any sense. And then when you take a look at they keep coming up with new diseases. They even call cancer being caused by a virus. Most of these viruses are very healthful for us. We need to keep them in balance. But going back to the germ theory, if Western medicine can’t kill it, then they can’t do anything with it. And the issue is, do we need to be killing these things that we normally live with? They’re everywhere. How can we put a mask on and think that we’re going to be safe from something that may be bad for us or do us in, when in fact the issue is maintaining optimal balance within the cell of all the minerals so that the cells can work correctly as they’ve evolved to do to defend us.

And so the Germ Theory of Disease is quite flawed, certainly if you look at the use of and really it truly started with the development of penicillin. And if you look at the use though, of antibiotics, they can be very helpful, particularly when you have an injury and you’ve got tissue, the skin has been cut and the tissue is exposed to everything around you. That’s fascinating though, because if you have all the right minerals, you can heal that wound fairly quickly and the immune system will come into play and deal with anything that you happen to be exposed to that wasn’t recognized during World War I. And it was only in World War II, after penicillin was developed, that we were able to deal with a lot of that. But what happens then is the penicillin doesn’t focus on the bad bug. It focuses on all of the bugs in your gut. And once that happens, you have a very compromised gut.

What we’re doing literally is destroying the body’s own ability to be able to deal with itself and protect itself with what we’re giving ourselves in the way of drugs. It’s there to kill something, but it kills other stuff as well. So the Germ Theory of Disease is definitely flawed. And the other thing to think about is if we were to look at how Western medicine deals with things, they only go down to the organ level. They don’t look at the cells. Well, we’re made up of billions of cells and those cells have to function and they only function if they’ve got an adequate supply of minerals.

So a malfunction of a cell then will and if that usually caused by a lack of minerals, specific minerals, and once that cell starts to go and then another cell starts to go, eventually it affects the whole organ and then you’ve got an organ issue. But in reality so the Western medicine looks at the organ and they say oh, your liver has failed or your kidneys have failed, or whatever. But where did that start? It just started the organ it started at the cells and it started because the cells couldn’t work right. So that’s the mineral balance theory of disease, I guess you’d call it. That’s my theory. All of our organs are made of cells and if those cells aren’t working, the organ is not working. And almost invariably it’s because of the lack of minerals. I’m not sure. Did that answer the question?

Katie: It did. And I’m excited to go deeper on this because I’m imagining there are a lot of factors at play here. Everything from we heard about the depleted nutrient levels in the soil in the past several generations due to over farming and all of the practices that go along with that. But I think you highlighted something really important. And I think I often talk about diet in general and a lot in the health and wellness worlds. And I talk about trying to shift our mindset away from a restrictive mindset when it comes to food and foods being bad and avoiding them because they’re bad, or limiting calories and shifting more toward a focus of how do we consume the most nutrients possible, the most nutrient density from our food sources, which I think is psychologically more helpful because then we’re focused on a positive metric versus a negative one, not to mention all the other things that go along with that. And it seems like this is a correlative for that. When it comes to thinking of the immune system and in supporting body health in general, rather than thinking of there’s these germs out there that are bad and we have to kill them, thinking of more, how do we support the body in the most effective way at a cellular level so that our immune system is capable of handling whatever it’s going to encounter and so that we are supporting all of those organ systems, but also our cells individually. So the body is capable of handling whatever we throw at it. Am I understanding it correctly?

Rick: You are. What’s fascinating going to the food system, that and our water system are the two delivery mechanisms for minerals. Well, we have just systematically, by refining our foods, by using monocropping, which is growing the same crops on the same soil year after year after year, adding only NPK, which is nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, which will keep the plant standing and looking like that plant, but it’s not delivering all the minerals. And here’s why.

A plant, and each plant is different will draw a certain combination of mineral elements from the soil to thrive. And that combination, if it’s appropriate, it’ll allow that plant to be able to deal with anything that will tend to go in and attack it, any virus, bug or fungi. And after about seven years of growing the same crop on the same soil without doing any replenishment, that crop will not be able to grow. In fact, that is one of the reasons I read at some point that really stimulated the growth of not the human population, because we were inhabited by a lot of Indian tribes way before we came in. But the progression west of the white man was promoted because the farmer would go out and get a piece of land, they would grow crops on it, but after about six, seven, eight years, they couldn’t grow them anymore. So they would just pack up and move more west where it wasn’t being farmed. And that’s just continued to this day, to the point now where you have corporate farms. They’re only focusing on getting the crop up and into the store, not the quality of the crop.

I think that even when it’s organic, the true word is biodynamic. That’s how a biodynamic farmer is looking at his soil content and the soil mineral content as well. How can he keep that strong? And that’s done by crop rotation, letting it lay fallow for a year or two. But even that doesn’t do it. The best way to do it is to add sea salt back to the soil because that sea salt contains every element that we know of on the planet. So anyway, what’s happened today is if you go, even when you go out and you buy organic, you don’t know whether or not you’ve got a full complement of what that plant normally would deliver to you. And so it’s very important to do that because at least you’re not giving your body toxins. Because what happens is, with the farmer that does not practice these things, their crops will become very vulnerable to the things that recycle us, the fungi, the bacteria, the viruses. And so what do they do to deal with that? They kill them. They kill it all. But in the process, they’re killing us as well. They do that by spraying roundup on everything or all these other pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Those small microorganisms are there to recycle unhealthy living matter and that includes us.

And so when you shop today you want to shop at the perimeter but you still need to understand that you may or may not be getting the things that normally, traditionally that plant would deliver. But eating that way is really important because if you eat any other way you’re getting refined foods. I tell people don’t buy anything in a bag, a can, a jar. I do a little bit, but not foods. Maybe condiments. I will do that. What we’ve done is literally create an environment where we’re getting food but it is not delivering the primary functional nutrients that we need, which are the minerals.

Okay, so then you go to water. What have we done to our water? Well, water has always been, I mean it’s a source of life. But in the past we’ve had a situation where we weren’t really paying a lot of attention to water and we would drink it if in fact it had become polluted in some fashion and then it would make us sick and create really bad epidemics of all kinds of things. And it was because the water was so bad. So then what we figured out is we could put chlorine in it and that will keep all the bugs killed again killing the bugs rather than enhancing them.

And now we’re putting fluoride in the water because they say oh, that’s going to help our teeth. Well, fluoride in the past has been used as a rat poison and so why would it be important for our teeth? All the studies show it helps about it does seem to help kids that have, are prone to cavities from the age of five to twelve. After that no help at all.

So anyway, though the water we have poisons in our water, excessive chloride can be poisonous. In fact, going back to minerals, excesses of any of the minerals can become toxic. The recommendation of taking 1000 milligrams of calcium a day is toxic, especially without silica. And what I like to ask or tell people to think about is what do you think a cow eats if you’re eating meat? What’s that cow eat meat or a horse or a goat. They eat grass. That’s all they eat. Well there’s not a lot of calcium in grass. They certainly don’t drink any calcium from their mom after they’re weaned, we’re the only mammal on the planet that does that. And so what’s keeping them healthy? Well, it turns out then we’ll go get into the silica thing in a minute. But I believe it’s the fact that the grass is growing on areas where they’re not doing mono-cropping even though it looks like it. Most of the grass is growing then dying and putting the minerals back into the soil. And then they’re starting to grow again, but they’re not eating all of these other things that theoretically are super healthy for us. But in the food, what we’ve done is literally today we’ve depleted the food and water have two primary sources, the only sources, actually, of our minerals, unless we supplement.

Katie: I definitely want to go deeper on that. I’m glad you mentioned fluoride as well, because thankfully there’s not fluoride in the water where I live. But I do have a whole house filter anyway to get out the excess chloride and everything else that they add. But I’ve researched oral health quite a bit and from what I found, yes, fluoride can be beneficial in that narrow window you mentioned, but typically just topically. So I always use the analogy that drinking it is somewhat similar to if you were going to eat bandaids because you had a cut on your skin. Technically a bandaid might help, but not if you’re going to eat it. So the delivery mechanism, I think, is a little misguided there. But I want to highlight a tip. So you mentioned adding salt to the soil, and I’ve been gardening for years, but that’s a new tip to me. I do make my own compost, so it has a lot of organic matter and hopefully minerals from the composting. But can we literally just sprinkle salt into our garden beds or is there a specific method for that?

Rick: Yes, I have orange trees at my home, and I met a gentleman many years ago. He represented a company that was harvesting sea salt from the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. And we met and we talked, and I was starting the mineral company at that point. He was selling his salt to farmers to sprinkle back on the soil, because what’s happened is we’ll grow a plant and then we’ll cut it and remove it from that area. And that’s where the depletion of the minerals comes from. It doesn’t get to die and go back into the soil. So you have to add it back in. And it’s the most complex form of easily dissolvable mineral elements that can get back be put back into the soil. And he sold this company, but whomever bought it is still doing this. And he taught me how to put them around my orange trees, and they’re healthy.

So everyone’s worried about the Asian psyllid, which is a bug. This is crazy. Okay, so the whole East Coast and West Coast is all worried that this bug from Asia is going to come over and infest the trees, the orange trees in particular. But the bug doesn’t hurt the tree. What they say the bug does is it will somehow bite the tree, but then put this bacteria into the tree, which then is what kills the tree. Well, in reality, the tree has just become depleted of potential essential elements and they haven’t added them back in, particularly zinc. And zinc is huge for our immune system, and it’s huge for trees, but they’re after the bug. They want to kill the bug, but yet the bug isn’t really even what kills the tree, but what they’re saying is that bacteria doesn’t kill the tree either. It’s just the growing quality of the farmers efforts on keeping a good mineral balance in the soil where those trees are.

So anyway, that’s the germ theory again. Okay, so what we have to do is spray our trees to kill the bug. Theoretical. Well, what I do is where I live, we’re required to spray. So what I do is I just have them spray with seawater. Basically, you take 400 gallons of water, and you put about 5 pounds of sea salt into it, mix it up, and spray it on the tree. The trees love it. Anyway, I’m not sure where we were going with that one, but refresh me.

Katie: No, that’s fascinating. I’m going to try that in my garden. And I’ve also heard of adding epsom salt for the magnesium to some plants, and that being helpful as well. But it sounds like plants have mineral needs as well, and we’ve sort of been ignoring those, which is also symptomatic of this happening to humans as well. We’ve sort of been ignoring our mineral needs. You also mentioned something that I think is really valuable and important to talk about, which is this overconsumption of calcium. Because I’ve researched this some, and certainly people have probably seen the recommendation to get enough calcium and take enough calcium. And I’ve talked some about how especially without other minerals present, that can be actually really counterproductive and or harmful for humans. But can you walk us through why too much calcium can be a problem and maybe what other minerals we need to be aware of in that equation?

Rick: Yeah, calcium is an essential mineral element, obviously. But when the National Academy of Sciences decided to do all their research on what, how much and of what mineral is essential for humans, this particular study on calcium was funded by the dairy industry, and that what they were selling was calcium and milk. Contrary to all natural functions of how mammals work, they don’t take extra calcium in after they’re weaned.

So what the body will do, though, understanding that it’s essential because not I mean, not only does it help as a major component of bone, which, by the way, is the warehouse for calcium, it also is important for nerve transmission, energy production, blood clotting. There are a number of functions of calcium, but the question is, how much do you need and how can you manage it? Well, I am a perfect example. I drank milk until I was about 50, had cereal every day or whatever. I still eat cheese now and then. Everything is yogurt, but everything is well monitored by me as to what I take in. But when I was about 50 or 45, I began to experience pain in my neck, and it was arthritis. So at about 50, I could move my head or 45 degrees, and that was it. And then before then, I had to move my whole shoulder like this to turn and see what was behind me. It was really tough backing out of a parking lot because they didn’t have backup cameras then. Anyway, and that was when I was introduced to this silica supplement. Keep in mind, silica is the second most prevalent element on the Earth’s crust after oxygen, and yet it isn’t really even recognized today by the National Academy of Sciences. I’ve asked them to do research on it and they just ignore me. Sulfur is another one, and they ignore that one as well.

So anyway, I started taking the Silica. It was a Silica Gel made in Germany to see if it regrow my hair, because I’d lost all my hair and I took it for about six weeks. And then I had scheduled a trip back east, and on the label it said, Refrigerate After opening. And this was a gel. And you had to mix it with stuff. Well, you mix ours with stuff. But anyway, I didn’t take it with me. I went for a ten day trip. At the end of ten days, all of this pain came back in my neck. Now, granted, I had gone to my doctor, Kaiser Permanente, and had an x-ray done. This was fortuitous. But it was right before I started taking this stuff. And they said, oh, yeah, you have arthritis. And I said, well, what do you do about doctor? And they just looked at me and they said, there’s no cure for arthritis. You just have to take aspirin the rest of your life. And if it really gets bad, we can go in with a scalpel and we’ll scrape the calcium off the vertebrae because that’s where it is. It’s on your vertebrae. Turns out one thing they did say is we can’t see the calcium either. But in fact, if you know how a vertebrae looks, it’s round. That part goes around the spine, and then it has a little thing at the end. Well, I thought that it may be those little things at the end rubbing together, but no, it was it was being built up on the inside of the vertebrae, so you couldn’t even see it.

As a side note, I had a friend that wouldn’t listen to me, wouldn’t take my Silica, and he got he got the same thing in his back and he let them go in and cut it. And he walks around with a walker now, so manually removing this stuff doesn’t work. So anyway, all this pain came back after about ten days of not taking it, and I thought to myself, well, this is strange. Why is that? So I got right back on it. Long story short, nine months later, I didn’t have arthritis anymore. I was about 50 at the time, and I’ve never had a pain in my neck or my back or any of my joints since.

So I then got very, very curious as to what was going on. I bought a book at that time on minerals and vitamins to see what they said about Silica. It wasn’t even mentioned in the book. I had a friend that was doing some research. Actually, I had a chemist friend, and he’s still my chemist, and he did some research on it and found that there had been some very good research done at the School of Public Health at UCLA by Dr. Edith Carlyle. This was in the mid 70s. She literally showed that by restricting silica from the diet of chickens and rabbits and other animals, their skeletal structure would become compromised, and their skin and their feathers and their fur, everything would become very compromised just by restricting the silica content. Well, they theorized, and in fact, as far as I’m concerned, this should be just proof. Silica is the essential element. It builds collagen. Well, collagen is what makes up. It holds all of our cells together in the right place. So it’s an absolute necessity that we have collagen in our bodies. It’s our cartilage, it’s our ligaments, our tendons, it’s all of our mucus. And so the restriction of the Silica element will create the inability of the body to maintain proper collagen. That is where everything really kind of falls into place.

But Western medicine isn’t looking at that at all. They’re just looking at the calcium. Well, it turns out that silica does another thing. It manages calcium. Because if you take extra calcium without the silica, your body says, oh, I need to keep this stuff. I don’t want to get rid of it, but I can’t get it into the bones where it’s normally stored, so I’m going to just store it wherever I can. That is osteoarthritis. And in fact, it’s also osteoporosis. Osteoporosis isn’t the lack of calcium and bone. It’s the lack of a collagen matrix. Bone is mainly collagen. It’s the marrow. And the marrow gives bone its flexibility, so that if you are struck or you fall and you hit something, it doesn’t just snap. If it’s just calcium, it will snap and break. If it’s fully mineralized with silica and has all the collagen matrix it needs, it’ll bend sort of like bamboo.

But think of when you were a child and you’re at school and you’re riding on the chalkboard and you push too hard on the chalk, it would break. Well, that’s calcium carbonate. That’s what actually most calcium supplement is. That just shows you that if you push too hard on a calcium that is not also incorporated with a collagen, it will break, it will snap. And that’s what happens in osteoporosis. It’s a man made disease, and it’s because of excessive consumption of calcium and no addressing the concept of silica.

Katie: That’s so fascinating and you explain that so well. I’m guessing we probably don’t have as many food based sources of silica as we used to and we just aren’t getting as much as we used to. But I’ll say I’ve been taking silica for about the last six months now, probably after meeting you guys at a conference. And I’ve also started giving it to my kids because they’re all athletes and doing pretty explosive intensive movements and so from a joint protective perspective. But I’ve also noticed just anecdotally that my hair and my nails are growing like crazy ever since I started getting enough silica. But what are some of the food based sources of silica? And are people just not getting as much as we used to? Or is it that we’re getting too much calcium? Or is it both?

Rick: It’s both. And as we all understand, bread has always been what we would call the staff of life. And before the advent of a combine, which is the machine that harvests grain, it would be harvested by hand. Now what we didn’t do was pick off the outside husks of the grain. We would thresh the grain to get them off of the staff or the shaft of the wheat. But we would not sit around and pick off the skin. That’s where all the silica is. So what we would then do is we would take that grain that had been threshed, we would take it to the grinder who had a water mill or whatever and he had two big stones, they were granite, which is primarily silica. They throw the grain in one end, out come the other as flour. And that flour was whole and it contained a full complement of the elements that that grain pulled out of the dirt, which actually is what all grazing animals live on anyway.

So with the advent of the combine, those outside husks are always removed. So the only ones that really get it are the animals that we’re feeding the grain remnants to. What we also do there is remove the outside portion of the grain, which is the brand. So that’s the other section of minerals that are so important. And all we eat, I would say 90% of the US population eats white flour. White flour is completely devoid of any minerals and it’s carbohydrates only. It is converted to sugar as fast as white sugar is in the body. And if the body can’t burn it, it converts it to fat. This is a natural process. This is the reason we have such obesity today and why people eat neat, because they here’s another theory. People eat a lot more food than they should because most of the food is nutrient deficient. And the body is saying I need more nutrients and it’s not going to get them because it’s not there and yet. But what they are adding is carbohydrates which the body converts to sugar instantly, and the to fat if it isn’t burned. That is really huge in my estimation. But that is the primary source is the grain of silica.

In the past, I’ve heard that potato skins also have a lot of silica. It’s the outside husks of whatever or skins or whatever it is. We also use horsetail, which is a plant which is very rigid, stiff plant. You grind it up and you swallow it. And then the other one is bamboo. Think of bamboo. Bamboo is rich in silica. The pandas eat it all the time. But when you can’t break it, it bends and bends and bends and then it’ll sort of crack, maybe, but that’s a very rich source. Now, here’s the problem. When we eat something, the body has to atomize any minerals that are contained in that food or water. In a water base, it’s pretty much already atomized. Seawater. All of the minerals in seawater are at their atomic size. When you eat let’s say you eat grain, all right? But this grain is whole. It’s got the outside husks and everything in it. It’s a loaf of bread. The body will start to break that bread down in the stomach. Your stomach is the only part of your body that has an acid base. And whatever we are breaking down in the way of minerals has to be done in an acid base. It will not be done in an alkaline state.

So you’ve got about an hour, hour and a half to be able to atomize whatever you eat in the way of minerals so that they can then be transported into the bloodstream and then into the cells for use. Well, after about an hour, hour and a half, the stomach has created what they call a chime, which is just really mushy liquid and or Liquid food that then goes down to the small intestine. Now, there are other enzymes that will then begin to break out and break down proteins into amino acids, carbohydrates into sugars and fats into triglycerides and so forth. And so that all occurs in the small and large intestine. There’s no more breakdown of the minerals at that point. So you’ve got to be able to get them in the stomach. The stomach has to be able to do it. So much of what we take in the way of solids is not ever even absorbed in a mineral state.

But the best foods, I would say, well, the problem is you can’t get them anymore. You can’t get the silica anymore in the food. It’s all been refined out. And in fact, I talked to at one of the Anaheim shows, I talked to a couple of the companies there that were selling organic grains and I asked them if they ever got the grains whole with the husks on. They said no, we can’t get them anymore, even organically grown. So it’s an element that we need to be supplementing with in some form, and it should be supplemented with not as a solid, but as a liquid so that we don’t have to worry about, okay, if you take 500 milligrams of this pill here, how much do we really get into our system? And so it’s very comparable to drinking seawater, but it’s more focused.

Katie: And I want to go deep on the best way to take minerals in a minute. But before we do, we’ve also talked about salt a little bit, and you mentioned the difference between table salt and sea salt some, but from other guests I’ve had on this podcast, it seems like a lot of us are actually not even getting enough basic salt in our diets or in our nutrition at this point. Can you speak a little bit to salt and sodium and how much we actually need and why we would want to avoid table salt, which to my understanding, is, like you said, devoid of minerals, except for maybe they add iodine in sometimes, but not all the other minerals we would encounter in sea salt.

Rick: Yes, and this is very important. It’s as significant as refined sugar. Table salt is sea salt, completely refined except for sodium and chloride. And those are the salty parts of the salt, anyway. Sodium and chloride are essential elements for the body. Without chloride, you can’t digest food without sodium and or without the combination of them, you can’t maintain a proper PH balance of no, that’s wrong. You have to have all the minerals to maintain a proper PH balance throughout the body. But sodium and chloride are the basic elements for that. And then there’s others that have they have either a PH of greater than seven or a PH of less than seven. Less than seven is acidic. That would be something that would be bonded to chloride. And then if it’s alkaline, it’s something that’s going to be bonded to sodium. I read a lot about how sodium is bad for you. None of these mineral elements are bad for you. They’re all essential, but you need to know the proper way to get them. If you are eating sodium and chloride, basically all you’re giving your body is two elements, not the others. Now, granted, they are two significant elements in the body, but if you get them without all the other trace elements, you are hugely deficient then in what you need to have to have your cells function correctly.

So sea salt, on the other hand and keep in mind that sea salt has been utilized by man ever since we began to walk on the planet. Up until maybe 100 years ago, it was sea salt, and Rome was founded on sea salt. All of our food preservation was done using sea salt, up until maybe 100 years ago. And so it’s been very recently that we’ve completely devoided our spicing with all of the other mineral elements that we needed. And it’s just the sodium and chloride that we’re getting in. Most people do that.

In fact, I experienced that as well. I went to a Club Med gosh early on, maybe in my forty’s, and the first day got up and I went and had breakfast and they had a bowl the French are still pretty smart anyway, they had a bowl of salt and you take a pinch with your fingers and sprinkle it on. Well, the salt was crystalline. And I looked and I was used to table salt. And I looked down and said, oh, I can’t do that, that’ll be too salty. So I did not put any salt on my eggs or in my food. And that day I really, really did a lot of work. I was in a swim competition and we did paddling and certain I didn’t surf that day, but a lot of water sports and a lot of land sports that night. And I perspired a lot. It was in Mexico and it was tropical. That night I began to feel kind of nauseous. And I told my wife, I said, you’ll have to go to dinner by yourself. I feel you really feeling really bad. So I just crawled into bed and she said okay. And I woke up that night, she was still at dinner. I was flat on the floor, some spot between the bed and the bathroom. And I literally passed out. And I woke up and I said, why did this happen? What’s going on? And then I thought I had read an article in the National Geographic several months before about how important salt is. And they would give miners and farmers salt tablets and that was just basic salt. When they would perspire too much, they’d take a tablet of not table, sea salt and it was all the electrolytes and everything else. And basically I had burned out all my electrolytes. So when my wife came back, I asked her to go back to the restaurant and get some sea salt. I just said salt because I knew that salt was not table salt and salt and bread and water. And she came back and that’s all I ate for the next 30 minutes. That morning, the next morning I was completely recovered. That’s all I did, salt water. And I don’t know if the bread was really that good, but it was French bread and that was it. That’s how significant salt is and how important it is to get from the oceans.

Now there are some sources that are better than others, and I believe that ocean water is by far the optimal blend of all the minerals. So if you get water from a land-based source, you need to question it. I would say salt from the Himalayan sea salt I would say is very good. There’s another salt that we’ve discovered that I think is magical. It’s Peruvian pink salt. This salt water bubbles up from the ground in the Andes. At 11,000ft in elevation. So the question we need to ask is how is sea salt getting from the ocean up 11,000ft in the air to come out and bubble out? And I’ve done analyses on it and it’s very, very comparable to ocean water. And so we do sell it. It’s such an amazing thing and we’re probably going to incorporate it into some of our Maltese and our blends might even make just a straight supplement of the sea salt. Getting it from other areas may or may not be a problem. The Dead Sea or Great Salt Lake or some of these other inland sea areas where man has polluted them is problematic. But the oceans can also be somewhat polluted, as we know, because we dump everything into them. So if we’re going to eat regular sea salt, we have to be very selective as to where we get it. But it’s the root.

Katie: That makes sense. And it lines up with what I’ve read and what other podcast guests have said about how we are often not getting anywhere near enough salt. And that especially with the several decades of being afraid of salt and people removing salt from their diets, and then people who are trying to eat a more natural diet based on whole foods but are not adding salt, that we can often get very deficient in that very quickly. And like you mentioned, this is necessary for every part of the body to function optimally, which is also, it seems like the case for a lot of minerals. So from my understanding, we can make certain vitamins in our bodies. Like for instance, we make vitamin D from sun exposure, but that’s not the case with minerals from what I understand. So can you speak to that and also how we can make sure we are getting enough of all these different types of minerals? Are there any other gaps that we need to be aware of?

Rick: The concept of vitamins and minerals is interesting. In fact, I’ve read that the word vitamin is actually a combination of two words vital and mineral. I don’t know who thought that one up, but vitamins are, are primarily made, all our B vitamins are made in our gut by bacteria. In fact, a very fascinating story is E. Coli. E. Coli is not a bad bacteria. It makes vitamin B12 in our bodies, in our intestines. What has happened and why E. Coli has gotten such a bad name is that these people that were raising cattle in feed lots were giving them, quote unquote, organic foods. Well, they were also giving them very refined foods and foods that they were not used to eating. It literally converted and mutated within their gut. And so the E. Coli bacteria that they were given actually was changed. It looked like E. Coli, but it wasn’t like the E. Coli that we use in our gut. So it’s another one of those cases where a bacteria which is absolutely essential, has been demonized to the point where it’s, oh, it’s deadly. Well, it certainly could cause health issues and digestive issues, but it’s a normally occurring element in the gut. And in fact, it is used by companies that make vitamins to make B12. So this is kind of a case of, well, gosh, what can we do?

Well, the one thing we need to be doing is making sure that our gut flora is in good health. Our gut flora does make all the B vitamins. Our skin makes the B vitamins. The only one that we probably need to eat is vitamin C. They’re talking about K2, while vitamin K when I studied nutrition, we didn’t even know what vitamin K was. So it’s a new one. And is it essential and necessary for bone? Not like silica.

But here’s the difference between a vitamin and a mineral. Within every cell we have a nucleus, and then we have all the cytoplasm of the cell. The nucleus contains the instruction to the cell with the RNA to make certain enzymes. These enzymes are then manufactured within the cell using amino acids, proteins, and perhaps some carbohydrate and perhaps some fats. Once the enzyme which is going to make the cell be able to do what it’s supposed to do is completed, and this is happening every single second of every of our lives, there has to be a particular mineral to attach to it to activate it. The enzyme can be activated by a mineral. If there’s no mineral for that to activate it, it won’t work. The vitamins act as boosters to that enzyme, so certain vitamins will come into play and will enhance the functioning of the enzyme to optimize it. So you can have all the vitamins you want, though, and if you don’t have the minerals, they won’t work, the enzyme will not activate, won’t be catalyzed. And so that’s the huge significant difference. You need them both. But the one for the functioning of the cell itself is the mineral that could be magnesium or potassium.

Here’s a perfect example. Your heart. Your heart has to beat every second of every day, and sometimes quicker than a second. There’s four elements that really control all of that: sodium and chloride and potassium and magnesium. The sodium and chloride work as far as being able to transport the potassium and the magnesium in and out of the cells. The potassium is what makes cells contract. So you’ve got to have, when your heart cell makes this enzyme to contract, it has to have potassium in it, and then they’ll contract. Then though, it’s making another enzyme right behind it that uses magnesium to relax. That’s why we always recommend if you’re getting cramps, take magnesium. If you’re getting cramps during exercise, take potassium. But they’re both absolutely essential and required. So then you run out of that, you will die. But there are other vitamins that will also help, but they cannot keep the heart functioning by themselves. That’s the significant difference. I’ve taken scores of vitamins and I’ve never ever seen any result or felt any result like I have with the minerals. And so that’s my take on it.

Katie: And it makes sense. You explain it so well. And I know you guys have the liquid minerals. I’ve started incorporating these for me and especially for my kids as well. For the kids. I love that it’s easy to just add these to water or to any liquid. So it’s for even for kids who would have trouble swallowing pills anyway, this is an easy way to get them in. And I think the idea of understanding how silica contributes to the collagen matrix in the body is such an important piece. And I’m really glad we got to go deep on that because certainly a lot of people are concerned with that from an aging perspective. But even more than the surface level of how our skin looks, that’s also, from your explanation, impacting our bones, our organs, how everything is functioning within the body as well.

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Are there any good guidelines for how much of these minerals that we need to get at a particular time? Or how do we know if we’re getting enough or if we’re not?

Rick: That is the $64,000 question. And I pay no attention at all to the National Academy of Sciences and what they say because they’re all based on solids and what you swallow and they’re all based on diet. We don’t really know what the optimum level of minerals should be in the body. That’s a continuous study going on because we do hair mineral analysis and we look at what’s in the hair. But that shows you what you’ve consumed and what you’re using and what you’ve excreted. And so it’s not necessarily telling us what the optimum level should be. And then who do you pick to measure for optimal? There’s no source somewhere of information that tells us that we have to learn it. And that whole process is in process, the learning process. We are human beings and we’re studying and learning, but we still don’t have the answer.

So the first recommendation is to make sure that you get a good multiple mineral. And that would be a combination of sea salt and then a multi like we make, or another multi. But the problem is you need so many of them are based on what you know, oh, you got to have 1000 milligrams of calcium, you have to have this and that, 400 milligrams of magnesium. It’s all supposition at this point. We don’t really know. And so the thing to understand, I think, is what minerals might cause deficiencies that then you would feel and understand that if you then supplement it with that, you’re obviously not getting that mineral adequately in an adequate level to not have that symptom. So we’re going at it from a basis of what people are experiencing in the way of taking these minerals when they have a problem.

As a simple example, magnesium, once a person starts to supplement with it, and this could be even a dose of ten milligrams, eight milligrams a day, especially taken at night, will be able to get around muscle cramping. Muscle cramping is big for us older people, and it’s because of a lack of magnesium that is created in the body. We don’t do a lot of physical exercise when we get older, but if you get cramps during that, you need potassium. I remember when I played football, when we first started doing our workouts, I would always get cramps. And what was funny is I now know that I needed potassium. So when I’d get a cramp or whatever, I’d go to the sidelines and I’d eat grass. I literally would there would be long things of grass. I’d pick it up and I’d be chewing on the grass. I think, oh, I was just getting chlorophyll. No, I was getting all kinds of things, potassium, magnesium, and everything else. But we don’t know what the optimum should be. But my belief is if you begin to incorporate sea salt into your diet, you’re going to be far better off, and then start to learn. And we’ve put together a book on what mineral ailments may be deficient given certain symptoms, and that’s all Western medicine is. They look at symptoms, they name it, and then they try and find a drug to suppress it, rather than to say, okay, here’s a symptom. What cells are driving that? What cells make that work, and how can we make those cells healthier?

Katie: I love it. I know so much more we could learn, and we could probably do an hour long episode on each of these minerals by itself and still not even come close to touching all of the information we would need to understand. But I was so excited to have you on and get to understand more because I’ve been incorporating these into my own life and for my kids lately. And especially I mentioned my kids all are in different athletic pursuits and this is kind of their peak season. And so I’ve been handing out electrolytes and silica to a bunch of kids who are in my house, the house where everybody can always go for food, and if they’re there, I’m going to put minerals in their water as well.

But I was so excited to learn from you today. I hope we get to do a round two eventually and maybe cover some other minerals in depth as well. But like I said, silica has been pretty life changing for me. I think six pregnancies probably depleted the silica I did have in my body, and so it’s been really great to replenish that, and I’m hoping to learn much more from you in the future. But a couple of questions I love to ask at the end of interviews, the first being if there is a book or a number of books that have profoundly impacted you personally and if so, what they are and why.

Rick: The most profound book I ever read I think was Conversations with God and I think there’s about five of those books and in one of the books I forget the guy’s name that wrote somebody, he asked God, he said I forget even the question but the answer was God lives in the minerals. The minerals literally and we are what we are is energy and the minerals are the energy-delivery mechanism. They’re made in the sun as the sun explodes. So they start out as hydrogen and then it creates all the other minerals and when we take them in, they are our energy. We are living minerals. That’s what we are. So that was probably the most profound awakening that I ever had as to what really this is all about. I am in the process, I will finish, of writing a book about my ideas on the minerals and we all have different ideas. We need to look at them and then evaluate them, see how they work for us and then adapt or not adapt. But it was Walsh, Neale Walsh wrote the book Conversations with God that was profound to me. I haven’t read a book yet that I would say is the ultimate and or really motivated me more so than my experiences, my personal experiences. But there are a number of books out there now that are addressing the different mineral elements and why they’re so significant but that was the one that really got me.

Katie: I will include a link to that in the show notes as well and of course links to Eidon and to all the products that you guys have available with some recommendations of the ones I’m currently taking as well. And lastly, is there any parting advice you want to leave with the listeners today that could be related to minerals or any of the topics we’ve talked about or entirely unrelated life advice?

Rick: Yes. I had an epiphany several months ago about life and people and what we really are and some expert was saying oh, this is the way it is and that’s the way it is. My recommendation to everyone is you are no less intelligent than any other person on the planet. We all have our own innate intelligence and so don’t listen to one thing or another or think that because some scientists came up with the idea that it’s real and we all have plenty of innate intelligence. If you look around to all the animals on the planet they’re living just fine by themselves. They don’t have doctors taking care of them, they don’t have their moms and dads saying oh don’t do this and don’t do that. We have as much innate intelligence as anyone else out there.

So when you read information, take it with a grain of salt. Just understand that it may be right, it may be wrong, it may be good for you, it may not be. But you need to follow your own feelings and intuition and gut as to what you need to be doing. But you can just rest assured that you’re not going to be helping yourself by eating anything refined by man. So man is not the answer. Nature is the answer as far as being able to optimize your health. But understanding how it works is the second thing. And listen to what people say and then evaluate it with everything else, you know, and make your own decision. Don’t follow anything blindly. That’s my recommendation.

It’s funny because now when I look at listen to anybody and I look at what they’re saying, I said, well, does that make sense? Maybe not, but we need to learn. And a lot of it, I mean, mine has all been just experiencing things. I didn’t get to read any of this stuff in a book until afterwards. Then that supported my own experiences. So anyway, listen to yourself, listen to your innate intelligence, and that will normally guide you very, very well.

Katie: I love that. I think that’s a perfect place to wrap up for today. And it touches on something I say often on this podcast, that we are each our own primary health care provider. And at the end of the day, while we can work with practitioners who can be helpful, the responsibility lies with us. And it’s our daily choices that make the biggest difference. And taking responsibility for that and for our own health is one of the best steps we can take, I think, to lifelong health.

Rick: Absolutely. That’s it. That is it.

Katie: Well, Rick, thank you so much. It’s been a joy to get to talk to you today. I learned a bunch in this conversation and I’m so grateful for your time. Thank you for being here.

Rick: Thank you. Take care.

Katie: And thanks, as always, to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.