689: The Survival Paradox: How Our Innate Healing Abilities Can Turn Against Us With Dr. Isaac Eliaz

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I really enjoyed this conversation that was all about the survival paradox, how our innate healing abilities can turn it against us and that also went deep on what our guest calls open heart medicine and really put some specifics to the mind heart body connection and this piece that I’ve talked about some in my own recovery journey and how dealing with the inner affected the outer so, so profoundly.

And I’m here with Dr. Isaac Eliaz, who is considered a leading expert in the field of integrative medicine. He specializes in cancer, detoxification, immunity, and other complex conditions. He’s a very well-respected physician, researcher, author, educator, and mind-body practitioner. And he’s working with institutes like the National Institutes of Health, Columbia University, and others. And he’s co-authored many studies on integrative therapies for a lot of the things we talk about today. He’s also the founder and the medical director of a medical clinic in California, where he has pioneered the use of therapeutic apheresis as an adjunctive blood filtration treatment for detoxification and chronic degenerative conditions.

And while he is extremely well-versed in the deep science side, I love that this conversation flowed very deeply into the mind-body-heart integration side. And we start off talking about how he got to study with meditation masters in the Himalayas and how this led to what he now calls open-heart medicine and how our feelings and emotions and hearts can actually very much impact our physiology.

He explains what the survival paradox is and what this new paradigm of understanding is for health and disease, how it relates to fight or flight, the feminine principle in Chinese medicine and how this relates to health, what alarming protein is and how it impacts the body, moving both physically and emotionally from reactivity to responsiveness, the fibrotic process that happens when our body locks down emotions, what the most physically reactive foods are, and how to avoid foods that will contribute to the survival system activating.

We talk about cytokine storms and their relation to the survival paradox. We go deep on the topic of a protein called Galectin-3 and how to block it to attenuate the inflammatory response. We talk about the importance of addressing toxins in food and water and ways to give our kids the best foundation in life and help them avoid encounters with the survival paradox.

He talks about the studies on gratitude and health and how to nurture gratitude and the distinction of letting go versus giving up and so much more. So like I said, I really enjoyed this conversation. I think it’s a not talked about enough pieces of physical health, which is that inner alignment, emotional and mental and spiritual health as well. And I think he ties it in really well with such a unique perspective from both sides of that. So without further ado, let’s join Dr. Isaac. Dr. Eliaz, welcome and thanks so much for being here.

Dr. Eliaz: Thank you so much for having me today. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Katie: Me too. And I got to preview your work and read through your book and I’m very excited for this conversation. Before we jump into the survival paradox and break that down though, I also noticed in your bio that you got to study under some of the greatest meditation masters in the Himalayas. And meditation has been a big part of my journey in the last five years. So I would love to hear how you ended up doing that and what it was like.

Dr. Eliaz: I started my journey in meditation and in martial arts and healing arts as a teenager in South Korea. I’m a native of Israel. My father was an engineer. So that was my introduction and since then I’ve been meditating. It’s getting close to 50 years so I’m not so young anymore. But I got very interested in… So always meditation was part of my life, but then when I got, when I was 30 years old and I came to United States, I got very interested in Buddhism. And I got very involved in unusual meditation training, and I spent 10 years, half a day meditating and half a day working.

And for 20 years, I would go to the mountains for two to three months a year and just meditate and practice. And as part of this, I got to be the doctor of some of the most legendary meditation masters in the Himalayas that were also my teachers. And this very esoteric, hard to come by, only one of them is alive now in his late 90s. All this unique and esoteric training, I’ve put it together into a simpler concept that they call open-heart medicine, the infinite healing power of love and compassion. That is innate within us in general. And there’s a bigger door to it when we are parents, especially when we are mothers, you know, the unconditional nursing and taking care. And so I use it as a healing tool that I, in my medical practice, the Amitabha Medical Clinic, but also when I teach meditation and healing. So I still do it, I’m still in touch. I get the WhatsApp messages from the assistants of this masters on a daily basis. And so I’m a day as student, while I also share my little bit of the knowledge I gathered over decades.

Katie: I love that. And I’m excited later in this conversation to delve into the heart side of the medicine and to go deeper on that. But for background context, I would love if you could walk us through sort of the basis, the foundation of your new book, The Survival Paradox, what that term means. And then we’re going to build from there into all the things that fit within that umbrella.

Dr. Eliaz: So the survivor paradox offered a new paradigm in our understanding of health and disease. We know in integrative medicine, at least for a long time, that inflammation drives multiple illnesses, acute and chronic. The cytokine storm in COVID is very, very well known to many people. But inflammation is really not a cause, it’s a result. What drives our inflammatory response is our survival drive. And the paradox is that the survival drive, Katie, that is built within us in every cell in our body, it keeps us alive. is also what gets us sick, what gets us miserable, what gets us not to enjoy life, and what shortens our life. And that’s the paradox. And because it is built within us, it’s automated through the autonomic nervous system and then the biochemical system wakes up. We’ll talk more about it. and And just by understanding it, we open a door to a shift. And the shift is multidimensional. And I’ll be delighted to touch about it as we go through our interview.

Katie: Yeah, I’m excited to delve deeper on this, both understanding the physiological things that are happening within the survival paradox. And then I would guess by understanding that, you said awareness is even just understanding it can be a huge key to this. But I would guess that knowledge can help us find the sweet spot of honoring our body’s survival mechanisms in a way that aligns with the modern society that we live in. Does this relate to, for instance, you often hear that example of that we have all these things that were designed to protect us when we were chased by a saber-toothed tiger, but now in today’s world we’re not chased by a saber-toothed tiger, but yet our bodies still interpret stress in the same way? Would that be an example of what you’re talking about?

Dr. Eliaz: This is an example, so that’s an extreme example. But whenever the body feels stress… whenever it feels that it’s being injured, physically, biochemically, emotionally, psychologically, psychospiritually, or our ancestors has been and the hard time genetically and epigenetically it’s passed to us, we respond. So automatically we respond just like you described with a sympathetic response. We have the fight, which equates to inflammation, to struggle, to reactivity, or we hide and run away, which relates to fear, to being frozen and also to hiding. And how do we hide? By creating a place where nobody sees us.

Physiologically, we create a microenvironment, an environment that is different than the environment of the rest of the body. This environment is a place where autoimmune diseases start, where metabolic diseases start, where cancer grows, where heavy metals and toxins hide, where infection can be shielded. And it’s, for example, our biofilm and demitrile microbiome in the gut. It’s the arteriosclerotic plaque. And the classical of inappropriate survival is when a cell forgets that it’s a part of a community. You know, this is a Wellness Mama, it’s not a wellness papa podcast. One of the things that is very, very, with the principle of what we call the feminine principle in Chinese medicine is that women have a way of supporting each other and creating a network. network, a feminine soft network. It’s in the essence of being of the feminine principle.

And this is very present in our body. We have, let’s round up 50 trillion cells, trillion, not million, not billion, trillion. Each of them has close to one million reactions a second. Can you imagine this? And it all works together. That’s the feminine mutual support, mutual nourishing. That used to be part of our endogenous communities, right? And growing our own food, etc. And then a certain cell decides it’s going to fight. You know, like more masculine energy, we fight. It doesn’t want to be part of a community because as part of a community, we come. We do our work and we go and somebody else comes.

And so this cell decides he doesn’t want to die. He wants to keep on surviving. And this cell is called cancer cell. and eventually it will kill the host and itself. So this is the destructive powers of the survival paradox. So when it comes to the autonomic nervous system, just like you said, if we take a deep breath, okay, the tiger is not chasing us. Just relax, go out to nature, look at the sky, listen to music. Suddenly our system changes and we all experience shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic. And where we are too much in sympathetic mode, ongoing stress, ongoing struggle, ongoing friction, it affects our body. We’re not able to relax. But the biochemical system kicks in by kicking in something called alarming protein. And the key one, Galectin-3 that I’ve done research for almost 30 years and made the key discoveries on blocking it.

What I call the survivor paradox voting and when it gets triggered It started a chain of biochemical events that don’t stop as easily. So our journey in life is to move from reactivity. to responsiveness. And there is a hallway in the body, the body is wired to do this. It’s not like an invention of mine. We are built to do it. And we’ll talk about it later on when we talk about the heart.

Katie: Yeah, this makes sense already what you’re saying. And I’d love to now take it from the extreme example of the tiger chasing you to now maybe what are some of the modern day causes of this?

Because for context, I’ve had a personal experience with this where I had some things happen to me in high school that were extremely traumatic and I had sort of like shut down and moved into that flight aspect of sympathetic nervous system dominance. And for years, I was doing all the things I knew to do physically to try to make my body better.

And it wasn’t until I addressed the emotional and inner side actually that even my physical health changed, which really led me to start paying attention to that relationship a lot more strongly. But it would seem like there are probably many micro causes in today’s world that our body’s getting that signal from. Can you walk us through what some of the inputs are that are sort of initiating that survival response?

Dr. Eliaz: So, anything that causes injury to our body starts a survival response. So, it can be an infection. So, for example, when an infection virus like the corona, bacteria, doesn’t matter what starts, you know, the body gets infected. Galectin-3 protein gets triggered within minutes and then it starts a cascade of events. So it will drive the inflammation in sepsis, the cytokine storm that actually will cause us to have kidney damage and no, in certain conditions, of the people die.

So for example, my research, I have an NIH grant. I’m studying what happened when we induced sepsis. And then we remove galactin with filtration of the blood, can we prevent the damage from sepsis? So that’s one extreme.

But this survival response, just like you said, what you did is you buried your emotion somewhere. In order to bury it, you had to kind of hide it. You really described it beautifully. Well, this is the fibrotic process of the body. The body knows how to do it. It creates a scar, physical scar and emotional scar. detoxification, getting rid of toxic materials. And why? Because if we are exposed to heavy metals, to mycotoxins, to pesticides, example being glyphosate, we’re all bombarded, EMF stress, we’re not sleeping enough, we need to get back to people within seconds, right? We have to be… totally reactive, the time of response is very short, it all affects how we live.

After detoxification, the next chapter is healing the scars of survival. How could you heal the scars that you had in high school that may have happened in high school or a tendency of it may have come even from past generations. That’s how profound it is.

So this of course will affect heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease, strokes, Alzheimer, Parkinson, practically cancer, drive cancer aggressive, practically every disease. So now we say what we can do about it if we understand the gravity of it. Well, they’re also solutions. They never talk about problems unless they offer solutions.

And so the idea is that we start changing it on all levels. On level of Galectin-3, we block it with a certain supplement. On the level of emotion, we start dealing with it, like in your story. Now, what is the first step in dealing with it that you know very well? It’s for some reason, somehow, you took the time. And you created this space? And this revelation came up, right? That’s probably what happened.

And here comes the big thing. The revelation happened. We have amazing revelations in life, like people may be hearing right now say, oh my God, wow! And somebody else will say, oh, this is nonsense. So there are different revelations, and then there’s how we respond to the revelation. We can respond with a survivor response, where you become reactive and you fight it, right? Or the first step is acceptance. Once we accept… Now a lot of the venom has been… melted away because it’s no longer a poison, it’s acceptable. And then we can start dealing with it. We can claim it or we can transform it. You know, we can make lemonade. out of lemon. our body is built to do these kinds of things. We’re actually wired to do.

So our body has a physiological maintenance system, all the organs and everything else, but it also has a purpose. And the purpose is to transform our life experience and to grow from them. the spirituality of life that is present in every religion and every authentic spiritual practice and it’s there, it’s innate and it’s easy to miss. And that’s where the magic of the heart comes in.

Katie: And it seems like, as you explain this, that this could become either a very positive feedback loop between the body and the inner experience in the mind or a negative one. Like, as you were explaining that, I was thinking of how, in my own process, as I moved through the emotional phases of… being aware of those emotions, accepting those emotions, then eventually releasing those emotions, my feelings even around the events that happened shifted from fear and helplessness and anger and eventually got to the point of actually gratitude where I realized that that had led to such growth that my feeling in hindsight about it was now I was extremely grateful and I wouldn’t have undone it even if I could have because it had led to such growth.

And that the emotions seemed to shift also my body in a very profound way, which made detoxification easier, which made it easier to release excess weight. And so I feel like is there an interplay here that works symbiotically between the body and the mind and that in whatever direction we’re moving, we can kind of encourage that movement. So in other words, as we’re healing, working through our emotions and helping the body through the detoxification and nutrition and all those things can move in a positive direction, just like you would see someone maybe who was needing those things and was kind of stuck in that, having trouble with EMFs being more sensitive or having more of a reaction to foods. Does it work both directions?

Dr. Eliaz: Absolutely, it’s really profound, it’s moving because what happened with you… you went to the core and you shook the core and you got rid of it from the inside out. That’s uncommon. That’s really what happened like when I teach retreats, because we change the environment, we change the food, we do certain cleansing drinks at night, we do exercise and then I teach and we peel off, peel off, peel off, peel off. So this is beautiful. This is what you describe as a complete detoxification and transformation.

So yes, it’s always multifaceted. And that’s why I teach a lot. And when I teach doctors and it’s hard for them because we all like regimens. We all like protocols. And my only protocol is that they don’t have a protocol. So each of us is different. So yes, if you can work on your emotions and you can work on yourself psychologically and spiritually. And if you are bombarded by pesticides and glyphosates and lead and mercury and micro-toxins from mold in the house and there is a huge antenna outside of you that is… You’re not going to feel well, and it’s going to affect your emotion, it’s going to disrupt your gut. Well, when it disrupts your gut, 90% of your serotonin may be gone, you’re going to be depressed. It’s going to affect your blood, your gut-brain connection, and then you’ll have fogginess in your thinking, and you will be exhausted, and then it will start affecting neurotransmitters and hormones. So of course, it’s multidimensional.

So the thing that are simpler. Not how, simpler, free, but not easy to do, which is one, to eat a healthier diet. To stay from things that are reactive. You are going in an interesting direction in this portrait. Which foods are the most reactive foods? Sugars, right? You eat them, you get energy within a second. They’re reactive. And then you have a crash. So when you eat a lot of refined sugars, your insulin goes like this, also your emotions go like this. Is it the emotions? Is it the insulin? It’s both of them. It’s mind-body medicine. It’s inseparable.

And so that’s one example. We hydrate well, the body gets more fluid, it gets better communication, there is less friction. It’s like adding oil to the car. It doesn’t heat up as much. We don’t get it inflamed. And then we start cleaning up toxins, heavy metals, mycotoxin, a lot of my work with modified Citrus pectin, with removal of glyphosate, with glyphosate detox. This part is very important.

And then… as we clean our organs. It becomes easier for us. In your case, it changed your hormonal system. It changed your metabolism. This is with six children, okay? Let’s not underestimate and underappreciate it, okay? I mean, I’m one of five, my mother is 88 years old and she looks like she’s 60… She’s and she was a high judge and Holocaust survivor. So I know this kind of women. My mother is like this.

So in any case, so now we start changing our physiology. The liver feels less toxic. We are less reactive. Enzymes are working better. When the gut feels, the microbiome feels relaxed. The biofilm becomes less aggressive. We don’t retain as much fluids. We don’t retain as much sodium. and then our body gets healthier. So it’s a multidimensional approach and it has an ongoing approach on a daily basis. And it is a focused approach that happens in the spring and in the fall from a seasonal point of view, because these are the seasons of change, right? And it happened in our body, either before a medical procedure, when we are sick, after we recover from a big treatment.

And on an ongoing basis, Katie, every time we exhale, we let go, we detoxify. Every time we inhale, we nourish. In between, that’s when the transformation happens. In between is the moment. So it’s hard in the mind, right? We have the thought after the thought after the thought. We lose the ability to recognize the space between the thoughts. But when we breathe, it’s much easier. We exhale, which is a passive movement of the lungs. And then there’s this gap before we inhale, easy to find. This is a gap where when we connect to it, we start feeling this place of things being more quiet, more spacious.

It’s critical, especially in women where you have career, and you have children, and you have the household, and there are so many tasks to do, right? So the trick is to find this gap. And for some people, they need two hours a day. For some people, they find out when they wake up before they jump, they take five minutes. Sit in bed and just let your conscious open and just breathe slowly. And then when you feel that you’re settled, you start your day. You’ll have a very different taste of your day. If you love to drink coffee, it’s great. But first, if you can do hot water with lemon. for half an hour, an hour, let your body, and drink some water, let your body start moving, warming up normally without a stimulant, detoxifying, your gut is very clean, then you can have your coffee organic hopefully because of pesticides.

And same before bedtime. There’s a long day. You know, you sit in bed and you recall all the amazing things that you have done for yourself and for others. We are a community and we rejoice. And anything you have done that you regret, you let go. It’s very important. You don’t know. You don’t carry it. And then you just, I mean, if you want, I’m kind of teaching quick healing, you can see like white light coming from the top of your head or whatever you believe in and just washing you. And then when you relax… It’s an amazing journey, you know, I’ve done this for decades and I’m quite trained in this.

Every time it amazes me that it’s different. Just connect with your body and you start feeling your cells and the space between your cells and between your emotions and you realize, wow, there is so much space within us and out of us and we expand, pressure goes down. And there our sleep quality is better. And during the night we will detoxify. So for busy women, for busy mamas, it’s essential. essential because we are so busy as parents in career. And the parenting doesn’t end. I know I have kids, very successful kids in their 30s. It just gets more and more, right? So I mean, I know from my experience. So anyway, I want to give some specific tips for people in this world.

Katie: Yes, and I want to make sure we do reserve time to talk about the heart side. And I love your idea of becoming more responsive versus reactive. I want to make sure we talk about that as well. But I’d also like to rapid fire touch on a few terms that you’ve mentioned for context on the biochemical, physiological side before we move into that. The first being you brought up, like you said, a buzzword during COVID, which was cytokine storm. And I would love for you to explain that a little bit more in depth and also how that relates to the Survival Paradox?

Dr. Eliaz: So, our immune system is our army, it protects us. And when we get a signal that something is wrong, which is a survivor response, and Galectin-3 starts it. So for example, in COVID, a lot of studies already published in August 2020. When you go to the ER, a patient who came to the ER in a large study with COVID, regardless of how big was the lung involvement, the level of the galectin-3 protein determined who later on will make it to the ICU and who will die, which means there was already something starting this cytokine storm.

What is a cytokine storm? The fire of inflammation, the fire of fighting starts. And it’s a cascade of events, cascade of compounds called cytokines. One of the leading ones, some people may have heard, called Interleukin-6, TNF alpha. And when they come, they fight the infection, but they do it by burning the field. And then we are left with fire and burnt field. We are left with inflammation of an internal organ, especially if there is kidney damage, it will affect the whole body and then mortality becomes like 50 percent. So it’s a deadly event.

And what we do often in medicine, we try to remove or control the cytokines, which is like catching a waterfall with a bucket at the bottom. It’s not a good, not very efficient. But when we block something like galectin-3 at the top, because it’s what we call an upstream protein, I’m showing it in studies, you can see a dramatic decrease in interleukin-6 in kidney damage, and of course in survival. And so we want to control the cytokine storm.

The cytokine storm is the ultimate example of reactivity that doesn’t stop. It’s great to start, but then we need to really relax. When we are young, when the rubber band is more fluid, more flexible, we can stretch, right, and we can go back. We are old and the rubber band is too dry, we stretch, boom. It gets torn and we’re in trouble. So that’s really the approach.

Now, it’s natural in us because every cell wants to survive. So if we now look into our body. I like to look at cell as a personality, as a living person, because the cell has boundaries, it has a surface, right? It has a membrane. And the membrane has receptors that decide what comes in, what goes out. and sometimes different things come in, different things get activated based on the relationship between the cell and its environment.

And of course, we have the genetic part and the epigenetic and the production of protein and mRNA and DNA, etc. But this is genetically, epigenetically means it’s affected by influence of our ancestors and their behavior also. So this is no different than us, Katie. We respond to the outside based on what comes. If it’s a very relaxed, great environment, we are in nature and it’s so quiet, we become more relaxed. Receptors change. So the cell has certain receptors. that react and they react from a survival point. The cell takes what it wants. what it needs. and it throws away what it determined it doesn’t want.

Now, if it’s time of relaxation, it is time to produce energy slowly and efficiently. And it’s called… normal mitochondrial function, normal metabolic function. We take one glucose. We produce 36 molecules of ATP, but we produce it slowly without toxic byproducts. We are in crisis, we need a lot of energy, right? We need to run away, the tiger. So we produce energy hundred times faster, hundred times, but only five to six efficiency, which means we are consuming two thousands times more glucose to get the same energy with lactic acid, with byproduct, with oxidative stress, with change in metabolism, with the idea that we can’t take a deep breath. And then there’s something called hypoxia-inducing factor, and the cell goes into this turmoil. But that’s how we survive.

And the cell throws what it doesn’t want outside. The lymph system collects it. It comes with the nervous system. There is one organ in the body that functions differently. It accepts, remember we talked about acceptance? There was a purpose for this. It accepts everything. with an open arm. The heart gets dirty blood from everywhere. It doesn’t say I’m going to get it only from the liver, but not from the kidney or just from the brain. Anything that our body doesn’t want, comes to the heart and the heart accepts.

That’s what happened to you. Your experience that was taught came to your heart. It came to your conscience. And then what does the heart do? connect with the universe, with the endless infinite possibilities of healing through the breath, through the lungs. It lets go of the carbon dioxide, of other toxins. It lets go of the energy of what we don’t want. It gets cleaner, that’s why you gotta take care of the environment. It’s not like… It’s a good thing from a selfish point of view.

Then, you know, we take linear, we get this transformation. Suddenly what caused us what we didn’t want, what was traumatic for us, is now transformed through the universe. For the universe, our drama is not a big drama, right? It’s endless time. And then suddenly we get nourishment.

Now that’s quite a difference, that transformation, and that’s what you said. I won’t give it up. There is gratitude around it. Because what does the heart do? The heart gives. The heart gives without judgment. The outer, the main artery of the heart is the stiff artery. When we contract the heart, the heart, the exhalation of the heart, the contraction is it gives clean blood everywhere. So this relationship between the heart and our body is also the relationship between us and our microbiome and between us and our community. If we react to the world and nourish based on judgment, based on opinion, we are at the… epic of this right now politically, geopolitically, right? We support people that agree with us, we’ll do anything and fight people that don’t agree with us. It’s contrary to the quality of our heart, of equanimity.

And only once the heart gives clean blood When it relaxes, it nourishes itself through the coronary arteries. Outside of the heart, the first arteries, go to the heart. So the heart nourishes itself in order to nourish others and is part of nourishing others. It’s an example of the selflessness of the heart that it doesn’t nourish itself until it finishes its work. Again, the only organ in the body. And you know, these are analogies that came to me. I didn’t study them from anywhere. It was like a meditation insight. It was wow.

How come nobody talked about it? It’s so amazing, you know? It’s like, it ties physiology with spirituality, with emotional. It all comes together. And when we realize that no matter what came to the heart, the heart was able to transform it. And give clean blood at different levels, of course, we realize that anything and everything is possible, because everything changes and that’s the infinite healing power of love and compassion of the heart.

It’s not like a buzz, you know, new age thing. It’s how we are built. Right? It’s what happened to you. Right? And as you know, and is it, if we get stuck with what happened to us, say, wow, this is great, we stop the process, right? We have to keep with the flow. Every day is different. And every day we can go backward, because we are human beings. We have trauma, we have difficulties. And every day we can move forward. And we have to accept it, we have to love ourselves as part of loving others because the heart is nourishing itself while it nourishes others. Physiologically, we are built to do this. The heart doesn’t stop. It doesn’t analyze. It doesn’t judge. It just takes what everybody doesn’t want and gives nourishment. That’s its job. It’s the head that stops, analyzes, that thinks, the judges, right?

So a lot of meditation techniques relate to the head, like becoming more spacious, quieting the thoughts, mindfulness. It’s okay. It’s good when you do it and after five minutes you lose it. When we drop into the heart, everything changes. So there is a process where like when I’m talking to you, I hear myself talking from here, not from here. I think here. And indeed, the heart does have its own nervous system. There are more neurotransmitters, there’s more messages coming from the heart to the brain than from the brain, with the heart, amazing, right? It’s really, and the electromagnetic field of the heart, talking about connection, is hundred times bigger than the electromagnetic field of the brain.

So every cell in our body is affected by how our heart feels. and the people around us. So mothers know this better than anything. You hug your baby, and the moment you hug, if you can relax into this infinite love. There are no negative thoughts, you know, it doesn’t work together. is this amazing quality. And this is the quality that is going to heal the world. That’s our hope, you know? We really have to grow it and share it and make it a community energy, because when it’s dark, every light shines very far. That’s a little bit about the how.

Katie: I love that and I can tell that is specific to you. I’ve never heard it explained that way before. I think it’s a beautiful way to not think of it, but feel it and understand it.

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You’ve also mentioned the word Galectin-3 several times and it seems like all the things you just talked about are a very important key in the nourishing of the body and all of that. But I would guess people might be curious, what are some of the ways to block that rise of Galectin-3 that we don’t want and to support the body through that process.

Dr. Eliaz: So, Galectin-3 so one of my big work and discoveries is that when you block Galectin-3 with modified Citrus Pectin, with a product I developed called Pectasol, which I’m no longer financially involved with, when you block it, you attenuate, you change the inflammatory response, you change the fibrotic response. So, this is why modified Citrus pectin, Pectasol, in my opinion, is the best. I’ve developed a lot of the treatments in this field. and at least some of them is the most important supplement someone can take because it will block the harmful effect of Galectin-3.

For example. we showed in biochemical relapse of prostate cancer, and when patient modified citrus pectin, almost 90% of the patients have slowing down or stopping of the biochemical progression of the cancer. So that’s a simple way. It’s a simple supplement. It’s a very sophisticated pectin. Just if people are very healthy, they can take only five grams a day. If they have health issues or they want to detoxify, they take 15 grams a day.

That’s really, this should be the foundation of every person because eventually, Galectin-3 goes up with age and it will get us, for example, centurians. have lower galectin-3 than people in the 70s and 80s, which means already there, the people with low galectin-3 are going to make it to be older, live a longer life. So it really supports healthy aging.

Then we have to address. our other components, how we can change our metabolism, how we can detoxify. So, modified citrus pectin is an excellent chelator of heavy metals, well published. I published quite a few papers on it. It also pulls out other toxins from the body. And while it does it, while it binds to them, it actually also… regulates the unhealthy inflammatory response. So that’s one important thing.

We got to address pesticides and toxins. So you want to use good Water Filters, HEPA filters if the air is polluted or there are planes flying above your house. And also I developed an important, I made it a mission to find develop a product that will remove glyphosate. Glyphosate is the most common pesticide, creating 300 million pounds a year in the United States. So one pound a person a year is being sprayed. And we kind of were numbed into the idea that it’s part of the environment. Every person you see it in a urine analysis, every person.

So glyphosate detox, and I don’t have time to go over the details. I’ve shown with this product that we reduce very significantly the levels of glyphosate and other toxins. So this has to be part of our daily regimen because we are exposed to it.

And then each of us has to really work throughout, you know, with whatever tools they have. Some of us have very little time, very little means. So within wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, try to find a small sanctuary. It can be a corner in a room, you know. Or it can be a larger place, it depends, doesn’t matter where it is, a place which is yours, where you can unwind, where you can get nourished.

And so use some of the tips that I talked about waking up and sleep. Get well hydrated. try to stay away from refined sugars, including diet drinks, almost worse because they change the brain patterns. Which is tough, you know, there’s a lot of industries that are capitalizing on our cravings, on our stress. So, yeah, so all of these are really important tips and on each of them, of course, we can talk for an hour or two.

And I mainly teach meditation healing with which mainly in the… Israel for the last decade, but I’m going to start teaching here so people will go to dreliazorg.com, I will start teaching more and I’m going to start a podcast that really focuses on, I know from my own experience, I know from my work with cancer patients, you know I work mainly with cancer patients and with very sick people.

And we know from your story, the power of the heart and the mind, right? I mean, to turn a trauma into a gratitude, it has to be transformed in the heart. There’s no other way. So you’re really describing your story, The Transformation of the Survival Paradox. It’s a journey. For some, it’s very quick.

For me, it wasn’t quick. In my book, I tell the story about my grandfather, who was named Isaac, who’s, you know, out of siblings were killed in the Holocaust and how I had pain all my life here that I knew is not mine. And when I cleared it, When I was 58 I think. After like 45 years, it completely went away. And within it, my mother, who could never watch any programs about the Holocaust, could suddenly start seeing programs on TV without me telling her the process I went through. That’s multi-generational healing. and that’s really part of parenthood. And it goes up and down, you know? When we clean the tram, we’re going backward. it’s going to affect all the offsprings going forward. That’s really why Mother Earth and nourishment is so fundamental. That’s why I’m excited to be on this podcast.

Katie: Yeah, and I’ve been so encouraged to hear from so many moms who have been on similar journeys as I have and who I feel like are stepping in to become the ones that break that generational cycle. And like you said, that has ripples going forward, but also backward that we may not even anticipate.

I also noticed, and I would guess this is also part of the key is when you make those shifts internally that start with the heart, all of the physical steps and the things you just mentioned, the nourishing the body and hydration and avoiding toxins, those things become almost intuitive and innate out of love and wanting to nourish yourself versus I feel like sometimes when I was stuck in the trying to fix myself mentality, it was like I was trying to sort of punish my body into being a certain way or force it to do a certain thing. And that energy shifted.

And now it’s a thing I want to do that’s easy and effortless to want to nourish myself, to want to get that morning sunlight, like you mentioned, and put my feet on the ground and hydrate first, and give my body what it needs out of love, not out of a battle to fix these things.

And so I don’t know what the tangible way to help someone affect that change is, but I felt how profound it is. I think we’ve talked so much about the clearing of this and how it all originates from the heart, which I think is so valuable. Are there any steps that you provide in your healing retreats or in your book that help people to learn how to do that and how to access it?

Dr. Eliaz: If you want offline, I would love to chat with you about your meditation because you went through something very profound. You went from doing things out of force, out of effort, you started touching on the quality of effortlessness. That’s where innate love and compassion comes. First we have, as they say in LA, fake it until you make it. You really had this innate approach that’s beautiful because that’s our truth. That’s the divine within us. Like people do to Christian, we are made in the… image of God, that’s the divine quality. And it’s infinite. And it’s effortless. And what happened to you, things became obvious, right? So I can, I know from a description because I teach a lot, things became clearer, right? You could make better decisions suddenly, because the clouds of the ego of the struggle fell away. So you became motivated instead of doing it out of forcing yourself. It wasn’t a chore anymore. It was a natural radiance and expression of your innate transformation. So you went from the outside in, inside out.

I already told you it’s amazing, you know, like homeopathic healing. And yes, but they are of course tools. The first step is to create space. But it’s very important, one of the flaws in meditation is that people get attached to experiences. But then you hold to them, it’s the same fixation. So whatever comes, we don’t hold to it. It’s very hard not to hold two things. So there are tweaks to do this and I’ve developed some unique tweaks.

And the key is really connecting to the heart and connecting the mind-heart and really bringing some of these very esoteric, ancient millennia techniques into very simple terms that don’t involve the need for cultural biases or belief systems. It’s who we are. It’s how our cells operate. It’s how we breathe, right? We exhale air with a lot of carbon dioxide, and we inhale air with less carbon dioxide and more oxygen. That’s how we function. So we take a ride on who we are anyway. So the heart knows how to do it physiologically. So it’s much easier to connect to it mentally and emotionally compared to the head that always analyzes and we have to change this innate survival pattern. And as you know, so what I don’t have to tell you just for my conversation. I know it’s an amazing journey. Right? Every day is an amazing journey.

Katie: Yes, it certainly is. And I know that we started off the conversation touching on the parenthood aspect a little bit. And I’d love to circle back to that because one thing I think often is anything that I’ve been through on a journey of life is how can I help give my kids the framework to maybe have an easier path on that journey than I’ve had? And I know a lot of parents think about that as well as like, if I didn’t learn nutrition until I was in my 20s, how can I help give my kids a really solid nutritional foundation for their life? If I didn’t learn some of these, like meditation or therapy or whatever it was, how do I give my kids a solid foundation on that?

So for many of the parents listening, are there any steps that we can integrate into our family culture, even from a young age with our kids that help them have access to this understanding and to that level of healing and to hopefully avoid that survival paradox happening in them at a young age?

Dr. Eliaz: Yes, definitely a lot, and it’s not so easy today because… You can have a very shielded environment at home and then the kids are outside. So the first thing is unconditional love for your children. There is never such a thing as loving your children too much. You have to be tough with them. It’s natural, you know? And so that’s a very basic thing.

The other principle is that if your kids are going through a struggle, look inside and what’s happening to you. Work on yourself, it’s going to just shed off to your children.

The other part is that you want to create space for your kids. We live in a world where kids are bombarded. I cannot even imagine. So try as much as you can to get EMF media-free environments. So, you know, my kids went to a Waldorf School. They didn’t have computers and didn’t watch TV, commercial TV until they were 14, I remember there was a girl in the neighborhood that came to my daughter when she was 12 and she had very nice sneakers. And my daughter told her, wow, it’s beautiful sneakers. And she said, it’s Nike. And my daughter turned and said, what is Nike? And so it was really neat.

So try to shield them, try to have them, And if it’s hard with school, of course, read a book to them at the end of the day, instead of looking at something which is electronically. Have them sit and listen to classical music or do a few breathing exercises with them. Teach them to let go of anything difficult they had during their day. Is there exhalation, gratitude for what happened to them and literally have them do this visualization of taking in healing and white light until they feel that their body is relaxed.

Kids are very attentive and it will change their physiology. When my kids moved from a Waldorf School to a Charter school, there were some really good kids who came to the class and then the county dumped a lot of difficult kids into the class. There were ten kids on Ritalin, ten out of twenty. The teacher asks the kids, the parents, not to give the children refined sugars and not to watch TV. After eight months, nine out of ten kids were off Ritalin. Nine out of ten kids.

So this stimulation, this bombardment is really, we are not built for it. We can adjust to it. You can already see two years old, right? Knowing how to work it, something is already adjusting, but give them the space. Take them to nature as much as you can. If you really live in nature, it’s great. If you live even in a city, take them to a park. Have them walk. Let them move their body and try to do it not only competitively. They don’t have to walk or exercise because they’re in a team and they need to beat somebody else and they’re upset if they lost. It’s good, it focuses them, it protects them, it’s true. But it’s creating ego-driven reality.

Just let them take a walk. And I remember again, when I was working with my kids and there were other kids who didn’t have the same education and I could see how my kids could see the plants and the flowers, and other kids literally didn’t see it, you know? It just wasn’t there. So have them, and then this will have a profound effect on their physiology. And at the same time. It’s not an easy world. We have to protect them with nourishment, with diet, make sure they get the minimal vegetables, they get well hydrated. And yeah, it’s a journey, it’s a responsibility.

Katie: I love those tips and I’m reminded again and again as a mom how healing to your point nature is and just unstructured time and even boredom, which gives way to creativity. And so I’ve tried even more and more as my kids get older to reserve the space in the home for not always being busy, for letting them have boredom and letting them just go unstructured play outside and build a fort and climb a tree. And I feel like those are often the most peaceful healing things for them. When we don’t give them so much structure and like you said, competitiveness and all these check boxes they have to do all the time, but let them play, let them be outside, let them breathe fresh air. That seems like kids adapt so wonderfully and so quickly to that.

Dr. Eliaz: Totally. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s so true. It’s so important and it’s so not built. Everything is so structured and scheduled by the minute. Yeah, these are huge tips, what you said now. And it makes a difference for them. Makes a difference.

Katie: And for adults too, I’m also learning as a grownup how just playing and being outside and having unstructured time is so restorative. And I feel like this might segue into another question I had for you, which is you mentioned teaching people to help soften their grasp on survival. And I would love for you to explain what that means and what that looks like.

Dr. Eliaz: So when we get, when we get, when, when outer input comes to us through what we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we touch, we respond, we respond immediately. And inside, when we have feelings, emotions, thoughts, we respond. And basically most people live their life in this immediate reactivity from the moment they open their eyes until they faint when they fall asleep and then they wake up. Certain people remember the dream, certain don’t.

When we start creating space between the thoughts, in different ways. And in the last chapter, Transforming the Survival Paradox in my book, I give the basics. And there’s another book coming called the Open Heart Medicine where I teach more about when we create space. then a layer from deeper layer comes up. A layer that some things are not as pleasant, but they are within us, and some things are amazing insights. Is it calm? First of all, they really help us get in touch with who we are in a deeper way, just like you said, someone can feel that they are really honest with themselves.

But you may relate to this, but when you are honest to yourself and you are aware of only 2% of who you are, you’re only 2% honest, right? I mean, it happened to you, right? And then something opened, am I correct? And a whole other layer came in. And within it, whatever tools you used, you develop different tools, different responses, right? You got all the way to gratitude. There are amazing studies on gratitude and health, you know? So then as things come up and we learn to open them up, then layer after layer after layer comes up.

And as the layers come up, and as we let go of them. This is not only detoxification, this is transformation, because if we detoxify… and then we create the same toxin again, it’s an endless loop. When we transform, when we turn the lemon into lemonade, it changes the environment. So for you, you lost weight, you lost fluid, your metabolism changed, and you said, wow, it’s happening on its own. Well, it’s happening because you hit the jackpot, you know, you really opened the door and this is really why within sometime in retreat within days people’s cancer markers can get better, especially traumatic events, fibromyalgia, fatigue would just dissipate. Because it’s a very intense recipe. For others, it takes a long time. It’s a journey, you know. My own journey, journey of others, it takes time. But it’s always ever changing.

Katie: Yeah, I’ve wondered, you touched on this a little bit, but I wondered if this was maybe part of the explanation for those cases we hear of this like seemingly miraculous, spontaneous remission of certain diseases.

Dr. Eliaz: Absolutely.

Katie: And it seems like often it ties in with someone actually like they’ll say they had that moment of sort of like letting go or like not giving up, but letting go and realizing that this experience was happening to them. And then the irony being in that letting go and that acceptance and maybe even the gratitude, that’s when the physical part actually helped, it helped them as well.

Dr. Eliaz: Absolutely. You said something very quickly and very important. It wasn’t giving up. It was letting go. Very different. Letting go comes from the heart. Giving up up comes from a different organ in the body. So very, very different. Yeah, totally, that’s what happened.

And if you look at what a miracle is, I talk a little bit about it in the book, a miracle is something that is unexpected, right? So if you have a probability of one to thousand, unusual, not really a miracle. One to one hundred thousand. Wow. One to a million, that’s a miracle, you know. Well, if we keep the same habits. we do everything the same. The outcome is going to be the same. To create a miracle, we need to change our habits. And to need to change our habits, we need to let go. And that’s why letting go is at the basis.

Our whole journey in life is between holding and letting go. I mean, people listening can feel, especially if you are watching. Contract your hands really strong, you feel the tension. Take a deep breath and exhale, just let go, your body feels different. So just imagine this letting go happening all the time because, Katie, our exhalation is twice as long as our inhalation. There is more of a letting go than nourishment in our life. The first thing we do when we come to this world, we exhale and we cry as babies. The last thing we do when we leave this body is we exhale and let go. If anybody was with somebody that is dying, it’s a profound experience. It’s profound letting go. So this happens all the time.

And women are more built into it because of the menstrual cycle. There is a nourishment, there is a buildup, and then there is a letting go. That’s why women are more connected with the lunar cycle, you know, with the waxing and waning of the moon. So you seek this buildup and letting go. And then you need to let go in order to nourish, right? If we don’t exhale, we can’t take a deep inhalation. And that’s why what you said is so important.

Katie: And I love so much your message and how it integrates talking about the physical things in our environment that we interact with daily and how they impact our physiology. But also what I feel like is such that really a key important part of also our inner experience and how that affects our physiology and how we have the ability to nurture that as well. So I think your message is so important and so timely right now.

And I’m personally very excited for your next book, Open Heart Medicine, and hope maybe we can do another episode and go deeper on that topic as well. But in the interest of time today, a couple questions I want to make sure I get to ask you. The first being if there is a book or number of books that have profoundly impacted you personally and if so, what they are and why.

Dr. Eliaz: So… The book that impacted me are not just the usual books. There’s a certain book in an ancient book about 2100 years old from Chinese medicine called The Book of Difficult Questions in Nan Jing, and it contains 81 chapters that actually 81 kinds of medicine. And I got to study them and read the book for years and years and years and years. And it really figures the way I do medicine.

And then another book that is more confidential, where I spent a certain interpretation of a certain meditation, where I spent a year just reading eight pages of it and meditating on it, that really changed my life. So yeah, I definitely… And these are books that I go back to again and again and again.

Katie: I will add those to the show notes as well for you guys listening, as well as of course all of your books and your website so people can find and go deep with you. Lastly, any parting advice you want to leave with the listeners today that could be related to everything we’ve talked about or entirely unrelated life advice that you feel is really important.

Dr. Eliaz: Yeah, that really is it when we connect with our heart and with unconditional love that we all have, sometimes we are connected to it, sometimes we are not. I’m sometimes connected, sometimes not. But when we’re connected with it, then anything and everything is possible. Not everyone will be a miracle, but anyone can be a miracle.

Katie: I love that. Well, thank you so much for your time today. This has been such a fun conversation.

Dr. Eliaz: Thank you. Thank you.

Katie: Thank you for being here. 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.