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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
This episode is sponsored by BiOptimizers. I love all of their products and I have been mega-dosing their masszymes for a variety of reasons. But today I want to talk specifically about Magnesium Breakthrough because you might’ve heard me talk about or write about magnesium before. And once I started taking Magnesium Breakthrough, my sleep completely changed and I wake up feeling so energized. It also helps me wind down at night, although I am one of the weird ones that I prefer to take magnesium in the morning and find it really supports my sleep when I do. And here’s why this one’s different. Other forms of magnesium might only be giving you one or two types of magnesium. But Magnesium Breakthrough contains all seven forms designed to calm your mind and help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up refreshed. And over 75% of the population is magnesium deficient. And this is important because magnesium is vital for hundreds of enzymatic reactions in the body. And what most people don’t know is that even if we’re taking a magnesium supplement, we can still be deficient because we’re not getting all of the forms. And Magnesium Breakthrough is the easiest way I found to get all seven forms in one supplement. So not only does it help me sleep better and calm my mind and body and stay relaxed during the day, it also helps me to have better digestion to recover quicker from exercise. And magnesium is well studied to also support bone density. Most magnesium supplements are ineffective because they only contain a couple forms. And Magnesium Breakthrough is unique in that it contains all seven forms. And I noticed a big difference from this one. For an exclusive offer just for Wellness Mama listeners, go to bioptimizers.com/wellnessmama. Your brain and body will thank you. And if you use the code wellnessmama during checkout, you will save 10%.
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What’s really fascinating to me is this unique peptide that is not found in any other products. And I’ve delved into the power of peptides in several podcast episodes. I think this is a whole new frontier of health and wellness. And I love that they’re pioneering the use topically on the skin. I think we’re going to see tremendous information about peptides continue to come out in the near future. But if you want to find out more about this specific peptide and its benefit for reducing biological age of skin, go to wellnessmama.com/go/oneskin. And I negotiated a special discount. If you use the code wellnessmama15, you will get a discount.
Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode is all about harnessing the energies of nature to create a primal healing platform. And I’m here with Robby Besner, who is someone I met recently at a conference, and he’s the chief science officer, developer, and co-founder of a company called Therasage. And they use a lot of different energetic technologies, including integrated infrared technology and much more. And ways to really support the body’s natural healing pathways and frequencies. And we talk about this a lot today, as well as the connection between toxicity and inflammation and energy, and how to make use of the healing energies of nature to create a healing platform for the body, including things like infrared and sauna and red light and how they all work together, as well as the importance of actually getting out in nature as well. Robby is an absolute wealth of knowledge on a lot of different topics. So let’s jump in and learn from Robby. Robby, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Robby: Thank you so much for having me, Katie. It’s a pleasure. And I really appreciate the opportunity to share some of my wisdom and research with your community.
Katie: Well, we got to chat at a couple of conferences, and I knew from just speaking with you a little bit that I really wanted to have you on the podcast to share some of this wisdom because you know so much about so much. And I think today I’m really excited to really go deep on a couple of topics that can especially help moms and families. And I know this is very close to your heart because of your experience with your own family and your daughter. Can you just briefly share that experience and what led you into this work that you do now?
Robby: Okay. This goes back 25 plus years ago. My oldest child, my daughter, contracted Lyme disease, and having a medical background in engineering, just a little bit of business, I took a look at the way that my daughter was expressing herself. And basically Lyme, well, now it’s a lot more prevalent or people are way more aware of it, but 25 or 30 years ago, it was a little, a road less traveled. And there were a lot less Lyme-literate doctors out there. And Lyme mimics a lot of different diseases. So it’s complicated. Anyway, my daughter was expressing high levels of toxicity, inflammations, of course, symptoms. She had body pain, and she was also experiencing cognitive challenges. And so from all that, I kind of focused on toxicity. Did a deep dive in the research on toxicity and then kind of looked at the relationship between toxicity and inflammation and then inflammation and its relationships to symptoms. And so they’re directly correlated.
So Katie, if I could lower your inflammation, then I, or I can lower toxicity and then I lower inflammation. If I lower inflammation, then certain symptoms that are bothersome would start to abate. And so that seemed like a, like a really interesting path to go down. And, as I was unpacking the best ways to detox, there are invasive ways like dialysis that, you know, you stick a needle in, you clean your blood, blah, blah, blah. Then there are less invasive ways, which are basically taking a supplement. It could be a pharmaceutical or maybe a natural chelator that basically will pull toxins out. And then I discovered that there’s actually wavelengths of sunlight that, which is the infrared spectrum. And basically when they come into the body, this is again, a function of nature, that vibration is called a bioresonance, but that vibration actually breaks loose all of these bonds between the toxins and where they’re stored in the body. And that really, really excited me.
So again, 25 years ago, when I started to look at the devices that were available in the public that you could buy mostly infrared devices in the healthcare industry was being used by sports medicine doctors to get players to heal faster, lower their pain thresholds, all that kind of stuff, you know. So I organized a trip. I went to China. I visited 65 factories. I picked a couple to work with and started developing devices for personal use, which we got such great results from. All of, you know, now we’re living in tele-med, and we’re living in an environment where there’s virtual doctors. But 25 years ago, we had a doctor in New York, and we lived down in Florida. We had another doctor in Florida. And then we had a pain doctor and a psychiatrist. And, you know, I mean, it just went on and on without, you know, without a lot of trying, my daughter had four or five practitioners that were all surrounded around her. So we started making these devices. She started getting some pretty great results. Again, it was just for personal use, but the doctor saw that she was doing so well, they asked for us to start making these devices for her, for them, you know, for their practices. And that was sort of the genesis of our company and our technology.
Katie: Yeah, and I think you’re on the cutting edge of what I hope is going to be sort of the next wave of understanding of human physiology and more of understanding the light, the energy, the infrared, and all the things you talk about so well. And I love that you also present it from a perspective of doing those natural, non-invasive things that help the body detox and heal naturally. Because at the end of the day, all we’re doing is supporting what the body already knows how to do and maybe is having trouble doing because of something that’s going on. You also mentioned sunlight and those especially healing frequencies. So before we go deeper, I would love for you to explain that when we’re talking about sort of harnessing the energies of nature and those healing frequencies, what are we talking about specifically? Because I think this is such a fascinating topic.
Robby: Well, it’s actually sunlight. And what we forget in our modern world, Katie, is that, you know, like we live in controlled environments. Like I’m in Florida, so it’s an air-conditioned home to an air-conditioned car to the store or to the office. And if you’re living up north and it’s wintertime, you’re going from a heated car, heated garage to your heated office. And so, we’re in controlled environments. If we date back the way nature kind of intended us to be or how it was set up for our ancestors 8,000 years ago, we were living on the land. We were waking up to sunlight. We were living in caves and tents. And so, we actually had a much more connection to Earth and to nature than we have today. And I think the absence of our connection to nature, something as simple as sunlight, getting direct rays at the right time of day can make all the difference in our physiology and basically what I call our health span. So we’re all concerned about our lifespan. But how about living healthy and vibrant from the first breath to your last breath? That’s a health span. And if I can do anything to our audience today to increase our health span, our vitality and the young families as well as the older adults that are listening in, I mean, then I think we’re really striking a chord that will resonate with your community.
Katie: Yeah, I definitely agree. And I think back to reading about the camping study and how even just less than a week spent in nature without artificial light and getting those, like you said, the temperature differences, the natural light differences had a really profound impact on the body. That’s how rapidly the body wants to and knows how to move back to that healed state. It’s just like you talk about, we have so many things in our modern environment that get in the way of what the body already knows how to do and how we’re kind of almost to a point, you hear it talked about, of being in like a nature deficit disorder type situation where we’re disconnected from our natural biology. And it’s at least contributing to a lot of the issues we’re seeing in modern society.
And you mentioned that these things are found in sunlight. And of course, I know it’s no secret that a lot of people have trouble getting enough time outside in the modern world. And that a lot of the things you created help to bridge that gap, especially for people who aren’t able to be in nature. Like what an idyllic world if we could all just spend the majority of our time outside. But that isn’t how the modern world tends to work. What are some of the, I know there’s many things found in sunlight, for instance, lots of different natural frequencies, including red light and infrared and all of those things. But what would you say are the ones we’re missing the most in the modern world with our modern lifestyle?
Robby: Well, in terms of sunlight, it is sun exposure. But what people don’t realize is that there’s a relationship of the sun to the earth. That directional relationship is called the azimuth. And so during winter, there’s a little rotation of the earth axis so that we’re a little bit further away from sun. That’s the definition of winter and why we feel that in terms of our temperatures. And so, you know, to your point, something that I think people are very aware of in mainstream, like the families and so forth, would be like the deprivation of sunlight, which is sad. We’ve experienced that and the feeling you get during winter, that anxiousness and unsettledness. Sometimes it causes depression.
And I used to tell a story quickly about for a while I lived in the Midwest, and it was very cold during the winters. And my wife’s family is from Florida. And so, during probably around January, it starts to get cold in Chicago, like maybe as early as November, right around Thanksgiving. And so, it would take me and my body till about January where I started to feel that sun deprivation because you’re just not going out. It’s sub-thermal temperatures. And people now are experiencing winter, especially if you’re in the northern states, they’re feeling that. So you go out, but you’re wearing four layers of clothes, your skin, which is a photoreceptor, isn’t getting enough sunlight to produce vitamin D and to do a lot of the things that we normally need in order for our bodies to be healthy, you know? So when I started to feel that anxiousness, I’d tell my wife and said, OK, let’s get the young kids in, you know, on a plane. Let’s go down to Florida. We’ll visit your families and our families. And then we’ll get a little bit of you know, sort of like rejuvenation from that sun deprivation. Right. So it would take me three months before I felt that anxiousness. When I got off the plane, got into the hotel, put on my bathing suit, jumped in the elevator, went down. It took me about 30 seconds for my feet to hit the sand and that feeling was completely gone.
So to your point, our bodies are so attuned to nature. But in our modern world we’re just diverted, like we’re driving electric cars. We’re surrounded with electromagnetic fields, all these exogenous energies that we can’t see, taste, smell. So we can’t really react to it the way we’d like to. Yet they all have their silent stressors on us that, you know, you add up enough of those stressors eventually we get symptomatic or we get less healthy, less vital, less vibrant, right?
And so what I’ve done with our body of work is I basically harnessed a lot of these natural energies and I put it into the devices that we make so that you can bring them into your home and in a shorter amount of time than you would even in natural light because it’s a little bit more concentrated in like an infrared sauna or some of the healing devices that we make, you know? You’re bringing these frequencies directly to your body and so you’re getting a little bit higher concentration. You don’t have to be around those frequencies as long as you would in nature. Well, let’s say the infrared sauna, for instance, a 30-minute session in that infrared sauna gives you enough of that healthy sun energy, healing energies, that would be equivalent to being in the sun at the right time of day for maybe four or five hours. And so, the devices actually serve the mentality and the lifestyle, like the fast-paced lives we live right now. And so, I guess one of the things I’d like to offer people listening in is that the things that we make, but not just our stuff, just in general, the category is important to have in your lives. This isn’t very expensive technology, but the benefits that the body has in augmenting and sort of turning on a lot of the body resources that we have that we need to be able to access on a daily basis those guys really get activated by light energy. And that’s been basically my focus for the last 30 years.
Katie: Yeah, and I love this topic. I know one thing I say every time I get the chance here is a reminder that our bodies are always on our side and they’re always wanting to move toward a state of natural health and healing. And I learned that lesson the hard way in my own life of for a while, having the story in my head that I had Hashimoto’s and that my body was attacking itself. And I had to learn to reframe that statement because I realized and several other guests have spoken to this, the body’s always on our side. If it wanted to harm us, we would be dead instantly. It is always on our side and trying to heal. And the things you’re talking about are so supportive of that natural process that it wants to do, but often just needs that little bit of extra help to get back to the modern world.
And as you talked about the light exposure side, I think of the most drastic example I’ve experienced of that personally was spending only a week in Finland during the winter where there was about an hour a day of light and it wasn’t even bright light. And how, within only a week, I started to feel kind of, I was like, wow, is this what depression feels like? I feel a little anxious. And kind of just like not nearly as motivated as I would normally feel, not energetic. And it made me really realize, and the contrast being in the summer here in Florida, I feel almost this ecstatic joy when I spend time in the sun. And it’s because that’s what our bodies respond to. Our bodies know that so innately.
I also think it’s important to distill the idea that it’s only about vitamin D because I think often we hear that from experts that the sun’s really just for vitamin D. And if you can just take vitamin D, we don’t really need everything else from the sun. And in fact, it’s harmful. But I know you explain it. It’s so much deeper than that. And that these frequencies that you’re talking about affect the body on a mitochondrial level, on such a deeper level than just whether or not your vitamin D levels are measuring in range. So can you speak to all the different ways that these frequencies impact the body? I know that could be an entire dissertation in itself.
Robby: Yeah, probably, but I’ll try to compress it for time restraints today. Well, to start with, I don’t want to diminish the vitamin D piece because that’s kind of important. But the problem is, is that in our studies, there’s been some random studies on this too, where they tested 3 million Americans with sunlight access, and more than 80% of them were vitamin D deficient. So sunlight is an important thing. But I think part of what’s happened is that not many Americans these days, about 50% of Americans can take oral vitamin D supplements and actually get the supplementation that they need, the absorption that they need. So getting that naturally from sunlight and having that skin exposure, because your skin is like a photoreceptor, is really important.
But focusing on sunlight in general, the two areas that are probably the most important are the UV spectrum and the infrared spectrum. So I focused on infrared because it’s the repairing and the remediating and the considered to be one of the healthiest spectrums of sunlight. And it’s broken down into three different wavelengths, the near, mid, and the far. If people were researching on Google or whatever, the search engines, there’d be a big discussion between the powers of healing from the near frequencies versus the far. Most of the science on infrared is about 100 years, and it’s mostly focusing on the far frequencies, the larger wavelengths that can penetrate close to three inches into the body. The near frequencies are skin surface.
So what do they do for us? The near frequencies and the red-light frequencies, they’ll support mitochondria energy. So that’s your cell energy. They will produce a transient gas that’s called nitric oxide. As we get older, after about the age, mid-20s to late-20s, our body starts making less of this nitric oxide gas. Nitric oxide triggers your blood to grab more oxygen. So one of the reasons why we age is from oxidative stress. Our body’s ability, our blood’s ability to hold on to oxygen starts to diminish. So if you get more sunlight then you produce more of this nitric oxide so your blood gets to hold on to more oxygen. So it actually slows down the aging process.
Being in Florida like you, you get the same warnings I do. Don’t go out in the sun. It’s going to tear up your skin. You’re going to get skin cancer, all that kind of stuff. Most of the real science actually shows just the opposite. And so it’s super important, especially if you’re fair-skinned. And generally, this is how it goes. It’s like if you’re, it’s around 30 minutes. If you are fair-skinned, then 20 to 30 minutes of direct sunlight. And for instance, right now in Florida, between the hours of 11 and 1 o’clock is when the UV spectrums are mostly present. And then from 1 o’clock until dusk is when the infrared spectrum is mostly present. So UV will give you a suntan. It will produce vitamin D3 naturally. And you can get overexposed to UV light. But in nature, there’s this balance. And if you get too much UV and you stay in the sun long enough to get the healing properties of infrared, then you’ve got your balance and you’re back to homeostasis or a good status. We get too much UV.
We don’t get in the sun long enough to get the IR. So we’re not getting everything we need to balance that out. So that’s why I focused on the infrared side, because it’s got so many natural healing elements to it that it’s fantastic. And they measure, Katie, these different frequencies basically in nanometers. And it’s almost like a radio station. 105 could be country rock and 107 could be R&B. And so each of these wavelengths in my studies actually do different things for us. And so what we’ve done here at our company is curated very particular frequencies that do very particularly great things for the body in terms of healing. And then we implement them and integrate them in the devices we make.
Katie: That’s so fascinating. And I’ve noticed, at least anecdotally, that when I’m getting more exposure to the near-infrared or far infrared in the frequencies that you’re talking about, I do tend to have a higher sun tolerance. Like it becomes much more difficult to even accidentally get a sunburn, for instance. And so it makes sense when you talk about these things in a holistic sense. And I’m glad you mentioned your sauna, because for one, it’s a much more affordable entry point for most people I feel like not all of us can fit a barrel sauna in our house or our backyard, and they’re really pricey. And I love that because this came from a place of serving your own family, you really worked hard to make sure that these products were accessible to most families because you wanted everybody to be able to access it. I’ve said for years that if sauna were a pill, everyone would take it because the studies are absolutely phenomenal. And I know there’s the mechanism of heat itself and how you talked earlier about the temperature regulation and how we’ve sort of lost our exposure to different temperatures. And then as you also just explained, that additional aspect of these particular frequencies that help put the body in a healing state. And I’ve also wondered if part of the benefit of sauna is just that it allows that more of a shift into parasympathetic. So it’s making use of the body’s natural healing frequencies. Can you talk a little bit more in depth about, I know you have many different products and I’ve gotten to try a lot of them at this point. But for which ones are related to the infrared, which ones are related to the red light? I know you have several different options there.
Robby: But I do, before I go there, I really want to talk about the note you just struck, because it’s so important. Like another body function, the heat can raise your core temperature up. And so the frontline defense against disease or an invader like a virus or a bacteria is basically a fever. And when you get inside the infrared sauna, it actually raises your core temperature up. So you create that false fever. And there’s a natural die-off of these organisms when you get your internal core temperature up to around 100, 100 and a half, 101. And then there’s this natural die-off.
And so if you’re about to get a cold or just to maintain vitality and keep your immune system strong, doing sauna regularly does two things. It raises your core, shows the contrast, and then your body can adjust back down. And it also pulls out a lot of the environmental toxins. It mobilizes and pulls out the toxins through sweat and the various different detox pathways to get these poisons out. And it’s really important that the young families know that this is available and affordable. Because in our current toxic environment, I don’t know of any device other than the cold plunge, which is another device we just made for contrast therapy, that can initiate so many amazing physiological events to keep our bodies strong and healthy.
And to your point earlier today, using your body’s resources and what’s been given to us naturally to do all the heavy lifting to maintain our vitality is such a key factor. So I love that you’re touching on these points. We have basically taken two approaches to harnessing infrared. One is through a full-body experience. That’s bathing in the sauna. And the other is the on-body experience, like using what we call healing pads. And there you’re bringing the same kind of technology right to a specific area, an organ, a muscle, a joint that needs that love or that healing. We call it TheraLove. Everything here is Thera something, Therasage, you know.
So, yeah, so we have those two delivery systems. We harness different curated frequencies. The TheraPro is one device, a second-generation device we just came out with last year. And it has five different or six different modalities in one pad. So it’s really cool because you can carry, you know, it folds up and rolls up. You can put it in your overnight bag. We feel it’s super affordable. In fact, some of our competitors in the same area, they’re feeling a little outed because we’re about less than half the price of the competitors. So part of our own journey, having with my daughter, sometimes our medical bills between medications and traveling could be in the tens of thousands a month. One of our mantras here at Therasage is to keep our prices affordable so that every family in the U.S. and people that are listening today can get them, use them within their family and their lifestyle to actually support their primal healing and their body, their body’s natural abilities to maintain vitality.
Katie: I love that. And I love that you brought up the heat aspect as well, because one thing I’ve talked about a little bit, but not super in depth on here is that as sauna and cold and contrast have become more popular, I think it’s important to make the distinction you just talked about that we actually have potentially three separate modalities happening here. And things like the Finnish study looked at the heat aspect in depth. And what they found was pretty phenomenal that a really significant reduction in all-cause mortality from people who use that heat mechanism pulled that lever regularly. Then you mentioned the cold plunge and how that has the potential to also trigger certain beneficial responses in the body. But then when they’re used together, it’s almost its own category of healthy response that contrasts therapy. And so I know in my own life, I try to think of those as separate categories to benefit from in different ways. So sometimes I’ll just do the heat. Sometimes I’ll just do the cold. And sometimes I’ll alternate. And they sort of give different physiological benefits when we use them all together or separately. So I just always encourage that so that people don’t fall into a routine of only using one or the other or only ever using them together because they actually do different things in the body.
And I love your products as well, the way you just explained them. And I know you also have a ton more resources available for people to learn about this. And like I said in the beginning, I think this is an emerging category of health that I’m extremely excited to see more information about and for everyone to keep learning on. And of course, there’s those quotes from many of the great thinkers throughout history about the future of medicine being in light frequency and vibration, which is exactly what you guys are looking into. Where can people keep learning more about these different modalities that we just talked about?
Robby: Well, certainly we spend a lot of time on our website explaining everything and offering white papers, things that we’ve done in our own research and offering other bodies of research so people can learn. We’ve also on our website, theracise.com, you can make an appointment with a health coach. And there you can just put down a couple of questions that you want to cover in a 15- to a 20-minute call. And it’s a free service. So people can just log in and make an appointment and then they can get some of their health questions answered. We are sort of naturopathic in our approach. We’re integrated functional practitioners. And so it’s not just about our devices. We look at the whole body. We look at the entire healing environment and the relationship between the external environment, the macro and microbiomes, so that we start to consider bringing more of nature into our homes and creating that safe place, that healthy home where we know that it might be free of EMF. And when you’re sleeping at night, free of noise and light that might affect your pineal gland and the proper circadian rhythm or your bio-clock so that people are actually synchronized with nature as much as we can be in the modern world.
And, so yeah, we’re constantly, we’re not like a complacent kind of company, Katie. We’re always on the edge of trying to discover and raise the bar. We develop our own devices. I am the co-founder and the science officer. And so, I lead a team of engineers and researchers that are constantly looking to raise the bar. We don’t, it’s not like General Motors. We employ technology that we feel will benefit people. On many levels, in some cases, we’re a little bit ahead of the rest of the researchers because they and competitors because they sell products that they just relabel or rebox. And we’re actually the original thinkers or the creators. And so we can kind of, to your point a little earlier, we can stack, excuse me, we can stack various different biohacks together to create synergistic effects when you’re in, or using our devices.
So the TheraPro that I mentioned earlier, it has six different modalities in one device. So we have full spectrum infrared, red light, gemstone technology that gives all these great, beautiful earth energies for the body. We have PEMF, so we’re actually pulsing curated fields, as well as we have an onboard TENS unit so we can recharge the cells and give them the energy they need in order for them to function properly. And so we’re really looking at many different aspects. We do have a central theme, which is harnessing full spectrum infrared, but we have created over the years different stacks or different hacks that you can stack to create that synergy effect. So when you’re in a sauna, you can bring in guided meditation or aromatherapy or ozone into that same environment, which turn on many different bodily functions to help, again, bring people back to their natural state of healing.
Katie: And I know you, like you said, you have a lot of information on your website. I’ll make sure those are linked in the show notes as well as, of course, all the products that we mentioned. But Robby, it’s always so fun to talk to you and learn from you. And like I said, this is an area I’m paying a lot of attention to because I think we need all this innovation that you’re doing and just more information and research about this because I think the potential to help humans, especially in a modern environment, is absolutely tremendous. Thank you so much for your time and for all that you shared today.
Robby: A pleasure being here and thank you for having me.
Katie: And thank you for listening. 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.
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