Welcome to the VPLR podcast, the show
where we bring you actionable health
advice from leading minds.
I'm your host Rob.
My guest today is Morley Robbins, creator
of the Root Course Protocol, founder of
the Magnesium Advocacy Group, and a
leading educator in the interplay of
minerals like copper, iron,
and magnesium in human health.
Morley's work challenges conventional
views on iron deficiency and pushes us to
understand mineral balance as central to
energy production, immune
function, and chronic disease.
Expect to learn why copper and
ceruloplasmin are essential
regulators of iron metabolism,
how mineral imbalances can drive fatigue,
oxidative stress, and dysfunctional
hormonal health, and practical strategies
to better understand and manage copper
and iron balance in
your own health journey.
Now, on to the
conversation with Morley Robbins.
Good morning Morley, and
thanks for being here today.
This one's been a long time coming, and
I'm glad we found time to finally dig
into everything copper and iron today.
Now, I was fortunate enough to have a
chance to listen to you
lecture in London a few months ago.
It was an amazing experience, and I
learned a lot especially about copper as
it pertains to sort
of post viral fatigues.
Of course, I don't want to get ahead of
myself, and I know that today's
conversation will be aimed maybe more at
the basics, and then hopefully we can get
together at a later date and dig into
sort of more specific topics.
Anyway, before we start, would you mind
introducing yourself to those in the
audience who maybe aren't familiar with
you and your body of work?
Sure.
Well, thank you for the opportunity, and
it's great to meet you, and look forward
to our discussion now,
and maybe going forward.
I'm Morley Robbins.
I may affectionately refer to
myself as a pre-med retread.
I had designs of going to medical school,
and a very good friend of mine, Ben
Edwards, who's a physician in Texas,
said, "It's a blessing you
didn't go to medical school."
I said, "Why is that?"
He said, "Because you
didn't get indoctrinated."
That's allowed me to ask different
questions of the research, of the
literature that's out there, and it's
been a fascinating experience on the
heels of 32 years of working in hospitals
and hospital consulting firms to then
step out of that role and become a
self-taught mineral expert.
I don't have the good housekeeping seal
of approval of any particular program.
I've just relied on the literature,
and the good fortune of passion and
drive, and the staying power of over
10,000 articles now,
I've learned a thing or two.
I wouldn't say that I have total recall
of 10,000 articles, but
I have a lot of recall.
One of my gifts as a consultant was
pattern recognition.
I was able to take data and extrapolate
it, take information and massage it and
synthesize, what is
this really telling us?
I've done that over the course of the
last 16 years and have assembled a very
unique perspective of how
does the body really work.
You have two largely competing paradigms.
There's attack the guest
and strengthen the host.
Attack the guest is the more
conventional, let's throw a chemistry at
it, let's throw a drug at it, try to kill
that pathogen or that
toxin or whatever it might be.
But when you look into the millennia old
healing traditions, most of them are
based on what can we do
to strengthen the host.
That's really what I think is from that
philosophy that the root cause protocol
flows out of let's make sure we have the
right nutrients in our diet and in our
supplement routine to allow the body to
express its original intent.
Go back to original factory settings and
allow the body to express the energy.
We can have a stasis.
Yeah, to get
homeostasis, that's exactly right.
And so we ignore the
enemies and we ignite the energy.
It's a very different way of thinking
about it and I think it's refreshing but
it's also empowering.
Individuals realize I can do this and
that's really the driver from the get-go
has been how do we democratize healing?
How do we put the individual back in the
driver's seat and draw on practitioners
as a resource but not
necessarily as the be all and end all?
So it's been a fascinating
journey over the last 16 years.
Yeah, I've listened to podcasts and I've
obviously gone through your books and I
can attest just the way you think through
problems and it's just a delight to see
that how you sort of, how do I say it,
sort of restructured the paradigm.
I mean, we're talking about that a second
ago off air and I think you've just
created a whole new narrative or again
paradigm to start thinking
through these sorts of problems.
And yeah,
when you were speaking,
the two terms just sort of came to head
or came to top of mind or one I suppose
and that is a sort of idea
of terrain and germ theory.
I was about to say, do you sort of
subscribe to that model?
It's a little off track and maybe not
quite the question I was
going to start with but
do you feel that there is an aspect or
element of correctness to that?
Oh, absolutely.
I think it's a foundational philosophical
divide and what you've got, we're going
back to the debates between Béchamp and
Pasteur and for those who don't know,
Pasteur's PhD was a correspondence course
in pharmacology and Béchamp was the most
decorated scientist in Europe.
He had an MD and two PhDs, many, many
awards and of course Béchamp was taking
the position of the terrain theory and
Pasteur was focusing on the particle, the
pathogen and that's where the moneyed
interest was on the pathogen.
But I think the part that I think is a
nuance of Béchamp around the terrain
theory is he wasn't talking about,
sometimes it's referred to as the field,
he was talking about the energetic field.
And I think he didn't say it that way but
as I've studied his work and studied the
debates, I think that's where we have
this conflict of if you put an electron
microscope on a pathogen and you ignore
the energetic field that it's finding
itself, then you don't
understand the problem.
And the pathogen is a reflection of
what's the state of energy in this tissue
and the fact that the pathogen can morph
from bacteria to virus
to fungus to parasites.
It's like that's mind-blowing to think
about but it does as the pH changes and
it's just and what so the
thing is what does pH stand for?
What's potential for hydrogen?
Well actually it's potential for oxygen
and the really critical
issue is when oxygen is available
and it can be activated by copper, you
make energy and the peak of energy
production is at the pH of 7 because
that's when O2 is most
available for activation.
But if you have,
if the pH starts to drop or rise,
the energy yield drops off and that's
when the pathogens wake up.
So I think the that whole concept is a
critical foundation for understanding
where is all this unrest in our body
coming from, this lack of homeostasis,
it's lack of energy and we're
yeah to me it's that simple.
Yeah and thank you for setting that up.
That was the perfect segue into my next
question really which is to sort of
really sort of maybe take a deeper dive
into why you think we are facing such a
high prevalence of chronic
disease in society today.
Now I believe your core thesis is that
disease stems from oxidative distress due
to mitochondrial dysfunction
caused by mineral imbalances.
I think anyway I could be off the mark.
Could you explain this a little more?
We've got a pretty savvy audience so the
details are good-ish just as long as we
don't start talking about sort of ion
channel polarizational anything like that
that up until that
point I think we're golden.
Yeah no I think it's the catch phrase is
mitochondrial dysfunction.
Okay that's like saying okay we're on
planet earth now and we want to we want
to climb a mountain.
Well we got to get a little more specific
about where we're headed and the reason
why we're on this
planet is because of copper.
It's not complicated.
Prior to copper's ascension,
prior to the great oxygen event, the
world was dominated by iron and sulfur.
And cyanobacteria began to engage in
photosynthesis with this
bright shiny object in the sky.
Why that started I don't think anyone's
really been able to identify the origin
of that but when that took place oxygen
began to be given off by those organisms.
It went into the primordial sea and then
when the seedbed filled up it would pop
into the atmosphere.
Now we exist right now with about what is
it 21 oxygen in the air.
It's fluctuated over the billions of
years but it's now we're
hovering around 21 percent.
But when the great oxygen event took
place allegedly 3.4 billion years ago I'm
always amazed at the astrobiologists and
their precision for
identifying these dates.
But when that happened when there was one
tenth of one percent of oxygen in the air
it wiped out 99.9 percent of life on the
planet because it was all anaerobic.
Oxygen it's a very reactive element.
It's the second most
reactive element after fluorine gas.
It loves to play with electrons
especially if those electrons
happen to be involving iron.
And copper's gift to the planet was the
ability to work with iron and oxygen at
the same time and not create
static, not create a reaction.
And out of that situation was born
several critical chemicals.
One of them was an enzyme the
classification is called
multi-copper oxidases, MCOs.
And probably the I would argue is
probably one of the most important is
called cytochrome C oxidase and that's
obviously what's running complex for.
And that's where oxygen gets turned into
two molecules of water at the pH of
seven, critical pH of seven because
that's the optimal peak of energy
production to allow ADP,
3 ADP to go over to complex five to
become 3 magnesium ATP.
Now the part that's a little nuanced and
it's very important for people to
understand is that cytochrome C oxidase
is like the stove in your home.
What's the stove made of?
Iron.
Made out of steel and cytochrome C
oxidase has a lot of iron in it, a lot of
iron sulfur clusters.
Actually two where there's two iron
sulfur clusters there's two heme groups,
forgive me, two heme groups.
But there's also three copper atoms and
so think about your stove at home.
Does the stove know what's for dinner?
No.
Does the stove know what
temperature to put the oven on?
No.
Does the stove know
which burner to turn on?
No.
And the world of convention has put a
spotlight on the stove of the
mitochondria and completely ignored the
chef that runs the show.
And in this case it's cytochrome C
oxidase and it has a celebrated function
of bringing in four hydrogen atoms or
protons, four electrons and voila in one
step creating two molecules of water.
That I think it's the most important
chemical reaction on the planet releases
the ADP at that point.
And you don't hear people talking about
that in the world of convention.
They love to talk about mitochondrial
dysfunction and they don't talk about the
55 or more solute transport carriers,
many of which are energy dependent.
They don't talk about cideroflexin, which
is really important
transport mechanism for iron.
I'm not familiar with that cideroflexin.
Cideroflexin.
I just learned it last week.
All right.
It's brand new to me.
I've never heard the
term before, I must admit.
It's going to make your toes curl when
you find out what it does.
What it does is it lets
iron into the mitochondria.
Oh wow.
Yeah, maybe not.
Right.
And so then we've got cideroflexin coming
in, allowing the iron in, and then we
have what are called ABC transporters,
ABC B8 in particular, but there's a whole
series of ATP transporters
that are pushing iron out.
What people don't, I don't think people
fully understand is that if the
mitochondria starts to accumulate iron,
which its tendency is to do,
the energy production collapses because
the oxygen is not available to be
activated to turn into water.
And you'll hear about hypoxia.
You've heard that term.
Definitely.
There's three different forms of hypoxia.
There's altitude.
We're at the top of Mount Everest.
The air is very thin.
It's kind of hard to
find oxygen out there.
There's a second form called pathogenic
hypoxia, and that's neutrophils.
Those are the marines of the immune
system that are using oxygen as a bullet,
turning it into an
oxidant to kill the pathogens.
Very important part of our immune system.
That function is copper
dependent, by the way.
That respiratory burst
function is copper dependent.
And then the third form of hypoxia that
no one talks about, I've only seen it in
one article, is functional hypoxia.
And what it really means is because of a
lack of bioavailable copper, and I think
it might also involve retinol, which we
can get into that as well,
the oxygen isn't
available to be activated.
It's become an oxidant.
It's become hydrogen peroxide, or it's
become the hydroxyl radical.
Or it's become superoxide
would be the starting point.
All of these, of course, being free
radicals that then cause various types of
cellular distress throughout the body.
Absolutely.
And we have mechanisms in our body to
neutralize them, but
they're all copper dependent.
And that isn't openly discussed in the
literature, except in
certain schools of thought.
Yeah, that was going to be
my next question, actually.
Coppers role as in support.
I know we'll get into this, maybe we can
catch into this rheoplasma a bit later,
but maybe copper's direct role to support
sort of mitochondrial
antioxidant activity.
I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong,
it's involved in the production of
mitochondrial sod or
superoxide just to be changed.
Is that correct?
That's exactly right.
So you have the beauty of copper.
It's a multifaceted,
many dimensional mineral
in terms of what it does.
But it's creating energy, right?
And it's killing the enemies,
one of them being, or another way to
think of it is creating
energy and then clearing exhaust.
Those oxygen molecules that have become
altered because of electron chemistry
aren't available to be activated and
become two molecules of water.
And so copper's gift in terms of our life
is the capacity to neutralize those
oxidants through superoxide dismutase
would be one of the most important.
And it's clearly involved in
mitochondrial production or
neutralization of mitochondrial acid,
superoxide, but also in glutathione
peroxidase and catalase.
I mean, the world is just a
flurry of thought now about
ferrooptosis.
Everyone's talking about ferrooptosis,
but there's a very easy way to stop it
with ferrooxidase enzyme from ceruloplasm
or glutathione peroxidase 4.
And not a lot of people that that
acknowledged impact.
Yeah.
Just for the audience, would you mind
breaking down ferrooptosis?
It is, can be quite a complex topic.
And I know that will probably sort of
might lead us to the
vitamin A discussion as well.
But yeah, would you mind
breaking down what that term is?
And this idea of sort of ion associated
sort of apoptosis, I suppose, or
pre-programmed cell death?
Exactly.
It's iron directed apoptosis.
It is the generation of lipid peroxides,
lipid peroxidation is, those are very
powerful oxidants that are going to
affect membrane integrity.
They're going to affect proteins.
It's going to create carbonylation would
be the technical term.
And it's also going to lead to the dings
of DNA inside the nucleus.
The relationship to the iron, again,
we're going back to sliteroflexin.
And if there's too much iron coming in,
and it starts to react with the membrane,
well, you're going to,
again, it's a chain reaction.
It isn't just, oh, it's
like a pinball machine.
And that iron, there's the steel ball
moving all around the the machine.
And it's got to be stopped.
It's got to be neutralized.
And one of the most important mechanisms
to stop that lipid
chain reaction is vitamin E.
It's the chain breaking antioxidant that
no one seems to talk about.
And there's a lot of concerns, as you
well know, about Puthis.
It's called feeding Puthis.
It's like, wait a
minute, let's back up a step.
You know, what are our cell membranes and
organelle membranes made out of?
Well, yeah, they're made out of Puthis.
And controlled oxidation.
Absolutely.
And so what is the match to
the fire of lipid peroxidation?
It's iron.
And that's documented in the literature,
I think it's 2008 and 2011.
It's just the scientists
know this deeper level of truth.
But it's not being brought to the
attention of students in the classroom
about how the body really works.
It really isn't Occam's razor, isn't it,
at the end of the day, the simplest
explanation on music, right?
One was sort of wrapped up in Puthis or
seed oils to be a bit
more colloquial about it.
That we're not sort of wondering why they
are becoming an issue.
I mean, historically, they shouldn't be.
I mean, it's not like throughout
evolution, nobody has
ever consumed seed oils.
And up until recently, they've never
really been a cause for concern.
And when looking at these sorts of
diseases that are metabolic in nature,
and excuse me, that are metabolic in
nature, yet all of a sudden, people are
happy to sort of try point to them as
being this root cause issue when
fundamentally, they're fairly benign, you
know, themselves, it's the oxidation of
them that's a problem.
And as you correctly pointed out, that's
being driven by this sort of this mineral
balance, this copper ion imbalance that's
sort of leading to
their excessive oxidation.
I suppose, while we're on the topic of
oxidation, it would be great to sort of
at least have an initial sort of chat
into the whole world of ceruloplasmin.
I think for those in the know, I think
people see it as potentially a copper
transporter, I might be correct, but it
plays just so many more roles in that.
It's as an example, it's an antioxidant.
Now, I know this is again, this is
something we chatted before, or about all
fair, but it's almost central to your
hypothesis in a sense.
Could you sort of, or at least briefly
just sort of work through the
ceruloplasmin story for the audience?
Can't wait.
It's a protein that was first identified
in the 1940s, beginning of 1940, 1941.
But it's the consistent reference is 1948
by Holmberg and Law.
And they had broken ground and they were
the ones that had done
the most research on it.
And it's a protein
that has 1046 amino acids.
It's not the biggest protein in the body,
but it's one of the biggest.
But what makes it unique is its
composition of copper
inside that protein.
And when it was first discovered, there
were eight atoms of copper.
And from 1948 to like 1975,
there were eight atoms of copper.
Then mysteriously in the 1970s, the
literature started to shift and say,
well, actually it's only seven copies.
A very mysterious change in the number.
And you say, well, they must have had
better diagnostic technique.
No, that's not at all.
And so then for 30 years,
it was seven atoms of copper.
And now in the around 2000,
it became six atoms of copper.
All the literature, all the recent
literature refers to seroloplasm having
six atoms of copper.
So put it in the context of your car.
If you've ever driven a V8,
you know how much power V8 has.
You take two cylinders out of the V8, it
doesn't ride the same.
It has a completely
different source of power.
And it just, it neuters
its strength as a car.
Well, that's what's
happening, I think, to seroloplasm.
Some of the most
revealing research was done by
two different teams.
One was a team out of Harvard,
Scheinberg and Stern and Eke.
This was in the 1960s.
What's very entertaining about that
research is here we have two preeminent
hematologists from Harvard Medical School
doing research at an AT&T Bell laboratory
in upstate New York.
Why were they studying human protein
metabolism of
seroloplasm in a phone laboratory?
I just find that utterly fascinating.
But there's a series of nine studies that
they published that revealed a lot about
what seroloplasm is doing.
And then some more critically important
research was done by Earl Frieden, who
was the dean of metal biology for decades
at Florida State
University here in the US.
And he, in the late 60s, 70s and 80s, did
a lot of studies about what
is the nature of this protein.
And what began to emerge is that, in
fact, there's 15 different
substrates for seroloplasm.
But this is just iron.
They work with copper.
It works with oxygen.
It works with phenol
groups, diphenol groups,
amine groups,
bioenergetic, biogenic amine.
It's staggering what
it's capable of doing.
All of the
catecholamines react with seroloplasm.
And what it means is that seroloplasm has
a unique ability to work with those
substrates to change their structure and
function, to make them beneficial,
turn on things, turn off things.
And I would argue it's one of the most
important mechanisms of
intelligence in our body.
And one example of the power of this is
that some interesting numbers,
36% of the Earth's composition is iron.
That's a lot of iron.
It is a lot of iron, yeah.
So over a third of the Earth has some
manifestation of iron.
And according to the latest research of
the World Health Organization,
to the extent that we can trust it, 27%
of Earthlings, it's a quarter of the
people on the planet, are anemic.
It's a lot of people.
That's 2 million people who can't
metabolize the number
one element on the planet.
And in 1971,
Dr.
Frieden wrote a very
important article about seroloplasm.
And he was doing research to see what
happens as the activity level of the
ferrooxidase enzyme dropped.
And so what we have to do is back up and
say, so we've got a seroloplasm protein
that can express itself in
nine different enzyme functions.
That's a very unique capability to have.
The whole basis of modern pharmacology is
one gene, one protein, one function.
Well, seroloplasm is one gene.
It is one protein, but
it's many, many functions.
Some say it might be as high as 20
different functions.
I'll keep it conservative.
I'm just saying nine.
I can identify those nineisms.
And then we find out that the one that
they always talk about in the literature
is ferrooxidase enzyme.
And what it's doing is it's oxidizing
ferrocyne plus 2, and we're
going to ferric iron plus 3.
In that ferric form, it can be either
loaded into ferritin for storage, or it
can be loaded onto a transfer for
transport back to the bone marrow so we
can make new red blood cells.
Very, very important
because we're doing that.
We've got to replace two and a half
million red blood cells
every second of every day.
Those are big numbers.
I have a friend who says, "Worly, there's
only three numbers, one, two, and a lot."
When you start talking about 2.5 million
a second, it's just people can understand
that, so it can't be that important.
That's usually what people will say.
I can't process it.
But that's one of the most important
aspects in our body is
that perpetual replacement.
And the Ceruloplasmic
expression is something that Dr.
Frieden really studied.
And when it went down to 10% of ideal
function as the ferrooxidase enzyme,
there was still healthy
hemoglobin production.
When it went down to 1%, 1% of ideal, it
was still functioning, but
it wasn't at the right level.
And what he asserted was that after seven
days of zero ferrooxidase function,
that's when anemia began
to present in the animals.
Anemia is lack of sufficient hemoglobin.
That's the real
clinical definition of anemia.
It's not red blood cells, it's lack of
hemoglobin in the red blood cell.
And is that what's then potentially
driving the iron deficient anemia?
Exactly.
And so again, it took seven days of zero
ferrooxidase expression to then trigger
the expression of anemia.
And here's the catch.
This is very important.
Low iron in a blood cell does not match
up with high iron
that's stuck in the tissue.
And that is ferrooxidase's gift to all
life is the ability to recycle iron.
That's what it's trying to do as we're
replacing 2.5 million red blood cells.
We've got to break them down, got to
release the iron, got to get it
transported back to the bone marrow.
And there are a lot of steps in between,
but this is completely lost in a world
that is preoccupied with dietary iron as
opposed to recycled iron.
And one of the most important statistics
as it relates to this whole dynamic is
that only one milligram of iron needs to
come through our diet.
24 of the 25 milligrams that are needed
every day to make that 200 billion red
blood cells every 24 hours.
24 of those 25 milligrams comes from the
recycling system that is
run and regulated by COPPA.
And so you've probably heard the phrase,
the simple lie versus the complex truth.
Everyone wants the simple lie.
It was Alex de Tocqueville who said it in
trans but centuries before
him it was Lao Tzu in China.
People would always prefer the simple lie
than the complex truth.
It's just easier to accept.
Well the simple lie is
that people are anemic.
The complex truth is I have access to
articles that to my satisfaction prove
that there's nine copper dependent enzyme
functions that contribute to "anemia"
that have nothing to do with iron.
And it's absolutely fascinating that the
world has been captivated by this idea of
low iron and has very little
understanding or awareness
that COPPA is running the show.
COPPA is the gem in the iron is the foot
soldier and that's not how it's presented
in the literature at all.
Yeah, it's the other way around and for
the most part people are more than happy
to just try and treat these conditions
ironically enough by well supplying the
body with more iron.
I suppose that's the
great irony there, isn't it?
Absolutely.
I mean it's just the world does not
understand that
copper iron interdependent
and if I were king for a day, if I had a
magic wand, I would require all studies
of iron to involve copper metabolism and
all studies of copper metabolism to
indicate its impact on iron.
We've got to get beyond and get people to
realize this interdependence that these
metals have in bringing up homeostasis
that you were referring
to at the very beginning.
Yeah, this sort of again, it's a common
theme in sort of biology as a whole.
Everybody sort of gets stuck in a sort of
a siloed in their own silo, don't they?
Irrespective of where you are and you
sort of end up missing, what's the
expression you end up missing the woods
for the tree, something to that extent?
Yeah, the site of the
forest for the trees.
There we go.
We had the pleasure of spending an
evening with Douglas Cowell who was a low
way down iron expert and when he was at
University of Manchester, his best friend
was Garth Cooper who was in
the office right next to him.
He was a world renowned
copper expert and according to Dr.
Cowell, they never talked shop.
What?
But I'll take him as word.
They just enjoyed each other's company.
They'd go to the pub
and let off some steam.
But it's like they didn't talk about how
their two research worlds were interwoven
in a very intimate way.
That's the challenge we've got around the
globe, is getting more people
to be aware of your curiosity.
So what are we missing?
What's the part that we
don't seem to understand?
I think it's this idea that somehow,
in my way of thinking,
copper's running the show.
But we're taught that it's toxic.
And when you get into the real bowels of
human metabolism especially,
it's undeniably central to
our health and physiology.
It makes no sense any other way.
And it's just not taught that way in any
school of nutrition or any kind of
doctor's school, whether you're
allopathic or homeopathic or
osteopathic or naturopathic.
Copper's not part of their vocabulary.
And as I was noting before we started the
formal part of the conversation, I've
seen five textbooks, not one mention of
this protein that you're
curious about, the ceruleoplasm.
And what's also important for people to
know is that it's
subject to modification.
It can get what's called denatrine so
that in the presence of ascorbic acid or
citric acid, it changes its structure and
the copper gets released.
In the presence of high glucose, blood
glucose, when blood
glucose gets above 120,
the denature of
ceruleoplasma, the copper's come out.
And so everyone is taught
to fear this unbound copper.
The copper's concentration in the blood
is one percent of the
copper's in the blood.
99% is in the tissue.
And if the copper is rising in the blood,
it means it's missing in the tissue.
And it's the absolute inverse of iron
that when iron is low in the blood, it
means it's stuck in the tissue.
That's just getting people to see the
symmetry of that and how that gets
represented in the testing.
But we don't have access to perfect
testing because at least here in the
States, we're not allowed to test for the
ferrooxidase enzyme function.
There are only a handful of countries in
the world that believe in allowing.
I don't think I've ever even seen it on a
lab request sheet, to be honest.
I suppose speaking of testing, you're a
proponent of a hair
mineral analysis in that respect.
Could you sort of briefly just walk us
through that and then maybe we could sort
of transition into your
protocol specifically?
Sure.
Been working with the hair tissue mineral
analysis from the beginning.
And my mentor in those early days, early
years, was a gentleman by
the name of Rick Malter.
He's a clinical psychologist.
And he had been using HGMA data for
decades, maybe three and a half decades.
And he was very quick to point out to me
that there's really two questions that
can be answered in a hair test.
One,
is this person under stress?
Very important because it will reveal
itself very quickly in the hair test.
And secondly, can this person mobilize
energy in the face of their stress?
And he developed something called the
Malter mix to normalize the results so
that you're seeing what's the actual
magnesium and what he was doing was
relative to its ideal,
actual calcium relative to its ideal.
And so the Malter mix is a great way to
level the data from the hair test because
it's very easy to be overwhelmed by that
trees versus forest dynamic.
And I think what my thinking really began
to change about the hair test was when I
realized that you can't measure
ceruloplasmin activity
or level in a hair test.
We can measure the mineral copper, but we
can't get to its protein
that really runs the show.
And so that's when I began to move into
the world of blood testing.
And it's not perfect because there's so
many restrictions on what we're allowed
to test in the blood, but it presented a
completely different perspective of
copper as it relates to
its influence in the body.
And so the hair test, I think it's an
absolutely vital source of broad
information because what you're looking
for is to what extent is this person's
mineral expression all over the map.
And the more it's all over the map, the
more stress they're dealing with
and that it's very easy to reveal, are
they making energy through the adrenal
ratio and the thyroid ratio, which is
kind of fun to see that.
And to me, that's where the rubber hits
the road is really relates to a famous
quote by, at least I think it's famous, a
quote by Mark Hyman about stress.
Stress is the body's inability to make
energy for the mind to
respond to its environment.
I think it's one of the most profound
definitions of what stress really is.
And what we've got to be able to do is
when you have stress in your world, I
guarantee you, you're going to have
oxidative stress in your body.
So then we're into functional hypoxia.
Suddenly the oxygen is not available to
be turned into water.
We can't make energy.
And then that's when all the symptoms
begin to surface, whether it's toxic
symptoms, pathogenic
symptoms, heavy metal symptoms.
That's when everything begins to flourish
is when we can't make the
requisite amount of energy.
And so when you look at a hair test and
you see this erratic picture, which is
very often the case,
what you really know is
that person's under stress.
Can they make energy?
Most can't.
How can we solve that?
That's what the root cause protocol is
all about is how do we reignite the
ability to make the energy so we can
respond to the stress and not resilience
in the face of that stress.
Perfect.
Molly, I could talk about
biochemistry with you all day.
However, I have a feeling the audience
would like something
maybe a little more practical.
So I'd love it if we could sort of maybe
dig more into what you're probably most
well known for, which is really your root
cause protocol, which you've developed on
sort of the back end of the research that
you've done for the last well, nearly two
decades at this point.
Could you walk us through the protocol?
I've got a bunch of questions of my own,
but which I'll interject, and I'll
interject along the
way when they come up.
But in a nutshell, how is your approach
to helping people overcome
various health challenges?
Well, working.
You know, having come out of the
conventional medical model,
where there's disease everywhere.
And I was involved in doing forecasts of
where was where were the
disease indexes going to go?
And they were all hockey
sticks waiting to take off.
I realized that there was something
fundamentally wrong or
something misunderstood.
And so that's what really pulled me into
this whole quest of, so how are we really
designed to work as a species
and I started out focusing on magnesium
because it's the first
mineral lost to stress.
And I was influenced by Carolyn Dean and
Mildred Sealeag and Gene Durlock and a
number of other famous researchers who
were able to connect the dots that
magnesium is the first to go, quickly
followed by the B vitamins.
We're under stress because they're water
soluble and they disappear very quickly.
And so that morphed into trying to
understand, well, what are
the biggest sources of stress?
And then I find out that there was an
article by an Italian team of researchers
that revealed that iron stress is the
greatest stress on planet earth.
I went, wait a minute.
And then I began to sync it up with the
research about the great oxygen event.
So I got iron and oxygen.
And then I really began to delve into, so
how do we stop that?
And it's copper.
Back to our earlier discussion.
Copper, when it's bioavailable, when it's
usable, when it's attached to its
appropriate spectrum of enzymes, is able
to neutralize the
static and create the energy.
And so I set out to, so how do we make
copper bioavailable?
We got to have ceruleal plasma.
And I was reading an article
by Ray Peat, who's recognized
since passed on, unfortunately.
Yeah, yeah, right.
But this goes back 10 years ago.
And it was a wonderful
article about iron overload.
He wrote several articles, but this one
particularly was
focusing on iron overload.
And at the end, towards the end, he said,
"To my knowledge, no one has ever
developed a recipe to increase the
production of ceruleal plasma."
That was a red flag
in front of this bull.
I said, "Well, that's
what I'm going to do.
I'm going to create that recipe."
And at the beginning, I knew that it was
going to be important to have things to
stop doing and start doing, in large part
because of a conversation I had with my
oldest son, who was an engineer.
He said, "Dad, you got to
tell people what to stop doing.
You got to tell them
what to start doing."
I went, "Oh, okay, stops and starts."
And so at the beginning, there were two
stops and two starts.
And the two key principle stops were stop
taking iron supplements
and stop taking vitamin D.
You can imagine the
heretical stance I was taking.
But go ahead.
Sorry, I was just going to say, what for
the audience is the issue there with
vitamin D specifically?
Well, it's just what we're proposing is a
balanced blend through catholic oil to
get both retinol and vitamin D.
Don't take a vitamin D
supplement standing alone.
In our solution.
Yeah, it's just not an advisable.
And there's a whole masterclass that I
have on the downside of vitamin D.
The people are
welcome to purchase online.
It's not very expensive, but it goes into
about an hour and a half of, "Here's what
you don't know about vitamin D."
There's a whole other side to it.
And so it's evolved over the, I guess,
probably 10, 12 years.
It's evolved into about a
dozen stops and a dozen starts.
And for those who are interested, just go
to the website, rcp123.org.
Go to the resources tab.
And then there's a starter guide.
It's the latest version of our getting
people started on the root
cause protocol that is printable.
You can put it up on your fridge or
wherever you want to post it
so you can keep track of it.
But all you have to do is donate your
email address and we'll send you the
record of the guide itself.
And it's really been met
with a lot of gratitude.
A lot of people are very grateful for it.
And it lays out not just the stops and
starts, but there's a schedule.
What should you do when?
And it answers some
of the basic questions.
There are other resources.
You can get the RCP
handbook, which is 84 pages long.
So the starter guide is 12 pages.
There's an 84 page.
These are both free.
There's no charge.
We're just, we're giving away the answer.
And it just takes
discipline to work with it.
And it takes a willingness to step out of
the box of convention that
tells you do this, do that.
When in fact, no, you don't, you don't
want to take ascorbic acid.
You don't want to take calcium.
You don't want to take vitamin D alone.
Okay.
To take a kind of oil.
And then the flip side being, it's
important to take whole food, vitamin C.
It's important to take magnesium and make
sure you've got minerals in your water
and so on and so forth.
And what we found, it's
absolutely fascinating.
People who just do the stops,
when they do those dozen or so stops,
they find that they
actually start to feel better.
And then as they start to adopt, we have
a phased introduction of the starts.
That's when the magic starts to happen.
And it's across the board.
It's, you know, the whole concept of the
root cause protocol is profiled in my
book, Cure Your Tea.
And again, the basis of that is there's
20,000 symptoms that are
profiled in the Merck manual.
That that's the Bible of medicine is the
Merck manual and the description of all
those 20,000 problems.
But what do they all begin with?
Oxidative stress.
The oxygen is not
being turned into water.
And when that happens, it sets up, it
sets the stage for symptoms.
And depending upon where it's happening,
whether it's in your mind or in, or your
brain, I should say, or your kidney or
your elbow or wherever it happens to be.
And it's called something different in
the Merck manual, but
it's all one origin.
And it's the three ring circus of the
world as I know it, is copper and iron
and oxygen, not playing well together.
And when they don't, they create this
spectrum disorder that
we call chronic disease.
And so the RCP is really
designed to empower people to
take control of their situation.
And we have
recommendations about an ancestral diet.
We don't get into the the fevered pitch
of ketosis versus paleo versus whatever,
you know, follow the tenets of Weston A.
Price.
He was a very brilliant scientist, gifted
dentist, but he was a very, very profound
scientist who studied what, what did the
original communities
eat to have perfect teeth?
And why was he
obsessed with perfect teeth?
Because he knew that
when we're a little fetus,
we start out with 32 buds and the 32 buds
split and become 64 buds and 32 become
our teeth and the
other 32 become our spine.
And he knew that perfect teeth and
perfect spine and perfect health.
And so I just think it's important for
people to realize that there is this
legacy of recommendations out there.
And we can get into all sorts of
religious wars about
nuances of the of the food system.
The manisha.
Yeah, it's exhausting, as you well know.
But I think the goal is to try to
simplify this message and simplify the
process so that people can in fact regain
mastery of their physiology
as we as we are designed to do.
I believe that we are sovereign
individuals and we're meant to have this
independence of action,
independence of thought.
And when you eat the right foods and you
have the right supplements, it enlivens
the innate healer within us.
And I'm not to say that, not suggesting
that we no longer have stress.
We will always have stress
as long as we're above ground.
But what we can do is neutralize that
stress with a level of
proficiency and efficiency.
And when the minerals are optimized, and
we've got an ability to curb the stress
that's around us, whether it would be
environmental stress, physical stress,
biological, I mean, there's many
different forms, but the body has this
capacity to heal itself under all those
types of conditions.
Yeah, no, it's a very adapted, sort of
regulating itself and re-finding
homeostasis when the
opportunity presents itself.
But as you've alluded to multiple times,
the moment there are breaks in
mitochondrial efficiency or high levels
of oxidative stress in the body, then
it's essentially almost, well, very
literally putting out fires.
And it's not in a position to really
regain its fundamental structure.
So essentially what you're saying is that
it's a tad more complicated than just
popping a couple of capsules of copper
glycinate every day, but it's still very
doable for the average person.
Just a sort of a quick tangent, speaking
of healing modalities, what are your
thoughts on molecular hypogem?
It's doing the rounds at the moment, and
it does seem to have quite a lot, it does
seem to be quite effective, both from
supporting mitochondrial function
directly and through its sort of actions
as a sort of selective antioxidant.
Do you feel that that
potentially has a place in,
well, either in your
protocol or in health in general?
That's a wonderful question.
And I'm often asked about molecular
hydrogen or ozone therapy or other
add-ons, if you will.
I tend to take a very
conservative stance.
Most of those modalities are designed by
scientists or practitioners who have no
deep knowledge of copper metabolism and
what the endearing role
of copper is on the planet.
As it relates to the hydrogen,
what's the primary source of hydrogen
protons in our body?
It's the mitochondria.
Complexes 1, 3, and 4 are pumping
hydrogen constantly, right?
That's their job.
Now, what most people don't know, I think
the literature is very selective about
what it reveals, but complex 1, 3, 4, and
5 are all copper dependent.
I mean, 99% of articles will say that
it's only complex 4, but there's
compelling research around complexes 1,
3, and 5 that no one likes to talk about
because it begins to spoil the show.
Yeah,
exactly.
And so I'm well aware of in a lab setting
that hydrogen can
neutralize the hydroxyl radical.
I think it's a little bit of a stretch to
say it's going to happen in a biological
system because we happen to put
hydrogenated water into our body.
My limitation is I'm not a
chemist, not a biochemist.
I don't pretend to be a biochemist.
I'm trying to think
like our ancestors did.
How do I maintain a level of vitality
through my diet, through my
self-reoutine, manage my stress, both
what I can control in the outside world
and my inside world and
just go about my business.
I get nervous when people start to reach
out for different modalities because it
sets the stage for two things.
One, I don't think we fully know what
those hydrogen protons are doing.
And the other side of it is when you
start to adopt all these different
approaches, basically what you're telling
the body is, "I don't really trust you.
I don't think you really
know what you're doing.
Let me give you an inducement.
Let me enhance what you're doing."
And it sounds silly,
but I think the body says,
"Well, why are you asking me to get
involved if you think
you know the answer?"
And the problem we've got is that you and
I are engaged in what I would call a very
switched-on conversation, exchanging
information at about
2,000 bits per second.
That's pretty fast.
The part of the brain that runs our body,
the hypothalamus, thinks a million times
faster than you and I can talk.
And I think it's a very bold thought to
say, "Well, I read this article on the
internet and I need to do this."
I think the body knows what to do.
It lacks the nutrients to make the energy
to run the immune system
to regulate homeostasis.
And I just take a very conservative
stance that I'd rather let the body run
itself than me start.
And again, there are
recommendations in the RCP.
But these are,
the stops are to eliminate what never
existed in the food system before.
And the starts are to try to restore
normalcy and sanity in the food system
that our ancestors had full advantage of.
That's very basic.
And I think it's also,
we could easily add 50
other items to the RCP.
Well, then we have a compliance issue.
Just getting people to do 12 things.
The basics.
Yeah, just doing the basics.
And so there's a trade-off.
And so I recognize the popularity of the
hydrogen water, but I had the good
fortune of spending a day with a world
renowned consultant to
the natural food industry.
And during the course of that day,
his first name was Michael.
He said morally,
"People always ask
me, Michael, what's new?
What's new?"
And he said, "I've
learned to ask what's enduring."
And he said, "I would strongly
advise you to start
focusing on what's enduring."
And it was really out of that
conversation that I stumbled into the
research about the great oxygen event.
And that completely changed my
understanding of the problem and the
realization of what
copper's role is on the planet.
And I would argue that people relying on
hydrogen water are
probably copper deficient
without the benefit of testing, because
the copper knows how to pump hydrogen.
The mechanism of making stomach acid, the
mechanism of recycling red blood cells,
requires acidification.
Well, that whole
process is copper dependent.
And what's it doing?
It's pumping hydrogen into these vacuoles
to allow change to take place.
These hydrogen atoms
don't come from Mars.
They're coming from copper enzymes that
are designed through the
ages to support our physiology.
That's a very concise
answer, not one I expected.
So thank you.
Morley, I've got some follow ups to you.
Well, maybe some other viewpoints I'd
love to get your opinion on.
But before we get to that, all those
particular viewpoints, I suppose I'd love
to kind of get your thoughts on trauma
and the central nervous system and
dysfunction there in general.
It's something I'm starting to see more
and more when I either work with people
or, I suppose, myself as well, but the
fact that people for the most part, when
they're following a protocol, often make
at least some liver improvement.
But unless they actually start to deal
with a lot of the emotional side of
things, the past traumas they've been
through, they never really start to heal.
Could you weigh in here?
Do you have any thoughts on any
techniques that you feel are effective at
helping people to overcome trauma,
assuming you think it's
an issue to begin with?
Oh, it's very real.
And again, I go back to
my mentor, Rick Malter.
He wanted to make sure that I understood
that the hair test was a window into the
person's stress profile.
And very, very important.
We're all under stress.
You and I are both under stress.
We're having a lovely conversation, but
everyone we know is under stress.
Everyone we don't know is under stress
because that's the human condition.
And when I started this work many years
ago, I was very Newtonian.
I actually have a, my grandmother's
brother's name was Newton Matthews.
Our ancestry is back in England.
And family legend has it that we're
related to Sir Isaac Newton, although he
didn't have any children.
So it's one of his collab with brother or
sister or something.
Somewhere we're
related to Sir Isaac Newton.
But I was very Newtonian, in my view.
There's some physical event missing.
It's a nutrient.
It's a vitamin.
Something is not there.
Over the course of 16
years, I've become very quantum,
realizing that at the very heart of all
this physical imbalance is emotional
unrest, which is very energetically
driven, as you well know.
And I think it's very, very
important to address that.
And so for years,
we've been talking about
the importance of dumping fear, because
that's the granddaddy emotion of all, is
that when you have a chronic condition
that doesn't resolve, doesn't respond to
the recommended path, you
begin to doubt yourself.
And you begin to think, well, there must
be something wrong with my body, or I'm
not doing it right, or I'm being punished
by God, or something to those effects.
And so that conjures up fear.
And we spell it differently
in the RCP, F E hyphen, A R.
And that way you see the symbol for iron.
And when you're under stress,
you become a magnet for iron.
Now we've been saying this for years, but
it's only been in the last month that I
have definitive
physiological proof that it happens.
And there's an enzyme in our body
that you may have heard
of called furin, F U R I N.
And it's what's called
a protein convertase.
It's a very ancient mechanism.
It's not as old as ceruleoplasma, though.
It's not as old as the PAM enzyme, which
is a very powerful enzyme in
our body for making change.
But furin has a unique ability to
activate the iron
hormone called hepcidin.
And now hepcidin is
what I call, was not me.
It's known as a negative
regulator in iron metabolism.
And ferrooxidase in the ceruleoplasmic
enzyme, ceruleoplasmic proteins, excuse
me, would be known as
a positive regulator.
Well, looking back on our childhood, our
parents were the positive
regulators in our upbringing.
A negative regulator
would be a SWAT team.
And what the world of convention wants us
to believe is that SWAT teams are running
iron metabolism and not our parents,
which makes no sense at all.
But the important thing to understand is
that when hepcidin starts to flex its
muscles, in response to furin enzyme that
is triggered by stress, and the form of
stress that triggers it the most is
social defeat stress,
otherwise known as PTSD.
Go back five years ago.
The world was engaged in PTSD.
Just a bit.
And so furin was off the chart.
Hepcidin off the chart.
Iron regulation was completely gone.
And so I renamed COVID.
COV stands for Coppers Vanished.
ID stands for Irons Disregulated.
And what your listeners need to make sure
they understand is that when copper is
down, iron takes off inside the body.
And so
the mind and our psyche will convince us
that we're under stress, which is only
going to feed the
problem of iron regulation.
And so that's why dealing with the
emotional side of the equation is so
important, which most
people want to ignore.
They want to stay away from their
psychological or emotional trauma.
And I get that.
We've all had some very severe trauma
that we want to pretend didn't happen.
But when you are able to engage in
emotional release techniques, like motion
code or body code,
integrative processing technique or EFT,
it's tremendously liberating because it
releases the fear that
you've done something wrong.
And it then says, as long as you're in a
state of fear, you're
in a sympathetic state.
Well, guess what doesn't happen in a
sympathetic nervous system?
Healing.
You can't heal and run from
the bear at the same time.
So you have to be in a
parasympathetic state.
And so that's the dilemma is we're living
in a society where most people 24 seven
are in sympathetic overdrive.
And lurking in the background, this is
enzyme that no one talks about.
Furen.
It's a very sophisticated audience who
would know what that is.
And then influencing
hepsidin, very few people know about.
But here's the most important part is
when hepsidin is elevated and activated.
Furetin is low because they
ride on a sea salt together.
And so who taught me that?
Douglas Kell.
I was about to say because Furetin is an
acute phase reaction, isn't it?
So that would then make sense as to why
it's an acute phase reactant, obviously.
Exactly.
Beautifully said.
And so what's the one consistent mistake
being made worldwide about Furetin?
That low Furetin means
you're not storing enough iron.
You need more iron or an infusion.
Why don't call them infusions anymore?
They're invasions.
And it's a very serious problem on the
planet that because people don't know
that there's nine copper dependent
enzymes to regulate the production and
the recycling of iron in the blood.
And all we do is
default to you need more iron.
No consideration given to these nine
different expressions
of miles per gallon.
Because you can put, you know, if you're
having trouble with your mileage,
you can fill the car up with gas.
And it's not going to
get better mileage, is it?
You've got to change
tire pressure, timing.
You've got to change a lot of factors in
the engine and in the car's performance
to get better mileage.
But throwing more gas in the
car is not going to solve it.
And that's the mentality of most
practitioners, whether they're doctors or
nutritionists or whoever, they have been
taught singularly, you need more iron.
It's like, really?
That is, to me, that's the foundation of
where the breakdown is in healing today,
is believing that dynamic that only iron
will solve a low
representation of iron in a blood test.
When in fact, I did this just the other
day, I was with a buddy of
mine who's very good at AI.
And I said, Steve,
what are the top 10 causes of anemia that
have nothing to do with iron?
And what came back was B12 deficiency, B9
deficiency, B6 deficiency, hemolytic
anemia, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it goes through the
whole beta thalassemia.
But there were two
things that were missing.
I said, okay,
what are the top 12 causes of anemia that
have nothing to do with iron?
Number 11, cupboard deficiency.
Number 12, retinal deficiency.
And to me, that was very representative
of the thought process of convention.
I'll give you 10 ones that you know
about, but only under duress will I give
you the two most important.
Yeah, no, I'm surprised to get those.
I was expecting another one.
So I was expecting you to carry on to at
least 20 to be honest.
So I was delighted that the AI gods let
the cat out of the bag.
But the important thing is this concept
of stress, of emotional stress, is
central to our health and well being.
And everyone's under stress.
And again, to reinforce a point that I
made earlier, if you have stress in your
world, and we all do, that means you have
oxidative stress in your body.
And if you have this perception that the
stress is unresolved or unresolvable,
then it becomes PTSD.
And then you just put gasoline on furin,
then you just totally change
the hepsidin ferritin dynamic.
And then the tragedy is the people who
have the low ferritin get iron
supplements, get some kind
of enhanced level of iron.
And what does that do?
It only increases the
physiological stress in the body.
Because when iron is too high, it has a
wet blanket effect on copper metabolism.
So then we've totally changed the
physiology of the body, which is only
going to intensify the
perception of stress in the body.
I think it's, to me, it's the hidden
factor for why so many people are out of
balance and have chronic fatigue and just
don't have the vitality that they want.
It's this confusion in the healing
circles about what's really behind low
iron in the blood, and not any
consideration to it stuck in the tissue
and not realizing the copper is the
shuttlecock, if you will,
between the two domains.
Definitely.
So take a chirp call and
let it be called copper.
Absolutely.
Molly, I'd like to maybe introduce, thank
you for that, by the way, I'd like to
introduce a slightly different
perspective if you're open to it.
Now, I'm a big fan of Joel Green.
I don't know if you're
familiar with his work and who he is.
He has a very gut-centric approach to
health, and health in general.
And he also has a fairly, I suppose,
multifaceted approach to how one might
deal with iron overload, which I'd love
to get your take on.
Of course, I'm not trying to
pit anyone against each other.
It's just really to, I'm just interested
in hearing people's perspectives, I
suppose, on different protocols and ways
of approaching something.
Anyway, he first posits that, excuse me,
he first posits that increasing various
gut bacteria, like
bifidobacteria, for example,
with various iron-binding cetaphols,
which I suppose for the audience can
maybe best describe as well.
I suppose literally bacteria-produced
magnets can help trap iron and I suppose
suppressor at the level of the gut and
therefore reduce systemic overload.
Do you think there's any
value to that statement at all?
Is there any way?
Value to that statement.
Would you agree with that?
Absolutely.
Iron metabolism is a two-step process.
We've got to get iron into the enterocyte
and then it comes in a plus two format.
But then it's got to go into a plus three
format to either be loaded into ferritin
or be exported onto transferrin.
And the second step of absorption is
transferrin accepting the iron so it can
go into the bloodstream and get back to
the bone marrow to
become new red blood cells.
And so when that doesn't happen
efficiently and effectively, there will
be a buildup of iron in the
enterocyte, the enterocytes.
And so I think that all of the
gut-related distress that's out there,
whether we're talking about colitis or
Crohn's or just IBS or whatever the
mechanism might be, I think it's all
iron-related due to a lack of copper.
And in fact, in the
world of veterinary medicine,
there's a condition called Jonas disease,
J-O-H-N-S-E-S, Jonas disease.
And it's identical to Crohn's disease.
The conditions are absolutely identical.
Do you know how they cure Jonas disease
in the animal world?
Copper.
Yeah.
But in the human world, the doctors wring
their hands saying we don't have to
understand this Crohn's thing.
And it's just, to me, it's unfortunate
that people don't
understand how iron is absorbed,
two steps, how copper is essential for
the mechanism to maintain that balance.
And so the other side of it, though, in
terms of gut dysbiosis is I've worked
with hundreds of people who have gut
issues, as you can imagine,
what do they all have in common?
There's an emotional
issue they can't stomach.
Yeah.
And that's sort of going to affect that
migrating motor
complex for the most part.
I assume there's a
copper link there as well.
Well, again, we're back to when you're in
a sympathetic state, the two hormones
that are going to really rise are
adrenaline and cortisol.
Yeah, fair enough.
Adrenaline has known
properties to increase hepsidin.
So there must be an adrenaline, there's
an adrenaline-furyin connection, right?
So hepsidin is going up.
We know what that's going to do.
And what does cortisol do?
Cortisol is very important hormone.
It serves many different functions.
But one of its least known functions is
the ability to increase the
production of metallothionine.
So in a state of stress, when cortisol
gets released, there can be a four to
five-fold increase in
metallothionine production.
And why is that a problem?
Because metallothionine binds up copper a
thousand times stronger
than it binds up zinc.
So then we've just changed the energy and
antioxidant dynamics of the body.
And so if someone has chronic stress,
what's essentially what's happening is
the organism, our organism is saying, you
can't seem to handle the stress.
I'm going to power you down.
Yeah.
Hence the, I suppose that sort of
something I go on about every podcast
just about so I'm sure the audience is
about, it was really
kill me at this point.
But that, that sounds
like, very much like Dr.
Robert Navier's Saldane response.
I don't know if you...
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
And the other part that I think is
important for people to realize is
there's a lot of belief, and what's the
three letter word in belief lie.
There's a lot of belief that we need to
manage our zinc-copper ratio.
No, no you don't.
You need to get zinc in your diet.
It's a very important mineral.
But I think we are facing a severe
shortage of copper in the food system
because it's not in the soil because of
modern agricultural practices.
But what people need to understand is
that zinc is a perfect
activator for metallothione.
So when you're gobbling down 45, 50
milligrams of zinc, you've effectively
taken copper offline.
And the part that people may not know is
that zinc has a known ability to block
copper uptake at CTR1,
copper transporter 1.
It has a known ability to kill the
cytochrome C oxidase function.
And it has a known ability by Dr.
Deuce down in Australia in 2010 to kill
the ferrooxidase enzyme function,
especially in the brain.
And so there's a lot of who struck John
about, "Oh, you got to be
careful of your zinc levels."
No.
The person who raised that issue was a
gentleman by the name of
Carl Pfeiffer in the 1960s.
When the heels of world-renowned
scientists like Otto Wirberg, Hans Krebs,
LVM, Conrad LVM, some very noted
scientists studying
copper and iron for 30 years.
They didn't study zinc.
Zinc wasn't even on the radar screen.
And in the same way that I would argue
that Louis Pasteur was guided in his
focus, I think that Carl Pfeiffer was
guided in his focus.
And he wrote the first article in the
1960s about the zinc-copper ratio.
Well, what's important to know is the
history of these scientists.
And it's in Wikipedia.
You can look it up.
But he was a principal in the MK Ultra
Mine program with the
CIA here in the States.
Well, when I learn about a fact like
that, that invalidates their research.
And so I just, I question the veracity of
this zinc-copper ratio that runs a lot of
thinking in functional medical circles.
They get very preoccupied with it.
And I don't think they understand the energetics of copper or
the de-energetics of zinc.
There's nothing about
zinc that creates energy.
It doesn't make you have more vitality.
It's my way of thinking.
Zinc is a structural mineral.
Copper is a catalytic mineral.
And we need both.
But when you've got to make change, when
you've got to make energy, when you've
got to neutralize the exhaust, you better
have bioavailable copper.
Bioavailable copper
at your beck and call.
Do you think the copper IDA is even close
to being sufficient?
Excuse me.
Do you think the copper IDA is even close
to being sufficient?
So in the 1930s, the average person, this
is here in the States, but actually there
were studies done in China and in the UK.
Back in the 30s, the average diet would
deliver four to six
milligrams of copper a day.
And I was stuck on one to two at best.
And then by the 1960s, it had dropped to
two to five milligrams per day.
And now worldwide, they seem to be
hovering around nine-tenths of one
milligram being acceptable.
And then Leslie Clavey in 2011 did a
study of the average American's diet and
how much copper were
they actually getting.
And if I'm remembering it correctly, 80%
of people in the States were not getting
nine-tenths of one
milligram of copper a day.
And he just has a very simple solution,
get more copper in your diet
and in your supplement routine.
And that's a very unpopular, almost
heretical stance because
copper is toxic, don't you know?
Yeah, you're going to end up with
Wilson's disease by tomorrow morning if
you ever do it by half milligram.
Exactly, right.
No, I think there's a lot of hysteria
around copper for all the wrong, well, I
will say for all the wrong reasons.
But the delicacy of copper is the
research is out there, but you really
have to work for it.
And it takes time and discipline, and it
takes a willingness to stand up to
convention to question,
could there be more to the story?
And that's really what we, that's the
position we take within the RCP is, yes,
there is more to the story.
Let's talk about it.
Yeah, do you have a preferred sort of
supplement form of copper?
I mean, I know there is one, I believe
it's by a company called Global Healing,
and they produce a copper,
it's a copper's
nicotinic acid, I believe.
And I have a feeling that you're a fan of
copper supplements in the sort of
alongside other whole food forms of
various vitamins and minerals, such as A.
What are your thoughts on sort of
stand-alone copper salts
versus copper in, yeah.
When I started this work, I was really
focused on more on
minerals in general and magnesium.
What really woke me up was COVID, that we
have a problem, that there's a, I think
there's a definite shortage
of copper in the food system.
There's a lot of opinions about it, as
you can well imagine.
But I was inspired to help a supplement
company based here in the US, it's called
Formula IQ, to make a copper
supplement called RecuPyrate,
that's my unending wit, RecuPyrate,
and it delivers two milligrams of copper
bisclicinate, along with spirulina and
desiccated beef liver and
some boron and turmeric.
And it actually comes
with or without the boron.
I fought the need to do that mightily,
and I was willing to run the risk of
being called a supplement
whore, because I somehow named it.
I had no influence over its design per
se, although the the formula was very
quick to get my, at least my opinion,
because I'm not a chemist.
But I wanted a solution to the copper
problem that I think was definitely
aggravated by the time
period 2020 through 2023.
There was a decided attack, in my
opinion, on copper status, other minerals
in general, but I
think copper in particular.
And so, at the risk of selling like Al
Gore, who invented the internet, right?
Yeah, I think I
invented the demand for copper.
And I think I made it fashionable to at
least talk about it.
Right now, there's probably 50 different
products out there,
which I think is great.
I think, you know, let's raise the tide,
because it's going to help all boats.
I think what's really needed, Rob, is a
definitive study to say, is there a
pecking order to all
these different approaches?
I've seen articles that are very critical
of the salts, the copper salts.
I've seen articles that talk about the
value of copper infusions.
I mean, the dilemma is,
what's really missing,
if I had another magic wand,
I would institutionalize the production
of ceruleoplasma and allow that to be
something that can be infused in people.
You were a component of ceruleoplasma.
Yeah, exactly.
Because it exists.
It costs about $200 a
vial, a one ounce vial.
But you have to be a research scientist
to get access to it.
And the thing is, back in the 1950s, they
were curing schizophrenia
with one shot of ceruleoplasma.
Oh, I was not even
close to aware of that.
That's fascinating.
I'll look that up.
And so that's work that was done at
Tulane University in 1959.
Dr.
Jensen and two colleagues from Harvard
Medical School were involved in that.
And they were studying 34
patients with schizophrenia.
And there was a marked improvement in 30
of the 34 with the shot of ceruleoplasma.
Well, what does that really tell us?
Well, the origin of schizophrenia is the
resting of adrenaline.
Because anyone who has schizophrenia is
in a state of fear, heightened fear.
And what's the out what's the byproduct
of fear and adrenaline?
It's called adrenochrome.
It's a very powerful chemical that alters
the thinking in the individual's brain.
And why do I know so much about it?
Because my dad had schizophrenia.
And what was the treatment of choice in
Baltimore, Maryland in 1958, when he was
because when he actually ran away from
home, never to come back, was they were
using electric shock therapy,
not ceruleoplasma.
And the reason why he left home was if
you've ever seen the movie Cuckoo's Nest,
you know how unbecoming
electric shock therapy is.
And he didn't want any part of that
because he had it done once.
So it's just, that's
the wound that I carry.
And I have the pleasure
of knowing how to solve it.
But I don't have the pleasure of
administering it,
because it's under lockdown.
It's under clinical lockdown.
And it's only available for research
scientists under very strict conditions.
But I can point you in the direction of a
dozen studies to prove that ceruleoplasma
would solve all the problems.
Well, I mean, hopefully through sort of
talking about through on podcasts like
this, we can at least raise awareness and
create the education around it.
I found the study, by the way, just while
you were talking, and I'll make sure to
link to it in the show notes so that
people at least do have access to it.
Okay.
It's
a very disruptive article.
Just a bit.
I will read it in
depth after our podcast.
Molly, the last thing I suppose I wanted
to talk to you about in earnest today,
and this is again something Joel Green
brought up, was this concept of
lactoferrin,
specifically human lactoferrin.
Now, I suppose Joel talks about this as
being a master regulator of iron balance
and a two-way buffer system, maybe rather
than just a one removal tool.
And the way I see it, and you're welcome,
and correct me if I'm
wrong, which I probably am, but
it binds to iron reportedly anyway, up to
300 times more than trozferrin, allowing
it to obviously then sequester more iron.
It then reduces free sort of red
oxactive, I suppose, iron
to limit oxidative stress.
And I suppose as a result of that
microbial growth by way of limiting
substrate for infections like Candida,
which we didn't touch on today, but
that's fascinating in and of itself.
It also seems to release bound iron in
the body when it needs to, yet it's then
able to bind up a surplus.
And then finally, it seems to sort of
support immune system
function by modulating.
And let me see if I can get this right,
macrophage function, which I assume could
help regulate iron
recycling by way of ferroportin.
Is that correct?
That's right.
So I think I'm piecing this together, at
least in some way, shape or form.
But do you think lactoferrin is an
interesting molecule in this regard?
And I know we're going back slightly to
the argument, well, not the argument, the
discussion around molecular hydrogen
adding sort of more pieces
to this particular puzzle.
What do you think about
lactoferrin in general?
And maybe with these new human specific
lactoferrins coming onto the market that
potentially have less of an immunological
reaction than say
something that's bovine in nature.
Yeah.
Do you think that has a part to play in
helping to regulate iron?
No, I think it's a
primal molecule to do that.
What's one of the highest expressions of
lactoferrin on the planet?
In unprocessed cow's milk.
Royal dairy.
And now we're back to
beychamp and pasture.
Indeed.
When you pasteurize milk,
what happens to the enzymes in that milk?
They disappear.
There's 50 of them.
There's 50 of them that disappear.
The two most important,
ceruloplasmin and lactoferrin.
Oh, wow.
I did not.
Okay.
I've learned some things today.
So if I know that, do
you think they know that?
Of course they know that.
Yeah.
We don't have, we don't
just pasteurize milk now.
We all do pasteurize.
Yeah.
I still find it quite funny that people,
look, I think raw milk definitely is this
place, but what I find funny is that
people will buy raw milk and they put it
straight into their coffee.
And yeah, your raw
milk isn't so raw anymore.
It's just milk.
But that's a good, that's a very
insightful observation.
But the thing is,
how much, how much
iron is in breast milk?
None, I assume.
None.
That's exactly right.
Do you think there's a reason for that?
Well, there is.
Because the baby, the infant human
doesn't have an immune system until
they're two years old.
What is their immune system?
Oh, yeah.
It's copper driven.
It's the liver, but it's copper driven.
And during the height of insanity of
COVID, I found 52 articles that
documented that copper was in
charge of the immune system.
COV, copper's vanished,
I, B, iron's dysregulated.
And so
the infant, and what's the level of
vitamin D in mother's milk?
Actually, I don't know, a fan.
Zero.
Okay.
Mother's milk is retinal.
Yeah.
No, I do know that.
All right.
That tracks, that makes sense.
It's starting to come together now.
Right.
And so what's one of the most important
mechanisms to make copper bioavailable?
You got to have retinal.
Yeah.
If you don't have retinal activate the
copper pumps, nothing happens.
And so we live in a world now where
people are afraid of, I'd like
to call it unprocessed dairy.
Raw sounds so crass, but it's raw dairy
is where the action is.
The real insult to milk
was the homogenization.
It was the breaking up of the fat.
That's where the problems really started.
But lactoferrin, very, very important.
And I think one of the better articles
that was written during COVID was by
Douglas Kell, an etheric,
blanking on her last name.
In any event, Douglas Kell, I think it
was 2021, talking about lactoferrin and
the whole dynamic of the
viral activity during COVID.
I don't have the title memorized, but it
would be a wonderful article for people
to familiarize themselves with because it
really gets into the weeds of why
lactoferrin is so important and how it
interacts with ceruleplasmin.
And it's like, it's really, really
important, especially in those molecules
that we're talking about with
macrophages, which are intensely
important for our health and well-being.
And they are,
you made the comment about
ferroportin, the iron doorway.
You've got to be able to, the macrophages
is going to engulf the problem and then
digest the problem, but it's
got to get rid of the iron.
It's got to get out of
the, of the macrophage.
And that's through a doorway called
ferroportin, which requires the
ferrooxidase enzyme function.
And that's not openly taught in
practitioner school.
There's no awareness of this need to have
iron recycling throughout the body.
And so there's a lot of confusion.
And the other nuance to lactoferrin is it
becomes apo and holo.
Did you know that?
No, I don't know.
Could you explain that slightly?
Apo is empty.
Holo is full.
So they actually sell people full
lactoferrin that has iron already
attached to it because
we're anemic, don't you know?
When in fact, what we really need is apo
lactoferrin, like mother nature produces
in the cattle, so that we can gobble up
the iron that's the
cause of all of our problems.
It's iron, the concept of aging,
everyone's into longevity now.
All the really, you know, hip scientists
are talking about
longevity and reversing aging.
Well, what is longevity?
Lack of oxidative stress.
And what's another way of saying aging?
Iron accumulation.
Yeah, that makes complete sense.
Yeah.
And that's the work of
Denham Harmon from 1956.
He was a former, he was a PhD industrial
engineer who studied oxidative stress in
the industrial setting.
And he thought, he was in his 30s.
He thought, Jim, what if
this applies to humans?
And so he decides to become a doctor
and he goes to Stanford.
So he's not your average Jim
and gets his medical degree.
And he creates this whole concept of the
free radical theory of aging,
which put the world of conventional
medicine on its ear.
And then 50 years later, he was 40 years
old when he wrote the first article.
When he was 90 years old,
he updated his findings.
And it's like, it's the most accepted
model of aging on the planet is Denham
Harmon's free radical theory of aging.
And we're back to the three ring circus,
iron, oxygen, and copper.
We've got to manage those three elements.
And that's the ultimate goal of the Root
Cause Protocol is that when they are
managed, you're going to make more
energy, you're going to clear more
exhaust, and you're
going to have fewer symptoms.
It's the whole basis of the argument.
And it seems to bear witness in the
people who do it on a regular basis.
Oli, that was fantastic.
Thank you.
I think that's a perfect
place to end it as well.
You were a terrific guest.
I think you've already suggested as much,
but where can people find you if they'd
like to learn more, maybe specifically
about you and your protocol?
Absolutely.
People are welcome to buy my book.
It's called Curie Your Fatigue.
There'll be a second
edition coming out in November.
So you can certainly
enroll for the second edition.
You can still buy the first if you want.
The website, rcp123.org.
We have a community, the RCP community,
that meets every other week.
That's on Facebook.
Yeah.
It meets every other week.
And people get to ask
questions, and I'm always there.
We have an institute where we train
people about these principles.
It's a 16-week program.
And we welcome people
being a part of that.
We're in class number 4,
16, in group number 22.
We've trained just under 1,000 people
now, coming up with 900 people.
Very exciting.
We're on all sorts of social media.
And then I always let people know that
they can reach out to me personally at my
email address, morleyrobins at gmail.com.
Or for the brazen few that want to call
me, it's ericode847-922-8061.
And I've never met a question I didn't
enjoy, but I appreciate the chance to
help people understand these concepts and
really value our time
together in that regard.
So thank you for the dance, if you will.
Definitely.
That's very gracious of you.
And thank you for your time, Morley.
It was an honor to speak to you.