What did I Learn at the Clinical Nutrition Seminar?

Did you know that your supplements can be completely ineffective?

Over the last 5 days, I spent 11 hours every day at a seminar on clinical nutrition. It was taught by world-renowned functional medicine practitioner, Dr. Robert Rakowski. In this newsletter, I’ll give you just a small segment of what I learned.

• Your body has a certain level of acidity, and it’s graded on a scale of 0-14, and that’s called the “pH scale.” Your acidity is regulated very tightly such that optimally, you are at 7.35. If you go as low as 7.1 you die. If your body is too acidic, it requires much more of a nutrient, hormone or enzyme to produce the desired effect. So for example, if your pH is 7.2 instead of 7.35, instead of needing 200mg of chromium per day, you may require 2000mg. This has implications for every single mineral, vitamin, enzyme and hormone. So if you are spending lots of money on supplements, but your pH isn’t right, those supplements are just going to waste.
• Too much acidity makes cancer resistant to chemotherapy.
• If a man is overweight and low in testosterone, it is criminal to directly increase his testosterone, because there is an enzyme in fat called “aromatase.” That enzyme converts testosterone to estrogen. Any additional testosterone will be rapidly converted into estrogen.
• Once you lose 10% of your body’s peak muscle mass, the immune system is impaired, and risk of infection increases.
• Once you lose 40% of your body’s peak muscle mass, you die.
• Sugar is more addictive than cocaine.
• The first sign of failing health is a shift of fluid from inside the cell to outside the cell. Ideally, a person has 2/3 of their body water inside the cells, and 1/3 outside the cells. The more skewed this ratio, the worse your health. This can be measured with a bioelectrical impedance analysis.
• Nutrients have synergistic effects. What that means is that for example, iron absorption is enhanced when it’s taken together with vitamin C and zinc. Every single nutrient has certain other synergists. This is a case when 1+1 doesn’t equal 2. It’s a case when 1+1 equals 60.
• Medical foods are specifically formulated powders for the treatment of different conditions. They contain synergistic nutrients. Different medical foods target different conditions. Dr. Rakowski makes very liberal use of very high-dosage medical foods at very high frequencies for short periods of time (typically 1 week, and up to 3 weeks) to achieve sometimes jaw-dropping results. For example, he had a female patient who had gangrene, and got her feet cut off. They were going to cut off her hands because they were basically dead. After that, they said they’d cut off her forearms, and then her upper arms, and then, she would die. Within 3 weeks of a medical food detox in addition to other interventions, she reversed her gangrene. The seminar was full of case studies like that.
• Dr. Rakowski is a big fan of a 1-week intense detox, where medical foods are consumed exclusively, as many as every waking hour.
• When you are losing fat steadily and then you hit a plateau where no more fat comes off, it is because toxins are released from the fat that you lost. Those toxins circulate in the blood and can either be stored in other organs, be stored in fat, or they can be excreted. These toxins slow down the metabolism. So when you do reach that plateau, it’s time for a 1-week intense detox.
• Excess body fat recycles cortisol, the stress hormone. So people who are overweight not only naturally have more of the stress hormone, but it stays in their system longer. So the effects of stress are more damaging on overweight people compared to lean people.
• Detoxification can involve heavy metal detox. Did you know that environmental lead is preferentially stored in the bones? Other toxins are stored in fat tissue. Since the brain is 60% fat, a lot of toxins have particular affinity for the brain, which can cause a number of neurological diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and others.
• Detoxification can also involve estrogen detox. There are lots of environmental estrogens, and both men and women have estrogen toxicity. The negative effects for men are prostate cancer, and gynecomastia (or in laymen’s terms, “man boobs”). The negative effects for women are fatigue, PMS, a very difficult menopause and many more.
• There is no such thing as discipline. There is only love… you either love finely etched muscular abs more than donuts or you love donuts more than wash board abs.

This is simply a small snippet of everything I learned over the last 5 days.

To say that I’m very excited about the tools I and my trainers now have as a result of this seminar would be an understatement.

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Until next week,
Igor.

 

500 Denison St.,
Markham, ON