March 6, 2021

From podcast: https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/article/nutrition-articles/hydration/

[00:00:00] Introduction

[00:01:19] Podcast Sponsors

[00:03:30] The Elixir Tracy Gave Ben for the Recording

[00:09:31] Tracy's Journey to Becoming an Influencer in Health and Hydration

[00:27:13] How Tracy Took an Interest in the Lymphatic System

[00:35:28] Podcast Sponsors

[00:37:49] cont. How Tracy Took an Interest in the Lymphatic System

[00:41:09] How Detoxing Is Undervalued in the Health Community

[00:46:17] How Tracy Changed her Approach to Hydration, Which Led to Better Health

[00:58:21] What Makes Tracy So Excited About Hydration

[01:04:10] Why Tracy Began Drinking Deuterium-Depleted Water (DDW)

[01:13:40] How Dehydration is Causing Major Health Issues in Modern Society

[01:16:27] How to Quench the Thirst That No Amount of Earthly Water Will Appease

[01:20:12] Closing the Podcast

[01:21:05] End of Podcast

Ben:  On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Tracy:  I truly believe that no matter what you do, you can't truly be healthy without speaking life over your body. That would equate to, “I'm drinking water that doesn't hydrate.” But we're not taught this in school. The words I'm saying, the thoughts I'm thinking, these have an effect to create all matter inside my system. I am creating, I am basically co-creating with God my own body.

Ben:  Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

Hey, I got a chance today to sit down with my friend Tracy Duhs. She's an expert on water. She has a wonderful podcast herself called HYDRATE, which is a podcast about all things water, which you may like if you're a geek like me and you're into more than just, say, grabbing an expensive glass of Pellegrino every once in a while at the grocery store, and you want to take a deeper dive than that. Tracy's information is fantastic and we had a wonderful discussion on today's show.

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Alright, let's go talk to my friend, Tracy Duhs.

Welcome to the show. Well, first of all, cheers. Raise a glass. I'm here with Tracy Duhs. Tracy made me an elixir, as she always does. Wherever I see Tracy, she's always gotten–I don't know if you have like a smoothie maker in your purse or what, but you've always got like an elixir that you materialize.

And I have not yet sipped it, but I'm about to so live in real-time on the podcast as I sip this. Tell me what I'm drinking, Tracy.

Tracy:  Okay. So, we've got some chaga in there, tons of tocos.

Ben:  Tocos?

Tracy:  Yeah. It's sweetened with monk fruit.

Ben:  You mean tocos like tocotrienols, like vitamin E?

Tracy:  Yeah. Rice bran.

Ben:  Oh.

Tracy:  Rice bran extracts.

Ben:  Rice bran is a great source of vitamin E.

Tracy:  Vitamin E. Yeah. Very healing, but it makes it creamy and has that like nutty, kind of creamy, frothy.

Ben:  I like that. What's the liquid that you use as the base?

Tracy:  Well, that's a very special liquid. I use deuterium-depleted water just for you.

Ben:  Which we can talk about on today's show.

Tracy:  Yeah. So, there's deuterium-depleted water. Yeah, but there's no nut milks or anything like that. I love to use tocos. I feel like–

Ben:  Well, it's very creamy.

Tracy:  It's creamy, nutty, sweet, and it's filled with nutrients.

Ben:  Do you blend it or do you use one of the frothers, or the hand frothers?

Tracy:  No. I use the Vitamix.

Ben:  Okay. Got it.

Tracy:  So, I heat the water first.

Ben:  Do you have a lot of different elixir recipes?

Tracy:  Yeah.

Ben:  You're coming out with an elixir. I guess it wouldn't be a cookbook, it'd be an elixir.

Tracy:  It's an elixir book. It's called “HYDRATE with Tracy Duhs.”

Ben:  That's the name of your podcast also, yeah.

Tracy:  Yup. The podcast is named HYDRATE with Tracy Duhs.

Ben:  Where do you come up with your, and I'll introduce you in a second to my audience, but where do you come up with your actual recipes? Are these just fabrications of your crazy brain? Are you off doing psilocybin in the forest and coming back with ideas for elixirs? Or, where do you come up with these? Because they're super tasty.

Tracy:  Kind of like you, how you just love to experiment. That's my playtime. My creative time is just throwing things together. And I've never been a person that–my body doesn't resonate with alcohol. So, I'd go to parties and my friends would be drinking alcohol and just didn't resonate with me. So, I thought, “I want to have a cool glass in my hand, too, and I want something that raises my vibration as well.”

Ben:  Not be the awkward person at the party who doesn't have anything in your hand.

Tracy:  Yeah, you can't be the awkward person.

Ben:  Mm-hmm. I've been that.

Tracy:  So, I wanted something cute in my hand, but also something that really raised my frequency and helped balance my body, give me the nutrition I need, because when you have the nutrients you need, you feel better, your neural chemistry is better. When you're hydrated, your neural chemistry is better. So, you're going to be a more fun and pleasant person to be around.

Ben:  Which also happens with alcohol, but it's temporary.

Tracy:  Yeah. The next morning you're not probably as pleasant. So, I don't know. I just started coming up with different things, but it was also out of necessity, too, because after I had my first daughter, I was going through some severe postpartum depression. My minerals were very imbalanced and I was just feeling horrible, and I needed something to bring me back to life, and I wasn't willing to take medication. I wanted to get to the root of it and figure out what it was, so yeah. So, it's just kind of been a thing. It's like what I became known for. And then, people come over to my house and they're jumping off the walls. I have trampolines at my house. I've got a treehouse, hot tub, secret garden, like all these little spots to play.

Ben:  It's a cool place.

Tracy:  Yeah. And people just are like, “Oh my gosh, I'm just having so much fun. What is inside of this drink?” And I'm like, “Just nutrients.”

Ben:  Well, the concept of elixirs, so to speak, let's just call them that, as alcohol alternatives, or even something that you could, and I do this sometimes, microdose alcohol with to get away with drinking far less alcohol. So, you get less of the acetaldehyde, and the toxins, and a lot of the other issues that arise with alcohol, histamine, sulfites, all the things that people are sensitive to. The idea absolutely intrigues me. I don't know if I told you this when I did all my “Boundless” book parties. We had a big one in New York and a big one in L.A., and we had elixir bars. They weren't alcohol bars, they were elixir bars. And there was this one place in New York City. I'm blanking on the name of it. It's kind of like this biohacking center back there. I'll remember eventually. But we had 12 different elixirs from cacao elixirs to matcha elixirs like you made the other day, chaga, adaptogens, mushrooms.

There is a company called Kin, which I've recently started using, K-I-N, and they make a bunch of like feel-good adaptogens that give you a similar buzz or similar relaxing effect, almost like that inhibitory GABA neurotransmitter effect of alcohol, for example, in the evenings. And you can put it in with a little sparkling water, or kombucha, or what have you. But this idea that you don't have to just drink alcohol is fascinating. And even if you look at, because I was reading a few books actually and just like the history of alcohol, and it was very common, for example, with wine, for a wine to rarely be just wine. It would always be mixed with all these spices, and cinnamons, and herbs, and–

Tracy:  And they would vortex it.

Ben:  Right.

Tracy:  And put gemstones in it.

Ben:  Now, I want to get to vortexing momentarily, and I want to talk about deuterium-depleted water, too, because you're an expert in a lot of these concepts related to some of the more advanced hydration things that people don't think about that might go beyond just not drinking municipal tap water. But before we do, I'd like for people to get to know you a little bit better. I met you a couple of years ago when I came to San Diego and I stayed at your Sanctuary Wellness Center, which is almost like a boutique wellness hotel down on the coast there. What part of San Diego is this?

Tracy:  Well, I live in Point Loma and it's a mile away in Ocean Beach.

Ben:  Okay. Yeah. Ocean Beach. So, you have this Sanctuary Wellness Center, very good energy, and you've got different water structuring units down there, and spiralizers, and silk sheets on the beds, and it's got very good energy. I guess it's just based off a lot of what you've studied up on when it comes to energies and frequencies. And so, I met you there. And because my father, Gary, is so into structured water and water filters, and I've learned so much from him, and what he learned about water when he was in the coffee business repairing espresso machines, and developing different coffee roasting recipes, and discovering that it's really, aside from the bean size, shape, and quality, the water that determines the quality of an espresso, or the quality of a coffee. And he got into this almost a decade ago and since then has taken a deep dive into water. And I've learned, pun intended, I've learned quite a bit from him about water, and so understood a lot of what you were showing me a couple years ago when I came to Sanctuary and you were just taking me through all your water spiralizers and your elixir recipes with the deuterium-depleted water and all of that.

So, that was how we met. And then, I learned a few interesting things about you, and our paths are a little bit similar. You were homeschooled, and you started college when you were 15, and you were pre-med. And your dad, like my dad for a brief period of time, was a pastor. And so, I'm curious, you being a health influencer, wellness influencer, a water and hydration expert, someone who's writing a book on water, someone who's now educating a lot of people on your podcast about water, how did you actually become so interested in, A, health, and then B, particularly the concept of hydration as it relates to health?

Tracy:  Yeah. That's a great question. It was really out of desperation, to be honest. I've always loved health and wellness. Since I was a little girl, I feel like I had this deep compassion for people that didn't feel well, especially people that were struggling with weight issues. My mom, I remember when I was a little girl, just her getting ready in the morning and just feeling so defeated. Like, she ate healthy, she did all the things, but–

Ben:  And where was this that you grew up?

Tracy:  I grew up in Salinas, California.

Ben:  Okay.

Tracy:  And we were crop dusted over all the time. So, she probably had–her hormones are probably out of balance. But anyways, you don't want to ever see your parents upset, and I always used to think like I'm a problem solver. I'm like, “There's got to be a way to figure out how to help her so she doesn't feel so awful because she's trying so hard but doesn't seem to be working for her.” So, I just thought, “Man, when I grow up, I want to learn about the body. I want to understand the body so that no one has to feel like they're a prisoner in their body, and they don't have the answers, and they're trying hard, they're doing all the things, but maybe this one little tweak could make all the difference. And if I could help educate people on what that is, that would feel so good.”

So, I was always interested in it since I was little. But when I was 24, I got pregnant from my first daughter, Grace. And when I got pregnant, I was a healthy girl. I've never drank or didn't really stay out late, party. I always ate a very balanced diet, worked out all the things. But when I got pregnant, I was so thirsty, Ben. Like, I would drink a gallon of water a day to quench my thirst and it was never enough. Like if we were sitting here having this conversation, all I could think about would be water. Like, is there water near me? Because I could get thirsty in any moment and the thirst wasn't just like, “Oh, I feel like I want some water.” It was like a desperation thirst. And when I get my blood panels and get tested, my doctor would say, “You're fine. Everything's great. You're wonderful.” But I didn't feel fine. I would literally wake up with my eyeballs stuck to my eyelids and I'd have to, with my eyes closed, go to the sink to put water on them to open them up.

Ben:  Wow. And your doctor would do tests for blood urea nitrogen and creatinine, and everything one would normally analyze for kidney function or for hydration?

Tracy:  Exactly. My kidneys were fine, even–

Ben:  Peeing clear?

Tracy:  Yeah, totally. And I was, by all accounts, super healthy, like everything you could think of I was doing. And I was desperate. It felt like when I'd wake up, it was like, was I crawling through the Sahara Desert without water for 48 hours? It felt like maybe what that would have felt like. So, I just was like, “What is the issue?” And then, at eight months, my daughter, I went in for a regular test and they said, “We need to do an emergency cesarean right now because you have two centimeters of amniotic fluid. And if you go home, she's basically in a dry sac, if you go home right now, she could pinch her cord and obviously losing–“

Ben:  So, a dry sack during pregnancy, I'm not familiar with that term, does that indicate poor hydration?

Tracy:  Well, what is that, right? Amniotic fluid in our system should have all 74, it should have 74 trace elements in it in perfect balance because our amniotic fluid is, it should be identical to the ocean. The ocean is like the earth's amniotic fluid. And I didn't know that. And since I had a mineral imbalance, the water that I was drinking wasn't able to effectively hydrate me. So, it was just passing through my system, and nobody told me about that. I didn't understand it. I was looking into everything like, “Gosh, are my aldosterone levels low? What's going on in my system that is not allowing me to hold hydration in my system?” And it really was just a simple fix, but I could have lost my daughter. That weekend, by God's grace, I was in the doctor getting a test. If I hadn't had been there, they said there's a really big chance she wouldn't have made it through the weekend. And no one would have known. So, yeah. I didn't look like I was pregnant. Like when you and I were talking, I told you I was like a size zero the whole way through. But it was because I didn't have any amniotic fluid.

Ben:  Wow.

Tracy:  I mean, I did, but it was a little.

Ben:  Okay. So, at that point, and I want to get back to what you found the fix to actually be, but at that point, you'd already been somewhat educated in health, because you had mentioned–or we had mentioned that you were homeschooled and–when did you graduate? Relatively early age?

Tracy:  Yeah. So, when I was 15, I didn't want to be homeschooled anymore. I had three younger brothers and I was like, “I just want to get to life.” So, I remember someone drove me to the local college and I went to sign up for classes. And kind of similar to you, it was like super overachiever. I didn't just go to sign up for classes. I'm like, “I'm going to sign up for 21 units of pure science load.” I had physics, biology, chemistry, calculus.

Ben:  It sounds very–I was the same way, all the things, every semester. As much as they'd let me take and then I would apply to be able to take more.

Tracy:  I had to go to the dean. Yeah. I had to go to the dean to have him sign it off. I'm just 15-year-old and he's like, “Are you crazy?” I'm like, “No.” But to me, it just seemed normal. It didn't seem weird or out of the ordinary, and that was just how I float. So, yeah. Like science was my background. I love it. I eat it up. My first job was tutoring calculus at the college. I loved it. And so, yeah, I do have a background in it and it's something that I always enjoyed. And actually, that summer when I first started college, since my dad was a missionary, I had the opportunity to go to Guatemala and live in this indigenous village up the top of this inactive volcano where people wove their own clothes, they built their own homes, their huts out of whatever was the natural resources there. And I shadowed a doctor. I was able to do surgery, I cut cancer out of a nine-year-old little girl, I gave vaccinations, taught about health.

Ben:  How old were you then?

Tracy:  I think I just turned 16.

Ben:  Wow. What a cool experience.

Tracy:  Yeah.

Ben:  Amazing. So, you did that, and then you also were interested in becoming a physician yourself, right?

Tracy:  Yes. So, that's why I went to do that trip because I was like, “I'm going to become a doctor, going to pre-med.” I mean, I already had my path planned out. And so, that was when that opportunity came up, I was like, “Absolutely, I'm going to take this. I want to understand everything that I can.” But it was on that trip that I realized it was such a blessing to be able to help people. But that form of helping people, the way the doctor was doing it didn't feel like it resonated with my personal path. And so, I came home a little discouraged, like, “I want to help people–“

Ben:  About practicing medicine?

Tracy:  In an allopathic way. But at that young age, and back then, the internet was like AOL dial-up, you know.

Ben:  AOL chat rooms, which as we were discussing tonight have now been replaced by audio clubhouse chat rooms, which in my opinion, are the same thing.

Tracy:  Yeah. We got you on your first experience, was the other night on Clubhouse.

Ben:  Yeah. Felt like a waste of time, but I'll mess around with it.

Tracy:  Yeah. Let's dabble in it a little bit. But yeah, anyways, like, I didn't really know about alternative health. I didn't understand anything about it. So, I thought it's either allopathic western medicine route or something else.

Ben:  That's funny. For me, it was the same way. By the way, I was very interested in becoming a physician, wound up working in hip and knee surgical sales after going pre-med, passing my MCATs, getting accepted to six different medical schools, working in the private sector in medicine, becoming totally disillusioned with the entire overpriced hips and knees being installed in obese patients that through preventive medicine would have been able to be easily, or at least probably avoided those surgeries in the first place. Unhappy doctors who were overworked and made good money but didn't even have time to enjoy their families, or their boats, or their cars, or anything else. They were amassing.

And at the same time, I didn't know a lot about natural medicine. I knew a lot about exercise, and fitness, and nutrition, and saw that I could help people via those means much more than I thought I'd be able to help them by disappearing for eight years studying more, coming out, and being a doctor similar to the doctors that I was seeing. But like you, I didn't know a lot about alternative medicine, about natural medicine, about naturopathic medicine. And so, I got plucked from allopathic medicine and wound up doing largely what I'm doing now. And it sounds like for you also, you were disillusioned with a traditional allopathic medical approach, yet didn't really decide to go more of the natural medical approach, at least as far as becoming an MD or a DO or something like that might be concerned.

Tracy:  I didn't even know that was an option at that time. It was just like–

Ben:  Yeah. Neither did I.

Tracy:  I lived in a little bubble. Honestly, I lived in a small town. My parents were missionaries. They just ran the church, and that was my life, and then school. So, I wasn't exposed to that. I didn't have that type of exposure to even know that. And then, when I was 17, we moved to San Diego. My dad got a job here and I moved with my parents, and I was like, “I think I want to switch to business.” It was like two and a half years of being in that whole pre-med thing, I was like, “I want to switch.” So, I switched all the way to business. I did a 180. I'm like, “I'm going to go into business.” And I got a really great opportunity because at the time, to pay for college, I was modeling. And back in the day, it's so interesting because you say modeling is so different than now like Instagram modeling or whatever. It's so different than what it was.

Ben:  I don't even know what Instagram modeling is. I can't imagine.

Tracy:  It was like you had to have an agent back then and do all these things, but I started my–

Ben:  Just being an Instagram model, by the way, just basically posing on Instagram?

Tracy:  I don't know. I think so.

Ben:  Because if so, I'm an Instagram model, or at least have been.

Tracy:  Yeah. Are you getting paid for what you do? Then you might be an Instagram model.

Ben:  Sometimes, actually, yes.

Tracy:  Well, yeah. Back then, you had to have an agent, and I thought, “Gosh, these agents are just–” I felt kind of exploited. It's like they measure you, they weigh you. It's like you're a piece of meat. It was very different back then, but I thought, “Gosh, I love to help people with health and wellness, and these girls were starving themselves. They were taking diuretics. They were getting like colonics in an excessive alarming amount.”

Ben:  I get it. I've seen Zoolander.

Tracy:  Yeah. You get it, yeah. Totally. So, I was like, “Maybe I can help them.” Going back to what I had said with my mom, it was like that, it triggered something inside of me. I don't want to see people suffering over their weight. So, I was like, “Hey, how about I start my own agency and teach the girls about how to eat properly, health, wellness, nutrition, how to take care of their bodies and feed them so that their skin was glowing when they were on camera, they didn't look gray and dull, and maybe they were the right weight on the scale, but they didn't feel good or look their best?” So, I wanted to help them with that. So, I started an agency, and then went further into doing venture capital, and investment banking, and total different path. And then, I got married really young at 24 and got pregnant right away.

Ben:  That's not really young. I got married when I was 20.

Tracy:  Okay. You beat me.

Ben:  I win.

Tracy:  Darn it, you beat me at that one. Okay. Well, I thought 24 was young for me. It felt young, felt younger than I wanted it to be. That's for sure.

Ben:  By all standards now, it actually is somewhat young.

Tracy:  How old were you when your kids were born?

Ben:  Twenty-five.

Tracy:  Oh, okay. Oh my gosh, okay. So, same. Yeah. So, when I had my daughter and she–this whole thing happened with the hydration, and then she ended up getting her immunizations. And right after immunizations, all of her hair fell out. She got alopecia, Hashimoto's thyroid, just her whole health started to degrade. And I was like, “The doctor said the same thing. There's nothing that we can do. She has to live with this forever.” And I was like, “That's it.”

Ben:  Which unfortunately is not uncommon due to that triggering of the innate immune response without the adaptive humoral immunity. Autoimmune reactions are incredibly common. It's actually one reason why I'm personally not super excited about getting vaccinated myself against COVID, just because I'm concerned about what might go on for me from an autoimmune standpoint.

Tracy:  Yeah. Everybody should consider that. And yeah, and just watching her, my little girl, just degrade in health. It was like if I have to spend the rest of my life trying to figure out what the answer is, I will do that. And so, that was really the catalyst that ignited the fire that was already within, but it took it to the next level.

Ben:  So, I'm confused. The catalyst was your daughter's autoimmune conditions, or was it the hydration issues you were talking about earlier that you were experiencing during pregnancy?

Tracy:  It was more my daughter. My issue was super uncomfortable and I thought–I didn't see it as like this huge thing. I thought eventually it'll figure itself out. I just accepted. I started doing these eye drops, Restasis, or whatever they were, to try to lubricate the eyes, and all the things, and I was able to manage. But when my daughter's sick, you know this is a parent, Ben. When something happens to your child, it's like you will do anything and everything to make that better. So, it was really my daughter getting sick that was like, “Oh, hell, no. No is never an answer. There is always hope.” And that was like, I felt God just impressed that on my heart, to never give up, there's always hope, no matter what anybody says. And I don't care if some white coat tells me this. They're not God. They're not the Messiah. They're smart, they went to school, they have their opinion, but let's leave it at that.

Ben:  I want to get back to hydration, but what happened with your daughter in terms of the autoimmune conditions and how you wound up tackling that?

Tracy:  Yeah. So, we ended up doing a lot of tests and found out that she had a heavy load of mercury in her system. And we ended up working with called Hal Huggins, started working with him. Do you remember Hal?

Ben:  Biological dentist?

Tracy:  Yeah.

Ben:  Yeah.

Tracy:  Yeah. We started working with him and trying to chelate the metals. It actually ended up taking her deeper, started probably driving it deeper into her mesenchyme. And so, it took what she had.

Ben:  And just for our listeners, that's quite common when you do a metal detox, you can often, based on the osmotic gradient of the metals, have the metal cross from the body into the brain creating neural issues in so-called mad hatter's syndrome that normally shouldn't happen during a properly administered metal detoxification protocol. But if you're just taking, let's say, a bunch of chlorella, or cilantro, or binders, you can often just shift metals such as mercury to a different place in the body, typically the brain.

Tracy:  Well, that's the whole thing. Chelation is pulling it out of wherever it's at. Now, it's liberated in the body and it can move to wherever it's going to go if you don't have something for it to bind and pull out. So, what I learned though through that process was that the key thing missing in her program was a lymphatic cleanse prior. So, the lymphatic system is huge, and I think it's an underrated system that's not talked about enough. I love our friend Dr. Perry, who talks–he's on Instagram, the stop chasing pain guy.

Ben:  Yes. Yeah.

Tracy:  Yeah. He's all about the lymphatic system. And I love the things that he talks about because it's so vital. If anybody is–

Ben:  Is that Nick, Perry?

Tracy:  I forget his first name.

Tracy:  Oh gosh, what is his first name?

Ben:  I'll find it. I'll link to–by the way, for those of you listening in, I'll make shownotes for you at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/tracy, T-R-A-C-Y. So, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/tracy, I'll hunt down everything Tracy's talking about and put it in the shownotes for you. So, the lymphatic system was what you found for your daughter?

Tracy:  Yeah. They were working with minerals, and I think the minerals were out of balance. But also, they didn't address her major detox pathways before they started doing the detox.

Ben:  You mean the liver's detox pathways?

Tracy:  Well, all the pathways. I think that in order to do a detox, you need to focus and make sure all of your detox pathways are open, including obviously the liver, but including the lymphatic system.

Ben:  And the bowels. That's another one that's underplayed.

Tracy:  She had constipation. Who knows what was going on with her liver, but I know she had constipation issues. And so, that backs up the lymphatics. It gets the lymphatic system get sluggish and toxic, and it's just a toxic soup that now you're trying to move things out of the body, dumps into the lymphatic system, which was we know is the body's trash can. Basically, I like to call it that for simple terms. So, everything dumps into there. And then, if the lymphatic system's burdened and overtaxed, it's just going to move back into the blood, and then now it's liberated in the system, and then like you said, it can move back anywhere across the blood-brain barrier. So, she went from having patchy alopecia to alopecia universalist where she lost all of her hair, all of her eyelashes, eyebrows, everything, overnight.

Ben:  Wow. And she's how old at this point?

Tracy:  That was when, by the time, she was eight.

Ben:  Okay.

Tracy:  And it was devastating. It was like we have been working so hard. No, it's worse, but that was at the time where I was just traveling the world. I would take her anywhere. When I'd find out, someone would say, “Here's a good doctor,” I would fly her out, meet with the doctor. So, we had seen countless doctors over the years. And Hal was one of the guys that we ended up with trying to chelate this. And so, through that process, I was like, “Man, I need to go back to school to figure out what is going on here because I am so sick of being not knowing, not having this full education and depending on someone else because they miss one little thing.” They're trying their best, but I think as a parent, you have this intuition, right? You just know that something's off. There's something we need to do more.

So, I started getting into energetic medicine. I started going to integrative medical conferences, traveling the world and just learning everything that I could. And that was when I realized how important the lymphatic system is. And at our wellness center that I've had for 13 years, one of the things that I always do with people is make sure all of their detox pathways are open, whether they come in with Lyme or cancer, or whatever the issue is. I don't even want to address that, and I won't address it until I make sure the body's strong because I have this firm belief that the cells have an innate intelligence. They know how to heal themselves. They know how to detoxify. We just need to remove the obstacles for healing, and then provide the nutrition, the building blocks for life for the cells to do what they need to do.

Ben:  How do you know if the detox system is working properly? Are you actually testing something?

Tracy:  Yeah. So, we check people's pathology, blood, urine, all those things. But also, I do bioenergetic testing with an EAV device. It's electroacupuncture according to Voll. And I really love that. We can see things before you can see it in the pathology.

Ben:  Are you measuring the cell's vibratory frequency for each of the different organ pathways?

Tracy:  Yup.

Ben:  Okay.

Tracy:  It's a dermal testing on the skin, and you're testing it on the meridian point. So, there's German meridian points. I don't know if a lot of people know that. There's German meridian points and Chinese meridian points, and we do both. So, it's very intuitive. We've been able to see things, like one of my mentor doctors, she was treating a 13-year-old boy that he was having a lot of issues with headaches and he'd been to many neurologists and doctors and they could not figure out what was going on. And through the EAV, she was able to determine that there was a tumor in his brain and exactly pinpoint where it was.

So, we can see things with this device that people can't see sometimes in the pathology. And we were able to find a lot of things out about Grace's situation with that, and she was able to heal her own Hashimoto's thyroid. So, her thyroid issues were definitely balanced after we did some work on that. Now, her energy levels are great because before, she had adrenal fatigue, really dark circles under her eyes, kidneys weren't optimal. It was just like this downward cascade. Now, all of her pathology comes up back really clean, her EAV tests are always really great. We're just still dealing with the hair. So, that's a thing that's like, it's really difficult. It's a difficult thing. Autoimmune, as you know, is like–

Ben:  Just get a boatload of Propecia, finasteride.

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Alright, let's go back to Tracy.

That's interesting that you're still weaving through all of that, but I think that this concept of the energy frequency, so to speak, that we might find in the German meridian points that you refer to, or the Chinese meridian points, or the so-called Marma points, which would be ayurvedic medicine, certain points through which energy flows. And many people may have seen like, if they've ever gone to an acupuncturist, the poster on the wall with all of the different points that indicate where energy flows through the body. But it resonates with me just because I'm very into–as you know, I have a company called Kion. My entire company is based around the concept of Ki, life force, energy flowing through the body. I have the Japanese kanji symbol for Ki tattooed on my right shoulder. I mean, it's something that I've been interested in since I was 18 years old, and began to study this idea that there are elements of the body that are more frequency-based that can be treated with things like sound medicine, acupuncture, energy frequencies, vibrations, emotions, et cetera, that go beyond what a pharmaceutical or a supplement might be able to address.

And so, I appreciate that approach, especially when combined with supplementation, with diet, with even some elements of allopathic medicine. I think that you can weave all of that together pretty intelligently to work with different issues. And the other thing that I was thinking about as you were discussing the detox pathways is a real thing that I focus on for myself personally. And I know, for example, that you have one of those mini-trampolines that you do some [00:39:34] _____.

Tracy:  A mini and a big one.

Ben:  I detox daily. I don't do some giant fast at the beginning of January to clean up all of the crap that I've done to my body the rest of the year. Daily, I jump up and down on a trampoline when I wake up in the morning, and I do breathwork, and I get in the sauna four to five times per week. We were at a party last night and has helped people do at a party. I was explaining how I actually take activated charcoal, which is a binder, which is potentially a problematic binder for the reasons that we talked about earlier unless you're actually eliminating typically via the stool or the skin the actual metals or the toxins that you've bound with something like charcoal. So, what I do is twice a week, I'll do activated charcoal. So, I'll just drink a giant glass. I get the Quicksilver Scientific activated charcoal. It's got the aloe vera and some other binders in it. Drink that. And then, I actually do a coffee enema. I'll use just organic coffee and get myself an enema, retain the coffee for like 20 minutes, and you eliminate everything, you're clean as a whistle. Then I go do a sauna sweat for about a half-hour. And everything from my skin to my energy levels, to my immune system, to the way I feel after I travel, nearly every function that would be related to lymphatic flow or detoxification is remarkably improved with that practice. And I don't have to worry about doing some intensive fast on a regular basis unless I'm doing it for self-experimentation or some journalistic endeavor to see what a certain form of fasting feels like.

But ultimately, this concept of detoxing being woven into your daily or your weekly routine I think is underplayed even in the health community. I talked to a lot of people who are just like, “Charcoal enemas? Infrared sauna? Can't I just do CrossFit and eat kale?” But it's a lot. There's a lot that goes in the caring system.

Tracy:  Well, the environment that we live in, I mean, that's why I say that I'm a modern wellness advocate because the environment that we live in, there's things that we need to do now in this modern world that we didn't have to do back then. Like you said, I 100% agree with you that detoxing is a regular thing. It's not something that you do. I take a detox bath once a week, an ionic mud bath. And I also do mud packs.

Ben:  I do that, too, actually.

Tracy:  Do you?

Ben:  I don't do mud packs. You gave me a mud pack the last time I was at the wellness center. And occasionally, I found a fancy spa, I'll do the mud or the seaweed, but yeah. Using water as well to eliminate via the skin in addition to a sauna. And a lot of companies, like, I think Ancient Minerals is the company I get it from right now. They do a magnetic clay, and you put it into your bath. And then, our friend Robert Slovak, and we'll get back to water because I know he's one of our mentors in water, he developed hydrogen tablets that can be added to the bath so that you get a lot of the anti-inflammatory effects of hydrogen dissolved in a bath, and in the same way that you get benefits of the selective antioxidant capability of hydrogen when you drink hydrogen, which I do every morning.

Tracy:  Me, too.

Ben:  You can also bathe in hydrogen.

Tracy:  Yeah. He gave me some of those tablets. Those were fun.

Ben:  Right. We sound mildly like it was a Queen Cleopatra who would take baths, and I think it was wine or milk, or possibly both.

Tracy:  Milk. Goat smell, gross.

Ben:  Right, right. We're not advocating a bathtub full of milk, but these are things that a lot of people don't think about, who may be exercising and eating healthy, still not feeling right, but who in many cases would benefit from incorporating.

Tracy:  A hundred percent. I mean, even though I ate a healthy diet and all of those things–when I was younger, I remember I'd get out of the shower. The first account I remember is at 14, my knees feeling tight and swollen, and my joints, and I suffered from that for years, my joints being swollen. And I'd go to the doctor and ask if I had some sort of rheumatoid issue going on. They're like, “No.” But the one thing that got rid of it was mud packing and mud baths. So, I realized joints are weak tissue. Scar tissue and joints are where toxins accumulate. That's where heavy metals and toxins want to accumulate. So, we need to use some sort of ionically charged substance to pull that out on a regular basis because we do live in a toxic world. As well as if somebody lives near the beach, I say, “Walking on the wet sand every single day for 45 minutes is a miracle worker.” Literally, we're two blocks from the beach at my wellness center. And when people come down–

Ben:  I've been on the beach every morning.

Tracy:  It's magic. Like we talked about earlier, the ocean is the earth's amniotic fluid. It has all 78 trace elements, which are the building blocks for life. But not only is it feeding your body those minerals, that ionic exchange between the wet sand and the bottom of your feet, it's pulling toxins out at the same time. And obviously, the free electrons and everything, and the ocean, is just so healing. But things like that that in this modern world, we can't just be sitting under fluorescent lights that are feeding us toxic photons, and also eating toxic food, and smelling toxic air, not thinking that we don't need to detoxify on a regular basis. We have to.

Ben:  Yeah. Dr. Cass Ingram wrote a book called “The Cure is in the Cupboard” about oregano. And again, it was my dad who I actually–I remember when I was probably 15 years old, my dad stopped smelling like cologne and started smelling like a hippie because he was starting to use like oregano, and patchouli, and some of these compounds that I was unfamiliar with. But it turns out that when you look at oregano aka hyssop, which you see in the Bible, God tells priests to use hyssop to cleanse themselves. And there's even a verse, “Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean. Wash me and I'll be whiter than snow.” That's what David said in the Psalms. And even this idea of detoxification is something you'll find in the Bible. And actually, that's something I travel with, a little bottle of oil of oregano. So, even when I travel, I can do like a mild detox just by putting a little oregano in a glass of water in the morning and in the evening.

And so, these are practices that have some deep cultural threads in them. And for you and I, as people of faith, it's interesting to read the Bible and see what it says about this process of cleansing and using some of these herbs that we're familiar with now is having some of these powerful detoxification effects that God knew about and encouraged the use of in scripture, which I think is super interesting.

And I know, as we were talking about last night when we were at a dinner, there's also quite a few interesting concepts related to hydration in the Bible. And perhaps we can touch on those later, but I want to come back to where we left the thread hanging about you discovering that you were drinking water when you were pregnant, the sac was dry, your amniotic fluid appeared to be depleted, your eyes were dry, there was something going on with your approach to hydration that wasn't working. And I'd love to hear you explain how you cracked the code on that and what you started to do differently from a hydration aspect.

Tracy:  Yeah. So, it started out really basic. What happened was I lived in Ocean Beach at the time and there's a lot of hippies in Ocean Beach. It's one of the last true–

Ben:  I don't know. I've been walking around every day.

Tracy:  –[00:47:13] _____ communities, yeah, on the western coast.

Ben:  Lots of acai bowl shops, and dreadlocks, and pot smoke.

Tracy:  Patchouli and Birkenstocks. But I was desperate. And I remember at the time, we had RO system, which is reverse osmosis filtration. And I thought I was doing a great job for my family. I mean, gosh, we've got clean water from the tap. So, I was drinking RO water, which as we know, has virtually no minerals to it. It's dead water, but chemically clean. So, I was drinking that and I remember just going, “I don't know what to do.” So, I went to this little medicine woman in Ocean Beach and she had herbs like nettle and horsetail. And I remember her just giving me–I think it was nettle horsetail and hibiscus. And she goes, “This may take a little while, but just drink this six times a day, this tea.” And I'm like, “Okay.” I mean, I'll do whatever it takes, right?

So, I started drinking the tea and I little by little started to feel like the electricity was starting to be turned back on again. The charge in my body was being–like my cells were starting to feel that electrical charge and they were able to communicate again. And I thought, “Gosh, what is in these herbs?” And it's minerals, right? It's the nutritive herbs. So, I started studying minerals more and realizing that, oh my gosh, our cells can't uptake the water without a proper balance of minerals. And why has no one ever told me this? Because I'm drinking filtered water which doesn't have any minerals. So, that would equate to I'm drinking water that doesn't hydrate, but we're not taught this in school. Why are we not taught this as young kids? Like, hey, don't drink purified water. You need to drink mountain spring water or add trace elements to your water. But we weren't taught that. So, it was something that–it was foreign to me, to be honest.

Ben:  Well, not only that. We are taught about the existence arguably, which has been since disproven by Gilbert Ling, of this sodium-potassium pump that will simply pump either sodium or potassium into or out of the cell to maintain the proper electrical gradient and the proper electrochemical status across the cell membrane. But what has since been studied by Gilbert Ling and written about pretty eloquently by a guy like Dr. Thomas Cowan has some wonderful writings on this. The fact that really, it's more of a gel-like structured aqueous matrix within the cell that allows for the cell to be able to maintain that charge. So, arguably, not only–

Tracy:  H3O2.

Ben:  H3O2. Yeah, exactly, which Dr. Gerald Pollack has studied pretty extensively at University of Washington, and it's based on this idea that not only do you need minerals, not only do you need water, but you also need for the water that is within your body that is mineralized, preferably filtered water within your body to be structured. And there's some, I guess an argument that goes back and forth about whether when you drink structured water, if it remains structured as it passes through the acidic environment of the stomach, whether the H2O bonding, the bonding between hydrogen and oxygen in this structured matrix actually retains its structure. But let's just say that it doesn't. One of the best ways to actually structure the fluids within your body is via photobiomodulation or exposure to infrared, near-infrared, far infrared, red light from the sun. And so, when you combine minerals, filtered, good, clean water, structured or unstructured, and I don't know what your thoughts are on structuring, and you can share of course, but then get exposure to adequate sunlight and/or the use of many of these infrared light panels or infrared sauna type of devices, then you're putting yourself into a state where you can actually have this gel-like water within your cells in a structured format that allows for proper electrolyte status within the cell, proper electrical chemical balance, and a metabolism that responds accordingly.

Tracy:  Absolutely. That's why it's so important to get out there and watch the sunrise, and watch the sunset, because the first 15 minutes of the sun coming up and the last 15 minutes of it going down, we don't have that heat from it that can hurt our retina, that thermal heat, so we want to be taking in those nutrients. That nutrition from those photons from the sun is hidden nutrition that we don't usually talk about, but it's essential nutrition. And you're right, the cell is not able to structure the water within the cell adequately without sunlight equally as important as grounding. The human waves from the earth, the magnetism from the earth, if we don't have that, then the cell will not be able to maintain that charge because that charge potential around the cell, the charge is what's essential for the cell to maintain that structure inside. And a big thing that is causing the depolarization of our cells is EMFs, dirty electromagnetic frequencies.

Ben:  Right. Not EMS, but non-native EMFs, because what you were just alerting to, that 10 to 100-hertz frequency that we would experience–well, actually, it's closer to like 5 to 100-hertz frequency that we would experience when we're walking, say, barefoot on the beach or swimming in the ocean, you get even more of that due to the negative ions and the minerals in the ocean, or climbing trees, or touching rocks. I was up at Paul Chek‘s house yesterday just stacking rocks, picking up rocks, walking barefoot in the sand. And so, you're grounded in earth for a full hour of heavy lifting and what he calls rock garden, rock meditation.

But you're touching stones. You're actually getting exposed to that same type of grounding and earthing. In fact, every rock has, once you really get used to, every rock has a different energy when you pick it up because there's a slightly different hertz frequency that's produced by it. But what we're talking about when we're talking about the ability of these hertz frequencies to be able to allow for the water in your body to become structured, particularly when combined with light and minerals, is a hertz frequency that is, like I mentioned, 5 to 100 hertz as opposed to, say, gigahertz. Not only gigahertz, but square waveform gigahertz, not this natural alternating sinusoidal rhythm that we'd experience when we're walking barefoot. It's a totally foreign EMF to the actual cell.

Tracy:  Yeah, it is. And that in order to be healthy and thrive in this modern world, we have to take our shoes off. We have to connect to the earth, connect our hands to the earth, touch plants, hug a tree. It sounds so weird, but it's what's going to keep us alive and thrive, and those cells need to have that charge and that structure within the cell, like that gelatinous H3O2 is essential. I think Dr. Cowan was the one that alluded to the fact that he really believes that cancer cells are just depolarized cells. They're the ones that the structure of the cell is losing its structure.

Ben:  Right. Well, do you know one of the ways to keep a cell in a state of constant depolarization? Which is the reason why a corpse is engaging in rigor mortis is to infuse the cell with calcium, which is one of the reasons we're sore after exercise, or the muscles are tight, or stiff after exercise. That's why magnesium can work so well for post-exercise soreness is it can offset some of that calcium influx into the cell. One of the ways that calcium can just take over like a robber baron inside cells is after the cells have been exposed to, or while the cells are being exposed to high-intensity non-native EMF. And they've shown this repeatedly in studies. You see a steep calcium influx into the cell resulting in a state of depolarization. Not only that sympathetic nervous system response, but depolarization, which essentially keeps your cells in almost this sympathetically driven state of danger where you can't relax, you have the calcium influx, so you don't have the proper electrical gradient, the water is not properly structured within the cell. This is one of the reasons–

Well, here's a perfect example for you. You have a myofascial therapist who will come and visit your clients at the Wellness Institute, and you had one come down to work on me because I'm down here doing a kettlebell certification. First thing that I did when he walked in and started working on me was I unplugged the Wi-Fi router in the room because I want my body to be in as relaxed state as possible, which is why I also do that when I'm sleeping, right? I unplug that Wi-Fi router. It automatically does a good job shifting your body into a parasympathetic state, but that's all based on this electrochemical gradient and stopping that calcium influx into the cell.

Tracy:  Absolutely. We don't want those calcium ion channels open like that when we're sleeping and everything going in there. I turn off my Wi-Fi. It's not even on unless I need it. It's off at night time. My phone's in airplane mode unless I feel like I'm going to need a call or need to make a call. It's like these things may seem small, but it's the accumulation over time that's really affecting our biofield. And yeah, we definitely need that. On my bed, underneath my bed, I think I have like 800 pounds of magnets because the earth's losing its magnetic pull and we need to supplement that. So, I have magnets on my bed so that my body–I want to make sure my cells are adequately charged. I think about this, like every night, most people plug their cell phone in to the wall to charge it so that the cells of the cell phone are charged. These are silica cells. Our cells, just like a computer, they need to be charged as well. And I was talking to Dr. Pollack and he was saying that he really believes that the water molecules that make up these cells hold more information than the cells in our cell phone. And it's just so interesting how we are, like a computer, we hold so much information.

That goes back to, actually, what really got me super excited about water was when I realized not only is it important for hydrating us, but we are made of 98.9% water molecules, and water is the source-receiver of all information it comes in contact with. And according to Swiss scientist and physician, Hans Jenny, vibrations create form and structure in all matter. And when I learned that, it changed my life because I realized the words I'm saying, the thoughts I'm thinking, these have an effect to create all matter inside my system. I am creating, I am basically co-creating with God my own body by the choices I make and the thoughts I think, and the words I speak, the environment that I'm in. And that gave me so much hope to realize I'm not a victim of my health issues that I was having, or the health issues that my daughter was having, or anyone around me back to my mom. No one has to be a victim of their body. We have this potential, unlimited potential.

And in the Bible, it says, Genesis 1, it says, “God said, ‘Let there be light.'” I grew up learning the Bible, Jesus Christ, beans and rice. That's what we do when you're a missionary. Just read the Bible. You don't have any money so you eat beans and rice. But I realized, okay, this is biblical when it said in Genesis that God spoke. All creation came to life because of the vibration of the voice. It says that God was the word, the word was with God. Nothing is without the word. It never made sense to me until I started studying physics and got into quantum mechanics. It's like my whole world opened up, and the potential of life for me expanded. My mind expanded.

I went from being in a deep depression and I was in a very unhealthy marriage. My daughter was sick, I was sick. I felt so discouraged because I was doing all the things, Ben. I was juicing the kale juices every morning, eating raw vegan, whatever it was. I did every extreme thing to–if I did it, I stuck to it 100%. Like, I want to do whatever it takes to be healthy. I was committed to health. But no matter what I did, it felt like I couldn't get better. I was so ill and I know that it was because all the molecules in my body, those 98.9% water molecules were receiving the information that I was sending them from the thoughts that I was thinking. All-day every day, this depression, these thoughts of desperation, these thoughts of desiring connection, desiring to be loved, desiring all the things as a human that we need, we're thirsty for that right now. And I think as a society, we all are, we're thirsty for connection, we're thirsty for that authenticity, that love. I truly believe that no matter what you do, you can't truly be healthy without speaking life over your body and speaking light. And so, that was what transmuted my health.

Ben:  And arguably, many of those same type of positive psychology and positive relationships, belief in a higher power, a good spiritual practice, et cetera, many of those practices even override things that would be arguably unhealthy, which is why you often see anecdotes of supercentenarians who smoke cigarettes and drink what might arguably be considered to be too much alcohol and don't necessarily exercise every day, and even perhaps live in a polluted environment or are in an area that is still sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, et cetera, yet they're healthy, happy, and live a long time. And when you look at their other habits, they are going to church every week, having massive family dinners with all their friends, and family, and relationships, and they're happy, and they have their ikigai or their purpose in life.

And there's almost like this totem pole of priorities when it comes to what's truly going to affect your health. And I'm convinced that the top of that totem pole is happiness, and relationships, and being with people. And for me, as a self-labeled introvert, that's something that's taken me a long time to really get used to is the fact that I actually am truly happy when I'm around people, when I'm building relationships, especially positive relationships, when I'm caring for my spirit, when I'm caring for my soul, when I'm able to shut off the logical rational mind and understand that I can affect my health in profound ways beyond just swinging a kettlebell or drinking my anti-aging smoothie in the morning. And these things really add up, yet there's also, I think, something to be said for intelligent pairing of those practices with lifestyle practices similar to some of those that we've already discussed, light, grounding, earthing, water and hydration with mineralization, and of course fitness, and movement, and nutrition, and magical elixirs, and all of that.

But because I think that there's still some importance that should be placed on how you're actually caring for yourself, boots on the streets, I want to ask you just a few practical questions in the time that we have left. And the first is this concept that you alluded to towards the beginning of our show, deuterium-depleted water. I want to rapid-fire some questions at you about water while I've got you captive audience here. So, deuterium-depleted water, when did you start drinking that and why?

Tracy:  I started drinking deuterium-depleted water about a year ago. I am like 98% deuterium-depleted water, and I started it because I was introduced to it by our good friend Robert Slovak. And he really educated me on deuterium, which is hydrogen. We like to call it hydrogen's evil twin. It's a heavy isotope of hydrogen. It's twice the weight of hydrogen. And when it goes into our nanomotors, it's breaking the nanomotors. Like, if you threw a wrench in your engine, it's literally–and our mitochondrial nanomotors are life. As we start killing off our mitochondria, it's killing us. We're aging faster. And I don't know, I just thought, “Gosh, if we're 98.9% water molecules, that's a pretty important thing.” So, I just wanted to experiment with it and see if I felt any different. I mean, it's a commitment. It's like you got to make your own nut milks, you make your own soup. You're not eating out, but I'll tell you, this COVID thing made it quite easy for me.

Ben:  And the reason for that is that you'll find water, particularly, if you're eating out or you're consuming produce that has been grown in pesticide and herbicide lid and soil. If you're eating a high carbohydrate diet, all of these add up to produce more amounts or expose you to greater amounts of deuterium, thus, displacing hydrogen with an isotope that's way heavier than hydrogen. And for lack of a better explanation, gumming up your metabolic machinery. So, by depleting yourself of all these external sources of deuterium, drinking water that's depleted of deuterium, which is–and I actually, for those of you listening in, I interviewed Robert Slovak and we took a little bit of a deep dive into deuterium. So, we don't have to spend the next hour explaining to people what deuterium is.

But the basic overview is that if you look into a lot of these practices to deplete your body of deuterium, yeah, it does involve drinking deuterium-depleted water. That's kind of like the fast track, more expensive because it's still kind of an expensive water to make and no one has yet really scaled it up to the point where it's become affordable for the masses just because you have to cool the water to extremely low temperature to deplete the deuterium, and then package it and bottle it. You can't just like slap a deuterium filter in your home yet, at least not in a way that's affordable for most people. But, for example, you can also produce your own deuterium-depleted water in your body via the process of beta-oxidation. When you burn fats rather than carbs as a fuel, the process of beta-oxidation results in the production of water, and that water is naturally deuterium-depleted.

So, by even being cognizant of something like glycemic variability or the amount of glucose, starches, sugars, et cetera, you're consuming, you can naturally deplete your deuterium levels. And if you get tested, there's one company I've tested with, is the DDW center in L.A., for example, and they send a little kit to your home, and you breathe in a tube, and you measure your deuterium levels, you can actually find out if your levels are so high to the point where you would actually benefit from drinking deuterium-depleted water. I forget what the–do you remember what a high value is considered to be?

Tracy:  You don't want to be above 150. Most people are about 150 parts per million. That's average. If you're above that, then that's really scary.

Ben:  Right. Well, do you know what your levels are at, or do you test?

Tracy:  The last time I tested, I was at 137, but I haven't tested since June. So, it's been a while. I would imagine they're pretty low because I drink 5 to 10 parts per million.

Ben:  Right. And it's got wonderful flavor to the deuterium-depleted water. So, certainly, if you're listening in, something to explore and listen to–well, Tracy, you have a podcast called HYDRATE, and I know you've done an episode on DDW, deuterium-depleted water.

Tracy:  Oh, yeah, yeah.

Ben:  And I've got a couple with Robert Slovak where we talk about that. So, that's one thing that I think is important that I want to make sure that people are alerted to. And of course, you can also make wonderful elixirs with it as we've already established.

Tracy:  High vibe elixirs. I think that's a good point to go back to that a lot of people probably do not know that the body makes its own metabolic water. And the metabolic water that your body makes is the purest water. It's deuterium-depleted water. And the way that we help our mitochondria make more deuterium-depleted water and make metabolic water is by getting sunlight, grounding, minerals. Those things are essential for helping our bodies do that because the average body makes about a liter to a liter and a half of metabolic water. So, if you didn't drink any water, you'd still be–

Ben:  Per day?

Tracy:  Yes, per day. And so, that's something that is so profound because our bodies are taking the oxygen that we're breathing and the hydrogen from the food that we're eating and it's coming together. It's like drawn together to create this metabolic water. And so, it's really essential that we do all of the things that are hard for us to do in this modern world. Take our shoes off, get sunlight. I can't say it enough. I have this chart, nine pillars of health, and my book is going to basically be the elixirs, but each chapter will be each pillar, because in my wellness center, I realized for 13 years, we were dealing with people that had these crazy diseases coming in with Lyme and all these crazy symptoms. We would try to attack them, go at the issue, find the root of the issue, which I think is important.

But I started to pull back because my mentors were going so deep, and intuitively, I thought, “God, the body knows exactly what to do itself. If I just make the body stronger, it can get rid of its own parasites, it can heal itself of whatever disease it is.” So, I started to pull back and just say, “Hey, what kind of water are you drinking?” to my clients. Instead of going and throwing all these supplements at them, like, they come in, I'm like, “What kind of water are you drinking?” Okay. “Are you taking your shoes off? Do you walk barefoot on the beach, on the sand, on the ground?” “No.” “Are you watching the sunrise or the sunset?” “No.” “Are you looking at your LED screen at night or watching TV late at night?” “Yes.” “Do you have a loving connected community? Are you in prayer and meditation?” “Not really.”

These kind of basic questions I started to ask, and most of the people that came in were not doing all of these nine pillars of health. And I thought, “Okay. Let's do a test. I want to do a litmus test.” I've had this for over a decade, this wellness center. I'm going to go back and start just doing basics with these people. Then people started to shift their health overnight. I had this one woman who–she had suffered from fibromyalgia symptoms for 20 years. She couldn't even put her pants on. Her husband had to help her put her clothes on because she was in so much pain. All I did with her was change her water, get Quinton mineral, the 78 trace elements, into her system. I also made a special frequency water for her because when I tested her on EAV, I realized she had some issues going on with the vaccination prior. But it was just simple, those three things, the water, the minerals, some vibrational water, homeopathic water. She came back 31 days later in tears. I have her on video. She's like, “My life has changed. I am a whole different person.” Oh, I forgot to add, that she's walked 45 minutes on the beach three times a week.

So, getting well doesn't need to be difficult, and that's what I'm so passionate about teaching people about hydration because I started to realize once I did that with my clients, people started to dramatically shift. And I realized, doctors, even naturopathic doctors, were getting away from the basics. And all we need to do is really go back to the basics. All these other fun biohacking things that we do are great, they're fun, they're exciting. But in order to be really well, it doesn't have to take a lot of money, and it doesn't need to be complicated.

Ben:  Yeah. It's a different paradigm of health as well compared to I think what you would, I don't know how much you flip through like Men's Health or Women's Health magazine, which is basically like buy, whatever, thighs and chicken breasts, make yourself stir for every night, get on the elliptical trainer for an hour a day, do X number of push-ups and eat your Trader Joe's dark chocolate covered almonds, and you're going to be healthy. And these are the concepts that I think still have not saturated the modern health and fitness industry, which is why I'm glad we can do shows like this to talk about this stuff.

And I think one other pretty important thing that I would be remiss not to mention when it comes to the concept of structured water, and when it comes to the concept of deuterium-depleted water and hydration overall, is something we actually were discussing the last time that I visited San Diego because I had a book in my bag called “Quench.” And I wound up interviewing the author of that book because that book gets into the idea that, really, drinking water is not the best way to hydrate yourself anyways. Not only do you need, as you've astutely noted, all of the trace minerals added back into the water from really good mineral sources, like Celtic salts, or trace liquid minerals, or like the Quinton hypertonic plasma solution, which is amazing. And Slovak and I talked about that. I know you and I are both fans of the Quinton. It's spelled, for those of you listening–

Tracy:  Like, is that a crate?

Ben:  Q-U-I-N-T-O-N. I mean, I go through three to four packets a day of that now. That's amazing stuff in and of itself. But this book also highlights the fact that compared to just drinking regular water, cucumbers and big plump avocados, chia seed slurries–what else are some of those? Think of a vegetable or a fruit that's like a watery vegetable or fruit. That water is naturally structured if it is an organic piece of produce, naturally deuterium-depleted. Usually, if it's grown in mineral-rich soil, has enough minerals in it to be able to pull more water into your cells. And so, this idea of considering food to be water, and considering also the fact that when you look at jerky, and when you look at the healthy food section of the average airport bookstore that you walk through and you get all the bagged, and the packages, and the products that are all dehydrated, everything at Trader Joe's, everything at Costco, everything at these places where people are buying their fancy, healthy, packaged foods, there's no water in those foods.

Tracy:  Well, even baked food. That's what baking is doing. It's dehydrating.

Ben:  Right. Microwaving.

Tracy:  Bread, crackers, all of those things, they're dehydrated, and we're eating a lot of dehydrated food. So, in this modern world, this is what's being thrown at us, but the ancients didn't have that. They were having the fresh fruits and vegetables.

Ben:  And I mean, sure, have bread. But my wife makes lovely slow-fermented sourdough bread. Have your bread, but put a giant slice of a plump heirloom red tomato, and then layer that with cucumbers on top of the tomato, sprinkle some sea salt on there, drizzle that with a little bit of raw honey. And now, your bread is actually, not only a lot tastier, but also hydrating you. And this idea of food being considered water is also important.

The other thing that I think is important, and perhaps we can finish here, it's something that we were talking about last night, that water is, at the end of the day, along with health, along with food, along with your six-pack abs and your VO2 max, and everything else, ultimately, never going to fulfill your thirst. Augustine has this concept that I talk about in my new book “Fit Soul,” called the God-shaped hole, the God-shaped abyss in each of our souls, and this idea that no matter how much we dump into that hole, it will never be full because we have this concept in our hearts called eternity in our hearts. We have this longing for something more meaningful that only something as meaningful as God can actually fill.

And there's a story in the Bible. It's the woman at the well, right? The woman at the well. And we were talking about this yesterday. Jesus encounters a woman at the well, the Samaritan woman, and she's trying to get the water out of the well. And Jesus, as part of the story, tells her, “That water will never fulfill you. That water will never fulfill you compared to the water of life that will fulfill your thirst for all time that you would find in me.” And it comes back to what we were talking about when it comes to relationships, and frequencies, and vibrations, and a positive outlook on life, and a belief in a higher power, and church attendance, and releasing all your sin and your shame at the foot of the cross. This idea that to really be fulfilled, not only physically, not just to quench your physical thirst, but to quench your spiritual thirst, you must have living water in your life. You must have the ability to be able to weave the spiritual disciplines into your life to care for your soul and to care for your spirit. And that's how you're going to be hydrated for eternity. And it may sound kind of woo, but it's something that I just think a lot of people don't think about. I don't care how many superfood smoothies you drink. You're never, at the end of the day, going to be fulfilled or happy with that.

Tracy:  Hundred percent. I 100% agree with that. We are thirsty for living water, and that true living water comes from the spirit, the spirit of God, the living true God. And the only way that we'll ever be quenched, like Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, is if you drink of the living water that you'll never thirst again. And it is so true. I know personally for my life, no matter how much success, no matter how fit my body is, no matter how many external things there are, I'm always left wanting more, more. It's an unquenchable thirst. The only thing that satisfies my soul at night is that deep intimate connection with the true living God, the spirit of God. And submitting and surrendering to that love and that truth, and letting it penetrate my heart, allowing it, that's what satisfies. It's the only thing.

Ben:  That's Chapter 10 in your book, “the elixir of life,” elixir of life.

Tracy:  We're changing [01:20:11] _____.

Ben:  Drink this. Tracy, you have a podcast called HYDRATE, which people can find where refined podcasts are found. You're writing a book by the same name, and I'm sure people can find that when it comes out. I'll link to all this stuff at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/tracy. Anywhere else that you would like to tell people to go to in order to find you?

Tracy:  I'm really active on Instagram. I post a lot of things, tips on hydration.

Ben:  Okay. And it's just Tracy Duhs, D-U-H-S?

Tracy:  Yeah.

Ben:  Okay.

Tracy:  Yup, that's it.

Ben:  Alright. Cool. Well, Tracy, you are a wealth of knowledge. I love what you're doing down here. I look forward to your book coming out. I love your tasty elixirs. And thank you, thank you for coming on the show.

Tracy:  Thank you for having me. It's a blessing.

Ben:  Alright, folks. I'm Ben Greenfield along with Tracy Duhs signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Have an amazing week.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the shownotes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful “Ben Recommends” page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormone, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please, also, know that all the links, all the promo codes, that I mentioned during this and every episode, helped to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. When you listen in, be sure to use the links in the shownotes, use the promo codes that I generate, because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.

 

 

Meet Tracy Duhs.

I've been a guest on Tracy's podcast in the past. You can listen to that episode here. 

Tracy, like me, was homeschooled K-12, so she's a bit…well…weird, like me. Also, like me, she believes that optimal health is a fundamental right for all humanity, not just a privilege for a select few. Helping people activate their vitality and feel alive has been Tracy’s lifelong mission. Growing up in a missionary home cultivated her profound sense of compassion and her desire to educate on the simple foundations needed to look and feel our best.

Also like me, by the time she was 15, Tracy had already begun her undergraduate education in medicine. At 16, Tracy shadowed a missionary doctor working in an indigenous village in Guatemala, where she gained hands-on surgical and medical training. The time she spent there opened her eyes and enlarged her heart, to the need for holistic wellness education and foundations.

After her experience in Guatemala, Tracy decided to forgo a traditional allopathic medical career in favor of one that focused on regenerative care and education. When Tracy became a mother, her professional path took a personal turn. Her first child, Grace, was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroid and Alopecia Universalis at the age of two. Emboldened by her daughter’s struggle, Tracy began her journey into hydration education by pursuing a Ph.D. in the field of biogenetics as well as shadowing doctors from all around the globe to learn their different approaches to disease. It was through these experiences that Tracy became passionate about hydration as she learned the power hydration has to transform overall health and wellness in all people.

Today, Tracy works as a modern wellness advocate specializing in the restorative powers of intelligent hydration. She has parlayed her wealth of experience and knowledge into a multi-dimensional career in wellness advocacy and education, starting with her podcast, HYDRATE. Tracy frequently consults large corporations and hotels to help build and facilitate wellness experiences. She also serves as the director of the International Brain Summit, is the founder of the Sanctuary Wellness Experience in San Diego, and the co-founder of Hydrate at the Sanctuary.

During this discussion, you'll discover:

-The elixir Tracy gave Ben for the recording…3:45

• Elixir ingredients:
  • Chaga
  • Tocos powder(rice bran extracts for vitamin E)
  • Monk fruitfor sweetener
  • Blend with Vitamix
• Tracy is publishing an elixir book soon, Hydrate: A Foundation For Life
• Tracy's podcast, HYDRATE
• Proper nutrients improve neurochemistry, which in turn improves your person
• Kin Euphorics(use code BEN to save 15%)

-Tracy's journey to becoming an influencer in health and hydration…11:00

• Sanctuary Wellness Center– Tracy's crib in San Diego
• Why Water, Sunlight, Grounding & Relationships Are The Keys To Your Health & How To Feed, Clean & Protect Your Body Forever: An Interview With Ben Greenfield’s Father Gary Greenfield
• Tracy grew up in Salinas, CA
• Her mom's chronic illness inspired compassion and a desire to learn about human physiology
• First pregnancy at age 24; she was alwayscraving water
• She had to do an emergency caesarian due to a dry sac; baby could have died if she didn't
• The water she was drinking could not effectively hydrate; it was simply passing through her system
• Excelled in science in school and college
• Traveled to Guatemala with her missionary father to work in medical missions
• Considered medical school, but didn't connect with the reality of being an MD
• Moved to San Diego at age 17 with her parents and switched to a business focus in college
• Paid for school by modeling, took an interest in the wellness of fellow models
• She eventually began a modeling agency that taught health and wellness to models to help their careers

-How Tracy took an interest in the lymphatic system…27:13

• Her daughter suffered from an autoimmune deficiency
• Lymphatic cleanse was the missing component that resulted in Tracy's daughter's issue
• Perry Nickelston, lymphatic system expert
• Went back to school to learn more about her daughter's problem
• Blood, bioenergetic testing to gauge detox
• Electro-acupuncture (EAV) device that measures cell's vibratory frequency
• German and Chinese meridian points

-How detoxing is undervalued in the health community…41:10

• There are things we need to do in the modern world people didn't need to do previously
• Trampoline
• Magnetic clay bath
• Water & Water Filtration: Everything You Need To Know About Water Filters, Alkaline Water, Structured Water, Hydrogen-Rich Water, Deuterium-Depleted Water & Much More with Robert Slovak
• Water and Wellness hydrogen tablets
• Mud packing and baths helped with swollen joints Tracy suffered as a child
• Walking on wet sand for 45 minutes is a miracle worker
• The ocean is the Earth's amniotic fluid
• The Cure Is In the Cupboardby Cass Ingram
• Hyssopwas used for cleansing in biblical times

-How Tracy changed her approach to hydration, which led to better health…46:30

• Was doing reverse osmosis (chemically clean, but no minerals, dead water)
• A medicine woman gave her nettle horse tail hibiscus tea; the life slowly came back to her body
• Realized the issue was a lack of minerals in the water she was drinking
• Thomas Cowan's writings on water
• H3O2 – Dr. Gerald Pollack
• Structured water
• Photobiomodulation (Joovv)
• First and last 15 minutes of sunlight are packed with essential nutrition
• Grounding, magnetism from the Earth allow cells to maintain their charge
• Non-native EMFs harm cells, depolarization
• Cancer cells are depolarized cells
• Unplug wifi to shift body into parasympathetic state
• Tracy has 800 pounds of magnets under her bed
• The cells in our body hold more information than our cell phones

-What makes Tracy so excited about hydration…58:30

• We're made of 98.9% water molecules
• Water is the source-receiver of all information we come into contact with
• Studying physics and quantum mechanics caused everything to come together intellectually, spiritually, emotionally
• Realized the thoughts she was thinking affected how the cells in her body charged or were not charged
• Positive thoughts, belief in a higher power, healthy family life circumventing less than ideal health habits

-Why Tracy began drinking deuterium-depleted water (DDW)…1:04:15

• Water & Water Filtration: Everything You Need To Know About Water Filters, Alkaline Water, Structured Water, Hydrogen-Rich Water, Deuterium-Depleted Water & Much More!, with Robert Slovakof Water and Wellness
• Beta-oxidation results in naturally deuterium-depleted water
• DDW Center in Los Angeles
• Tracy's podcast on DDW
• The body makes its own metabolic water—the purest water possible
• Sunlight, grounding, minerals are how our body makes this water

-How dehydration is causing major health issues in modern society…1:13:45

• Quenchby Dana Cohen
• Quench: The Big “8 Glasses A Day” Water Myth, Why Water Isn’t The Best Way To Fully Hydrate & Much More!, with Dana Cohen
• Quinton minerals
• Cucumbers, chia seed slurries, avocados (especially organic) have naturally structured water
• Jerky, so-called healthy foods that are dehydrated lose many of the really healthy qualities in their natural form

-How to quench the thirst that no amount of earthly water will appease…1:16:30

-And much more!

Resources from this episode:

– Tracy Duhs:

• HYDRATE Podcast
• The Sanctuary Wellness Experience
• Going Deeper With Ben Greenfield Podcast
• Prolonging Human Life By Examining The Effects Of Deuterium With Dr. Laszlo G. Boros
• Hydrate: A Foundation For Life(coming soon)

– Podcasts:

• Why Water, Sunlight, Grounding & Relationships Are The Keys To Your Health & How To Feed, Clean & Protect Your Body Forever: An Interview With Ben Greenfield’s Father Gary Greenfield
• Water & Water Filtration: Everything You Need To Know About Water Filters, Alkaline Water, Structured Water, Hydrogen-Rich Water, Deuterium-Depleted Water & Much More With Robert Slovak
• Quench: The Big “8 Glasses A Day” Water Myth, Why Water Isn’t The Best Way To Fully Hydrate & Much More!, With Dana Cohen
• My New #1 Hack For Zapping Inflammation, Increasing Deep Sleep & Recovering Faster – Earthing (The Most Important Health Discovery Ever?), With Clint Ober

– Books:

• The Cure Is In the Cupboardby Cass Ingram
• Quenchby Dana Cohen

– Gear and supplements:

• Trampoline
• Magnetic Clay Bath
• Joovv
• Structured Water
• Vitamix Blender
• Kin Euphorics(use code BEN to save 15%)
• Chaga
• Tocos Powder
• Monk Fruit Sweetener
• Water and Wellness Hydrogen Tablets
• Quinton Minerals

– Other resources:

• Center For Deuterium Depletion In Los Angeles
• Tom Cowan On Why Cells Depend On Structured Water For Form & Function
• H3O2: The 4th Phase Of Water

Episode sponsors:

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