transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] Welcome to Everyday Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, nurse practitioner, Cynthia Thurlow. This podcast is designed to educate, empower, and inspire you to achieve your health and wellness goals. My goal and intent is to provide you with the best content and conversations from leaders in the health and wellness industry each week and impact over a million lives. To add the honor of reconnecting with friend and colleague, Caroline Alan, she is a health survivor, mineral expert, and educator on a mission to ship the way we think about cellular health. And she is the author of The Mineral Reset. Her transformative experience sparked a deep dive into the science of minerals and human physiology. She is also the co-founder and CEO of Beam Minerals, and she loves sharing this vital information with the world. She's affectionately known as The Mineral Geek. Today, we spoke at length about her personal story of poor adrenal health in perimenopause, the impact of plant-based minerals, why mineral deficiencies are so common with our modern day lifestyles, and the impact of key stages in a woman's life including menstruation, pregnancy, perimenopause, and menopause, macro and micronutrient deficiencies, and how these are exacerbated by poor gut health. The role of humic and fulvic acid and how they can be instrumental in balancing our health as we traverse perimenopause and menopause, special circumstances that are specific to challenges that women experience in middle age, why these humic and fulvic molecules can be supporting our bodies at a very foundational level, and last but not least, important paradigm shifts for us to consider as we are navigating middle age and beyond. Caroline, welcome back to the podcast. Such a pleasure to connect again with you and share your new book with my Everyday Wellness community.

Speaker 2:
[02:08] I'm so excited to be with you and I'm really also excited for your book, The Menopause Gut, and we're excited to be promoting that to our audience.

Speaker 1:
[02:18] Thank you so much. I think it's interesting how women navigating perimenopause and menopause are trying to determine the source of symptoms they're experiencing, and it's not at all uncommon for women to feel tired, to feel like they don't have the energy they once had, they hear about mitochondrial health, they hear about hormone decline, they hear about shifts in neurotransmitters. But I think that your story and your own health journey is really inspiring because it brought you to looking at your health a little bit differently in a way that was sustainable. And you do such a beautiful job of making the science actionable so that women that are listening are able to understand science at a deeper level, but make it very accessible. So let's start the conversation today about your story of feeling fatigued and tired. And I think you described it as wired but tired. Helping women understand that this can be more than just mitochondrial health, just hormone decline. There can be more to this conversation.

Speaker 2:
[03:27] Yeah. You know, I really am. I was one of those women in perimenopause, really struggling with so many chronic health issues. I was in a corporate career. Very stressful. You know, I had young kids. You know, it's the old story. And I hit a point where I had completely flat-lined adrenals. And the doctors were like, okay. And we tried a whole bunch of different things to fix it. And nothing was working. I had bad inflammation in my gut with elimination issues and bloating. You know, even though I'd been like gluten-free for many years, I could never really get back to a good, healthy gut state. I had bad inflammation in my mouth. I had periodontal disease, bad gum loss, and bone loss in my teeth. And I'd been to multiple dentists trying to figure out what was wrong with my mouth and how could I fix it. I also had really bad recurring sinus infections. So I had just inflammation throughout my body that my body could not ever gain momentum against. All of these things also, I experienced terrible brain fog. So really a hard time. This is a standard thing with perimenopause. The body is going through a huge sea change event, and the way that everything's managed starts to shift, and the brain is one of the first things that gets impacted. So I struggled, and I've always been a very go-get-it kind of person, and I suddenly had trouble getting my thoughts together and making decisions. And also one of the main problems is I could not sleep at night. So I would wake up three, four, sometimes five times a night. I mean, I never woke up less than three times. So my sleep is badly interrupted. So there were so much interruption and disruption in my system. And at that time, I had tried, I'd gone to many, many doctors, practice, specialist practitioners, you know, you name it, I've tried it. And then I, at this, right about this time, it was about 10 years ago, I met my business partner, Dan Howard, and he introduced me to these plant-based minerals, and it was a liquid, and I drank it. It tasted like water, it was easy, and I didn't, you know, I was kind of skeptical, but I was also pretty desperate, so I started taking it. And interestingly enough, I woke up every morning, and my body went, oh, I want my minerals, because that's what it was, it was minerals. And nobody had ever mentioned minerals to me in all of the practitioners, doctors, specialists, right? Nobody ever said that word to me. Maybe zinc, that was probably the only one, right? Take your zinc for immunity. And maybe chromium, because I had also had some blood sugar issues at some point. But really, that was it. But I started taking them, and two months in, I went to my dentist to have my teeth cleaned, which I had to do four times a year. And when they cleaned the teeth, there was no bleeding. And when the dentist looked in my mouth, all of the tissues were suddenly pink and healthy. And there was no longer this bad inflammation. She was surprised. She was like, what is going on? I didn't even, I did not make the connection, but I thought about it for a bit. And I said, you know, maybe it's these minerals I'm taking. Then four months in, I went to my naturopath. And she, at my past appointment, had given me hydrocortisone, prescription for hydrocortisone, which I had not filled. But I went back, we did the adrenal test. And when she looked at the results, wow, they were one third of the way up the chart. And she was like, oh, this is great. The hydrocortisone is working. I said, no, I've never filled that prescription. She was like, well, what are you doing? And I said, I think it's these minerals. And over the space of eight or nine months, Cynthia, all of those symptoms, every single one that I described to you just slowly resolved. And I regained my health and my sense of thriving.

Speaker 1:
[07:25] It's such an incredible story because it really speaks to the fact there's this, I don't even want to say the word crisis. It makes it sound too strong. But there's many aspects to our modern day lifestyles that are contributing to these loss of minerals. And your personal health journey is so inspiring, but yet what it really speaks to me as a clinician is what is it about our modern day lifestyles that is contributing to why we're having mineral deficiencies to begin with? I think for many people, they probably have heard, yes, the soil is not like it was with our grandparents. And, you know, there's a lot of ultra processed foods, which I'm sure are not making it any easier. But from your estimation, obviously being in this field and talking to thousands and thousands of individuals, what are some of the other main reasons that we're seeing so many deficiencies in our modern day lifestyle? Because I think we forget about this. We just go about our day and we're like, I eat nutrient dense food, I try to sleep as well as I can, and yet you can be doing all the right things and you can still have these deficiencies. And I think a lot about these trace minerals, which you again talk about in the book, but for listeners to have a better sense, to hear from you directly, what are some of the other common reasons why we see these mineral deficiencies?

Speaker 2:
[08:45] Yeah. Well, you know, I really love to make this so clear to people because understanding why you would be mineral deficient is so important. And it was the first place I went, like, well, wait a minute, these minerals helped me, like, what was going on that caused my body to be so deficient? And there are several things. And one of them I do want to mention is the fact that women grow babies in their body. And when you grow a baby, all of the structure of that body, that fetus comes from your body. And most of us start mineral depleted, then we have children, and then we never also get replenished afterwards. So that, just in a woman's life, that's a huge impact. And even the process of menstruation, you know, your body is growing that uterus lining and then sloughing it off. And that actually requires a lot of minerals to build that uterine wall. So even on a monthly basis, women have this experience. So just for a woman, that's the first thing. But I want to help people understand something about minerals. So the first thing is, if you look around the room where you are, all of the structure of every single thing, including all of the structure in your body, at the very foundational level is minerals. So minerals are the structural elements of the entire universe. That's how important they are. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that they are also the fuel for your cells. They are the primary fuel that supports all of the biosynthesis processes in your body and also the generation of most of these tiny units of energy in your body. Now, the way this works is if you think about a plant growing in the forest, and when that plant grows, the way that it grows is it absorbs minerals from the soil through its roots, and it uses those minerals for structure, as well as to fuel its cellular processes that create energy to make it possible to grow. Now, in nature, what happens is that plant grows, and at a certain point, it also dies. And when it dies, it decomposes and it delivers all of that mineral content back into the soil, where it's again available in the future for other plants to utilize and grow. Now, our problem is that we cultivate, so we grow plants in soil, we harvest them, we take them away, we eat them away from where they were grown, and we dispose of their waste far away, and we've been doing this for hundreds of years. So it is really a key component. In fact, there was a study done in 2000, I think it was 2002, where they measured foods grown in the 1950s and foods grown in the 1999 timeframe, and they found significant nutrient density loss, significant. So many nutritionists will say that to get the same nutrition from an apple your grandfather ate, you'd have to eat like six apples today. Who's going to sit down and eat six apples? So it truly is a crisis because I'm telling you, you cannot actually get enough mineral fuel from the food that you eat today. You would have to eat too much of volume to actually receive all the minerals. The next thing is that the water that we drink, many of us drink filtered water, reverse osmosis, distilled water, even many countertop filtration systems, they remove the minerals from the water. And that actually has two effects. One is that you're not getting the minerals from the water. And second is the water is empty. And water is a carrier molecule, and the way it moves around and is actually absorbed into your body is because of its mineral content. So the water that you drink that's distilled and reverse osmosis or has no mineral content, it actually mostly goes straight through your body. It's not hydrating you. And as it goes through, it's actually grabbing minerals from your body and carrying them out. So it's actually irrigating. It's not supporting hydration or mineral deficiency. It's not helping any mineral replenishment. The other piece is glyphosate. So glyphosate is a very ubiquitous herbicide that's sprayed on genetically modified crops. It's also used as a desiccant, so something to dry certain grains like oats. Please do not drink oat milk lattes thinking they're healthy, unless you're using completely genetically non-GMO oat milk. You are drinking a glyphosate cocktail, so you do not want that. Glyphosate, one of its main problems, it has many, many problems in your system, but one of them is that it chelates minerals out of your system. I say that mineral depletion, because of all these factors, mineral depletion is the vanguard of health. A few years ago, really, people were talking about the gut. Now the gut is coming into the mainstream as the second brain in the body, and it's truly central to health of the body. But I'm telling you, every single biosynthesis, microflora, microbiota that's happening in the gut relies on minerals. So it is the next piece that people have to look at.

Speaker 1:
[14:29] If you're in midlife and you've started to notice that your energy, your strength, or even your recovery just isn't what it used to be, I want to share something I've been thinking more and more about lately. For many women, we assume it's all about hormones, and hormones are absolutely part of the story. But there's another layer that often gets overlooked, and that's about cellular energy. As we get older, our mitochondria, the energy engines of ourselves, become less efficient. They accumulate damage over time, and when that happens, it can show up as a very specific kind of fatigue. You're doing all the right things, you're eating well, you're strength training, you're prioritizing sleep, and yet, something still feels off. That's why I've been incorporating timelines might appear into my routine for the last five years. What I appreciate might appear is that it works at the level of the mitochondria, helping your body clear out damage once your cells can function more efficiently. And clinically, this matters because mitochondrial health is tied directly to energy, muscle strength, and resilience. For me, this has been a foundational part of my routine, as well as my husband's. Not something extra, because something that supports everything else I'm already doing. And for women in perimenopause and menopause, this is an important part of the conversation, because supporting your energy at the cellular level can make a meaningful difference in how you feel day to day. And my friends at Mitopure are doing a big price cut. There's a one time purchase is going from $125 per month to $99 with subscriptions that will now start as low as $75 a month. The hope is that this will make timeline more accessible to folks in my community who've been on the fence or tried it and lapsed. You can go to timeline.com/cynthia to learn more. Again, timeline.com/cynthia to learn more. If you're in perimenopause or menopause and are feeling more fatigued, dizzy, lightheaded, struggling with headaches, or noticing your workouts feel harder than they used to, electrolytes may be part of the missing piece. As estrogen declines, we lose some of the fluid regulating and vascular protective effects that hormones once provided. That means blood pressure regulation can shift, cortisol can run higher, and many women become more sensitive to dehydration, especially if you're strength training, walking more, intermittent fasting, or reducing processed foods. That's why I love Element. It is my favorite electrolyte formulation, and I've exclusively used their products for the past six years. Element contains a science-backed ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium without sugar, artificial ingredients, or unnecessary fillers. It supports hydration at a cellular level, helps reduce muscle cramps, improves energy, as well as recovery, and can even support better stress resilience. This is particularly helpful in midlife when we're prioritizing metabolic health and muscle preservation. I personally use Element throughout the day, and it's become a staple in my routine as well as my household. If you'd like to try it, go to drinklmnt.com/cynthia to receive a free sample pack with any purchase. Stay hydrated, stay strong, especially in midlife. I think for so many people, they probably, you know, you started the kind of answer talking about menstruation and pregnancy and how, you know, different life stages are impacting women's ability to maintain minerals and micro minerals at an appropriate level. And it's interesting, I work with an integrative physician, and so with micronutrient testing and all the things, I take a good amount of trace minerals orally as well as your products. Because, you know, even though I eat a quote unquote conventionally, you know, healthy nutrient dense diet, there just isn't enough ways to replenish. And I think about chronic stress and how I can't think of any middle-aged woman, you know, any woman north of 35. Heck, if you have kids, you're going to be stressed just by virtue of trying to keep track of all the things that they need to be doing at any given day or time. But I think our modern-day lifestyles, from the perspective of stress, that we're at a stage in our lives where we have aging parents, we have older children, we may be in a position in our job where we have a lot more responsibilities. And so that stress per se is not going away. I think it just continues to kind of remain additive. And why I think it's so important to be proactive. You mentioned the gut and obviously this is a very important topic. Talk to us about how these mineral deficiencies can impact not just the microbiome but actually the absorption. So we know that the small intestinal lining is this main site of absorption in the body. And whether or not you have Celiac or not, I think we're really speaking to the fact that the gut microbiome and the gut itself is impacted by a lot of the choices that we're making. Well, as well as our modern day lifestyles, even if we take glyphosate out of it, which we really can't, because glyphosate is everywhere. Even the kind of organic, conventional, non-conventional farms are even mentioning that birds in the wind are carrying glyphosate. So we're all exposed to it. It's just really making an effort to limit it as much as we can.

Speaker 2:
[19:54] Exactly. Yeah, we have glyphosate in our water table. So, but here's the thing. It's an interesting thing to think about replenishment. And this was like, first I looked into, you know, when I had this experience, the first thing I did was, you know, wanted to understand why I was depleted. And that ended up leading me to understanding what I call the replenishment system in the body. So we tend to think about minerals in particular as supplements, and we use this supplementation model that's based on minimum daily allowances or requirements and recommended daily allowances. And the problem, and you see those on nutritional facts panels, supplemental facts panels, the problem is they, first of all, they completely don't take into account how minerals actually work in the body, which is really key for people to understand, and we'll get into that. And the other piece is they don't actually relate to you personally. So you and I, we have different lifestyles, we're at different stages in our life, potentially we're, you know, we have, we eat potentially differently, we have different genetics and epigenetics, there are just, our lifestyles are different. So, so many things are different. Who's to say that my needs for minerals today, on this day, are the same as a six foot four triathlete, you know, or a 90 year old, you know, old person, or a young woman, you know, who's just hitting puberty, you know. So, there are so many, many differences in people. The thing we have to understand about minerals is minerals do not work alone. They work together. So, we tend to, because we've looked at these nutritional facts panels, we tend to think of how much. And what I say is it's actually not about how much, it's about how bioavailable. So, bioavailability has three stages. The first is you put that something into your mouth and it has to digest. So, it starts actually digesting slightly in your mouth with your saliva, and then hits your stomach and hydrochloric acid breaks it down, ends up in your small intestine, and it starts breaking down more using all sorts of enzymes, enzymatic processes, et cetera, depending on the health of that microbiome. So, here's the thing. Things have to get broken down all the way to their chemical ionic components before they can be absorbed through the lining of your gut. So, just that stage, that first stage has a lot of potential impediments, many of which I'm sure you talk about in your book related to how well is that microbiome working at actually breaking down the nutrition that you put in through your mouth. So, that's, and there are many, many potential impediments to that. So, that's the first stage. Only the first stage. The second stage is the absorption process through the lining of your small intestine into your bloodstream. And actually, it absorbs through other places in your gut as well, but we'll just talk about the small intestine. So, lining this intestine are these finger-like structures. They kind of look like fingers, and they're called veli. And lining each one of these veli are these cells that are called epithelial cells. And lining each one of these cells are receptor sites. I like to think of them like catchers mitts, okay? They're ready to catch different things, but they're not like just general, like they can catch anything. No, they're actually magnesium receptors, and chromium receptors, and selenium receptors, and vanadium, and molybdenum, and potassium, and sodium. There's a lot of them, okay? And they are designed in a particular ratio. So there's a lot of what we call the macrominerals, magnesium, potassium, sodium, calcium, boron. There's a lot of those, but there are also smaller numbers. In a specific ratio of all of the micronutrients that your body needs, and total, this total list is like 18 to 22 of them. So you can take a big pill of calcium, that's got like, say, 500 milligrams of calcium, and you can swallow it and it'll end up in your gut. So the first thing, it had to get digested, and it had to get all the way broken down, and guess what? Because it's made from bone, most of it, most of those calcians are made from bovine bone, it only maybe breaks down like 10 percent of it in a pretty healthy gut, 10 percent. The rest of it, the body says this, it says, oh my gosh, I've got a concentration of calcium. There's a whole bunch of calcium right here. We're going to have to deal with this concentration and we want to bring water and other balancing minerals like magnesium and phosphorus and from other places in your body. We're going to try and balance this out. We're going to try and eliminate a lot of it, and we're going to break down some of it. You see how that's happening? Because guess what? The gut is an ecosystem much like a forest. If you took a wheelbarrow of calcium and put it on a forest floor, the plants would go, this is a lot. What are we going to do here? They may not thrive. The interesting thing, so here you're trying to get calcium into your body to support your bone health, but it doesn't actually work. It's not like there's a tank for calcium and I can just fill it up every day. No, it's a very, very, very complex replenishment system that requires all these different stages to get all the way into your cell where it actually can be useful. So what happens is these catchers mitts grab, like at a certain point a calcium molecule hits a calcium catcher mitt and it absorbs into your bloodstream. Now you have some calcium in your bloodstream, but that's only two stages, digestion and absorption. But your bones are your cells, and that means the calcium has to get into your cell, not only to support energy generation, but also to support structure in your body. So that process is called assimilation, and there are all sorts of different impediments to assimilation. We should talk about beyond the other issue with absorption is that there are all sorts of impediments to absorption that depend on the health of the lining of your gut or whether you've had gastroplasty, or some very intense problem. You have SIBO, IBS, Crohn's, all these issues that make it really challenging for the lining of your gut to do absorption well. The other issue is heavy metal toxicity, because heavy metals will take up the receptor sites for beneficial minerals, meaning that they're not available for absorption of the beneficial minerals. There's all in parasites also in your gut. They will actually metabolize minerals before you do, so then you're not able to utilize them. There's a lot of potential impediments here. But now we have this calcium in your bloodstream, and let's say you digested 10 percent of it. Now maybe 7 percent gets into your bloodstream, and then a much smaller percent actually gets assimilated into your cell. It's the same process, receptor site, the calcium hits the cell, the cell goes, what is that? Oh, it's calcium. This is good. Let's let it in, and the calcium gets into your cell. It's a long journey. It's a very long journey just for one single little calcium piece. This is the big issue that we've got with people struggling with deficiency. Not only that they're not getting enough minerals from the foods they eat, but they have a lot of potential impediments for replenishment. The general model for getting minerals into the body is this supplementation model that doesn't actually take into account either the way that replenishment happens in the body or the fact that concentrations can exacerbate mineral imbalance in the body.

Speaker 1:
[28:18] I always think about, you know, I worked in clinical cardiology as an MP for over 16 years, and I laugh about the fact that the standard magnesium given to patients in a hospital, unless it's IV, which is IV magnesium sulfate, which is readily absorbed, we gave magnesium oxide.

Speaker 2:
[28:37] Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[28:38] The absorption of magnesium oxide, I think, is 10 or 11 percent, and yet we would keep giving it to patients and not making the connection that it's so poorly bioavailable, that it's almost like we might as well have just asked them to toss it into the toilet. And it's, you know, these kind of prevailing themes that just taking the supplement will be allow that mineral micronutrient to be absorbed properly. And you really beautifully kind of identified how that can get messed up. You know, sometimes through no fault of our own, it's just the fault of the cumulative effects of our modern day lifestyles on our health. And so when I was preparing for our conversation, I kind of reacquainted myself with humic and fulvic acid. And I think this is really fascinating how they can be either, as you astutely say, the garbage truck delivery person, but for people that are trying to differentiate between both of them, how they can help replenish the body, but do so in a way where it's very bioavailable. Let's talk about humic and fulvic acid because I find this fascinating. And as a someone who prides themselves on remembering the details in your book, you really do such a beautiful job explaining how and why these are important and doing so in a way that it's very accessible, as opposed to if you were reading about it, perhaps in a scientific journal or a publication or a textbook, you might be scratching your head and saying, okay, wait a minute, I've got to read that sentence again to make sure I fully understand and appreciate the main concepts here.

Speaker 2:
[30:13] Yeah, I wanted to make things so accessible to people. And that's, you know, when I started studying mineral depletion, mineral replenishment, and then ultimately humic and fulvic, I recognized that this subject is extremely complex. And I had to teach myself to read scientific papers. And I would look up words every time I ran into something I didn't know what it was. And then that would take me on a many, many hours study, so I could understand what that single word meant. And then I'd be like, well, why didn't they just say this? You know, and I understand there's all those reasons that they do things in science. But what I wanted to do is empower people with the simple understanding of like how their body is fueled. I mean, most of us are kind of like walking around in a car that we don't know how to fill up the tank. And, you know, we've been taught that way. Sort of like, you know, we tend to think of our bodies like a car. Like if something's wrong with my car, I take it to the mechanic because they know how to fix it. I don't really know what's under the hood that much, you know? But what we're often doing with our bodies is sort of like I say, going to the, if our body was a car and we filled up a cup of gasoline and we put it in the cup holder, and we thought that was going to fuel the engine because we never learned we had to put it in the tank. It's like that, we don't know the first thing about how our body is fueled. Once you understand that, you recognize that guess what? Every single cell on Earth requires this same process. Minerals have to get into cells, so guess what? Mother Nature solved the problem because it didn't just have to get 500 milligrams of calcium in or 800 of magnesium or whatever, all those different milligrams of minerals. No, it actually had to get 18 to 22 minerals into every single cell on Earth. How was it going to do that? It created pre-formulated mineral molecules, and that's what humic and fulvic represent. They represent pre-formulated molecules that have all the minerals the body needs already in the natural ratios that your body needs to receive them in at a cellular level. Just that alone is really cool, and those substances are humic and fulvic. Just to be clear, I call them molecules because they're really complexes of minerals that are held together electrically as a molecule. And that humic is a large molecule relative to a cell. So if you hold your hand in a fist, that's the size of a humic molecule. And you think of a head of a pin, that's the size of a cell, you know, generally speaking. So it's just much larger than a cell. And the humic molecule is very, very interesting. It's called a polyelectrolyte molecule. So the surface area is like a sponge. If you can imagine a sponge in your mind, all this surface area. But it's very, very like magnetic. And different areas on it will attract positive molecules and other areas will attract negative. So it's like having a magnet that had different parts of the magnet with different things could attach to it because it was positive or negative. That alone is a very, very rare molecule. There are a few other molecules on Earth like that, but very few. But this one is very, very strong. And it carries this full spectrum of minerals with it. But its job is to detoxify cellular systems, one of its primary jobs. And it literally, I call it Mother Nature's janitor. It literally moves through your gut and through your bloodstream, picking up things like biowaste, toxins like glyphosate, heavy metals, free radicals, nanoplastics, viral detritus, just non-beneficial bacteria. It will just gather them and they stick to it. And in some cases, it will even sequester them like glyphosate. It will actually build a film around it and sequester it in the molecule. Now, the other interesting thing is in this molecule, there are heavy metals, but those heavy metals are completely held inside the molecule. They can't come free and roam around in your system, and it acts like a magnet for other heavy metals. So, humic is very well known for being a great tool for remediation of heavy metals, specifically mercury, cadmium, and lead, from aqueous situations like water, from inside your body, and also from soils. So, really, really effective for those things. So, what an incredible thing. And that's what I call the, you know, it's like the trash, the guy who comes through once a week and takes the stuff out. Well, guess what? What if he came like three times a day and just, you know, you'd never have any accumulation of garbage.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[39:08] You can't get away from it. And that's why I say what you really want to have. That's why I love the term Mother Nature's janitor, because the janitor is just the one who comes in every night and just cleans up and makes sure everything's in order. And so you really want to have these in your system all the time, and you want to take it every single day, because it's just constantly working in the background to clear out this stuff. And that has many, many effects in your body beyond, it supports the whole entire ecosystem and homeostasis of your body, raising the entire bandwidth. When your body isn't constantly being, dealing with the oxidative stress associated with so many of these things, it can do other things, which are more about optimizing rather than just kind of gaining a baseline. And that's really exciting. So, and the other interesting thing about this humic molecule as a binder is that it's actually, we call it an effector because it does something very interesting. So let's say you took a whole bunch of like magnesium, some sort of very bioavailable magnesium, and it broke down and it absorbed into your bloodstream. Now you've got a lot of magnesium in there, and it's maybe too much in terms of natural balance of minerals in your body. Humic molecule will actually bind to that magnesium in the system all the way up to the point where it reaches balance, and then it will stop binding. And that's a very interesting thing. It's one of the reasons it's being studied all around the world, because they don't really understand how it does it. They think it has something to do with pH levels, that is reaching a certain pH and then its binding capacity lowers. But they haven't found the exact mechanism. So they are still the chemical mechanism. So they're looking at that. So that's a very, very cool thing, knowing that not only is the humic molecule taking toxins and bio-waste out of your system, it is also supporting the balance, the mineral balance in your system by constantly removing where there's excess, okay? The other thing that the humic molecule does, which is really interesting, is it interacts with the lining of cells, the proteins in the cell linings, and it increases permeability. So because you want to get nutrients and minerals into your cells, and the way that works is there's these openings that happen. If you're in a room and you've got maybe one window and one door, so many things can go in and out. But if you have three doors and three windows, so more things can go in and out more efficiently. The efficientness of how our cellular assimilation and diffusion process, this transport of things across cell membranes, is one of the key factors for mitochondrial health in the body, which is this basic energy production system in the body. So having something that increases, like adds doors and windows to all your cells in your system is a great tool. So now let's talk about the fulvic molecule. Where does the fulvic molecule come from? It comes from inside the humic molecule. It actually is extracted out under certain conditions, out of the humic molecule. So now you have these two separate molecules. Humic molecule is still doing what it's doing, but now the fulvic molecule can do what it does well. Now, so we can understand the size of this molecule. It's extremely tiny. If you're now, if you put your hand in a fist, that's a cell and the head of a pin is a fulvic molecule. Extremely tiny. Now, the fulvic molecule is very interesting. Your body recognizes it as a beneficial substance because guess what? The cells in your body evolved right alongside all of the other cellular life on earth. All cellular life on earth utilizes fulvic, recognizes it as beneficial, and so do the cells in your body. Now, the fulvic molecule is like the humic in that it carries that full spectrum of all the minerals you need. In the natural ratios that you need, but it does something really cool. It delivers them into your cells. The way that it does that is it's carrying this full spectrum of minerals. It hits up against the lining of your cell membrane, and the membrane goes, oh, that's fulvic. That's something great. Let's let it in. Opens a passageway. The fulvic molecule goes into the cell, and then it does something interesting, and it's the only a molecule on earth that they know can do this. It changes its polarity. So if you imagine a magnet and things are clinging to it, and then you can turn the magnet off, those things drop off, and that's what happens inside your cell. It literally delivers this mineral, this bolus of all these minerals and other nutrients into your cell, where now they're available for your mitochondria to utilize for energy production. This is such a cool thing.

Speaker 1:
[44:29] It really is, and it's interesting, as I was reacquainting myself with the book last night and preparing for our conversation, I just kept thinking about there's so many things that we do that are over-complicating our lives, and yet keeping things a little more simple can be incredibly beneficial. I know that everyone listening probably takes a bunch of supplements, and I love the idea of something allowing you to simplify what you're already doing instead of making it more complicated. I think that for so many of us, especially as we're navigating perimenopause and amenopause, there's an onslaught of information that we see on social media that we get in our inbox that we're probably texted. Now, I feel like there's an onslaught of text messages from different companies. In your experience working with thousands and thousands of people, how are humic and fulvic acid helpful specifically for women in perimenopause? We know that we're at risk for autoimmune conditions. We're four to five times more likely to get a diagnosis of autoimmune disorders. Now, there's over 100. Like I was saying the other day, now we've got chronic Lyme and long-haul COVID or two newly acknowledged autoimmune conditions. But especially as women are dealing with more adrenal stress, they're dealing with bone health issues, brain health issues, and perimenopause and menopause. How have you seen these products be particularly helpful if we're being really conscientious about these beautiful molecules?

Speaker 2:
[46:03] Yeah. Well, I want to mention first of all that in the book, there's a whole reference section, which is a really useful tool because you'll be able to go through that and find the issue, the chronic issues that you're dealing with and hear about how mineral replenishment might help, what minerals are being affected by that condition, and how you can support yourself in coming back to regaining health or maybe potentially removing that condition altogether. What I want to say to people is minerals don't heal anything. What they do is support your body at the most absolute, most foundational level so your body can do what it naturally can do. I'm going to give you a really interesting thing here. Your body, if it has enough minerals, can generate about 1200 watts of electricity every day. It's like enough to run a blender, a toaster, a substantial electronic device or electrical device. But without enough minerals, maybe you're only producing 800 watts, or if you really are struggling to eat well, or you have some of these impediments we talked about, maybe it's 500 watts. Your body literally cannot generate enough energy to do what it normally should be able to do, and so it has to pick and choose. When it picks and chooses, based on the weaknesses in your particular ecosystem, that's what's going to hit for you. Over time, like with me, that ended up hitting a lot of different points, my gut, my sinuses, my mouth, my sleep, my brain. It starts hitting a lot of places, but all of those things were able to resolve when I supported the energy generation and all of those biosynthesis processes at this fundamental level. Minerals, I always say, they're the first thing you should do. I'm not saying you shouldn't do anything else. There are certainly supplements that are very, very useful especially as you go into perimenopause, etc. But even if you're going to do hormone replacement as an example, guess what? Hormones and the utilization of them in your body require minerals. They require minerals. Your adrenal function will not work without minerals. Your thyroid will not work without minerals. The way that hormones are doing all of their different jobs in your body, they will not work without minerals. Your gut microbiome, it will not work without minerals. So yes, do all the things but start with minerals. That's the first thing.

Speaker 1:
[48:58] I think that's such an important message. As I've been doing book press, I've been saying to podcast hosts or even when I've been doing media, that it's important that we're getting greater awareness around options for women in middle age. Number one, full stop. Number two, if it were just about replacing hormones, then everyone would be feeling better, right? And so I jokingly say, but I mean it seriously, if you think slapping on an estrogen patch is going to fix all of your lifestyle and micro macronutrient deficiencies, unfortunately that's not the case. So I think we have to really think thoughtfully in a very kind of layered perspective that there's probably multiple things that we need to be doing to get us back to health optimization. Because I think for everyone listening, we just want to feel better in our bodies. And I'm talking physically feeling like we have more brain energy that our sleep is better, that we can get through exercise, that we can engage with our loved ones, that we can show up for our communities and do so in a way that feels very authentic. And so that's why these kinds of conversations are so important. Caroline, is there anything in the book that you feel like we haven't touched on that would be particularly helpful or relevant for my community? I always, you know, as an author myself, sometimes I'll get asked this question, and I now appreciate it more now than ever as I'm going through a book launch myself. Sometimes there's little subtleties in the book that maybe a podcast host has not kind of identified or illuminated in the conversation. Is there anything that you feel like we left out of the conversation today that would be valuable for listeners?

Speaker 2:
[50:35] I think you did a great job. Thank you so much. I want people to understand that there are really two components of the book. And the first is really a paradigm shift, which is the paradigm shift is to stop thinking of your body like a car that's made of parts and pieces and systems and tissues and liquids, and to start thinking of it as a natural ecosystem. So that is a big component of the book and really the foundation for all of the rest of it. And then to understand that minerals are the foundation for that entire ecosystem. And if you don't start with minerals, all of those other things are going to have limited effect. Even 10 years ago, I was doing hormone replacement. But it wasn't until I got replenished, where actually the impact and the positive effects really took hold. So again, it's just the first thing. And the great thing about the book is it not only just helps you walk through the foundational information, but it also has a lot of resources for this reference section. It also has a complete buying guide so you can understand what you need to look into and at the kind of questions you should ask. If you're going to go get humic and fulvic and introduce them into your body, it also has a whole complete mineral reset program at the end, which I'm actually going to be taking people through online in a live event starting in May, and that'll be like a five-week or five-module program. So lots of different ways to engage, to get the information, to make it really actionable in your life. Of course, you don't have to read it end to end because you can definitely get the pieces that really interest you. And we'll help you on your journey and whatever stage you're at.

Speaker 1:
[52:24] Well, I'm so grateful for the opportunity to connect with you again. Please let listeners know how to get access to the book, how to learn more about your work and Beam Minerals.

Speaker 2:
[52:35] Yeah. If you're interested in learning more about the book, and we would love you to go get it. What we say is, don't just buy one book, buy three books, one for yourself, one for a friend so you can join both of you, join the Mineral Reset program, and the third one for somebody in your life who's just given up hope of feeling better. I say, if you want more energy, the best source of energy on earth is from the earth, its minerals. It could be so simple for that person who's really struggling to feel better. Give them that gift. If you're interested in reaching me, you can go to carolinealan.com or join me on my social at carolinealan.official. Would love to hear from you. If anyone has any questions directly, feel free to contact us on social or via the website. As well as you can go to my own company, which is beamminerals.com. If you're just ready to get started on your replenishment journey and you just want to try those tools that I use to get to feel better, I recommend you look at the advanced set at beamminerals.com and we can provide that link for people in the show notes. Perfect.

Speaker 1:
[53:55] Thank you again for your time.

Speaker 2:
[53:56] Thank you so much, Cynthia.

Speaker 1:
[54:00] If you love this podcast episode, please leave a rating and review, subscribe, and tell a friend.