Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Daniel Vitalis talk about getting people back to nature from a stress perspective as well as a movement perspective. They discuss in detail about continuing to balance our biology and our zoology in this technological era we're at now. Discover the rewilding approach on health strategies as suggested by Daniel Vitalis.
Get some advice on EMF meter recommendations and learn more about grounding mats, EMF harmonizers and filters. Get answers as to why people need negative charges and less positive charges as well as how to recreate a healthy habitat. Then find out why we need good quality earth, water, air, and fire in this interview.
Podcast: Play in New Window|Download
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey, it’s Dr. J here. On the show today we have Daniel Vitalis. Super excited about this interview. He’s been on my books for a few months. Again, Daniel Vitalis is a writer, podcaster, public speaker, a lifestyle pioneer in the sphere of human health, personal development, and strategic living. Again, Daniel has a podcast over at Rewild Yourself podcast. He’s the founder of SurThrival and his website is also at DanielVitalis.com. Daniel, welcome to the show.
Daniel Vitalis: Hey, thanks so much, man. Good to be here with you.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Awesome! Very cool. So you’re doing a lot of cool stuff, kinda getting people back to nature from a stress perspective as well as a movement perspective. Can you tell me maybe one of the–maybe one or two biggest things that are on your radar screen right now?
Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, well, you know what I think is going on right now is human beings are moving into this kind of transhuman dimension of living. We’re kind of on the brink of so many unfolding technologies and so we’re seeing things like biotech and gene therapy and all of this sort of very technical medicine. It’s all very exciting.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: And what’s really on my radar is that I feel there needs to be voices out there that remind people very simply that we are a type of ape. That we are homo sapiens, a species like all other species. And we need to remember as we move forward in this technological era to continue balancing in our biology and our zoology. Because we can’t–it’s kind of obvious I think to a lot of us at this point that the more technology we apply to our lives, the more suffering we seem to be creating in our lives. It never seems to end. It’s always like we come–we learn a new piece, we try to add in a new ingredient, and what happens is we imbalance something somewhere else. So I’m not saying we need to give up all this technology and of course, we’re not going to, but I do like to remind people, “Hey, if we’re a type of ape, maybe there’s a lifestyle that we are really adapted to and have evolved in accordance with over the last 3 and 1/2 million years, and if so, we should try to bring as much of that into our lives because otherwise, we’re sort of fighting our own nature.” And I think that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 10,000 years and I think it’s had really deleterious effects. So–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: You know, rather than like, “Hey, here’s the new hot ingredient.” I really like to remind people, “Hey, let’s bring in a little human zoology.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes so much sense. So you’re–let’s say you’re an executive, you’re using your Wi-Fi, you’re on your smartphone 24/7, right? What are some simple things you can do so you can still use your technology to get your work done, etc. but then you can still disconnect? How do you find the balance with the clients that you work with or people that you just see on the internet and such?
Daniel Vitalis: Well, you just brought up some interesting stuff. You know, you brought up Wi-Fi, you brought up phones, and these are really new devices in our lives, right? These are new technologies in our lives and they are sort of habituating in the same way that maybe something like cocaine would be habituating or tobacco can be habituating. And you know, incidentally, I just wanna be clear when I bring up those drugs, I really think there’s a place for everything in our world.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: But those–things need to be moderated, right? Everything needs to be used in sort of moderation or else we abuse the tool. When it comes to things like our phone and our Wi-Fi, I think the best way to disconnect from it is actually to be able to choose times to disconnect from it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: So when it comes to things like Wi-Fi, you know, we are adapted to the electromagnetic rhythms of our planet and the electromagnetic rhythms of our Wi-Fi were not designed to be optimized with our biology. So it’s important I think for instance with that like that at night, I recommend everybody unplug their Wi-Fi. When you go to sleep, like I don’t see any reason to have that on and same thing with our phones, like I think those phones need to be switched off or to airplane mode when we go to sleep so that we’re not receiving that constant bombardment of that electromagnetism. I think also for you know, you sort of mentioned, okay you’re the executive, you’re interacting with these machines. I’m a big fan of that sort of blue blocker glass approach where you wear an orange-tinted lens after sort of sunset–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: So that you are not getting bombarded with that noon day light that comes out of our machines and I love apps like, I don’t know if you’re–I’m sure you’re familiar by now with Flux which changes our computer screens over to an orange hue after the sun sets in our environment so we can keep ourselves on a circadian rhythm because these technologies have taken us off of the planet’s natural calendric cycle and put us on this very artificial, given us an artificial circadian rhythm. Our body thinks it’s noon time when we’re looking at our computers and it’s–it’s important that we balance that stuff in our lives.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. I had a doctor friend of mine just over at my house with a–a fancy $500 EMF detector meter and we were literally just walking around my house seeing where Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and smart meters were really causing the EMF to jump up and you wanna keep it below 15 on this scale and we’re walking around and we went outside and we got in front of that smart meter we saw things jump like 10 to 20-fold–
Daniel Vitalis: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And went in front of my Nest meter jumps up, went in front of my Bluetooth and the, you know, the wireless routers and such, and it jumped up significantly. Now I think exactly what you said, we gotta turn off the Wi-Fi at night. One of the things I do is I sleep on a grounding mat. I have EMF filters in my room. I kinda have a couple of EMF harmonizers that I wear and put on my phone, put the airplane–put the phone in airplane mode, and etc. but it’s amazing, with just walking around my house with this detector and I could just see all these different things coming at me, and it was kinda eye-opening. Have you ever had that experience before?
Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, so I use a–a trimeter and bring that always to new environments, to sort of like to check out especially new appliances and one of the things I think is important that we do is kind of–because we live in this world where so many of the technologies literally function on to us in invisible level, right? We don’t see the electromagnetic radiation that comes off of these devices, unless we have something like a meter which allows us to sort of bring that into some kind of focus for ourselves. But I think it’s important that we almost kind of give ourselves like an x-ray vision. Like imagine that you can see–once you’ve tested that, I know, when I look at my Wi-Fi router for instance, I can imagine that pulse of energy that comes off of it and I can imagine where my meter starts to pick it up so I can see sort of how big that field is. I can see that on my blender–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: I can see that on the ceiling fan. I think it’s important that we imagine our devices, as producing not just that invisible light but a visible light and we start to think about our proximity to them especially throughout the day. And you know, for me at home I do have a Wi-Fi router but I rarely use it actually. I mean, I mainline my computers in with Ethernet because I like to just avoid having that signal altogether if I can. It’s really important with our phones as well and I think I mean obviously your listeners know these aren’t devices that were meant to be put, you know, next to our gonads in our pocket or you know, in our chest pocket against our heart. All of these organs function off very delicate electromagnetic rhythms and the reason, again, I wanna be clear, the reason I say this stuff is not because I’m trying to kind of–it’s because–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: When we want to recreate a habitat that is similar to the one we are biologically adapted to.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Daniel Vitalis: And we are biologically adapted to the natural rhythms of the Earth, so we wanna try to maintain as much of that in our lives because we can’t in one generation biologically catch up to all these new technologies in our environment.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Daniel Vitalis: So it’s really important that we try to harmonize our environment with nature as much as we can and that’s not just on the electromagnetic level, that’s on the atmospheric level, that’s on the nutritional level, that’s on the hydrological level. We wanna make sure everything that we’re putting into our bodies and bringing into our homes is compatible with our biology and if we’re not doing that; all the kind of latest fanciest health trends aren’t really gonna help us if we’re fundamentally battling our biology at the basic level on our own homes.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That totally makes sense and regarding an EF–EMF meter, do you have one that you recommend?
Daniel Vitalis: I like to use what’s called a trimeter; it’s fairly inexpensive, has a really long battery life. You can pick one of these up on Amazon and it allows you to see things electrically and magnetically and also in the microwave frequency range as well which is really helpful. So you can kind of switch from setting to setting and it allows you to see, some devices only show up in the magnetic range, some only show up in the electrical range, some only show up in the microwave range, so it helps to see everything from our phones to our Wi-Fi routers, to you know, big electromagnets that are in fans and other kind of whirling, spinning devices, and such.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Is that the–the Trifield 100XE? Is that the one you’re referring to?
Daniel Vitalis: That’s the–that’s the one.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay, it’s about $119 on Amazon. The one that I’ve been using is the HF35C. It’s about $300. It was 500 bucks last year. That’s the one I use, but that’s cool. Just to give the listeners some options to check things out with. And then regarding outside of unplugging routers, do you recommend things like grounding mats? Do you recommend EMF harmonizers? Do you recommend EMF filters? Are those part of some things that you’d recommend that people who are exposed to these kind of technologies, too?
Daniel Vitalis: Well, I think that it’s important that we stay really sane and balanced with our approach in this and here’s what I mean by that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: I have seen and I’m sure you’ve seen so many stickers and gadgets and widgets that have come out that make all these claims about how they balance EMFs or block EMFs.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Daniel Vitalis: I see constantly people go–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: “Oh, I put this–I put this device on my phone. It blocks the EMFs.” And I go, “If it blocked EMF, you wouldn’t get a phone call on this phone.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Daniel Vitalis: Right? Well, let’s take out the meter and see what it’s doing, whether they harmonize it at some subtle level or not, I don’t know, but I haven’t seen any real data on that kinda thing that really convinces me that any of that’s legit. That said, there are things that legitimately block it. For instance, like a silver mesh will block EMF, right? So if we took a–a silver mesh and we wrap it around phone, our phone won’t receive calls. That’s truly blocking it. So there are things like that that I would like to bring into play. Per–for instance, a piece of laminate that contains a silver mesh that blocks EMF. You can put that in your pocket and your phone on the other side of that so there’s a barrier between your body or your backpack or your purse wherever you carry that. And that will still allow your phone to pick up signal on the other side away from your body so those kind of devices make a lot of sense to me but I think there’s a lot of kind of hoaxy fake stuff out there as well. So I think it’s just that we need to be really balanced with our choices around this stuff and make sure we’re not buying in to sort of hocus pocus. These are technologies and we need real technologies that block balance and protect us from those things.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: What do you think about a grounding mat though?
Daniel Vitalis: Okay, I–you know, this is a–I wanna be delicate here in how I say this. I see grounding mats as having a place in our lives.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: I’m not a huge fan of some of the grounding sheets and things like that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: And let me explain why that is.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: The grounding sheet and this has been in my personal experience and I wanna say that I live out in the countryside in a–in an environment where I can step outside naked every single day and I don’t have to be–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Nice.
Daniel Vitalis: Concerned with, you know, I’m not on Floor 42 of a high-rise apartment building–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Daniel Vitalis: Living in all these kinda signals. But if you think about what a grounding sheet is, it’s a sheet impregnated with a silver mesh. It’s essential a large mast antenna. So if we wrap ourselves in a mast antenna, we are going to–that antenna is going to be picking up all of the signals from everything in our environment, so you know, you could imagine essentially what you’ve done is wrapped yourself in something that’s picking up the neighbor’s Wi-Fi, it’s picking cellphone calls as they pass by and all of that is being transmitted to your skin which is in contact with that sheet, if you will.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: So for me, I have concerns about that. I think that that’s a technology we need to be really thoughtful about, but that’s different than a–say a pad that you walk by and touch from time to time to discharge static, so I–I know and again, I don’t live in a place where I’m constantly disconnected electrically. I live in a place where I’m very connected electrically so I don’t have to be as concerned about that but I think we should be thoughtful with some of those technologies before we just jump kind of full speed into them.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. And then what’s your take on earthing versus like a–a ground mat so to speak. Obviously, you kind of have this bent more towards earthing, getting out in nature, connecting with the ground, dispelling a lot of those positive ions, what’s your take on that?
Daniel Vitalis: I think that even more beneficial than the discharge that happens is the electrical upcharge that happens–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: When we’re in contact with the earth. So, you know, the thing that’s happening when we’re contact with the Earth is we’re drawing electrons, free electrons, up from the earth into our cells. Now when we talk about things like antioxidants, I’m sure you know this from your background.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Daniel Vitalis: You know, essentially what we’re talking about is something that can donate an electron.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Daniel Vitalis: When we talk about things that are toxic to us, almost always these are positively charged substances. So most toxic compounds can be absorbed by the consumption of something like charcoal or clay. Why? Because those are electrically negative compounds.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Daniel Vitalis: And the things that are poisonous to us are electropositive. We need as many electrons as we can get into our body to quell the oxidative fire, to stop free radical cascading. So when we are earthing, truly earthing, we’re pulling free electrons into our body. It’s basically like guzzling free antioxidants. So I think when we look at human biology, when we look at ourselves as an ape that has, you know, essentially 3 and ½ million years of human evolution, hominid evolution, we were in contact with the earth or grounded substances for most of that time and only recently have we cut ourselves off from it. It’s not just that we build up charge, it’s that we are unplugged. Now you see, like if you’ve got an iPhone, you see what happens after a day of using that phone and not plugging it in, it’s like the battery dwindles down. And I think there are sort of something similar going on with us being barefoot on the earth is kind of like plugging yourself in to an electrical outlet and recharging yourself if you will, but if in this case, recharging yourself, well, I guess, it’s very similar you’re recharging yourself with electricity in the form of these free electrons.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. That makes sense. So just to be clear to all the listeners that are trying to wrap their head around what we’re saying. Oxidation essentially is a loss of electrons and–and stress and all these things that are happening, they are pulling away electrons from us and antioxidants, they’re–they’re helping to quench the loss of electrons so when you’re grounding or you’re earthing, you’re–you’re getting a whole bunch of electrons back into your body, is the whole–the whole idea, you’re kind of giving yourself extra electrons so you’re not losing them?
Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, and if you think about it, what’s the–the process of living consumes electricity or electrons, right? It consumes electrons and so we need to be recharged with electrons. Now I like to sort of imagine–here’s how I imagine in my sort of very simplistic rewilding approach to how I see the world. I imagine ourselves as being beings who consume the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire. What I mean is we consume earth as food, water as the water we drink, air as the air we breathe, and fire as the sunlight we absorb from the sun. Now we need food that’s fresh and when I say fresh I mean electron-rich. Fresh food–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: Is full of electrons, right? When we preserve food, we lose electrons. When we eat fresh food, it’s electron-rich. When we drink fresh moving living water from, let’s say, a spring or a good well, there’s electrons in that water. And we lose that when water becomes still and stagnant. When we breathe fresh air, it has ions in it. Electrons–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: So we ions, so we get electric–free electrons from earth, water, and air in our natural environment and then we are charged by the sun, right? By the power of photonic energy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: So we need that and the challenge with our modern environment is that the food is dead and loses its electrical charge. Our water is dead and been laden with lots of sort of halide chemicals. We eat, drink–we breathe air that’s been through kind of recyclers, in other words, it’s processed air.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Daniel Vitalis: And–and rather than getting fresh, real sunlight, photonic energy in its full spectrum from the sun, we’ve been living under really artificial lights. So we’ve created something not dissimilar to a space station for ourselves. And the challenge is we’ve become like aliens to our own planetary landscape–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: And that’s causing our health suffer, and we run around going, “Oh, my God, what’s the cause of cancer and heart disease and diabetes and arthritis and all these things?” And it’s like it’s kinda obvious.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Daniel Vitalis: We are not living really on our planet anymore. We’re living in a little virtual world we’ve created around our planet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Daniel Vitalis: And we didn’t stop and think about making that harmonious with our biology.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right. More negative charges, less positive charges, and again all the things that you talked about getting these electrons and these are all negative charged compounds, right?
Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, exactly. And you know, it’s funny because the wording almost, you know, sounds backwards, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know, it sounds backwards, right?
Daniel Vitalis: It sounds backwards if you don’t know, if you don’t understand the electrical meaning of it, but once you do, I think of negativity almost like a positive–a positive-like male and negative-like female, and I think of that female energy, that negative energy is–as like nurturing to us.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: Right? Positive energy is more like the fire of oxidation and negative energy is like that soothing, calming, nurturing feminine energy that comes in the form of those electrons. So yeah, we wanna be finding those electrons in our food, in our water, and in our air. And if we don’t have those present, we can kind of recreate some of that, right? We can–we can find like we obviously don’t get to eat out in our natural environment very much, but we can find fresh food at our Farmer’s Market, real fresh food from our–our local food shed. Well, I have a website called FindASpring.com which directs people to springs in their area where they can go get living water from the earth for free.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow!
Daniel Vitalis: That they can gather and drink and that is electron-rich gaseous rich water that’s very different from the fluoridated and chlorinated H2O that people are drinking. This is rather a lifeless water that most people are drinking and we can bring, you know, negative ions into our air at home–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: By using good quality ionizers and by cleaning up our local atmosphere, so we can start to recreate healthy habitat in our personal lives and I think that’s the goal that the health world really needs to embrace, is the idea of, “Hey, if we’re gonna live in this artificial world, it should be more of a zoo and less of a factory farm.”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Great.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right? We’re living–we’re living in like a factory farm and in factory farms you don’t care about the health of the animal long-term because you’re just gonna kill it early anyway. In a zoo, you try to keep an animal as healthy as possible and recreate its natural habitat as much as you can. I think we can make this world a bit more like a zoo and a bit less like a factory farm for humans and each one of us has to take responsibility for our own zoo habitat, our own personal habitat or our homes and offices as another way to say that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. So getting out in nature is a big one. Let’s kinda bring in the diet piece. You kinda talked about the caveman, ape, and there’s a lot of different biases in these topics. There’s some people that say, “Hey, we evolved as vegetarians, etc.” And there are some that talk about how animal products, collagen, colostrum, a lot of the bone marrows, some of the animal proteins, the omega 3 fats, these are really important to growing our brain, growing our frontal cortex which help us evolve into humans. Can you give us a perspective on the nutrition part of our evolution?
Daniel Vitalis: Sure, I’d love to. I’ll give you my perspective, and you know, I spent many, many years chasing that dragon around, trying to figure that out, and it never occurred to me until just, you know, 5 or 6 years ago, I finally–it really clicked. We already know the perfect human diet. We are acting like we don’t because it–to look at what the truth of this is causes us to look at some things we’re really shy about looking at. We don’t like to consider ourselves, in fact, I don’t know of any taxonomist except my good friend, Arthur Haines, who has been willing to look at this, that human beings have a wild form and we have a domesticated form. Just like dogs have a wild form, the Grey Wolf, and the domesticated form. Those are our domesticated dogs. They all come from Grey Wolves. We all come from hunter-gatherers. We don’t come from just hunters and we don’t come from just gatherers. We come from hunter-gatherers. Omnivores.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm. Yup.
Daniel Vitalis: And we–we know that that’s been our diet going back those 3 and ½ million years. We eat just about anything in our natural environment with–that can be rendered edible, be it plant, animal, fungi, or microbiota. So it’s not just should we eat plants, should we eat animals, we also need fungus and we also need microbes in the form of fermented foods and things like that. So we actually eat from 4 kingdoms—animal, plant, fungi, microbiota—and we need to make sure those are all being balanced into our lives just like the hunting and gathering people who are still alive today and the ones who were studied in the past before we pushed them to extinction or dispersion or integration. We know the natural human diet because we know what hunter-gatherers eat. Now their diets vary around the world based on their location and that’s as it should be, but to act as if we don’t know, you know, like what the ideal diet is sort of makeup diets which is what we’ve been doing for a long time. We just keep making up diets, so and they come in and out of fashion and it’s important for people to understand that it’s very wise to step back and observe the dietary trend and avoid the fashion stuff. So it’s like it’s in fashion right now to eat a high fat diet and a low carb diet and to have lots of protein, but I remember when it was in fashion to have low fat and high carb. I remember when it was in fashion to have high protein.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm.
Daniel Vitalis: It keeps changing, right? They keep rearranging the–what it–it’s just–it’s fashion so step back from that and look at what hunter-gatherers ate and be careful of the, I think there’s a lot of value in some of these modern trends like the Paleo movement and the raw food movement. There’s value there, but I think that we need to be careful not to develop diets based on caricatures of human beings. In other words–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: Modern Paleo is based on the cavemen Flintstone caricature of human beings and we never–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Daniel Vitalis: Lived like that. That’s ridiculous. We didn’t grow up–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: On Bronto burgers. We need to look at real hunter-gatherers in their natural environment, determine what they eat, and another cool thing when you look at hunter-gatherers is that you’ll see that men and women do eat slightly differently and do prefer slightly different things. For instance, when looking at the Hadza in Africa, we see that the women prefer berries more than they prefer meat and men prefer meat more than they prefer berries–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: And that has to do with the natural division of labor. So women are spending their days foraging. Men are spending their days hunting. This just makes sense.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup, yup.
Daniel Vitalis: And what we do is we tend to try to imagine there’s only one type of human, like some kind of ambiguously sexed, ambiguously raised human being, and the reality is we all come from different places, different adaptive backgrounds. We’re different sexes. We’re different people and each person needs to fine tune their diet to themselves and not get too wrapped up in these like very big blanket statements of nutrition. So I hope that’s not too vague but I–it’s–it’s not so simple as often we want it to be yet it’s simpler than most people realize.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So in other words, we should eat meat and vegetables and–
Daniel Vitalis: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And maybe some fruit and some of those ratios may–may differ for each person, right? That’s kind of the tent.
Daniel Vitalis: And–yeah, it is and then I’ll add one piece to that which is that it’s important with animal foods that that animal eats what it was des–developed around eating. So it’s interesting that if we take a, you know, a cow and we feed it grass, its body fat will be very healthy for us. It will be rich in omega 3. But if we take that same cow and we feed it grain, its body fat will be rich in omega 6 and that’s gonna push us into imbalance. So there’s one factor there. We wanna make sure that the animal foods we eat are animals that were reared on grass or come from wild environments. When it comes to plants, we wanna be thoughtful as well because most of the plants we’re eating are so hyper-domesticated that their medicine component has been pushed way down. Their nutrient component has been pushed way down and their sugar component’s been brought way up.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly.
Daniel Vitalis: So in nature, of course, the blueberry is a very small pea-sized not very sweet but incredibly nutritionally dense food whereas a cultivated blueberry is the size of a marble, tastes like–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: Water and has very little nutrition in it. So we wanna be always thinking about animals that are closer to wild animals and foods that are more heirloom or closer to wild. That’s gonna really help us clean up that glycemic issue and it’s gonna help us get more vitamins, more minerals, and more phytonutrients. That’s why I always say, “Think of nutrition as a spectrum from you buy your food at Walmart to you’re actually hunting and gathering everything.” No one’s gonna really do that but let’s imagine that’s the other extreme. We wanna always be moving toward that even if that we never get there. So maybe at first you go from Walmart food to, you know, better supermarket food. From there you go to completely organic food. From organic you toward that Farmer’s Market food and start looking at heirloom stuff. From there, you start developing relationships with people in your food shed and if you’re real bold and adventurous, start going towards some herbalism which puts wild foods back in your diet, towards some foraging and gathering even if it’s in your own backyard. And that always moves us in the direction of much, much better food. So I think it’s about always having a locus of focus in moving toward that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So tell me, what did you eat today? Or like let’s go through yesterday, what’s your day like? What’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner look like for you?
Daniel Vitalis: I like drink in the morning so I’m not–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: Huge about eating a big breakfast, so yesterday I had brewed a couple different mushrooms in the wat–the water from my well. So I brew those up, that was turkey tail mushrooms and chaga mushrooms, which I actually did gather from my own–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Nice.
Daniel Vitalis: Environment. Yeah, I had lots of vegetables from my Farmer’s Market yesterday which I, you know, cooked down in some lard from a local farmer here. I’m big into saturated fats and think they’re really important. I ate some local pastured eggs yesterday.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Nice.
Daniel Vitalis: I–this is gonna sound weird to the listeners but I cooked some dragonflies yesterday which I caught in my house.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Daniel Vitalis: Yeah and that might sound crazy but when you start to do the research on insects as food, it’s like, “Oh! Not only was that the past, it’ll be the future, too.” I like to play with lots of different herbs and so I worked with some different superfoods yesterday that a friend had brought over. So I like to think about food as I need–I need my calories. Those are the–usually the fats that I eat. I gotta get my calories in. I had also some bison yesterday as well. So that’s like, there’s the protein component, the insect was a protein component, the eggs were a protein component, then I think about the medicine that I need, and that comes from my herbs and one of the things we often forget, you know, when Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” He said it at a time where people had lots of fresh herbs in their diet.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Daniel Vitalis: And those herbs contain lots of medicinal compounds. The problem with the food in our supermarket today is that medicine has been bred out because medicine typically has a bitter flavor and people are adverse to bitter flavors often so we’d bred that out and the problem is the food people eat today lacks medicine and what they end up doing is becoming dependent on pharmaceuticals because people do need medicine. We do need to take medicinal compounds. Without them in your diet, you become pretty hooked on pharmaceuticals. When they’re in your diet in the form of a variety of good herbs, you don’t need them as much. So I’m always trying to think about where’s my–where’s my calorie, my fuel coming from? Where are my antioxidants coming from? Where are my nutrients coming from? And where’s my medicine coming from?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That makes sense. So you were kinda following a Paleo template so to speak, maybe adding in a little bit of extra stuff like the dragonflies, and I’d love to see that on your SurThrival site, a little dragonfly protein powder.
Daniel Vitalis: Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sweet. Yeah, I know right.
Daniel Vitalis: That’s gonna become a very big thing in the next decade. I mean, we are starting to see the early rumblings of that but that is gonna become a big thing and what’s really cool about insects, a couple of things that are really cool about insects, I mean, I hope this isn’t too weird for everybody but when you cook a grasshopper for instance, it turns red just like when you cook a lobster. That’s the astaxanthin. That’s a very powerful–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yeah.
Daniel Vitalis: Antioxidant.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: For real.
Daniel Vitalis: But with a lobster, you sh–you throw that away. You don’t eat the shell. With a grasshopper, you eat that part. So you get all that. They’re very high in protein and they’re also very high in omega 3 fats. These become–they’re–they’re a very ideal food source but what’s really interesting is when you look around the world, you find that hunting and gathering peoples, natural human beings living in the wild always eat insects, always, always. And we will start to again. They are much more efficient to grow than cows, than chickens, and soon we’ll see a lot of–a lot of these these filtering in and it already is starting to.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great. Now in my functional medicine practice, I see a lot of chronic infections and one of the things that I do to help boost the immune system, well, we’ll try to knock out the infection but I use a lot of medicinal mushrooms. I’m a huge fan of cordyceps or Reishi mushroom, maitake, etc. and I see on your SurThrival site, you’re really promoting a lot of different medicinal mushrooms. What’s your take on medicinal mushrooms and how do you apply that with your patients, clients, and yourself?
Daniel Vitalis: Okay, well, I really think and I mentioned it before that fungi are really important part of every human diet and we are kind of a mycophobic culture, have been classically here in the West, and so uptil recently there were very few mushrooms in our diet because people are very afraid of mushrooms. And you know, when you go foraging with people, it’s like, “Oh, berries!” Everyone’s psyched. When you pick a mushroom, everybody’s like, “Ohh, be careful.” Because there are dangerous mushrooms in the environment.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Daniel Vitalis: But we’ve gone to the far extreme when we got really afraid of them in our culture. It turns out as you know, that mushrooms are incredibly important for up and downregulating our immune system. And what I love about and I’ve fallen in love incidentally with chaga and Reishi. They’re my two favorites. They’re the products that I carry on my website, I–on SurThrival.com. I love the idea of the sophistication of the medicine that’s available to us in the form of the–sort of glyconutrients of mushrooms and so–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: What they’re able to do, of course, if upregulate weak immune systems and downregulate autoimmune issues.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Daniel Vitalis: So they help to bring all immune systems into balance. There’s no toxic dose. You can take as much as you want. The more, the merrier. You can take them alone. You can mix them. They’re–I think that they’re crucial to teaching our immune system about its environment. They basically educate, it’s–I mean, this sounds almost crazy but–but the compounds in medicinal mushrooms educate our white blood cells on how to better at what they do, and so I think this is really important and it’s why I mentioned yesterday that I started my day with a–a tea brewed from these mushrooms. Now what I’m really into and I think it’s really important for people who are using them, like you said, for infection, for other types of chronic illness, cancer treatments, things like that, is that they’re using a dual extracted mushroom–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: And if you look at the mushrooms that I carry there on the site, you’ll see that we extract them both in alcohol and in water–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Daniel Vitalis: And then combine those. That reason being a water extract of mushroom like these–like these medicinal mushrooms is very good for your immune system but lacks the adaptogenic qualities. In alcohol extract has the adaptogenic qualities but lacks the immune system component. So when we get a fully dual extracted mushroom product, we’re activating the immune system the way we want to and we’re getting that component that helps our bodies become more adaptive to stress and more tolerant to the stresses in our environment and since the mushrooms contain both of those, we wanna get both of those into any product that we’re using.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Do you have your favorite mushroom that you use on a daily basis?
Daniel Vitalis: I would say chaga for me, which is a–a sclerosia of a fungus that grows on birch trees, and I’ve just literally fallen in love with this mushroom and for 10 years–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: I’ve been a hunter of it and a collector of it and I love to harvest it and I also produce the product at SurThrival there with wild harvested mushrooms. So these are not ones grown in hoop houses or in sort of, you know, facilities. These are–these are truly wild mushrooms, and I–that’s important by the way, because mushrooms that are grown indoors lack the density of medicinal compounds that we find in the wild form, but I’m a huge fan of chaga and when it’s brewed up, it tastes delicious and one of the reasons is because it contains vanillic acid so it almost has this–it’s almost a maple-vanilla flavor and that product that you see there on SurThrival that you were just looking at, the taste of that product is almost like–it’s almost like a coffee brandy or Kahlua or something like that. I mean, it’s just delicious flavor. And you know how most of the medicinal mushrooms are quite bitter and so I really like that. It doesn’t have a mushroomy taste. It tastes quite sweet and delicious.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s awesome. Most conventional vanilla flavorings is actually from beaver’s butt serum. You know that?
Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, I love that!
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I love it. Isn’t that crazy? My favorite–
Daniel Vitalis: You know, we used to–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Go ahead, yeah?
Daniel Vitalis: Oh, well, it used to be Tonka bean, which was actually quite dangerous, right? So a lot of vanilla coming out of Mexico was Tonka bean which is really rich in coumarin and is–can be dangerous for people on blood thinners and stuff, so it’s–I’m–I’m almost glad they’ve switched over and away to beaver butt.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It just sounds crazy. My favorite medicinal mushroom is Reishi. Reishi is the ten-thousand-year mushroom, just for the listeners. It has these compounds called triterpenes in them which are really cool. They can deactivate viruses and it’s–it’s crazy, you don’t see it in the literature in this country. But these mushrooms are used in the first line of therapy with various cancers and even organ transplants. There’s so many benefits. I think if mushrooms are really recognized for their true power, they could replace a lot of the medications that are used today for immune issues in conventional medicine.
Daniel Vitalis: I–I love Reishi as well. I gotta say it’s another one that I forage in my environment. It’s one I’m super passionate about. Some of the other mushroom that we carry at SurThrival and as you mentioned that triterpene complex that’s in there is not soluble in water. So it’s important that we have an alcohol extracted and water extracted Reishi as well. But I mean, just an incredible–and–and one of the cool things about these medicinal mushrooms is it’s not like we’re just figuring this out. I mean, this is five thousand years in China–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know.
Daniel Vitalis: That they’ve known this. I mean, this is ancient knowledge finally being validated here in the West.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally. And I know on your site, you’re a big fan of colostrum. Can you talk a little bit more about colostrum and its benefits?
Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, sure. Well, you know, colostrum is amazing. I mean, this is something that’s been looked at in over 5,000 studies. It is the first product that comes from the mammary gland of all mammals after they give birth. So before milk is produced–this is not a milk product, in fact, technically not really a dairy product, but the first product that comes through the breast from when–when a mammal breastfeeds its new young is colostrum. And what colostrum–this is how I like to imagine it. It’s like when you’re born, you’re a blank hard drive. Your immune system is sort of kind of blank and colostrum uploads the mother’s immune system to you. It formats your disc if you will. So when a–a human is born, now here’s the thing about humans. We get a lot of immunity from our mother’s umbilical cord or from our umbilical cord from our mothers, so she passes–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: A lot of antibodies to us in that way. But colostrum sort of tops off our immune system. Now if we were never breastfed or if there was a delay in breastfeeding in the hospital, we’d likely didn’t even get any colostrum and that’s why many people have such poor immune systems. It’s one of the factors–one factor. Now with cows, the thing about cows is they pass nearly their entire immune system on through colostrum.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Daniel Vitalis: So colostrum is super crucial for a calf. If a calf is born and doesn’t get colostrum, it’s not really gonna be a viable animal for the farmer there who’s raising that cow. So the colostrum’s really crucial but we’ve been breeding cows for 8,000 years and they overproduce milk and they overproduce colostrum and that’s due to the way we bred them. So there’s extra colostrum available from cows. So what we do is we harvest that colostrum in the first 6 hours and 6-hour colostrum from cows contains all of the antibodies and a substance called transfer factor and through some kind of un–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: Really not well understood magic, essentially what happens is transfer factor transfers antibody immunity onto the drinker and because we’re both mammals, it works on us, too. So there’s studies on PubMed for instance that show drinking colostrum is 3 x more effective against flu than any vaccine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Daniel Vitalis: And that’s really cool to me because, you know, we’re talking about viral immunity here that can be passed on from drinking colostrum. But the other thing is colostrum contains all known mammalian growth factors. So it really helps with body regeneration for, not just for athletes and bodybuilders who love it, but for anybody who’s trying to regenerate tissue in their body. So it’s really effective for that, and then one of the things I love about colostrum is that it’s a supreme gut healer and most of us–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: Need some regeneration to the lining of our gut. Very helpful for people with Crohns’ and irritable bowel and all–you know, the whole suite of intestinal disorders that are really common today. All those things are helpful. And another great thing about colostrum is since it’s not really a dairy product but something produced in the blood of the cow, it–people who are sensitive to casein and lactose are almost never gonna be sensitive to colostrum. And so it works for just about everybody and like I said, it’s been looked at. I mean, we’ve been using colostrum as a species from cows for 8,000 years and so, there’s a–a quite a bit of research on this.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That’s great.
Daniel Vitalis: On this food.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Can you also mentioned some of the immune benefits of the–the placenta, another great reason why you shouldn’t cut the placental cord right way and let that cord pulse, make sure you get all of nutrients, all the clotting factors, all the–all the good stuff from the mom into the baby. Don’t cut that placental cord early.
Daniel Vitalis: God, I love that idea and I love it when people–you know, a lot of my friends who have had babies in the last couple of years have dried their placentas, ground them and encapsulate–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.
Daniel Vitalis: Them. And I just think this is a really important–again, it comes down to looking at what we did in nature and understanding that changing what we did in nature means changing something we’ve done for 3 and ½ million years and that can be a really risky thing to do because we are consuming–women have consumed their placentas as far as back as we know and the sudden change in that means a change in–I think one of the big factors is the change in the amount of progesterone that a women ends up within her body because it’s all in her placenta. Really important that women have babies in a way that sort of in accordance with our biology.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Totally agree. All my patients I recommend them having their placenta encapsulated. I’ve seen them made a huge difference on patients who had, you know, the first two kids and had a lot of PT–or not PTSD, post partum issues–
Daniel Vitalis: Right.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Depression and such and they do the placenta and it’s amazing that it’s gone and they just tell me it was the best, you know, post pregnancy period ever.
Daniel Vitalis: Yeah, that’s what I always experience with people, too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool. Now what’s your take on water filtration because you’re drinking water from, you know, your local well? Are you worried about fracking or underground GMOs or run-off pesticides getting into your well and contaminating it? How do you ensure that you’re drinking clean water even though it’s from a well?
Daniel Vitalis: Right, okay, so I wanted to say that water is not the thing we always think it is, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: When we talk about water, we’re not talking about H2O and that–that’s a really important thing for people to understand. H2O is refined chemical that doesn’t really exist in nature.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: H–H2O is non-conductive substance. H2O does not conduct electricity. I mean if we were, you know, we think of water as like the conductor, right? Never get in the bathtub with an electrical device. You’ll electrocute yourself.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right.
Daniel Vitalis: That’s true. That’s water. H2O distilled water doesn’t really exist in nature because water is a solvent and it always draws things into itself.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: Gases, minerals, things like that. Now one of the challenges is we got taught about H2O and not about water and we just assumed that it’s all the same stuff. Well, the reality is distilled water, hyperfiltrated water, water that’s been through reverse osmosis which is a mechanical distillation is water that’s stripped down to almost pure H2O. It’s non-conductive. It lacks gases. It lacks the microbes that should naturally be in water. It lacks the minerology of water and so what we end up doing is drinking a kind of dead water, and there’s–I think we’re gonna to see a lot of emerging science on this in the coming years and people like Gerald Pollack are doing a lot of really interesting work on this. But that said, I think the healthiest water for us is whole water in the same way that the healthiest food for us is whole food. Now people understand when you say whole food versus processed food. Everybody gets that. There was a time when that–those were new terms and nobody knew what that meant yet. In the same way, there’s whole water and there’s processed water. And people don’t yet get that but people are starting to. So when I say processed water, I mean reverse osmosis filtration, I mean distillation, I mean UV treatments, I mean submicron filters. All of these things strip water down to its bare components and nobody’s really that good at putting water back together. Now the water you drink becomes your blood. The water you drink becomes your lymph.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Daniel Vitalis: This is really, really important that the water you’re drinking is of high quality. When water comes out of spring source in nature, it’s rich in lots of substances. The local minerology, in other words, the electrolytes and it’s the electrolytes that make water conductive, these are–are charged particles, charged minerals. There are gases like carbonic acid which has been dissolved into that water. That’s really important for water to have a hydrating and–and flavorful component to it, right? So it doesn’t feel dead or dry in your mouth. It feels wetter if you will.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Right, right.
Daniel Vitalis: There are–there are algaes in naturally occurring water with–that actually can affect in bacteria that can affect our mood, that can increase our serotonin levels. They occur in natural water. Now I drink water from deep aquifers and my well is a deep drilled well. So I’m tapped down into deep aquifers and I’m in a place where there’s not a lot of fracking happening. So I’m not super concerned about that here. My concern actually is more with processed water. So if we’re going to the supermarket and we’re–we’re buying distilled water in a plastic bottle, we’re getting really toxic plastic-filled water. We’re getting a dead water filled with plastic that we know is a xenoestrogen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: If we’re getting RO water from the–from the supermarket, let’s say we’re going into one of those machines with the RO filter in it. The problem is we’re getting water that’s been stripped of its minerology and that water is basically is a diuretic and leeches from our body minerals. And we know that’s true now, by the way. There are people who say that’s not true. We know that’s true. The World Health Organization has a fantastic living paper on this explaining sort of their concerns about the arterial damage that RO water does to people’s bodies and also some of the diuretic effects which they’re also very concerned about. So I–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So we add some mineral–I’m sorry to interrupt–can we add some minerals back in if we’re trying to drink clean water, can we do a good quality sea salt and pepper some minerals back in there and such? Does that help mitigate some of the damage?
Daniel Vitalis: Okay, so let’s–yes and no. Let me–let me kinda break that down for a second. If–I don’t think grains are great food. But let’s imagine for a second that we think whole–whole wheat is a good food.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: Can I just take white flour and then add some, you know, molasses to it and add some salt and minerals and make white flour back into whole grain? Not that easily, right?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: It doesn’t quite work that way. I can’t just take–if I just take some water and some dried milk solids and some lactose, can I make milk again? Not that effectively.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: So we think water is this really simple thing, but in fact, water is one of the most complex and misunderstood substances on our planet. And anyone who delves into this will quickly learn that. So to take water and just try to magically bring it back to natural living water that’s been through the gigantic filter of the Earth’s ecosystem is not that simple. And again even the World Health Organization says that mineral injections do not effectively create natural spring water again. So that’s one challenge. That said, is it better to do that than not? I think it is and what I would recommend somebody do is get themselves a TDS meter–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yup.
Daniel Vitalis: Which is an inexpensive device, a total dissolve solid meter. When you get your, let’s say you’re drinking RO water, reverse osmosis water, check the minerology of that so you stick your TDS meter in there and you go, “Okay, hey, my water is 5 parts per million.” Then you take your minerals or your sea salt and you gently add those in, stirring them in until you get that water up to the minerology–minerality you want maybe 150 parts per million, something like that so you know that there are minerals back in there. But I do wanna be clear. You probably notice this phenomena if you take good water and you leave it in a glass out in the sun for a little bit. You’ll notice little bubbles form all over the side of the glass–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: That’s actually the carbonation that’s natural in that water leaving and the water’s going flat, just like if you did a soda or a beer and you leave it out long enough, it goes flat because the carbon dioxide leaves the water. Natural water is filled with gases and those gases leave the longer that water’s been out. So when I go gather water at my spring it’s filled with all these gases and it gives a mouth feel that almost ecstatic and when we don’t have that–so we can add minerals back but that doesn’t put gases back. Now there ware devices like the Revitalizer which are cool, kind of almost like this interesting blender which whips the water around over mineral cube and we’ll sort of recreate and restructure that water to some degree, but it’s important that we understand that the best water in the world comes from ecosystems and there’s really no question about that. Maybe that’s not realistic for everybody, but it’s important that we do know at least as a template where the best stuff is and the best stuff comes from springs and they come from deep aquifers.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. My father actually just emailed me an article last week by Dr. Pollack on structured water and he talks about blending it up and how it–how it affects the charge of the water. What’s your take on Dr. Pollack’s research in structured water and should we put our water in a blender?
Daniel Vitalis: Well, it’s interesting. You know, I use a Vitamix blender and I have for many years and I do, if you have one of those blenders at home–I recommend you’d go up to it with your trifield meter and just see how big of an electromagnetic field comes off of a blender. Any time you’ve got a spinning motor like that, a ceiling fan, a window fan, a–a blender, you’re gonna get tremendous electromagnetic fields coming off of it when–where it’s spinning, so is that ultimately the best thing? I don’t know but I think Pollack’s work is amazing. I had him on my show. I love talking to him. He’s a really profound dude and the work he’s doing is really important. And what he’s showing and helping the world see, this has been known for some time but it’s not been validated in the past, is that water does have a structure. It’s not just H2O. There’s something far more complicated going on in here and the water in our bodies is definitely not H2O. It’s another structure entirely. He calls it a fourth phase of water. We are going to eventually dial this in and figure it out and when we do, we’re gonna look back and go, “How did we survive the industrial age drinking dead water?”
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm.
Daniel Vitalis: I think structured water is really important. There’s a lot of approaches right now and the challenge and the reason I’m very tentative about it, it’s kind of like what we said earlier about cellphones. There are a lot of like water structuring drops and little stickers that you put on your glass and all this stuff that are don’t–they don’t really do anything. And then there are devices like the Vitalizer which I think are legit. That’s a–that might just work. That said, my personal approach is I go to springs and so I’m not an expert on sort of remedying water. I’m more of an expert on where the best water is and that’s why I created FindASpring.com and that’s why I’ve sent so many thousands of people out to natural springs and I’m talking about springs you can drive your car up to, get out with your bottles, fill them up, bring them home. And since so many people now buy their water anyway, I think this is a really awesome alternative for people. I do think structured water is important but I think that the water that comes from springs and deep wells is already structured and the goal there is more about maintaining its structure. That said, if that’s not water you have access or aren’t interested in accessing, I think looking at water structuring technology is important but be discerning.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Got it. So we talked a lot here the last 45 minutes to an hour. If you are a listener and you’re trying to like find out what are the big home take home applications, what are the big 3 you’d say? If you could just summarize in 1-2 sentences each, alright, if you listen to the podcast, what can I do now? What do you think those 3 would be?
Daniel Vitalis: Can I get 4?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Sure, 4.
Daniel Vitalis: Alright, let’s do 4. Earth. It’s really important that you eat the highest quality foods you have access to and that you think about a spectrum of moving from the commercial, industrial grade food that we grew up as essentially human kibble, toward whole fresh food with good genetics. It’s not just the food’s nutrition, it’s its genetics. So moving toward that heirloom and wild food is always a good choice. When it comes to water, we wanna be drinking the highest quality water we can. Most people are walking around sort of bags of dirty water and–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm.
Daniel Vitalis: If you were–if you were a fish tank, the food you put in the fish tank is less important than the water in the fish tank.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Mmm.
Daniel Vitalis: So just think, the food you eat is important. The water might just be a little bit more important. So whatever your approach, drink the best water you can get access to. The air that you breathe is crucial so make sure that you become the steward of the atmosphere in your home and in the place where you work. That–I think the way to do that is to clean that air up with HEPA filtration, to have plants–
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Uh-hmm.
Daniel Vitalis: Around that have ions, make sure your windows are open whenever you can, recycle that air, don’t bring outgassing products into your home, have the cleanest air that you can breathe. And then fire, get out into the light of the sun. There is no replacement for this. There are surrogates, of course, but there is no replacement for the natural light of the sun. It doesn’t just help us produce vitamin D. It increases our serotonin levels. It helps to balance our circadian rhythm, helps to balance our sleep cycle, and nobody feels better than when they have a tan. So we need good quality earth, water, air, and fire that all–that’s how we have adapted and evolved and we gotta make sure that we don’t lose sight of that chasing around a lot of products and fads when we don’t really deal with the fundamental underlying stuff and that’s again earth, water, air, and fire.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Love it! And the last question I typically ask all my guests. If you stuck on a desert island and you only could bring 1 herb, 1 supplement, 1 nutrient outside of, you know, your food and water, what would that be?
Daniel Vitalis: Hmm. I think it would be elk antler extract. If I could only bring one, I–because on that island, I think I could find most of what I want, I would bring the extract of elk antler like the one that I carry on my website. I mean, I just think this is an incredible natural steroidal substance which youthens and strengthens and rebuilds the body and that’s kind of thing is not that easy to find in nature compared to, you know, the kind of herbal medicines and nutrients that we’re usually looking for.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And elk antler, the whole goal is to increase IgF-1 and growth hormone, right? Right?
Daniel Vitalis: It’s actually an entire suite of growth hormones.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Wow.
Daniel Vitalis: It’s 6 different types of collagen. It’s a blood builder with stem cells. It’s basically doing to you what it does to an elk which makes new tissue grow incredibly rapidly.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you can only find that with–on the elk antler.
Daniel Vitalis: You could find that on the antler–the growing antlers of any cervid. So it could be deer, it could be moose, it could be caribou, any of the animals that produce antlers. I like to work with elk in the United States and that’s why I say elk antler and that’s what my–my product is, but yeah, most desert islands don’t have a cervid on them and that’s why I would choose that.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Very cool, very cool. And everyone listening here, they can find Daniel Vitalis’ work over at SurThrival where he talked about some of the couple of products that he likes and recommends at his podcast, the–The Wild On or which–what–what’s the podcast?
Daniel Vitalis: It’s Rewild Yourself podcast.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Rewild Yourself and are there any other places that our listeners can find you, Daniel?
Daniel Vitalis: Sure, go over to DanielVitalis.com. There you’ll find my blog. You’ll find my free online magazine, Rewild Yourself. You’ll find my podcast and of course, like links to everything that I do.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Daniel, it was great chatting with you.
Daniel Vitalis: Hey, thanks for having me on today.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Thank you!
[retweet]
speak pipe
Rumble
Youtube
Apple
LIBSYN
Bitchute
In this episode, topics include:
8:41 grounding mats, EMF harmonizers and filters
14:25 rewilding approach
18:52 nutrition part of our evolution
28:39 medicinal mushrooms
33:44 colostrum and its benefits
38:26 water filtration and structured water