Podcast 543: The Gut, Sinus, Sleep & Mold Connection: Unlocking Your Body's pH

MARTIN: Hi everyone, Martin Pytela here for Life Enthusiast Health Shots. With me today, Spencer Feldman, the relentless researcher of all things health. Spencer is a man cut from a cloth very similar to mine genetically and probably psychologically too. We are nerds. Enjoy. Spencer, I love you.

SPENCER: I love you too. And thanks for the intro. How have you been?

MARTIN: Life's good. We keep finding ways of helping people to understand how they get sick and how they should get better. We are opening doors, aren't we?

SPENCER: Yes. Well, I wanted to share with you where I'm at with some of the things I've been working on in terms of the gut, the microbiome, pH, sinuses, things like this. I have been trying to figure out or specialize, I should say, in the things where people get sick, and they're either not there or there is no really good solution for helping them, or perhaps it's a problem people don't even know they've got. 

MARTIN: And that I think is important because we have been taught to not feel and we've been taught not to observe, and we've been taught to just grin and bear it, endure. 

SPENCER: Well, one of the things I've come to is, you can't fix a problem you don't know you have. And so why wouldn't we know we have certain problems? And one of the reasons we might not know is because we choose not to look at it or we're not present while it's happening. And I'll give you an example. And I'm specifically or there there's no sign that we recognize. And so I'm going to talk about one of each of these types with you today. So the first one is we don't want to look at it. So what don't we want to look at? Well, we don't want to look at the end product of our microbiome. Fecal matter. It smells. It's disgusting. And we want to flush it and be done with it. And so because of that, we don't ask ourselves, well, is what's in the toilet, which came out of me, is that telling me anything useful that I can,

MARTIN: Examine it, right?

SPENCER: So you don't look at what's offensive to you, right? So it's offensive, and away it goes. But we need to look at it because it's a healthy microbiome that creates fecal matter that's not really all that offensive. It doesn't smell. So I'm going to walk you through just this part of it first, and then we'll talk about the other things. Problems where we don't know it's a problem because we're not present, meaning we're sleeping through it. That would be sleep apnea, and then the other one is where there's no obvious signs, and that would be sinus stuff which has its own, creates all sorts of problems you'd never expect. I think that 80% of senility and mental failing or psychological issues are actually coming from sinuses, but we'll get there. 

Let's start with the gut. So if you went to a city or a town or another country and everybody was constantly blowing their nose and everybody carried tissue papers with them all the time and you'd say, "Hey geez, what's going on? Why is everybody sick? And they'd say, "Well, we're not sick." And you're like, "Well, there's all this mucus coming out of your nose, and you've got it. You need tissues to wipe it up. That can't be healthy." They're like, "Well, everybody does that. That's just normal, right?" Well, yes, it's the norm. Statistically, it's what everyone's doing, but it's not good for them. So, toilet paper is the same phenomena, right? If someone has a healthy gut and a functional microbiome, there's zero need for toilet paper.

MARTIN: Think about dogs and cats or whatever's out there in nature, they do it without, and I bet you that the first 10,000 or 100,000 years of human evolution were done without it. Right?

SPENCER: No healthy animal soils itself. So what happened? So why do we even need toilet paper at all? Right? It's basically, it's a gut infection, and it's mucus and slime. So what happens is when there's something going on in the gut that is either acutely problematic like food poisoning, diarrhea, right? Or chronically problematic, like the bad microbiome. The toxins that are created, Martin, irritate the gut, and the gut responds by secreting mucus to protect itself from the toxic stuff that's happening in the microbiome. And when that mucus gets embedded into the fecal matter, it makes it slimy. And then you need toilet paper.

MARTIN: Right. So you're putting out something the consistency of peanut butter, right?

SPENCER: So basically, toilet paper is basically the mucus. It's the sinuses blowing. It's the gut blowing its nose, blowing mucus into the fecal matter that we're wiping up, right? If you need to, and the more toilet paper you need, the sicker the gut. So the first thing is to realize if you're using toilet paper, you've got something going on in your gut and it's not good, right? 

The other thing is, it really shouldn't have much of a smell. There is always a bit of a sour smell because of the short-chain fatty acids that a healthy microbiome generates, but the smells that are bad like the hydrogen sulfide and the protein putrifaction smells, that's a sick gut, right? If you have to turn the fan on, if you go to the bathroom and they're like, "Oh man, don't come in here right after, air it out." That's a problem. All right. 

So, let's walk into what happened. How did we get here? Right. Okay. So, it started about 10,000 years ago. So, a happy hunter or gatherer is going through the environment and mostly eating tubers, right? And then and some meat and some maybe some insects and berries and things like this and things you forage. And when we get to the idea of agriculture, we start realizing, hey, we can control, we can manipulate, we can play with our plants a little bit. So, how about we take, wouldn't you like a plant that wasn't quite so bitter and you didn't have to chew forever. It didn't have all that fiber in it and maybe it was a little sweeter, right? So, think about it like a crab apple if you've ever had one. They're very bitter and they're very fibrous, right? So, that's what all food used to be. It was more fibrous, which is good for the gut, more bitter, which is good for the gut, right? Helps suppress bad infections and all those things, right? Bitters are huge. And it wasn't quite so sugary, which again is good for the gut, right? 

And then what we did is we started manipulating it. So like the tuber of 10,000 years ago and a potato today are entirely different. So even if you think you're eating healthy and you're like, “I'm going to eat plants and I'm going to eat grass-fed meat and I'm going to do all these things,” the food simply doesn't exist now that we were designed.

MARTIN: Driving everything toward the donut, toward the cake, toward the fluffy, greasy, sweet, salty, all at the same time mouth orgasm.

SPENCER: I call it the candification of food. We've been turning our food into candy for 10,000 years. Okay, so that's the first issue, right? And that's an imbalance. So the second issue is that in the 1920s we invented antibiotics and they saved and continue to save lives. But they wrecked the microbiome. And the more sophisticated our antibiotics became, the more powerful they became, the more damage they did. And now the bad guys unfortunately tend to be more resistant to antibiotics than the good guys. So,

MARTIN: That reminds me of the disturbed backlot between two houses never covered in carrots and roses. It's usually lamb's quarters and thistle, the resilient bunch. Right.

SPENCER: Yes. So the archaea, the methane producers and a lot of these things are more resistant to antibiotics. So between the change in our food and the introduction of antibiotics and then the background stuff of chlorinated water and glyphosate and all these the microbiome gets out of whack, and low tech toilet paper is your proof. If you want to get really sophisticated, you can spend $300 to $500 with things like Vibrant America and the Gut Zoomer, they make a great test. But there's an intermediary test which you can also do which is with pH paper. 

If you get some pH paper and have the pH paper kits that you can get and you press it against the little bit of stool on the toilet paper, it'll turn a color, the pH paper will change color and it'll tell you the pH of the stool. Now why is this important? So in a healthy gut, what happens is you've got the fibers coming in and then you've got all these consortiums, all these different guilds of bacteria that will turn it into things like lactic acid and then the short chain fatty acids, butyrate, proprionate, acetate, a little bit of valerate, and these all acidify the stool because keep in mind when the when the food comes from the small intestine, it's been bathing in the alkaline bile. So, it's got a pH of like 7.4 and then it gets, so it enters the colon at around 7.4 and then this mass of bacteria, your microbiome, turns the fiber that's in there, fiber meaning the stuff you couldn't digest, and ferments it and creates all these acids. And then the stool becomes acidic.

MARTIN: Maybe a short sidebar, when you're fermenting in the presence of oxygen, you're making vinegar. When you're fermenting in absence of oxygen, you're making alcohol. And some of that thing plays here. We should realize that making an acidic environment is the natural consequence of processing through fermentation of fibrous or carbohydrates.

SPENCER: Right. You don't always have to go the alcohol route. That's one type of fermentation, what we want actually in our gut is without alcohol.

MARTIN: I want the vinegar.

SPENCER: Yes. Now, all these short- chain fatty acids all have these amazing effects in the gut. They suppress infections. They get into our bloodstream. They regulate our immunity. They're good for the brain. So, the short- chain fatty acids that are made are really good for you and you can measure them by pH. So, what you want your stool pH to be is like 5.7 to 6.2. Okay? And that, and you can see it right on the paper. That tells you you’re making lots of short chain fatty acids. Your microbiome is happy. What most people are going to be at is going to be something like 6.8 to 7.2. They're going to be nearly neutral to alkaline. And the reason that is because their microbiome simply isn't making the short chain fatty acids. So.

MARTIN: Okay, not enough fiber to begin with then?

SPENCER: Well, it's not just the fiber, right? That's part of the change in the food. It's actually the bacteria that would work on the fiber can be gone. Some people when they get constipated, some people think that they're constipated because they only go to defecate every two days or 3 days, they're not necessarily constipated. They might just simply not be making stools, 90% bacteria and I'm sorry, 90% water and bacteria, it's mostly water and bacteria. So if you don't go to the bathroom but every few days you could be constipated or you might just not be making stool which means you just don't have a microbiome or it's operating at a very low level. 

So we want to be going to the bathroom at least twice a day optimally three times, right? And that tells you that the microbiome is generating a lot of material because the things it generates are important and you can measure with your stool. So then the question is, okay, if so many people need toilet paper and so many people have neutral or alkaline stools what do we do about that? 

Now, if you've ever canned food then you'll know you only can acidic food because the things that grow in an acid environment tend to be okay for you or good for you like sauerkraut, kimchi and the things that go in a neutral or alkaline environment tend to be bad like botulism. So there's a classification of bacteria. The acidifying bacteria we tend to be allies with or good for us and the neutral and alkaline ones are bad for us. 

So when you're measuring the pH, you're partially measuring what bacteria can grow because if it's alkaline or neutral, the bad guys can grow in there. And there's all sorts of people that end up with these chronic infections that they don’t even know they've got because the pH, the main driver of what is allowed to grow in the gut, is shifted into the neutral or alkaline side. 

Okay, so there's two ways that the stool gets alkaline. The first way is it's alkaline when it leaves the small intestine and it never acidifies. So that's someone's got a stool pH of like 7, 7.2, 7.4. Microbiome just never did anything. It never created the acids in the first place. That's one way. Then you get people that are like 7.6, 7.8 and higher, hyper alkaline. Okay. Well, the stool coming, the food coming out of the small intestine isn't that alkaline. So something has to be making it more alkaline to cross that line and that's ammonia production. So there are some bacteria that will take protein and urease which is urea and turn it into ammonia and,

MARTIN: Right, so these are nitrogen rich inputs that are being fermented into an alkaline substance.

SPENCER: Ammonia is highly alkaline. So, what happens is if these guys get in there then now, it's not enough just to restart the microbiome because we've got bacteria that are actively pushing it alkaline. So there's a few things we have to do and if you go to our website on our protocol page based on your stool pH, it'll tell you what's going on for you and this is the intervention you can, the supplementation, the protocol you can take with your diet and so forth based on where your pH is because different pHs have different meanings in your gut. 

So what happens is as we bring the pH down, now the short- chain fatty acids are being made. Now the bad guys are not growing. That doesn't mean they're dead. They're just not growing, right? You're never going to kill them all. But what you can do is make it so inhospitable for them that they just stay sleeping. They're suppressed.

MARTIN: I think what I'd like to hear is what happens in the gut that's overly alkaline like past 7.4. What trouble actually is going on in the whole body? Where are we taking it?

SPENCER: Right. So, as the wrong bacteria starts to grow, it shifts into the type of bacteria that make very inflammatory lipopolysaccharides, LPS, and then the gut starts to inflame and starts to get leaky. And then all the toxic junk that is being made by the gut, the stuff that smells, the stuff that's disgusting, that's all passing through into the bloodstream, bathing the brain, bathing the organs. Here's another one for you. If someone is dehydrated, one of the places the body can go for water is into the fecal map because there's water there. 

MARTIN: That's actually normal, right? It’s supposed to be dehydrated until it's semi-solid.

SPENCER: Well, okay. So, the stool should be smooth. It should come out in one solid piece or it should be smooth and you shouldn't need to wipe. As it dehydrates, it starts getting bumpy. And the extreme of that dehydration is it breaks into these little pieces and pebbles and then pebble poop. Keep in mind, if you're dehydrated to the point of constipation where it's not a smooth easy path, you're actually, your body is actually reclaiming fecal water into the bloodstream along with all the water soluble elements that are in that. So that's a really good argument not to let yourself get dehydrated because you don't want to be pulling water out of toxic fecal matter.

MARTIN: So the advice there would be to drink more water, right?

SPENCER: Well, drink more water so the body's not reclaiming it, but also fix the gut so that if you happen to have a day when you're driving your car and it's a hot day and you didn't bring water with you and you're dehydrated, the water you reclaim is not toxic. People wonder where they get bad breath from. Well, some of it's from the mouth and things in the throat, but some of it is just the volatilization of all the toxins coming out. 

Now, here's another one. You get people that try desperately to lose a little weight around their belly. Now, yes, some of it's body fat, but let's go through all the things that can cause the waist to increase. Body fat is increased as a result of inflammation and toxicity. So, when the gut is inflamed and toxic, it lays fat on to absorb those toxins as a buffer.

MARTIN: The storage of the toxic things, right?

SPENCER: It sequesters the fat soluble toxins. Two, if it's inflamed, it's going to swell with water to try to dilute the toxins, right? So now you've got the fat and then you got the inflammation and the swelling and someone is probably producing a bunch of excess gas. So now that it’s swelling from bloat and then as the toxins increase, the peristaltic stimuli decreases. So now someone's got a transit time, and suppose the time between when they eat it and when it goes to the bathroom should be 18 hours, 24. You got people going 36, 48, 72 and they're backed up with fecal matter. And so they're thinking that a lot of the reasons why someone looks down in the shower and sees their belly bulging out in addition to bad posture, right? Also their guts are a wreck.

MARTIN: The colon passes just underneath the rib cage. The transverse colon is just underneath the rib cage. So as it swells it'll push out. Right.

SPENCER: Well, but it's not that. The whole area gets inflamed. The whole thing just swells and fills. So there's a part of it. So fixing the gut microbiome is huge until it's, and while you're waiting for it to get fixed, you can also supplement with the very same short chain fatty acids a microbiome would make for you. And we have those. So the idea is we will give you the short- chain fatty acids a good microbiome should be making because they're very nice. They're very calming, it is a nice experience when you take them, you need them, right? If you've already made them, you won't feel it.

MARTIN: I guess what I hear you say is drinking vinegar is not quite the answer.

SPENCER: Well, vinegar is acetic acid and that's going to acidify you. I'd be more interested in sodium acetate, the salt form of it. So, there's a cascade of events, a domino of events that happens in the gut from at the very top the bifidus making lactic acid and acetate turning into propionate going into butyrates. So, there's a chain reaction that has to happen and you can individually give one or more of these things, but it's better for your body to make them internally which you can check with your pH. And until that happens take them exogenously, take them as a supplement. They're so important. 

They control which parts of your DNA turn off and on. We could talk for an hour just on the effects of short-chain fatty acids in the body. You'd be surprised by how many pharmaceutical drugs are mimicking the effects of short-chain fatty acids, so it's my thought that many of these drugs are basically analogues of short-chain fatty acids at a particular point. Why not just give the short-chain fatty acids and completely and more than that make them internally?

MARTIN: Well, the why is because you make no money. But anyway, so, I remember just recently reading about beta-hydroxybutyrate and how it's reflected in the brain function and your ability to think or recall and whatnot. And right there, you just tossed in the magical name, the butyric acid. Right?

SPENCER: Well, that takes us to the next thing I want to talk about, which is the sinuses. Now, someone listening may say, "I don't have any sinus problems." Right? Sinus problems can be silent. They don't always appear as nasal drip or irritation in the sinuses. Someone can have a sinus issue and have no idea. So unlike the gut, which is a simple tube and then there's the appendix. The benefit of the simple tube is you can flush, the body can flush things out and the appendix is the backup for the microbiome. You wipe out the microbiome to a degree the appendix can reseed it. Right? It's not a vestigial organ. The sinus is the opposite. The sinuses are like the gut in the sense that they have a microbiome and that they are affected by antibiotics, but they're unlike the gut because they're very labyrinthine. There's lots of little dead ends in there.

MARTIN: Actually, let's just dwell a wee bit about the physiology of it, the anatomy of the sinuses, because most of us only perceive it as, well, it's attached to the nose somehow, but in fact, it's connected to your throat. It's connected to your ear. And there are multiple cavities, right? There are these cavities under your forehead and cavities under your, can you describe it in some detail?

SPENCER: Right. So, there are these hollow cavities in your face where, and some people might say, "Oh, well, it's just there to make it so your head doesn't fall forward so it's not too heavy or maybe it's just there to condition the air." Yes, but it's also a microbiome.

MARTIN: It's functional. It's not just.

SPENCER: It's highly functional. And so, and because there's no appendix to reboot it and because it's very labyrinthine, there's all these dead ends and once a bad infection gets in there, it's very hard to get it out. From my perspective, in addition to the things that we know the sinuses do which is warms the air and reclaims some moisture and things like this there's two very fundamental things it does. One is it's a microbiome. And two, it is there as part of the glymphatic detox of the brain. We used to think that the brain detoxified itself and flushed itself through these little granules at the top. Turns out 80% of the brain fluid that gets cleared comes out through the sinuses through something called the cribriform plate which is this very thin bone up here at the top with where the olfactory nerves go through, and in those same holes that the nerves go through toxins can come out. So when you sleep if you're sleeping well, 80% of the toxins of the brain are going to come out through the sinuses and you swallow them and that's that.

However, if someone has a chronic sinus infection and I'm of the opinion that most people do without knowing it, just like most people have a gut infection, right?  If they have a chronic sinus issue the biofilms get up into the cribriform plate and make it so that the toxins of the brain can't come down. So they build up in the brain. So what does the brain do? And the brain thinks, well, I've got all these toxins I can't get rid of. I've got to do something with them and I can't get rid of them. Let me encapsulate them in some material. Let me create some sheets of protein and stick them in there. And that's what amyloid plaque is. 

People who are going through these dementia type experiences where they build up these protein sheets in the brain, I think that's directly as a result of a failure of the brain clearing out normal toxins, right? It's backing up, but it's more than backing up. What happens is the infection that lives in the toxic infections that get up into the sinuses, they go retrograde and they go up into the brain. So now the brain not only has to deal with the fact that it can't go to the bathroom, but other junk is coming up. Martin, I'm of the opinion that at least 80% of dementia, senility, and psychological disturbances are directly from the sinuses.

MARTIN: That's a big statement and one that is not heard elsewhere.

SPENCER: People wonder if you have these unsolved medical mysteries, why is there such a mental health crisis in the country? Granted social media doesn't help, yes, there's all sorts of things that are doing this but what's the prime driver? Why do we have so much senility? So many mental health disorders? Well,

MARTIN: So far I have heard mostly blame on the ketones versus the glucose, right?

SPENCER: Well, here's the thing, if we knew what the problem was, as big of a problem as mental health and senility are. If we knew the problem, I think we'd have the answer already. We're not a stupid species. There's enough smart people out there working on things that if we were going down the right path, we would have figured it out already.

MARTIN: I'm going to challenge you here. We're channeling research dollars based on the profit motive. We're not channeling it because of what we should be doing.

SPENCER: Sure. But even if that were the case, I don't think anyone's looking at the sinus connection. And we know from study, the incidence of depression and anxiety go through the roof with people that have sinus problems. We're looking at the wrong thing. Because even if someone came along and said, okay, let's say modern medicine decided maybe there's something to this sinus brain connection. They would come out with some specific antibiotics for the sinuses, they cleared the sinus infection, it would get better, right? It wouldn't necessarily be the path I would take, but they would be able to get to the same end point which is the sinuses are no longer filled with biofilm and dumping toxins in.

MARTIN: Spencer, I have a challenge with that line because you would have to be on this thing, this antibiotic for 20 years, long, far back, before you even noticed that you started to have a problem. That's almost like insurance, selling life insurance to 20 year olds. It's just hard.

SPENCER: Okay.

MARTIN: All right. Anyway, you're probably right in the theory of saying that, but if we fixed the microbiome in the sinus, we could have eliminated the problem.

SPENCER: We could argue with you on what the right way to fix it is, and there could be the alternative medical path which I'm going to suggest, and the pharmaceutical path. I think, and that's a wonderful conversation to have. The problem is we're not even at that conversation. Modern medicine hasn't even made the connection yet that I think needs to be made, which is if your sinuses are out don't expect your brain to be functioning well. And you could go through every psychiatric drug you want. 

MARTIN: You cannot chemicalize yourself into normalcy. A problem of toxicity cannot be solved with toxic substances. 

SPENCER: And I've seen now enough people with psychological problems, longstanding theoretically incurable psychological problems getting their sinuses to come back online and they’re like, what wizardry is this? I can't believe what this stuff is doing for my mind.

MARTIN: How did we get my life back or how did we get my brain back?

SPENCER: How about why, here's one that I just heard the other day. One person doesn't need glasses anymore and I'm thinking, it worked on their sinuses. He's like, "Hey, I'm smelling things I couldn't smell before." This is a guy who's got manic depressive episodes. He's like, "Hey, I'm calm and I'm smelling things I couldn't smell before and I don't need my glasses anymore." And Martin, I'm like, "Okay, well that's a new one. Why the glasses?" I'm like, "Okay, I guess his sinuses were inflaming, maybe the optic nerve?" I don't know. In any case, so what do we do for the sinuses, right? So, sinuses are another microbiome and they play a huge role. And I think if you've taken antibiotics, which everybody usually has, right? The sinuses are going to have been impacted. So my thoughts on the matter and we have a few products designed around it is, number one, I want to go in and I want to deal with the biofilms that are making the infections so resistant to being dealt with.

MARTIN: Right. You need to break up the concrete before you can get to the substrate.

SPENCER: Right. And it's not just because I want to get the infections, I want to be able to go after the infections. Once I break up the biofilms, from my perspective, I'm like unplugging the drain. It's like the brain can clear, right? Now the cribriform plate has been cleansed and it starts to drain again. It's like plunging a toilet. It's like whoosh. It all goes out. So I want to clear out, let the brain drain out but also to get you access to get rid of these infections.

MARTIN: It's a dual purpose.

SPENCER: And you can do that with things like types of EDTA. So, I made a nasal spray. It's got EDTA and cyclodextrins and N-Acetylcysteine and,

MARTIN: That's an interesting thing, right? The EDTA is so good at taking apart this biofilm.

SPENCER: If it's a calcium free EDTA, it is.

MARTIN: Right.

SPENCER: Other EDTAs won't work. But yes, that's the concrete that holds the biofilm together. It's a calcium binding.

MARTIN: I just wanted to bracket this in. EDTA has had a lot of people shouting from the rooftop saying, “This is bad. It's an awful chemical. It's made from formaldehyde and who knows what else.” And yet, it's a very efficient tool for pulling apart the biofilm that the microbes build to protect themselves.

SPENCER: It's four vinegar groups attached together. Yes, there are a lot of things we make that go through chemical processes that you wouldn't want to stop there, but that doesn't mean that the end product when properly purified is a problem.

MARTIN: There's a good point, right?

SPENCER: It's the same thing in the gut. In your gut, you go through formic acid. You make formate. It's toxic and it's an intermediary and then it's gone. So that same argument, “Oh, I shouldn't use EDTA because it goes through formaldehyde would then say, well, I shouldn't have a microbiome because it goes through formate, like, really? Okay. So it's only a problem when you stop at these intermediaries not,

MARTIN: Right. And you put out the right word there is, you're trying to take away calcium from the protective layers. 

SPENCER: That's right. So we dissolve various, so the biofilms are held together with various bonds and so we break them down and then we use cyclodextrins. The other thing is a lot of the inflammatory chemicals that the toxic sinuses make are fat soluble. You can't rinse them out with salt water. They're fatty. They're greasy. And so the cyclodextrins taken nasally bind to these fatty toxins and now you can make them water soluble and they can come out in mucus or the nasal rinse. So that's one,

MARTIN: That's another awesome thought, right? How to invent enough of a detergent that you can get up the nose so you can actually emulsify.

SPENCER: Well, the ENT therapy for sinus infections is Johnson and Johnson's ‘No More Tears’ baby shampoo in a nasal rinse. And the reason that works, not… I tried it and it's uncomfortable. I wouldn't do it again, but the reason that is helpful is because it's a detergent. So, what I thought is, okay, why does that work? Must be biofilms. Can I make a smarter biofilm buster than sticking baby shampoo up my nose? And the answer is, I think yes. 

So, we clear that out. The next thing I want to do is I want to supply. So, just like I offer a way to supply the short-chain fatty acids orally if the gut's not yet making them, I do the same thing in the sinuses. Give the short-chain fatty acids into the sinuses. Now, you might say, "Well, you're putting so little in, but “location-location-location”, it's right up by the cribriform plate, so it gets right into the brain." The sinus short-chain fatty acids, even though they're the same short-chain fatty acid that the gut makes, delivering them to the sinus has an entirely different and very powerful psychological effect. So, that's really amazing.

And then the last thing I wanted to do is I said, "Okay, I don't want to make people dependent on the sprays. I want to get the sinuses themselves doing this. So there's three bacteria that healthy sinuses have in them. And I paid a lab to culture those three bacteria and they're available in a product I make called Floramet and if you decide to put it in a nasal spray and inoculate your sinuses with the three healthy probiotics, okay, as far as I know,

MARTIN: So, this inoculation, once established, you're done?

SPENCER: One would think, right? So it's on a spectrum, right? So you have some people who have a mild infection and they have an immune system that goes and secretes into certain places. Not everybody's immune system is a secreter. So a mild infection, you clean out, you break up the biofilms, you reinoculate, you're done, right? And then all the way to the other extreme where it's been in there a long time. It's really deepseated. You can control it, you can hold it in place without possibly some antibiotics, which maybe there's a case for it. We can't knock them out entirely. And so you would be on some maintenance. And that's why I was not, that's why I was being a little contrary when you were saying, "Hey, let's only go the natural route.” Because I think that there are some people with, in the sinuses specifically, right? And I wouldn't take it orally. I wouldn't, but I think that nasal antibiotics for some people might be the only way they're going to get there in a time frame that makes sense.

MARTIN: And so you're saying that no matter how concentrated the salt spray that you might push up the nose, it's just not enough to knock out the,

SPENCER: I don't know. Time's going to tell. It's going to be feedback over the next several years from practitioners who are going to say, "Hey, we were or yes, if you stay with it for a month, even the most hardcore cases resolve or no, there are some people that it's just they need the extra help.”

MARTIN: Okay.

SPENCER: Now here's an interesting thing. There's the sinus microbiome and I take those sprays regularly and I find that I'm just- I'm in a better mood. I sleep better at night. So, let's talk about.

MARTIN: You sound really clear and unobstructed.

SPENCER: Oh, interesting. Sinus, interesting.

MARTIN: Interesting. I listen to a couple of guys who have suffered with what they would call obstructive nose, right? They just try to come up with these spring things that hold their nostrils wide, whatever, a thousand different ways, trying to do the mechanical thing and going on a CPAP machine, and who knows what else, and yet I think you're onto a better,

SPENCER: Okay, so let's talk about it right? So what happens is there's tissue in the sinuses that's erectile tissue, just like the same tissue that gives you a certain erection, and it swells up, and so mechanically you can try to create more room with those nasal strips. But if you need that, what that's saying is your sinuses are inflamed. Right? So here's something interesting, so first, and if you listen to it, you can hear the sound of someone whose sinuses are a little blocked. There's a,

MARTIN: Totally, you hear them. You hear them. It's not wheezing. 

SPENCER: It’s a little resonance.

MARTIN: But it's a nasal wheezing, right?

SPENCER: You can hear it, and you can pick it up in people's voices. So I started clearing out the sinuses, and some interesting things happened to me. The first thing that happened to me is for one day, I could have sworn I was breathing in peppermint oil because I had this very cold sensation in my lungs and in my sinuses. And what I think that was that places were opening up in my lungs and my sinuses that hadn't seen the light of day for so long that the nerves never got air to them. And when the nerves finally got some air for the first time, the nerves didn't know what to make of it. And the experience they gave me was, "Well, it's cold.”

MARTIN: What's this coldness? I've never,

SPENCER: What is this thing called airflow? We've been locked up for years." And then it went away after that. So that was interesting. Now, here's something else. The sinuses are one of the main places where you make nitric oxide. 

MARTIN: Alright.

SPENCER: Now, have you ever wondered why someone who has, you may have heard a story someone says, "Oh, they went in for a stent because it turns out they had a 98% blocked artery." Well, if they had a 98% blocked artery, why were they alive? How come they didn't have a heart attack and die? Right.

MARTIN: That's right. There's just zero chance that 2% opening is big enough.

SPENCER: Right. So, the reason they didn't die is because that blockage happened slowly over years, and collateral blood vessels rerouted around it. Okay. In order to get that to happen, number one, you can't be toxic. Certain toxins, like things found in cigarettes and other things, and certain metals will stop that from happening. So, you have to detoxify. And we’re heavy on the detox side of things. The other is that you have to have nitric oxide. That's what triggers that to happen. So, by having the sinuses online, it means you're protecting yourself from a heart attack because you're keeping the new blood flow from happening. Okay. Now, here's the other part. We're an adult audience here. There's, if you have kids listening to this, put them in, pause this and put something on for them.

MARTIN: Kids should learn everything too.

SPENCER: Fair warning. A man, when young, typically wakes up with a morning erection.

MARTIN: Absolutely. Stand, kickstand, they call it.

SPENCER: And three or four times a night this will happen. Excuse me. So, when you are making enough nitric oxide for all the body parts, the heart and everything else to be happy. Then the other side, the other thing that does is it dilates, it causes vasodilation which gives erections. Now, penises shrink with age. Sorry to say. And the reason they shrink with age is that people lose the nitric oxide flush that happens three or four times a night, which exercises the tissue, rejuvenates, flushes, and keeps that tissue healthy. 

So, if you don't want your penis to shrink with age, keep your sinuses healthy because they're making the nitric oxide, which is giving you erections at night. And I'm now of the opinion that no matter what age you are, if you're not waking up with an erection, you probably have a sinus problem. 

Now, for the women, they get erections, too. They have the same erectile tissue, except instead of being outside of the body, it's inverted internally. So, women have a different experience. Obviously, I can't speak from experience. I don't know what it feels like, but from what I understand, it's a sense of fullness as the tissue fills with blood. And so, the same for a woman, you want that tissue to be healthy. If you want a healthy sex life as you get older and the tissue not to degrade, you have to have healthy enough sinuses to make the nitric oxide to not just keep your heart healthy, but also to keep that tissue healthy. So, that is like a really inexpensive way to know, are you making enough Nitric Oxide? Are you regularly waking up with ‘tumescence’ is the term.

MARTIN: So sidebar, so these nitric oxide drugs like Viagra, where do they get that? Do they stimulate a flush of NO, or are they, where do they steal it from?

SPENCER: Right. So I would have to look up the pharmacology of that, but you made a good point. They're working downstream of the problem. They get that the problem is nitric oxide. They're just not realizing that, hey, let's, instead of manipulating the things that create or break down nitric oxide, what we're saying is, “Hey, let's make it correctly in the first place.” So, there you have it. Nitric oxide, heart attacks, and erections. The connections you wouldn't have thought that were there, right?

MARTIN: In your nose. Okay.

SPENCER: So, now let's talk about the problems that we don't know we have because we're not present when they're happening, but because we're sleeping, a lot of people have sleep apnea and don't know it. There's generally three ways you can get it. Sleep apnea is when the airway collapses. Hypopnea is when it narrows. You're still breathing, but it's not enough. And

MARTIN: So, when people turn into mouth breathers during sleep, that's essentially blocked up here, right?

SPENCER: So there's three places where you can get apnea or hypopnea, where you can get airway disturbances. And they're not exclusive. You could have two or three of them. One is the sinuses. And we just talked about that because of the sinus, the turbinates inflame. And then if it's sinus-oriented, that typically gets worse if you sleep on your stomach. And it can be improved if you raise the head of the bed up four inches and sleep at a slight incline. It helps drain the sinuses out. 

MARTIN: Sitting while sleeping.

SPENCER: No, you don't have to go that far, but just at a little bit of an incline. And they make those things you stick under the bed posts or wedges that go underneath your mattress. But again, or the nasal strips, but again, fix the issue. The issue is the sinuses are problematic. And also, there are things that can irritate the sinuses like if I get it around cats, my sinuses swell up. You may find that pollen will do it for you, or you may find certain foods will do it for you.

MARTIN: This is an important sidebar because so much of our industrial age experience is,  “I have the seasonal allergy and it's rampant.”

SPENCER: So an allergy is a challenge, right? You've got that. But you can do some things, right? You can sleep with a really good air filter. You can avoid the things in your own home and in your own diet that make it worse, right? So the sinuses are one thing to pay attention to. That's airway disturbance. Another airway disturbance is at the palate level. So that's like in the tonsillar epiglottis the area at the back of the throat. And if you have someone take, if you hold your mouth open and stick your tongue out and have someone take a photograph, you can look in, and there are grading systems based on how much of your tonsillar area is closing down to show you. If you look up the Mallampati gradient system online, you can compare the picture of your own tonsil area to that grading system and determine how much your tonsils are affecting it. And the last one would be the tongue itself. The tongue, especially for people with extra weight, the tongue itself could be up to 40 percent fat. It can get very large, it can also swell, and if you look in the mirror and you see little scallops at the edges of your tongue, that means your tongue is swollen.

MARTIN: Imagine the tongue is too big for the opening?

SPENCER: Swollen. And when it swells it gets shoved backwards. And when the tongue is the problem. That's apnea that happens when you're on your back. And there are belts you can wear. It's one called the night shift that will vibrate when you roll on your back, and it'll flip you over on your front or your side, and you won't even know that it's happening. You'll sleep through it. But what you need to do is you need to pay attention to the air you're breathing, the food you're eating, the pets in the house, all these things, and then which of them are making any of these three systems worse, because when they’re all clear, then you get a perfect night's sleep. And then of course, in the meantime, you can, we make a product called Tessamet, which is a liposomal DAO, which is the enzyme that breaks down histamine, because histamine is a big player in this, but so does bradykinin, and so does vitamin C. But the long-term goal is to identify what things are getting you and keeping you from causing these sleep disturbances. 

Now, not always, but most of the time if you have hypopnea from any of those three things- the sinuses, the tongue, the tonsils, and the palate. If you have hypopnea, dreams will be frustrating. You're trying to do something, and it's a frustrating dream. And frustration is how the brain makes sense of not getting enough air. 

Now, if you actually stop breathing, that's apnea. Then the dream becomes violent. Either violence towards you or towards someone else in the dream. And then if it gets really bad, you'll find that there's sweat on the sheets or on the blankets or on the pillow. And that's because you've stopped breathing for so long that your body went into an emergency state and started dumping sweat. Now, the traditional medical establishment says it's perfectly normal to stop breathing multiple times throughout the night, right? I don't think you should stop breathing at all throughout the night, but they move the goal posts because so many people have apnea, even kids. I think that sudden infant death syndrome is apnea.

MARTIN: Classic new normal. Everybody's sick, therefore, it's normal.

SPENCER: So, if you happen to remember your dreams and your dreams are either violent or frustrating, that's an airway disturbance usually. Now, here's another one. And the other one is mold. And we should talk about this for a minute because mold is one of the ways that can definitely cause all three of those systems to light up. The sinuses, the palate and the tongue can all swell from mold in the house. Mold itself doesn't really have a smell. Bacteria that often grow with mold will, but the mold itself doesn't have one. So, unless you happen to have a machine where you can go around and test a house for mold, you're not going to know. I bought one of those machines. I bought something called the Instascope. It's a $40,000 scientific instrument for measuring mold. I have yet to find a house that doesn't have mold. They've all got mold. 

MARTIN: Yeah. Stale places if your ambient humidity is above 50%, mold will grow.

SPENCER: It's so bad that I'm actually going to be building a house from scratch based on some German principles of how to build a mold-free home because I can't find a home that doesn't have it, and I don't want to be around it. But I'll tell you what you can do short of building your own home. We changed the way we built houses for decades for thousands of years. Houses were built with an understanding of how to keep the humidity out. Basically, no matter how you build a house, water is going to get into it. Nobody builds a perfect roof. Nobody builds perfect walls, built the perfect foundations. Water gets in. What makes a house healthy or mold-free are two things. All right. What allows mold to grow is food and humidity and water.

MARTIN: And depressed oxygen and warmth.

SPENCER: Well, the temperatures that we're going to live at, mold's going to grow at, right? Okay. And mold will grow fully in oxygen. So it's going to be food, some food source, and it's going to be water.

MARTIN: Wood, fiber, or paper board.

SPENCER: Right. So what they did with houses is they said, "Hey, let's make these houses uber efficient, super airtight.”

MARTIN: The energy crisis and the cost of fuel was the impetus to start building airtight houses,

SPENCER: Right. So you see these homes going up, and first off they wrap them with this Tyvek waterproof stuff. So what that means is when the water gets in, and it does, it can't get out. Okay. Now what does it meet? What does it meet when it's in the walls and it's in there? Well, cellulose. Mold can eat dust, and it can eat plant matter.

MARTIN: Well, it will eat skin cells that we slough off all the time.

SPENCER: That's dust. The average person dumps 2 lbs of dust from their skin into the air every year. So, what happens is in the walls, the drywall has paper behind it, and it eats that. And then the insulation, if it's cellulose, it eats that. And then the water gets in, and it can't get out. So, how do you properly make a home? Well, you don't use paper and cellulose. You can use wood because wood is coated with lignin. The wood cells have lignin around them, and most fungus can't get through that. So, only when you have the OSB board and the cellulose and all this damaged wood, now the molds can get in. And the other thing you do is you say, “I know water's going to get in. Maybe there's a leak. Maybe there's humidity inside.”

MARTIN: I bring the water. I exhale the water.

SPENCER: So you make the wall. So you do the opposite. You make the walls vapor permeable. You make it so that you want walls so that when rain hits, it doesn't go through, but the vapor inside can come out. All right. So that's how you do it. The other thing is the HVAC system. HVAC systems are the sinuses of the house, right? And what happens is all the dust gets up in there, and right after the AC in the HVAC, there's a humid spot because AC's generate some humidity. 

MARTIN: And so now you probably have a heat exchanger in there,

SPENCER: Right. So now you have the moisture and the dust, and all the mold and bacteria grow, and they're learning how to grow on human tissue. So then that blows in, and it already knows how to eat you because it's been eating you inside the HVAC. So if you are dealing with mold or you think you might be dealing with mold, my answer and you can't move, right? Turn off your HVAC, seal it up, get a dehumidifier in the house and set it at 40%, have some fans because you need the whole house to be at 40%, not just the spot around the dehumidifier, right? If you have,

MARTIN: Yeah. When you take a shower, you put out a huge amount of steam into,

SPENCER: Right. But if you've got cabinets under your sink that are closed, locally, that could be 80% humidity. You've got to open up the cabinets. You've got to go in there. All right. Step number one, turn off the HVAC, right? Step number two, 

MARTIN: Okay, just to be clear, you mean like forced air systems?

SPENCER: Heating, ventilation, air conditioning. Turn it off.

MARTIN: Well, I understand, but these would be forced-air, like heat pump or furnace type of a thing.

SPENCER: Furnace, not necessarily, but if it's a central system where it's sucking air in, going through vents, getting heated and conditioned and blown back out again, inside there is pounds of human skin. Okay. Now, sometimes you can clean that out if it's a metal HVAC system. You can scrub it out and then start over and and put in, upgrade your blower and put in HVAC filters, HEPA filters in there. There's a way to do it. But I'm just saying right now if someone listening to this is like, "Oh my god, they know their house is moldy. What do they do?" Turn off the HVAC and seal them up, right? Open the windows when possible. 

Two, get rid of every rug and carpet in the whole house. You can't fit. Those things are so loaded with mold and mycotoxins. It's unbelievable. Just take them, toss them. Three, give a really good clean of the place. Get all the dust off, right? Dehumidify it. And the last one is you can fog the place, and there are ways to fog because what you want to do is you want to knock down not just the mold but also the toxins the mold makes because it's not really the mold that gets you, it's the toxins they produce, mycotoxins.

The first thing I did when I was getting into mold is, I got a really good mold fogger. I got two of them. I got a $40,000 one and a $90,000 one and I wanted to see if they were actually doing what they said. So then I got this $40,000 tester, and this thing cost a fortune, it was very expensive to do this thing, to figure this out, Martin. So, I bought these two, and I won't name them, very high-end fogging machines for fogging for mold. 

And neither worked. And I knew they didn't, even though they said they did, they didn't work because I was able to test it. And what I realized was these were people who made these machines during COVID and they work great for viruses. They work terribly for mold and they're selling it for mold. And so, I call them both up and I'm like, “I tested your machine pre and post. It doesn't do what it says it did. It doesn't say what it's going to do. Refund me.” And so now I'm in a difficult spot. How do I fix the mold? 

There is an ingredient that you can actually kill mold with. And it's a mixture of vinegar, back to vinegar, right? EDTA, back to short- chain fatty acids, right? These things have biological effects. So vinegar, which is a short- chain fatty acid, right? It's a part of the microbiome, and hydrogen peroxide, which is actually part of the immune system mixed together in a particular way. And I realize now why the other companies wouldn't use that stuff because they must have known that was the proper stuff to use. It's because it would have destroyed their machines.

I said, "Okay, well, what about these cheap $300 machines that you see on Amazon?" And I got one of those, and it blew this white fog, and you could feel the water on your hand, and you could see droplets. If you can see the fog, the particle size is too big. It's going to make the problem worse because you're actually just going to make the place wet. So, I tried one of those $300 devices, and it was junk. It wasn't doing anything. It was just like a hand sprayer. It has to be a vapor that goes. It has to be small enough to penetrate.

SPENCER: So, what do I do? The very expensive units will be destroyed by the very thing you need to fog for mold. And the cheap ones, they're toys basically, 

MARTIN: A sprayer and fogger, right?

SPENCER: And I've seen a company that's, I'm not going to mention their names, but they're all over the internet. They're very well known using their branded version of these cheap $200, $300 foggers. And I'm just like, if you don't test, you don't know. And I know those don't work. I tested them. They're junk. So what I did is I said, "Okay, I have to do something."

I commissioned the creation of some fogging machines. I used something called a Venturi port. So instead of pushing it through a very fine nozzle like the expensive ones do, the acids would destroy that. It's a Venturi port, so it's spinning it and letting the change in pressure blasted into a vapor. And because of that, I can put anything through it, not just fogging things, but I can also put probiotics through it. So you can actually take some bacillus which are the good bacteria and use it and spray your house.

MARTIN: Fog your house with the healthy microbiome

SPENCER: You can. I don't know if you can see, there’s an Airbnb and it's all wood floor in here because I got into the air, I couldn't stay in the place I was in because once I tested and saw how moldy the place I was living in was,

MARTIN: You decided you couldn't stay?

SPENCER: I'm not going to, I was like, “Well my well-being is more important to me than this house, so I gotta go.” And so I got this Airbnb, and I came in and it stank. I'm like, "Oh man." So I fogged it. Well, the first thing was, I got rid of all the carpets that are in here, put them in their garage, fogged the thing, the smell went away, and the Airbnb people were thrilled because, oh my god, they're like, I'm like, "Your place smelled." They’re like, "Sorry." Okay. Well, it doesn't smell now. And by the way, you want me to fog your garage because your garage is moldy. They're like, "Would you?” It took three foggings, now the garage doesn't smell anymore. It was full of mold. And so we make these units. I couldn't imagine not having one. And I'm not saying this because I want you to buy it. I'm simply saying, if you don't have the ability, look, I have the ability to go and make a whole new home, right? And I'm going to, but even that is going to take me like what, eight months? You got to get the land. You got to put,

MARTIN: Probably more than that.

SPENCER: It takes a lot of time. Well, so what am I going to do for the next eight months? I got to live somewhere. And there are no homes that don't, every home has mold because of the way these things are built.

MARTIN: But we have regulated ourselves into this disaster. The building code is the cause. Much like health insurance is the cause of our poor health.

SPENCER: If you have a house that has had water damage, or it's an older home, or if everybody in the house tends to be sick or arguing, something's wrong in that house, my advice is carpets and rugs all got to go. Sometimes even the drapes, right? Sometimes some of the upholstery furniture has to go, right? Two, give it a good cleaning. Maybe you put on a HEPA mask, get a HEPA vacuum, get all the dust out as much as you can from your starting from scratch. Three, fix or more realistically, turn off your HVAC. And then four, fog it. And you might fog it like once a month. Just turn it on. Go leave the house. It'll automatically turn off. It'll automatically vent for you. The whole system's automated. It's a good thing to, if you’re going, I think it's pretty important. 

MARTIN: Think of it as if your life depended on it.

SPENCER: My health is so much better since I have gotten out of the moldy home.

MARTIN: Now, how long has it been?

SPENCER: I have been out now for about a year. It's just been remarkable. I don't have sleep apnea anymore, which theoretically is incurable. It's gone. It's gone completely. It comes back a little bit if I do something like last night. This morning I had some spirulina, and then I laid down and took a nap, and I felt it coming. I felt my palate swelling a little bit and I looked it up, spirulina can have mycotoxins in it. I'm like, all right. And that's the nice thing. If you get yourself to a point where things are good and any one thing that hits you notice it, you feel it. But someone's got a thousand things or ten things dragging them down. Then if you pull any one of them, it's just noise. They can't hear it. They can't tell the difference.

MARTIN: Here's my metaphor for it. When you have a completely clean sheet of paper, you put a short line on it, a single line, it's very visible. If you have a scratchy thing that's just covered in graffiti, another line will make no difference.

SPENCER: Won’t make a difference. So, every once in a while, I'll experiment with something, like a bite, and then I'll be like, "Oh, my tongue or my palate or my sinuses are reacting, and I might not have the best night's sleep that night." And then I have to stop whatever that thing is, and that's fine. So those are the things that I think are getting a lot of people Martin, things you don't want to look at because they don't want to look at their stool.

MARTIN: Okay. So let me try and put a summary on it which is this, you started saying that checking the pH of your poop is important, and then we looped back into fixing it through the mold problem or fixing the sinus problem, and that’s the microbiome that's probably prevented from doing its job by the biofilms that are, 

SPENCER: It's the microbiome of the gut. It's the microbiome of the sinuses. It's the microbiome of your home. These are all biomes.

MARTIN They all tie. So, we should probably still highlight the pH test, which is not just for poop. We can also test saliva and urine.

SPENCER: Oh, thank you for reminding me. So, the pH papers that I made, I try to make them very inexpensive, but people can do them. They'll test three different things, right? They'll check the stool. So we make them so they work on stool pH. Then they'll check urine. Now, what you want your urine to be in the morning is 6.5. It's not going to be because you would have to be eating a very plant-heavy diet to do that. But if you can get your urine in the morning to 6.5, there are some advantages with that because when the body has acidic urine basically you pee your bones out every night. You pee your teeth out. You're creating metabolic acidosis to a degree that is burning the tissue up. And,

MARTIN: Let me just try and get at that. The bones would make it more alkaline, no?

MARTIN: Right. So the body robs calcium from the teeth and the bones to neutralize it.

SPENCER: It's the urine pH. And so what happens,

MARTIN: Well, just to say so, whatever you're peeing out, that's what your body is getting rid of.

SPENCER: It's getting rid of the acids, and the body is keeping it from being even more acidic by dumping calcium from the bones and the teeth,

MARTIN: Buffering it. Okay. So if it's more alkaline, so if your pee comes out at 6.8, you're going to what, rejoice?

SPENCER: Okay. So, if it's at 6.8 and you're not doing something to make it at 6.8, it's more likely the kidneys are starting to have problems. They're no longer able to concentrate the acids. With a normal diet, most people are going to be 5.5 to 6.0. Okay. So, unless you've got a very extreme plant-based diet, you're 5.5 to 6.0. And long term, that's going to cause problems. So, what I do is every evening before I go to sleep, I take some baking soda mixed with some other things, products called Bicarbamet, and It's designed to survive the stomach so you don't wipe out your stomach acid and deliver the bicarbonates to the small intestine, which is where they belong. And then I find that for me, if I take three of those before I go to sleep, my urine hits 6.8. I'm perfect.

MARTIN: And so when you take the Bicarbamet, you also don't have to get up in the middle of the night to pee.

SPENCER: Well, that's a different phenomena, right? That has to do with bladders and prostates and things like that.

MARTIN: So yes, you do then. Okay.

SPENCER: Oh, well I don't yet. I'm 57. Hopefully I never will.

MARTIN: Okay. I should have said more. It's interesting that there's this particular regulator. I forget the name of it, but young people make lots of it and older people much less. And that's the ability to hold urine. And so young kids don't have to go for eight hours. Old people probably go every two, three.

SPENCER: Interesting. I'll have to look into that as it hits me. Now, the other thing is you can measure your saliva pH.

MARTIN: Yes.

SPENCER: Now, the way you do this is, first thing in the morning, you rinse your mouth out with some pure water, and then you chew or gnaw on your tongue a little bit until you salivate, and then you check that fresh saliva, and it should be alkaline. That's your bicarbonate reserves. And what you're measuring is your bicarbonate levels. Now, the bicarbonates, they do a lot of different things.

The other thing you can do is you check your saliva pH. And you do that by rinsing your mouth out first thing in the morning before toothpaste or anything. And then gently gnawing or chewing on your tongue until you salivate and you check the saliva. And optimally, it's alkaline above 7.0. And when you have enough bicarbonate, this protects the bones, protects the teeth, great for the kidneys. Do much better within when there's enough bicarbonate. 

It also preserves muscles. So people that are losing muscle or trying to maintain muscle, bicarbonate is part of that. And of course, if we lose the bicarbonate, then those functions go the other way. And again, I find that if I take about three by and it depends on what your diet is, but if I take about three of the bicarbonate at night, my urine is about 6.8, my saliva goes up. And I think that's a useful thing to do as you age is just to protect your bicarbonate reserves.

MARTIN: So, a lot depends on the timing of things, right? Like you're very clear about the fact that you want to take the baking soda at bedtime, not way back when.

SPENCER: Oh, you can take it whenever you like. However, when you go to sleep, unless you're doing biphasic sleep, you're laying down for eight hours at a stretch. You're not drinking water. You're not dumping acid. It's like there's a lot of things that are accumulating in your tissue that are being dumped out at night time. So, I figure that's when the body is doing its repair and drainage work. That's when I will give it some help to help the kidneys and help neutralize all the access coming out.

MARTIN: Okay. So, I have a question about urine. So, for people who do get up in the middle of the night, let's just say that they pee at 3:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. and then they finally get up at 8:00 a.m. for example. Which urine do they test for the pH test?

SPENCER: I would say the one before they start their day.

MARTIN: So, okay. Before you have breakfast. Noted. All right. So, that's the whole cascade of things. Urine acidic, but not too acidic. Saliva alkaline but not too alkaline. And the stool definitely acidic.

SPENCER: Right. Go to the protocol page on my website, I talk about the exceptions to the rule. So, for instance, if someone has carbohydrate malabsorption problems. They'll have very acidic stool and it's not a good thing. If someone has kidney disease, they'll have alkaline urine. It's not a good thing. There are ways in which you can get false readings under certain medical situations and our protocol page will discuss those. But by and large, those are the general rules for most people.

MARTIN: All right, I'll share that information. Awesome. Well, there we have it. So, the pH papers are going to be available readily and affordable.

SPENCER: Yes, we have them in stock.

MARTIN: All right. Lovely. Spencer, I think we have explained it. You have explained it. I have paid attention. Thank you very much. This is Spencer Feldman, the founder of Remedy Link and Martin Pytela, the founder of Life Enthusiast, sharing our hard won research. Spencer, thank you very much. You will find us at life-enthusiast.com. Thank you.

SPENCER: Nice seeing you again, Martin.