Plant-Based Minerals & Fulvic Acid Benefits

Nick Urban [00:00:05]: Hello, and welcome to MINDBODY peak performance with your host, Nick Urban. Pop quiz for you. What category of nutrients is the most abundant throughout the entire human body? Yet virtually all modern humans are deficient, and that deficiency has devastating consequences. If you guessed amino acids, you’d be close. That’s certainly one of them. But right behind it is minerals. These unsung heroes of the human body have all kinds of biological effects throughout the entire body. And quite simply, if you want to be your healthiest self and perform your highest, you need to be consuming an external source of minerals. As you’ll learn in this episode, the food in your diet simply will not have the amount of minerals you require to thrive. In this episode, we’ll cover why minerals are among the most neglected yet important nutrients of all. Why the RDA, the government’s recommendation of mineral intake isn’t even close to sufficient sources of minerals. The super micronutrients humic and fulvic acid. Why most mineral supplements do not work. Basically, everything you could want to know about minerals and then some. And if the biochemistry our guest shares this week is over your head, don’t worry. Towards the end, we translate that into actionable takeaways. Our guest this week is Caroline Alan of Beam Minerals. She came from a career in the corporate world and found herself struggling physically, mentally and energetically. So she dug into the research and discovered the power of plant-based minerals and their incredible ability to support a return to natural balance, aka homeostasis in the body. Ever since then, she’s been educating on minerals and plant-based humic and fulvic substances. Her own research has taken her deep into the realms of microbiology, molecular biology, cellular biology, agricultural soil science, and the study of plant decomposition. You’ll find the links to everything we discuss at the show notes, which are at outliyr.com the number of this episode, which is 120. If you’d like to give her product, Beam Minerals, a shot, you can use the code Urban to save 20% on your order. All right, sit back, relax, and enjoy this mineral masterclass with our guest, Caroline Alan. Caroline, welcome to MINDBODY peak performance.

Caroline Alan [00:02:53]: Thank you so much for having me, Nick.

Nick Urban [00:02:55]: It’s a pleasure to host you and I first met you several months back here at KetoCon in Austin, Texas, and I’ve been actually using your Beam Minerals, microbiome and electrolytes products since then. So it’s nice to be talking to the face behind the brand.

Caroline Alan [00:03:14]: Right on. How do you like them so far?

Nick Urban [00:03:17]: I like them. I have several forms of micronutrients in my lifestyle in addition to my diet already, but these are nice and convenient. I can add them to my drinks, as I’m actually doing right now, and it’s a great way to get them in because I firmly believe that micronutrients are equally as important, if not more important than macronutrients.

Caroline Alan [00:03:39]: Yes, equally important. And we’ll talk about it for sure. Great.

Nick Urban [00:03:43]: Well, let’s start off today. What are the unusuals or non-negotiables you’ve done for your health, your performance and your bioharmony?

Caroline Alan [00:03:52]: Well, I’m not sure that I separate any of those. So to me they’re all one thing. So actually, I have some practices first thing when I wake up. When I first come into consciousness, I immediately do a practice that is part of something called self-identity through Ho’oponopono, which is something that I’ve done for probably about 20 years. And it’s a very simple practice of connecting with the child within me. And I spend a little time with her. I kind of talk about the day, ask her how she’s doing, ask her if she needs anything particular today, like maybe a walk or something in her water bottle or whatever, and just give her a chance to, and in the Ho’oponopono tradition, that’s really just talking to your subconscious. They call it the child, but really it’s just giving an opportunity for your attention to turn to your subconscious rather than it needing to scream and cry for your attention.

Nick Urban [00:05:05]: How do the responses usually come up in that format?

Caroline Alan [00:05:09]: Well, it is interesting. 20 years ago, when I first started doing that practice, literally, it was like I couldn’t even get that consciousness or that part of my being to even come into the room with me. But now we have quite an intimate relationship and it’s part of what’s allowed me to come more into my body and more present with myself and with people and raised my own awareness and allowed me to be more gentle and loving with myself because my subconscious doesn’t have to scream and cry to get my attention. I’m giving it that opportunity daily.

Nick Urban [00:05:53]: Nice. Well, let’s talk about minerals. Now, for people who have heard of them and haven’t given them much additional thought, what would you say is like the best segue, like a fact or stat or something that is interesting about minerals?

Caroline Alan [00:06:07]: What I always like to say before I say anything else is you have in your body, your body is made up of between 37 billion to 150 trillion cells if you’re a very large human. And your cells are fueled by two things, minerals and amino acids. And your body makes a lot of amino acids, but it makes no minerals. And what do we know about minerals? Very, very little. So that’s the first thing is to really begin to think, oh my gosh, everything, even your brain, your heart, your lungs, it’s all cells.

Nick Urban [00:06:59]: Yeah. And even when we’re talking about minerals, it’s usually lumped into the category of vitamins and then minerals as an afterthought. Can you break down why that is? Why are minerals not more well known if they’re so important?

Caroline Alan [00:07:15]: Yes. Well, really, I think it’s for one particular reason. The minute you start talking about minerals, the conversation gets very complex very quickly. And so I think it’s taken me nine years to find ways to communicate the importance of minerals. And that’s both in terms of helping people understand depletion and deficiency and helping people understand mineral replenishment and also how minerals operate in the body and find ways to communicate in simple metaphorical ways that people can easily grasp and understand. And they’re just literally, I think the people who were talking about it were scientists. And then if you think about doctors, practitioners, even naturopaths, none of these people, and I shouldn’t say none, but a very, very small percentage of even natural health practitioners know about minerals, how they operate in the body and how replenishment happens.

Nick Urban [00:08:24]: Yeah, it’s certainly a complicated subject. And I’ve read a couple of books on minerals and I read one book on magnesium alone and it was like 250 pages. And I’m like, okay, when we tend.

Caroline Alan [00:08:39]: To think about minerals, we tend to, as you said, think about the macro minerals, which are the electrolytes that we all take. They call them macro because these are the ones your body utilizes a lot. It’s also what your body is made of a lot. But there are a lot of other micronutrients that your body absolutely needs that nobody really understands or talks much about.

Nick Urban [00:09:07]: Can we talk about all of them today? And hopefully fairly concise and not too sciency level because I know that even just defining them, there’s the minerals, the macro minerals, the trace minerals, there’s like ultra trace minerals according to some people. Can you just define the landscape?

Caroline Alan [00:09:25]: Yeah. And there’s lots of different languages. And really here’s what I’d like people to think about. Look around your room and look at everything. Everything that has substance, your entire body is made of minerals. All the food that you eat, it’s all made of minerals. All structure is composed of minerals. If you took all the water out of your body, you’d be a little pile of minerals. Think of that. Okay? And really these concepts of like macro minerals, micronutrients, phytonutrients, these are really related to the formulation. So your body has a lot of the macro minerals and it utilizes a lot of macro minerals, which are magnesium, calcium, potassium, the ones that we hear about a lot, those are the ones your body uses a lot. But as you go down the chain of the ratio of what your body is made of in that little pile of minerals that you ended up with when you took the water out and we actually pulled it out and said, oh, there’s this much magnesium, there’s this much calcium, this much potassium, this much molybdenum, phosphorus. Things you wouldn’t take a pill for. But your body absolutely needs what we call the full spectrum of minerals.

Nick Urban [00:11:16]: Yeah, I’ve looked into it, especially in the context of the macro minerals and industrial farming practices. But like to play devil’s advocate, if you’re going to eliminate all the water from the body and all that’s left is the minerals, it seems like that’s the last thing we would need to add more of into our diets.

Caroline Alan [00:11:39]: Here’s the thing. When you grow a plant in soil, how does the plant grow? How does it create that structure? It sucks the minerals out of the soil. It’s the minerals that create the structure. It’s the minerals that also fuel all the cellular processes. And it’s very hard to get minerals back into the soil. They add nitrates, they add other humus and other things that bulk out the plant, actually make the plants create more carbohydrates, but it doesn’t necessarily make the food more nutrient dense. It is an absolute fact you cannot get enough minerals from food that you buy at the supermarket or food that you grow in your backyard. And in fact, most scientists who study this, they say that most people, modern humans have only about 40% of the minerals in their body that they need.

Nick Urban [00:14:29]: And the way I like to think about it is if the body is constantly deprived of energy because our mitochondria aren’t working as well as they should, then it has to cut corners somewhere. And a lot of times that’s going to result in the things that aren’t as necessary to our immediate survival. Which also, I think, explains a lot of the disease rates skyrocketing in the tissues where there are the highest number of mitochondria in every cell.

Caroline Alan [00:18:12]: Of course, it’s even higher than the eyes. I’m literally sometimes overwhelmed by the beauty of this. The human body has, it’s truly magical. And when I did my own research and I just delved so deep into all of this, I became more and more amazed at the incredible capacity of the human body to heal itself, to fix things, to just keep all our autonomic processes going to perform at really high levels. And the thing about it is that if you can imagine taking your light and turning the dimmer up on it, maybe even 20%, think how much more capacity your body would have to heal itself to deal with any chronic symptoms that are happening, whether it’s brain fog, anxiety, depression, panic, skin problems, cramping, hair loss.

Nick Urban [00:19:30]: I want to go back to what you were saying earlier. If you’re buying your produce from the supermarket, you’re certainly mineral deficient because there’s been several studies that have come out comparing the nutrient levels of produce these days versus decades ago. And it’s sadly a very different picture. But then even if you’re growing your own produce in your backyard, you still aren’t going to be getting enough of the micronutrients and the minerals. Why, if you’re doing it in your backyard and you’re doing all the right things, are you not going to be getting enough?

Caroline Alan [00:20:06]: Well, again, if you think about the plants, let’s say you have this beautiful backyard garden. You put a lot of humus in there and compost and all this stuff, it’s definitely better. It’s definitely going to be more nutrient dense than buying it at the store. But again, when you are growing plants in the same soil over and over again, it simply depletes the minerals from the soil. And we’re talking about the micronutrients because the problem is even when you put that compost in there to get it to go all the way back to its ionic components, meaning that plant material has to dissolve all the way down to its ionic chemical components for the plants to be able to utilize it.

Nick Urban [00:22:11]: First let’s talk about supplements in general. So we laid the groundwork for why supplementation of minerals matters. One thing I’m sure you’re asked about often is mineral products, because you’ll rarely see a product that’s just a full spectrum, has everything in it in this pure form. Usually it’s a mineral of some sort, bound to some kind of other molecule. How does it actually work when you take what occurs in our bodies and you’re packaging it into a supplement to try and increase those levels?

Caroline Alan [00:22:55]: So this is where I come in, because I’m a mineral geek. And I’ve spent years and years studying minerals and mineral replenishment in the body. And what I really want to do right now is completely change the way you think about it. The problem with the current methodology or paradigm is that it looks at the body the way you would look at a car. So you’ve got a gas tank, you’ve got an oil tank. You need some water, you put it in the radiator. And that’s how we tend to think about our body. So we’re like, oh, I need magnesium, let’s throw in the most bioavailable format. But the body has no reservoir for magnesium or potassium that you’re just filling up. So what we have to do is understand how mineral replenishment actually works. Let’s get into the word bioavailability.

Caroline Alan [00:24:30]: So bioavailability has three stages. The first stage is digestion. The second is absorption, from your gut into your bloodstream. And the final stage is called assimilation, going from the bloodstream into the cells. The most important thing to remember about minerals is they have to go through all three stages. It’s not good enough to get some potassium and throw it in your gut. It has to be absorbed, and it has to get into the cell because the mitochondria are inside the cell. That’s where the minerals have to get.

Caroline Alan [00:35:05]: Food-based minerals are better for long-term health. Minerals work in balanced pairs. And this is something that’s really important for people to understand. If you’re mega-dosing magnesium, you may actually be throwing off the balance with calcium, which can lead to cramping and bone issues. The body needs the full spectrum in proper ratios.

Caroline Alan [00:40:29]: How BEAM Minerals work is we provide the base components for your body to utilize. Our fulvic and humic products are plant-based, they’re already at the ionic level, which means they bypass digestion entirely. The fulvic molecule is small enough to go directly through the cell wall, deliver its payload of minerals, and on the way out it picks up the biowaste and heavy metals. It’s both a delivery system and a detox system.

Caroline Alan [00:48:34]: Fulvic and humic molecules have a massive capacity for intercellular detoxification. The humic molecule, which we call the God Particle, contains fulvic within it. It has the ability to bind to molecules, forming a protective biofilm around them that assists in breaking down harmful substances like glyphosate. And these humic molecules are versatile and are effectively eliminated from our bodies.

Caroline Alan [00:53:28]: BEAM Minerals are self-manufactured, FDA-registered, and 3rd party tested. The unique formulation is crafted for maximum balance and absorption. Our products are ionized and can bypass the digestion stage, so they are immediately available for absorption and ready to interact with receptor sites in the body.

Caroline Alan [00:58:35]: The body is a homeostasis-generating engine. If you give it the right building blocks, the right mineral components, it will self-correct. It will find its own balance. That’s what’s so beautiful about full-spectrum plant-based minerals. You’re not trying to fill individual tanks. You’re giving the body what it needs and letting it do what it does best.

Caroline Alan [01:04:52]: Mineral replenishment is the vanguard of health. If I could tell everybody one thing, it would be to start with minerals. Before your nootropics, before your fancy supplements, before your biohacking devices, get your minerals right. Everything else works better when your cells have the mineral cofactors they need.

Nick Urban [01:06:20]: How can people connect with you and try BEAM Minerals?

Caroline Alan [01:06:25]: You can find us at beamminerals.com. And your listeners can use the code URBAN to save 20% on their order.

Nick Urban [01:06:58]: All right, let’s do the rapid fire. What’s a book or teacher that’s influenced you?

Caroline Alan [01:07:05]: Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len, who’s part of the Ho’oponopono tradition. And I love Rumi. And I’m also fascinated by Skinwalker Ranch, the TV show.