Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week, we decode the tools, tactics, and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body, and performance span. Things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting-edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel, and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. What if the long list of chronic illnesses, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, even chronic Lyme weren’t separate diseases at all, but one problem wearing different masks. My guest today is Dr. Bill Rawls.

Nick Urban [00:01:08]:
He’s a medical doctor who got so sick in his 40s that conventional medicine couldn’t reach him. So, he rebuilt himself from the cell up using herbs and other modalities. Now, he argues that your cells carry dormant microbes for decades, and that your health comes down to whether those cells can keep clearing house. He’s also 70 and still chasing wind on a foil board. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:01:39]:
Oh, thank you, Nick. Appreciate it. Good to be here.

Nick Urban [00:01:43]:
You argue that most chronic diseases are one problem in a disguise. Lay that out. What’s the one thing underneath fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and even chronic Lyme.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:01:54]:
Yeah. You know, we tend to look at disease in terms of the dysfunction, right? Symptoms, inflammation, hormone imbalances, other manifestations of the illness, and we treat that dysfunction. And so we’re always chasing our tail. We’re always trying to figure out how do we stop this dysfunction? How do we suppress it? And it’s really, It’s a wrong approach. So in my journey, I ended up taking a very different approach, which was looking at the body as a cellular organism. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the liver, the brain, the heart, any other part of the body, it’s all made of cells. Everything in our body is made of cells, and that’s held together by a network of connective tissue. So every cell is held in place.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:02:50]:
And, you know, part of that is ligaments hold connecting bones and and muscles, but most of it’s cell and it’s all managed by cells. So everything that happens in the body is due to the actions of cells. So when you look at that, it’s like, okay, if everything that happens in the body is due to the actions of cells, if things aren’t working in the body properly, it must be because our cells aren’t working right. And so if you can get to the bottom of why our cells aren’t working right, that really puts you in a whole different place of understanding chronic illness, And how to overcome it.

Nick Urban [00:03:29]:
So you chose cells as the base level unit. Why cells specifically? You could also look at a level up and you can look at tissues. You could look down into cells and you could look at mitochondria or other organelles. What made you choose cells as the right layer to focus on?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:03:46]:
Yeah, it is the unit of life. It is the smallest functional unit of life. So organelles, mitochondria, they’re all part of cells. And if you look at a liver, a liver isn’t a unit in itself. It’s a composite of billions and billions of liver cells. So the smallest functional unit. So you can think of your cells as like little biomechanical machines, and every one of them is functioning independently. And it’s interesting, you think about it, they’ve got their own operating system.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:04:22]:
Every cell has chromosomes. With the exception of our red blood cells, which we go through pretty fast, so they don’t need it. But every cell has a hard drive in that chromosome that tells it how to function in relation to all the other cells, where it should be in relation to other cells, what its job is, what kind of nutrients it needs. Everything that that cell needs to know is built in, and it pulls from that program, that operating system to run. So every cell is doing that. And of course, if all of our cells are functioning randomly, then things wouldn’t work right. So when we talk about hormones and signaling agents and nerves and all of those kinds of things, what they’re doing is coordinating cellular functions. So for our cells to work, for our body to work as a unit, all of our cells have to be in constant communication with all other cells.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:05:21]:
So all cells are sending messages. all cells are receiving messages. Some cells like our adrenal cells, our brain cells, our thyroid cells are specializing in messaging. But so that messaging, that coordination of those functions is essential for us to survive. But that’s all done by cells. So it all comes back to cells.

Nick Urban [00:05:47]:
So if you just look at the cells, you’re zoomed in, say with a microscope, literally looking at a cell, you introduce something, say, a drug, a supplement, how do you know if you’re having a beneficial net effect, or if you’re just benefiting the cell, the cell that you’re looking at perhaps, at the expense of the others?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:06:07]:
Yeah. Well, you know, when you look at our cells, it’s that operating system. You know, they are designed to perform. And to do that, you know, there’s certain qualifications that, it’s like any machine, you know, you have to have the right operating requirements. for it to work. So cells have very specific operating requirements. There are very specific nutrients that cells need, and that varies. Like thyroid cells need iodine to make thyroid hormone.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:06:37]:
Heart cells mainly burn fat. Our brain cells, really high-energy, fast-working, they mainly burn carbohydrate. So different cells need different nutrients. Cells need downtime like sleep. Cells need good blood flow, which comes from moving. But when you look at other things, there are things that damage our cells like unnatural radiation and certainly all the toxic compounds, toxic chemicals in our environment. I mean, there are over 200,000 different chemicals that are in our environment right now that are toxic to us that weren’t here 100 years ago. And what they’re doing, most of these things come from petroleum.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:07:25]:
So they used to be millions of years ago, either plant matter or algae. I mean, if you went back and ate that stuff, it’d be good for you. But millions of years of compression in the earth have distorted these organic chemicals to a form that isn’t compatible with life, isn’t compatible with living cells. So it basically, so our cells pull this stuff in. Because it’s an organic compound, and then they can’t find, they can’t use it. So it basically just jams up functions, and it can eventually kill the cell.

Nick Urban [00:08:01]:
Hmm.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:08:01]:
So that’s the problem with all these organic compounds, pesticides, herbicides, automobile exhaust, all of these things, is our body really picks them up, but then it messes us up.

Nick Urban [00:08:17]:
And so, for these things that you’re calling organic compounds, I get that you’re using the chemistry definition of organic compounds. You’re not talking about the organic certification. What exactly are these organic compounds and what is the difference between that and an inorganic compound?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:08:33]:
Organic compounds are things with carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, basically. It is the building blocks of life. It’s the building blocks of carbohydrates, fats, amino acids, pretty much everything we use. Now, inorganic compounds are metals and chemicals that are outside or atoms that are outside of that. But we still use some of those. We need zinc, we need various kinds of minerals that are incorporated into those organic molecules. But what happens again, so all of, you look at coal, it mainly came from plants and petroleum came mainly from algae. Those were living organic compounds.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:09:20]:
The things that life is built from. But again, all that pressure and heat over long periods of time distorted and destroyed these molecules such that they’re just not compatible. I mean, it’s like nobody would drink gasoline and think that our cells could actually use that to make energy, but we can burn it because it’s really, all these organic compounds are really, really high energy.

Nick Urban [00:09:48]:
Well, what if we did that on a micro level? What if we took, say, other forms of organic compounds that our body can recognize more effectively and say we heat them up, such as we take a food and we heat it at a really hot temperature? Yeah.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:10:04]:
Well, it’s the same kind of thing. And I mean, everybody likes their steak charred and their onions caramelized, but basically, that’s what you’re doing. You’re breaking down those chemicals and creating really bad free radicals and other things that aren’t necessarily good for you. So yeah, you have to be really careful. You know, we hear about seed oils, how bad seed oils are, and it’s not the seed oil that’s the problem. It’s that we use high heat and chemicals to refine them, and that destroys these really brittle chemicals, these polyunsaturated fats. It destroys them and it creates, makes free radicals out of them.

Nick Urban [00:10:50]:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:10:50]:
put that in your body and lace it into your cell membranes, where that’s where it all ends up, it’s really damaging to your cells.

Nick Urban [00:10:59]:
So, now, let’s take a healthy cell now, and then let’s expose it to different things. So, if I have a healthy cell and I expose it to, say, something unhealthy, such as glyphosate, the most common pesticide, herbicide, rodenticide chemical used in agriculture, and also as a desiccant to dry out wheat and other crops, What happens to the cell at that point?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:11:22]:
It depends on the chemical, and different chemicals have different effects. So there are a couple of just of the possibility, there are a couple of simple things. One, it can integrate itself into the cell, and it varies depending on whether it’s fat soluble or water soluble. So glyphosate can end up in cell membranes and other parts of the cell and actually damage the cell, but it also can act make chemical messengers in the body. So our messaging system is really dynamic. I mean, it’s like this enormous conversation between all of our cells that’s changing every millisecond. And so that if you can think about a conversation between a group of people, say you got a group of people that are trying to solve a problem, And somebody walks in the room. So they’re talking and trying to solve that problem, and somebody walks in the room and puts down a soapbox and stands there with a bullhorn screaming one word.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:12:32]:
It’s really disruptive. And that’s kind of what’s happening. And that can happen with giving hormone therapy and things like that. You can do that same thing. We just don’t know the language well enough. So you have to be really careful about how you do things. Now, there’s a place for all of those things, but you just really have to know what you’re doing to make sure you’re doing it properly or it can be disruptive. And, that’s another side of all of these abnormal chemicals that we’re exposed to in our environment is it can disrupt communications.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:13:09]:
Communications get disrupted and you add some cellular stress on top of that so your cells aren’t working as well, that’s when the body starts breaking down.

Nick Urban [00:13:18]:
Hmm.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:13:19]:
That’s when start increasing your risk of chronic illness. And that’s how, you know, all these stress factors do that.

Nick Urban [00:13:28]:
What are the different ways in which cells communicate? I think people at this point are pretty aware of the chemical way of communication. There’s also others. A lot of cells communicate via electricity. Some, there’s research on like ultra-weak biophotons or light. How do cells, like, what are the different options available to them to communicate with the whole system?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:13:48]:
Yeah. First of all, we’re starting to learn some of the messengers, but we can’t completely answer that. I mean, it’s really, really complicated. So yeah, as you said, I think the things that most of us know about are chemical messengers, and there are a lot of different kinds of chemical messengers. There are hormones that are typically made of fats, typically from steroids, like some of our adrenal hormones like cortisol. We have hormones that are made out of amino acids called peptides that you’re hearing a lot about now. The peptide that we know the very most about is insulin. So there are peptides in the body.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:14:37]:
They’re very short-acting. They don’t stay around. It’s like a short messenger here. I want you to know about this really quickly. And as you said, electricity, possibly even variations in the angle of water molecules. They’re just, and biophotons of actual using light to communicate. So cells are, yeah, again, it’s this really dynamic conversation that’s just going on all the time that is, it’s really cool to think about. I mean, it’s a lot more sophisticated than any AI can even come close to.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:15:18]:
Just every person’s body. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:15:21]:
I’ve seen in your work that you mentioned that we’re all carrying dormant microbes inside our cells and tissues, and sometimes for decades. How is that different from the gut microbiome that everyone’s talking about? And how does that, how do those microbes influence the different channels of communication that we were mentioning with the caveat that of course we don’t understand it fully because the body is so complex and we’re still studying it every day.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:15:45]:
Yeah. Yeah. So when you look at bacteria, they use a lot of the same chemical messengers that we do to communicate. So this started a long time ago when there was just bacteria on Earth and that was it. They were communicating, they were starting to work together in different ways. So when you look at the human body, we have to define ourselves as an ecosystem more than just a complete being of cells. So we, us, it’s cells and the stuff that holds our cells together, like ligaments and just that connective tissue that holds the cells together. But we have passengers on our skin.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:16:34]:
We have mites, we have bacteria. And in our gut, we have loads of bacteria, over 40,000 different species of bacteria alone. And who knows how many different viruses, there are protozoa, there are yeast, there’s all kinds of stuff that live in our gut. So in any space in the body or any location on the body, we have microbes growing there. Those microbes are less of a threat to us because they are behind a wall. I think that’s important to recognize. So all microbes have one purpose, That’s growing more microbes. That’s all they care about.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:17:17]:
As long as they have food in the right conditions, they keep right on growing. And that’s what they’re trying to do. And microbes have cultivated various different environments. So there’s some microbes that have just specialized in living on or inside other living organisms. And that’s been going on a long, long time.

Nick Urban [00:17:37]:
Right.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:17:38]:
So it’s even the earliest multicellular organisms, there were bacteria colonizing those organisms and living inside of them. But when you think about it, what they want is food and that organic matter we’re talking about from living things, carbohydrates, fats, proteins, that’s what they need for food. And they need the minerals. They need the same things that we need. So they need access to that. Well, of course, our cells, Our tissues are access to that. That’s what our, we are food. Our cells, our ligaments, our connective tissue, it’s food.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:18:23]:
So when you look at microbes in the gut or on the skin, they’re contained. So our gut contains the bacteria inside. So basically they have that free source of food. So I call it free food and protection. food inside the body. So free food is the food in our gut, and that’s where we have the highest concentration of bacteria because there’s a lot of food. So, you know, there’s constantly food coming in, and, you know, so what we don’t eat, they get access to, and they can actually help us in a lot of ways to digest it. Now, most of those bacteria are friendly, but not all of them.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:19:07]:
So when we talk about this thing called friendly flora, they’re actually not very friendly. They’re not trying to do good things for us. They happen to do good things for us, but that’s not their goal. Their goal is survival. They want all the food. So we have this longstanding relationship with those bacteria that goes back millions of years that They, we allow them to have some of the food for them to produce chemicals that suppress other things that are more threatening to us. So that’s how it works. Our normal flora are important because they suppress potential pathogens that aren’t so good for us.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:19:50]:
Really important. Now on the skin, there’s not much food, but there’s oil that we secrete to lubricate our skin. So bacteria do fine there. They live off of that, and their growth is limited by that food supply. So the concentrations of bacteria in our skin and places like that, sinuses and other places, is pretty low. But that’s all behind a wall. And, but, you know, bacteria are bacteria. They’re trying to get across that wall.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:20:21]:
So right now, while we’re talking, there are bacteria trickling across from our gums, our sinuses, our gut into our bloodstream. So they all want to to the bloodstream because that’s the highway to our tissues. All of them want to get to our tissues. And of course, then we have foreign things from outside of our body that are going, I want to go straight to the tissues. I want to go straight to the bloodstream. I want to get my share. And they know, well, there’s normal flora going to keep them in check if they go through the gut, through the skin. So it’s like, I want the good stuff.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:20:58]:
I’m going to go for gold. So they come in for a lot of different ways. They come in when we breathe, we take things in. So when we get a viral infection, a respiratory infection, and we’re coughing and sneezing, we’re actually helping the virus spread to other hosts. But what they’re doing, that is just the entry point, and people don’t realize that. It’s not just your sinuses that are where the viruses located. They’re damaging tissues so they can break through that barrier and get to the bloodstream. And that’s why we get systemic symptoms because they cross over into the bloodstream and they’re invading tissues throughout our body.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:21:44]:
You get muscle aches, you get all these different things. And part of that is the immune reaction to these things. So things are getting in our body. So the thing that is the really easiest way is Wow, insect bites inject it right into the bloodstream and you don’t even hardly know about it. It’s awesome.

Nick Urban [00:22:04]:
Yeah.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:22:06]:
But we get bitten by dogs and cats and hamsters, and we have intimate contact with other people, and we get things in food. So foreign invaders are trying to get into our body all the time. Some have the strategy of let’s break down the door and get as much as we can, get as much food. We know that the immune system is going to clear us out. So let’s create a situation like sneezing and coughing that we can spread to other hosts while we’re doing that. So they keep that pathway going. But there are other microbes, and here I’m talking about bacteria, viruses, protozoa, yeast, that have a different strategy. What they want to do is persist.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:22:49]:
And this is, the classic is that the tick-borne microbes like Borrelia, the Lyme bacteria, it’s not trying to make you It doesn’t benefit from that. It is trying to get in your body and set up a permanent presence. That’s what he wants to do. That works for it because if it came to get inside your body and set up a persistent presence, wow, it can just hang around. And you think about, you know, 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago, humans were getting bitten by ticks and all kinds of bugs all the time.

Nick Urban [00:23:25]:
Yeah.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:23:26]:
And so there were lots of opportunities for it to spread. And that is true of other hosts that infects, but like Borrelia, it infects a very wide range of hosts. And the same thing with Bartonella and Babesia and these things, not necessarily from ticks, but from other things. Bartonella, at least, you know, you get that more for dogs and flea bites and things. So different Different ticks, different microbes have honed different ways of getting in the body, but a lot of them, many of them want to establish a presence, and they do that by two mechanisms: growing really slowly so they’re not as much of a target by the immune system, and it makes them really resistant to antibiotics, and invading cells. Now, some of them have to invade cells to actually reproduce. The Lyme bacteria Borrelia does not, but it still invades cells, and if it invades cells. It has a habitat inside the cell that it can, it’s basically shielded from the immune system and antibiotics completely.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:24:36]:
But the inside of the cell is not necessarily a favorable place. It’s a very hostile environment. Cells don’t like microbes cluttering them, and they will try to get rid of them. And that Oh God, kind of steps us over into, I think, talking about autophagy.

Nick Urban [00:24:53]:
Before we go there, how, why doesn’t the immune system recognize and eliminate them as soon as they enter the bloodstream?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:25:00]:
Oh, it does.

Nick Urban [00:25:02]:
All of them?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:25:02]:
Yeah, no doubt. I mean, and, and, you know, and this is the thing, when we talk about this thing called virulence, the potential of a pathogen to cause, to, to make us sick, it’s really more about the immune system than the actual pathogen. And I don’t think, now, different pathogens definitely have different strategies. Some are fast-growing, some are slow-growing, et cetera. But something is bad when we don’t have a history of exposure. In other words, our immune system is naive. Ebola is really horribly bad because humans have rarely been exposed to it. We don’t even know the reservoir yet.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:25:49]:
And it occasionally pops out, infects people, and there’s nothing to stop it. It ravages cells throughout the body and it kills people really fast. And pretty much everybody that gets it gets really badly sick. That is a mismatched host-microbe relationship. It doesn’t work for the microbe. It doesn’t work for the host. It burns out really quickly. But when you look at things that are carried by ticks, man, humans have been bitten by ticks for millions of years.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:26:21]:
I mean, as long as we’ve been around, ticks have been biting us and we’ve been exposed to this thing. I mean, they found amber in the Dominican Republic with a tick that had Borrelia in it that was like millions of years old. So it’s been around a long time. These are not new things and it’s not new exposure. So here I’m talking about Borrelia because it’s just a convenient one to talk about. We could be talking about Mycoplasma pneumoniae that all of us are exposed to as children. We could be talking about Epstein-Barr. We can be talking about scores of different microbes.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:27:01]:
So when these things enter the body, the immune system knows them. They do. And so it’s like I said that Borrelia is really slow growing, as is Bartonella and Babesia and many, many things. that makes them less of a target, but the immune system still sees them and is trying to clear them. Now, slow growth isn’t the same thing as slow moving. Like Borrelia, the little spirochetes, they move really, really fast. So their strategy is, as soon as they enter the bloodstream, how fast can we get to tissues and invade cells? Because the immune system is hot on our tail. It’s clearing all of this stuff.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:27:45]:
It’s getting rid of it. And that’s why a lot of people, for many of these kinds of infections, they don’t get very sick. If you’re really healthy and you get exposed to it, it’s like most of us get Epstein-Barr when we’re kids. It’s not very bad. But you get it in college when you’re really stressed and you’ve never had it before, it can make you pretty sick. So if you’re vulnerable, you’re more apt to have an acute sickness. But even after, whether you do or don’t get symptoms, You haven’t necessarily cleared it from your body. The immune system has cleared all the active microbes.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:28:24]:
It’s cleared. They’re gone, done, right? But what you don’t realize is you’ve seeded yourselves throughout your tissues with these different microbes. 95% of us on Earth carry Epstein-Barr along with other herpesviruses. Most of us, 60% at least of the population carries Toxoplasma, a protozoa that’s been associated with schizophrenia, various cancers, all kinds of stuff. I mean, Bartonella, Bartonella is everywhere. Every mammal species on Earth carries some forms of Bartonella. Every one of them. Whales, dolphins?

Nick Urban [00:29:08]:
Yep. Yep.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:29:10]:
Yep. They carry it too. So these things are really common. And if you’re healthy, these things get in your system, course through your bloodstream, invade tissues, and invade cells. And that’s the part that I’ve been studying over the past decade is looking at the research of how they persist inside cells.

Nick Urban [00:29:32]:
Well, there’s a lot there, and I don’t want to just leave people on the scary note of everyone having all of these things because they’re so prominent and And I was aware to some extent how widespread it is, but those numbers are still surprising to me. And so, if you’re part of the vast majority of the population, almost everyone that has them either in the active stage, which seems to be less likely, or the dormant stage, what to do about it?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:29:59]:
Yeah. Well, it’s keeping your cells healthy, but just looking at the mechanisms of how they persist. So, we have We’ve touched on that topic of autophagy. So when we look at our cells, our cells contain a very important process called autophagy. And what autophagy is doing is basically continually rebuilding cells. And there are things that stimulate autophagy. Some stress stimulates autophagy to cause this. So our cells are constantly pulling worn-out proteins and parts, and basically it pulls all these parts.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:30:42]:
It’s like you can imagine a little alien inside your cells and it’s pulling the worn-out stuff and it’s throwing them into a trash bin called a lysosome that digests it down to the component amino acids, fats, carbohydrates, and then we use it, reuse it because our cells are really frugal. So when our cells are stressed, like when we exercise, like when we fast, like when we, and certain kinds of chemical substances from the we eat, the natural things, it stimulates autophagy. So healthy cells depend on cycles of stress, being active during the daytime, but then recovery at night. And, you know, most all of training is based on stress, recovery, stress, recovery, stress, recovery. And as you do that, you refine yourselves. What you’re doing is optimizing autophagy. So it’s a really important process. Without it, your body would last a few days.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:31:45]:
That’s it. If it stopped right now, we wouldn’t be here. So autophagy is important for cellular maintenance, but it’s also important for protecting the cell. So autophagy, that trash can that we call a lysosome, it can take Viruses, bacteria, things that have invaded the cell and throw them in that lysosome and digest them down and use the parts. So autophagy, a process, part of autophagy called xenophagy, is protecting ourselves. So it’s not just our immune system, our cells can defend themselves. But eons of time, the bacteria and the viruses and others have gotten really smart and they’ve found ways to subvert autophagy. And the biggest way they do that is going in the cell, walling themselves off before they get thrown in the trash can, and going dormant.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:32:49]:
And if they’re dormant, they’re not using resources. They’re not pulling nutrients from the cell and damaging the cell, and they can just quietly do that. And it’s a really common survival mechanism. At any given point in time, 60% of the mass of microbes on Earth are in a dormant state. Yeah. So most things are dormant. They’re just waiting for an opportunity. They’re just hanging out inside of ourselves.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:33:18]:
And part of that is like going back to Borrelia again. So say you really haven’t noticed any problems and you’re healthy and you’re feeling good, and then you get another tick bite. Well, that tick circulates saliva throughout your system, and that’s a signal that causes these things to reactivate and get out and go and get on board that tick so they can go to another host. So that’s part of that life cycle.

Nick Urban [00:33:50]:
How fast is this happening?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:33:51]:
Pretty fast. Yeah, I mean, your blood, you circulate blood within a minute. I mean, it’s really fast. So your blood is a highway. It’s moving things around. It’s not moving just all the stuff you need. It’s moving microbes too.

Nick Urban [00:34:05]:
too. So like if it’s dormant in your body, and I guess this wouldn’t probably apply to a mosquito that is injecting whatever into your bloodstream, but like if the parasite, whatever parasite or whatever microbe it is, is dormant, it’s not able to reactivate and then leave in time, like in a really quick time span.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:34:30]:
Oh, you gotta remember, you know, go, go back. thousands of years. And humans, they might have a tick stuck on for days. So there is time. But various microbes have found various different ways, and survival and persistence has appeared to be a big deal. We’re still learning a lot. So I’m giving you an overview of a theoretical explanation for chronic illness that is based on examining literally hundreds and hundreds of studies, putting together these little pieces. So everything that I’m telling you can be verified by a clinical study that somebody has looked at that little piece of the puzzle.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:35:19]:
So when I look at my big 1,000-piece puzzle of how all of it works, I’m looking at about 90% of the picture now. So there are some things that we’re still learning, but we do know that it is well documented that many, many microbes can go dormant inside cells. And it’s not just in humans, it’s virtually every living organism on Earth have this. Probably the biggest evidence is though our mitochondria. Our mitochondria were once bacteria. And very interestingly, they have traced our mitochondria genetically to an ancient species of Rickettsia. Rickettsia is an ancient relative of Rickettsia that causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever. So we’ve been having a relationship with bacteria living inside of ourselves almost from the beginning.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:36:17]:
So this shouldn’t be so far-fetched for people to think about.

Nick Urban [00:36:21]:
The reason they go dormant is because once they’re in your by going dormant, they’re no longer subject to autophagy. They’re not going to be thrown in the trash can and recycled and turned out into whatever the cell needs. Right. Because that’s also fascinating about autophagy in itself. Like your different cellular components, the things that make up your cell, they, once they’re no longer doing their job, they get tossed in the trash bin and then they don’t just become whatever they were previously. Your cell intelligently decides how to allocate those resources, what it needs to produce.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:36:51]:
Correct. Correct. Yeah. So that is a constant threat. But interestingly, when cells are stressed from eating a poor diet, being stressed, not sleeping, high cortisol levels, all of these things disrupt our autophagy.

Nick Urban [00:37:10]:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:37:11]:
So when we look at all of the organic compounds, foreign compounds that we were talking about, these things initially stimulate autophagy because they’re breaking down the cell, but it breaks the autophagy machinery. So it eventually destroys the cell. So when you disrupt autophagy, what happens is when the cell is stressed and autophagy is working overtime and starts to break down, you’re also taxing your mitochondria, those ancient or ancient bacteria. You’re taxing them, you’re bleeding down their energy capacity. So you’re really, it’s like you’re putting a triple load on your battery. And so the cell becomes energy deprived, and that is the signal. And different bacteria, it’s different for different microbes, but that is part of the signal for these things to reactivate and start breaking down the cell because it’s food. And then emerging, invading other cells, breaking down tissues.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:38:20]:
So when you look at illness, Yes. All aspects of all chronic illness are related to impaired autophagy, and all aspects of all chronic illness are manifest as symptoms, as inflammation, as hormone imbalances. So it’s all tied to this cellular stress. And what I’m finding is connections to various different illnesses with these stealth microbes and this idea of the potential reactivation as being a core of it.

Nick Urban [00:38:53]:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:38:54]:
So impaired autophagy, cellular stress, and in many illnesses, I think what we’re going to find over the next couple of decades is more and more and more connections to not specific, like this microbe causes this illness. That happens in acute infections, but reactivation of lots of different things. I mean, you look at MS, so multiple sclerosis is when the myelin sheath, the insulation of the nerve is damaged and the nerve can’t properly conduct impulses. So we have all these crazy neurological symptoms. That sheath is a cell called an oligodendrocyte in the brain or a Schwann cell in the rest of the body. We know that Borrelia invades and can go dormant inside oligodendrocytes. That has been proven. But we also know that Chlamydia can do that.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:39:55]:
Mycoplasmas can do that. Epstein-Barr can do that. Why do they do that? Because myelin is a nutrient. And if they can’t get to it until that cell is stressed, they’re going to wait for it until they can get what they need. And when they do, they start breaking down that cell and that insulation that’s so important for our nerves goes away and our nerves start shorting out. So So, you know, it’s just all these little connections. It’s just pretty fascinating when you really get into it.

Nick Urban [00:40:26]:
How do the microbes know that the cell is stressed? Is it like a voltage change or some kind of chemical signal they’re secreting? And how does the microbe pick up on that and decide that’s when to reactivate? Does it have like a sensor or something?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:40:39]:
Different chemicals, different signals for different things. It’s been worked out for herpes viruses as well, as much as anything, but it appears to be the energy status of the mitochondria. And the function of the cell and other signals that that stressed cell is giving off to know that, hey, it’s our time. Let’s go.

Nick Urban [00:41:06]:
And then you also mentioned that there’s a number of different conditions that are associated with like, at least the symptoms associated with stealth infection like this. Is it an association or is it causing Like, is the stealth infection causing the symptoms and triggering the progression or even the initial issue, say, around chronic fatigue or any of the other ones? Or is it like, okay, you already have chronic fatigue, your cells are in a more stressed state, and therefore, it’s a prime target for these pathogens to invade?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:41:38]:
Yeah. That’s in that 10% that we still don’t know the details of. We do know that, you know, When you look at the body as a cellular organism and cells are responsible, the cells do everything in the body. Everything that happens in the body is due to cells. When you stress cells by bad nutrients, overloading them with fat and carbohydrates that are unnatural, toxic substances, not sleeping, running high cortisol levels, not moving or moving excessively, Then you start to stress that cell, and different cells in the body may be stressed differently, so it’s different manifestations of illness. So how far that microbe factor goes, we don’t know yet. That’s still in that 10%. Again, I think all of this will be defined, but if you look at it logically, When you start looking at illness, so petrochemicals, bad food, all of those kinds of things are affecting every cell in the body.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:42:51]:
High cortisol and bad sleep, it’s affecting every cell in the body. So your whole body is breaking down. But why do people get specific symptoms and specific illnesses? So this is a theory, not something that is You know, we know a lot, but not enough for me to say, oh, this is absolutely how it is. But think about it this way. So Borrelia invades oligodendrocytes, chondrocytes, the cells that build our cartilage. It likes collagen. It needs certain nutrients. So it’s going to invade specific cells in the body.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:43:31]:
Bartonella is a very different bacteria. It invades cells that line blood vessels. vessels, and it scavenges red blood cells. And Epstein-Barr, chlamydia, they like nerve cells. So you look at this spread of many possible stealth pathogens that we’re all exposed to in a lifetime, and we all pick up different ones. Different ones of those microbes are invading different cells in the body. So if you have widespread stress, yeah, you’re going to have some symptoms of that from cellular dysfunction. But once you start reactivating those microbes, that could explain why different people get different symptoms.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:44:21]:
It might be that we’re, it depends on what microbes that you have picked up in your lifetime. Now, Again, that’s theory. You know, I’m just looking at a logical explanation that might help us understand something, but it really fits if you think about it.

Nick Urban [00:44:41]:
So, a lot of people talk about either you have germ theory camp on one side, you have terrain theory camp on the other side, and it seems like there could be a nuance where they’re actually highly linked. And if you have poor terrain, you’re more susceptible to the germs and perhaps even to make that a layer more nuanced, it’s not just the overall organism per se, it could be the terrain of your blood vessels or the terrain of your gut or the terrain of these different parts of the body.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:45:08]:
Right.

Nick Urban [00:45:08]:
And, if you have a weaker terrain there, you’re more susceptible to germs there, to microbes there. And, as a result, you may develop conditions that can start there and they can go dormant or they can be active. And then, Perhaps if that microbe has the ability, it can further compromise your immune system or leave that particular area of the body, travel through the bloodstream, go elsewhere in the body and predispose other tissues and cell types to infection.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:45:39]:
And all of these stealth pathogens, they invade our immune cells. Why do they do that? To manipulate the chemical messengers called cytokines. kinds so that they can harness the immune system in their favor. That’s been very well documented that microbes invade immune cells of various kinds. Different microbes invade different immune cells. It’s been documented for Borrelia, Epstein-Barr, virtually all of them. So yeah, they’re manipulating the immune system. They’re working to create an environment out of your body that is favorable for microbes.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:46:20]:
growth. And, and you know, that, that in a nutshell, I think is a lot of what chronic illness is.

Nick Urban [00:46:28]:
Dr. Ross, you said Bartonella, Babesia, and a bunch of others a bunch of times. Am I correct? Are those types of bacteria or I guess microbes in the category of Lyme or what’s believed to be responsible for Lyme? Where do those fit into the picture?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:46:45]:
You know, I mentioned these because these are the ones that are people, we’ve got a lot of information on them already. But you go outside of that, if you go, okay, Lyme microbes are over there, let’s look and see at other players. There’s mycoplasmas, chlamydias, there’s just a whole range of other microbes that behave like this. So I tend to talk about those things just because I’ve studied them a lot and I know about them. Bartonella is carried by some ticks, but that’s not where most people get it. It’s considered a Lyme co-infection, but most people are picking it up from dogs and cats and and other sources. So it is a bacteria, but it behaves very differently and invades different cells in the body than Borrelia. Now Babesia is a protozoa.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:47:38]:
And so it’s a distant relative of malaria, but it’s been infecting humans a lot more for a lot longer than malaria. malaria. And that’s a good comparison because a lot of people are now testing for Babesia. I learned about Babesia in medical school. It was a footnote that said, yeah, some people get it from ticks, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. It doesn’t really make people sick. It was pretty much ignored. And so what they’re basically saying is, we haven’t really studied it in chronic illness, but it doesn’t cause much in the way of acute But now that we recognize it, a lot of people are testing it.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:48:23]:
They’re hitting them really hard with anti-malaria drugs, and it’s not working in the same way. Here’s why. So when you look at malaria, it’s more virulent, which means we have less immunity to it. Growth, when it hits the body, is explosive. And fast growth is the key to antimicrobials, antibiotics working. So malaria is explosive growth. So the anti-malaria drugs work quite well for it, though it becomes very resistant very quickly. Babesia comparatively is really slow, just like Borrelia.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:49:08]:
It’s slow, so slow. It controls its growth so it can survive without causing symptoms in the body.

Nick Urban [00:49:14]:
That’s well-proven.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:49:18]:
So when you look at something slow-growing, the anti-malaria drugs don’t work for it in the same way. And that’s a problem with antibiotics. Everybody says, oh, well, it’s bacteria. Let’s use antibiotics. Antibiotics depend on fast growth. So if you get a respiratory infection and happen to get Streptococcus on top of that and you’ve got a pneumococcal pneumonia, it’s growing really fast.

Nick Urban [00:49:44]:
Yeah.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:49:45]:
It’s turning over. It’s doubling its mass every 20 minutes. So somebody can get really sick really fast, and your immune system can be overwhelmed by that. The immune system. So that bacteria, its strategy is we need to grow fast enough to overwhelm the immune system. So antibiotics work really well for that. Antibiotics depend on fast growth. The faster the microbe is growing, the quicker it can get under control.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:50:17]:
So with Within 2 or 3 days, somebody’s starting to get better and then their immune system can catch up and take over. When you look at Borrelia, it turns over, it doubles its mass every 12 to 24 hours. 20 minutes for one, 12 to 24 hours for another. So it’s really resistant to antibiotics. So a lot of people that even if you get symptoms after a tick bite and you get an antibiotic, 20% of people still get sick later. We know that. But I think even with antibiotics, most people probably get some of those bacteria in their system. Now, granted, if you use the antibiotics after a tick bite, which I think is very reasonable, you’re probably going to knock down the load, which means your body gets seeded with fewer of them, but you’re probably still getting So, Bill, you’ve managed to freak me out about this.

Nick Urban [00:51:20]:
This is like something that I was aware of and I didn’t realize how big of an issue it is. And we’ve talked about how antibiotics are not going to be the one-size-fits-all solution for a lot of these. What are the solutions that do actually work, whether it’s obviously the basics of keeping cellular stress low by getting the right nutrition, the right sleep, the right movement, the right light exposure, all the things that people have heard a million times, What else can we do to help us?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:51:47]:
How to take care of yourselves. Where I was by age 49 was what I call past the boiling point. So what I call the boiling point is when someone, and that’s just a name I’ve given it, it’s not a technical term obviously, But there’s a point that cellular stress is causing microbe reactivation, and the reactivated microbes are driving the cellular stress that it becomes a self-sustaining vicious cycle. And so the microbes are active throughout the body. The immune system is back on board trying to control this, but they’re popping in and out. It’s why symptoms, you can have one symptom in one place one day and it’s gone, and then it’s in the next place another other day. So the body is trying to fight this, but you’re talking about a behind-the-8-ball situation that the body’s already stressed. You’re vulnerable at that time.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:52:55]:
For me, it was 20 years of taking night call and not sleeping almost continuously for 20 years finally caught up with me. Aging is a factor. And everything, my entire body was falling apart. So at point, changing my health habits, trying to get more sleep, trying to eat better, all of those things helped, but they didn’t solve the problem. And I looked at a lot of options. I tried antibiotics at one point. It just made me sicker. And just by default, I ended up reading a book and did some research on herbal medicine, really having low expectations.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:53:42]:
But did this robust protocol, not just herbs, like high-grade botanical concentrated extracts, really potent stuff and combinations of different things. And I started getting better. And over a 5-year period, I rebuilt my body from a nearly destroyed state to a complete normal state of health. And I’ve been able to maintain that ever sense. So what are the herbs doing that nothing else can do? The herbs, you have to understand, and here again, we’re talking about not your average grade grocery store herbs, we’re talking about high-grade botanical extracts. It’s the chemistry of the plant. And second to that, medicinal mushrooms act very similarly. So basically you’re borrowing the plant’s defense and regulatory system.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:54:36]:
So it’s not one chemical like an antibiotic, it’s hundreds or even thousands of chemicals, and what the plant is doing for that. So plants don’t have a cellular immune system, they have a chemical immune system. And so they’re building out chemicals to affect a wide range of pathogens, bacteria, viruses, protozoa, yeast, everything that could threaten that plant. And it varies depending on that kind of stress in the plant’s environment. But there are also chemicals that are protecting the plant’s cells from free radicals, from toxic substances, from abnormal radiation, just from all of these stress factors that we’re talking about. The plant is building that protective system. So when we take that in our body, it’s doing the same thing for us. But there’s an intelligence about it.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:55:32]:
And I think this is really, really important that when we take an herb, we’re borrowing that intelligence built into into that different kind of immune system. So it’s selective for pathogens, but it doesn’t affect our normal flora. And because it’s not one chemical, it’s hundreds or even thousands, we’ve never seen resistance to an herb. So it’s potent antimicrobial properties, and that’s been documented, well documented by scientific studies, but it is selective. So it doesn’t wreck your gut like antibiotics. do. And it’s protecting your cells. It doesn’t wreck your mitochondria like antibiotics do, and it doesn’t generate resistant pathogens like antibiotics do.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:56:24]:
So you can take them a long time. Right. So I’ve now been taking this kind of herbal medicine, botanical medicine for almost 20 years. And I’ve experienced some of the best health in the past decade that I’ve had in my Hmm. And so I like to talk about it because it’s been pretty profound. And just looking at the research of the plants, we know so much. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of years of use of these plants. We know more about the herbs that we are commonly using than we do about any drug on the planet.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:57:04]:
And a lot of people don’t appreciate that. There is lots of science looking at the mechanisms of these things work. So here, when you look at this thing we call herbs, it ranges everything from culinary herbs and plants in food all the way to plants that have chemical properties that are very strong or even poisonous. I tend to stay away from that spectrum. I like herbs that we define as adaptogens or adaptogenic. And what that means is their primary properties are protecting our cells, but they don’t have chemicals that have a drug-like effect, which many herbs do. A lot of people are using herbal medicine like St. John’s wort and things like that to have a drug-like effect.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:57:57]:
So one of the qualifications of an adaptogen is it doesn’t have that. And what that means is you can take it for a long time and it has a very low potential for toxicity. And many of these things have very good antimicrobial properties. So it’s It’s a perfect fit for keeping this stuff that you may have harbored away in your system in check. It gives you that extra. So it’s not only protecting your cells, it is helping you to keep any microbe activity contained, which is really valuable.

Nick Urban [00:58:38]:
Bill, so I’ve heard you talk about these and distinguish them specifically by calling among them, adaptogenic herbs with antimicrobial properties. Now, some astute listeners listening in will be thinking, okay, yeah, I know what adaptogens are. I’ve heard of adaptogens. Maybe I take some. I’ve heard of the ashwagandhas, the rhodiolas, the ginsengs, the different forms around the world. But these are not just constrained to those. What are some examples of things that fall into this category?

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:59:06]:
All right. Yeah, we hear a lot about adaptogens. I think everybody’s familiar with that word now. So, the definition of an adaptogen is something that increases stamina and resilience, and they do that in different ways. So each plant has a little bit different quality. They do that by protecting our cells. So the second qualification is not having drug-like effects. You don’t want to take something, you don’t want to feel an effect.

Dr. Bill Rawls [00:59:39]:
You just want to feel better. And that’s what adaptogens do. And the third is they balance our stress So that’s a thing that defines an adaptogen as a true adaptogen is does it affect our stress hormones? So when you look at rhodiola, ashwagandha, ginseng, one of the classic adaptogens, they have chemicals. So we’re getting the regulatory hormones that the plant is using too. So many of those chemical substances are very much like our chemical messengers. So some plants have things that feed back to our hypothalamus, our stress thermostat, and just basically say, okay, calm it down a little bit. Just chill out, relax, calm down. So that’s the effect of a true adaptogen.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:00:35]:
So there are medicinal mushrooms that have this effect like reishi, cordyceps. So there is a long list of adaptogens. So those are some, just some of the off the top of my list. But when I started looking at these plants that had antimicrobial properties, they’re adaptogenic. And the thing that they don’t always have is that stress, direct stress inhibition. So they may be adaptogenic. They protect cells. They protect our cells from vagrant microbes, all of these kinds of things, but they may not have quite the stress relief.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:01:15]:
It’s like Turmeric. Turmeric would be a really good adaptogenic herb that helps your body adapt to stress. We think of it as being anti-inflammatory. It has some direct anti-inflammatory, but it’s just a great cell protectant. But there are others, herbs that have really impressive antimicrobial properties that have been studied, like Japanese knotweed, Chinese skullcap. Actually, ginger does have some really, really nice antimicrobial properties.

Nick Urban [01:01:47]:
Interesting.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:01:48]:
properties. One that’s commonly used for Lyme is cat’s claw, or Sarracenia aporilla. There’s a long list of them. Andrographis, wonderful antiviral. But so they’re not defined as true adaptogens, so I tend to call them adaptogenic antimicrobials. But even the margins of that are starting to blur because I’m funding research that shows that ashwagandha and others do have really good antimicrobial properties. But a lot of it depends on the stress of the plant’s environment, what kind of stress factors and microbes it’s having to deal with. So we look at those stresses and that can tell us a little bit about the plant.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:02:33]:
So rhodiola, that’s a favorite adaptogen. It typically comes as source from Siberia. But guess what? It grows up in Alaska too. They found it naturally there. They’ve also found it along the Appalachian Mountains.

Nick Urban [01:02:53]:
Sure.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:02:54]:
So a lot of plants grow in a lot of places around the world, but it typically grows at high altitudes. And so there’s a lot of physical stress in those environments, but it’s cold. There’s not as much microbe stress, so it’s not as good an antimicrobial. Does it have some properties? Yep. Yep. Has some antiviral properties, but it’s not as good as say Japanese knotweed or cat’s claw. It’s like cat’s claw is from the Amazon. Boy, that’s a hot, warm environment.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:03:25]:
A lot of microbes there, a lot of bacteria. So it’s a stronger antimicrobial. So a lot of it is influenced by the plant’s environment and how it chooses to make chemicals to solve those problems. So plants are solving problems with chemistry. But some of that can be protecting the plant. Poison ivy is probably a really great antimicrobial, but we’re not going to use that one as a medicine because it has these other toxic chemicals in it that just aren’t compatible for us. So the things that we define as herbs, medicinal herbs, are things that humans have been exposed to for thousands and thousands of years, and we have And are these working?

Nick Urban [01:04:16]:
Obviously, we understand the chemistry layer. Are there other layers that they’re working on as well, like these herbs specifically?

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:04:23]:
Probably. There are different messaging components. What I’ve studied and what the science is telling us is a lot about the phytochemistry of the herb and how that is protecting ourselves, helping ourselves function better, that sort of thing. But interestingly, You know, a lot of, when you look at herbal products, they typically get thrown on the shelf with vitamin B and all the other nutrients and that sort of thing. And they’re 2 different things. So vitamin supplements, those kinds of things, those are nutrients that our cells need to function. So when you look at herbs, they are not nutrient dense. They don’t have nutrients that cells need to function.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:05:14]:
What we want from an herb is that protective phytochemistry. So it’s a totally different thing. But if the phytochemistry is protecting cells, then the nutrient demand is actually lower. So we don’t need as much nutrient to, because our cells aren’t stressed. So it’s the phytochemistry that we’re looking for. So the problem with a lot of products is you’re just not getting a good quality product and you’re not getting the full spectrum or concentration of that really important phytochemistry that you need. To do what the herb is supposed to do. And I think that’s why a lot of people try herbs and go, eh, didn’t really do much.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:05:55]:
One, they’re not feeling an effect unless you’re getting a phytochemical like caffeine that causes you to be stimulated or sedated like kava. So those are more, those would be what we call effector herbs. They have chemicals that are causing us to have a specific effect. But we’re looking for adaptogens that normalize functions, protect ourselves. Those are the things to take long-term that you’re going to get the most benefit from.

Nick Urban [01:06:27]:
And it seems like if you were taking this approach, it would make sense to make sure you’re getting your essential nutrients on board, your vitamins, your minerals, your fatty acids, your amino acids, because if you don’t get them over time, that’s going to become a cellular stress. And if if you avoid that cellular stress by making sure that you’re replete with nutrients, then perhaps the adaptogens with antimicrobial properties will work more effectively and vice versa.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:06:53]:
No doubt. Yeah, absolutely. Best place to get a good variety of nutrients is eating a very, very diverse diet as much as you can and eating a lot of plants. I think that’s where people go wrong. They’re not eating enough plants. And, when I say plants, I’m talking The stems and leaves and roots, not the seeds. So seeds are a different thing. And so for hundreds of thousands of years, we ate a foraged food diet, and that’s what our cells are actually programmed for.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:07:30]:
So it’s all in the programming. The nutrients we need are what our cells are programmed for. So our cells were programmed by several hundred thousands of years of eating a foraged food diet. which was about 2/3 plant matter and about 1/3 very lean animal matter, not just the meat, every part that they could actually get nutrition from. But so average on most areas on Earth, humans were eating up to 500 plants a year, different plants. They were eating anything that they could eat that they discovered wasn’t poisonous and might have some calories. But what they weren’t getting was calories. So wild foods don’t make calories for some other creature.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:08:24]:
They’re very, very frugal. So plant matter and animal matter too was very low in calories. So they had to eat a lot of plant matter just to survive. So what they were getting was an enormous spectrum of phytochemicals. It’s like they were eating herbs every day by the bucketful. Something to think about. Yeah.

Nick Urban [01:08:49]:
And the people who live in the more extreme environments too, they’re naturally going to be exposed to say wild rhodiola or wild ginseng or whatever’s around them. And they’ll be, of course, they’re not going to be eating pounds and pounds of it, but they’ll be eating it with their meal. And perhaps they’re getting sort of like bioactive levels because they’re eating enough of it when it’s fresh.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:09:07]:
They were getting an enormous diversity and enormous amount of fiber. And we did well like that. A lot of people think that humans stopped foraging because it was hard and wasn’t a good way to live. Actually, it sustained humans for hundreds of thousands of years, but very gradually our populations grew enough that it became unsustainable. And that’s the point that we started farming. But once you start farming, you can’t roam around and look for food anymore. You’re stuck where the farm is. So once we did that, it changed everything.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:09:48]:
And that happened about 10,000 years ago, starting in the Fertile Crescent with wheat. But that’s only been 10,000 years. That hasn’t had an enormous influence, as much influence on our genetic programming as that ancient diet. But what we farmed were seeds because you could store them over the winter and you feed them to animals and it changed everything.

Nick Urban [01:10:14]:
Bill, I want to make this practical for people. If they want to go about implementing this into their routine, we’ve already mentioned how important it is to cover your bases, to have the basics down, the sleep, the nutrition, the light, the exercise, all that kind of stuff, the diet. Then on top of that, are these adaptogens with antimicrobial peptides, are these things that you like to run year-round, perhaps not at the full therapeutic dose, but at a lower dose, perhaps the full dose? I’ll let you decide what, how to actually approach that and anything else to make sure that we’re getting that level of protection from those herbs and the lifestyle? And then also, is it common to see Herxheimer or die-off reactions when people start the herbs, or is that a sign that they’re going too aggressive?

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:11:02]:
Yeah, it is highly variable. And I think Herxheimer can be different in different people, and it’s more complicated than just bacterial die-off. Die-off. It’s also cellular die-off. There’s a lot of things happening and it really varies from person to person. It seems to be stronger with antibiotics because there’s a bigger killing factor, but it can happen with herbs too. But most people, if they’re just, unless you’re recovering from a chronic illness, if you are taking just a basic level of herbs, of botanical extracts, you’re probably not going to feel that. And that’s not not desirable.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:11:43]:
We try to avoid that as much as we can. But, start simple with something like turmeric. And, one of the products I formulated, I put in another herb called Boswellia that complements the turmeric that really is great for controlling inflammation. But, the Boswellia has some really nice antimicrobial trivial properties. That’s a great place to start. Start with your adaptogens and know just getting some chaga in your coffee probably isn’t going to quite do the things that a standardized extract is going to get you. But hey, it tastes good and that’s great. So, I think get it any way you can, enjoy them too.

Nick Urban [01:12:33]:
Perfect. Well, Dr. Bill Rawls, if people want to check out your work, your books, your programs, Where do you want to send them?

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:12:39]:
For this audience, probably my book, The Cellular Wellness Solution, which has got a lot of stuff in it. It basically has this story about cells and why it’s important. It’s a primer for understanding herbal therapy from a scientific point of view. And it has your basic things of diet and everything to go along with it and just some problem-solving part too. And then, I have a website, RawlsMD.com, that I tend to put as much information as I can out there. And then, a commercial website called VitalPlan.com that we sell products and protocols chiefly for helping people overcome these really challenging health conditions.

Nick Urban [01:13:32]:
I’ve got a couple more rapid-fire questions All right. What is the number one most underrated adaptogen?

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:13:41]:
Oh, there’s, they’re all good. But I think the medicinal mushrooms like reishi, reishi is just, it’s so well tolerated. People are getting reishi in their coffee, but it’s, taking it as a standardized extract is good too. Really great antiviral properties, immune modulating, But when you look at all of these things, they’re anti-cancer too. And we didn’t really get to the connections between stealth microbes and cancer, but it is very startling to read the science. So reishi has been studied in Japan and found to have some of the most potent anti-cancer substances on the face of the earth. So it’s a really interesting one.

Nick Urban [01:14:29]:
What’s one thing that you do every single day for your cells that most health optimizers don’t?

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:14:36]:
People are exercising. Most people are getting a good diet. I mean, in particular, in sleep and all that’s really important. But probably, I think the things that are missing most is people don’t appreciate this micro factor and they’re not taking the herbal therapy, the botanical extracts, in the concentrations that they could and recognizing the benefits.

Nick Urban [01:15:04]:
What’s a piece of health advice that everyone repeats that makes cellular stress worse?

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:15:11]:
Their focus on the symptoms and the dysfunction instead of the causes. You know, it’s so much of our whole system is, okay, I’m sick. I need to test and find out what’s wrong so I can get an intervention to fix me. And it’s chasing the dysfunction. You need to get to the cause of dysfunction. And that’s the root of the cellular stress, the diet, and all these other things that we talk about, including taking the herbs.

Nick Urban [01:15:42]:
We were talking offline earlier today about kiteboarding. We’re both kiteboarders.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:15:47]:
Yeah.

Nick Urban [01:15:48]:
If you had to choose between clean air, a forest, or open water, which would you Well, I like all of them.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:15:55]:
I mean, where I am right now is surrounded by trees and it’s on a little salt marsh that I can jump in a boat and be kitesurfing in 10 minutes.

Nick Urban [01:16:05]:
Perfect. Well, Dr. Bill Rawls, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It’s a pleasure learning about your work, this less discussed facet of health that I think deserves a lot more attention. So, thank you for your work and for joining me today.

Dr. Bill Rawls [01:16:19]:
Thank you for the opportunity. I really always enjoy Sharing this.

Nick Urban [01:16:23]:
And thank you all for sharing your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. Until next time, be an outlier. Thanks for tuning in to High Performance Longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their healthspan. You can find all the episodes show notes, and resources mentioned at outlier.com. Until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.