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Outstanding health with Michael Galitzer

Dr Michael Galitzer is a nationally recognized expert on energy medicine and integrative medicine. He also works in hormone replacement therapy. He understands how our bodies work from a biochemical perspective and from an energy perspective.  On this episode, we discuss his book, Outstanding Health.

Allan (08:41): Dr. Galitzer, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dr Galitzer (08:44): Good morning. Glad to be here.

Allan (08:45): Your book is Outstanding Health Longevity Guide for staying young, healthy, and sexy for the rest of your life. I love the subtitle of that book. Actually, I love the whole title of the book because it is something that we often sort of sell ourselves short. I want to stay healthy or I want to be healthy. But your premise in the book is that we should really try to have an optimum energetic life where we're feeling and looking younger.

Dr Galitzer (09:14): Allan, I ask a lot of my patients said, do you want to live to a hundred and they say not if I'm going to be in a wheelchair or a walker. So it's obvious that really what people want is outstanding health. People really want to be outstanding and what they do, whether it be his appearance or at their job. We reward outstanding. We get Super Bowl rings, Academy Awards, Gold Metals, and so what people really want is outstanding health and if you do have outstanding health, you will get longevity. And so that's why the title was picked. Outstanding Health.

Allan (09:49): I recently interviewed Dr Lee Know about Mitochondria. And so this whole concept of “it's the energy stupid” concept is in my head lately. If you can maximize the energy in your body and fix that, that tends to have the downstream effect of fixing a lot of our other health issues. In the book, you have a pretty comprehensive quiz that someone can go through that will direct them to bits of the book that are going to be more relevant to them.

I like the way you put it up front end of saying, let's not just aim for okay, let's aim for awesome. You have some energy self-boosting tips in the book. Would you mind going through some of those tips?

Dr Galitzer (10:38): Certainly. Exercise is one of them. In my practice, I ask my patients what kind of exercise do you do? And some people say, I walk the dog? That's not really sufficient. Exercise has been one of the proven techniques to help improve energy. There are various different ways of exercising. I found that the high interval intensity exercise seems to work really, really well. You go fast and then you go slow. So maybe 30 seconds on a treadmill or an elliptical fast and then a minute slow. You can do the same thing with walking or running. I find that for health, high interval intensity exercise seems to be the optimal way. There's less time involved and you're more efficient.

Breathing is really, really key. The word I don't like and I hear it every time, is stress. I'd rather look at a better word like challenge. I think if you use a different word you get to a different place to describe how you're feeling. Stress is really about people being fearful. Ultimately when they say they're stressed or a stressed out, they’re not accepting the moment for what it is. And when we do get into that state, we tend to shallow breathe, or hardly breathe at all. You can't really think when you breathe and when you think you really don't breathe well. Most people in that challenge state tend to have very shallow breathing. And I think breathing is really, really key. The Yoga breathing, where you're breathing into your stomach is really, really important. So slow, deep breaths. Maybe inhale for a count of four, hold it for a count of four and then slowly exhale for a count of four. So the slower and a deeper the breath, the better. So again, breathe. Really, really important.

I find meditation really important as another exercise, as an energy booster. All successful people seem to meditate. Meditation really is about quieting your mind and concentrating on your breath.

Sleep maybe the most important or one of the most important energy boosting techniques because the lack of sleep seems to really interfere with everything in our life. Create the ideal situation in your bedroom, take certain supplements for sleep, magnesium, Melatonin, calming your mind before you go to sleep. Instead of reviewing all the frustrations of the previous day, program your subconscious in the five minutes before you go to sleep as to how you like to sleep, how you can sleep through the night and feel when you wake up. I find sleep to be a really, really critical. You want to stop the alcohol if you're drinking four hours before you go to sleep. We want to stop all food three hours before we go to sleep. You want your digestive system to be as quiet as possible.

Another thing that would help with energy would be the whole concept of EMF, electromagnetic pollution. We're exposed to so many different things everyday. One example would be somebody talking to their friend on a smartphone with it to the ear for about an hour. These things are really, really interfering with our health, and are draining our energy. We need to look at this whole concept with EMF, Wifi, a cell towers. You can go to a website called and tennis search.com. And you can type in your address and just notice so many antennas and cell towers are in your area. We're really getting hit left and right with ems and they're a huge, huge energy drain.

And finally, people with mercury fillings. Not only as mercury toxic, mercury in the presence of saliva causes electrical currents. So then if you're in front of a computer or on your cell phone, those those EMF currents are amplified and can override currents in our brain creating all sorts of difficulties, especially with sleep. So getting those mercury fillings out has two different purposes: 1) to eliminate the toxic effect of mercury; and 2) to eliminate the electrical current caused by cell phones and computers.

Allan (15:16): Other things in the book, Outstand Health that I thought were really, really important were you were talking about having more time for loved ones. Just something as simple as that and having more fun, taking your time with your life, and being more in the moment. I think those are the types of things that when look at all of this, if all we did was work, workout, eat and sleep, it wouldn't be that great, but taking the time to enjoy the life that you have. Pulls it all together for me.

You also got into all of the toxins, which would include, the EMF. I want to get into a little bit more detail later.

On the mercury fillings, everybody in my generation probably has them. We need to ask ourselves are they causing us a problem? We probably need to have them removed and removed safely because there's a right way and wrong way to deal with mercury fillings.
Now on the EMF, because it is a topic I really haven't spent a lot of time with on the show. And I hear a lot about it. It isn’t only about the fact there is an electronic signal around me. We have an energy going through our systems. We have our own frequencies. Can you kind of explain what EMF is doing to us? Almost all of us use a cell phone and a lot of people leave their cell phone right by their head on the nightstand at night or on their hip in their pocket. What are these things doing to us and what can we do to protect ourselves?

Dr Galitzer (17:06): Well, first of all, I think that the stronger we are energetically, the more we're able to be less affected by these EMF. I see a lot of people in my office that have some serious illnesses and the more serious the illness, the more you're affected by the EMF, whether it be computers or cell phones. Certainly for computers, you don't want to be on your computer late at night. The blue light that comes out of computers can interfere with your sleep. There are programs like Flux where you can eliminate the blue and get it into a warmer orange. Smart phones and tablets also have the capability to get rid of the blue. Basically you set the time on his computers and phones to a switch from the blue to the orange. And so you have an orange screen say at 10 at night until seven in the morning. I think those are really, really helpful. I think your real energy drain is from the EMF source, smartphones and computers. People with heart cardiovascular illnesses should not be putting their cell phone in their shirt pocket right over the heart area. It’s not a great idea. They distort our natural energy field.

There are smart meters that are outside the home that to interfere with the energy flow.

Where we're most sensitive to the EMF is the bedroom. We can really deal with a lot during our waking day/working day. But the bedroom should be electrically quiet. You shouldn't have your smart phone as an alarm clock in your bedroom. You shouldn't have electric alarm clock near the head of the bed. If you can maximize sleep, you should have your head to the north when you're sleeping.

So no electric blankets, no waterbeds, which were more common in the seventies and eighties. All these things really contribute to a electrical energy that interferes with sleep. A lot of people unplug Wifi. We have Wifi here but Ethernet (a cable) would be a better way to connect to the Internet. If you do have Wifi, unplug it every night. So I think it's really about how do you maximize your EMF situation within your home.

In Alternative Medicine, there's always a hot topic every year. This year it's microbiomes and everybody talks about the microbiome of your gut. Put the good bacteria into your gut. Well, how about the microbiome of your house or your home? And that's where the EMF thing is really, really key. So the less exposure to get in your home, the indoor pollution, the healthier you're going to be.

Allan (20:05): Yeah. So we're getting these from our phones, from our computers, from our IPADS, from our Wifi, the Bluetooth, and even from some electrical currents. And then obviously if there's a tower or electrical wires near our home, those are going to be emitting some EMF as well. So the more we can reduce our exposure to those, the better off we're going to be. Also, the better health we have, the more resilient we are going to be towards those things.

Dr Galitzer (20:32): Absolutely. You know, it's really about staying as healthy as you can. A lot of this you just can't avoid. So certainly you don't want to put the cell phone to your ear., use Bluetooth, use the speaker. The studies that have been done are basically saying, we've done these studies for one year and we see no adverse effect. Well it's cumulative and nobody has done the studies, certainly not the manufacturers, that show what happens over 10 years or so.

Allan (21:03): We’re really the first generation to come along and have long-term exposure to as much EMF. More than anyone's ever had in the history of the world because it's just getting bigger and bigger. Every year, more and more connected devices are using wireless and all these things are happening around us. My Google home sits over there and it's wireless, connected to my Wifi and so it's obviously getting a signal. My phone is getting a signal. I like keeping all that stuff down in the living room.

It's just funny you mentioned sleeping with your head toward the north, because the top of my bed is actually facing north. That's really just a coincidence. It wasn't a planned thing, but hey, I'm glad I did one thing right without actually trying.

You put it in the book six key essentials to outstanding health. Do you mind going through each of those? Because I thought these were really, really good.

Dr Galitzer (21.56): Well, first and foremost it is getting your head together, the mental, emotional aspect. As physicians, we really have the time to address that. The office visit in this business is short. As a rule medicine, traditional medicine doesn't seem to have the technology to cause people to want to change, to effect, or show them how they can change. So I think emotional mastery is key. When we talk about emotional mastery, I think purpose, passion, and gratitude are the three keys. What's your purpose? Why are you here? What's your vision? What’s your dream? I ask a lot of people I asked that question, what are you curious about? And so I think knowing your purpose and aligning with your purpose I think is one of the really, really keys to mastering your emotions.

Passion, passion is really, really key. To get excited, do what you love and love what you do. The more you can do that, the more life flows for you. There's that old thing we said as a kid, row row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. So go downstream, don't go upstream. And your boat is your body and rowing your boat. Maybe your assault, rowing your boat down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. I think that's a great thing that we said as kids and we don't say it too often as adults.

The last thing that's a really, really key is a gratitude. Being grateful. The focus of your life has got to be a being grateful for what you have as opposed to what you don't have. Do you focus on what you have or what you don't have? Do you focus on what you can control not what you can’t control? Do you focus on the past, the present or the future? Obviously it'd be ideal to spend most of your time in the present. And that brings us to the concept of mindfulness. Patients come into the office and they're always complaining. They figured, well, I’m going to see a doctor. I might as well tell them what's wrong. But it's really about what's right. The more that you get into being what's right, being grateful for what's right.

The real key emotion is love. Anger and fear ultimately a come out of the fact that there isn't enough love in your life. Do what you love and love what you do. Do you know that old Crosby Stills, Nash and Young, song, if you can't be with the one you love, love the one your with? Those are the real keys for emotional mastery.

The second part is cleansing your body. We’re exposed to toxins in the air, the water, the food. We can't quite trust the food. A lot of the food isn't organic, is full of pesticides. Glyophosate: I think the statistics are we consume 880 million pounds of glyphosate as a country, which is just really creating havoc in our bodies and our gastrointestinal system. So you’ve got to eat organic. But more importantly, you know, they're toxins in the air, the water, the food, prescription drugs or chemicals. So we've got to cleanse our bodies. But the big, one of the big things that people talk about is we've got to detox. And what I try to tell people is know we have to do drainage first.

There are three key organ systems that can allow the toxins to move out of the body. They're the liver, the kidneys, and the lymph. Liver sits higher than most people think right behind the right breast. The kidneys are in the back. And then there’s the lymph system. Most people associate lymph glands with a sore throat, but there's slim throughout the whole body. There's lymph in the breast, armpit, abdominal, and pelvic area. Toxins, first pushed out of the the cell is going to the lymph system. From there, it's a very elaborate system and the limbic system empties into the big veins under your collarbone from which they go to the liver, which can either take it into the intestines and out the stool or back into blood, kidneys and out the urine. So stimulating the drainage systems (lymph, liver, and kidneys) is key before you try to get the toxins out of the cells.

You can do lemon in your water for the liver, lots of veggies, juicing green vegetables. You should have a green juice everyday, cucumbers, celery, green apple, parsley, kale, or something like that.

For the kidneys, you’ll want lots of great water. Water is probably going to be the theme. Cape Town, South Africa is running out of water. Healthy water, you don't want distilled water because it's dead. Distilled water doesn't have any minerals in it. Filtered water. Alkaline water is pretty popular these days. There's hydrogen water out there, there's oxygen water out there, and a clean water is really, really key. Parsley helps the kidneys. Pomegranate helps kidneys. Asparagus helps the kidneys. And there's a tea called horsetail tea that helps with kidney drainage.

For the lymph I recommend no dairy. Dairy tends to clog the lymph. Deep breathing, which we've talked about previously. And exercise, bouncing, there's rebounders, trampolines, jumping jacks, jumping rope, really any kind of exercise will help lymph system.

So drainage is so important. If you try to do detox, colonics, chelation, or infrared sauna without drainage, people get sicker. It's kind of like having a bowel movement on a toilet that won’t flush, there's nowhere for the stuff to go. So drainage has to be first before you attempt to do detox. We can then proceed to getting a little more in depth with detox.

I find intravenous vitamin C to be extremely effective in helping the body, especially the liver, with the drainage. Out here in La, there are clinics all over now. Vitamin C clinic so where people can just walk in and get intravenous vitamin C. I find that to be really, really helpful. So cleansing your body of toxins is key, but the real key is to do drainage. And the more that one does drainage, the better off the body's going to be.

The third area is the gut, the health of the gastrointestinal system. Let's talk about nutrition first. I think one of the keys in our modern day lifestyle is that it is too acidic. People drink too much coffee, sugar and people are smoking cigarettes, drinking a little too much alcohol, having soft drinks which are fairly acidic. A Coca Cola has 10 teaspoons of sugar. Diet Coke has the sweeteners that really don't help anybody. So coffee, sugar, cigarettes, alcohol, soft drinks, and, that word stress again. Those are the real contributors to tissue acidity.

The more acidic our body, the less well we function. We have to get people off the acidic foods and eating more alkaline foods. Basically it's really about more fruits and vegetables. In terms of beverages, coffee, alcohol, and soft drinks are acidic. Green tea and lemon water are alkaline. So the more that we can have a alkaline foods in our diet, the less acidity we're going to have from a nutritional point of view.

And obviously, you know, stress is a major contributor. We’ve talked a little bit about things that you can do in terms of a deep breathing and meditation. Stress is really about not accepting the moment for what it is. So the less don't accept that the better we'll be.

Think of your body as a Ferrari and you really want to feed it high-octane fuel. The, the higher the octane of the nutrition that we put into our body, the healthier we're going to really going to be.

I practice a certain type of energy medicine, a German biological medicine that I started doing about 30 years ago. It was impressed upon me that the health of the body really starts with the health of the gastrointestinal system. It's a really like a triangle, Allan. It's the liver, the pancreas, and the intestines. Any part of that triangle can affect any other part of the triangle. And so, it becomes really, really important to optimize each of these key areas.

For the liver, there’s homeopathy, there's herbs, there's acupuncture that'll help all of these areas of the triangle. The pancreas makes digestive enzymes, that are really important. As a society we tend to eat a very small breakfast and very large dinners. But in terms of the energy of these organs, the pancreas is strongest in the morning and weakest at night. When you're having your large evening meal, your body has the least amount of pancreatic enzymes to help digest that food. Certainly, if you’re socializing or having a business meeting, you’ll want to take digestive enzymes help your body digest the food. Otherwise you’ll go to sleep with a lot of undigested food and have a problem falling asleep.

So we've got the, got the pancreas, and then you've got the intestines. Everybody is taking a probiotic to put the good bacteria in the colon, but to get this microbiome right. Do you eat right? How do we get the liver and the pancreas healthy.

The large intestine is where the good bacteria needs to live in balance with the Candida and the yeast. I believe the issues are in the small intestine. We call this in our kind of medicine leaky gut, which is the area around the belly button, the small intestine. People complain about gas, bloating, pain, and cramps. Food is normally absorbed through these finger-like projections called villi in the small intestine. And from there the food goes to the liver for processing. There should be tight junctions between the intestinal cells, so only perfectly digested food gets in. The intestines absorb the food, but are also barrier systems. You don't want to toxins from the outside getting into the body through the small intestine.

When the gut gets leaky, there are spaces that form between these intestinal cells allowing partially digested food and toxins to get into the body and overload the liver, and many issues happen from there. The prime contributor to leaky gut is gluten sensitivity. Blood tests won't always pick that up. When people have those kinds of symptoms, you really want to get them off of gluten hundred percent. You can’t just say well I tried to get off it, you have to do it 100 percent.

There's a lot of healing nutrients for the small intestine. Glutamine and a certain powders will really help.

Pesticides are another problem with leaky gut. I see this all the time.

So gluten, pesticides are the two primary contributors to leaky gut or leaky small intestine. You should put the good bacteria into the large intestine. Treat the leaky gut, avoid gluten, eat organic to avoid pesticides, a supplement with pancreatic enzymes, especially at night, and do the things for the liver to help it work a lot better.

The next area is we’ll talk about for creating more energized lifestyle beyond exercise, breathing, meditation, minimizing EMF, and maximizing sleep is energy medicine. I've been doing this for about 31 years. I was an emergency room doctor for 15 before that. Energy Medicine is what I've defined my practice to be. It's more than just an anti-aging, holistic practice. A health is energy number one. There is an energetic level to the body. Just like a cardiologist would do an EKG to look at a electrical heart and a neurologist to do the EEG to look at the electrical brain, there's an electrical liver, kidneys, pancreas, adrenals, and thyroid.

Look at your body as an orchestra, where the organs and glands are instruments. Some are sluggish, which you can't see on a blood test. We do blood tests on everybody or people come in with their recent blood tests. Sluggishness you can't see on a blood test, but we can see it in some of the tests that we do. We do bioimpedance, looking at body fat, phase angles, body water. And we also do something called heart rate variability, which gives us a lot of clues as to the health of what we call the autonomic or automatic or subconscious nervous system. Say your heart rate is 60 beats per minute. Would you think each beat is one second and therefore a 60 times 1 is 60? But there is variability between beats where one is a second, the next is 0.96 seconds, and the next is 1.02. That's variability. The greater our heart rate variability, the healthier the nervous system and the healthier the person's going to be.

So using these kinds of techniques, we can actually spot energetic dysfunction in the body. Once we assess the body from this point of view, certainly we would do a physical and a history on every patient, we can then use energy medicine to help people feel better. We can do homeopathy or acupuncture. Some people prefer to do muscle testing. In my office, there's a lot of use of the light therapy, sound therapy, and music therapy. Pulsed Electromagnetic Fields (PMF), which is FDA approved. Or we can use Ionized oxygen. So we use a lot of different techniques that are in the area of energy medicine.

Obviously traditional medicine uses energy medicine. Not as much in the therapy part, but the diagnostic part in it. We do MRI, x-rays, and ultrasounds. All of these are basically employing different energetic techniques to diagnose. We go a little further than that. We utilize it in the diagnostic part, but also using energy medicine to help people feel better. And basically balance the sluggishness and move from sluggishness to a healthier, more vital body. One of the important things I was trying to point out in this book is that a energy medicine can go a long way to getting people into the mode of outstanding health.

Now, the last part of the six essentials is hormonal balance. Hormones are chemical messengers. They're secreted by a certain glands and affect not only certain glands, but all the organs in the body. As you know, there's been a whole push towards a bio-identical hormones, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. Suzanne Somers popularize that in 2004. They're not the major hormones. They're the minor hormones. You can cut out my testicles I’ll still live. Cut out a lady’s ovaries, they'll still live. The majors are insulin by the pancreas, thyroid hormones, and the adrenal hormones.

You really want to keep your sugar low. You want to keep your insulin low. If you don’t, you’ll wind up in trouble with things like the high triglycerides, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, etc.

Thyroid is essential. Think of the thyroid is the fuel injection system in your car and think of the adrenals as the gas pedal and you really need both to drive the car. Thyroid is very easily assessed with blood tests. You can get a history of constipation, sluggishness, low body temperature, but the blood tests are pretty accurate.

There's a condition called Hashimoto's thyroiditis that a lot of people have these days. I don't see it as an autoimmune disease. I think that's a mistake. The body isn’t attacking itself. I see this more as a toxin, gets into the thyroid. Most likely gluten or mercury from the mercury fillings and the body attacks the toxins in the thyroid. So we pick up art antibodies in a blood test, but to tell people that they're attacking themselves, I think that’s a disservice to people. We can easily pick up thyroid dysfunction and Hashimoto's thyroiditis with blood tests and treat with thyroid supplementation. Some people like the synthroid, some people like the pig thyroid, armour thyroid, nature thyroid. Those are pretty easily treated.

The one that most people overlook is adrenal function. The adrenals sit on top of the kidneys. The adrenals are the first organ affected by stress, mental stress, emotional stress, nutritional stress, environmental stress, electromagnetic stress, physical stress, or infectious stress like virus, bacteria and yeast. Whenever there's a stressor, the adrenals are stimulated to secrete stress hormones, cortisol, and to a lesser extent, DHEA. If the stressors occur for too long a period of time or there are too many stresses occurring at the same time, the adrenals ultimately get tired. And your ability to handle stress is reduced. You can't differentiate between big stress and little stress. You overreact to little things. Stress is no longer a challenge, it becomes a threat and it’s a vicious cycle. And so I'd say that one of the key issues in the body is trying to maximize adrenal function.

The adrenals have the highest need for vitamin C in the body. So that's a must. Magnesium is really important for the adrenals. Vitamin D in some people is really important for the adrenals. And again, intravenous vitamin C may be even quicker way to strengthen the adrenals. You can't really see too much of adrenal fatigue on a blood test. People order at 8:00 AM, but Allan if somebody coming at you with a needle at 8:00 AM, your cortisol's going to go up. So the best thing to do is saliva testing before trying to diagnose adrenal dysfunction. And you get clues. Hypoglycemia as a clue for a weak adrenals. When your blood sugar drops, 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM are typical times. And sometimes it happens in the middle of the night at 3:00 AM. If you wake up, a buzzed, it's frequently adrenal dysfunction. The adrenals are overlooked. The adrenals attention.

You've really got to balance the major hormones. Low insulin, you can pick that up on a hemoglobin A1C on a blood test, which looks at your blood sugar over 90 days. Maximize your thyroid. Maximize your adrenals. So when people complain of fatigue to their doctor and the doctor will immediately put them on thyroid. And if you put a person on thyroid without treating the adrenals first their fatigue will get worse. So I find that the adrenals are probably the most important area. If I had to pick two areas of the body to really look at the liver and the adrenals. Balance out the major hormones, insulin, thyroid, and adrenal hormones first.

Bioidentical hormones can be very helpful. You want to do a blood test first. A women's started losing progesterone in their late forties, causing menstrual disorders, abnormalities of PMS, and shortened periods. And then a little later on, early fifties, there are hot flashes, night sweats, dry mucous membranes, foggy thinking. These are all signs of low estrogen. So those people after the blood test proved that these are really low can really benefit from bioidentical estrogen and progesterone. It's a little slower with men. There's a gradual decline in testosterone. In your late 50 days, certainly sixties and above, if you get a blood test, you'll see testosterone levels to be pretty low. Men will be grumpy, not have the edge they used to have, and lack the libido they used to. So combining those symptoms with a low testosterone level on a blood test would be indicative of low testosterone and testosterone should be replaced. There is either an injection once a week or as a cream everyday.

That’s the overview of a hormonal balance and how it relates to, uh, an outstanding health

Allan (43:49): That’s what is so cool about this book. It literally walks you through a quiz, then gets into what's possible, and then gets into these different things we can do. You gave us so much great information today. I really appreciate it, Dr Galitzer. If someone wanted to get in touch with you or learn more about the book, Outstanding Health, where would you like for me to send them?

Dr Galitzer (44:12): Well, you can certainly go to the website drgalitzer.com. The book is available on Amazon and again it's called Outstanding Health. My office is always available. The number Is 310-820-6042.

Allan (44:32): Cool. You can go to the 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/319 and you can get access to those links and that phone number there. So again, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Dr Galitzer (44:??): My pleasure, Allan.

 

 

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briand - May 14, 2018 Reply

8 minutes of commercials at the beginning is too much.

    allan - June 18, 2018 Reply

    Sorry about that. I just wanted to get word out about the online PT and guess I went a little overboard.

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