- in guest/interview , health by allan
Using the gerson method with Nicolette Richer
Nicolette Richer is a Gerson Method trainer. She runs several businesses; a collection of organic cafe & juice bar called the Green Moustache now with seven locations across Canada and the Richer Health Retreat Center is a sanctuary in British Columbia, offering transformational retreats for people battling cancer, diabetes, heart disease, fatigue, depression, and many other conditions. She's also the founder of Sea to Sky Thrivers, an education and support group for people and their families who want to reverse cancer and other chronic diseases. Her mission is to empower people to take their health into their own hands, to demonstrate how food can be used as healing medicine. And show people that leading a healthy lifestyle doesn't have to be boring. It can be colorful, inspiring, and fun.
Today we talk about her book, Eat Real to Heal.
Allan (1:35): Nicolette, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
Nicolette (1:40): Thanks, Allan. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Allan (1:42): I’m really excited about your book, which is Eat Real to Heal. I’m really appreciative now because more and more I’m talking to more people in the medical profession who have begun to recognize the importance of food in our health. And I really appreciate seeing a book like this where you’re actually giving us evidence and showing us how we can use food to heal ourselves.
Nicolette (2:07): I am excited by it too because the research has been there for the last hundred years, and within the medical community, they’re only taught certain things in school and they’re not taught nutrition. Even now in 2018, most doctors don’t receive more than an hour to four hours of nutritional training. So, to be able to teach food as medicine is very exciting, and more and more health professionals are definitely working at the research.
Allan (2:34): The other thing that you got to, that we’re not going to get into too much detail here, but it is a conversation point that I’ve had with my audience here on the podcast. I’m also talking about it in my book that’s coming out soon, is that it’s actually disappointing to me that we have to use a term like “whole food” or “real food” at all.
Nicolette (2:58): I agree with you. It’s so crazy. But I’ve worked with thousands of clients, and one thing that I know is most people think that they eat healthy, but once I get into their kitchens and into their cupboards and fridges, their definition of health is very, very different from my definition and probably your definition as well. This whole concept of real food I think has been so lost over the last hundred years that people think if something’s marketed or packaged as organic or whole food or vegan or gluten-free, they think that’s healthy. They’re forgetting the origins of food – it’s the stuff that comes from your garden, the bushes, the trees and the ground.
Allan (3:36): An apple doesn’t really advertise itself as heart-healthy with a label the way a box of cereal might. I could write the word “healthy” on arsenic and give it to you, and that doesn’t mean it is.
Nicolette (3:50): You’d laugh to know that we received a letter at our restaurant in the first couple of years that we were open. We’re in Canada, and it’s the FDA. The FDA is not in Canada, so I pretty much ignored it. But it pretty much told us that we need to stop using the word “healthy” in our restaurants because there’s no way to prove that our food is healthy. And at the end of the day, our food is only whole foods, 100% percent plant-based. There are no refined foods in our restaurant at all. So I just laughed at that letter that they were trying to tell us that we couldn’t use that word.
Allan (4:20): They don’t own the word, but anyway. So in your book you go through five things to know, and I really do believe that these are the critical aspects of health and wellness, particularly with regards to food. Could you go through your five things to know?
Nicolette (4:38): Yeah. At the end of the day we have to turn back to real food, so that’s the first thing. So we need to turn back to the food that grows from a seed, and then basically it’s removed from the tree, the bush, the garden, the ground. And then maybe it’s cooked slowly or roasted or turned into a super juice or a salad, and then we eat it. So it doesn’t enter into any kind of manufacturing process, other than your kitchen, or maybe a fantastic restaurant that doesn’t use any processed food. So the food needs to be real, it needs to be whole, it needs to be unprocessed, and it definitely needs to be unrefined.
The second thing that we need to do to be able to… The work that I do is to reverse disease with my clients, so we absolutely need to look at the nutritional deficiencies as well in the body. We can get a lot of our nutrients through food. However, because we’ve been eating this way for the last 50 to 75 years, our food’s really become depleted from all the processed food, but also from the farming practices. So a lot of us have these nutritional deficiencies that we need to look at. Understanding what yours are is really important. You might need to take a few supplements to be able to restore that, but most of the supplements are really around the things that help our organs already. So it’s not actually putting more nutrients; it’s not saying you need to take glutathione, because your liver actually produces that. Or glucosamine or things like this. It’s really the basics. It’s more like the digestive acids or restoring the iodine deficiency and maybe supporting your thyroid and things like that.
The third thing to look at, which is critical, is that once you start turning to real food as medicine, your body will just take it in, absorb it, it’ll love it. But then it’s going to have a counter balance, and that is that it’s going to start to flush toxins into your blood stream, out of your tissues, out of your organs. Your body is going to be changing over, your bones are going to start reabsorbing nutrients, your organs will do that. There’s a regeneration process that happens, and when that happens, your body gets flooded with these toxins and this metabolic waste. We need to get that out of our bodies quickly because most people in our society now, their organ systems, their detoxification systems aren’t really strong enough to support them in their detoxification process once you switch to real foods and clean foods. So we need to support through detoxification as well, just so we’re not putting any extra damage on the organ systems.
The fourth thing to look at is getting additional nutrients from whole foods. We do that through juicing. Juicing currently is a trend or a fad. In a lot of people’s eyes, they think that it’s showed up in the last decade and it’s going to be gone in the next. What a lot of people don’t realize is that juicing has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, back to when even medical doctors used to tell their patients to use a cheese grater and grate their vegetables and fruits. And then put it through cheese cloth and just twist the cheese cloth, and you would produce juice. What I tell people is that juice is like an IV bag of nutrients going directly into your bloodstream and being absorbed without having to affect your digestion. So juicing is critical, but the one thing I do want to say is I don’t promote juice cleanses. You need to have all the fiber and the additional carbohydrates and all the other things that come along with eating the food whole as well. So that’s important. But to restore those nutrient deficiencies that you can’t get through food alone or through supplements, juicing comes into it. And it’s critical, especially for my clients that are on a deadline, like they have a timeline to reverse their health so they can avoid a surgery, or if they have cancer or any other life threatening disease.
And then the last thing that people need to remember is stress. Stress and rest go hand in hand. For your body to be able to regenerate, it absolutely needs to be in a place of rest. We’re never going to get rid of stress, but definitely giving our body the time to recuperate and regenerate through really good sleep, taking a break from all these excessive exercising regimes that everybody loves doing, and just giving your body time to rest. So that means resting for long periods of time, and that also helps the body to regenerate as well. So when we do all of those five things, what we see is a really, really fast reversal of disease in a lot of my clients.
Allan (9:12): This protocol – I had not heard of this before your book, so I did learn a good bit here – is the Gerson Therapy and protocol. You basically present it as a five-week protocol to go through. Although the thing I’ve found is when someone tries something like this and it actually works, most of them don’t go back. But you present it as a five-week protocol. Could you tell us a little bit about Gerson protocol and exactly how someone would go about this?
Nicolette (9:44): The thing to remember with the Gerson Therapy is that it started off as the therapy for Dr. Max Gerson back in the early 1900s, when he suffered from debilitating migraines. He found that when he ate clean, real food, he wouldn’t get migraines. When he ate processed foods that are smothered in refined oils, salts and refined sugars, then that would trigger a migraine. So when other people learned about this and they started doing this and other doctors started prescribing his protocol to people with migraines, what they found was that people would have migraines, but they would often have other chronic diseases like tuberculosis and Crohn’s disease and hundreds of other disorders. But all of those disorders would clear up as well from this one so-called “migraine therapy” that Max Gerson had designed. So he became really curious, because most doctors are taught there is one diagnosis and there’s one treatment. For example, if you have a headache, you might take Tylenol or aspirin or something like that. But if you had, let’s say, another chronic disease like Crohn’s disease, you’d take an entirely different medicine that was designed for that. But what Max Gerson found is that his one protocol, which was clean, real, whole foods, no salt, no oil, no refined sugars – when you ate just lots of food in abundance like that, all these diseases would clear. So ultimately he saw that the body had this innate ability to heal itself, which he had never been taught in med school, amongst all the other students he went to school with.
The Gerson Therapy then of course became a tuberculosis care because there was a clinical trial done with 450 terminal tuberculosis patients, and they were quarantined in a medical hospital. They were administered the Gerson Therapy and all of them healed 100% percent from their incurable tuberculosis at the time. That was really one of the first trials that was done. Then it became known as the tuberculosis cure all around the world, and it was actually known as the Gerson-Sauerbruch method, and all the doctors all around the world practiced it and administered it to their patients when they could. Then of course people who had cancer started doing the Gerson Therapy, and Max Gerson started seeing a complete reversal in his patients who had cancer. And then when he had to flee from Germany just before World War II, he ended up in New York City. So he had to flee, set up practice again, and then he started treating people in the United States who had stage four terminal cancers, and then they started healing. So, it really became known as the cancer protocol after that, which consists of 13 juices every hour on the hour, all day long. And then three meals a day. There’s a liquid detox portion, which we’re going to get to later. And then there’s of course the juicing and the supplements. So, it’s a really intense protocol.
Now, when I got trained in the Gerson Therapy over a decade ago, it was really to work with people who had end stage cancer and wanted to try and reverse the disease. And those are the people who would come to me. Most people don’t come to me when they have a migraine. Most people are happy to live on their medications for long periods of time, and it’s only when they hit rock bottom that they would consider doing the Gerson method. And so, I designed the five-week program because for some of my clients I want to say, “Maybe just drink three juices a day. Eat all the food. If you want to take the supplements, you can, but if you find that you don’t want to order them, then don’t do that. And then at least do one of the coffee enemas a day to support your liver and your body to detoxify.” And what I started to see was that even when my clients with chronic diseases would do this very, very modified version of the Gerson Therapy, they would heal. And with some of the stories that I have, they made their doctors’ jaws drop and their endocrinologists’ jaws drop. They were able to cancel surgeries, they got pregnant after being told that they were infertile, they didn’t have to get hysterectomies and brain surgeries and all of that. I noticed that there was still value in doing the Gerson Therapy, even at a modified method, so I started the five-week program to teach this and I would take people through all five steps of the Gerson Therapy over five weeks. And the reason I chose five weeks is that I knew if I could get them through 30 days, that they would probably never go back to their previous lifestyle. And if I could just add one more week onto there, then they would probably stick with it for a lifetime. And that’s what I’ve come to realize, is that around 95% of my clients end up living this way and they actually can’t go back to the way that they used to live, because they find the foods they used to eat revolting and almost toxic in themselves, and they have no appetite for it.
Allan (14:35): It’s so interesting that a doctor would not recognize the body should have this innate ability to heal itself. If I cut my finger, there’s a full expectation that my body will heal the cut. If I break a bone, there’s a full expectation that if we set the bone, it will reheal. I don’t understand why the doctors wouldn’t somewhat recognize our body wants to be healthy and it’s going to do what it can to get healthy. A lot of the things that we call “chronic diseases” today are pretty much self-inflicted, for lack of a better word. And changing our food and going to real food is to me somewhat of a no-brainer at that point in time. I really do appreciate learning about this protocol. I learned something else in the book, about vegetables and a new way to cook them, because I’d never thought about what you call the “long and low” as a way to cook vegetables. It tends to be stir fry or eat them raw. Can you talk about the long and low and the value of cooking your vegetables this way?
Nicolette (15:32): With the long and low method, it’s interesting because when my clients cook it for the first time, they usually call me and they’re like, “It’s like eating baby food.” It’s quite soft and some of the vegetables even become a little bit mushy, almost like a stew. So people think that they’re losing all the nutritional value when they cook their foods for a really long time on a very low temperature. So that’s what the long and low method is. You don’t add any water when you prepare your vegetables this way. So you would chop up all the vegetables – let’s say onions and tomatoes and squash and colored greens and beans that you want to cook. And you would just layer those in a pot, and you don’t add any water and you put a lid on it. You want a tight-fitting lid so the steam is not going to escape. Then you put that on a stove and you turn it up to a medium temperature, and you just sweat the vegetables for a few minutes and you have the heat build up in the pot. Once the heat is built up, you would turn the temperature right down on your stove. Some stones are actually even too hot for this method. They run too warm, so you’d have to have a heat diffuser in between the pot and the element. Then you crank the stove right down to the lowest temperature and you just cook it for about an hour to an hour and a half this way. And what it does is that because the food is cooking in its own liquids, it’s reabsorbing its own liquids, and then pouring them back into the pot. So most of us only like to boil our vegetables or we’ve been taught by our mothers, let say, to boil vegetables, but all the nutrients get brought out and sucked out of the foods and into the water. We toss that water and then we basically just eat a bunch of fiber, with minimum nutrients left over whatever’s remaining.
Now, when you do the long and low method, you would never throw out the remaining water that naturally comes out of the vegetables. You would actually add it into a soup or you would use it as a vegetable soup broth or something like that. Or you just drink it or eat it with your meal. The reason this method is really critical is it not only helps to maximize the nutrient retention in the foods, but also when people come to me and they have a chronic disease, their digestion is really, really destroyed, and it’s probably been like that for a long time. So, similar to, let’s say a six-month-old baby, when you go to feed them the first time, number one, you would never give them raw foods. Most parents have to cook the foods. They don’t have the microbiome built up in their little bellies to be able to get down the food, to digest the food. That would be too much on a six-month-old baby, so you would cook the food and you would mush it up and then you’d give it to them. Then you’d let their microbiome built up over the next six months by introducing them to a diversity and an abundance of different fruits and vegetables. Then when they’re about a year old, that’s when you start to introduce some more of the harder to digest grains, and maybe the foods that people might have more of an allergic reaction to. You don’t give babies strawberries in the first six months of feeding them, and you don’t give babies nuts and seeds in the first six months. That’s because they’re too hard to digest, and as well their digestion can’t break that down and it might trigger often an allergic reaction to it. But that allergic reaction really comes down to having leaky gut, where your tight junctions in the digestive system are too open and they’re allowing these proteins to enter into your bloodstream. So by doing the long and low method, it’s actually like treating your digestion, just like you are treating a baby’s, and letting it become more robust slowly over time. That’s when you can start to introduce more of the raw foods after that.
Allan (19:15): I liked that for a couple of different reasons. One is, it’s simple. It’s one of those, you can set it, not necessarily forget it, but it can be doing its thing and you can be focused on something else at that time. If you were to do batch cooking, it’s brilliant for that, as you mention in the book. And the other thing is, with the current state of farming in the United States and other Western countries and how the soil is depleted and the vegetables we are buying, even when they’re organic, they don’t often have necessarily the nutrient profile that food had 80 years ago. So as a result, you want to do everything you can to retain as much of that nutrition as you can. And this is a great way to know that you’re not damaging the nutritional value of the food, because you’re in a healing mode. You’re also kind of making it easier on your digestive system to deal with the food, which means you’re probably going to absorb more. In my mind, it’s really a good win-win-win as a way to prepare vegetables.
Nicolette (20:11): Exactly. This is why I believe we see the healing happen so quickly, is because people are getting maximum nutritional value for the volume of food that they’re eating, compared to the standard American diet, which tends to be very, very high calorie, low nutrient food. This is the reverse. It’s actually very high nutrient, low calorie food. You eat it and really every bite of food that you put into your mouth is maximized on the nutritional level, and the digestibility level as well.
Allan (20:39): That’s excellent. Now I want to shift gears again. I’m sorry on this interview I’m bouncing all over the place with this, but I just found so much cool stuff in this book that I want to talk about. But anyway, you have a very interesting twist on goal-setting. Up until the time I read this I really had not given it a lot of thought, but it makes perfect sense. Can you talk a little bit about the goal-setting process that you have and how that works?
Nicolette (21:06): I use a lot of different goal-setting processes in the book. We have a few different exercises that people can do, and I find that they’re really effective and I think it’s the reason why so many of my clients stick to this as a lifestyle. Often when people are changing their diet and changing their lifestyle, they’re not looking at the outcome that they want to achieve necessarily. They’re just looking at the tasks that they need to do to be able to eventually get whatever results are down the line. I use a backcasting approach, and this is from my days in government, in sustainability planning. It’s that you look at the outcome that you want to have. Tony Robbins talks about this as well, and so many life coaches talk about this.
So one of the things that we do, number one, is just giving yourself permission. A lot of people don’t give themselves permission to do anything. They want to achieve these goals that they set for themselves, but they haven’t given themselves permission to, let’s say, buy organic food or even spend two hours cooking, or saying “No” to going to restaurants with friends and just inviting them over and cooking for them. They often feel an obligation to go to a birthday party for friends and drink the wine and eat the cheesecake and have the steak. So, this is giving them permission to say “No” to things like this and giving them permission to say “Yes” to doing everything that’s going to optimize their health to reverse their disease. One of the things in the book that we have is the permission exercise. So, you identify a goal that you want to achieve – let’s say it’s to do the Gerson Therapy for five weeks, or do the Eat Real to Heal program for five weeks. That’s your outcome. And even more specifically, it could be, “I want to lower my cholesterol by X number of points” or, “I want to reduce the insulin that I’m taking by X number of points” or, “I want to be migraine-free by this date.” It’s even better when it’s more specific because then you are more inclined to take the actions to get yourself there.
After that you actually have to identify the steps you are going to take to achieve that goal. A lot of us set these big, beautiful goals, but we don’t realize it’s a ton of sub goals that we need to also achieve. So it could be, “I give myself permission to buy a juicer by this date, and then I am going to get rid of all my pots and pans that are coated in Teflon and all the other coatings that are not conducive to optimal health. And I give myself permission to spend X number of dollars on a set of airtight stainless steel pots and pans.” Or, “I gave myself permission to tell my husband to f-off” is another one, because I can’t tell you how many women especially say, “Oh, I can’t eat like this because my husband needs his steak. He’s not going to allow me to buy organic food.” And that’s when I turn around and I’m like, “It’s the year 2018, ladies. You don’t need permission from your husbands to do anything, I’ll tell you that.” So giving yourself permission to tell your husband that if he wants to eat his steak and French fries, then he’s going to have to cook them himself. And this goes vice versa too. I don’t want to put men in a bad place. I definitely have had lots of male clients who have said that, “My wife needs me to make sure that the kids eat X, Y, and Z”, and often those foods aren’t healthy so there’s a battle in the household. So, you need to get that taken care of before you start this, because when you’re making a lifestyle change, you can’t have any of those additional stressors on your plate at the same time. So, this permission setting exercise just seems to work, and what I find is that some of my clients give themselves permission to do things just for fun, like, “I give myself permission to do this, but also to dance.” So, they sign up for a dance class. Doing these things seems abstract and not connected, but it’s often how you need to do the things that you really desire in life and allowing yourself to actually take steps to doing them. Then the outcome of that is actually tenfold; it’s 10 times greater than you could’ve ever imagined. So that’s one of the exercises that we do. There are a few other ones that we do that I’m happy to talk about.
Allan (25:11): One of them that I found extremely valuable… And I agree with the permission-based thing here, because I’ve used different words to say the same thing – “You can set a vision for yourself, and that’s where you want to go. And then you have your ‘Why’. And if you’re going to ask your family to deal with something or you know that you’re going to have to change your pace or do something a little bit different to make things happen, it’s going to affect them at some level. And so letting them know why you’re doing this.” So this is not just, “I’m doing this to make you suffer.” This is, “I’m doing this because I’m unwell, and this can’t be my future state. I need to be well.” And wellness is not just health and fitness; it’s happiness. There’s three legs of the stool that make wellness. So, the dance classes are an excellent example of, what are the things that make you happy? When you’re happy, healthy and fit, that’s the vision. That’s the thing that you put out there in the future that you wanted for yourself and you make that happen. You need the people around you to at least understand why you’re doing this, and they’re actually probably a big part of the “Why”. So once they hear that emotional part of what you’re after and the healing that you need, I can’t imagine that there’s a husband or a wife out there that’s going to say, “No, this is how I need it to be for myself.” I think if that is the case, we’ve got a much deeper problem there than just this wellness journey.
One of the other things you had in your goal-setting, which I thought was just brilliant, was, I guess you had a patient and she went away with the plan and then she came back the next time and she had not done anything. And you’d said that you asked her to do an exercise about the things that she would give up by being healthy. And because she was ill and she was out of work, she had some additional freedom that she had not had before. And she knew maybe just subconsciously, not necessarily consciously initially, that by getting healthy she would have to return back to work. I found it very interesting that there can be a downside to wellness that we have to deal with as well.
Nicolette (27:26): I’m a psych-kinesthetic facilitator as well, so that’s looking at the psychology and the kinesthetics of the body and how they go hand in hand, and really looking at how the beliefs that we have in the world, the subconscious beliefs, 95% of them guide our actions. We tend to think that it’s coming from our conscious mind and that we are these willful beings that make solid, rational decisions all the time. But most of us are really, truly operating from this 95% subconscious mindset that we have. I find that a lot of coaches when they’re working with clients, they focus just on the goal, and the outcomes they want to receive, and the tasks they need to do to get there. This takes it a step further. Any time that you are doing anything in life, when you are making a change, there’s always going to be that tradeoff you talked about. Most people don’t want to identify their tradeoff. Tim Ferriss talks about this. He talks about identifying your fears, so this this is an example of that.
In that particular case with my client, I asked, “What are the adverse consequences of achieving the goal that you set for yourself?” And in her case it was to be healed from cancer. And she said, “That’s weird. There are no adverse consequences to being healed from cancer. I’d have my health back, I’d have my life back.” And I said, “But is there any adverse consequence? You’re going to do this therapy, you’re going to be healthy. What would life look like after that?” She really thought about it and one of the things that she mentioned is that she’d have to tell her teenage kids that they’re assholes. Excuse me for swearing. But she’s like, “I’d have to be honest with them and tell them that they’re just jerks. And what kind of mother would I be if I told my kids that?” And I was like, “You’d be an honest mother, and then who knows what would come from that?” Another thing she realized as well is that she’d have to return back to work. She had never known what she wanted to do with her life, so she’d always just taken jobs to earn money but never been satisfied. She really felt that if she was cured from her cancer, she’d be at a loss. She wouldn’t know what to do, but she could never go back to just working any odd job. So for her, that was actually trying to figure out who she was and what she needed to do with her life and what she wanted to do with her life, and really to find her purpose.
Ultimately, that was something she wasn’t willing to do. And she realized that that challenge was far greater than being faced with cancer and her illness. And in the end she just said, “I’m really fine with dying.” And she made peace with it. She was in her 60s. She had sold her house, she had given up everything because her doctors had told her that she was going to die, which is fine too. At the end of the day, it’s a life journey for all of us. And she had one of the most peaceful, beautiful deaths that I’ve ever witnessed. But that was my first time being faced with a client who actually said, “The challenges of life are just not worth it being healed.” But I would say 99% of my clients say all of those adverse consequences are totally worth it. I even had one client who said, “If I heal from this, I’m going to have to tell the world that I’m gay.” And I was like, “Amazing. So are you still willing to heal from this disease?” And they were like, “Yes, I am.” And sure enough they did heal, and did come out and told the family and the community that they were gay. And they are in a wonderful place now. That was something that potentially could have stopped them from healing, if they hadn’t acknowledged that.
Allan (30:52): One of my first clients, we were seeing great results, so I was feeling really good about our progress. Then all of a sudden it’s like she started getting noticed. Family members started commenting, and she was not comfortable with that. She was not comfortable being the center of attention. She was used to being kind of in the peripheral. She would babysit her grandchild and she couldn’t keep up with the grandchild, so that’s part of the reason she came to me. She knew she needed the capacity to continue to babysit her grandchild, but she was not able to keep up with her and it was starting to trouble her whether she was going to be able to do this for her daughter. In the end though, all the comments actually turned her off. It literally just shut her down because she couldn’t handle the new her and the way people were now talking to her and about her. So she actually fell off and I was really sad to see it happen. But it was a learning experience for me of at least knowing as I go through with my clients to recognize when you get to the end of this journey, you’re not going to be the same person you were when you started.
Nicolette (32:00): I love that, especially because you got to go through that. I imagine that when you’re working with clients now you can recognize when there’s that self-sabotaging happening. That’s when you get to jump in and acknowledge and say, “What’s going on here?” And sometimes just understanding it and bringing it to light is… They’re sabotaging themselves because, “I’m not used to having all of this attention. I didn’t like it.” Instead of going off their therapy or the protocol or the lifestyle change, “I can stay with it, but let’s address this other part: I don’t like being in the limelight.” And that’s very different step forward that you would take in that way.
Allan (32:40): Absolutely. I could not let you leave this call without talking about the coffee enemas, because I’ve heard of these before, but you gave a complete protocol for it, and I’ll let them get the book to go through the protocol. But the purpose and what this does for us is really what I want to get into, because I had just considered the coffee enema a really good way to clean out the pipes, for a lack of a better word, but there’s a little bit more going on than just that.
Nicolette (33:09): There’s so much more going. We have a Nutrition and Detox coaching program, and one of the things that I teach our students who go through our training is how to do good research. So this is scientific research; it’s not just the “look on Facebook” research. It’s the diving deep into journal articles. But going further than that, how can you identify good studies from bad studies as well? Now, when it comes to the coffee enemas, it’s so funny because a lot of my clients will say, “I read about the coffee enemas after our session together and I heard that somebody died.” So, I want to address those first before we go into the coffee enema. And yes, there is a story that one woman did actually die from doing coffee enemas, but that’s because she was doing 13 of them a day. She wasn’t doing any of the food, the juicing, she wasn’t neutrifying. So she ended up probably suffering from, I imagine, an electrolyte imbalance. There is another case of a woman that burned herself because she put hot coffee into her rectum, and I highly advise not doing that. But as you can see, that’s about as far as the research goes.
There was actually a clinical trial done on coffee enemas. It was a doctor out of Austria. And the way he did it is he didn’t apply any of the other methods from the Gerson protocol, but he just applied the coffee enemas to his patients who were going through surgery. So he administered the coffee enemas prior to the surgery and then post-surgery. And what he saw is that when people did the coffee enemas, the test group needed less pain medications than the control group, and they healed faster. And there was a significant difference as well, so that’s important to note. What he said is that obviously there’s a further need for studies on the coffee enema. But if you can imagine, a lot of these studies cost $50 million dollars to do – do a double blind placebo, randomized control trial. So we’re still waiting for somebody to cough up the money to do that on the coffee enemas.
So, going into the science of the coffee enema and why you want to do them – people often ask if they can use something besides coffee. Unfortunately not. Coffee seems to be the one product that contains everything that you absolutely need. Another myth that I want to bust is that it’s not a high colonic. A high colonic is when basically you get a fire hose shoved up your butt, and it really washes out your colon, your lower intestinal tract, and it’s scrubbing away everything. So it’s really taking away your good flora, your good bacteria, and the bad bacteria. For some people a high colonic might be necessarily a few times if they really are in a terrible state, where they don’t even have the capacity to make the dietary changes and lifestyle changes to treat their disease. I’ve seen it beneficial for some people, but you can’t do colonics long-term without suffering consequences from them.
Coffee enema is not to clean out the pipe. What it does is it actually triggers your liver and supports it to detoxify. So when you do the coffee enema, you’re actually laying on your right hand side. The coffee gets transported directly to the liver through the hepatic portal system, hepatic portal vein. What the chemicals in the coffee do is they stimulate the production of bile, so more bile gets produced. There are also so many other systems that it supports. Your liver is responsible for over 500 different functions that we know of today. I guarantee there’s probably thousands of different functions that we still don’t know that the liver does. So it’s really meant to support the liver in detoxification and it’s absolutely necessary when you switch your diet to a plant-based, whole foods diet, and especially if you’re adding the juices to it as well. There’s going to be so much flushing of toxins from the tissues into your bloodstream and your liver has to take care of all of that. So if you’re already suffering from a weak liver and the liver is not functioning as well as it should, then it’s not going to be able to handle that influx of extra toxins. You absolutely need to do the coffee enema to support the liver. And that’s where the coffee enema is different from cleaning out the pipes, and it’s the one thing that our clients definitely will continue to do for the rest of their life. Even if they don’t do all the juices, even if they don’t eat all the foods perfectly cooked Gerson style, they will still continue to do the coffee enemas because they see how well it supports the body.
Allan (37:47): The protocol itself is very, very interesting, and if you’re looking to heal yourself, this is definitely something I would say, take a look at it and give it a shot. It’s five weeks, and typically if you’re talking to a doctor, they’re trying to schedule a surgery or some other type of treatment. This is an alternative that’s not going to cost you a whole lot because even though organic food does cost a little bit more, I find that you actually end up eating less of it than you would if you ate the regular food that you would buy, because it’s just so much more nutritious. In the book, you also get into supplementation, you get into a lot of other general things that we can do to deal with stress, to help ourselves through this whole thing. Each of the five things that we talked about at the very beginning of this podcast are detailed in there, all the different pieces of this protocol. They can help you. Nicolette, if someone wanted to get in touch with you, learn more about the book, learn more about the treatment center that you have, Green Moustache, the restaurants that you have and the coaching and things that you do – where would you like for me to send them?
Nicolette (38:48): For the health consulting – if somebody has a chronic illness and you’re faced with a surgery, or you’re on drugs and you want to get off them, or if you have heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, anything. So if somebody is saying you need to be on meds or you need to take out organs, give us a call at Richer Health. And you can reach us on our website at RicherHealth.ca. Now, if you are traveling and you happen to be in British Columbia, in any of our locations where we have our restaurants, we do serve 100% plant-based, organic whole foods, unrefined foods. So a lot of grandmother-style cooking in our restaurants. A lot of people who are doing the Gerson Therapy actually seek us out and they’ll come visit us at our locations, because it gives them a break from having to cook for themselves in their own kitchen. We can do it for you. So, you can check us out at GreenMoustache.com. And then for people who want to dive in and learn the practical aspects of doing the Gerson Therapy and doing this protocol as well, even if it’s the Eat Real to Heal – the modified Gerson protocol, then you can come and experience it firsthand. We teach it to you at our wellness center, and that’s located in Pemberton, BC. And you can find more information at RicherHealthRetreatCentre.com. We’re located in Whistler and Pemberton, British Columbia, Canada.
Allan (40:21): Cool. This is going to be episode 339, so you can go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/339 and I’ll be sure to have all of those links there in the show notes. Nicolette, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
Nicolette (40:37): Thank you, Allan. It’s been a pleasure listening to your podcast, and I can’t wait for your book to come out as well and have you on our podcast so we can talk more about that.
Allan (40:46): Outstanding. Thank you.
I want to leave you with just a couple of announcements. We’re fast approaching the first ever Keto Minifest here in Pensacola Beach, Florida. I’ve paired up with Carl Franklin from 2 Keto Dudes to hold a Minifest here in Pensacola Beach, Florida. This is this Friday, so if you haven’t signed up yet, you’ll want to get there and do that. There are limited seats and we’re probably going to sell this thing out. So go to 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Ketofest, and that’ll take you to the Minifest that we’re going to be holding. The invite is there. I’ve made it very cost-effective. Dinner is included, there’s a cooking class and talks from both Carl and myself. It’s going to be a really fun time. Get out of the cold, come on down to Pensacola for the weekend. This is Friday night; real easy, 4:00 to 9:00. Come on down. Again, 40PlusFitnessPodcast.com/Ketofest, and you can join Carl and I for this first Minifest, at least the first one outside of Connecticut.
Also, I need you on my launch team. We’re building that launch team up, we’re getting closer and closer. The book is coming probably around the end of November. So far my publishers tell me we’re straight on track. We’ll know a lot more once I lock the manuscript, which I’ll be doing in just a few days here. Once we’ve locked the manuscript, we start work to get the thing put into the print versions and it’ll be ready to go. So, you want to go to WellnessRoadmapBook.com and join the launch team. WellnessRoadmapBook.com. I’ll be putting new stuff out there about the book, doing all the marketing things and letting people know what’s going on. But if you really want to be on the inside and watch what happens with the publishing of a book and be a part of the conversation with me as we go, go to WellnessRoadmapBook.com and join the launch team. Thank you.
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