And he spoke with all the Chiefs of the tribes and he was trying to get an idea about how many women die whilst giving childbirth. In his report, he basically said, I could not find a single instance where a child died during childbirth or a woman died during childbirth. This is the true health report where critical appraisal fuels true freedom. Hello everyone, and welcome to the True Health Podcast. I AM your host, Dr. Andrew Kaufman, and today I have a guest that is really near and dear to my heart because of the amazing work that he’s produced.

And this gentleman I’m going to introduce now comes from the academic world, really in naturopathic area of medicine. But he, even in that setting, he realized that not everything added up. And he’s done an amazing job over the past several years researching germ theory, contagion and related scientific issues with amazing depth, precision and comprehensiveness. And his book, which I have right here, can youn Catch a Cold? And I’m speaking about none other than Daniel Reutes, is what I consider required reading for anyone’s education, including adults who are unfamiliar with this. But certainly it has become required reading for my family in terms of our home education, and I would strongly recommend you do the same.

So let me bring to the stage to have a great and interesting discussion. Daniel Royce. Hi, Dr. Kaufman. Thanks for the wonderful introduction. Pleasure to be speaking with you again and I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you and yeah, have an interesting discussion. Continue off from our previous chats on your podcast and my podcast. Yes, I’ve been looking forward to it as well. And you know, please feel free to call me Andy. I don’t prefer to go by titles, especially when, you know, they don’t mean so much these days. Daniel. So, you know, we’ve certainly had a lot of discussions and we’ve looked at a lot of similar things and I feel like in many ways we’ve been in parallel and our paths have obviously crossed many times.

So I think it would be good to kind of start off and, you know, tell us a little bit about the main areas of content and perhaps some of your main conclusions from your book and all the research that you’ve done that have kind of led to this, where you’re at now in your career. Yeah, the book was essentially inspired by people like yourself and Dr. Tom Cowan, Dr. Sam and Mark Bailey, and various others who I heard talking about this idea in 2020 about contagion and germ theory. And this was something that was readily discussed in my undergraduate qualification when I was studying naturopathic medicine.

And funnily enough, this is in all of the naturopathic textbooks, like the fundamental textbooks written by the Eclectics all the way up until, like, the 1950s and 60s. This was sort of readily discussed, and that certainly followed through into my undergraduate discussion and qualifications and then even, to an extent, in my postgraduate education as well. So I started a degree or a master’s degree in Chinese medicine and acupuncture. And when I was studying that, this is a qualification that I may go back and finish off, I never actually got around to finishing it. But throughout the time I was studying there, contagion was never mentioned once.

Viruses and germs and things were never mentioned once. So there’s. I mean, this was a master’s degree at one of Australia’s leading universities. So, you know, this concept of contagion seems to be strictly related to Western medicine. You don’t see it being spoken about in naturopathic medicine or Chinese medicine or even Ayurvedic medicine. So when I heard you and others talking about this, I had to go and find the evidence because what I was taught in my undergraduate degree was very different to what Western medicine said. And I dismissed what I was actually taught in my undergraduate qualification because I thought I was there to learn science and I thought natural medicine’s got it wrong.

So I went forth for over a decade in clinic and teaching under the guise that it was either one thing was right, so it was just the germ theory, or there was a duality there. There was germ theory and terrain theory. And when I went looking for the evidence, I was really surprised to find that there was very little, if any, evidence to demonstrate contagion. From the way that we’re told that it’s a microorganism being passed between people, there may be other things going on, but that was essentially the foundation and the premise of the book was just looking at all the studies that I could find and then exploring other ideas about why people may or may not get ill.

Well, now, of course, this is very fascinating and you bring up something that I’ve mentioned occasionally, but I think many people out there may not fully realize. But I think what you said is in traditional Chinese medicine, as well as in Ayurvedic medicine, at a minimum, there is no concept of germs and contagion related to illness, Correct? Yeah. There are things called external pathogenic factors in Chinese medicine, but they never specifically talk about a germ. Like they would say that you would be exposed to, say, cold wind or damp Heat or something like this in the environment, which would cause a physiological response.

But there’s no mention of microorganisms as such. Now that. That’s even more interesting because there is a statistical association between changes in the temperature and humidity and the onset of cold and flu season, right? Yeah, there is. And there’s actually some pretty interesting experiments and things that have been done to demonstrate physiological changes when tissue is exposed to changes in humidity and temperature. When temperature and humidity changes, it dries out the respiratory tract. And there’s actually a video on YouTube that people can look up which demonstrates this. Again, it’s in a lab. I think this is common knowledge.

Like, in the last couple of months, I’ve had several people ask me what to do for nosebleeds. Right. Because that’s one of the physiologic responses to the very dry conditions of this time of year, right? Yeah, absolutely. The argument is that that dry, cold weather makes you more susceptible to pathogens floating around in the air. So they discard this knowledge that your mucous membranes dried out and it shuts down mucocillary clearance and you get a buildup of particulate matter in your lungs. They really sort of don’t think about that. Will discuss that. Gets cast aside. And it’s all to do with the microorganism in the air.

And interestingly, when these changes in temperature and humidity occur, there’s frequently an increase in the particulate matter, the PM 2.5, in a lot of these areas, like China, for example, in the wintertime, when the pandemic broke out, there were some of these meteorological phenomena occurring. But it also happens that it coincided with a huge increase in this particulate matter. And we know that the PM 2.5 exposure can cause respiratory symptoms that are identical to the cold and flu. The particulate matter you’re talking about, this is pollution, like industrial pollution. Pollution, yeah. So I spent quite a lot of time over in Asia, Southeast Asia.

And in the wintertime they burn a lot of crop fields. And also in the wintertime, you get more of an accumulation of that pollution from, like, cities and factories and car exhaust and tire dust and these kinds of things, because you don’t get the movement of the air closest to the ground up into the atmosphere. That sort of effect or phenomena is not as prevalent or prominent as you would see in the warmer months. And then in the warmer months as well, you have more rain. So that washes a lot of the particulate matter out of the air.

That’s not really considered when it Comes to cold and flu. So even though you’ve got more of that particulate matter in the air in the wintertime, they say, well, it’s. They. I’m talking about mainstream medicine here. Their claim is that a virus is piggybacking on the particulate matter, and it’s the virus on the matter that you inhale that causes the illness, not the particulate matter itself. So it’s kind of like a catch 22, really. Like which. Which one is it? Is it the viruses, or is it the particulate matter? Well, I think we know which one it is, since one of those entities is real and the other one is only theoretical or imaginary.

Yeah, that’s right. There was a video, actually, Dr. Kaufman, that people might be interested in looking at online. So this is an experiment from, like, 11 years ago, and it actually shows what we’re talking about here. The reduction in mucociliary clearance in lung tissue when there’s changes in humidity and temperature. The impact of reduced temperature and humidity on mucociliary transport is shown very clearly in this experiment, which compares the behavior of two tracheal samples. The first on the left is at normal humidity. The second at slightly reduced humidity, 90%, only 10% below normal. You will see that when the relative humidity of air flowing over the trachea is below 100% for a long period, the mucous layer will dry out.

Of course, this prevents proper mucociliary transport, leaving potentially infectious debris stuck in the airway as the clip starts. The right trachea has been exposed to a constant airflow at lower humidity for 15 minutes. Although you can see tiny beating cilia flickering in the background of the both clips at this stage, debris in the mucus of the right clip are stationary. Mucus transport is essentially stopped. The dark spots moving quickly across the left clip now show debris being cleared by effective mucociliary transport after only an hour at the lower humidity, the mucus layer at the right has completely dried out.

So if that happens in wintertime and you’re not clearing out as much of the gunk you’re inhaling in the air, they wouldn’t stand to reason that there would be other mechanisms that would have to take place to compensate for that loss in mucociliary clearance, and I think this video really exemplifies that very well. You really need to have repetition to get these ideas across, because it’s so foreign to what we’ve been entrained to throughout our life that it’s hard to break down some of those beliefs or those deeply ingrained thoughts that we thought were factual. Right.

Because they were told to us as if they were factual. And it’s hard to dissolve the bonds of those things into our way of thinking. So it’s really good to look at the material different ways and see it over and over again until it starts to make sense and that you can start to shed the preconceived notions about what’s really going on, on with health. Yeah. And I’m even. I think I said this last time we were chatting that I’m at the point now where it doesn’t matter to me if there is a microorganism floating through the air making people sick or there’s not, because the way that I would approach dealing with the situation is exactly the same.

So what I’m saying is here that the human body requires certain things to function and to flourish and to be vital and to be healthy. And if there is a germ, you would do all of those things to protect yourself against it. And if there’s not, you would still do all the exact same things. You would behave the same. You would do the same preventative and proactive health measures if there was no germ. So if there’s a germ, you want to strengthen your immune system. If there’s not, well, then you want to strengthen your systems of elimination and detoxification.

And it just so happens that the way you do that is essentially exactly the same. And this is also true of any disease, really. So I know when I was teaching, it was like, if someone had cardiovascular disease or diabetes or autoimmune disease or whatever, it’s like, oh, you treat it this way, you do it this way, you do this test, you do that supplement, blah, blah, blah. And now I’m at the point where I had to get out of clinical practice, because if a hundred people came to me with the same, like, 100 different conditions, 99% of what I would do would be exactly the same for every single person.

All the recommendations would be essentially the same. There may be some very minor individualistic changes for each person, but it was very hard for me to sit there day in, day out, just giving essentially the same advice to all of my clients. Because when you give those things to people and they’re willing to do them, then the body starts to heal itself. And what. Those things are very simple. They’re very easy. They’re usually cheap or free. But the problem is that a lot of people don’t do them for those Very reasons. Now if everyone did do that, I don’t know if we would have this burgeoning epidemic of chronic disease and possibly even these problems with so called acute diseases like the cold and flu and bronchitis and various other illnesses like that.

Well, even if those were the only thing they’re, you know, it’s only lasts a few days. I mean, if you are chronically ill and in bad health then, then it could be a much different experience. But for most people who are generally in good health, it’s a minor nuisance. You made one really important point in my opinion, which is that the body heals itself and there’s really nothing else that can take action for our body’s healing. Right. It has to be our own cells, tissues and organs that actually take any action to heal. You can’t make new cells for our body and implant them and they work.

Right. It’s like there’s no such technology. Our body’s the only thing that takes action. And of course we need to give it the right materials and not give it harmful things. But when those things, those inputs, right, that doesn’t have to be a physical substance, it could be sunshine too. But those conditions allow our body to actually carry out the healing. Now, that being said, I want to play devil’s advocate, not for my thinking, but for someone else who would ask this question. So that’s all well and good, but if the germs are there, wouldn’t you also want to add antibiotics to that equation or perhaps even vaccines if you thought they could actually do what they’re claimed to do? Yeah, you could, you certainly could do that if that was the case, if that was the reality of the situation.

And I think that is what a free, democratic, scientifically minded society would do, is say, look, here are two options. Option one is to take care of yourself and eat well and exercise and do all the right things. So the government and the health bodies would say that. And they would also say because of this potential issue here about things in the environment that may make you sick, we also want to play a part and we’re going to make sure that there is a minimum of air pollution and we’re going to make sure that we’re using sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices and we’re going to move away from monocrop farming so there’s not poison being sprayed on your food and we’re going to make sure that your houses are built out of natural building material and all of these things because we really care about the health of the people.

And we’ve got to do everything we can to minimize the risk of infectious diseases. And if all that fails, if everything we do as a society together, who’s working towards a common good, if all of that fails, well, then there’s a vaccine and then there’s an antibiotic. It’s like our last resort, but we don’t do that. We pollute the environment, we pollute the air, we pollute the water and the food supply, and we’re all walking around in synthetic clothing and living in houses which are toxic to us. And then people get sick and go, right, here’s an antibiotic.

Here’s the first step that everyone should take. And if you don’t take that first step, well, then you’re crazy. There would be two very different ways that we would see society and medicine and the approach to healthcare if we were truly focused on making sure that people were healthy. It doesn’t seem to be that way to me. But in saying that, I do have to give, like, the peak health bodies in the government some credit, Dr. Kaufman, because these things that we’re talking about, the essential fundamental factors and principles that a human body needs to thrive and survive, are all listed on the government websites.

They’re all there. But people choose not to. To listen to that advice because they’re under the impression that it’s not really important. And the only way you can be healthy is by consulting with someone who’s in a white coat with a prescription pad and a scalpel. They are the gatekeepers of health. And all those other things don’t matter because we’ve been conditioned to think that way. Well, this is a really kind of interesting situation in terms of how the responsibility is doled out. And of course, ultimately, it’s always on us as individuals because it’s our. Our health, our bodies, our decisions of what we do, regardless of whomever else might give us information or advice.

And I would say that for the most part, what you said about the government websites or other sources of information telling you all the things you need is almost true because they do leave out a few things. And they also do put in a little misdirection there about things. They would, for example, say that it’s good to use seed oils in place of animal fats to lower your cholesterol. Right. But notwithstanding those relatively minor points out there, and including especially on government websites, in fact, in some of my lectures, I’ve actually gone to government websites to show people where they can find this information.

They tell us and there’s plenty of research, although it’s not as much as there should be, about all of the poison chemicals that we’re exposed to in every sector of consumer goods. Right. In every sector of society. And in the research literature, there’s a lot of toxicological and other related information about these things. So on the one hand, it’s readily available, right. And anyone, if they look for it, they can find it. They can realize that this has got to make a difference in our health. But on the other hand, all of the directions about what to do to stay healthy almost always say, go see your doctor or you get checked for diabetes.

And when you know that they’re not going to ever really do anything, even just with your diet in response to that in the mainstream. So it’s like all of this information, in a way is hidden in plain sight and it’s there. But when push comes to shove and the questions are asked or somebody makes an important policy, it’s not related to that. It’s related to the profiteering products and services that are offered in the allopathic system. Yeah, it is hidden in plain sight. And it’s interesting that when people think about what is it that I need to do to be healthy? No one ever really thinks about those simple things.

They always go to the extreme things like what drug do I need, or what injection do I need, or what surgery do I need, or what specialist do I need to go and see? Their first point of call is never what am I eating? Or what am I being exposed to in the environment that I should maybe minimize my exposure to, or how do I support my body’s natural capacity to detoxify itself and heal itself? When, whenever we think about human health, we get confused. But if you were to ever think about, like an animal, for example, and let’s say there was a bunch of sick animals in like a paddock somewhere, there was a bunch of cows that were ill and they all fell ill with the same symptoms and they’re all dying.

And you came along and you are tasked with working out what was going on. Well, maybe the first thing you would do is go and test the water supply for poisons, for example, in the stream that runs through the paddock. And if you found some poison in the stream, the first thing you would do is to take the poison out of the stream and then you would see what happens. Did the animals get better? Oh, yes, they did. Great. Well, we found the problem. But when it comes to human health, you say, hey everybody, there’s poison in the water supply.

There’s poison in the air, there’s poison in the food, there’s poison in your home. There’s all these toxins and things you’re being exposed to. Maybe we should minimize our exposure to them and maybe we should focus on implementing infrastructure that minimizes their use. And people sort of just discount that and go, no, it couldn’t be that simple. It’s got to be something lurking in the shadows. It’s got to be a microorganism. There was a really interesting movie and again, I don’t watch a lot of sort of movies and things, but sometimes I think again, it’s like truth in plain sight.

There was a movie, I think, back in 2019 that I just watched, came out in 2019 and it’s got Mark Ruffalo and it’s called Dark Waters. Have you heard about this movie? I’m not familiar with it, actually. So in it, that very situation happened. There was a farmer and all his cows are dying. And he went to an environmental lawyer. This is a true story. And the environmental lawyer did some investigations and found out that there was a chemical plant up the road producing Teflon. The dupont. Yes, pfoas. Pfoas. And they realized that that was poisoning the cows and it was also poisoning the local town’s water supply.

And the people in the town were getting sick. And that turned into a massive issue over in the States and many, many years of back and forth in the courts trying to remove this chemical from the water supply. And yeah, at the end of the movie, they basically said PFOAS are really toxic to your health. And Teflon, which was designed as a waterproofing agent for tanks in World War II, is really bad for your health. And it’s in every single person now because these chemicals are man made and they don’t break down. And we know that this particular PFOA causes XYZ disease, but there’s still 600 of them that are out there being used that we don’t have any data on that people are being exposed to.

Wouldn’t it make sense if we’re seeing a rapid increase in chronic illnesses that our first point of call for getting to the bottom of this would be to remove the poison out of the environment. But it just doesn’t seem to be a priority, which is really quite perplexing to me. Well, Daniel, it is perplexing and I have another anecdote related to this to cause further perplexity. But the. Have you heard of biosolids? Biosolids no. Yeah. So in wastewater treatment plants, in addition to getting sewage, they get effluent water from manufacturing plants, including plants that make things like PFOAs.

And in the water treatment process, the solids are separated and form into this sludge. And then this sludge is processed into a product that is sold as a fertilizer. And it’s called biosolids. And in fact, it’s also mixed with potting soils. And even if you go into a gardening store in the United States and you could by organic potting soil, and it could have 10 or 20% biosolids. Now, these biosolids, because of all of the chemical inputs that come to the sewage treatment plants, they’ve been tested and shown to have high levels of things like PFOAS and many other toxic substances.

But they’ve been sold as cheap soil amendments to farmers, even industrial farmers. And so there was this one farmer, and this was somewhere out West, I don’t remember exactly in the US and he had been using this on his land. And this investigative journalist crew found out about this and they went to interview him and they tested his soil and found all these chemicals, told him about it, etc. Etc. And asked him if he was gonna do anything about it. And he said right there, he’s going to keep using it on his land and keep growing food there and selling it.

And it was just, it was crazy. Like, even the look on his face when he said that, it was like you could tell he had to disconnect himself from reality for a minute to say that. And maybe he couldn’t face the fact that, oh my God, I poisoned thousands and thousands of people unwittingly. Right. And I can’t accept that, so I’ll just keep doing it and pretend that’s not happening. Yeah, we’re so disconnected from reality, Dr. Kaufman, or Andy. I mean, last year alone, 3 billion kilograms of pesticides were sprayed on our food supply. And doctors in the mainstream health system are walking around scratching their heads, going, we don’t know why everyone’s so sick.

Well, could it be the 3 billion kilograms of poison that gets sprayed on the food, on the crops, on the soil which enters into the waterways every year? Could it be that even if it’s not, we should really seriously consider doing things differently to make sure we’re not being exposed to these things? And why are we even sort of entertaining these concepts and going down this line of thinking? One of the reasons I do this is because I’m not convinced that there is disease in nature. And if There is. It’s the exception to the rule. So I think there was a Lancet report that came out a couple of years ago and it said that 96 or 97% of the world’s population, population now has one health condition and only 3% of the population are truly healthy.

They have no illnesses whatsoever. I think once upon a time in the not so distant past that it was the other way that 97% of the world’s population was free from disease and 3% or maybe less of the people were disease ridden. So that the disease is the exception to the rule. And then if you did get sick because your body was in a relatively good state of health and you had vital tissue, if you got an injury or something like this, your body would heal itself very rapidly. And there are countless examples of this published in the literature where anthropologists went into untouched or uncontacted native tribes and just observed the people.

And some of the things they observed there were very perplexing to them and it didn’t match up with what they were being told about disease and illness and even infectious diseases. So if we look at how did they live, why were they healthy? What were the differences between them and us today? Well, yeah, being exposed to those poisons and things and a processed and refined food supply, not living out in nature, not getting enough sun exposure, we’re not moving our bodies enough. I mean, these are all the very simple things that they were doing that were not so to me, it’s like, let’s go and try to mimic or live as close to how they were living when they didn’t have disease and just see what happens.

But again, it doesn’t seem to be of high importance to any of these people who claim to be for health. Right. Well, you know, of course those authorities with profit and power motives are not really for that. But, but you know, the average individual really is not thinking about it this way. And usually what I’m told by people is that, oh, you know, native indigenous peoples who lived before the Industrial Revolution and before modern medical science had very short lifespans. That’s generally what people believe to be true. And you know, obviously there are some natural things.

There could be times of famine where food supply is short and that obviously is not good for the health. You mentioned trauma. And of course, if you’re living in nature and especially if you’re doing things, things like hunting and cultivating and climbing trees, there’s going to be injuries. But I’ve been in the workers comp evaluation game before and I saw that the people were very sick whose injuries didn’t heal, injured workers who ended up ever seeing me. They weren’t just your simple cases, they were protracted, complicated cases because that was where I specialized in. But all those people were in terrible health and they’d never healed from this injury.

And that’s why they were pursuing this compensation. But I don’t think we even really know what nutrition is required to be in a good state of health. But this is the potential, really. And an example that we can illustrate this that’s a little bit more concrete is heart disease. Prior to, I believe, 1905, there were zero heart attacks reported in any medical publication in the United States. In other words, it wasn’t a thing in nature. Right. It’s something that we created through some kind of poisoning. But if I walked around the street and asked people about heart attacks, like have heart attacks always existed as long as man has existed? They would probably think, yes, that it’s just a normal, it’s one of the things that would kill us because we’re not immortal.

And speaking of that, and I’d love to hear about your research on longevity, but there are many, many documented instances of not just individuals, but of having groups of individuals within certain cultures in certain geographic areas that routinely live not just above 100, but even above 120 year lifespans. Yeah, certainly reports of this in the literature going back into the 1800s, where the Imperials, that the British sent doctors and research teams to these tribes and kept good statistics after doing examinations and medical investigations on the native people. And yeah, they essentially said that they were free from disease.

They did investigations about the rates of cancer in native people. Some of these reports said that there is no cancer in nature. They couldn’t find cancer in native people. That even follows through to today where they’re doing studies on people in the Amazon. So the Somali people in Bolivia, their claim to fame is that they’re the people with the healthiest hearts in the world. And the doctors that are researching them are scratching their heads going, we don’t understand why. They don’t have diabetes, they don’t have obesity. Cancer is very rare. There’s no heart disease or any of these kinds of chronic illnesses.

But they’re living very close to how their ancestors live. So it says a lot. What is it that they’re doing that is making them healthy? Well, I don’t think it’s any one thing. I think it’s a combination of many things. And people also say, you’re right about the longevity. So people in nature live their lifespan is significantly lower than those in the West. But when you account for childhood death, the modal life expectancy in people living in nature is on par. I think it’s like three years less than the people living in the West. So if you don’t die in the first 10 years of life, your chance of living a long healthy life free from disease until the age of 80 or 90 is quite high.

I just want to clarify one thing about how those statistics are calculated in the west, because it would be surprising for most people know the amount of abortions that are conducted, and those are not counted towards infant mortality, even if they’re carried out for a baby that would have birth defects or was stillborn. So it makes it seem like in the modern era that we have a much lower childhood mortality. But that is not a true. I mean, the magnitude of the difference, if there is one, is much smaller compared to these cultures you’re talking about, and their quality of life is better.

So in these reports, like these were universities like Harvard and Duke University and like these pretty high profile universities sending out doctors and research teams to these tribes. I mean, they were, some of these anthropologists were reporting that the elderly people in their 70s, 80s, 90s, were on horseback going out hunting. They were completely fit, completely well, not a wrinkle on their face, not a gray hair on their head. So, okay, let’s just grant for a moment. You live in nature and your life expectancy might be 10 years less, let’s say even 20 years less than it is in the West.

So you live until your mid-60s instead of your mid-80s, but wouldn’t you rather live till your mid-60s and you’re healthy every single day and your quality of life is good, rather than maybe getting ill at 35 or 40 and then managing a chronic health condition for 40 years? And you’re sick and you’re tired and you’re depressed and you’re uncomfortable every single day you have to ask these questions, what sort of life do we want to live? And the other thing is, we have to realize that dying is a part of human existence. And the native people understood this and they weren’t afraid of death.

And in fact, they went to war with each other. So tribes would war, and it wasn’t because they hated each other necessarily, but it was their way of keeping the population in check. So they knew that they could maintain a population density of about 0.03 to 0.15 people per square kilometer. Any more than that and it would start to put a strain on natural resources, so the people wouldn’t be able to survive. And it would increase their risk of famine and these kinds of things. So if there was, say, many children born in that tribe in one period of time, some of these tribes would practice infant side.

They would kill their children because they knew if all these children grow up, it’s going to put the entire tribe at risk. We might all starve to death. So that’s what they did. They knew that they had to do that. It’s not a pleasant thing, but this was their understanding and their connection with the world around them. They knew it was unsustainable and a threat to their existence to do so. Fast forward to today. And we’re all so fearful of death, and we all want to live for forever. In countries like the United States, the population is 37 people per square kilometer.

In places like Japan, it’s 300 people per square kilometer. Now what would happen if the supply chain ever went down? Let’s say the Internet went down or the lights went out. How are 300 million people going to find enough food in nature to survive? It’s an impossibility to do so. We would tear through every living organism out there in the wild, trying to keep ourselves sustained. That we would quickly destroy the environment around us. And the natives knew this, and that’s why they basically kept their population numbers within a sustainable level. So these are some of the things that we need to consider about how humans should be living rather than how we want to live today.

It’s unsustainable. And I think the answer to our problems is much more simple than we realize. But unfortunately, these simple answers tend to be overlooked because we think the answer has to be far more complex than it really is. That’s right. Well, you threw me for a loop there a little bit, talking about the infanticide. And I see how, you know, that makes sense from what you’re talking about. But I think we, we could achieve that more simply with a, a thermometer. But of course, that would also skew the longevity data, depending on how prevalent that was.

But also the attrition from wars. Right. Because those are not natural deaths. Although it may be obligatory to participate in the fighting, especially for the men. Right. So it’s natural in that sense. And. But the thing about, you know, having balance with nature such that you don’t overextend the resources, because I think a lot of what we’re talking about are the things that are actually harming our health Right. Are driven by profit motive and the idea of a corporation like, you know, I’ve never seen an individual man or woman treat land or the environment this way, but they would just basically go into an area and deplete all of the resources that they found profitable and not care what was left behind or how it affected that land, the same way that they would even affect other people’s land or, you know, land that they’re not occupying by dumping things into the local waterways or exhausting it into the air and affecting everyone else.

And these practices are not necessary for progress. And they completely don’t even consider our relationship with nature and achieving that balance. And this is perhaps too a macro way of looking at the individual not respecting their own balance with nature and the fact that nature, if just left alone, will try to restore that right, which includes restoring your health after you have been exposed to all of these negative forces. Yes. Sorry, I didn’t mean to throw you into a loop with the infant side thing. But, like, that’s just an example because people will say, well, the life expectancy was less, but one of the reasons is because they, some of these tribes killed their children because they knew that they had to.

There wasn’t enough resources to go around. So by doing that, you would pull down the average life expectancy. Right. Well, look, it’s really. No, it’s no different from abortions, elective abortions. Right. And in fact, it’s for the same. You know, it has the same justification, but in one case it’s counted as mortality in the statistics, in the other one it’s not. I didn’t know about that. But that certainly would even further exaggerate, right. This incorrect belief or opinion that that way of living had much shorter lifespans. And people also point to women dying in childbirth and children dying during birth as well.

But I mean, I have found some evidence where people have gone round, like in America, for example, to the native tribes. Was it the late 1700s or early 1800s? There was like one. I remember this guy went to hundreds of different tribes and I think he said he met like over a million or 2 million natives. And he spoke with all the chiefs of the tribes and he was trying to get an idea about how many women die whilst giving childbirth and how many complications there are. And in his report, he basically said, I could not find a single instance where a child died during childbirth or a woman died during childbirth, any complications.

I couldn’t find an instance reported where there was a congenital birth defect. He couldn’t find an instance of, like, women having long, painful labor. He said it was relatively short and painless. So it didn’t go on for 36 hours. And it was this big, traumatic ordeal. It was much the opposite. I guess you could say that’s anecdotal evidence. But someone did one day go and speak to these Native people and document what he was told. Now, either that’s a fabricated story and the Native people were lying. No, no, no, no. I. I think. I. I think that.

So, first of all, culturally speaking, you know, doctors were not involved in births, right? But at some point, they became involved, but they had to have something to offer, right? And so I think the main thing was anesthesia, because that’s the original hospital births. They put you under general anesthesia, right. Which probably was ether at the time. And so it was a completely, you know, painless experience. So they have to sell it as being painful. And if you look at, like, pop culture references, right, which is very influential in our culture, you see, every time there’s a birth, there’s, like, screaming and moaning and pain, right? And then that is that every girl who grows up in our culture believes that’s the experience they’re going to have.

But what is even more compelling is the large research studies on home birth versus hospital birth. And the main difference, other than just obviously being in a familiar, comfortable setting versus a hospital, is interventions. In the hospital, they’ve got all kinds of interventions. And home births, they have almost no interventions. And in countries with socialized medicine in Europe, like in the Netherlands and other countries, they have large data sets that they can analyze for outcomes. And they have done this with hundreds of thousands of women giving birth and shown that home births are far, far safer, far, far fewer complications.

Right. And that is basically what you’re describing, because, you know, the traditional way of giving birth is similar to home birth. And even if they didn’t have, you know, an officially trained midwife, I think in most places, the tradition was that the elder women of the tribe would kind of supervise and guide the birthing process for the young woman because they already witnessed 50 or 100 births in their life, and they would share the wisdom. And through that, almost nothing ever goes wrong. Yeah, that’s right. And again, this is. So for anyone who’s interested, the instances I’m referring to here are by a gentleman called George Catlin, C A T L I N.

And he documented all of this in his work called shut your mouth and save your life. He published that in 1878. So he says he went to 150 different tribes across the United States and by his account observed in his travels over 2 million native people. So, yeah, it’s. I think all of the answers that we’re looking for, Dr. Kaufman, are already out there. We just need to go and find this information. And I think we can learn a lot from people who just used to live and exist in nature. It tells us, it gives us a good baseline that we can work from and it gives us an indication about what human health can be like and that we can exist in harmony with nature and live relatively free from disease and enjoy a good quality of life without having to interfere so much.

And that’s one of the hard things as humans that we need to unlearn is that we don’t have to be interfering all the time. We can just sort of stand back and observe and see what happens. And maybe we would see that all these things we think we need to fiddle with actually we can just leave to their own devices. And Mother Nature’s actually got it worked out pretty well. Yeah, no, it’s much more important what we don’t do than what we do. That sums it up really nicely. Well, Daniel, it’s really, it’s been an intriguing, fascinating and a thought provoking hour in this discussion and I think the viewers are.

Have a lot to consider, certainly, and a lot to look into. Do you have any place that other than definitely check out Daniel’s book Can you catch a Cold? Which is available on Amazon and any other booksellers that you want to mention or any other. Do you want to tell people about your podcast and your membership? Yeah, absolutely. So you can go to my website, which is humanly.com h u m a n l e y.com got a podcast there. I’ve got a free webinar library so people can sign up and get access to the content there.

I’m going to be starting a short course, five week short course in probably the next month or two and that’s just going to be educating people about the very simple things. Getting back to basics, talking about some of these ideas about what we’ve discussed today, the very simple things that human beings need to thrive. And yeah, a lot of these things are very cheap, inexpensive, low barrier to entry, they’re readily accessible. I’m thinking, I’m thinking that’s something I might be interested in, Daniel. Maybe. Well, actually it’ll be on your website, but if you want to have a, a dedicated link, we’ll post it when we air this interview.

Yeah, thanks Dr. Kapanel certainly send that through and it’s going to be very, very affordable for people. This is not something that’s going to be hundreds or thousands of dollars. It’s going to be something that will cost a fraction of that. And I’ve done that because I want to help educate as many people as I can. There’s only so many people I can see in clinical practice and to do it that way you might only get to see 50 or so people a week. And a lot of people can’t afford some of the consultation fees because they can be rather prohibitively expensive.

So I’m trying to take a different approach where I can say here is the sort of fundamentals and if you get all of that right, then you’re starting on the right foot forward. And once all those things have been taken care of, then if there are little things that have been, if there’s still residual things hanging around, then you can start to look at a more individualized approach. But you got to get the fundamentals right first. So that’s what the five week short course is all about. So I’ll definitely keep you posted. Well, that’s excellent. And I take a similar approach myself and you can see my terrain workshops which are the same kind of experience, very affordable option and has all the information and it’s up to you, of course, to incorporate that into your day to day life.

And that’s the only way to get the results. But I’m really glad that you provide these kind of resources as well, Daniel, and thank you so much for coming and having this discussion with me. Thanks so much, Andy. I really appreciate it. If today’s episode helped you connect some dots, stop here. Brain fog is often the result of toxic exposure. Once you understand what’s behind it, you can start taking your mind back. Watch Brain Hijackers for free@AndrewKaufman.com brain hijackers. You’ll also find a link below in the show notes. Your mind is yours. Protect it, sharpen it, trust it.
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