➡ Andrew Kaufman M.D, a health expert, discusses the popular trend of using sea moss or sea moss gel as a nutritional supplement. He explains that while sea moss contains some minerals and vitamins, the amounts are too small to make a significant difference in our diet. He also debunks claims about its health benefits, such as supporting immunity and improving gut health, stating that the evidence is weak or non-existent. Finally, he suggests that people should be cautious about health trends and always seek reliable information.

➡ The article discusses the potential benefits and risks of CMOS, a seaweed-based supplement. While some studies suggest it may have health benefits, these are not yet proven in humans. There are also potential risks, including exposure to heavy metals, inflammation from a component called carrageenan, and excessive iodine intake affecting thyroid function. The author concludes that the potential risks outweigh the unproven benefits, and does not recommend CMOS supplements.

➡ The text discusses the importance of a balanced diet and the use of trace mineral supplements, like zinc and copper, to avoid deficiencies that can lead to serious health issues. It also mentions the potential benefits of water fasting after antibiotic use to restore the body’s bacterial balance. The text further explores the potential health benefits of Quinton isotonic water and the importance of sourcing iodine from natural food sources. Lastly, it addresses the use of CMOS gel supplementation and encourages further research into the therapeutic uses of borax.

Recovering physician, plandemic whistleblower, natural healing pedagogue and legal code talker. You can call me the Truth Doctor. I’m here to shift your paradigm as I perform a radical forensic dissection, discerning fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, medicine from poison, law from legal fiction, and individualism from collectivism. This is your channel for unraveling the truth about health and science. This is the Healthy Living Livestream. Hello everyone, I’m Dr. Andrew Kaufman and it’s great to see you. For another live stream today, I’m going to be covering a lot of alternative therapies and health trends in order to debunk and uncover what the real evidence is behind these fads and to help you sift through all the information out there which may be conflicting and misleading in many ways.

And so today we’re gonna cover a supplement that is quite trendy. And in fact I hadn’t really even heard of it until one of my team members mentioned it to me recently and suggested I do a show on it. And I am referring to sea moss or sea moss gel, which is also sometimes called Irish moss. And it is a type of red seaweed or red algae. Seaweed is in fact algae and it grows in the North Atlantic coastlines and rocky areas and such and has been harvested for nutritional purposes and now developed into this new trendy supplement.

So let me bring up some slides to get into the nitty gritty on this topic. And we can see that this was in many articles. The popularity of CMOS and CMOS gel was attributed to Kim Kardashian who added it as an ingredient to smoothies and it will thicken the smoothie and increase its gelatin like consistency depending how much you add. But plenty of other celebrities have jumped on board with this trend and you can find lots of articles in the popular media on this. And so it includes many celebrities that I have not actually heard of myself being a little bit out of touch with this scene, but Bella Hadid, Haley Bieber, Winnie Harlow, Farrell Williams, Michael B.

Jordan and Lizzo and Cardi B are all on board with loving the CMOs. So why such an interest in this product? So if we look on Healthline, which is a very mainstream source of health information, we can find an article that gives kind of a comprehensive introductory synopsis of all the properties related to sea moss. And we can look first at the nutritional properties because many people advocate for the supplement saying that it has a wide variety of nutrients that are helpful or perhaps difficult to get in the diet and that it can be sort of like a nutritional supplement.

Now, in terms of having building materials or macronutrients, it has very little, almost no protein, no fat, and a little bit of carbohydrates. But they may actually just be fiber and not absorbable like sugars and starches. But it’s touted to have a variety of minerals and some vitamins. But if we look at more closely at the actual amounts of minerals in the CMOS for things that are commonly deficient like zinc and copper, we find that it’s only a very, very tiny amount, even of the official recommended daily value, which is likely below our actual requirements. So this is four full tablespoons of CMOs and we can see it only has 4% of the zinc, 3% of the copper, 1% of calcium.

So those are not going to provide sufficient amounts to make any actual real world difference. You’d have to drink gallons of the CMOS to get enough of those minerals. Now, it does have iodine, which can be difficult to get in the modern diet, and it is a vital micronutrient. Going to talk a little bit more about getting iodine from seaweed a little bit later. But in general, I have recommended for people that would benefit from some extra iodine that they don’t get from their diet to use supplements that are derived from kelp, but those are standardized with known quantities of iodine in each tablet.

But you could also, of course, incorporate some seafood into your diet on a regular but intermittent basis in order to get iodine that way. So let’s go to the next slide which summarizes the proposed or theoretical or hypothetical really benefits of this for health purposes. Now, you could see that the first bullet point actually refers to iodine and mentions thyroid function, because in order to make our thyroid hormones, we need iodine. It is a constituent of the thyroid hormone. Now, the next study here mentions immune support, may support immunity. Now, I want to caution you to any claims like this that are just general, because how can you tell if something supports your immune system and you know what is even the real function of the immune system? That’s a difficult thing to say, but it mentions a study here, so I’m going to skip ahead and show you that study which is in salmon and so that you can see what this kind of evidence actually is.

So this study is entitled Immunomodulatory effects of dietary seaweeds in lps, which is lipopolysaccharide, that is an inflammatory stimulating chemical from bacteria challenged Atlantic salmon salmo salar as determined by deep RNA sequencing of the head kidney transcriptome. And really that last phrase there, deep RNA sequencing is the operative words in the title. So what they did in this study is that they had salmon, the fish, and they gave these salmon different diets. One they gave fish meal, and the other one, it was supplemented with a mixture of seaweeds. Now, this is not specific for sea moss, which is a specific seaweed.

This is a mixture of different ones. So it’s not direct results for sea moss, but this is how far removed the evidence is from actually what we’re talking about. Now, what they did with these fish, giving them either one diet or the other, is that they challenged them by exposing them to this harmful chemical, inflammatory chemical, lps. And then after that, they measured a variety of things. So one, they measured some actual health outcomes like their blood pressure, their hemoglobin and hematocrit, which is a measure of their red blood cells and function as well as measuring their weight gain, okay, like their growth.

But the study was not really looking at those outcomes. It was really looking at the deep RNA sequencing. And what they did is they took the head kidney. Okay, And I’ll just read the sentence that describes this that’s highlighted. RNA sequencing was performed on the head kidney as major immune organ to determine transcriptomic differences in response to the immune activation. Okay, so what that means is they looked at the pattern of their expression of rna. RNA is supposed to come from DNA that it’s transcribed and it’s supposed to then be translated into proteins. But they didn’t look at the proteins.

They just looked at the RNA and said, guess what? It’s different between groups. Now, they looked at some of the particularities of those differences and they said that that means that it increased the immune function. But there was no evidence that the immune function in terms of the actual function was any different. And I’ll read the last sentence in the highlighted portion. Atlantic salmon fed with dietary seaweeds did not show major differences in performance in comparison with the fish meal fed fish. And if we go one slide further to the conclusion of that paper, it says here, in general, no major differences in performance were found in comparison with fish meal fed fish.

So the things they actually looked at actual health and performance of the animals, there were no differences whatsoever. So you see that we really cannot take away, even if we say that what is found in research in salmon applies to us, there was actual no difference in functioning, only a difference in RNA transcripts, which we don’t know the Meaning of or the significance of, if there is any significance at all. Now it goes on back to the summary of potential benefits may improve gut health. So notice how it says may in all of these, really hedging the claims.

And it says here seaweeds are a good source of live probiotic bacteria which support a healthy gut microbiome. But the thing is that no one knows how to define a healthy gut microbiome. So that is a bit of a very difficult thing to show in any research because it’s not defined and a good source of probiotic bacteria. Virtually every food that we eat has probiotic bacteria unless we sterilize it. Okay, so these are theoretical hypothetical benefits that you could make a claim about almost any food like that. Then there is may help support weight loss. And it also mentions a specific study where a compound in seaweed called flucoxanthin may have anti obesity effects.

Now in that study, it wasn’t a study of giving seaweed to animals. It was actually giving this purified chemical in high doses and it did not have a very certain effect. Even so, I don’t think that really applies directly to eating some seaweed. And we have similar things in the other studies. There was a similar study in mice looking at blood sugar, also taking that particular compound and purifying it and giving it in high concentrations. Now, even on Healthline, it says here, while the potential health benefits of CMOS are promising. Okay, so we have potential and promising.

It’s important to note that most of the research is based on seaweed or components found in marine plants, not CMOS specifically. And the studies were conducted in test tubes or animals, not in humans. So we have really no solid evidence of a clear benefit looking at that research. Now I want to give you one other example of a benefit that would be amazing if it were true. But you may hear about this, that CMOS can actually help with Parkinson’s disease. And this is all based on this one study that I’m showing here, which is done in C.

Elegans, which are nematode worms, okay. That supposedly they have a mutant version of nematode worms that is a model for Parkinson’s disease because the worms have accumulation of certain proteins and changes in their genes and they tend to move slower than other worms. And what they did in this study is give them these mutant nematode worms which are very, very tiny. They gave them some seaweed mixture and the big result is that they had more body bends per minute than the mutant worms that weren’t given the seaweed Now, I’m not sure if we’re supposed to really take this too seriously.

One, that worms would have anything to do with humans, which have, you know, a very sophisticated nervous system compared to worms, that these are mutant worms, not worms found in nature, who developed Parkinson’s disease or had any exposure to the toxins that are known to cause Parkinson’s disease. And the main outcome we’re looking at here is body bends per minute, which we, you know, could have a variety of different things that could affect that. Like for example, the arousal level of the worms could affect their activity. Right. So we can’t even say that this body bend outcome is really related to anything that we would consider Parkinsonian, like stiffness, for example.

Now even in the group that didn’t get seaweed, they still had 27 body bend, sorry, they still had 15 body bends per minute. So they were still moving substantially 15 times a minute. They weren’t so stiff that they couldn’t move. So I really think that we can’t make too much of this worm study. So if you have a relative with Parkinson’s, I would not run out and get CMOS gel for them to take. Now I want to take a few minutes to talk about the potential hazards related to CMOS gel. Now let me tell you a little bit more about it before I go there because one of the things is that it is called a gel because of this polysaccharide type of soluble fiber that is in the seaweed and it’s called carrageenan or carrageenan and I’m going to call it carrageenan today.

And if you disagree with me, you can certainly leave a comment. And carrageenan causes, when mixed with water or when boiled, turns into a gel like substance and it’s actually used frequently as a food additive as a thickening agent. So for products I think like yogurt is one example that it’s used as a thickening agent or ice cream. So if you see that on the ingredient lists, you know what it does. Now there are a lot of published studies looking at safety and toxicology of carrageenan and you’ll see that it is even cited in those studies as being a controversial issue.

But of course it’s still in the, I believe in the GRAs, generally regarded as safe category in terms of FDA regulation, which is why it could be used as a food additive. But even though short term exposure may be looked at and not shown to be a big deal when we are exposed to these things in consistent amounts over a long period of time. We don’t really know the effects. What does the research show? Interestingly, and I’m going to read the highlighted portion here from this review article about the role of carrageenan in allergies and inflammatory bowel disease.

It states carrageenan is extensively used as an inflammatory and adjuvant agent in vitro and animal experimental models for the investigation of immune processes or to assess the activity of anti inflammatory drugs. Now in case you didn’t hear that correctly, what that is saying is that if they want to test do new anti inflammatory drugs work, they take animals, they give them carrageenan which causes gut inflammation, then they give the experimental drug and see if that inflammation decreases. So it’s known to cause inflammation. Let me read on. Carrageenan can activate the innate immune pathways of inflammation, alter the gut microbiota composition and the thickness of the mucus barrier.

Clinical evidence suggests that carrageenan is involved in the pathogenesis that is the cause and clinical management of inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Indeed, food exclusion diets can be an effective therapy for disease remission. So if you avoid eating carrageenan you can actually improve your inflammatory bowel disease. So this is a pretty significant concern with eating carrageenan in terms of the inflammatory effect on the bowels. Now I told you I would also come back. Oh, not quite yet. Let me tell you about two more risks associated with CMOS and CMOS gel. And one of them has to do with the ecological role of seaweeds to filter the seawater.

So since our seawater is highly polluted these days from a variety of sources, some of the flora and fauna of the sea will absorb these contaminants and even concentrate them. And this includes a seaweed like sea moss that it can absorb and concentrate heavy metals. And this is a known risk. So if you still feel that it would be a good idea to take one of these supplements, I would strongly consider is there heavy metal testing available for the specific brand that you’re going to purchase and what do those level show? Now in this paper, which is a long paper in the section on heavy metals, I’ll read you this highlighted portion.

Exposure to contaminants is increased in perennial seaweeds like Irish moss, the regular consumption of which may lead to risk of heavy metal toxicity in humans. So if this is going to be something you’re taking on a regular basis, then you’re going to increase Your risk. And here is the actual supplemental data on the level of heavy metals in a variety of studies on different seaweeds. And the top two rows where it says Chondrus crispus, that is actually the C. Moss or the Irish moss. And you can see that in both the samples, which were both from Spain, but they were from different areas, that they showed arsenic, cadmium and lead present in the seaweed.

This, of course, can be highly variable. This was a long table looking at different types of seaweed from different areas, and you can see that there is variable content in terms of these heavy metals. So there may be some areas that are much safer than others in terms of this degree of contamination. And then I want to mention one more potential hazard. And this gets back to the iodine. So it is good that we find a dietary or nutritional source of iodine for our health, but the levels of iodine and CMOS can be actually quite high and are somewhat variable.

And this has another risky side, and this is mentioned in most of the articles about CMOs, but here we have specifically a case report published in the literature. And the problem is that for people that may have an overactive thyroid with something like Graves Disease, getting too much iodine in the diet can actually make that situation worse, as it did in this particular case. And there may be other untoward effects of having too much iodine in terms of the thyroid function. But it’s a little bit too complicated to explain the nuances here. So suffice it to say, there is a such thing as too much of a good thing when it comes to iodine and, of course, many other.

Many other things. So now that I have reviewed, really, the very limited evidence that is available about CMOs, we can see that it does contain some small amounts of some important nutrients, not enough really to be clinically significant. There are a variety of purported proposed hypothetical health benefits and claims, but none of them are really substantiated by any real evidence. They’re far removed from reality in general, although further evidence may accumulate, and I certainly always will be happy to take another look at it. And then, on the other hand, we have several potential hazards with CMOS supplements, including exposure to heavy metals, including the potential inflammatory or other unknown yet to be discovered toxicities from Carrageenan, and, of course, the risk of getting a little bit too much iodine and adverse effects on the thyroid function.

So overall, in my opinion, there is really no upside here that would convince me to take this particular supplement or recommend it to anyone else. And the risks, although you know, they are also somewhat theoretical. We do certainly have some evidence of the presence of heavy metal. We certainly have evidence of the detrimental effects of carrageenan and some evidence that at least in some people, the iodine overload was harmful. Now, if you’re looking to make sure that you get optimal nutrition without missing out on all those micronutrients, it’s important that you one, you know, have a whole food diet, that you have a lot of fat soluble vitamins in the diet, which can be difficult to get depending on your dietary consistency, and that you also use some form of micromineral or trace mineral supplement because it’s pretty much impossible to get all those minerals.

And those include things like zinc and copper, which are known to represent a significant deficiencies across the population. And in, you know, many case reports, particularly with copper deficiency, the level of copper is so low that the person has life threatening medical issues that can be reversed just by giving them some copper. So, of course, please do check out my shilajit on my website, which is an excellent source of trace minerals. And we will be shortly introducing or relaunching our new version of shilajit, as you can see from my T shirt. So please do check that out when you get a chance and I look forward to answering a couple of questions now before we wrap up.

All right, the 59 Lincoln asks, aren’t red algae blooms in the ocean, red tides, a bad thing? I think I read they are due to contaminated water runoff out of rivers. Yeah, you can see red toxic algae blooms where there’s a toxic metabolite from the algae and there are warnings to not swim on those beaches and et cetera, et cetera. But that is not the same species that we’re talking about here with Irish moss. It’s a different form of algae. All right, Y2 Kazan asks what to do after one week of antibiotics. I had an infection from a broken wisdom tooth and in order to extract it, I had to be on one week of antibiotics.

What is the best source of probiotics? Well, I would argue that you had to be on one week of antibiotics, but nevertheless, the question is, you know, how do you help your body restore its normal balance of bacteria since you killed them all with the antibiotics? So I think this is really not just a matter of eating or supplementing with probiotics, although that can be part of it. But really the bacteria is already in your body and it can repopulate itself. You don’t need to provide the bacteria from another source necessarily. Although I don’t you know, I would say that if you use something like sauerkraut juice, that would be a good source, especially if you fermented the cabbage yourself, because then it contains the local bacteria that are in your area, which would represent some of the species.

Most likely that would be in your gut anyway. But what you really need to do is have a very clean lifestyle to recover from this. And one of the things that is shown in the research to accelerate recovery and healing the quickest is water fasting. So doing, say a three day or a five day water fast after the dental procedure would probably be optimal to restore your normal balance of bacteria. All right. Mojo Curio asks great analysis of CMOs. Do you have any thoughts on Quinton isotonic water? It’s very expensive, so don’t want to waste my money.

Thank you kindly. Well, yes, Quinton isotonic water. I should really do whole show on that because this comes from the veterinary researcher who essentially took salt, seawater, filtered it, and then diluted it to match the same concentration of salt in our bodies, or normal saline. So diluted it to the concentration of normal saline and then did experiments with dogs where he bled the dogs almost completely dry and instead of giving them a blood transfusion, transfused the diluted seawater, which is the Quinton water that you mentioned. And the dogs had amazing outcomes like they all survived and they had improvement in their other health conditions after receiving these transfusions.

So one thing that I think is that this is the optimal replacement for blood loss. So if there is severe hemorrhaging, I think that would be the biggest use case to have some of this water around. Now, I think that you could probably manufacture it yourself if you were able to collect seawater and do the proper kind of filtration to, you know, make sure that you got any contaminants out, but kept all of the salt and minerals in. And you could probably research how to do that and then, you know, simply diluting it with distilled water to the right concentration because it is, you know, as you mentioned, expensive.

And you would need, you know, several liters to replace a severe hemorrhage. And that might not be a practical way to utilize this water, but I’m not sure, you know, what the effects might be if you try to drink it. It would certainly wouldn’t taste very good because it would be so salty, or if you tried to do an enema with it, or if you tried to just give yourself an IV infusion. But it would certainly be interesting to see and it could have potentially potent healing effects. In fact, it’s something that I have on my list of things to experiment with myself.

All right. LS asks, what do you think of Dr. Brownstein Lugol’s 25 to 50 milligram? Well, so Lugol’s iodine solution is a, you know, not a natural form of iodine. So my philosophy is that the body expects to receive the various nutrients from the natural environment from food sources. So my preference is always to get it from food sources. So if it’s iodine that you need, I would say to eat, you know, seafood or take supplements that are essentially like the kelp based iodine that I usually would take for myself or recommend to people is essentially just freeze dried kelp and it has iodine in it naturally and it is an edible food.

So that’s how I would recommend getting the iodine. All right, we have one more. Elliot James, you looked at borax boron yet, Andy? Well, looked at it for what purpose? Boron certainly is an essential nutrient or mineral. So I know that it is present in several foods. You know, one example of a food that has fairly high amounts of boron is collard greens, actually. But I haven’t looked at it extensively and I really haven’t looked at Borax as a therapeutic agent. But I certainly, you know, if there’s any compelling research, please do forward it to me.

You can do that, you know, through a comment on this live stream or using the contact form on my main website. But borax certainly, you know, is useful for practical things like laundry and cleaning applications and may, you know, have some therapeutic uses. But I’m not really familiar with anything major. All right, well, I appreciate the stimulating questions and hopefully I provided you some useful information today about how to navigate this celebrity fad of CMOS gel supplementation. I look forward to seeing everyone next week for another healthy living livestream.
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