The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #328 - Morley Robbins

TRANSCRIPT

Morley Robbins
century into this medical being that everyone's anemic. It's a very dark being.

This is not just a North America problem, this is a global problem. The world's authorities on iron and pregnancy are not on board with us, but somehow the practitioner side has hijacked the world of iron status in pregnancy. Society's become conditioned that they can take as much iron as they want, but be afraid of that copper thing. And that's how we know we're in a world of delusion and inversion. It's the opposite of the truth.

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast, where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind, we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying herein.

So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this! Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Friends, today's episode is one of my historically most popular guests of all time. That's right, I'm here with Morley Robbins for the re-release in stores second edition of his incredible book, Cure Your Fatigue, which is honestly the biggest paradigm shift you could ever have about iron, copper, magnesium, vitamins, minerals, all the things. It's kind of crazy, Morley's work and findings about how the specific interactions of minerals in our body affect our ability to generate energy. After listening to today's conversation, you just may be questioning if conventional medicine has almost everything wrong. I cannot recommend Morley's work, his supplements, and his live 16-week online program enough.

For that, you can go to MelanieAvalon.com slash RCP. That stands for Root Cause Protocol. That is an incredible program with Morley where you can dive deep, deep, deep into this work if it resonates with you and you're dying to learn more, which I'm sure so many of you guys will be. Also, listen up because we are going to have a Q&A with Morley and air that in a few months. So whatever questions you have after listening, I know there will be so many. Please, please, please let me know what they are. You can post them in my Facebook group, IF Biohackers, or you can directly email them to me to contact at MelanieAvalon.com. In today's conversation, we talk about so many topics, including whether or not anemia is actually a myth. That's right. Does it not exist? The vital role of copper and not only iron metabolism, but basically everything that happens in your cells and why copper toxicity is something you don't need to worry about. Yes, problems with supplementing with vitamin C and vitamin D. The effect of stress on iron levels and the multiple problems with iron, including how inflammatory it is and how it's linked to aging, the iron heart hypothesis, and so much more. The show notes for today's episode will be at MelanieAvalon.com slash fatigue. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about. So definitely check that out. I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group, IF Biohackers, intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life. Comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love.

Melanie Avalon
And then check out my Instagram, find the Friday announcement post. And again, comments there to enter to win something that I love. All right. I think that's all the things.

As a brief reminder, please send me your questions after listening to today's episode for our special Q&A. You can do that in my Facebook group, IF Biohackers, or by emailing contact at MelanieAvalon.com and definitely consider signing up for Morley's 16 week online Root Cause Protocol Institute program. For that, go to MelanieAvalon.com slash RCP. And now without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous conversation with Morley Robbins. Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I am about to have. So fun fact about today's guest, he is honestly, if you go look at the download numbers on my show, he is always one of the most downloaded guests on this show. And I think you've been on my other podcast as well. People love this man's content. And so I'm here with Morley Robbins and the backstory on today's conversation. I originally had him on the show for his book, Cure Your Fatigue, his original version of the book. And then I had him on, I think once or twice after that for some listener Q and A. And then I was so excited and thrilled to learn, I think it was last time-ish that we recorded that his book got picked up by Ben Bella, a traditional publisher, a major publisher and was going to be re-released and put in stores and all the things and have a big launch. And so we are back today to dive deep into that. And friends, it was really, really exciting for me to revisit all of his work, see the new edition. And I mean, there's a lot of reasons that his work is popular, but if you are not familiar with Morley's work, he will completely give you an entire paradigm shift when it comes to everything health and fatigue. And in particular, the role of minerals and health and fatigue. We're going to talk about things like iron regulation and how the current ideas about that might be all wrong. You might think that you are low in iron when maybe you actually are saturated in iron. We're gonna talk about a lot of compounds that conventional medicine doesn't talk about, things like, and I'm probably gonna pronounce these wrongs. What is it, ceruloplasm? Close, that's close. Close, wait, I'm not looking at the word in front of me. Ceruloplasmin. Plasmin, plasmin, okay, ceruloplasmin, various enzymes. And we can talk about things like vitamin D and how we might all be wrong about that as well. And magnesium, which you guys love magnesium. So there are just so many topics here. I'm truly grateful for this man's work. He has changed so many lives. Morley, thank you so much for being here.

Morley Robbins
Well, thrilled to be here. For the listeners, the backstories, it took us 35 minutes to figure out a platform, how to get connected. So, we're just, you know, Melanie and I are giddy with the light that we actually connected. So, can't wait to have the conversation, right? I know.

Melanie Avalon
I'm super curious, so it's interesting because your publishing process for this one is very similar, I think, to what I experienced, which was, because did you originally self-published your book? I did, yeah.

So with mine as well, because I don't think this happens a lot where, it happens, obviously, because it happened for me and you and other people, but where you have the self-published version and then you get the traditional publisher, and then rather than doing a brand new book, you redo your first version. And so I went through that experience, which was really fun, because I felt like, I'm really curious to hear what it was like for you, because for me, I was like, oh, I get to make the dream version of my book with a publisher and everything, what was it like doing that? And your content is so, I mean, so, I don't want to say controversial, but so intense and paradigm shifting, were your editors completely on board with everything? What was it like?

Morley Robbins
Yeah, no, it's a great question. I think there are very few times in your life where you get to do a mulligan, do it over. So this is exactly that.

I mean, the first book, or the first round, I was very proud of it. But it wasn't 100%. I mean, the footnoting was really kind of weird, and there was a lot of finger pointing. So we stepped back and said, let's really redo this. So we think how we want to convey this information. What new information do we want to add in? And so we made sure we had, there's a chapter that really dives deeper into the copper issue. Why is it so important? It goes deeper than what the first edition does. And we have a chapter on women's health, which we think is very, it's going to stir a lot of pots, which is exciting.

But the one thing about Ben Bella is Glenn Yefeth, who is the CEO of the company. He likes to publish books that are controversial, by intent. He wants to bring controversial thought forward and help people stimulate the dialogue around that. So typically, in a traditional book like that, you would have three rounds of editorial review. We got four. And the guest writer, Larry Trevieri, who's just a prince of a guy, great writer, he was laborgasted. He said, I've never gone through a fourth review. So we made it through there. It's a much tighter book. I think the editors really did their job. I'm really proud of what they did. We've got a very robust footnotes. I mean, just it's a completely different beast in that regard. We have an index. I mean, it's like it's a real book, you know? And so we're very proud of it and very excited. It'll be interesting to see how the public responds.

This is a book that would be easier to give to a practitioner because it has a more scientific feel to it. And the whole layout of it is really designed to educate someone and say, if you have questions, here's the footnote. So we went through a meticulous effort to take intact the comments that we were making. I think people will be genuinely impressed.

Melanie Avalon
I love it so much. I'm having flashbacks because I remember, I remember when I was doing it for me, there were just really random things that made me so happy.

And one of the things was people making an index for me. I was like, this is so exciting. They're like making me an index. Which now with like AI is probably a little bit easier, but was there anything that you really wanted to keep in that they took out or that you had to fight for? No, they're

Morley Robbins
were they were very accommodating. I think they were generally surprised at what they didn't know.

Because Denville does a lot of health books with the editor was was pregnant. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. And she was like, what? So she was really quite surprised by some of the information that was being shared in that book. And it was very complimentary. She was she was very impressed. And so, no, there was no arm wrestling. No, oh, you can't do this. There was a there was a external editor, and then three internal editors. And the external editor was Prince of a guy. Oh, my gosh. And we had the most amazing conversation as he was going through this and he was having the same like, Oh, my gosh, he was just shocked at what he didn't know.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. Did the editor that was pregnant, did she experience any anemia type conditions in her pregnancy? Because I know that's one of the things you added to the book that you talk about.

Morley Robbins
No, fortunately, I think that would have been a fascinating experience to try to work our way through that. And it's, you know, the challenge we've got with that topic is, it's important for people to know that there's three different ways to measure iron status in a blood test. So we have hemoglobin, we have serum iron, and we have serum ferritin. And they are wildly different in terms of what they represent. And so the hemoglobin, that's where 80% of the iron in the body is tied up in hemoglobin and myoglobin, 70% in hemoglobin, 10% in myoglobin. And that's an enormous footprint of iron in our body. Then we come down and less than 10% of the iron in our body is in ferritin. But here's the catch, ferritin is supposed to be inside the cell. It's not supposed to show up in the blood. When something shows up in the blood, it's outside the cell. And this is a great source of confusion in medicine and in nutrition and anyone doing health coaching.

But, you know, one of my colleagues, I was just in London back in the spring in May, meeting with Douglas Kell. We did a presentation and a program in functional medicine, fascinating experience. But he's one of the world's authorities on ferritin. He said, it's supposed to be zero. It's not supposed to be in the blood. And what's happened in the modern era is now people are tapping into, oh, ferritin is supposed to be between 70 and 100. It's like, no, that's liver disease at that level. You've already started a breakdown of the recycling process in the liver. And sadly, the area of birthing practices, obstetrics and midwifery and what have you, they are abusing this marker serum ferritin. And if it's too low, they're advising clients to get iron infusions, not just take supplemental iron. And they're not accounting for the hemodilution, the natural drop of iron in a woman's body as pregnancy progresses. And it is becoming an absolute crisis on this planet. I get emails and calls from people all over the world asking me, this is what's going on and what do I need to do? And this is not just a North American problem. This is a global problem. The world's authorities on iron and pregnancy are not on board with us, but somehow the practitioner side has hijacked the world of iron status in pregnancy. And it's really becoming a cause to love, unfortunately.

Melanie Avalon
So I have quite a few questions here. So one question that I was thinking about while reading this in the book and hearing you talk now is we can talk about, I want to say like at maintenance level or like in their normal everyday life, not in a pregnancy situation, the role of if they seemingly present as low iron, how copper is likely, you know, a key role there and addressing it that way. So we can talk about that.

In the situation of being pregnant, because like you mentioned and like you talk about a huge portion of that iron goes into the, like through the placenta into the baby, right? So that's why their hemoglobin drops and such. So is that a case where when a person actually has a large iron loss, is the solution still not to add iron? And then a cute situation like that, like pregnancy? Well, when you say iron loss, are you talking about the delivery? Like the iron going from the mother into the baby, I'm assuming that is taxing her iron stores. Okay.

Morley Robbins
let's talk some numbers. Let's say that the average woman today having a child is like 30 years old. Let's just use that as a reference point.

Okay. So someone who's 30, so 30 times 365. So they've got about 11,000 milligrams of iron. The amount of iron that the mom needs to give to the baby at birth is 375. So let me just 375 divided by 10,950. So that's not even, it's 3%. So the tragedy is we're a century into this medical meme that everyone's anemic.

It's a very dark meme. If someone were here from the World Health Organization, they would tell us that 30% of the world's population is anemic. It's not just anemic, they have iron deficiency anemia. Doesn't make any sense. 36% of the Earth's composition is iron. They're fortifying iron everywhere, all over the planet in grains. They're hybridizing food to bring greater iron uptake. It's so out of context and out of touch with reality.

And so the great fear in pregnancy is that someone's going to deliver and they're going to quote, bleed out. That's one of the great fears, especially that the practitioners have. And that's why they want the hemoglobin up really high so that if they do bleed out, they know they're going to be just fine. Here's the part that no one is accounting for. There's only one way to get rid of excess iron in the human body, and that's through blood loss. And that's why there is heavy bleeding in some situations because the body is really smart and knows this mom has too much iron.

Must get rid of it. The other thing that people may not be aware of is that there's a very important hormone in pregnancy called oxytocin. I'm certain you've heard of it. The love hormone, right? The bonding hormone, the lactation hormone, right? Well, you know what its conserved job is? It is, in fact, the mechanism that clamps off the blood vessels so there isn't excessive bleeding. The reason why that's important, Melanie, is that oxytocin is nine amino acids long. It's a really tiny little peptide, nine amino acids, but it's one of the most important in our body. And if you reverse two of those nine amino acids, it becomes vasopressin. These are two of the most studied neuropeptides in the human body. The guy who identified, sequenced, and replicated oxytocin got a Nobel Prize. It's a big deal. What is required to make it work? Oh yeah, you've got to have that PAM enzyme, which is copper dependent. And if the PAM enzyme is not working, then you can't activate oxytocin, then it can't clamp off the problem. And so women today are copper deserts.

They're iron loaded because they're taking prenatals. Some of them have 75 milligrams of iron each and every day. That's an outrageous amount of iron to be giving a pregnant woman. And people think nothing of taking... I had a client that was taking 375 milligrams of iron every day. So that's a year's worth of iron every day, and she was still anemic.

So you know there's something wrong. There's more to the story. And so what's happened is society has become conditioned that they can take as much iron as they want, but be afraid of that copper thing.

Morley Robbins
And that's how we know we're in a world of delusion and inversion. It's the opposite of the truth.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I'm just fascinated by all of this and we talked about this, I think probably all the times you've been on the show, but I feel like I'm a good case study because I've been very aware of the inflammatory potential of iron, not to the extent of what you talk around the book, but I've just been hesitant about iron for quite a while. And I was, I mean, I think I was actually anemic, like I think I was actually iron deficient because of how bad it was. And I did get like blood transfusions and iron infusions. And that that the thing that's confusing, though, is that did, maybe it's not confusing, because maybe I generally was just iron deficient, because that that really helped, like changed my life, getting getting those infusions and transfusions.

But I was really nervous. I was like, I don't want to take all this iron. It's so inflammatory. Yeah.

Morley Robbins
No, no, I understand. So the work that I've been doing or the research of late, because I'm really quite preoccupied with this issue of anemia, I personally do not think it exists on the planet. And I think there's a complete and utter misunderstanding.

There is iron sequestration under stress. And there are two models of stress that have been used. They started doing these stress models back in the 80s. One is called chronic social defeat stress. And the second is called repeated restraint stress. Well, when you connect the dots, that's what 2020 was all about, chronic social defeat and restraint stress. What they've been able to show definitively is that under stress like that, the immune system responds to that stress. And it triggers an immune response of interleukin sex which then whips up hepcidin, which is an iron hormone. And as the hepcidin rises, the body is sequestering iron and will not release it into the iron recycling system. And so we have a complete shutdown of the iron recycling system, which is what is critical for our health and wellbeing. And it would be fascinating to go back in time and see what was your level of stress when you were at this critical juncture. And what was your copper status? What was your retinal status? What was your iron status across the different markers? Because it's, I think it's a very rare situation. Unless someone's been in an auto accident and they're bleeding out, yeah, let's get an infusion going. But what people don't realize is in a typical iron infusion, and I no longer call them infusions, they're invasions or explosions, you have 215 milligrams of iron coming into the body. Okay, that's okay. One milligram of iron has 10 to the 20th atoms of iron. That's a big number. So an infusion is 250 times 10 to the 20th. The number is so big, we can't even relate to it. And when people have the need for repeated infusions, then you know that the immune system is shut down. It is not allowing that iron to get into the recycling system. It's going into the spleen and the liver. And when was that first documented? 1938, when did they revalidate it? 1948. And so there's a lot of confusion around this. And again, the meme, running medicine, running medicine and nutrition, is your anemic and your copper toxic. And the truth is just the opposite. So it would be fascinating to kind of look at your blood work back then and see what was going on, but also what was your stress level back in the day.

Melanie Avalon
Well, speaking to that, so, because this is something else I was thinking about, because I've really been, it's really been perplexing for me to read your book, understand all of it, and look back at my situation and what happened and reconcile it. I guess my hemoglobin, and it's interesting to hearing you say about if like repeated infusions being needed, because basically it was, I think this was 2018 when it was really bad, and like that's when the hemoglobin was around four, I think, and ferritin like non-existent, which we can circle back to, because I know you're just saying how ferritin shouldn't even be in the blood, but the infusions in the blood really helped, and then everything got better, but then fast forward probably two or three years, and I did need infusions again, but it's been stable since then, but the infusions also helped then, which is interesting.

Did you ever measure copper in either scenario? Not to my, I don't think so.

Morley Robbins
rare if a doctor or a hematologist would do that.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I'm actually going to be looking through my, my, my hematologist might have, because he measured a lot. He actually, I asked him to measure, is it Hepcitin or Hepcitin? I asked him to measure that.

And he, at first he was like, no, but then he, but then it was on the lab test when I showed up at the lab test. Cause I had brought him some like articles on it, but they actually didn't measure it though, cause they didn't, they didn't have the code for it.

Morley Robbins
Okay, the reason why hepcidin is so important. Hepcidin, yeah. There's two classic forms of anemia, iron deficiency anemia and anemia of chronic inflammation. You know, iron deficiency anemia, hepcidin will be at the bottom, it'll be very, very low. When hepcidin, and this was, there's a wonderful article in 2009, Dr. Gans and one of his associates, Elizabeta, and I can't think of Nemeth, Nemeth and Gans, did an amazing study comparing hepcidin under those two conditions, iron deficiency and anemia of chronic inflammation. And so iron deficiency, the hepcidin was very low, like one or two. When it's under anemia of chronic inflammation, it's about a thousand. And when it's normal, it's around a hundred. So it's orders of magnitude. And so the hepcidin is never done. It's very rare that a practitioner would test for that, which I think is a sin, because it very quickly reveals whether, in fact, it is true iron deficiency.

The only way you know it's true iron deficiency is through a hepcidin blood test, and they don't do it. They just, as soon as the numbers look low on a blood test, they say, oh, you're deficient, we gotta give you more. And there is a wonderful study by Robert Hodges in 1978, where he documents the use of an infusion in a study. And yes, there was this momentary peak, it lasted about four to six weeks, where the hemoglobin rose, and then it collapsed. And that's what happens to people. Over the course of every six to eight weeks, they have to go back and get more, get more. And what he was able to demonstrate in that study from 1978 was that a lack of retinol is really what's driving the low numbers. And as soon as retinol's in play, retinol can make copper bioavailable, and then the game starts to pick up. And it's just a wonderful study that most people don't know about. But I think the fact that hepcidin is not being tested, I think is a problem, because it really helps the practitioner and the individual know, is it truly a deficient state, or is it an inflammatory state? And the article by Nemethin Gans is just so clear about what the distinction is.

Melanie Avalon
And to put it like in my own words and to make sure listeners are following because I think listeners are pretty familiar with insulin like we talk about that all the time.

And so if my understanding is correct it's kind of have sit in its functioning sort of like insulin but for iron so if it's and correct me if I'm wrong so if it's high that could mean that it's you know essentially wait blocking iron.

Morley Robbins
It's shutting down the iron recycling system, and so you can't absorb it and you can't release it into the recycling system. So the iron is being sequestered into the tissue to protect the individual from the pathogens that would like to feed on that iron.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, and so the reason you're saying the only way a person would be genuinely potentially iron deficient anemia, even though you also think that that's not really happening, would be if hepsidin is low, because now that means the system is actually still working, so there should actually be some sort of iron presenting. Exactly.

Morley Robbins
I mean, this is one of the most confusing and most dysfunctional parts of organized medicine, in my humble opinion.

Melanie Avalon
When I tried to get him to test my hip sit-in, that, I'm pretty sure that was before I had read your book. So I think I had come across it just on my own. I'm fairly certain. And yeah, and I was shocked because I came across the concept of it and I was like, oh, that makes sense. Like, this is important to test. And he didn't even know what it was. And he was like one of the top, you know, hematologists in Atlanta. So that was, yeah, really interesting to me.

Quick question though, one more question about like my situation. Cause you were talking in the book about how, like two different ways that there can be a struggle. I'm talking very casually, but a struggle for iron, you know, to be getting into the body correctly. And one is being inhibited in the GI tract. So it's actually not getting absorbed properly. And then the other one involved a system, I think in the spleen. So say like case study example, you have a person. So say it was me. Say I'm not absorbing it for whatever reason, I'm like correctly. And maybe that's the reason I don't have enough quote iron throughout my body. Cause then that would make sense. Like if I were to have an infusion that that's bypassing that getting it straight into my bloodstream, getting levels back up. And then I could like work on the copper situation or can I, or is it better to just not have that process at all? I'm just really curious by this.

Morley Robbins
No, I know. The process of absorbing iron is a two-step process. So when iron is in the diet, it's typically in a... If you're eating meat, you're going to be eating heme, which is going to have iron in a plus two state, and it's going to need to be altered into a plus three state. And so to get iron into the enterocytes, which are the cells in our gut that absorb food, absorb the nutrients, that process of reducing it to go from plus two to plus three, that is an enzyme function that then allows the iron to get into the enterocyte.

So then it's in a form that can be used, but then it's got to be... In order to get out again... Let me see. I think I may have gotten a battery. So it's going to typically come in at a plus three state and then be changed, reduced it to a plus two. So then once it's in the cell, in order for it to go into ferritin in the enterocyte or go into the bloodstream, it's got to be changed into a plus three state. Iron has to be plus three. It's called ferric iron. And so in order to make that change, you need copper to make that change. You can't put iron into ferritin without copper, and you can't put iron into the bloodstream without copper at the back door. It's called the basolateral membrane. And so when someone is having difficulty absorbing iron, it's almost invariably because they don't have copper to let the iron into the bloodstream.

It's getting stuck in the enterocyte. Does that make sense? It does. Yes. So then when you get a blood infusion, you're bringing iron in, but the infused iron goes to the spleen into the liver, but it's not going into the recycling system. That's the part that's hard for people to get is that we were never designed to have infusions of iron. It is so unnatural. I appreciate the fact that you found benefit and that it was lifesaving for you, but it's like six standard deviations away from natural.

It's just so, and now it's become commonplace and people think nothing of... I have a student of mine who had 82 iron infusions in the course of her life, and now she's perfectly fine, and she's... She birthed six children, not knowing that she was losing minerals all the while. And so there's just a lot of confusion about what's behind these numbers. And the average person is not going to challenge their doctor or their hematologist. They won't push back. But in fact, I think it's that one area where people need to be very vigilant and say, wait a minute, do you really understand what's going on here? Do you know why my iron is low? That's the question that no one's asking.

Why is my iron low? And they always say, well, you've got to bleed, or you're a woman, you've got a menstrual cycle, right? And the amount of iron that women lose in a menstrual cycle is very, very small, outrageously small. And this idea that everyone's bleeding in their intestine is just not true. And so there's... Accumulation of iron in our body is taking place. And one of the other areas that I've identified is that under stress, guess where iron accumulates?

Morley Robbins
It's accumulating in the mitochondria. Well, that's not going to show up on a blood test, is it? And so then the mitochondria begin to become ineffective. They can't make energy when there's a buildup of iron. And no one's the wiser because there's no blood test for iron accumulation in the mitochondria.

And so the choice we have is the simple lie versus the complex truth. So we've been talking now for about 40 minutes about the complex truth of iron metabolism. And it's much easier to say, well, I'm anemic, I need some iron. And that's what people default to. The average person just doesn't want to try to understand how their body really works. The average person knows how their car works 10 times better than their body. And that's the world we live in. And what we strive to do within the RCP is just teach people how the body really works. And we continue to grow, doing very well. It's just not everyone wants to get into the weeds of human metabolism, which is unfortunate.

Melanie Avalon
Two questions there, and I agree, and I want to get into the weeds. I just think it's funny that I just love this content so much.

So one question you were saying that when we get an infusion, the iron cannot enter the, the, the RES system. Is that what it's called? Because I remember, I remember being so, I have like certain memories of when I learned something medical or experienced something medical, and I'm just completely fascinated by it. And one of the things was when I did get the infusions, I was like, they were saying you have to come back every, you know, so many weeks because that's, your body's going to slowly rebuild your hemoglobin. And so we just monitor it. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting. Like it's not instant and that there's like this rebuilding process. So how, how did the infusion, if it doesn't go into the RES system, how did my body start rebuilding iron?

Morley Robbins
great. That's a wonderful question. And I don't know that I'm qualified to answer it.

The iron that you got in the infusion doesn't make its way to the bone marrow, which is where it's needed. And I don't know, I don't know how your numbers would have changed. I really don't. The thing is, there's compelling evidence that if you had gotten an IV of Ceruloplasmin, your iron recycling system would have taken off like a rocket.

Melanie Avalon
That would have been nice, but I would have preferred that.

Morley Robbins
Well, they were doing that back in the 60s and 70s, and then they stopped. And so now everything is iron, iron, iron, iron, iron.

And the average person doesn't know that, wait, there's another way to do this, another way to solve this dynamic. Dr. Hodge has solved it by giving human subjects retinol, and suddenly they're hemoglobin came right back. So the thing is, there are multiple pathways. And what I've also understood is that any heavy metal that is injected into the human body will force an increase in hemoglobin. It's a conserved response to heavy metals. And so I just don't know how your body responded, but apparently, and clearly it did, where you wouldn't be as focused on this as you are. I don't know what the mechanism is. But the classical research says that that infused iron does not get into the recycling system.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, another question, because you're mentioning that there's iron in places that we can't test through a conventional blood test. So like in the mitochondria, or we're not really testing ferritin in the tissues or stored ferritin, we're testing it in the bloodstream.

So how do we know that's actually happening to a lot of people if we're not testing it very often?

Morley Robbins
absolutely don't. We are flying blind and the level of or the comprehensiveness of testing is frightening because there are so many markers that are just ignored.

We should be measuring not just hemoglobin, we should be measuring heptaglobin, which is a very critical component of managing iron status. We should be measuring turnover rate. What's the lifespan of the red blood cell? We should know what that is. And there's a very simple test to do that. It's never

Melanie Avalon
Oh, I I was thinking that too really quickly just cuz I I went on a like a also interesting research thing about people's a1c and How it doesn't take into account the lifespan of the bread blood cells. I was like that would be important information that could be helpful

Morley Robbins
It's a game changer. It totally changes the interpretation of the result. And so if there is copper deficiency, the average lifespan of a red blood cell is supposed to be 120 days. If there's copper deficiency or magnesium deficiency, either one, the lifespan goes down to 20 days. That's an 80% loss of life.

And so what's happening is you've just accelerated the need to turn over the red blood cells by a factor of six. The body is running in place, going faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster. And no one's the wiser because we don't know how long the red blood cell is lasting. And we're not measuring hept...or excuse me, hepside, which I think is a sin. We're not measuring ceruloplasmid, which is a sin. We're not measuring copper, which is a sin. And so the average person doesn't know to ask these questions. The most important question for someone to ask is if when they're told you're anemic, say, well, doctor, why is my iron low? Can you explain to me how it got low? What's behind it? And the part that I was completely unaware of until recently is it's stress related. People who are under greater stress have lower markers for iron. And that'd be a great thing to start, is, well, what's going on in your world? You know, how's your relationship? How's your job? What's going on with your family? But whatever the components might be. And those are questions that no one ever asks. What's the stress in your life? And that's where we put the highest priority in the Group Cause Protocol is getting the story of stress of the individual before we worry about the numbers in the blood test. Because we can very quickly neutralize the numbers in the blood test because we know what the story of stress is.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, so huge question there. This is such a complicated topic. If iron is inflammatory and most people are saturated in it, then would stress be a good thing because it lowers iron? Well, we're not.

Morley Robbins
a great question. We were never designed to have the level of chronic stress that we have. Our ancient ancestors were in a parasympathetic state 90% of the time. 10%, they were chasing after an animal or they were being chased or whatever. But this idea of 90% chronic social defeat stress, that's unheard of.

And so there's a wonderful article on stress and hypoxia and how it affects cortisol and adrenaline. It's called, the lead author's name is Zaman, Z-A-M-I-N, P-R-A-P-I-R-A, Zaman, P-R-A, that's all one word. 2018, I believe it is. It's how chronic stress causes hypoxia in the individual and cancer in the cell. And what's missing is our understanding of copper's role to regulate iron and regulate oxygen and avoid the chronic stress of oxidative stress.

As soon as oxygen becomes an oxidant, it can't be used to make energy. And what's the most important thing we can do in the face of stress is make energy to have resilience to respond to that stress. And so one of my favorite quotations is from Mark Hyman, what is stress? Stress is the body's inability to make energy for the mind to respond to its environment.

And so as a species, we're designed to make energy, constantly making energy, especially under stress. But if it becomes chronic stress, the immune system is set up so it begins to take the person offline. If you can't handle your stress, I'm going to take you offline. And that is the mechanism that leads into the symptoms that are driving people's perception of whether they're well or not.

Melanie Avalon
Really quick question, just cause I pulled up. I was like trying to find my labs from all these different moments of, quote, anemia. But so one of the panels that one of my functional doctors did, it's like the anemia panel and it includes something I actually don't recognize. What is methylmalonic acid? Oh, it's...

Morley Robbins
Yeah. It's just a sign of oxidative stress in the body, especially in the

Melanie Avalon
Okay. Okay.

That's interesting that that's on the anemia panel. So going back to copper's role in all of this, when people think copper, I think they more likely think that people will be copper toxic. So why is that? Like, where did that idea come from? And does that happen? Carl Pfizer?

Morley Robbins
late 60s. He wrote a very important book, Mental and Elemental Nutrients. I wrote a very important article in that same time period where he moved the cheese. Prior to that, all the great clinicians and scientists were studying the relationship of copper to iron because people were really focused on making energy. And he shifted the focus to zinc and copper. Let's make that the priority. And suddenly, everyone responded to that.

Makes no sense. It should never have happened, but it did.

And of course, the ratio should be 7 to 1 or 10 to 1. You've got to have 7 parts zinc or 10 parts zinc in your diet. What people have not taken the time to do is the research that I've done to reveal that, oh, well, when you have zinc, especially supplemental zinc in your diet, it's going to block copper uptake. When you have raging levels of zinc, you will have copper deficiency. When you have raging levels of zinc, you're not going to be able to make energy properly in complex 4. When you have too high of zinc, you're going to not be able to express the ferrooxidase enzyme. That's the most important enzyme to regulate iron status in the human body.

So, the perception is the distribution of copper in the body is very different than what people realize. 46% of copper is in the bone marrow, 25% in the muscle, below 25% in the organs. And 1%, 1% of copper is found in the blood. Of that 1%, 95% of that copper is bound to ceruloplasmin, very important antioxidant protein. I would say it's the most important antioxidant protein. And under stress, ceruloplasmin responds to that stress.

And there's tremendous intelligence in ceruloplasmin and it's reading the immune state of the body. And so, the question that's never asked is, they'll do a blood test and the serum iron is elevated. It might be over 100, it might be over 120. The question that's not being asked is, why is my copper becoming unbound from ceruloplasmin? Well, the classic triggers are increased ascorbic acid, hormone replacement therapy, hyperglycemia. As soon as your blood sugar goes above 120, the ceruloplasmin protein blows up and the copper comes out. So that this elevation of copper is in response to a change in the environment. What medicine has done is turn the spotlight on the copper saying, you caused the problem and they ignore the ascorbic acid, the hormone replacement, the antibiotics, the blood sugar, and so on and so forth.

The meme running medicine is you need more iron and you have too much copper. And it's just a twisted world that we live in. And you're being very patient and trying to understand, there's a part of this melody you will never understand because it's completely irrational. When you spend 16 years like I have doing the research, three hours a day, seven days a week for 16 years, it is very disorienting to have this kind of dialogue around something so irrational, but that's where we are as a society.

And people, I would have thought that people would really snap to around 2022 when they realized we were being scammed. But what did it do? It only intensified our belief in the insanity. It did just the opposite of what you would have thought.

Morley Robbins
So then I'm labeled the crack, what more, he's wacko. And we have all these doctors who don't know, there's five things they're not taught in medical school, how to make blood, how to make bone, how to make energy, how to make babies, and how to activate hormones and neuropeptides. How do I know they're not taught that? Because all five of them require copper in order to be made. So they're breezing through their clinical training, learning all sorts of terminology, all sorts of pharmaceuticals, but they don't know how energy is made in the body. They don't know how blood is made in the body. They don't know how bone is made in the body. And I think that is wrong.

And they don't reason, they react. If this, then that. Oh, your number's low. You must take this. Well, let's talk about it. How did it get low? They can't walk through that process of articulation because they didn't learn it. And I'm not criticizing the doctors. I'm criticizing the system which is corrupt and bankrupt. And we are trained to venerate the system and ignore the truth that's found in the research, that's profiled in the book, that has, I think it's 360, 380 footnotes. This is not Morley's opinion. This is a compendium of research to weave together this tapestry of insanity and try to pull it apart so people can understand what happened. It's not for everyone. Out of 100 people, there are probably two or three that will really step up and take the time to understand this. The average person is gonna do what they're told. They're not gonna buck the system.

Melanie Avalon
Speaking to all this research, because this is like a big question I have about it, so if we're not just regularly testing, because you've given breakdowns of iron, for example, where all it is in the body, and then copper, for example, where it is, and zinc, where it is, and whether things are in the bone, or the muscle, or the bloodstream, or the organs, that actual research where we know the percent of where things are, and the mitochondria, if that's not regularly being tested anyways, where does that research come from, and is there enough of it to know that that's the way it should be, if we're just not testing it that much? When is that research actually done, and how often is it repeated?

Morley Robbins
question. There are certain centers of research that you can depend on. A lot of the really great research on iron is coming out of Italy, coming out of Austria. Gunther Weitz is a wonderful hematologist. You have to know the centers.

If you're interested in copper, you want to be at University of Florida in Gainesville. They understand it. Or be at Auburn University. Jamie Collins is at Florida. Paul Cobine is at Auburn University. But there are other centers around the world where they're doing this research. The key is it's not being done as extensively as you might like it to be done, but it is being done. This research began in the 1910s was when it really started and has been doing steadily for the last or greater than a century. I think the question that we need to be asking is, why isn't this research being taught in medical school?

That's the real question. Why is it a very biased narrative that is taught? Why? Because there's no incentive in using copper. It wipes out the profit motive in big pharma. When people learn the different mechanisms of what copper does, it's like, well, why would I take that drug or this drug or that drug? And again, there's a level of disbelief that, well, it's not possible that it can do all this, but it's in the research. It's been documented decades over time. We have been trained like circus bears to believe the narrative. I grew up in the 1950s. I was born in 52. I grew up with Geritol ads on TV. And the interesting thing to know about the Geritol ads is that it was a governmental agency that took them off the air, but it took 10 years for that lawsuit to work its way through the courts. But during those 10 years, the ads were being aired on TV. So for a decade, people heard about iron and poor blood, iron and poor blood, iron and poor blood, iron and poor blood. And you hear that like 10,000 times in a week, and you really believe in iron and poor blood.

Who was the governmental agency that brought that? You would like to think it was NIH or CDC, right? Or the FTC? No, it was the FTC, Federal Trade Commission. They knew it wasn't true. And they opposed it because they knew it was a bold faced lie that iron and poor blood was not true. But they were the only ones that would enter the lawsuit. That's the world we live in.

You know, the analogy I use, Melanie, is that if you're familiar with the movie, it's a wonderful life.

Melanie Avalon
Yes, I was in it in the play.

Morley Robbins
Oh, beautiful. Okay.

Well, we grew up thinking that we were in Bedford Falls when in fact we live in Pottersville. The truth of the matter is we live in Pottersville and it got a lot more Potterville-y after 2020. And people still don't see that. That's the part that blows my mind.

Melanie Avalon
So speaking of after 2020 and related to the copper that we were talking about, so quickly to revisit. So you're saying the copper is typically supposed to be attached to ceruloplasm, ceruloplasmin. I will get it right someday.

And then in certain states that, you know, with high blood sugar or ascorbic acid or hormone replacement therapy, it detaches. And then we interpret that as quote, copper toxicity. So when it detaches, is it ever toxic? Can it reattach back or once it's detached, is it gone?

Morley Robbins
As soon as it comes out of the ceruloplasmic protein, it gets bound to either albulin or histidine, or a transport protein called transcooprene. People have heard of transfarin, that's the transport protein for iron, where transcooprene serves the same role, but it's for copper.

There is no unbound copper. The studies that have been done inside the cell, the amount of unbound copper inside the cell is called zeptomolar, Z-E-P-T-O-M-O-L-A-R. It's zero point followed by 20 zeros, one. It is essentially non-existent, unbound copper does not exist in our body, but there's great license given in research because of the funding to create this impression that copper is very dangerous. They don't talk about the chaperones and the transporters that are instrumental in moving copper carefully through the body, through the cell, through the organelles of the cell. All of this is very carefully regulated and always has been, but they create the illusion of, oh, you have to be careful of copper, and the reaction that people have when they take copper, typically they get one of two reactions, nausea or a headache or a racing mind. Those would be the typical reactions, well, why is that? Because copper, when you start to ingest it, it has a job. Copper's job on the planet is to mobilize iron, and where is it mobilizing it? In your stomach and in your brain, it's very good at it, and people don't realize how much stored iron they have in their tissue because it doesn't show up on the blood test, does it? That's the tragedy, is that we have very flawed and skewed testing to reinforce the narrative. And so the blood test looks low, the perception, well, I must have low iron in my body. No, the iron has been sequestered because the body's really smart, it's trying to protect you from the pathogens, and no one takes the time to work through that dynamic.

Melanie Avalon
So that perfectly relates, I was saying that this relates to the topic of 2020. This relates to a whole question that I have, which was, so in your book you have, and listeners, friends, I know you're fascinated by all this conversation. If you get the book, it has all of this times a million deep dives, so get it now, and you can revisit it and reread it because I know it's really complicated.

So in the book you have these stops and these starts which are parts of your actual protocol that people follow, and I'm always really, really intrigued about updates that are made just in general, like when people have protocols or ideas and then what they change and what they don't change, what they add, what they take away. And you mentioned in the book that one of the things you added to the starts, which was not in the original version, and that you came to this idea, you came around to this more after COVID, which was adding copper. So I'm curious, so why was it not in the starts before? Why is it now? And when you do take it as a supplement, you just mentioned how it can liberate iron from the gut and from the brain, but yeah, what actually happens when you take it as a supplement, and what does it bind to? Does it, because you mentioned all the different things it can bind to, like ceruloplasm, et cetera. Yeah.

Morley Robbins
What became very clear to me about April or May of 2020, is I was mindful of the COVID cocktail that people were taking, which was high-dose ascorbic acid, high-dose vitamin D, and high-dosing. That was the COVID cocktail.

Well, I knew that that was the perfect triad to kill the bioavailability of copper. Once I piece that together, then I thought about the word COVID. What does it really stand for? Well, COV, in my world, stands for Coppers Vanished. ID stands for Irons Disregulated. As you get into the world of research now, post-COVID, it was all about iron dysregulation, the cytokine storms. There was something about the spike protein that was agitating the ferritin protein that was jammed full of iron because we live in a society that fortifies everything with iron, and they took it into a completely different level of expression. So that was one factor, was that this realization that, and there were only two or three articles that I found that even remotely touched on this copper-iron dynamic.

One particularly noteworthy one was out of France, and they glommed in very quickly on the copper issue. It's like the parts that people may not know about or may not recall is that it was the 1928 march at the University of Wisconsin, May at the University of Kentucky, where they denied copper in the animal's diet and their livers filled up with iron. It's a very, very powerful study that's done in two separate institutions, but that's not taught anywhere. And so, oh, so, but that's not a problem for me, is it? Well, the second piece of the puzzle is we have this complete disconnect between copper and iron with COVID.

Well, then I began to do more research about glyphosate. That's a particularly powerful chemical, as you probably know, but it chelates metals and minerals in the soil. That's its job. It was originally designed, it was originally patented as a pipe cleaner, industrial pipe cleaner. It would chelate the inside of the pipe that was accumulating minerals. And someone noticed it, oh, with a runoff from glyphosate is killing the vegetation outside the building. Oh, we've got an herbicide. And then it changed into an herbicide. But Don Huber at Purdue University, professor emeritus, brilliant individual, has studied glyphosate in its mineral chelating properties very carefully.

People are familiar with the logarithmic scale of a earthquake. So an earthquake of three, now the dish is rattled, but no one's gonna be harmed by that. An earthquake of 12, no one survives because it's orders of magnitude. So it's going from one to two powers of 10. So one, 10, 100,000, and so on up the scale. So what Dr. Huber has been able to demonstrate is that glyphosate chelates minerals at a different rate, different speed, different velocity of chelation. So it chelates calcium and magnesium at a speed of three. It chelates iron and zinc at a speed of nine, and it chelates copper at a 12. So what does that mean? What means that it's chelating copper a billion times faster than it's chelating calcium or magnesium, and a thousand times faster than it's chelating zinc or iron.

Morley Robbins
Now, why is that a problem? Well, we need copper, we need to get it from our food, but the challenge we've got, Melanie, is that big numbers don't make sense. So when I was a younger man, I was in college, my mom was the executor of her father's estate, and with the proceeds of that, she bought a Mercedes 350 SL. It was a sweet car. I remember driving it down from Baltimore to Florida, and at one point I just wanted to see what the car was able to do, and I was going 140 miles an hour in a 70 mile an hour zone by the grace of God that I didn't get caught, but that was twice the speed of, I was going 140 as opposed to 70, so that was 2x. When I was young, there was a guy named Chuck Yeager, broke the sound barrier, and he broke through that 750 miles an hour. That was 10 times the speed on the highway. We don't know what it's like to be a thousand times faster, or a billion times faster. And so what we do is, well, I don't understand that, so it can't be important. So we just ignore it.

When in fact, glyphosate, in a study that was done in France in 2022, documented the fact that 99% of French citizens are paying glyphosate in their urine. Well, why should we be worried about that? Well, France was most opposed to using glyphosate, that's important to know. But if French citizens, if 99% of French citizens, that means that glyphosate is in the air. It means it's pervasive. It means it's not just on the commercial farms, which means that the minerals are not available in the food that we're eating at the rate that we think they should be. And one of the cautions I would have for your listeners is, if they are relying on nutrient tables to guide their choice of food to eat, those nutrient tables have not been updated since the 1950s. We have become Swiss cheese eating Swiss cheese because of the mineral deficiencies that we have in our body and the mineral deficiencies that exist in our food.

And so the decision to make a copper product was born out of those two realities that, oh wow, the world changed in 2020, and the world changed when they started amping up the use of glyphosate. And what really galvanized it was one of my students was wanted to analyze one of the most popular forms of desiccated beef liver, because beef liver is supposed to be the richest source of copper on the planet. She sent it to a lab, and on the nutrient tables, it says there's nine milligrams of copper, 100 grams of beef liver should generate nine milligrams of copper and three milligrams of iron. And she got the results back, and it was just the opposite. It was nine milligrams of iron and three milligrams of copper. And when I got that information, I said, okay, we gotta make a change. And so we sought out a manufacturer, a formula IQ, my case is a very talented formulator, and we were able to design a product that I think is second to none.

Morley Robbins
Now, the interesting thing is my focus over the last several years has been all about copper. There are probably 50 copper products out there now. I think that's great. I think that's wonderful.

I happen to think that the recuperate is head and shoulders better than all the others, but that's just my personal opinion. But I think the testing would substantiate that. But the decision to change the protocol and add that component was very deliberate, very intentional, and very strategic, because it was time. It was absolutely essential to do that.

Melanie Avalon
And so the form, the recuperate form, is it the bioglycinate form? It's copper bisglycinate.

Morley Robbins
But it has the cofactors. You have desiccated beef liver.

You have spirulina, which is a very rich source of superoxide dismutase, a very important copper enzyme. You have turmeric to help deal with inflammation, and then you can get it with or without boron. And boron is a sleeper mineral that is very, very important for our health and well-being.

Melanie Avalon
So, and this is, I didn't know that about SOD and the relationship with copper. I have a spirulina supplement, so this is really exciting, something else I can be talking about and taking it for.

So, because you just mentioned how, you know, now there's a ton, a lot of brands making copper supplements. Is any form okay or is there potential problems with some forms? Does it need to be that bisglycinate form? Well, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

Morley Robbins
The copper bisphylacinate made by albion minerals is a very unique formulation in that the big debate in the world of copper is copper I versus copper II. Again, we're back to iron II, iron III. It's just the valence of the mineral. What most people don't know is that the body using ceruloplasmin will manage the copper coming in. You don't need to worry about, oh, is the copper proper and all that?

But what copper bisphylacinate represents is that particular form, it's as though it's copper zero and it is immediately taken up by the tissue. So it's a very unique form of it. I think, and again, maybe it's pride of crafting, but I think the nutrient cofactors are essential in order to take copper. We were designed as a species to have copper in our food, and that's really what recuperate is. It's food that happens to have this copper bisphylacinate. I think just taking copper alone or even in the bisphylacinate form, I don't think you're going to get the same level of impact. And I've had clients tell me that. They've been very clear to tell me that they get a much better response with the bisphylacinate or with the recuperate than the bisphylacinate.

Melanie Avalon
Would that also mean if a person was just taking copper alone, that taking it with food would more likely be helpful because it's more likely you're getting other nutrients with it? Yeah, very much.

Morley Robbins
So the key is copper is a fat soluble minimum. So what's challenging is that we live in a world of a low-fat diet. Most people are terrified of fat.

People are terrified of cholesterol. And where does cholesterol hang out in the fat? And so just so people know that when cholesterol starts to rise in their body, it's because they're under stress and the copper is being sequestered by metallothionine. And it's the lack of copper that causes the rise in cholesterol. When did we first know that? That was in 1973 by Blessed Cleve's research. For that finding to become science, one other lab needed to verify that. To date, over 30 labs have confirmed Dr. Cleve's findings from 1973.

So what's the number one selling product on the planet? Stens. Why are we using stens? Because no one wants to talk about copper. Wow.

Melanie Avalon
Talking about all of this the minerally depleted soils from glyphosate and such So is it possible can't could a person get all their nutrients from food? Is that possible?

Morley Robbins
I don't think it's possible anymore. I'm sort of a Debbie Downer now. The more research I've done about it, I mean, the fact that it's so pervasive in France.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, that's shocking, actually, because...

Morley Robbins
And I don't think people realize how significant that is, because they were vehemently opposed to it. And so if the French citizens are struggling with this, that means it's all over North America. I mean, and so it's very discouraging.

I mean, it's like, do you think I want to make a big deal out of that in a couple of days at the Western Aid Price Conference? No, but it's a stark reality.

Melanie Avalon
I was gonna ask, I was wondering, yeah.

Morley Robbins
it's the reality of our existence now. And there are steps that you can take to mitigate it, but it's like you're constantly battling not just your neighbor farm, but you're battling the air.

It's in the air, it's in the water now. And it's just like, oh my gosh, you don't want to think about it.

Melanie Avalon
I know now because now I'm thinking so I'm a big wine fan which is a whole other topic but I don't drink really convince wines from the US because I know glyphosate is so pervasive in the soil like they've tested organic wineries and they all test for glyphosate but I thought my French organic wines were safe but maybe not

Morley Robbins
I would I would tend to doubt it. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon
Ah, super upsetting. Okay, and then, so, okay, can't get the things from food.

The, the ascorbic acid that you have a whole section on vitamin C and how, you know, people are, you know, I mean, that's interesting because vitamin C has been posited for so long as high-dose vitamin C being the thing to, to boost your immune system. But that, I guess that's only the case in the whole foods form of vitamin C. The thing that's confusing to me is where are we getting all of this data showing things to the contrary? Or these ideas, like people taking high-dose vitamin C.

Morley Robbins
So let's back up. You're talking about cancer therapy in particular. The cornerstone of cancer treatment is kill the cancer cell. Everything is kill the cancer.

And they will use radiation therapy, they'll use surgery, or they'll use chemotherapy, or in a classical sense, conventional sense, or they'll use high-dose vitamin C. What does high-dose vitamin C do? It generates an enormous explosion of hydrogen peroxide, which kills the cancer cell. But let's step back from it. Cancer is very much like drug addiction. The cancer cells are addicted to iron and sugar. They've got to have both, can't live without them. They're feeding off of lactic acid. There's a 70-fold increase of lactic acid in a cancer cell versus a healthy cell next to it. And so a lot of people, let's just deal with adolescents, experiment with drugs. And when we have that happen, do we try to rehabilitate those individuals, or do we just take them out and shoot them? And so I think the whole premise of the world of cancer is based on killing the cancer cell, not rehabilitating the cancer cell.

So it's flawed from the get-go. And so, again, that's the game that's played. Let me bias your thinking, convince you that you've got to kill the cancer cell. And as soon as people get that diagnosis, they want to cut it out, do whatever you've got to do. Burn it. I can't. Again, it's all mind control. And people don't realize that. There is no cancer. There's cancer metabolism. Cancer metabolism, in my humble opinion, represents what metabolism was like on planet Earth before copper and ceruloplasmin were here. There's two cancers in particular, thyroid cancer and colon cancer, in separate studies, prove that there was no ceruloplasmin present in the tissue. And there should be ceruloplasmin in that tissue. But they've documented that when ceruloplasmin is zero, that it's then the cancer begins to take over.

I heard an interview recently. I don't know what the timeframe was of the practitioner. He was a, I think it was a naturopath from California. And he was talking about the fact that in breast cancer, there can be a 15-fold increase of iron in the breast cancer cell versus the healthy cell next to it. 15-fold. And in leukemia, which is a bone marrow disorder, there's a 1,000-fold increase of iron in the leukemia cell as opposed to the healthy cell next to it. These are incredible numbers, 15-fold, 1,000-fold. And again, we're so conditioned that we need more iron. We think, well, okay, we are drowning in iron as a species, absolutely drowning. It's just, it's really an ongoing process to try to get people to wake up and embrace that reality. Wow.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, this is the only other guest that's talked about the vitamin C in this capacity is Dr. Nayan Patel on his expertise is glutathione, and he talks about how vitamin C is actually an oxidant, not a, that it's a pro-oxidant, not an antioxidant, like a lot of people.

That's exactly right. And the vitamin D aspect side of things, I mean, you're mentioning like the COVID cocktail with the C and the D and the zinc, the D. So what do you think has happened? I guess we haven't even established your thoughts on this, but what is the role of vitamin D and how should we interpret studies that seem to show beneficial effects from high vitamin D levels? This is the thing that definitely most like holistic and non-conventional doctors are there. It's like pro vitamin D supplementation, like across the board.

Morley Robbins
most of the studies are studies of correlation, not causation. So they've correlated levels, they're extrapolating in leaps of inference that, oh, well, the higher the D, the less disease you're going to have. And that's simply not true.

And what they're completely ignoring is retinal and the role that... See, here's the analogy that I'm using with increasing success. You know farming, you probably know farmers, and I'll bet the farmers that you know are really aware of the role of the sun in photosynthesis. Really important, right? Truth be known, you can't engage in photosynthesis without copper. It's one of the critical factors. And one of the number one protein on the planet is called Rubisco, like Nubisco, it's R-U-B-I-S-C-O. But it's a critical enzyme that is involved in separating carbon dioxide from the sugars so that the plants can produce the sugar. And the carbon dioxide is then given also... It's separating the oxygen, and then we can breathe the oxygen, thank you very much, little plant, so that the number one enzyme on planet Earth is copper dependent, Rubisco. Most people don't know that, they don't talk about that.

They don't talk about the plastocyanin enzyme that's the toggle between photosystem I and photosystem II, that moving the electrons is copper dependent. So the analogy that I've been using is, and I haven't lost sight of the vitamin D question, I'm going to come back, but the analogy I've been using with folks is that doctors are farmers that don't believe in the sun.

And so we live in a world that has been isolated from knowing about copper, knowing about bioavailable copper, knowing about the role that copper plays to regulate iron and oxygen on the planet. And if you don't know that, outside and out of mind, why would I need to worry about that? And then suddenly, we go back in time in the research and in the 1920s, the 1950s, like 1915 to 1920, into the 20s, an explosion of research about retinol. What were they doing with the vitamin D? Throwing it away because they said it wasn't important. And then we come fast forward about 80 years, and all suddenly, vitamin D is the hair hair child, and what does excess vitamin D do? Oh, it blocks retinol uptake.

So you can't get vitamin A, so you can't activate copper, so you can't run the system on copper. And again, there's a wonderful study done by Sabitha Merchant, she's a world renowned botanist, where she's profiled the copper-dependent enzymes and the iron-dependent enzymes. And then when copper is limiting, yeah, you can use iron, it'll work, maybe not as well, but it does happen. Like, you know, the enzymes in the liver, cytochrome P450, I think there's 52 different enzymes. And we're supposed to believe that the liver runs on cytochrome P450 enzymes, when in fact, we were designed to run on tyrosinase. Well, where's tyrosinase? It's found in the center of whole food vitamin C that's not being made available to people. What's one of the most prevalent chemicals used in food processing, tyrosinase inhibitors?

Morley Robbins
Oh, wow, didn't know that. And so the level of deception and hidden information is legendary. And so then we are trained to believe that vitamin D is where it's at. And then we're flooded with research that says, oh, this is absolutely true, but how long did it take us to wake up about 2020?

And so one of the great questions, of course, is, is the Earth flat or round? Everyone wants to know. Well, I've decided- We all want to know. Yeah. Well, I've decided Earth is a Petri dish because it's flat and round, and we were just subject to experiments. And I think we are in a giant experiment with humans to see how much stress can they put on us before we break. And I would go so far as to say that the window is closing on Homo normalis. I think that the human species is being changed. We know it changed with the jab, radically changed. And so we've got to be aware of that.

It's a very different world out there, but not everybody wants to embrace that. And most people just want to stick their head in the sand and pretend like everything's fine. It's not fine. The food system, farming has changed dramatically. Food processing changed dramatically, pharmaceuticals changed dramatically, and the intersection of those three events is having a decided effect on humanity.

Think about the number of people that you know who are chronically ill now. Think about the number of people you see wearing boots because they have hairline fractures in their lower extremities or their feet. Think about the number of people that you know who are on medications, multiple medications. I'm 72. I should be on seven medications and I take none. And so this is a very uncomfortable subject for people to embrace because it forces them to confront the reality that they live in.

And the most factual statement that I've ever read is by William Shakespeare. All the world's a stage and we are merely players. And there is a play, there is a stage, and we're just big players on the stage. But I think there isn't an agenda and it's been playing out for millennia of millennia. And it's like all I'm trying to do is give people a fighting chance to generate energy so they can deal with the unrelenting stress in their lives because it's unchecked.

There's very little being done to try to ease our day-to-day lives. And so I'm just trying to give people a viable alternative that's borne out in the research, proven that it works, tens of thousands of people around the world, maybe hundreds of thousands. I don't know what the number is. I've talked to, this week, I've talked to three different practitioners who didn't take my training, who have been relying on the RCP for the last five years in their practices. It's changed their practice dramatically. And it's like, that's great. I'm thrilled to hear that. I'm not troubled by the fact that they didn't take the training. I'm excited. I don't know what the actual number is of people who are actually doing it.

Morley Robbins
Who knows? But the fact of the matter is, people are responding to the protocol. They are getting benefit from the protocol. And is it counterintuitive? Absolutely.

Is it countercultural? You better believe it is. But there's wisdom in it because it's based on the genius of Mother Nature. So that's just my contribution to the world out there, is to give people a completely different alternative of healing besides the insanity that's being dished out by conventional practitioners.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, this is, and I'm so, so grateful for everything that you're doing. And so for people to that point, this protocol that helps so many people, the Root Cause Protocol, for people to implement it in their lives. And if listeners go and read all the reviews of your book online on Amazon, you can see all the people who have, this has helped so much.

So a few questions there, actually implementing the protocol. So you have the protocol in your book. Can people pretty much do it on their own what is the role of working with a practitioner? And if a person is not experiencing what they're hoping to experience as far as their fatigue improving or whatever they're looking to address, what's the role of troubleshooting?

Morley Robbins
Yeah, great question. The protocol was designed to democratize healing. Take it out of the hands of the priests, put it in the hands of the public. We should not need anologist for every part of our body.

So I really wanted to build on that. I'm a firm believer in the premise, the focus, and the discipline of the Western price community, because that's really, we've got to be eating ancestral food, food that our ancestors would recognize. But then we've got to go one step farther and begin to rethink the narrative about what we should be doing, should not be doing, and that's what created the stops and the starts. But the concept is that as people do this, the vast majority of people do quite well on it. I would say over 80% of people have a very beneficial response to it, but not 100%. And why is that? There's two key parts to the protocol that a lot of people don't like to spend time with. And I get calls all the time from people who've been doing the protocol, they got better and then they plateaued. And I have two questions invariably that I ask them, have you dumped your iron through phlebotomies? And have you dumped your fear through emotional release techniques, EFT or integrative processing technique or emotion code? And invariably, Melanie, they've not done one or the other or both. And it turns out, back to the beginning of our discussion, stress creates iron dysregulation. And so it's hard to believe, but we live in a very iron fortified world, but it doesn't always show in the blood. We've talked quite a bit about that. But the thing is, once you start to do the protocol, the iron will come out of the tissue and it needs to be released from the body. That's the value of the orderly phlebotomies. Certainly, if you're a menopausal woman or a guy, you need to be doing quarterly blood donations. And women who are still experiencing their menstrual cycle should do it at least twice a year. But there are many, many women with a menstrual cycle who do it four times a year, above and beyond the blood loss that they have. So the premise of the protocol is designed for the individual. Not everybody wants to do this on their own. A lot of people like working with a practitioner. So we've made it available through our training. And we've trained over almost a thousand people now who are certified as practitioners of the Root Cause Protocol. And they are there to guide people, answer questions, give them encouragement, give them case studies that they've worked with or that we talk about within the community. And it's a wonderful way to spread the message, but also provide the support that certain people want. Because not everybody wants to take responsibility for their health. I would say that out of a hundred people, maybe only two or three, really want to take ownership and responsibility for that process.

Melanie Avalon
We have two things there. One is, and this is very appropriate for this podcast and you talk about a little bit in the book as well, this role of women and menstruation and that effect leading to them losing iron more regularly.

What role does that play in the potential longevity benefits that we see for women compared to men?

Morley Robbins
enormous longevity benefits. And that was the work of Jerry Sullivan, who is a world-renowned ethologist at University of Florida, MD, PhD, who created the Iron Heart Hypothesis, studying the differences in heart disease between men and women.

And then he noted that post-menopausal women got the same symptoms. And he realized it was because they were no longer releasing iron in their monthly cycle.

Melanie Avalon
I'm really shocked this doesn't come up more and because I I'm always researching about life span and longevity and this why do women live longer and People don't mention that but it makes so much sense. No, it's again

Morley Robbins
Again, there is a tremendously protective shield around the concept that everyone is anemic and everyone is copper toxic. Both of those are so deeply embedded in our psyche and reinforced routinely online in conversation, and it's just the world that we live in, and people don't realize the brainwashing behind it.

And it's an absolute bold-faced lie. We are copper deserts and we're drowning in iron, and that's a very heretical thing to say in a post-COVID society. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon
And for people who want to sign up for your program, right? Thank you.

Morley Robbins
People can just go to the website, either rcp123.org or therootcauseprotocol.com, depending upon how many letters you want to deal with. But they can sign up for, just to start, they can sign up for the starter guide. You know, that's a great place to start.

They can get a more enhanced handbook if they want that. They can delve into all of the podcasts and research and iron toxicity posts and things like that. Then there's another level that they can join our RCP community. And we have meetings every other week where people get to ask questions, hardball questions, find out what's going on, welcome people to join us in that venue. And then people are always interested in doing the training, and that's the RCP Institute. And you access that at the resource page. And it's a very robust 16-week program. It's rigorous, this is not for the faint of heart, but it does not require a science background to be successful.

It's really designed to teach the average person how does their body work. And we have basically three groups of people that typically populate the classes. We have practitioners, as you might expect, everything from a massage therapist all the way up to physicians. Then we have moms who want to take care of their family. And then we have people like you and me that just, we don't have a license to defend or any kind of professional certification. We just want to help people. And so it's really designed to allow people to have that latitude and get the training to know how to engage in the right kind of conversation and find out what's going on in someone's world to understand their pattern of stress and then connect them to the root cause protocol to help them realize that that stress pattern is what drove the symptoms. It's not a disease. And it's very, very important for people to realize that there is no disease.

There's only stress-induced mineral dysregulation that causes metabolic dysfunction. And the metabolic dysfunction then creates symptoms. And what do we do with our symptoms? We go see a doctor. They dump all the symptoms onto their table and they look at it and they look up on the textbook and they say, oh, you have XYZ syndrome. And because we're humans, we're very gullible and they tattoo that XYZ syndrome on our forehead. Then we go home and we look up XYZ syndrome. That's exactly what I've got. I've got all those symptoms. And all of those symptoms are born out of copper iron dysregulation that affects the oxygen that then affects the production of energy and the rest is history.

Melanie Avalon
Yes. So for listeners, I will, well, we'll put all of this in the show notes. Definitely get the book, Cure Your Fatigue Now. Cannot recommend it enough.

Definitely check out all those resources at the site. I will make a link, MelanieAvalon.com, slash RCP, and that will go to the signup page for the RCP Institute. So if you would like to take that course. Yeah, that'd be great. I appreciate you doing that. That's wonderful. If listeners would like to take that course, which again, I cannot recommend enough and I'm seeing that it's a live course, right? So you only, it's not like happening all the time. It's like, this is like the real deal. It's like live.

Morley Robbins
That's right. That's exactly right. There's a live class, but there's also recorded material that needs to be reviewed before the live class.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, awesome. So for that, that's at Melanie Avalon.com slash RCP. And then, oh my goodness, so many things. Just quick comment on you were talking about the different types of people signing up and learning about this and you know how you and I were like, we're not doctors or anything. I actually have a lot of gratitude for that because it's kind of like a safety net.

Like if I were a doctor, there'd be all these I think legal implications with what I do with my work. It's really nice to be free from the system and not have to, well, knock on wood, not have to worry about that. And have more time to like research, like just research.

Morley Robbins
Exactly. So, I think the part that is very disorienting, and this is based on the work of Douglas Wallace, who's a preeminent geneticist at Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania. He does a lot of work on mitochondrial dysfunction. And he said, in 2005, he had a very important paper that they got a lot of notoriety. But in the very first sentence of that paper, he was chastising his clinical colleagues. He said, doctors do not understand the concept of cellular energy deficiency.

And that's the very mechanism that originates, or is the point of origin, for all 20,000 symptoms that are profiled in the Merck manual, cellular energy deficient. So, what does that mean? It means that the oxygen that was supposed to be turned into water to release the energy molecules got altered, and it became an oxidant. It became a reactive oxygen species. And at that point, that oxygen can no longer be turned into water to be made to release the energy. And that's, I mean, his work is just legendary. And it's lost on the average practitioner who believes in disease when, in fact, it doesn't exist. It's cellular energy deficiency because of the mismatch between what I call the three-ring circus of copper, iron, and oxygen.

Melanie Avalon
Well, Morley, this has been absolutely amazing. Again, I'm just so, so grateful for all that you do.

And congratulations on the book. I know that is no small fee to, well, A, to write a book, and then just every, it's a lot. It's so much. The last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and you might remember it from before, but it's just because I am so obsessed with the importance of mindset, which again, like you were saying, is huge in all of this. Like we talked a lot about the nitty gritty of the minerals and all of that, but the role of stress and your mental health and wellness has a huge part to play in this. And you mentioned EFT. I'm a huge fan of that. And so again, listeners get the book because it dives more into all of that. But in any case, that is all to say, what is something that you're grateful for?

Morley Robbins
I'm grateful for the fact that I was invited into this whole paradigm of research, that something triggered my being to question the regular narrative. And what I'm really grateful for is that the information is there, that it's accessible, that I have the wherewithal and the energy and the aptitude and the discipline to examine it, reflect on it, and then connect the dots for people.

And I'm also very grateful for programs like this that take the time. We've been talking for a good long while now, and it seems that the two formats that are dominating our airwaves now are shorts and longs. And I'm very grateful for a long platform where we can get into the real nitty gritty, the real weeds of the problem, so that people have a deeper understanding that it's not just some glib opinion behind this. This is a very sincere quest that I've been on for a good long while. 16 years is a good chunk of time. And I'm not stopping. I have no desire to back off my regimen. And so I'm just thrilled to be able to share this kind of information on platforms like this. So thank you for that.

Melanie Avalon
Thank you. That is such a good answer and nobody has said that before and I think about this all the time.

I am so grateful because I was worried for a little bit that the long format, especially with like the rise of all the short form and TikTok and social media, I was like, oh no, what if we lose, you know, the long form conversation, which I think is so important, but it's still here. I'm so grateful. Yeah, no.

Morley Robbins
I, but again, it's not for everyone. It's for the, and again, I think it's a small percentage that really want to hunker down and make sure they understand it.

The quotation that I absolutely love relative to this is from Einstein. Anyone can know the object is to understand. And that's what you can do in a long format is you can begin and really, really grasp what is the understanding of this topic. Because the short format is about knowing this, knowing that. Okay, big deal. But do you understand? And the question that I kept asking rather conversations, ask the doctor, why is it this way? That's the question that they don't want to hear. That's the question they don't know how to answer. And I don't say that to be being spirited. They don't know the answer. And people are need to begin to question, then why am I taking my putting my life in your hands? If you can't explain it to me, that's, that's the part that I find most unsettling is this is not rocket science. It can't be because I figured it out. And so, and so the thing is, we need to have greater command of what is behind the symptoms and know that there are natural ways to correct them. And that's really what the root cross protocol is all about.

Melanie Avalon
Amazing. Well, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for doing that and for fighting the good fight and all of your time and energy And literally are changing the world. So I'm so happy for you with the book I cannot thank you enough would love to have you back on in the future listeners as a brief reminder you can go to Melanie Avalon comm slash RCP to sign up for the Institute and definitely get the book your your fatigue now Thank you more late. This was amazing

Morley Robbins
Thank you so much, Melanie. It's always a pleasure.

Melanie Avalon
Enjoy the rest of your day!

Morley Robbins
You as well. You take care.

Melanie Avalon
I thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What Win Wine, as well as my supplement line, Avalon X.

Please visit MelanieAvalon.com to learn more about today's guests. And always feel free to contact me at contact at MelanieAvalon.com. And always remember, you got this.