Elwin Robinson

When a child is really aggressive, it may not be their character. It can be lead toxicity. Lead works differently from most toxins. Your body can't tell lead and calcium apart very well, so if you have a lot of lead, your body starts using it in place of calcium, including on the proteins that control how your nerves send signals, and then those cells don't work. That's an even bigger issue in a growing child, who's still building their brain and body. Lead can cause a lot of behavioral issues. It can also stunt their growth and significantly lower their IQ, which is the biggest predictor of success, and even of health, over a person's lifetime. If that happens when you're young, I'd say it's as ruinous as severe trauma and abuse, possibly even more so, because you can maybe overcome those, but you can't overcome a low IQ. So when I hear about a child who's super aggressive, the kind who might get labeled with oppositional defiant disorder or ADD, my reaction is: test them for lead. Maybe they have those issues and it's nothing to do with any toxin, but aggression can be an indicator.

I started taking activated charcoal after every meal, and I ended up absorbing more nutrients, not fewer. That's the opposite of the common worry, which is that charcoal soaks up your nutrients. I'd been underweight all my life. I started the charcoal as part of a protocol for mycotoxins, the toxins mold produces, and took it about two to two and a half hours after each meal, as the first thing I drank. Once I was doing that, I got hungrier more quickly, because one of the main things stopping me from being hungry, it turns out, was the toxins. If you feel poisoned enough, you're not hungry. The charcoal mopped them up, I was able to eat more, and so I was able to absorb more. Charcoal was a meaningful part of that, and so was bile flow. They worked together. I know it's anecdotal, and I wouldn't generalize from it. But I went from about 70 kilos (154 pounds), and quite deficient in quite a few nutrients according to thorough testing, to having almost no deficiencies two years later in amino acids, vitamins, minerals or essential fats. By then I weighed around 85 kilos (187 pounds), with my waist the same size.

A foot bath with baking soda and citric acid, two cooking ingredients you can get in most stores, leaves me warmer and more relaxed afterwards. You put about equal amounts of each into the water. When they combine they produce carbon dioxide (CO2), so the water starts fizzing and bubbling and smells just like carbonated water. Then you let those little bubbles rest on your skin, and the CO2 is absorbed through it. It's a nice little boost, and it feels really good. CO2 helps to speed up the metabolism, so afterwards I notice my temperature is higher, I feel more relaxed and I feel better. This comes from the work of Dr. Ray Peat and his followers. It's an experimental practice, not a clinically validated protocol, but many people find it valuable. If you want to try it, start with a few tablespoons of each in a foot bath the first time, so you know how your body responds. Using too much can actually give you a panic attack instead of relaxing you, so build up over time. Keep the water around body temperature or slightly lower, not too hot, because the CO2 is better absorbed that way. If you have sensitive skin, test a smaller amount first, as citric acid can irritate some people's skin. And if you have a serious heart or lung condition, don't do this without checking with your doctor first. For most people it's a pleasant, deeply relaxing experience.

If you take your health seriously and you've ever tried to "support your liver", this is for you. Most people who set out to do that buy milk thistle or a liver formula, and then they wonder why they feel worse. Your liver processes most toxins in two phases. Phase 1 breaks a toxin apart, and the compounds it creates are often more toxic than the original substance. Phase 2 then packages those compounds so your body can get rid of them. If Phase 2 is slow, because you're low in the nutrients it needs or your genetics make some of its pathways sluggish, those more toxic compounds circulate and do more damage than the originals would have. That's exactly what was happening in my body. My Phase 1 was working fine, but my Phase 2 was genetically compromised. This is one of the reasons some people feel terrible when they take an herb or supplement that "supports the liver", like milk thistle. If Phase 2 can't keep pace with Phase 1, you end up with more of those toxic compounds than you can remove. Milk thistle isn't a bad herb, but taken on its own it can actually make you feel worse, not better. So I'd go at it the other way around and get the nutrients in place before reaching for a liver herb. Every one of the pathways your liver uses to package a toxin for removal needs specific nutrients to run, and if those nutrients aren't there, it doesn't matter how many detox supplements you take.

When you hear that smoking's bad for you, it's easy to kid yourself that you won't be the one who gets lung cancer. I started smoking at 13 and was a chronic smoker until I was about 27. I knew it was bad for me, and I'd read the same health warnings as everyone else. Around that time, a dentist told me that if I didn't stop soon, my teeth were going to fall out. I already had a lot of gum disease, my gums had receded a lot, I'd had a lot of bone loss, and my teeth were really starting to get loose. That wasn't a maybe. It was already happening to me, and it was one of the things that really shocked me into quitting. What stopped me was a combination of two things: hitting a point where the cost of carrying on was clearly higher than the cost of stopping, and finding another way of dealing with the feelings I'd been using cigarettes and other substances to avoid. Without that second piece, the first one would've just meant staying off them through sheer willpower for a while, then relapsing.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a Soviet physician called Dr. Konstantin Buteyko was given the job of monitoring the breathing of two very different groups of people: those in peak physical condition, including athletes and cosmonauts, and those who were terminally ill. He found that the healthier and fitter a person was, the less air they breathed, and the people who were sickest and closest to death breathed the most. Until then, people had assumed heavy breathing was simply a consequence of being ill. Buteyko asked a different question: what if the over-breathing wasn't just a symptom, but a cause? So he trained seriously ill patients, many with breathing disorders, to breathe less, and according to his clinical records and the accounts of those who worked with him, many of them got better. That's the insight we owe him: chronic over-breathing is a driver of poor health, rather than merely a sign of it. I don't think what he taught is a fix for every health issue, but I do think it's an essential foundational pillar of good health. Every time you breathe out, you lose carbon dioxide (CO2). If you're breathing more air, more often, than your body needs, you lose more CO2 than your body is producing, and your CO2 drops. Low CO2 is a stress signal that makes you want to breathe even more, so people get stuck in a loop. At its extreme, that loop is hyperventilating, which is why the standard advice for someone who's hyperventilating is to breathe into a paper bag: they keep breathing their CO2 back in instead of losing it, and the cycle breaks. But most people aren't at the extreme. They're slightly, chronically over-breathing, all day, every day, for years, and most of them have no idea they're doing it.