Life After Beating Bulimia, Escaping an Abusive Alcoholic Marriage, and Repeated Exposure to Black Mold

Matt Handy (00:00:03):
I am Matt Handy and you're listening to My Last Relapse. How are you?

 

Cynthia (00:00:08):
I'm doing well. I'm excited. I just finished watching your podcast with Dr. Kahn. Is it ?

 

Matt Handy (00:00:12):
Dr. Shah?

 

Cynthia (00:00:13):
Dr. Shah, sorry. Please forgive me. Dr. Shah, if you're watching this. I thought that was,

 

Matt Handy (00:00:18):
It's SHAH.

 

Cynthia (00:00:20):
Shah. Got it. It was riveting and it was right up my alley, so I was excited to share more kind of where he left off from.

 

Matt Handy (00:00:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he actually just left too.

 

Cynthia (00:00:31):
Oh, I missed him,

 

Matt Handy (00:00:33):
But he's always here. So there's a bunch of stuff that you actually want to talk about additionally to whatever else we talk about. Right. So do you want to start with that or do you want to start with your story?

 

Cynthia (00:00:45):
Probably with that's more, I mean, my story can be interesting. I'll talk some things about my story, especially recently that's kind of given me some new insights and help me connect some dots. But I'll give a little bit about what I do. I'm a functional nutrition and lifestyle practitioner, and what that means is I'm a nutritionist, but my focus is not on typical nutrition, what your body needs. It's basically what is getting in the way of your body utilizing what your body needs. So you could be eating and doing all the things, but if there's something in the way, like let's say metal toxicity or a pathogen, like you get COVID or no matter what things are thrown at you, your body can either, in the case of a pathogen, take up a lot of nutrients to be able to fight it. Or in the case of something like a metal toxicity, it will displace certain other metals that are critical for your body functioning if there's a toxic metal in the way and then your body processes can't happen.

 

Matt Handy (00:01:55):
So you're talking about heavy metals getting in the way of zincs and

 

Cynthia (00:01:58):
Stuff like that. Right. Metal. So there's heavy metals which are cadmium, lead and Mercury, and then there's a whole host of other toxic metals that are medium to light.

 

Matt Handy (00:02:08):
And the exposure to those metals comes from?

 

Cynthia (00:02:12):
Lots of different places. You can get 'em from pickles.

 

Matt Handy (00:02:15):
Really?

 

Cynthia (00:02:15):
They put aluminum in pickle water or pickle fluid.

 

Matt Handy (00:02:19):
Yeah, the brine

 

Cynthia (00:02:20):
To make it, they don't have to, it was typically salt water, but to make it crispier something like a velastic, if you look at the, and I don't know if velastic has it anymore, I haven't eaten them in so long, but if you look at the ingredients, you'll see an ingredient called alum, and that's aluminum. And the same thing applies baking powder. So you get it in your baked goods if you don't know who made it where they got their baking powder from deodorants long.

 

Matt Handy (00:02:45):
I was about to say,

 

Cynthia (00:02:46):
Yeah, that's the one people know about mostly, and it, it has been found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and also autistic patients and other people with other mental health issues.

 

Matt Handy (00:02:59):
So did we talk about microplastics previously?

 

Cynthia (00:03:01):
No, we didn't. I mean, I haven't gotten into microplastics as far as plastics are concerned. I do focus on things like endocrine disruptors, so things that plastics typically when you see the no parabens, that's a plasticizer, that is an endocrine disruptor and it can cause your hormones to shift and men can start having more female hormones. Men can also end up, well, anybody can end up with more cortisol once one of them gets toppled over. They all affect the other.

 

Matt Handy (00:03:41):
So I heard this thing, I don't remember when it was, but that there is a credit card worth of microplastics in every human in our whole body.

 

Cynthia (00:03:49):
Probably.

 

Matt Handy (00:03:51):
That is a lot of, that's crazy to think about.

 

Cynthia (00:03:53):
It's a lot of plastic. I haven't really, that's a subject that I haven't delved into as much, just because I know already plastics are bad. Just hormonally how to get it out. That's something, I mean certainly I think we're just on the tip of that research wise. And it's nothing that I have any tests for, but certainly something that people should be, I already am getting my clients to look into those kinds of things, removing as much plastic as possible from their lives just because of the hormonal shift that it will and that gets in the way of your nutritional.

 

Matt Handy (00:04:33):
So when you talk about tests, what are the tests that you do run and what are they for?

 

Cynthia (00:04:41):
I run, I have a list of a litany of tests.

 

(00:04:46):
So they're typically blood, urine, feces. I love doing stool tests, not because they're gross, but because they really do yield, especially the stool test that I run yields a ton of information because the gut, if you think of it like the engine of your car, that's where everything happens. You can't cleave molecules off of meat and get B12 and get iron. You can't do any of that disassembling of your food if your gut's not right. And what that means is not just your mechanism of your stomach doing what it does, not just your bile, although that's another piece of it. You also have to be able to metabolize it with the use of your microbiome. So I think you may have heard something like you have more genes in your microbiome than you do in your whole body.

 

Matt Handy (00:05:51):
So I've heard a lot of around the flora in your gut, in gut that there's entire ecosystems worth of flora and then around the microbiome, how, because of the medications that are just, I mean, epidemically mean everybody's on these crazy medications that are specifically engineered to do something and then off label, it'll do like a million other things. The reality is it's a chemical that does a lot of things and people just kind of on label for this, and then they say side effects and all that stuff. But the reality is it's all just the effect of the chemical.

 

Cynthia (00:06:34):
Right, exactly.

 

Matt Handy (00:06:34):
And a lot of the actual downstream effects of these chemicals are the destruction of your microbiome is the first thing that it attacks

 

Cynthia (00:06:43):
Well, even your food. So if you just even want to talk about antibiotics in your meat, that's going to cause a disruption in your microbiome. And even too much sugar is going to feed your yeast. Interesting that we're talking about addiction. One of the things close to my heart, because I've experienced it with my loved one, is alcohol addiction. There's something called auto brewery syndrome where your own gut is a brewery because your microbiome is shifted into yeast overgrowth. And my son actually had that, not because he drank beer, but because he had a vaccination and that affected his whole microbiome. And again, back to your medications, it can be something as simple as a vaccination. It doesn't have to be harsh, hard medication for life.

 

Matt Handy (00:07:36):
Well, even like antibiotics, right? They're the greatest defender of this. It destroys all of the good bacteria as well as the bad bacteria. And so that is you go to the doctor with any kind of infection and the very first thing they're going to do is put you on an antibiotic. So it's interesting to see. It's funny because the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry specifically are not geared to heal people. They just mask symptoms typically.

 

Cynthia (00:08:10):
And I have utmost respect for doctors because if I'm in a car accident and I have to get my arms sewn back on, please, by all means, give me the drug, sew me up, do what you need to do. But I think what we've gotten into is that that's the only thing that we're supposed to turn to. And really that's more for acute issues, like something like you run in, you have a car accident or you have something severe that you need some kind of atomic bomb to fix it. Otherwise your body has a self-healing process that it goes through. If you give it the building blocks it needs, and the building blocks are, everything in your body takes the ingredients of vitamins, minerals, and amino acids to be able to do anything chemical. And that comes from your food primarily. You do have things like vitamin D and your food is important, but everything's important. That's why I'm a nutrition and lifestyle practitioner because Dr. Shaw's, so well put, oxytocin is huge. That's going to push down cortisol. So if you do have some kind of inflammation in your body from whatever source, oxytocin is a huge one that's going to bring down the inflammation, bring down the cortisol levels. It's not the only thing that you can do, and it's not the only thing you should do. It's more of a palliative kind of measure because I think to your point, what that does too is take care of the symptom. We need to find out. And that's what I do. I put my detective hat on and I'm looking for the smoking gun.

 

(00:09:52):
And sometimes more than one, the culprits, and I'm reverse engineering. So typically what happens, and I had a boy, a 14-year-old boy come to me who had depression, anxiety, mood disorder, and he was eating a lot of junk food and stuff. And so we did a stool test. He had an overgrowth of different things, but then we're like, well, why does he have this overgrowth? We don't want to stop there and just fix the overgrowth. Something caused this. So do a little more research. Some of his symptoms are pointing to metal toxicity. So let's do a metal test. So I do the metal test. Sure enough, he has a great panel except for one. And where did he get that? Well, there's another one that's thallium that's a little bit high, but not in the yellow. There's a green, yellow, and red. And so I chased that down a little bit because that's typically implicated in a water supply.

 

(00:10:55):
There's a lot of people with Valium issues because of water supply. So I asked the family, because they're pretty crunchy like me, pretty organic and wealthy family in Austin. And they knew their stuff. They looked, they were fit, they worked out all that stuff. And I'm like, do you use a purified water? They're like, no, we just drink it from the tap. Okay, we need to test your water, but you need to go ahead and put a purifier just in case. And sure enough, that was the source. The only thing that they really were not doing to protect their health was their water supply and it hadani in it. So what that did was domino effect down thee disrupted a couple of things. It displaces zinc Chromium, which led to his prediabetes. Chro chromium is implicated with diabetes. It displaces B vitamins, which is a stress regulator and a host of other things, which also affected his hormones. So downstream the hormones, he was estrogen dominant because of those displaced vitamins and minerals and estrogen dominance and men leads to depression.

 

(00:12:12):
And then the other displaced hormones led to anxiety. So I had a whole map written out where this led to this and this led to this, and this led to this. And so what we needed to do, yes, he needed to adjust his diet because that was not helping him keep the diabetes in control. But his mom complained to me. He's much like an addict. You're reaching for something that's going to fix the problem. He's tired, he's fatigued, he's depressed. Now what does he do? He's going to go reach for the thing that gives him quick energy, something like a candy bar or something like junk food makes him feel better. But then he's back in that cycle again. So what I told mom, because she was complaining about he's not eating right, well, he can't because his B vitamins are low, his chromium is low, all these nutritional deficiencies exist, and that's keeping him in that fatigued state. So what we're going to do is we're going to reverse this. We're going to give him those supplements, and once he has those supplements, he's not going to be fatigued, so he's not going to reach for the sugar anymore. He's going to be better able to control what he's doing that's contributing to this downward spiral that he's got going on.

 

Matt Handy (00:13:24):
How old was he?

 

Cynthia (00:13:25):
14. So we backtracked, we plug in those holes of the nutrition so that he can eat well, and in the meantime, we get his gut right too so that he's ready for chelation because chelation, and that's basically giving you it's natural substances because that's the only thing that crosses the blood-brain barrier to get it out of the brain. But it's also a little bit of pharmaceutical. There's EDTA, there's DMSA, so it's a combined herbal and pharmaceutical supplement, but just an over the counter pharmaceutical, but still a pharmaceutical just to get the intimidate out of his body after his guts, right after his supplements are taken care of, then we chelate, we get that out of his system and everything is reverse engineered and back to homeostasis or balance where he's supposed to be.

 

Matt Handy (00:14:21):
And what was the ultimate effect of all of these adjustments?

 

Cynthia (00:14:26):
So we're working on that. We're in the middle of his gut issue now, and I don't do chelation because chelation can be kind of dicey if you don't do it. Precisely. It can lead to health complications or problems. Like case in point, my son had chelation because he had aluminum poisoning and he was given, it's a magnet. The kind of goes through your body. It's a pill or transdermal. They used to do IVs, but that's not necessary. And it goes through your body picking up all the metals. It's not discriminating one against the other.

 

Matt Handy (00:15:03):
Really?

 

Cynthia (00:15:04):
Yeah. So what you have to do is refill that. So you have a chaser.

 

Matt Handy (00:15:08):
So it's a magnet.

 

Cynthia (00:15:10):
Well, I mean it's not an actual magnet, but the things

 

Matt Handy (00:15:13):
Like the effect of it is the same as the magnet is.

 

Cynthia (00:15:14):
Exactly, yeah. It's picking it up and it's not pulling everything out, but it's pulling out the low hanging fruit, what's spilling out, and it's going to come back and do another excavation. And then as you're doing that process, you're doing it slowly and then you're chasing it with trace minerals. So with my son, he didn't get iron in all those minerals that we gave him. We were giving him meibum. We were giving him strontium, all the different things that you don't even think about, and they missed iron. So he started eating and smearing his poop. He was eight years old, and as soon as I realized it, I called the doctor. We realized we had an iron issue, gave him 20 milligrams of iron. He stopped doing that.

 

Matt Handy (00:15:56):
So we had talked about this, I think we did, where my mom became iron deficient when she was pregnant with me, she became anemic. And so my body did the exact opposite of that, and I got hemochromatosis, which is an overload of iron in blood, an overload of iron. And so now to this day, it's like I can fall off a two story building and probably break something but not bruise.

 

Cynthia (00:16:22):
Wow. Wow. I didn't know it did that. That's interesting how there's a paradox. I had my mom when I was getting divorced, I stayed with her and I was glad I did because she started acting crazy and screaming at me for no reason, saying I did things I didn't do and just being a nut.

 

(00:16:43):
And then I kept asking her out to go with me places and she would never go. And I finally came to find out she had been having diarrhea every day for three years and then was going through dementia. She eventually kind of came clean to me. It turned out we did a specter cell, that micronutrient deficiency test, and we found out she was magnesium deficient. Now she had been taking mega doses of magnesium. So there was a paradoxical, like you're saying with your mom, because her body was getting so much magnesium, it started spilling out tons. It overcompensating for it. And so she ended up deficient paradoxically.

 

Matt Handy (00:17:21):
Yeah,

 

Cynthia (00:17:22):
Maybe that's what your body did too. It took all your mom's, give me all that iron

 

Matt Handy (00:17:27):
Because the fetus is basically a leach or it's feeding off of its host. When she became iron deficient, my body from what I understand is that it somehow triggered something in her body to

 

Cynthia (00:17:47):
Give you all hers

 

Matt Handy (00:17:47):
Give you all of hers as well. Yeah. So yeah, it's crazy how that happens.

 

Cynthia (00:17:52):
Well, and that's a good segue into, I was going to talk about sex addiction, and I think everybody knows, or I think most people know that when a woman is pregnant, your body or the woman's body suppresses its immune system. Something tells your hormones are just messengers. So this woman's body is going to tell, or a chemical, chemical messenger hormone says you're pregnant. So now we got to switch all these things off, And one of the things we switch off is your immune system for a while. And then when you give birth, the opposite happens. Your immune system cranks up because you've got to give milk and there's immune supply. Colostrum is huge. It's got a lot of immunoglobulins. The rest of the milk, if you're nursing a baby, you're basically inoculating it with the same antibodies the mother has. So they don't need vaccines If they're nursing, I mean, I don't think they need vaccines at all, but if you're going to give the argument of vaccines, they're getting vaccinated from their mother's milk, everything she's been through, all the things that she has antibodies for, the baby does too at that point. Anyway, so thinking about that, your sexual hormones are integrally linked. They're integrated with your immune system. So anything that happens to it, I mean your whole body is, it's a whole system. So things like I've just recently gone through, I'm in mold again, this is my third time being in mold.

 

Matt Handy (00:19:39):
What's interesting, you are sensitive to it and you know about it, and it's like, is it just because I'm not sensitive or looking for it that I've never interacted with it?

 

Cynthia (00:19:49):
I think that's the thing

 

Matt Handy (00:19:50):
Really,

 

Cynthia (00:19:51):
Because there are a bunch of people like the manager of my apartment's, like you're just very sensitive. No, it's, I know. I've been through it before and it's like anything you've been through before, you kind of know. I know a doctor I worked for, he's a functional medicine doctor in Sugarland. He's world renowned. He's amazing. Dr. Peter Osborne, he had a boy come in with behavioral issues and a DHD, and I heard him come in the office one day and I'd seen his chart before and I heard him complaining and whining, and he had this wine that was so distinctive and that I recognized from when my son had yeast overgrowth. And so I go look in his chart to see if he had a stool test and he hadn't had one run. And so I run to the doctor, I'm like, have you done a stool test on him? He's like, no, he sounds like he's got a yeast overgrowth. So you get to the point where start you recognize things and it's stuff that sticks out to you when you bought a car and you never noticed that car on the road before. But now all of sudden thing you I, it's everywhere. Everybody has one. So yeah, I think it's that. It's that I know what these signals are and I know what to look for. But that mold, there's a particular strain of mold and there's 36 different toxic molds that you could have.

 

(00:21:12):
Some molds that you have in your home. They are just allergenic and they're not toxic. So it's like metals. Metals can be toxic or nontoxic. Your body can use it, your body can break it down. Your body can do things with it. Toxic can't do anything with it. It starts to go nuts. There's a pinball war happening in your body. There's one mold called zero and alone, and it acts like a xenoestrogen. So it's an endocrine disruptor. It acts like an estrogen in your body, both for women and for men, for women. I'm breaking out. It's changed. The last time I was in mold, it changed my monthly two biweekly. I thought I was going through perimenopause. Sure enough, I move in a month, I'm back to normal again. And I shed weight. I was gaining weight, I was losing my hair, getting acne. Now I'm back in the mall. Same thing's happening. So the signs are there again, joint pain, all the things that you think of with perimenopause.

 

Matt Handy (00:22:12):
Have you found it? Have you actually been like, okay, it's right here.

 

Cynthia (00:22:15):
Well, I know where it is. I can tell because there's a distinct smell.

 

Matt Handy (00:22:19):
Yeah,

 

Cynthia (00:22:20):
But it's not a smell like you would think if you didn't know this before, but I just happened to know the place I was in before had that same smell. Somebody else would come and be like, I don't see anything. It's a luxury apartment. It looks great. But if it's behind the wall, you'll never know it's there. And there are all kinds of toxins that it's still off-gassing into the environment.

 

Matt Handy (00:22:43):
We live in Houston, one of the most humid parts of the country.

 

Cynthia (00:22:48):
And that is what I hear a lot is like mold is everywhere and it is everywhere. But if you build it right, because I've been in places, homes and apartments where it's old. It's not brand new, but it's built with good materials, it's well sealed and they're dealing with their plumbing properly. So the places that I've been in where I have mold issues, they haven't remediated. One place had been through Harvey. They didn't remediate properly. A lot of people feel like Clorox is just going to do it, but that just keeps the visible mold. It basically bleaches the mold, but it's still there. It doesn't kill it completely because mold has tendrils kind of reaching into the materials.

 

Matt Handy (00:23:36):
Right, because they are like fungis, right?

 

Cynthia (00:23:39):
They are fungi, yeah.

 

Matt Handy (00:23:40):
Okay. So there is, what are they called? The network that Fungis have? They're called something anyway, they can communicate a colony. So within the colony there is a communication network that they use, and it's called something, I can't remember what it's called now, but it's like a brain can send signals to each other

 

Cynthia (00:24:05):
And it sends signal to your body too. So sorry to be all over the place. But back to the auto brewery syndrome, if you have an overgrowth of yeast, it's telling your brain to eat more sugar or drink more alcohol. So you have this feedback loop between the gut microbiome that you've got and your brain, but you have that all the time. And there's an interaction between your gut microbiome and your genes. So you can turn on or turn down or completely off your genetic

 

Matt Handy (00:24:40):
Sequencing and signaling

 

Cynthia (00:24:42):
Signaling. So it's the program. You have DNA, and you've written the program, but if you don't give it the right things, it won't execute

 

Matt Handy (00:24:50):
Right

 

Cynthia (00:24:53):
Or it will get stuck if you give it the wrong stuff.

 

Matt Handy (00:24:55):
Right. Okay. So have you heard this? What is it called? There are receptors in your stomach. You want to talk about that?

 

Cynthia (00:25:09):
Keep going. There's a lot of receptors.

 

Matt Handy (00:25:13):
So there are receptors in your stomach that are also in your heart.

 

Cynthia (00:25:22):
Yeah, that makes sense. I don't know. Something I can pinpoint off the top of my head. I do know as far as stomach is concerned, I

 

Matt Handy (00:25:32):
Remember what it's,

 

Cynthia (00:25:33):
Go ahead.

 

Matt Handy (00:25:33):
There's emotional, there are receptors in your stomach that are responsible for the way that you feel, right? Emotionally, and there's more actually in your stomach than there are in your brain,

 

Cynthia (00:25:48):
I'd say. Yeah, that probably makes sense. And also the majority of your neurotransmitters are being synthesized in your gut

 

Matt Handy (00:25:57):
Really.

 

Cynthia (00:25:57):
So your serotonin, your dopamine, all these things, if you don't have the right gut microbiome, you're not producing those things. So emotion is stunted when you're not producing those neurotransmitters.

 

Matt Handy (00:26:14):
So in addiction, when you're using, when I'm using, I'm not eating anything. So what happens when you just constantly are not eating anything?

 

Cynthia (00:26:24):
Your body goes into autophagy, so it eats itself, but then your microbiome starts to starve.

 

Matt Handy (00:26:30):
Okay.

 

Cynthia (00:26:32):
I think your're headed in the right direction. It does kind of kill off maybe the good stuff in addition to the bad stuff.

 

Matt Handy (00:26:38):
So isn't one of those things where it's like if you don't feed it correctly, it is just only the bad ones that seem to thrive.

 

Cynthia (00:26:48):
Yes.

 

Matt Handy (00:26:48):
Isn't that weird how that works? It's like you have to constantly feed good stuff to keep it going. It will never just sustain itself, but all the bad stuff can sustain

 

Cynthia (00:26:56):
Itself almost. I mean, because you're going to reach for something and once you get, I think into a deficit kind of like that, boy, when you're in a deficit, then you go for anything, right? It's like if you're in pain, you're just cut my arm off. So

 

Matt Handy (00:27:09):
What is with the smearing and eating, what is that signal

 

Cynthia (00:27:14):
That is, I don't know the actual chemical process of it, but it's a situation called PICA that pregnant women also get, and they'll eat dirt. If they're not getting enough minerals, they'll eat dirt or phone books or newspapers just to get the minerals that they need. So it's a mineral deficiency. And then they're going for whatever seems right,

 

Matt Handy (00:27:34):
Phone books.

 

Cynthia (00:27:36):
When we used to have phone books, I'm dating myself.

 

Matt Handy (00:27:39):
Yeah, there is going to be a contingency of people that actually, no, I just found out that the majority of the people that watch this, 99% of them are men and they're like 35.

 

Cynthia (00:27:52):
Oh, wow. Well, and for your male audience, I wanted to get into this a little bit. I thought this was really interesting. And I mean this from a totally clinical perspective. So having been in the mold three times and having experienced something similar when I was a teenager, I'll have to kind of take you through the mold first this last time. Thank you.

 

Matt Handy (00:28:15):
I forgot

 

Cynthia (00:28:15):
I was in. Thank you. I know my toxins. I started to experience again with the perimenopause, I realized why there were so many younger men interested in older women that I was suddenly getting asked out by young men. I'm like, what is going on? I was like, oh, this is why. There's that curve of when you're at your peak and perimenopause, all the hormones are everywhere, so you're just kind of sexually very prime.

 

Matt Handy (00:28:48):
So there's a pheromonal reaction.

 

Cynthia (00:28:50):
There must be that, well, I'm sure it's comm. Measure it with that, because your body's putting off exactly what's going on in it.

 

Matt Handy (00:28:58):
Oh, yeah.

 

Cynthia (00:29:00):
Because you do. I mean that's, Hey, I'm ready. So during this process of going through the mold illness, I found myself really, I'm glad I was a religious person, and I don't believe in sex without marriage because goodness, and it's too bad I wasn't married. But it was interesting to see this shift into that and then away from it just by moving. And it doesn't mean I didn't have a healthy appetite before, but this became a little bit like

 

Matt Handy (00:29:29):
It was a driver.

 

Cynthia (00:29:30):
I need to lock myself in my house kind of thing. And a similar thing. And that's because the immune system, my immune system was getting hyperstimulated from the mold, but something similar, it just rang a bell. Something similar had happened to me when I was a teenager and going through puberty. I was 16 and I'd had my vaccines for high school and right after I had them. And that's

 

Matt Handy (00:29:58):
Vaccines for high school.

 

Cynthia (00:29:59):
Oh yeah. You have to have them every, there's a schedule and you even have 'em through high school.

 

Matt Handy (00:30:04):
I am almost positive I did not do that

 

Cynthia (00:30:06):
Well. And that's the thing, sometimes people don't, it just depends on the doctor. It depends on your parents and how they want to do it. It depends on the schedule too. Because I had 16 vaccines all my life. My son had 25 by the time he was three. And now the current schedule, it's 76 by the time you're 18. But that event, to have a vaccine, it is designed to hyperstimulate your immune system. So right after I had those vaccines, I became same way. I was in the malt, actually worse. And my poor boyfriend at the time, he would be talking in high school, not courtyard, and I go grab him for a snog. I was like, beeline laser lights coming out of my eyes to go get him and get something taken care of. And it was really overwhelming. And I can imagine with me, I've only ever had that feeling and the feeling of food. And I think probably because of my history of having been molested, maybe those are the things I used food to cope with those feelings. So just kind of thinking back to that episode, in that part of my life, it also affected my mood. So I was very aggressive just in general. And my mother kicked me out at that point. I was getting so aggressive with her. She kicked me out. I went to live with my sister.

 

Matt Handy (00:31:37):
How old were you?

 

Cynthia (00:31:38):
I was 16.

 

Matt Handy (00:31:39):
Yeah. Okay.

 

Cynthia (00:31:39):
No, I turned 17. It was between 16 and 17. So I was 16. I got my vaccines, and then it took a few months for all the process to kind of carry out. 17, I'm with my sister and I start breaking out in hives. This again, points to that immune system. Part of it. My eyes would swell up. My lips were huge whelps on my back, whelps everywhere. And I was trembling because it was so just nervous system, I guess it was affecting. So the same thing happens with a lot of different events that are hyperstimulating your immune system. And I say that to kind of emphasize when your immune system is involved, sexuality is involved, anxiety is involved because you're talking about all of your hormones, you're talking about your sex hormones, but you're also talking about cortisol levels and those can spike. And then you've got anxiety, and then you want to reach for something. And depending on you, whatever's going to quell it, what is your poison?

 

Matt Handy (00:32:43):
Yeah. And Dr. Shah does talk about, it's the hyperactivity in the amygdala.

 

Cynthia (00:32:47):
I was listening to that.

 

Matt Handy (00:32:48):
So the signaling that goes on within the amygdala specifically where it starts in the base lateral amygdala. So in the basal part, have you ever seen the Amy? Yeah. So in the fat part of it, and then it starts signaling out of control. And the interesting part is the neurotransmitters that your brain produces, it doesn't just have an endless supply of neurotransmitters.

 

Cynthia (00:33:14):
It's not just your brain too,

 

Matt Handy (00:33:16):
Right? Well mean. Yeah. And then that's another part is people in early recovery are typically, not always, but typically using food as coping mechanisms because you've taken away their real coping mechanism, which is drugs or alcohol. And it's like, so now there a lot of the time it's like starchy sugary foods, calorie dense, empty calories. And so yeah, you've got all that signaling. But then additionally, if you are presenting in the way that we are looking for here then, which Dr. Shah has worked with enough people to know that it's basically one out of three. So 33% of people are presenting in this particular way where they have a hyperactive or overstimulated amygdala. And then he talks about the Jacksonian march and all of that stuff. That really points to it being a low grade seizure. And really all it is, is your signaling is incorrect.

 

Cynthia (00:34:19):
Everything's pew, pew, pew,

 

Matt Handy (00:34:21):
Hyper firing, and then it's setting off this chain of events within the brain, not the mind, but the brain that is causing you to escalate in behaviorally, emotionally, ultimately, spiritually. When you talk about this, it's like a complete cutoff, right? Because now you're operating out of fear. So in early recovery, one of the downstream effects of this, if you do not intervene correctly or in time, is you're going to get high. You'll eventually pick up something that will quiet the amygdala. How many clients are you working with that are addicts? Or how many historically have you worked

 

Cynthia (00:35:03):
With? Actually, I have not worked with a single addict.

 

Matt Handy (00:35:06):
So

 

Cynthia (00:35:07):
If you take away maybe a food addict,

 

Matt Handy (00:35:11):
Well, so the process addiction of food addiction is,

 

Cynthia (00:35:14):
Is a similar process,

 

Matt Handy (00:35:15):
Very similar process, but it's feeding off of different signaling for addicts and alcoholics specifically. It's like when you look at the neurological pathways that are firing off, it's like all of the short pathways, right?

 

Cynthia (00:35:31):
Sure. It chooses the path of least resistance.

 

Matt Handy (00:35:34):
Yes, for sure.

 

Cynthia (00:35:35):
Well, and it also takes, going back to that boy that we had to reverse engineer, and he had all these deficiencies because of what was going on in order to fire the way it is. And in order to make a single hormone, you're using all these amino acids, minerals and vitamins to make that it's making a cake. If you don't have that, let's say I had to make a bunch a billion cakes, and all I had were six eggs. I'm out of eggs now. And so I can't do any other processes and the body is still demanding from this, so I need to go and get some more eggs or some other egg substitute. So that's kind of reaching for the candy or reaching for the sugar. I've got to get something that's going to fill in that hole, although it's not going to fill it properly.

 

Matt Handy (00:36:22):
So with this overstimulation of the amygdala, eventually what we found out is that you will burn out. It will eventually stop, but most people interrupt it by then externally. And so with the people that you're working with, are you seeing that they are specifically reaching for, what is it that they're actually reaching for to calm that down?

 

Cynthia (00:36:46):
It depends on them. So coffee actually calms me down. For example, it wouldn't calm somebody else down, but that's how my chemistry and my genetics works. Some are reaching for sugar to give them more energy. Some are reaching for wine to calm down.

 

Matt Handy (00:37:04):
So alcohol sometimes.

 

Cynthia (00:37:05):
So there is alcohol, but I wouldn't call them an addict per se,

 

Matt Handy (00:37:10):
Because they're No, but it still produces the same effect that just on a much more basic level.

 

Cynthia (00:37:16):
But I do have plenty of clients that do have the anxiety and that do have the depression, and they have all those things that go along with becoming an addict. They just aren't necessarily calling themselves anything other than maybe a food addict. And for that, we've got substitutions that I'll make for them. But I think if you're talking about, I do know for me it's kind of been, I wouldn't call it a labor of love, but I guess a labor of

 

Matt Handy (00:37:47):
Interest,

 

Cynthia (00:37:48):
Interest. And maybe not even validation, but what could I have done for my ex-husband who was an alcoholic? I see. What would I have done?

 

Matt Handy (00:37:59):
You are doing your therapy through working with others.

 

Cynthia (00:38:01):
Right? Exactly. Thank you for giving me words for that. I was finding it hard to articulate it. And what I would do if he would let me, I could have given him GABA to help calm down his nervousness. Because really, I think that that was a lot of it. He was dealing with an anxiety issue. But there are other things too, have you ever heard of,

 

Matt Handy (00:38:31):
So some kind of mood disorder?

 

Cynthia (00:38:32):
Well, it's emotional blindness. So a lot of people that have,

 

Matt Handy (00:38:37):
I remember your story. Okay, yeah.

 

Cynthia (00:38:40):
So that's just an iodine deficiency. And he did have that. He had an inability to read people. Their emotions were he took it. He had a perception of the way people were facially their responses to him, his perception was completely off. And that is another thing I would've tried to help him with is, okay, your perceiving slight where there are none, you are perceiving danger where there's none. And that, I think Dr. Shaw was talking about a little bit there, and something as simple as iodine. And again, you can get that iodine deficiency from your water supply having too much bromide, chlorine, fluoride.

 

Matt Handy (00:39:29):
How do you supplement iodine?

 

Cynthia (00:39:31):
Just give them iodine. I'm actually taking it now. The mold has been making me deficient.

 

Matt Handy (00:39:37):
So like iodine that you rub on, you

 

Cynthia (00:39:40):
Can, I just have a dropper of it. It's not the best tasting thing in the world. You can eat, you can eat for it, you can eat kelp, you can eat more seafood, that kind of stuff. Things from the sea. But I take the easy way out at the moment just because the mold has just really wrecked up a toll on my body, and I'm trying to get it quickly done.

 

Matt Handy (00:40:05):
So it's interesting when remembering what I remember and hearing you talk about this again, and then having a completely different point of view based on what I've been learning over the last, how long has it been? Four months?

 

Cynthia (00:40:19):
I think. So Something Like that. This Summer.

 

Matt Handy (00:40:21):
December?

 

Cynthia (00:40:23):
This summer.

 

Matt Handy (00:40:23):
This summer. Was it?

 

Cynthia (00:40:26):
Was it

 

Matt Handy (00:40:27):
Like July? Was it July?

 

Cynthia (00:40:28):
Think August 1st, If I'm not Mistaken.

 

Matt Handy (00:40:30):
Yeah. Yeah. But first of all, the awareness around, the awareness around what's actually going on, the ability to what happened with you right now, right? Our ability to actually articulate what's going on, completely lacking, but the awareness factor for what's actually going on with people in your ex-husband's situation. And what you're saying is that he misread micro expressions.

 

Cynthia (00:41:04):
Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (00:41:05):
Have you heard of a book called The Three Christ of Epsilon? No. So there was a psychologist that worked at an insane asylum a long time ago, and he had two clients that had the same delusion. They were schizophrenic and they had the same delusion, and they met each other. And one of them realized if that person's that, then I can't be. And he dropped the delusion.

 

Cynthia (00:41:28):
Yes. I think I heard you talking about that.

 

Matt Handy (00:41:30):
I have talked about this before. And then what

 

Cynthia (00:41:33):
He, I've watched your podcast.

 

Matt Handy (00:41:36):
So then do you remember the rest of it?

 

Cynthia (00:41:38):
No, Keep going.

 

Matt Handy (00:41:38):
Well, the bottom line is he found that people, schizophrenia have primitive belief problems where they do not associate things correctly with each other. And so it's like a primitive belief is my name is Matthew, and when I'm three years old, I can correct an authority figure. I understand who I am. My name is Matthew, right? And so that's a primitive belief. But then there's also associations within the primitive beliefs of humans that we understand. It's like, this is mom, this is dad, this is safe. That's fire that's outside. This is inside. That can hurt me.

 

Cynthia (00:42:18):
I think I get it. They used to call me Amelia Bedelia. Do you know who that is?

 

Matt Handy (00:42:21):
Hell yeah. I read those books.

 

Cynthia (00:42:23):
If they tell you to, this was my ex's family. I'm not quite like that anymore, but I used to be, if you tell her to dress the chicken, she'll actually put clothes on the chicken. She doesn't know that.

 

Matt Handy (00:42:34):
That is so funny.

 

Cynthia (00:42:35):
Oh, I thought you were. But that's very common in autism too. And to me, these disorders, these mental disorders are not, they're just degrees of damage. And it's not permanent damage. It's like degrees of your body being out of sync, out of order of the way it should be working. And my son used to, I asked him if he wanted tuna. He said no three, not when he was very little. And I hadn't realized he was autistic yet. So there is a comprehension issue that is common.

 

Matt Handy (00:43:08):
Yeah. It's the associations,

 

Cynthia (00:43:09):
Right? Yeah. And it's very common with even narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality, even the cluster bees. And I'm looking at things like serial killers. We have one in my ex's family.

 

Matt Handy (00:43:24):
How about the one that's going on right now? Have you

 

Cynthia (00:43:26):
Oh, yeah. That would be interesting to see. But what I'm noticing is that they all seem nutritionally deficient, all of them, every, because I watched them because I had one in my family, but I'm watching them and Richard Ramirez totally sunken in cheeks. You can tell he's emaciated. And there's a whole bunch of other ones. Ryan Kohlberg. I don't even remember. Ed Gein.

 

Matt Handy (00:43:53):
Ed Gein was the guy that, well, now it's like a big deal.

 

Cynthia (00:43:56):
Green River. No,

 

Matt Handy (00:43:57):
No. The Green River Killer is another one. Interesting one too. But Ed Gein is the guy that the Texas chainsaw massacre based on.

 

Cynthia (00:44:03):
Oh okay. Was he really skinny?

 

Matt Handy (00:44:04):
So he was, historically, when you see pictures of him, he's like a really small person. So I'm genetically short because I'm Vietnamese. But

 

Cynthia (00:44:20):
This guy was not,

 

Matt Handy (00:44:21):
This guy was white, and he was a really small person.

 

Cynthia (00:44:24):
He could have been taller if he wanted to be. Well, and that does play a part, because if you're not getting any, the nutrients or the microbiome, all of the things you need, you're not going to be able to carry out your thought process properly.

 

Matt Handy (00:44:39):
Yeah, I mean, you have to be able to run the machine,

 

Cynthia (00:44:43):
Right? Yes, exactly. Oh yeah. And he looks pretty and healthy too. Brian Berger, the one who was in the college and just killed four people. I don't know if you saw him, but he had been really overweight and then all of a sudden he was super, super skinny.

 

Matt Handy (00:44:59):
So he's an interesting person too, because he's a genius.

 

Cynthia (00:45:04):
And there's a lot of that going on too. I think there's some damage your veins when they're hurt, or if you get surgery, your veins will bifurcate and they'll grow around. And I think what's happening with people with any kind of chemical damage in the brain, I think that's the same thing that's happening. Your nerves, it's plastic, the

 

Matt Handy (00:45:30):
Neuroplasticity.

 

Cynthia (00:45:31):
Exactly.

 

Matt Handy (00:45:32):
It definitely has the ability to, so Dr. Shah talks about it.

 

Cynthia (00:45:38):
Make new connections.

 

Matt Handy (00:45:39):
And so for people that smoke meth, they fry their synapsis. And then if you look at X-rays of their brain, they always say there's holes in their brain, but really it's just dead. It's completely inactive, but there's still signaling going on around it.

 

Cynthia (00:45:54):
And they can regrow

 

Matt Handy (00:45:56):
With meth you cannot. You fry a lot of it to the point I

 

Cynthia (00:46:00):
Have a lot of, whenever I hear, I mean, I guess this is how I've been able to help my son and myself. Whenever I hear you like watch us.

 

Matt Handy (00:46:09):
I shouldn't say you can't.

 

(00:46:10):
There is a level of

 

Cynthia (00:46:11):
They have not figured out how.

 

Matt Handy (00:46:13):
So there's a level of damage that that particular drug, it's very different. I mean, there are people that have not smoked meth for 20 years. And when you look at certain scans of when your brain lights up due to electrical signaling, 20 years later, there's still dull parts of the brain.

 

Cynthia (00:46:32):
And I do look at these things like if you had an accident, a car accident, and I've had a car accident, multiple ones, and I've got two discs that are messed up because of it, but I do find, unless I'm in mold, and it triggers the inflammation of those, just like a trick knee, when you injure yourself in football and it rains, it'll swell. So anytime you have any kind of inflammation in your body, which inflammation is your body's response to something going wrong, it'll go first. That's where you're going to get hit first. I do feel like damage to the brain can be a little bit like that. You may never fully recover, but you can gain some level of recovery If you give it all the right things

 

Matt Handy (00:47:15):
Like CTE, right? It's pretty permanent, right?

 

Cynthia (00:47:19):
CTE jog my memory. Tell me what that means.

 

Matt Handy (00:47:24):
What it actually, I

 

Cynthia (00:47:25):
Know we're going to have to look

 

Matt Handy (00:47:26):
IThat's like, that's what football players get in boxers. Oh yeah.

 

Cynthia (00:47:29):
Concussion.

 

Matt Handy (00:47:30):
Yeah.

 

Cynthia (00:47:31):
And I do have a concussion patient.

 

Matt Handy (00:47:32):
Really?

 

Cynthia (00:47:33):
Yeah. And one of the interesting thing with concussion, again, back to the gut-brain connection. When you have a head injury,

 

Matt Handy (00:47:41):
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

 

Cynthia (00:47:43):
Encephalopathy, thank you. I should know this. I do know this. So when you have a traumatic brain injury, again, your chemical signals go out. Zonulin is triggered, and that will actually open up the tight junctions in your gut. So your gut has all these tight little cells right next to each other, but it's a little bit permeable so that your food can basically be absorbed into the bloodstream. So when you have a head injury, your gut actually becomes leaky, and then you have a gut issue as well. And then there's a spiral. So when people are dealing with head injury and brain injury at all, that's going on. So whenever you're dealing with something going wrong in the brain, you have to address the gut in some capacity. Everything is important. Your metal toxicity, your environmental pollutants, your plastics.

 

(00:48:42):
It's all important. And it's all something to investigate. But I go by the person's story, what is happening, and kind of travel with them to find what the, don't play clue with me, because I'm really good at catching all the little nuances. And that might be pointing me to the right labs to do further investigation, like the stool test that tells us a whole bunch. It has a lot of markers that then we can go, there's a marker in the stool test for whether or not you have IGA A, which is food sensitivities. So then I might say, okay, you have a marker for food sensitivity, so let's consider taking a sensitivity test. A lot of times those can happen because of something like mold. When I was in mold the second time I developed an allergy and sensitivity, those were two different things. One's an IgE that goes through your immune system.

 

(00:49:41):
That's what they're looking for when they do allergy tests. But allergy tests won't discover food sensitivities or other kinds of sensitivities that are I-G-M-I-G-A and IgE G. So sorry to give you all that.

 

Matt Handy (00:49:54):
No, no, you're good.

 

Cynthia (00:49:55):
But they're just, they're two different worlds. And the typical doctor isn't looking for sensitivities. But if I eat pork now, the mold has made me sensitive to pork, and I'll get depressed just from pork just because what happens is now my body's mounting an attack and the chemical cascade that's happening after that is leading me to a depression state. So it's fascinating and amazing to see how many little things can build up to cause you your emotional state and your thoughts.

 

Matt Handy (00:50:30):
So it'll be really interesting. So I know I've already told you this, and they probably all heard this too, but early on in my recovery journey, I was constantly told, you got to do this. You got to do this, you got to do this. And now that you're sober, you should eat better and work out. And it's funny because we look in recovery, we look for all these things that can trigger us to revert back to serious symptoms of addiction, which is drug use or alcoholism. But when you tie in this level of what nutrition does to you, it makes me think about all of the different times where it's like something happened and it's like I can't actually explain what happened, but it's like I wonder if I was eating fucked up.

 

Cynthia (00:51:22):
Yeah. Yeah. Had, did I already say when I was getting divorced, I was eating buckwheat flour?

 

Matt Handy (00:51:31):
No, I remember this.

 

Cynthia (00:51:32):
Okay, maybe I said it to you just off camera. I had been going through a divorce. My ex was stalking me. He broke into my place a couple of times. It would stand a reason that I would have panic attacks. I realized that right around the times when I would have panic attacks, I was making this gluten-free bread for my son and it had buckwheat flour on it. So I do a quick search on online buckwheat flour and panic attacks, and I find one person on one bulletin board that said that she had them too. So they little more digging on buckwheat flour, and it has a super high phenolic content. It's polyphenols,

 

(00:52:10):
They're important, they're good to have, but I don't make enough of an enzyme to break it up. Kind of like with your story, with their Asian genetics and not being able to, not having enough of the enzyme to break down the alcohol. I don't do phenols. I can do a little, but if I have a lot at once, I need to take an enzyme. So I have this enzyme that's called no phenol and has this enzyme that will break that apart and then not cause havoc in my body, but it was causing me panic attacks. So a lot of people are going through their life going through emotional distress thinking that I was thinking it was my husband or my ex-husband causing this when all along was the food, sorry guy. And I'm sure he probably had the same situation with me at some point and just not knowing that that was really the culprit.

 

Matt Handy (00:53:00):
How many people that you work with, I guess maybe a large percentage, but how many people are actually this sensitive to food?

 

Cynthia (00:53:07):
I think it's like you said, with mold, they don't know. So everybody that I worked with, and the thing with the sensitivity to the pork with the mold is after a while being out of the mold, I won't be sensitive to pork anymore. Your body will go back into it.

 

Matt Handy (00:53:21):
So no bacon.

 

Cynthia (00:53:22):
So not for now.

 

Matt Handy (00:53:23):
That is crazy.

 

Cynthia (00:53:24):
I know. It's the saddest.

 

Matt Handy (00:53:25):
That sucks.

 

Cynthia (00:53:26):
It's okay. I can eat duck. Okay. But the sensitivities are one level. The metals. The mold pathogens. My ex, he had gotten the chicken pox and I had the chicken pox too, but for some reason when he was little and he would get cold sores all the time, I never got those. But what happens with the chickenpox virus is it stays dormant and your fifth cranial nerve, and then it comes out to your lip.

 

Matt Handy (00:53:58):
I remember this,

 

Cynthia (00:53:59):
Unless it goes back to your cranial nerve. And then you can get Bell's palsy. And this happens with other viruses too. But viruses and pathogens can eat up your vitamins and minerals and nutrients, but they can also cause a toxic load. And what happened with him was when he was a kid and that happened, he first got Bell's Palsy. He said he had a dream that he was wearing one of his sister's friend's nightgowns, they were having a slumber party and he woke up and he didn't have it on. He was like, whew. Then he is cleaning his room a few days later and he finds a nightgown. And the nightgown he dreampt about under the bed. Fast forward to we're married and we're like three years into our marriage, he goes and alcoholic, he goes on a bender, his immune system goes down because he's drinking. And that causes your microbiome to go down, which affects your immune system. The same thing happened, the Bell's palsy. He wakes me up the next morning, he's like, I think I did something. I'm like, you do? I think I came in the house naked. I'm like, what are you talking about? And he's like, and I have Bell's Palsy. I'm like, what's going on? And he did. He apparently had a psychotic episode because of that virus going back to the cranial nerve affecting his brain, he took all his clothes off in the car and came in naked to the house.

 

Matt Handy (00:55:23):
That's interesting.

 

Cynthia (00:55:24):
Viruses are a big deal too.

 

Matt Handy (00:55:26):
Yeah. Well, I mean, you hear about really just so when people are under the influence, they do crazy things. The Bell's Palsy thing is definitely interesting. I've only met one person in person that had Bell's Palsy, and he was like, oh yeah, I was drinking a lot and I was really stressed out, and my dad kicked me out and I woke up one morning and half my face didn't move. Okay, I guess, whatever.

 

Cynthia (00:55:53):
Why would that be? Well, this is one, so there's a lot that I think we're medicating with substances because we don't know, just like the mold, how would, and I had some intrusive thoughts during the time in the mold, and interestingly enough, I had some thoughts that I'm like, what the hell was that horrified,

 

Matt Handy (00:56:15):
Violent, or

 

Cynthia (00:56:18):
Just stuff I would never ever think about in my regular life and just not me at all so bad. I don't even want to say, but it was really shocking. I know right now everybody wants to know. But it was shocking. But it was also one of those thoughts that I was like, wow, I was relatively in control. I'm like, how much longer would I have to be in this mold to where I wouldn't be able to be like that? Because at one point I was in mold and it was making me aggressive. And then the vaccine, when I was a teenager, it did make me aggressive. All your hormones. But it also, when I moved out of the mold recently during the summer, I was living in a place that didn't have any. And when I moved back just recently, like a month ago, the night I lived in the place, I had nightmares and my whole body swell up. My joints were completely swollen and painful. And it just was amazing to me that nightmares would occur because of this. And I kept having nightmares until I decided to live, to sleep in my son's room, no nightmares. And then I did some investigating and I found the water damage. And so I think the wall behind the wall in that room is where the mold is, but that's how much mold can cause you to have thoughts just because of it changing your body chemistry.

 

Matt Handy (00:57:45):
Yeah. What is that one? It's like cats. Oh,

 

Cynthia (00:57:54):
Cordyceps. Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (00:57:55):
Yeah.

 

Cynthia (00:57:55):
Where it was the last of us, they had it in there and it controls the ants with cordyceps. I think it's more like it functions in the human body. It doesn't let you get exhausted. The Chinese Olympians used it, but yeah, it controls the ant's brain and gets it to walk up the tree or the limb so that it can explode out of its head

 

Matt Handy (00:58:16):
So that it'll spread.

 

Cynthia (00:58:18):
But that's exactly how your gut microbiome works, symbiotically with your brain. And if you don't have it right, it is going to make the neurotransmitters or not make the neurotransmitters to make you behave certain ways.

 

Matt Handy (00:58:33):
It's so weird. All the downstream effects of, so what about meats?

 

Cynthia (00:58:38):
Meats are great. I mean, I don't have a problem with them if they're clean, if they're clean source. Because back to my hippie ways, everything is about toxic load. And so with meat, one of the reasons that it's demonized so much is that, and it's usually like red meats that have more fat, is that toxins are stored in the fat. So your body tries to protect you. And animals are the same way. By storing all the toxins in the fat where it's not going to do any damage or not, at least not too much. And then the fat kind of becomes a hormone producer in itself and stores more fat, and there's this terrible cycle. But the fattier the meat more, it's going to have toxins in it unless you have a clean animal.

 

(00:59:26):
So if you have a conventionally raised animal that has hormones, it has chemicals from the pesticides in the grass that it eats or the feed that it has, it's not an organic grass rat raised or raised the way nature intended, you're going to have more of a toxic load in the fat of that animal. So the fattier the meat, the more it's going to be bad for you. If it's conventional, if it's not conventional, there's a host of really good things that meat can provide. Particularly liver. You don't have to have meat. I don't think vegetarians should take B12 because you have an easier time breaking B12 off of meat than you do typically, because vegetarians don't eat fermented foods. If they eat more fermented foods, if you eat right as a vegetarian, you can do fine, but the typical vegetarian doesn't. The typical vegetarian will go towards more carbohydrates, and that's going to feed more of the bad gut bugs. You're not going to have as much of a balance unless you have the raw food diet.

 

Matt Handy (01:00:31):
Yeah. So specifically with milk, have you heard this whole thing about the estrogen? Okay.

 

Cynthia (01:00:42):
Well, I mean, I know where you're going with it. I am not sure what you,

 

Matt Handy (01:00:46):
Well just talk about it for me, I find this super interesting, especially with the effects on boys,

 

Cynthia (01:00:51):
Right? So you've got the conventional cows are just loaded up with hormones. They're constantly pumping out milk, and they shouldn't be the regular cows though it's a lactating animal. So it's full of hormones and it's passing the hormones on to you and your milk. So one of the things that is passing along is the ability for the baby to grow, or its calf to grow. The hormones in milk are causing, I think, problems with boys being more estrogen dominant, but also with girls, what is it? Precocious puberty. Having

 

Matt Handy (01:01:30):
Developing,

 

Cynthia (01:01:30):
Developing earlier. Yeah. So for me, with people that have, ladies that I deal with that are talking about weight gain and they want to lose weight, which that's some of, I market for mental health because that's where I really want to help people. But there's plenty of my friends and people I know and people they know that have come to me for weight issues. And one of the things that I tell the ladies is, especially them, if you are having perimenopause or you are having just hormonal issues, PCOS, whatever, that's polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is very common with women nowadays because taking the pill and it's making them that way, they shouldn't have dairy because that's going to tip over their hormone and one hormone tips over, it's going to tip over the rest of them. Same thing with insulin resistance. If you are having blood sugar issues, it's going to tip over the rest of your hormones too.

 

Matt Handy (01:02:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Insulin resistance. And when you look at America and who talks about it? I think, well, somebody talks about it all the time where it is. Have you seen pictures of people in the thirties and forties?

 

Cynthia (01:02:42):
No, they weren't like the

 

Matt Handy (01:02:43):
Dude. It was like everybody was healthy. Yeah,

 

Cynthia (01:02:46):
But we're not eating food. And even there's no crop rotation like there used to be. Oh yeah. It is just the food that we're eating is devoid of nutrients and you can taste it

 

Matt Handy (01:02:58):
Or not taste it.

 

Cynthia (01:02:59):
Yeah, exactly. More appropriately. You don't taste what you're eating, so they load 'em up with sugars and salts and all the things that are causing you addiction. And Philip Morris, I think at the tobacco company, the tobacco industry has, they took over the food industry. So they applied the same tobacco science to the food to addict people to foods

 

Matt Handy (01:03:25):
As in the additives and stuff like that.

 

Cynthia (01:03:28):
Well, everything that could make you addicted to it, that's what they do.

 

Matt Handy (01:03:33):
Have you heard about the sugar scandal?

 

Cynthia (01:03:37):
Not I'm sure.

 

Matt Handy (01:03:38):
The way that

 

Cynthia (01:03:39):
I'm sure I have, but I don't register it right now.

 

Matt Handy (01:03:42):
I don't know if it's called the sugar scandal. It was a scandal that the sugar industry perpetrated to get trick people into eating more sugar. More

 

Cynthia (01:03:50):
Sugar.

 

Matt Handy (01:03:51):
Yeah,

 

Cynthia (01:03:52):
That sounds about right, but I'm

 

Matt Handy (01:03:53):
Not, yeah, talked about high cholesterol and

 

Cynthia (01:03:56):
Fat.

 

Matt Handy (01:03:57):
Low fat when they low

 

Cynthia (01:03:58):
Fat, high sugar content

 

Matt Handy (01:04:00):
And they created the food pyramid.

 

Cynthia (01:04:02):
Oh yeah. And Philip Morris is involved in that too, because they wanted to sell more grains.

 

Matt Handy (01:04:09):
So yeah, they created this food pyramid based on profits over people instead of

 

Cynthia (01:04:13):
That's correct.

 

Matt Handy (01:04:14):
People that, how old are you?

 

Cynthia (01:04:17):
50.

 

Matt Handy (01:04:18):
Okay. I'm 36. The food pyramid was on everything when I was a kid. It was on milk and four slices of bread.

 

Cynthia (01:04:28):
Cereal boxes.

 

Matt Handy (01:04:30):
And it had a box of cereal on it too. Yeah, that was funny.

 

Cynthia (01:04:33):
They were trying to help us. Gave even more money.

 

Matt Handy (01:04:37):
The downstream effect is how many people, statistically it's like 50% of the United States is obese or something like that.

 

Cynthia (01:04:45):
It's pretty bad. But a lot of the obesity too, especially having gone through mold and having gone through other things that I can see causes you or you're tired like me now, I want to eat more because I'm tired just like that young boy because the mold is fatiguing me. I don't have the energy to work out. And when I do, my joints are all inflamed, so when I do work out, it causes problems. So it's not only the food, it's also your environment. So all these things matter. Just like with this kid, his water supply was the crux of the matter. Your water supply matters.

 

Matt Handy (01:05:29):
Yeah. I still really, you and Dr. Shah should talk and

 

Cynthia (01:05:34):
Yeah, I know. I was just wanting to hug him when I heard him. Amazing. He is.

 

Matt Handy (01:05:39):
He's amazing. We were just talking about him too. Everybody loves him. He's got an amazing heart. But because we're so, we're really hyper fixated on what the amygdala is doing, trying to marry that into whatever's going on in the gut too. Because as the build out happens and we're developing curriculum and doing all this stuff, it's like there's a lot of conversations around the human machine. And addressing the four components, at least the four components that we're boiling it down to is it's mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical. How do we develop all of the breakdown for the programming for each category and specifically the physical part is hard to address because how do you force somebody to work out? It's very easy in treatment to be like, okay, you got to go to this class, you got to go to this class, you got to go to this class.

 

(01:06:40):
But it's like there is so many other issues with having a physical training type regimen in it. First of all, they don't want to work out. Second of all, there is so much, when you're early in recovery, you make the craziest assumptions about everybody's looking at you and judging you. And there's all of this shame and guilt that really plays into, I don't want to, especially for guys, I don't want to go work out because what if they're better than me? Everything that you're doing is super self-conscious to the point where it's when you are building, at least this happened for me. It's like to this day I told you I hate going to the gym. I work out every day. I had to build a gym in my garage in order to go work out.

 

(01:07:32):
Even to this day when I go to the gym, it isn't so much that I hate going to the gym. I hate going to the gym and comparing myself to people. And so that's a really hard piece to have fit in where we can be like, you got to do this. But if we start marrying the gut biome, marrying the whole what's going on in the gut to what's going on in the brain, think it'd be a lot easier to convince. I always tell

 

Cynthia (01:08:01):
People to do the physical part.

 

Matt Handy (01:08:02):
It's much harder to convince somebody on should and much easier to convince them on why. Right. Shoulds never work.

 

Cynthia (01:08:13):
If you have a strong enough why, anyhow, that can be arranged. And I think too, you got to, and that's what I do, is I try to get out of the way. The things that are keeping you from functioning, that's what functional medicine is about. What's keeping you from functioning right now? I cannot work out. I, I can go on a walk. I don't even want to go dancing just because I don't feel good. I'm in pain.

 

(01:08:39):
I just want to lie down in so much pain. So you got to get those things out of the way. So the first thing, order of business is moving. I went and looked at apartments this weekend. I tried to go to other apartments in the complex, and it's systemic. They have it all over four out of the five places that I moved to. And thankfully they were nice enough to let me try. I literally just spent the night in one of the units. Really? I just dragged my son's mattress over there and I spent the night in what would be my room and what would be his room. Same problem. Dragged my mattress back to the other place that I'm renting. That is a sick and it's a luxury apartment. It should be good. But the newer places have been, it seems like they've cut a lot of corners.

 

Matt Handy (01:09:24):
Oh, sure.

 

Cynthia (01:09:25):
So I think that's what's causing the problem. But once I get that out of the way, I can work out again. I can do all the things that it's just the how in this case. Well, the why in this case is very important. I do want to do it, but there's something in the way, and that I think is maybe with some of your addicts and maybe with my ex-husband and the piece of it that I wish I had been able to do some investigation for him. But that's the thing that I'm very good at. It's listening to someone's story and being like, that sounds like yeast and just kind of connecting the dots of what they're telling me so that we can go into what's keeping you from that goal that you're trying to get to. Even if it's just, and maybe there's milestones along the way, just like that. Boy, this leads to that, leads to that. So we're going to reverse engineer that so that we can fill in the gaps so you can do what you need to do. But in the meantime, we're going to be doing these things too.

 

Matt Handy (01:10:27):
What's funny, so between the last time that you saw me and this time, I've lost a lot of fat.

 

Cynthia (01:10:33):
I know. I've noticed your face is much thinner.

 

Matt Handy (01:10:38):
And the only thing that I really did different was I started supplementing branch chain amino acids.

 

Cynthia (01:10:45):
Acids.

 

Matt Handy (01:10:46):
Same amount of food, same amount of working out a lot of, I actually stopped doing cardio and now I just lift and I've lost way more weight

 

Cynthia (01:10:57):
Because it builds your muscles better and that uses up more energy. So Yeah, makes sense.

 

Matt Handy (01:11:03):
And so yeah, I just added that one thing and it was like I applied to the weight loss stopped, then the weight gain started and I was like, oh no, this is crazy. And then I was like, okay, what am I going to do? It was like somebody told me about glutamine.

 

Cynthia (01:11:21):
Yes, that's helpful for your gut.

 

Matt Handy (01:11:23):
And I was like, okay, I'm going to try this. And it was like, dude, it was like clock works. Really helped

 

Cynthia (01:11:29):
I would recommend, and of course I'm going to recommend it, right? Because this is what I do. But with my son, I'll take you back to that. When we were first just frantic trying to get something to help him, we were doing that whole, this is good for that, and X is good for Y. We were throwing things at him and it ended up taxing his kidneys. Then we ended up actually making him worse because he didn't need the thing we were giving him. So I went, we scaled back, and then we started running tests and that's where we start getting more into precision

 

Matt Handy (01:12:02):
Licorice. Right? Something around licorice.

 

Cynthia (01:12:05):
No.

 

Matt Handy (01:12:05):
Okay.

 

Cynthia (01:12:07):
I don't know where that came from.

 

Matt Handy (01:12:08):
There was something, maybe it wasn't you, but something, whatever. The main ingredient for licorice actually is. It was like this, whoever it was, it was like they needed to add that to their diet and it changed a bunch of stuff.

 

Cynthia (01:12:23):
Oh,

 

Matt Handy (01:12:23):
Made 'em healthier.

 

Cynthia (01:12:24):
I don't know.

 

Matt Handy (01:12:25):
Not phenol, fennel.

 

Cynthia (01:12:28):
Fennel.

 

Matt Handy (01:12:28):
Fennel

 

Cynthia (01:12:29):
Or Fen Greek.

 

Matt Handy (01:12:30):
It was fennel.

 

Cynthia (01:12:30):
It was fennel,

 

Matt Handy (01:12:31):
Yeah.

 

Cynthia (01:12:32):
I don't know. Anyway. And it could just be, and that's the thing for that person, yes, but we've gone into this like a standard, everybody is supposed to do X.

 

Matt Handy (01:12:45):
Oh,

 

Cynthia (01:12:46):
But that's not how your body works. That's not how your genes work. Your genetics are different from mine. Mine are different than my son's just from being, he's a boy and I'm a girl. So that alone is one change. I did his hormone test and my hormone test. We both have a lot of the similar things, but because the pathways, his breakdown of his hormones is different from mine, the pathways are different. I need a different herb than he needs. So he takes Rhodiola and I take maka, and this is all because we're breaking down stuff wrong because of the mold.

 

(01:13:22):
So there's lots of supports that we're putting in different places and hormones and micronutrients. But what we did for our son, we finally got a micronutrient panel done, a deficiency panel. And this is not your standard doctor's panel where they just get what's in your bloodstream. This is looking in the cells, seeing what the cell is deficient in your particular cell, and yours could be different from other people's. And finding out what your deficiencies are there, and then you shore up those. That way you have some precise answers and you're not just guessing and throwing things at yourself, potentially making yourself worse. If you give yourself, during my divorce, I was having heart palpitations and I was weak, I'd go down the stairs and I'd be wobbly. And again, I thought it was just the stress. I hadn't done a micronutrient panel and it showed that I was deficient in magnesium.

 

(01:14:19):
Turned out I had been taking lots of calcium because I was like, well, I'm going through a divorce. I better shore up my nutrients. I was taking calcium. I already had plenty of calcium. So what it was doing was depleting my magnesium because they compete in the body. So there's lots of things. If you don't get precise in what you need, you're not necessarily going to solve for your problem. You might hit the jackpot in certain places like you did. You felt better after taking what you took, but you can also have a problem. So it's easier tests, don't guess. So it's not necessarily, I don't know if it's cheaper or more expensive because if you take the wrong thing, you could cause yourself a problem. So it might be cheaper to just go precision and take a test and then fill in those gaps.

 

Matt Handy (01:15:09):
How much is a full every panel, how much would it cost to

 

Cynthia (01:15:12):
Every panel?

 

Matt Handy (01:15:13):
Yeah.

 

Cynthia (01:15:13):
There's no such thing as every panel.

 

Matt Handy (01:15:15):
Okay. For you, what is the average cost to do these tests?

 

Cynthia (01:15:20):
And I say this because think about a grocery store of, so I've got a grocery store of tests you can take.

 

Matt Handy (01:15:25):
There's really that many tests.

 

Cynthia (01:15:26):
There's that many tests.

 

Matt Handy (01:15:27):
Okay.

 

Cynthia (01:15:27):
So I have to pick based on what's going on in your story, which test will help me get more precise about what's going on with you? And I try to be very conservative.

 

Matt Handy (01:15:38):
So you're looking at symptoms And then giving a prescription of the test description for whatever the symptom

 

Cynthia (01:15:45):
Right? Exactly. And also the story around it. So I have, for example, my neighbor at work, she uses a lot of lotions and potions, and she's been complaining about weight gain. I'm like, well, there's your culprit right there. You really need to look at maybe not using all these lotions and potions because of the parabens. All the endocrine disruptors that are in these, clearly these are not natural. Look at the ingredients. This is getting in the way of your hormones.

 

Matt Handy (01:16:15):
It's all petroleum based.

 

Cynthia (01:16:16):
Yeah, pretty much. So there's things like that. Those are just stories that you hear and they're not necessarily a symptom. It's just Tell me what you, I dig in further. Tell me what you use for X like I did with the boy. Do you all use a water purifier? No. Okay. Now I can see the clues that lead me to X, and then we dive in from there. This is the lab. I think we need to do, let's look under that rock.

 

Matt Handy (01:16:47):
So for sleep disruption.

 

Cynthia (01:16:49):
Oh, I told you about the EMS from the car chargers disrupting my sleep.

 

Matt Handy (01:16:54):
Oh,

 

Cynthia (01:16:54):
Yeah. Yeah. Mold did it too. I haven't been able to sleep more than five hours in the mold. Can't cortisol rises. I wake up immediately.

 

Matt Handy (01:17:05):
So how many people do you think are this sensitive out there that they just don't know?

 

Cynthia (01:17:09):
I think everybody.

 

Matt Handy (01:17:10):
Okay.

 

Cynthia (01:17:10):
I think there's people that are, my ex-husband was not sensitive to his body, so he could be complaining about something, but it didn't register that he was clearly, that's a problem. I'm real sensitive to what's going on in me. So I think there's that element of it where people just ignore their signals, but they're getting them. But I think it's more what we were talking about earlier that people don't know that these signals mean there could be something going on in the environment and to test different, either really get a test or go stay at somebody else's house for a little while, see if that changes things. Maybe it is your environment. You did smell mo the other day. You did have leak, a pipe burst in your house. Or even things like tattoos, and I hate to say this too, I know you have a lot of tattoos, but that is an immune system. Hyper stimulator.

 

Matt Handy (01:18:03):
Really?

 

Cynthia (01:18:04):
Yeah. So not only that, sometimes there's metals in those. There's cadmium typically in a red ink, and so that can cause you displacement of other nutrients.

 

Matt Handy (01:18:16):
Okay. So yeah, I do. Most people will never see this.

 

Cynthia (01:18:20):
This is a no judgment zone though, but just so you know. And so your listeners know.

 

Matt Handy (01:18:26):
Yeah, yeah. Most people never see all my tattoos. They just won't. But I'm covered and it's like I strategically got it so that all of anything that's covered is covered first and then I'm getting the extremities done.

 

Cynthia (01:18:40):
Oh, wow.

 

Matt Handy (01:18:41):
So my whole leg is getting tattooed right now.

 

Cynthia (01:18:44):
Look into the effects of tattoos on your immune system. Just a suggestion.

 

Matt Handy (01:18:51):
Well, I also intravenously digested copious amounts of drugs and chemicals and stuff for a long,

 

Cynthia (01:19:01):
That'll cause you issues for sure.

 

Matt Handy (01:19:02):
Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. I don't have a, well, maybe I shouldn't say that. I should say this. I'm not symptomatic in the way that definitely that you are. Right. And maybe I'm just not sensitive to it, but when now that I'm clean and not doing all that crazy shit to my body, I'm really surprised at how healthy I get. It's like my body bounce that

 

Cynthia (01:19:34):
Wow, it's a funny day.

 

Matt Handy (01:19:35):
Yeah, it's crazy.

 

Cynthia (01:19:37):
Everything's cool.

 

Matt Handy (01:19:38):
And then there's my wife. It's the craziest, she has better dental hygiene than anybody I've ever met anybody. She brushes her teeth. She takes care of her teeth so crazy. And her teeth are always falling out.

 

Cynthia (01:19:56):
Oh, wow. Well, and that's a micronutrient issue. You think so?

 

Matt Handy (01:20:00):
I think it's genetic.

 

Cynthia (01:20:01):
No, no, I know so Well, I mean, genetics could be loaded with gun.

 

Matt Handy (01:20:05):
You know what though?

 

(01:20:05):
She is terrible about nutrients. Terrible.

 

Cynthia (01:20:09):
The mold that I was in and my son, it depleted our strontium of all things. Like who would ever guess,

 

Matt Handy (01:20:16):
What is it?

 

Cynthia (01:20:17):
Strontium.

 

Matt Handy (01:20:18):
Okay, what is that?

 

Cynthia (01:20:19):
It's a mineral and it's something that's very necessary for your bones and also your teeth. If you don't have it, it leads to metastatic bone cancer.

 

Matt Handy (01:20:29):
Metastatic bone cancer,

 

Cynthia (01:20:31):
If you have a deficiency, but also cavities.

 

Matt Handy (01:20:35):
So that's what happens is she gets, I mean, when you x-ray my mouth, I have no fillings. It's

 

Cynthia (01:20:42):
Like, and you've treated yourself horribly.

 

Matt Handy (01:20:43):
Terribly.

 

Cynthia (01:20:45):
And she's like, she like, what is wrong with you.

 

Matt Handy (01:20:46):
Dude? So bad. It would suck between smoking, meth and just doing crack for for years. I mean, I have yellowed teeth from smoking.

 

Cynthia (01:20:56):
It's not that bad,

 

Matt Handy (01:20:59):
But I have nothing going on in my mouth. And you're like, if you saw an X-ray her, it's like pure metal.

 

Cynthia (01:21:06):
Oh, well, and that's the thing. God, I'm a killjoy. I am sorry audience, but I had all my mercury fillings taken out.

 

Matt Handy (01:21:14):
Mercury fillings.

 

Cynthia (01:21:15):
Because that also can lead to brain issues.

 

Matt Handy (01:21:19):
I thought it was like

 

Cynthia (01:21:22):
Metal fillings have mercury.

 

Matt Handy (01:21:23):
Really?

 

Cynthia (01:21:24):
Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (01:21:24):
Well, I mean everything does, right?

 

Cynthia (01:21:27):
No, it's like saying everything has mold. No.

 

Matt Handy (01:21:30):
Yeah. Okay. Most things you get mercury. Have you like the

 

Cynthia (01:21:36):
Tuna? Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (01:21:38):
The amount of mercury that there is in canned tuna.

 

Cynthia (01:21:40):
Yeah. But they put much more in vaccines.

 

Matt Handy (01:21:42):
That's another crazy apart.

 

Cynthia (01:21:43):
You're your average flu shot.

 

Matt Handy (01:21:44):
It's actually an ingredient

 

Cynthia (01:21:46):
That's shot right in.

 

Matt Handy (01:21:47):
That's shot right in you. I don't get that. Why do they do that?

 

Cynthia (01:21:51):
They don't care.

 

Matt Handy (01:21:53):
Okay. But what does it do? Why is it in there? Supposedly?

 

Cynthia (01:21:57):
I don't dunno. If you ever heard in the olden days, they had the milk brought to your door and it was just room temperature. They would put a silver dollar in the milk to keep it from spoiling because metal inhibits bacteria growth. So that's one of the reasons this boy who had intimidating poisoning had a gut issue. So that's one of the reasons that we have

 

Matt Handy (01:22:19):
Is that real?

 

Cynthia (01:22:19):
Yeah, that's

 

Matt Handy (01:22:20):
Real. We'll put a silver dollar in there.

 

Cynthia (01:22:22):
Tell them. So they have to put some kind of metal when they're producing medication, when they're in drips, IV drips. I think maybe the saline solutions the only one because it already has salt. So it may be the only thing that doesn't have metals. But when you have an IV drip of a medication, there's metal in that. Dialysis patients, there's so much aluminum in it that when you get an aluminum panel done on yourself, the light metals panel that I got on my son, he had lots of aluminum. But for regular people, there's a scale of zero to nine. If you're over nine, you have aluminum toxicity. But for dialysis patients, it's 41.

 

Matt Handy (01:23:07):
Oh my gosh.

 

Cynthia (01:23:08):
Because they already know that they're going to have it. And aluminum binds to brain and bone. So if you ever know someone with dialysis, they typically get bone fractures or some kind of fracture and they start to get dementia because of that.

 

Matt Handy (01:23:24):
Have you heard of this silver nitrate stuff?

 

Cynthia (01:23:27):
No. That's a new one for me.

 

Matt Handy (01:23:29):
Silver.

 

Cynthia (01:23:30):
I've heard of methylene blue. That's been the rage all.

 

Matt Handy (01:23:34):
Is there silver in it? No,

 

Cynthia (01:23:36):
But I know it's colloidal silver.

 

Matt Handy (01:23:38):
Colloidal silver. Okay. That's the one.

 

Cynthia (01:23:39):
That's actually one of the things I use with my clients.

 

Matt Handy (01:23:42):
Really?

 

Cynthia (01:23:42):
Yeah, because silver is not going to harm your body.

 

Matt Handy (01:23:45):
Okay. Have you heard of the love has won cult?

 

Cynthia (01:23:49):
No.

 

Matt Handy (01:23:49):
Okay. Well, they would sell colloidal silver.

 

Cynthia (01:23:53):
That makes sense.

 

Matt Handy (01:23:54):
And this lady was on a

 

Cynthia (01:23:55):
Bunch of hippies given colloidal silver out sounds right.

 

Matt Handy (01:23:58):
So she had so much in her system, she turned blue.

 

Cynthia (01:24:01):
Blue. And there's the papapa smurf guy who's blue. It can turn you blue. It's not good for you to have too much of it, obviously, but it is a very potent

 

Matt Handy (01:24:11):
Silver nitrate.

 

Cynthia (01:24:12):
Silver is actually, when you go through mold toxicity, typically you'll have staph overgrowth in your nasal passages. And so you could get a M-R-S-A

 

Matt Handy (01:24:26):
Medication resistant.

 

Cynthia (01:24:27):
So they've used different medications for that, for your mucus membranes in your nose to get rid of that. But the medications are too potent, so they cause all kinds of die off problems and harms. The patient more silver doesn't do that. And silver will gently make you better. You don't want to take it forever. Just like you don't want to take any medication or really should take any supplement or anything forever. Maybe a probiotic because really that's what you should be eating anyway. Or Omega-3, that's what you should be eating anyway. Maybe a multivitamin, but nothing specific. But silver is actually one of the things I give my clients for their gut issues. They'll take it in a fluid. Sometimes it's ionic silver because that will kill certain bacteria or suppress it. And sometimes it's colloidal depending on the bacteria.

 

Matt Handy (01:25:22):
You should really watch this documentary.

 

Cynthia (01:25:25):
Okay, what's it called again?

 

Matt Handy (01:25:26):
The Love has won

 

Cynthia (01:25:27):
Love has won.

 

Matt Handy (01:25:29):
I think it's actually called Love is one. The Cult

 

Cynthia (01:25:31):
Is love is one,

 

Matt Handy (01:25:32):
Love has one,

 

Cynthia (01:25:33):
Love has one.

 

Matt Handy (01:25:34):
And yeah, it's some hippies up in the mountains of Colorado. And so she was a really pretty girl and she turned blue. So this is what she looked like. That's what she looked like. And that's what she died. The crazy part was the guys were, the people were so delusional, they thought that her dead body had still

 

Cynthia (01:26:09):
Magical powers,

 

Matt Handy (01:26:10):
And so they wrapped her in a sleeping bag and brought her all over the United States.

 

Cynthia (01:26:15):
So gross. But maybe she didn't rot because was so much of silver.

 

Matt Handy (01:26:20):
She didn't, they found a mummified body.

 

Cynthia (01:26:25):
And that's the danger in it, is that it really? Okay, you need some bacteria. So let's not go nuts here, but you do for a time. And I'm talking about a six week stint is usually what my clients get and that's it.

 

Matt Handy (01:26:36):
Years,

 

Cynthia (01:26:37):
Yeah,

 

Matt Handy (01:26:38):
Years. And she got cancer and it was like something, she got something and then her answer was like, I'm just going to drink. And they were making it. They were making it and selling it as part of how they made money. And it was like, it's actually silver. It's actually the metal silver. And they would break it down with chemicals and then reconstituted it with more chemicals, and then it would be in this liquid and it was selling

 

Cynthia (01:27:08):
Them in.

 

Matt Handy (01:27:09):
Yeah, they're drinking stuff.

 

Cynthia (01:27:10):
Little brown.

 

Matt Handy (01:27:11):
Yeah. Geez, man.

 

Cynthia (01:27:14):
Well, there's a lot of new things. There's methylene blue now that's been all the rage, which it's like a dye that they found. Does

 

Matt Handy (01:27:22):
I have Heard of this. Yes.

 

Cynthia (01:27:24):
But chlorella and spirulina, which are just theology, they do the same thing and it's natural. My friend told me he was taking methylene blue. I'm like, it does work. And

 

Matt Handy (01:27:34):
What does it do?

 

Cynthia (01:27:36):
It's helpful to all your cells in your mitochondria. I can't go. It's too much detail. And now I'm going to go overboard explaining it. But essentially it's the dye in those things that blue, that deep indigo or blue green dye that's in plankton and then spirulina and then chlorella. That is effective in your mitochondria. I'm still studying what spirulina does because forever I was like, spirulina. I remember my mom doing that. That's such, I don't even know why we were doing that, but now I'm kind of looking into it and kind of comparing.

 

Matt Handy (01:28:14):
Was your mom a hippie?

 

Cynthia (01:28:16):
No, she was not, but she was really into homeopathic stuff and organic stuff. She was less of a hippie than me.

 

Matt Handy (01:28:23):
Well, that's not really saying much, right? I don't know. You're pretty hippie.

 

Cynthia (01:28:27):
I'm pretty hippie. You are pretty. But she's wasn't like I am about it. Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (01:28:33):
Okay.

 

Cynthia (01:28:33):
I think I'm on steroids. But she was really into health, so we did go to organic farms and get crates of stuff to juice. We were big juicers back then, and we did. I went through a year of the raw food diet, and that was actually pretty good. I got to admit.

 

Matt Handy (01:28:48):
I mean, yeah, the last time we talked, I told you that I did the carnivore diet for 18 months and I don't know why. I don't do. I know why. Yeah. That's why. But I hate cooking. I hate cleaning is what it is. I hate doing dishes.

 

Cynthia (01:29:04):
You got to find what it is you hate doing. Yeah. I hate cleaning too. I hated cooking before there was a challenge. And once I had a challenge,

 

Matt Handy (01:29:12):
So I used to love cooking. And so I got out of prison the first time and thought it'd be a great idea. I'm going to go to culinary school. Then I went to culinary school and hated it. So now I just don't really like it. And for the punishment, which I was sliming heroin, so I was constantly punished. I would be, they were like, are you falling asleep standing up? I was like, No, But you have to wash dishes.

 

Cynthia (01:29:38):
Oh, no.

 

Matt Handy (01:29:40):
And I hated doing dishes already because my mom made me wash dishes my whole life.

 

Cynthia (01:29:47):
We were the dishwashers.

 

Matt Handy (01:29:48):
Yes. And it was like, so now, and good luck. My wife is not just going to do the dishes. She's just not right. It's like if I cook, you do the dishes. Well, our kids aren't old enough yet. Right. It's like

 

Cynthia (01:30:04):
Whatcha talking about two years old or just fine? Bring them up there, get 'em a little stool, Few broken dishes.

 

Matt Handy (01:30:11):
Well, I mean, with her as a mom, I doubt they'll ever do dishes. Yeah. But yeah, so I

 

Cynthia (01:30:18):
That's the thing keeping you from cooking

 

Matt Handy (01:30:20):
It is

 

Cynthia (01:30:21):
Get paper plates.

 

Matt Handy (01:30:23):
Yeah, it's the pan. The pans have bun. So I did the carnivore diet for 18 months and was really meticulous about supplementing. I mean, now that I look back on it, it was like I was taking so many different supplements. It was really crazy, but I never felt better in my life. It also might add something to do that I was like, I had slammed heroin and smoked meth and injected anything that I possibly could for 10 years

 

Cynthia (01:30:52):
Prior

 

Matt Handy (01:30:53):
To that, so

 

Cynthia (01:30:56):
All of a Sudden

 

Matt Handy (01:30:57):
Could have had something to do

 

Cynthia (01:30:58):
With it. It's amazing when you finally go over the other side.

 

Matt Handy (01:31:00):
Yeah, yeah. The amount of health. So also additionally to that was like I didn't go to the doctors the entire time. I would go to the doctors. I would go to the emergency room when I was dying.

 

Cynthia (01:31:16):
When you Too sick? Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (01:31:18):
Or I would get abscesses the size of that skull on my shoulder from muscling. I didn't have veins anymore. So I would inject into my muscles and I would get mean five or six going at a time. And finally I would be so lethargic and just so fucked up that I would have to go to the hospital and they would've to drain 'em and then try to convince me to stay while they tried to heal it. And I'd be leaving with stuff T into me, no packed with gauze. I'd rip it all out and go right back to it. It was terrible.

 

Cynthia (01:32:02):
Yeah. I had a good hold of you.

 

Matt Handy (01:32:04):
No. Yeah, no. So my wife and I were talking about this the other day. It was like we knew somebody. She went to the hospital and she had an infection in her arm. It was an abscess. And they told her, if you leave, you will lose your arm. And so she tried to stay for, she was in there for 48 hours max. It was probably less than that, but she needed to go back to the street so bad. She went back, continued on with her life for however long, and then she disappeared for a month. And then she came back. She had one arm. So then she learned how to shoot up with her feet. And it was like the conversations around that decision, she would just say, I don't care. She didn't care that her arm was gone at that point. She learned how to do it with their feet. But the amount of sacrifices and just totally illogical decisions that you make around the absolute need to be as close as possible to the source, or at least doing it, or at least as close as possible. And it's like that was one of those decisions that you see out there. It's like she did not care that she lost an arm because of her priorities.

 

Cynthia (01:33:22):
That's so devastating.

 

Matt Handy (01:33:23):
And it's like she was homeless. One of those people, she actually had a horror story. It was like her boyfriend died and then got with this other. Anyway, just crazy

 

Cynthia (01:33:35):
Trauma.

 

Matt Handy (01:33:36):
Trauma and just emotional baggage and scarring and all this stuff where it's like when I talk about people like her, when I think about it, it's like, do I ever think that she will get clean or come inside? And the reality of that situation is most of those people want to be on the, I wanted to be on the streets. The decision to be homeless was very intentional.

 

Cynthia (01:34:04):
I helped a few homeless people. There was one woman that got straight when I was, I think I was 19 years old, my ex-husband and I, we'd walked to work under a freeway and made friends with the people that were there. And one woman got raped. And I was like, absolutely, you're not sleeping out here tonight. You're going to go to the hospital and you're going to come back to my place and you're going to shower here and you're going to stay here. And then I was like, what can I do to help you? You can go back there again. She's like, no, no, I can't. And we had a whole conversation. She went back to street. She's like, I like it here. This is where I want to be. And I was like, no.

 

Matt Handy (01:34:46):
So there's this whole thing going on in California right now. They did this 24 billion scandal in California. Have you heard about this?

 

Cynthia (01:34:52):
Where they're the tent cities.

 

Matt Handy (01:34:54):
So this is what happened. In 2019. They were like, we're going to put together these initiatives and we're going to Oh

 

Cynthia (01:35:01):
Yeah. To get 'em off the streets.

 

Matt Handy (01:35:03):
And so they did these studies and they posed a bunch of questions and came up with the answers. One of the questions that they asked was, how much money would it take? At the time, 2019, there's 32,000 homeless people in California. So they're like, how much would it cost to take every homeless person off the street house for a year and give them, I am pretty sure it was like a thousand bucks a month for food and for expenses, and all the bills are going to get paid. And the number came out to 1.6 billion is what it would take. Well, they used this to justify creating a 24 billion package with a B. It's a lot of money. And so they created a bunch of NGOs and a bunch of organizations that were going to receive and distribute the money. And four years later, there's 164,000 homeless people on the streets in California.

 

Cynthia (01:35:59):
Even more so than before. It

 

Matt Handy (01:36:00):
Quadrupled. It quadrupled. And then they started looking into where did the money go? And the one that I like to talk about is there was, in LA there was a company that was formed around this whole thing. They got a $20 million contract. The deal was they were going to build a facility for 132 people. They were going to build the facility house them create a curriculum. It was going to be a reentry program and all this stuff. They got, it was 5 million a year that they would get 5 million. So it was like 5 million to build it, 5 million to implement it, 5 million to keep it running, and then 5 million to distribute. And it was like four years later, all the shit hit the fan. They started looking at the numbers, the overdose rates skyrocketed, the amount of homeless people skyrocketed. And they're like, okay, what happened? And when they looked into it, they found out that they got all 20 million and they didn't even break ground on the building. So it was like a complete scam.

 

Cynthia (01:37:00):
Well, and that's another thing that when I mentioned the mold, and I mentioned I'm in a luxury apartment, but they still cut corners even though we're paying high dollar for it, they're still screwing us because somebody wants to, somebody is greedy and not caring about people. How much more So, I mean, I was always, when my ex and I were together, we were young and pregnant teenagers and had places that were old and moldy all throughout Montrose, always. And never attributed some of the things that were going on, especially with my ex-husband because he's gluten sensitive and so is my son. And I am a little bit, but affects me differently. That genetic part. It affects me hormonally, just like the mold does. And it's the same gene that makes you sensitive to mold as makes you sensitive to gluten. So it affects me hormonally. I can see that now. I'm not eating gluten, but I have mold. So I'm breaking out. I'm having hormonal issues, swelling of the joints, all that stuff. It affects him and his family genetically, mentally.

 

(01:38:15):
And they have a lot of mental illness in their family. Most of them have not given up any kind of, they're still drinking beer and eating bread and all that stuff. But I think about all the people that are poor living in moldy situations because they have some landlord that's a slum lord. And all these typically people in poverty, impoverished situations like the homeless, they not only aren't eating well, but they're also in dilapidated places that aren't well taken care of. And they get marginalized and treated like, get a job. You should be doing better. You got to pick yourself up. They can't. They've been put in a situation taken advantage of to some degree because they don't know better or they don't have the resources. Food deserts are one example. You live in a neighborhood that's in the hood, you you're going to have a seven 11 close to you. Do they have those anymore?

 

(01:39:13):
Some kind of convenience store close to you that only has Twinkies and beef jerky and sodas to eat and drink from. And that's not going to give you any nutrition. So that downward cycle just kind of continues and just runs them into the ground. And of course, prisons are full of people who have been in impoverished situations. They might be just reacting violently because they're not getting the nutrition that they need, or they're being in an environment that's polluting their bodies so they can't function normally. And that keeps me up at night the way they're feeding prison inmates.

 

Matt Handy (01:39:48):
Oh, you have no idea.

 

Cynthia (01:39:49):
Well, I've known a couple of people who have been in prison. Why are you feeding? Don't you understand? And now that I've seen the buildings too, they're not taking care of those buildings. How are they expecting people to get better if they're not going to invest the money in it? And then you've got people you just talked about where they just took advantage of a situation again and ran off the money when people who needed it could have had it. And it's really going to take people being accountable and being willing to provide good environments for people.

 

Matt Handy (01:40:29):
In California, at least you get fed twice a day, but they'll give you a sack lunch at breakfast, and then you take it and eat it

 

Cynthia (01:40:39):
When you're hungry.

 

Matt Handy (01:40:42):
But the meat that it comes with,

 

Cynthia (01:40:44):
Isn't it vitaloaf something?

 

Matt Handy (01:40:47):
Vita loaf.

 

Cynthia (01:40:48):
Yeah, that's what I heard. It was basically this loaf of some sort. Yes.

 

Matt Handy (01:40:52):
Yeah. It's like

 

Cynthia (01:40:53):
Has vitamins supposedly, but

 

Matt Handy (01:40:55):
Well, with the package,

 

Cynthia (01:40:56):
It taste like bunk.

 

Matt Handy (01:40:57):
Yeah. The package says not for human consumption.

 

Cynthia (01:41:00):
Oh my gosh.

 

Matt Handy (01:41:03):
Yeah. The boxes that it comes in, that makes me, makes me

 

Cynthia (01:41:05):
Mad because you can't, how are they expecting to get people better?

 

Matt Handy (01:41:10):
I don't. So this is a thing that I'm running into with the treatment industry is they don't want them to get better.

 

Cynthia (01:41:18):
No. It's a good cycle for them to be in.

 

Matt Handy (01:41:20):
It's a money maker.

 

Cynthia (01:41:21):
Just like the drug industry. The pharmaceutical industry makes money off you being sick. What? Are you kidding me? We're not going to make you. Well,

 

Matt Handy (01:41:27):
Yeah, we're not going to heal you.

 

Cynthia (01:41:28):
Right.

 

Matt Handy (01:41:29):
We're going to patch you,

 

Cynthia (01:41:30):
Or we might cause the problem in the first place.

 

Matt Handy (01:41:33):
Yeah. Well, so my admissions director, he lives in League City, and a few weeks ago he was like, man, every Thursday I get this scratchy throat. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you live in League City. Oil refineries everywhere. Yeah. Indina

 

(01:41:52):
Over there. And it's like,

 

Cynthia (01:41:54):
What are they offgassing in?

 

Matt Handy (01:41:55):
Yeah, exactly. And he was like, oh yeah, probably. Right? It's like we live in the fourth,

 

Cynthia (01:42:01):
A toxic soup. Well, and in this city

 

Matt Handy (01:42:04):
We live in the fourth biggest city in the country, which means it's one of the biggest cities in the world. I say this constantly.

 

Cynthia (01:42:13):
I think India is pretty, might have a speed Bangladesh.

 

Matt Handy (01:42:19):
No, for sure. But this is one of the biggest metropolises in the world. Maybe it's not like top 10, but it's one of the biggest population dense.

 

Cynthia (01:42:30):
We have a lot of

 

Matt Handy (01:42:30):
There's a lot of people here. I mean, how many people are here?

 

Cynthia (01:42:33):
7 million, I think.

 

Matt Handy (01:42:35):
Dude,

 

Cynthia (01:42:35):
Last I checked.

 

Matt Handy (01:42:36):
Yeah. That's

 

Cynthia (01:42:37):
Just in the Metropolitan Houston area.

 

Matt Handy (01:42:39):
I think it's more than that now. Let's see, greater Houston, we'll say Greater Houston,

 

Cynthia (01:42:46):
But we are a hugely polluted city. When I did my metal panels on myself and my son, we have CCM and barium, which are radioactive.

 

Matt Handy (01:42:55):
Really?

 

Cynthia (01:42:55):
We have it in the yellow.

 

Matt Handy (01:42:58):
So getting up there.

 

Cynthia (01:43:00):
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's no wonder people in the fifth ward have been complaining because there's toxic dump sites there. Yeah. So there's some radioactive waste in the fifth ward that they're having to live on. And that's another poverty stricken area.

 

Matt Handy (01:43:17):
Really?

 

Cynthia (01:43:17):
Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (01:43:18):
So radioactive dump site in the fifth ward.

 

Cynthia (01:43:23):
I don't know that it was a dump site now, actually

 

Matt Handy (01:43:25):
Like a storage.

 

Cynthia (01:43:26):
Storage. I think there was a spill.

 

Matt Handy (01:43:28):
Oh, that shit's there forever, right?

 

Cynthia (01:43:32):
It's got a halflife, but it's very, very difficult to Clean up and get it all.

 

Matt Handy (01:43:40):
So yeah, it's interesting, whenever I talk to you and I always go away from it thinking about what are we not addressing in that is heavily linked to what's going on here. Yeah. I mean,

 

Cynthia (01:43:56):
That's the big thing.

 

Matt Handy (01:43:56):
I mean, like I said, and what's

 

Cynthia (01:43:57):
In the way of it?

 

Matt Handy (01:43:58):
Yeah. I was always, well, it's also access to care is, it's like trying to pull teeth. A lot of people don't understand how to access the care that they need. We're not taught, even when I was in high school, we didn't have a substantial or an efficient nutrition class. I actually, I don't remember taking any kind of nutritional education. Oh, I did. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. But I also missed 200 days.

 

Cynthia (01:44:32):
Was it the pyramid though, that they taught you?

 

Matt Handy (01:44:35):
I don't remember, but sophomore year, my sophomore year, I think I missed 200 days. Oh, wow. Yeah, I was too busy doing drugs. But yeah, it was like we made tortillas one day. I remember that.

 

Cynthia (01:44:54):
And that was the extent of your nutritional kind of knowledge. Well, and I think people think it's harder than it really can be. One of the things I've aimed to do with my company is make it all as DIY as possible.

 

Matt Handy (01:45:08):
Yeah. But it is expensive.

 

Cynthia (01:45:09):
It's expensive and that is the problem. But the way I look at it, just like right now I'm in mold. I could stay and just take allergy meds and pain meds and meds all the time and get worse and worse and worse because mold grows or I could move out. And I've moved four times in the last, since June, so the last July, August, September, October. So four times in the last four months, my whole house, I've moved just trying to find a place where I am. Well, or trying to figure out the issue.

 

Matt Handy (01:45:45):
Have you tried a brick house?

 

Cynthia (01:45:47):
I have lived in a brick house before, but there's still leaks and you're still going to have wood and you're still going to have wood beams and things like that. But what I did, I have been in a place that was clean. I just had to move out. I couldn't afford the large, it was a three bedroom and I couldn't afford that. So back to the poverty issue, you get what you pay for, but sometimes you still, but my point with that was I will do anything I have to do to get well Because it's not worth it to me. I'm going to spend more money getting sick than I will, keeping from being sick. I had a friend that he spent a hundred thousand dollars having strokes and heart attacks.

 

(01:46:34):
He had three strokes and two heart attacks. And one of the strokes was so severe that he couldn't remember who I was. He was my mentor for 20 years in it. And I call him up at the hospital and he doesn't know who his sister had picked up. And I said, you tell that stubborn mule that I'm Cynthia and he knows me and he needs to talk to me. And she goes, she does know you. He was a stubborn mule, but he wouldn't listen to me about that. I thought that he needed to do all this stuff that I do. I sent him the test. I made him the appointment to go get the test, and it turned out he had toxic mold, black mold in three walls of his house, and that was causing him blood clots and ending him up in the hospital.

 

(01:47:22):
He spent a hundred thousand dollars being in the hospital that many times the mold tests that I do, $300, the mycotoxin test, that is for your body, because mold test is for your house, the mycotoxins for your body to see, first of all if you have it, what I say, 300, $400, the micronutrient panel, 4 75. Okay, so we're getting close to a thousand. Well, we are past a thousand. Sorry, my math's not good. Those tests would've kept him from spending a hundred thousand dollars. So a fraction of the cost of what he ended up paying. And that's kind of what I try to drive home to people. And what I had to learn myself, because with my son, I was trying to nickel and dime with insurance and do things here and do things there and wait, and all the things I had to do along the way ended up costing me three times as much as the $10,000. I plunk down on all his tests for very severe autism like autism, to the point where he didn't look at you anymore, didn't talk to you anymore, couldn't hold his bowels

 

Matt Handy (01:48:33):
And the progress that he's made. Right.

 

Cynthia (01:48:36):
Astronomically.

 

Matt Handy (01:48:37):
Okay, let's talk about that.

 

Cynthia (01:48:38):
Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (01:48:41):
We live in a time where, I mean, they've kind of swallowed up all kinds of other diagnoses into

 

Cynthia (01:48:48):
Autism.

 

Matt Handy (01:48:48):
Autism. And it's like everybody's got it now. And it's almost like a, people are virtue signaling by like, oh, it's my autism's, my OCD, or it's my a DD,

 

Cynthia (01:48:58):
My mental illness,

 

Matt Handy (01:49:00):
Yo. And it's like, so your son had a severe case of Autism. Tell us where he was at with it and then what you did and where he is at now because crazy.

 

Cynthia (01:49:13):
So what I look at autism as being, and really all of these mental disorders is just a brain injury. It's just chemical. It's no different from actual head injury, brain injury, It's just what level of damage was done. And that tells you how much you can recover. And then what are the different components? The amygdala is one part, and there's this, that's another part, and all the different, the gut microbiome, what bacteria is overgrown because that bacteria will turn on and off certain genes. So all of those things are implicated in what my son had, which was a vaccine injury. So with him, he had the measles still alive in him swelling his brain for two years. It was a chronic measles or chronic infection, but it didn't present as the measles.

 

Matt Handy (01:50:14):
Did he get it from the vaccine?

 

Cynthia (01:50:15):
He had to have. I have no, I can't go and sue because I don't have proof, because the chickens are, the foxes are guarding the hen house. The CDC. By the time I wanted to test, it didn't used to be this way, but by the time I wanted to test him 12 years ago, 13 years ago, they were the only ones that did a PCR test. And with COVID, you guys probably know what a PCR test is now. But what that really does is tell you where it came from. And this would tell us whether it was the wild strain of the measles or the vaccine strain of the measles. My pathologist, I had 10 doctors on him at the time, so I had a gastroenterologist. He had failure to thrive. So I knew that was one component. Again, back to the serial killers and their emaciated look, he was super violent. He couldn't speak anymore. He only had echo to communicate with, and he was just kind of vacant. He was gone. He couldn't look at us in the eye. He was just super spacey. He was hallucinating.

 

Matt Handy (01:51:19):
How old was he at that point?

 

Cynthia (01:51:20):
Three. And he hadn't been like that. He was like a total angel, turned into a total demon, tried to throw a huge tube tv, almost breaking his own leg, trying to lift it and throw it, but had superhuman strength with it. So I had him scope because I was like, okay, he has failure to thrive. They almost called CPS on us because he was so emaciated and all of his lab markers showed he was malnourished. But I'm like, we had to complete a food diary. And they're like, oh no, you're feeding him just fine. There's got to be something else, but we can't figure it out. And I'm like, well, why don't you scope him? And they're like, why would we scope him? I'm like, well, if he's eating, but he's not absorbing his food, maybe there's something in there keeping him from absorbing his food. So then we did, and then they come back to me with, well, he's got lymphoid hyperplasia, he's got this and this and pigmented macrophages, and there's a whole report. But that's normal. And I'm so fed up with them. How many normal kids do you scope? What parent is going to put their kid under general anesthesia we just did for you to scope 'em just for giggles, they're sick. You're scoping them because they're sick. So yes, that's normal for a sick child.

 

(01:52:33):
And I didn't get like this with them, but in my head it was raging. So we did find lymphoid hyperplasia, which again, back to the immune system being in the gut or this being a huge component of it, the majority, I don't know if you've ever seen the Activia commercials where they're like 80% of the immune system is in the gut. That's your biggest lymphatic system. Yeah, exactly. So that was all inflamed, so he couldn't absorb his food. So that was leading to a nutritional deficiency. And later on, I found out he had all these, when I finally went through all the typical doctors and I went to a functional medicine doctor, I had three of those, he wasn't speaking. So we did his stool test and found out he had what his bacterial and fungal loads were. They gave him some probiotics and he started speaking again in four months.

 

(01:53:28):
He was hallucinating, and I thought maybe he had a yeast overgrowth, but I wasn't quite sure until, and we told the doctor and he was like, well, I dunno what you want me to do about it. This other doctor, regular PD. And one day he gets strep throat, so the doctor gives him an antibiotic. He goes, nuts. He goes absolutely nuts. And I had noticed that I was making him bread because we knew he had a gluten problem, or at least that was what autistic kids had problems with. So I made gluten-free bread, but I was making it with yeast. One day I overdid the yeast and steadily through the day he started becoming more and more violent. And finally that night he couldn't sleep. He was flopping around like a fish. He was touching bubbles that weren't there and hallucinating hardcore. And we finally get him to sleep. I was going to take him to the hospital because we were both just, we didn't know what to do. He finally goes to sleep. My ex and I go and sit down to recover. We go back and check on him. The whole room smells like a bakery.

 

(01:54:31):
And I'm like, it's the

 

Matt Handy (01:54:31):
He's burping.

 

Cynthia (01:54:31):
Yeast. So the yeast was causing him hallucinations and that auto brewery syndrome was being fed and causing him all kinds of psychological issues because he was basically intoxicated. And so we got probiotics to kill that. Well, the doctor gave us an antifungal. We called him. We're like the same thing happened with an antibiotic he got for strep. We told the doctor and he's like, lemme give you an antifungal. And he stopped being so violent. Well,

 

Matt Handy (01:55:01):
I mean, yeah, he probably felt like shit.

 

Cynthia (01:55:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and even the hallucinations, he had the vents, he would talk to all of the vents and he touched things that weren't in the air and just everything became the cat was terrifying to him eventually. So we got through that and then we went on that process of, okay, well what caused the gut dysbiosis apart from the measles, inflaming his gut, he also had the yeast. So what caused that? Oh, the metals. There's aluminum in the vaccines. My sister is an MD and she got me tipped off to that. So I did an aluminum panel. Sure enough, he's got three times the limit of aluminum in his system.

 

Matt Handy (01:55:47):
So you're talking about what, like 27 on the scale?

 

Cynthia (01:55:50):
If it's nine? Yeah, about that. I'm trying to remember. It's been such a long time. But so we get him chelated and then that stuff with the eating, the poop happened, but every time we chelated him, he got more and more lucid. So as we're going along, and it was a slow and painful process, partially because I was nicking, dimming, trying not to spend, I wish I got a divorce in the middle of this whole thing. My ex ran off with him. I remember, I feel really guilty about it. But one day my ex was being so horrible to me. I was like, just, I wish this would happen to him instead. And then sure enough, it wasn't even, I felt bad afterwards, but he already had it. That's why he was being so horrible to me.

 

(01:56:38):
And I think the place we were living in had mold, but he had a psychotic break and he had just had the worst gout incident that he'd ever had. I read later that the crystals that form from the uric acid, uric acid form in your brain folds too. So the worse it is there, the more it's collecting all over your body. And you can have a psychotic break if you're manic depressive.

 

Matt Handy (01:57:05):
So gout is extremely painful. Do you think they can feel it in their brain too, or are they getting headaches? The

 

Cynthia (01:57:13):
Crystals are there.

 

Matt Handy (01:57:14):
Yeah.

 

Cynthia (01:57:14):
So the same crystals that are accumulating, because it accumulates in your foot, the blood vessels are so small and it's hard for them to pass through. Blood vessels in your brain are super tiny too. So the pain is actually, it's collecting there too. So yes, I think there's something to, if you're in pain, you're going to have a chemical response and a hormonal response. But I also think there's crystals. The uric acid is, the crystals are there causing all kinds of havoc and damage.

 

Matt Handy (01:57:45):
I don't know if this is a widely talked about thing in the medical field, but you hear it all the time. And in addiction where they talk about pain is the sixth sense. And it's like pain is a serious indicator, but it also,

 

Cynthia (01:58:00):
It's your alarm.

 

Matt Handy (01:58:01):
It sets off all kinds of downstream chemical reactions and then very extreme cases that your body will shut off, your ability to receive the signals and then it gets really crazy. But, and he was an alcoholic.

 

Cynthia (01:58:23):
And he was an alcoholic.

 

Matt Handy (01:58:25):
And was he actively drinking at the time?

 

Cynthia (01:58:26):
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. He never really stopped. I don't know what's going on with him now. I don't know if he stopped or what, but he was gluten intolerant too, genetically just like our son. But he wouldn't give up and he wouldn't eat either, all kinds of stuff. And I had an appointment for him. The reason he left me, I had an appointment for him with a functional medicine doctor. I was like, babe, it's okay. We just found out he was bipolar. He was doing all this crazy stuff. And I'm like, look. And we were right in the middle of the chelation with our son right after he was, it was literally a month or so after he'd been eating his poop and that whole thing happened and he wasn't really able to care for our son properly. Was like when I found he was eating his poop was like, he told me, yeah, he's been doing that for a while.

 

(01:59:09):
He was in his care. He was a house husband. And I was like, what do you mean? Yeah, I've been talking to him about it. I'm like, no, this is Pika. This is a medical problem. We got to call the doctor. And so he really wasn't in a good space mentally. He just kind of things were not like that primitive thinking that you're talking about. Everybody thinks it's talk therapy that will control your behavior, but there's more. So I was freaking out about what he was, he was acting really bizarrely. And when we went to a marriage counselor, the marriage counselor did bipolar testing or just a questionnaire because we had long suspected that he had bipolar and they did determine that. He likely did. And so I'm like, he came home all upset and I'm like, look, we know what to do. We're doing it for our son.

 

(02:00:06):
All we need to do is go to this functional medicine doctor and you'll be fine. This is just a biochemical thing that's happening. This is not you, a character flaw. This isn't something that you have to be ashamed of. He's like, he said that he was afraid I was going to put him in a facility. And I'm like, babe, I'm worried about the homeless people down the street. I don't even know. I'm not going to do that to you. But I think that didn't, that soft approach with him, I wish I had kind of kept that, but I had found out after that that he had been doing all this stuff behind my back to me and I kind of exploded on him after that. And then that just triggered him filing for divorce the day before the doctor's appointment and leaving and taking our son.

 

(02:00:53):
So that kept me from getting our son. Well, for about four years there he refused to do anything with our son. My son got sicker. Well our son got sicker and then he got so sick that my ex was like, okay, fine, we'll go. We'll do this. And after that my son got even better and even better. And now he's 17 and a half and he's playing in a band with his friends. He has friends. He went from being graded retarded level at three and a half to he's making A's and B's online schooling with no help. I try to get involved and he's like, I got it, please. And he was just talking to me the other day, a couple of years ago. There's a deficit in comprehension a lot of times not with, like we were saying, Amelia Bedelia and all that literal thinking. If you give them a manual or something that's not social or something that's very literal. Typically autistic kids that are functioning better, highly functioning can get it. But trying to give them something more nuanced like a fiction book, they're not going to comprehend that as well,

 

Matt Handy (02:02:06):
Like math and systems,

 

Cynthia (02:02:08):
Those engineering type of things. But he came home saying, we're reading this book. He came to me because he lives with his dad. He came to me and he was like, we're reading this book. It's really interesting. These animals are on a farm and it seems a lot like the political system that

 

Matt Handy (02:02:27):
Animal farm.

 

Cynthia (02:02:28):
That's what I said. You're reading Animal Farm and you understand it. Oh my God. Such a far cry from Trina to three. Yeah. I still love saying three, but it was a huge awakening that's happened over these years. And so I wish I had to put my divorce on a credit card because by then we were still poor and I didn't have money for the divorce. I put $7,000 on my credit card for that. I wish I had just done it for my son before. Maybe that would've kept us from having the divorce in the first place.

 

Matt Handy (02:03:07):
Yeah, alcoholism is such a crazy situation. Was it ever abusive?

 

Cynthia (02:03:13):
Oh, my relationship, yeah. Oh yeah.

 

Matt Handy (02:03:15):
Physically

 

Cynthia (02:03:16):
He headbutted me and I went to work with a shiner and I lied to my boss at the time. I worked for the security department for Reliant Energy at the time, which is now something else. CenterPoint, I think they were all ex FBI, all ex-cop. And they knew, I could see in their face that they knew I was lying through my teeth, but I didn't know what else to do. And he was a house husband at the time. I didn't have anybody to take care of my kids. All the things that is typical and abuse. And I was way too tolerant and way too loving Christian, trying to make things work, codependent well and not too, but I really wasn't that codependent. I wanted to divorce him, but in my religion you don't do that unless there's

 

Matt Handy (02:04:04):
You're Catholic?

 

Cynthia (02:04:05):
No, I'm one of Jehovah's Witnesses.

 

Matt Handy (02:04:06):
Oh, that's right.

 

Cynthia (02:04:08):
Which I wish now, and I was young, so I wish now I had just split up with him, but I couldn't see the forest for the trees. I was just focused on trying to keep our family together. And I have trauma from my mom being divorced, and I didn't want to have a split family. I didn't want my kid to not have her dad around. I wanted to fix it and I thought I could. And I realize now the fallacy of that when someone's, that's not something you can fix as the person.

 

Matt Handy (02:04:42):
But I mean also at the time, alcoholism and addiction, I mean it was still a moral issue back then. It was way less medically. People were not as medically aware around.

 

Cynthia (02:04:54):
They still aren't as much as they should be.

 

Matt Handy (02:04:57):
It's severely deficient in the education and awareness around it for sure. But it is advanced, especially with fentanyl has really created a situation. It's the leading cause of death for people under 40. It's really been around for five years and it's already killed that many people. So it's gotten to the point where people are very aware of. I heard something the other day that said that everybody is within two degrees of separation of an addict or an alcoholic. So it's either you a family member or a friend of a family member. It's that close to everybody now. And it's funny, like everybody drinks, everybody smokes, everybody does something, even if it's non-problematic

 

Cynthia (02:05:50):
To cope with.

 

Matt Handy (02:05:52):
Yeah, even if it's non-problematic.

 

Cynthia (02:05:54):
I chew gum. I chew a lot of gum.

 

Matt Handy (02:05:56):
My brother just talked about chewing. What kind of gum?

 

Cynthia (02:06:00):
Well, a healthy gum.

 

Matt Handy (02:06:01):
Okay.

 

Cynthia (02:06:02):
They have to no spar to me and no food coloring. My favorite is joy ride.

 

Matt Handy (02:06:10):
He told me that the leading contributor to microplastics is gum.

 

Cynthia (02:06:15):
Well, hopefully not mine. Mine is super healthy gum.

 

Matt Handy (02:06:18):
He chew something weird.

 

Cynthia (02:06:23):
There's something that you can make gum with. I can't remember what it's called, but I think it's messed is something. Anyway,

 

Matt Handy (02:06:30):
I'm going to text him and ask

 

Cynthia (02:06:30):
Him. Yeah, you should. I'd like to know. But yeah, that's how I handle my stress. When I'm stressed out at work, I stop biting my nails and I just want to chew something.

 

Matt Handy (02:06:44):
So you do that instead of biting your nails?

 

Cynthia (02:06:47):
Well, I used to bite my nails even more than I chew gum, but I think I need to eat or chew something.

 

Matt Handy (02:07:01):
Have you tried carrots?

 

Cynthia (02:07:03):
That's too much sugar for your system.

 

Matt Handy (02:07:05):
Is there a lot of sugar in carrots?

 

Cynthia (02:07:07):
It's a high, high-glycemic vegetable

 

Matt Handy (02:07:09):
Root. So instead of smoking, have you heard of all that? Instead of smoking chew,

 

Cynthia (02:07:14):
Having a carrot chewing

 

Matt Handy (02:07:14):
Carrots? No, not having just chew it, eat the carrot. The oral fixation is really what people are

 

Cynthia (02:07:22):
Going for. Well, and that's definitely, I noticed that when I'm in the mold, I have more of an issue with it than when I'm not.

 

Matt Handy (02:07:29):
Did you ever smoke or drink or anything?

 

Cynthia (02:07:32):
I did chain smoke for very briefly

 

Matt Handy (02:07:35):
Chain smoked

 

Cynthia (02:07:35):
Afew months. Yeah, because I was trying to get skinny. I'd always been.

 

Matt Handy (02:07:42):
So you smoked? I mean, it is a stimulant, so

 

Cynthia (02:07:45):
I just thought it would keep me from eating.

 

Matt Handy (02:07:47):
Did it?

 

Cynthia (02:07:47):
So I don't know.

 

Matt Handy (02:07:51):
Didn't work though.

 

Cynthia (02:07:51):
I wasn't that fat to begin with. I just had been a fat child. So I had the body dysmorphia, but I did filter list too. I wanted to go all the way. I just stopped short of rolling them. But yeah, I did it for maybe four months, I can't remember. Four, six months. And then I got pregnant and I was like, okay, no more that.

 

Matt Handy (02:08:16):
Did you like it? No. Yeah. So the last three or four years of my addiction, we would smoke these things. They were called USA Golds. They were like three bucks a pack.

 

Cynthia (02:08:28):
I know what they are.

 

Matt Handy (02:08:29):
They are gross, gross. Yeah. And there was a corner in San Diego where you could buy singles from people or you can buy the pack. And it was 25 cents. It was 25 cents for a single, and then it was three bucks for the pack. So it was either five bucks or three bucks. And then we would go down to TJ and buy cartons of this stuff. And it was like, anyway, they make enough money where it was a thing that they did. But

 

Cynthia (02:09:01):
Mine where Chesterfield or Marlborough? Ew. I know gross

 

Matt Handy (02:09:06):
Cigarettes are so when I really think about it, it's like cigarettes are really gross, but I smoke camels the majority of my life. That's a much better tasting cigarette for you. So no addiction really

 

Cynthia (02:09:23):
For me.

 

Matt Handy (02:09:23):
Yeah.

 

Cynthia (02:09:24):
No food was my addiction of choice.

 

Matt Handy (02:09:28):
Did you ever get eating disorders?

 

Cynthia (02:09:32):
Yes, I had bulimia.

 

Matt Handy (02:09:34):
Oh wow.

 

Cynthia (02:09:36):
I was a large girl after my molestation. I think I started overeating.

 

Matt Handy (02:09:41):
Oh yeah.

 

Cynthia (02:09:41):
To kind of

 

Matt Handy (02:09:42):
How old were you?

 

Cynthia (02:09:42):
Quell that? Four.

 

Matt Handy (02:09:44):
Four. What's our first memory?

 

Cynthia (02:09:49):
I think cooking. I think it was five. That's my first memory.

 

Matt Handy (02:09:56):
So Dr. Shah says this.

 

Cynthia (02:09:58):
I heard him.

 

Matt Handy (02:09:59):
Isn't that crazy?

 

Cynthia (02:10:00):
Yeah. Because I don't remember anything with my dad before eight.

 

Matt Handy (02:10:04):
Yeah.

 

Cynthia (02:10:04):
I only remember things with my mom before. Isn't that

 

Matt Handy (02:10:06):
Crazy?

 

Cynthia (02:10:07):
And my dad was a pedophile.

 

Matt Handy (02:10:10):
You've had the craziest interactions, child molesters, serial killer, killer,

 

Cynthia (02:10:16):
Killer. Wait, I've got a book coming, but it didn't come out until we found out my sister had been molested.

 

Matt Handy (02:10:26):
Okay, so you blocked the memory and then remembered it at some point?

 

Cynthia (02:10:31):
No, I don't think my dad ever molested me, but I also don't remember anything before eight years old with him. So I don't know. Actually, I do have one memory with him before I was eight, but I don't remember a lot with him. I don't like being,

 

Matt Handy (02:10:47):
I mean, yeah, it's traumatized trauma when you shut off the memory recording part of your brain because you're in fight or flight. I don't even remember things.

 

Cynthia (02:10:57):
I have issue with this because I know me and I'm mouthy and I remember when he would,

 

Matt Handy (02:11:02):
But you were a child.

 

Cynthia (02:11:04):
But I was a mouthy child and I never touched anyone until after my dad beat me up pretty rough. And they were trying to get me to live with him and I didn't want to just because I knew how inappropriate he always was. So he was always very inappropriate and weird with me, but I don't have any recollection of him ever touching me. He was weird with my friends. My 11-year-old friend came over with shorts on and sat with her legs open and he said she couldn't come anymore. She was trying to come onto him. So that kind of psychology from somebody with pedophilia, that's what I was subjected to. And he would talk about his sex life in graphic detail from the time I was young, but I don't recall. I did sleep in his bed with him until I was eight. So when I was eight, we moved to a two bedroom. That's all I remember with him. And then one incident when he bought me a little barbie with you could comb her hair. And I was super excited about that. But that's all I remember about him before eight. So maybe he's right. I don't know. But I do know anytime my dad would do something, I would mouth off. So I was kind of a spirited kid.

 

Matt Handy (02:12:31):
I mean, yeah, a lot of people that have these traumatic experiences in their childhood, they're always interesting people. It's actually, Dr. Shah says,

 

Cynthia (02:12:44):
Makes you colorful.

 

Matt Handy (02:12:45):
Well, it makes you smart, right? You have to protect yourself until your brain is overreactive.

 

Cynthia (02:12:51):
Could be be, I know the ones that molested me. He had two girlfriends and their boys were always left with me. So I know I don't have memories of him doing it. I just knew he did it. As I got older, I knew he did it. I don't really have a vivid memory of anything.

 

Matt Handy (02:13:10):
Have you tried EMDR?

 

Cynthia (02:13:12):
No. I know what it is, but I'm just like, I'm not of the mind that, and I could be wrong, but I find this stuff a lot kind of with my divorce and thinking that that had caused my heart palpitations and my panic attacks and realizing it was my food and my vitamins. I, I feel like I'm a lot more mentally strong.

 

Matt Handy (02:13:41):
I've worked through that to be

 

Cynthia (02:13:42):
My issues.

 

Matt Handy (02:13:43):
So that's a hundred percent valid. My therapist tells me, she says all of the trauma that I've experienced, the least impactful one was the sexual trauma. She was like, you're not using because of that.

 

Cynthia (02:13:57):
Yeah. I'm a lot more traumatized by what happened to my son and all the lies from the medical institutions and the gaslighting.

 

Matt Handy (02:14:04):
Oh, I believe it

 

Cynthia (02:14:05):
Than even what happened with my ex. And I'm a little traumatized with my ex to that level, but I don't think anything has traumatized me as much as what happened to my son. That changed me tremendously.

 

Matt Handy (02:14:19):
And that's what really pointed you down this road, right?

 

Cynthia (02:14:21):
Yeah. So it was a blessing in disguise.

 

Matt Handy (02:14:24):
Yeah,

 

Cynthia (02:14:26):
Especially considering I got him. Well, I didn't, God did, but that I was able to figure out. He showed me what to do.

 

Matt Handy (02:14:37):
That's crazy. It's such an interesting life, just seeing the progression of the way that things work out and really, especially in hindsight, understanding why certain things happen. It's like I'm not religious by any stretch of the imagination at all, which is actually changing. I think I'm thinking about joining a church, which is weird because it's the church that I was historically all my life told it was the most wrong of all wrong churches.

 

Cynthia (02:15:13):
Really?

 

Matt Handy (02:15:14):
Yeah.

 

Cynthia (02:15:14):
Well that's typically, I know my dad told me he thought of himself as very libertine or liberated and really he was just a libertine. He was like, anything goes. He didn't want me to get baptized. And all my sisters had been because my mother was widowed and that was their father's children. He's like, no, we're going to let her pick her own religion. And when I did, he's like, what? No, not that one. So it seems like, and he would always make fun of Jehovah's Witnesses, so maybe there's some rebellious

 

Matt Handy (02:15:46):
Well, no, for

 

Cynthia (02:15:46):
Me, I don't think it's what it was for me, but

 

Matt Handy (02:15:50):
I've been really looking at, I guess just religion. So I went through a long time where I looked at religion as just trying to figure out why I went through the fuck, why did I have to go through that? And just exploring options and seeing what was going on. And then for, I don't know, 10 plus years, I would tell people that I was an atheist and I would use all of, I went to seminary for years and held office in the church and

 

Cynthia (02:16:23):
Wow.

 

Matt Handy (02:16:23):
Yeah, the first 13 years of my life, I pretty, I only missed one Sunday my entire from zero to 13 that I can remember at least. And so it was just like, I don't believe in God. That was my ultimate way of just completely avoiding, it was just being like, there is no God. And then sometime recently, in the last six months, it was right before I met you where I was hearing a lot about orthodoxy and then started investigating orthodoxy and then really started getting into apologetics and hearing lectures and stuff like that. Then recently I realized that there is too much metaphysical, there's too many things left up to metaphysics that I could really get with where it's like, I've got to explore my feelings around this stuff. And it's like, no, that's not going to work for me.

 

(02:17:29):
And then I've started having in depth long conversations about Catholicism with somebody who's devoutly Catholic. And it's like every answer, every question that I have, he gives me a very logical answer. And it isn't just some whatever cheap question where it's like, well, why do you believe in God? And it's like, no, tell me about the Christology of Jesus and tell me, let me understand what your theological basis of understanding what Jesus was and who he was and why he did what he did. And it's like, and he gives me articles and just stuff to read. And it's like, okay. And every time I look for that inconsistency, I find more consistency and it's like, okay,

 

Cynthia (02:18:16):
Okay, I'm listening now.

 

Matt Handy (02:18:19):
Yeah, yeah.

 

Cynthia (02:18:19):
That's kind of how my journey was. I already believed in God, but I could see, and I already had started reading the Bible and I'm like, you're not telling what's in here. No, that's not in there. I just kind of went more by what I saw in the pages of the Bible and what I saw in the real world, what I was experiencing. And then I happened to come across people who were speaking the message that I felt like I was seeing in both of those that resonated with me and that I think helped me deal with the trauma a lot better. I try to think about going to therapy for trauma, and I have gone to therapy before, but I'm like, so much has happened. I don't even know where we're to begin. And I feel like studying the Bible and getting close to God has been a therapy of sorts. Because it's rewritten those tapes my ex used to because of my molestation and the sexual issues that created, he would call me a whore and remind me of all the things.

 

(02:19:33):
And I'm like, yeah, but God doesn't see me that way. So go jump in a lake. And at some point it really was like, I don't care what you think. And I think that bothered him. He was trying to get a rise out of me, but it really did settle something in me and it gave me much more backbone. My father was still alive. It gave me more backbone. Once I started really understanding it. I wasn't a Jehovah's witness when I lied to my employer about the bruise on my eye. If I had been more rooted in, God says, don't lie. I would've told them the truth, but I wasn't committed to anything and I was trying to feel my way through. But I think this kind of people call it scaffolding. I'm too weak to stand on my own, but it really does make a structure for you of how to live life. This is right, this is wrong. And then the decision tree, you know how to go through your life. Is this happening? If yes, do this. If no do that, you've got some kind of clear way forward. And for me, I really needed that because I was too soft and I needed something more Structurally, Rigid.

 

Matt Handy (02:20:59):
Organized religion does real wonders for people that need direction. It's very hard for people. So self cannot critique self. But then when you have a moral framework and a clearly cut path for you to be able to, well, when this happens, you do this, or when this happens, you do this or you just walk down this path anyway. And people that live a religious lifestyle, like a truly religious lifestyle, they're almost always happy. It's like if they buy into it and they live by those principles, you hardly ever find religious people that are just unhappy people.

 

Cynthia (02:21:36):
Well, I think you hit the right word, the principles, because you can have a religion that teaches a bunch of rules, but when you are reading the Bible itself, there are a lot of rules. But even the Bible itself has some wiggle room based on the principles. And when you start talking about Jesus, he's preaching love. What is really loving. In the case of my ex-husband, I thought I was being loving to him, but I was enabling him. And later on when I understood that better, I started putting my foot down. He left me for it right when he decided to bail, when I remember one day he came downstairs and he started criticizing me for being religious. Mind you, he was raised in the religion. He introduced me to and I became, and he had just gotten baptized in a year. He started calling me, Carrie's mom from the movie Carrie.

 

(02:22:30):
She's all wacky. And that is so far away from who I am. It is just night and day. And I knew he was just trying to get my goat. So I just told him, provocative, I'm not going to get mad about it. It's not worth, it's not it. He lost his mind. Of course, he lost his mind and was like, how can you say I'm not worth it? And just realized that I wasn't down for it anymore. So right after that, those things, those all came from being more rooted in God and more rooted in my belief versus anything a religion was necessarily teaching me. It was more like this whole concept of love. What does that really mean? There's only so much a religion's going to be able to teach you about in your personal life for every scenario. But the principle itself, you start to mature in the understanding of it.

 

Matt Handy (02:23:29):
So there's also purpose, right? It's a good framework to directionally be able to lead you. And then as far as the principles, there is so many layers that you can go to because a lot of people will plateau and then just stay there. But if you keep exploring principles as they're working in your life, there's layers and levels that you can always growth,

 

Cynthia (02:23:59):
Evolve

 

Matt Handy (02:24:00):
Into a different level of love. Because when I was a kid, love was something totally different than it is today. I thought love was what your parents had. And then I grew up a little bit and I was like, love is what you and your girlfriend have. And it's like you grow up and it's like love is what I found with drugs. But when you apply it in a healthy way, it's almost endless how many layers to love you can actually discover. But then religion in general, I forgot who said it was like religion is the Christianity is the opiate of the masses. The masses,

 

Cynthia (02:24:39):
Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (02:24:39):
Who said that?

 

Cynthia (02:24:41):
Somebody I don't care to know about personally. I can't remember. It's hackney to me. So sorry, I didn't mean to be rude, but I was like, it's boring. I hear it so much from a lot of people who have never even tried to.

 

Matt Handy (02:24:56):
Yeah, that's the thing.

 

Cynthia (02:24:58):
They've never even opened the Bible or

 

Matt Handy (02:25:01):
A lot of religious people never have.

 

Cynthia (02:25:02):
Well, and that's true too, but I think there's a lot of people out there making judgment calls on things that they don't understand and being, oh yeah. Was it armchair quarterbacks of something they've never done before?

 

Matt Handy (02:25:14):
Yeah. What's funny, I was just having a discussion about this. You can find in the day and age that we live, if you have a presupposition, you can find information based justification for it that there is no clarity on information anymore. And truth is so subjective.

 

Cynthia (02:25:32):
And people have a confirmation bias. They usually want to believe whatever, want proof of what they already believe so that they can continue believing it and not so that they can actually open their mind and grow. And I always say for me, if someone showed me something better than what I currently believe that's more in line and aligned with what I read in the Bible and what I see in life, then I go for it. But I just haven't found that yet. So I'm happy where I am.

 

Matt Handy (02:26:05):
Yeah.

 

Cynthia (02:26:06):
And the growth never stops. I am still studying the Bible and over and over again finding it. But for me, the Bible was a big aha moment and a very therapeutic thing. And I'll watch YouTube videos on narcissism to deal with my ex and things that, and try and put it in perspective. There's a guy now that I'm all over his videos, Dr. Peter Saleno. And if you're out there watching, he's got a really interesting take on personality disorders and chiefly narcissism and narcissistic personality disorders.

 

Matt Handy (02:26:47):
What's his name? Peter. So

 

Cynthia (02:26:48):
Peter Solarno, which is really an interesting and really good take except he says, it looks like it's not trauma that's informing these disorders as much as it is genetics. And I'm like, I see that in my family, my kids and my ex-husband and his family, and even with my dad. But there's nurture and he is considering nurture epigenetics versus what I consider that is epigenetics. Because if you're in a traumatic situation, your cortisol will go up and you will eat all your B vitamins because of stress and all this chemical stuff will happen because of something that happens to you, no doubt. But there's also the epigenetic component. That's your environment that you're living in, the area you're breathing, the water you're drinking, the food you're eating.

 

Matt Handy (02:27:47):
Was this you and I that had this conversation before?

 

Cynthia (02:27:50):
I don't know, maybe, but it's that trigger and that trigger, it's sad to me to just consider the genetic component or just consider the emotional component. It's all of it. It's that the environmental component, the spiritual component, because your spiritual beliefs are going to cause you peace, which is going to cause oxytocin. If you're comfortable with other people, you're around and you're in a group worshiping together, you're probably going to get a lot of oxytocin.

 

(02:28:24):
And if you're stressed out because you don't have that support system like Dr. Shaw was talking about, I do the Argentine tango just for the hugs, I'm going for the oxytocin, and it does make a huge difference. But that's because I don't have the family around me, and I'm in a congregation that's not super touchy feely, and I need a lot of that. So you have to find, you need to be in four D and have all those corners. All of those things will affect your genes. So while I really appreciate what he's saying, because my daughter won't speak to me, I think she's going through a mental issue and she makes up, she has confabulation where she's making up stuff I've never done and upset with me for things that never happened. And she's taking that whole philosophy of trauma, informing your mental illness, whereas there's this genetic component that he's absolutely right about. I see it. But I also know that she's still eating gluten and she probably has gluten deficiency or gluten sensitivity. I know she's got eczema already, and that's typically a sign that you have got dysbiosis issues,

 

Matt Handy (02:29:40):
Really. So genetics is funny because I have two biological brothers, full-blooded biological brothers. I've got a lot of siblings, but three of us are from my mom's first marriage so we are full blooded, and we all got our 23 and mes done.

 

Cynthia (02:30:49):
Oh yeah.

 

Matt Handy (02:30:50):
And the one that looks the most Vietnamese is, so my mom is half Vietnam. Her mom is from Vietnam. My grandpa is from the United States. He is not Asian at all. Right? So she's 50% Vietnamese. And my brother, you would think that it's like, okay, well he's 25%, right? He's like 27% Vietnamese.

 

Cynthia (02:31:14):
Wow.

 

Matt Handy (02:31:15):
Yeah. So it's just genetic switches, right? So it's like,

 

Cynthia (02:31:19):
It says chromosome square dance. This happens with your partner.

 

Matt Handy (02:31:23):
Do all this.

 

Cynthia (02:31:23):
Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (02:31:24):
So there's real mathematically, it doesn't make sense because you would think that the maximum amount of Vietnamese that he could be is 25%, but that's not how it works. You have, I think there's four switches in every single chromosome or whatever, and it's like if you have, I don't know how likely it is to have all of the right ones get flipped at the right time, but yeah, 27% Vietnamese. And it's like, how is that possible? It's like, well, it's genetics. Anything is really possible. And then it's like, my wife is a redhead with blue eyes. She was like genetically the least, statistically the lowest population of people in the world. And then we have our daughter that looks exactly like me, and it's like, yeah, you have a hundred percent recessive jeans. You glow in the dark, you're so white and you have red hair and blue eyes. It's like, you're not going to

 

Cynthia (02:32:30):
Not win in this battle.

 

Matt Handy (02:32:32):
And I have dominant genes. You never lnow.

 

Cynthia (02:32:34):
You never know. My father had blue eyes and my ex's dad has blue eyes, and so our daughter has blue eyes, even though I have green eyes and my ex has brown eyes. So sometimes you reach back in the annals of history and throw in an ex and you can have mutations.

 

Matt Handy (02:32:54):
Oh, yeah.

 

Cynthia (02:32:54):
Based on actual problems. I talked to a mom. YouTube actually took this off of the air, but I had a video after I talked to her.

 

Matt Handy (02:33:05):
Why did they take it off?

 

Cynthia (02:33:06):
Because it was the pharmaceutical industry that it was, so maybe I shouldn't mention it so they don't take it off of the air, but she said that a medication caused a mutation in her genes. A specific one that ended up leading to things later. But Agent Orange. Well, I mean thinking about how binary people agent, and there's that too. It can happen.

 

Matt Handy (02:33:28):
And Agent Orange, right? Agent Orange is like we were just talking about . Wait, was that you?

 

Cynthia (02:33:33):
No,

 

Matt Handy (02:33:34):
That I was telling today. I was telling somebody today that my grandpa was in Vietnam, got exposed to Agent Orange. And somewhere along the way, I still don't know if this is true or not, but somebody said that autism has been directly linked to a downstream, multi-generational effect of people who are exposed to agent Orange. It's like my grandpa. And now we've got a ton of kids in my family, and I have

 

Cynthia (02:34:05):
Autism.

 

Matt Handy (02:34:05):
Autism.

 

Cynthia (02:34:06):
But I think why now? Why not your generation?

 

Matt Handy (02:34:10):
Well, they said that it was going to skip multiple generations before it manifests.

 

Cynthia (02:34:16):
I have, again, the loaded gun theory. We're eating worse than we ever have been. We're vaccinating more than we ever have been. That's loading kids up with toxins, just that alone. And then the other things that are happening environmentally. I mean, genetics might play a role, but I don't think it's as big

 

Matt Handy (02:34:35):
Think about the electronics. We are in a,

 

Cynthia (02:34:38):
Yeah, wifi, the electrical charging cars that were causing me problems. Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (02:34:45):
Yeah. There is a, I don't know what it is really, but when it's only at night when the rest of the world is quiet, you can feel it. Yes. Yeah. It's like I've never really noticed stuff like that before and all of a sudden until a few months ago where it was, I still don't know where it's coming from. I don't really know what it is, but I can feel it somewhere.

 

Cynthia (02:35:13):
Yeah, there's something going on. Well, they keep adding to it. And should I talk about the electrical vehicle situation that I had?

 

Matt Handy (02:35:21):
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

 

Cynthia (02:35:22):
This is something else that I look for in clients when I'm doing that detective work. I had gotten out of the mold. I was in a good apartment. I had gotten better, and I knew I had to move the last two weeks, really, the last week I was, there were two days where the first day I was like, I went to bed, I'd been feeling fine, no joint pain, no issues, sleeping eight hours a night. And before I had been only sleeping five hours a night, suddenly I was wracked with pain. I felt all my joints were all twisted up and I could not turn my brain off. And it wasn't like it was racing thoughts. It was just like, okay, sleep Now, any moment now, just, and I started hearing the sound. I realized there were electric charging cars. Two of them plugged in outside my window.

 

(02:36:19):
There were four outside this new place. So I went to the opposite end of the apartment where my son's room was, and I slept there. He wasn't home. And I went out like a light, no pain. Everything resolved. And that's just from the electrical magnetic frequencies that were coming from the electric chargers for the cars. They put out a lot of energy. Next night I was fine. No cars were charging. The next night, I had a lower level of that start to creep up on me, and I'm sleeping, and I look out the window and sure enough, there's one car there. So I did the same thing. I went to my son's room out like a light again, no problem. No pain. So a lot of times when patients come to me and they're having some kind of inflammation and even something like mold, I'll have them unplug their wireless router at night or whenever they're not using it, so that at least they have less, it's a complex, it's an apartment complex where I am. I'm getting some, but I've told people about organic food, even if, let's say they have to put a little pesticide there, less poison is better than more. So the more you can just eliminate to keep your body from going through inflammation, what EMFs do, it starts to inflame your tissues, the better off you are.

 

Matt Handy (02:37:45):
Yeah. It's so crazy. It's everywhere I am. Literally,

 

Cynthia (02:37:50):
We're on it right now. Yeah.

 

Matt Handy (02:37:53):
And then as you extrapolate the world that we're living at in today, as you extrapolate that out, it's less and less fossil fuels and more and more electronics. And

 

Cynthia (02:38:06):
Is it really better for our environment? For us? Yeah. I

 

Matt Handy (02:38:09):
Don't know. It's crazy.

 

Cynthia (02:38:11):
I's really crazy. Not a big hurry to get to that.

 

Matt Handy (02:38:13):
You know what I heard the craziest thing though, they were like, of course of Elon Musk wants to go the electric route because there are no fossil fuels on Mars. He was like, what is there? There's a lot of sunlight right there, but there's no natural resources. You can't go drill out there too. Yeah. I mean, it's just not what's going on. So he was like, yeah,

 

Cynthia (02:38:44):
Never thought about it that way before.

 

Matt Handy (02:38:46):
Pretty interesting. So batteries will be a thing. Just bring them there. But electric cars on Mars.

 

Cynthia (02:38:56):
On Mars, you can go, Elon, you can go.

 

Matt Handy (02:39:02):
I would go. I think I would go,

 

Cynthia (02:39:04):
I'm not going, I'm good here, but I'm a hippie. I'd rather be, I mean, in my heart of hearts, I'd love to be out off the grid.

 

Matt Handy (02:39:13):
Okay. That brings up a good point though. Could you do that?

 

Cynthia (02:39:17):
Could I?

 

Matt Handy (02:39:18):
Yeah. Being allergic to or sensitive to all this stuff. Well,

 

Cynthia (02:39:21):
The thing is, I'm sensitive to it because of the mold,

 

Matt Handy (02:39:24):
Which is really primarily because of houses.

 

Cynthia (02:39:27):
Isn't that? That's crazy. But it's not even because of houses. I was talking to an Argentine friend of mine from the Tango, and I told him what was happening. He's like, yeah, because in this country, everything's built with wood. And that's true. In other countries, it's usually like cinder block, and it's stuff that's less moldable, more that's not a word, but less inclined to be more mold resistant. And there are mold resistant materials. And really, I've been in places that were fine because they were built right and maintained properly. So I could still live out off the grid in a nicely built home with good. I wonder if indoor plumbing is necessary, but maybe I'll

 

Matt Handy (02:40:09):
It's definitely more comfortable.

 

Cynthia (02:40:10):
It is more comfortable. Who am I fooling?

 

Matt Handy (02:40:13):
Yeah,

 

Cynthia (02:40:13):
I will probably have a tiny house with stuff and even, yeah, I don't know what I really could do, but I think that we have a lot more, I mean, I think it's well known that we have a lot more indoor pollutants than outdoor pollutants these days.

 

Matt Handy (02:40:28):
Yeah. Yeah.

 

Cynthia (02:40:30):
Mold is just one of them. But yeah, when you're away from the toxin, the toxic substance that's giving you problems, metal will also make you allergic to things. You can get rid of that, and then your body will resolve the allergies and sensitivities, but you have to get rid of the source. If you still have the exposure, you're going to continue to be

 

Matt Handy (02:40:55):
Obviously reactivated.

 

Cynthia (02:40:57):
Right.

 

Matt Handy (02:41:00):
Well, okay.

 

Cynthia (02:41:01):
Okay. Thank you for letting me be here. I appreciate your time too.

 

Matt Handy (02:41:05):
I appreciate your time and you can definitely come back.

 

Cynthia (02:41:08):
Thanks. I'd love to. I got to talk to Dr. Shah.

 

Matt Handy (02:41:11):
A how people, a hold of you.

 

Cynthia (02:41:13):
Oh, yes. So I am Cynthia Pereira and I'm at biomentals.com, and all of my social media is linked on the footer of my website. Some of them are Bio_mentals, and some of them are bio mental straight up. But I have YouTube, Instagram, and I have a Pinterest page with all my recipes. So if you do have sensitivities and you need to substitute, that's what my Pinterest page is all about.

 

Matt Handy (02:41:41):
Well, okay. There she is.

 

Cynthia (02:41:43):
Thank you.

 

Matt Handy (02:41:44):
Thank you. Thanks for listening to My Last Relapse. I'm Matt Handy, the founder of Harmony Grove Behavioral Health, Houston, Texas, where our mission is to provide compassionate evidence-based care for anyone facing addiction, mental health challenges, and co-occurring disorders. Find out more at harmonygrovebh.com. Follow and subscribe to My Last Relapse on YouTube, apple Podcast, Spotify, and wherever you like to stream podcasts. Got a question for us? Leave a message or voicemail at mylastrelapse.com. If you're feeling overwhelmed or struggling, you don't have to face it alone. Reaching out for support is a sign of strength and help is always available. If you or anyone needs help, give us a call 24 hours a day at 8 8 8 - 6 9 1 - 8 2 9 5.