Powerful Topics in Medicine Interview with Sayer Ji

Marc David, Founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, interviews Sayer Ji who is a widely recognized researcher, author, and founder of greenmedinfo.com. Greenmedinfo is known internationally for providing open access, evidence based resources supporting natural and integrative healing modalities. Marc and Sayer discuss how true health is life empowerment and why so many people are choosing natural remedies.

Transcript:

Marc: Welcome, everybody. I’m Marc David, Founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are in The Future of Healing Online Conference, and I am here with one of my favorite thought leaders in the nutrition and health and transformation space, Sayer Ji. Welcome, Sayer Ji.

Sayer Ji: So good to be here, Marc. I love your interviews and what you’re doing, and it’s always  a great pleasure to be in your events.

Marc: Thanks! The feeling is so mutual. Let me just say a quick few words about you for anyone who’s not familiar with your work.

Sayer Ji is a widely recognized researcher, author, and presenter, a member of the Global GMO­Free Coalition and advisory board member of the National Health Federation and Fearless Parent. He’s a reviewer and editor of The International Journal of Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine and the founder of one of my favorite online resources and one of the world’s most widely referenced, evidence­based natural health resources of its kind, and that’s greenmedinfo.com. Now Sayer Ji founded greenmedinfo.com in 2008 to provide the world an open­access, evidence­based resource supporting natural and integrative modalities.

That’s how I first found you was just doing what guys like us do. We poke around   online and we find stuff. Somehow I found GreenMedInfo and my jaw just dropped!  Then I spent a little time stalking you and finding out more about you. I’m like, “Wow!  I’ve got to meet this person.” I’m a huge fan of your work, and we’ve gotten to have some great conversations. I’m wondering if we could just start out a little bit, big picture of just how you personally got on your journey into the work that you do. How did you end up here?

Sayer Ji: Well, it’s a very similar story. We had spoken about how you also had come to this movement because of health issues, and I think both of us suffered early on from    types of illnesses that made it necessary to be within the conventional medical system.   I know I had an inhaler until I was 20, always by my side because I would periodically have severe bronchial asthma episodes and have to go to the hospital and undergo what felt like experimental procedures to open up my lungs.

It wasn’t till I got into nutrition, diet, learning about cow’s milk affecting asthma incidents and then weed and all the other things we all know about now that I was

liberated from that system. Over time, it just became really a passion for me to identify what—today people want evidence. They want peer­reviewed, published research because if they don’t have that, well, then coin to the powers that be, it’s just not true. When you have self­healing experiences and you see the wonder of something as simple as turmeric or Echinacea or vitamin C, you just want to tell the world.

That’s when, through happenstance, I was exposed to the National Library of Medicine’s database, which is 23 million citations presently. You can go on  pubmed.gov and search and it’s this huge ocean of data that you just jump into, like you’re swimming looking for clinical pearls. You just sit there on the edge and fish with your keywords, and you can find the most amazing research supporting what you and   I love to advocate for, natural healing.

Marc: These days, you and I were talking before this conversation. There’s so much opportunity available to us. It just feels like there’s an explosion of, in a sense,    personal empowerment because we now have access to information like never before, and we have access to kind of dig into that information. I’m just wondering when you kind of take the temperature of the people in your world, the people who come to GreenMedInfo, what is the general sense when it comes to people’s relationship with health, with health information, with integrative modalities? What are you seeing from the big picture?

Sayer Ji: I agree with you. It’s like this massive wave of enthusiasm when it comes to the technology we’re using now. It’s amazing to think that there are thousands of people around the world that are now able to stream into this conversation, and we’re able to make available what we want to share to them. That technology has really created sort of a literal manifestation of a global brain so that we’re all connected, we all can share what we feel is valuable, and it’s just created such an empowering movement because previous to this we were kind of dependent on the priests of the body, the physicians    or the scholars who stated that they know the truth, but it was very hard to get to it.

In fact, just 20 years ago, you couldn’t even get to the National Library of Medicine’s database without modem speeds that were, I think, a thousand times slower. It was, I think back then, $100 an hour and now you go on GreenMedInfo and you can get tens of thousands of studies or go on Medline and get millions, and it’s such a Copernican revolution.

But on the other hand, people are overwhelmed and the information is too voluminous so that they’re kind of paralyzed. What you and I think to try to do as well is to try to translate some of that and make it more understandable as best as we can so that people can have chunks of edible wisdom that aren’t going to give them indigestion.

Marc: Well put! Let me ask you this question. What do you notice when it comes to just the health, in general, of the population. Since you’ve been doing this work, would you    say, “Wow! We, the collective we, we seem to be getting healthier or maybe we’re kind of staying the same or maybe things are getting worse.” I look at statistics. I look at my friends. I’m trying to gauge these things. I’m just wondering what’s your big picture assessment of sort of health of the world, health of humans?

Sayer Ji: Wow! Well, it appears that I believe there’s been no time that I can think of in recorded history and we can assume even pre­recorded history, and things have been so polarized. We have little pockets where you can get some of the highest quality food that probably has ever been produced using technologies like biodynamic farming, using sea salt derived hydroponics so that it’s really clean and in high mineral, and yet we also live in a time when it’s a miracle any of us are standing because we’re in the kind of post­industrial, chemical apocalypse where there are hundreds of thousands of chemicals that have no regulatory oversight, that the industries have released directly into our food supply, our cosmetics, our air, our water, and now they’re in our bodies lodged there. There’s no toxicology research that has ever assessed the notarial  effects, the synergy of more than one of these compounds at any single time.

When you look at what are called toxicants or synthetic often petrochemical derived substances, additives, pesticides, and then, of course, almost every pharmaceutical on the planet that has FDA approval, the kiss of death, technically, is a petrochemical derivative.

We’re all being poisoned. It’s a miracle that we all are still standing and feeling okay, which speaks to the resilience that I think later hopefully we can expand on, just the amazing ability of our body to heal itself and overcome what, in really scientific terms, shouldn’t really be possible. Yeah, it’s really a tough time. I think there’s cognitive dissidence where we have all this great stuff available. You have so many choices, but then on the other hand, we don’t. Our choice is to be exposed to chemicals has been taken away from us. We can’t even tell if there are GMO, Roundup­laden ingredients

in our foods because it’s not mandatory to label them, so it’s a tough time, I think, for everyone.

Marc: I love how you mapped it out as a time of tremendous polarization. It’s so true. I got in the shower this morning and recently I bought this natural shampoo that was made by essentially two young hippies, and it’s truly all natural, all organic, handmade. This is  the best shampoo I’ve ever used. I felt great and I think of just a week ago I was in a hotel somewhere and I forgot to bring my shampoo, and I’m using whatever is sitting in the hotel room. I remember putting this stuff on my hair and thinking, “I am going to   die!” Because I’ve so trained my body to enjoy what’s natural or real or organic, that when something different shows up, I really react.

Sayer Ji: Oh, it’s so true! In fact, that’s the problem for those who are educated out there on   these topics is that once you realize, for example, just a year ago, a study was  published on the effect that Roundup has in infinitesimal concentrations. We’re talking about the parts per trillion range, and then recently I had a discussion with Jeffrey   Smith about the paper and he believes that it implies they’re parts per quadrillion range has an estrogen­like effect on breast cells so that it causes cancer, a proliferative    effect on the cells lines.

It’s just amazing to think that that’s possible, so now you live in a world where you think, “Oh, my gosh! Okay, it’s not the dose that makes it poison, but any amount of this substance.” In fact, even diluting it can have a greater endocrine disruptor or cancerous effect. It just makes you kind of go batty because previously you didn’t know about it. You weren’t freaking out. All the stress hormones weren’t there. You were just kind of ignorantly blissful, so there is a really difficult situation for all of us here now that we didn’t even have a decade ago.

Now that we’re aware, it can get scary and we have to know what to do with that information. That’s where, I think, I know you do this a lot. I try really hard is to find that research that also shows that even though things are so bad, there’s hope and that there’s an amazing resilience that we can access to overcome even what seems like a very bleak situation.

Marc: It feels like one of the things that you and I both do is we’re educators, and there are parts of that job that are so, to me, thrilling because I’ve been in a classroom since I was sitting in kindergarten, and I love learning. In the health field, getting back to this

polarization thing, there’s a topic that I would love to talk about with you just because I know you’ve really taken this on, and it’s the topic of vaccinations.

Let me just preface my question by saying, for me personally, this is a topic that’s very near and dear to me because in my infancy I almost died a handful of times, and my immune system collapsed and my lungs—I became intensely asthmatic within minutes after I was vaccinated. I really spent the first 13 years of my life struggling, going from hospital to hospital and doctor to doctor.

There’s so much information now coming out about the problematic nature of    vaccines, which previously vaccines are kind of like motherhood. You don’t question it. You don’t question the value of a mother. How dare you! I’m just wondering if you can just give us some big picture pieces of what you’ve noticed as you’ve started to    explore this topic and see what other experts are saying. What’s sort of going on  behind the scenes here?

Sayer Ji: Well, it’s a great question because I’m a curious individual, and of course, my whole platform is based on really looking at the research as a standard for asking questions like, “Okay, I’m not just going to say, ‘Echinacea is good for a cold.'” I’ve experienced it. I’ve talked to hundreds who have, but unless the powers that be have evidence to prove it, it’s really not going to have any meaning and doctors aren’t going to feel compelled to use it. For Echinacea, I spent about a week looking at every published study ever in Echinacea and I indexed all the relevant studies from GreenMedInfo showing value. We have now 70 studies on its benefits.

I did the same with vaccines and I wanted to see what the research was like. The studies that showed benefit, I wanted to look at the affiliations. Was this a study    funded by a drug company or a vaccine company? Is this a study funded by the government or is it independent? After looking at a lot of studies, I was shocked to find that the evidence to support the health policy that the CDC’s immune—the vaccine schedule, for example, isn’t really compelling. It was actually quite a shock to find this, and it was extremely meaningful to me because I have two small children. I have two daughters and when I’m being told that for their safety and the safety of society they should receive 60+ vaccines by age six, it’s a really serious problem because, of course, so many of their peers are sick.

We have the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world, and we have the highest number of vaccines, and this has been studied in depth. In fact, SAGE published a study showing that the multiple vaccines are likely causing this, then it really brings up red flags.

Again, the research is very shockingly not pro­vaccine. That’s really where my journey started with questioning whether there’s really any sanity to the whole process of vaccination, which is unfortunately mistakenly equated with immunization. This is what   I really dislike when I hear this. Someone will ask, “Have you immunized your  children?” The problem is vaccination is not equivalent to bona fide immunity. They’re already assuming that all the questions have been answered, effectiveness is proven, and that’s not what they do. They use surrogate markers often now, which means they inject something into a patient. They see the antibody levels rise, and they equate an elevated antibody titer with real­world effectiveness or protection from a pathogen.

That is absolutely not evidence­based medicine. It’s really a way to fast­track approval and also evades the problem, which is real­world effectiveness is almost impossible to prove. The reason is you can never prove that any single vaccine prevented any single disease because the outcome is a non­event.

In other words, if you’re intervening and you’re choosing to vaccinate, you can’t prove that the person didn’t get chicken pox because of the vaccine, because guess what? They have an immune system. How can you say the immune didn’t do it? It’s impossible to prove. When you look at the assumption that this is evidence­based, the notion that vaccines confirm immunity, it’s based on very broad epidemiological  studies, which are extremely weak in terms of evidence quality.

Marc: What happens from here is that what I’ve noticed in the conversation going on around vaccinations, there’s this big sort of black hole around vaccinations and autism.

There’s even a connection that you were mentioning before potentially with GMOs. What are some of the pieces that you have seen come together in terms of what might be some of the unwanted effects of vaccinations that we should be aware of?

Sayer Ji: Well, #1 is when you look at the PDF inserts for the vaccines. This is really all the manufacturers are beholden to the public to provide. You’ll find listed clearly the ingredients, which are so shocking to see that yes, they took Thimerosal, a type of mercury out of vaccines around—I think it was 2005 is when they started to kind of pull  it out in acknowledgement that everyone was raising red flags. “How can you inject

mercury into any healthy individual when you know if you’re playing with a mercury thermometer your mom says, ‘You can’t do that. It’ll stay in your body forever.'” We know that pregnant women shouldn’t eat types of fish because they can cause all types of serious harm to the fetus. But they inject it directly into children.

So what they did is they switched it out for aluminum, aluminum hydroxide, and it’s   also extremely neurotoxic. It doesn’t belong in the body. It serves no biological role whatever that we know of. What we saw is that the rates of autism continue to expand to the point where it’s truly an exponential increase. The problem, of course, is that there are those out there who claim it’s a genetic epidemic or there’s some type of environmental set of causes that we haven’t yet identified, but has nothing to do with vaccines.

But by definition, a genetic epidemic is an oxymoron. I mean there’s no such thing, you can’t—genetically, in theory, it takes thousands and thousands of years for a change in the DNA sequence to confer some type of radical change in disease risk, so it’s pretty ridiculous.

When it comes down to the sort of emperor not wearing any clothes, the problem is    that if the CDC was to acknowledge that the brain damage caused by vaccines is   linked to this dramatic increase in autism spectrum disorder cases, then the whole process of protecting the manufacturer from a lawsuit, and of course, the government’s role in hiding data which showed the connection between certain vaccines and autism would be exposed. Really the whole credibility of the conventional medical  establishment would implode.

It’s a big deal because globally the CDC is still considered by many nations to be sort  of the ultimate authority. What they do is it’s called “science by proclamation” or “evidence­based medicine,” is that when you go to the CDC’s site and they talk about  a particular topic like say measles being deadly. One in a thousand people with measles die or some kind of ridiculous distortion of the truth—they don’t reference research. What you see in the mainstream media, thousands of articles on the   dangers of measles is they reference the CDC as their authority, but in this chain, you don’t see reference to actual proof, which is the assumption that somehow the CDC is on top of the evidence chain of command and that they are talking from a perspective of science. It’s actually quite the opposite.

Marc: We have such a—it feels like a powerful opportunity because we have to educate ourselves and we really have to kind of dive into the information and at least listen to those who are diving into the research and go, “Huh? What’s happening here?” It feels like it gets back to personal empowerment.

I remember when I was a kid and I used to learn in grade school about all the information that was coming out from the FDA on the food pyramid, and I should be drinking a lot of milk and eating a lot of breakfast cereal and eating Pop Tarts. That was the reigning nutritional—and margarine, for goodness sakes! That was the reigning nutritional wisdom of the day that was sort of governmentally approved.

Sayer Ji: Yes, I mean one thing is so clear factually, which is that in 1986, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund was launched, which sounds great. If you’re injured by a vaccine, which, of course, many people in mainstream media say doesn’t ever  happen, that you get compensated. But what actually it did was it indemnified manufacturers from liability, from manufacturing a product that can cause harm or death in the exposed populations.

It also kept it from being possible to sue a physician or pediatrician, for example, who is just without any thought to bio individuality or any type of susceptibility that their patients may have to injury, being sued or being liable for pushing the agenda.

Since the beginning of this program, $3 billion has been paid out to those in this  country who have been injured by vaccines as settlements. Anyone who claims that there isn’t a massive burden of injury caused by vaccines can look to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund and know that isn’t true. Furthermore, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, theirs only captures approximately 1% of the injuries that occur because it’s a passive reporting system.

There’s so much negative pressure keeping these reports from being heard because,   of course, if you’re a pediatrician, you have  thousands  of  patients.  You’re administering all these vaccines, and your children are getting harmed, they’re getting brain damage. No one in that position is going to acknowledge that the vaccine caused harm because they’re saying, “They’re safe and effective,” to the parents. In fact,   they’re saying, “If you don’t take this, you’re going to harm someone else. You can’t go to school.” I mean it’s just such a really terrible system, but the facts speak for themselves. Over $3 billion in compensation has been paid out by our government for

vaccine injury, so it’s really disturbing that the so­called “skeptics,” right, they’ll    question a mother’s observation that after early vaccine their child went through a sudden regressive state, but they won’t question that the public facts, which are that   the manufacturers have no liability just like the nuclear power industry, the government underwrites the risk for private industry. That is the worst type of collusion that is possible when you’re dealing with the health and wellbeing of little children.

Marc: How can people empower themselves in this area and learn more? Do you have any resources that you recommend for the inquisitive mind that wants to go, “Huh? This is interesting. Where do I go?”

Sayer Ji: Well, the first thing is common sense because when you think about things, for example, “Oh, wait. They want me to vaccinate my children with 60 vaccines so their kids don’t get infected. But wait a second. They’re fully immunized. How come they’re not super immune, then?” There’s a task and acknowledgement by those rabid pro­vaccers that, “Oh, my gosh! If your kids don’t vaccinate, my kids are in danger.” If that was true, then why are you giving your kids vaccines? They’re supposed to work.

So #1, commonsense. Number 2 in this category is that the whole justification for vaccination is based on the fact that when challenged in nature to wild­type exposure, chicken pox, measles, our body meets the challenge and then has lasting immunity. In fact, it’s conferred for a lifetime, whereas the vaccine schedules peppered through with these boosters because the vaccines failed to convert any kind of significant immunity. In fact, they often result—like chicken pox results in a worse form of herpes zoster, which is—or varicella, which is shingles—is that they just make the disease worse.

The idea that vaccines now are required for us to be immune when for literally millions of years that’s all we had was an immune system. It’s just if we apply commonsense, we won’t fall prey to the propaganda that immunization vaccination is truly the lifesaving—it’s the sacred cow of conventional medicine. It’s their Holy Grail. It’s their holy water. It doesn’t work. When you look at the actual implementation of mass immunization in the United States, you’ll find the decline occurred after sanitation, refrigeration, improved nutrition, better hygiene protocols, less crowded. All of those factors were dramatically reduced at the time of decline of the diseases that we now have the vaccines for like measles and chicken pox and rubella was after there was already a success through changing the terrain and not trying to eliminate germs,  which actually help us to regulate immunity and confer lasting immunity.

Then #2, because your question was the research is so abundantly clear. We released  a PDF document of 1,000 studies. You can download it for free on greenmedinfo.com. Showing over 200 serious adverse health effects linked to the CDC’s vaccination schedule that really no one in the mainstream media is discussing. This goes from autism spectrum disorder to diabetes type 1 to psychiatric issues to bowel problems. I mean it’s really quite disturbing. The problem is that without informed consent, without   a parent knowing that these risks are there, then this is not abiding by the Nuremberg Code of Medical Ethics. That is a serious humanitarian issue. Not only is it unconstitutional. It is illegal. It’s unethical. It’s all the things that we don’t want to    believe that our government would force upon us, but the truth is so clear.

Marc: The download from your website of free—1,000 studies.

Sayer Ji: Yeah.

Marc: PDF showing the not so pleasant effects of vaccinations. I mean congratulations on creating that labor of love. I know that was a lot of work!

Sayer Ji: Thank you. It just was done for my own process of learning that really the research doesn’t unequivocally support the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, and if that’s true, then there’s nothing to stand on because you can’t use eminence or authority­based medicine in this day and age and assume that you’re going to have credibility in the eyes of those who have sick children because of these sorts of pharmaceutical products being shoved down their throats and one­size­fits­all is what they’re doing. It’s just completely—it’s unreasonable.

Marc: Yeah, this conversation reminds me once again it feels like the zeitgeist. It feels like   this is­­the times that we’re living in right now. I mean just think of straight up nutrition. So many of us have to find good food, so if you’re born into this world, there’s a very good chance that you’re born into sort of an unnatural toxic way of eating. That’s the probability. You’re going to be exposed to mass­produced food, nutrient­depleted food, food that’s laden with chemicals, pesticides, GMOs. You don’t have to do anything.

That food will come your way. If you travel across the United States in a car, there are stretches for hundreds and hundreds of miles on the highway where all you can do is stop at a gas station and there’s nothing real or nothing fresh.

All I’m trying to say here is that I think we live in a time when we can’t take for granted that we have to go find the good. We have to find the good food. You have to go find  the good health practitioner. You have to go find the good people, the people that are your friends, that will care about you. We’ve got to look for it. It doesn’t just come flooding in. oftentimes, it seems like we have to wade through a lot of disinformation to find the treasure, and it just feels like that’s the times that we live in.

Sayer Ji: Totally, yeah, the default trajectory for all of us is disease and suffering, unfortunately and packaged in a way that it seems as if it’s the opposite. You look at something that says, “All natural.” Well, it’s guaranteed to be synthetic. It’s just everything Orwellian, and in a way, like you’re saying, it’s forcing us to become to conscious and aware in  our daily decisions. It’s forcing us to become more spiritual in that sense because ultimately choice is the most powerful thing that we are bestowed in this life because we can make a choice to go ahead and get good food or decide that we’re going to investigate vaccinations instead of letting our children just be pulled into the system.

There are many like­minded individuals doing this. In fact, the beauty of this summit or conference is that a lot of you listening are pre­selected. You’re like me and Marc and you’ve already kind of come to this conclusions. Together it’s like a new mycelium or  the sort of undercurrent in the soil of people that are working together to create a   better world. Yeah, it’s a very interesting situation. It’s not easy to be healthy, but it makes you very aware and it gives you an opportunity to be very conscious if you are going to make this your lifestyle.

Marc: Here we were moments ago. We were talking about vaccinations and how it’s called immunization. Have you been immunized? I oftentimes think of the immune system   that we don’t always give it the sort of beautiful definition that it deserves. Just you and   I being able to sort of reach out and look at concepts or information that might not be healthy, that might be toxic. That’s sort of the psychic immune system at work. Us getting together and having a conversation and sharing it with other people. That’s a collective immune response saying, “Wait a second. There’s information coming into  the system and we want to alchemize that a little bit or we want to stop that or we want to do something with that.” There are all different ways that I think immunity has to  exist, and I think maybe immunity in the realm of mind might be as important as anything. It’s kind of where it starts in a lot of ways.

Sayer Ji: I love that! Absolutely, because you look at notions like herd immunity, which really are not based on any type of evidence. It’s just this assumption that you reach a certain point in the herd where a certain number are infected, and then therefore they end up being immune.

When you apply that to humans and vaccines, it’s really more of just a metaphor that has been taken in a very literal sense, but the herd concept is true. When I post information to Facebook, for example, on questioning vaccines and I’m referencing Lancet or some high­impact journal, it’s amazing how few people will actually look at the research that they claim is so important, the science, and they’ll constantly question and say, “This isn’t true. The CDC says it’s not true.” It’s remarkable. We need to cultivate an immune system for the misinformation because it is truly like a disease.

I like the term meme, because a meme is an idea that has viral components. It’s like ideology. It takes over, and in fact, consumes biological resources. The notion is that if you’re, for example, looking at life in terms of the biological instinct to reproduce, there are religions where, for example, being a martyr or not reproducing is fundamental. So we have to start understanding that ideas have more power than genes on some level, and they are infectious, and we need to start, like you said, exerting greater immunity against false and dangerous information. When it comes to medical information today,    I think we have the ultimate religion. It’s the science that devours all other religions or the religion that devours all other religions is this notion that somehow science is going to give us the answer and the only way, and then when we apply it politically, you don’t even have a choice. It’s like the ultimate fascism.

Marc: Usually I think when people hear the term “science,” we often think it’s a bunch of    guys in white coats with gray beards nodding their heads and agreeing with each other and sort of somehow connected to this higher, irrefutable wisdom and science, it’s the Wild West, really.

Sayer Ji: It is. It’s so the Wild West. It’s a projection. The whole notion that you can separate subjectivity was destroyed with quantum mechanics. We know that just based on how you’re looking at something it’s going to change it manifestation. If you’re looking for a particle of light, it’s particle. If you’re looking for a wave, it’s a wave. Completely different substances.

No one can sustain the concept anymore that there’s just this impartial observer and there are these little atoms or little mathematical entities that we’re going to determine this is true for everyone. That’s really not how it works. It doesn’t mean that the other is true in its pure subjectivity, but yeah, science is an investigative open attitude. It’s   about being aware of what you’re perceiving. It’s about really being a reasonable,    using commonsense individual. It’s not some kind of high­level, Greek, Latin, reading tealeaves type of occupation. It’s really misunderstood.

Marc: So along this concept of memes and how they’re so powerful and how they can take over. There are a lot of good memes out there, and I know you like to keep your eye    on how food is information and how even plants are imparting energies and    information that we’re not always aware of. I’d love to spend a little bit of time on that topic just because I find it so fascinating, some of the different ways to look at food, not just as merely a package of nutrients, but energy and information.

Sayer Ji: I love it! I mean because we started out really appreciating the healing properties of other entities within our environ, so if a plant was able to heal us, it had a soul and energy and it had compassion. It was able to give us its essence and we’re consuming it. It’s not living anymore. It’s a sacrificial, mutually—it’s like a spiritual relationship. It sounds all poetry and sort of a bunch of gobbledygook, but now the science is confirming this, in my opinion, because after spending so many years looking at the research on turmeric, there are 7,200 studies published right now on it on Medline. I started to index piece by piece the studies showing benefit and found over 600   different health benefits that this one plant seemed to impart to mammals, because some of the research is on rodents, etc.

I was like, “Is that possible?” I mean you think about a drug. It has one benefit they’ve already—which is actually a side effect, and then 75+ adverse effects, which usually include death, depending on the dose. Then you see something like a plant that can heal 600 different conditions. Then I analyzed the physiological actions by which it was doing these miraculous things. It was just amazing! Over 170 different ways documented that it’s able to modulate a certain pathway in the body.

Over time, it came to me and this was based really on one study published in the Journal of Nutrition and Cancer, where they took the retinoblastoma cells, a type of neurological cancer that’s extremely hard to treat, and they added curcumin to that environment, and within a matter of just a few minutes, it was able to downregulate

903 different genes and upregulate 1,319 other genes and start to turn the cell into a non­cancerous cell.

What that showed me was there’s infinite amount of information that just one biomolecule in turmeric contains because turmeric has 1,000 chemistries. It’s an intelligent, orchestrated, complex food plant. One of its compounds has all this information. That’s an intelligence that no chemical we use to treat cancer has. Then also, it embodies truly an ability to alleviate suffering in higher multicellular species like a human or a rat. That’s really, to me, an environment of compassion. When you look   at the mythos, the lore associated with turmeric or back to the Indian tradition, it’s   linked with a number of goddesses. It’s the embodiment of one who shined a bright   light of compassion and has all these different names.

To me, it was just an illustration on how today we have the mythos, the old stories, all the plant wisdom that was once passed down orally. Then you have this almost alien­like entity of science. It’s coming in and it’s scanning all the way down to a molecular level, all these different substances trying to say, “No, it’s just about the chemistries.” But even that approach has led us to the point where we have to acknowledge that there’s a miracle going on that nothing even close to this type of medicinal action can be reproduced through a chemical. I think we’re finding once again that the ancient approach to healing is really the one that we need to re­employ in this day and age.

Marc: Beautifully put. It feels like we are living in a time when it’s easy to miss, to not   perceive the intelligence that’s around us that is part and parcel and has created the natural world and us. There’s such this mindset that wants to reduce humanity to a bunch of random molecular collisions, and we lose the fact that we are this brilliant creation. My body is a brilliant creation. It’s easy to take the plants for granted. Here you’ve picked one plant and shown this impossible to re­create intelligence. We can’t,  in a laboratory, create that kind of intelligence into turmeric. We can’t create that in a prescription drug, as you described. Maybe a prescription drug might have a couple of actions. I know every time a drug company finds that their medication actually has this other positive effect that they didn’t even intend, they get all excited.

Sayer Ji: I know, right? It’s usually a side effect, so you take something like Lunesta. It’s a neurotoxic chemical that’s been linked to increased mortality from all causes. So basically its side effects that are probably almost killing you, knocking you out, and

then they repackage it into the intended beneficial, pharmacological action. It’s just insane when you think about what they’re doing.

I wanted to point out that I agree with you that we’re living in a day and age where   really medicine has converted us all into objects of control, not intentionally,   necessarily, but the ultimate outcome is that it has nothing to do with healing whatsoever. It has to do with if you have a planet full of billions of bodies, the best way to control, organize, exert influence over those bodies is to control their definition of  their self through medicine. It’s actually rather disturbing, but I think that’s true, is this is really a global, political control system. It has nothing to do with healing any longer.

Marc: Well, it just reminds me that a healthy human has the launching pad to be an amazing creature. I don’t just mean somebody who can run faster and jump higher. A healthy human can fulfill one’s potential, can fulfill one’s personal, emotional, spiritual potential. A healthy human is unstoppable. I think health, in a lot of ways, can really—it propels   us to our genetic potential, our inborn spiritual potential, and that can be dangerous.

I think you look back in history. Some of our greatest leaders and our most revered peacemakers get shot and killed. It’s almost as if the times are asking us to find that baseline of health, not just so I can be thin and sexy. That’s nice. That’s interesting, but it just feels like health is so much more. Health is empowerment.

Sayer Ji: Yeah, it goes pretty deep because you think about—I like to think about sort of the little miniature Big Bang that occurs in the womb through embryogenesis. You start off as  just an egg and a sperm, and from that moment, a miracle occurs, which for some reason, we forget soon after birth maybe because of a colicky baby driving us crazy   that humans are an explosion from the void, from nothing into something. There’s no way we can explain this miracle through any present scientific notion.

That’s what happens on a daily basis. Again, that’s the miracle of how we’re exposed   to absolutely devastating nutritional compatibilities, toxic and exposures all day long, stress is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and we’re still holding together, feeling quasi­healthy. It’s because it’s not that we depend on solely the biochemistry of our food, as you know, because this is what you do all the time through your amazing platform The Psychology of Eating. We are a soul that has a body, not a body that has a soul. I mean there’s an element where the body has a soul. It could be a prison if

we’re really not healthy, but as you have done such good work with, this isn’t pseudoscience. It’s not new age. This is the truth.

I even have some examples I’ve mentioned before in previous talks. The New England Journal of Medicine found when those who had received a cancer diagnosis were told either they had it or they didn’t, regardless if it was actually a false positive or not. They had up to 26.9 fold increase risk of heart­related death within one week if they had   been told they had a cancer. You can imagine the power of belief is so strong that they literally died internally and physically because they gave up hope that they could live because they had cancer.

The other is true, too. If a doctor comes in and says, “Guess what?” The person could have a serious cancer. You’re totally healed. It can completely induce within the body an elimination of that condition. There are documented examples of this. The reality is that I think on the one hand we are thinking we’re these molecules mashing together, this hunk of flesh, this carcass. Then on the other hand, we’re starting to see the research itself, the science, proving that our belief, our choice, is fundamental in determining our health outcomes.

Marc: There’s the good news. Really, the good news is, on the one hand—I was thinking as you were speaking how you started getting very poetic. There’s a place where, if you really dive into science and you dive into the science of life and you really follow it, you have to become a poet almost because we hit these places where science just   reaches its limits in that moment, and we can’t explain the miracle. We can’t explain   the beauty. We can’t explain this invisible big bang that happens in the womb that produces a life form out of really nothingness, out of this tiny amount of nothingness. We can’t reproduce that in a laboratory. It’s impossible.

Sayer Ji: No, it’s such a beautiful thing. You could condense it down to this, which is that science is truly the system where you have to see it to believe it, and then you have traditionally religion or the finer arts and all that are about you have to believe it in order to see it. Actually, technically my background is philosophy and I focused on phenomenology, which is all about going to the things themselves. You have to open up your eyes, get rid of your assumptions, and try to really perceive what reality is. In that case, there was something called a “perceptual faith,” so you didn’t throw down assumptions on what you were seeing. You were just opening yourself to it, so it doesn’t have to be religion, but the idea is that you’re open and you think that

possibility is there for healing, for all the things that we’re so scared of and maybe not being the only way of looking at it.

Yeah, I think that we’re getting closer to acknowledging the self­healing ability of the human body and soul is so profound that even though we’re seeing the darkest times  in history coalescing, even the conspiracy theorists and Orwell and all these folks had predicted, we also are being forced to recognize that we are truly the priority agent in our experience in that we can affect profound change just through some really basic choices and believing in ourselves.

Marc: Let me ask you this question. In your work, what gives you hope?

Sayer Ji: What gives me hope? Well, in my work, what gives me hope, really, is the response   that I see to those that are just looking for alternative information, because when I started, I was just a hobbyist. I just was compelled by the research. I wanted to share it because I was like, “Wow!” You start out writing a few articles, and before you know it,   it went from just being a little database and a couple blogs to having several million visitors every month. It’s not really based on anything new. I still write maybe once  every other day and people out there are responsive because really this kind of information has been completely blacklisted. It’s causing this kind of ripple effect where now people are going to your site, they’re going to my site, they’re making choices not based on just their doctor saying, “This is what the CDC says you’re going to do this or you’re going to die.” They’re questioning things. They’re saying, “Well, really? Well, here’s research saying that’s not true.”

I think that ultimately it’s really beautiful because the Internet has given us a platform that anyone can use for free, speed of light, and really end up empowering themselves in a way that never was possible before. I’m hopeful. I’m definitely hopeful.

Marc: Well, Sayer Ji, I so appreciate how you have really brought together so much information and really been faithful to the research and compiling it and just saying, “Okay, here. Here’s what science says. Here’s some of the buried treasure that you might not know about.” That’s kind of how I see you. It’s like we sort of send you into the wilderness of information, and you come back with the nuggets that are really useful for us. So thank you, thank you, thank you. I would just love if you can share with us how we can stay in touch with you and your world and what we should know about.

Sayer Ji: Oh, thanks! Well, I love connecting through our newsletter. I try to do that daily. We  send out a daily newsletter. Then Facebook is okay. They recently censored our article on removing ovaries for preventing cancer, but regardless, that’s still presently a way that a lot of our fans connect. Other than that, really, I encourage people to actually go through our site, pass through it, go to pubmed.gov themselves and give it a little try.

It’s the global brain’s convulsion dedicated to medicine, and it’s just a miracle.

You go in. Say you have diabetes and you want to learn about diabetes and ginger. Type in “diabetes and ginger.” Seventy studies and it’s just amazing when you look at the primary literature, which by the way, almost no doctors do. You start realizing,  “Wow! If this is true, then maybe I could start using natural medicine,” like their intuition is telling them. So it’s good.

Marc: Beautiful, my friend. That’s GreenMedInfo.com.

Sayer Ji: Thank you.

Marc: Which is any time somebody asks me what are my favorite online research resources for health, medicine, transformation, that’s #1 on my list, so thank you for the work that you do. Really appreciate it, my friend.

Sayer Ji: Thank you, Marc. I feel the same about your work.

Marc: Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. I appreciate you. I’m Marc David, on behalf of The Future of Healing Online Conference. I’ve been with Sayer Ji of GreenMedInfo.com. Lots more to come, my friends.