Sean Croxton – A Primer On Digestion, Detoxification, The Immune System & Hormones
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| Show Date: | 9/26/2012 | ||||||||
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| Show Guest: | Sean Croxton | ||||||||
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| Guest Info: | After graduating from San Diego State University in 2001 with a Bachelor’s in Kinesiology (emph: fitness, nutrition, and health), Sean began his journey as a certified personal trainer. After years of study and a litany of classes and course, Sean works with clients to uncover the root cause(s) of their health challenges. He works with individuals from all over the world by phone/Skype from his home office in San Diego, CA. | ||||||||
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| Topic: | Digestion, Detoxification, The Immune System & Hormones | ||||||||
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http://www.undergroundwellness.com/
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| Items Mentioned: |
Websites & Info http://www.naturopath4you.com/ http://www.paulcheksblog.com/ http://www.westonaprice.org/ http://www.acam.org/ http://seancroxton.com/ http://www.chriskresser.com http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/ http://www.fdn.tv/ Dr. Hal Huggins on Cholesterol Chek Institute Kim Schuette Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Just Eat Real Food Video Cosemtics Database Sean’s Video On The Gut Connection to Health Article: 10 Ways To Improve Digestion Books Products |
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| Duration/Size: | 00:58:01 / 53.11 MB | ||||||||
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Podcast Transcript:
JUSTIN: What’s going on everybody? I hope you’re having a good day with whatever you’re doing out there. I know I’m having an awesome day so far. Thank you so much for joining us, as we really appreciate it. Just for reference, this show is on Monday, September 26, 2012 and this is episode #13. Just so you know, all of our shows are transcribed, which means that anything a guest says or I say during a show is searchable on our website. If you’re ever looking to do research on something like ‘rheumatoid arthritis’ or ‘Parkinson’s disease’ or maybe just a product or anything like that, any conditions, you can search for it on our website. So please take advantage of that. You can find out what all of our guests are saying about certain subjects. There are ‘show notes’ too for each episode, so if Sean mentions a book or a website or anything like that, and you’re driving along and can’t write it down, don’t worry about it, just visit extremehealthradio.com/13.
If you have any questions, please email them to [email protected] or you can call our voicemail line and we will play your question on the air, to our guest, which is (949) 391-7363. I want to let you know that this episode is brought to you by the Vitamix blender, which is my favorite blender. That and the Blend-Tec are my two favorite blenders. If you’re looking to buy a Vitamix, please buy it through us and we will get a little commission. You can check that out at extremehealthradio.com/vitamix and we would appreciate that.
Before I introduce Sean Croxton today, I would like to just talk a little bit about our show schedule this coming week. We are booked all the way up until the end of the year and have some great guests coming up. We typically do shows on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This Saturday, we have Dr. Bruce Shelton, who is a homeopathic physician and doctor out of Arizona. He has a clinic healing people from incurable diseases and working with things like ozone and oxygen therapies, and all kinds of amazing things. So, check out that show.
We also have Barry Carter coming up next week. He is a researcher on the subject of ormus, so I have to learn a little bit more about that. We also have an herbalist, Dr. Wendy Wilson and she is going to be talking about herbs and how to incorporate herbs into your diet. We have Dr. Gerald Smith coming up, who is a holistic dentist out of New York. He has been talking a lot about the connection between root canals and cancer. If you have never heard about that, you might want to listen to that show, as I know we’ve all had root canals. I have had one, so listen to that show and learn about that.
With that said, I want to introduce our guest, Sean Croxton. I will just read a short little bio and then we will just start chatting. After graduating from San Diego State University in 2001 with a Bachelor’s in Kinesiology with an emphasis on Fitness, Nutrition and Health, he began his journey as a certified personal trainer. After years of studying a litany of classes and courses, Sean worked with clients to uncover the root cause of their health and challenges. He worked with individuals from all over the world, by phone and skype from his home office in San Diego.
Sean takes a holistic functional approach to rebuilding health from the ground up. As a functional diagnostic nutritionalist and certified metabolic typing advisor, and currently enrolled in the functional medicine university program, Sean does not focus on symptoms, but rather his focus is on uncovering the root cause of health challenges. He is a video blogger with over 42,000 Youtube subscribers. That’s crazy. And a radio show host. He has the undergroundwellnessradioshow program. He is an educator and author. He is the author of a book called The Dark Side of Fat Loss. He is also the creator of the underground Workout Manual and The Real Food Summit, as well as The Paleo Summit, all of which you can find links to on this page. If you purchase from any of those links, we will get a little commission also.
Thank you so much for joining us today and I really appreciate it Sean.
SEAN: Thanks for having me Justin. I really appreciate you having me here.
JUSTIN: So, you are calling in today from San Diego, California. Right?
SEAN: Yes sir, SD.
JUSTIN: Nice. I know you’ve told your story 1000 times, but just for our listeners, who may be new to you, can you just tell us a little about your story, how you got involved in health and nutrition.
SEAN: It’s a story of failure, really. I went to a California State University and studied kinesiology with an emphasis on fitness and health and did really well in all of my classes. I was that guy who, you know, on test day I would be done in five minutes. Everyone would look up and be like ‘where is he going’ you know. I thought I knew everything there is to know about fitness and nutrition. I graduated and was ready to become a personal trainer and thought I was going to save the world from obesity and what not. Then I went ahead and became a personal trainer and applied what I had learned in my classes, especially from a nutritional angle, to my clients and failed miserably.
Those things I applied to them were food guide pyramids, eating all these servings of bread, rice, pasta and grains and all that stuff, starches, low fat diets, eat lots of soy, foods that are low in cholesterol, and on and on and on and on. Obviously, it didn’t work. It wasn’t working with my clients and it wasn’t working with myself, as I had problems of my own as well. I was never overweight, but just had depression and anxiety issues, as things just weren’t working properly.
So, I went on this journey and this journey was all about reading books and learning from people who were getting real results from real people. I stumbled upon people like David Gettoff and Paul Chek and Weston A. Price, and his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, completely changed the way I thought about food. The Paleo Diet by Lauren Cordain, the Metabolic Typing Diet by William Wolcott really helped me understand that there are different diets for different people and that we’re not all the same. So, I started taking that information and this was when utube was fairly new. I started making Youtube videos from home. It just kind of grew and grew and I remember that Youtube was relatively new and I got 600 subscribers really fast, like in a week. It was a big deal and I was like, there is something to this.
I kept on going and a year later I said ‘hey, I’m this guy in this room, with his Yankee’s hat on backwards, talking about this really important health stuff, and I may not be the most credible source in the world. I started interviewing authors, whose books I had been reading, and practitioners’ work I had been studying on
underground wellness radio through blog talk radio so I’ve been doing that for about three or four years as well just to add that third party validation for the things I was saying on Youtube and from there, you know, started working the clients, doing one on one coaching over the phone to great success, and then eventually wrote my own EBook ‘The Dark Side Of Fat Loss’ and did a couple of summits and now we’re here.
JUSTIN: Wow! That’s amazing. So it’s just amazing how you could find that kind of nutritional lack of information coming from conventional schoolings. I mean it’s crazy, they were teaching you how people eat soy and low cholesterol and all these common things. They’re just complete myths aren’t they?
SEAN: Yes. They’re absolute myths that are really based on zero scientific evidence at all. I recall reading Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories, which definitely isn’t an easy read. I had to go through it several times to fully get it, but you learn that there is no scientific backing for any of this stuff, and you know, in hindsight, graduating from that program, I feel bad. I sound like a bitter person about my college education. I don’t like that I sound that way, and stuff that I learned gave me a good foundation for things that I teach these days, but I feel like I was more of a representative for the food industry, the processed food industry more than anything else when I graduated from that program. There are a lot of people out there who feel the same way. There are a lot of registered dietitians out there who don’t believe in what they’re teaching their clients, but they are just kind of trapped. Do you know what I mean? To say things that are counter to what we have been taught, especially from a professional level, can be frowned upon at times. It’s not cool for a registered dietition to say ‘you know what, saturated fat isn’t really that bad for you, and maybe you should drop the soy milk and drink some real raw milk with all the fat in it, you know the fat is in there for a reason. God didn’t put the fat in the milk to kill it. God didn’t put the yolk in the egg to kill it. You know what I’m saying?
I kind of took it back to common sense, in the way that our ancestors, of not so long ago ate, and I don’t think it’s any different for us now. And the question that I pose to a lot of people is ‘how does some old school food cause a brand new disease? If you read the works of these missionary doctors, the missionary doctors who I see live with these indigenous populations who have never been exposed to processed food. You will find that there was no cancer there. The people lived to be 70, 80 and 90 years old and they died of something called ‘old age’. You know at the turn of the 20th century, the early 1900’s, heart disease wasn’t even taught in Medical School. People just didn’t die of it. You know what I mean? And of course, there’s a lot of money and politics behind it. Unfortunately, it’s hurting a lot of people.
JUSTIN: Yes, that’s for sure. In this show, I want to focus on some of the subjects I know you are really well versed in, like digestion, detoxification, hormones and the immune system. Before we get into that though, I want to ask you a little bit about what your thoughts are about the, I know we touched on it briefly, whole cholesterol myth. People think, oh, I’ve got to bring my cholesterol down to 110 or 120 or some crazy low number, because doctors are telling them that. What do you tell people who ask you about that? Or ask for your advice about what you think they should do?
SEAN: Cholesterol is a very interesting topic, because it’s so driven by fear. If your cholesterol is over 200, then you need to be on a Statin drug. This is a great way to sell drugs man. Give it a couple of years and that number is going to be 180. Give it a couple more years and that number is going to be 160. They are just looking for a bigger population. Cholesterol is partly what your cells are made out of, and is really important. It is also a repair substance. When you encounter some type of oxidated stress, nicks and scrapes within your arterial lining, cholesterol comes there to repair the damage. You know it’s kind of analagous to saying hey whenever I see a fire, like a house on fire, I see fire trucks outside. So, I must assume that the fire trucks caused the fire. No, that’s not the case. Something else caused the fire and the fire trucks and the firemen are there to repair and put the fire out. That’s what natural cholesterol does. A really interesting fact about cholesterol
is that 50% of people out there who have heart attacks have ‘normal cholesterol levels’. You know what I mean?
That are below 200, so we have to stop really vilifying cholesterol as it’s a very important substance for the body. It always befuddles me how cholesterol yes, is found in the plaque and arteries, and again it is as repair substance, but there is a lot of calcium in there as well, so why don’t we vilify calcium at the same time. Do you know what I’m saying. It really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, so we should start to question our doctors.
Another fact that is kind of mind-blowing is that women, I believe it’s over the age of either or 50 or 60, I can’t recall, the higher the cholesterol, the longer the life span. So, we have all these older women out there who are on Statin drugs to drive their cholesterol down, as actually shortening their life span. So, that is something that really threw me for a loop at first and I really had to dig deep and read a few books, like The Great Cholesterol Myth or The Great Cholesterol Con by Anthony Colpo. Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. You can actually find out that this stuff is really backwards and it doesn’t make sense. Cholesterol is very, very important.
I can’t give you all of the details behind this because I haven’t studied. I don’t want to say that cholesterol is no problem for anybody, because when cholesterol is really, really high, and if you have familial hypercholesterolemia, your cholesterol is 300, or way up there, that’s a problem. We do have a lot of people saying don’t worry about cholesterol at all, and I don’t agree with that. There’s a happy medium there about where it should be. It shouldn’t be too low and it shouldn’t be super sky high, so we have to take that into consideration.
One more thing that I got from Chris Kresser, who was a participant in The Paleo Summit and his presentation was on cholesterol, was that when you have your cholesterol taken, your doctor will just take one cholesterol measurement and then say, oh, it’s 201 and maybe we should consider getting you on a cholesterol lowering drug. If it’s higher than that, he will scare you into getting you onto a cholesterol lowering drug, because if you don’t take that drug you’re going to die of heart disease. The thing is, a standard deviation for that cholesterol score is like 35 points. So we can swing 35 points either way at any time of the day. There is a 70 point swing there on both sides. We have to keep that in mind, so I highly recommend that people go and have their cholesterol rechecked. Get it done at a different time of day. Go in three or four times and see where it is. Just don’t depend on one number to get you onto a cholesterol lowering drug.
JUSTIN: Wow, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that. I’ve heard recently that cholesterol is a result of sugar and insulin, causing inflammation inside the arteries. Is that what you’ve been able to determine as well, or what’s the connection between sugar and cholesterol? A lot of people think that it’s the cholesterol foods, like the egg yolk and things like that. I’ve heard that it has more to do with insulin and sugar. Is that kind of what you’ve heard?
SEAN: There is some truth to that. To be honest, it’s not really. This is something I know a little bit about. I would recommend that you talk to Kresser or Chris Masterjohn. Talk to one of those guys and they will give you the full detailed analysis on that. I haven’t truly studied cholesterol for about two years. It was something that I was really deep into for a while, but since then I’ve kind of simplified my approach and have just gone to a more eat real food kind of approach, so I can’t fully answer that question for you, but I do recommend Kresser or Masterjohn who will be all over that.
JUSTIN: Yeah, that’s cool. I have emails into both of those guys to be on our show, so that will be good.
SEAN: They will lighten you up for a good hour and a half about cholesterol, so I think they will do it better justice than I can ever do.
JUSTIN: Nice. I’ve also heard to, or read somewhere, can’t remember where I get all of this information, but I’ve heard that in order to make hormones, your cholesterol needs to be at least 150.
SEAN: Yes, that’s one thing that people forget about. Kim Schuette who is a practitioner and health coach out here in the San Diego area, had a presentation with The Real Food Summit, where she talked about erectile dysfunction and how she has been able to correct erectile dysfunction with her clients with adding traditional fats to their diet. So, eating the skin on the chicken and eating the fat on the beef, consuming more butter and coconut oil, because at the root of your hormones, is fat and cholesterol. If you have a diet that is low in fat and cholesterol, or if you’re not making the precursors to your hormones, you will find that your hormones will go askew. It is certainly something that you don’t want to have.
I did hormone testing with my clients for a good three years. I really don’t do much one-on-one coaching anymore, but looking at people’s hormones, looking at the cortiscol curves, looking at their estrogen levels, the DHEA, their testosterone and their progesterone, I never saw a normal test, ever. Everybody was way off, and of course, there is going to be some stuff going on with people, but these huge imbalances that I saw, can be attributed to many things, but one thing certainly is the low fat, low cholesterol mantra that has been handed down from these dietary associations, as well as our government, is absolutely backwards, and is just a great wy to sell Viagra. It’s a great way to sell Statins. It’s a great way to sell drugs for diabetes, for people are replacing the fat with sugar. It’s not really working too well. People’s insulin is out of control, their blood sugar is out of control and I think the stat is that one in two non-African American babies born in the year 2000 are going to get diabetes at some point in their lives. Two out of three African-American babies born born in 2000 are at some point going to get diabetes in their lives. It doesen’t really have to be that way.
We have just totally vilified fats, and actually while we vilify the saturated fats, we have promoted these polyunsaturated fats, which are the rancid oxidized dangerous fats in vegetables oils that are the cause, or one of the many causes, of a lot of the issues that we have right now, including cancer and heart disease. So, it’s totally backwards and we need to kind of flip it around and get with it and educate people.
JUSTIN: I hear you. I’ve heard from Dr. Hal Huggins that, according to him at least, the optimal cholesterol levels are what he says, around 220. Each doctor has their own opinion, but whatever the case, that’s way higher than the 140 or 150 they’re trying to get people to.
I want to take a quick break here, but when I come back, as you know, it all comes down to digestion. Almost the whole thing comes down to digestion, and that’s one of the first things I want to talk to you about when we come back from this break. How to improve people’s digestion and how digestion causes breakdown all over the body. So, we’ll get to that with Sean Croxton right after this break.
Hey, what’s up everybody? I just wanted to talk to you a little about the Paleo Summit, which was put together by our man Sean Croxton. This is a summit that took place live over eight days and I believe there are 23 video presentations, 23 audio files, 18 hours of cutting-edge information and 300 pages of transcript. This program is really an amazing program if you’re looking to making some permanent changes in your diet, if you’re tied of struggling with fat loss or weight loss, and you’re struggling with food addiction and are just looking for a permanent solution, this is definitely something you want to check out. You can find it at extremehealthradio.com/paleosummit.
They talk about things like gluten sensitivity, how to curb food addictions and cut back on food cravings, how animal foods and things like cholesterol do not cause heart disease or degenerative diseases, as well as how to deal with things like bone loss, cancer, muscle pain, autoimmune diseases, how to burn fat and all that kind of good stuff. If you’re looking to change your diet once and for all, definitely check that out. It’s on extremehealthradio.com/paleosummit. Now let’s get back to this interview.
Okay, we are here with Sean Croxton, the creator of Undergroundwellness.com and, on this showpage, which is extremehealthradio.com/13, you will find a link to his Youtube channel, his Twitter feed and his Facebook account.
So, please follow him, if you can, on any one of those three outlets for him. Visit his website, undergroundwellness.com
I wanted to talk with you Sean about the number one problem, I think, is just about everyone on earth is having, whether they know it or now, is the inability to digest the food they’re eating.
SEAN: Huge, huge, huge topic and it’s one that people don’t address enough, because they don’t like to talk about it. People just don’t simply like to talk about their poop. I’ve had so many clients who, during our consultations, I’m the first person ever to ask them ‘how much are you pooping, how often are you pooping, what does it look like and what’s going on’? They are kind of thrown off by the question and I go ‘this is extremely important’. You can have the greatest diet in this history of the world, but if your digestion isn’t working properly, then what good is that diet doing for you.
There are many things that can go wrong with digestion. I think the quote from Elizabeth Lipski’s book, called Digestive Wellness, is that 60% of the American population has some type of digestive dysfunction, whether it be bloating, gas, belching, constipation, diarrhea, fluctuating back and forth as well, bacterial overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, food sensitivities, leaking gut syndrome and it goes on and on and on. In my practise when working with clients, I would do a particular test called the Mucosal Barrier Screen to kind of see what was going on in that gut. To see what was going on with the levels of good to bad bacteria. To see if the body was making anti-bodies to a particular food. To see if that lining, what I like to call that window screen in the gut, that’s supposed to allow the good nutrients through and to get into the blood stream and circulation, to keep all the bad guys and bugs out, keep them in the gut so that you can poop them out, and to see if it’s working well enough. Most people out there, when I tested, had leaky guts. That’s not good, because do you know what happens when you have a leaky gut? You have poop in your blood stream. You’ve got indigested food particles getting into your blood stream directly and your immune system goes ‘what is this, what is this piece of apple, what is this indigested piece of bacon doing in this blood stream’ and we need to fight this off. So, what you end up getting is food sensitivity, which isn’t good.
And then, you know, down the line your body says ‘hey, I’ve been fighting off this piece of bacon for the last few years, and you know what, such and such is thyroid or their cartilage or their brain tissue or their muscle tissue really looks like the protein strain that makes up that bacon you’ve been fighting off. So, now you’ve got autoimmune issues where your body starts to fight itself. It turns into this massive dominoo effect that can be a really big problem for a lot of people, and actually is a really big problem for a lot of people. They are just not addressing it because they don’t know what’s going on.
Just real quick, again when I was working with clients, I would say 70-80% of them, when we ran a stool test, had some type of parasite or h-pylori infection, or some type of pathogen going on their gut that was causing their symptoms. Again, it was a domino effect. It’s a stressor, it’s breaking down the immune system, it’s causing stress to the body, which has an impact on the hormones. I will tell you this, my book is The Dark Side of Fat Loss, and it most emphasizes getting healthy as the way to losing fat. But I’ll tell you guys, if you want to lose fat, you want to have healthy testosterone levels. If you don’t have healthy testosterone levels and are trying to burn fat, I’m not sure it’s going to happen for you. So, when I would test my client’s hormones, the ones who had the long-term digestive issues, the ones who said ‘yeh, I’ve been dealing with this for 5-10-15 or 20 years, since that trip to Thailand back in the day’. Those are the ones who always, except for this one young guy, had low testosterone levels.
You want to see how all of these things connect, it’s just not about your diet and your exercise program, there’s also some hidden stuff that can be going on with you that’s causing you to gain weight and causing you to be unhealthy.
JUSTIN: What would you suggest people to do. If I’m sitting here listening to this, or someone else out there is driving around in their car and are listening to this and they’re saying, ‘you know what, I’ve got IBS and was diagnosed three months ago, or I’ve got gas and bloating’ and they know they’ve got digestive problems. What would suggest for the first thing they should do? What books should they read, or should they go get their blood tested?
SEAN: First of all, of course I’m going to say ‘read my book’. I think the longest chapter is that they could read a 30-page chapter on digestion in The Dark Side of Fat Loss and of course they can get that on my website. Another book would be by Digestive Wellness by Liz Lipski. If you really have some issues, I would certainly recommend contacting a holistic practitioner, at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com, a Chek practitioner at Chekinstitute.com, a naturopathic doctor, a functional medicine practitioner in your area, or even somebody you can talk to over the phone, to help you investigate, lift up the hood and see what’s going on in there, so you can really get to the root cause of the issue. I mean, there are a lot of people out there who just may go to the supermarket and grab some probiotics, which is great. I have no problem with that. I think most people sho