What We Can Learn From Ancestral Diets – With Dr. Bill Schindler

Dr. Bill Schindler 0:00
There are some incredible insect farms that are growing insects for human consumption around the world, it’s something we really need to pay attention to. And if you are really trying to change your health and at the same time, meet or exceed other important obligations and expectations of eating in a sustainable way, in an ethical way, then this is I think, something that’s worthy of your time to do.

Dr. Mindy 0:28
We set her as Dr. Mindy here, and I am on a mission to teach you just how powerful your body was built to be. This podcast is about giving you the power back and helping you believe in yourself again, let’s jump in. On this episode of The recenter podcast, I bring you back, Dr. Bill Schindler. So we have already done two episodes with this brilliant mind that you’re about to hear. And where Bill and I really meet on missions is that we both are so focused on trying to bring back many of the ancient healing principles that our primal ancestors did years ago. How do we bring those into this modern world, so that our health can thrive? So I love it, because I feel strongly that we can do this through fasting. And Bill feels very strongly that we can do it through food. He has a new book that’s out and it’s called eat like a human. It is like no other health book and cookbook, it’s a combination of both that you will ever find. Because this man has traveled. He’s a food anthropologist, and he has traveled all over the world, looking at different cultures, going back in time and in history, and seeing how we prepared food, the quality of food that we ate, and certain food groups that we used to eat that we are no longer eating again. So in this episode, we actually talked about three key things. One, we talked about something as simple as corn, all the different variations of how corn is prepared. And that when you’re actually eating corn in a processed way, you actually could be setting yourself up for certain deficiencies of different nutrients. So we talked about the preparation of corn and how important that was to our overall health, especially vitamin and mineral balance. Second thing we talked about was insects. Now, this is fascinating, too. There is a lot of evidence and an emergence in the in even different foodie worlds, that insects are an incredible source of protein. But I don’t know about you, do we just pick up insects off the ground? How do we cook with insects? What are they safe? These are all the questions I had for Bill. And he will show you a whole new approach to insects and eating insects in a way that will give you extra protein will give you more amino acids. Okay, third thing, we talked about clay, activated charcoal and ash, which clay comes from the earth. And many cultures in our world use clay in their cooking, too as a detoxifier. We also talked about activated charcoal and ash as the residue leftover from fire. Our primal and ancestors also use those as detoxifiers and nutrients. And we can now bring these back into our diet. And Bill is going to show you how exactly to do that. He’s going to talk about resources for all these he talks about recipes and his new book. I love this man. I love the mission he’s on and he brings a whole new discussion to food that nobody’s having. So Dr. Bill Schindler enjoy and if you get inspired to make one of his recipes or to start eating crickets, please please tag me on on any social, I can guarantee you that after this conversation. I wanted to know how I could start cooking this way. So if you come up with some new ways that you experiment with this type of style of eating, let me know I’d love to see your pictures on social media.

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Dr. Bill Schindler 7:35
Such a great question. And and it’s a question that so many different people are adjusting from so many different places. And those people talking about grounding, and, and, you know, cold therapy, and all these other sorts of things. And then sometimes people are going a little bit off in my mind a little bit off the deep end where they’re, you know, recreating failed hunts, and then doing these other sorts of things. Oh, yeah, that mean, it’s, it isn’t brand new, that that’s something that was going on 20 or 30 years, where you come up with this reconstruction of your mind what life was like in the past, and then you try to replicate all of it. And there’s some validity to that, no doubt. But the reality is the amount of time that we’re talking about millions of years of diversity, and then within those millions of years diversity, geographically and environmentally all over all over the place. People didn’t do the same thing all the time for three and a half million years. So you wouldn’t have this certain kind of a hunt for the entirety of a population and then a failed pot, and then a certain kind of fit, and then people would eat, there’s even people that will cut themselves, because they think, Well, if I was fighting a mastodon, you know, and this it really so there, he does extreme to the absurd. And I’m not suggesting to go that route, what but a good solid understanding of the relationship between people and their environment, I think is very important. And I think trying to replicate access to things like sunlight, and fresh air and the earth, and all the microbes and all that isn’t important. And then from my point of view, and one thing that you know, I’m focused on, is finding ways to replicate how our ancestors approached food to make it a safer nursing as possible to get ready for our bodies.

Dr. Mindy 9:22
Yeah. And you’re, by the way, the only person I know that’s really truly looking at our primal ancestors, and showing us food styles and ways we can start to look at preparing food that would mimic that which is why I love I love your book, and I’m gonna really recommend you know, all of you listening that you go and get eat like a human and it’s just a great I mean, the concepts Great. So let’s dive in. I want to go through three things and just filling everybody in, because these three things are are really topical. Interesting to my mind, and I think there’s a lot we can learn from the first I want to talk about some of the ways for preparing food now. So you, you have a thing on corn that I want you to dive into old corn versus new corn. I definitely want to talk about bugs and how we can eat bugs. I’m so I have a whole bunch of us. So I’m so interested on this. And then I want to talk about ash and using ash for healing. So why don’t we start with the corn? What what is it that’s really missing in a main crop right now like corn?

Dr. Bill Schindler 10:31
You know, one of the things that’s really fascinating to me are the the different modern factors involved with kind of teaching us in a very bad bad sense, what food is and how much of it we should be eating right? It we don’t have the same sort of triggers and barriers and things in the past that promoted certain things in our diets and restricted other things in our diets in for example, we have way too much easy, cheap sugar in our in our in our, in our grocery stores today. And all of a sudden, because it’s so cheap, because it’s been so many things. Many of us don’t realize how bad it actually is like, How could something bad be this prevalent? Well, it is. But it’s the same thing with trains and maize or corn. And for the real quick, just a little semantics here. Corn means grain. So it’s an old, an old world term that means grain and that usually refers to the local grain of an area. So if you said corn in Ireland back in the day, it would have meant oats, right? If you meant you said corn and say England, it would have meant probably wheat or something like that. So when the early explorers came to the Americas Armed with this word corn, that just means local grain. And they saw the Native Americans with maize or what we now consider corn, they just called the corn it just meant grain. And now it’s kind of stuck. So when it’s really synonymous, right, so corn or maize is really the same thing. But on the same sense. And this is very important as well to understand the two major ways that most of us eat corn or maize is one in a in a dried usually ground up form like corn meal. And then also like at a picnic where you’re eating corn on the cob. Yep, corn on the cob is an unripe version of the grain, right. So it has different nutrients, different problems with it different good things about it, but it is we’re talking about that essential plant, which is a grass that has this grain or this or maize. Now the problem with maize several things is in one and how I started is that it is the most widely grown grain in the entire world. One of the good things about me is that it’s very easy to grow. And within certain latitudes, it’s just so easy. And you know, within that band around the planet, we see tons of maize being grown. In the US we have government subsidies to grow the same. So it’s actually relatively cheap. And we see it in everything. That’s, I don’t know if it’s good or bad. But here’s some bad things. One is it’s it’s probably the most difficult grain for the human body to fully digest. And back to I know we’ve talked about this before it I know probably most people understand this now. But just because you put a food that contains certain nutrients in your mouth. That doesn’t mean those nutrients are in an absorbable or usable state by your body. And maize is a great amazes probably the poster child for this. And I’ll tell you a story in just a moment. But just because you eat maize, it the only thing you can guarantee is that it comes out the other end and do that.

Unknown Speaker 13:39
Hold some time that’s

Dr. Bill Schindler 13:44
actually Can I grab something? It’s gonna Yeah, because I see one second. Okay, what you you went here first, so it’s okay today

Dr. Mindy 13:55
describe for our listeners. He’s now opened up a very big container of mystery stuff posted in the stool conversation. I’m a little nervous. It’s coming out. Okay, this

Dr. Bill Schindler 14:09
so when my youngest daughter who’s now 14 was very young. We, we we had just moved here. And where I live is in a fairly rural area. There’s not a lot of access to stores, especially stores to stay open late. And it was the night before Christmas Eve. And my wife called me Christina called me said listen, you know, she was counting all the gifts and all the stockings and all this and she said listen, we obviously we have three kids, we have to make sure everything’s equal. Just listen, we’re shy one stocking thing for Alyssa and you have to go get something and you have you know, you have a maximum amount you can spend like $5 and like you just you just set me up for failure in the middle of Chestertown Maryland on the Eastern Shore. Everything’s closed. I have to buy a gift for our four year old daughter and find out our limits. So I went into Toys R Us and I I was going through all the aisles and I couldn’t find it. And then I went to the playdough aisle, and I saw it, I saw it, it was perfect. And I got to because of one for her one for me, and this is it. So number one, it has the so you can describe this mold, but it has this

Dr. Mindy 15:13
mold. Mold, I just want y’all to know. And it’s got two

Dr. Bill Schindler 15:18
colored things. One, somebody is really sick, who invented either got fired or promoted, I don’t know. So it’s got this like greenish brown, gray thing, which is obviously for the poop. But here’s the important piece, it also has yellow, and it’s for the kernel of corn on the mold. So the mold has to but a kernel of corn. So I bring this when I speak because it’s a perfect example. All of us everybody listening has eaten corn on the cob. And usually when you eat it, it’s completely overcooked overbilled it’s comparable at a picnic and we eat it. And every one of us whether you want to admit it or not, has seen whole kernels of corn the next day in the bowl, and we maybe laugh about it most people other than you and we don’t talk about it. But the reality is, what are we doing? I mean, that was supposed to be food. And all it did was take a ride on our digestive tract. That’s

Dr. Mindy 16:11
it, it doesn’t even break down

Dr. Bill Schindler 16:13
doesn’t even break down. And that was a visual example of it. I mean, corns, grains, nuts, lagoons, seeds, they are physically and chemically designed to withstand the digestive tract of animals. I mean, that’s exactly what they do. The fruits on the other hand, that most of these things are encased in, or they’re there to attract their their sweet smelling sweet tasting, and they’re wonderful. So they want to get eaten, then the seeds survive the digestive tract, and then they get dumped in a pile of manure. You know, for me, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. But here we are trying to derive nutrition from this thing that is physically and chemically designed to withstand our digestive tract. And that’s such a great example. Now, here’s the part we don’t usually see, even if you took that maize for that corn, dried it and ground it up into cornmeal. We wouldn’t see it the next day in the bowl. But what the reality is a lot of the nutrients that were in it did listen no digestive tract. And if we have a second and here’s the here’s the powerful, the powerful story. So maize was first domesticated, probably, and there’s a lot of debate, at minimum 1000 years ago, some suggestions or up to 12 or 1000 years ago or longer. In fact, there’s some suggestion that maize could have been the first domesticated plant on the planet, regardless has a very long history. And it was the staple food of so many civilizations, the Incas, the Olmecs, the Mayans, I mean, as Texas and it wasn’t like they had, you know, a little bit amazing diet and other stuff. It was a bunch of maize in their diet and a little bit of other stuff. I mean, it was that at that level, then, and so it spreads throughout the Americas, from South America, Central America all the way to North America, it actually hits places even like New York state at a very early time. So you may have American diets in general were in many cases dominated by maize. By the time the early explorers came and saw it for their for the first time, about 500 years ago. So explorers saw it, it tastes great, it’s filling, it’s easy to grow. Of course, they took this back to Europe with them and tried to spread it and it did spread it spread like wildfire. But along with the maze, on the tail of the maze is the maze spread, a disease called pellagra was followed in its wake. And we it was first documented in the 1700s in Spain, and then it was documented in Italy. And then we see it in Eastern Europe. And this disease, it’s very, it’s fascinating, really, this disease first shows up as skin lesions. And then, you know, pieces of skin are falling off. And sometimes it was misdiagnosed as leprosy, eventually untreated or undealt, with blindness, and then even death and in many cases, and this was anywhere where you saw amazed this, especially in poor populations, where what maize dominated the diet, because it was so incredibly cheap and filling. You saw this pellagra and it just followed around. It showed up. Believe it or not some authors and researchers suggest that it was the basis for most of the vampire mythology because it shows up in Eastern Europe at that time. And you would get a bleeding in the mouth, a version of sunlight, pale skin, all of those things. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. We see it again in the 18, mid 19th century at the end of the Irish potato famine because the US as famine really food was shipping massive quantities of maize to Ireland and people now that had access to that maize were no longer dying of starvation but they were getting sick and dying of this weird disease they never saw before. Right? And then most recently, well most dramatically for at least for us and then early 1900s 1920s 1930s in the American southeast. It showed up in a mass amounts people were dying and getting sick less than Right. And the really interesting part of the story is that the our government hired an infectious disease doctor by the name of Jeffrey Goldberg. And or Gober, and they asked him that to study this. And they said, you know, you have to tell us what disease is causing all this, all this trauma. And he studied and came back and he said, Listen, I am, I’m an infectious disease doctor, this isn’t infectious. It’s not infectious at all it has to do with food. I think it has to do with corn. And they’re like, there’s no way first of all, there’s no way and disease this bad is food related rights. The sound familiar, right. And then number two, don’t mess with corn. You know, corn is king of the south don’t even mess that go figure out what this was. So he went to mental institutions and prisons, things you can’t do today. And he divided the populations in half, fed half of them nothing but corn, fed the other half regular diet, whatever diets they’re getting. And people that were fed nothing but poor and started to get sick and show symptoms of this disease still couldn’t convince everybody and what he had to do was he and his wife and his partner would hold these parties parties. He called them filth parties, because this was a disease that was usually something it showed up in impoverished areas. People called it a filth disease or something if somebody in your family got you were very embarrassed that it had happened. And they brought gathered a whole bunch of people around brought people that were suffering from this disease up to the middle. And they would they would take swabs and swab and mucous membranes and then swab their own. And then they would draw blood from the victim of the people that were suffering from it, then stick put the blood right into their own veins. And then even they would take the skin, the scabs from them and eat them. Just to show that it wasn’t infectious. And they finally convinced people it’s okay, this isn’t infectious. They, but they couldn’t figure out what the cause was. And it wasn’t until 1936 that a team of doctors who won scientist of the year and Time magazine that year as a result of this, realized it was a result of a niacin deficiency in their diet. So here’s the crazy crazy part and the punchline of the whole story. This happened in areas where people were starving are very sick already are actually malnourished already. And maize comes in, it’s incredibly cheap and maize replaces anything else they were eating because it was just so filling and cheap. And all they were eating was maize and all different or corn and all different forms. The they weren’t suffering from this disease before because even though they weren’t eating enough food, they were getting food from a variety of different sources and getting niacin from some of those sources. But when they just ate the maize, they weren’t getting the niacin in their bodies where needed to go. And they were getting sick and literally dying. When I say sum over the core, even in just the US alone over a span of just a couple of decades, millions of people got sick and hundreds of 1000s were dying from this disease because of eating meat because eating corn. But the again, the punchline of the story is you know all that you can sort of maybe understand but the problem is maze has massive quantities of nice and in it. I mean that the funniest part is they’re eating food, dying and suffering from malnourishment. You know, not getting enough niacin while eating massive quantities of niacin. The problem is the niacin and the maize along with other things are locked up in a state that our bodies can’t access unless we’ve processed the maze properly. This is why we don’t see evidence. This is exactly what the Native Americans are doing for literally 1000s of years. We know for sure they’re doing it for 4000 years. And we just identified a new technique, archaeological technique to directly look at an archaeological site and tell if they were if they were actually in this timeline in May. So I that 4000 is going to get pushed back I bet by 1000s of years as we look further and further. So here we are. Millions of people around the world we’re getting sick and dying from a disease while eating the food that contain the thing that they didn’t you know, we’re getting into their bodies, and the only thing that they had to do was processed that maize properly and the the way to process it properly is called Miss tamo zation and it’s incredibly simple. In the past you would use wood ash and water create an alkaline or lie Lake solution. Simmer the Colonel’s amazing for about 30 minutes let it sit overnight and wash it off the next day. It’s literally all you have to do today we use other alkaline things like lye or something called kallar, calcium hydroxide which you can dig up out of the ground. And that’s all you need to do. Originally, grits were made the same way. Real tortillas up until the Civil War, the Civil War almost all grits are just round of corn. They’re not in this timeless. So same issue is their corn meal is not this time alized. But a real genuine tortilla like you would get Wahaca Mexico is in this timeline. A tamale which the word comes from this thermalization is actually a real one is actually made properly.

Dr. Mindy 24:54
Yeah, so please tell me you’re going to hear you have a course on how to teach people how to do that with corn.

Dr. Bill Schindler 25:02
We do and it’s so simple and all you need is the corn and you can go to literally you can go to Walmart and buy pickling line, which is actually calcium hydroxide and do the entire process in a pot on your stove or go to a Mexican grocery store spanic grocery store and get calcium hydroxide. It is incredibly cheap. And you were talking about not only improving the nutrition, but it improves the flavor. It improves your roulement and improves the texture as well. Amazing.

Dr. Mindy 25:27
Just to back up one step. So what I heard in that is they were niacin deficient because the food product that was supposed to give them niacin didn’t have an available that it wasn’t an available source of niacin, right.

Dr. Bill Schindler 25:43
It’s in a state called Nyah seitan, which the bar body can’t do anything with it hex has to change it was locked up in the maze, and they were actually it was passing right through their bodies.

Dr. Mindy 25:53
So it is corn, our number one way to get niacin, or can we get niacin from other foods?

Dr. Bill Schindler 26:00
Well, you can get nicer from other foods. The reason this was such a huge issue in the examples that I that I mentioned was because and why it usually only happened in impoverished areas where people didn’t have a lot of access to food is because corn dominated the diets and replaced other foods in their diet, God, so it’s not like, and I do want to be very, very clear here. I think there’s two big takeaways for us today, you know, most of us have access to a lot of different foods, you’re not going to get sick by eating corn on the cob, you’re not going to you know, you’re not going to die of pellagra, because you’re getting all these from other places. But at the same token, you know, that story about maize, I think it’s a profound, very interesting story. But absolutely is just one example of you could tell very similar stories about literally almost every single food in our diets today. And it’s about that processing. So it’s happening in maize, it’s happening in dairy, it’s happening in grains, it’s happening all over the place. And it’s the combination of all those things where the real problems the root of it is, do you

Dr. Mindy 27:07
think I’m going to go as bold as to say, do you think humans are on a collision course? With extinction? If we don’t come back to some of these ancient food preparation? Strategies?

Dr. Bill Schindler 27:20
Oh, I think absolutely. Extinction is for not only ourselves, but all the resources. So So here, this is the most widely grown brain in the world. And I have been a I’ve been a part of and also witnessed so many conversations, where you have some of the best scientists in the world sitting there saying, Okay, how are we going to feed a growing population, oh, maybe we need to genetically modify corn better, so that we can plant more stocks on the same acre. And I’m sitting there saying, You’re not even getting all the nutrition from the corn we already have the sun even start to maybe that is an important conversation to have some time. But we’re not there yet. Because we’re not getting all the nutrition from the food we already have access. Right.

Dr. Mindy 27:59
And, and I will tell you on the flip side of that genetically modified conversation, because I’ve had it with, with friends around the dinner table that are really, really intelligent people who are advocates of genetically modified foods, because you can feed so many people. But what I hear you saying and I would agree with is just because a food can sit on your table and can be highly processed and can go in your mouth doesn’t mean it’s giving you the nutritional capability that you need to function normally not even thrive to function normally as a human. And that has to change, or we are on a collision course with a lot of things.

Dr. Bill Schindler 28:41
And on top of that it’s sitting on your counter and all this processed food and you’re in you’re looking at the box or the can or the plastic package, and you read, you know, the nutritional breakdown on the back and the macro micronutrients. And you have that, unfortunately, false sense that, okay, if I eat that food that’s going into my body, and it’s going to nourish all that’s going to nourish me and the reality is, even if it’s there much of it, it’s going to pass right through your digestive tract. If you’re not if you’re not healthy. And if your food isn’t processed.

Dr. Mindy 29:14
Yeah. And so what do we look for in corn? Like, is there a is there a line a word we can look for? Or do we have to really make it our ourselves at home the way you’re

Dr. Bill Schindler 29:24
talking? No, there’s a couple things you can do. And I know some of these conversations seem so complicated, but in the first of all, instead of being exhausted by listening to something of this get excited, because it’s interesting, right? Yeah. But also, you know, you have the ability to inform yourself and make these decisions and make really profound changes. And these kinds of changes aren’t the change that but you make that change. You feel better in a week. This is the kind of change that culminates over days and months and years Right? in you and just just as importantly in your children and the rest of your family. So the If you if you start from the perspective that maize is incredibly difficult for the human body to derive nutrition from, and it must be processed properly, then all of a sudden, almost all of the corn products you have access to are off the table, right? Or at least aren’t going to deliver all the nutrition that it can. The best way to do it and I say and I truly mean this and this sounds exhausting to but again, I find it exciting but it’s it’s empowering is the right word. If you eat a lot of corn than you know what Miss tantalize once just do it one time in your kitchen, it’ll take literally a couple hours. Try it deal with that if you never do it again you you know more than anything that I could tell you and then it hope you read labels and deal with things. But aside from that, and we have instructions in the book on how to do

Dr. Mindy 30:48
it. Yeah. Do you teach we teach you Yeah,

Dr. Bill Schindler 30:50
we we teach it in the book. And we have a bunch of different recipes for nishtar Analyze maze. And then we do it here we go through the entire process. And then we make tortillas and we make tamales and we make grits and we make all sorts of things all sorts of things with it. Totally. But if you’re trying to buy something that is at least in this tantalized, you believe it or not there is there is something and it’s called Maseko or dried masa flour. The problem it’s actually in most grocery stores you can find it in if it’s not at by the regular world, the other regular white Well, the flowers and things are go over to the Hispanic section and then you can find it there. There is one downside though, have to mistake it so it’s been processed properly. The problem is it’s almost always D germinated. So it’s the equivalent of white flour compared to whole wheat flour. And the reason they do it is the same reason you do it with flour is because as soon as you break that germ, you release the oils and the oils can turn rancid and it has a shorter shelf life. So yeah, so you’re getting this you’re getting like a nice tamo. It’s like you’re getting a sourdough. White bread 100% white flour, sourdough bread, whereas compared to the kind of version I’m talking about would be a sourdough whole wheat loaf, or something like that.

Dr. Mindy 32:11
So are we better off just skipping it? I mean, I can say in what I just learned in the last 15 minutes from you. I’m like, okay, so if I go out to a restaurant, and there’s corn on the menu, the first thing I typically look for is Is it organic, non GMO. But what I’m now hearing is if I’m going to eat it, just realize that it’s it’s, it’s a taste food, it’s not going to be anything that’s going to contribute to my health in that moment,

Dr. Bill Schindler 32:35
not significantly contribute to your health. I mean, you can almost think of it as empty calories, just empty carbs. It really is now with tortilla chips is very quickly because semantics here are very important. And this is This is so crazy, a tortilla chip. It’s called a tortilla chip. According to the FDA, it has to be in this tunnel. It’s unfortunately it so it has some gone through that process. Unfortunately, it’s almost always that D germinated version, but it has been this timeline. If it says corn ship, it’s not. It’s it’s like a like a Frito for example would be just straight corn, but a tortilla chip will have gone through it, but it’s the white flour. But here’s the here’s the sticking point. And this is where it’s by definition, according to the FDA are tortilla chip has to be fried in vegetable oil. It has

Dr. Mindy 33:26
to be called a tortilla chip. Yes.

Dr. Bill Schindler 33:29
It has to find

Dr. Mindy 33:31
matory Just so everybody let’s just Yeah, you can’t find it lard. Yeah, that’s so make you insulin resistant really quickly.

Dr. Bill Schindler 33:41
And here what we do at the monastery kitchen, you know, we we miss Tom allies, every week, we have a Molino where we stone grind and then we pray and press tortillas and sell those and put those in some some of our meals. But we also then take those and fry them in lard and now that is a completely different food it is miss Tom alized whole grain maize heirloom maize that we import from Wahaca and then fry an animal fat that’s a food now it’s not something I put a tons of but that’s a food that is something that we I have no problem feeding my kids. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy 34:13
Amazing. And your recipes by the way and eat like a human unbelievable. i It takes a lot to wow me on a recipe because we love we love to cook. And I was like when when I looked at all the fermented products. I was like, Oh my gosh, this is gold. Like this book. I hope people realize that it’s not just a book that’s going to educate you on things like this. But it’s a cookbook, too. Right? And that

Dr. Bill Schindler 34:36
was that the intent there was this host hope hopefully a huge takeaway and those recipes are the recipes that literally my family is built not only from you know, sort of that emotional sort of paranoid perspective, but also physically that were built on the cupola.

Dr. Mindy 34:51
I also have to tell you, though, I love watching you guys on social media, because I love how you and your family show up It really hits my heart because this is how we are with our, with our kids. You know, we just want to do everything with them. We it we’re foodies, we we love adventures, and it’s just it’s really sweet sweet to watch your family online. So thank you so much. You know, I know we’re seeing the highlight reels, but the highlight reel looks good. Well, thank you very much we work hard. One of the most immune boosting compounds out there is silver. In fact, a PubMed literature review has indicated that there has been over 6000 years of use of silver to prevent microbial infections. But of course, once antibiotics came around silver was put on the backburner. It wasn’t given the credit that it deserves. And it was discarded as a clinical tool. But now the antibiotics are are proving to create resistance, we are actually going back and looking at some of these old ancient strategies like silver to overcome infections. So if you have a gut infection, Candida overgrowth, silver would be incredible, have any kind of food poisoning or in your gut that you eat a wrong meal Ecoli Klebsiella parasites, also silver can be incredible. You can also use silver when you’ve been around somebody who’s sneezed on you. So if you’re worried about catching infection, that would be a time to take silver and use silver. We’ve used seen silver in my clinic for pinkeye. And for ear infections, we have leaned into silver as a tool to be able to overcome a microbial infection. So really cool concept around silver. If you are not experienced with it, I encourage you to start with upgraded formulas, silver, because that is the one that I think is the most effective. And I think you guys have heard me say this before, they love upgraded formulas because they have these active ingredients that allow these minerals to get into the cells more effectively. So today they are offering my listeners 15% off with the code pills PLC, and you just need to go to upgraded formulas calm, and they will give you a discount and silver is definitely should be in your medicine cabinet and your go to when these infections both gut and systemic infections appear. So as always, I hope that helps. So okay, now you have to go into insects with me. Now let me let me tell you a little story on my end on the insect thing. There a while ago, this was about seven years ago, there was a set of chips that came out that were like cricket chips,

Dr. Bill Schindler 37:53
chips, chips, but yeah, church chips. Yep. Chips chips.

Dr. Mindy 37:57
So okay, so I turned what I found about out about him, my son must have been like an eighth grade at the time. And I said, Hey, would you eat, you know, cricket chips with me? He’s like, Sure. So I ordered a bunch of them. We ate them. They were really good. I didn’t have like bug legs hanging out my mouth or anything like that. So help us understand why insects are so such an important part of our diet. And how do we start to bring these back in? Like, do I just walk outside and pick up a bug and cook it in my house.

Dr. Bill Schindler 38:30
So insects were have been in our diets longer than just about anything else. We were and many people believe that including me, that incident before we started creating tools, insects were the most nutritious thing in our diet. And without them, we wouldn’t have been doing much of what we’re doing. And I went to a great presentation at the Smithsonian oh, about six or seven years ago. Cast I forget the woman’s name, who gave the presentation brilliant. But she was talking about how important insects are in mammal diets in general, but mostly humans and our ancestors. And she did a lot of work with chimpanzees and also important chimpanzees. And she was saying that the most nutrient needy time in a woman’s life is when she’s lactating even more so than when pregnant. And she had it. I love the picture that you showed this picture of a chimpanzee nursing and eating ants or termites off a stick at the same time. It was it was perfectly like drove everyday. But it is true. They’re incredibly nourishing there and just as important and we just have this whole conversation about maize. They’re incredibly the nutrients in the in the insects are incredibly bioavailable. So the nutrients are there and our body has access to them doing very much work at all. So from a nutritional standpoint, there are definitely a win and at least and I can’t speak for all insects. I do a lot of work with crickets right now because that’s what we’re using for The base of some of the foods that we’re creating here, but crickets have all essential are all nine essential amino acids, amazing plus a ton of other things. But they have and many insects have really high quality fat in them as well. But from an environmental and sustainability perspective, they are you look at all numbers about how much water goes into growing a pound of meat and how much acreage you need for the exam and all that. And not only the resources that are getting consumed, what is compared to the output of the nutrients, but also the waste that’s part of that. No insects blow those numbers off the charts. I mean, they are incredibly sustainable. They’re incredibly easy to grow. Anything that comes out of them is usable in a number of different ways. And they’re incredibly, incredibly nutritious. So the hard part is, most of us were brought up to fear insects or to hate insects or to kill them and throw them away or just get them away from us at best not to eat them. So there’s a huge mental

Dr. Mindy 41:04
swatters for them. We have like we do with our foot, like you’re right, we have totally villainize them. So to turn around and eat them is like 180 degree turn, in our mental thinking in the way we approach this.

Dr. Bill Schindler 41:19
And it was for me, too, and the story was, we started I prayed about this a little bit the book, but what that was, I was in graduate school. It was a long time ago, it was it was almost, it was almost 20 years ago, I was defending my dissertation. I’m sorry, no, let me back up. I was teaching I was in graduate school, and I was teaching a graduate class. And we were talking about insects as in our ancestor, human diets, and then insects today, and all the kinds of things we just just briefly mentioned. And I hate to speak about or teach anything that I haven’t done or experience at some level. And I know that’s a really tall order to try to do. But it’s important for me to be able to do that. And here I’m talking about insects, and I’ve never had them. So my wife and I were at the time were were newly married, we had no money. We’re both in graduate school. And I said, I’m going to buy some insects. And she said she was a vegetarian at the time. And she’s like, man, would you be buying insects use our money to buy insects? And I said, Yeah, and by the way, the and this was a while ago. Now there’s a lot, not a lot, but there’s places with really high quality insects we can get in the US and Canada and other places. But at the time, there was none, none of that. And I said, yeah, the only place I can get them is from Thailand. So the shipping is out of control. And she’s like, No, don’t tell me no, I’m teaching here. This, I need to do this. And we actually, we’ve, we can literally count the number of arguments that we’ve had on one hand, like real arguments, this is one of them. And, and I finally I guess you don’t really win an argument, but I won that piece of it. And we got them and I brought them in, I had them. And it really started an important conversation between me and Christina. And then what I did when I defended my dissertation a few years later, we actually brought it was her idea, we brought a bunch of insects, everybody to try. And then it really sort of became a thing. And part of it for me was can I overcome this sort of fear or cultural block that I had of eating these? And yeah, I mean, I will put, I’ll try anything, I’ll put anything in my mouth. But can I do it and enjoy it? Because that’s part of it, can I do it and not only derive nutrition from it, but be be fulfilled by eating it. And I can now and it took a lot of work. It really, truly did. But there’s a lot of ways to do that. There are some incredible insect farms that are growing insects for human consumption around the world. There are laws changing left and right. In fact, the EU just changed an important food law. I think it was two years ago that allowed I believe mealworms to raise at some status and now they can be shipped from country to country in the US and restaurants and foods and things like that. A lot of things are changing. And there’s there was a big push, like you’ve mentioned a few years ago with chirps chips at the same time. There was a guy named Pat Crowley who won not troopships and pet Crowley both won or did whatever on Shark Tank and got for their projects. He came out with something called shampoo bars, which were fantastic. And there were a couple other versions of these and every now and then at some Whole Foods and health food stores, you could see them and there was a little bit of a rise of it for about a year or two and then it started to decline. It kind of was a fad thing maybe but now it is finally starting to get the received the attention that it deserves. And some of that attention is because of sustainability reasons. And some of it is as a result of nutritional reasons. It’s something we really need to pay attention to and if you are really trying to change your health and at the same time, you know, meet or exceed other important obligations and expectations of of eating in a sustainable way in an ethical way, then this is I think something that’s worthy of your time to do.

Dr. Mindy 45:07
And so are all insects, do they pack the same amino acid punch? Like how do you choose which insect and like I know when I’ve been at a Mexican restaurant before, and there’s like grasshoppers on the on the menu, I always I’m up for an adventure. So I’ll order it. And the one time I did it, like the grasshopper legs, I’m not joking. They were like, in my teeth. I’m like, Okay, this talk about not enjoying it. Not only did it not taste like anything, I had grasshopper legs and my teeth for like the rest of the day.

Dr. Bill Schindler 45:39
Yeah. And that’s not enjoyable. It’s not good. Like, for me, travel experience. Seinfeld’s wife came out with a book years ago. And it was kind of like how to hide nutrients in your kids foods or something like that. And it was like how to make like brownies with broccoli in them. So you can get broccoli in your kids, and they don’t know it. And I really had a huge problem with it. Because part of the eating is yes, I want to nourish my family. But I also want them to know what they’re eating. And I want them to know why they’re eating. And I wanted that sort of build on one another. And I feel and I brought bring that up, because I feel the same kind of the same way. With insects, there’s a couple different approaches to putting insects into your diet. I know some people who started companies were there sort of making are using cricket powder, cricket, which is nothing more than crickets that are roasted and dried, and ground up into a meal. And you can stick it in just about anything, you can put it in the meat, you can make the most amazing protein shake on the planet, you can stick it in baked goods, you can do all sorts of things with it, which is awesome. Before getting the nutrients where they need to be, it does nothing about creating a bit larger understanding about the role of insects in our diets. And that sort of, you know, those other sorts of things. So we went and we talked about this in the book, we went to Thailand as a family several years ago, because I wanted to experience three different things, I wanted the entire family to experience three different things. And most of the research we did for the book was done as an entire family. Because I I know my brain is wired in in a certain way. But and I wanted to experience the things you were experiencing not only through my eyes, but through my wife’s eyes and through my kids eyes, because I wanted to be able to bring that information back and, and and reach a much larger audience than I would as a 40 something year old man. And I thought and it’s really, really worked and really broadened my my outlook on a lot of these things. When we went to Thailand, the three things I want the family to experience was I wanted to go to some of the major markets in Bangkok, and just see what a normal everyday person was buying and how they were purchasing and consuming insects, which there was huge stalls of insects. In some of these markets. I wanted to go to a rural area in Thailand and where there’s more traditional consumption and production of insects going on. And we went to a we Weaver ant farm. And in place go fits a new look. And then I wanted to go there was a amazing chef, his name is Chef that I believe, who had a restaurant called boat insects in the backyard, and the entire restaurant and it I don’t know if it had a Michelin star or not, it should have what, but he who’s doing the exact opposite of hiding cricket powder in pasta. He was actually celebrating the insects he was he wouldn’t have never given an insect leg that would have stuck in your teeth. But he was celebrating, you know the plating was revolved around the way the insects look, he wasn’t hiding anything he was you know that he was celebrating the textures and the flavors and the nuances of different insects and all of these dishes the way they should be celebrated just like we do the same thing with certain vegetables and meats and those sorts of things. It was brilliant. But what struck me and I think this is a big takeaway, and I don’t want to give anything away, but I’m going to because it’s that important. We made a deal with my youngest daughter Alyssa, that she wanted to go to this thing called the Unicorn Cafe in Bangkok. And she and she promised us that she would eat all the insects we put in front of her if we brought her to the Unicorn Cafe. Now we made the worst parenting mistake on the planet. We brought her to the Unicorn Cafe first because it worked on our schedule better. So we gave her the reward before she did. That’s guaranteed what oh, wow, I know. So bad. But we went to this thing and it was horrible. I mean, it looked like unicorns.

Dr. Mindy 49:57
Like it’s the opposite of anything you stand for

Dr. Bill Schindler 50:00
It is it is what I really wanted her to experience the other side. So she did that first, then no matter where we were, she wouldn’t do it. Like she wouldn’t eat the insects, even at this amazing restaurant, she wouldn’t eat them. We were with a guy that was doing making some of the pasta. Like I mentioned, it was actually an Italian guy living in Bangkok that had started a company hiding cricket flour and pasta sheet like one piece. But when we the last, our last stop was to that village in the middle of nowhere, we had to, it took us forever to get there. And we spent all day harvesting these Weaver aunt eggs, and then the entire village came out. And we spent the entire day cooking and preparing all these dishes with the village. So nothing was hidden from her. In fact, she helped prepare the dishes with all these people. And then we sat down to eat, there was nothing she didn’t eat. And it was all about the context. It was, you know, we put her in an incredibly safe, real I mean, we just met these people. But it was a loving and caring situation that fostered nothing, but like human relationships. She cooked alongside of all these people, it was an amazing day and then sat down and ate the meal. And that was what put her not put her over the edge but helped her take that next step. And it was brilliant.

Dr. Mindy 51:17
So I have two questions on that one. How do we travel with you? Because I know sign me up next time you guys are going somewhere. I want to go with you. That sounds amazing. And then my second question is okay, so how, how do we get insects into our diet here in America? Or you know, we do have a worldwide audience. But most people don’t have access to a chef who specializes in in?

Dr. Bill Schindler 51:46
Let me let me answer both those questions. The first one is actually a timely question. COVID has thrown a wrench into a lot of things. As you know, we are launching very soon. And please keep an eye out on on both my website eat like a human calm and our family’s website, the modern Stone Age kitchen, we are reporting back together because we had everything planned right before COVID hit. We are going to start off by running hopefully three trips a year to food culture history, archaeology, anthropology related trips, one to Ireland, one to haka, and one to Kenya. And then we’re hoping to expand on that. But those are the first ones just because we know those areas, so well. And we have really good context and the stories and the food are just incredible.

Dr. Mindy 52:36
Well, so I mean, Sign me up. Okay, perfect. Let us know we are we’re in a new phase of our life, our kids, that one’s in college ones living out on her own in her early 20s. And we’re so we’re empty nesters. And so we’re looking for more adventures. So we will definitely join you on one of those and maybe we’ll bring them along with us. But for but if I if I tell my children, we’re going to go to Kenya and eat insects, I think I think one of them would be pretty excited. The other might be a little apprehensive.

Dr. Bill Schindler 53:01
Even sex drinks and blood milk will be awesome, right? I

Dr. Mindy 53:05
remember the blood milk story I asked you just to fill everybody and you guys can go listen to the podcast I did with Bill a couple years ago. But I asked him what the what the most interesting thing he’s ever eaten. And you told me it was blood, it was milk mixed with blood from a cow and that it tasted like chocolate milk. That’s all I remember.

Dr. Bill Schindler 53:26
Chocolate milk with a little bit of iron in it a little bit higher.

Dr. Mindy 53:29
Amazing. Amazing. So how do we get here in America, because I really, I’m with you on this idea. And I also don’t know if you know that, when you get 30 grams of protein at one sitting into your body, you trigger an amino acid receptor sensor in your muscles, that force opens up that muscle for those amino acids to go in and make that muscle function better. But the but the threshold is somewhere between 25 to 30 grams at one time. Okay, so that’s what the research says. So they are now saying you know, muscle is the organ of longevity. I can tell you women over 40 as they go through menopause really have to focus on muscle. So if insects become this power, protein, amino acid punch, it really can help with our need to really add more protein into our diet.

Dr. Bill Schindler 54:29
Absolutely. So there’s a couple things. This is the perfect time to have this conversation. If we had this conversation even two years ago, it’d be difficult for me to even help you find good sources of insects. But over the past few years, more and more have been popping up more and more facilities that are actually raising these insects for human consumption. So when I started, I was other than shipping stuff from Thailand. And real quick. The reason we went to Thailand is because I wanted to go To the place that we got the very first insects that we ate, there’s a lot of places we could we certainly could have gone. But that was That was why, but um, then we started eating a lot of insects from beach shops. A really good thing to

Dr. Mindy 55:15
start from bait shops, shops, yes, thank you go fishing. And so you’re you brought them home to the family, or else you go

Dr. Bill Schindler 55:21
get things like face shops and pet food shops. I mean, that’s where you get mealworms and crickets and grasshoppers and elbows thing, so that those aren’t raised for human consumption. And I don’t suggest that. So that the choices you really have are one, are you going to go out and harvest these things yourself? Which you can. And I think it’s amazing. Be careful, though, because insects can very easily take in toxins and pass on toxins from their environment. So if you’re living in the middle of hold, yes, yeah. So So most people, I would never want to sort of unempowered somebody by suggesting that you can’t go get some food yourself. But I am suggesting that you have a responsibility and a need to figure out where these first of all, not only to identify them properly. But also, you know, where these insects are living in where they’re getting their own food from. So the easiest and safest way to go about it, especially when when when you’re starting out is to find a place that’s raising insects for human consumption. And more and more are popping up. The one that we use all the time, because we have a relationship with many on I just love what they do is in tomo farms, e n t o, Mo in total, like entomophagy is the consumption of insects. So Jared golden runs that place. It’s very funny because his brothers all started raising insects for bait shops. And for pet food stores. He’s like, I want to raise insects for humans. And he’s doing amazing, awesome, but even so I have a couple other places in the book, where you can go ahead and look very easily and find them. The cool thing is, when I was teaching a Washington College every year, we would do an insect meal or an insect we’re offering to cook a bunch of insects and and serve them for and provide a bunch of information about the health and environmental reasons to be consuming insects. And it started at Health Department was like, You can’t do this, like no. And the only reason they let us do it at all is because we’re in a closed we’re kind of a gray area cuz it was a closed community. And we weren’t like advertising to the public and all this but she kept saying, No, you can’t do this. And they kept hiding me under the steps to go up to the cafeteria. They had this little table under the steps and it kept making me so angry because I wanted to show that this is actually real food and everything everybody was making me do was showing that it was this weird thing, right. And I kept pushing the health department pushing the health department until she finally dove in deep. And she found out that insects right now in the US are classified as gra s which means generally regarded as safe. Yeah, it has the same designation of salt and pepper. So you can’t as long as they’re coming from an approved source as long as they’re coming from a place that’s growing insects for human consumption. You cannot you can you can serve them, you can make them we certainly we sell insect related foods here at the Monterey Sun age kitchen. And what was very cool is you know, we under we were under the steps for like eight years. And then finally we were fried. And the next year we built a mock up taco truck up in the dining hall and people got tacos from us. And the next year they gave us an entire station in the dining hall one day. And so it really I was so proud because it was like you can go and get this that you consider food this that you consider food or this that is actually also food so amazing. Yeah, there’s a lot.

Dr. Mindy 58:45
The modern Stone Age kitchen is Can people order online? Again, we have a worldwide audience. Yes.

Dr. Bill Schindler 58:52
So we yes it to do we have to Christina and I left the college in June. Yeah. Thank you very much. It was it was a very good move. Because we have been able that we’ve had so many dreams about doing everything we can do in power nurse community that we’ve been able to take the steps we need to do that. We have the Eastern Shore Food Lab, which is what I started through the college years ago, has now become a nonprofit. And so all of our teaching and research and outreach is goes is done through that. And then our for profit food production. The modern sonates Kitchen is actually downstairs and we have a storefront there. We do deliveries we we do the market farmer’s markets, but yes, we do have we’re expanding our shipping, and some of the insect things that we’re creating we will be shipping very soon as well so that you can find them honestly.

Dr. Mindy 59:44
Yeah. And well. I saw that actually on one of your posts on Instagram that there was like it looked like a little fat bomb of x. And of course my little fasting brain was like oh my gosh, that would be perfect to break fast with because it’s high protein High fat. What’s that call? I meant to order some I just saw like 10 o’clock.

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:00:06
Cricket protein bombs we call them but it really is. It’s fat and protein is really what it is. Very, very little carbohydrates we have we it’s sweetened a little bit, or a little bit not a lot. There’s a little bit of dates and a little bit of raw honey. But that’s it.

Dr. Mindy 1:00:19
Okay. Yeah, yeah, but perfect to break fast with. When we’re, I’m doing a lot of teaching right now. And actually, I dedicated a whole chapter to it in my new book, on the importance of what you break your fast with. Because like you what, where are both of our work comes together is I love fasting so that we can mimic our primal ancestors. And we can go into these feast, famine, cycling style of eating. And yet what I see when I’m teaching fasting to the modern world, is that people are breaking their fast with toxic food. And it’s not hard to get toxic food to your point on maize. I mean, it’s easy to get toxic food, I mean, you have to really be conscious to get not toxic food. So I’m always trying to come up with new ideas for breaking a fast, and protein is an amazing way to do it. And I looked at those, what do you call them cricket balls, cricket fat bombs,

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:01:18
we call cricket protein bombs. We were calling them cricket balls. But that didn’t go for for

Dr. Mindy 1:01:22
now, maybe? Yeah, but that would be a perfect thing to break fast with. Because if you look at just the two states of healing in the body, when you go into a fast, you go into what we call autophagy, where the cells are cleaning themselves out and making themselves more efficient. But on the other end of that is a cellular process called mTOR. An mTOR builds up your mitochondria powers up your cells can build you up muscle, but they they’re like night and day. They can’t exist at the same time. So when you go into a fasted state, and then you take something like these cricket treats, and you break your fast with that, you’ve now literally Miss have the best of both worlds. And you’re mimicking what our ancestors did. Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:02:10
Absolutely. And I am so glad you said that it’s got me my mind spinning right now. But there’s so we have three teenagers. And it is so hard to have a snack in the house that we believe in. Something that you can just pop into your mouth, that’s actually slightly storable that has the nutrients that we want and doesn’t have any of the bad stuff in it. This is one of the few things that we actually have in our house, I mean, that we believe in and love when they eat. So and the other thing we are committed anything that you know, it’s so funny, because we spent Christina spent all this time trying to do really the reason we did almost all the research that we did was trying to learn how to just feed our own family, right. And then, you know, we certainly there’s still a lot to learn no doubt. But we wanted, we’ve been very happy with what we figured out. So we wanted to share it through the book, which is what we did. And now we get to turn that book and make it into reality. And we’re making all the things from the book here at the at the shop, but we’re committed that is our number one priority is to empower people to take this into their own hands and do it themselves. So those Cricut bombs was there, actually, that recipe is in the book, and we’re making it here. And if anybody listening, if there’s something that we have, and you want the recipe to and you don’t find it there, ask us, we’re happy to share as much I would love for you to make it yourself. And if you if you don’t want to recant then ask us and then we’ll make we’ll make it for you. But that’s that’s really what we’re looking to do.

Dr. Mindy 1:03:43
And what I would love to do is look, I’m going to go back and look at those recipes with a fresh eye and go look at the modern Stone Age kitchen website. Did I say that right? That’s right. Yeah. Okay. And look at what would be perfect for breaking fast because again, where you and I geek out together here is mimicking this primal ancestor and how do we thrive in the modern world? So those foods sound perfect to break a fast with so I’m gonna this is a To be continued conversation where I’m going to look at your food and match it to my fast and let’s come up with like, the perfect like feast famine cycling experience for a human.

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:04:25
Awesome. I love it. I love it. Absolutely. salutely Yes, To be

Dr. Mindy 1:04:29
continued. Okay, To be continued. Yes, you have to We can’t finish this conversation without a good old explanation of ash. You that in your book was another thing that I it was brilliant because we have a green egg in the back of now in our house. And my husband and son loved the green egg and there’s a lot of ash there. So is ash from a fire, something we should be looking at as a healing food or a healing tool and how Would we use it?

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:05:01
If yes, it depends on what the fire was was no thought, right. So the insects just like the insects. So if you’re burning, usually conifers which most people don’t burn, but things like spruce or Hemlock or pine, there’s a lot of issues with the residues left behind from the resins and and those sorts of things. So most of the time that Ash is not desirable. And if you’re burning pressure treated wood, or painted wood, or those sorts of things, then that Ash is not is more toxic than it is helpful at all.

Dr. Mindy 1:05:35
So duraflame, the Azure flame

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:05:39
we’re talking about here. A good old fashioned fire made from a hardwood like hickory or oak or maple or something like that is a completely different thing. Now there is a difference. And these terms often get confused between charcoal and ash. Right. Ash is what happens when something organic burns in the presence of oxygen, and that’s what’s left. So if you had a burning log, and you just let it burn, you had a pile that really kind of gray feathery stuff. And if the wind blows, it kind of just goes everywhere, that’s ash, if you put something in high heat, in the absence of oxygen, you create charcoal at carbonizes. So so if you maybe had a campfire, actually, most if you have a camp camp or a bunch of logs, and then you know it’s burning, you go to bed, you wake up the next day, and you have probably a bunch of this feathery ash around the outside. That’s what most of you know, the wood burn completely down. But then you have a couple of logs that maybe didn’t fully burn, and you turn it over and on the bottom it’s like really black and it looks like a charcoal briquette that’s charcoal because that would didn’t have any oxygen because it was sitting against the ground. Right? So there are two different things. And they often get confused. They have different properties. Ash itself is fairly what’s the word I’m looking for alkaline and was used in the past for all sorts of different things. Ash but and believe it or not, one of the first things is one of the first chemical leaveners ever was ash ash, you know, baking soda in the presence of an acid. So Baking soda is alkaline and bake and vinegar is acid, you put it together and you make the volcanoes like in third grade, you put it together and you make pancakes, you put it together and you make muffins, I mean those but the original that that is actually a chemical version of Ash Ash is alkaline ash, it was it was a chemical leavener for things. Ash, a refined version of Ash called pot ash worked even better and a more refined version of that called Pearl Ash was actually what we started to make synthetically in the 1800s to make baking soda. So you can actually bake with ash, you can make soap with ash, you can put ash on the outside of cheese to make it have different kinds of things happen. So in your part of the world.

Dr. Mindy 1:08:05
Napa Valley drinking wine and eating cheese with ash. So they

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:08:09
do it for two reasons with as there’s there’s some there’s some French cheeses that it would take a farmer two days to make to get enough milk to make that cheese so they’d actually milk the cows, make the curds, press them, get them ready, but then they want to keep the flies off them before the next day’s milking. And they cover it with ash. And then they do the next one. And then they’ve kind of had that line in the middle and that was it. But quite often you see ash on soft cheeses, like different kinds of goat cheeses for aged goat cheeses and what happens is, cheese is acidic, it’s gone through a fermentation process. And when you so you take that acid and you put an alkaline substance like ash on the outside, it changes the pH it neutralizes it and it allows other things to grow on the outside for different types of effects for the cheese, so you’re changing that pH with the ash. Charcoal on the other hand is like a natural detoxifier

Dr. Mindy 1:09:04
Yes, we use charcoal in our detox programs. It’s a really good binder.

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:09:09
It’s amazing right and if you you know if you overdose on something one of the first things they do when you go to the hospital is they give you a charcoal I mean it is incredible and it has we’ve used it for so many things for so so so very long. Both of those foods have been in both of those things have been in our diets since we’ve had access to fire there’s no doubt I mean they just write by by mistake and also on purpose. So Ash is was the original thing that was using this tantalizing of maize to sort of bring it back to that right um, it’s used like I said it used to make syrup used to make all sorts of different things. One of the easiest things to do ash wise is actually if you have any leftover herbs, you know burn them literally burn and put them in and put them in your oven I talked about in the book, put them in your oven at a high temperature until they literally burn in turn to ash. And they’ve already made become a storable seasoning. Now, there’s a lot of high end restaurants doing just that. The reason I put this in, and we had a long discussion with the publisher, whether this chapter even shouldn’t be in the book, I said, Absolutely. Listen, I am asking people, if they’re going to take that step to rethink what real food really means and turn to the past as sort of, you know, a framework for this understanding. I mean, we’re still living in the Stone Age bodies. Let’s talk about all of it. And we still didn’t talk about everything. I mean, pre masticating, our food and all those sorts of there’s all sorts of things we could have talked about, but I wanted to sort of push that a little bit. So it’s Earth, ash and charcoal. And you know, Ash is important. Charcoal is important. Earth is incredibly important as well. I mean, there’s certain kinds of like dirt like Clay Clay, yeah, almost every animal on the planet eats clay. And they do it for two main reasons. One is to get different kinds of minerals that they’re not getting out in their normal diet.

Dr. Mindy 1:10:56
Pica. Pica. Do you remember I was one of the things I’ve ever learning, like early on, like people eat dirt had a mineral deficiency. And it’s a legitimate thing called pipe. It’s legitimate.

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:11:05
Absolutely. And but it’s not like you’re eating lead paint chips off the windowsill, you’re eating something that your body actually mean. Yeah. And the other reason is because clay binds with all sorts of toxins and allows us toxins to safely pass through there, your body and it’s actually used in a bunch of traditional cooking. So there’s how

Dr. Mindy 1:11:24
we eat that.

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:11:27
It’s great. So we thought it is in the book, like you mentioned there. There are actually books on just including these things in your diet. There’s not a lot about charcoal and ash except for you know, little mentions here and there in other applications like cheese making books, for example. And like there are entire books on clay and you can actually the cool thing is you can go to Amazon and buy ash, food grid ash, food grade charcoal and activated charcoal and also food grade clay. You can as well. Yep.

Dr. Mindy 1:12:02
And do you have recipes in the book on how we cook with those? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. I think you have a recipe for everything. I just go into like a bread like I’m trying to is it act like a flower is that where you would put the clay, all of it clay, the charcoal and the ash probably all we have front texture.

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:12:23
We unfortunately charcoal is not on the gra s list. In fact it for even though it’s been our diets forever, even though somebody’s sick, it’s one of the first things we give them. And even though you can buy food grade charcoal all over the world. It just isn’t on on the list. And but I will tell you we are actively working with the FDA right now to try to get it on there. But so several things happen. There was a huge festival. They sort of look the other way. For a long time. There was a huge festival I believe was in San Francisco about 10 years ago cold or maybe go to recent but it was called 50 Shades of charcoal. And all the chef’s everything had charcoal and every dish that they presented there, and it causes big up or it was widely accepted by everybody that went but the FDA went nuts, and then a bunch of shit right afterwards a bunch of chefs in New York City we’re using charcoal and a lot of their cooking, which you can go all over the world and see charcoal intentionally put into food. pastas, breads, there’s a traditional Italian bread around Eastern time. It’s a black bread that’s made with charcoal in it. And it’s very adsorbent and helpful with removing toxins from your bodies. It’s wonderful. But it is as a result of the chef’s using it is actually illegal to use charcoal in a restaurant in New York City any longer. It’s and we started when we launched the sourdough bread company we one of our first products that was most widely received was charcoal crackers, which were they were they tasted great. They look cool. Even people around here who grew up on nothing but like meat and potatoes, love them. And then we were totally we’re not to make them and sell them anymore. So the recipe for them is in the book you can make them in your own home. So charcoal is easily put into all sorts of baked goods it’s easily put into things like shakes and the like.

Dr. Mindy 1:14:19
And change does it change if you cook it like if you heat these all of these up? Will the temperature change the the healing property

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:14:28
for those no unless you know the activated charcoal is brought up to a super high temperature I believe there’s some chemicals involved in making it activated all activated means is the reason charcoal is so incredibly absorbent is because it has all these caverns I mean, it’s just like it’s nothing but a shell of caves and everything can get stuck up in there and activated charcoal just has more of those has more of that open space on the inside. And there’s a couple ways that they make that happen. But no I mean with a lot of things like Baking soda for example, if you heat that it does chemically change to something different. But ash, I mean, these have already been through the heat process, nothing you’re going to do is beyond what what it’s what it’s been through already.

Dr. Mindy 1:15:12
Yeah. Yeah. So fascinating. What do you feel like when we look at these three categories, I feel like we’ve got two sides of the health equation, we’ve got the destruction that food is doing to our health, just normal food walking into a grocery store is no longer the same food that we had years ago. So we have this modern made version of food in our supermarket and then we’re missing these key things like Ash and insects, and then just the way corn should properly be made. Do you feel like if we brought just let’s just take those three things if we could just bring them back into our diet, it’s powerful enough to overcome the lack of nutrients that we’re getting in from our normal food that we’re buying a supermarket?

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:16:04
Yeah, that is an awesome question. I don’t know if it’ll overcome all of it. But I think two things are gonna happen at the same time that’s going to allow the allow that the issues to be overcome one is yes, you will get an influx of nutrition your body can actually do something with that will work wonders no doubt, I don’t know if overcome all the issues, but at the same time, by opening your mind and including things like properly processed maize, some insects, maybe some things that are on the fringe, like some earth and answer some charcoal, you’re putting your mind in a different state to look at your entire diet through a different lens and probably take whatever steps are necessary to overcome the rest of it. But yeah, those are, those are great steps. No doubt, and the insect one is so easy to take. And I know some people are sitting here cringing, cringing, but we eat them as kids, we I pull insects out of our kids hands as they’re putting them towards. It isn’t it isn’t a nonhuman thing, it is a non human thing to force is not to eat food that can deliver such incredible nutrition and if done properly. Also, you know, meet the other cultural and emotional expectations of eating. It’s it’s worth it. You know what, start with some cricket powder. Start with some of these cricket balls. And, and it’s going to blow your mind. We started putting them on the shelves a month ago here, and we can’t make them fast enough. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy 1:17:29
I can’t Oh, I can’t wait to go and order a bunch of stuff. Plus, you know, so clay and I are foodies. We love cooking. This is why we love watching everything you do online and how you’re like all the amazing recipes. But now I’m going to go home tonight be like, Okay, we’re gonna expand our diet, I really am a big fan of diversity of foods. I feel like in order to feed your microbiome, you have to stop eating the same foods over and over and over again. And you just gave like three huge food categories of that will be a whole new experience to the gut bacteria in our guts. So I’m like, I can’t wait this is amazing. This is so this was like as interesting as the first time I talked to you. I just I love what you’re up to let me finish on this site. One how can people find you we’ve we’ve already talked a lot about that. But for my listeners, you know what I think is so beautiful about the marriage of your information in my information is we truly are trying to get the human body back to a more foundational way it wants to be treated. So how do people find your your resources

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:18:37
so there’s our websites we have two primary websites one is eat like a human calm and that’s sort of the the Eastern Shore Food Lab side the the the research and education piece. So all of our information about the book, there’s our blog, there’s the classes we teach a lot of in person and virtual classes as well. So all that information can be found there. And any upcoming research those sorts of things. That’s the home for it. And then the the food production side the modern Stone Age kitchen is at monitor sonates kitchen calm and you can see all of that there and on social media. Same thing you can find me at Dr. Bill Schindler. So Dr. Bill Schindler and Facebook and Instagram, mostly and then modern Stone Age kitchen is where the the other food pieces are.

Dr. Mindy 1:19:21
I love it. And when I when we choose which one of those excursions we go on with you, I’ll announce it on my social media. Like, come join us. I’ll be I’ll be a student in that experience. But I just think it’s so neat, and I can’t wait to join you on that. So I would love to have you there. Oh my gosh, would be so much fun. So okay, I’m going to finish up with this question. We you know that this is the third season of my podcast and this year, we really want to focus on gratitude because there’s so much of an opportunity in the world right now to be focused on what you’re not grateful for. But there are you could go to the other side of that coin and you could also look at a lot you can be grateful for. So do you have a gratitude practice that you do on a daily basis? And what are some of the things that you’re immensely grateful for right now?

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:20:13
Well, I am immensely grateful. And this I mean, immediate as you’re talking, I know exactly what is my wife is the most amazing person on the planet, I mean, the most amazing person on the planet. And I think, not only has she made me a better person, but the kind of work that we’re doing now is a direct result of her pulling me into reality. Like, if it was, if it was just me, I’d be living in a straw hut in the middle of the top of mountain somewhere, banging rocks around around a loincloth, and I’d be perfectly happy, but it wouldn’t be doing anybody any good. No, she is, you know, it’s sort of a ying yang thing. You know, I’m my head’s buried in the past. And her head is up and looking around and saying, Hey, if this stuff is that important, what can we do to make it relevant today. So I’m immensely grateful for her. I’m immensely grateful for my family and my parents for never, I mean, I failed out of college, and I dropped out of the same college and it took me 10 years to get my undergraduate in my parents for never giving up on me. And then finally, you know, getting a PhD and things later, but never giving up on me. I’m immensely grateful. And I have to say one more thing. I have two corneal transplants. And they I know, I know that one of and I shouldn’t know this, but I do know that one of my corneas is from a 13 year old boy who was in a traumatic accident. And I don’t know the situation in the other. But I do know that in both cases, the families of the people that passed made the decision to donate their organs, and I literally am seeing the world through their eyes. And I am immensely grateful for that as well.

Dr. Mindy 1:21:51
Wow, wow. Well, I didn’t think I could love you anymore. Bill. And you now have crawled you and your family have crawled deeper into my heart. So thank you for what you’re doing. I just I love people on a mission to help other people and you you just exempt your that you are exactly that person, not just you but your whole family. So

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:22:13
like so thank you. And thank you. Always a pleasure.

Dr. Mindy 1:22:18
Thank you for enlightening me, I will be sending you messages of my insect rest. We will we will report back so everybody go grab his book and go check them out online. And thank you, Bill, so grateful for you.

Dr. Bill Schindler 1:22:33
Thank you so great to see you. Thank you.

Dr. Mindy 1:22:37
Thank you so much for joining me in today’s episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we’d love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.