Ian Clark, founder of Activation Products, was diagnosed with a series of life threatening health issues in 2004 and was not expected to live more than a few months. Realizing that conventional measures of treating his illnesses had not worked for his family members in the past, he forged his own path to better health through food and specialized nutrients and supplements.
After five years of healing and improving his own health, and 90 pounds lighter, Ian set out to help others achieve the same results that he had. He focused on finding the highest level scientific discoveries in the world and making them available to others.
In my personal conversations with Ian, he has told me about several unusual supplements, remedies and practices that have made a noticeable difference in my life and that I had not heard anyone else talk about before. I asked him to be on the podcast to share these with you.
In this episode, we cover:
- The scientifically backed reason you should put your feet up at night (and it isn’t what you think!)
- A simple change you can do when you first wake up that has a big impact on your health
- Why Ian was grateful for his life threatening health struggles
- How he lost 90 pounds
- The problems with almost all nut and seed oils, even the organic ones!
- How stress is the biggest danger in the modern lifestyle and how it comes in many forms
- Deceptive marketing that many oil manufacturers use (and it is legal)
- Phytoplankton- A substance originally found in the sea that is highly efficient at transporting nano nutrients into cells and why this is important
Resources we mention:
- Activation Products (Ian’s Company)
- PanaSeeda Five Oil Blend
- Coriander Seed Oil
- Black Cumin Seed Oil
- Amaranth Oil
- Magnesium Infusion (rapid delivery transdermal magnesium)
- Oceans Alive Phytoplankton with Nano Nutrients
- Article: The problems with industrial seed oils
[toggle title=”Read Transcript”]
Katie: Hi, I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. Welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast where I provide simple answers for healthier families.
Did you know that the human body has 60,000 miles of blood vessels, 32 million bacteria per inch of skin, and 300 billion new cells created per day? In fact, today’s guest is an expert on cellular health and several other areas.
Ian Clark is the founder of Activation Products and Oceans Alive. He had a series of life threatening health issues that hit him all at once in 2004, and this was his catalyst for pursuing natural methods of restoring health. After five years of learning and healing, he set out to help others achieve better health as well. And from my discussions with him, he’s on the cutting edge of a lot of new natural health modalities. With his five sons and the support of his entire team of innovators, his company Activation Products was born and has now grown into a large company that produces the world’s greatest health products with extremely high quality products. His largest discovery was almost eight years ago with Oceans Alive marine phytoplankton which we talk about in today’s podcast. So stay tuned to this episode. We’re going to discuss things like the reason you should be drinking a quart of water in the morning, how he lost 90 pounds, and why he’s so grateful that he had health struggles to begin with, and the scientific reason that you should put your feet up at night, and it isn’t what you think. So without further ado, let’s join Ian. Ian, thank you so much for being here.
Ian: Yeah, thank you, Katie, for having me on. This is a pleasure.
Katie: Awesome. Well, I would love if you could start by telling us your own story and
the struggles that you had with your own health and your journey to finding answers.
Ian: When we look at when disease hits your body, we call it unfortunate, but there’s all kinds of plays on words you can do. And I consider it extremely fortunate now that ten years ago, I had a whole list of serious illnesses, and some were life threatening involving heart disease, liver disease, kidney problems, and a lot of infection-related stuff that was just there and I couldn’t figure out why. I was doing everything else in a lifestyle situation that my colleagues were, except for they were drinkers and I wasn’t. I stopped drinking and smoking back when I was 21, but I had all these really serious problems.
So anyway, I went to the doctor and went to several doctors who then referred me to other specialists. And my family comes from an allopathic background so they’re very medically leaning. And when they kept coming up with the same old answers that you just have to do surgery and pharmaceutical drugs and etc., I became quite unnerved with all that and I gave my oldest brother a phone call in desperation. And I said, “Hey, they’re telling me they’re gonna do all this stuff. What do you think?” And he’s been a medical doctor for 37 years at that time as a general practitioner. He goes, “You just gotta follow through, because if you don’t, you’re putting yourself at a severe risk.” And he basically was colluding with them saying, “Yeah, this is absolutely the way you gotta go.” He told me, “I’ve had thousands of people come to my practice over the years, and I’ve watched all different types and body shapes and age and people that were health conscious and not health conscious.” He said, “At the end of the day, it was all just genetic predisposition. And no matter how hard they tried, they would die no matter how healthy they got. And no matter what, that person that just was healthy, it didn’t matter what they did. They stayed healthy for a long time.”
And so I said, “Well, what’s the conclusion you’re trying to get me to come up with here? Because I am 46 years old at the time, and I’ve got all these issues, and you guys can’t tell me why other than I’m a statistical number based on averages. And I don’t accept that. I think there’s something that I’m doing or something is going on that I don’t know and I need to fix and change. And it’s not just genetic predisposition.” Well, that was met with a lot of laughter and, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and, “What are you gonna do?” I said, “Well, the first thing I’m gonna do is get away from the doctors.” Not to disrespect them because they were certainly doing everything they could, and we have a great deal of respect for the medical industry for a lot of things they do do saving millions of lives a year. But when it came to my situation, I compared myself back to my two uncles who were 51 and 54 years old when they passed away. And that’s on my mom’s side, which I very much lean to her genetics. Both of them had cancer. Both of them died two days apart in the fall of 1978. And I recall that they had done everything they were told to do by the doctors who took full responsibility for their health, and they all landed in the casket just about on time according to the prognosis after the diagnosis.
And I thought, “Isn’t that the craziest thing?” People just take the advice of somebody with a white lab coat and a stethoscope around their neck telling them, “This is what you’ve got. You’re going to die. Here’s the steps to your funeral.” And they follow them and they have their funeral and they’re gone. And I just said, “That is not something that I want to accept. There’s gotta be a better way.” And of course, there is many better ways, but the world we live in, the society we live in . . . my family was very upset that I was taking responsibility for my own health, and I was basically being thought of as suicidal and “What are you doing?” and so on and so on. But I just said, “Guys, you gotta just back off. Give me 24 months,” because I hit the wall in 2004. By 2005, I was starting to get real serious. That’s when all the pressure came on. And then I just asked them for a 24-month window which people figured I had a six-month window at the most just to work with. So they all backed off eventually and talked behind my back only instead of to me.
I prayed about it. I asked for guidance to find the people that would be able to help me. Because I knew that out there somebody knew or a number of people. And slowly but surely, I just started to find my way and met the people that helped me to learn about eating clean, and detoxifying my body, and doing juicing, and breathing properly, and drinking the right water. And I met some people that told me about a product called . . . it’s a micro algae from the ocean called marine phytoplankton, and I started taking that and noticed a really big uptake in my physical mental energy which made me feel great. And then as that progressed, I just realized that I didn’t just want to get healthy again. I wanted to become super healthy and how do you do that? But it took five years from 2004 ’til the end of 2009 before I was back within a clinical medical range on my blood panels and various tests that were being done. And I felt absolutely fantastic. I had dumped 90 pounds off my frame. I had gone through outrageous detoxes during that time because I really didn’t know what I was doing in a lot of ways, and overdid stuff and got into Herxheimer healing crises and whatever.
But along the way, I began to gather very crucial information and began to set a bar higher and higher and higher until I set the bar at the highest level when it came to products or the things that I’m gonna invest my time, energy, and resources into. And I was able to let, so to speak, the cream rise to the top very patiently to where we are today. Now, we’re producing the highest quality products in our category on the planet for people’s health.
Katie: That is an amazing story. And knowing you personally, you’re obviously still in excellent health today. Would you say you continued to even improve your health since that time when all your levels were normal?
Ian: Oh yeah, because the clinical medical range is boring to me. You know as well that you can continuously improve your health as you learn more and more. And all these things keep coming in that are definitive, so you spend less and less time getting better and better health with the greater amount of wisdom. So the object now is to share that wisdom with as many people as possible in this lifetime, just like you’re doing with your Wellness Mama. It’s affecting so many people in a positive way. And so you have your whole entire category you’re dealing with, and we bring in another category that complements everything you’re doing and people like us are doing. So this is a really exciting time to watch all this develop and come together.
Katie: Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned that you were pretty much following the mainstream lifestyle advice. You were living the same type lifestyle as all of your colleagues back when you discovered you were ill. What do you think are some of the biggest dangers with modern diet and modern lifestyle?
Ian: Well, number one is not watching stress levels and also avoiding the fitness, like not doing anything for fitness. Those are number one, number two. Number three is not getting enough sleep, thinking that we’re invincible, that we can go without proper sleep, we’re warriors, all that kind of stuff. Disregarding Mother Nature’s natural kick-you-in-the-butt-if-you-don’t-behave-yourselves thing, right?
Katie: Yeah.
Ian: And then when it comes to what you consume, the water is so important, becoming hydrated with proper water. And there’s a whole world of proper water which we’re not gonna talk about right now. But there’s a whole thing with water that once you nail it down, the water goes into every cell very efficiently and you remain perfectly hydrated, and that allows the body to flush things out. Waking up in the morning and drinking a large amount of water is key crucial because that then flushes all of the waste material your body has been processing all night. That’s another big one, and then making sure that you’re not breathing a lot of toxic air all the time, being conscious of air filtration in the house or your work environment. And then eating clean. People don’t eat clean. They go to restaurants. They go to venues all over the place when they’re travelling and end up eating GMO foods and non-organic, and who knows what’s in the food? Regardless of how good the chef is to make it taste good, there’s a lot of junk in those foods. So just being more discerning and discriminating when it comes to what you put in your mouth for food and then making sure you’re getting the nano nutrients and the micronutrients that you require.
Katie: Yeah, I feel like that’s an area we’re just starting to really understand more and more especially right now. And I know one thing that you and I agree on is the dangers of things like industrial processed seed oils, many of which are genetically modified. But also one of your areas of specialty is that not all seed oils are bad by any means, but there’s a huge, huge difference between processed industrial oils and a healthfully processed oil. So can we delve into that? How do you find oils that are supportive of health and what makes that difference?
Ian: Well yeah, the entire seed oil world, whether you’re Asia, Europe, North America, wherever you go, you do have to search diligently to get the quality oils because laws and legislation in various jurisdictions allow companies to add . . . like right now our company could add 90% canola oil to all of our oils with 10% of the actual oil itself that we’re touting is in the bottle and legally get away with that.
Katie: Wow, and just call it the original oil and not even mention the canola oil.
Ian: Call it “100% pure,” because “Gee, the oil that’s in there is 100% pure. There’s just only 10% of it.” And by law, you can add 90%, so a lot of companies take that shortcut, anywhere from some small percentage up to some large percentage. But canola oil, which it used to be called rape seed oil — as in the actual term rape, R-A-P-E — and it was called that for centuries. They decided to change it to canola oil because it was grown primarily in Canada. And that became a more friendly word, obviously, but it was always used as an industrial lubricant in its original form, and it’s been known to weaken the cell membrane. Because every cell in your body has a lipid profile and it needs to have healthy oils in there. Canola is the absolute worst, and that’s sold more than any oil internationally now by diluting other oils, or for cooking oil, etc., and is hyper ultra cheap because the seed itself gushes with oil. And it grows quickly and it’s easy to monocrop and they’ve got genetically modified. They also have non-GMO and organic canola oil, yippee. And all of them are super bad for you. So that’s number one.
You don’t know which companies are doing what to you. How can you tell if there’s no law telling you what’s inside the bottle? So we don’t care what legislation allows us to do or not allows us to do. We don’t care what quality standards the government sets for oils. We set our own standards, and we set the bar so high that nobody can even come close to the quality we have.
And the cool thing is the moment you taste oils that are correctly produced, you become an instant international connoisseur of oils, because you now have something to go from. Whereas when you’re tasting all other oils that are produced in the market, none of them taste like the seed itself. They don’t have the same color as the seed. They don’t have the same consistency.
Whereas all the oils we produce with this specific German technology we have produces oils that actually match the taste, smell, and color of the seed, and the lab tests have numbers that are off the charts when it comes to high quality that nobody can believe how good the numbers are. So when people are going out into the world to buy oils, they just gotta become more and more discerning. And our oils are therapeutic oils. They can be used culinary to a certain degree with some of them. Others are just straight out medicine. They taste medicinal. They’re very strong and they’re very good.
But people with cooking oils . . . like a lot of people grab olive oil and cook with it. Well, they shouldn’t do that because it has a low smoke point. If you want to get a good oil to cook with, do some rice bran oil that doesn’t have canola in it, for sure, that you can check the company out reputably if they’re willing to tell you. Or pecan oil, or oils that just have high smoke point if people are frying with them or cooking with them.
Katie: Yeah, definitely. And you mentioned the processing. I know that it’s a patented process that you guys have so you can only say so much, but can you talk about the difference between how maybe canola oil is processed, and how they derive that oil, and how you guys derive oils from the seeds you use?
Ian: A lot of oils that are high-processed. They use these massive hydraulic presses that just crush the oil out of the seeds en masse. That’s primarily how they do the canola, so you get different levels of types of processing. There’s hexane extracts. There’s cold expeller pressing. And then there’s what we have, which is zero press. So the difference is that there’s a major amount of grinding and crushing and friction involved and often a lot of heat involved even in cold expeller pressing. They call it cold expeller press because the seeds are going in raw and they’re going through this turning head that eventually grinds and crushes all the oil out of the seed, and that takes 10 to 15 seconds depending on the type of press. In that process, the oil is sheared.
Where when we press our oils, there’s no hydraulic forces involved. There’s a very special mechanical advantage that allows the oil to come out of the seed in about a tenth of a second, so there’s zero grinding and shearing of molecules. When you don’t sheer molecules in the oil from the grinding process, the oils don’t oxidize. They stay stable. And we also have a very expensive packaging we use to further protect the oil and to improve it while the customer is waiting to receive it or while it’s sitting on the shelf. It has a very, very long shelf life. Whereas traditional oils like flax seed oil or chia seed oil would go rancid within a day, day and a half, ours doesn’t go rancid for two to three years. And we don’t even know if . . . the thing with our deal is we have to wait until we have oil in a bottle to test it because traditional lab testings don’t tell you how long or how short that life is because we have a special packaging that nobody else has. And the oils we know are stable . . . minimum two years right now. We’re going into our third year of testing on these very special oils that are packaged in this miron glass. There’s this . . .
Katie: And . . .
Ian: Go ahead.
Katie: Oh, I’m sorry. I was gonna say yeah, the glass that you guys store it in is absolutely gorgeous, but there’s a whole scientific reason to that as well.
Ian: Right. Yeah, it’s not just blocking the light. And even the company itself is unaware why this happens, but products improve in quality the longer they sit in that type of bottle. And it’s a phenomenon. It literally absolutely has been proven over and over again to happen, and they cannot explain the mechanism. Because they thought that maybe it was some of the unharmful light coming through the glass that could get through, but that was not the case because they had the improvement happen when it was stored for years in darkness. So it’s just a unique thing that was discovered by Andreas many years ago, and that’s what we’ve used ever since.
So it’s just taking that extra care. Our products are the priciest on the market, but they’re not the most expensive, meaning that it’s a far greater investment to spend more money on the oils because you’re gonna get a hundred times the value out of something you’re spending on high quality versus something that could potentially harm you if it’s unstable or rancid. And most of the oils are unstable and rancid. That’s why they have to put them in the refrigerator at the health food store, even the pricier ones. You’re gonna pay more money for it in the health food store in the refrigerator, where ours are never required to be in the refrigerator. In fact, it’s not good to put the oils in the refrigerator ultimately because it changes the structure of it.
Katie: Yeah, and that really puts things in perspective when you think about that most of the oils people are buying are industrially processed, chemically processed, and then in BPA clear glass going rancid and then being heated. It’s pretty scary to think about. You mentioned Andreas, and I know who he is from reading your story, but can you talk about who is Andreas and how does he fit into this company?
Ian: Well, Andreas was the visionary that was the whole driving force behind Andreas seed oils, hence the name of the production company. Everything else is sold through Activation Products.
But Andreas is a very unique individual, and he ended up with Crohn’s disease in Germany in 2004, 2005. And he tried to find every natural means possible to deal with Crohn’s and almost died as a result of that. He literally was bleeding to death over the course of a six month period. Because when you have Crohn’s disease, they have to go and dissect the trunks of the colon or the small intestine that are so inflamed they’re bleeding and then sew you back together again.
And he was refusing all of that. Well, it got to a point where one night he knew he was in a world of trouble. He was down around 84 pounds, and he really felt strong that maybe the end was near. And so he asked his wife to call his mom, which she did. And his mom came over, saw the condition he was in — she hadn’t seen him for a few weeks — and was shocked at how far down he’d gone . . . rushed him to the hospital, and he was in there for six weeks and had eight blood transfusions during that time which saved his life. They said that if he would’ve been two hours after that trip to the hospital, he probably would’ve been passed away. He had so little blood in his body they couldn’t see how he could have survived.
But that was just really irresponsible for him to do that, and they put him into some psychiatric treatment after that because they were concerned about his mental stability. Why would you do that when there were doctors available to him? He hadn’t gone or seen a doctor for six months and he had been seeing doctors before that.They slated him for surgery which he agreed to. They had him on the meds. And then somebody came along and said, “Now, Andreas, you really don’t have to have the surgery. This is not gonna cure your Crohn’s, but if you go and find somebody that presses fresh new good quality flax seed oil and begin consuming that right from the press, you’ll get some strength. At least you’ll be able to get nutrition.” Because he couldn’t eat any food. It would just go right through him.
So he said, “Sure, I’m willing to try that.” So he went and he found somebody, and then he ended up getting his own press and he started pressing flax seed oil, consuming it fresh. But the problem is he knew not everybody’s gonna go buy a press, number one . . . big hassle, expensive. But he wanted to find a way to be able to get fresh-pressed flax seed oil stabilized to the end user. And he just knew that somehow that was possible to be done.
He moved to California in 2007. I met him in 2009. He was a skinny little blond-haired, blue-eyed, happy German guy that had a strong German accent, and we chatted. We immediately hit it off as friends, and we had a long conversation that day. And he was trying to explain the seed oils to me, and he told me that something big was gonna come, that he had had a vision of a piece of equipment. He didn’t tell me the word “vision.” He told me that a couple of years later that it was actually a vision. But he said that something big was coming. And I said, “Well, what is it?” He goes, “Well, it’s a new press technology.” I said, “Okay, cool. Let me know when it happens,” which he did. But I just didn’t understand it. I didn’t get the whole picture.
And I had kinda lost track of him. I think the last time I saw him was the end of 2010, beginning of 2011. And then at the end of 2012, through a random email, his name came up. And so I called his old mobile number to see if it worked, and it did. And I was able to get through to him, and he goes “Oh, man, I’m so glad you called. I was wondering where you were,” and, “I’d lost your number.” And he said, “Can you come and see me sometime?” I said, “Yeah.”
And I was down in California a couple of weeks later, so I went to visit him — he was living up in Big Bear at the time — and when he walked out of the house to greet me. He was a totally different person than I had seen two years before that. He was very athletically built. He looked amazing. And so we went in the house and I go like, “What are you doing? What’s going on with you? How come you’re so well built and you’re quite different from the last time I saw you?” And he goes, “Well, I told you before. It’s all about the seed oils and this new technology.” And he said, “I figured out how to press coriander seed oil back in August.” So that was August of 2012. And he said within 32 days of taking coriander seed oil, my Crohn’s symptoms, they left me completely, and they’ve been gone ever since. And since that time, my body just started to rebuild itself because I can eat food now and get nutrition from it.
So that’s where I realized, “Okay, this guy is sitting on something that the world absolutely needs,” and let’s see what I can do to help him to get that out there. So that’s what started the business. Then when he showed me the amount of work that they had done, and that started in ’05 approximately. Actually, the traction didn’t really happen until 2007, so it’s been now going on eight years. But there was many, many years of development where he had to study in depth the various protocols to use the press technology he has to produce each type of seed oil. And so there are literally hundreds of little iterations and tests on each type of seed to perfect that production, taking careful notes and retrying things and so on. Well, he was not making hardly any money doing this, just selling a little bit of oil here and there.
And I realized that his background, which is an Olympian . . . he spent his career from the age of 18 ’til he was 30 in the Olympics for the German gymnastic team. And he took the men’s gold in the horizontal bar in 1996, which is a very difficult Olympic medal to get — one of the most difficult — and he got the highest score in the Olympics that year. And so I just said, “Andreas, you’re an amazing guy discipline wise to do even that, but you’ve taken that same discipline and focus and put it to the seed oils, and now you’re getting the gold medal in the seed oils.” And he just laughed. He goes, “It’s actually right.” That’s the short snapshot of Andreas.
Katie: That is fascinating. Can we delve more in depth into the different seed oils and what they specifically do for the body? I know that there’s a blend of them that you guys have, but that there’s individual ones as well. So what are they and how do they benefit the body?
Ian: Right. People look at seed oils as oil, okay. That’s all they see, just a spoonful of oil or something that you pour in a salad or cook food with or fry food with or whatever. Once I started to really get my head around what the oils were and how they work, I realized that the oil itself is simply a delivery system. So each seed oil has a different purpose and reason of being for the human operating system. And when I’m referring to the human operating system, I’m talking about heart function, brain function, your lungs, your liver, your gallbladder, your kidneys, and how they all function together. And each one of those parts of your body thrives on different type of nutrients.
For example, a pumpkin seed oil delivers the broadest spectrum of nutrients for the reproduction system for men and women, for healthy womb, healthy prostate, healthy reproduction, but yet it’s an oil. And it has a different color and a different flavor, but that’s the primary purpose for pumpkin seed oil. And other than that, it’s antimicrobial. It’s good for heart health, and there’s this whole list of these things. But I sat back one day and I realized, “Wow, each oil has a different reason for different functions in the body. The oil’s only a carrier. If you damage the carrier, you’re ruining the potential of those nutrients to function properly in the body.”
So when I ran into Andreas again in 2012, he was pressing a bunch of different oils. So it was flax, and sunflower, and black sesame, and white sesame, and pumpkin, and that type of thing. And he was also pressing the coriander at that time. I said, “Well, people don’t wanna have something complicated where they gotta open up all these bottles and pour all these oils in. Would you be able to put together a way where maybe we could press oils and just mix them together in a bottle and then sell it as one thing that would be a one stop shop for people?” He says, “Oh, well I’ll figure out the formula, but I can do way better than mixing them up.” He said, “Our technology allows us to put all these seeds together at once and literally press them into what appears to be one molecule. Of course, you can’t just blend the molecules together from different seeds, but they come out and there’s no separation. They’re perfectly one oil when it’s done.” So I said, “Cool.” And so he took a week. And he’s already super experienced with what these seed oils do. But he took a week to see what he could do for a blend and how it would work in this press technology. And he called me up and he goes, “Okay, I got it figured out.” He said, “I got flax oil, sunflower, black sesame, pumpkin, and coriander. It’s the perfect blend. It covers at least 15 major organ functions of the body.” And of course many more, but that’s the major ones. And he said, “It tastes amazing. It’s super smooth. It presses perfectly.”
And I go, “Great, we can’t talk about 15 different things at once, Andreas. So when we’re presenting something to somebody in the marketplace, that’s too much information.”And it just struck in my mind. I said, “What you’ve got here is a panacea.” Because he’s not that familiar with the English language on some words, and he says, “What’s a panacea?” I said, “A panacea is an overall body tonic that supports the entire body’s function and will help you become super healthy all at once, actually one stop shop.” He goes, “Yeah, yeah, that’s right. That’s what this is. That’s exactly what this oil is.” So I said, “Okay.” And then the word “PanaSeeda” popped into my mind because it was a play on panacea with seeds, so that’s how the brand PanaSeeda came out. And that was the launch. That’s the only oil we pressed at that time. We stopped all other oils and just pressed that one for the first six, seven months. And then, as we realized there was demand for things like black cumin seed oil, straight up coriander seed oil, and many of the other ones we press now, then we branched out and have more products coming out. But that’s how it all started.
So the list of things that the oils do . . . just think of any and every organ function in your body is supported by a particular seed oil. So like I said, reproductive health for pumpkin. And then, you’ve got brain, heart, liver function with flax. You have a high vitamin E with sunflower, anti-inflammatory. The black sesame is wonderful for kidneys, and the coriander keeps heavy metals at bay and keeps candida overgrowth checked, and is also highly antimicrobial. So it’s going after unfriendlies in your system and leaving the friendly bacteria alone. All those bases are covered in that one five-seed blend.
Katie: Interesting. So basically, these beneficial properties are bound within the oil itself, and that’s how they’re delivered to the cells, or are these basically nutrients or antioxidants? What’s the function on a cellular level?
Ian: Well yeah, all of the above, so you got every different type of nutritional molecule functioning at once, everything from pigments to lipids to amino acids and so on. Obviously, essential fatty acids are the main thing. We didn’t get caught up in the omega 3-6-9 because it’s a lot of marketing hype. And also oils have gotten a bad rap over the years because people are selling a lot of rancid oils. They did a lot of testing on oils and found out they were not beneficial for the human body, because of course, they wouldn’t be. They’re very damaged. So it was throwing the baby out with the bath water.
But as far as the oil is delivering . . . the difference between eating a seed . . . because people go, “Oh well, I just wanna go to a whole food. I don’t need the seed oil. I’ll just eat the seed.” Well, our bodies are not set up to be able to extract the oil from the fiber that is bound inside that seed. So the oils where all the nutrition is, that is bound as a fiber. If you grind it like a flax seed, you’ll get 5% to 10% of the nutritional value from a flax seed, which is still a really great thing. People get great benefits from grinding flax seeds and putting them in their smoothies. But instead of 5% to 10%, when you press the flax seed oil — and the same applies to chia seed and all the rest of them — you get 80% to 90% of the value bioavailable to you when you press that as an oil separated from the fiber. The fiber of the seed can still be consumed for the lignins and various other things that are beneficial properties. The fiber of course, right, because the fiber bulks up in your body and helps your digestive tract. So you end up eating the whole thing anyway in the end, but the release of that oil from the fiber of the seed is the key to your body being able to benefit fully from the absorbability, assimilability of those nutrients.
Katie: That makes sense. And I know I’ve talked to some people who seem to struggle with a lot of nuts and seeds, and that they’re irritating, especially digestion wise. And I have heard theories that this is because of the lectins that are found in some of these. Does the oil, when you separate it, does that remove that problem for a lot of people as well? Is it easier to digest?
Ian: Well, it is very, very easy to digest. It’s actually extremely beneficial for the body overall. So all of the fears of enzyme inhibitors and all these different things that people
talk about where you gotta sprout them and you gotta do all this in order to activate them, we have not seen that in our experience with people at all. We only see people that have tremendously benefited from the seed oils.
And the person that I looked at, the one that opened my eyes the most right out of the gate, was Andreas. Before we had all of our thousands of customers raving about these oils, it was him. This guy, I can’t believe how much oil he’s consumed. But he stands at the press with a big tablespoon and he presses oil all the time, and he’s constantly consuming the oils.If anybody was gonna overdo it and have a problem, it would be him, and he only shone brighter and brighter and brighter as time went on the more the oils he consumed.
These concerns are raised from probably mostly rancidity is often the problem. Many nuts and seeds are already rancid before you get them. So we actually have traceability from soil all the way to seal of our product, because we have to totally ensure that we don’t receive . . . it doesn’t even matter if they’re certified organic. They could still be going off. We have to have fresh, highest quality seeds possible, which requires lab testing. So the companies supplying this certificate of analysis is one thing, but it’s another whole thing where we have to press it and test it on a lot batch control number. Because the last thing we need to have is to have seeds come in, either reject them and send them back, which is a huge waste of time because it takes sometimes weeks to be able to get the supply, or to even pressing oils that would be bad from the seeds that started bad. And this happens so often in the industry where companies just go, “Oh well, they get it. We can’t afford the time, and yet we gotta get this production run done.” And they just press it anyway. And we just can’t do that. It cannot happen. When your bar is set so high and the controls are set so tight, you just can’t allow that kind of thing to go on. Unfortunately, people do have bad experiences with nuts, and seeds, and oils, and various things from time to time as a result of those problems.
Katie: That makes a lot of sense. And one thing you mentioned earlier with regard to your own health was the phytoplanktons. And that’s something else that I’ve seen you talk about but does not seem to be widespread knowledge. So can we talk about what is the ocean phytoplanktons and how are they beneficial?
Ian: That was the kick starter for the whole health revolution that happened in my personal life and also to launch the company. The marine phytoplankton is still very much unknown as you mentioned. There are some people that are in the highest levels of the wellness industry that are familiar with it, but I find most people have never heard of it.
So what marine phytoplankton is primarily on the Earth is the foundational functional food for life in the ocean, and it also produces 70% to 90% of the oxygen we’re breathing every day. So it’s a crucial nutrient on the planet that if you removed it, everything on the planet would die. But, it’s not gonna be removed. It’s not going anywhere.
The only reason that we have a product that is human consumable is because of a 30-year research project done in the south of Spain where they searched all over the world all the different strains of marine phytoplankton from the ocean that they were pulling out and analyzing for various use in industry, whether it was biofuels or aquaculture and things like that. And then they’ve realized right towards the end of the research project, coming up in the late ’90s where they saw a couple of strains that matched the human nutritional profile perfectly. And they go, “Oh, this is interesting.” So you can’t harvest marine phytoplankton out of the ocean because it’s microscopic.
There’s no way to do it. Plus, there’s a lot of contaminants in the ocean. So what they did is they built a photobioreactor which was all brand new technology when they began doing this. And they took it to sophisticated levels of being able to produce these individual strains perfectly pure — the heirloom strain — without altering them, providing a perfectly natural environment for them to flourish in using natural sunlight, actual clean CO2, real ocean water, and allowing the oxygen off gas and things in a sealed environment where there can be no contaminants. So I ran into that one back end of 2006, beginning of 2007, and that was a big breakthrough. I didn’t know what we were sitting on at that time, but as the years went by, I learned more and more and more about it. I just started consuming it back then. I noticed that it changed my whole enthusiasm in life, my mental energy, my physical strength, and it’s not a stimulant. There’s nothing in it that’s like coffee or anything like that. It gives you a really deep level energy that you can tap into at will.
And so as time went on, I learned why that is the way it is. And what they discovered in the last two years, once they had perfected the quality of it and created an atmosphere, and the bioreactor was tuned into the extent that it gives an exact highest quality marine phytoplankton product, they took the cells of the two strains to the University of Greece and to a third party company that does that type of research, and they started looking at all the nanonutritional molecules that were within the marine phytoplankton itself. And they discovered, to their surprise and joy, that every single known nutritional molecule in all historical data from all research around the world was found inside the cells. So hundreds of nutritional molecules that are known in history that are recorded in all the annals of all these publishings were inside there. They were like, “That’s very cool.” And they were also seeing nutritional molecules that could not be identified because nobody had ever discovered them before. And as of September 2014 — and I haven’t heard any updates since then — they had already had 185 additional nutritional molecules that they could not find a match to.
So this research is going on. And it’s just for the purpose of going, “Why is this stuff so powerful?” And when you put that broad spectrum of a nano nutritional product into your body, your brain innately intelligently knows what to do with that. And it’s something that nobody has ever experienced until they had this. Because nowhere are you gonna find every single nutritional molecule known to man in one place in the nano nutrient level in a microscopic marine phytoplankton cell. So the company that is owning this, the company that’s funding this whole project, is so excited they’re apportioning 36,000 acres of land in Morocco near the coast to be able to produce billions of dollars worth of marine phytoplankton within about six to eight years from now. So this is in the pilot project for the big production, but we have the only stabilized liquid marine phytoplankton product on the planet that’s perfectly stable, fresh harvested, and it has had no chemicals or heat or any processing added to it. It’s just stabilized in a concentrated sea mineral solution that is altogether good for your health.
Katie: That is really interesting. And that makes sense that because they’re nano nutrients, they’d be able to get into the cells more effectively. And since phytoplankton you said creates a lot of the oxygen in our environment, does it also have that effect in the body as far as helping the body oxygenate more efficiently?
Ian: Well, to a certain extent. The oxygen that the phytoplankton produce are in the production phase when they’re growing. Because like any plant, it pulls in CO2 and releases oxygen, so it’s during that phase. But chlorophyll, really what they’re doing is they’re soaking up energy from the sun, any kind of a green plant. That’s direct sun energy being stored up for us, so when you put it in your body you’re releasing all that life energy that comes from all those different components. But oxygenation, that’s a whole ‘nother subject that is very, very important that you and I should have a specific podcast in regards to when the time allows.
But I would say primary, the primary function of the phytoplankton is it’s giving you all the amino acids, all the essential fatty acids, all the pigments of the rainbow, all of the minerals in the entire world as far as plant minerals and trace minerals, and all these amazing enzymes that are in this, including superoxide dismutase. So superoxide dismutase is one of the primary enzymes on the planet. It goes in and removes superoxidated stress out of your body. So putting that nutrient in there has a great effect on anti-aging and just getting you back tuned in to get all the junk out of the system that’s bothering you.
Katie: That makes so much sense, and I know another thing that both of us are a big fan of and I’ve written about and you’ve written about is magnesium. And there’s a whole lot of information and misinformation — I feel, like right now — regarding magnesium. So can we talk about magnesium and how it affects the body and the proper way to get magnesium?
Ian: Yeah, the understanding of magnesium really kinda came on the scenes starting about 20 years ago in the scientific world, the medical world, and a lot of studies were done. And what they found out was that a typical North American, Canadian, or United States citizen, is usually magnesium deficient to a significant degree, about 80% of the population. So everybody is magnesium deficient, but 80% is deficient enough that they’re gonna have health problems from it. And magnesium is the master mineral. The reason that we’re more and more deficient as time goes on is ’cause there’s less and less bioavailable magnesium in the foods we eat, and our kidneys filter a lot of it out as well. So when this was discovered that magnesium depletion was a big problem . . . and it affects 330 different enzymatic functions in your body when you’re low in magnesium, and that can cause everything from anxiety to panic attacks to muscle twitches to brain fog and fatigue. It’s a really long list of all these things that are caused.
This big explosion happened in magnesium supplements, and they started selling all those magnesium in pills and all of different types of magnesium, and everybody touted their magnesium is better than other people’s magnesium, of course. And then there was a breakthrough that happened about eight years ago, nine years ago actually now where they began to discover that you could have magnesium enter your body through the skin, and that the form of magnesium that did that the best was magnesium chloride. And then there was a deeper level discovery that magnesium chloride hexahydrate that is derived from ocean water is the most beneficial, because you can get magnesium chloride from a mine that’s been sitting there for thousands of years. There’s a nickel mining waste product, which is magnesium chloride . . . very, very cheap. You can buy it for a penny a pound. And so companies were going out and buying that and then putting it into solution or putting it into pills.
When that was discovered, that’s not the way to go. All you need is pure magnesium chloride hexahydrate going into your system. It is structured in a way that it holds as a fuel source, or a fuel resource rather, in your system, because a resource comes from a source. But you wanna have a resource because it will stay in your system long enough to be used, whereas if you have a magnesium sulfate bath, which is good — Epsom salts — the magnesium relaxes your muscles while you’re in the bath but it just goes in and out of your body and it doesn’t have a lasting effect.
So we ended up running into this information that allowed us to produce a very specific type of highly concentrated ultra-pure magnesium chloride hexahydrate, and that is actually sprayed on the skin. It goes into your microcirculation and allows the body to have a relaxed energy, and it bypasses your digestive tract which is actually difficult for the kidneys to deal with. And people that have kidney disease cannot use any magnesium supplements at all because it’ll mess with them so much. So putting it geographically on your body is another big bonus as well as having it come into your skin. So if you have a twitching muscle or a muscle cramp in your leg, you spray it right on there, and it alleviates the cramp in a matter of a minute. And this stuff is into your microcirculation system a minute, a minute and a half, allowing you to have deeper sleeps. You handle stress way better and get out of sympathetic stress into parasympathetic so that you’re into a healing mode. We get continual testimonies on the people’s lives that have been changed from simply adding magnesium into the skin.
Katie: That’s incredible. And speaking of sleep and stress, a random tip that I have gotten from you — and I’ve only ever heard from you — that is supposed to help with adrenal health and cortisol problems is to put my feet up at night, but there’s a specific way that you recommended doing that. And I’ve definitely noticed much deeper sleep from doing that. So can you talk about what is this tip for putting your feet up at night and how it works?
Ian: Yeah. After many years of trying to figure this out, a doctor in Los Angeles realized that you could deal with sympathetic stress manually, mechanically. The medical world knows that when you’re in the sympathetic stress mode — which means flight or fight, and you’re anxious and you’re under stress –your blood vessels in your thighs expand about 10%. The blood vessels in your biceps do the same. And that means that not as much blood availability is for your abdomen and for your brain, where your abdomen needs the blood for digestion and the brain needs it for thinking.
So after all these herbal concoctions and acupuncture and massages and all these things that he was trying to do testing on people to see what would . . . because you can test with litmus paper and PH strips and things like that to see which system you’re in, either parasympathetic for healing or sympathetic for flight or fight. He told people, “Okay, lay on your back on the floor. Let’s try this. Lay on your back on the floor. Put your bum up against the front of the couch. Rest your legs on the couch so that your knees are bent. Your thighs are vertical columns. So now gravity is going to draw that excess blood from the largest blood vessels in your body, which is in your thighs, back into your abdomen and up into your brain. You don’t use a pillow. You just have your head flat on the ground, and that allows that blood to go back available to the body.” And he found that when people would do that for 30 minutes a day for 14 days running and not miss a day, that they would be training the brain to accept the fact that it does not need to be in sympathetic stress, and then you would flip out of sympathetic stress.
Because some people get locked in and they stay in, and that’s where you get extremely exhausted. And the more years go by like that, the closer you are to having an early death. And this completely reversed it. Everybody tested around the 14-day mark — sometimes a little bit earlier, sometimes a little bit later — but right around the 14-day mark, they would be completely out of sympathetic stress and acting in a functional way which immediately improves your life because you get better sleep, you handle stress better, you’re happier to be around and just happy more with life.
So it’s very cool that you actually did it. Very few people do things that are known to be good. They’ll do it for a while, then they stop, and then they might start again. But to do it and to complete that process and to experience the benefit, people see it the first day, and especially after a couple of weeks, you really see a big shift.
Katie: Yeah, I started doing it at night and I noticed after just a few minutes like that… because I was like, “Oh, I’ll just sit like this and read or think or journal.” And after a few minutes, I was just like extremely tired, and it just puts you right to sleep. So I definitely recommend it at night. But it’s been amazing, the difference that it’s made for me.
Ian: Yeah. And even people, if they have a midday where they’re crashing a little bit, the best thing to do is just let the crash happen. Get in that position. Set an alarm clock, because most people can’t afford to sleep too long during the day. Even 30 minutes, set their iPhone alarm or something, and go into another universe. Because within a couple of minutes you’re knocked right out because that blood is back in your brain. And your brain, it’s been a long time before most people have had that level of proper blood in their brain.
Katie: Yeah, and one of my big things is that I wanted to find all these health answers out for myself, but also so that I can help my kids avoid having these problems that I’ve struggled with. And so we’ve kind of made that a family habit at night, and I’ve noticed it helps the kids sleep a lot better. So for any moms that are listening, that might be a really valuable tip. If you can make it a family activity, your kids might sleep more deeply as well.
Ian: Oh yeah, and children in this day and age can get very stressed. There’s so much different from when I was a little kid to what I see now today. What a difference. And all of the electronic gadgetry and all the stuff that we do ten times more in a day than we’ve ever done before, so definitely children are helped tremendously by that. Yeah, there’s no age differentiation when it comes to this. And doing it once in a while, even once you’ve got yourself back in equilibrium, you still wanna keep tuning up periodically. It doesn’t have to be done every day in a row, but it’s certainly a great thing to do.
Katie: Yeah, that was gonna be my next question. ‘Cause it sounds like the 30 minutes for 14 days is kind of the golden ratio for the beginning, but how much is a good amount to keep that up so that you don’t go back into sympathetic?
Ian: Well, I don’t think you have to do it every day, and the reason I don’t think that is you don’t want your brain to go the other way and think, “Oh,” and so kind of flip it around. You want your body to get back into its own equilibrium. But the thing is it’s such an enjoyable thing to just remind your brain, “Hey, it’s okay.” Maybe every four or five days, just put your legs up like that. And I fall asleep like that for hours and it never bothered me. So it’s a good relaxing thing to do. It’s all the way good for the health, and it’s a reminder. So I would say every four or five days after you’ve completed a two-week cycle and you’ve reset your system, and you’ll be able to tell. Everybody that does this, they see a big change in the way that they handle stress and their happiness overall.
Katie: Yeah, it’s dramatic, and I love things that are completely free and easy and relaxing to do. It’s one of the few health changes that doesn’t take any really extra effort. You just have to relax.
Ian: Yeah, it doesn’t cost anything, just the knowledge of doing it.
Katie: Exactly. Well, I want to respect your time, but I have a few questions I always ask at the end, and I’d love to hear your answers. And the first is what is some advice that you wish you had gotten earlier in life?
Ian: Oh, I wish I would’ve met myself ten years ago. That’s kind of being a little bit facetious, but the fact is, if I could’ve run into somebody who knows what I know now then, I would’ve probably been about six to eight months instead of five years of getting things sorted out. So the advice that I would like to have gotten at that time was how important it is to remove the exhaustion molecules that are in your system out.
So I’ll give you an example. If you have breathed a lot of carbon monoxide, driving a lot in traffic, walking in traffic, downtown in the city environment, everybody builds up a certain amount of carbon monoxide in their system. And the only way you can get it out is by having donated oxygen molecules that turn the CO into CO2 and then you breathe it out, but nobody knows how to get that into your system. If I would’ve known that back then, what a difference that would’ve made, because I was full of the worst type of toxins. And the best advice would be how do you detoxify the safest most effective way? That would’ve been the great advice and that’s a long thing to talk about. If I could’ve sat with somebody that knew about that, two hours later, I would’ve been on a completely different track than where I was then.
Katie: Another podcast for another day for sure. Next question, what is a great resource that you’d recommend beside your own? Maybe it’s a book or a website or audiobook. What’s a good resource you recommend to people often?
Ian: Well, there’s no specific one place. We have, of course, the Activation products. We have a certain amount of information there, but we’re actually building it out a lot. We have a new website coming up called misterwellness.com, but that has not launched yet. When I go online, I just use my intuitive thought patterns to do keyword searches. So I don’t have any one place that I go for an end all be all. I just kinda let myself be guided through and discern.
Now, I travel a lot though. What I’ve done is I’ve searched out the top level researchers, like the top guys in their category. Searched them out because I don’t know anything. I’m a blank canvas. And I get them to write on my canvas what’s supposed to be there after their lifetime of work having filtered out all the things that don’t work between the things that do work, going good, great, greater, and greatest. That’s where I go. And I go to health product trade shows. I like that kind of thing. You don’t want too much misinformation. So if there’s any one book I could recommend, I don’t have that, unfortunately. I wish I did.
Katie: Okay, thank you for that. And then lastly, what would be the first three baby steps that you would offer to someone who maybe is where you were in 2004, 2005 or who just has any health struggles? What would be three baby steps to start the journey toward health?
Ian: Well, it would be watch what time you go to bed at night. Reset your clock so you’re gonna bed at 10:00 at night and getting up at, say, 5:00 in the morning. If they can get seven hours sleep, it would be really good. Uninterrupted sleep, that’s number one.
Number two, the moment they wake up in the morning, drink at least one quart of good quality water with oxygen in it, and more if they can stomach it. But start out with one quart, preferably two, so you rehydrate and flush your system out. And number three would be to eat clean. Find some local farmers markets. Know who you’re buying your food from. Read the labels. Don’t keep just putting the same old junk in your system. And avoid any processed foods or fast foods. Eat clean — those two words — eat clean.
Katie: Awesome. Ian, I know you’re a very busy man. Thank you so much for your time and for all the wisdom you shared.
Ian: Yeah, Katie, thank you for having me on. I trust that it’s been of benefit to the listeners and really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Katie: Absolutely, and I’ll make sure to put links in the show notes to information about everything that we talked about as well as resources to find good oils and phytoplankton and all that. So those will be in the show notes at wellnessmama.com. Ian, thank you. Have a great day.
Ian: Thank you, Katie, you too.
Katie: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Wellness Mama podcast where I provide simple answers for healthier families. If you would like to get my Seven Simple Steps for Healthier Families guide for free, head on over to wellnessmama.com and enter your email, and I’ll send it over to you right away. You can also stay in touch on social media, facebook.com/endlesswellness, or on Twitter and Instagram @WellnessMama.
And I would also really appreciate it if you would take a second and subscribe to this podcast so that you’ll be notified of future episodes. And if you’ve ever benefited from something I talk about on this podcast, I would be really appreciative if you would leave a rating or review since that’s how others are able to find this podcast, and so we can help spread the message. Thanks as always for listening and for reading and for being on board with creating a future for our children that’s healthier and happier. And until next time, have a healthy week.
Thanks as always for listening to the Wellness Mama Podcast. If you’re enjoying these interviews, please subscribe via i Tunes or S titcher and leave a (5 Star!) rating and review if you haven’t already!
[/toggle]
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Wellness Mama podcast! I would really appreciate it if you would take a second and subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or Stitcher so that you’ll be notified of future episodes. If you’ve ever benefited from the information shared on the podcast, I would really appreciate if you would leave a rating or review since that’s how others are able to find this podcast, and so we can help spread the wellness message.
Thanks as always for listening and for reading and for being on board with creating a future for our children that’s healthier and happier. And until next time, have a healthy week.
Leave a Reply