Adapted from episode 165 of The Perfect Stool podcast and edited for readability with Caroline Alan, mineral enthusiast, educator and the co-founder of BEAM Minerals and Lindsey Parsons, EdD.
Lindsey Parsons:
So I’m wondering how you went from software development and business consulting to educating about and selling minerals?
Caroline Alan:
Well, you know it happened because I burned out from that very intense career, and it was about 10 years ago I had bad inflammation in my gut. I had been gluten-free for many years because I am gluten intolerant, but I could never get over the inflammation. I also had bad inflammation in my mouth, with bone loss in my teeth and periodontal disease that just had gone on for several years. I had recurring sinus infections. I had flatlined adrenals. They’d been flatlined for over a year. I’ve been to multiple practitioners trying to find some way to jumpstart them. I also didn’t sleep through the night. I woke up many times a night. I was deep into perimenopause at the time, so my hormones were also out, and my thyroid, I struggled. I have Hashimoto’s, so I’ve struggled with my thyroid over the years. So all of these things led up to, at a certain point, a complete inability to continue in my high-powered work career.
Lindsey Parsons:
Yeah. So what led you to the minerals? How did you figure out that that was the issue?
Caroline Alan:
Yeah, well, so, like many of us, we’ve been taught to treat our bodies like we have parts, pieces, systems, and tissues, and we have all these different specialists. If we have hormone problems, we go to a hormone doctor; if we have thyroid problems, we go to a thyroid doctor; if we have skin problems, we go to a skin doctor; if we have sleep problems, we go to a sleep doctor, etc. And nobody was looking at me holistically, until I met my now business partner, and he looked at me and said, maybe you should try these minerals.
I was reticent. I had been trying so many different things, but these were really easy. They were liquid, they tasted like water, and I just started taking them. Over the space of eight or nine months, all of the symptoms I described to you, except that I still take thyroid replacement, cleared one by one, slowly over weeks and months. Even my doctors and my dentist noticed. My dentist said, “Oh my gosh, what’s changed? The tissues are pink and healthy. Your periodontal disease is gone. What happened?”
My adrenal tests showed my adrenals being a third of the way up the chart after four months of taking the minerals. As a result, I went back to my then friend, now business partner, and asked, “What’s the deal? No one ever mentioned minerals to me. How could this be?” He started sharing little pieces of research, an article about this, an article about that, and I just went deep. I went down the rabbit hole and kept going for many years, studying minerals, what they are, how they work in the body, why we’re depleted, and how replenishment occurs effectively.
Lindsey Parsons:
Interesting.Yeah. So what gave you the persistence to keep going? Did you see results really quickly? Was there something that was fixed quickly that made you, keep going?
Caroline Alan:
Well, first, the interesting thing was, I’m not a huge supplement taker. I don’t like taking pills. Just some people struggle to swallow pills, and I’m one of those people, but this was liquid and it was easy to take. And strangely, every morning I woke up, my body said, I want my minerals, which was new for me with any other supplement. So it wasn’t like I started to feel better and I was like, oh, great.
I will say that when I went to my dentist, after going to three different dentists over three years trying to figure out what was wrong with my mouth, when I went to my dentist, and that was just two months in, she said, oh my gosh, what’s happened? That was my first cue. And that’s when I started going, okay, these actually might be helping me, and that’s when I really got more religious about taking them daily.
But I didn’t really start to feel the longer term effects – for example, I was getting sinus infections because I’d had mold exposure. So I was getting sinus infections every four to six weeks, I mean really that often, terrible headaches and pain, and I just stopped getting them. So it’s funny when things change slowly. It’s one thing if you have a headache, you take an Advil, you feel better in a couple hours, or in 20 minutes, 30 minutes, right? But with minerals, they are such foundational support. They’re what I call ecosystem support. And like most ecosystems, those changes occur slowly over time.
And so because we learn to notice changes that happen quickly, I didn’t really notice the changes until I would look back and went, wow, I’m not eating so much. I’m not craving sugar. Oh, I’m sleeping through the night. I noticed in retrospect, yeah.
Lindsey Parsons:
Okay, so can you explain the role of minerals in the body?
Caroline Alan:
Yes, I love to explain the role of minerals. So first of all I want people to understand, if you look around the room that you’re in, or if you’re in a car or walking, and you look at all of the structure around you, it’s all made of minerals. Every structural element in the universe is minerals. So minerals are the substrate for all structure in the world, including all of the structure in your body. So that’s the first kind of, whoa, wait a minute. That’s actually true. Okay.
The second piece is that minerals are, the way I like to describe it, if you’re going to build a campfire, you’re going to need some wood, and you’re going to need some tinder or something to start the wood, and then you’re going to need a match. Inside of your cells, you have something called the mitochondria. And mitochondria are energy-generating units that live inside your cells. They’re like the match. They have the ability to turn fuel that you take in through your mouth and gets absorbed into your cells, they have the ability to turn that fuel into energy, but you have to have the fuel.
And the primary fuel that you use at a cellular level in your body is minerals and amino acids. Your body makes a lot of amino acids. It makes no minerals, and they all have to come in through the foods you eat and the water you drink.
Lindsey Parsons:
Okay, so I deal with people who have gut health issues in my coaching and that’s the majority of my podcast audience. So I’m wondering if these folks are more mineral depleted than the average person. And if so, why and why is the average person mineral depleted in any case?
Caroline Alan:
Yeah, so let’s talk about mineral depletion, because it’s so interesting, because we should be able to get minerals and all the nutrition that we need from the foods we eat. The problem is that our foods today are way less nutrient dense than they were historically. And there’s many research pieces and data that have been developed over time about this.
So to get the same nutrition from an apple that your grandfather ate today, you’d have to, depends on who you speak with, but most people say between four and seven apples, so it’s that much lower, and it’s across all things that are grown in soil, and even the meats that you eat; those animals also ate plant material. So it’s everywhere. So you cannot get enough minerals. You’d have to eat so much food, it’s really not possible to get all of the minerals that you need from the foods you eat anymore.
And to exacerbate the situation, most of us, particularly in the US, drink filtered water. When you drink water from a well or we used to drink water from streams, of course, you shouldn’t do that today, but that water had a lot of minerals in it. Even tap water that came out of your faucet in your kitchen has a lot of minerals in it. When you filter that out using reverse osmosis or distilled or even a Brita filter, you’re taking those minerals out, and now you have what we call empty water, and that water doesn’t actually have a good way to get absorbed into your body. It mostly goes straight through you, and in the process, it’s actually flushing more minerals. So this problem of mineral depleted water as well as mineral-depleted foods has created a curve of mineral depletion in humans that is radically going up.
Lindsey Parsons:
And so people with gut health issues, I assume, have it worse because of poor absorption.
Caroline Alan:
Yeah. So because most minerals that we’re going to talk about don’t require the gut, which is really one of the most exciting things, but there are so many things that are attacking gut health, like glyphosate as an example, which creates all sorts of problems in the gut, as well as chronic stress and all sorts of things.
Okay, but one of the things I want to talk about with gut health in particular is one of the contributing factors being that your body is not able to generate enough energy. So if you think about energy generation happening inside your cells with this mitochondria and the wood and paper, the fuel, the amino acids and the minerals. If you don’t have enough minerals anywhere in your body, your body can’t generate enough energy, and so it has to pick and choose what it can do and what it can’t do.
When you’re fully mineralized, your body generates about 1200 watts of electricity, but many of us who are mineral depleted are only able to generate maybe 800 or maybe 500. If you’re an elderly person who eats really badly and is in a care facility where the food is, there’s very little nutrition in it.
So what happens is the body can’t clear the inflammation. It can’t find homeostasis or balance, and so it just keeps the lights on. It’s going to keep your gut peristalsis basically going, but it’s not going to be able to clear that inflammation. So that’s one of the first things with minerals and the gut in general.
If you have SIBO, IBS, Crohn’s, if you’ve got inflammation, or you have really bad microflora and enzyme production is not on top, you’re not even able to break down much of the food that you’re putting into you, that’s making your situation even worse. So there’s a whole body of knowledge in looking at the gut.
And one of the tricks about minerals is when people use single minerals, like take magnesium for sleep, or they use multi minerals that are in salt-based electrolytes, one of the things I help people understand is that your gut is a freshwater system. It’s like the rivers and lakes on the earth. The ocean is like your bloodstream, it’s a salt water system.
So when you take concentrations, which are relatively large concentrations, of salt based electrolytes, and you put them into your gut on a regular basis – some people take one, two, three stick packs of salt-based electrolytes a day, what they’re actually doing is disrupting their gut microbiome. They’re throwing it completely out of balance, and all of that salt is not supporting healthy gut microflora.
So that’s one of the first things that we talk about relative to minerals. If you have gut problems, you need to not be using salt-based electrolytes. You absolutely need minerals and you need micronutrients, but the salt-based electrolytes are not going to be supporting a healthy homeostasis and balance in your ecosystem.
Lindsey Parsons:
So if you are someone who is clearly sodium deficient, I see that sometimes because people’s chloride levels are low, you see low blood pressure. How can you slowly get enough sodium in the course of a day?
Caroline Alan:
Yes, and that’s such a great question, because one of the things that we think about when, let’s say someone has a low sodium issue, and we talked to lots of people who are using tons of salt-based electrolytes, because they heard in the past, as a kid, they had low sodium issues, okay? My business partner is actually one of those people. He used to take salt capsules as a young person, because he had so much cramping.
The thing is, the issue is not about the quantity of salt. The issue is about absorption of the salt. So what you want to do, rather than creating large concentrations of salt, which the body when you put a large concentration of salt in your gut, what does the gut do? It says, I’ve got a concentration, and I need to balance this, and I need to get rid of the excess. So now what happens is, you urinate more, now you’re actually flushing your system, and you’re not absorbing.
So instead, what you need to do is, sure, put a pinch of salt in your glass of water if you want, but taking salt-based concentrate, milligrams of salt every day, unless you’re eating a low salt diet, it’s very hard to have. I mean, unless you’re really focused on eating a low salt diet, it’s hard to get no salt. So the issue is not about the quantity of the mineral in it, it’s about how to make it better absorbed. And that’s, again, what we’re going to get to, which I’m so excited to introduce you to, is the plant-based minerals, because they have the capacity to enhance the absorption and the assimilation of minerals and salts into the cell, where they can actually have their positive impact, instead of creating concentrations that create imbalance and actually exacerbate the situation and create flushing of the system.
Lindsey Parsons:
Okay, well, we will get there, but I have a couple other questions before we get there. So I’m wondering if you mentioned that the reverse osmosis is problematic? I think you mentioned other filtered water. So what kind of water, and knowing that spring water comes in plastic bottles, and we don’t want a lot of plastic, what’s the best choice for water? Should we do a reverse osmosis with then re-mineralizing?
Caroline Alan:
So what I always recommend at this point, because most people aren’t going to buy glass bottles of mineral water every day because it’s very expensive, is to use your reverse osmosis filtration system, or whatever system you’re using, and remineralize. The trick is, you don’t want to remineralize with rocks, shells and bones, because, first of all, those are not necessarily ionized, and ionized means at their component size ready for absorption. So let’s say you mean putting a pinch of salt in your water. That works because salt ionizes very easily. What it means is it actually connects to that water molecule then you drink it. It’s probably not going to, it would over a very long period of time, but it’s not going to precipitate out and end up at the bottom of your glass, okay, but most minerals that are made of the rock, shells and bones will do that. What I recommend highly is getting a liquid mineral that’s already ionized that you can remineralize your filtered water with.
Lindsey Parsons:
Okay, so you’re not talking about the system that comes with that, but more like liquid minerals that Beam makes.
Caroline Alan:
I haven’t looked well enough into the reverse osmosis filtration systems that do remineralize the water. When we learn about the plant-based thing, you’re going to understand why they actually are the ultimate solution for mineralizing water.
Lindsey Parsons:
Yeah. Okay. So the other question I was wondering about is, does eating organic or eating lots of fruits and vegetables help with the lack of minerals?
Caroline Alan:
Well, here’s the trick, and I want to give people an understanding of this. When a plant grows in the soil, the way that it creates all of its structure and generates the energy for its growth is by taking minerals and amino acids from the soil.
And when it takes those minerals from the soil, in nature, what happens is the plant grows. At a certain point, it dies and decomposes and delivers that mineral content back into the soil, whether it’s in the forest, in an organic garden, or in some production farming setting. If the plant dies and decomposes, the minerals in that plant go back into the soil.
But we cultivate and whether you’re eating organic or you’re eating production farmed, regular, conventional food, it’s you take it, you grow it in the soil, you take it away from the soil, you process it, you eat it, and you dispose of its waste far from where it was grown. And what happens over time, even in your backyard garden, is that soil gets mineral depleted.
So the same problem that we have with our body and getting the minerals into our body is the exact same issue we have with the soil, which is, how do we effectively get minerals back into you? You can’t just take some powdered calcium and throw it on the soil and expect that to be bioavailable to the plants. It’s not. It has to be broken down just the way it does in your gut, all the way down to its ionic chemical components, so that it can be absorbed.
And in soil, that happens via microbial processes. Microbes go through a sequence of processes, and they actually deliver these complexes, which are mineral complexes that roots of plants can absorb.
Lindsey Parsons:
Okay so let’s hear about these plant-based minerals.
Caroline Alan:
Thank you so much. The reason I’m so excited by plant-based minerals is that they’re truly nature’s technology for mineral replenishment of all cellular systems on earth. Years ago, some scientists recognized that soldiers and athletes were mineral depleted, and they went into their labs and created salt-based electrolytes as an emergency solution. If somebody was crashing, they would give them those things, and they worked for that short-term situation, but they were never meant to be used on a regular basis.
If they had instead looked at nature and said, how does nature replenish minerals into cells, considering that at a mitochondrial level, like an energy generation level, inside your cells, your cells work just the way a cell in a redwood tree works at the energy generation level. So all cells on earth, all cellular life, requires minerals, and the body makes no minerals. It makes a lot of amino acids, but makes no minerals. They all have to come from the outside.
So nature, in its infinite wisdom, developed a solution, and that solution is something that’s naturally created through that microbial process, that breaking down, degradation of plant material as it slowly breaks down through this microbial process. The result are these two molecules, one called fulvic and the other called humic, and they are like these tools for mineral replenishment of cellular life and detoxification of cells and cellular systems.
Lindsey Parsons:
So, I had heard of them before, and I’d taken them before in pill format, and I think something that may have given me pause at some point was one of them, and maybe this was the California prop 65 warning. There was something about heavy metals, lead maybe, I can’t remember what it was exactly. Can you speak to that?
Caroline Alan:
Yeah, absolutely, I can. So I’ve done a huge amount of study about heavy metals, particularly related to plant-based minerals and in humic and fulvic, and there’s a lot of misunderstanding about heavy metals in general. And since we’re not having a whole podcast about heavy metals, if you ever want to do that, we could jump in and just talk about heavy metals, because there’s a lot to understand, and a lot of people are really scared about them, and they should be, particularly when those heavy metals are coming from manufacturing effluent or mining or from man made issue, things that are man made and then they’re throwing this waste out into the world. However, if you just dug down anywhere in the earth, 15 feet, and you took some soil, there’s going to be heavy metals in there. The difference is, there are different kinds of heavy metals. There’s inorganic heavy metals, and there’s organic heavy metals. And organic heavy metals are bound to the carbon molecule, and they have a totally different structure, so they’re different.
There is, I think it’s like 0.02 parts per million greater than the lead level identified in the California prop 65 in our MicroBoost product.
Here’s the interesting thing. So a few years ago, a heavy metals toxicity specialist, she’s an MD from China, she works in the US, and her main focus is detoxing people, particularly from mercury and lead. And she called me up, she wanted to talk to me. I was a little worried, and she said, I need to tell you that your MicroBoost product is the first product that I have used in the last 10 years that has effectively moved the dial, lowered lead and mercury toxicity in my patients. She said, I am using it with everybody now.
So here’s the interesting thing, and this is where we get to talk about how the molecules work. And this is so exciting to me. So let’s talk about the humic molecule. The humic molecule, if your fist was a humic molecule, if you made a fist and you think, that’s a humic molecule, and you thought of a cell, the cell would be the size of a head of a pin, so it’s much larger than a cell, and the humic molecule is called a polyelectrolyte molecule, so different parts of its surface have different polarities. It’s a very unique molecule. There are very few molecules like that on Earth. It’s an incredibly strong electrolyte molecule, meaning it has extremely strong electrical charge and it acts like a magnet.
So even though there are heavy metals associated with the humic molecule, as there are with every soil, just pick up soil on the earth, even deep down where there’s no pollutants, there’s going to be heavy metals, but the heavy metal molecules that are part of the humic molecule, the scientific term is they have no valence. They have no ability to come free. They’re completely bound in the molecule, and they actually act like magnets in your bloodstream and in your gut.
So they literally travel through your system and pick up and bind other molecules. So this humic molecule hangs out in your gut or your bloodstream, binding with heavy metals, bio waste, toxins, nanoplastics, because nanoplastics have heavy metals in them, free radicals, viral detritus, spike proteins, all sorts of different things. And this molecule gets all these things sticking to it with glyphosate. It actually even will build a film around the glyphosate, making it so the glyphosate can’t have its negative effects in your system anymore, so it completely sequesters it.
And these electrical bonds that are made with the heavy metals are very strong. At a certain point the molecule gets so heavy it falls out of solution and it leaves the body through all the elimination channels. So it doesn’t require a liver, it doesn’t require a kidney. It uses your tears, your sweat, your snot, your saliva, your ear wax. It uses your urine and feces, of course, as well. And when you think about nature, and you think about nature creating a tool for detoxification of cellular systems anywhere on the earth, because there’s always been concentrations of chemicals or different things that were toxic to cellular life. So for cellular life to thrive, there had to be a way for removing those things, and that’s what humic represents. It represents a method of gentle, continuous detoxification of cellular systems.
Lindsey Parsons:
And how does that work with the fulvic? Is there some synergy then?
Caroline Alan:
Yeah, fulvic is different, so it’s very cool. Fulvic now, if you make a fist with your hand and imagine that your fist is a cell, the fulvic molecule now is the size of the head of a pin. It’s very, very small. And the beautiful thing about fulvic is that your body recognizes fulvic as a beneficial substance, because your cells developed on this earth just the way all the other cellular life did.
And so if you’ve never taken fulvic, never had fulvic in your body, and you put it in your body, fulvic, your body goes, ah, fulvic, great. And what it does is a channel opens in your cell. It says, fulvic, come on in. I recognize you. You’re a good thing. And it brings the fulvic molecule in.
Now the cool thing about fulvic, if you imagine a magnet and imagine if metal pieces were connected to that magnet, the fulvic molecule is a very strong electrolyte molecule, and it attracts and holds minerals and nutritional elements to it. So it’s a delivery system for minerals into cells. So the cell, it hits the cell wall, the cell wall says, oh, that’s fulvic. Let’s let it in, open the channel, the fulvic goes into the cell, and then it does what no other molecule on earth can do. It changes its polarity, and it drops those minerals and nutritional elements into the cell. So it literally is a delivery system for minerals into the cell.
Now it’s in an opposite polarity, and it travels around inside the cell, picking up bio waste, toxins, heavy metals, nano plastics, viral detritus, Spike proteins, all of these different problematic substances. And it carries those out of the cell. It changes its polarity again and drops them off in the bloodstream, where its partner, the humic molecule, then binds them, gathers them, cleans them up, and takes them out. I call humic Mother Nature’s janitor, and fulvic, the intercellular transporter, delivers nutrients and bio waste and toxins out.
Lindsey Parsons:
So does that mean you should take them at the same time, or in some sequence?
Caroline Alan:
What I say is, we’re so used to thinking, I take a supplement and read the label and it tells you, take it at night, take it with food, without all of that. But you have to understand, these are nature’s tools, and nature couldn’t define how they needed to be used. So it had to just make them work, period.
So there are certainly people who like to take the fulvic in the morning, because then all of the food that you’re going to be eating and breaking down in your gut throughout the day is going to have a better possibility of uptake into your system. It may or may not be true, sounds like a great story to me, but from my perspective, if you are constantly using fulvic, and you have it in your system all the time, then it doesn’t matter when you take it.
And then sometimes people will take the humic at night to support the natural detoxing processes that are happening when you’re sleeping, including brain respiration, because these cross the blood brain barrier.
Lindsey Parsons:
And the fulvic is the Electrolyze, and the humic is the Micro-Boost, correct?
Caroline Alan:
Yeah, and we have them separated really for two reasons. One, because Electrolyze, it’s such an enhancer of energy production in the body, for someone who’s a performance athlete or someone who really struggles with gut problems, with absorption issues, they might want to take more of that, but because, especially if they have Crohn’s or different autoimmune problems, their systems can be very sensitive to detox.
I’m actually one of those because I’ve had so many things. So I always put my humic, I don’t have very much in there right now, but I put it in my glass of water in the morning, and I just drink it through the day. Then there’s no problem.
But when I first, actually it was after COVID that I started. I never had detox symptoms until after COVID, but people who are very sensitive can have that, and then they just need to use what we call the slow introduction method, which is easily available when you read the instructions.
Lindsey Parsons:
Yeah, and so are the minerals that the humic and fulvic bring in, are they just the macrominerals, or are they the microminerals?
Caroline Alan:
The minerals are all of the macrominerals and micronutrients your body needs. And here’s the cool thing, though, they’re naturally in the ratios that your body utilizes. So there’s lots of the macrominerals that your body utilizes a lot of, but there are all of the micronutrients. And in these natural ratios, those balanced ratios that the body needs.
So the thing about minerals is one mineral might have a relationship with up to 10 other minerals, and your body is constantly working, and this cellular system that is your body constantly works to manage and work with that balance. There’s no way you will know, or any even ChatGPT could ever tell you what of any particular mineral your body needs.
So instead, what you do is you bring them in using the plant-based minerals already in their natural ratios, and you just put them in daily, and your system goes, oh, I have exactly what I need. They’re in the right ratios. This is really supporting homeostasis in the whole system.
Lindsey Parsons:
So sometimes I will run tests like Organic Acids tests, Metabolomix, NutrEval, where they do say you’re very magnesium deficient, for example, you should take 600 milligrams a day. So I’m just wondering how this compares? Could you need this plus maybe some extra something else, or should this, in theory, supply all your needs?
Caroline Alan:
Yeah, this is a really interesting question, and particularly for a practitioner like you, it’s a natural thing to think somebody is low in magnesium. We should add magnesium, but the way I want you to think about it is because the gut is more like a forest than it is a car. There’s no tank for magnesium. We can’t just fill it up with 500 or 600 milligrams of magnesium every day. The issue that you’ve got, and I’m not quite sure. I don’t know those particular tests. So first of all, are they intercellular tests?
Lindsey Parsons:
They’re urine tests that look at metabolites of processes in the body that would indicate deficiencies.
Caroline Alan:
So the challenge with something like that is, first of all, they’re transient. So to test minerals, you really need to do an intercellular test, whether it’s hair tissue mineral analysis, which is challenging with women particularly, most women color their hair, so you could use a pubic hair, but you can’t use a hair from your head, and then intercellular there are some but you have to be physically with your patient to do an intercellular test. The one that I recommend is something called Oligoscan. It uses spectrophotometry, which is used in material science, to do an intercellular look.
Because what you don’t know with this test, with the urine test, is what is the real issue? Is there a heavy metal toxicity issue, meaning that the heavy metals are taking up the receptor sites for the magnesium, and that’s why the magnesium is not being absorbed, or is the body actually flushing? So you don’t really know from a transient type of mineral test what is happening intercellularly.
And because minerals have to be utilized, particularly magnesium. I mean, there are some areas where magnesium is used not intercellularly, but mostly intercellularly. You need to know how much magnesium is getting absorbed and assimilated into the cells, so that’s the tissues. So it’s a whole body of knowledge.
And what I think, and you could have a short-term effect for somebody with giving them 600 milligrams of magnesium, but you also have to think again about what kind of imbalance you’re creating in the gut on a regular basis with the homeostasis of that ecosystem by putting in a concentration. Minerals are very powerful substances. They’re very powerful.
So from the research that I’ve done and the study that I’ve done, and what I’ve seen also in people who have an Oligoscan at a show and it shows a deep imbalance with magnesium, they just take our minerals for six months and their imbalance goes away. So this is the difference with minerals. Rather than trying to create a quick change in the mineral level of magnesium over the short term, you have to look at the whole ecosystem. What’s happening in the ecosystem that they’re having a potential magnesium depletion?
Should we look at heavy metals or parasites, or maybe an overgrowth of Candida that is messing with the uptake and absorption? If you’re doing an intracellular test, how are their cell linings doing? Are they struggling with cell lining health, and the magnesium is not getting into the cell?
So you see, this is a whole thing that I’m trying to bring to the world, like a different way of thinking about minerals and what even a mineral depletion actually means.
Lindsey Parsons:
So I have done a hair tissue mineral analysis. I can’t recall but I was deficient in something important. Would that be a good way to track your minerals for six months? Like, how long should I do it before I retest? Six months? Is that a good amount of time?.
Caroline Alan:
So what I always say is six months. And if you had a very deep depletion, I would say eight months to even a year. The idea being, if you think about your body as a natural ecosystem, how do ecosystems like change to occur? They don’t like large, big changes happening in a short period of time. They want slow, incremental changes so that, and I always say it like this, if your body had all the minerals that it needed, when it needed them, where it needed them, how it needed them, on a regular basis, every single day, and it was able to generate that 1200 watts of energy that your body needed, think what could happen. It’s a really exciting idea.
Now it’s certainly possible that you could take the minerals for six months and still show a deep depletion in a particular area, then you absolutely have to look at toxicity, like a heavy metal toxicity, or parasites, because parasites metabolize minerals prior to you getting them, things like that.
Lindsey Parsons:
Okay, you mentioned the Oligoscan, and I always sort of thought of that. It’s kind of woo, woo. So tell me a little bit more about why you think that’s a valid measurement and how it works.
Caroline Alan:
Oh, we’ve done a lot of different testing with Oligoscan and the hair tissue mineral analysis, and they really correspond with the real experts that I know in the mineral world who are chemists, and they agree that it is a solid test. It’s not a medical device in the US, mainly because the company did not want to pay the money, because it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to get your device made into a medical device in the US. It’s a medical device in Europe. So it uses spectrophotometry. And spectrophotometry is a very stable science in the material sciences world. It’s not questioned at all. So what it uses is a light. And have you ever had one? It shines a light.
Lindsey Parsons:
You put your hand on it like this?
Caroline Alan:
No, you hold your hand up, and it actually has a device, and it uses the spectrophotometer, shines in four places on your palm.
Lindsey Parsons:
I don’t think I’ve done it.
Caroline Alan:
And it takes it through an algorithm they’ve been developing. It must be close to 25 years they’ve been working and refining and refining this algorithm, and it delivers back your levels of all your beneficial minerals, your electrolytes, your heavy metal levels, vitamin levels as well. And it’s telling you what is happening intercellularly, so in your tissues. It also gives you some idea about free radical load, as well as sulfur conjugation, which is about how detoxification is happening in your body.
From the research that we’ve done and looked into it, we believe it is an absolute, real, effective device. There are other intercellular mineral tests that you can do, and I can’t think of the names off the top of my head, but there are as well.
Lindsey Parsons:
Well, the one that you typically hear about is the RBC Magnesium. What about urine testing?
Caroline Alan:
The problem with urine testing is that, again, first of all, it’s only telling you what the person ate in the last 72 hours, and it doesn’t tell you anything about absorption and assimilation. It’s not telling you what you need to know. And what you need to know is how much of these minerals are getting into the body, because then once you know that, you can learn a lot more.
It’s an interesting thing to even look at minerals if you know, people do a poop test for micronutrients, and that’s a big one. I’m like, well, it’s not telling you what you need to know, because you need to know what was absorbed into the bloodstream. Yeah, so at least, but even in the bloodstream, just because it’s in the bloodstream, doesn’t mean it’s in the cells yet. So really intracellularly is what you need.
Lindsey Parsons:
Yeah. Okay, so I know there’s some obvious signs of mineral depletion, like low blood pressure or muscle cramps or twitches, but are there others people might be looking for?
Caroline Alan:
Absolutely! So the way I like to describe this is, everyone’s different. And if your body can’t generate 1200 watts, it only can generate five or 800 watts a day, what happens to your system? Your weakest areas get hit. So if you have a struggle with your heart, or you have a struggle with muscle stuff, they’ll go there. If you have brain fog, it is a huge, huge sign of mineral depletion. ADHD is a huge sign of mineral depletion. Mouth and teeth problems, huge signs. But what the thing is depends on the person, because one person might have sleep issues and one person might have ADHD, and one person might have anxiety, and one person might have brain fog, and another person might have gut problems.
So the interesting thing about minerals is that when you provide that full spectrum of minerals on a regular basis to a system, here’s what happens. Imagine a cell that doesn’t have what it needs. It sends an electrical, neurological message to your nervous system, saying, I don’t have what I need, I don’t have what I need, I don’t have what I need, I don’t have what I need. Go looking. Go looking. You find yourself opening the fridge at night, looking for something after you just ate dinner, because your cells are literally hangry. They actually call micronutrient deficiency the hidden hunger, because that’s this feeling like there’s just something missing.
So when you think about energy production in your body, why would you get brain fog? Because in a single neuron in your brain, you have up to 2 million mitochondria. So the amount of minerals that your brain uses on a regular basis, moment to moment, is huge. So there are many symptoms that people experience, anxiety as an example. You know, I used to have a lot of anxiety, and I struggled to sleep at night because my nervous system was on high alert all the time. Once I got mineral replenished, I was able to calm and actually be present and get my thoughts together and focus. It really changed everything. It’s like when the tide comes in and all the boats go off the sand at the same time, not really fast, but slowly.
Lindsey Parsons:
Yeah. So are there any contraindications for taking humic and fulvic minerals, for example, like somebody who might have sulfur processing issues or hydrogen sulfide SIBO, who react to supplements with sulfur?
Caroline Alan:
So first of all, there is some sulfur in our products. It’s a very, very small parts per million amount. We have not had people have strong responses related to that specific issue. But with our Micro-Boost product, we always recommend that people start slowly. So that means like a quarter teaspoon. If you have any of these kinds of issues, you would start slowly with a quarter teaspoon of Micro-Boost in a glass of water you drink that. You do that for three or four days. If you have no discomforts, nothing showing up, then you continue. You add another quarter teaspoon, and you slowly titrate up over time.
So one of the things I have been schooling people in is when you start to think about your body as an ecosystem, rather than a car that needs some windshield washer fluid, you start going, okay, maybe every supplement that I’m going to take, instead of just starting with the dose that’s recommended, I’m going to start slowly, and I’m going to introduce it to my ecosystem in the way that ecosystems like to operate, in a small way, incrementally over time, and really checking in and developing a relationship with our ecosystem, rather than trying to affect it. It’s a different way of thinking.
There is one thing that I will say is if people have hemochromatosis, which is a buildup of iron in the system, taking our products can exacerbate that. However, we have found that using bentonite clay, a particular bentonite clay product from a company called Curcumin Pro* that we think is the best, because it’s a very specific type of bentonite clay, it’s very effective. And you take them together and it creates, it totally balances it out.
Lindsey Parsons:
Okay, so the Micro-Boost has some iron in it is essentially what you’re saying. I have some genetics for hemochromatosis.
Caroline Alan:
So you do need to just watch that. And again, the bentonite clay, really, it’s known to balance it.
Lindsey Parsons:
And this is a powder, or is this a pill?
Caroline Alan:
You can get it in either form, powder or pill.
Lindsey Parsons:
Is there a dosage of that bentonite clay?
Caroline Alan:
I think it’s just like one capsule a day that you’ll see. Yeah, that particular product is the one that I’m most aware of. Yeah.
Lindsey Parsons:
Okay, so can you tell everybody about the different products and then where to find them? And I know I have an affiliate link that people can access in the show notes.
Caroline Alan:
Yeah, yeah, that link should give you a 20% off if you want to try them (use code PERFECTSTOOL for 20% off). So first of all, you can find us at beamminerals.com, I also do want to mention that I have a book coming out in the spring. It’s called the Mineral Reset. It’s being published by Hay House. I’m very excited about that. And if anybody is interested in learning more, they could go to mineralresetbook.com so that’s a great way, if you want to start learning more and getting information sent to you. The two products that I recommend for anyone getting started with bean minerals are these two. It’s called Electrolyze and Micro-Boost. And we call them our advanced set, because the two products together provide all of the uptake, the enhanced uptake of nutrients into the cells via the fulvic, that’s the Electrolyze, and then all of the detoxification, full system detoxification of the humic, which is the Micro-Boost product. They’re really easy to start taking. They taste like water.
Lindsey Parsons:
Yeah, I’ll vouch for that. You put them in a glass of water, you can’t tell they’re there. The one makes it look like Coke, which is weird when people see me drinking it, especially if I am doing a podcast. I’m just like, this isn’t Coke.
Caroline Alan:
I just pretend. It’s a really great tool. Both of those together, we call them the advanced set, because using them together provides that full spectrum of minerals, plus all of the intercellular and full system detox. It’s a great way to support replenishment, as well as they are going to support uptake of all the other supplementation and nutrition that you’re putting into your mouth.
Lindsey Parsons:
And I also got it, you sent me a set of stuff with, like some sprays. I thought that was interesting, can you really absorb things like that?
Caroline Alan:
Oh, yeah. So this is the coolest product. This is truly a revolutionary product. It’s called Insta lights, and it’s a spray and it’s fulvic so remember how small the fulvic molecule is relative to a cell? If your fist is a cell and the head of a pin is the fulvic molecule, it’s so small that you can spray it right onto your skin, and it will absorb right through your skin into your muscles and tissues within like five seconds, three to five seconds.
So if you are a person who has night cramps, first of all, if you’re a person who has cramping at night, you are mineral deficient, and you need to be taking these minerals internally, which will remove your cramping over a period of time. But with the acute symptom, you just spray this onto your leg. When you have that cramp, it will release your cramp in 30 to 45 seconds, because it’s not just a magnesium spray. Your cramp might not have anything to do with magnesium, phosphorus depletion. There’s other things that can contribute to night cramping. This provides all the minerals directly to the place that you need them, and it absorbs within three to five seconds, and it starts working so that you release your cramp.
It’s incredible. For menstrual cramps, you just spray it on. If you have pain during your first few days of menstruation. It’s great for tension headaches. You wake up with a crick in your neck, you just spray it on. I use it in my eyes. I literally just blink and let it go into my eyes, because in a single cell in your eye, you could have I think it’s 20,000 mitochondria in a single cell. So your eyes are also huge processing tools.
Lindsey Parsons:
I think there was also another bottle that I got that said, like, Happy-Lytes. And whenever my husband’s getting cranky, I’m just like, close your eyes. I’m going to spray your face with this. I didn’t realize it could go in the eyes too.
Caroline Alan:
I’m telling you, Happy-Lytes is our third favorite product out of all of our products. So if you’re a person that deals with anxiety, depression, panic attacks, this is an amazing tool. So it has an essential oil called Bergamot. The interesting thing about Bergamot is your olfactory system, your sniffer is connected to your lower brainstem, which is where the trigger is for the release of endorphins in your body. So you literally just spray and breathe it in and within five, seven seconds, you literally, it shifts the whole neurotransmitter wash in your body. And people literally who struggle with anxiety, depression, panic or hormonal shifts that make them little edgy, incredible support. Teenage girls love this tool.
Lindsey Parsons:
So you know, a lot of the people I work with, and I’m sure a lot of the people listening are already taking calcium, especially if they have any osteopenia, osteoporosis, everyone’s on magnesium, multivitamins, of course, that includes minerals. Some are on multiminerals. If they’re starting your stuff, do you think they should just drop all that other stuff or do it gradually? I mean, what would be the way to change the regime?
Caroline Alan:
Well, first of all, I always want to say that I am not a practitioner, and you always want to check with yours. If you’re working with a practitioner, you need to check with and work with your practitioner, help them to understand the minerals. Have them contact us. We’d love to talk with them to help them understand this.
I am not a proponent of taking single minerals in any form, whether it’s calcium or magnesium or potassium or chromium or zinc or any of those. And it’s not necessarily because they’re creating lots, some of them create more problems than others, but it’s because they’re not maintaining balance in the body, and their bioavailability is extremely low.
So even though these are trace minerals, meaning they have small amounts relative to that pill you take that’s got milligrams of magnesium, it’s nearly 100% bioavailable. That’s the cool thing about fulvic. When you drink, your fulvic starts absorbing through your mouth, your esophagus, your throat. By the time it hits your stomach, it’s already started to be absorbed and utilized by the body. That’s phenomenal.
When we work with athletes and they use it for the first time, they’re like, what just happened? Because they feel it immediately, because they’re in deep depletion when they’re in an event. So with your ecosystem, you never want to make drastic changes quickly. So you’re going to start with the minerals, and you’re going to slowly say, okay, what happens if I stop taking one of your other tools. Let’s say you’re not going to need it over time, because these are going to provide all that you need. Again, if you’re a performance athlete, you should contact us, and we’d be happy to tell you how you can use it for performance athletics, for recovery or increasing your performance. So yes, slow changes over time, and on the back of the bottle, we have a little QR code. It explains this all very, very well.
Lindsey Parsons:
Okay, great, yeah. Any final thoughts before we go?
Caroline Alan:
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me, and I’m so excited for the people who listen to this podcast and are interested in gut health, because I’m telling you, there’s really nothing better that you can put into your gut microbiome than humic and fulvic to support homeostasis balance and a thriving environment. So thank you so much for having me.
Lindsey Parsons:
Yeah, thanks for being here. This is great information.
Caroline Alan:
Awesome.
If you’re dealing with gut health issues of any type (diarrhea, constipation, bloating, SIBO, IMO, H2S SIBO/ISO, IBS, IBD, gastritis, GERD, H pylori, diverticulitis, candida, etc.) or have an autoimmune disease and need some help, I see individual clients to help them resolve their digestive issues or reverse autoimmune disease naturally, You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session to see if you’d like to work with me. I also have my own two products, Tributyrin-Max, which is particularly helpful for loose stool and diarrhea as it slows your motility and firms up your stool, and SBI powder, which is an all around gut pathogen binder, which is super safe and won’t harm beneficial bacteria, and is usually the first line of treatment I educate my clients about in order to avoid stronger antimicrobial herbs.
*Product and dispensary links are affiliate links for which I’ll receive a commission. Thanks for your support of the podcast by using these links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.