Excerpts from my podcast Interview with Dr. Russell Jaffe, MD, PhD, founder and chairman of Perque Integrative Health LLC. Listen to Episode 40 of The Perfect Stool.
Life Guard Multivitamin, How Much B-Vitamins Should I Take and Avoiding Genitourinary Issues
Lindsey: So I actually heard you speaking on another podcast before your folks reached out to me. And I realized that I was already taking a Perque product. It’s the Life Guard Multivitamin (find at Fullscript). And I was really happy because when I heard the way you talk about your supplements, it made me feel like I’d be a fool to be using products from any other company.
Dr. Jaffe: We did a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial to show that our Life Guard Super Multivitamin, which actually replaces more than one product for most people, is more bioavailable because it has more active, more enhanced uptake, and less what I would call binders, fillers, flowing agents, glues and other stuff that is in most supplements for reasons of profit, not reasons of value.
Lindsey: Yeah, and it’s not unreasonably priced either. So it was a good choice for me. And I think the reason I selected it was that it had a high level of the active B vitamins.
Dr. Jaffe: Right. So it’s a super B complex, complete B complex, and a super mineral, which is usually a separate formula. It’s got 40 active ingredients in meaningful amounts because you need them all.
Lindsey: Yeah, I take two a day and I feel good about that.
Dr. Jaffe: And hopefully you keep your urine sunshine yellow, while being well hydrated.
Lindsey: It’s the B vitamins that turn your urine yellow, right?
Dr. Jaffe: Oh, yes, it’s specifically riboflavin. And I want your urine to be sunshine yellow. If it’s glass clear, you’re deficient in something, right?
Lindsey: So what you’re seeing is the excess B vitamins coming out in your urine that you don’t need?
Dr. Jaffe: No, no, not excess! B vitamins that protect your kidneys and your bladder and your genitourinary system. There’s a lot of problems that happen in later life in the genitourinary system. And you can avoid them if you bathe it in the right kind of nutrients for life.
Lindsey: Ah, okay. So I always thought that that was because I was taking too much. But you’re saying that’s just like a good healthy thing?
Dr. Jaffe: Yes. I’m saying that you want to protect your kidneys, your bladder and the rest of you. And the answer is, yes, most of us are deficient. And when deficient is common? Well, we go around saying “well, everyone’s deficient, who cares?” I do care and it makes a difference.
Food Sensitivity Testing with the LRA/ELISA Tests
Lindsey: I wanted to start with a question about an area that comes up with a lot of clients of mine, which is food sensitivities. Can you tell us about the technology that you invented to test for delayed reaction sensitivities, including food sensitivities?
Dr. Jaffe: Right, so the reason that we brought together cell culture, and amplified reactions in a single system, after many people tried and didn’t, was we needed an ex vivo (meaning outside the body) test: reacting in the laboratory just as things happen in the body. So we needed an ex vivo specimen and we needed to validate the procedure. We did that in the early 1980s. We’ve done over 80,000 cases. We’ve done over 25 million cell cultures. We are the gold standard for functional immunology, especially T cell reactions, which turned out to be more important than the antibody V cell reaction.
Lindsey: And so that’s the technology that you use for the ELISA test? Yes, it’s ex vivo, which means in the laboratory, cells react just as they do in the body. It’s a cell culture; it’s not red and blue and dead. It’s not stained, it’s not dried. It’s not something can just put out your hand and take a specimen and get a result. Because a number without a meaning is meaningless. We produce meaningful results over 30, 40 years now. We want to provide the meaningful results for what you should eat and drink, what you should think and do based on what each of us needs, because that is kind of personalized.
Lindsey: So can you touch a little bit on the difference between a food sensitivity and food allergy?
Dr. Jaffe: A food allergy typically means an immediate reaction. For example, the bee stings you and you drop in anaphylactic shock. And I say, well, you must have a hymenoptera venom hypersensitivity. That’s type one. But then there’s Gell and Coombs, two guys who basically articulated the language of the immune system along with a guy named Lujerne. They all got Nobel prizes. So dumb, they were not. And they pointed out that there are antibody reactions. These are from B class cells. B cells become plasma cells that produce antibodies. Now, are those antibodies helpful and neutralizing and memory? Or are they complement fixing and harmful? When you do a serum test, you don’t know; only when you do a cell culture test to distinguish good from bad B cells. But more importantly, you also get immune complexes and T cells in the same cell culture. And that was our pioneering effort, so that we could open up the black box of the immune system. Because what we knew when we started was that if the immune system is happy, you’re happy and you live long and well. And if your immune system is unhappy, we can whack it, like with dexamethasone, which may or may not be helpful.
Lindsey: So would you recommend the ELISA/LRA test to a person who has a highly reactive gut and seems to be reacting to everything they eat? Or would it be better to try and heal up what’s likely a leaky gut before testing for food sensitivities using the LRA?
Dr. Jaffe: I think that’s a very appropriate question for someone like me, because you would think I would say everyone needs what I do. But I’m not going to say that. I think you can start with 4 self assessments, you can start with betterlabtestsnow.com, which is a consumer portal to get information, inspiration and accurate interpretation of where you are. What if your hemoglobin A1C, for example, is less than 5%? What if your high sensitivity C reactive protein is less than 0.5? What if your homocysteine is less than 6? Well, then I would interpret your results differently than if the only thing I had was food sensitivity. Now we have the gold standard of delayed allergy. But delayed allergy is only a big part, not the entire part, of digestive issues. And John Hunter, very important guy in the United Kingdom, pointed out that there are intolerances. For example, let’s say you acquire a lactose intolerance to milk sugar. That’s not immune. But it will make you unhappy. That’s for sure.
Lindsey: I’ve got that. And I can tell you it makes me unhappy.
Dr. Jaffe: Haha, yes, unless you take lactose free milk. So you could put an enzyme called lactase on a column, pass the milk through that, the lactose becomes something else, but not lactose. And now it’s okay. And I’m pretty sure in most healthy markets, there is a little section called lactose-free milk. And by the way, I actually recommend you make your own almond milk at home or cashew milk – after you ferment your own cashews.
Lindsey: Okay, so at betterlabtestsnow.com you’ve at got these tests, but what should people look for first at that website?
Dr. Jaffe: Well, I think where they should go is predictive biomarkers. Tell me where you’re strong. And I’ll celebrate. Tell me where you’re weak. And I’ll tell you what to do.
Lindsey: I actually found on that website, the LRA test and saw that they ranged in price from about $397 to $1725 for the most Deluxe one, but all of them included foods, environmental chemicals, food additives and preservatives, molds and food colors.
Dr. Jaffe: If you want the everything test, it’s at the higher end, if you want selective testing, that’s an option. We provide the best quality of the best testing; you decide how much testing you need.
Probiotics, Prebiotics and Symbiotics
Lindsey: So tell me about some of the products that you designed for gut health and the research on their ingredients.
Dr. Jaffe: Well, in regard to gut health, we’re talking about prebiotics, probiotics and symbiotics. Prebiotics is fiber. Probiotics are bugs, but alive. Symbiotics is recycled glutamine. And now I’m going to paraphrase Dr. Denis Burkitt. He first won the Nobel Prize for Burkitt lymphoma. And then he had so many invitations to talk to journalists and others that he actually disconnected his phone and he went to Kenya. He became a missionary, a medical missionary, Nobel laureate. How many Nobel laureates do you know decamped to Kenya? And what he noticed he taught me personally. He said, “You know, when people there (like East Africa), when they live a traditional diet, which is high fiber, it’s somewhat subsistence, it’s feast and famine. There’s no irritable bowel syndrome. There’s no ulcerative colitis, there’s no mucal enteritis. There is no leaky gut, there are no digestive problems. It’s when they move to the city. And they have the challenges of the toxins of urban living. That’s when these problems occur. So we need 40 to 100 grams of fiber. That’s the prebiotic fiber, 40 to 100 grams a day of unprocessed fiber. And we need 40 to 100 billion healthy bugs. Isn’t that interesting: 40 to 100, 40 to 100. Different a little bit, but not much. One is fiber, and the other is bugs. And then we need recycled glutamine.
Lindsey: And what is recycled glutamine?
Dr. Jaffe: Well, glutamine is a very important amino acid. It’s the source of energy for your enterocytes, the cells that line your intestines, and make your leaky gut go away. But glutamine goes to glutamate unless you recycle it. So we actually pioneered how to recycle glutamine about 10-fold. So now you give 1.5 grams rather than 15. You give that on rising and before bed because it’s an amino acid recycled by PAK. PAK is called pyridoxyl alpha-ketoglutarate, if any of you are biochemists.
Lindsey: And so what is the product that you sell that is the recycled glutamine?
Dr. Jaffe: Yes, thank you. It’s called Endura/PAK guard (find at Fullscript).
Lindsey: And if you are eating plenty of protein, would you need something that provides glutamine?
Dr. Jaffe: The amount of protein that an adult human needs is 60 to 70 grams a day. And when you go above 60 to 70 grams a day, you add acid. Because the excess amino acids become keto acids, you’ll lose ammonia, that ammonia is lost in the urine, sweat. And still, it’s part of why people sweat in ways that are, shall I say, unpleasant?
Lindsey: So your probiotic product, I noticed that it doesn’t list the strains, but I presume that you’re using those strains that are numbered and researched?
Dr. Jaffe: First of all, we do have 10 billion active CFU (colony forming units). Ten active strains, between acidophilus and bifidus and strep thermophilus. What we do not include are the individual, proprietary, and shall I say manipulated strains, because we follow nature and nurture and wholeness. (Find Digesta Guard Forté 10 at Fullscript). We don’t follow vogue. And I don’t mean just Vogue magazine, I mean, scientific vogue. I mean, the fact that today people are looking for the magic probiotic that they can patent. I don’t think that’s actually a good idea. I think that that probiotics, prebiotics and synbiotics should be available to promote healthy intestinal digestion, assimilation and elimination.
Lindsey: Okay, so in other words, the strains that you’re using are more sort of general?
Dr. Jaffe: Not only they’re more general, more active. We actually harvest our strains in what’s called log phase, which means doubling. Wouldn’t you like a more potent probiotic? Well, most of what you get in almost every other probiotic is yogurt, freeze dried, or dried, and then powdered, and then put in a capsule. And by that time, by the time you get to plateau, by the time you get to too many organisms and too little nutrition, they’re cannibalizing each other. And when you cannibalize each other, you immunized the probiotic, so many people who are taking probiotics (and so need probiotics) are actually getting immuno probiotics, which we really, really, really don’t recommend.
Lindsey: And so you said they’re in a log phase. Can you explain a little bit more what that means?
Dr. Jaffe: Log phase means doubling 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256. I can’t go much above that. But doubling. There is a point where when you grow the organisms in the culture medium, they double, double, double, double, and then they plateau. When they plateau it’s easy to harvest the maximum number of bugs but they’re mostly dead and not only dead, they’re immunizing dead, and that’s a double harm.
Lindsey: What does that mean they’re immunizing?
Dr. Jaffe: Oh, immunizing means that they’re cannibalizing each other to the point where they leave remnants behind that will burden your immune defense and repair system, including endotoxins that my friend Ron Alene pioneered in the 70s. If you know about endotoxin, look up limulus crabs. My friend Ron, who still is a friend and a colleague, would go out once a year to San Diego – La Jolla, which we all thought was a nice place to visit, in order to harvest limulus crabs to get their fluids so that he can have a year’s worth of endotoxin assays back at the National Institutes of Health.
Lindsey: What are assays?
Dr. Jaffe: Oh, assays mean tests.
Lindsey: What’s the prebiotic product that Perque makes?
Dr. Jaffe: The prebiotic that Perque makes is multiple sources of unprocessed fiber called prebiotic fiber (Regularity Guard – find at Fullscript), because it nourishes the beneficial bugs in your gut. But it’s not bugs. Those are the probiotics.
Lindsey: Okay. And there has been some research of late that pointed to the idea that taking probiotics after antibiotics might not be a good idea because it takes longer to return to your base microbiome. But the people that I’m dealing with as clients already have a very disturbed gut microbiome that probably we don’t want to return to. So can you just comment on that research? And when it’s appropriate to use probiotics?
Dr. Jaffe: When I explain it, this is my answer. None so blind, as those who will not see. What I mean by that is you have very smart microbiologists and other scientists who are pathology oriented and not physiology knowledgeable, and they don’t know their elbow from a hole in the ground in regard to what we’re talking about. Because the whole conversation has changed in the last two or three years, because we’ve actually learned a bunch in the last two or three years. And so if you go back even five or 10 years, you can actually make recommendations than I am very sure will harm and not help. So this notion that oh gosh, we need antibiotics. Oh, and let me stop at that point. I’m a licensed medical doctor, at least in several jurisdictions like New York and California. I have never had a problem with my medical practice, because people have gotten better and not worse. And no, I haven’t given antibiotics in the last 30 years, probably more, because people didn’t have an antibiotic deficiency. What they had was a deficiency of the good stuff. So we give the good stuff, in sufficient amounts to crowd out the bad stuff. And guess what? That works.
Lindsey: So say somebody had a urinary tract infection, what would you give them?
Dr. Jaffe: Again, such really astute questions. Now say you have a person, more likely a woman than a man. But let’s say you have a person with a UTI, or a urinary tract infection, the first thing I would give them is a simple sugar called mannose. Why? Because there is science. And by the way, there’s good science and there’s bad science; I only want to talk about the good side. There is good science that says if you give this simple sugar called mannose, then some of the harm of a urinary tract infection can be reduced, while hopefully you restore the imbalance of the immune defense and repair system.
Lindsey: I actually have some of that mannose in my in my cupboard, and I’m curious what kind of doses do you need to actually begin that process?
Dr. Jaffe: Again, very good question. Let’s say you have a UTI and you’re irritable, for whatever reason, in that region of the body. I’m pretty sure that if you if you don’t take half a gram twice a day, it’s almost homeopathic, which may or may not work. And there are people who will give you 5 grams. And I don’t think that’s a harmful thing because mannose is one of those sugars that’s not metabolized. It’s not like glucose, it’s is not like fructose, it’s not a harmful sugar.
Lindsey: And how does it work? Does it attach to the bacteria and carry them out?
Dr. Jaffe: It prevents the bacteria from connecting with the wall of your genitourinary tract and therefore irritating it. You know, it prevents the connection. It basically pushes things away.
Lindsey: And so that on its own could clear a UTI?
Dr. Jaffe: Let me say three things about that. First of all, most urinary tract infections are not accurate. When you have a count of 50,000 bacteria in a urine specimen in regard to a urinary tract infection, I am 100% sure from running the labs at the NIH, that that means you didn’t have a clean catch. You didn’t have a sterile specimen. Only when you have a lot of bad bugs and not just bugs, you have to have a lot of bad bugs. If you have a lot of bad bugs, I want to get them out. If you only have a few bugs, I’m not sure. In fact, I’m very sure I wouldn’t treat a result without a meaning.
Lindsey: Given you have an accurate test, is mannose sufficient to clear UTI at appropriate doses?
Dr. Jaffe: Without question, mannose will reduce the symptoms. It is not alone sufficient.
Lindsey: And so would you add probiotics to that?
Dr. Jaffe: Well, since I’m a physiology before pharmacology physician, since I’m a scientist and not just a mystic, everyone, in my experience needs prebiotics, probiotics and symbiotics.
Lindsey: And if you are eating a sufficient amount of fiber, then you probably don’t need to take prebiotics, but few of us are actually doing that right?
Dr. Jaffe: 40 to 100 grams of prebiotic fiber means you’re chewing chili, and curry, and dal at almost every meal.
How to Help My Sciatica (and deal with inflammation in general) and Should I Take Curcumin Supplements?
Lindsey: So I actually have been going through sciatica and . . .
Dr. Jaffe: Is it really sciatica or is it? There’s an alternative, which is . . .
Lindsey: Yeah, it’s not piriformis syndrome, it’s really sciatica.
Dr. Jaffe: Okay, now, if it’s sciatica, you have an antioxidant deficiency, a magnesium choline citrate deficiency, and polyphenolic deficiency. Take them for three weeks and I want you to report back.
Lindsey: Okay, so I’m already taking vitamin C, but maybe not enough.
Dr. Jaffe: Based on a weekly C cleanse?
Lindsey: No, I’m not doing anything like to bowel tolerance.
Dr. Jaffe: What you’re thinking, my friend Bob Cathcart recommended bowel tolerance. I can tell you don’t do that. But do follow our recommendation for the C cleanse, one of the four personalized predictive biomarkers.
Lindsey: Right. And then magnesium, I’m already taking magnesium glycinate, 400 milligrams a day.
Dr. Jaffe: And your urine pH after rest is what?
Lindsey: I don’t measure that.
Dr. Jaffe: Until you do, you’re flying blind.
Lindsey: Okay, so what am I shooting for on my urine pH if I’m taking enough magnesium?
Dr. Jaffe: Six and a half to seven and a half – that’s only based on 1,227 studies.
Lindsey: Okay, that sounds like a sufficient number. And then the polyphenols, I have been taking the Perque product called Repair Guard (find at Fullscript). And I didn’t know what it was for, but I knew I was going to be interviewing you and it just caught my eye and I bought it. So is that something that’s useful in the polyphenol department? I know it has quercetin.
Dr. Jaffe: Well, it has quercetin dihydrate. So there’s quercetin, of which you should be concerned, and then there’s quercetin dihydrate, of which you should not be concerned. So for the last 35 years, we have combined quercetin dihydrate with soluble OPC. We have published multiple requested chapters and review articles showing that you can have good or bad polyphenolics, flavonoids and flavonols. And we want the good and we don’t want the bad.
Lindsey: Okay, so quercetin dihydrate is the safe format is what you’re telling me.
Dr. Jaffe: And let me give you another little anecdote. So my friend Bob calls me up and he says, Well, have you ever heard of resveratrol? And I said, “Yes. If you drink about 400 glasses of red wine, you’ll get a meaningful amount of resveratrol.” He says, “Yes, what do you think? I said, “Well, I think quercetin and soluble OPC.” He says, “Well, you know, I own the patents globally on resveratrol.” I said, “Sell them,” and he did.
Lindsey: Okay, so you thought they weren’t worth keeping?
Dr. Jaffe: When you have the better, stay with the better, if you need the worser, that’s your problem. Is that clear?
Lindsey: Yeah. Okay, so anyway, back to my sciatica. So you think I’m nutrient deficient, but I was just wondering about the products in terms of Repair Guard or Pain Guard Forté, would either be useful in helping with my sciatica pain?
Dr. Jaffe: In regard to your or anyone’s sciatica, you start with the 4 personal self assessments, you move on to the eight predictive biomarkers, interpret your best outcome values, and then you’ll be fine. My father had sciatica, I cured it.
Lindsey: I’ve been having it for like eight months. So it’s getting a bit urgent. And I’ve been taking every supplement anybody recommends. . .
Dr. Jaffe: . . .and they have been treating the back end of an ass. Forgive me for saying it that clearly. They’re not looking at the causes, they’re looking at the consequences. I understand that; most professionals do. So throw curcumin in that has lead. What value does curcumin from turmeric have when it has lead contamination? Negative. Oh, but I didn’t know it had lead. I actually thought it was curcumin. Well, it’s not. Because curcumin has to be heated and has to be met with piperine. It has to be part of dal or curry or other foods. So that’s why we start with what you eat and drink, think and do and then we don’t let you be dehydrated.
Lindsey: So if I have USP verified curcumin with bioperine, could I feel safe that that’s not lead contaminated?
Dr. Jaffe: It’s two points. First of all, when you start with a pepper corn, and you grind piperine onto a food, it lasts about one hour. And I’m pretty sure it’s been more than one hour before that piperine was exposed to whatever it was that you got in the supplement. And so it was a false, as in illusion, promise.
Lindsey: So would it be better to just grind up some pepper myself right then as I take my curcumin?
Dr. Jaffe: And not only fresh ground pepper, or fresh ground peppercorns, which I buy. And I buy the white, the black, the pink; it’s really very pretty. But I put them in a simple copper, as an Italian copper, grinder. And why do I do that? Because that keeps them away from mold and problems. And how do I grind them? Fresh. Because the piperine in my kitchen lasts one hour. In your kitchen, the piperine lasts one hour. When you have piperine in a product? It’s an illusion, because it’s not what you want.
Lindsey: And the reason that they put it in, in theory, is to extend the . . .
Dr. Jaffe: Oh no, no, the theory is that consumers are smart enough to know that the word piperine should be associated with the word curcumin, or turmeric, if you want better uptake. Except what the consumer doesn’t understand is time.
Lindsey: And so is there a Perque product that has curcumin?
Dr. Jaffe: Never.
Lindsey: Okay, so you think we should just be eating it fresh?
Dr. Jaffe: Yes, make a curry once or twice a week. Make a dal once or twice a week, make a chili once or twice a week. Do it with whole foods if you can. We want you to start in the kitchen. And we don’t want you to start with the supplements. We have supplements. They’re necessary. But they have to start after the kitchen.
Lindsey: Yeah, and I do like curry. Of course for people whose kids don’t like it, it’s more challenging to have it twice a week.
How to Get Your Kids to Eat Healthy
Dr. Jaffe: Well, no, no. Let’s talk about that for a minute. What I would do with children for a dal or a curry is noodles. But they would be bean curd noodles. Kids tend to like noodles. You know like slurp slurp slurp. I must tell you that my children were never very neat and we didn’t care. We just wanted them to eat. We just wanted them to enjoy what it was that we were eating. And by the way, there were times when my children said “I’m not going to eat that”. And we said, “What do you want to do?” And they said, “Call in for Uber” (Dad actually can do that). Well, maybe Dad can. But we’re not going to do that. We only have this and that and the other thing from the kitchen. “Well I don’t like you”. “I don’t care, I still love you.” “Oh, well, I’m hungry.” And then they would sit down and eat. If the children are in charge, it’s actually a problem.
Lindsey: Yeah, no, my kids eat curry. Just to say, it’s not my kids. I was referring to someone else’s kids.
Dr. Jaffe: No, I appreciate your point. You want to make it savory. You want to make it aromatic. You want to make it something that’s appetizing. You do not want to force them to eat something that you think is healthy that they hate you for. I promise you that will not end well.
Lindsey: Yes. No, it’s not fun to have battles at dinnertime with the kids.
Dr. Jaffe: No, but start with I’m tired and hungry, and then they’ll eat.
Which Vitamin C is Best? Is Liposomal Vitamin C a Superior Form?
Lindsey: Yeah. Okay, so let me ask about the Perque vitamin C because I heard you talking about it on another podcast and you made it sound like the way it’s made, that any other vitamin C supplement would be essentially useless. But I’m guessing that that’s probably an overstatement. So could you compare Perque’s vitamin C to others? And why are they different in terms of efficacy, like a percentage difference? Or how would they compare?
Dr. Jaffe: So most of the commercial vitamin C, which is 95 plus percent of the vitamin C you would buy in any store from health food to other, including online, is damaged. It is partially ascorbate. It’s partially diketogulonic acid, it’s partly dehydroascorbic acid. It is deficient. It’s not distilled under nitrogen. It is not nature’s vitamins. Since 1987, and for the last 30 plus years, we have provided nature’s vitamin C. Safer, uncontaminated, more effective, documented in clinical outcome studies, multiple, and documented for the last 35 plus years. It’s safer, more effective, when you use nature’s form. (Find it at Fullscript)
Lindsey: Okay, and by nature’s form, you mean if you were to say, eat an orange, you would get vitamin C in the same form as the Perque vitamin C supplement?
Dr. Jaffe: Good point. However, do you know the average orange moves more than 1000 miles by the time it goes from being picked to your eating it? It has 10% or less of the vitamin C that it started with. That’s a fact, that’s not an opinion. If you live in an area where you have your own citrus garden, and you pick your own tangerines, and you pick your own oranges, and you pick your own citrus fruit, Hmm, that’s a blessing.
Lindsey: Yeah, I planted a mandarin tree two years ago, and the first year it got decimated by a horrible – some sort of butterfly or the worm form. And then this year, I’ve got two mandarins on it. And boy, I’m watching those things grow so anxiously. I’m hoping one day I’m going to have a voluminous tree.
Dr. Jaffe: As long as the roots survived. I’m currently growing a nectarine and a tangerine that we think are going to survive in our zone seven.
Lindsey: I’m in Arizona, Tucson, so we can do citrus.
Dr. Jaffe: You absolutely can do citrus but it should be xeriscape. You have to drip the water in.
Lindsey: Yeah, that we have to get that set up. We have yet to have to put in drip irrigation. Okay, so tell me about what you think of liposomal vitamin C?
Dr. Jaffe: Well, since our recrystallized ascorbate gets 100% uptake and since most ascorbate gets a fraction of that, how much more than 100% do you think you could get on God’s green earth?
Lindsey: Okay, so in other words, no point in investing in liposomal, because the Perque is the best one. That’s sort of the end story?
Dr. Jaffe: To be really clear, liposomal ascorbate includes a significant fraction of the ascorbate that is not ascorbate. It is the liposome, and it is there on the premise that you can’t get the beneficial ascorbate in. And since we have documented over many decades 100% uptake of the recrystallized under nitrogen ascorbate that nature provides, we’re pretty sure that compromising that is really not a good idea. In fact, we’re very sure it’s a bad idea.
Lindsey: So I also noticed that Perque’s vitamin C pills are 1000 milligrams and I have read multiple times that you can only absorb 500 milligrams of vitamin C at any time.
Dr. Jaffe: You listen to people who don’t know their elbow from a hole in the ground, and are pathologists rather than physiologists, who are my friends, and I specifically mean Mark Levine at the National Institutes of Health. I specifically mean the Food and Drug Administration, who has for many years obscured, not clarified, the issue of how much do you need. Because if you want to avoid scurvy, I mean, scurvy, if you want to avoid your teeth falling out when you sail on the Pacific, or the Atlantic Ocean, oh, you only need a dusting, as in an orange or a lime. They were called limeys for some reasons. Haha, that has nothing to do with health. If you want to know how much ascorbate you need, you’ll have to do a C Cleanse. It’s one of our four personalized assessments, followed by eight predictive biomarkers, interpreted to best outcomes values, if you want to be well and healthy in the 21st century.
Perque Brain Formula
Lindsey: Okay, I got it. So is there anything that Perque or you are working on right now, any new products that might be coming out soon?
Dr. Jaffe: Again, thanks for asking the question. We have long needed, and now have perfected, what we call Perque brain formula, brain like cognition, you know. Like, I’m not going to take periwinkle, I’m going to take something a little more effective. And I think you know this – I’m no longer a spring chicken. So I actually want my brain to work. At least for as long as it does. I cannot control when a piano might fall out of the sky, or when the good Lord is going to take me. In the meantime, I don’t lose my memory. If you can’t remember your loved ones, it’s really not a very pleasant place to be.
Lindsey: And so is the brain formula already out then?
Dr. Jaffe: It’s coming out very soon.
Lindsey: Does it have a name?
Dr. Jaffe: Yes. It has a very interesting name. It’s called Perque Brain Formula.
Lindsey: Okay. So it’s very transparent. We can keep our eyes out for that.
Dr. Jaffe: And you can place orders now because it’s really coming out very soon. It’s in production. Now, we have pioneered a better formula. And yes, we’re very proud.
Lindsey: What kinds of ingredients?
Dr. Jaffe: Everything you would like and nothing you wouldn’t.
Lindsey: Okay. I guess people can look at the label.
Dr. Jaffe: Haha, there’s more than one thing on the label.
Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. It’s a multi-item formula.
Dr. Jaffe: Right. synergistic.
Lindsey: Is there anything that you wished I had asked you about the topic of gut health that I didn’t?
Dr. Jaffe: You’ve asked so many good questions. No, I think I’ve had a chance to say my “truth”. I think, as you know, I came as a skeptic, but I’m now here. I think physiology before pharmacology, I think nature and nurture and wholeness. I think living in harmony with nature. I think knowing what you can eat, assimilate and digest and eliminate without immune burden is a stepping stone toward lifelong health and well-being. And I want to be dancing at 120 with folks like you, because if I’m the only one dancing at 120, it’s lonely.
If you want more help with your gut, autoimmune or other health issues, you can set up a free, 30-minute Breakthrough Session with me (Lindsey) to share what you’ve been going through and decide whether my 5-appointment gut health coaching program or a longer program for autoimmunity or weight loss is a good fit for you. Individual 1-hour consultations may be scheduled directly here.
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