My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph, a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants. Today we’ll be talking about your immune system: how it works and the best things to do to protect yourself from catching colds and flu this season—without a flu shot. Pamela is a 1990 graduate of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, where she studied Pharmacognosy (the study of medicines derived from plants and other natural sources). She has worked as an integrative pharmacist teaching physicians, pharmacists and the general public about the proper use of botanicals. She is also a grant reviewer for NIH in Washington D.C. and the owner of Botanical Resource and Botanical Resource Med Spa in Clearwater, Florida. www.botanicalresource.com

 

 

LISTEN TO OTHER SHOWS WITH PAMELA SEEFELD

 

• Vaccines: Harmful or Necessary?
• Evaluating A Study and Testing a Test
• Seven Deadly Drugs
• The Hidden Dangers Affecting Your Heart and How You Can Protect It Naturally
• What We Can Do About Cancer
• The Power of pH
• How to Protect Your Health From Toxic Mercury Dental Fillings
• Pharmacology 101: How to Use What Pharmacists Know to Take Supplements to Best Advantage
• Are You Heading For Kidney Failure? Natural Remedies Can Help
• How to Keep Your Blood Vessels Open and Flowing With Supplements
• How Inactivity Leads to Illness and Drug Use—And How Exercise Can Get You Off Drugs and into Health
• How to Protect the Environment from Pharmaceutical Pollution by Using Natural Medicinals
• Hidden Toxic Dangers in Common Dietary Supplements
• See More Clearly with Natural Remedies
• Hidden Mental Health Dangers in Common Drugs
• Different Types of Detox
• Getting Off Prescription Drugs with Natural Remedies
• How Natural Remedies Could Have Saved A Life
• Natural Alternatives to Sleeping Pills
• Natural Back Pain Treatment Options That Work
• How Toxics Age Your Body & What You Can Do to Stay Young
• You CAN Lose Weight—Even if You’ve Had Difficulty Losing Weight Before
• Calcium—Is There Really a Deficiency in America?
• How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health
• Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs
• Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How To Choose the Right One for You
• Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld

Date of Broadcast: September 24, 2014

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.

It’s September 24th 2014 and it’s a beautiful early – well, I was going to say ‘early autumn day’, but it’s not early autumn anymore because yesterday was the autumn equinox, so we’re officially in the middle of autumn. Here where I live in Clearwater, Florida, that means that instead of it being 90° higher day and night, it’s now 80°. And it was 70° overnight. So I’m very happy it’s getting cooler.

My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who prefers to dispense medicinal plants rather than drugs and she’s telling us – I have her on every other Wednesday and we’re doing a whole series on how you can use plants to heal your body. And if you’re taking any prescription or over-the-counter drugs, how you can get off of those drugs and use plants instead.

Today, we’re going to be talking about why you shouldn’t get a flu shot and how you can support your immune system during cold and flu season so that you won’ t get sick or if you do, then it’s less of a problem.

Hi, Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey! Great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you! Great to have you here. So first, before we talk about colds and flus and shots and all of those things, I want to talk about me.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s good.

DEBRA: I want to talk about the work that you and I have been doing and particularly, a couple of weeks ago, I stopped taking insulin.

Now, the reason that I have been taking insulin is because obviously, for blood sugar, but I only started taking it as an emergency. I was doing well controlling my blood sugar with diet and exercise. And even though it wasn’t normal, it was good enough for me.

But then last summer (not this year, but the summer of 2013), my blood sugar went way up into a dangerous area and nothing I did could bring it down. And so I started taking insulin as an emergency life-saving kind of thing at the insistence of my medical doctor. But then I kept doing things to heal my body. Was it really necessary to continue to take insulin?

Some of you know that earlier this year, I went on a Paleo diet for 30 days and during that time, I reduced the amount of insulin I was taking by half. And then after I started working with Pamela a couple of months ago (it’s been a couple of months now), but I think it’s just been about a month where it was time to buy another bottle of insulin for $200. And I said, “Pamela, isn’t there something else I can do?” and she said, “Of course, there is!”

PAMELA SEEFELD: And I said yes!

DEBRA: So tell us what you told me to do.

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is what I told her to do, Debra and this is what we normally do with people that are transitioning off of insulin or especially oral hypoglycemic like metformin and glyburide and some of these popular drugs.

What you have is type II diabetes. Someone that has type I diabetes has been a diabetic since they were a little kid. That’s a different situation. The pancreas just never really worked correctly. In your case, what happened is you get insulin resistance and the insulin is just not working correctly in the body and the pancreas is not producing correctly after a while because it’s kind of overtaxed at one point.

So what we’re doing is we gave you homeopathic medicine, pericardium triple warmer. These particular brands of homeopathy that I use, that particular company only sells to pharmacists and doctors. It’s not at the health food store. It has to be prescribed.

What this does is it actually starts making your beta cells and your pancreas to start working again. I use this with countless patients. They’re off their medicines, they’re doing great. And what we do is we’re offering – the way I approach things, I want a cure. I don’t want to just give you something to replace what you already did.

And when we were discussing that, $200 is a lot of money to put towards the insulin. We are already trying to transition you off. It’s like, “Okay, look, we can just up the dose of this particular product and do a circulating enhancer to get them into the beta cells and it’s working great. “

DEBRA: It is working great. I mean, it isn’t costing me $200, but it is costing me over a hundred dollars to buy that amount in order to do that for the same period of time as I would have had to pay $200. But here’s the big thing. All insulin does is control your symptom. It’s just there to make your blood sugar not so high. It’s not doing a thing to help heal your body. And so now, what I’m spending my money on is something that is actually healing my pancreas.

And in all these years, nobody had ever given me anything to heal my pancreas. All they were trying to do was control my symptoms.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. And the other thing I want to tell you too is that you won’t eventually be using two to three bottles a month. After a while, the pancreas is going to kick – it’s kicking in gradually and you’re going to see huge declining of blood sugar.

DEBRA: Well, I’m expecting that. But what I’m happy about right now today after two weeks (or maybe it’s been three weeks, something like that) is that without my insulin taking what Pamela gave me to take, my blood sugar is the same as it was on insulin.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yehey!

DEBRA: I was a little afraid. When I went to her, I said, “Well, I don’t want to buy my insulin. What could we do?” and she says, “Well, let’s just try this because you can always go buy your bottle of insulin if your blood sugar just goes crazy.” And what happened was that for the first couple of days, it just like went up and went down and went up and went down. And then, it evened out just right where it is. And every day, it’s just right at that level. And even though it’s not going down yet, I know that I’m just waiting for my pancreas to heal and then it’s going to down. And then I’m going to be taking less. And then I’ll be taking nothing. I’ll be able to have a normal pancreas.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. I mean, it’s going to come. The thing is with these cells – I mean, in most cases, most people, they never regenerate at all. But in your case, we’re giving homeopathic products that actually open up the meridians in those areas and actually target those cells completely instead of just doing just some general cleanse and that kind of thing.

This product is specifically for the little assignment I gave it. That works exactly like that. I’ve seen it very reproducibly work in a lot of patients.

DEBRA: I think this is just wonderful. And this is only just an example of what Pamela does. I just wanted to tell all of you that it’s possible to actually heal your body and it’s not about taking drugs or even natural remedies to control your symptoms. What we want to go for here is healing, regeneration of the damage that toxic chemicals and toxic foods and all those things are doing to your body that you want to detox, stop being exposed to and regenerate.

And now, I’m starting to regenerate. It makes me so happy. It just makes me so happy.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s wonderful. I’m very happy for you. You’re doing great.

DEBRA: Thank you.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I’m glad I could help… I am.

DEBRA: So I do want to say right off right now that you can call Pamela if you have health issues you want to talk to her about, if you’re on some drugs you want to get off of, if you have loved ones with health issues or drugs that they should be getting off of. You can call her on the phone and she will talk to you for free and advise you about what you can take instead. You want to give them the number?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, the number is here to my pharmacy, Botanical Resource. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I highly recommend her especially if you have – like I know in my body, I’ve had a lot of difficult situations especially from all the toxic poisoning that I have had in my life and my body not functioning in all its wonders because of that. A lot of things that I’ve tried to do hasn’t worked over the years and everything that she’s given me is working. It’s just like night and day especially if you’re a difficult case.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, I’m very proud of what I do here. I’m very happy I can help you. I’ve been doing this over 20 years. I teach this.

I’m a really good chemist. I look at the products, I look at the ingredients and I decide what I’m going to use them for. So it’s much more than like me taking a class and someone old me that “Do this for that.” As a pharmacist, that’s how we learn, “These drugs go for certain things.” You have to sometimes think out of the box and look and see what’s really happening in a person’s body and target the exact ingredient to go to where you want it to go.

DEBRA: And she just does that very well. So when we come back from the break (because we’re already through the first segment), we’re going to talk about flu shots, why you shouldn’t take them and how your immune system works and what you can do to support your immune system as we go into the cold and flu season.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She is a registered pharmacist who dispenses medical plants – and there’s a word for that. It’s a pharmacognosist. I love that one. So we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants. And today, we’re talking about what you can do so that you don’t have the flu.

So let’s start. I saw something, I get a lot of newsletter from different places, but one came last week that talked about how Dr. Oz had a show where he was talking about mercury in flu shot. Mercury is certainly something that we don’t want to be putting into our bodies. I think that there are some other reasons why not to take flu shots. Could you talk about that first because I know every place I go, they’re saying, “Have you had your flu shot?”

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s true, that’s true. They do ask that quite a bit. Well, this is the thing with the flu shot. We’ll just kind of backtrack for one second. We’ll talk about the immune system, okay?

DEBRA: Okay.

PAMELA SEEFELD: How do you keep your immune system working really well so you don’t even need the flu shot or even considering it? If your immune system is depressed, you’re going to be at risk for not only the flu, but a host of other colds and things that come around during the winter time. And we’re going to start going into cold and flu. That’s called cold and flu. It’s the two of them.

Your immune system acts on certain different things. There’s cellular and humoral and mediated immune system. The humoral is these things called chemotactic factors. They’re little signals that bring the immune system to the area. It’s kind of like a little signal like little beacons, “Come over here and take care of this.”

The immune system that goes after just in general any kind of cell (it can be a bacterial or a fungus or a virus) are called leukocytes. When people are sick and their immune system is trying to launch a response, you get these huge increases of leukocytes. And leukocytes are kind of cool because they don’t actually have an assignment. They just go everywhere. They look around for the tissue. These little factors bring it to the tissues. So how can we enhance these first line defenses so that no matter what you get in contact with, you’re not going to get sick?

A big thing is, believe it or not, diet. We have found – and I just downloaded some different studies here – that the t-cells, the t-lymphocytes, which is what’s affected in AIDS patients, when their immune system goes really low and they’re able to be infected with AIDS, we know that vegetables and fruits regulate and up-regulate t-cell activity to go to find viruses.

So when we want to prevent getting sick in the first place (because let’s face it, we know we don’t want to do the flu shot altogether), let’s get the immune system working better so you don’t need to have it.

The preservatives that are in – that’s pretty easy step. We always talk about diet, but there’s actually proof now that shows that these t-cells are up-regulated specifically by what you eat.

DEBRA: Oh!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Another thing too is stress control. Now, people that are stressed out, they have increases in cortisol in their blood stream and it suppresses the immune system, an increase of inflammation.

I’ll give you an example. If I go in a room and there’s like 20 people there and one person has the flu, will everybody get the flu, Debra?

DEBRA: No.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No. Right! That’s the trick. You’re saying, “No, I’m not going to get the flu.” What Dr. Oz is saying and commenting on those things is that when you have a flu shot, you’re launching an immune response. That’s what it does.

A flu shot and vaccines are kind of like homeopathy, but they’re not. I don’t want to confuse people. You’re getting a small amount of a causative agent to try and elicit an immune response. So what happens those little cells that were called in, they come to the area and they make antibodies. And so supposedly, supposedly, when you come in contact with the virus, you’re not going to get it.

You know what percentage of people still end up with the flu even with the flu shot?

DEBRA: I don’t know, but…

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s over 50%.

DEBRA: So over 50%? It doesn’t work.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s pretty high, yeah. They still end up with the flu. So when we look at it, we have to say, “Okay, the flu shot is bad.

We really shouldn’t get it.” But really, what we need to do is make our immune system work like it should work, so that if I’m sitting next to you and you’re sneezing and coughing, you have the flu, I don’t get it.

DEBRA: That’s right. So how do we do that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s the trick, to prevent it. If we want to prevent it, there’s some simple things you can do. What you’re eating is very important. If you’re going to eat fruits and vegetables, especially vegetables that have – you know, we’ve always talk about all these bioflavinoids and these immune system enhancement. You need to have oil, some kind of fat present on the vegetables to be absorbed.

Otherwise, you’re not going to be getting the benefit of bioflavinoid.

And taking a good multivitamin is also important. I would really like to comment that fish oil has an excellent immune response. It increase the immune system and lowers inflammations consistently and that’s an easy thing to take. If you don’t want to take fish oil capsules, you can even take sardines. If you have sardines a few times a week, that’s very preventative as well.

The immune system, the biggest depressant of the immune system is stress. It sounds crazy because people are talking about stress and anxiety. But if you’re really stressed out and you are not sleeping correctly, a lot of that is going to affect your immune system, right?

DEBRA: Yes.

PAMELA SEEFELD: And we know that glucocorticoids, which is cortisol that’s released from the adrenal gland – like people get adrenal fatigue where the cortisol is just released and released constantly. We know that excessive amounts of glucocorticoids in the blood stream can really depress the immune system. So stress control is really important.

If you take calming fish oil or passion flower or maybe do some yoga or some breathing techniques, you try and control your reactions to stress in everyday life, things like that. If you look at most people, when they end up getting the flu, it’s through at a point where they’re underslept and they’re anxious, so they have a lot of stress going on in their life.

DEBRA: Right! And you know, I’ve really noticed that most of the time, I can handle a normal amount of stress and even an extraordinary amount of stress. But when my adrenal glands go out, then I can’t handle any stress at all.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly!

DEBRA: And so I would say that if people are finding that they can’t handle stress and that they fly up the handle or that any little thing bothers them or if something goes wrong and they just got upset about it and they can’t do anything about it, that is a sure sign that the adrenals are being stressed and that you should do something to strengthen your adrenals.

So would it be a correct assumption to say if you have adrenal problems that your immune system is going to be less functional because of the stress?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. Yes, that’s exactly right. This sounds crazy because this sounds like elementary advice. But if you, like you’re saying, flying off the handle at little things, can’t keep your stress under control, that’s a big part of your immune system. It basically shuts everything down.

I’ll give you an example. When you have an immune response and the doctors are trying to control, say, an allergy or a rash, they give you prednisone. Prednisone is a steroid, it’s a glucocorticoid. You make cortisol in your body from your adrenals. It’s the same thing. That’s why they give you that, because your adrenals aren’t working correctly. You’re not preventing a severe immune response, so that’s why they’re giving it to you in a pill.

What I tell people is that you need to make sure that your adrenals are working correctly to make sure that you can launch a stress response.

DEBRA: Interesting. Well, we need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants that’s called a pharmacognosist. I’m still loving that word. I love it because it means drug cog- as intelligence. So you’re dispensing intelligent plants that have drug-like effects I guess. So we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants. We’re talking about what you can do for your immune system now that it’s getting to be cold and flu season so that your body will just fight off those bacteria and viruses and germs and you won’t get sick because that’s what your immune system is supposed to do.

I just want to interject that there are many toxic chemicals. The way that I got interested in this in the first place is because my immune system was damaged by toxic chemicals. There’s so many toxic chemicals that harm the immune system that there’s a whole class of chemicals called immunotoxicants, which destroy your immune system.

We’re all being exposed to them day in and day out unless we do something to not be exposed to those immunotoxicant. What I found was in order to heal my own immune system so that I wasn’t just reacting to everything all day long – it was like I couldn’t even wear a cotton share without reacting to it. Even things that people aren’t allergic to, my body would react to because my immune system was damaged by these toxic chemicals.

The thing that I really want to emphasize is that if your immune system is damaged, it leaves you wide open to catching anything that’s an infectious disease. So it’s not just cold and flu. Another thing in the headlines of newsletters I get is ebola virus. In Africa, there’s a big problem with it. Well, what if it came over here and we started having an epidemic of ebola? If your immune system is not in good shape, you’re going to be one of the first ones. This is just what happens.

And so our immune system is – everything in the body is important, but I can’t imagine life without a functioning immune system. You would just be open to everything.

Do you remember many years of ago, there was a movie I think with John Travolta called the ‘Boy in the Plastic Bubble?’

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes.

DEBRA: Remember that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yep.

DEBRA: Well, that’s somebody who doesn’t have an immune system.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right.

DEBRA: That’s what it would be like. So I can’t stress how important this is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, your immune system is like a little army. Like I said, it’s a front, right, front and center looking to see. There’s all these different cells. Some of them are little beacons and say where the problem is and others actually go and just keep combing the area to find where they can go and activate so that they can engulf – kind of like amoeba, they engulf the different viruses and bacteria.

What I’ll say too is that I just looked at a new position statement on exercise. People that do intense exercise, they’re just like kind of the Weekend Warriors, they’ll go out and do too much, it actually suppresses your immune system.

But moderate exercise actually increases your immune system. When you do moderate exercise, it actually increases these neutrophils and lymphocytes and these different cells that go after it. It’s a transient increase and so it actually activates your immune system to go after infections. So I’m talking about walking, biking and things like that, not running a marathon, which can actually be counterproductive for some people. So exercise is important.

But I’m going to talk a little bit about supplements too.

DEBRA: Okay, good. Go ahead.

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is probably what most people are interested in. So we talked about we got to protect stress, we got to help the immune system.

If we looked at a product called andrographis (it’s an herb), an andrographis is very, very great as far as the immune response. I call this an herbal antibiotic. Now technically, it’s not an antibiotic, but it’s one of these things that you can use if somebody has an infection brewing or say that they’ve – a lot of times, when people have the cold or flu, they go to the doctor and they give them a Cipro or a Z-Pak and they really don’t have a bacterial infection. They give them antibiotics just to make them happy.

So now, when we do this, if someone comes to me and said, “I don’t want to take these prescription” or “I’ve been on all these different prescriptions and it’s not working,” andrographis is where they might go to. That increases the white blood cells, increases the lymphocytes, the neutrophils and all these different cells that have really specific assignments to go in the immune system and to take care of bacteria and viruses. It elevates that tremendously. It’s inexpensive and it works great.

You can get it at a health food store. I use a medical version of it, but I know that the health food stores sell it too. So, andrographis is great.

DEBRA: Could you spell that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, andrographis. So it’s A-N-D-R-O-G-R-A-P-H-I-S.

DEBRA: Good. Thank you. I’m sure some people will go get that.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Andrographis is great. Now, there’s a product from Heel. I’m not affiliated with the company, but Heel is a German company that does homeopathic products (a great, great company) and they have a product called Engestrol. Engestrol, you can get that even off of the Internet. It’ll say right there for flu. I’m sure it’s going to be prominently displayed on any website. Engestrol is what they’re using in Germany in place of flu shots.

DEBRA: Oh!

PAMELA SEEFELD: And this goes after viruses. It’s an increase in the lymphocyte activity, the lymphocytes that go after viruses by 95%.

You can give this to children and babies and adult. So I use this a lot. People, I tell them, “Just keep it in your purse. You put them underneath your tongue. You can do one or two a day as needed.”

Say you have a little child in childcare and you’re worried about cold and flu (you know, little kids pass these things back and forth to each other), you might want to use this. When you give them to infants and you use any kind of homeopathic pills, you want to crash it between two spoons and then put a little water and make a paste and put it on the gums of the baby. That works very good too.

DEBRA: Hmmm… so can you take that as a preventive like if you’re going out and you don’t want to get something, you just take that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yup, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. When people are traveling, I tell them to take it as a preventive. If you’re feeling you’re getting sick, you can take even more. I feel it’s perfectly safe even if you take up to eight tablets a day of that product.

So Engestrol is the real go-to because like I said, in Europe, they’re using that on the frontline instead of using the flu vaccines.

DEBRA: Okay, spell that one too. Spell that one too.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, let’s see, Engestrol. E-N-G-E-S-T-R-O-L.

DEBRA: Okay, good.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Engestrol. That would be really an excellent product to have around, kind of a go-to product in your house for your children, for yourself. There’s a lot of excellent data on that. It’s very, very effective.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about coconut oil.

DEBRA: Good!

PAMELA SEEFELD: Coconut oil is probably one of the most underutilized supplement for viruses. Most people think about cognitive issues and of course, there’s data with dementia. A lot of people are using it for that, for prevention or for stopping some of the advancement of dementia in elderly patient. But coconut oil is a great product especially for children and for adults, but especially for little kids.

When I see someone come in and they have a little child getting colds and flu and viruses and things like that because the immune system is really low, the coconut oil, what it does is it’s medium chain triglycerides. So it’s not actually fat. You don’t actually store it. So it’s kind of like a free calorie. Coconut oil, with MCT oil, it contains lauric acid. And lauric acid has the effect of lowering viral activity probably up to 75%. So it can stop shedding and activity in the bloodstream.

I use this a lot where someone comes to me and says, “I’m using the Engestrol. I’m really concerned. All the kids at the preschool have this cold or flu” or whatever they’re trying to prevent, coconut oil in the kids’ food. It works great.

DEBRA: Wow! I didn’t know that at all and it’s so easy and so inexpensive. We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld, registered pharmacist who uses, as you’ve been hearing, medicinal plants and foods in order to handle all kinds of body conditions. We’ll hear more about what you can do for your immune system in the cold and flu season when we come back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a registered pharmacist who uses medicinal plants and foods and other natural things in order to make people’s bodies heal, actually heal. She doesn’t just get rid of symptoms. She actually wants to make the body well.

That’s what I think is one of the big differences. A drug is just about symptoms, a lot of natural remedies are just about symptoms, but she actually does something that’s healing.

Pamela, can you tell us, just you mentioned coconut oil fighting viruses and flu. Can you tell us a couple of ways that people can use coconut oil if they’re unfamiliar with it and how they can use it for their food?

DEBRA: Yeah, great question. Okay! So coconut oil comes in capsules and it comes in solid. Sometimes, people, if I tell them, “I want you to put a tablespoon of coconut oil” and it looks like a clear fat. It has no coconut taste. Some of them do have a coconut taste. If it’s unrefined, it’s going to have a little bit of coconut taste. Most of the ones you’re going to get don’t have coconut taste. If you don’t like coconut, you don’t have to worry. It’s not going to taste strong coconut.

And what I normally recommend that I know for myself, what I do if I feel like my throat is getting sore, if I have my lymph glad swollen a little bit, if I’m feeling kind of run down, I like to put it on a cracker. I make my own organic crackers and just spread a little bit of almond. I eat a cracker before I go to bed. When I wake up in the morning, all the swelling in my neck have gone.

DEBRA: Wow!

PAMELA SEEFELD: It’s quick and easy and it works great. I use it a lot too for mono. I see a lot of mono where kids in highschool have mono and the parents come to me and like, “She’s on the basketball team” or, “She’s on the tennis team. She needs to get back to where she was. She can’t be laying on the coach.” I see a lot of that where young people come to me, teenagers and we have to get them back in shape within a few weeks instead of them lingering on with this.

Coconut oil is quick. It’s within a few days and the person turns the corner. So if you’re looking for a quick result, but especially for children. What I recommend for the little kids is just mix it with their food. Pretty much, at room temperature, let’s say your house is – like if you’re in Florida, it can be like 80° depending on what time of the year it is, it’ll be like a semi-solid. If you put it in the refrigerator, it will be solid.

And if you have it in your cupboard, depending on the temperature of your house, if it’s in the low 70° or in the 60°, it probably will be solid.

If it’s in the 80°, you and I might leave the air conditioning off during the day and come back later on, it might be liquid. So it just depends.

You can literally mix it into food. You can melt it a little bit if you want to to to put it on things. I like it on popcorn really. I think it tastes great.

DEBRA: I was going to say that. I was going to say that because what I found is that if you make your own popcorn at home, which you should and not buy it in a bag (you can make your own organic popcorn at home), you have the issue of heating up bat enough to be able to make the popcorn pop. And I think the coconut oil is the perfect oil to pop corn in because you can heat it up and put in the popcorn and it just pops right up.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Absolutely!

DEBRA: It doesn’t taste like butter, but it has its own pleasant taste I think. I mean, I’m somebody who likes coconut, so what I like to eat is coconut manna or coconut butter, which is coconut oil with some coconut meat in it.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great.

DEBRA: I just think that that’s delicious. If it gets kind of melty so that you can pour it, what I do is that I put it in just on a baking sheet. I put little globs of it on a baking sheet and put it on the freezer. It actually turns into something like a candy. It has its own sweetness and you can put a little mint flavoring or whatever and it’s just like eating white chocolate. That’s what it tastes like, white chocolate. There’s no sugar in it or anything, but those coconut manna, frozen tastes like white chocolate.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, you’re exactly right. I’ll tell you, coconut is great for the family to just cook their food in it. You could throw vegetables in it. And what’s good about coconut oil instead of good butter and olive oil, the burning point where it starts to smoke and smolder is much lower in coconut oil. Coconut oil, you’d have to put it in the calorimeter. You cannot reach that temperature in normal cooking conditions in your home. So it will never burn, it will never smoke. You can walk away from it, come back to there if you’re throwing vegetables in it and chopping it up. So it’s very versatile. You can just mix it in with the food.

So the coconut oil is great. I’m going to talk a little about too about astragalus. Astragalus works on the t4 lymphocyte, the cell that’s affected in AIDS patients, but can affect for our immune system and for viruses. Astragalus is an inexpensive herb. You can take that to enhance the immune system as well.

So really obvious things, you can be cooking with coconut oil and the engestrol, maybe you have that sitting around for your kids and either the andrographis or the astragalus could be a back up product if you really wanted to do that.

Now, I wanted to talk about one thing really quickly about the stress effect. I found something. Do you know – and this is really interesting.

I did a full MedLine search, the National Library of Medicine last night to look at different things that affect the immune system.

This was just published and archived to toxicology this year, 2014, September 12th. It’s called the The Role of Oxidative Stress and Carbon Nanotube-generated Health Effects. I was not really aware of this and I thought this was very interesting that I’d like to tell your listeners.

Carbon nanotubules are a type of nanotechnology that is ubiquitous. It’s all over the place. It’s in semiconductors. It’s in radios. It’s in our phone. It’s in car parts and in electronics. What they found is that these nanotubules, because it’s nano technology, they could come on to our body and we can breathe them in.

And what they have found now, some of these toxicologists is that exposure to these carbon nanotubules is associated with depletion of antioxidants, increasing reactive oxygen species, cellular damage, inflammation signaling is impaired. So the immune system can be impaired from the electronics.

I’m not saying you’re going to throw away your phone. I’m just saying that we need to just be aware of this. The scientists are even questioning some of the safety of the nanotubules. It damages DNA. Now, I’ll let you ask some questions. What do you think of that?

DEBRA: I think we shouldn’t be using nanotechnology at all. More and more, I read these kinds of things or hear them from you. My first question is what do we do to counteract that?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well yeah, this is really important. I could be maybe far-guessing in this, but I will tell you that homeopathy would probably be your best bet because homeopathic medicine kind of goes where it needs to go and it has a very generalized assignment in the body other than specifically targeted herbs, vitamins or medicine.

But I didn’t realize that these nanotubules are coming onto people and they’re breathing them in. I thought that was pretty upsetting. I don’t really want to change the tone of the conversation, but I wanted to make sure that people were aware that there’s a lot of other things going on that are affecting our immune system – some, we can control and some, we can’t.

But in all realism, you really need to be taking some of these supplements to counteract some of the things that are going to be affecting your immune system. You have to do what you can about the things that you have control over.

DEBRA: Do what you can. That’s exactly what I was going to say. Do what you can about the things that you have control over because there’s so many things we don’t have control over that we need to give our bodies the best chance we can.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, most definitely. So the exercise, the healthy food. You’ve all heard these things before. I will tell you to have the coconut oil at the house and Engestrol is a really good product. I’m still really a bit fan of Body Anew, which is the homeopathic detox product that I use because that actually elevates humoral and cellular immunity. It works on both parts of the immune system.

I’ve been doing it consistently for 15 years. You don’t have to do it every single day, but it does basically scan the body and remove out things that aren’t supposed to be there (bacteria and viruses). Your immune system works in a much better level as far as the cellular level and effectivity level.

DEBRA: And I’ll tell you, I have seen Pamela. You can look at her picture, but she’s one of the healthiest people I’ve ever met. She really is. Her skin glows and she’s very happy and energetic and just all the things that you would want to be.

And so I see the results of what she talks about in her and I see the results of what she’s giving me. I see these same kind of results starting to happen. I can’t say enough.

So we only have two minutes left. Do you want to give your phone number again?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, most definitely. So if there’s any questions, they can call me at my pharmacy. It’s 727-442-4955. That’s 727-442-4955. I would be glad to help you with any condition you might have for yourself, for your pet. I treat pretty much everything. And also, I get people off of medications if they’re interested in that as well. I really appreciate everything.

DEBRA: And she really loves to get people off mental medications especially.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Specifically, correct. Mental health is a specialty that I’m very good at. I’ve done this for a long time. So anybody that’s on psychiatric medicines that wants to look for something other than that that actually works, I can talk you through it. It’s pretty easy and pretty inexpensive to do.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah. I’m just always impressed when I hear some stories about what she’s doing. We only just have less than a minute left, so do you want to tell us a really quick story about somebody that you treated that had a big surprise this week?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yeah, yeah. Actually, we’re talking about the immune system, I had a lady come to me last week and her little child was in daycare and had been constantly getting sick, constantly getting sick, constantly at the doctor – ear infections, throat infections, all these sort of stuff. She works full-time. She’s just a professional lady.

She’s very upset about the whole thing. She goes, “I don’t have time to keep taking my child at a daycare.” I said, “Look, the coconut oil.

Use the coconut oil.” She looked at me like I was crazy. I said, “Look, just put the coconut oil in the baby’s food in the little baby jar. Put it in there, warm it up, half a teaspoon twice a day.

She called me not even 48 hours later and said, “You know what? She’s better.” She’s not coughing anymore. All the drippiness stopped.

Anyway, it was a significant change within a short period of time.

You would be surprised. Natural products work very well, and I’ll tell you, especially about psychiatric products. I get people off of medicines every single day especially anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medicine and even narcotics.

DEBRA: And I would stop you because the music is going to come on. So thank you so much.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, thank you so much.

DEBRA: Pamela will be on again two weeks from today. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well.