My guest today is Pamela Seefeld,R.Ph, a pharmacist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances to heal the body, instead of drugs. We’ll be talking about different kinds of fish oils, their health benefits, and how to choose the right one for you. Pamela was my guest on 30 July (see Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs) and was so informative that I invited her to be a regular guest (she’s going to be on every other Wednesday). 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?
• It’s Cold and Flu Season—How to Support Your Immune System and Why You Shouldn’t Get a Toxic Flu Shot
• How Eating Fruits and Vegetables Help Your Cells Create Health
• Toxic Psychiatry and How to Have Mental Health Without Drugs
• Medicinal Plants Can Replace Toxic Drugs

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Why You Should Take Fish Oil and How to Choose the Right One For You

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Pamela Seefeld, R.Ph

Date of Broadcast: August 13, 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 and in fact, how to do things that are helpful and regenerative for those of us (which includes everybody) whose bodies have been damaged by toxic chemical exposure.

Whether you know it or not, if you live in this world today, that’s what’s happening. And your body, if you have any kind of health problems, any kind of illness, it’s probably being contributed to by your toxic chemical exposure for everyday products that you’re using in your own home and just being exposed to toxic chemicals when we go out in the world. There are things that we can do about those things. That’s what we’ll talk about on this show.

Today is Wednesday, August 13th. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida and it looks like we’re going to have some rain. It’s a foggy August here and that’s great because it cools it down.

Today, we’re going to be talking about fish oil. Not my favorite subject because I don’t eat anything from the sea. I never have since I was a child. But I know that fish oils are extremely important in keeping your body healthy. And we’re going to talk about different kinds of fish oil. How you can choose the ones that are right for you (and maybe we’ll see if we can find a fish oil for me). But they are very important, so we’ll find out about that.

My guest is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacist who specializes in medicinal plants and other natural substances in order to heal the body instead of giving people drugs. I met her because she has a shop here in Clearwater, Florida where I live and she helps people get off of their prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs and even psychiatric drugs. She knows how all these natural substances that can work to heal your body.

I am so impressed with the amount of information she has and the clarity with which she understands all of those that we’ve actually scheduled her every other Wednesday for the rest of the year and probably beyond. So you’re going to hear a lot from Pamela and I think you’re going to learn a lot.

Hi Pamela.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Hey, great to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. For those people who weren’t here the last show and don’t know your background, just tell us a little bit about how you got interested in and what your viewpoint is about what you do.

PAMELA SEEFELD: I studied pharmacognosy at the University of Florida and pharmacognosy is the study of plant medicine. It’s a little bit more than herbalism, which is the study of the pharmacological properties of plants.

I’m also a pharmacist as well. My background is also in homeopathic medicine. I studied that in England and in Germany. And here in the United States, I’ve done extensive speaking, talking, and attending conferences that were in relation to pretty much every subject I’m interested in, which is basically all human health – a lot of cardio-vascular disease, a lot of mental health. I specialize in mental health more than anything probably.

What I really do is look at the pharmacological background of all the different plants and of the natural and homeopathic products that we’re using and to determine what’s best for most people from a pharmacological standpoint. In regular pharmacy, we learn that “this drug is for this disease and that drug is for that disease” and everything is pigeonholed. Natural products don’t necessarily work that way. It’s very important to realize that these have multiple effects on the body and the chemistry behind it is what I’m very good at.

DEBRA: And I will say that she is very good. After the last show, I went right down and said, “Okay, what should I take?” and she gave me a bag full of them. And I liked all of them.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s great. I know what I’m doing. I’ve been doing this a long time. That’s wonderful.

DEBRA: She really does. She really knows what she’s doing. The way I found out about Pamela was from a friend of mine whose mother had Alzheimer’s I think and was taking a whole lot of prescription drugs. My friend went down and Pamela replaced those drugs with natural drugs and his mom is doing a lot better. So I looked at that and I said, “I need to talk to this woman.”

So let’s start by telling us why are fish oils important?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, so omega 3 fish oil are made up principally of EPA and DHA. That’s eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid. You can see why they are shortened into acronyms. These particular products are in concentrations depending on how they process the fish.

The majority of the products that you see are going to be a 2:1 ratio of EPA to DHA. That’s how it normally comes from the fish. But the smaller a fish is, like a sardine for example, they have a shorter lifespan and they’re smaller. And so they have less time to concentrate toxins in the environment like mercury.

And that’s why tuna fish is really problematic because tuna is a very large fish and it has a longer time period to expose itself to things in the environment. And as a result, it can accumulate mercury and that’s why they’re always giving warnings that you don’t want to be eating too much tuna fish.

DEBRA: Oh.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, did you know that? It’s cool, huh? And it’s very interesting.

DEBRA: Yeah, I didn’t know about the sizes of fish since I don’t eat fish.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, the size and the lifespan of the fish matters. You have to think that it has a larger surface area and a greater chance to be able to concentrate. For us, it would be subcutaneous fat, the fat underneath the skin. That’s where things are stored.

When people look at tuna fish and giving it to small kids or to pregnant women, there are restrictions to how much they can eat. When you take in mercury, it doesn’t leave the body. And the bad part about mercury is that it has high acidity for the central nervous system, the brain. And we know that it’s directly related to cognitive impairment.

DEBRA: And so it’s not a good thing to be feeding children every day when they go to school.

PAMELA SEEFELD: They should not have that, no. Or I use homeopathic detox that can pull that out. You would want to use something to remove it if you’re going to be doing that. But really, in all honesty, young children should not be eating tuna fish. It doesn’t say that they shouldn’t be eating fatty fish. There are plenty of other fishes that are safer, but that would be the worst.

The safest thing to eat is probably sardines. And what they do when they go out and catch a school of sardines, they test them on the boat immediately. So the very high-quality oil, for the products that I use like OmegaBrite from Dr. Stoll (he’s a Harvard psychiatrist and I can talk a little more about that later with the mental health), these particular products that are very, very good, they buy these sardines that, they test that. They’re very pure and they buy them off the ship literally. That goes for the better, higher quality products. The lower grade oil, the less expensive brands, the mail order stuff, Costco, that kind of stuff, you know what I’m saying, not that they’re bad, but those lesser quality oils, those go for the cheaper products. So that makes sense.

So the more expensive products, the medical-grade products, they take the better quality oil because they don’t want the contaminants. And actually, when they go and purify them, they use what is called fractional distillation, which is how they process petroleum. They use these column filtrations and different products are put off at different areas depending on how they go through these microbeads. It’s really very interesting.

DEBRA: That is interesting to me. I just want to emphasize what you just said because I understand what fractional distillation is from studying petrochemicals.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Exactly!

DEBRA: So what it does is that – and correct me if I’m wrong – they heat it up, but then different things will evaporate at different temperatures.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct, and doing this separates out the components that we have –the fish protein, the components that have contaminants, things like that.

But what’s important to know is that the concentration of the EPA and the DHA has unique effects on the body and that’s leading up to mental health. It can turn on 300 different genes in the body and those are the ones they know about. It can be for cardiovascular disease, it can be for mental health, it works for children.

It’s a bunch of different topics we’re going to hit on today, but what I would say is that it’s important to realize that it’s all encompassing for all individuals. It can address a lot of different things in the body which are very important.

Luckily, fish oil doesn’t have one specific assignment. And it’s important to know that when you first start taking fish oil, the organs have very high affinity for fish oil – the heart, the lungs, the liver. They can actually radio-label these fish oils. And when they’re first given to somebody who hasn’t really taken supplementation in the past, we see that those areas light up the first.

So when you’re treating somebody for mental health, you really have to load the body with omega 3’s in the beginning because you have to realize that the first few weeks, these body organs are going to take the majority of it and the central nervous system will see very little of it.

DEBRA: Oh, I see. So, when you give people fish oil, or anything else, then certain parts of the body are going to take it first then other areas will…

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s exactly right. That is important to know.

DEBRA: That is very important to know. We need to go to break. We’re going to find out more when we come back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and I’m here with Pamela Seefeld, pharmacist and pharmacognocist – I don’t even know how to say that word.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Pamela dispenses good, natural substances. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She is a – okay, I’m going to get it now, “pharmacognosist.”

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes!

DEBRA: I was practicing during the break. The thing I really want to remember about this word (because I looked it up at the last show), the key part of it is, well, “pharma” means “drug,” but then “cog” is like the word, “cognitive” or “cognition” and it means “knowledge.” And so these are “drugs with knowledge.” They work differently from drugs that don’t have knowledge. They’re natural and they have all that good information that comes from nature that is in there because it’s a natural substance and it works with our bodies in a knowledgeable way, pharmacognosist.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Correct.

DEBRA: Now, I want to ask about something that you said. You talked about medical-grade supplements. So I just want you to tell us the difference between medical-grade and what people just buy from the drugstore.

PAMELA SEEFELD: All right. That’s a really good question. So, medical-grade oils, like I said, are going to be prepared from the sardines that are very small fishes, shorter lifespans, caught in very clean waters and they’re tested in the boat. Those particular products will go for the medical-grade oils. What I normally would recommend is, especially if you’re using it for mental health or for wellness, when you’re using products that are not medical-grade, there is a risk of having contaminants in there and also, the way the oils have been handled.

The higher grade oils are going to go for the better products. A lot of times, what we use, especially from a mental health standpoint because these people, technically, a lot of times already have issues with mercury, arsenic, lead, and pesticides, these things go freely in and out of the central nervous system and it affects people’s cognition, mood, and depression. And a lot of times, when you remove those things out with a homeopathic detox, you can normally correct some of that.

Especially if you’re doing this for mental health, but you’re also doing it for cardiovascular disease, you want to have a medical-grade oil. And some of the products that I use are from Nordic Naturals and they have a medical health line that’s different from the health food store line. That’s actually a higher grade product.

DEBRA: So can people buy medical-grade? I know my doctor gives me professional-grade vitamins and I have to get them from him. I can’t order from another professional. I can’t just go to the natural food store and pick these up.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, that’s a good question. The products that you’re going to have at the natural food store are not bad. I’m not saying that they’re bad. It’s just that they will not be specifically geared for your indication, what you’re trying to treat. And the quality of the oil might have some contaminants in it. That’s possible.

When people call me or they come here in person, I usually ask them, “Are you depressed? Do you have a lot of energy? Do you have a lot of stress? Do you have a lot of anxiety? Are you having trouble sleeping? Are you having trouble with work?” because most people inherently have something else going on in their lives.

A lot of times, people will read or watch a television show and it says, “take fish oil,” and they know they should take it. They’re going to grab a product and take it from the shelf. They’re going to ask the lady at the health food store and she’s going to say, “Oh, this is good,” but it’s inherent to look and important to see that the concentration that you use will affect the way your brain works. And that’s the beauty of it. You need to decide on the product.

For example, there’s a product I use quite a bit called OmegaBrite. OmegaBrite is from Dr. Andrew Stoll. He’s a Harvard psychiatrist. He did a double-blind placebo-controlled trial with Zoloft, which is a drug used for depression.

And in the trial, the fish oil product that he came up with had actually more anti-depressant effects than Zoloft. There are clinical trials with this. So I use that product a lot even for people who aren’t depressed, but also for people who need more energy, for people transitioning from a serotonin reuptake inhibitor like Paxil and Prozac and some of these drugs because the clinical data showed that you can actually come off the medicine with that product.

I’m not saying randomly take a fish oil. You want to take one that is specific to your particular need.

DEBRA: I know you have five different kinds of fish oils. You have multiple fish oils. And so I think that if someone probably wanted to take a fish oil, the smartest thing to do would be to have you help them choose which one it is.

PAMELA SEEFELD: That is important, yes, because what they are going to choose from the store (it doesn’t mean that the product’s bad), you want to have something that is going to inherently enhance your life, right? So if you have a lot of stress, you want it to take the stress away. And normally for that, I use a DHA to EPA ratio of 4.5:1 and that was shown to be very effective for ADD, ADHD, scattered thinking, anxiety, and a lot of stress. It takes that off the brain.

And it’s really interesting too to note that EPA, when it goes into the brain, it has its own transport protein that moves it into the brain and that’s what causes this mood-elevating effect. But when they autopsy, they only find DHA in the brain. So these things actually interconvert. They’re thinking that it’s actually converting. That conversion process in the brain is why it’s causing that mood-elevating process.

There’s a lot of chemistry and science that backs up which product you need to use and I will be very grateful to talk to anybody that has a question about what oil they want to use to treat their mental health issue, whether they’re on medicines or not. They can call me at 727-442-4955 and I’ll be glad to tell them which concentration they use for which product.

DEBRA: Yeah, it really is one of the things that I think is so fascinating about what Pamela does. She really is approaching it as a pharmacist where it’s not just about taking something at random and not knowing how it affects the body. She knows how it affects the body, but also what goes with what condition.

It’s a very exact, precise thing. And that’s so different from just hearing advertisement that you should take fish oil or whatever that supplement might be and taking it on a random basis. When I had her choose my supplements, it was just right on.

We need to go to break. Actually, we have 15 seconds. Pamela, why don’t you give your phone number again.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Yes, it’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: Okay, so now we’re going to go to break. It’s so tough to not ask a question before we have to come on to break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I am Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld and she has so much to say. So when we come back, she’ll tell us more about fish oils. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Pamela Seefeld. She’s a pharmacognosist who dispenses medicinal plants and other natural substances to heal the body instead of drugs. In fact, she helps them off drugs if they’re on drugs, and she’s really, really good at what she does. Okay Pamela, what else do you have to tell us about fish oils?

PAMELA SEEFELD: This is pretty good. In preparation for the show today, I went on the Library of Medicine, the National Library of Medicine, which is nih.gov. And the National Library of Medicine has all the articles all over the world about health. And these are studies that people conduct, clinical trials, and you can read about these different trials and what their results are.

I went and did a search, which is called a MedLine search. I went to see some of the newer articles, some of the newer studies that show some of the benefits of fish oils so we could have some timely and really interesting information to talk about today (besides all the other things we can discuss).

So a brand new study just came out last month and it’s talking about cardiovascular disease, omega 3 fatty acids, fish oils and what it does for the cardiovascular risk factors. And this is very interesting. We find that when people are taking fish oil, we know that their lipids go down. Fish oil will raise HDL, the good cholesterol, and lowers the triglycerides. In fact, fish oil, if you look historically at all the studies combined, fish oil will lower triglycerides 30% per month, which is a huge number.

In fact, I found one study that talked about patients that are on hemodialysis. These people are really highly at risk for cardiovascular disease and for heart attack. Taking the omega 3’s in a higher EPA to DHA ratio raised up their good cholesterol and lowered their triglycerides more significantly than medication. It’s very important to these people especially if they have any type of illness to be taking it.

But this is really interesting. We find that it lowers blood pressure, and also at the same time, it helps for people to lose weight. We’ve known for a long time that it’s anti-inflammatory and it has antioxidant effects as well. So these things work collectively all through the body to prevent heart disease. It’s very interesting that it’s so significant on multiple things.

Most people that have had heart attack risk factors, they’re going to have high blood pressure and high lipids. You think all go in together. Really, fish oil is all encompassing to take that down.

DEBRA: I want to ask you a question first. You’re telling me all these great things. I’m listening to this and I’m thinking, “I should be taking fish oils.” But I know for myself that I’ve tried to take them in past and also, I don’t eat any kind of seafood at all because my body just doesn’t like it.

I know some people who have difficulty swallowing the pill, and you have a trick for that. But also for people who are allergic to fish, are there other things that they can take that are comfortable? And why do things like walnuts have a lot of omega 3’s? Why would that not be as good as fish oil?

PAMELA SEEFELD: That’s a very good question. Okay, so omega 3’s, when we take them in in fish oil, a medical-grade product does not have anaphylactic, which is the throat closing up, we need to go to the hospital, call EMF and that type of thing. They probably could take a fish oil product that’s medical-grade and I could assist them in that because the fish protein that people react to would have been removed, but the lesser-quality products, it would still be present. That’s right there. When you take omega 3…

DEBRA: That’s a huge, important thing to know. That’s a huge, important thing to know because I really thought that all fish oil would be the same.

PAMELA SEEFELD: No, and that’s probably the general consensus because we would think that the FDA’s regulating it, the products are all the same. But really, in reality, the medical-grade products will have gone through a much higher degree of scrutinization than the other products that you’re going to get, “buy two, get one free” that kind of stuff if you use mail order, things that come to your house.

Those products, like I said, are going to be the poor-quality fish and they’re not going to go through the extra processing because that’s going to cost money. I really respect people’s time and money. You know that being in here. This isn’t like a big markup kind of thing. I look up to see what is someone’s value and what works within their budget to get the best product. People that have real allergies to fish oil, they really need to check and talk to a pharmacist like myself that can tell them what to use.

But going back to what’s in food. When you take walnuts or flax seeds or these types of things that have omega 3, you’re still absorbing a lot of the omega 3, but you have fiber with it too. Deending on what you’re eating at the same time will depend on how much of a peak you get in the bloodstream.

So I’ll give you an example. If you take a fish oil capsule in the morning but you have it with an apple, and you don’t have any fat in the meal, your absorption peak in the bloodstream, which is what you want, is going to be pretty low.

So I tell people the trick, when you’re taking omega 3’s or any kind of medical-grade oil, you want to have a small amount of fat present at the time you consume the food. So it doesn’t have to be tons of oil or anything. It can be almonds along with the fish oil or something that has some fat.

I like to drizzle olive oil on a lot of things. That’s what I use. If you have the taste of fat in your mouth prior to taking the supplement, you get a much higher peak in the bloodstream and that’s really where the trick is. Otherwise, you’re not absorbing most of it.

DEBRA: That is so useful. If you didn’t say anything else on the show today, just knowing that one thing – because people are taking so many supplements and spending so much money on supplements, and to know that there are so many ways to take them that would make them more effective on the body, that is very, very important to know.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Well, it is. And I think that from my background, being from pharmacology, what I do is really unique. There are million vitamin stores around the country, but not many people know about the chemistry behind food and behind supplements and how it can work in the body.

And that’s very important to know because when I prescribe a regimen for somebody and I say that you need certain doses put in your diet and certain products, it’s very important that they know that you should take this with this type of food or that type of food.

If you’re going to spend the money and take the time, you’re going to want a high peak in the bloodstream. You don’t want to have a low peak because you’re taking the supplements and they’re not going to be used for what you want them to be for.

Another interesting study I found (and I think you’ll find this pretty neat) is that when we combine fish oil – this I another study that was just published this year talking about intestinal inflammation. When we look at inflammation in the gastrointestinal tract, we know that a lot of people have irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s Disease, all these different inflammatory diseases in the bowel.

What the studies found is that if you consume bioflavonoids like quercetin – you can get those in vegetables and fruits. Quercetin is very highly-concentrated in apple and in onion just to name a few. But quercetin is in three-quarters of our plants), if you combine the two together, they react to protein which is a measurement of inflammation that’s very dangerous, it comes down 75%, just combining the fish oil with the bioflavonoid.

So what does this mean for us and our diet?

DEBRA: But before you answer that, we need to go to break. We’re going to have a cliff hanger. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is pharmacognosist Pamela Seefeld and we’re talking about fish oils. We’ll be right back.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is pharmacognosist Pamela Seefeld. She helps people find healing plants and other natural substances to help heal their bodies instead of drugs. So, go on with what you were saying before the break.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Okay, so we were talking about ways to improve absorption of different food with fish oil and about bioflavonoids along with fish oil. There are three bioflavonoids in herbal medicine: quercetin (which was originally found in onion); hesperidin (which was found around the pitty part around grapefruit); and we use rutin (which was originally found in buckwheat). So that’s where they were originally isolated from the plant.

It’s so important that when you’re taking fish oil as a product, we need to have real food in our diet as well as taking supplements. People that are just taking supplements and not looking at their nutrition at the same time are really missing a key concept and a part in fixing their illnesses in their body.

So the beauty of it is that we find that when combining the two – you can take quercetin in a pill too. I use homeopathic bioflavonoids as well. When you take those, they incorporate together in the body and they create a decrease in inflammation that is much more significant than fish oil by itself.

DEBRA: Wow, this is so fascinating to me that 1) nature does this and 2) that you understand all this because it all just makes sense to me.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Nature is really unique and it’s very special. People really underestimate the intelligence of plants and I say that very figuratively. The enzymes that are in the plants are the same enzymes that are in our liver that metabolize medicine and pesticides. The plants have the same P50 enzymes, which to me is just very amazing.

And what’s nice is that the bioflavonoids in plants are there to keep the vascular structure intact, so that the leaves are taunt and sitting up straight and they can have photosynthesis. But when we take those into our body, they do the same exact thing to our blood vessels…

DEBRA: Oh, I love this.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Isn’t it unbelievable?

DEBRA: No, it’s believable. It’s so right. I love how right it is that of course, there are these functions that happen throughout nature, that they need to happen in the plant, they need to happen in our bodies and you can put them together and they’ll perform the same function.

PAMELA SEEFELD: The same exact function and the same little assignment. They go to the same places in the body as they do in the plant and they come, repair, and heal us. Taking and picking the right supplements and the right concentration based on your level of stress, are you sleeping, especially for children. We really didn’t touch too much on kids. We can probably do a whole show just on children.

Children are so important not to be on medication. All these kids on all these medicines for attention deficit and hyperactivity, you can take omega 3’s and the DHA to EPA 4.5:1 and see a miraculous difference in the child’s behavior with no drug. And there are studies that can show this with a few simple supplements that’s very inexpensive.

We need to look at mental health as being the forefront of treatment, because if you’re not feeling well and things are not convalescing in society, you’re not doing well with all your things that you have going on, it’s really going to be hard to occupy yourself with creating something to get over other health issues.

DEBRA: Right.

PAMELA SEEFELD: So this is interesting. I wanted to say one more thing. There’s a study that just came out this month, August 1st and this was talking about osteoporosis and obesity. These are major problems that affect a lot of people going into middle age and going into their golden years, right?

We see all these women walking around and they’re all taking calcium and D and they’re having lots of trouble with their spine. My grandmother used to call it “settling”, when the spinal cord starts to settle and they lose height.

Well, the new studies show that taking fish oil – this was just published – affects the skeletal response. What they’re saying here is that when you take fish oil, it’s associated with increase in bone density and a weight loss as well. It also seems to be particularly helpful in the spine.

This is where you see a lot of people hunched over and their posture’s not good anymore, they’re having trouble with compression, which is called “stenosis” where you have narrowing of the spine. The fish oil, believe it or not, actually helps build bone density. This is pretty new information. This was just published.

There are other reasons. Everyone’s taking all this calcium. Calcium’s not the problem. The problem is that the calcium is not staying in the bone. That’s what the real problem is. And it looks like fish oil works on the receptor called the peroxisome proliferator and it looks like it works on PPAR, which is really interesting. People are looking for other ways to build bone density other than just taking calcium and D.

DEBRA: Wow. Wow.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Isn’t that neat? This was literally just published.

DEBRA: Yeah, it is so neat. I think that you have such a different way of looking at things than the standard medical way of looking at things. I understand what you’re talking about because many years ago, I discovered for myself that if I want to heal something, look to nature. In nature, there is a regenerative factor that isn’t in things that are man-made in a factory or in a laboratory. And I think we’re just going to keep finding that the answers to everything that we see as a problem is all going to be found in nature.

And so I’m not surprised to hear about all these studies and it just delights me because we should be healthy. Our natural state should be health. And so the fact that plants and fish oils and all these things can help us restore ourselves, I just think is wonderful.

I wanted to just ask you one more thing. Let’s come back to the medical-grade. I asked my doctor once about professional-grade supplements and he said to me that one of the differences between medical-grade and the stuff that you buy from the natural food store or the drugstore, is that they’re really designed to be more dose-specific, so that somebody like you or somebody else who is a health professional could look at it as giving something as therapeutic, rather than simply giving somebody vitamin C or giving vitamin C for a purpose. Did I get that right?

PAMELA SEEFELD: Right. That was very well-spoken. What we’re seeing is that a lot of people will read an article or see something on TV or know that they’re supposed to be taking supplements of fish oil perhaps and they go take something off the shelf and they ask somebody at the health food store, “Is this good or bad?”

But most people, especially when you’re looking at what’s encompassing the whole family, you are going to need to take something that is going to be specific for your needs. And mental health is the first and foremost like if you have mild depression and you just think it’s an astoundingly hard day, “I can’t believe I have to go through this again,” or if you have a lot of stress, stress at work or stress at family.

It’s important that if you’re going to take omega 3, then you need to take one that will be absorbed, that you will know exactly what food you need to consume with it to get the highest peak in the bloodstream, and something that has a high affinity with the brain.

Actually, I even use homeopathy, believe or not, I use it. There are circulation enhancers to bring it to a higher concentration in the brain. It’s for when I have people that really want to get a fast result.

DEBRA: Wow, I love this.

PAMELA SEEFELD: It works really good. “We don’t have all day, we’re going to get this done this week. We’re going to front-low. We’re going to try to push it into the brain at a higher rate.” That’s the beauty of using the natural products along with homeopathy. It works fantastically.

DEBRA: Okay, so we have two minutes left. And this is my last question. There are all these different kinds of fish that are used in fish oil, like anchovies, sardines, krill, and all these things. Can you just tell us what they are and something about them?

PAMELA SEEFELD: The anchovies are en even smaller fish than the sardine, so their quality of oil is very good as well. What we find is that when we’re talking about the different qualities of oil, when they catch a school of fish and there are these anchovies, sardines, salmon, they test it and the higher quality oils are going to the companies that sell medical-grade. They buy that immediately. They pay top-dollar for that.

The others go to more junkie stuff, things that are more mass market and not sold to professionals. They’re just at regular health food stores or places like that, chains. And it’s interesting that the sardines, the bottom level go to the grocery store. So it doesn’t mean that it’s bad, but you’re getting the ones that the other companies didn’t want.

The krill oil is better because it has more free form fatty acids than fish oil does. But in my opinion, and I looked at this quite a bit because I revisit it all the time, I don’t think necessarily that the krill is better over the fish oil. And the reason that I say this is that it’s not necessarily the amount of free fatty acids that are in there. What determines how something is going to work in your body is what you’re consuming with it at the same time to get the right peak.

Remember how I was talking about how your body releases biomasses and as a result, you get a peak in the bloodstream? I think a lot of people are taking these different types of oils and they’re getting what is called a sub-therapeutic response, “Fish oil didn’t work for me.” Well, were you taking the right product that fits what you’re eating, and are you looking to trying to get the highest peak in the bloodstream? There are little tricks to do that and I think a lot of people, the reason why…

DEBRA: I need to interrupt you because the end of the show music is about to come in in 10 seconds. I want to tell you that her website is Botanical Resource. Give your phone number again and then we’re going to be saying good bye.

PAMELA SEEFELD: Oh my gosh! Yes, it’s 727-442-4955.

DEBRA: And you’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You can go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and find out more about the show. Be well!