Kris: Hi this is Kris Costello and I’ve teamed up with Michael Senoff to bring you the world’s best wellness related interviews. So if you know anyone struggling with their weight, with cancer, diabetes, ADHD, autism, heart disease or other health challenges please send them to Michael Senoff’s www.HardToFindSeminars.com. I’m Kris Costello we’re with beloved Actress and Bestselling Author Suzanne Somers. Well Suzanne you have written a very exciting and groundbreaking new book called “Breakthrough: Eight Steps to Wellness”. So can you describe for our listeners what exactly do you mean by Breakthrough Medicine?

Suzanne: Well in its simplest form it’s how to live a quality life and achieve peak health and often that falls on death ears because people say “Well I’m healthy” and I’m healthy means well I don’t have cancer and I’m not in the hospital or I don’t have Alzheimer’s or I don’t have heart disease. And I always go “…yet” because the way we are approaching health right now should not be called healthcare it should be called disease care. We wait until we’re in the disease state and then we go to the doctor who has no choice but to load us up with pharmaceutical drugs an every drug creates some kind of side effect that requires another drug and another drug and another drug. And so I started thinking about the tipping point. At what point when we have chemicals in our food in unprecedented ways we’ve never experienced anything like this in the history of mankind, not only in our food but in our environment, we’ve never experienced an environmental assault as we are now experiencing with the pollution and chemicals. And it’s in our water it’s in our household goods. When I was a kid my mother use to clean things with lemon water and Ivory soap and mineral oil now we use chemical sprays and chemical detergents and chemicals in our clothes and we send our clothes to the dry cleaners for more and more chemicals. And there is a household of chemicals and we have chemicals in our food, you open some people’s freezers and its all boxes of food with chemicals they don’t even realize what chemicals are. And then you couple that with the overuse of pharmaceutical drugs the notion of allopathic medicine, which is here’s your symptom here’s your drugs. And when you start layering all these chemicals on top of one another I always ask, what is the tipping point? What is the candy bar or the Raid spray that you use for your ants or the Roundup Weed Killer or the Lipitor or the synthetic hormones or the Prozac that women are taking in unprecedented numbers or the Ambien or Lunesta or sleeping pills that is just out of control because people can’t sleep? What is it that makes it tip over and your liver says “I give. I can’t do anymore work for you.” And that’s when you get cancer. And we’ve reached the point that we all pretty much expect in our old age that will get one of the big three cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s. And “Breakthrough” is Suzanne Somers as a filter, essentially, interviewing cutting edge doctors, western doctors from around the world all who have stood back and said “You know what we’re doing is not working.” And “Breakthrough” is how to get off drugs, how to deal with aging with natural ways using natures tools, which is Jonathan Wright terms. Dr. Jonathan Wright the doctor who wrote the very first prescription for bio identical hormones in the United States 23 years ago and has been a renegade and cutting edge doctor ever since. How to achieve it so that you can live this new life that we’re being afforded because they’re now keeping us alive like it or not twice as long as the body actually wants to live through MRIs, cat scans, sophisticated blood test, antibiotics, even fluids all these things are life prolonging, cat scans, etc and they expect us all not to live 90, 100 some even say 120. Well I’m looking forward to that because I’ve decided to embrace true healthcare and go to the doctor when I’m well and think about every morsel of food that goes into my body. I expect to be there but I expect to be there with my brain intact with my bones intact and with energy and at one point die healthy. And I’m trying to convey to my readers to my lecture audiences that it is possible but you got to start now. And it’s not impossible if you’ve had a lifetime of bad habits you can reverse it the body is very forgiving. Once you start feeding it right, once you start taking good care of it and sleeping it and dealing with the depression that comes with aging by understanding that it’s a hormonal imbalance replacing the hormones you’ve lost in the aging process and physiologic doses, individualized or customized just for you, that you can live this long life. And I fully expect to be there and I know everyone will be watching me because I am my own experiment. And at 62 I do not take or require at present a single pharmaceutical drug as a result.

Kris: Well we’re looking forward to interviewing you when you’re in your 90s.

Suzanne: A 100.

Kris: A 100 okay. We’ll set the date.

Suzanne: We’ll do the first one at 100 and let’s try again at 119 or 120.

Kris: Sounds good. I hope I can make it that long.

Suzanne: Yes. Well if you’re interested in health I’m sure you will. You know people think it’s so hard making a few simple changes. I eat amazing foods, I grow my own foods and I know not everyone is capable of doing that, but I grew up and I had a lot of Italian families living around me and it didn’t matter if they lived in a big house or a small house they’d find some patch of ground to stick tomatoes in and carrots in and peppers. And I grew up watching this and realizing that their vegetables tasted so much better than ours but also when I grew up there was no such thing as organic because it was all organic. They wouldn’t think of spraying poison on food that concept would have seemed ludicrous. And we’ve gotten use to the fact that they spray poison on our food and we don’t even take washing our fruits and vegetables very seriously if we don’t buy organic food. What do you think is going to happen? Dr. Russell Blalock a renown neuroscientist who I interviewed with “Breakthrough” he said “You have to understand depending on your exposure it’s anywhere from a quarter a teaspoon to a teaspoon of let’s say, rat poison daily.” And he said to me “How long do you think you can be well taking in any rat poison daily?” He said “But that’s what people doing now and not thinking about it. And young people have grown up on chemical foods, they prefer it. You have to drive a child into eating a little Florida broccoli, you know, and then they get their dessert which usually comes in some form of a chemical in a bag or a box. And kids eat chemicals all day long they eat them at school they drink diet sodas because their parents have them around the house and it’s disastrous.

Kris: Now you mentioned Dr. Russell Blalock. One of the things that he talks about in your book is glutamate and how they are excitotoxins for the brain.

Suzanne: Right.

Kris: And that they’re in most of our processed foods. One thing that he said was “People need to understand how important this is. It’s not just one more thing to scare you this is real and of major importance. It exceeds most of the other things that are being talked about.” What is he talking about with that?

Suzanne: Well glutamates are harmful chemicals and they have disguised names. It’s so clever soy protein that sounds kind of good doesn’t it? Soy proteins that’s a chemical it’s a disguised name. Hydrolyzed soy protein, [idolized] yeast, MSG - I’m trying to think of all the different names - but these foods are not foods they are food additive chemicals and they’re everywhere. And the fact that we don’t really realize what a glutamate is that we don’t realize the dangers of MSG. I asked him I said “How do it get this way?” He said “Well at the end of World War II our American soldiers captured Japanese soldiers and noticed that the Japanese rations tasted so much better than the American GI’s rations. So they did a study and realized that all the Japanese ratios were loaded with MSG, Mono Sodium Glutamate. Glutamate is a chemical. So they brought over all the American food manufacturers all of them Swanson and Heinz and Betty Crocker, all of them, and explained to our American food manufacturers that if they put their chemicals into, as they called it “Our Lousy Can of Soup” that our can of soup would taste so much better that everyone would want this soup rather than the other soup. And that’s how chemicals got into our food and it changed the American pallet. We started growing accustomed to the taste of chemicals and then we started liking it better because it is addictive. And then diet sodas came along. He said to me “One diet soda so over stimulates the neurons of the brain it literally excites them to death within six to eight hours.” He said “That’s one diet soda.” So now we have billions of neurons he said “But the killings of effect of diet soda and its addictiveness” he said “Is what is a direct link now to brain tumors and brain cancers and to pancreatic cancer.” And if you look around there’s an epidemic now of brain and pancreatic cancer. So we have to pay attention. And so many people I know who are addicted to diet sodas, ah I can’t give it up. And there’s nothing you can really say to them because they’re as addictive as smoking. I had a guy in my organization 45-years-old for years I’ve been saying he eats out of the vending machines down the hall and he’s always got his diet soda on his desk and I always said to him “You know Greg, those diet sodas are going to kill you.” He said “I know, I know, but I like them and I don’t drink and I don’t smoke.” So four months ago he comes to me and says “I have Phase 4 Pancreatic Cancer.” I said “Greg, before you get into the whole chemotherapy world please know that chemotherapy, according to all the oncologists I’ve interviewed, does nothing, nothing whatsoever, nothing for pancreatic cancer. Go to one of my doctors. There are doctors curing cancer, go to one of my doctors and try to deal with this naturally because at Stage 4 all chemotherapy is going to do to you is degrade you.” Well that was four months ago and I buried him last week. I never saw anybody degrade that fast at 45-years- old. The chemo just turned him into what looked like a Holocaust survivor. So I don’t like to be doom and gloom but my message is hopeful. My message is if you make these small changes you don’t have to go that route. So when you’re looking at foods, you know, look for MSG but look for hydrolyzed protein, look for soy protein, soy isolate, soy protein concentrates, [odilized] yeast when you see these things look them as the poison and think about that quarter of a teaspoon to a teaspoon of rat poison everyday and how long do you think you could stay healthy? How long do you think a child can stay healthy? Dr. Blalock told me that giving an infant six tablespoons of diet soda will alter their DNA forever. So it’s serious stuff and it’s not me saying this I am the filter for these doctors. So do not take it seriously is putting yourself and/or your family at great risk. For more interviews with the world’s top health and medical experts go to Michael Senoff’swww.HardToFindSeminars.com.

Kris: It can be very tricky. I know for years I got fooled by natural flavorings.

Suzanne: Right. Natural flavorings means chemicals, that’s deception isn’t it? For those of us who are reading labels when you see natural flavoring if you don’t listen to this interview or read “Breakthrough” you’re not going to know that that has been a deceptive name made up by the food manufacturers approved by the FDA as a hidden name for chemicals. That one really bothered me when I found that, it just isn’t right.

Kris: It is. Another fellow that you talked quite a bit about in the book and that you interviewed is Bill Faloon for Life…

Suzanne: Fearless Bill Faloon.

Kris: Fearless Bill Faloon from Life Extension.

Suzanne: The Editor and Founder of Life Extension Magazine. I love that magazine because it’s non-profit. Bill Faloon as the leader and scientific advisory board looking for ways to improve the health of all people around the globe using natural means, natural alternatives, supplementations. We’re not getting what we use to get out of our soil, there’s no minerals left in our soil, there’s no selenium therefore we have to replace selenium because it’s so important, and they really taught me so much about the value of supplementation. You know when I was on Oprah I have had a lot of flack because they asked me to lay out in one long line the supplements that I take every day and as I was doing it I said “I know you’re going to make fun of me but I’m at the far end of this and I’m my own experiment and I research this stuff. The benefits of Vitamin D, I take 8000 units of Vitamin D every day. Why because of it’s unbelievable cancer protective quality. There’s two studies that I read one, people who took Vitamin D only 1000 units a day for four years had a 60% reduction of cancer and for those people who already had cancer who took Vitamin D for four years had a 71% reduction in cancer, that’s a pretty significant just by taking Vitamin D. Now we should be able to get it from the sun but even in Southern California people are deficient in Vitamin D because we are at our house cave and then we get into our car cave and then we drive to the office cave and we stay at the office cave all day and then we get back into to car cave and then we drive home and then we get back into house cave and maybe we’ve had 60 seconds of direct sunlight throughout the day. We were meant to be in the sun. I use to watch my children’s run sun block on all of our little grandchildren the babies and when you’re the mother-in-law and the mother you just have to shut your trap. And I would sit there and I’d think “It just doesn’t feel right to me to be rubbing sun block which is chemicals on all these pure little babies. Well now they have found that sun block a) blocks our body’s ability to take in sunlight i.e. Vitamin D which is cancer protective and b) the chemicals are going into the skin which is transferable. And so this is the first assault on these little children, and again it’s by well meaning parents. It’s just the way that pregnant mothers for so long drink diet soda when they’re pregnant well meaning trying not to gain so much weight, which by the way has that opposite effect. So we’ve been sold a bill of goods and I am startled to find that I’m the mouthpiece for this because I’m not an accident. In the 70s I did not burn my bra. I didn’t care if I had a corner office, I didn’t even have an office. It took a while before I started thinking that I deserved to get paid equal to men and when I did speak up on my 6th year of Threes Company and went to them when my contract was up and I said “Hey you know I’m the Number 1 female star on television according to all the research, I’ve got the highest demographics of all women 18 to 49, and why are the men getting paid 10 times more than me, and now my contract is up and I would like to be paid what you’re the men, not more just what you’re paying the men.” And I got fired for asking. So my nature is not to be an accident but it happened when I went into menopause how terrible and nobody could tell me why. Why can’t I sleep? Why do I sleep for 15 minutes wakeup soaking wet, then I’m up again for three hours then I fall asleep again for 15 minutes, wakeup 15 minutes later soaking wet and I’m awake for another three hours. And I’m getting a total of maybe an hour or two a night. I’m exhausted, I’m gaining weight, I don’t know why, I’m exercising more, I’m eating less, I’m gaining weight. My mood is out of control and my nature is a happy one, I don’t know what’s wrong, I’ve lost my sex drive, I can’t feel sex, it just doesn’t appeal to me anymore, my skin is dry and itching, my hair is changing, my eyes are watering, I don’t feel way. And all I was offered was Prozac, Ambien for sleep, Valiums to calm down my anxiety, pain and joint killer pharmaceutical brand, Lipitor and on and on. And I remember looking at one doctor I said “Are you joking? Is this the best you have to offer women?” And by the way men this is how you’re dealing with it with [inaudible 15:53]?” And I went on a personal search and I went from doctor to doctor to doctor extremely disappointed. I was offered synthetic hormones, all the above drugs. I kept saying “I don’t want to take drugs, I don’t want to take synthetic hormones, and I don’t want to take Lipitor I know what that will do” and one doctor patted me on the back and said “The drug companies know best dear.” And that’s when I thought “Alright, I’m on my own.” And I finally found an anthropologist who I’d heard about. I had to drive three hours to get to her. She took a blood test. She looked at me and she said “You poor thing.” I said “What?” She said “You must feel terrible.” I said “I do.” She said “You have no estrogen.” I said “Tell me what that means?” She said “It means you probably have migraine headaches.” I said “I do.” You probably have watery eyes and have allergies. I said “I do.” You probably aren’t sleeping. I don’t. You probably are depressed. I am. You probably have no sex drive. I don’t. We went through the checklist and she said “We’re going to put back what you’ve lost in the aging process have called Bioidentical Hormones. And she said “They’re non-drugs, they’re an exact replica of what your body once made that you are no longer making.” She said “I can’t give you everything you need right now.” I said “Why? I feel terrible.” She said “Because it took a long time for you to drain out so we have to put it back slowly. If you put back the whole thing right away” she said “You’ll literally go crazy. You can’t fool around with hormones.” So she started me on low dose bioidentical estrogen everyday of the month and two weeks Progesterone. Gave me thyroids because my thyroid was low, she gave me bioidentical cortisol to take four times a day to lower my cortisol so I could start sleeping. And within two weeks I was feeling better. Then I would report to her my symptoms and with each symptom I said “My leg’s itching.” She said “Okay, let’s up the estrogen just a little bit and we’ll up the Progesterone just a little bit. Let’s add in a little DHEA all for me, customized just for me. It took months but each week getting better and better and better and better and at the end of the year I was me again, I was sleeping eight and nine hours, my sex drive returned, my hair got its luster back, my skin plumped up and was no longer dry, my mood was beautiful, my happy nature returned, the hot and cold that I was experiencing would wake because my thyroid was corrected. My sore feet went away because my thyroids were corrected. My cortisol went down and that made sleep beautiful. My weight went down because by sleeping it put my insulin down, which I explain in all my books, and I went “We’re onto something here.” Here I am being offered all these drugs feeling miserable for three whole years, putting my marriage, my incredible marriage at risk because my mood change was so drastic. And now I’m back to normal, I don’t require a single pharmaceutical drug, my blood test are coming back stellar and that’s when I decided to start writing books about this and go deeper and then deeper I went the deeper you could go. And the nutrition became a part of that and understanding how chemicals are blunting hormones. That’s why younger and younger people have hormonal deficiencies when normally they shouldn’t, but the chemicals are blunting it and the stress is blunting hormone production. So the backbone of breakthrough medicine is Bioidentical Hormone Replacement and if you’re too young to replace them and you have no symptoms at all. I recommend by being a filter doctors to start every year at your physical get a hormone blood panel done. And doctors always say “You don’t need that you’re too young.” I always say “Do it so that next year here’s something to compare it to from year-after-year. And when you start seeing there’s a decline start replacing right then so that you never have to go through what I went through, what women of my generation went through. Of all the women who lost their husbands and marriages fell apart and families fell apart because of hormonal imbalance, because when hormones are off in the family the whole family is affected. And so health and wellness when you feel it and achieve it and I look around at my friends who are on allopathic medicine, the Lipitor, the Prozac, Ambien, Valium Cocktail. And I see that they can’t remember a thought, I see that they can’t sleep without sleeping pills and on diet pills to get rid of the bloating which is just a hormonal imbalance. Instead they’re being given this harsh chemicals and I realize oh my gosh, this is why we’re all ending up in nursing homes. It’s a perfect business template and so many of the nursing homes are owned by pharmaceutical companies. So when you look at the template for middle-aged on they start throwing this drugs at us, we get more and more dependent on them, we get more and more side effects, which require more and more and more. By the time we reach our 70s we need a tackle box for our pharmaceuticals, by the time you’re in your 80s you need a healthcare practitioner to come in everyday to keep it straight, and then when you get so whacky they put you in a nursing home and you stay in the nursing home until your insurance runs out or your family goes broke and then you die and what a terrible end to a beautiful life. And what all the doctors are saying who I’ve interviewed is that by starting early and really at any time don’t think that you’re too old for it, but the earlier you start the better, changing your diet and that means butter, creams, sour creams, hold back cream cheese, olive oil, that’s real food. If you can pick it or pluck it or shoot it its real food, but if it’s unpronouncable, if it’s natural flavoring, hydrolyzed soy protein, [odilized] yeast, caffeinate, any of those things that’s not a real food, your can’t pick that anywhere. Avoid all that. Try to buy organic if you can tell, try to grow it if you can, if not even grow in a window box herbs and spices. Because Dr. Khalil [McMouf] who is a beautiful man, a doctor, oncologist, gave up his oncologist practice and he was Department Head at his University Hospital. I said “Why?” “I couldn’t do it anymore” he said. What do you mean you couldn’t do it? He said “Nobody’s getting better on chemotherapy.” He said “I would get so attached to my patients and then have to watch them die. And I realized that we are approaching “Cancer wrong.” He said “And I realized that the protective nature from cancer was bioidentical hormones.” Young people don’t get cancer unless it’s an environmental or genetic adoration. He said “But young people making a full complement of hormones don’t get cancer because hormones signal to the brain that all is well in the body it’s the reproductive person.” And he said “The object of human beings being on the planet is to reproduce, that’s the biology in us.” And really when we’re no longer reproductive a brain’s job is to assess this and then try to get rid of it. Sometimes that takes forming a cancer that we have in us that gets accessed or affecting the brain or organs or whatever, but the brains job is to get rid of non reproductive once it makes room for these healthy reproductive ones for perpetuate the species. He said “So I now am taking in patients who are able to agree with the logic of restoring everybody to hormonal balance young, old, middle-aged and old he said “Because young people I’m finding are as hormonal imbalance as the older ones” and teaching them about nutrition, teaching them about herb and spices.” Tell me about herbs and spices. He said “Nature in its beautiful wisdom provided us with basil, thyme, sage, oregano, paragon, mint, chives, and other spices like turmeric, cumin, ginger, chili peppers, all these things nature provided. So we would flavor our healthy with them to make our food taste so great. And he said “The beauty of all the herbs and spices that they are nature’s antioxidant.” He said “In a world like today when we’re getting an assault of chemicals from every angle like Star Wars” he said “It’s creating pre-radicals in the body.” He said “You get enough pre-radicals in a body and you’ll get cancer.” He said “The antioxidant beats pre-radicals. So it’s people that eat quality food and add to that food as a beautiful flavorful enhancement. These spices and herbs I just mentioned, he said “It’s protective against cancer.” He said “You can prevent cancer if you eat right, if you don’t drink diet soda, if you make beautiful lemonade and drink lots of water and keep your system alkaline because cancer is acid alkaline throws off the acid nature in your body.” He said that “Everything about the body wants balance.” He said “Hormonal balance, chemical balance.” He said “And you can expect to live this long life and get to a 100 and 120 we’ll see, and be intact.” And how fun it would be to be 100-years-old with a well working brain and bones so that you can stand up, walk around and impart your wisdom because you’ve lived so long and you have respect. To me that’s just a beautiful thing and that makes living twice as long an absolute privilege.

Kris: Well Suzanne it’s been such a privilege to talk with you today and we look forward to continuing our conversation with you about health and wellness. Thank you so much. That’s the end of our interview and I hope you’ve enjoyed it.