Benedict: Yeah, yeah. So, well, I guess I met Brad well before all of everything started. So I met Brad back in, like, grade six in primary school. But my mother’s a naturopath, so I guess I grew up always exposed to complementary medicine. And along with all the scrapes and bruises and bumps that I got, I always had support with homeopathy or naturopathy and nutrition. But really I think it started in year 12. My parents made the crazy decision to pack up their lives, and we actually travelled around the world for two years filming a documentary on complementary cancer treatments. And we got to meet amazing people like Charlotte Gerson and Bruce Lipton and Dr. Henning Salpa. And through all that, I kind of decided that I wanted to study journalism. And I don’t know what I was actually thinking when I started that journey, but all I realized I was writing about was about health and about food and nutrition.

So when I finished studying journalism, I actually went and studied a bachelor of health science in nutritional medicine at Endeavour. And following that, I went to a cardio practice in Germany where Dr. Henning Salpa works. And worked there as a nutritionist for about five months and gained some incredible experiences working with cancer patients and other chronic diseases there as well. And having a really good team and setup. Like, it was just an incredible time. Following that, I came back… Sorry. Yeah.

Andrew: I was just gonna interject, sorry. So, over in Germany, that time working in a cancer hospital, was it, or a clinic?

Benedict: It was a clinic. So we had some inpatients that would stay there for four to six-week blocks. And then it was also, in a sense, well, a clinic for local patients as well that would just come in for day treatments. And there was things like hypothermia offered, ozone treatments. Then they had everything from sound healing to psychology to nutrition. All the patients that stayed in-house were fed with an in-house kitchen. So, all food aspects were controlled as well. Nutrition supplements were all supplied during that time. It was, like, a complete package for these people that were in-house.

Andrew: Right. Right. That’s quite incredible what they do over in Germany and how complementary medicine is accepted into not necessarily mainstream medicine, but there’s hospitals that actually sort of look after or co-manage the patients. It’s really quite an interesting model.

Benedict: Yeah. So the hypothermia, a lot of the research, the positive research with hypothermia is actually in conjunction with chemotherapy. And that’s what this clinic was doing a lot of. So it’s now being offered at just standard hospitals in Germany, even though hypothermia is offered alongside chemotherapy. But back then, a lot of patients in a nearby hospital were receiving their chemotherapy and then would come to a cardio and receive a hypothermia treatment just to combine those two, just to increase perfusion and all the other benefits that come with that hypothermia.

Andrew: Yeah. So forgive me, Benedict, I interjected, please go on. Tell us a little bit about what happened then.

Benedict: So coming back to Australia, learning so much through that, and I guess through the experiences I had meeting all these different people when we filmed our documentary, we wrote a coaching program. So I helped co-author the Truly Heal coaching program. And from that, we really focused on finding the underlying drivers of chronic disease, including cancer. And we realized that all these clinics, or most of these clinics, they all focused on one aspect of the disease or one aspect of the driving factors of this disease, but very few did super comprehensive case analysis and actually put it all together. So we, kind of, put that into a coaching program, which means that, you know, people can understand all the different aspects that are involved in something as chronic as cancer. And yeah, it’s something that is still alive today.

So, following that, I created our own clinic with my now wife, who’s a nutritionist as well. I met her at uni, so it’s called Learn to Nourish. And we’ve been practising in that now since…eight years now. We moved to Tasmania in 2017 and basically restarted the business down here to a degree. And it’s been great. So I focus a lot on, still, cancer and chronic diseases, but then I’ve got strong passions in gut health, in fatigue, and pretty much a really wide range of areas including sport actually, too.

Andrew: Right. Now, let’s go into our topic, a cause-based approach to therapy. Often we think about a condition-based approach to therapy. But that, obviously, is defined by that little box of what the condition is. Doesn’t necessarily smack with naturopathic axioms about supporting the human body. So tell us more about a case-based approach.

Benedict: Yeah. So throughout education, we’re told to look for the cause and we’re told to look… Well, first of all, we’re told to look for the cause. And I already have an issue with the word “cause” because cause seems so finite. Cause sounds like that’s the thing to look for and exclusion of everything else. So I actually like to use the word underlying drivers because they really are. They’re one little piece of a puzzle, and that’s what we’ve come to know.

We’re not looking at diseases anymore where there’s one cause where we’re looking at one viral infection or one nutrition deficiency. We’re looking at these complex chronic diseases where there is these different drivers, which all contribute to the cause. So, first of all, yeah, I think we need to rephrase the way we’re looking at that, but we’re taught really that we should be looking for the cause, but then we kind of assess a case from a system-based approach. So, we look at the cardiovascular system or the integumentary system or, you know, the respiratory system. And we then end up focusing our treatments based on the symptoms of that system. And very rarely are we then connecting those together and, kind of, trying to understand what underlying drivers are, kind of, umbrellaing over all of those systems.

So, although I investigate systems, and I’ll do that in a questioning process just to keep things systematically for me, I’ll then, kind of, take a step back and look at these six underlying drivers that I’ve identified. And I think that we can, kind of, put everything into these six underlying drivers. So those are infections, toxins, deficiencies, stress and trauma, diet and lifestyle, and genetics. And, obviously, they are all interlinked. You can’t have one without the other. Like infections, you know, leads to more toxins, and infections leads to further deficiencies or causes stress and trauma. So they’re all interlinked, but we can, kind of, get the general gist of which of those is the main, kind of, driving factor or which combination of those are the main driving factors for disease.

Andrew: Were you taught in uni when you were learning nutrition? Were you taught about this aetiological sieve that is like “C That Italian Vase Now Has Many New Dried Peas In It?” Have you ever heard of that acronym?

Benedict: No. Well, if it was, I have forgotten.

Andrew: Yeah. So it’s like C is Congenital, That is Trauma, Italian is Inflammation broken up into infections and immune, autoimmune. Vase, Vascular. Now, Neoplastic. Has, Hormonal. Many, Musculoskeletal. New, is added, it’s Nutrition. It wasn’t in the original one, the medical one. Dried is Drugs. Peas, Psychiatric. And then In is Idiosyncratic. And It is Iatrogenic, we caused it. So it’s this whole thing about what could be the possible causes or drivers of what’s happening in front of you? And I tend to run through this list with everything I hear, and you just get used to it going [vocalization] what could be the possible driver of that symptom? Is that how your mind systematizes this? Is that a word? Is that how your mind plays with it?

Benedict: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Look, it’s very similar. Like, it’s based on accumulating the information and then categorizing it into these six different factors. And by doing that, I get this overriding understanding of a case, which isn’t system-based, it’s much more specific to these underlying drivers. And it means that I’m then connecting those systems together. But it’s just a constant…like you’re just constantly thinking back to, “Is this infections, is this toxins, is it deficiencies?” And it, kind of, just creates a much more manageable representation of the case instead of, you know, all these different systems or all these different imbalances. It comes down to just these six. And then we can systematically start working through those. So, you’re still working with all the nuts and bolts, but it, kind of, gives you a bigger picture first, which is almost easier to manage.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. The thing that I love is, you know, you said it before, forgive me, my mind goes back to “lade Runner,” the new “Blade Runner” when you kept on saying interlinked. But we’ve got to remember that even some seemingly disparate symptom might well be from something over here. And you see it sometimes in quite weird presentations of diseases. Like, for instance, it almost looks like cornification or a fungal infection on the skin, but that’s a very rare presentation of lung cancer. So it’s really interesting how many people go for the skin. You know, it’s a dermatologist’s domain, but when you interlink things, you learn, hang on, that can be something from a system far, far away. Sorry.

Benedict: It’s amazing. I try and draw mind maps. I’m a huge fan of mind maps. And you start drawing lines between different components of that mind map. And then you realize that really you could just draw a line between every single point on that mind map and it turns into something that isn’t actually useful anymore because everything is interlinked. And it’s almost impossible not to create some sort of link with anything in the body. Like, everything affects something else, and then that, in turn, you know, continues to affect something else. So it’s this incredible system and it’s a massive puzzle. And because it’s such a massive puzzle, I guess that’s why I’ve tried to categorize it to a degree to make it more simple. Because otherwise, you can get so easily overwhelmed, and you get more and more overwhelmed the more you learn because it’s just infinitely complex. It doesn’t get simpler the more you know. The more you know, the less you know.

Andrew: That’s right. That’s exactly right. Let’s start off with genetics because, you know, it’s the sort of new kid on the block that’s really taken the interest of many [crosstalk 00:13:14].

Benedict: Yeah. So genetics is either…

Andrew: Let’s dive into that.

Benedict: Yeah. So genetics is, I guess, either relatively cut-and-dry. Either we’re looking at something like chromosomal abnormalities where we have very distinct changes to a whole range of factors. And there’s very little we can do to change those chromosomal abnormalities. We’re more working around that new framework of how the body is.

But then the other side of it is that we know this huge field of epigenetics and nutrigenomics, and that’s where we’re finding that health factors have an equal if not greater effect on the expression of genes or on the expression of disease than the actual gene itself. And that’s, kind of, the work of Bruce Lipton with epigenetics, basically finding that our environment nurture has more of an effect on our overall health than nature. And I fully believe that. I think that our environment has a greater impact on that, but that doesn’t mean we need to disregard genetics.

And it’s often something I won’t investigate until I’ve gone through a lot of the other factors, so toxins or infections or deficiencies, because those are the nature components, whereas genetics is something that, yeah, is sometimes I think you can delve into it way too deep and get way too stuck in it when it’s something that we need to look at the environment first. But it’s something that I’ll do if I’ve got a great dietary and supplemental protocol and I want to, kind of, become more specific with it, or, for instance, there’s some really great… We know a lot of great nutrigenomic, a lot of great genes related to liver detoxifications and toxin clearance. So if I suspect issues there, that’s when I’ll possibly go down the genetics pathway as well. Sorry, were you gonna say something?

Andrew: So with genetics, you know, you might have a preponderance to an issue with a SNP, but you might not have an actual issue handling that because let’s say with drug detoxification because you are maximizing it with nutrigenomics, your diet is so good that it’s actually supporting that slight deficiency, let’s say, in quotation marks. But then you’ve got issues that just are, for instance, when you’ve got double allele and you’ve got a massive or a nil effect of that enzyme, sometimes catastrophically, you know. So how do you manage your way, and do you further test to confirm that there’s an issue, like, for instance, with functional pathology, let’s say liver detox profiles, things like that? Do you continue to test until you know what you’re dealing with?

Benedict: So, yeah. Yes. But first, I’ll just jump back there. I think we also don’t know a lot about those alleles, yet, and those SNPs because…

Andrew: Very true.

Benedict: Especially when we look at some DNA tests or some…you know, where they’re looking at SNPs and there is, you know, 50,000 results there. And most of them have no clear science or no clear research backing up that they do what we think that they do. So we’re basically assuming that this VDR, you know, and there is some code number behind it, does what we think it does, but it might actually code for something completely different. Whereas we know… So we know, like, a certain number of these SNPs, and we know them relatively definitively because the research is quite clear. So I think it’s, first of all, really important that we stay within our scope of where the current research is with that, and only use SNPs that are fully understood.

And when you said like this, sometimes the body works around a SNP, and that’s because there’s all these SNPs that we don’t fully understand yet. So give us, you know, another 50 years and we might know this SNP doesn’t work and this SNP does work and, you know, then we’ll have that complete picture. But right now, we know that your environment is able to work around even some complete, like, SNPs where they’re completely mutated where we’ve got, you know, a homozygous representation.

So I think we need to keep that in mind that there is these limitations with this, and it is a really new field, but you’re completely right. If I do see something where we have a homozygous SNP in, like, let’s say CYP1B1, then I wanna see that through a test where we’re looking at hormone metabolites. So we’re actually showing that the body isn’t coping with the clearance of estrogens and we are seeing elevated levels. So you’re right. Because we need to confirm mutation.

Andrew: Yes, yes. Totally agree. Like, I’ve pondered about… What about the combination of SNPs of alleles? I noticed that, let’s say, with autism, you know, they’ve noticed that… First, they started with, I think it was 6, something like that, then it was 9, 12, 14. Now, it’s, like, this whole category. I think there’s 46 or something. I might be way wrong, so please don’t quote me. But, I mean, that’s going to require artificial intelligence to then computationally look at the combinations of alleles and the effects on certain disorders, diseases, metabolic processes, etc. It’s gonna be very interesting in the future to see what happens here. So, let’s move on to toxins. What do you do and how do you handle them?

Benedict: Yeah, so toxins, I guess, I break down into different components. So, I look at environmental toxins like mercury and mold and pesticides, like glyphosate. Then I look at endogenous. So that’s where things like estrogens or bilirubin, uric acid, any of the endogenous-produced, I guess, toxins you could call them or metabolites that we don’t want too much of. And then we’ve got microbial metabolites. So we’ve got infectious ones. So, for instance, like the COVID-19 spike protein or H. pylori cytotoxin. And then we’ve also got gut bacteria, so commensal gut bacteria, and they’re producing toxins or metabolites as well, so lipopolysaccharides or hydrogen sulfite. So, first of all, I look at what toxins are we actually talking about? And then… So, again, I just really like systematically breaking down, you know, this toxin component, and then looking at how we most appropriately not just manage that toxin, but how do we treat it? How do we look at the underlying driver? How do we remove that driver?

So, for something like, you know, lipopolysaccharides, we can, you know, try and reduce the production of it with reduction of saturated fats, but realistically, we want to reduce the bacteria that are producing those lipopolysaccharides. So, again, we can treat the symptom or we can treat the cause. And that changes with every single one of these toxins. So, you know, we talked about estrogen metabolites, estrogen quinones before, and, for instance, COMT there. So we can support COMT with magnesium quite well, but we also know that COMT breaks down all of your noradrenaline and adrenaline. So, actually, addressing stress can be a big factor when it comes to managing the clearance of hormones.

Andrew: Isn’t that interesting? Who would’ve thought?

Benedict: Yeah, I know. I know. Who would’ve thought stress is involved. But I wanna preface that with Herxheimer reactions. I hear a lot of patients come to me who have had detoxes and say, “Look, I’ve had a Herxheimer reaction.” And I think anyone who has a Herxheimer reaction… We’re actually exceeding the rate of Phase III detoxification. So we need to make sure that we’re not just mobilizing things around the body, we’re actually allowing it to be fully excreted. And if that is in line, if those rates are established, then we shouldn’t actually be having any Herxheimer reactions.

So I think management of detoxification is a much slower process than what most people imagine. And often we need to just slow down and actually focus on health, in general, and detoxification, kind of, happens on its own. Charlotte Gerson, she said, “You can’t heal one part of the body and not begin healing the rest.” Like, when the body heals it heals. And, like, sometimes that’s as simple as just focusing on shifting out of, like, a sympathetic nervous system dominance to allow the body to focus on detoxification again.

Andrew: That’s really interesting. And very interesting you were speaking about the Herxheimer reaction. I’ll always remember when I consulted in pharmacy. This greengrocer didn’t believe in natural medicine. And quite unbeknownst to me, he came in when I wasn’t there and bought a liver, they were called fat metabolizers, which was, you know, choline, methionine, and a few liver supportive herbs, globe artichoke, things like that. St Mary’s [inaudible 00:22:39]. And stupidly, he didn’t obey the directions on the bottle and he took nine tablets. Now, this is not a massive… When you think about it, it’s not a Herculean dose, but it’s quite a robust dose. And he immediately broke out in a rash, like a full body rash. And I was like, “So doesn’t work?” Of course, one would say, “Oh, that’s an adverse reaction,” but then, you know, reaction, adverse reaction, thalidomide is used for cancer now, you know. So it definitely had an action. It was just not the desired action. But it was a very interesting example of, oh, yes, these things happen. Oh, yeah.

So do you tend to then pull back or go quite gently with your initial therapy when you are detoxing, like supporting the gut? I remember these… Forgive me for going on, but I remember these quite challenging protocols, and I hate that word, protocols for detox. And they were…like, the first step was basically, let’s load off everything, you know. Let’s dump everything. And I thought that is really unwise when you’ve got people that are cycling at really low ebbs, chronic fatigue. What’s your take on how we should be addressing it instead? What should we be focused on?

Benedict: I think there is minor exceptions to that. So if we have acute toxicity of a heavy metal, for instance, or of, I don’t know, let’s say Panadol or something like that, we need to very quickly detoxify that. And that’s the exception to it. But whenever we’re talking about chronic toxicity and we’re talking about chronic levels, we need to detoxify very, very slowly. We need to let the body’s own mechanisms basically be supported and allow those to manage or clear those toxins. Because the body’s incredible. I think we often, you know, as health practitioners, we tend to try and change or modify the body, but really our bodies know how to do 99.99% of everything. So really all we wanna do is support that innate ability to detoxify. And sometimes we’re giving a little nudge by mobilizing the toxins a little bit, but it is still very, very gentle.

So, I’m always supporting liver clearance. Look, I love glycine and the support of those amino acids and methionine. And then I’ll look a lot at the guts. So the gut is such a massive factor for toxin clearance. And then hydration. I think it’s often overlooked, and so many of my clients and so many people I know just really struggle getting that water in. It’s funny you come to a nutritionist and all they leave is me telling them that they really need to pick up their water intake. But it’s such a big part of detoxification and supporting, you know, that elimination process.

Andrew: And you were mentioning stress and trauma before. Now, trauma’s a really interesting one. Therein lies a lot of psychological support, counselling support, and possible inter referral to appropriate other individuals. But how do you manage this focus, particularly with your history of dealing with cancer patients who have this chronic type of vigilance after their cancer recovery? How do you handle stress and trauma?

Benedict: Yeah. So, like you said, first of all, referral, referral, referral. Like, I’m very much aware of my scope of practice in that area. But I think the big aspect of the referral or seeing a psychologist or a counsellor is really just that sense of community. And we’ve seen that in, like, the blue zone. So the healthiest people on earth, they have this really strong sense of community and that provides them support, they’re able to discuss their issues, problem-solve their issues. And they’re actually part of something bigger. So that’s, first of all, my first general recommendation when it comes to psychological help. But I really focus on the physical aspects of psychological stress or trauma. And here we’ve got this incredible emerging research. So we know, for instance, that after a car accident, we change our gut microbiome for up to six months, and that’s due to, you know, a mixture of physical and mental stress, but the effect of psychological stress on the physical body is absolutely massive.

And there’s so much we can do to support that. There’s so much we can do to actually reduce the impact of that psychological stress. And that’s where I’ll work with vagal nerve stimulation mostly or increasing vagal tone because I know that I can help people’s body come out of that stress response more quickly, and therefore, not have as long-term damaging effects on their gut function, on their liver function, on their detoxification pathways, on their immune system, because all of those are considered secondary in a state of fight, flight, or freeze in that sympathetic nervous system response.

So I’ll do that with mostly, kind of, exercises, with vagal tone exercises, so, you know, gaggling and humming and singing and splashing cold water on your face. But I’ll also do it with bitters, so working with the gut and actually triggering that vagal response with bitter foods, with smelling, and tasting, and, kind of, creating that ritual around food as well, because all of that stimulates the vagus nerve and enables us to go into that parasympathetic system response again and allow our body to do all those normal functions which are so essential for health.

Part of the whole vagal nerve stimulation, which I’m quite interested in, is I guess mental hacking or creating new neural pathways. And I often refer to Pavlov’s dogs, which is a study where they rang a bell and they fed the dogs, and after a while, they were able to just ring the bell and the dogs would start salivating. And we can use vagus nerve stimulation exercises to do the same thing and elicit a positive response when we do those vagus nerve stimulation activities or exercise or where that is we decide to do. And I think we can do a lot for psychology and for stress with really simple exercises. But yes, you are so right, with chronic disease, especially with cancer, that initial diagnosis is life-changing, absolutely shattering. And I think we can’t be holistic practitioners without addressing that from a psychological and from a physical perspective.

Andrew: Yeah. Can I go back a little bit to toxins? Now, you know, like I mentioned, these herbs that I love, and I don’t think I could intercede or help people without using beloved herbs. But as a nutritionist, what do you tend to use when you are helping somebody to detox? Is it mainly focused on amino acids and acetylcysteine? You were mentioning paracetamol overdose. I mean, there’s a call for N-acetylcysteine, isn’t it? Gram dosages every…what is it? Four, eight hours. What do you tend to use when you, you know, don’t use herbs, or do you inter refer to use herbs? How do you combat that?

Benedict: So I’ll use a combination of amino acids. And then a lot of the time, I’m working more with mobilizing the gut with other… There’s some nutrients I’ll use like Diindolylmethane or I’ll look at Calcium D-glucarate depending on which toxin. It’s very specific for each toxin. Sometimes, you know, all we’re doing is putting something like a binder inside the gut. So, sometimes I’m looking at something like clinoptilolite, just trying to bind things in the gut.

So I think it changes so much for each toxin. And I think we can’t really say that, you know, it’s the same for all toxins because they are bound and excreted with such different ways. Sometimes I work with competing nutrients, so with zinc to try and flush out other heavy metals. So yeah, I think there’s so much we can do even without herbs because I think herbs are fantastic at triggering that detoxification response, but they’re also the easiest way to then elicit that Herxheimer reaction, and actually, pushing almost a little bit further. So by almost avoiding them, although they’re fantastic, we’re almost guaranteed… It’s very difficult to actually have that Herxheimer response, and detoxification happens a lot slower. So there are some things that are fantastic. So, I’ll use cilantro as well. Even just dietary, we know that mobilizes toxins really well and heavy metals. So, I guess I’ll brush into food and herbs a little bit, but mostly I’m working with nutrients.

Andrew: Gotcha. And so therein, infections. Now, you know, most naturopaths would go, “Oh, the infections are herbs first,” sort of thing. How do you handle that nutritionally? Do you look at deficits, nutritional deficits, or do you look at nutrients that really enhance the immune system there?

Benedict: So, again, which type of infection are we talking about? Are we talking about something like a viral or a bacterial infection? Again, it’s gonna change. Or are we talking about even just a dysbiosis and labelling that as an infection or H. pylori? So I don’t think there’s one right way of doing it for anything, but it needs to be specific for what that infection is. So let’s say, for example, if we are looking at a dysbiotic gut bacteria, I’ll work with fibres most of the time, with prebiotic fibres, and thereby promote the growth of other bacteria to outcompete that species. We can work with antimicrobials there, so things like a pine needle extract can sometimes be used to lower some species like streptococcus. But even there, like, if we can avoid doing that, instead outcompete that bacteria, we’re gonna have much more positive results without having that almost like a Herxheimer star reaction without releasing…

I give this analogy to my clients that if we actually try and peel something inside the gut, it’s like squishing flies inside a room, and all we end up with is a whole bunch of dead flies inside the room. So you need to then clear all those dead flies. And the less we do that or the slower we do that, and we just kind of encourage the flies to leave, it’s gonna be much more gentle for the body.

Andrew: Open the door [crosstalk 00:34:04]

Benedict: Open the door and windows.

Andrew: So, Benedict, obviously, there’s, you know, so much more that you do and it’s hard to cover in one podcast. It requires a talk at a conference or something. But I look forward to hearing so much more from you. I’d love to keep in contact. Where can practitioners learn more about what you do?

Benedict: Yeah. So they’re welcome to hop on my website, learntonourish.com. Also, got social medias, which I occasionally do things with. On Instagram @learntonourish, and Facebook. But I’ve actually just started up one-on-one mentoring as well, which is live on the website. So if anyone’s interested, they’re welcome to check that out at learntonourish.com. And yeah, hopefully, doing more podcasts and things like this.

Andrew: Well, if you’re a friend of Brad, of course, you are, going to be doing much more podcasts. But it’s been lovely to meet you. Thanks so much for joining us today, teaching us through about a sort of system-based approach rather than…well, how did you say it? A driver-based approach, forgive me, which gives us clues. I think importantly, it teaches us not to get hoodwinked into becoming little doctors, little leaf-waving doctors, and instead to retain the rich history of natural medicine and the philosophy of natural medicine and why it works, why we are not shackled to a diagnosis. I think that’s the important point.

Benedict: And the interrelationship between all those different bodily systems and overriding, you know, factor, is it influencing that?

Andrew: Thanks, Benedict. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Remember you can catch up on the show notes for this podcast and all the other podcasts on the Designs for Health website. I’m Andrew Whitfield-Cook. This is “Wellness by Designs.”