195. Michael Sileck: Sea Salt Benefits, Mineral Depletion & Soil Health Crisis

20:48I was actually listening to the podcast with Stephen, I believe is his name the other day, and he made the interesting point about seed oils and alcohol and how there's such a proliferation of seed oils in our guts these days is that actually we can consume less alcohol. Wow. And so that's an interesting way of, okay, if there's other quote unquote poisons or bad things, that actually throws off the ability to consume and benefit from more healthy natural things, if that makes sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So C90 is our agriculture brand and our Baja Gold is of course our human health and wellness brand.

21:19And so we have this spot in the Baja Peninsula. So the Baja Peninsula is on the Western part of the North American continent. and we use the Sea of Cortez ocean water. So the Sea of Cortez is a very clean, pristine body of water. And this was actually selected by Dr. Murray because he did a couple of years, maybe up to a decade of ocean water research. And he was really focused on improving the health of the human populace. And he said, I will, if you've ever been in logistics, Dr. Murray is a smart guy. He said, I'll never change the world if I have to ship liquid containers of ocean water from Florida or wherever into the middle of Illinois.

21:57Right. It's not going to work. It's just it just doesn't work. You can't get enough ocean water. It's too expensive. And so he said, I need to find a way to concentrate this down to a sea salt that maintains as much of the minerals and trace elements as possible. And so he identified five key factors where you would have the most mineral rich sea salt. And so the first is you start with a mineral rich body of water. The Sea of Cortez has elevated mineral levels. So it's a very rich, clean, mineral rich body of water. The second is that you want a location where either currently or previously there was a fresh water connection point into that body of water.

22:32So you almost create more of a brackish water.

22:34Gary Brecka:Yeah, an estuary. Exactly. So, yeah. So we had the Colorado River from millennia would run into the Sea of Cortez. And now it was dammed off about 100, 150 years ago. But for many millennia, you brought the minerals from the Rocky Mountains down into the Sea of Cortez. Oh, wow. So you have this mineral soup kind of occurring there. You also have the San Andreas Fault Line, which runs directly underneath, of course, California, but then the Sea of Cortez. And within that, you have these geothermal vents that push up these rare earth elements. So you have even more uniqueness with the mineral composition of that water.

23:08And then lastly, you want to, of course, be in an area without industry or pollution. And you want to ideally be in an area where you can produce consistent mineral salt year round. And so that means your weather patterns have to be appropriate and your heat. So essentially, it's very hot, very arid year round, very minimal humidity. So you're really just in perfect conditions to produce this salt year round. Wow.

23:32Gary Brecka:Does it occur when the water recedes and it dries? Is that what happens? Is there a time of year where the salt flats at the bottom of the ocean, they're exposed to the sun? And is that when you harvest them? So we actually are about 12 miles inland off of the actual Sea of Cortez. And so that's important because the lunar tides will bring the water about 12 miles inland. And we have constructed, essentially dug out these retention ponds, we call them, or salt flats. And so the tide brings the water in. It fills up the salt flats. This happens about four times per year. And then over a period of four to six weeks, the salt will dehydrate out to those beautiful sea salt crystals.

24:13And then you can harvest them. You know, I was telling someone the other day, I said, you realize that if your blood pressure was so high right this moment that you called 911, when they got on site, the first thing they would do is they would actually bag you with saline.

24:27Gary Brecka:It's not water. It's saline. Yeah, yeah. It's not water. You know, and when you're so dehydrated that you, you know, need intravenous fluid, the first fluid they give you is the saline IV. I mean, when I was racing triathlons, whenever somebody, we called it bonking, would bonk and end up on the side of the road. Usually what would happen is they would get severe cramps first and that would make them stop. But if they were, you know, a more accomplished athlete, they would, they could push themselves into that real threshold of dehydration and mineral depletion. And sometimes they wouldn't even put these people on a gurney or anything.

25:03Gary Brecka:The paramedic would pull up on a motorcycle and hook a saline line up right there. So I think there's a lot of misconceptions around salt, that sodium is just dehydrating, that it raises your blood pressure, that it dries out your skin, all of these things when I believe that the reality is different, especially when you talk about mineral salts. Yes. Salt is the electricity of life. All living things need salt. All living things very likely need more salt than what is currently recommended. And that goes for the soil, through the animals, and all the way to human beings. Yeah. You know, I also have been studying methylation pathways.

25:42Gary Brecka:And the number of times that key minerals are required in these pathways is mind-numbing. And I've always tried to put forward the notion that the majority of humanity is not as sick or diseased or as pathological as we think we are. We are nutrient deficient. And I think one of the most overlooked, because it's rarely talked about, are actual minerals. People know what potassium, magnesium, and sodium are, right? Because those are the big ones. It's in every electrolyte drink. But when you get into the boron, manganese, molybdenum, silica, the ones that are, I guess, less sexy for - Yeah, the trace minerals.

26:19Gary Brecka:Yeah, the trace minerals. Those are equally as important. and the realization for me several months ago that even eating organic um that it's very difficult if not almost impossible to get your mineral content into into the optimal range yes um and so talk a little bit it doesn't need to be that way yeah no it does definitely doesn't look i say i say all the time and and i won't hide it i mean i think baja gold is probably my favorite uh and least expensive biohack. I mean, I don't know, a$15,$20 bag of that will last you years. I mean, it's really, and you can get all the minerals that you need.

26:58Gary Brecka:What was astounding to me is that we're also using mineral salt to restore soil health. So what else is in the salt besides sodium, obviously sodium chloride, what else is in the salt that just makes it so viable for restoring the soil? Of course. So it is God's building plan. It's the entire periodic table of elements in a consistent proportional balance to really feed your enzymes, your bacteria and your fungi in your soil microbiome. So you had mentioned kind of the trace minerals. They are critically important to soil health. And unfortunately, if you go and get an agriculture degree, they're really only going to harp on 12 to 20 minerals that need to be restored into the soil.

27:39But what we have found is that it is critical to have the entire spectrum of trace minerals available, we may not be able to specifically say what mineral 52 exactly does. And it is usually context dependent, but making sure that they are all available and, uh, in, you know, present, if the soil needs them is critically important and it can unlock genetic potential in ways that you might not have seen before. And so soil varies, uh, significantly from coast to coast, the amount of, you know, the type of soil that you see, the, uh, minerality differences between soil in Illinois versus Washington is very, very different.

28:16So what C90 does is actually allows you to provide a full spectrum of minerals and trace elements and allow that soil to kind of work through what it needs, context dependent, to unlock its most perfect self, if that makes sense. Wow.

28:29Gary Brecka:What are some of the myths about salt and mineral salt or even sodium that bother you? There's some that bother me. Yeah, no, it's a great question. You know, the entire C90 business is the open question is, you want me to put salt on my land? I don't understand. Yeah, I mean, if I were a farmer, that would kind of be my first reaction too. And you talk about the salting of Carthage and kind of some historical things as well. And so there is an education that needs to occur and it's not just sodium. We've done tests where you do, if you take like table salt, for instance, and you do a side-by-side with C90, the results are dramatically different.

29:09In 90 % of cases, just putting pure table salt will not provide benefits for you. But when it's C90, which is a reduced sodium, extra minerals and trace elements, you know, solution for you, then that soil responds positively. Then you get the plant growth. You get the nutrient density improvements. So that's the number one thing on the agriculture side of things is just help me understand why I need to do this. And then, of course, on the human health and wellness, there has been a war, if you will, against salt and perpetrated by other individuals to really elevate. Well, maybe sugar should be more acceptable.

29:48And so there are certainly a common understanding that I can eat more sugar than salt. And I would say that is completely backwards. Wow, that's insane. Yeah.

29:57Gary Brecka:And, you know, what is it specifically that's in the mineral salt that allows it to be a good fertilizer? The extra minerals? It is. Yeah. So it's that natural mineral composition. What we found is that the bacteria and the fungi within the soil microbiome, they use the C90 nutrients as a food source. And so this isn't necessarily feeding the plants. It's feeding, maybe to your point earlier, it's feeding what feeds the plants. So it gets that soil microbiome, the gut health of the soil going in a way that it can process all environmental factors and then provide the most nutrient rich and medium for that plant to grow in.

30:34Gary Brecka:You know, I think, too, when we talk about minerals, like I said, people know the big ones, potassium, sodium, magnesium. You don't realize the molybdenum, the silica, the manganese, the boron, you know, all of these other copper, all of these other minerals that are naturally occurring in nature that are critical to biophysiologic processes. You know, I believe that the majority of our country is mineral deficient. They are. Full stop, yes. Okay. Great. And that if you actually saw this chart, and I do this sometimes when I do stage talks, I'll put up this really complicated chart of methylation pathways and cellular biology.

31:15Gary Brecka:And I do it first to freak people out a little bit because it looks so complicated. There's like arrows going everywhere and there's circles. And if you've ever seen a methylation chart, guys, just Google one and your eyes will roll back in your head. But the reason why I do that is because I tell people to look at that chart. And as they zoom in on it, they start to realize they know, they recognize the name of all of the compounds on that chart. Oh, they're like, oh, that's tryptophan. That's an amino acid. Oh, that's magnesium. That's zinc. That's copper. That's iodine. That's palladium. That's, or not palladium, that's boron.

31:51Gary Brecka:And you start to see the importance of these minerals in your cellular physiology. because our cells are so busy. They're like many businesses, right? I mean, they've got to eliminate waste. They got to repair. They got to detoxify. They got to regenerate. They got to bring things through this phospholipid bilayer membrane. They've got to participate in oxidative phosphorylation. You know, the mitochondria has got to create energy. And this takes fuel. Yes. And very often, I think we think of the fuel as our macros, like how much protein am I getting? how much sodium, I mean, sorry, how much carbohydrate am I getting?

32:32Gary Brecka:How much fat am I getting? But the truth is beyond those macros are the micros, are the traces, are the minerals. And what are some of the consequences of us not having mineral rich soil or not having mineral rich bottom? If you know me, you know, I'm a huge believer in the benefits of hydrogen water. H2Tab delivers cost-effective portable tablets that generate ultra-clean molecular hydrogen at 12 parts per million, one of the highest concentrations on the market. With over 1 ,300 published studies showing benefits of oxidative stress, energy, recovery, brain function, and so much more, taking charge of your health has never been easier or more cost-effective.

33:22Gary Brecka:Just drop a tablet in water, let it dissolve, and drink it back. It's less than a a day, science-backed and part of my daily routine. I never travel without this, and it is my favorite biohack. Visit drinkh2tab.com. That's drinkh2tab.com and upgrade your hydration today. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. The consequences are poor human health, said frankly. So when you have this epidemic of, some people use the term hidden hunger, There's this idea that we are eating plenty of like volume of food, but the actual density of the food that we're eating leaves our bodies malnourished and hunger and hungry.

34:07Excuse me. But it's a hidden hunger because you're not going without food. You're going without minerals. And so your cells, like you mentioned, don't have the basic building blocks that they used to receive from the food 100 years ago. it's why it's the same reason why you know you'll eat 2x the amount of volume as you would have 50 years ago and you'll feel less full you'll feel bloated and like i don't know why i needed to do all that and i still don't feel satiated um you go to different cultures that are ahead of the curve in this and you'll have a plate that looks tiny and you're like where's my triple patty big mac you know and you're like what is this and then you eat it you're like oh my gosh i'm so satiated because that food is so mineral rich.

34:46It's a true whole food. A whole food, it's not just about being unprocessed and unrefined. It actually has to be grown from the right building blocks because it's interesting when you think about produce and you think about going to the grocery store, we have a lot of specifications and governance around processed foods. You have your nutritional facts. You have all of your regulations, if you will. There's not really a whole lot of regulation around what a tomato is. Right. Right. And so like if you think about going to a grocery store 50 years ago or just going to the farmer's market then 50 years ago, 60 years ago, a tomato was so much more mineral dense and nutrient dense than it is today.

35:27But they're still called tomatoes. Right. And so it's not the the you know, the population's fault that this is happening. They don't even know it because how could they? But, you know, there's this other parable where people talk about, oh, my gosh, I remember growing up. It's always like I remember growing up on Papaw's farm and the vegetables we would get from his garden were so delicious and just so like fulfilling. And now I go I've been chasing that at every farmer's market and Whole Foods for years. And I can't ever find I try organic. I try all these different things. But that richness of like homegrown nutrient dense produce is something that like it locks into your brain almost just like instinctively.

36:07Gary Brecka:Yeah. And and people know what they need. They just can't find it. Yeah. What are some of the outcomes you see when farmers start using a mineral sea salt on their land? Because even for me, that was, I grew up on a farm. I'm familiar with farming practices. I'm very familiar with different types of fertilizer. Actually, where our fluoride comes from is that fluorosilicic acid that's being discarded from phosphate fertilizer production. But what are some of the outcomes that farmers experience when they actually just start to put mineral-rich sea salt into their soil? Absolutely. So most farmers are businesses.

36:42So number one, we're going to help your business from an overall economic perspective. So if you look at your net inputs, right, you can most in most cases, you can reduce a lot of your synthetic fertilizers. I will say that C90 is not fully and exclusively an organic and regenerative agriculture input. It has a whole place within conventional agriculture as a substitute or something to work in parallel with current farming practices. So while we maybe prefer organic and regenerative agriculture, if you are using traditional conventional methods, C90 is still a great product for you. So you can reduce whatever your input structure looks like today.

37:22And the outputs of what it is that you're growing are going to be superior, either from a quantitative quantity standpoint, and or a qualitative standpoint. And so what we mean by that is the, you know, the amount of bushels per acre that you're growing, which is what you're selling, that's going to be elevated for you. But the actual quality of what you're growing, if that is important to your context, will also be more valuable. So if you're selling hay, for instance, you want to look at your protein and your RFV values, which is this is kind of farmer parliaments, but the quality of what you're growing is superior because it's more mineral rich.

37:56And so you might be able to sell that at a higher price, for instance, or if you're feeding that to your animals. and I want to talk animals kind of in a second.

38:03Gary Brecka:Yeah. The animals benefit from that. So yeah, they benefit from mineral rich produce. I totally agree with you. Um, it must be frustrating that you hear a lot about, uh, salt not being heart healthy, salt raises blood pressure. Um, even though, yeah, I talk about this all the time. If you were, your blood pressure was so high that you called nine one one. The first thing they would do when they got there is they would bag you with saline um and sometimes they'll actually just squeeze it in to try to rapidly rapidly to lower your blood pressure and i think the majority of america if probably the majority of people listening or watching this podcast would say yeah um you know my father or grandfather was you know had hypertension or had some kind of cardiovascular issue and the first thing they told him to do was stop taking salt.

38:54Gary Brecka:And I mean, can you speak on that a little bit? I mean, does low salt necessarily mean heart healthy? It does not. No. And there has been a significant amount of research in this space from qualified individuals. And we can post that maybe in the show notes of looking into that. Yeah, I'd love to. I'll link it in the show notes for sure. But the amount of definitive research that says low salt is better for your heart is virtually nil. It is very context dependent. And in general, I think it's safe to say in general, if you are following a exercise protocol and eating healthy and you're practicing healthy lifestyles, the amount of salt that your body not only could benefit from, but really needs is going to be much higher than what the recommended level is.

39:36So today, I think the recommended level for sodium is about 2000 milligrams per day, 22 ,000 to 2300 milligrams per day. There's research that would Again, if you're a healthy, active individual, you should be closer to that 4 ,000 to 6 ,000 milligrams of sodium per day to help keep everything moving. Again, salt is electricity. So it provides the electricity for your cells. If you are eating a mineral salt as well, then you're getting that magnesium. They talk about the sodium-potassium pump and that connection. And so you have that added potassium to help your hydration and your overall cellular processes.

40:11okay um so yeah so no we um we believe that again everyone's context is individualized and they need to speak with a nutritionist and their doctor but in most cases the idea that lower salt is a healthier option uh we we would disagree with that i would totally disagree with that too i take this

40:28Gary Brecka:mixture every morning uh when i get in the sauna and i'll i'll put you know baja gold sea salt um I put a little turmeric and I put a couple tabs of hydrogen tablets in there and a scoop of perfect aminos. Man, I feel amazing, especially after I sweat and that stuff circulates around. I mean, I can actually feel the minerals like going into my body, like legit feel it. And then days when I travel and forget it or don't have it, I notice the difference. And, you know, I've actually read reviews, peer reviews where there was actually an interesting article published in the Wiley Journal of Headaches.

41:07Gary Brecka:And they looked at migraine headache sufferers. And did you see that one? Yeah. I mean, I've talked about it a lot where they found an inverse relationship between sodium and deep in the study, if you read it, it was sodium and other minerals and highlighted the difference between mineral salt and just table salt, iodized table salt, because I want to make it clear, we're just not talking about iodized table salt. And I guess in the commercial production of a lot of salt for some reason there seems to be high lead contents showing up not in baja gold but in in some of you know your peers in the mineral salt industry and it's freaking people out um you know a lot of the pink himalayan sea salt that was coming from china had extraordinarily high mineral content and i you see sales of that those kinds of mineral salts plummet.

42:00Gary Brecka:And then recently, I'm not trying to throw Celtic salt under the bus. I used to take Celtic salt. I would actually put it straight on my tongue. I looked at the level of lead coming out in some of the reports on Celtic salts and it was very high. Is that because of industrial processing? Is that because of how it's harvested? Because, you know, there is going to be some heavy metal content in produce. It's going to be in mineral salts, like we talked about earlier. but what what keeps your what keeps your heavy metal content so low and where are these heavy metals coming from that are showing up in a lot of these mineral salts sure so we're looking at mineral unrefined sea salts is where typically there's these challenges unrefined meaning it's just not highly processed correct it's actually more natural okay yes you're not denaturing it and just taking the actual salt salt amount yes exactly yeah so um how we harvest and where we harvest is really key to this.

42:58So we start with a very pure mineral source. We have a couple of different filtration elements throughout the process there. But really the key is that we have very, very large salt flats. Historically, salt flats have been a little bit smaller. And so there is pieces of all elements in ocean water, but the surrounding ponds themselves can also have some of these heavy metals. And so Baja Gold is like the perimeter. Correct. Exactly. And so Baja Gold is unique in that we only harvest from the very center of our ponds and our ponds are like 10 or 20 times larger than most traditional ponds. So instead of having like a nine by nine, you know, square yard pond, you're going to have more of a football field size pond for Baja Gold.

43:43So it's significantly larger. So you are, I mean, 200 feet away from that perimeter where you're harvesting Baja Gold from. So it is a very clean and pure salt. You had mentioned some of the others. Just, you know, they have trace elements of these potential heavy metals in them. And we do think the difference largely is because of the size of our salt flats and how we kind of harvest it. So you leave some waste or you actually don't harvest around the perimeter.

44:11Gary Brecka:We don't harvest around the perimeter. Yes, exactly. And then I'm always curious about what the process of salt is. I mean, harvesting the salt. So you go in, you scoop the salt out, and you bring it over to the plant. and then what happens to it is it going a big um like stainless steel drum and and you like slowly get dried i mean yeah so we have uh so we can do salt 101 why don't we yeah yeah i'm really curious you know there there were there used to be the show on uh it might still be on cable called how it's made yeah there you ever see that like i stopped eating half the things in my life because i saw how they like have you ever watched sausage yes you'll never eat sausage again um but it was a really cool show it was uh but they never did one on mineral salt so there's three i categorize there's three different types of salt so we'll start with kind of the the worst type so that's going to be your table salt so highly processed refined table salt for really millennia table salt didn't exist because humans hadn't kind of invented it yet if you will um it is it was produced to allow salt to be more of a commodity more easy and accessible for people to use and And then it was kind of taken in, I would say, a negative direction by processed foods, right?

45:24Because you can use it so readily and it's so inexpensive to, you know, you can integrate it in everything. Right. So what table salt is, it either originates as rock salt, which is then processed and stripped of minerals and trace elements. Or in some cases, it actually originates as unrefined sea salt. And then they strip the minerals and trace elements out of it. They bleach it oftentimes to make it pure white. And then they will add one of two things, possibly both. In the, I want to say the 30s and 40s, there was a goiter challenge in America because we had a severe iodine deficiency as a country.

46:00And so the, I think it was the FDA, they regulated this idea of putting artificial or synthetic iodine into salt. And so the reason I bring this up is people will say, what is iodized salt? What does that mean? So there was a regulation to put synthetic iodine into salt. So you will see on your grocer regular table salt and then iodized salt. That's what that is. They take table salt. They add, I think it's either a half or 1 % of iodine, and then they call it iodized salt.

46:26Gary Brecka:Okay. That's one of the two things they add. The other is many salts will contain an anti-caking agent or what's called a flowing agent. And so salt is naturally hydroscopic, which means it attracts moisture and it tends to clump up. Right. Even table salt, which has been dried and processed. Yeah. You go to restaurants and they put rice in there. Exactly. on to try to keep it flowing moisture yes so um there are other synthetic ways to do this um some of them are more healthy than others but it's an artificial component that's being added some of them are are aluminum based i believe wow um so you know do your research look into that and look at the back of your salt canister it'll tell you what's in it um so that is table salt we never recommend table salt for anything right neither do i yeah yeah um the next best thing is going to be rock salt and or earth salt.

47:14And so what rock salt and earth salt is, it's a close cousin of unrefined sea salt. It is a body of water that was captured by the tectonic plate movement generations ago, millennia ago. And so it ultimately dried out that ocean water and left behind a salt mine, essentially. And so when you hear pink Himalayan salt, that's a rock salt or an earth salt. There was a body of water in Pakistan that was free flowing at one point in time the plates moved around it the mountains moved around it we're talking eons here right and captured that body of water and over time it dries out and it leaves behind salt what's interesting is these are deposits that are thousands and thousands of years old there is some interaction with the soil and the earth around it and so pink himalayan salt is pink because of the excess iron it has absorbed over generations and so that's not necessarily a bad thing or a good thing it just is why it is pink now that indication also shows you that there's other imbalances in pink salt so you're going to have different levels of magnesium and potassium and all of your trace minerals versus an unrefined sea salt so that's pink himelan there's uh redmond is in america same concept it's an underground salt mine okay um so then the best category is unrefined sea salt this is heritage style salt creation free flowing ocean water into a salt basin or a salt flat that you exclusively let the sun dehydrate, preserving all of your minerals and trace elements resulting in the lowest sodium chloride proportionally relative to your macros and traces.

48:49That's a Baja gold. So Baja gold, you know, it's flashy, new, exciting. It's a centuries old innovation. We're not remaking the wheel here. So this is how salt used to be made. This is if you take, you know, a rock and you pour some salt water on it at the beach, you let it sit in the sun, you're going to get some salt. It's not all that dissimilar from what we do. We have a different location and different processes, but that's the same concept. So you mentioned from the salt flats to the facility, we bring the salt there, we do some screening for grain sizes, and then we bag it. That's it. There is no other processing.

49:24There's no additives ever. And it is a pure, clean, unrefined sea salt with all the minerals intact.

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50:10Gary Brecka:That's telehealth.peptual.com forward slash ultimate and use code T-U-H-10 for 10 % off and get access to the same premium grade peptides that I trust with my own health. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. How does, you know, when we talk about hydration, it's interesting to talk about salt and hydration at the same time. I mean, we've known this in athletic performance for years that, you know, athletes need higher amounts of salt when they're respiring. But, you know, I've often used in clients of mine that have very high triglyceride levels, fat levels in their blood. I very often used keto resets, what I call a 10-week ketogenic reset, putting somebody on a very clean keto diet so that they can begin to switch their fuel source from glucose to beta -hydroxybutyrate over to a fat source.

51:08Gary Brecka:and when they do that and their body metabolizes and begins to break down the triglyceride the fat that's in their blood and it's a really fast way to reduce triglycerides in the blood kind of restore that balance was originally formulated for epilepsy a lot of other benefits but their sodium requirements go up by fourfold interesting uh and so can you talk a little bit about the the reason why sodium and some of these minerals are so important in hydration? Absolutely. I mean, from a hydration standpoint, the first thing we talk about, you mentioned athletes, is perspiration. So we are constantly even sitting here, we are perspiring out minute levels of sodium and of all of your minerals and trace elements.

51:54So you are perspiring them out, so you need to replenish them. And so that's why it's not enough to just drink water. You need to make sure that you're getting all of those electrolytes as well. On a cellular level, there are specific needs for sodium, for potassium and for magnesium to help regulate the osmosis process, I believe, from a cellular hydration standpoint. And then the other macros and some of the traces also play roles in muscle recovery, in regulating daytime versus sleep time functionality within the body, within regulating reproductive health within the body as well um and so it's all of i think what is happening in in the situation you described we've heard of something called like the keto flu yeah which is like and so like people are like i just i take a ton of baja gold and it really helps with the keto well yeah it'll

52:43Gary Brecka:completely uh avoid it i mean uh yeah the keto flu it's because the the kidney is using uh four times the amount of sodium when you're in a ketogenic state then if you're not in a ketogenic that your sodium need quadruples and you shouldn't get the sodium from iodized table salt. I agree with that. And we've, you know, we've seen this. And one of the ways that I manage it in my clients is giving them high doses of a mineral salt. And that's the key with earlier of, you know, if you're doing all the right, the right things to change your diet, right, be more healthy. And then all of a sudden you're moving your nutritional source to this practice, but you're also trying to follow a low salt diet.

53:22It won't work for you. Yeah. So that doesn't, you know, You need to pick carefully what it is you're following, if that makes sense.

53:28Gary Brecka:So how much Baja Gold, for example, should people consume in a day? So of course, they should always talk to a nutritionist and their doctor and kind of work through that plan for them. The average recommended sodium level is about 2 ,300 milligrams per day. Again, we found and others in the space have started recommending 4 ,000, 6 ,000, even 8 ,000 milligrams per day. It really is context dependent. It depends on how often you're exercising, how heavily you're exercising, what your overall nutritional patterns look like. Thank you for dinner last night. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. But such clean, simple food that you can add, not that we needed to, but you can add more sodium into it because you're not getting it from the food itself.

54:11My point in saying this is if you are shopping in the middle of the grocery store, right in the middle aisles, you probably need less Baja gold because you're getting so much sodium from all that packaged and processed food. If you can transition to the outer aisles and start eating whole foods exclusively, start really narrowing in on those basic building blocks, then yes, your sodium content will be elevated. You're going to want it for seasoning and for flavoring, but then also for your cellular kind of overall health. So it's not as simple as just, okay, start taking 6 ,000 milligrams of Baja Gold every day.

54:43It needs to be more thoughtful, if that makes sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

54:46Gary Brecka:Are there any kind of salt myths that bother you? Well, we've covered a few of them. Yeah, we've covered a couple of them, like that it increases blood pressure, that it's not heart healthy, or that it dehydrates you. One thing I will say, just a nitpick, right? But so I mentioned the three different types of salt. So table salt, rock salt, and then mineral sea salt, unrefined sea salt. So there is a practice of labeling and you take an unrefined sea salt, you process it, you either wash it, dry it, or do other things to it. And then the mineral content is nowhere near a Baja gold or a Celtic.

55:24It's not that in any way, it's not a mineral salt, but they sell it as a sea salt. and so you'll look and see and and the manufacturer will say well it started as a sea salt so it's a sea salt right it is challenging to really uh educate on the difference between those two so that is that's a personal pet peeve of mine i go to the supermarket i'm like gosh that is not a real

55:46Gary Brecka:sea salt so yeah uh you know i i i've heard bobby kennedy say it before too and i say a lot that you know it's not very often it's not the food it's the distance from the food to the table right it's the processing we put it through seed oils are a prime example of this you know the processing of the seed oils processing of meats processing of vegetables um you know sometimes it's the industrial processing and that's what you're referring to yes that just just destroys it we just get back to as close to the soil as we can get yes that's where that's the secret i think one of the biggest challenges in america is people don't know who grows their own food and if you told our ancestors that 150 years ago they they wouldn't even be able to comprehend that statement right but if you for a vast majority of people and said do you understand kind of where these food staples come from how they're grown where they're grown they we don't know and that's oh yeah right exactly and so getting back to if you look at blue zones like two of the big things for blue zones are community and whole foods right they're located in different parts of the world but it's always community and it's always whole foods and so getting back to that principle of even if it's just going to your local farmer's market, you don't have to grow your own entire food source.

56:59But knowing that it came from, you know, two, two streets down or whatnot, and being able to shake your farmer's hand and say, thank you. And now I understand where this is coming from. The gut synergies, all of that ties together. And it's in ways that maybe we don't fully understand, but the world worked that way for many thousands of years and it worked well. and now you know it's it's challenged so you know i've been on this journey with your family for a

57:22Gary Brecka:while um and i already talked about how much i respect you and your family and the practices that you're using to make sure that you're not destroying the mineralization and salt um but you guys just made it into whole foods you're like big time now um don't forget about me by the way don't forget about the ultimate human and all my peeps um but what's next for uh baja gold you gonna expand your product line are you gonna because i noticed celtic salt and pink himalayan I mean, they're like in everything, you know, electrolyte drinks in there and they make all kinds of steak seasonings and things.

57:54Gary Brecka:You know, part of me wishes you guys would expand to those areas because I would be a user. That's for sure. Yes. So for Baja Gold, we have a lot of exciting things coming. So stay tuned. Yes, we're working on different ways to use Baja Gold within those types of applications. Try to make it more user friendly and more accessible. I will say, I guess maybe one myth is or one misconception. People wonder why the Baja gold is wet or a little bit moister and damper than a typical salt. So maybe that's a good question is, why is that the case? When you use an unrefined heritage creation process, you do not expose the salt to significantly high heat temperatures like a traditional processing plant would.

58:34And so there is a little bit of moisture in your salt that's completely normal. Some people will call us to open their bag and say, it must have been a rainstorm or something. What happened here? So that's the mineral magic. is preserving that little bit of moisture within your salt there. So that's completely okay. That's actually meant to be that way. But we are working through, how can you have a grinder or a shaker application while preserving those minerals and trace elements? So pull some of the moisture out without extracting the minerals. Without extracting minerals. Yes, exactly. So that's on the docket.

59:06Gary Brecka:I'd like to put a state seasoning on the menu for you guys to work on. I like it, yes. You can call it Gary's blood. But yeah, I'll be a big fan of that. Michael, this has been amazing. It's just been an incredible journey with you and your family. And I deeply appreciate, you know, your commitment to quality and not over-processing, you know, your mineral salts. You know, I wind all of my podcasts down by asking my guests the same question. So there's no right or wrong answer to this question. And that is, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? Gary, I'm very blessed to have a very fulfilling professional life.

59:43I have a really awesome personal life, really great friends, great family. But my most important job every single day is dad. And so when I think about being an ultimate human, it's about being the ultimate father. It's about being the ultimate dad. And with my wonderful wife, making sure that my three kids grow up to be curious, selfless, respectful, intelligent, and just above all good people. and that's the legacy that we leave. You know, one day we all go and what's left behind is our kids. Yeah, father time's undefeated for sure. For me, being the ultimate human is being the ultimate father.

1:00:18That's amazing, man.

1:00:19Gary Brecka:Well, I let my VIP community know that you were coming on the podcast so they've got some questions for you. So after the cameras go off, we'll go into my VIP room. We'll answer their questions. If you're interested in becoming one of my ultimate human VIPs, the community that I really pour myself into, you can just go over to theultimathuman.com forward slash VIP. It's 97 bucks a month. I promise you that I provide$97 a month in value. You'll get private podcasts in there, access to me and to group questions. And we do all kinds of challenges. And it's just such an amazing community that we built.

1:00:51Gary Brecka:So go check out the Ultimate Human VIP. And until next time, that's just science.