349-SYNCPocast_CarolineAlan

[00:00:00]

Jenny Swisher: Welcome friends [00:01:00] to this episode of The Sink Your Life podcast. Today I’m joined by my friend Caroline Allen. She’s a mineral researcher, educator, and author of the upcoming Hay House book, the Mineral Reset, the Essential Guide to Replenishing Your Body and Restoring Your Health. She’s on a mission to make mineral replenishment foundational to women’s health and midlife vitality.

Her research shows that many of the most frustrating symptoms in perimenopause and beyond, things like joint pain, fatigue, brain fog, weight gain, anxiety, poor sleep, these are all rooted in widespread mineral depletion that accelerates with age and hormonal shifts. Now, what’s interesting here is that I, myself, have been going through some midlife changes and when she and I had the chance to connect a month or so ago, she said, let me send you some of these minerals.

So I’ve actually been consuming the minerals, which we’re gonna talk about later in the episode, and it’s been making a really profound difference for me, which I’ll share more of. I’m really excited for this interview because minerals is not something that we’ve covered in detail on the podcast. We’re almost 400 episodes in yet it seems foundational to so much so, as I told her when we first connected, you know, I have been [00:02:00] asking myself and asking lots of doctors for the last few years of dealing with vertigo and migraine and different issues myself.

I’ve been asking. Is there something really basic that we’re overlooking here? Like, are we not looking at some, am I missing a certain vitamin or mineral? And it turns out Caroline had landed in my lap and it was like, okay, this is the perfect conversation to have now. So without further ado, let’s dive in.

Caroline, welcome to the show. Share more with us about your story. How did you get into minerals?

Caroline Alan: Yeah. Oh, thank you for having me, Jenny. I’m very happy to be here. I’m so excited to share and empower people. Um, with this knowledge about minerals, I got into this, um, I was actually in a corporate career in technology, completely different.

I was not a scientist, I was not a practitioner, and I, I burned out of that career in extremely, um, bad health. I had bad inflammation in my gut. Um, I had been gluten intolerant all my life, but I had been gluten-free for many, many years. Could never get over the [00:03:00] elimination issues and the bloating problems.

Um, I had really bad inflammation in my mouth, um, with bone loss in my teeth and in bad periodontal disease. I could, I worked with several dentists trying to heal that. I had recurring headaches. Um, I also had sinus infections that recurred. I’d had a really bad mold exposure event, so I didn’t know that I was, had mold toxicity, but I was definitely experiencing that as well.

Um, and I had flatlined adrenals. I had, they’d been flatlined for over a year. Been working with a practitioner, trying all sorts of things. I, I mean, Jenny, I have been to every kind of practitioner, you know, from MDs and, you know, the regular stuff all the way to energy medicine and, um, homeopathics, you name it, I’ve tried it and.

The interesting thing is that no one, not one of those practitioners ever mentioned that I might be mineral deficient. [00:04:00] Now, what happened was, right at this time, I was introduced to the person who is now my business partner, Dan Howard. And he introduced me to something called plant-based minerals. And it was a liquid drink.

Really? It tasted like water. And he’s like, why don’t you try these? You know? I’m like, okay, sure. So I took them every day, just one ounce of liquid every day. And after two months I went to my dentist and she looked at my mouth and she. Oh my gosh, this is amazing. Your, your gums are pink and healthy. You didn’t have bleeding when your teeth are cl were cleaned.

What is different? And I thought about it. I said, you know, I think it might be these minerals. The interesting thing about the minerals is I’m not a person who loves taking pills and supplements in general, but every morning I woke up, I was like, my body said. Oh, get your minerals you want. I want my minerals.

Mm-hmm. Which is really new for me. Four months in, I went to my naturopath to review the results of my adrenal test. They were one [00:05:00] third of the way up the chart. She was over the moon and surprised because she had at my last appointment, given me. A prescription for hydrocortisone, which I was not going to take.

I didn’t want to get on that kind of bandwagon, and so she was kind of worried about me and I was feeling really good and everything was going well over the space of eight or nine months. All of my symptoms, my adrenals, my gut problems, my mouth problems. The other issue that I dealt with was sleep. So I’ve ha been an insomniac all my life, but as I entered into perimenopause, sleep became a major problem.

I woke, woke up three to five times every night, um, and I struggled to get to sleep. But I started sleeping through the night and just, just that alone, just that one thing alone was a huge shift. So, you know, if it had been just one or two things that had changed, I [00:06:00] probably wouldn’t have wanted to research.

But because so many things changed over a relatively short period of time, considering how long I’d been trying to heal these things with so many different practitioners. Um, I wanted to find out what the story was, so I went to my friend and he gave me a few articles to read, and then I just went down the rabbit hole and I, I mean, I gave myself a PhD in, you know, cellular biology and molecular biology and physics and chemistry and like all these different scientific pieces so I could understand.

Why we’re depleted, why I was depleted of minerals, how mineral replenishment works in the body, actually, how minerals work in the body and why not having the minerals had such far ranging effects. And I learned so many things. I had these [00:07:00] amazing aha moments after aha moments, and I kept going back to my friend and going.

My gosh, like why has no one ever mentioned this? Why do I not know this? It’s like if you bought a car, you would never buy a car if you didn’t know how to fill up the gas tank. If you didn’t know how to fill up the oil, even if you’re not gonna do it, you’re gonna know that it needs to be done. I mean, there are basic things we learn about our cars that we don’t know about our body.

And so I went to him first and I always said, you know, we have to bring this knowledge and this information and these minerals that, that he had given me to the world because. That was a big part of my research was how plant-based minerals, which is a completely different thing than the bottles of single pills that you see in your health food store.

How those kinds of minerals support replenishment so effectively in the body.

Jenny Swisher: [00:08:00] Yeah. I love when people take sort of their own struggle and turn it into their mission to figure out, right. You said you got a degree in molecular biology and all, all the things. Just trying to navigate this for yourself.

It’s interesting because I have thought so often, as I mentioned earlier, that you know, when it comes to our health issues that so many of us are facing. What if it’s really simple? Like what if all of the solutions for what we are deficient in or all the things that we’re struggling with, what if it, what if everything was very simple?

What if it all came from the earth? What if, what if everything was really in our own hands? But we’ve made it so twisted and weird in modern medicine to, to navigate. So I wanna start off, you know, I wanna, I do wanna dive into like. Especially my women and midlife, like what we could be up against here.

But before we get there, let’s start with the questions that you asked yourself, because I think that will help us better understand minerals. So why are we depleted? Mm-hmm. Um, I assume this all comes back to just soil depletion, but I’d love for you to just tell us more about that and then how do minerals work in the body?

Caroline Alan: Yeah. Well, let’s start with, um, why we’re [00:09:00] depleted. So, because it’s really, I’d really like to connect the dots for people because lots of people say, yeah, our soils are depleted and our food isn’t ntri nutrient dense. But why is it so, think about it this way. First of all, let’s start with minerals. When you look around your room, wherever you are, if you’re out driving in your car, wherever you are, look around all of the structure in the universe.

Is minerals. At the foundational level, everything is minerals, and in fact, everything in your body that is structural is also at the foundation minerals. So minerals are the foundation for everything on the planet. Now when a plant grows in the soil, the way it creates its structure is by pulling minerals from the soil.

The, the minerals are absorbed into the roots of the plant. They go into the plant, and the plant becomes. A structure above the soil, above the surface of the earth. [00:10:00] And that’s true if it’s even a small pea shoot or it’s a huge California redwood tree. All of that energy, all of that structure was pulled from the soil.

Now in nature, when a plant grows it. Does that, it takes the minerals from the soil, creates its structure, and then at some point it dies and decomposes and it delivers all of its mineral content back into the soil where it’s available for future cellular systems to utilize and grow. Now, what we do as humans is we grow our plants in the soil and we harvest them and we take them away and we.

Do things with them and we eat them and we dispose of their waste far from where they were grown. So what we’ve done is we’ve disrupted what I call the sustainable loop that nature relies on, which is things grow, they die, they decompose, they go back into the soil creating, you know, this stored energy for future life.

So. [00:11:00] The sad thing is that when you eat an apple to when to if to get the same nutrition from an apple that your grandfather ate, you would have to eat six. Some people say seven or eight apples today. That’s the difference in nutrient density. So what it means is you cannot get all of the mineral content that your body needs.

With by food alone, it is not possible. And then to exacerbate it, most of us drink filtered water, so we use reverse osmosis, filtered water, or we buy distilled water, and this is empty water. Now there’s two problems with empty water. One is it has no minerals, which your body needs. And when you used to drink from the hose or from a well, you got mineralized or a stream, you Dr.

You got mineralized water. Of course, we can’t do that now, um, because we’ve polluted our waters and it’s dangerous, you [00:12:00] know, with bacteria, et cetera. But that empty water. Doesn’t have the ability to actually hydrate your body. Most of it just goes straight through. And as it goes straight through, it’s actually flushing minerals from your system.

It’s actually, it’s a flushing process, so it’s irrigation rather than hydration. So all of these things put together has created widespread mineral depletion. In humanity, so much so that the World Health Organization has a term for it. And they call it the hidden hunger, which is a term I love because you know you’re going to the doctor with all these different things and you’re like, isn’t there?

There might be something, you know, so many people have this sense, like there’s just something, I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something missing. In fact, it’s the thing that actually gets us up an hour after eating a meal and we open the fridge. ’cause our body’s like. [00:13:00] No, I I still need something.

There’s something, you know.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. Yeah.

Caroline Alan: It sends us to the chips, you know, the salty snacks and the sweets. ’cause what does a hungry cell crave? It craves salt and sugar.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. Well it’s, it comes back to the question of what do our bodies require? Right. And it’s, that should be the starting point for all things health.

Right. It’s, it’s interesting ’cause in my own journey we’ve had. We’ve done all the things. I think I’ve had every possible test known to man to figure out what’s causing the dizziness and such, but yet minerals, it’s like an overlooked, like I’ve even asked multiple times, like, should we, should we look at minerals?

Should we look at mycotoxins? Um, and as I was sharing with you before we hit record, we just learned that we have some mycotoxins, some mold in our, our HVAC unit. So we are starting to get some answers there. And I do know that I’m feeling so much better consuming the mineral. So there’s something there as well.

But I just think, I love the, the phrase irrigation versus hydration. When I talk to people about. Proper hydration. I see this all the time coming, especially from a fitness [00:14:00] background. You know, a lot of people, especially start of the new year, you know, they wanna kick off with, I’m gonna make sure I’m drinking my body weight and ounces of water each day and all this, and they, they carry their gallon jug of water.

And I’m like, but if there’s, if the minerals aren’t there, then again that’s irrigation versus hydration. Like, yes, you’re gonna pee out that water and it, but it’s not necessarily hydrating you. Um, from that perspective. I also just wanna touch on this for people because I do think. I think we we’re starting to hear more about electrolytes and all these things, um, sort of in the health space.

Mm-hmm. But a lot of people think, you know, magnesium, potassium, sea salt, and there’s so much more. One thing I, I, I loved about, um, just kind of diving into bean minerals was more about. The fulvic minerals and just learning more about fulvic versus IC minerals and, and all of that and the balance that it requires.

So it really is just more than, yeah, I have women that’ll, well, I’ll just put a little sea salt in my water. Well, it is so much more than that, right? Mm-hmm. And as you mentioned, reverse osmosis systems. I know this was the case with us. We put one in in our new house. Which soon after is when [00:15:00] I started to see health issues.

And we never thought about the, we’re like, well, we’re doing all the things, like we’re purifying our air, we’re purifying our water, but we’re stripping that water of the minerals that we need. So when it comes to, I, I’d love for you to kind of just give us, um, you know, my audience may not be super science minded, but if we could kind of dive more into like, what are fulvic minerals?

What are these things and how do they really work in the body?

Caroline Alan: Yeah. Well, I, I would really love to touch on the hydration issue a little bit more if, if you’re up for that for sure. Absolutely. You brought it up because it’s really an interesting thing because you know, the answer to your water being filtered is not to put a pinch of salt in there.

Um, the best thing would be to get some fulvic because you want that full spectrum of minerals that was originally in that water, and that’s what fulvic represents what I, the, the. Reframe that I want to do for people is this, your body is like the earth, okay? The rivers [00:16:00] on the earth, the rivers and lakes and streams, those are all freshwater systems and they flow into the ocean.

Your body, your digestive system, like when you take things in through your mouth and through your digestive system. That’s like the rivers, lakes, and streams. That is a fresh water system. It’s not a salt water system. Your bloodstream is like the ocean. It’s a salt water system. So. When you’re using large amounts of salt based electrolytes, stick packs on a regular basis, a lot of people use 1, 2, 3 of those a day.

What they’re doing is they’re completely undermining the gut microbiome, which is a freshwater system. What I als always tell people is go take your salt based electrolytes and feed it to your house plant and see how it does. You know, you, we know that fresh water plants don’t enjoy salt [00:17:00] water of, some of them can live in salt water, but most do not enjoy salt water.

So. When you’re constantly doing that, um, you’re, you’re doing several things. One, you’re throwing out the whole mineral balance in your body and the amount of minerals in your body. The quantities is as important as balance because minerals don’t work alone even though you see them in single pill bottles on the shelves in the health food store.

That’s all because of a misunderstanding about how minerals actually work, and that’s why I’m. That’s why I’m here educating, because nobody’s ever done this. It’s like years ago when people started talking about the gut and probiotics. Nobody had ever heard of ’em. They’re like, what? What are you talking about?

There’s plant life and stuff in my gut. You know what? You know now most people understand about that, and this is just. This is now the next Vanguard I call mineral understanding and replenishment the next vanguard of health. This [00:18:00] is the next place for us to focus, so, so to talk about fulvic and ic, what we need to talk about is how is actually start with how minerals work in the body.

And this is, this is really like how your body is powered. So. The best, the simplest way I like to describe it is to start with this Conte context, and the context is your body, and this was a huge aha for me. Your body is completely made of single cells. You’ve got about 37 to 150 trillion cells making up your body.

And you know, cells on your, you know face know that their face cells and in your heart, they know their heart cells and liver cells and like all the cells in your body have very specific jobs to do. And they need specific things and they’re doing specific things and. Amazingly [00:19:00] miraculously, they all know what they’re doing.

I mean, just that alone, that all these single cells in my body work together in these incredible ways to allow me to sit here. And I’m talking to you and I’m thinking, and I’m moving and I’ve got all these autonomic processes happening, happening in the background. It’s phenomenal.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan: What I want people to understand is that system, your cellular ecosystem, is a lot more like a forest than it is a car.

It’s not a mechanical system, it’s a natural ecosystem. So how do natural eco natural cellular ecosystems work at a single cell level? Inside your cell, there are these things called mitochondria, and mitochondria are the energy generating units of your body. Every single one is generating constantly moment by moment by moment, [00:20:00] small units of energy called a TP.

Now I’m gonna give you the sense of scale of this first. So you’ve got 37 to 150 trillion cells in your body, and on the back of my hand here in a single cell, I might have 200. Appro approximately mitochondria. In my heart, in one single cell, I might have five to 8,000 mitochondria. And in my brain, in a single neuron, I might have upwards of 2 million mitochondria.

One single neuron neuron. So the amount of energy that’s being generated in your body at like. All the time amounts to about 1200 watts of energy per day, of electricity per day if you’re fully mineralized. But because we’re so depleted, our bodies may only be generating, you know, 900, maybe 700 [00:21:00] in many cases, like less than 500.

Watts of electricity every day. So what does a body do? It has to pick and choose. It says, well, I don’t have enough energy to do everything, you know. I can’t, I’m gonna keep the lights on though. I’m gonna be sure the heart is pumping and the, you know, your lungs are working and things are moving, but I can’t take care of hair and I can’t really remove all that inflammation.

And, you know, I, I don’t have the energy actually to remove these toxins. I don’t even have any tools to do that. So it limps along and people end up. Nowadays with not one or two chronic symptoms, but five or six

Jenny Swisher: mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan: That they’re dealing with. And they’re like, I can’t gain any momentum against all these things, you know?

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Caroline Alan: So this is what I’m trying to say. It’s like, you know, in the summers, in some cities, they have brownouts because the city can’t generate enough energy to keep all the air conditioners going, right? Mm-hmm. And that’s what your body’s like. [00:22:00] It’s operating in a brownout. He so inside the cell, what fuels all these mitochondria?

These quadrillions of mitochondria. So imagine a campfire. You’re gonna build a campfire and you’re gonna need some wood and probably some tinder or paper to get the fire started and you’re gonna need a match. The mitochondria is like the match. It’s the thing that has the ability to ignite the fuel and turn it into energy.

The wood and the paper or the tinder are like minerals and amino acids. Now your body makes a lot of amino acids. Many you get from the foods you eat, but your body makes no minerals at all. They all have to come in from the outside. They all have to come in through your mouth. In some cases, people, you know, have, um, get IVs of different [00:23:00] things.

Um, but they mainly come in through your mouth, so. This is what we need to understand is when a mineral comes, when I eat an apple, and there’s some, there’s some minerals in there, not enough, but some what happens, it hits your mouth. It actually starts digesting with your saliva. It goes down your esophagus, it goes in your stomach, it continues to break down, ends up in your, in your, um, digestive tract where it continues to break down and that apple has to be broken down all the way into its ionic.

Chemical components of magnesium and potassium and selenium and chromium, whatever, okay? They have their, they’re molecular components before they can be absorbed through your lining of your gut into your bloodstream. That’s only two stages of the process. ’cause now they’re in the bloodstream. That’s great.

But remember, those mitochondria are [00:24:00] inside your cells. So now that magnesium molecule has to hit a cell and the cell goes, oh great. That’s magnesium. Let it in. And that magnesium gets finally inside your cell where the mitochondria can ignite it and make it into a little campfire. Mm-hmm. Okay. So. This is first what I learned.

I’m like, oh my gosh, like I’m eating all this food. I, I, I was very, like, if you looked on the outside, you’d see that I was a very healthy person. Don’t drink, don’t do drugs. You know, do, um, don’t smoke, never smoked, you know, um, ate really, really well. You know, I’m not a sugar person. I mean, I really ate so well and all of that.

Um. But still so unhealthy because I literally wasn’t bringing in enough fuel to keep my campfire burning bright throughout my body. I.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. So it’s almost like when we’re mineral depleted or mineral deficient, it’s like our body’s [00:25:00] struggling to keep the lights on, so to speak. Right. And so that’s

Caroline Alan: exactly,

Jenny Swisher: um, yeah, this, this, I love the way you’re talking about this.

It’s really easy to learn about. So when it comes to, um, you know, I wanna connect this to my women listening ’cause they’re probably Yes. Keeping like really though, ’cause all the rage right now is this, talk about perimenopause. So I really just think maybe I just hit 40 and things change. ’cause I used to feel great.

Right. But I have a feeling that like if we are, you know, based on our genetics, et cetera, and soil depletion and all the things, if we’re dealing with this mineral deficiency, and it may look different for each of us. Um. Then I assume that that may contribute more to like, inflammation in middle age that may contribute more to the, the symptoms I hear women talking about often, which is like joint pain or fatigue and brain fog.

And you think about it in that analogy that you were using of keeping the lights on or, um, you know, it starts to make sense that all of a sudden we might see those issues exacerbate in midlife. So I’d love to sort of touch on, you know, how, how does. Mineral deficiency [00:26:00] factor into these things that we see for women over 40, uh, as far as maybe blood sugar stability or, um, hormone, you know, decline.

Like how, how, how does this all mesh together? Yeah. I’m sure there’s multiple steps along the way, but, uh, it’s probably our own podcast topic, but I’d love to kind of hear more about that.

Caroline Alan: Yeah. Well. First of all, the way it’s, it’s so different for women and so much of medicine has been designed with men in mind.

And women not only have a monthly cycle, but they have a life cycle and they go through puberty and have all of the hormonal shifts that they go through, potentially childbirth, and then they go through perimenopause and menopause. And, and the shift that I want people to get is your body is an ecosystem.

And in the same way that an ecosystem goes through the seasons of a year, your body goes through seasons as a woman, I mean men too. Okay? [00:27:00] And each time a season shifts, there’s an ecosystem imbalance that occurs, and there are biosynthesis processes that happen in your body that require more energy to manage.

So if you are already mineral depleted and you hit puberty. You’re gonna have probably a lot of menstrual discomfort. You’re gonna have huge PMS. You’re gonna have huge ranges of, you know, all of that. If you are mineral depleted and you try to have children, you’re gonna struggle with fertility. ’cause your body’s gonna say, I don’t have even have enough energy for you.

How am I gonna build the lining of your uterus? You know, and, and host a baby here, you know, and, and take all of the minerals from your body to build that baby, right? Because all of the structure is minerals, you know? Yeah. Or when you hit perimenopause, how are you going to deal with all of the shifts, the hormonal shifts that have to happen and all of the, you know, to maintain ecosystem [00:28:00] vitality and health through that shift?

So. What happens when people get mineralized? I mean, I’m telling you across the board. First of all, remember how many, um, and I’m not saying people, I’m talking women who are entering perimenopause and menopause and the brain fog that. Difficulty in getting one’s thoughts together, especially if you were a type A, really get it together.

You know, you, you had it together and then suddenly you’re forgetting things or you’re, you know, not sure what’s happening in a day. You can’t get, you know, make decisions. All of that. Think about how many mitochondria are in your brain and when they’re not fueled. So what I say is they’re of course, if you know.

Uh, you know, not everybody is into hormone replacement therapy. Um, but you know, if you, if you do or don’t wanna do that, all of that relies on minerals. 5,000, over 5,000 [00:29:00] biosynthesis processes in your body, including all of the hormonal stuff, all of this stuff associated with your thyroid, and the shifting of, you know, T three to T four, all of this stuff and all of your adrenal function.

It all relies on minerals.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan: So if you don’t have this foundation, you’re gonna struggle with all of them, especially as you move into these ecosystem balanced shifts in your life, like women have, um, even more so than men.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah, and it makes sense. It makes me think about the fact that, you know, early on in my life, in my twenties, I, I learned that I tend to have, you know, with, with migraine specifically, um, we’re told a lot by neurologists that you have to find your triggers, right?

Like, what are your triggers? So I feel like I spent so much of my life trying to figure out like what triggers. My migraines, and it was pretty obvious, pretty evident from a young age that hormonal shifts, um, specifically my, my drop in estrogen before my period and all that kind of stuff, which is what led me down the rabbit hole of even getting [00:30:00] into hormone health was, was trying to figure out my own health.

And, uh, it wasn’t until maybe four years ago that I, I met a doctor that’s been really pivotal in my own journey and she said, well, has anyone ever told you that your, your body as a female is supposed to have, uh, hormonal fluctuations? And so the question isn’t. Okay, the hormonal fluctuation’s my trigger, and that’s the quote unquote problem.

The, the, the real answer here is why is my body not resilient to, to the actual hormonal fluctuation? And it really sort of pivoted the way I thought about, oh, like, whoa, well why? Yeah. Like, why am I not, and why are some months better than others? Like, I always get a drop in estrogen, you know, before my period.

Like, that’s always gonna happen. So why was this month so much better than last month? And so I do think, you know, kind of coming back to those foundations of. Well, what does my body require? Am I giving my body what it requires? Nutritionally, you know, foundationally. So, um, that makes a lot of sense. It also makes sense to me that, like you said, if, if we are dealing with some sort of [00:31:00] deficiency over time, it makes sense that we would all of a sudden start to just see.

More alarming symptoms or more alarming things come to play. And I can’t help but think about the brain fog and the cognitive decline that I see so much and that I hear about so much from women. Like they walk into a room and they forget why they’re there. And I think we’re very quick to say, well, there’s my Es.

It’s my estrogen. My estrogen is left the building, right? Or I must be, this is menopause. Or we laugh about it, right? And in reality it’s like, maybe the question again, similar to my migraine journey, isn’t, okay, well it’s the estrogen leaving the building. It’s more of why is my body. Not resilient to this.

What’s natural change that’s happening? As you said, we are not just circadian beings and fian beings. We have these seasons of life. So why is my body maybe not as resilient through this transition as, as others might be, uh, or whatever. So I. It then makes sense to me why the message that I preach, which is around making sure that we fuel enough, making sure that we aren’t falling victim to diet culture, that we’re not restricting, that we’re not [00:32:00] just overworking ourselves.

Right. That your story with adrenal health really resonates with me, uh, because. My functional doctor that I work with is constantly saying, like, your adrenals, it’s your adrenals, my dear, your adrenals. And I have a similar story to them wanting to start me with hydro hydrocortisone. Right? And so, um, again, I feel like you stepping into my life for this podcast was the perfect timing because it’s allowed me to kind of take a step back and say, no, wait a minute.

My intuition from the beginning on is there something foundational that my, that I’m, that I require, that I’m not getting? Like, is that, is that what we need to scale this back to? Right? And so. I just wanna, I just wanted to call that out again and say that this idea of like. Missing something is probably what a lot of people are missing and we want to replace those things with, okay, well I know it’s a hormonal change, so I must need hormones.

Okay. But again, why is your body not resilient to those changes? So, uh, one other thing I wanted to say, and this is, you said something earlier about this and I just wanted to kind of make this connection, um, too. So [00:33:00] after going through, um, you know, having COVID twice in 2022, and of course. Now everybody wants to say, oh, well your dizziness must have come from COVID.

And I’m like, ah, I don’t necessarily know that. But regardless, um, you know, I, I was diagnosed a couple years ago with pots postural ortho, postural orthostatic Tachycardia syndrome. Uh, for me it means when I go to stand up, my heart rate shoots through the roof. Uh, for some people it’s blood pressure. For me, it’s heart rate causes me to be dizzy upon standing and all the things.

And so in my digging, I’ve learned actually, you know, through the functional lens, there’s really no such thing as pots. It really comes back to this idea of maybe adrenal insufficiency or adrenal. Function. So it’s funny because hearing you talk earlier about this, about how people will just do these, uh, stick packs or the salts and, and all the things, this was what was, I was told when I first got this diagnosis by multiple people, it was like, oh, well your body really needs LMNT, which is like a very traditional, you know, it’s popular electrolyte drink that’s very, very high in salt.

Mm-hmm. And they’re like, when you start [00:34:00] feeling this way, you know, you should maybe drink like two or three packets of those a day. ’cause you need even more than the average person. I think I might’ve told you this when we first connected. So I started doing that. I thought I did all the things. ’cause I, you know, being dizzy, there’s nothing worse.

You literally can’t function. And so I would put on the compression socks, right? I would like slowly prop myself up in bed. I would take the. Element T packets. And I started feeling so much worse. And so, and I, I started to reach out, you know, I wanted to reach out to people that were going through the same thing.

So I joined a support group for people that were dealing with this. And I saw that they were going through similar experiences where they’re, they’re just drinking the salt sticks, like drinking, doing all the things, trying to feel better and they’re feeling worse. And so, um, I wanted to mention that ’cause we’re seeing pots on the rise.

We’re seeing this, what they call dysautonomia, um, starting to rise, especially post COVID. And I can’t help but think that. You and the world that you have researched and the world that you provide is, is, could be the perfect match, um, to, to helping people in that realm. So I’m not sure if you have anything to say [00:35:00] about, about these things, but I just wanted to, to call attention to it as well.

Caroline Alan: Yeah. Well, um, again, the, what I see is minerals don’t heal anything.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan: But minerals are the foundational tool

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Caroline Alan: That your body uses for every single process. Tissue, muscle, bone. Activity. Yeah. So, you know, it is the first thing, what I say, I’m not, I’m not against lots of different things except for salt based electrolytes, but, but, um.

But the foundation is minerals. And, and that’s where we really should go next is, you know, what kind of minerals, because it’s very confusing if you go to your health food store and go, yeah, I need some minerals. Yeah. And somebody said, I need electrolytes. And someone said, I need some zinc for my immune system.

And you know, someone says I should be taking chromium and I don’t know, you name it, you know, all these different [00:36:00] minerals. And I’ve gone there and, you know, see people, I, I literally actually spent time in the health food stores talking to people. ’cause I wanted to learn what people knew and what they didn’t know.

As I was learning to talk about minerals and f. What I found is people don’t know anything really. Mm-hmm. They’re just, somebody told them they need them and they’re in, there was, they got several bottles in their cart and they’re, I just know that most of those are gonna end up in what I call the supplement graveyard.

Yeah. You know that cupboard, you’ve got home filled with the pills that you took for a while and we’re like, I don’t know any difference. I don’t wanna take all these pills. It’s not sustainable. So. Really what we wanna talk about is, first of all, why those don’t work, why they end up in the graveyard, and why these plant-based mineral substances called humic and fulvic are so different.

’cause that’s really the exciting thing. Like imagine being able to get all your minerals in a shot a day and it’s easy. It’s like it’s the [00:37:00] one thing in your health regime that is just so easy and has such far reaching effects. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah. I, I mean, I have, I have to also ask this question because it makes me wonder sometimes, like when it comes to, um.

Supplements in general, but I’m learning that there’s, there are so many nuances to the supplement world as far as like how things are created, whether it’s a capsule or whether it’s a liquid, whether it’s a spray, or whether it’s a cream or. Um, I’ve also learned, even just based on my own genetics, I had a recent experience with vitamin B12.

I thought my vitamin B12 was fine. Um, because every time we would test it was through the roof high. My doctor was like, oh, you know, it’s, you know, you just urinate excess B vitamins. It’s no big deal. It’s because you supplement with them. No, it turns out with some digger, some further digging. Uh, we learned that actually my body wasn’t absorbing the B12 in the form that it was in, and I was taking methylated BB 12.

Um, but we switched over to a hydroxy B12 with [00:38:00] folinic acid, and my life has changed. Like I’ve felt so much better energy wise. I’ve had two outta three months that were ovulatory, which for me has been a big shift in my sort of reproductive health. So I’m seeing all these big changes. That’s the only change that I made.

Was, um, was the B12 and, and, and that, so I, what I’m getting at here is. I assume that in this world of minerals, that sourcing is also, um, also matters like quality of, of ingredients, so to speak. So I’d love to you free to speak to that as well as you’re the formulator of the product.

Caroline Alan: Yeah, yeah. Well, I wanna talk about two things.

So one is that most mineral supplements that you get in bottles that have pills, capsules, or, or powders, stick packs, all of those, they’re either made from rocks. Shells, bones or salts. Now the problem with rock shells and bones are that your body doesn’t actually digest them well. Your digestive tract is not well versed in breaking those things [00:39:00] down, so you there have very low bioavailability.

Most of it like your B12. Just goes straight through you and ends up in the toilet. Okay? So they’re kind of a waste and you, and it’s the rare person who feels a difference from taking minerals in that form. The salts have the other problem that we talk about where, where they’re really not good for your gut microbiome.

They were designed for emergencies not to be used on a daily basis. So, um. The, the other way that you can get minerals is with this, these substances called plant-based minerals. Now this isn’t like plants that we grabbed from the garden and ground up and dried and, you know, called them plant-based minerals.

No. What these are, is actually ancient decomposed freshwater plants. So imagine the, the, the Earth 65 million years ago. Um, it was covered with rainforests and a. Meteor hit the Yucatan and it killed 75% of all life in a few [00:40:00] hours. And all of these rainforests around the earth, freshwater plants died and decomposed and created this layer of incredibly mineral rich substances.

And these substances exist in different forms around the earth and the Himalayas. They have something called Sheila Jit. It’s a tar like substance. Many people use that as a ic. Substance. Um, there’s something called peat in the British Isles. There’s some, another one in the, in the South America, in Eastern Europe and in North America we have a couple of substances, one called Humate and the other called Leonard.

And we use in our products something called Humate. It comes from about 12 feet below the surface of the earth. The good thing about that is it comes from a very remote area. There’s no manufacturing, no mining, nothing like that around. So it’s. Very, very pure. It’s not had any contact with any modern pollutants, acid, rain, or even air airborne things.

So very, very pure, [00:41:00] extremely mineral rich, black crystalline substance. We take that product, we bring it to our facility, and we use a non-chemical process. To extract it. Now, many people will refer to humic acid or fulvic acid that is mineral. The, those are plant-based minerals that have been extracted using acids, uh, uh, hydrochloric acid.

And the, the only problem with them, it’s fine to, you can ingest them, but they taste horrific. So they’re used a lot in agriculture, but they’re not really great for human consumption. So we use a different process and we come out with a liquid that is completely, I mean, really tastes like water, maybe a little alkaline water, right?

So, and what we’ve done is we’ve actually. Split the two molecules. So you have IC in our product called micro boosto, and you’ve got Fulvic, which is in our product called Electrolyzed. And the beautiful thing about that is IC and fulvic. These two molecules have different capacities [00:42:00] beyond providing all the minerals.

That your body needs in the ratios, that your body needs them. And this is a really key point. So the cells in your body require the same ratios of minerals as the cells in a tree. That’s the interesting thing. At a mitochondrial level, at the cellular energy production level, your cells work the same as a tree.

There’s lots of other things about a tree that are, are different, but at that very basic energy production level, it’s the same. And so as above, so below, it makes sense that these molecules, I call them mother nature’s technology. For mineral replenishment and detoxification of all cellular systems on earth.

They were designed in nature to support mineral replenishment. ’cause every [00:43:00] cell on earth requires minerals in specific ratios to operate effectively, to be able to generate the energy necessary to grow that cellular sy that cell in that cellular system, okay?

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan: So that’s what humic and phobic are.

They’re pre-formulated molecules with all of the minerals you need, but they have. Additional capacities that are really cool. So let’s talk about the fulvic molecule. The fulvic molecule is very, very tiny. If you can make your hand into a fist, and then think of the head of a pin, the head of the pin is the fulvic molecule and your fist is the cell.

So the book molecule is very small relative to a cell. And it’s a delivery system for minerals into your cells. The cool thing is because fulvic evolved on the planet just alongside all of the other cellular life, your cells [00:44:00] recognize fulvic as a beneficial substance. So you put fulvic in your body today, if you’ve never taken it before, your body goes, woo-hoo, this is fantastic.

It And your cells just. Open up channels and say, come on in, bring all those minerals into my cells.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan: So what that, the effect of that, the result is you get more energy. Like very quickly, and that’s the coolest thing about fulvic. The other thing is because it’s such a small molecule and in our products, it’s not bound up with other things.

It’s ready for absorption. Immediately. When you drink it, it starts absorbing through the lining of your mouth and your throat and your esophagus, but at the time it even hits your stomach, it’s already, some of it’s already been absorbed into your system and is being utilized. It’s that quick.

Jenny Swisher: Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan: It’s very, very cool and it doesn’t rely on a healthy gut or a healthy gut lining because it can absorb through any [00:45:00] tissue. So that’s why we separate out the fulvic molecule so that you can get energy regeneration very, very quickly. Now the HU and that, that is our product called Electrolyze. It’s in a green bottle and it’s the fulvic, so the very tiny one.

The delivery system for those minerals and nutrients into the cell, the humic molecules, very different. I call it mother nature’s janitor. It is a large molecule that hangs out in your bloodstream and in your gut, and it just travels around. It’s an incredible binder. It picks up bio waste, toxins like glyphosate, other toxic substances, heavy metals, nanoplastics, viral detritus, mycotoxins.

Um, senescent or zombie cells?

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Caroline Alan: Free [00:46:00] radicals. All these things bind to its surface and it’s a, it’s a poly electrical mo, electric electrolyte molecule, which means different parts of its surface have different polarity, allowing it to pick up different substances. At a certain point, this molecule, imagine it like a magnet with all these things attached to it.

It gets so heavy that it falls out of solution. Like if you mix something into a powder, into your glass, and then over time it would settle to the bottom. That’s called precipitation, and that’s what happens. The molecule falls outta solution and it leaves your body through every elimination channel.

Including your tears, your snot, your sweat, your saliva, your ear wax, just sloughing off cells, and of course your urine and feces. So it’s a very effective but gentle, continuous detoxification agent. And it’s what nature uses because out nature, there’s lots of places where there are [00:47:00] tox, things that are toxic.

Jenny Swisher: Yeah.

Caroline Alan: To. Uh, natural cellular systems, and this is what nature uses to clear out those toxins and bring the system back into balance.

Jenny Swisher: It’s so fascinating and it’s just, it’s fascinating just how our bodies work and um, the fact that you give your body what it needs and the light in you shines a little brighter, right?

It gives you that, that instant energy, but also your body knows exactly what to do with it. Yeah. It’s just every time. It’s so fascinating to think about, but I know we’re running short on time. This has been so, so fantastic. I feel like I’ve learned so much just about. Minerals. I mean, like I said, I’ve been consuming beam minerals now for just over a month.

I would love to link up for everyone, uh, a link to beam in the show notes. But I would also love for you to touch on your book if you would just share some more, share with us more about your book that’s coming out. Um, you know, tell us where we can find you. All the good stuff.

Caroline Alan: Thank you. Well, I became so galvanized to bring this information to the world, and I’ve been talking about it for many years.

I decided to put it [00:48:00] into a book so that I could reach more people. The book is called The Mineral Reset, as you said, and people can go if they want to pre-order it. We’re actually gonna be starting in January. Um. You know, I’m gonna be doing some teaching on the book, and if you pre-order the book, you can kind of join that community and begin to get that information over time.

We’re gonna do a mineral reset program and things like that. Um, so you just go to mineral reset book.com. Mineral reset book.com, and you can pre-order. I’d love that. Um, if people can get on there and, um, and join the community, I’d love to talk to them. Um, you can also, of course go to beam minerals.com to find out about our products, which are just a fan fantastic way to up the energy in your life and support you through any kind of perimenopause or maybe.

Post birth, you know, lots of, you know, women are having children and then they’re feeling extremely depleted [00:49:00] afterwards. Um, and so getting replenished with minerals is foundational for feeling better again soon. And, um, finally, they can also join me on Instagram at Caroline Allen Official. I would love to, um, do that and I’ll be doing all sorts of different lives and all sorts of different things for the community there.

So. I really appreciate you having me, Jenny. It’s, it’s a pleasure to spend time with you and I always love to talk to people. If people have questions, please um, send them through and we will get answers to everybody.

Jenny Swisher: Absolutely. Absolutely. We’ll make it easy for our listeners too to simply swipe up and all of these links that she’s mentioned will be there.

I know I’m gonna go grab my copy of the book so that I can get into your community and learn more as well. I’d love to, to learn more so that I can share more and and send more people your way. So thank you so much for taking the time. Again, thank you for your flexibility in doing the podcast, but this is gonna be one that I refer out often.

I know this is gonna be one that my listeners say, whoa, like what if [00:50:00] it really is this simple, but also. We just blew their mind with how amazing the human body is. So thank you again, Caroline. It’s been a pleasure to get to know you and we’ll talk again soon. Take care.

Caroline Alan: Thank you, Jenny. It’s a pleasure to, uh, be with you today.