Part FIVE: Interview between Dr. Z and Healing with Clay Author Ran Knishinsky
This is PART FIVE of a SIX PART Interview series.
Dr. Eugene Zampieron, ND interviewed Ran Knishinsky, author of Healing with Clay: A Practical Guide to Earth’s Oldest Natural Remedy about the health benefits of edible clay.
Dr. Z: You put quite a number of them in your book. You cite the journal articles, which is nice that people can go into PubMed or other ways to check them out. Now you call them geophagy and do a search. Geo I would assume means the earth, geology, and phagy?
RK: Its commonly called geophagy and basically means eating earth. What’s really crazy, doctor, is that we’re eating earth on a daily basis, and we don’t even know it. For example, when you ask one of your family members at the dinner table to pass the salt, that’s a form of geophagy. If you think about it, salt is simply a rock. And it’s a rock that we grind up and we put on our foods and tastes good. When you’re buying, let’s just say, orange juice at the refrigerated aisle at the supermarket and it has added calcium, that’s a form of geophagy. Because calcium too is simply a rock. Or if you are taking Rolaids or tums with additional calcium, the same thing goes. So, we are eating dirt on a daily basis, we’re just not aware of it. We’re also consuming, in small micro-doses, earth as well. If you’re going to a farmers’ market and you are buying, let’s just say, carrots – and you’re eating those carrots – the chances are that there is a bit of dust on those carrots. The author of the book, Eat Dirt, by Dr. Josh Axe talks about the health benefits of communing with dirt daily and discusses the beneficial microbes that are part of dirt. And how important it is. He wrote a book on leaky gut, he creates a connection between eating dust/dirt not necessarily clay but dust, dirt, clay, and other supplements and how it helps to repair, cure gut problems.
Dr. Z: Wow, that makes a lot of sense. I remember my grandfather used to say that you eat a pound of dirt or more by the time you leave the earth. The old timers knew about that. Haha.
RK: From dust to dust…
Dr. Z: It’s been used throughout history, it’s also used topically, too. You mentioned that Cleopatra used clay. Clay is used in creams, powders, emulsions, anti-perspirants. If you think about it, some of the things that make us stop sweating, I know that they put toxic aluminum in the anti-perspirants. I guess you could just dust your armpits with some clay. That might kind of help, I guess.
RK: I have never seen research with clay acting as a deodorant or anti-perspirant. But I do use salt. I go to the grocery store and utilize the salt crystals.
Dr. Z: What about mud packs? I mean, back to the study of what’s called fango, the mud packs were used for drawing out impurities I guess through the sebaceous glands. It’s a topical application of what you’re saying can happen in the intestines. But it seems like it doesn’t really matter where you put the clay, it still has a powerful drawing effect on the body.
RK: That’s absolutely true. I worked in the aesthetics business for a few years. And yes, clay is used in all different types of products including creams and powders and its effects externally mimic its effects internally. That’s why clay can be drying to the face because its water loving so it’s absorbing those same toxins, impurities.
Dr. Z: And oils, too. Because you mentioned in absorbs oils. A lot of the things that cause acne is the sebaceous secretions. Either they contain hormones or like we talked about…with the 9/11 veterans, they contain the very toxins they were breathing in through the pile. We sent samples of the sweat, Ran. Sweat is like a little bit sodium chloride, but it also contains the secretions from the sebaceous glands. And when we sent the sweat samples to very sophisticated laboratories that do mass spectroscopy and all these fancy physics things, we found that they were excreting mercury, lead, heavy metals, whatever happens when you burn computer parts, and all the melted plastics. The very thing that they breathed in came out via their skin. Of course, we also sent their stool samples into the laboratory, and found that the very thing they were breathing in, came out with the stool. So, it makes a lot of sense that if people are going to do detoxification protocol to include clay as part of that. For instance, what’s been very popular now in natural medicine is to put people on Dr. Jeffery Bland’s 4R program. He made a simple way for us to remember to detoxify the gut. 4 R’s. That’s how I teach it in naturopathic school The first R is rid, so you’re ridding of course bad food habits, bad food combining, bad lectins, but you’re also ridding the body of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and the very toxins that they make. You called them enterotoxins earlier in the program, but we didn’t really define that for the listeners. That’s basically the toxins from the bugs that live in our digestive system, right?
Read PART SIX: Interview between Dr. Z and Healing with Clay Author Ran Knishinsky or listen here: https://thenaturalnurse.podbean.com/e/the-natural-nurse-and-dr-z-040522/