Regulate Blood Sugar

Apologies for the use of the word "blood" in the title, as it is one of my pet peeves that in RBTI the refractometer is thought of as a tool that monitors blood sugar, which it doesn't.  But it does show an incredible connection to available sugar - or what you might call sugar levels in the brain and muscle and available to the cells.  Because of that, the refractometer continues to impress me, as it's about the most simple, inexpensive, and easy-to-use health tool on the planet (up there with the thermometer).  And it demystifies "hypoglycemia," a condition that the mainstream medical establishment more or less doesn't recognize, nor should they, as hypoglycemia means low, sugar, blood.  Having low levels of sugar in the blood is an extreme rarity in today's day and age.  Having radical fluctuations in available carbohydrate is another story altogether, and that is revealed not in the blood, but in the urine.

This is one of my favorite Challen Waychoff videos that I've posted thus far.  In the video he discusses the fluctuation or "the wobble."  This is a central theme in RBTI - trying to eat and drink in a way that makes this fluctuation smaller - allowing your body to heal itself more effectively, gain energy, and "pick up more vitamins and minerals from the food that you eat."  Enjoy, and stay tuned for next week for an exciting interview series with 180DegreeHealth's "biggest loser," who has lost 130 pounds and counting eating the food...  

Ulcerative Colitis Diet

This is a funny video with Challen Waychoff.  One of the attendees mentions something about the RBTI beliefs surrounding how cancer develops, and he stiffens up so as not to reveal anything too libelous on camera.

But he goes on to tell an anecdote of a man basically on his deathbed due to a severe case of ulcerative colitis - an inflammatory and "incurable" bowel disease.  Something was obviously quite off in his "chemistry," but it was something that Challen was able to guide the man to sorting out and fix in short order, like he so often does.  I did not ask him specifically the details of the case, and what was causing the problem, but obviously following one of the simple rules of the RBTI in particular was enough to sort it out (as he hints at in the video).   

RBTI and Junk Food

Before getting started, I must publicly declare a winner for the two combined road trips. Winner of what? Awesomeness of course. While one guy opened the door adorned in a faded Ghostbusters t-shirt – and believe me, I was impressed and thought this was unlikely to be topped – and another fed me cheesecake, housed me and Pip for an evening, and let me have a couple games of ping pong, there is no question whatsoever that the Croatian giant that I met in Chicago won handily over all the others if awesomeness is the object of the game.

I walked in the door and he had an 80’s movie cued up on the television. Before saying anything he pushed PLAY. It was an obscure 80’s film that I didn’t recognize right away. But lo and behold I had not only seen the film, but actually saw it at the movie theater as a kid. K9. While many might prefer Turner and Hooch in the crime-fighting dog category, K9 has subtle undertones of Belushi that is more appropriate to a refined 80’s palette. And it was poetic as we said goodbye and the credits were rolling. Coincidence? I think not.



On to our primary matter of business – the RBTI junk food scare…

It seems a lot of people get freaked out about some of the questionable foods being consumed as part of RBTI; version Waychoff. I get freaked out too. Margarine, soy bacon (Stripples!), and corn oil for example aren’t exactly old-world foods that human beings evolved with. We have survived quite a while as a species without them. Nor is the very clear research on such foods particularly comforting. Then again, none of those foods are mandatory requirements, so there’s no point in having such foods stand in the way of your openness to the basic guidelines of RBTI.

I joked while in Wheeling that I cleared up my margarine and HFCS deficiencies while I was up there. One day we ate sandwiches where the bread was slathered in margarine and toasted and then filled with mayo-laden salmon salad – served with canned soup containing HFCS (remineralized with blackstrap molasses of course!). Pretty funny. But at the end of the day, who the f#%$ am I to bash such foods when people are seemingly overcoming death sentences eating them? Sometimes even the great Matt Stone has to eat a slice of humble pie – and two slices if it is Marie ‘Challen’dar’s Coconut Cream pie.

But if I had to say anything definitive about refined, processed, packaged foods and the RBTI (which I don’t) – it would go a little something like this…

Refined, processed, packaged foods are much easier to digest and metabolize. Take for example the diet of a gorilla, which is based upon eating a lot of “browse” – leafy vegetation. It is estimated that the gorilla only gets 50% of the calories in browse, while the rest is wasted. Processed gorilla biscuits are very concentrated, far more palatable, and far more digestible. A gorilla will choose this every time over its natural diet (and get fat because of it) – just like a human will typically develop a distaste for simple, unseasoned, fibrous raw foods when something like a Happy Meal – practically pre-digested for maximal softness, tenderness, absorption, and digestibility (which our senses recognize as superior), is eaten on a regular basis.

With refined foods, there is a tendency to eat more, digest more, and absorb more. That may not be true for everyone, but generally this is true. And I’ve understood this all along, having first told an extremely underweight and undernourished guy to run, not walk to the nearest 7 Eleven and have doughnuts and Gatorade. Doughnuts and Gatorade are much more healing to a starving person than sauerkraut and grass fed raw meat (which was the basis of this 120-pound guy’s diet). If I was visiting a village of starving people in Africa I wouldn’t show up with chicken breasts and Brussels Sprouts, but kegs of Coca Cola and mountains of French fries and pastries.

And guess what? There are a lot of people out there – I have seen many for myself now in the 10,000 miles I have driven since May 31st of this year, who are underweight, gaunt, feeble, overexercised, and hypometabolic with radical fluctuations in sugar levels. And these are often people who are the most afraid of eating junk food – as they often got to this state by eating a puritanical diet of 100% unprocessed, unrefined foods. They heal the fastest eating food that is maximally palatable and maximally absorbable. Marie Challendar has the creation of that kind of food down to a science. For a starved person, it could very well be that the most nourishing farm on earth is Pepperidge Farm.

For everybody else? Well, I suspect the same rules apply. A lifetime of eating a lot of junk food yields a junk body. It’s not like Challen’s pets have escaped the wrath of commercial dog food because he feeds them lots of mineral-rich bones. Sure, he fixed some major health problem in his dog in the short-term, but long-term he still became lethargic, swollen in the abdomen but with skinny weak legs, food-obsessed with no ability to self-regulate his weight, and not much better off than a typical indoor pooch.

There is no mandatory requirement to eat packaged and processed food if you are someone who is overweight, pre-diabetic, etc. In fact, I would recommend you avoid that stuff almost completely – especially if you start this RBTI thing and find your waist travelling in the wrong direction. People with a tendency towards having a high refractometer reading, according to the RBTI (and I’ve heard this straight from Challen’s mouth) should be eating mostly whole foods, and shouldn’t be eating any dessert at lunch time either – but just a single piece of fruit at breakfast and no other sweets during the day other than the trace amount of sweetener in the lemonade.

And no, having perfect “numbers” is unlikely to make excesses of margarine, corn oil, and other vegetable oils found in processed foods miraculously stimulating to the metabolism. They are not.

With an acute disease, these are trifling matters. No one needs to make a big deal out of eating such foods if you are going to die of cancer in a few months if you don’t reverse your body chemistry. You can do so with corn oil, so why make a big deal over telling someone it’s not optimal? The program should be as easy as it can be while still getting the intended results. There’s no reason to fuss about it in a situation like that.

As it pertains to a lifelong pursuit of health through a quality diet, for the purpose of health maintenance – well, you figure it out for yourself. Avoiding processed food doesn’t mean that you are “not doing RBTI.”

I think the biggest mistake people are making is looking at it like an all or nothing kind of thing. It’s as if there are two extremes squaring off against one another at the moment – the people who think that whole foods are problematic and inappropriate, and those that think processed foods are problematic and inappropriate. In reality, everyone should probably eat a little bit of everything. The underweight low sugar health fanatics should have more processed foods and desserts, but still plenty of nutritious whole foods like steamed vegetables, meats, dairy products, and fruit… While those who have strong digestion and tend towards having a high sugar problem that are overly stimulated by calorie-dense junk food need to eat far less processed food and desserts and a lot more nutritious, non-pornographic, homemade fare.

Fair enough?

Having said all that – I’m getting leaner and leaner eating all this junk food and driving around in a car haha! I would have lost more I suspect if I had been eating a strict whole foods, homecooked diet and not going bonkers with dessert every day, but who knows? This health/diet/nutrition game is full of surprises. It’s best to keep an open mind. Like the WHIZard says:

“Minds are like parachutes – they only work when they are open.”

RBTI vs. DHEA

Tomorrow I leaveth the WHIZard and the wonderful paradise city of Wheeling.  At least for a few months.  I have spent a total of four weeks here and about six weeks on Waychoff's basic program at this point - with decent but not perfect adherence due to some chaotic road trips. 

My body chemistry has moved much closer to Reams's theoretical ideal.  And I can honestly say I've noticed improvement in all the areas I was having troubles with upon arrival - from improvements in foot pain, chest pain, and back pain to a huge decrease in pet allergies and asthma.  My teeth feel noticeably stronger - kind of like what I felt on my extended milk fast over a year ago (which made the other problems listed exponentially worse in exchange for those healthier teeth).  My breathing has improved and I no longer wake up with crusties in my nose that used to make me sneeze all morning long.  My skin is clear.  And I've lost an inch or two off the waist eating to appetite with no physical activity.  I can't argue with those results.  And it wasn't exactly torture choking down that coconut cream pie at lunch today.  Or those waffles smeared with cream cheese and jam at breakfast.    

That doesn't mean Waychoff is God.  He isn't.  Or that RBTI is foolproof.  I don't think it is.  Even some that have followed his advice for a decade still have major health struggles (granted, those folks would probably be dead if it weren't for Waychoff's guidance).  

As wacky as it is, very little doubt remains that RBTI, as Challen Waychoff practices it, at the very least deserves a prominent place in the world of alternative health.  I'd put it up against any of the popular alternative health modalities, such as Acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic, etc. any day of the week.  I've tried all those, and none of them lived up to my experiences with RBTI thus far.  It is a shame that you can find a practitioner in those fields in every town in America, and only Wheeling, West Virginia - yes WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA, has a licensed professional doing RBTI as Waychoff practices it.  I hope my exposé of the WHIZard is the initial spark to change that.   

I can't possibly be the only one that responds well to it.  In fact I know I'm not.  I've talked to several dozen of Waychoff's clients that report success varying from pretty good to miraculous.  My own sister was able to wave goodbye to heart arrhythmia and hypertension after a couple of weeks of loose adherence.  My father sent me a text message featuring the word "bonerville."  Like pops, I can't help but have a little excitement here.  

Anyway, I still have much more video and my own personal thoughts to share about my RBTI "experiment" and research.  Only time will tell what the uses and limitations of it really are.  But anywho, here's yet another clip of Challen that features a very basic concept central to RBTI...     

RBTI, Sleep, and Vegetarianism

In the months leading up to my pilgrimage to Wheeling, West Virginia (where I saw a grown man wearing a hospital gown as a shirt on Saturday - it was tucked into his pants but his fat, hairy, bare back was showing... the thing was faded and frayed as well, as if he had been wearing it as a shirt for years), I was eating a progressively vegetarian diet.  I noticed the more meat I displaced out of my diet, the better I felt in many categories - such as lower levels of inflammation, less tooth pain, no body odor, gums stopped bleeding, better breathing...

But I knew it was a dead end and I also knew things weren't right.  I broke out with two major rashes on my backside in a period of only 5 weeks for example.  My toes started getting icy cold in the middle of the day.  The ominous signs that I'm all too familiar with the significance of, were creeping in.  

Deep inside it was obvious to me that my "meat intolerance" was not because meat is unhealthy or inherently inflammatory.  It was obvious that I just wasn't, and haven't been digesting and metabolizing it correctly - the same logic I used when I started having problems with "carbohydrates" and went on to fix that (and help guide many others to fixing their "carbohydrate intolerances").  

Anyway, that's exactly how meat is looked at in RBTI.  To be able to digest meat properly, you have to have strong enough digestive juices, liver bile, and overall "reserve energy."  One of the beliefs that is nearest and dearest to RBTI is that young children lack such digestive strength - and that children don't reach their full digestive power until around age 12.  Before then, meat is constipating, and causes tons of problems with congestion, sinus infection, asthma, ear infections - as constipation and congestion more or less go hand in hand.  Eggs and dairy are mainstays of child RBTI diets.  Meats? Not so much.

Here's Challen Waychoff discussing vegetarian diets, meat-free diets for kids under the age of 12, and sleep...       

As an update on Pippa and I's next road trip... We will be in Detroit on Thursday, Chicago on Friday, and Minneapolis over the weekend.  If you live in one of these cities or close to it, there is still a chance you can have her play with your urine. Contact her at pipparoni@yahoo.com right away to schedule. 

High-Brix Gardening and Farming

On my crazy road trip, I took the time to swing by the Platte family farm in Rochester, New York.  The Platte family has had a history of many debilitating health problems, but used RBTI, as well as clearing their homes of black mold, to get dramatic improvements - especially since they made the recent switch to working with Challen Waychoff.   

Their RBTI experiences have been so inspiring that they decided to take the plunge and buy a tract of land to start some "Reams-based agronomy" for themselves and their local community. 

Reams believed that the Brix reading was the best indicator of the nutritional quality of a food.  The Brix reading shows the total amount of dissolved solids - such as sugar, in a drop of liquid squeezed from the food.  While not the be-all, end-all of gauging the nutritional quality of a food, there often is a very strong correlation between vitamin and mineral density and the Brix reading.  The higher the reading, the better the product.  Reams developed the chart below... 

One thing you will see with foods of higher nutritional quality is a higher specific gravity - meaning that the fruit or vegetable feels very heavy for its size.  This is one thing I really noticed when I put a Platte-farm squash, some peppers, and a few tomatoes in a plastic bag.  The bag felt like it was full of rocks, and was very heavy even though very little was in the bag.  The squash felt like a freakin' meteorite or something - small, but very heavy like you would expect something to feel that was saturated with dense minerals. 

Another indicator is complete resistance to insect damage, fungus, and so forth.  As you will see in the video I shot, the leaves on the crops they are growing are completely pristine.  And they use no pesticides or herbicides or anything of that nature. 

And one really amazing indicator of nutritional superiority is that the food doesn't rot.  Literally.  It may dehydrate, but it does not rot or go bad. 

Anyway, I knew some of you out there, like Rob A. who I was able to give a sneak preview to, are really inspired by growing foods with great nutritional superiority.  So here is a taste of what one family, with no farming knowledge going into it, was able to achieve by their 2nd growing season in soil that was totally depleted when they started.  Pretty remarkable. 

If this kind of stuff really turns you on, you can find out more from the Platte family on the RBTI yahoo forum that Pippa put together a few months ago.

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/ReallyRBTI/

You can also get in touch with Thomas Giannou in Spokane, WA (who is growing 4-ft. tall broccoli and 28-Brix grapes - 2 points higher than the world's best winemakers acknowledge is even possible), who sells starter kits for farms and gardens that sound pretty remarkable.   

Also, Pip and I will again be hitting the road again soon en route to Colorado for my good friend's wedding.  We will be making many diversions to test people along the way just like we did on our recent trip to New York/New Jersey.  So if you are anywhere between West Virginia and Colorado - including Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, etc. - including of course Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, etc. - then let Pip know immediately at pipparoni@yahoo.com.  We will try our best to get to everyone.   

Cancer and pH, Sugar, and Vitamin C

Okey dokey, so maybe I haven't quite had the opportunity to post videos like I had planned.  The trip has been a mega whirlwind, and totally fun.  The best part was giving Rob A. the schooling of a lifetime in ping pong.  Yeah, I totally brutalized the poor kid.  I went totally Forest Gump on him.  Only the exact opposite.  Yes, sadly, I learned a very hard lesson.  Never take on someone in ping pong that is living in a desolate lodge in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do other than play ping pong in the basement. 

I'm looking foward to my meeting with another 180 follower later this morning.  He has requested that I hang upside down from his little batman device and "do some Mercola tapping" as he put it - followed by cleaning out his garage.  No respect I tell ya.  No respect.

To top it all off I'm meeting someone for lunch who answered his phone by asking me if I have ever seen a grown man naked.  Should be interesting.   

Anyway, here is another video clip of Challen talking about some of the interplay between vitamin C, pH, sugar, and cancer in response to a cancer question I posed to him (that he slightly dodged because of the liabilities involved with talking about cancer).  But his response was perplexing, and put the focus more on some simple fundamentals of healing. 

Also, someone apparently captured some video footage of Pippa and I in our travels.  You can see in the video that I have gotten quite lean and my hair is really growing fast!!!  But I've maintained my strength as you can see when I arm wrestle JT in the opening scene.  Only problem is that my voice has gotten very high-pitched and Pippa is looking somewhat masculine - almost like Paul McCartney.  Haven't figured that out yet, but we are working on it... 

RBTI - Eating a Big Lunch

One of the simplest aspects of the RBTI - and one of the most powerful, is eating a big lunch - the meal of the day when you eat the most fat, the only meal that you eat meat (not including eggs and dairy), and the last time during the day that you eat sweets or desserts.  

Seems that people are daunted by this whole RBTI thing, but, as Challen says matter of factly - "the more rules that you follow the healthier you will become."  Well, I'm finding that just following this ONE rule - eating big every day and finishing up the meal no later than 2pm, is helping a lot of people.  It's very simple.  No meats or sweets after 2pm.  Dinners are very light - typically small salads, steamed vegetables, cottage cheese, soups, and a little starchy food on occasion like 2 pieces of toast or last night's corn on the cob with sauteed veggies.  It may sound difficult, and you may be hungry as hell for the first week, but I really think it's worth making the adjustment to reap the rewards.  

I also think it's vastly superior to typical intermittent fasting or eating super light early in the day because the danger of hypoglycemia during that time is very high -whereas the sugar levels rise the highest in the late evening, making hypoglycemia and the heavy taxation on your adrenal glands that you might get from morning fasting a non-issue.  Bottom line - it works well for a lot of people.  More energy, better sleep, better blood sugar regulation, better appetite regulation, and fat loss eating to appetite - even if you eat ice cream or cheesecake at lunch of every day (as a normal-sized dessert - not as your whole meal)... 

P.S. - Pippa and I are leaving for our New York/New Jersey tour tomorrow.  For those interested, Pippa will be charging $150 for a visit to your house or office - which will include running the RBTI test, calling Challen to get feedback about your chemistry, going over every detail you would need to follow the program - including the specifics for your chemistry, and answering any of the questions and concerns you may have.  You can have other friends and family members tested for only an additional $25 per person.  Once again, you can contact her at pipparoni@yahoo.com to set up an appointment.  Plus you get to see me and hear me make jokes about pee and stuff.  You don't wanna miss that.   

RBTI Introduction Video - Challen Waychoff

Pip and I will be leaving Wheeling on Friday to tour around New York and New Jersey (starting Friday in Rochester).  Pippa will bring a test kit with her and is willing to swing by and test anyone in the area that is interested, as well as go over all the intricate details of Challen's program for a reasonable fee.  I'll be there to make fart noises in several creative ways, do impressions, say GARRRR every time she looks at the refractometer, and otherwise annoy her.  I'll write more about this tomorrow.  If you are an individual or alternative health practitioner of some kind in the area and know that you are definitely interested you can start the process of lining up an appointment by sending her an email at pipparoni@yahoo.com. 

I say all this now because I probably won't be busting out any big articles while we are gone, but I do hope to keep pumping out short video clips of Challen - the myth, the legend... each day - or when I get a chance.  You can see the first one right here.  I think he did a pretty good job at introducing the basic concept behind the RBTI, the meaning of some of the numbers, and the kind of approach he takes.  

Before you hastily nitpick every phrase or try to bust his balls over the details, realize that no one here is trying to proclaim Challen as the almighty guru of all things health.  He is not.  No one is.  What Challen offers is a powerful tool to add to the toolbox - especially for those in desperate circumstances that simply can't stabilize their body chemistry enough to digest and metabolize food efficiently enough to heal themselves.  The system is, in many ways, very advanced.  And, for the most part, very straightforward, simple, easy, predictable, and oftentimes extraordinarily quick depending on the situation.  Anyway, here's "THE WHIZARD..."

Hypoglycemia, Blackouts, Seizures

Here is another interview with the woman visiting West Virginia to work with Challen Waychoff in person.  This is basically an exit interview about her experiences in Wheeling before she heads back home later this afternoon.  Turns out one of the biggest roadblocks that she was running into at home was eating "too much health food."  She kept trying to do things like make pancakes from fresh-ground whole-grain flour and things at home, only to find out that such measures were not only unnecessary, but counterproductive.  As you listen to the interview, be open to these ideas...

a) Whatever she did here obviously helped her out.

b) Very ill people may actually recover better eating easy-to-digest refined foods as opposed to hard-to-digest unrefined foods.

c) The mineral supplements given may very well make up for the lack of minerals in refined foods - and maybe even end up being far more nutritious than whole foods without supplementation.

d) Many additives found in processed foods may be minutiae, benign, or at the very least less harmful than eating food you can't digest.  

e) Getting the body chemistry in a certain place may make vitamin and mineral absorption so much more effecient that avoiding refined food becomes unnecessary.  

f) Reams claimed to have developed the program for anyone to be able to remineralize even buying and eating common foods out of their supermarket.  

Anyway, those are thoughts I've had that have kept my mind open to following the program as Challen feels is ideal.  Of course, eating refined food is not really a required part of the program, so don't let your health food infatuation stand in the way of your open-mindedness about all this.       

Water: Is it Good or Bad?

I think it’s the nature of the human psyche to be somewhat lazy. By lazy I mean wanting to cling onto simple black and white concepts, declare “case closed,” and systematically file everything into good and bad categories.

In the world of nutrition this laziness abounds. It seems everyone wants to create “good guys” and “bad guys” out of different foods, different substances, different therapies, different medications. But you really can’t do that. And when you do file things into categories that are either “always good” or “always bad” you commit intellectual suicide to a certain degree.

I have been thoroughly punished by this type of mindset just like anyone else. Many years ago I thought water “had” to be good for you. Pure, crystal clear water. The genesis of life on earth. It was the essence of purity and wholesomeness – the more the better.

Later, I came across some opposing views on water, and noticed that I was having ill effects from drinking it, such as indigestion. I went so far as to write an article pointing out this error (Oops, I Did it Again), and jumped on the other side of the water debate. First, water was always good. And now, water was not preferable to other fluids that contained electrolytes and carbohydrates – like milk and fresh juices.

But then I improved my health by ending an overly-restricted diet that got me into trouble (one could call it a “Weston A. Price version of a low-carb diet”), and no longer had any issues with water at all. I began drinking tons of it again. I thrived on it. Water was back on the “water is good for you list.” I’m not the only one to flip flop back and forth on water. Mercola has done the same recently.

The problem was trying to put water into a category as good and bad. You can’t do that – not even with something as simple as water. Maybe you could do that with cyanide or DDT or movies that were not made in the 1980’s, or Room 304 at the McClure Hotel in Wheeling, West Virginia, but not all common foods.

Anyway, on to what I mean, and why water can be extremely good or extremely bad depending on the circumstance.

Water, quite simply, is a solvent. Salt and sugar dissolve in water. When you drink water, you urinate or sweat it out later and it is contains a lot more sugar, minerals, and electrolytes than it did when it went in. Water washes all that out.

As Ray Peat has written, those with a low metabolic rate have trouble storing adequate amounts of glycogen and often have a tendency towards hypoglycemia. Likewise, they have a hell of a hard time retaining electrolytes and other minerals like magnesium. Both hyponatremia (low electrolytes) and hypoglycemia (low sugar) can induce things like migraines, seizures, headaches, anxiety attacks, anger and aggression, frequent urination (polyuria), vomiting, nighttime urination and bedwetting in children (nocturia), night terrors and nightmares, and a long list of other complaints – all of which are serious stressors. In fact, as I pointed out in an argument I had with a completely uninformed person earlier this year who was encouraging someone with low blood sugar seizures to drink lots of water – giving large quantities of water to an infant can induce a seizure on the spot.

Reading all this, you would think water was, generally-speaking, a negative. Quite the contrary. The fact that it can wash excess salt and sugar out of the system is wonderful for those who have TOO MUCH SALT AND SUGAR in their systems. As I’m finding with my investigation of Challen Waychoff, who tracks these things with a conductivity meter (which measures electrolytes basically) and refractometer (that measures all dissolved particles in the urine), most people have very high levels of sugar and salt and get the most benefit from lowering these levels, not raising them.

Of the waters, distilled water – completely devoid of minerals and thus much more potent for stripping salts and sugars out of the body, is so powerful that Challen named his company “Heavenly Water.” But even someone who calls water “heavenly” knows the power of water used in the wrong context. That wrong context is of course, when given to someone with a tendency towards hypoglycemia and hyponatremia (and I’ve noticed that many who do, have a natural aversion to drinking water, but often drink tons of it anyway due to bad advice given from the mainstream - the mainstream obsession with water runs deeper than freakin' Lake Baikal).

But hey, even most practitioners of the RBTI don’t get this at all. Poor 180 follower Sheila, who has one of the most obvious cases of chronic hypoglycemia I can think of (cold hands and feet between meals, brain fog, waking up in the wee hours of the morning, nocturia so bad that she can’t go to bed until after midnight after she’s finally quit peeing every 5 minutes), was told by someone practicing RBTI in Europe to drink 5 LITERS of water every day. This, of course, made all of her problems exponentially worse. 5 ounces of water is probably plenty for someone with severe hypoglycemia – until of course they overcome that condition – at which point they need to drink more and take advantage of water’s purifying effects.

This is why the refractometer I wrote about recently is such a powerful tool. When the reading drops below 1.5, it is an indication that the solutes in the urine have dropped too low. In plain English, the body is lacking adequate salt and sugar to perform basic functions. This is one of the greatest stressors the body can experience. The worst thing you could do in this situation is drink a big glass of water (or other drinks that lack sugar, like diet soda or tea). It would be much healthier to rush to the nearest fast food establishment and drink a Mountain Dew. Drinking antifreeze would probably be healthier than drinking water in that circumstance.

Once you realize that whether or not something is healthy is circumstantial, it opens things up to a whole new world of possibilities.

Anyway, this is why I KNOW what Challen Waychoff is doing up in Wheeling is, at the very least, a huge step in the right direction in the medical use of nutrition. Instead of giving blanket recommendations to all of society based on the likelihood of more than 50% of people benefitting from it (while a portion of the population is decimated by the same advice), he looks at a person’s specific body chemistry and comes up with a very precise program for rebalancing that body chemistry. It is Ayurveda on steroids. And I believe that time and experience will prove to me that this works as well as or better than any non-specific nutrition guidance currently being given anywhere on earth - even with its Frankenfood-o-philia. 

There will always be general information. And as a writer, that will probably always be my specialty. But there are certainly circumstances that demand much more precision, careful monitoring, and fine-tuned manipulation. If only mainstream medicine could have open-mindedness to such as concept, targeting the diet and lifestyle root causes and effects of abnormalities in diagnostic tests as opposed to going first to medications to strong-arm the numbers back into “healthy” ranges... Sniffle, sniffle.

Instead we are all told…

Don’t eat red meat

Nuts and whole grains are good for you

Milk does a body good

Saturated fat is bad (Keep in mind there are over 30 types of saturated fat and each is unique, but I digress)

And dozens of other things. Including, none other than…

“Drink 8, 8-ounce glasses of water daily.”

I'm not saying drinking water is bad.  I'm not saying drinking water is good.  I'm saying that telling everyone to drink water without having any knowledge about their health, body chemistry, and metabolism is stupid. 

RBTI Testimonial

I've made the point before and I'll make it even more emphatically here - there is only one person that has cracked the code of the RBTI.  His name is Challen Waychoff.  It has recently come to my attention that many people are hearing about RBTI here, googling it, and ending up on the forums of various jagoffs that have no idea what they are doing.  Fail. There is only one person in the world that has developed any degree of mastery using the Reams equation.  Accept no substitutes. 

For example, the most popular of the "RBTI" practitioners nearly killed the person that speaks in the following interview, by having her drink a bunch of water.  Water is like kryptonite to the hypoglycemic, and this is one of the worst cases of hypoglycemia imaginable - complete with daily blackouts prior to finding the really deally in Wheely. 

Anyway, Challen's program is a program designed to achieve remineralization.  And well, having a tooth start to regenerate and literally pop out a filling in only two weeks time is a pretty remarkable example of the amazing remineralizing potential of Waychoff's work.  Have a listen. 

Armi Legge

This work with Challen is heating up and getting more and more interesting every day.  I'm away from my beloved Wheeling at the moment, but used one of the simple rules of RBTI today to prevent someone going into a seizure.  In fact, the person was so disoriented that she thought she had had a seizure and rushed to the bathroom mirror to look for bite marks on her tongue.  But there were no bite marks because the vast majority of seizures are incredibly easy to prevent when you know what Challen refers to as, "The rules of the sugar."  In fact, not only was this person's seizure prevented, but ten minutes later the splitting headache was gone, there was no sign of disorientation or loss of coordination, and she was talking 90 miles per hour, smiling, and in a good mood.   

And that's just how RBTI is.  It's impossibly simple, quick, and easy.  So much so that no one believes it.   

Anyway, got a good interview coming up on Monday with a person who was bedridden with a side of thyroid cancer six months ago and is in great health today after following the guidance of Challen Waychoff.  Thought I would torture all you first with something not pertaining to RBTI...

Here is a month-old interview I did with Armi Legge - a pretty remarkable young triathlete, blogger, and podcaster who is only 16 frickin' years old!!!  Way ahead of his time this one.  Thanks to Armi for doing it.  I owe him and arm and a leg.  Haha, ya get it?!!!  Bet he hasn't heard that one before.          

http://www.armilegge.com/podcast-matt-stone-interview

Hypoglycemia – It’s Not All in Your Head, It’s All in Your Urine

While I of course am still very unsure of what to make of my RBTI adventure overall (it’s only been a week, and it is quite a shocking mind funk), I feel comfortable saying that there is at least something of value going on here. How much value? I don’t know. It remains to be seen. I have no doubt that some seriously undesirable body chemistries can be greatly improved, and from the improvement many health problems of all kinds can be improved along with it. This is obviously a very familiar concept here and in the world of nutrition and natural health to begin with.

While I am most skeptical that the ideal urine and saliva pH is 6.4, what I am becoming increasingly certain about is the absolute awesomeness of the tool used in RBTI known as the refractometer. The refractometer is a simple agricultural tool that measures the degree of refraction as light passes through a liquid. The result is a number representing the total amount of dissolved carbohydrate in the liquid (I thought this number was the “Brix” number, but was corrected by DML on that – thanks dude).

What’s so cool about it is that it really is the best measurement of your true sugar levels. The mainstream thinks it’s all about the blood sugar level, and this can be revelatory, but often the carbohydrate levels in the urine and the blood move in completely opposite directions. This is particularly true as it pertains to what people casually refer to as “hypoglycemia.”

Hypoglycemia is a term that drives many in Western Medicine berserk. They go nutty nuts (a technical term used by Martin Short in his role as Clifford – one of the most monumental and inspiring motion pictures in the history of film) because actually having blood sugar levels in the range of hypoglycemia (below 65 mg/dl) is very rare - and you can go below that and sometimes feel just fine, with no signs of an adrenaline surge.



In fact, if most people were to test their blood sugar when feeling that shaky, irritable, lethargic, headachy, mid-afternoon “hypoglycemic" dip, they would find that their blood sugar is actually elevated. And this is where the confusion over what is really physiologically taking place in a person’s body stems from. It is most certainly hypoglycemia, but because the blood sugar is fine or even elevated, in the medical world this is not hypoglycemia but just some psychosomatic crapola. The refractometer settles this.

I’ll explain in a moment. First, let’s look at the “hypoglycemia” experienced by one of the people who turned me onto Challen and the RBTI in the first place.

I had a very difficult time helping this person to rehabilitate herself from a high-protein/low-carb distance running combo that left her completely unable to metabolize food and hospitalized for months. She was a wreck. When carbohydrate was freely available to her system she actually felt pretty good. When it wasn’t, she would tremble and shake, vomit, lay awake sleepless, and deteriorate rapidly. We tried again and again to tweak macronutrient ratios and things like that, but still she would experience these crushing hypoglycemic blows.

What she was experiencing, without a doubt, was the symptoms of her adrenal glands kicking into hyperdrive in order to elevate sugar levels in the body. That’s where the shaking, psychological and mood disturbances, cold hands and feet, and so forth stem from. Not exactly rocket science.

And she was at her worst early in the morning. 4am is a very common time of day to enter into a hypoglycemic state and it progresses throughout the early dawn hours if no food is ingested. This person had a glucose meter, so she tested. During this hardcore (and I mean hardcore) hypoglycemic episode, her blood sugar levels would soar to 130 mg/dl (technically hyperglycemia!) – a diabetic fasting level. But this person was definitely no diabetic. In fact, eating would immediately make her feel better and send the blood sugar plummeting to 75-ish.

What’s going on here is that the adrenals keep blood sugar elevated – trying to deliver sugar to the system somehow, and when food is ingested insulin rises, shuts down the adrenal glands, and stops the release of glycogen coming from the muscles and liver (which is the source of the hyperglycemia during fasting).

There is always a push-pull going on between the primary sugar raising and sugar lowering forces in the body. In the most simplistic sense, activation of the sympathetic nervous system causes the body to release sugar from within, and when food is ingested the body switches into a parasympathetic state that allows the sugar to be stored and stops the release of sugar from within.

In someone with hypoglycemic tendencies, the sympathetic nervous system goes wild to continually try to make carbohydrate available.

You may be a little confused at this point. Is hypoglycemia really hyperglycemia and how can I call someone with hyperglycemia (blood glucose 130mg/dl) “in a hypoglycemic state?”

The almighty refractometer tells the real story. If you want a tool that will tell you whether you lack carbohydrate or have too much, blood sugar testing ain’t gonna do it for you. The refractometer, however, is extremely reliable from what I’ve seen thus far. During those hypoglycemic dips, so common in the wee hours of the morning and in the early afternoon, the refractometer reading of the urine will tell you all you need to know.

Now, when this person tests the sugar levels of her urine, it will confirm if she is hypoglycemic or not (but of course, by now, she knows exactly what it feels like to have the sugar level dipping too low – hypoglycemic symptoms emerge like clockwork). The reading will be 1.2 or less, and in her case, with a severe problem, it is often much lower (like 0.5). Yet, her blood sugar often moves in the exact opposite direction.

Part of the RBTI program is keeping the sugar levels stable in a small range instead of a large, chaotic roller coaster range. And many years ago, when I first ate to keep my sugar levels as stable as possible by eating precise amounts of carbohydrates at precise and consistent meal times, I no doubt experienced the benefits.

If you know, even after doing RRARF (which can increase your glycogen storage capacity, improve glucose clearance, and other things that are helpful in keeping sugar levels stable), that you still have some lingering sugar swings that are causing you problems with energy, sleep, mood, focus, appetite and cravings, and more – there’s no question that using a refractometer and figuring out the precise times of day, number of minutes after meals, and so forth that your sugar levels tend to tank could be a huge game changer. Then, by simply eating a piece of fruit or two during that time, you may in turn be able to keep your sugar stable enough to reap the many potential rewards of keeping this stable (and keeping the stress response dormant).

From what I have gathered so far, Challen’s rules regarding hypoglycemia couldn’t be simpler. Whenever sugar levels are below 1.5 on the refractometer, eat a piece of fruit or have a sip of juice (and get to know at about what time that is going to happen). If you have sugar crashes in the wee hours of the morning, make sure not to eat heavy in the evening and keep an apple or glass of juice by your bedside. That’s it. Complicated stuff I know.

But seriously, Challen strongly thinks that the refractomer alone would be enough to really improve people’s health. I tend to agree. For self-care and dietary fine-tuning, it shows a lot of potential. Seeing how unstable some people’s sugar levels are with the use of the refractometer, more medical folk would really understand hypoglycemia, and realize that the problems are not just all in people’s head when the problem doesn’t show up in the unreliable glucose tolerance test.

Granted, this article is really an oversimplification of the whole picture of sugar regulation and how sugar levels interact with the pH and salt levels.  But like I said, I do suspect that the refractometer does have a medical value aside from the strict practicing of the full RBTI program.  I can't wait to get one and play with it.   

RBTI – Challen Waychoff Delivers

I went to see Challen Waychoff because I was told he could look at a basic set of numbers ascertained from a series of simple urine tests and tell what was wrong with a person, what they ate and even when they ate it, and precisely what course of action to take to fix their body chemistry. This seemed like incredibly powerful knowledge, and hinted at a more sophisticated understanding of nutrition than anyone else in the world possesses.

On the first day I watched a few clients come in. The first was an average construction worker kind of guy. He had a big gut and was just a regular Joe. He had a heart attack at which point he decided to pay Challen a visit. Within 48 hours his chest pain was gone. He had no problems whatsoever, including having energy, which he had suffered from to the point he could hardly get out of bed, until he deviated from the diet. When he did, his problems returned. Nervous about having another heart attack, he went back to Challen and once again, within a couple of days, chest pressure was gone and things back to normal. No trouble since, and he reports feeling great.

The second and third client came in after that. The 2nd was about to try yet another round of chemotherapy, but really felt like she didn’t have the strength left to survive another chemo serving. She tried the RBTI once again. And in 3 months all her tumors were completely gone without a trace.

The third client was a very attractive young girl who started out working with Challen and looking pale, sunken-cheeked, and bulimic according to Challen’s description – with acne. Radiant would be a huge understatement of her physical presence. She has gained 10 pounds since she started, and honestly had one of the best female figures I have ever seen. I don’t mean that in a creepy way. Just reporting here.

Her acne was still slightly visible, but she mentioned how much better it had gotten. She had just come back from vacation, so her “numbers” were all over the place. She had already begun drinking lots of distilled water in anticipation of what her numbers would be. She was right. Her urine brix (a reading of carbohydrate content) was roughly 400% higher than the ideal. Drinking distilled water in a systematic way lowers the urine brix. If you have low urine brix, drinking plain water is strictly forbidden.

And then of course, it was my turn. I went into the bathroom, whipped out the magic Johnson, and hit the little pee cup with a strong burst of embarrassingly-dark urine (I had not had much to drink that day – it was my first day and I had sort of forgotten about my physical needs).

Challen and his office diva laughed at how dark it was, and then Challen proceeded to run the tests on it. With a little dish he added a few drops of various solutions, had me spit in one part, mixed a drop of Matt whiz and stirred it around with something 120 times, put 15 drops into a big test tube full of distilled water, held my urine up and eclipsed the light with it (and had the skin color of an Oompa Loompa briefly), put some kid whiz on the refractomer and had me look at the reading, and 5 minutes later I had my “numbers.”

Urine brix = 4.2
Urine pH = 7.4
Saliva pH = 7.6
Salts = 28c
Albumin = 4m
Nitrate Urea = 8
Ammonia Urea = 12

And there ya have it.

He looks at my numbers for 15 seconds or so before he starts to talk. I’m waiting for a John Edward psychic moment to spill out of him. He says, “Do you take any medications?”

I say, “fool you crazy!!!”

He says, “Well, how about some herbs or supplements?”

“You betta ax somebody sucka!”

I’m thinking, “Wow, this is a disappointment.” But he insists there’s gotta be something causing the pattern he is seeing. As if he barely believes it, he says, “Well, do you eat a lot of bananas?”

I laughed and said “oh snap!”

“Well how many do you eat?!!” he asked as if I must be eating an amount of bananas that he’s never seen someone eat. And in fact, I had been. In June I ate 2 entire cases of bananas (roughly 170 bananas in 30 days). The day before I had eaten 4 in one sitting. My nickname to the 5-year old daughter of my Florida gal is “banana” because of all the bananas I eat.

Well played sir. I’m very attentive now. I take out my corn rows and remove the red bandana from my head and roll down the one pant leg I had up to my knee so I could hear dis fool betta. (Sorry, this gangsta spoof is a little out of sync with Wheeling. I should have said I got off my sister – who had a picture of Sarah Palin taped to her face as an aphrodisiac, put down my Moon Pie, and turned down the romantic sounds of the Georgia Satellites for a minute to listen more carefully…)

He then proceeded to tell me what was wrong with me starting at my feet (which have been hurting like hell this year – especially walking barefoot on hard surfaces), and working his way up. He mentioned feet, then lower back (one of my most chronic conditions – a major problem for me since the age of 16 when I began seeking treatment for it), and pain in the center of the chest (my most recent health problem that began after a year or so of being on a low-carbohydrate diet). He didn’t mention pet allergies, but I was still pretty damn impressed.

Challen, and the RBTI is not part of the psychic network. It’s just simple analysis. Anyone can do it. Challen is the first to systematize basic patterns in the numbers and their relationship with one another. For example, if your urine pH is low – like 5.5, and your Nitrate urea is higher than your ammonia urea (forgive me if I’m saying anything incorrectly, it’s only my 2nd day for Pete’s sake), then you have consumed pork in some form. This is one of the recognized patterns of which Challen has formulated dozens, hundreds maybe I don’t know, and has them all in a 3-ring binder.

It’s just very diligent investigative work that he has put together. No one on earth has done this. Other supposed practitioners of the RBTI deny that it’s even possible. Oh it’s possible alright, and freakishly accurate. So accurate, in fact, that I think it’s kind of scaring people away. I can sort of relate. I mean, this knowledge is making me have a complete identity crisis. It’s hard to explain why exactly. I feel like the hitchhiker in There’s Something About Mary when Ben Stiller suggests that 7-Minute Abs sounds like a good business idea, but warns about the potential of someone releasing 6-Minute Abs as a competing product…



For example, if you are taking dolomite as a supplement and the total of your urea numbers is 13 or less, your neck stiffens up. Then you stop taking the dolomite and it clears up right away. Likewise, if he sees your ureas getting closer to the low levels and you are taking dolomite, he can say, “You might get a stiff neck sometime this week. If you do, stop taking the dolomite.” He said this to a 180 follower that switched to the RBTI “dark side” and it happened like clock work. Earlier today someone (another 180 follower that has been working with Challen for 2 months) self-reported a total of 10 and was taking dolomite and didn’t have a stiff neck. Challen then knew that she had mis-reported her number, which she had. The total was 14, not 10.

A lady today came in (wearing a Beavis and Butthead t-shirt - I'm being totally serious) and Challen looked at her numbers for no more than 10 seconds before he said, "You eat some chocolate?"

"Yes, last night."

"And some nuts 6 days ago?"

"Yes, cashews." 

That’s how crazy this stuff is. And as you are reading this you are thinking the same way I thought when I first heard about it – that it is sounding like some super-creepy guru bullshit. That’s why I had to come here. I had to see it for myself, and I didn’t want to be one of those db’s who negates something just to protect his own ego, which just took a cold shower by the way, and will be quite raisin-like if my health problems substantially improve in the days, weeks, and months ahead (and more 180 followers continue to get much better results with the Challen-ator than I am capable of delivering to them).

We’ll see how things go as the bigger question is answered – “Does it work?”

Why RBTI?

So why exactly have I journeyed up to the dilapidated town in West Virginia known as Wheeling, where tattooed rednecks walk around with no shirt through city streets, where the Klopeks would be scared of their neighbors – and would have the best kept house in town...

...where cars like the one shot with my phone are parked on lawns, where some of the world’s most unnattractive and physically debilitated Americans can be found “wheeling” up and down the streets in wheel chairs like a scene out of Wall-E?

Well, because Carey Reams (who looked a lot like Harry Caray, coincidentally – maybe I’ll start calling him Harry Carey Reams) spoke to God and God gave him an equation for the numbers you should score on a bunch of pee pee tests, that’s why! Reassuring isn’t it?  Holy Cow! 

Today, for the first time, I meet with Challen Waychoff II, practitioner of a very purist form of RBTI – Reams Biological Theory of Ionization. And trust me, I’ve got more red flags flying than China during a big parade. More red flags flying than even Canadians visiting a foreign country to distinguish themselves from Americans (we really hate it when you do that by the way).

So why in the name of all that’s Holy would I make such a great effort to check this wacky stuff out?

I’m making the effort because Challen has such great mastery over the RBTI that he can look at some pee pee test values from anyone on earth, near or far, recite their medical history more or less, and then proceed to bring their “numbers” to the “healing range” within a week. This has been a consistent report from the people I know who have been working with him this year, which includes one of my most trusted informants – ol’ Pippa Galea, who is one of my best personal friends on the planet, and who has been following my writing since before I even began blogging (although, after seeing Wheeling I'm thinking of ending the friendship!). 

But none of that really impressed me. What really got me was that Challen could reliably tell when a person deviated from the eating regimen he laid out for them, and even tell what they ate to cheat and roughly what time of day they ate it – even if it was just a miniscule amount of something forbidden on the Reams program (like say, chocolate or canola oil).

I mean think about the power in that? With RBTI you are looking at a slew of tests that can be ascertained with home testing equipment. Using an agricultural tool called a refractometer you get a measurement of overall carbohydrate in your urine. With pH strips you get your saliva and urine pH levels and see what they are in relation to one another. You test other things as well, such as dissolved “salts” and albumin.

So Challen, looking at what these numbers are and the relationship to one another, sees sort of a fingerprint that is unique to each individual but at the same time shows a host of general and, depending on level of mastery and understanding of this cultish RBTI, specific information.

“Looks like you had some chocolate 5 days ago.”


“Yes, I had two chocolate chip cookies that night.”

Not only that, but using this information he can forecast a lot of what a person is going to go through as they undergo the healing process – also with freakish and difficult-to-believe accuracy.

Anyway, I’m keeping my skepticism flying mightily. As should any readers of the many articles I will soon write on my Wheeling dealings. But, knowing how powerful this knowledge could really be, and that he clearly possesses knowledge in an area of using nutrition that I do not, I’m eager to learn as much as I can and hopefully discover something very useful.

I’m attracted to the idea because of the general mantra of Reams, which is “Why guess when you can know?”

To me, gathering real observable data and using nutrition with surgical precision to bring that data into a harmonious balance is the ultimate use of nutrition. It’s basically doing what Western Medicine attempts to do with their endless array of blood and hormone tests, but foolishly and unecessarily using medication in isolation to tweak those “numbers.” With the human body, this doesn’t work very well, and comes with consequences. The RBTI, however, is about bringing several markers of good function into a synergistic alignment, stepping back, and watching how well the body heals itself from illness under those ideal conditions. At least that’s it in theory.

And, if the theory works even slightly like it ideally is supposed to, it would really be amazing. To me, the concept behind taking real numbers and, like I said, tweaking them with “surgical precision” using nutrition would be by far the most sophisticated, scientific, and reliable use of nutrition out there. Otherwise people just keep volleying back and forth between diets getting relief in some areas but causing problems in others, only to reshuffle the deck with a totally different diet and get a very different, but still mixed, mediocre hand.

And I think what is one of the potentially coolest things about it all, is that RBTI was designed specifically to achieve the type of healing a person might get from truly eating the perfect food grown in the perfect soil, but doing so using supermarket food. Regular old plain stuff that anyone can access.

And if Reams is right – that all disease stems from an imbalance or lack of minerals in the body to stimulate proper energy production (not a bad argument as we know how instrumental minerals are for the pH and productivity of soil, the basis of all life, and how this directly translates to the health of the animals that eat food from that soil), then that would certainly provide a better explanation for why refined, mineral-stripped carbohydrates always seem to be there at the onset of modern disease.

Most importantly, it’s going to be spectacularly fun and interesting for yours nerdingly. I’ve never done anything quite like this. It was time for a good shock to the groin, and hopefully Challen is the man to deliver the voltage.