(NaturalNews) This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's The Healthiest Year of Your Life, which can be found at (http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com) . In this excerpt, Jon Barron shares on herbs, tinctures, antibiotics and probiotics.
The Healthiest Year of Your Life with Jon Barron, creator of Base Line Nutrition and author of Lessons from the Miracle Doctors.
Jon: Now, I mentioned Echinacea, it's a great one. A lot of people are not aware, but good herbalists can identify 100 or 1000 or 1500 herbs by taste or smell. They can tell you how strong they are. It's like, there's no machine yet that can match the pallet of a wine expert. No machine can match the taste and smell of a good herbalist. I can do maybe 100, 200 herbs. I'm not even close to 1000 or 1500. Echinacea though is a simple one. Every herb has what's called a signature characteristic. If you have two bags of peppermint tea and you brewed pots up and one of them tasted like dish water and the other had a really nice strong, crisp peppermint taste, anyone would go, "oh that's good peppermint and that stuff stinks". And they would be absolutely right. The signature characteristic of peppermint is the peppermint taste.
The signature characteristic of Echinacea is that it numbs and tingles the mouth. The more it doesn't, the stronger it is. You can run tests on the active ingredients of the ones that don't and it will verify that they are far stronger than the ones that numb and tingle stronger. I've gone to health food stores and bought 30 brands of Echinacea, tested them and actually when I did this 10 years ago I found only one that had any activity at all. 29 of them, the only Echinacea of value was the word that was on the label. There was nothing inside.
Jon: Yeah, they could have been using Echinacea but it was of such low grade that it had no impact.
Kevin: So, let me get this straight again. It numbs.
Jon: And tingles the mouth. You take Echinacea tincture and you squirt it in your mouth, two droppers. Take two droppers and swish it around in your mouth for about 15 seconds and swallow it and you should find your mouth numbing and tingling and actually saliva should be flowing and if it's really strong, it will actually start to make you gag in your throat, because your throat starts to catch. The more it doesn't, the stronger that Echinacea is. The one thing we could do very easily is if we took the same stuff and we would brew it in two ways and one of them is if we used good quality Echinacea and the first one would numb and tingle your mouth and would blow people away. In fact, I actually use to walk around with three bottles. One that I bought at the store, a commercial Echinacea that had virtually no activity but was a very popular brand, to the one we created using a higher quality herb which is about three or four times stronger than that and then that same herb brewed the new way with the new technique that we had and we've since measured it and it's a 100% stronger.
Jon: Yeah and actually what would happen is I did it once in a large scale demo. I will never do it again because people started gagging all over. Their throat started seizing up it was so strong. So we had a few go, ugh, ugh, ugh – several hundred of them.
Kevin: So I imagine that the value in terms of price is –- I mean, you go to get these tinctures, they're fairly expensive regardless, so it would make sense if it is any extra money, is it extra money to get...
Jon: You know actually, it isn't extra money because you actually get more bioactive ingredients out. You're actually making stronger stuff. You actually use less of the good herb than you would otherwise. Actually, the process lowers the cost so what you are doing and what you're paying for is still the quality of the herb but the process actually makes the cost a little less for us because we get more high quality tincture out of a slightly less herb, because it does so much better. Also, one of the things I mentioned, you have water and alcohol as the solvents making the tincture. That still leaves behind anything that is oil soluble and we found a way that we can use that process to also pull out the oil soluble bio-chemicals.
Kevin: Oh, that's cool.
Jon: Yeah, which makes it even stronger, but you use good quality herbs, good quality Echinacea –- we have one formula, an antipathogen formula. It's not even a tincture actually. It's a pressing of garlic and horse radish and habanera and things like that and it's got liquid zinc in it, grapefruit extract, olive leaf extract.
Jon: It's an antipathogen formula that was so strong we actually were contacted by people in the government who wanted us to send them some 100 bottles and we did. It was tested for bird flu, Ebola, small pox, anthrax. It went to the Department of Defense, U.S. Army, Walter Reid Medical Hospital and an agency that I'm not suppose to mention but they're all initialed and we were told that it passed all their tests.
Kevin: Are you serious?
Jon: And they sent it out. We were told it was going to an outside lab for verification and we wouldn't hear from them again unless it failed the test. That's the last we heard so I don't know.
Jon: But we know it works and for colds and flus like that. That's actually a topic worth discussing on why antibiotics and antivirals don't work and why natural substances do.
Kevin: Yeah. That's very important.
Jon: The problem is that when you take an antibiotic and an antiviral, you're actually breeding super bugs. It's very simple. When you take an antibiotic, anything that survives it, by definition is one that has a resistance to that antibiotic or antiviral.
Jon: So what you've left now is a pool of those that have a resistance. They breed, they duplicate and you're actually sort of breeding bacteria and viruses that are immune to the antibiotics and then it turns out they have the ability to pass that immunity onto other species, they've found.
So if you get immunity going like in a staph, the next thing you know, all bacteria has that resistance. That's why antibiotics are a problem; well, one reason. The other is they are one dimensional. They kill bacteria in one way. They either, like some, will break the cell wall open. Others will work and stop the energy production, the mitochondria of the cells, but it's one thing that that antibiotic does so it makes it very easy for bacteria to build a resistance.
There are now bacteria, for example, that have protection on the cellular wall against the antibiotics. So when it's a one dimensional pack, it makes it very easy for these very primal structures, which reproduce rapidly in a matter of weeks, viruses in just a few weeks, bacteria in 12 months, or six months to maybe a year and a half, can start to develop a resistance and pass it around.
Even natural substances -- take garlic -- we use garlic in ours. We use 30 cloves crushed so you have the juice of 30 cloves in one bottle and it smells it, but garlic has over a hundred substances in it that are known to be antibiotic, antiviral. So it's not just a hundred times more effective. You now go into gaming theory because you get them in combination. In different ways you start to actually get hundreds of thousands of combinations of these things that present a resistance to these viruses and bacteria. You combine a few other ingredients and you actually have a combination that starts to go into... you know, they rival the number of stars in the universe because it goes up exponentially, which is why even though things like garlic have been around since the dawn of man, they still work against bacteria. Garlic at one time was used against anthrax. Those poor men, the poor farmer's protection for anthrax on their animals and it worked. In groups though. There were farmers feeding their animals in Korea kimchi which is high in garlic and it was stopping bird flu. It works and it's impossible for bacteria and viruses to build a resistance, because they're so complicated.
Kevin: Now in terms...
Jon: That's something to keep in mind for the next pandemic that comes around.
Kevin: Sure. Now in terms of the good bacteria, the good flora in your stomach, will garlic wipe that out, as well?
Jon: Garlic actually is pretty benign. There's sort of a regression. There are certain things you don't want to do. One for example, is goldenseal.
Jon: That is one that kills bacteria, great for limited use, but know if you use it regularly it will kill your good bacteria.
Kevin: Got you.
Jon: Colloidal silver is another one. It tends not to be kind to intestinal bacteria. So if you use it on a daily basis, that's a problem. My recommendation for colloidal silver is use it for external use and use it internally only for extreme situations.
Kevin: Sure. Great. That's good information because I've always wondered that if it's an antibiotic, wouldn't it kill the bacteria. So that's good.
Jon: Yeah, it depends. It does. Some are more benign than others. Garlic, though, is one that's actually quite benign to the beneficial bacteria.
Kevin: And if you were taking something like goldenseal or something like that, would you recommend taking a probiotic with it or is it not even worth it?
Jon: Well, I recommend... yeah if you're using it daily, you should take your probiotic. Otherwise, after any round of antibiotics, anything you're using that's killing bacteria, you want to use probiotics again.
Kevin: Yeah. Why don't you just talk about the base line of health programs and just some of the things that you offer under that huge umbrella of just incredible information and products?
Jon: Yeah. If I saw something that somebody else was doing well, I wouldn't duplicate it. But we created those products that I thought weren't being done well enough or weren't easily available. Where people weren't using consistently high enough quality herbs or whatever, so we offered detox formulas, supper food formulas, enzymes and a couple of formulas that are worth noting is we make what we've been told by people who've tested it is the strongest probiotic enzyme formula, which we haven't talked about yet, but in one of the more important formulas you could use is a high proteases formula that you take without food to go into the blood stream.
Jon: There it will do things such as kill bacteria and viruses in the body because they all have protein coverings, if you will, that could be broken down. It also breaks up clots in the blood, repairs it, eats up scar tissue. They're great things. Another formula we have uses certain combinations of herbs that slow down the digestion, the simulation of high glycemic carbohydrates, so it stops insulin spikes.
Kevin: Got you. Well, Jon, you've given us a ton of information and I think that anyone whose listening to this call can take something from it and that's extreme value so thank you so much for doing that.
To read the rest of this transcript as well as access more information on creating and living a healthy lifestyle and hear from other health experts just like Jon Barron please visit (http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com) .