Steiner Schools and Education

00:00 Welcome to this month’s Ask Your Herb Doctor. My name’s Andrew Murray. My name’s Sarah Johanneson Murray. We’re both trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine and clients consult with us regarding the health issues and we recommend personalized advice in nutrition, supplements, herbs, diet and lifestyle. We can be reached toll free 1-888 WBM herb or on www.westernbotanicalmedicine after the show or Monday through Friday 9-5. So for tonight’s show this November, clocks have gone back, it’s getting darker and colder and winter’s on its way and we’ll hopefully start getting some rain here soon. For this month’s show I wanted to Doctor Raymond Pete’s going to join us as usual here, fortunate to have him on the show and I know maybe that people who’ve listened to the show fairly frequently have heard Doctor Pete speak on a very wide range of topics. Well tonight’s topic is no exception, believe it or not. He’ll bring out, I won’t even talk for him, he’ll speak for himself as usual. 01:03 I want to bring out the topic of Steiner schools and Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophie and biodynamic gardening and medicines, etc. etc. all ties into itself as a very kind of complete system that Rudolf Steiner brought out in the early 1900s and I know Doctor Pete has his own very pertinent and personal background in education but anyway we can we can get into that if Doctor Pete’s willing to talk about that. I haven’t actually asked him but we’ll see. Okay so Doctor Pete, are you with us? Yes. Thanks so much for joining us and for those people who perhaps have only just tuned into the show for the first time and haven’t actually heard you before would you just give an out-ground of your academic and professional background before I ask you the first question here that I don’t think I have asked you but you can always say no if you want to. 02:03 Okay, I studied humanities as an undergraduate and eventually went to graduate school in biology although linguistics and painting had been most of my previous study and since graduating with a PhD in biology I’ve done a lot of counseling in nutrition and general health issues. Okay well I think what I wanted to what I wanted to get at and it’s it’s not something that I’ve actually kind of written up beforehand or discussed with you and you can always just say no but I’ll let you I’ll let you decide on that. In terms of your work, your life’s work and education in academics would you want to mention anything about a college that you were part of at one time or? Yeah it was very very directly related 03:09 to everything I did before and after. I had been a critical consumer of education right from the first grade. I knew how to read when I went to school and so I didn’t take it very seriously when they went through their routines. My third, fourth and fifth grade experience was exceptional in a one-room country school where there were eight grades in one room so that made it more interesting and it was completely unregimented and I think that gave me the idea that maybe kids would do better in a free or learning environment and my college experience I found that 04:10 there were only two or three professors that knew anything that I wanted to learn and my first teaching experience confirmed to me in the belief that the institution tended to be an impediment to learning. The trustees had their idea of what the students should do with their lives and the students and teachers interests really were antagonistic to the trustees and as a result of that I got the idea of starting a school in Mexico where we could be somewhat beyond the reach of the trustees and government types who wanted to tell us what we couldn’t study and talk about. What year was this? 1961. 05:10 I had been reading and studying at William Blake’s work and so I named the school Blake College and the idea was that we would incorporate it but the students and teachers would be the only trustees and so there would be no curriculum. Students could bring up topics they wanted to study. Instructors could offer courses. Students didn’t have to attend. Just complete independence but everyone was interested in something and we had the idea that since the students would use their bachelor’s degree to go on for a master’s or PhD that the requirement for getting a degree 06:13 should be passing the graduate record exam that students normally have to take to qualify for graduate school. That’s established in the U.S. I’m not familiar but it’s a very standardized system. At that time they had both advanced tests in specialized fields and a general area test and we said that if a student would be able to pass at the 87th percentile of American college graduates level on that test but they could have their degree because practically any graduate school in the country would would be willing to have someone who scored in the upper 12 percent of of American graduate. As it turned out, students generally chose to take that exam 07:16 after being there only a few months six or seven or eight months and their average was over the 90th percentile. No one flunked the test. You could see the process happening. People would come thinking that they needed to be structured somehow but what they learned was that they were full of knowledge and what their business would be to structured reality for themselves to make sense of what they already knew and use that orientation to then ask questions about what they really wanted to learn and so they could use any resources that we had. 08:18 They could ask anyone of the teachers to help them find the resources to figure out the problems and you could just see a very quick change in their sense of confidence about knowledge. So I don’t want to sound too ignorant but okay so within a few months you said that the students could take this exam and they actually scored in the 90th percentile. How much of that in part was due to them being the right kind of people that would typically choose to go to that establishment in that place and have that fairly free-minded free thinking or maybe critical thinking or just alternative thinking as opposed to what they learned while they were in that place for that amount of time that enabled them to then score highly. I’m not too sure I grasp what you’re saying in terms of a year’s education or two years 09:19 education and then being examined on that it’s not what you’re saying is it you’re saying? No some of them had been flunk outs at state universities and a couple of them had even scored poorly on standardized tests and thought they were idiots and when they had the opportunity not to be imposed upon and to be able to talk to other students and teachers they realized how much they knew and could think about what they knew and who they were and you could see the change from someone who felt helpless coming around to seeing themselves as a responsible citizen having all the abilities that anyone has. And then they went on to score 90 percent 10:21 in the college entrance exams? Um yeah they varied from around 90 90th percentile up to about 98th percentile. And did they get accepted into? Yeah um some of the state schools and they simply having having that high score wasn’t enough so some of them had to go to private graduate schools but all of the good schools let them in on the basis of their scores. Without having had their previous bachelor’s or master’s? Yeah that’s incredible. Yeah excellent because I didn’t I never did plan to ask you that question but it ties in ties in very well to the the thought that I had drawing this up for tonight shows that the Steiner school environment would be a good discussion for topic and I know that 11:21 you’ve been involved in education for a long time and you obviously have a very very different approach to problem solving that’s radical and it’s very cutting edge in terms of the way science understands the concepts that you describe so eloquently in your own way that current research is proving and that the the topic of education especially Steiner school education for all the benefits that will bring out in the discussion this evening how that ties in with herbal medicine ties in with biodynamic gardening sustainability conscious behavior as sentient human beings regardless of gender race or political background whatever none of those things matter but for the pure sake of intelligent creative consciousness the Steiner approach to education does 12:23 seem to be full of full of little gems that I think if most people were aware of and the Steiner concept was more broadly distributed disseminated and people had a chance to send their children to Steiner schools I think there’d be a huge conscious rise in the the call for it in in terms of the educational background of Steiner and the developments we’ll get into that in a bit too but has some very different approaches to educating children in terms of their readiness for education and I know that’s also something that we can discuss as the time goes on while you’re listening to ask your doctor my name is Andrew Murray from 730 until 830 callers were invited to ask any questions related to this subject of Steiner schools education biodynamics free thinking lack of government control and the number if 13:26 you live in the area is 9233 911 but the toll free number for those people living outside a state or outside of here is 1-800-568-3723 so we’d love to hear from you perhaps if you’ve been to a Steiner school and or you switched from a public school to a Steiner school and how you how you saw the changes but anyway getting back to back to you doctor Pete and the college and your philosophy surrounding the college you said there was no curriculum right the we had the people the the professors were doing it just for fun basically we only paid a couple of professors there just wasn’t enough money for tuition fees to the students but there were well-known people painters philosophy professors psychology professors writers 14:28 even a math professor cool and they usually they would end up saying they were learning more from the students and they had to teach the students and when you look at the ideology of public education over the last couple of hundred years you see that a whole theory of what an organism is is related to the theory of education and what they’re doing is based on a an authoritarian social system that’s based on the mechanical conception of what the the person is and the the progress of biological knowledge in the last 50 years has illuminated some of the problems with 15:33 with the theory of education that the brain is the body’s energy organizing system and if you have education that conflicts with the body’s own processes you’re going to impair the body’s energy system lead to a reduction of ability create a tendency to lack of adaptability in biological as well as mental processes are you speaking about like children being forced to sit for eight hours a day energetic children there have been been studies for example in new york city kids were given an IQ test every year that they were in grade school and they saw these slum kids coming in with an average IQ 16:34 each year their scores would get lower as they spent the year sitting in school being oppressed and with with our students at lake just the opposite happened very quickly they would come out of their oppression and realize that they were creative minds and not not just passive learners and that same process was discovered 50 years ago in rat studies the rat that was given an entertaining free environment became more intelligent grew a bigger brain with a thicker cortex and their offspring would have a bigger brain and be more intelligent so it could be inherited passed on to the yeah and so the the students were being impaired by bad 17:37 public schools are actually probably passing it on to generations oppressed i found it interesting in reading about steiner and his philosophies that and he must have borrowed this from Galen or from yeah probably probably from Galen but the the the four humor classification the HUMOR classification of personalities that he used in his temperamental assessment of children that would enable them to be children of these characters would be segregated if you like within a classroom environment all given completely different curricula to follow that best suited their temperament and he mentioned the melancholic the sanguine the phlegmatic and the choleric temperament and these these classic temperaments here they 18:40 were actually described by Galen in 400 BC and have formed part of the tenant for our chemical medicine for healing via information on the humours and without getting too out there and being unquote unscientific about it there’s a lot of scientific rationale to support it so he used the children and their temperaments to guide their education what do you think about that yeah the we called it a student-centered education following on Carl Rodgers plant-centered therapy he used a non-directive approach of empathy with with the client and in in our 19:41 the non-curriculum the sense of empathy was really the guiding principle the teachers and students tried to understand each other and they together created questions that none of them had thought about before so the the empathy tried tried to listen to the the character or personality of the other person which would if you had them categorized according to humours and such that would be a way of organizing that process but with with our small group it was a to relate individual adaptive empathetic approach okay um I know again looking at 20:44 Steiner and how he or how he was described by his peers as having formulated this system of education the students themselves and what I thought was particularly mindful and I have some of this background myself from from schooling in England but the students were taught to observe and depict the scientific concepts in their own words and drawings rather than encountering these ideas first through textbooks and and that the students that came out of Steiner schools were shown to be uh well the Steiner schools were shown to have an above average number of students that became doctors engineers scholars of the humanities and scientists because they were able to investigate the world about them in a far more objective and scientific manner than school taught students perhaps who would have been wrote taught by rote or 21:46 you know to repeat repetition without our memory or memory yeah without truly applying their own basis for understanding a concept in their own terms um the typical professor has his understanding of how a student’s brain works and they think they have to impose their abstractions and such the science textbook idea that the professor has assimilated they think they have to impose that on the student’s brain but the actuality of of a student’s brain and personality is analogous to any organism of a simple mammal for example understands physics very well birds of crows in particular 22:52 are very intelligent and can figure out physical processes and make predictions that many graduate students in physics wouldn’t understand but they can predict that if you left me out on that rock the day before it might be there the next day at the same time okay so uh then the other the other notable point then about um Steiner education i’ll ask you the question about some of the previous history of how state education came into being because i don’t i’m not sitting here making an argument against state education and purely illuminating the alternatives as always and looking at the holistic side of all sorts of things and education is one of them but from from a Steiner perspective the they were looking at the the main thing was the method of inquiry 23:55 and how this strengthened the interest and the ability to observe and that was the main the main fundamental guide that every student being very different and individual would have unique ideas and unique talents uh that they could bring to bear on the science because it was a very it wouldn’t say was is it’s a very science-based rational education i don’t know uh i think perhaps when i first heard the word Steiner uh i kind of thought well there was a pretty loose kind of hippie education where you could just sit around and i don’t know bake cakes and play games and perhaps i don’t know play music and it wasn’t it wasn’t particularly intelligent but it’s actually the opposite it’s very true that given the individual’s creative ability in an environment where they’re not stressed they’re not forced to perform and they’re not forced to you know compete which i think does lead to a lot of suppression of expression in certainly in individuals that are not naturally competitive 24:58 because we’re not all naturally competitive but everyone’s so very different that these people given the um the the sense to inquire and find the natural world wonderful which i think is an excellent excellent example of how to teach people to to show that the natural world is an excellent tutor in its own right and that’s how i think it plays into biodynamic cultivation and that whole philosophy of giving back to the earth for one of a better phrase but to not just take away but to give back and to build up and support and sustain and and all these kind of cool hip terms that we hear now as a just a part of being hip is just a very real part of being a conscious human being so in terms of getting them to cultivate this sense of meaningful wholeness uh of nature where the person wasn’t separated from it or alienated it alienated from it um that would enable them to get a better grasp of concepts that 26:01 them individually as free thinking people could bring to the table that perhaps would not be thought of or born out in regular teaching environments so what do you think about the whole thing about uh from the ages of um three to seven there’s no pressure whatsoever to learn abc’s and to learn you know facts and figures and rudimentary education but that the child is to be immersed in that environment of nature where they’re to look at nature with awe and to you know get into gardening and you know learn about animals and create that whole side of their you know their their their being before they do anything structured with math and science i think as well they don’t read till they’re ten right on average i think that’s when they start to teach them to read in in my experience i i saw people are reading and and talking about things 27:03 they saw in the newspapers and so i i just spontaneously wanted to see what they were doing and had nothing to do with a curriculum or or being taught i just wanted to find out what was so interesting and at the summer hill school uh started by as neil in england okay and i think around like 1920s it started and it was finally recognized in the 1960s by universities and such as really having achieved something in education his he had no curriculum at all students could stay there for 12 years if they wanted and not study but the ones who did stay there and graduate were superior in their achievement to uh 28:08 those who had gone through taking classes every day for 12 years they demonstrated that the um curriculum is completely unnecessary if the student is aware that there is something to learn they can learn it just in a flash compared to what the schools expect of them i know didn’t you tell me dr pate one time that you learned to read like you were saying watching people read the newspaper and so you learned to read because you wanted to read the comics and yeah yeah the the funnies were the first thing alleyoop and smoky stover and such were my favorites but but then my parents had a shoebox full of the little blue books classics that were printed in a very small size and then the newspapers i wanted to 29:10 hear what was going on with the war so i learned the various types of things that were available and what year was that or how old were you um four wow well you’re listening to ask your ebdoctor on kmede gaboville 91.1 fm and from now until the end of the show you’re invited to call in with any questions either related or unrelated to this month’s subject of freethinking, alternative education, steiner schools, biodynamics, etc. A number if you live in the area is 9233911 or if you live outside the area there’s an 800 number which is 1-800-568-3723. We have Dr Raymond Pete with us and very welcome to have him on the show again. Dr Pete again i was wondering and i guess i don’t want to get it too don’t want to get into it too far because it kind of sounds more like politics than anything else but in terms of 30:10 education i know that in this country i think around the beginning of the 70s homeschooling started to become prominent or possible and i think in the early days there was quite a movement against it i think both probably federally and on a state level but what do you what do you think about the concepts of homeschooling in terms of the um overriding and again i don’t want to get too political about this and i’m not asking you to be political about it either but in terms of state schools the state being the the government that the people put in power really to do the people’s bidding not to be told what to do by but the state schools that educate our children obviously have their own agendas i think you can see this a lot in some of the subjects that are born out taught in schools and this comparative analysis with homeschooled children and how how the actual 31:15 how the rise of state education came into being to become the kind of totalitarian um yeah the totalitarian source of education uh in this in many other countries i read that there was at one point in time the concept of education by the government for the children of the people the government was helping or whatever you want to call it supporting um was because at one point in time there weren’t both of the both of the parents of children didn’t work it’s typically in the olden days the the woman would stay at home and be the homemaker take care of the home take care of the children would then ultimately school them and or get together in groups where why the the male person was the person who did the physical hard work works on the farm etc whatever and did all those kind of things to bring food in and um you know just keep the house keep the household going but that taxation came into play in the early 32:16 early 40s um federal taxation which made it actually very financially unsound um to have just one person working and actually caused the um cause a need for two people to be working in order to make ends meet and that actually the children were then left as the question well we’ll educate the children for you so you just come to work and pay more taxes but without getting too political about it i know there is um a true case in point for having um that that freedom of choice and that actually it’s just not even thought about these days do you have any anything to say about that in terms of being an educator or um looking at it from a perspective of where it was and where it’s where it’s come to now in terms of not really having uh well i guess we do have a free choice if homeschools do exist here in america um and i think the state can set the curriculum to a great extent even in homeschooling 33:19 okay and the um federal government approves the agencies that accredited high schools and colleges and universities and so the um there are private accrediting agencies which really are are responsible to no one they are kind of an abstract authority that the citizens can’t affect directly the government approves them because they meet the government ideological standards apparently and the um state bureaucracies are set up so that no school can have grant degrees or credits or transcripts if they don’t conform to those accrediting 34:20 agencies uh so the really the power to grant a transcript or a degree is pretty much a matter of mind control unless people realize that there is reality and then there’s the official curriculum in my experience in grade school and high school was just not to pay too much attention to them in in high school some of our teachers were openly fascists and and hitler worshipers racists and such and uh so it was just a matter of getting through it with without having to interact too much with them 35:22 i mean i hear this i hear this from you a lot when you’re either talking to me or on the radio show in terms of the way that you think the way that you conceptualize the way that you bring to life concepts that you won’t find in mainstream medical journals in mainstream government type research that you won’t find typically in any abundance unless you’re just looking for the independent research that is available and you can find on the web and or the research um that’s being done by phd students when they’re writing their papers for submission for peer review etc that do get published in terms of that free thinking that brings about that lack of control that lack of dominance in the direction of the thinking i know that you’ve had a lot a lot of personal experiences with that you mentioned that when you were 36:24 studying that most of your professors didn’t even really understand what it was you were trying to get across to them that you had read and when you’d studied the papers that were in the libraries that since were withdrawn that um you had a very different way of looking at it that they were completely dumbfounded by because it was not typical rote uh just repeat repetitive kind of uh yeah not facts but repetitive statements that were poor science the system not only the explicit accrediting process and agencies and curriculum but uh the official high high status publications the journals publishing houses uh all of all of the major institutions have ulterior motive right and you have to look for people who 37:29 are motivated by reality remember a few years ago someone in the white house said your your problem is that you belong to the reality-based community problem while while we’re cruising a new reality you’re studying the old one the concept of a reality-based community was officially in the white house at that time of futile outsider business that was being left left behind but i i think there is a really possibility still in the reality-based community yeah i hope so we do we do have a caller doc speed so let’s see where i run this call is going caller you’re on the air i’m here yeah where are you from caller i’m from colorado springs colorado 38:30 springs yeah okay good well what’s your question uh dr pete i was wondering if you had any suggestions for a person that wants to uh self-educate in biology um having access to a really good university library i think is is important the journals are too expensive even buying articles over the internet they cost 30 or 40 dollars per article and so if you have a like the university of colorado probably has a good science library where you can find journals and and current uh recent books old books old journals and such and uh if you have questions and uh things that you think you should know 39:33 just start looking them up and in the library asking anyone that has possible information on that subject sometimes professors can can be helpful if they don’t know what your real purpose in is and do you have any specific uh textbook suggestions um no the um there were a good textbooks published periodically uh many years ago but in the last uh 10 or 20 years uh even the uh the textbooks that were good have been revised under the the name of the good author now most textbooks are created by committees that look for the uh professors who have the biggest classes preferably uh professors who have 40:36 four or five hundred students in each class and uh and they say something nice in the textbook about the work of that professor and uh that means that every time they platter a professor they sell an extra 500 books at a hundred dollars profit each so the textbooks become really a a matter of a profit for the publisher rather than information for the student but didn’t you recommend a physiology textbook one time that was published maybe in the 50s or 60s yeah wasn’t there a physiology and you said if you could find the original one it it’s pretty accurate oh yeah um i’m not sure which one i was referring to but uh there are some some good ones from the 30s 40s and 50s have a little handbook of physiology from i think 1965 41:42 that has the basic information and uh doesn’t have the stuff on membrane pumps and channels and so on which is misleading a lot of present present students i was going to ask you what was the name of the um what was the name of it was index medicus that you said at one time at the university there in oregon that the basement had all of this data that suddenly got taken out of the library and you no that was biological abstract biological abstracts which had references to international journals all fields related to biology and when i would compare index medicus which was the paper precursor to pub med national library of medicine i found that any interesting discovery 42:48 of recent years that i found in in the journals or in the biological abstracts it took usually about 10 or 20 years before it would show up in index medicus and then it would be put down as uh these people are now saying that coenzyme q10 has biological value and would scoff so they would scoff for a few years and then 30 years after it was published in the science literature the medical literature would finally accept it okay we’re getting on to uh let’s just uh make sure everyone knows what’s going on here first before i ask you the next uh next round of things um the number if you live in the area is 93 3 9 1 1 or the 800 numbers 1 800 k m u d rad which is 1 800 5 6 8 3 7 2 3 dr raymond 43:49 peats with us on the show tonight a special guest uh we’re talking about steiner schools alternative education by dynamics and you’re listening to ask your doctor on kbd gaubild 91.1 fm so dr p i think just to get on to the uh topic of medicinals and anthroposophage kind of joined together um you did mention uh the isca door and i don’t know if anyone’s listening knows what the isca door is but it it isn’t anthroposophical preparation and that is very closely allied to the alchemical preparation of uh viscam album the miss european mistletoe um do you want to say anything about european mistletoe and what it’s been used for and how uh how that’s come about or no i’ve just been following the issue for more than 50 years i knew people in the biodynamic 44:50 steiner approach and uh they told me uh various interesting things about the the influence of fields created by the moon cycles and so on and following up some of that stuff i found that uh there were fairly main mainline researchers uh continuing ideas that steiner had proposed uh doing the interaction between the moon cycles and uh botanical processes from from the uh twenties through the forties there were several people doing very good research unrelated apparently to steiner but showing uh that organisms are biologically coordinated through through the earth and moon fields 45:53 i mean that that’s the basis for uh lunar lunar planting where i know the entire calendars are devoted to the phases of the moon and the um benefits uh or the uh adverse effects of doing certain plantings at certain times of the moon are shown and that again that’s kind of resonance with the way that the moon affects water through gravitational pull and how that uh biological effect is exerted on all of us as living water-filled beings and so not just seeds but mammals and even bacterias etc they all all fill these uh fill these influences and so that’s a pretty a pretty real scientific approach to it um for people who want some other background besides steiner uh Harold Saxton Burr a book fields of life he was a Yale professor i think who um did some of the measurements showing these 46:56 lunar cycles uh a professor named Brown at the Indiana University did a whole series of of the biological cycle studies uh day day and lunar cycles both South Dakota Trump or Trump the R.O.M.P. was a Dutch biologist and ecologist who wrote a book called uh Psyche called physics how the nervous system interacts with these fields i think that that also reminds me the um some of the points that were brought out about the pathology uh amongst steiner school students versus uh students in the general population of mainstream education is that steiner students had a 47:57 significantly or a statistically significant um difference uh a lower incidence of gastrointestinal distress as one of the main symptoms of the stress i think that was brought out in the regular school environment as opposed to the free-thinking a liberal in the sense of being liberal um not the kind of modern sense of the word liberal but the kind of liberating um environment that students were in a little bit a little bit like the animal experience you made you first mentioned when we we first started talking about the rats that were given the kind of environmental enrichment uh having uh better and greater intelligence and their progeny um bearing from that you know benefiting from that also but in terms of the um the lack of stress i think probably in the lack of like i said in the beginning the lack of competition and that kind of you know all all that that competition nurtures all the negative side of the competition 48:58 because competition is not necessarily a bad thing but i think the way that most people compete with other people is usually in a fairly negative way um what do you think about the mind-body connection and i think we all agree that it’s a real connection uh both in our nervous system and and in our psyches the uh issue of helplessness learned helplessness or inescapable stress um that shows up first in the stomach as ulcers and intestine as bleeding um but the uh it’s really happening in the brain and if it continues you can see it now with uh MRI studies of the brain you can see the chronic stress in the cortex of the brain makes the brain smaller and and emptier uh and the uh the main parts of the brain that 50:05 relate the uh digestive damage to um the uh nerve damage the uh serotonin system uh contains components of excitatory like the toxic excitatory amino acids glutamic excitation processes that release nitric oxide nitric oxide reduces the um energy producing capacity the brain leads to um atrophy uh the the intestine releases uh both serotonin and uh nitric oxide the system goes back and forth between the brain and and the intestine affecting every other organ in the process and you can see these same processes even in fruit flies go on if a fruit fly has a traumatic brain injury for example 51:11 it develops ulcers and the leaky intestines they can do that if really fruit flies are just like us incredible or we’re just like fruit flies yeah but that makes me think of lemon bomb because it’s so calming on the nervous system but it’s also very soothing on the the intestinal tract so when you were saying there’s such a link there really made me think a lemon bomb in chamomile yeah keeping keeping the brain steroids up and the inhibitory GABA transmitters up this preserves the brain and all of the organs keeping the brain energy up keeps the structure up i don’t mean to cut you off right there but we do the the lights are going on someone’s on on the air so let’s take this caller from and where are you from caller Windsor Ontario in Canada okay great good to have you on the show what’s your question 52:12 hi um as far as intestinal problems go i was wondering how dr. feet uh felt about uh chia seeds chia seeds dogs yeah go ahead i know he doesn’t like seeds but they always need to have help with stomach problems they’re good for making funny fuzzy animals but not treating he doesn’t like him treating i have no i don’t really know any virtue they have as a food they’re very musilaginous yeah yeah so it’s it’s kind of like a like psyllium with my with intestinal problems they always seem to have helped before what do you what do you think about intestinal musilages because i think that’s the key component in chia seeds that the lady’s talking about a little bit like slippery or psyllium husks or flax seeds have i know they have that oil too but they’re also very musilaginous yeah as long as they aren’t allergenic in themselves i’ve known a few people who uh had a bad reaction to even psyllium seeds 53:17 oh but the omega-3s and stuff in them aren’t that bad for you there isn’t much i think it’s it’s the risk of an allergic reaction to some of the proteins in them that would be the only risk i mean you’d have to eat a lot of them to get a really large dose of yeah omega oils and the other thing that helped before is uh shirataki noodles have you ever heard of those before they’re made from um um a tuber in japan that grows in water i believe what’s the name of it shirataki noodles no i don’t know is it a starchy noodle i think it’s a cognac cognac something root cognac root so it’s a starchy tuber oh oh oh yeah it gets all insoluble fiber like no soluble fiber just all insoluble fiber um yeah yeah i read that uh they were having a problem with people choking on that i think it was yeah they don’t digest they just kind of 54:18 but they really help with bowel movement so yeah well cascara does the same thing for bowel movements and it’s a lot safer yeah have you yeah have your issues ever been with constipation then is that why you’d use um mostly i think just like um intolerances like pain and stuff like that but i found anytime i ate the chia seeds or the cognac those shirataki noodles you know the bowel movements were always like perfect right well if it’s anything like dr beat always recommends carrots but he doesn’t like seeds so i was just wondering if the chia seeds were not really good to eat or i’m i’ve just not had any experience with them myself no no but they do have that uh that mucilage or whatever you want to call it around it so yeah i know sodium seeds work for many people yeah i think i’ve tried that before and i’ve had cramps so well that’s then you’re then you’re obviously having the allergic reaction 55:18 then to the psyllium yeah okay thank you all right thanks for your call thank you well i know we do only have a few moments left but i do want to ask you dr beat and again this is it ties into education it ties into research it ties into suppression of research and this is the the latest the latest findings of a product called lanostero and its use its use in the treatment in the very real treatment of cataracts without surgery and it’s extremely inexpensive and it works so what do you think about lanostero and eye cataracts i was just a little surprised to see a big publication in nature and uh this group at university of california san diego uh was actually reversing the majority of cataracts in uh something like half a dozen or a dozen 56:19 rabbits and then dogs both using eye drops and infecting it directly into the eyeball but they actually got established cataracts to clear up and when i wrote a newsletter about cataracts a couple of years ago uh i noticed that uh research in treating and curing cataracts had been suppressed because of the immense amount of money there is in removing the lens doing cataract surgery is a multi-billion dollar business and that money interest had just wiped out practically all curative research in in eye studies interesting so we’ll keep our we’ll keep our eyes open for lanostero and any other future publications and hopefully it doesn’t get suppressed and buried so that’s something to keep an eye out for but thank mushrooms mushrooms 57:22 happen to be a good source of that steroid okay and you said it was a precursor um precursor to cholesterol yeah it’s a preceding but between the polymer that cyclizes forms lanostero and that turns into cholesterol yeah again so boil your mushrooms for 45 minutes to an hour and make a yummy winter soup and don’t think of cholesterol as the bad thing because it’s not okay well thank you so much for your time dr i’ll just tell people how to find out more about you okay thanks thank you okay