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In this episode, you will learn about the benefits of earthing.
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About My Guest
My guest for this episode is Clint Ober. Clinton Ober is CEO of Earth FX Inc., a research and development company located in Palm Springs, California. He first learned of grounding when installing Cable TV systems in Billings, Montana in the early 1960’s. A decade later, he formed bCorporation and built it into the largest provider of cable installation services in the United States. This company specialized in proper grounding of cable installations for safety and TV signal stability. In the 1980’s, he turned his attention to the developing computer industry and partnered with McGraw-Hill to distribute live digital news services, via cable, to PCs. This led to the development of the first cable modem and an increased awareness of need for proper system grounding. Following a health challenge in 1995, he retired and embarked on a personal journey looking for a higher purpose in life. During his travels, he noticed people wearing plastic and rubber soled shoes that insulate the body from earth. He wondered if no longer being naturally grounded could affect us. The question led to an experiment that suggested grounding alone reduced chronic pain and improved sleep. Thereafter he developed a working hypothesis: Earth grounding the human body normalizes functioning of all body systems (Corollary: The body utilizes the earth’s electrical potential and free electrons to maintain its internal electrical stability for the normal functioning of all self-regulating and self-healing systems). Over the past twenty years, he has supported a host of research studies (Earthing Institute) that collectively demonstrate that grounding alone reduces inflammation and promotes normal functioning of all body systems.
Key Takeaways
- What is earthing (or grounding), and why is it important for health?
- Is there a difference in disease prevalence between wild and domestic animals?
- What is the earth charge, and what role does it play in grounding?
- How might grounding lead to reduction in inflammation and pain?
- Are the potential inflammation-reducing effects of grounding observable with thermography?
- How does grounding affect sleep and cortisol regulation?
- Can grounding be used as a tool to mitigate exposure to EMFs?
- How might grounding normalize blood coagulation and increase oxygenation?
- Can grounding lead to increased ATP production and improved mitochondrial function?
- How long should one be grounded each day?
- Why might some with conditions such as Lyme disease initially feel worse with grounding technologies?
- Is there a difference between grounding with an electrical socket as compared to a grounding rod in the earth?
Connect With My Guest
Related Resources
Interview Date
December 12, 2019
Transcript
Transcript Disclaimer: Transcripts are intended to provide optimized access to information contained in the podcast. They are not a full replacement for the discussion. Timestamps are provided to facilitate finding portions of the conversation. Errors and omissions may be present as the transcript is not created by someone familiar with the topics being discussed. Please Contact Me with any corrections.
[00:00:01.04] Welcome to BetterHealthGuy Blogcasts, empowering your better health. And now, here's Scott, your Better Health Guy.
[00:00:14.09] The content of the show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or is information to facilitate self-treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health-related decisions with your own personal medical authority.
[00:00:35.00] Scott: Hello everyone, and welcome to episode number 110 of the BetterHealthGuy Blogcasts series. Today's guest is Clint Ober, and the topic of the show is earthing. Clint Ober is CEO of Earth FX Incorporated, a research and development company located in Palm Springs, California. He first learned of grounding when installing cable TV systems in Billings, Montana in the early 1960s.
A decade later, he formed Telecrafter Corporation and built it into the largest provider of cable installation services in the United States. The company specialized in the proper grounding of cable installations for safety and TV signal stability. In the 1980s, he turned his attention to the developing computer industry and partnered with McGraw-Hill to distribute live digital news services via cable to PCs. This led to the development of the first cable modem and an increased awareness of the need for proper system grounding. Following a health challenge in 1995, he retired and embarked on a personal journey looking for a higher purpose in life.
During his travels, he noticed people wearing plastic and rubber-soled shoes that insulate the body from the earth, and he wondered if no longer being naturally grounded could affect us. The question led to an experiment that suggested grounding alone reduced chronic pain and improved sleep. Thereafter, he developed a working hypothesis: Earth grounding the human body normalizes functioning of all body systems. The corollary: The body utilizes the earth's electrical potential and free electrons to maintain its internal electrical stability for the normal functioning of all self-regulating and self-healing systems. Over the past 20 years, he supported a host of research studies that collectively demonstrate that grounding alone reduces inflammation and promotes the normal functioning of all body systems. And now my interview with Clint Ober.
[00:02:38.22] Scott: I was at a think-tank with Clint Ober in 2011 where he spoke on how earthing impacts blood viscosity and coagulation. Users report that earthing, also known as grounding, can help with circulation, inflammation, sleep, anxiety, and many other symptoms resulting from our modern world. I'm very honored today to have Clint Ober on the show to share the latest in the area of earthing. Thanks so much for being here today Clint.
[00:03:03.14] Clint O.: Thanks, Scott, it's good to reconnect with you and definitely good to be on your show.
[00:03:09.03] Scott: Tell us a little about how you became interested in the topic of earthing or grounding. What led you to doing the work you're doing today? And how did it, and why did it become your life's purpose and passion?
[00:03:19.10] Clint O.: Well, that takes a couple of seconds to explain that one. I grew up in Montana in an agricultural environment; ranching and we ran a lot of cows and stuff. So I kind of grew up with a prevention background, meaning that if the cows get sick, then something in the pasture is messed up. And if you let them get sick, they have to call the vet, call the banker, and give them the keys and say you guys figure it out.
So anyhow I've always had that bent of trying to, if there's something wrong in the pasture, then we have to go find out what it is. Whether it's bad water, short grass, noxious weeds whatever it is. But I've always had that, and then when I was growing up, we always had Prevention magazine in the home, so the word prevention kind of is ingrained in my brain. And then beyond that, I spent a lot of my younger years in interacting with Native Americans, and some of my best friends growing up were Native American. So I always had that earthy bent, because everything they do or suggests is like a blade of grass is your cousin, the trees were all connected, it's all one thing, and we're just a part of it.
And so I've always had that on the other side, but after I left that environment I went to work in the communications industry, primarily cable television in the development, back then it was called community antenna television or CATV. And we would put an antenna up on top of a mountain, and then we would run the cable down the side of the mountain and then connect it to antennas and point them to the houses and broadcast distant signals into the environment. That later led the development of coaxial cable, and what we call today is cable television, where you can run hundreds of pictures in infinite amounts of data down a cable system, and you get good clean signals and so on.
But in developing that industry, the first thing we learned is you have to ground anything electrical, anything hanging in the air. And just prior to it going into the home, you have to put a ground rod next to the house. Connect the cable to the ground, and then the inner conductor of the cable goes on into the home, to the TV set, or the converter. And if you don't have a good ground, then you get interference, flecks on your TV screens, noise and then you have environmental frequencies and you have internal frequencies within the cable, and they have to be isolated, so they don't get into the environment and mix.
Otherwise, you'll have interference with anything from aircraft to police radio. You name it. So anyhow for 30 years in that industry, and I developed one of the largest probably the largest cable installation service companies where we installed with lots of crews that would go across the nation, build the cable systems, installed cable drops, and everything had to be perfect. So basically, grounding was an essential part of what we did, and if you had certain types of issues with the picture, then the concept was more ground. Find the leaks, find the cracks, find out what's going on, and verify that the grounds are working properly. So that's kind of how I got into a background into grounding.
[00:07:25.04] Scott: So then how did you then take that experience in grounding, in the cable industry which by the way if it wasn't for you we probably couldn't do this podcast today, because this is relying on cable technology to be able to do this, right? So how did that experience then translate to earthing or grounding in the realm of health?
[00:07:45.14] Clint O.: Well, I'm 75 right now, and 25 years ago, I just turned 50. And I was living in Denver, Colorado, and actively involved in the cable industry. But anyhow, I started getting sick on in early December, and I'd been going to a lot of Christmas parties, and that year, they had Hepatitis going around and being evidently something to do with Christmas parties. So anyhow I started turning yellow, not feeling well, I would go to the doctor, and they were doing a bunch of tests.
Came back the next week they said well it's not Hepatitis, but there is something going on they need to run more tests and this went on for about three weeks, and then I got very sick, and I went to the ER. And they checked me in, and they couldn't figure anything else, so they put me in a CAT scan. And what they had found was that there was an abscess in my liver, and it had exploded, and I was shutting down. And so they actually drained a lot of the abscess while I was in the CAT scan, and then they gave me a bunch of pills to make it comfortable because there's a lot of pain with it.
And so then the next morning, the doc comes in he says we have some good news and we have some bad news or not-so-good news. And the good news was that they figured out what it was and what caused it. They asked me first of all somebody had bit me; I said no. They said have you had any dental work, and I said yes, I had a root canal about three or four weeks earlier. And evidently, there are some bacteria from the root canal which got into the blood system. And sometimes, when that happens, it'll attack the lung or the heart and very rarely the liver, but mine was “rarely” the liver.
So anyhow, they said I was young enough to get a new liver, but they didn't know if I had time because it takes time to get them. And so I went along, they told me they say go home, get everything in order because you don't know what the outcome was going to be, but they weren't very optimistic. But a couple of days later, Swedish Medical Center in Denver they called me; they had a young surgeon who would like to do some experimental surgery and go in and see how much of the liver they can cut out and if I can recover from that. So I had really no options, and so I went and went through that experience, and they went in and cut out the bulk of the main lobe of the liver. And they sewed up what was left and threw it back in, and sewed me up.
And that was kind of a traumatic experience because when you go into those surgeries, and it's life-threatening, you have no idea whether you're going to come out again, but anyhow, I did. And so shortly after that, I went home, and I could walk three or four feet a day and then add to that every day. So it took me like a week to be able to get to the kitchen or to get into a shower or do anything. And then I spent the next few months just doing nothing but trying to recover and trying to get my energy back because I mean all your energy comes from your liver.
But anyhow, within six months, my liver grew back 100% to its original size, wasn't the same, but it was instead of six little sections, it had one big section. And so along the way going through this recovery, I mean the funny part of it is in order to keep going and to keep pushing myself every day to go a few steps further, there was a 7-Eleven about a mile away, and they sold coffee and those glazed donuts. And for some reason, I set my mind; you know this is 25 years ago, so I set my mind on I wanted one of those donuts and a cup of coffee.
And so I kept walking, I mean walking a little further every day until eventually, I made it, and then when I got there I had to call and get a ride home, but that's the funny part of recovery. But during that process one morning I was laying there in bed and looking around at all of the things that I owned, and I had a lot of art, and I was living out 5000 square foot one-bedroom A-frame home on a mountaintop in Evergreen Colorado, it should have been a lodge. But I realized at that time that I had spent my whole life about collecting things and building business and money, and I damn near got taken out at the age of 50.
Age of 50 is when guys, that's the peak of the mountain, that's when most guys run into the wall, and I didn't know that, of course. But anyhow, through that process, I just had this epiphany that I know that I didn't own all of these things that basically when you die, all this stuff goes away. Kids come and take some of it; the rest of it gets given away, thrown away whatever. And so I just lost interest in owning anything, I liked everything that I owned, but I let absolutely everything go. At the same time, everything was different in my life, I never went back to work and never went back to the company, turned it over to the employees and I just felt that I needed to do something; I wanted to do something other than make my life about making money and acquiring things.
So I set up on the road for about four years in an RV, spent a lot of it in national parks really nice places in nature. Up in Montana, all the way to Carolinas to Florida wherever. But anyhow, I ended up down in Key Largo, Florida, on the bay side, and I had been there for several months. And one night, I was out looking over the bay beautiful sunset, and the manatee they would come up, and you'd take some fresh water, and they liked the freshwater. And so it was kind of interesting then, but something just kind of seemed to come over me that night, I just felt like I had to go back to work, go do something.
So I went in the whole house or into the RV, and I wrote down a piece of paper become an opposite charge. To me, that meant go out and stir people up, poke them, charge them up, get him doing something. And a few minutes later I have second thought was the status quo was the enemy or is the enemy, I had no idea what that was about, but I wrote it down I still have that tablet to this day. So anyhow then shortly after that I decided I had to go back to the west coast, so I packed everything up went back to California and decided I really didn't want to be there, so I went to Tucson, felt better, but it wasn't where I felt I should be.
So I thought well I'll go up to Flagstaff because that's more like Montana where I'm from, they have snow and pine trees and all that. And on that afternoon I took off and later in the evening it was getting dark, and I was getting tired, and there was an RV park sign pointed to Sedona. So I'd never been to Sedona, so I drove in there. I pulled into the RV park, plugged in went to bed. The next morning I got up looked outside, and I said I'm not leaving here; this is like living in a national park, so I spent about two years there.
And while I was there, I didn't really have anything to do, but when I was young, I had a background also in stage lighting for theater and stuff. And so they have a lot of art galleries there, so I started going to the art galleries, joined the chamber of commerce, got to know a few people. And one of the galleries was having a major artist putting on a show. And I went into the gallery, and I was visiting with him, and most art galleries you have to wear a baseball cap so you can see because the lights are too bright and there's too many of them you can't see the paintings. So I asked him to let me go in and put together some special lighting, take down all of the art in the gallery, take down all of the lights.
Put the paintings in, because there are only like 20 paintings in this particular show. And let me put the lighting back up and bring every piece of art up so that it has a presence. So I did that and after that I mean everybody loved it, and of course after that all the galleries they all wanted to have their lighting fixed. So I spent about a year just doing nothing and some special lighting in Scottsdale and Sedona for the galleries. The high-end galleries that I actually did some work in Taos for the Georgia O'Keeffe gallery and so on.
But anyhow, during that time, I had a little computer setup when I was in trying to do some billing or something, and the computer kept crashing. I mean, I knew what it was because every time I would touch it would crash, like there was a spark, so it's obviously static electricity. So I laid a piece of copper tape across my desk, connected it to a wire with an alligator connection to the ground because the computers back then didn't have ground. And then I would touch the copper cable before I'd touch the computer and then it was fine, because I got rid of the static electricity.
And so anyhow that brought that to my mind ground, and then I went outdoors and sat on a bench that afternoon, and a big tour bus pulls up, and it looks like a Japanese tour bus came, I mean they were all Japanese on tour. And they were a little shorter than normal people, and they all had these big white tennis shoes on. They all look like they had been to this outlet mall, and the Nike type shoes were on sale, and everybody bought a pair and put them on. But it was so obvious because they were white, and they were oversized relatively speaking. And so I just intuitively asked, I said I wonder if there's a consequence to humans no longer being naturally grounded? I had not a clue.
And that night, I went home, and I drag out a meter and simple ground rod that I had, and connected a wire to it outdoors, started walking around the house measuring the voltage. The difference in electrical potential between my body and the earth, huge amounts of static electricity every time you lift your foot because you have rubber shoes on and carpet. You have these static spikes going on all the time. They're happening to everybody all the time; nobody pays much attention to it unless it's three or four thousand volts, and then you'll get a little spark when you touch a doorknob. Then where I found the highest and at that time, I noticed all of the EMF, the 60 Hertz electrum, I mean the 60 Hertz electric fields.
[00:20:26.11] Scott: So from the wiring in the walls basically?
[00:20:28.22] Clint O.: Yes, and from the wiring and the walls. And so what I did was I went into the bedroom, and I laid down or sat down I remember now. But lay down in the bed, and so there was very high voltage in the bedroom, and I thought well this is kind of interesting, so I didn't know what to do. So I went back to the hardware store and got me some roll of three-inch wide metal duct tape like you would put around furnaces.
And I laid it across the bed, connected it to a wire, connected it to the ground rod outdoors, meter was already connected to a similar ground rod. So I put my hand on the tape, touched the meter it'll go to zero. I would lay down on the tape, as long as I had a little bit of good contact meter would go to zero. So I knew I was at earth's potential, no static electricity and no environmental electric field.
[00:21:26.10] Scott: So for people listening, so that's using what's called a body voltage meter. That's the way that Clint's referring to being able to test voltage in the sleep location, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that later. So bring us then just from kind of a high level, what is it about earthing or grounding that is potentially beneficial for our health?
[00:21:46.23] Clint O.: Okay. Well, at that time, I didn't really know; I know that first night that I grounded myself, I was playing with the meter, and I was lying in bed, just kind of going through the meter. And the next thing I knew, it was morning, and I had fallen asleep, and the meter was down by my side.
The significance of that is I usually had to take Advil with go to sleep and I never slept well ever, because I always had a lot of pain in my body from ski injuries, tennis injuries, back surgery, this other operation that I had and I was a cowboy, and so I had pain. In fact, I remember going out in the backyard one day, looking at the sky and I said God why did you make my body with so much pain in it, later I found out he didn't - it was me. But anyhow, I played with it for a little bit, and I had got a couple of friends that I made in Sedona, and I said you guys got to try this, so I grounded them, and I said you're going to sleep better.
A couple of days later, one guy comes over, and he said, do you think this could be having any effect on my arthritis? I said no, I don't think so; I think it's just going to make you sleep better. And then I recognized immediately well my pain had gone way down, and I thought well there's something here I don't know. So I started doing research on the internet, back then it was AOL and the landline, and there wasn't much service, and there wasn't much bandwidth, nor was there much data on the access.
[00:23:17.02] Scott: Back in the days of “You've got mail!”.
[00:23:19.06] Clint O.: Yes. And so we had to go to data retrieval, Nexus Lexus or things like that. But I couldn't find anything, so I went down to the University of Arizona. I met with a fellow down there that runs one of the departments. Tried to find some literature, and there was nothing in the literature that talked about grounding the body and reducing pain or improving sleep. But they do have to ground a human before they open the skin, especially with heart surgery anything like that you open up the body if you have static electricity the surgeon or the instruments they touch the body then they can create an electrical event.
So anyhow that was all I found, so then I said well as time went on, I recognized more and more that there was something really going on there. And at that time, I really thought it was EMF more so than anything else because I didn't really understand what it was. I had a heavy background in electrical, little background in biology other than animal husbandry type stuff. So anyhow then I went to UCLA, told them actually what I was doing, and I said I needed to do a study, get somebody to do something because nobody knows about this. And I remember one of the fellows, this is in the Sleep Department, he said you expect us to believe that somebody's going to put a nail in the ground, tire a wire around it, bring it in the house tie it around somebody's toe, and they're going to feel better? He says get out here you're crazy or you're nuts, something like that.
Anyhow, as a result of that, I ended up making contact with a couple of the students that were there, and they helped me design a study. And what we did is we rounded up 60 subjects, and grounded 30 of them with a live ground and 30 of them with a placebo ground. And we had a nurse that interviewed everybody, and because of what we were doing, I did the installations, and everybody else did all the other monitoring and stuff. So what we did is they would give me two or three people a day to go out and install.
So I would go out, and I remember one morning I went out, and I grounded this older gentleman, he was probably in his 70s, he had arthritis, he had cardiovascular issues, he had all kinds of just issues. But when I went into his bedroom, it was an Adobe home; there was no wiring in the wall, there were no outlets on the bed side of the wall where his bed was, and his bed was metal frame, and it was on con hard brick floor. And then I went to measure the EMF. It was just noise; there was nothing there to speak of with 10, 20, 50 millivolts or something.
And I said to myself it's really unfortunate because I've got a live pad here; this fella is not going to get any results, because again in my mind it was all EMF at that time or electric field. And so that afternoon I went to another person she was a similar age, flaring arthritis. She was in her middle-late 70s, so they were kind of similar, both had arthritis, both had terrible health, I mean just elderly age. Except that in her bedroom she had the highest reading I had ever seen, I mean it was like 18-20 millivolts. But that was because she had heating pads, she had metal lamps next to the bed, just all kinds of chaos.
[00:27:08.09] Scott: Just to clarify, Clint, 18 to 20 millivolts or 18 to 20 volts?
[00:27:12.10] Clint O.: Volts.
[00:27:12.29] Scott: Okay, got it.
[00:27:14.28] Clint O.: Compared to earth, because these are all measured to earth. And so anyhow, sat her down on the bed, because I would always take the body voltage of the person and then to make sure that when she touched the pad, that it went down. She didn't really understand what was going; I didn't ask anybody to remove lamps or do anything, because at that time it just wasn’t appropriate. And so anyhow that study went on, and a couple of months later when they had started to collect all the data, and I was going through some of the files and looking at them, and then these two people came up, and they both had the same results.
And I said okay this can't be right because this person didn't have any EMF exposure, this person had the most extreme EMF exposure I'd ever seen, and I couldn't get that person down as low as I really wanted to anyway, because it didn't have a big enough ground plane. The ground planes were used back then were about a foot wide and two feet long, and they were conductive material bonded to a felt pad with an alligator clip going out. And so anyhow I just dismissed it, but I did go home, and then I sat down, and I said okay if this is true then I need to verify it, and then I also need to experiment and try to find out what is the mechanism of action here.
Because grounding does reduce the electric field, if you're not grounded, your body is an antenna, and you will attract any kind of environmental, electrical noise. If it is grounded, then the body is equal with the earth, and then it will reflect any of that environmental stuff. So it takes the charge off the body, and you have a negative charge of the earth on the body, but it removes the 60 Hertz charge and any other charge that's on the body at that time. I took a wire, and I would put in capacitors if a capacitor will push electrons out, but they always belong to the capacitor that they're not an electron donor.
I mean, you can't donate electrons from a battery or from a capacitor because as soon as you disconnect, they are pulled back into the capacitor. So I checked that and found that pain didn't go away when I used the capacitor, and then I would use shielding, I would take and create shielded cords and connect them. And when there's no magnetic field, I mean they were energized, but there was no current going anywhere. But you could build up what would normally be like a 3 or 4 or 5 volts of EMF charge in a room. And what I found was that when you remove the EMF, the electric field that did not affect the pain. I mean it was the electrons coming directly from the earth, went I put a capacitor in and cut that supply off. And then I went through with magnetic field, so I went through it with everything. And then I realized that okay, so what's happening here is earth itself ground, electrical ground.
And what that is, most people aren't aware, but in common electrical terms, I mean the earth ground is a reservoir of free electrons, that it can absorb or if you stick a ground rod in the earth then electrons can come up the ground rod, or they can go down the ground rod, so it's in order to maintain electrical stability in an electrical environment. So anyhow, then I recognized that okay, then I started doing a lot of work and found out that just like when we ground cable systems or anything, a refrigerator, computer anything that the chassis of your refrigerator is grounded at earth potential.
So if there's an electrical event right there, the event will trigger a charge and blow a breaker within the chassis. Rather than having a person touch something and accidentally touching something else, so it's primarily for protection. In the communications industry, when you ground, you ground the chassis for sure, but what you're trying to do is you're trying to create a shield to mitigate EMI - electromagnetic interference, which is like an electric field, or noise from radio or anything that's in the environment.
So anyhow going forward, I went down to San Diego, and I remember I met with a group of Bau-biologists down there, because they want to know what I was doing and why I was doing it and all of this stuff and their model was going out and doing home, investigating the home and trying to find out what the sources were, if they had magnetic fields or miss wiring in there, utilities and everything that could go on in a home. And then, in many cases, they would rewire things, and they have a host of things that you can do in the home to reduce and mitigate electric fields or electrical noise.
And so anyway, when I was down there, my background is very simple, and it's if you want to shield something you ground the chassis. And to me, the skin of the human body is the chassis, so when you ground the body, it is naturally protected from any kind of electrical noise, and most people do not understand this; most Bau-biologists did not accept it, and it really started war. All the way around the world everybody was attacking me because you can't do this, you're an antenna, the electric fields go through you to the earth, you're going to cause heart problems, you are going to cause cancer and went on and on and on for years. And I would continue to go and attend some of their meetings and visit with them, and I even hired some of them like Spark Burmaster, Larry, all these guys and to come in and say come and talk to me, help me understand what you're trying to do.
Because grounding, what grounding does was very simply, but at this time we didn't understand the health effects, nobody did. So at that time, via this group, I met a retired Bau-biologist by the name of Maurice Ghaly. And he said I don't understand, I don't know exactly what you're doing here, but I think there's something in this, and so he said let's go do another study. So we did another study where we measured circadian cortisol. The subjects we would go and measure their cortisol levels every four hours for 24 hours. Then we gave them a one foot by two-foot-long bed pad to put under the sheet and for them to lay on during sleep for the next six to eight weeks depending on what it was.
And then, at the end of that study, we went back and did the same thing over again, measure cortisol every four hours for 24 hours. What we found from that study was that before grounding, a lot of the women had exhausted adrenals or very low cortisol in the morning, the younger ones had higher cortisol from anxiety and that kind of stuff. And some of the early subjects that we couldn’t leave in the study were stewardesses from New York, and when they flew to San Diego, and we measured their cortisol, their cortisol was three hours off on the 24-hour cycle. So then we realized that their cortisol was based on being in New York, we assumed that was like sound whatever.
But when we did the actual study, we found that 4am is when the cortisol spikes, and it increases significantly. That's what gives your body the ability to get out of bed in the morning without having a heart attack, gives you the energy to get up and get going. And then during the day it slowly depletes, and at midnight it's the lowest. We also found that at midnight, most of these people had just slightly elevated cortisol; some of them a little more, but everybody slept better. But when we looked at the cortisol levels, cortisol levels at midnight would bottom it out in the subjects.
So in all of the literature, there's only one reason people don't sleep at night it's because you have an elevated cortisol, you can't sleep I mean that's your fight or flight system. And so you're either worrying about something, thinking about something kids, money, life and it's causing a little bit of cortisol to become elevated and that interferes with sleep. So anyhow that study was quite profound because we found that at the end of the study everybody's cortisol secretion levels synchronized in a very tight band, the older ladies their cortisol came up, the younger ones came down, everybody had improved sleep and less pain. And we also measured heart rate variability, that's the ability of your heart to compensate for when you get up or when you do something, so it doesn't tax the heart.
And at that time, we didn't really know too much about it, but it was a new thing that was out, and Dr. Ghaly said well as long as you're doing that let's try this and see what comes of it. And in interpreting the HRV, we didn't really understand, and we couldn't find anybody that really understood it. So one day, Dr. Stephen Sinatra was in San Diego had a convention, and he was a cardiologist, so we contacted Steve and asked him to explain it to us, which he did. And then we told him what we were doing, and he said, if you ground somebody and you're reducing pain, he says you're affecting inflammation. Because you can't have pain unless you have inflammation, pain is a byproduct of inflammation.
So at that time I knew nothing about inflammation, I thought it was you twist an ankle it swells up, and it's inflamed, it's on fire feels like it. And he said no, that's not what we're already talking about here; he said this is kind of a chronic low-grade inflammation that's persistent. But at that time, still, there wasn't enough information, and nobody was using the word inflammation; this is 2001-2002 in that timeframe. Inflammation was not in the language nobody used it, it was about the inflammatory cascade, oxidative stress, but they didn't know what was causing it.
But when Rutger and the boys from Boston Mass came out in 2004 when they had the cover of Time magazine, and it had the word inflammation and fire on it. They said you don't have cancer; you don't have all of these health disorders. What you have is chronic inflammation, and it manifests differently in different people based on their genetics and their living environment and their lifestyles.
And so at that time, I knew that once I understood, and that inflammation was really from a neutrophil, the white blood cell in the body going over and attacking or encapsulating a pathogen or damaged cell and releasing reactive oxygen molecules. Then I realized the word reactive meant that they were an electron imbalance. So to me, in my mind, the immune system is electrical because it functions with electrical particles charge.
[00:39:57.12] Scott: So you mentioned Dr. Stephen Sinatra, so for people listening you co-authored a book Earthing with Dr. Sinatra that people can still get; it's a fantastic book, so that's available as a resource. Tell us a little bit about in terms of earthing; if we look at, let's say animals that are wild animals that are constantly grounded to their earth versus domestic animals that are in our homes and not grounded as often do we see differences in prevalence of diseases?
[00:40:26.14] Clint O.: Yes, in Madison, Wisconsin, I think it's a National Wildlife Center. They have a paper where they had examined over nearly a hundred thousand animals over a period of years, and they had only found the presence of cancer in thirteen of those animals. Now, these are wild animals, animals living in the wild, and I don't know too much about the detail of it.
But in general, animals that live in the wild like cattle, horses, antelope, deer, coyote, wolf, those animals do not manifest any of the modern health disorders that we do, humans do. And domestic animals, on the other hand, that live indoors with the owners, by and large, they manifest the same type health disorders as their owners, meaning inflammation-related health disorders. 50% of all domestic animals in the home die from cancer. They have all of the same problems, whether it's diabetes or just everything that the owners do.
[00:41:41.06] Scott: So that's a really key observation I think for me in terms of the environment that we've created being a significant contributor to our health challenges, and how important the external environment around us is. You talked about earthing and grounding as a tool for preventing electron deficiency and actually getting electrons from this free source that the earth can donate to us. Is that the basic mechanism of action? Or is grounding also allowing the body to discharge an unhealthy charge also allowing it to bring in the electrons from the earth, or is it actually allowing us to do both of those things?
[00:42:19.05] Clint O.: Well, you kind of have to know the environment, but first of all, go back to the neutrophil real quick. The neutrophil what they do is they encapsulate a cell, a damaged cell, an injured cell, and they release reactive oxygen, which rips the electrons away from that cell and destroys it. That's how the immune system works; that's how it reduces pathogen. Okay, if you don't have enough redox potential or enough free electrons available to rapidly reduce any of those remaining radicals left over from the oxidative burst.
Then they're going to steal an electron from a healthy cell and damage it, collateral damage. Okay, then another neutrophil comes does the same thing, and so it sets up a chain reaction, and that's where we come up with the term chronic inflammation, inflammation meaning on fire. So you have chronic inflammation in the body, there's a chronic cascade going on here. And as time goes on, I mean free radical only lasts two or three nanoseconds, they're not going to sit there, and they don't build up in the body.
What builds up in the body is damaged, free radical damage, and eventually, that will manifest as all kinds of health disorders. But what it does, first of all, it compromises the immune system, because the immune system is fully engaged in trying to take care of the inflammation that it's creating itself and reducing its ability to maintain the body in this natural state. So the electrons coming from the neutrophils and the immune system, that's a shortage of electrons.
Because you remember before 1960, everybody was barefoot or they wore leather sole shoes and leather sole shoes, an electrician will not wear I mean a leather shoe if he's working. But anyhow, the leather would saturate with body perspiration and body salts and become conductive, so we were always naturally grounded. But in 1960, we invented the synthetic plastics, the first thing we did was put them on the soles of shoes, the second thing we did was put plastic carpets in our homes. So all of a sudden, we totally insulated ourselves, and that began the rise of autoimmune disease.
I mean that's when this exponential curve, I think is you have a first edition of the book, in the second edition of the book we have a chart that shows the rise of the growth in rubber-soled shoes and then the growth of diabetes, but you can also layer autism, Lupus, MS, any of these health disorders on the same curve. So they all follow the shoe, so that suggests that it's a shortage of electrons. Because the earth is on the average 20 millivolts negative or more, meaning there's an abundance of free electrons that are free to move and do work, and the work they do is reduce charge.
So when the human body touches the earth, it's conductive, and so it will equalize with the earth. And we know this because of the blood viscosity studies where we measured the electrical potential in red blood cells. After we ground the body, then their surface voltage on red blood cells goes negative about 20 millivolts, same as the earth. Now when things are negative like the blood, for instance, they can't stick together; they repel each other like little magnets because they're both negative, and they're both rounds.
And so anyhow that suggests electrons are coming from the earth to the body, it's coming up. The charge that would be going from the body to the earth and static electricity can go either way depending on what the materials are involved, but generally, you're going to become positive, so you need to bring electrons to the body in order to reduce the static charge on the body. If you touch a doorknob, the doorknob is giving up electrons, or you're donating electrons to the doorknob, but you're trying to equal out.
But as far as grounding to the earth, which is what you do in the electrostatic discharge industry, which I borrowed a lot of what I do from because that also is part of the communications industry. So I would suggest that the body is electrical; every single cell in the body is electrical. A lot of our organs are fully electrical, our brains, our muscles, everything is electrical first, chemical second. So I would suggest that, and then we're eating food, and during metabolism, we're creating some radicals, we're breathing air that has a lot of particulates in it positively charged particulates.
And so that's creating radicals, and that's what's creating some of the cytokine storms like with asthma and stuff. So I would assume that again using cowboy logic and in my experience that, when you touch the earth, those electrons on the earth are migrating into the body throughout the body, and reducing any charge in the body. In fact, I make the claim, and after twenty years, twenty million dollars all this research everything to me it's so obvious you cannot have charge in an amplifier or a refrigerator or a human body, you cannot have charge on a grounded human body, it's not possible.
[00:48:04.03] Scott: So if we come back to the idea of chronic inflammation just so we try to make sure we're understanding it. So chronic inflammation is the result of these oxidative stressors or free radicals that you mentioned. We think of the electrons coming in from the earth; those are essentially antioxidants if we think of things like vitamin C for example, can we think of these electrons as antioxidants, and thus it's helping to minimize the oxidative stress in the body that is leading to the chronic inflammation. Am I following the logic?
[00:48:35.16] Clint O.: Yes. Vitamin C would be an electron donor, a blueberry would be an electron donor, and they will reduced a radical or a positively charged molecule, but the body gates all this stuff around because you have a myelin sheath on the nerves, and those are not conductive. So there's a lot more to it than that, eating healthy is very important, eating live food is extremely important because that's what your eating is energy electrons.
[00:49:12.02] Scott: If we look at inflammation, thermography is a tool that people will commonly use to see what the hotspots are in the body. If we do a thermogram before grounding and after grounding, can we see shifts in what shows up in that thermogram?
[00:49:28.08] Clint O.: Yes. In many cases, and we have hundreds of them done by various different thermographers and studies that have incorporated a lot of this in. Basically, that's the evidence that you can't have charge in a grounded body, because 30 minutes after you ground somebody, if you take your thermal image on a knee or an area where there's the inflammation, it'll show up as red, orange, yellow.
Thirty minutes later, and these people are in controlled environments where the temperature is constant because thermal imaging can change just based on the atmospheric change in the temperature. But then within 30 minutes, they'll turn blue, green, meaning the charge is gone, meaning the inflammation is reduced. The only pain that has left would be some residual pain from the damage that had been done, and the immune system will clean that up quite quickly as long as you keep the inflammation down, yes.
[00:50:27.01] Scott: Let's come back to the conversation about EMFs, and in this conversation, we're kind of using it broadly to talk about electrical fields, EMFs from things like cell phones and Wi-Fi and things of that nature. But we know that EMF contributes to health challenges, we're seeing that more and more.
One way to approach that is to mitigate those sources, to turn off your Wi-Fi, to stop using your cell phone, all of those kinds of things. But can we use grounding to also help mitigate this soup of stressful electromagnetic fields that we're essentially bathed in around the clock in our modern world?
[00:51:05.06] Clint O.: Yes. When you ground the body, the body is negatively charged, and that's that earth's potential. I mean, when you are not grounded your body is an antenna, you're going to attract these electric fields, and they're going to, I have to go a little bit deeper. It's like I have grounded hundreds and hundreds of people myself, and I would say the majority of the people that I work with have Lupus, MS, those kind of inflammation-related health disorders, many others but those specifically. And what I have found is if you ask somebody who developed MS or lupus, and that's one that a lot of EMF'ers claim that electric fields are the cause of.
And so if you ask somebody who developed MS and they're out there, they're everywhere I mean it's like 1 in 50 have MS now. And MS is usually when it's advanced, I mean they've lost control of their nerves and what's happening is the neutrophils are oxidizing the myelin sheath, okay. And it's the collateral damage; it just keeps feeding and growing and growing. And up until a few years ago everybody said well there's nothing we can do for MS, said get yourself one of those mobile beds, go up and down and a big-screen TV and make yourself comfortable, I've heard doctors actually say this, and it's absurd. But anyhow, one day, I was grounding a lady with MS, and I said, were you born with MS? And she said no. And just innocently, I said, what caused the MS to manifest in your life? And she said I don't know.
And then I was taking care of some grounding things for her, and then she said oh my god she said that was the year my mother died, and I went through a divorce and I lost my house and just everything went bad, and I just got so whatever you want to call it. So anyhow, I got in the habit of starting to ask anybody with Lupus or MS or any major chronic health disorder, what happened in your life before you develop, before this manifest and even cancer. And every one of them have a story, a great story, a loss I mean some kind of a major loss. Divorce, death, money, jobs you name it, every single one that I've run across that I've asked.
And so then I started to study a lot about okay, I mean grounding will put out the fire of inflammation, it will stop it period. You can't have inflammation in a grounded body, but what's feeding that inflammation? And so what happens is if somebody is a trauma, like in Montana you have a lot of rabbits and a lot of coyotes. And here's the jackrabbit - they're sitting there eating like nothing is going on, that's what they do they just eat. And over here is a coyote sneaking up on the rabbit, the rabbit always senses the coyote at some point. The ears go up, coyote jumps, the rabbit Springs and he zigs zags back and forth across the pasture, so he can keep one eye on the coyote at all times.
And the coyote is running back and wherever and then 99% of the time I think the coyote runs out of energy so he runs and runs and then he just stops and the rabbit will run just a little bit further, but not far enough that he loses sight of the coyote. He'll sit there, and he'll be watching the coyote, and then he'll be shaking it's a visceral response you could see it. And then all of a sudden he'll have a big shake, and then he'll go back to eating grass like nothing ever happened. And so what he did is he grounded out the chase, grounded out the inflammation, the oxidation that was created from that race.
So then when I look at a lot of these ladies, and you have to remember 90% of visits to a practitioner are female, men don't go to doctors, okay. 80, 90 percent of all drugs taken prescriptions are female, 80% of all nutraceuticals are female. So this is a female issue primarily. Very few men have MS, Lupus, these kind of things, but a high majority I mean much higher percentage have in the female side. So, women, I've recognized that they respond to everything viscerally, meaning if somebody drops a fork on the floor and then you can see them, and so what that does, it creates a cortisol spike. So in our living environment, we have a thousand coyotes today: the mail box, the telephone, going to work, the traffic, customers, employees, bosses, whatever.
So forever, we're always on a chronically elevated fight or flight state, and so what happens is the adrenals or the parasympathetic it's designed in nature so that if the coyote is jumping, then the cortisol skyrockets, but your adrenals will, or the parasympathetic will release enough hormones to modulate that enough just long enough for you to make a decision to run or to fight, that's how it operates in nature. But today we live in a state where we're under constant coyote attack or however you want to say it.
And so the cortisol is elevated at all times, which eventually the adrenals which usually modulate that become exhausted and then the sympathetic can over-respond. And so now wind, noise, static, touch anything you're much more sensitive to it, you're much more sensitive to an EMF if your adrenals are blowing. Now all the people who are not sensitive to EMF their adrenals are more normal, okay. So there are other factors involved. It's just what I'm trying to get to its environmental like I said we can put the fire out with grounding, but what's feeding it, what's feeding it in most cases is adrenal fatigue.
[00:58:16.01] Scott: So let's come back to the conversation that we were having about the red blood cells, and them being essentially sticky. So if we look at red blood cells under a microscope and we see what many people talk about is rouleaux or sticky blood or clumping or whatnot. Once someone's grounded, if we look at that again, do we see then the absence of that rule or formations?
[00:58:40.10] Clint O.: Yes, it happened some 100 percent of the time, and we've done this hundreds of times. But basically, what happens when you're breathing oxygen, you're using up electrons via metabolism whatever, but your body would be short of electrons. So the red blood cells will stick together in a rouleaux formation, what they're really doing is they're sharing electrons. And the problem with that is when they get clumpy or sticky; then, it's hard for them to get in and out of the capillaries and oxygenate the tissue. So what happens when you ground the body then, and we've measured this at two different studies.
One at the University of Arizona, and one in California, I think UC Irvine at the time. But what we do is you can measure the electrical potential or the electrical surface charge on blood cells. As soon as you ground somebody and leave and grounded, we've done it for an hour, we've done it for two hours I think it happens actually within about ten minutes. But what happens is the red blood cells, the electrical surface charge, and red blood cells equalize with the earth, has the same electrical potential as the earth.
[00:59:54.11] Scott: So if someone has hypercoagulation which people listening to this show chronic Lyme disease, mold illness, many different types of autoimmune conditions; it's not uncommon to have thickened blood or hypercoagulation. So would we then think that grounding over time would help with that hypercoagulable state, and does that then also mean that the body becomes more oxygenated as we're grounded?
[01:00:17.29] Clint O.: Yes. Well, what we know for sure you can take any person, and I've done these thousands of times in seminars. We've grounded as many as 1500 people at a time in Longevity conferences. And what we do is we take a patch, electrode patch and we just put it right in the palm of the hand, and then it's connected to the ground it's on the floor which runs through the system and goes out to the earth somewhere. And in fifteen to thirty minutes, which you're not going to have any pain, first of all, I mean your pain is going to be significantly reduced.
Your respiration is going to shift, your O2 saturation is going to increase, and we have this, we've documented all of this, so it's all there. But to women, what we say is very simply your color is going to change, your demeanor is going to change, and you're going to smile, and you're going to be happy. Usually, within 30 minutes after grounding, the face turns pink; the blood can get in and oxygenate the capillaries in the skin, tissue, and so on. So you have a better perfusion and better color.
[01:01:24.11] Scott: So do I potentially need to be cautious with grounding if someone's on let's say a blood thinner like Coumadin or Warfarin or something like that?
[01:01:33.06] Clint O.: Primarily Coumadin. Because if you're taking one of these blood thinners in order to maintain the blood viscosity at a certain level, then if you get grounded, then that's going to potentially further thin the blood. So you have to not do the grounding or not do the Coumadin, and I think there's moderation and has to totally be done under medical supervision.
[01:02:02.23] Scott: Fatigue is one of the more significant symptoms that many people experience these days. There's everything from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which is far more than fatigue but fatigue being a major player, to fatigue and things like chronic Lyme disease, mold illness, and so on. Is there a role of grounding in terms of the production of ATP in our mitochondria?
[01:02:24.09] Clint O.: Yes, we know for sure that grounding increases ATP with Lyme disease. Alex Mayer, who was a head of one of the...
[01:02:33.10] Scott: SpiroChicks, I believe.
[01:02:36.00] Clint O.: SpiroChicks, yes. I met Alex at a Wolf conference many years ago, and she had Lyme disease. And so I called her, and I said whatever you need, whatever you want, I'll help you and teach you everything about grounding because she had other issues as a result. So then I started grounding her, and she couldn't sleep grounded for quite a while actually, so we had to ground her just a little bit at a time so that she felt comfortable because you feel different when you get grounded. So what was happening is when you ground somebody, you normalize blood viscosity, okay. If you have Lyme disease, you have usually thick sticky blood, and you have inflammation in your body.
So what happens is as soon as you normalize blood viscosity, now the blood can get in and out of the capillaries. The spirochetes many of them live in the capillaries where there's poor circulation. And so when you start oxygenating the tissue, you have a huge die-off of the spirochetes. And that will show up, and it'll feel like the flu because the same thing that's happening with that flu, with the immune system fighting a flu is the same thing that's happening here with the immune system fighting spirochetes.
[01:04:10.17] Scott: So does that mean that when people start introducing grounding pads and things that you make available that they should titrate up slowly, rather than putting it on the bed and sleeping on it all night long for the first time if they have a chronic health challenge?
[01:04:24.03] Clint O.: Yes, they have to experiment. I mean start by going outdoors and putting your bare feet on the grass and sitting there for 30 minutes at a time, get some sunshine because you don't get enough of that because we live in these homes now with roofs. But get some sunshine and earth at the same time and do it that way, that's an easy way to feel the effects. But when you're indoors, yes, you definitely want to play with it, experiment.
[01:04:57.19] Scott: How long over the course of a day would one need to be grounded to get essentially the full benefits from a redox and antioxidant perspective, an inflammation-reducing perspective. If someone was grounded, let's say for an hour a day, or four hours a day, would that be enough or what's the target?
[01:05:15.26] Clint O.: Okay. What I have found, first of all, I'll say any amount of grounding is better than no grounding, because there is a capacitive effect. So if you get grounded, for some reason, it's about 10 minutes after you get grounded that you see all of the increases in O2 saturation, heart rate variability, and everything. So basically, I think that is the blood charging up and the blood becoming normalized. So it can start functioning and feeding everything properly.
So 10 minutes you're going to charge up the blood, so 15-20 minutes that's the absolute minimum that you should ground, but again any kind of grounding is good. And if you can't ground any other way, then ground at least as much as you can a little bit in the morning you're going to feel better and before you go to bed at night, because you're going to get rid of the charge and you're going to again charge up a little bit. So the healthier person is probably, the less, but people who's health is compromised like arthritis, flaring arthritis, flaring MS, flaring Lupus we can ground them for eight hours and they'll get great benefit, but by 10 o'clock in the morning, everything starts to come back, because again this is a flaring disease.
So over the years, we learned that if we can ground somebody 16 hours a day with MS, Lupus, they're going to recover; they're going to get well faster. But again, you kind of have to go back to nature, like animals that live in the wild are grounded 24/7. We used to be grounded 24/7; it was only 150 years ago that we were still sleeping on wet dirt floors, it's hard to advance and figure out how fast we've come with our modern living.
[01:07:18.27] Scott: In someone that has chronic infections, there is a school of thought that says too many antioxidants could be counterproductive in that you need oxidation to actually deal with chronic infection. So do we have to give that some thought relative to a grounding perspective, if someone still has a significant infection with spirochetes from chronic Lyme disease, for example? Could too many electrons or antioxidants actually result in the body being less able to respond to those infections?
[01:07:51.00] Clint O.: That just goes against everything I know, I would like to see some paper or research on that literature. But basically what I have learned over the twenty years is health is the body's most natural state, and the immune system is a self-correcting mechanism, I mean it only knows to return the body to normal; I mean it's a self-healing mechanism.
And so when you have chronic disorder something is feeding that disorder, something is feeding I mean like if you get Lyme I mean this basically I believe from deer ticks I don't know of what else it might come from, but the deer’s they're grounded, it doesn't manifest as a disorder in them. But they're not a whole lot different than us, they're mammals, but there is something different obviously. And I think that the difference is the fact that humans are no longer living in their natural state, grounded.
[01:08:59.28] Scott: So you have a number of products that you've created, you have grounding mats; you have the patches that we've talked a little bit about. In terms of getting access to ground, there is a ground tester where you can test an electrical ground in the wall socket. There's also an option to be able to take an actual rod and put it into the earth.
I know there are some people that suggest that taking an actual rod and putting it into the earth is maybe better than using the wall socket. I know some people will say if you use the wall socket, you should also turn the circuit breaker to that room off while you're using it as a ground. Can you tell us a little bit about is there a difference between one way or another in implementing your technologies?
[01:09:40.10] Clint O.: Oh I know that we supply an 11-inch ground rod, the reason is because you can't put a ground rod more than 11 inches in the ground without calling for utilities to come out and measure and make sure there's no telephone power, gas or anything in the area. And you would never know sometimes until you punch through one. So anyhow, that's why we have an 11-inch ground rod. The other reason we have it is because all homes built before 1965, not all homes, but most homes built before 1965 do not have a ground; there's no ground wire in the walls. And even though they have remodeled and upgraded the outlets to the three-prongs grounded look, there's no wire in the back, and in some cases, they actually ground them to the neutral, short them out to the neutral.
And so but anyhow these older homes they have to have a ground rod, or they have to use cold water pipe because it's the only other thing going to the ground. Gas maybe in some of the older homes, I don't know. But anyhow, that's what those rods are designed for, now an electrical ground on the average. It goes eight to twelve feet in the ground, and it's a permanent ground, and it's going to be there forever.
An 11-inch ground rod the gardners are going to come by pick it up put it on the window, and I mean that's one of the biggest problems we have out there and they forget to put them back in, or they don't, or just various issues. But those are temporary ground rods, in order for somebody to get a permanent installation putting. This is one of the things I talked early on about Bau-biology; you guys need to be focused on some of these other things. But grounding is important; grounding is going to become a business in a service industry because a lot of these homes don't have grounding.
[01:11:41.20] Scott: So if you do have a home that has a ground and you send a ground tester, so you actually know, and you then use that wall socket as the ground. Is their benefit to turning off the circuit breaker in that room where your grounding in your sleep location? Or do you find that that does not make a difference?
[01:11:59.02] Clint O.: Well, technically, it shouldn't make any difference because when something is grounded its grounded, it has the earth energy. I mean, it's connected to the earth. Now what you have with 60 Hertz, is you have going on and off sixty times a second, so you have a push and a pull 60 times a second. So here's ground on the body, so you're going to have a push and a pull from the earth equalizing it to push it away from the body, okay.
So there is some energy there, but there's not a harmful going to cause cancer no that's craziness, that's insane, that's insanity. Is there noise, there might be some noise, but it's like depending on what's connected to that circuit if it's in a high-energy air conditioner that could cause some more noise because it's bigger and louder, but that's not likely the case in a bedroom.
[01:13:07.09] Scott: If we take the actual grounding rod, there is some conversation about the way power is delivered to our homes and buildings today in terms of stray current moving through the earth. I've had one listener that said that when she grounds at the ocean, for example, she has very positive effects but when she tries to replicate that even in her own backyard without rods or anything, she doesn't get any of those benefits. So is there any difference in terms of where the grounding rod is actually placed relative to being urban versus rural and those types of factors?
[01:13:41.15] Clint O.: Okay. Well, let me set an example; I mean create something we can relate to. For instance, when there's a lightning strike, there's big debate on whether the electrons are going up from the earth to the cloud because the bottom of the cloud is positively charged and the negative electrons are being pushed to the top because the negative is repelling each other or are electrons coming from the cloud down to the earth. In either event, if you look at the area where the lightning occurs, how far does it travel? Does it travel how many feet and it's going exponential in a circle, no radial? And so generally energy is going to go out radially, and so it's going to dissipate into the earth in some area.
So the problem that I have, and I've been puzzled with this for 20 years is somebody is trying to tell me that an electron is going to come into the home; first of all no electron comes into the home from the grid, you have a step-down converter and in that or two coils and one coil is energizing the other coil, and that's how you end up with the voltage that you have in the house. So there's energy, but there is no electron flow between the two, okay so you have no electric field that's all, 60 Hertz is an electric field created by a coil. So now it's connected to the wiring that goes into the home, and connected to the outlets. I mean to the breaker system and the outlets and everything, and you turn a switch on, and so you have 60 Hertz electric field going back and forth 60 times a second. There are no electrons going anywhere, but the filament in the light bulb is heating up because the 60 Hertz is cycling back and forward 60 times a second, creates heat that creates light.
Okay, so you turn the switch off it stops wiggling. So when people say that there's stray voltage, there's voltage coming out of the house, down the ground and into the earth and going back to the power plant, they're out of their ever-loving mind they don't know what they're talking about. We do have a situation up in Wisconsin obviously because that's where we hear about the dancing cows. Where they have what they call a single-wire electrical service, that's where you're just running an electrical service on one wire; there's no return, there's no neutral. And so this is going into the, I'm not sure what the actual circuit is in the box and how that works.
But here's there's energy going to the box and then it's somehow going to the milk machines or whatever's in the environment and then it is grounded to the earth, so what they call an earth return. And in their minds when they're talking about it to people, they're assuming that if you dump a cup of electrons on the earth at the barn, that it's going to go all the way through the earth and travel all the way back to the power plant, that is absolute nonsense.
That's like saying that I'm going to take a cup of water out of the ocean in Japan, and I'm going to throw it back in the ocean when I get to San Francisco, and it's going to go back to where I took it out, that's nonsense that's not how it works the same is with an electrical. So anyhow, there's a lot of misconception and misinformation and sound bites out there.
[01:17:31.15] Scott: No, that's good; that's why I'm asking the questions. And some of my listeners use a silver-lined cloth to block incoming EMF from let's say cellphone towers and Wi-Fi and those types of things in there sleeping location. Can I use a canopy like that and a grounding technology in the same sleep environment, is there any contraindication with using both of them? If I'm doing that, do I need to keep the material from the grounding pad, and the material from the canopy keeps them from touching one another? Or what are your thoughts on that?
[01:18:06.02] Clint O.: The first thing, I mean, the shielding is what you're talking about?
[01:18:11.09] Scott: Yes.
[01:18:12.04] Clint O.: Shielding is depending on the size of the space in the material that you're using, you know, absorb certain radiation or certain frequencies. If it's a solid material like a silver or nickel or copper, those kind of shielding things that were used commonly in the communications industry, they're designed to capture radiation, to absorb radiation, and prevent it from infecting you.
Hitting your hair and stimulating your sympathetic nervous system and exhausting your adrenals, okay. So there's no problem with grounding being grounded if you're using shielding. If you're using shielding material and it is not grounding, you're creating a hell of a big antenna for 60 Hertz EMF.
[01:19:16.25] Scott: Yes. So you're talking about the canopy itself that you're using with the shielding material, that itself also should be grounded, right?
[01:19:25.27] Clint O.: Yes, if it's not, it's going to be a huge antenna for 60 Hertz.
[01:19:30.22] Scott: Yes. So if you didn't have the material grounded, you at a minimum would need to have the circuit breakers to that sleeping location turned off when you're in that environment.
[01:19:40.03] Clint O.: I mean, it all depends on the noise level beyond and so on. And when you shield, and I have never used one of these tents, I helped Joe Mercola one time put together a bunch of them, but I didn't really test one of them. But do you have one of these tents?
[01:20:05.15] Scott: I do.
[01:20:05.28] Clint O.: Can you use your cell phone inside of it?
[01:20:08.23] Scott: You can.
[01:20:10.06] Clint O.: Okay. So what is it supposed to be shielding?
[01:20:13.24] Scott: Well so if you take an EMF meter and you measure the incoming EMF sitting on your bed, and then you drop down the shielding material it will go down by 99 percent, so it does significantly reduce what's incoming, but it doesn't completely eliminate it.
So the cell phone might have a lower signal, but it will still generally be able to make a call. I mean obviously, that's unwise, because I'm actually then inside that Faraday cage and creating probably an amplification, so I don't do that. But it does significantly reduce the incoming EMF if you measure it with an EMF.
[01:20:47.26] Clint O.: What I would highly recommend is the shield is they are an antenna for your 60 Hertz EMF and any of that low-frequency type stuff.
[01:21:02.19] Scott: And is your thought process if you are grounded, you mentioned that that essentially kind of mitigates a lot of the exposure we have to EMFs anyway. So is it possible that being grounded with the grounding pad would make the shielding material in some cases unnecessary anyway?
[01:21:20.25] Clint O.: Well, it depends on the frequency; first, I mean, there's a lot of a gray area in all of this.
[01:21:26.16] Scott: You recently participated in a project called The Earthing Movie with a really tremendous team of people, including Dr. Stephen Sinatra, Deepak Chopra. Tell us a little about that project and how people can watch that film?
[01:21:39.25] Clint O.: Okay. Well, it took three years to shoot; it's totally authentic. Nothing was manufactured. These were all people who showed up at different points in the last few years and made their contributions to the film. It's a little bit of a story about how I came about this and a little bit about my background. I said that's the only problem with you made it too long by having me in it. But anyhow, it has a nice cast of characters; one of my favorite in it is Richard Koch, who spent five years working for the Environmental Health Agency and 30 years for the FDA.
And his experience and his mother's experience with the grounding prompted him to become actively involved with us, and he actually states that this is the most important thing that he's seen come across his desk in his entire career. Mainly because it has huge results in its free or it's very inexpensive to do something to mitigate.
And so anyhow it's about people and their experience putting a little bit of the science together, but mostly talking to a handful of people from school teachers to ladies with MS with various other issues, that just tell a story that helps make sense of grounding.
[01:23:10.04] Scott: And where can people go to watch that film?
[01:23:12.22] Clint O.: The movie was released about ten days ago on YouTube, it's called The Earthing Movie, and it's an hour and 15 minutes long. So you can just go to YouTube, and it's free commercial-free. There are no commercials in it.
[01:23:29.25] Scott: I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well, so people can find it.
[01:23:32.28] Clint O.: And the other thing too, the movie was presented at several film festivals, it won several awards. But the main award that it won was the audience choice award in Hollywood at the Dances With Films Festival.
So the audiences loved the movie, a lot of the creative people say wait a minute, but it's the content of the movie. It's already had a hundred and forty thousand views just in the first ten days.
[01:24:02.17] Scott: Yes. And I personally enjoyed it as well, so I urge people to check that out. Clint, this is the last question I ask every guest. What are some of the key things that you do on a daily basis in support of your own health?
[01:24:13.22] Clint O.: Well I'm 76 years old, so I'll be 76. I'm 75 soon. Anyhow, what do I do? First of all, for 20 years, I have grounded myself. I sleep grounded, if I have any issues I go outdoors, I mean if I stub a toe I go outdoors and stand on the earth, and the pain goes away. At the computer, I have a grounded floor, so I don't have to have a pad or anything; if I'm in an office, I usually have a desk mat that's grounded, so let me put my hands on it when I'm typing or whatever.
So I do a lot of grounding, but beyond that, I get up every morning, I don't eat until around ten o'clock, but I'll have a cup of coffee or two, and then I will have more keto bend to my diet. Usually eggs, avocado, that's one of my main routines. But I eat well, I've been around David Wolfe in that group for many years, and so I've learned to eat raw as much as possible. I travel a lot, so it's hard to keep a good diet, but I try to eat live food as much as possible. I have a very healthy immune system now.
I don't have the aches and pains; I don't get sick like I used to when I was younger, like around 50. I walk, I can out walk anybody for my age as long as I'm barefoot, if I put shoes on I'm good for a mile and a half two miles then I get fatigued. But as long as I keep the shoes off, I can walk ten miles without even thinking about it. I don't run anymore because it's just too hard on the knees and stuff. But just good walking is what I do the most of.
[01:26:19.24] Scott: Well, Clint, this has been a really fun conversation, and I want to thank you for the contributions that you've made in providing tools that can be potentially helpful for people dealing with conditions associated with chronic inflammation. I want to thank you for sharing all your knowledge and wisdom with us today and taking your time and being generous with that, and just appreciate you very much for all that you've done, so thank you.
[01:26:42.05] Clint O.: Well, I appreciate the opportunity to meet you and visit with you again and share this. And if you have any questions or issues related to any of this, let's visit about it.
[01:26:52.13] Scott: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
[01:26:54.14] To learn more about today's guest, visit GroundTherapy.com.
[01:27:04.09] Thanks for your interest in today's show. If you'd like to follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you can find me there as better health guy. To support the show, please visit BetterHealthGuy.com/donate. If you'd like to be added to my newsletter, visit BetterHealthGuy.com/newsletters. And this and other shows can be found on YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify.
[01:27:31.16] Thanks for listening to this BetterHealt Guy Blogcast with Scott, your Better Health Guy. To check out additional shows and learn more about Scott's personal journey to better health, please visit BetterHealthGuy.com.
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Disclaimer
The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or as information to facilitate self-treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health-related decisions with your own personal medical authority.
