Dr. Scott Treadway on formulating and detox

Will Falconer, DVM 0:10

Welcome everybody. It's Dr. Will Falconer with another episode of Vital Animal Podcast. And it is my great pleasure today to welcome a friend and partner, Dr. Scott Treadway. Welcome, Scott.

Dr. Scott Treadway 0:24

Thanks a lot. It's really great being with you, I've wanted to do this with you for some time. Thank you.

Will Falconer, DVM 0:32

Glad to have you here. Scott, if people are first hearing about you, can you give us a little bit of background to help us understand how you came to be associated with supplement formulation? That's how you and I got together. I recently interviewed Kasie Maxwell, an episode or two ago, from San Francisco Raw and she says, "Oh, I know. Dr. Scott Treadway. He's helping me as well. Tell us that background please.

Scott Treadway 1:02

Yes. Okay. She has tremendous energy, really good. Get along with her.

So my background mainly, is in nutritional research. I think my family wanted me to become a physician but I was always interested in nutrition. I was an athlete when I was young I became really interested in when I about 18 years old. That was some time ago. I went through different evolutions of study, mainly in nutrition.

Eventually, I got to Ayurvedic medicine, which I think is really what expresses what's inherent in nature, about the knowledge of how the human body operates, and how we can maximize nutrition. So I got involved in that and then some people asked me to do some formulations for them, because my teacher was actually a formulator and had actually quite a few pharmacies all over the world. And so he taught me about formulations. I learned it from him, and then I got involved with other companies that wanted lines of products and different things. And then I met you, and we started to talk about animals and veterinary medicine, and so on. So I became very interested in that as well.

Will Falconer, DVM 2:55

One of the things that makes you unique, Scott, is that you have from the get go said that we need to have our formulations be based on natural ingredients, right?

Dr. Scott Treadway 3:05

Yeah, that's right. It's really kind of interesting. The whole history of nutrition is all about kind of a struggle, and in a sense, it's still going on today in certain ways. We have a much more aware population that's aware of natural techniques and natural approaches, and approaches like you have, which are mainly preventive. The preventative approach, which I appreciate the most. Even back in the 40s and 50s, when they first had vitamins, or when that term was coined back in the 1930s. Almost a century ago, they didn't really understand what a vitamin was. They were able to finally isolate these nutrients, like vitamins and minerals and different things, and decide how they worked in the body or not to decide, but study how they worked in the body.

Even back then Big Pharma was really looking at this as a major business because this became something started with good intentions. In World War II for example, in the K rations, which are the things that the soldiers would would use as meals that had a long shelf life that they were able to carry out onto the field and so on. They wanted to make sure that they had enough energy and enough proper nutrition. So they gave them all these K rations that were packed with vitamins and minerals and things. A lot of them were synthetic because they learned back in the 30s and 40s to make synthetic nutrients. That became this interesting conflict between natural and Synthetic.

The truth is that I really do believe in naturally occurring nutrients as being the best because this is what nature makes. We have a lot of belief in technology. Technology is wonderful. We've learned so much in terms of transportation, communication, all of those things. But can we make an apple? No, we can't. We've never been able to make even like one cell of a plant or anything, anything living, it seems to be impossible to make something like that, because it's the intelligence of nature, that really is at the core of the creation of proper nutrition. That means it can't be made by men, just this can't be done.

Will Falconer, DVM 5:56

In a nutshell, if we're if we're feeding, artificially synthetically made vitamins and minerals and such, versus those things that come from nature, how does the body view those two things?

Scott Treadway 6:11

The body is very intelligent. It recognizes the difference between synthetic and natural. For example, talk about vitamin C for a second, vitamin C is something they call ascorbic acid. Ascorbic acid is really just a chemical. It's really a part. It's like a wrapper you can say, but it's really just a part of the vitamin C of the whole vitamin C.

If you eat an orange or something, it has vitamin C in it, but that's natural vitamin C in its whole. It has all these other constitutes that are part of it, that the body recognizes as a whole vitamin C, and that's what it uses. For the purposes of good skin, health and good immune system (connective tissue), all those things that vitamin C is good for because the body's recognizing a whole vitamin C.

If you put in a part vitamin C, what you're doing is you're actually creating a body burden. Even though it might work a little bit, but the reason it would work a little bit, maybe 1%, or 2%, is because the body pulls the other constitutes that it needs to make a whole vitamin C from the rest of the body. That's actually what happens. These synthetics, the body sees a synthetic and says, "Oh, I see, you gave me a part, okay, well, I'll make a whole because, you know, the human body is amazing, it can make anything, it makes all these proteins out of amino acids, and it can do a lot of things that are just miraculous.

The idea is that if you have a synthetic product of any kind, or whether it's a nutrient or food or whatever you find it in, it's really a drug, it really is. There's going to be side effects. Every every drug always has a side effect. There's never a drug that doesn't have a side effect, put it that way. Synthetics are the same thing. They really are drugs are not really natural, naturally occurring nutrients.

If you go to a doctor's office, or anybody, sometimes what they'll do is they'll give you, they're supposed to by law, at least on the human side of things, when you go to see a physician, they give you sometimes it looks like a phone book, full of all the side effects that you're going to get from this thing, you have to sign off and say, "Okay, whatever you say."

There's a big difference between naturally occurring and synthetic. I like to make everything naturally occurring because in formulations you want to give. You don't want to create a burden for an animal or human or anybody. What you want to do is you want to give the naturally occurring nutrients that you get from food that you get from natural, naturally nutrient rich diet.

Will Falconer, DVM 9:34

Right. Makes perfect sense. We joined forces last year in forming Vital Pet Health, the company that's making our line of natural products for pets. And one of those products is our really popular Canine Immune Complete transfer factor based formula. But I've asked you on today to tell us about another exciting product we now carry called VAD or Vital Animal Detox. Tell us what makes this one special, Scott

Scott Treadway 10:01

The inspiration for that actually came from a human product that we gave to veterans from the Middle East. I had a friend, a doctor who was treating these people in Ohio. He told me on because it's such a mess, they go over to Iraq and then they go to Falugia, and they get this depleted uranium and they come back like they have radiation sickness. I have to detox these people, because when they go to the VA hospitals, they just all they're doing is just giving them painkillers.

Will Falconer, DVM 10:45

Wow.

Scott Treadway 10:48

They did they just palliate the thing, but they don't really get to the root of it and help them out. They're in there for years, just suffering. I just really wanted to help him out. I said, "Look, I understand what you say, you want to help them out and you want you want something natural?" Yes.

So we worked on this formula that has zeolite. It had a few herbs at that time, zeolite plus a few herbs that were known to be natural chelators, meaning that you could take the food supplement that we would develop, that's like VAD, and then you were able to basically give a person chelation therapy. Chelation therapy is something that's popular, where you go to a [indistinguishable] they give you an IV and they help remove toxins from your system. It seemed to work pretty well, so it was good.

It was good inspiration and I said, well, you know, like you and I have talked about dogs, especially I think because they're on the ground. They're picking up them with their nose and their paws. And they're basically naked, right? And they're walking around…

Will Falconer, DVM 12:04

And barefoot.

Scott Treadway 12:05

Yeah, barefoot, they’re getting into all kinds of stuff, right? We don't know what they're getting into because we can't watch him all the time but the thing is, they're down in the ground. That's where all the toxins are. Everything falls down. I mean, most of the toxins, they're in the air too.

So humans are exposed to toxins but I think dogs are supposed to a lot more toxins than humans just because they're stooping down and they're smelling everything, and they're going everywhere.

Will Falconer, DVM 12:35

They use their tongues as well, right to taste something.

Dr. Scott Treadway 12:38

That's right. That was sort of the inspiration, the thing is to try to help out with a naturally chelating formula. This goes well with the other product that we have, which is the CIC Canine Immune Complete, which is for the immune system. Not only do you want to help the immune system, but you also want to help a dog with its natural detox, which has to do with the kidneys and the liver and, and what it does to get rid of toxins on a daily basis. But look at the epidemics we have. Even with dogs and cats. All this cancer and all this.

Will Falconer, DVM 13:26

Number one, cancers now, I think for well over a decade, the number one reason animals die after the age of middle middle age, you know, dogs especially, we know that. And we learned a couple episodes back from Dr. Pitcairn, this was kind of a mind blower, but listeners heard him say that there were 100,000 approved chemicals used in manufacturing, agriculture and pharma. It's like how does a body that evolved over millennia, or at least hundreds of thousands of years, how does it body deal with something that's just brand new in the 1940s coming out of World War Two? Well, you can imagine it's got to be difficult.

Dr. Scott Treadway 14:13

It's amazing how many chemicals we have now. If you look at the diseases, human and animal diseases, they weren't even existed 40 years ago, 50 years, 60 years ago, we didn't have kids with autism, cats leukemia that just happening. And now it's auto immune.

Will Falconer, DVM 14:38

Oh, big time autoimmune diseases, right?

Dr. Scott Treadway 14:41

Oh, yeah.

Will Falconer, DVM 14:43

So many kids are autoimmune. Adults are autoimmune. Yeah, we see a lot of it in the pets as well.

Dr. Scott Treadway 14:50

Exactly. I think that you know, we have to help ourselves of course, but we have to help our pets at least, often like our children, right? We have to help them out and give them something. Help them detox on a daily basis, because this is what's happening. We're picking up all this stuff daily.

Will Falconer, DVM 15:10

So we definitely have a need. We've got lots of toxins in our world, and how does the Vital Animal Detox work? What what are some of these key ingredients that help get this stuff out of our pets?

Dr. Scott Treadway 15:44

Yeah, the main ingredient is something known as zeolite. Zeolite, it's been around a long time, in fact, fairly recently, with the Fukushima incident over in Japan, they actually use truckloads of zeolite. They just backed up the trucks and dumped it on on the area because it absorbs the contaminants, the radioactive contaminants, like uranium, that kind of thing. It picks up heavy metals.

So it's negatively charged. It's like a crystal, basically, it is a crystal. It's like a crystal cage. It has to be cleaned, we'll get to that, I'll tell you in a second why, but it has the ability then to sort of basically attract some heavy metals into that cage, and then sort of traps it in there, because it has that negative charge and the contaminants are all, even chemicals are all charged, these toxins are mostly charged, positive itself.

It works really, really great. You have to have a clean form, the form that we use is kind of like an off white, which means it's been cleaned mechanically. When you first dig it out of the ground, it's like a sediment, almost like sand, it's actually made of silicon. And these little pieces, they can't clump together, either, you have to micronize it. We do a process called micronization. And then we also clean it thoroughly. That actually changes the color of it. Sometimes it's greenish or pinkish but when we're done cleaning, that's kind of like white basically a little bit off white looking. It's important to have that really clean, the zeolite. Then we turn it into the powder form. That's the main ingredient.

Then there's some others. We could just go over briefly, I won’t go over every ingredient. It was like 12 all together. But they're all they're all for chelation purposes. In other words, they all work really well. And they're known to work. There's been studies on all of this.

So for example, another one would be the, see the next main one, actually cilantro. That's something you put on your salad. It's also good for removing mercury, and lead and some other heavy metals from the system. We have various other herbs. Let me see if I can mention a couple more to you. Of course, the main one. And we mentioned the type of zeolite I think that's really important.

So cilantro, and then we have something called Shilajit, which,

Will Falconer, DVM 19:19

Oh, yeah. Tell us about that one.That's a really interesting one.

Dr. Scott Treadway 19:23

It really is. It comes from the Ayurvedic tradition. And it's kind of used like a panacea. In other words, if, if an Ayurvedic physician can't figure out what's, what's going to work, sometimes he'll just turn to Shilajit. That works. Because it's there works for a lot of things. But mainly, it's in there in this formula, VAD formula…

Will Falconer, DVM 19:51

Tell people where this comes from Scott. It's fascinating to me.

Dr. Scott Treadway 19:58

It comes from the foothills of the Himalayas. And what happens is this is made actually over millions of years. What happens is plants that are growing in the foothills there, in the granite where there's a lot of granite, will just die and decay. Then they'll pass through by geothermal purposes when it rains. Then there's this pressure as it goes through the cracks of the granite, and it mixes within the minerals, they're there from the ground and from other sources. It takes a long time but eventually like in the summertime on the face cliffs, these semi mountain, this foothills, it'll start to ooze out. That might take several hundred years for it to get to that point, but start oozing out.

And then the people they're like in the Hunza Valley, for example, or some of these places where Himalayan groups of people live, they collect it and they make scaffolding, they go up the cliffs and scrape it off. It's kind of like a gum like stuff, it's very unusual. It's hard as a rock at room temperature, you can hit it with a hammer, and it will just split into tiny fragments. If you leave it in a warm room, you know, for a couple of weeks, it will kind of melt. It's just it looks like glass, but it's very, very much concentrated with a lot of minerals. Almost every everything in the periodic chart.

When I did my study on Shilajit, I set out to see how many minerals were in there. It had 75 minerals. I think if I had done even a better analysis, I probably could have found 100. I mean, it's just amazing. So this helps to rejuvenate the liver. Especially the urinary tract including the kidneys, and even the gallbladder. Those are things that are really important for natural detox. What we're doing is we're basically helping the animal to become more efficient, and keep a clean liver in an efficient way to naturally detox on its own.

Will Falconer, DVM 22:57

So we're actually using it as a nourishment it sounds like, to nourish those organs of elimination. Is that right?

Dr. Scott Treadway 23:04

Yes. So that's kind of like a little bit different than the other ingredients in the sense that we were actually nourishing them and helping them to maintain a stronger liver function and the stronger kidney function so they can have a better chance of eliminating and chelating. Now, some of these things, that's the first defense is the animal’s own organs of elimination.

Will Falconer, DVM 23:38

Right.

Dr. Scott Treadway 23:40

We're supporting them, as well as adding things like the zeolite and cilantro, we add Dulce sea lettuce, which is really good. And that works for free radical scavenging, free radical scavengers just means that in the bloodstream, there's a lot of these toxins are floating around. It basically sort of grabs on to those and helps to take them through the kidneys and eliminate them out of the body, in a natural way. We have a few other things in there. We don't have to get into everything but there's a few like the triphala, which you're familiar with that one as well, I think. They call it triphala because it's ph in English, you say the ph with an F sound but, this is a an Ayurvedic group. I think the ph is it's actually “tri” which means three and then phal means fruit, so it's three fruit.

Will Falconer, DVM 24:54

Right, right. I take it every day.

Dr. Scott Treadway 24:59

I like it too. I also take it daily. It helps to cleanse out the intestine. While the dog is doing this natural detox and being helped with the Vital Animal Detox on a daily basis, then we just assure that the intestines remain cleansed. On a micro level, it scrubs the walls of the intestines and helps eliminate these toxins.

All together, we're talking about many ingredients actually.

Will Falconer, DVM 25:36

That was one of the things that impressed me is that it takes a formulator who knows how things combine to put things together that are going to complement one another, right? I mean, you can't just throw everything that might help the body all into a, you know, a vat and say, “Well, here's our product,” right? You got to know how this bounces off of that and interacts with that, correct?

Dr. Scott Treadway 26:02

You're absolutely right. In fact, a lot of people take sort of the kitchen sink approach. I see them all the time, people say, “Just throw stuff in, that doesn't matter whether it's synthetic or natural. Ah, that works and I got a study on this and they work.” You have to understand the synergies, in other words, how things are going to react with each other, and also how they're enhanced as they work with each other. That's the synergy thing. In order to get a good formulation you have to redo it a lot.

Will Falconer, DVM 26:37

yeah, yeah.

Dr. Scott Treadway 26:41

Sometimes if you've worked with herbal extracts, and, different things over many years, you start to get an intuition. I think that's part of it, too. Just that after 30-40 years, you have an intuition of what's going to work and what isn't, and then oh, okay, well, that worked out.

Will Falconer, DVM 27:04

Yeah, it's one of the things I appreciate about homeopathy, and I think it's the same with your work, is that it's a left and a right brained thing, right? A certain amount of logical stuff, this should work. But then you also have to have that intuitive side that says, “Well, I experienced this, in this set of animals, or in your case, maybe the set of humans etc. And so I'm going to be cautious about that…” you got to balance both sides of that equation of intellect and intuition, right?

Dr. Scott Treadway 27:35

No, absolutely, you're right about that. So these two products together, I think are good, people that were, that are giving their pets, the Vital Animal Detox that gets important for daily, to have that daily detox going on. But also, the immune system, what you've talked about before, quite a bit. So the Canine Immune Complete, and you can take those together. And that creates a synergy as well, because you're helping the immune system at the same time as you're, as you're helping the animal detox. And that's a powerful combination. You can almost not worry about what they're getting into, if you do that.

Will Falconer, DVM 28:22

Beautiful, beautiful. I wanted to also just ask about, some people when they hear the word detox, they think about a healing crisis, if you do it wrong, you end up with a pretty sick body as they’re throwing these toxins out? Do we have any worries about that with the Vital Animal Detox?

Dr. Scott Treadway 28:44

The reason that we don't is because the body's intelligent, it takes what it needs. We don't know exactly how this happens, but we do know that the body knows what it needs in terms of detoxification, just like it knows what it needs in terms of nutrition. It works both ways. In terms of nutrition and detoxification, the body knows best. If you're giving them these things, it's not like you can overdose them or something. We should go by the directions, obviously, instructions are there for the for the basic daily details.

Will Falconer, DVM 29:27

Dosing by bodyweight, right?

Dr. Scott Treadway 29:30

Things are also balanced. For example, we have the Dulce and we also have the shilajit. If you were just taking only shilajit by itself, you would have to cycle off. In other words, you could take it for five days, and you have to cycle off two; if you take it for four weeks, and then you might want to cycle off two or three weeks. There's some things that are like that, that would make a person or an animal detoxify too quickly. So they can't detoxify too quickly or too slowly for that matter. You have to kind of create a balance there. We've done that in this formulation, as well.

Will Falconer, DVM 30:15

Beautiful, beautiful. So it sounds like that may be the difference too, is that because these are all natural ingredients and there's nothing artificial in it? The body is going to have an easier time sorting it out, it's not going to overdo things?

Dr. Scott Treadway 30:30

Exactly. It's just like if you were to take an extract of oranges to make it simple. For vitamin C, or concentrated rose hips, that's really high in vitamin C, the body's gonna uptake them on a nutritional level, whatever it needs, and eliminate the rest. So, the same thing goes for detox, the body's not going to allow itself to become too toxic by uptaking too much of the of the detox ingredient.

So you see that happen. It doesn't happen though. Here's the interesting thing: that (intelligent sorting by the body) cannot happen when when you're being given synthetics or chemicals. Let’s say you’re you're taking chemotherapy, for example. Or you're going into a detoxification program, which uses chemical chelation therapy. It has no choice, because it's like, if I were to put you in a bath of formaldehyde, your body is going to be forced to absorb a certain amount of that.

Will Falconer, DVM 31:51

Yes and you can imagine flooding the veins with EDTA, you don't have any choice, right? It's there.

Dr. Scott Treadway 32:00

Exactly. It's there, you can't get away from. So that's the beauty of approaching things on a naturally occurring basis, is that you let the intelligence of the body sort of take over and sort out things and balance things because it wants to be in balance. The body's very intelligent, the body of a dog, or a cat is also very intelligent wants that balance. You have to introduce something that's not going to cause side effects or problems.

Will Falconer, DVM 32:35

Beautiful, beautiful. So that the idea, I've called it the Daily Double, I think, is having the Canine Immune Complete supporting that immune system arm of the animals, and the Vital Animal Detox, making sure the machinery is clean and free to function fully and as intended by nature, correct? that the two are really a good match for each other.

Dr. Scott Treadway 33:00

Yeah, I like the way you put that, that's true. I think both together is good. As opposed to just one or the other. I think they really complement each other that way, as well.

Will Falconer, DVM 33:18

Well, this has been great. Scott, I really appreciate you coming on with us. I I'm looking forward to my own version of Vital Animal Detox coming. I think you're sending me some; slow boat with customs and everything where I live now. But I'm looking forward to having it here. Because, like anywhere in the world, I live amongst toxins as well. We see mosquito sprayers going down the streets here. It's something I'm keen to get into my body as soon as I can.

Dr. Scott Treadway 33:54

I'm glad. Really great to finally connect with you and spend some time talking with you. Thanks.

Will Falconer, DVM 34:05

Perfect. All right. Well, this has been another episode of the Vital Animal Podcast. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. We'll be back next week with another episode. Stay tuned and do remember to subscribe and leave us a rating and a review on Apple podcasts if you'd like, if you found value here. This is Dr. Will Falconer. Over and out for now.

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