Why My Barber Thinks I'm A Freak (& Crazy Health Discoveries You Can Get From Your Hair, Your Urine & Your Stool).

Ben Greenfield (0:01)

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

Wendy Myers (0:04)

That's where we're all getting this stuff, and it's unavoidable in our toxic environment. We've got 100,000 chemicals in the environment. There's dozens of metals being dredged up from the earth's crust, from industry, coal burning, and go on and on. We just accumulate this stuff over time.

People that are supplementing with iron or eating enriched flour, this is a form of iron. Again, they're like iron flanks. Our body can't use them, and it builds up in our body and causes various problems.

SPEAKER_3 (0:36)

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition. Voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

All the information you need in one place, right here, right now, on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Ben Greenfield (1:34)

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and I think the lady who cuts my hair thinks I'm a freak, because every time I visit her for a haircut, I've got this little envelope with me, and I'm politely requesting that she save a few clumps of my hair clippings for me to put in an envelope and mail to my friend who is a guest on today's podcast. Her name is Wendy Myers, and I don't just send her my hair because she has some strange Ben Greenfield hair fetish.

She's actually an expert when it comes to something called hair mineral analysis. And actually, she doesn't stop there. She does urine and stool analysis too. So actually, last month, I sent her everything, the hair, the urine, the stool, all the goods. And she was actually able to delve into and find a whole host of really interesting health information that we're going to delve into on today's show. So if you're interested in how you can test your body, the things you can find out about mineral ratios, metals, just basically how to delve into the details of your biomarkers in a really interesting way, this episode is going to be quite up your alley. Wendy is a functional diagnostic nutritionist, and she's a certified holistic health coach. And she's the founder of a website called Live to 110, even though I think it should be named Live to 180 Kind of an underachiever, Wendy.

I'm just saying, I've heard there's people out there who are targeting 600, 700, 800 I mean, why stop at 110, right?

Wendy Myers (3:16)

Well, that URL was taken, live280.com.

Ben Greenfield (3:19)

Yeah, oh, really? Was it?

Wendy Myers (3:21)

A lot of them are.

Ben Greenfield (3:23)

That's funny. I didn't realize. Oh, 110 sounds pretty good.

And, Wendy, we've talked a lot before at different health conferences and fitness conferences, and I see you at places like Paleo FX. I know that you're really kind of immersed in this whole process of analyzing people's body based on the strange parts of their body that they send to you, like their hair. So anyways, the first question that I have for you is basically the big raised eyebrow that I get from everybody when I tell them that I do hair mineral analysis, because they say that it's not really a reflection of what's actually going on inside the body because it's hair or it's dead or it's cut off. So can you explain in kind of scientific terms how hair analysis actually works?

Wendy Myers (4:13)

Yes, and that's a reasonable doubt that people have, especially if someone's coming from a medical field or whatnot, and they just don't know anything about hair mineral analysis or they don't know how to read it because it's not what meets the eye at all. So you have to know how to read and analyze the hair mineral analysis for it to be of any useful information. And hair mineral analysis is, you know, it's used in all of the sciences. You know, hair mineral analysis uses Mass Spectroscopy ICP. That's inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.

And mineral testing by Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy was developed almost 100 years ago. And it has been and continues to be the standard way to test for minerals in geology, agriculture, plant and animal and human tissue studies.

And it is also the standard method of environmental mineral testing used throughout the world. And, you know, as a test, HMA or hair tissue mineral analysis isn't perfect. There's no perfect test. It's simply a screening test, a tool that gives me a lot of information about the state of the body. And it's kind of like a treasure map that tells me where to dig further. It's almost like a blood CBC panel. That's just a screening tool. It tells you where to dig further, where to investigate further. And so it's not like I'm using this in and of itself. I do other metals testing because hair mineral analysis by itself doesn't measure all of the metals.