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What are humic acid, fulvic acid and Zeolite?
How naturally sourced earth minerals support human health and nutrition.
In this INTERVIEW with Rob Seeman, Steve Lankford explores the unusual products offered by The Food Movement Company. Rob shares his passion for the natural products industry and talks about the company’s innovative products, including fulvic humic products and Alkalize 55. He also discusses the challenges faced by consumers, store owners, and manufacturers in the industry.
Rob Seeman is a natural products industry expert who has been involved in the industry since his time as a health food store owner. They discuss how Rob became passionate about the industry and why it is so important to him, as well as the innovative products Rob’s company, the Food Movement Company, creates. They also touch on Rob’s podcast, Whole Earth Radio, and his blog, Botanical Nutrition.
Rob discusses how the American diet can make people sick, and how finding the connection between what you put in your body and the way the body works can help people feel better. Rob talks about his own experience of getting sick and then finding a health food store that helped them understand how to address the root cause of their problems. Rob begins with a discussion of the healthcare industry and how it is often driven by profits rather than by care for the people using the products and services. This has led to a number of challenges, including a lack of good information sources for people seeking answers to their health problems.
Our discussion includes exploring these innovative products.
Alkalize 55
Alkalize 55 is a unique nutritional supplement made from triple-fermented biodynamically-grown foods, and fulvic minerals complexed with natural humic acid. Each capsule contains over 80 bioavailable trace elements, many of which are believed to be essential for optimal physical performance.
Black Earth Zeolite with Fulvic Minerals
AWARD WINNING ZEOLITE – Black Earth® Zeolite is a highly purified extract of Zeolite Clinoptilolite in a based of humic and fulvic minerals. Every batch is third-party tested & very safe, produced in USA exclusively by the Food Movement Natural Products Company.
MADE WITH HUMIC & FULVIC ACID – Black Earth® Zeolite supplement contains both Humic Acid and Fulvic Acid. Both of these organic acids have been shown to have numerous health benefits to the human body.* Fulvic Acid is a rich source of additional oxygen for the body.* These black minerals from the Earth make mineral compounds like Zeolite more usable, and more readily available to the cells of the body.*
Black Earth Fulvic Minerals
- PROMOTES ALKALINITY – An alkaline environment is important to maintain health and wellness. Modern diet, stress, and environmental toxins all force your body to work overtime to maintain your normal PH balance. Black Earth Minerals will help your body maintain this range ensuring a healthy pH balance.
- CONTAINS FULVIC ACID – BLACK EARTH® FULVIC is composed of both both humic acid and the higher molecular-weight humate fulvic acid. Fulvic Acid is a super charged mineral blend found in Humic Acid, with unique health benefits.
- CONTAINS TRACE MINERALS – Trace minerals are incredibly important minerals that our bodies require small amounts of to maintain healthy biologic functions. Humic acid is an important mineral compound consisting of over 70 trace minerals.
Rob Seeman
Rob Seeman has worked in the health food business his entire adult life as a vitamin store clerk, store owner, natural products broker and as the founder of the Food Movement Company. Based in the Chicago Illinois area, The Food Movement makes plant based nutritional supplements and organic super food products. In his spare time Rob maintains a blog at Botanical Nutrition and a podcast Whole Earth Radio.
The Food Movement
The Food Movement has been an industry leader in the creation of plant-based nutrients, offering many health food industry ‘firsts’. Today our focus is continually on creating the highest quality products.
The Food Movement is founded on the belief that the human body has an innate ability to heal itself given the proper nourishment. We believe in not just healing with whole foods, but also in supplementing our diets with specific nutrients that may be missing. We feel this approach is crucial to our survival as a people and a planet. This involves raw materials in their purest forms, formulations which correspond to the systems of the body, and an overarching philosophy that respects the wisdom of nature.
As part of our mission we work to eliminate hunger in the world through donations of at least 11% of our profits annually to worthy organizations ranging from Trees for Life to the Chicago Food Depository to Peace Possible… and beyond!
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
trace minerals, humic acid, superfoods, fulvic acid, Zeolite, Rob Seeman, The Food Movement,
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
Rob Seeman: The Food Movement Company
Rob Seeman on the Journey to Creating His Natural Health Company
The Importance of Addressing the Root Cause of Health Problems
The Food Movement CompanyThe Benefits of Zeolite for Health and Wellness
The Benefits of Superfoods
Pomegranate and Fulvic Acid
The Benefits of Humates for Blood, Alkalinity, Brain Health, and Gut Integrity
The Benefits of Trace Minerals and Humic/Fulvic Acid
The Benefits of Nutrients for the Body
The Benefits and Risks of Lifestyle Drugs
The Importance of Acid-Alkaline Balance in the Body
The Effects of Acidosis on the Human Body
The Benefits of Zeolite for Health and Wellness
The Importance of Endorsements in the Health Industry
The Future of Food
Transcript
SPEAKERS
Rob Seeman, Steve Lankford
Introduction 00:09
Hello and welcome to Health Quest dedicated to nutrition and your good health support for Health Quest has been provided by some of America’s best nutritional companies and now Health Quest with your host, Steve Lankford.
Steve Lankford 00:30
Hello, and welcome back to Health Quest Podcast. I’m your host, Steve Lankford. Thanks for joining me, I’m glad you’re here. This is going to be an interesting interview. This is going to be with Rob Seeman. Rob is somebody I’ve known, oh, maybe almost 20 years, perhaps he’s been in the natural products industry, his whole adult life as I have been, it’s a passion for him. It’s a passion for me, Rob started off basically, like many of us working in a health food store, moved on to being a store owner. And from there, he’s gone on to be a natural products broker, visiting all kinds of stores, helping others learn about these innovative products that are foundational on our industry. One of the companies that he worked for, that you may know is Nordic Naturals. We’ve had many Nordic Naturals interviews on Health Quest Podcast, and you can actually go back and access all of those previous interviews. He’s now been the founder of the food movement company. I’m not even sure how many years it’s been. But I know it’s been a while he’s been focusing on this company, they create some very innovative and unusual products. Definitely not a me too company.
So you’re not going to find vitamin A D, you’re going to find some interesting things like a fulvic humic products that I’m not even very familiar with. And that’s where we’re going to explore some of these unusual products. So Rob has his passion for the natural products industry. And he’s like a lot of us where we found our passion early. And it was so real, so strong, so powerful, that here we have made it an avocation and a vocation for a lifetime. He sponsored one of the previous interviews we did with Dr. Decker Weiss. And Dr. Weiss, who is a naturopathic cardiologist had some very interesting things to say about Rob and his company, and one of the products that they make called Alkalize, 55. And we’ll maybe touch base on that today.
So he’s a person that’s recognized in the industry, he’s been involved, knows a lot of people, and has taken a very interesting approach to his company’s product mix. And that’s what I really appreciate about Rob is that he has taken something that very few people that I know have talked about and explained and promoted for the benefit of the consumers. And I’m really looking forward to exploring this content with him. He has his own podcast called Whole Earth radio, and you can access that. He also has a blog at Botanical Nutrition. So he’s passionate about sharing his information with others why he was willing to be on our podcast today. And it’s in that capacity, I’m pleased to introduce to you Rob Seeman. Rob, welcome to Health Quest Podcast.
Rob Seeman 03:27
Hey, Steve, thanks for having me on. Always a pleasure.
Steve Lankford 03:30
It’s a pleasure for me, you and I have known each other a long time, I had a store and you were a broker for our store. And I remember how so many times we would talk about a lot of other things besides just product. I mean, you have a passion for this industry. I do. We’ve watched these many changes over many years as every industry. And so I’ve always appreciated the chance that you and I have had to speak together, because it wasn’t always as a buyer salesperson, even though that’s what we both did. We expanded those conversations many times over many, in depth discussions about the challenges for consumers, for store owners, for manufacturers. And as a broker, he’s very familiar with that, as a manufacturer. He’s very familiar with it. So he knows this topic very well, from both sides of that equation. Well, Rob, before we get into our conversation, tell our listeners a little bit about your history, how it is that you got interested in natural health, and a little bit about your journey that brought you this far to where you felt compelled to create a company to offer these unusual and innovative products.
Rob Seeman 04:46
Was your I’m happy to tell that story of Steve because I think it really illustrates how this industry is for a lot of us. It’s not just a business. It is as you said, a personal passion because we have some kind of person Well story. So mine is essentially that as a young man, I was in high school in North Carolina where I grew up working at a Burger King, I found out I could get my meals at 50% off as an employee. So I didn’t just eat there. When I was working there, I started eating there, basically three meals a day. And if you’ve ever seen the movie about the other fast food chain Supersize Me, I was 17 years old, I didn’t gain a lot of weight. But what started happening was that I would throw up after I ate, I didn’t understand at 17 how my body worked very well, I had never been introduced to any of the principles that are so common now that that you and I have delved into so much, I was very naive at 17. It’s food, they sell it as food, it should be fine. If there was something wrong with it, they wouldn’t sell it. I had no concept of buyer beware at 17.
So my mother took me to the doctor, and he said, Well, you have a spastic colon. That’s why this is happening to you. Oh, it’s no one ever said what are you eating young man? they assume probably that I ate like a 17 year old American. And they were right. Even worse. So because I had just really gone into a bad eating pattern. So anyway, the remedy for a spastic colon at that time was a little pill that stops your colon from working stops it from being spastic, it also stops it basically from being functional. So I kind of went from bad to worse, it relieved my symptom. But it did not address this may sound familiar, right? The root cause because it didn’t look at diet at all. And I got I got sick, I got really sick. I will spare you the details.
But it was all related to my digestive tract and what I was eating, and I got so frustrated at about 17 so desperate that I walked into a health food store and basically said, Can you help me and I was able to stand there and listen to a woman who was an herbalist who owned the store, who explained in depth how interrelated all of this is, after that, I discovered macrobiotics and went on a macrobiotic diet for some time, and eventually became vegan for about 10 years. In other words, I went the total 180 of the American diet of the extreme version, I’ll admit of the American diet that I was doing as a teenager that was making me sick. And I discovered this connection that so many of us discover in a health food store, the connection between what you put in your body, the amount of nutrients, the type of quality of food, but also, this interconnected way that the body works that no one ever tells you about in mainstream medicine, at least they weren’t when I was 17, maybe it’s getting more progressive one can only hope.
I think all my time in the natural products industry. I have heard stories like these over and over again, it seems to be kind of a commonality is that people feel so much better. They have gained so much from this, and it is such an aha moment. And also this sense of this should be more mainstream. Everybody should know that when you get sick, you don’t have to suppress the symptom, you can address the root cause. Does anybody ask you if you’re taking a multivitamin? Are you getting enough B vitamins? Are you getting enough d3? These questions are prior to now, perhaps it’s getting better, but they really have not been asked. And the question is, what is your symptom? What is the drug we can give you to relieve that symptom?
And then you come into what I learned are iatrogenic problems, those are problem caused by the solution. When the solution the pharmaceutical solution is worse than the problem or it makes things worse. It may make things better in the short term by relieving the symptom, but it’s not working holistically with the body. So this is the story you’re going to probably hear from everyone in our industry. To some extent, everyone has some version of this, even if they didn’t have personal problems, maybe your Michael Murrays of the world just or maybe just genius, medical folks, and they didn’t personally suffer. They just had an aha moment in some other way. Because it isn’t always I got better now I want to make other folks better. That’s my story. And that was why I wound up working in a health food store.
Steve Lankford 09:35
Well, it’s a very common story. And I always ask my guests what led them into this. And I got to say 50/60 75% of the time, it is from a personal experience, if not their own, their child, their parents, their spouse could be anybody that they’re closely related to, as well as themselves reaches a limit where the modern medical model is isn’t sufficient to move them forward and you hit upon something that is very common. And one of my passions is to describe to people how these drugs are not necessarily making us better or healthier, they are managing the symptoms. So as if, when you stop the spasms, but go into constipation, you don’t necessarily have the symptom again, but you’re not healed. If you have arthritis, and you take pain medication, and now you can dance as if all your problems are fixed, they’re not, they’re continuing to get worse, it’s a very common problem.
And people don’t understand that they think that these drugs are going to cure them to help them actually get better. And when you look into actually how little of that actually takes place with some of these common health issues that we have, it’s no wonder that people start turning to solutions. One of the challenges is, there aren’t as many places to go get good answers, like you got answers in a health food store. So much so that you became the clerk and then a store owner, I was a store owner for over 45 years. So I know those problems that people deal with. And I know how these drugs are not making them healthy, they may be making them worse in other ways. So this is really a common theme that we share, and so many in our industry actually share. Unfortunately, there’s a whole growth of interest in our industry that’s born out of profits, and profit potential, that has nothing to do with somebody caring about the results that the people are getting.
So one of our messages is you do have to pay attention to the sources of your information, make sure they’re credible, make sure that what you’re hearing is corroborated by other experts in the industry, and that these companies are able to provide you with the information, you need to be confident that they are a good company. So we’ll explore some of that when we get to talking about the food movement. So I appreciate your history and how this came about. And again, not surprising. So tell us a little bit about the food movement. What were the origins of that what spurred you into actually looking to expand into a company that provides product, I mean, that’s a whole different kind of business model, going from being a store owner, and a broker to actually being a company owner, and then having a whole other set of challenges. Tell us about your, your motivation and your history there.
Rob Seeman 12:43
Oh, sure. So when I started the food movement company, it was 2011, I was doing two other things in the industry, never a dull moment here I was the owner of a store, the part owner of a store, a co-owner of a health food store with another partner in the industry and operating holders marketing, which I still do, we represent other brands and do their sales and marketing here in the Midwest. At that time, I had larger staff that holder with marketing and had a couple of folks working for me that are now out on their own as brokers Interestingly, some really great folks. And at that time, I was able to kind of juggle all that and have a health food store and be a broker. But at some point, my partner and I decided to sell the store, we got a good offer.
And one of the interesting cross sectional sort of set of events there was that I was putting together a private label superfood line for the store, which I can just say is called earthly goods at the time and I was really getting into it because private label lines, a lot of times it’s turnkey, with the vitamins that usually is you get a bottle it’s a premade formula, you put your label on it, that’s what private label usually means. It’s a stock item that you’re labeling under your story or brand or what have a fairly common thing and there’s nothing wrong with it. But in superfoods, I wanted to create a private label Moringa now no one was selling Moringa so it I kind of said what, what I was really trying to do was create more of my own line, a custom line for the store. But I was looking at it, I was naively looking at it as I didn’t realize the difference at that time between sort of turnkey items and creating your own item from scratch. So I went out and tried to create items from scratch to build our private label. I did find some street private label opportunities. some of those superfoods, a lot of superfoods are somewhat commodities.
So the food movement 10 plus years ago as the that early version that originally was going to be a store private label, but became the food movement. It was going to be earthly good superfoods, originally, but it became the food movement, super foods, and I wanted to raise money for good causes. So I said, we’re going to give a portion of these proceeds to hunger relief, because I was looking for a way to take the philosophy bigger, and not just give people a product, kind of what you and I are talking about, I want to always have the holistic nature of this as part of the conversation. So when you find a supplement, or a food that can make people better, and when I worked in a health food store, I would always try to tell people, are you getting enough sleep? Are you drinking enough good clean water? are you do you have a lot of stress in your life, have you addressed that kind of thing, not in a playing Doctor sort of way, but more just, hey, I want to bring these points up.
Because I know at points in my life when I was sick, nobody mentioned how important these basics were. And part of our philosophy here is that all of that works together. So I want to mention to you all have these things. And so as you try to make it more holistic, you got it, you keep looking at food, and even something like Moringa, which, we still sell today, even though we don’t sell goji berries and chia seeds, it became a very, as you said, it is a unique product line, because I was looking at it differently. Because I see all that’s out there, all of the Me too. And all of the very profit driven products that come out like Well, that might help people but you have to look at it in and sort of a cost benefit analysis in the way that I know that customers will have to, because if you wind up on a protocol, you’re going to have a lot of things you have to buy or a certain number of things. So you want to make things affordable, useful if they can do more than one thing. And superfoods are great for that, something like spirulina or Moringa, it doesn’t do any one thing. It has a wide range of nutrients, and superfoods tend to but the next thing that happened in the food movement is that I’m really diving in, I’m learning about the behind the scenes part of the industry that I had only sort of dealt with the front end, I had been selling the products in a store, representing them as a sales rep. Basically, these are great products. Here’s what they do. Here’s the science, but how are they made? And who supplies the ingredients?
Now we’re starting to get more of this on the front end. Now, as you’ve dealt with brand name ingredients. You know why someone might take I’ll just say some theanine, l-theanine, as opposed to, drugstore. l theanine. Why would you use name brand ingredients that are clinically researched? Well, there’s a myriad of reasons, right. So I mean, that kind of approach is something that you learn more of, or I learned more about in putting together the food movement products. You mentioned, d3 is interesting. We don’t make it anymore. But we were one of the first companies to make a plant based vitamin d3. And that opportunity came about because someone was at the trade show. And they wanted people to private label it for their store, they didn’t quite understand that’s a bit of a leap, you’re not going to launch a brand new ingredient, by asking stores to put it in their private label stores don’t have that kind of bandwidth. They’re looking for an intermediary, a brand to launch it, and to go out there and wave the banner and talk about it. food movement, plant based vitamin d3, it’s vegan for the first time ever called a Calciferol. All not from an animal.
And so we did that. And we got customers and we forged these unique relationships with stores. And it became its own thing. And the food movement has been a brand for those past 10 years. It’s gone through a lot of changes. There have been a lot of great people that have worked with us and still a lot of great people today. And I look at my role today as just to be somewhere in the middle. and I’m not a I’m happy to do this interview today. But I’m not one of those brands spokespersons that where it’s all about me I didn’t food movement is not all about me. I am just someone. It’s really about this industry. I think it is about because I see things changing to where the health food store that helped me is changing.
So I wanted the food movement to be a brand that did new and innovative things and specific We’ve partnered with the brick and mortar health food stores, rather than selling direct to consumer online, and we do sell from our website, but we don’t discount at all. And what that means is that if someone goes into their local health food store, and there’s a sale going on, they’re going to get a much better deal than they would on our website. In fact, there’s a store locator on the website, where we’re encouraging them to go to those stores, and find the products there, because there’s a good chance if they do, they’ll find more information, other products that will maybe help them. And if they really get in to the end, they’ll find things like Health Quest Podcasts, maybe we’re trying to tie all this together just to be a part of the solution.
Steve Lankford 20:46
Well, you’ve covered a lot there, Rob. And I really appreciate the depth that and I so much am aligned with your history and your story, and your passion. And really, I would say, for your own brand, you’re kind of a low key guy, you’re not one of those whiz bang kind of this is the end all, as an educator, you want people to know these benefits, and let the benefits speak for themselves. I’m that kind of person as well.
Let people decide what they’re going to do once they have enough information to make a decision. And clearly you have moved into an area of a product mix. That is not common, necessarily. So a lot of people are not going to know about it. So if you don’t know about it, you can’t make a choice. And this is really what the independent health food movement of the last 50, 60, 70 years has been store owners that take this passion, and curate the products and bring the best products to their stores, and then teach their customers how to use them. You don’t get this in any of the even the big box health food stores. You can’t go to a Fresh Thyme or a Whole Foods and ask them what’s good for my cholesterol? Or how do I support by heart health or any of those questions, they’re not allowed to answer those questions. And generally speaking, I don’t think they probably even know how to direct people in those ways. That’s what the small independent health food stores did.
Because it was the passion of those owners to learn those things for themselves and to then pass it on. This is one of the things that keep us up at night, we worry about the future of this industry when we lose that personal connection. And of course, we deal with this internet, the Amazon, of course, everybody knows that a huge marketplace. But you can’t go to Amazon and ask them to explain what is zeolite? And how does it work and how’s it going to benefit me. So we’re trying to find out ways to actually get that information out to consumers, because we need to reach a broader audience or at least have the content available for those people that are interested in it and do find their way to explore these products in when they don’t have a personal contact, I always encourage my listeners to seek out their local independent health food store support them, because they’re the ones who can answer your questions and lead you to the better product. So this is what you want to do. And we’re trying to provide a resource I know you are I know I am.
And we both know many people in this industry that have been part of this educational stream that goes from raw materials to manufacturers to stores ultimately down to consumers, that information chain is harder to maintain. And so we’re trying to be a segment of that, that perhaps can reach that audience where they don’t go to their local health food store, maybe they don’t even have a local health food store where they can do this. So let’s talk about your product mix because I know it’s so innovative. I want you to just list maybe your top five products, what are they? And then let’s get into discussing some of the aspects of those products. You mentioned Moringa where else do you want to cover?
Rob Seeman 24:22
Well, the superfood was the starting point. But as you had mentioned earlier the humic fulvic minerals which we now actually have a trademark on black earth minerals are pretty much all of our top five fall into containing that ingredients so we have some liquid products we have a black earth fulvic trace mineral, we have a black earth zeolite which has been our number one seller, and black earth silver which is humic fulvic minerals with the Nano Colloidal Silver you mentioned earlier Alkalize 55 That’s its own unique formula using those black earth minerals, and also a prebiotic fermented food blend formulated by Dr. Michio Kushi that was the one Dr. Weiss was talking about in the podcast he did with sort of in association with us and his charity Peace Possible, which has now sort of changed but Alkalize 55 has had a real, real following since the early days because, another product that uses the humic fulvic, minerals and food is fulvic/pom, fulvic pomegranate. So, these minerals are such a useful ingredient, that formulation can be somewhat simple. So like fulvic, pomegranate really has two ingredients, it has the black earth mineral base, the humic, fulvic, trace minerals, and organic free dried pomegranate juice. So from our perspective and making the product, there’s really two ingredients. Now within those two ingredients, I mean, how many healing compounds are in pomegranate, I mean, it is a long list of antioxidants that have been well researched just in the pomegranate, within the black earth minerals, the humic acid, the fulvic acid, the over 70, trace minerals, you have a lot of research, a lot of well researched activity in those kinds of nutrients.
And when you put them together, you have a synergy because the fulvic, in particular, helps to escort other nutrients into the cells. And there’s research to back this up, and to support us, including specifically a combination of fulvic acid and pomegranate, there’s research on that. So all of those products that use the humic fulvic minerals, I believe you’re right, we’re still educating people. And one of the ways trying to mix education and marketing, just to be totally transparent here was to create the black earth minerals, you may remember when I first sold these products, and I was going around, Wisconsin with, hey, check out my mineral product, they were very low key, they were originally called Whole Earth minerals.
And the only people by and large, who took me up on it, because, it was hard, harder to sell when we weren’t marketing it very much. But doctors, naturopathic doctors got it. And they were like, Oh, I’ve been looking for a good humic fulvic. And we don’t care that the label looks kind of hokey and isn’t marketed properly. And so that was those were the original customers for those products. That’s how we got proof of concept that I started to get more interested, like, whoa, if this guy, this chiropractor, this naturopath is really recommending this product to all his customers. Maybe I should double down in researching this and it tells me we’ve really got something good. And then the formulation becomes how do you make it available? How do you make it attractive? How do you make it useful?
Because if this is a powerhouse mineral ingredient, and it makes other things more bioavailable, something like Alkalize 55 was just like a aha moment for me where it was like wait a minute, if we could take the fermented foods and I should say for Alkalize 55 You know when I told my story about how I got better, you know my digestive problems, macrobiotics, I started eating fermented foods. I started eating miso and Tempe and Rejuvalac things you don’t hear always so much about the old school. Right and Dr. Kushi and his movement Dr. Ozawa’s movement, the macrobiotics movement was where I got a lot of that information from and they were very cost driven. They wanted they really wanted to help people. They were not looking to make a million dollars, although they probably did very well in the end. That wasn’t the point and Alkalize 55 took Dr. Kushi’s work and put it into a capsule and that was his intention. That was the stated intention to in creating the pre B ingredient which we use as part of Alkalize 55.
So these minerals are pretty amazing. They’re kind of a best kept secret. So for a small company like The Food Movement, it’s like we know we can’t do everything. So how can we do some unique things that maybe will catch some what was the word you used earlier get enough traction with people to that we can continue doing this and we’ll reach some people. Because if you just toil in obscurity, your efforts will not really be fruitful. You have to keep building and reaching more people. And that in itself is success if we’re getting this out to more people, and we know that it’s helping them. that’s really the mission right there.
Steve Lankford 30:27
Well, yeah. And it’s, it grows organically, but you can’t help people if they don’t know about your product. this is where we engage. Historically, it was the independent health food stores that did that, who they understood, after they learned and the importance of passing it on to their customers. Let’s explore this humic fulvic acid, because I think those terms, right, there are going to people are gonna go well, what is that? So give us a foundational introduction to that.
Rob Seeman 31:50
So humic acid and fulvic acid are related compounds that are found in humates. humates are plant matter that has been decomposed over sometimes millions of years, depending on the strain that you find, and they appear in the environment, like strains of gold, if you were to, we don’t do this, but if you chop off the side of a mountain, people do all kinds of things in mining, you would find veins of gold, and you would find veins of humates, there are many places to find humates, because they’re in the water, they’re in the soil. So the struggle is really to find a clean source. And that’s one of the things the food movement has brought to the table is a very clean source of these organic materials. So they are plant based minerals that are very old.
If you look at trace minerals in our industry, most of them are coming from shale from the great salt lakes. And that’s fine place I think anywhere you can get clean trace minerals is good. there are some advantages that humic fulvic minerals have over other trace minerals. And mainly it’s because humic acid and fulvic acid have biological activity of their own, they can be isolated. When you take humates out of the side of a mountain or out of a dry riverbed like we do, you have a mass of minerals and organic acids. It needs to be tested, it needs to be in some cases purified. And you cannot just give it to people raw in our opinion, although some people do. And that was part of why the further I got into this, I said there’s a real need for it because a lot of the companies that were selling humates, when we got into this 10 years ago, were outside of the industry.
People who had no idea there was already an industry, just hey, we’ve got a new ingredient, we’re just going to do it our way. And they wind up not knowing about DSHEA not knowing about FDA rules on labeling, testing, GMP, we’re GMP we test Every product is third party tested. And we know that it’s important because you cannot assume that your product is free of lead and just start shipping it off to California or anywhere else because it’s against the law, so that third party testing is part of making the product safe for people but for us, it’s an industry norm we know this stuff, but people who just because a lot of people, they weren’t into supplements but they just discovered people out west, run humic fulvic oriented companies and they do things well outside the industry norm so if people find out about this kind of prior to some of what we’ve been doing, they were getting a different version of a supplement. So in that respect, I think our approach has been to take this great ingredient humates humic acid fulvic acid, which I can get a little more in depth on what they actually can do for the body. I don’t want to go too far, we don’t make a lot of health claims. But one could go on to PubMed, and type in fulvic acid. And you see a wide range of benefits that come from its ability to bring oxygen to the different cells in the body.
So if you want to talk about blood, alkalinity, brain health, gut integrity, transporting nutrients into cells and waste products out of cells, this is in peer reviewed literature, that I’m getting this from, we didn’t just make this up, this is coming from science from credible, fairly mainstream science. And you could do the same thing for humic acid, because these are components of what is a holistic compound humates that have humic acid, fulvic acid minerals, what we call the black earth minerals, because it is black in color, that’s how it’s different. If you go get shale, and you make minerals from that it’s not black, it’s a lighter, it’s very light, it looks might look sort of like sand or, or really light soil or something. The black earth minerals are dark because of that humic acid and fulvic acid. And it can it’s interesting, because there was someone who talked about the doctrine of signature, and things that are that very dark color, and it being aligned with bringing a lot of energy.
So you can look at different herbs and in traditional Indian medicine and Ayurveda, they used a form of humates called Shilajits. In traditional Chinese medicine, they used a form of humates, called moomio, basically very similar humates or are, they have a certain similarity, and that really is in those organic acids, and the trace minerals, but they have a lot of ability to have holistic benefit, because think about how, how broadly beneficial trace minerals can be because they are cofactors. For so many reactions in the body, so many functions, and they’re missing from the American diet. Because of all the other food problems, the depletion of topsoil, if there was a first to go in the American mass produced food system, it was probably trace minerals, because the macronutrients have been more widely addressed. We know we need vitamin C, we’ll add it to the Cheerios. we know we need zinc that goes into the other processed foods, but who’s putting back in the trace minerals most companies are not, it has not been as broadly addressed. I know in our industry, people recognize the benefit of trace minerals. But humic acid and fulvic acid add another important aspect to that, which is how can you make those trace minerals even more bioavailable?
Steve Lankford 38:20
Such an interesting concept. And let me just state a couple of things here. First of all, in relationship to these minerals, most people maybe know of six or 12 minerals, because that’s what they see in their multivitamin and assume that’s it, there’s 72 different trace minerals that aren’t being addressed by so many of these supplements. So yes, folks, there’s a lot more to minerals than you have heard. The other thing I want to address is this idea, I heard your hesitancy, you don’t want to be making claims. We in this industry have this struggle between the idea of transmitting information and making sure it’s not a drug claim.
So let me just state my personal disclaimer. I use this in almost all of my episodes because I think it’s such an important distinction. And that is drugs are not nutrients and nutrients are not drugs. So let’s not confuse the two the doctor treat your disease the doctor tries to cure mitigate your disease using his tools, drugs, surgery, radiation, whatever it might be. That is the medical model. Nutrition nourishes the body. It is not a cure. It is not a treatment. You can’t treat a disease. Because these nutrients don’t treat disease. They nourish the body. The body is what does the healing the body appropriates any of these nutrients and does something with it. That’s part of the natural biochemical physiology of the body that allows these things to happen when the body is adequately nourished. If and if we don’t have these adequate amounts of nutrients like you didn’t in the diet that you ate as a teenager didn’t have these nutrients, where are you going to get them? You’re not.
And even in today’s modern diet, those of us that eat well are still going to be missing some of these things just because of the nature of where our food system and our planet is at these days in relationship to the studies that you mentioned, and I encourage people, if you’re interested in the science PubMed, Google Scholar, both of these can lead you to research that will further in depth explain these. we make the point that just because a nutrient is used in a clinical study, and in a clinical study, they usually often use quote, unquote, disease endpoints in order to evaluate is this something that is effective, even when a product is used in a clinical study, or, and shows results? For people who have these challenges, those results are not does not make the product a drug. It might, in some people’s minds, the discussion may do that.
But in my mind, what it’s really revealing these clinical studies are revealing the amazing power, that the body has to utilize nutrients to do amazing things. There’s nothing magic about these minerals found in the earth, the magic is found in the body. So let’s not confuse nutrition, and the benefits of nutrition with disease claims. I know that there’s a lot of controversy on that. And that’s my particular take, I don’t want people to be thinking of using these nutrients to cure my arthritis, I want you to think of using these nutrients as nourishing my body, my systems. And that’s why many different nutrients can play a synergistic role in helping somebody improve whatever their condition is. And when that improvement takes place. How is that happening? It is the body and the body’s innate intelligence and ability to use these nutrients to do what nature intended, and that is provide sustenance and health for the planet.
Disclaimer
And so I just need to make that disclaimer, because I don’t want people to feel like we’re suggesting that these are any kind of a treatment or cure. You and I we both know that and our industry knows that. But sometimes we feel that we can’t speak openly because of the fear of a quote unquote, disease claim. So if we talk in sort of couched terms, and point to studies, it is to avoid this conflict, which is kind of the deal we made with the devil, when we passed DSHEA that we would talk about structure function and not disease. And I think actually, that is to our benefit to approach it that way. But the consumers are not used to approaching it that way. So this is a process of educating the consumers to think in terms of structure function. And what does that mean, this nutrient helps the structure of my body, calcium helps build healthy, strong bones. But the calcium doesn’t do it, it’s like dumping a load of bricks in your front yard and thinking you’re gonna have a house, you don’t it’s the intelligent workmanship of the body that is able to appropriate these parts and do something with it for the whole.
So if we understand that we’re looking to support the structure, or the function of our body, we are going to, I think be more successful as consumers and understanding which nutrients are likely to provide us benefit. I don’t treat my arthritis, I support my cartilage, I support my synovial fluid, I support my tendon health, I support all of the tissues and processes that are part of that healthy tissue. And when we do that, then the body provides this benefit. So that’s kind of my long winded disclaimer, which is actually I feel very important for consumers to try to understand it’s one of the passions I have, every time I do this interview is to relate how these products are actually benefiting. So when you read about a study that treats this disease or that disease, it’s not treating those things. It’s the body that’s responding to the application of these nutrients. And truth be told, in my opinion, drugs don’t heal, cure or treat either they’re providing the body some kind of chemical compound, the body has to respond, and maybe that suppresses a symptom. But it doesn’t often necessarily lead to the cure. You might feel better for a while but you’re not actually necessarily getting better statin drugs. Don’t help you be healthier. Diabetes drugs don’t help you be healthier blood pressure drugs. There’s a whole history list of lifestyle drugs that actually aren’t helping us be healthier. They are just helping manage these markers, these symptoms, as if when we get a symptom relief that that’s actually a true cure or healing and many times it’s not.
So anyway, I’ll turn this back to you. Let’s talk a little bit about how these things play into like your Alkalize 55 Because I know that’s something that a lot of people might be able to relate to. They’ve heard about acid alkalinity, how too much acid can be problematic alkalinizing can be benefited. Dr. Decker Weiss certainly made that point in the interview we did with him. So tell us about Alkalize 55
Rob Seeman 46:00
Well, it is a combination of the black earth minerals and a fermented food blend formulated by Dr. Michio Kushi. I mentioned before as one of the founding fathers and macrobiotics and Dr. Kushi’s. Goal with his formulated fermented food blend triple fermented food prebiotic food blend there. I got that all out. But he take this triple fermented probiotic prebiotic foods blend and encapsulate some of the benefits of the macrobiotic diet because you can imagine you’re eating fermented foods, every meal, that is a range of benefit. That’s hard to encapsulate. But what they did was they concentrated a lot of that they tripled fermented these things that grew them bio dynamically and they made this food ingredient. Now when this came on the market, lots of other companies or a few other companies started selling that there aren’t very many anymore, but they just called it like fermented superfoods or something. And or doctor’s choice for fermented super blend or something like that, and it really didn’t go anywhere, because there was not an inherent demand for fermented superfoods.
People weren’t going into a health food store and asking for that. So I said, What can we do to make this even better to make it even more dynamic, make it even more alkalizing and make our own product that we can then present in a way that may be more eye catching or ear grabbing to consumers, the way that they’re used to approaching things Alkalize 55, rather than just calling it a generic name, and it’s not just a generic name, because it’s also a unique formula. But all of that was conscious in how we wanted to bring this to people and putting alkalze in the name of the product was very purposeful, because this is still even in our industry. I have people that come up to me, Steve, and they say, Well, I don’t think acid alkaline is that, critical and issue. That’s not really the primary issue. It’s this or it’s that.
And I think some of that may come from the prevalence of macrobiotics in the 70s and 80s that was not very science based. And it was more Eastern. And then it was sort of non-dualistic and Eastern, in the way that it approached it. But when you get into the science on acid Alkaline balance, look up a condition called, subclinical acidosis. And that is very prevalent because, people who argue against acid alkaline as an important way to look at things in the body say, Well, if, if you’re if you have acidosis, you’ll die. It’s a fatal condition. Well, okay, the fatal pH for acidosis, as I’ve looked into it, is about five, so from one to 10. Here, we’re really the healthy range for the human body is the optimal range, the optimal pH range is between 7.35 and 7.45.
Steve Lankford 49:13
And That’s the blood if I understand correctly, that’s the blood level. And the body is always going to maintain that blood level. And it’s going to draw these Alkaline stores from other places in order to maintain that. So yes, in a way, that’s true, however, it doesn’t address what you’re just starting to describe the effect on tissues and systems in the body, when that is not properly balanced. And the body has to kind of rob from its stores to maintain your life through the blood. But what happens to your tissues when they’re over acidified? So please continue on.
Rob Seeman 49:51
Yeah. And so if we wanted to back to your point on micro focusing on the magic bullet theory sort of approach, you could address this Let’s say that you’re have bone depletion, because you’re not in an optimal pH, in part, because you’re not in an optimal pH, lots of other factors. But this is a major one. So you start supplementing with just calcium. Well, just like when the blood is too acidic, it robs calcium from places in our body. If we take supplemental calcium, it’ll use that calcium, to buffer the pH of the blood; hopefully, we hope it will also use it to rebuild some of our bones and tissues that have been depleted. But I don’t know that we have a lot of guarantee of that.
One thing that can also happen as sort of a side effect of all of this and really, of the acidic pH or the less than optimal pH is calcification in other parts of the body, it’s a big factor in heart disease. This is why Dr. Weiss is so aware of this probably right. Other than his experience, I remember him talking about his residency, and finding that cancer patients, as you went through the hospital were universally below, had an acidic pH, they were below optimal pH, so when you have serum pH, blood pH that is below that optimal range, and it continues to be low, you don’t instantly die. I mean, lots of people in America walk around less than optimal health, and they survived for years and years and years, part of our industry has been trying to look at optimization, we want people to not just stay alive, but we want them to thrive. This is a big theme in our industry, right? You don’t have to feel bad, and it’s not like we have a magic bullet, take this, and you’ll feel good every day. But if you use these principles, if you address the body as a whole, you’re more likely to have really good days, as opposed to just staying alive.
Steve Lankford 51:59
Well, then I think somebody that that has gotten to the point where they understand that is going to look to appropriate, these other aspects of healthy living, you alluded to things like pure water, pure air, pure food, exercise, a spiritual life, positive mental attitude, all of these things play into a healthy life. And so it’s not about supplementation. And sometimes that’s what people think of, oh, we take supplements, because that’s what’s gonna make us healthy, not if we’re not appropriating many of these other things as well. So if you’re not looking to have a healthy lifestyle, of which supplementation is a part, and when you have these other aspects in your life, and you include good natural nutritional supplements, you’re much more likely to see a totality of benefit, a synergy of benefit that you won’t get if you just focus on one thing.
I mean, there’s some people who all they focus on is exercise. And sometimes they’re not very healthy, and their joints aren’t very healthy, or, whatever they hyper focus on, and sometimes it can be just diet, a vegan who eats potato chips very well, it’s not an animal product. But, isn’t the best food. So making these wiser choices across a whole spectrum. I’m really glad you brought that up, because that is one of the keys and we can’t and shouldn’t miss or ignore that point. So I really appreciate all that you’ve brought up there. Well, Rob, we’ve been talking a long time now and we’re getting near the end of our interview. As always, I want to give my guests the last word. What didn’t we cover today that you’d like to make sure that our listeners hear?
Rob Seeman 53:57
Well, I would be remiss if I did not mention our best selling product, which is black earth zeolite. And it’s funny because we talk about humic fulvic minerals is something that not everyone is heard of. Even fewer people have heard of zeolite. Prior to the past couple of years, we’ve been selling it for 10 years, but there’s been a real explosion of interest in zeolite. And I think there again with the synergistic formulation, the food movement, are black earth zeolite is beneficial in many ways. Because it is not just the light because we have the humic acid we have the fulvic acid, we have the over 70 trace minerals. So when they take zeolite from the food movement, they’re also taking a trace mineral supplement. So it is giving them more because that is our goal. That is our philosophy. What is the light? So zeolite our natural aluminum silicates that are formed from volcanic activity. So whenever volcanic lava or ash hits groundwater, you have these unique crystal formations. And they are honeycomb like structures that have an affinity for minerals. And we’ve used them in industry to do things like remove radiation from environments, use them in nuclear power plants, to filter water to filter lots of other things.
Because they have this unique micro porous nature, where they can absorb and adsorbed, which is a little bit different, lots of different kinds of potential pathogens and toxins and things. Dr. Gabriel Cousins was the first person I heard talk about using zeolite in his clinical practice, and he’s a little bit unique, he called it an alchemical gift from God. I don’t know exactly what he’s saying there. But that tells me there’s really something there. And I got to meet Dr. Cousins at one of these seminar things where we were displaying food movement products, and he actually came up and checked out our product, he said, he really liked the idea of combining it with humic and fulvic acid. So it’s just kind of a 360 thing for me of talk of getting to, our industry being small enough, you get to talk to some of the people that may have influenced your interest in something and see what, what they think about it.
And if they’re, like Dr. Cousins is an MD, like Dr. Weiss is an MD, these people have to me a little bit of an edge, I’ve been able to help some people, but I’m not a doctor, so the thoroughness of care that these people give when they like a product, and they get behind a product of ours, or they, give it even just, I’m not asking for a billboard endorsement, but when they give us their personal endorsement, that means so much to me, that gives me a confidence that we’re on the right track, that these products actually help people. And it’s just another level of validation and insight into; there are many different ways to get better, right. there are many different roads to health. But if you can provide people with some unique assistance, with some things that they might some options, they might not get other places, I think that’s probably about the best you can do.
Steve Lankford 57:37
Well, I know it’s your passion, people are going to want more information, where would you suggest they go to learn more?
Rob Seeman 57:45
www.TheFoodMovement.com. We are also on the social media, usual suspects, Instagram, as The_Food_Movement_Co. And we’re pretty active there reaching probably the next generation of health food enthusiast with that kind of content. And you can also check out my podcast, Whole Earth Radio, which is, at Apple, Apple podcast or whatever. Yeah, they’re the usual suspects there as well of podcast aggregators, but Whole Earth Radio. I’d love to have you on some time, Steve. And I’ve had a lot of interesting folks like Dr. Weiss, and I just I really appreciate this chance to talk to you today and this conversation, I think it’s so important for, for the future of what we do.
Steve Lankford 58:46
Well, you talked about endorsements. And people sometimes think that’s suspect, and maybe it is, in some cases, however, in my opinion, what I do is I vet the companies and the people that I interview, I use my experience to lend my expertise and my endorsement, and then I encourage people to follow up, prove us wrong, or prove us right. It can’t be both. So people can explore from here and you’ve given those resources where they can look into it, because I got to think for a lot of people this is new information, new concepts and new ingredients. For their own personal use. It may be new been around as long as the Earth has been around.
So we’re here to say these things that are supplied to us by the Earth are critical and important for our health. Unfortunately, we are losing access to them through the destruction of the environment and the farming methods and all kinds of things that impede our ability to appropriate these things. Certainly the modern food system doesn’t do a very good job of nourishing us as well, which is why we look to things like these humic fulvic acid, this black earth, this Alkalize 55. These are unique products that are designed to supply nutrients to the body in a novel, innovative, effective and safe way. So, you’ve done a lot of work to lead us to this point to create this brand. And I’m very interested in and I want to thank you so much for being my guest today. It was most interesting.
Rob Seeman 1:00:32
Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate the opportunity. Always good to talk to you
Steve Lankford 1:00:37
And you too. Take care. Bye bye.
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