Interview with Dr. Decker Weiss about Earth's Promise nutritional powders from Enzymatic Therapy

Mike: We're here today with Dr. Decker Weiss, a naturopath who also serves on the scientific advisory board for Enzymatic Therapy. Today we're talking about the Earth's Promise product line. So, thanks for taking some time to sit down and chat.

Dr. Weiss: Oh, anytime.

Mike: Can you give people an overview of what this product is all about and why people might be interested in checking it out?

Dr. Weiss: We should probably try to keep it real simple. Absorbable nutrients are what it's about. It's about very, very busy people having a hard time getting fruits and vegetables into their life, and it's about making them easily accessible and making them taste good. Earth's Promise does all those things.

Enzymatic Therapy didn't copy other greens products. They had to reinvent it. They had to reinvent it in a way so it wasn't like putting your mouth over a lawnmower and sucking grass. Because the nutrients are so absorbable, we can see the wonderful pH changes in the urine of folks with osteoporosis and autoimmune diseases. We really see this wonderful absorption in a lot of our seniors who never got enough B vitamins in their diet. I don't have to give them as many B vitamin shots, and sometimes we just skip them altogether, because they're getting the Bs so fast from the greens.

Mike: So you've been recommending this product to your clients?

Dr. Weiss: Oh, absolutely. I'm also a cardiologist. As a cardiologist, I'll go and bring natural medicine sometimes to the nursing homes, and when someone's bedridden or in a wheelchair, giving them shots of these vitamins is really hard. They are likely to get sores and other complications from the injection. We're seeing really nice effects from the greens.

Mike: Can you talk in more detail about what kind of things you've seen?

Dr. Weiss: Number one: More energy. They feel like they've gotten that B vitamin shot. The second thing is better bowel movements and better bowel function. Probably the third thing is better stability with their moods. They experience fewer mood swings. When people are very low in Bs, it's like being low in sugar. You start to go up and down all the time. That is what I see in my little test area with folks in these nursing homes. I'm seeing moods even out and people reporting greater levels of energy. What's more, they love the taste, and that, I think, is the key. One week of greens is going to do them some good, but one year is going to do them a lot of good.

Mike: Right.

Dr. Weiss: If it doesn't taste good, there's going to be problems.

Mike: And that's an important point for everyone to understand. I've tasted this product myself. In fact, I had it for breakfast this morning, and I might ask for another one here soon. Of all the greens products I've tried, this product has one of the best tastes. And I think that's for a couple of reasons. One is that the fruit content, the fruit concentrates in this product, are higher than in many other products, which is great.

Dr. Weiss: Without fruit sugars, it's just the fruit content and its flavor.

Mike: Right. And it doesn't have wheat grass in it, correct?

Dr. Weiss: Right.

Mike: So, you don't get that grassy taste. Plus there's a little bit of stevia in it.

Dr. Weiss: Yes, there's enough stevia to freshen the flavor up. The wheatgrass and spirulina were both things that we considered putting in for a long time. The challenge was finding sources that were clean enough – free of metals and other substances. Another challenge was covering up the taste. We were able to keep the nutritional content on par with our competitors, but we didn't need to make it taste bad.

Mike: I notice you also have sea vegetables in this product. I think you deserve a lot of credit for having those in the product, because the nutritional potency of sea vegetables is widely known, but they are something you don't see in a lot of greens products.

Dr. Weiss: And again, any time you're dealing with the ocean, there's metal content and metal toxicity. We're going to want people to take greens not for a day, but for years and years. So, the key was sourcing those sea vegetables and keeping them at levels that the body can handle. We bring in things for clearing the metals out. The product's the cleanest one I've seen on the market.

Mike: So, would that mean going to pristine waters like off the coast of Hawaii?

Dr. Weiss: Actually, it's less complicated. We go to pristine suppliers. We go in and get every single company that's a supplier to send us batch after batch after batch. Then we get them independently tested. Enzymatic Therapy has its own lab facility. The lab tests parts per million of metals and bugs and all the things it needs to do. It took us a year and a half to find the suppliers to do it.

Mike: Wow.

Dr. Weiss: Because, everybody's going to say, "Oh, we have pristine waters! We're here! We're here!" But the proof is in what's going on in the in-house facility to make sure it is. Frankly, very few cut the mustard.

Mike: Would you see mercury and cadmium?

Dr. Weiss: Mercury, specifically. Mercury for the sea stuff, lead for the land stuff.

Mike: Now, this is a fairly new brand for Enzymatic Therapy, correct?

Dr. Weiss: Yes, it is. It's been out [over a year], and it's doing very, very well. Everybody knows that getting more greens and vegetables is a good idea. The question is how to do it fast, keep it palatable and still keep the same feeling. Now people don't have to choke down vegetables and gag on them. They can enjoy it, which they should be able to.

Mike: Yes, you don't have to mix this with three bananas and two apples to make it drinkable.

Dr. Weiss: Right.

Mike: So, people can find this in most health food stores?

Dr. Weiss: Yes, it's readily available. It's got black packaging that says "Earth's Promise" on it. It's designed to stand out and reach the eye of the customer.

Mike: Wonderful. Is there anything else you'd like to add, that you think people should know about the product?

Dr. Weiss: I think that if you've tried greens products and you've been disgruntled in the past because of the flavor, there is a single serving pack. Buy that and see if that works. Try one of each flavor. See which one works for you. Again, as a physician, this is one of the best tools I've seen in years. So, we want you to be on it for a long time. If you're not sure, if you've tried a greens product, if you've gargled some wheatgrass and that didn't work, try some. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Mike: I have to say by the way, it's very refreshing to talk with you. With all of the conventionally trained doctors out there, I've been one of the greatest critics of the lack of nutritional knowledge in conventional medicine. But here you are, and you know nutrition.

Dr. Weiss: Well, I was first a naturopathic physician, then I became a cardiologist. So, for me to exclude nutrition from my platform for health, that's beyond me. I don't understand how you can practice medicine without nutrition. I mean, you've got to talk about daily habits. We're talking about greens products from Enzymatic Therapy and bringing good things in – clean products, good tasting products – to change your daily habits so that you receive rewards 20 years down the road.

Mike: Yes, definitely. I have to tell you, I use various green products, and I'll be using this one, too.

Dr. Weiss: Beautiful. You know, we're not programmed to die; we're programmed to live – maybe not forever, but we're not programmed to die from heart disease. And I hear this all the time: "The only reason we're dying from heart disease is because we're living longer." This is absolutely a farce. Sometimes surgery or an intervention can be recommended, but very rarely.

Greens are a big part of fighting heart disease. There's a shifting of pH, and you can feel it. It will help keep calcium in the bones instead of it entering the arteries and vessels, which causes many of these heart problems. I mean, that's a big thing. So natural medicine has multiple benefits. I mean, when you take a natural product, there are no adverse reactions, generally, except in some rare toxic plants. But there are side effects. Side effects became this dirty word. The side effects of greens are helping with osteoporosis, irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn's. Getting absorbable nutrients into these patients that are wasting helps put their lean mass back on. It's life-saving. I mean, that's a side effect, but it's not a dirty word anymore.

Now, in drug commercials, it's, "Side effects: Death, pancreatitis ... " and those things. But side effects like keeping your bones strong, increasing mental clarity, getting rid of candida and preventing irritable bowels are the kind of side effects we really enjoy.

Mike: I'm glad you mentioned that. Nervous system health is so dramatically influenced by this kind of nutrition – green drinks and whole food concentrates. In my experience, I've seen people reverse symptoms of dementia. What have you seen? I'm curious.

Dr. Weiss: Well, number one, I say that you're not even in the game until you restore nutritional status. You don't know how sick they are. You don't know if senile dementia is because of nutritional issues. Once you restore them to healthy nutrition, then you find out what remains of their health. You find out what can't be restored.

I mean why is it that all of a sudden my patients have all this clarity? They're doing things; they're going to movies. That's how I know my seniors are doing better -- they go to a movie because they can control their bowels long enough and can sit for a long period without falling asleep. You know, these people have worked 40 to 50 years, and now they can't stay awake through a movie. I can see that. I've put my patients with Parkinson's on greens and CoQ10 and other supplements. Soon they're able to feed themselves. Did we get rid of the Parkinson's? No. But they're able to feed themselves. That counts, too.

It's not been studied, so I don't know how you double blind study changing nutritional habits. And it's a flaw of models. You know, conventional models study a single entity to death and find out everything about it. With a natural model, nobody's ever going to say, "Okay, take this vitamin E, take this CoQ10, but don't eat them." It's a multi-therapeutic model. But it's the only thing that can work.

In Asia, the No. 2-consumed liquid is green tea. They smoke much more than Americans. Alcohol consumption, I believe, is higher, but there is far less cancer. What's going on there?

Mike: Right. And I know we're getting a little bit off track with the product, but I'm so curious about your experience as a cardiologist. What do you say to people who are insisting they need a statin drug, and that's the only thing? What if the doctor told them to take a statin drug to get their cholesterol down? What do you say to those people?

Dr. Weiss: What I say is that we won't know if this class of drugs is safe for 20 years. I mean, we find nightmares. There's a drug called Doxazosin. We found out 10 years later it was actually increasing risk of heart failure. Now, we found that if you mix calcium channel blockers and diuretics you double your mortality. We don't know for a long time. There are a couple of flaws in the model of statins. Number one is that HMG coA reductase is a major enzyme in the liver. It does a lot more than just influence cholesterol.

Mike: So, when you block it, you negatively impact a whole lot of other things.

Dr. Weiss: We know about the CoQ10 downfall. But what do we not know about? What makes me very suspicious about statins is, actually, that heart attacks and heart disease are getting to be less of a concern. What's a greater concern is congestive heart failure. There's a big announcement: "Less people are dying from heart attack." Well, all that's happening is that they're dying from congestive heart failure. So you know, they say cancer is No. 1 and heart disease is No. 2. But if you add in congestive heart failure, which is just a weak heart with heart disease and heart attacks, it's still No. 1 by far.

I've seen statin use go up, and I've seen congestive heart failure go up. Until somebody studies that, I don't think it should be prescribed. I think that there are a lot of ways to get cholesterol under control – greens, fiber, natural medicine diets. If your LDL is a little high, you can go on some antioxidants. I'm not worried about it. It's also not the number one risk factor. Oxidation and inflammation are your two primary risk factors, cholesterol being the third. If you take care of those top two, you'll watch cholesterol come down almost every time.

Mike: I have one more question, if it's okay.

Dr. Weiss: Sure.

Mike: Do you see any trend with patients taking on more responsibility for their health these days, or do they still say, "You fix me!"

Dr. Weiss: The seniors from the Depression generation are still like that. They use a lot of supplements, but they still feel, "We're the country that liberated the world; we have the greatest system." Baby boomers are different. What's happening is that the baby boomers are putting their parents into nursing homes. They're visiting their parents who, in their early 70s, have senile dementia, Alzheimer's and can't feed themselves. They're being told, "Well, I guess it's just genetic." But yet their grandparents didn't experience these illnesses. We have a generation in this Depression generation, and it's going to affect the baby boomers at an unprecedented level of illness. By the sixth decade of life in America, in the 60s, the average American has 10 different disease symptoms. Double-digit pathologies. That's a public health stat that's firm. We are literally falling apart.

A good day for my parents, my father specifically, is when he can brush his own teeth. He's gone. We cannot get him back. His grandfather smoked cigars, drank all these things into his 80s. When they see that those folks are going to nursing homes, they get scared. They're saying they're not getting the answers from their medical doctors that they need.

You know, these aren't dumb people. They've got the most money. They're the most stressed. To me, President Clinton is a classic example of that generation. He gets bypass surgery, and they have to go in a second time now to fix a lung collapse. What did you see during the presidency? You saw him eating at a fast food chain. The head of McDonald's dies from cancer at 44 years old. The head of Wendy's dies from a heart attack, heart disease.

Mike: Do the math.

Dr. Weiss: Yes, very good.

Mike: Well, it's been a real pleasure, Dr. Weiss. Thank you for your time today.

Dr Weiss: Any time.