Mucus: Friend or Foe?

Happy November, friends! Please pardon the dual posts today … due to a staff error, our earlier email contained an incomplete version of my newest article. You can now read the full piece here.

This may be the weirdest topic I’ve covered in 16 years, but please trust me that reading this will be the most important few minutes of your day.

Half my life ago, I had to recover my own health, and the health of my two little children, after making the mistake of believing that getting all the pharma injections the folks in white coats pushed on us was key to preventing health problems.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and I had to learn that the hard way. Because, “science.” 

And also because I was in my 20s, pursuing an elite academic path myself, and I didn’t know who to look up to besides those with more degrees — or more elite degrees — than I had.

H1 - The Canary in the Coal Mine

H2 - The Canary in the Coal Mine

H3 - The Canary in the Coal Mine

H4 - The Canary in the Coal Mine

H5 - The Canary in the Coal Mine

H6 - The Canary in the Coal Mine

And if I may jump to the end, to justify the beginning, may I say what I learned about mucus was vitally important, and it bore out to be a critical canary in the coal mine. 

PULL QUOTE
what I learned about mucus was vitally important,
and it bore out to be a critical canary in the coal mine. 

BLOCK QUOTE - First, mucus isn’t always bad. The clear mucus that lines our mouths, noses, and throats functions as a lubricant/moisturizer, and it’s there to help you. 

Clear mucus is not saliva, and it’s not phlegm (the darker stuff). It consists mainly of water, protein, antibodies, and some dissolved salts and it traps both bacteria and dead cells and other debris from our upper and lower respiratory tracts, which we then expel, generally through our noses. 

And if everything is working properly, clear mucus sticks around for a day or two, max!

My first child — who not only got all the injections (for three diseases, or six, at each peds visit) but also got all the drugs to treat the adverse events from those injections — had yellow or green mucus, constantly.

What I learned caused him, and my other three children, to never again in their lifetimes to have yellow or green mucus.

Back then, his diet was many bottles a day of dairy milk, chicken nuggets, popsicles, cinnamon raisin toast — you name it, his first year was exactly the Standard American Diet. I did not know better. 

I did not know that his diet was why he had thick, nasty mucus. Nor did I know how accurately this symptom reflected the state of his underlying health.

Per FTC guidelines, please assume links on this newsletter may be affiliate links that benefit us, though if so, the price is not marked up. Thank you for supporting our mission.

When a “Cold” Is Your Friend

Here’s the thing: Your body “cleans house” now and then with a thing you’ve been taught is a virus — a coronavirus, in fact — called the “common cold.” 

Here’s what a “cold” really is (which I learned from copious reading and finding different kinds of experts besides pediatricians): It’s your body producing thin, clear mucus as a strategy for cleansing. Which is a good thing, even if it’s uncomfortable to sneeze, cough, and be “stuffy” for a couple of days. 

Your body “cleans house” now and then with a thing you’ve been taught is a virus — a coronavirus, in fact — called the “common cold.” 

For healthy people with a well-functioning immune system, that “cold” should last just a couple of days, while the mucus helps carry out the toxic stuff that has accumulated inside of you. 

… And When a Cold Is a Breeding Ground for Pathogens

Yellow mucus, and lingering symptoms like weeks of bronchial congestion, however, are signs that the healthy detoxifying your body is meant to do, now and then (even up to twice a year), has gotten stagnant.

Instead of that thin, clear mucus coming for a couple of days and then going once it’s done its job, it has now taken up residence and become more difficult to resolve, making you a sitting duck for more serious infections and illness.

Yellow mucus is a sign of an acidic body. Thick, sticky mucus that sticks around, rather than flowing through, is the perfect breeding ground for more and more pathogens.

When I learned to get my kids off sugar and dairy and processed foods, my children’s minor “viral” symptoms resolved in a day or two. The same thing happened to me.

How “Never Getting Sick” Can Be Bad News

It’s a normal state of being, to “feel sick” now and then. People often tell me they’re healthy because they “never get sick.” And while getting sick repeatedly, and for long periods of time, is indeed a sign of a struggling, maxed-out immune system, never getting sick may actually be highly problematic as well.

Because (if you’re willing to consider a change of reference) your body produces thin, clear mucus to flush out toxins. The thin “bathing fluid” you call mucus isn’t just in your sinuses; it’s flushing out tissues and organs all over your body, too.

Some people think any time you feel unwell your answer should be Tylenol, ibuprofen, or other drugs. In fact, virtually all pharmaceuticals are highly acidifying, and contribute to that acidic condition that turns the mucus thick and yellow.

Green Mucus Is Downright Scary

Green mucus is downright scary. This is the sign of significant dysbiosis, and chronic acidity — and you want to take the diet and lifestyle steps to turn it around.

If you want to know more about the various colors of mucus (there’s also brown/rusty, pink/red, and even “black”), check out this Healthline article: Yellow, Brown, Green, and More: What Does the Color of My Phlegm Mean? 

When I see children with green mucus coming out of their noses, they’re usually breathing with difficulty, and I have to resist the urge to scoop them up, holler at their parent that I’ll be back with them in a week, and put them on a no-dairy, no-sugar diet high in vegetables, fruits, and other whole foods — maybe some bone broth (the only animal product I’d include) and lots of green smoothies or juiced greens and vegetables.

I’d bribe that kid to drink green juices if I had to! 

How I Tricked My Toddler into Eating Greens

Since many toddlers are virtually never given fruits and vegetables and greens, they may act as if you’re from Pluto when you give some to them the first time. I’m not above using some minor psychological manipulation.

I drank my son’s first green smoothie in front of him. I called it “green ice cream” and pretended that it was “just for Mommy.” It worked, and he begged me for it. Slurped the whole thing down. Which became a daily event — ongoing to this day, 28 years later!

(Not me giving him the green smoothie — he’s long gone, living life as an adult — but him eating lots of plant foods, and me still making green smoothies.)

How Green (Leafies) Vanquish the Green (Mucus)

How did I go from one child with stagnant, thick yellow mucus–to four children who never got seriously ill again, with zero antibiotics, and zero acidic, thick-mucus conditions, for 25 years?

It was a whole-foods, plant-based diet. I’m not saying it has to be vegan — just lay that aside, if the diet cults have made you think you must eat animal products to be healthy. Do what you want, there. 

Except, I must disabuse you of any lie you read in that last diet book that told you that greens, vegetables, and fruits (with some legumes, nuts, seeds, etc) are not the crux of all healthy diets around the world — because they are.

Eat animal products in minor amounts if that’s important to you, and try to obtain very clean forms of them. (Like our bone broth protein, the one animal product I’ll eat — that and grass-fed butter.)

Whether or not you eat minor amounts of clean (hopefully unprocessed) animal products isn’t particularly relevant. What is relevant is that some foods are highly alkalizing — the greens, vegetables, and fruits. Runners up are seeds, nuts, and legumes.

(And organic whole grains, which do not have to contain gluten, BTW — not all of them do. Don’t eat gluten if you’re reactive to gluten.) Plus some seed fruits most of you aren’t familiar with.

You can eat these alkalizing greens, vegetables, and fruits whole, if you like them, or in an infinite variety of salads, or blended, or juiced.

To find ways my young family would enjoy and eat those alkalizing foods, I did a lot of all of the above.. 

To this day, my husband and I drink a green smoothie every single day (consisting of any and all greens on hand, plus cabbages, aloe, a bit of fruit, etc). My most popular smoothie recipe of all time is my Hot Pink Breakfast Smoothie, in which I blend a vegetable or a fruit (or in my current favorite, coconut liquid) with my strawberries, carrots, beets, cashews and dates. 

And on the weekend, we also juice about half a gallon of them. (Our standard cocktail is organic cucumbers, celery, limes and ginger root, though sometimes we add turmeric root, carrots, and other things.)

You don’t have to do it exactly like we do, but that works for us.

How I Instilled Healthy Habits in My Teenagers

Once my kids got to be teenagers, they’d go to a church function, their friends’ homes, birthday parties, or school, where they were of course constantly plied with foods made of sugar, flour, dairy, and other ingredients that would have put them right back into poor health.

Except I had a few tricks up my sleeve: 

1. I educated my kids. About the “why” of Mom’s habits that were so different than their friends’. 

2. I gave the teachers “alternative” snacks, plus asked them each year to not make junk food a scholastic incentive. And I even requested a specific teacher in 5th grade for each of my kids, to avoid the one who famously gave out a lot of junk food to reward good behavior.

3. On the way to birthday parties, I had them drinking a pint of green smoothie in the car. At least then, they’d be less hungry, and have some alkalization to buffer whatever they chose to eat at the party.

Even so, because I very consistently put a pint of fresh juice or green smoothies in front of them, and because I fed them a whole-foods diet at home, we simply never again had yellow or green mucus, or a “virus” that lasted for weeks or months.

None of my children ever had strep, or a bronchial infection. See if you can find me another family where zero of four children never needed an antibiotic. I’m not bragging; I’m just saying 

• It’s rare. 

• It’s possible. 

• And it’s totally diet/lifestyle related. 

Let me just say: my children did not have fantastic genetics.

My third daughter’s doctor wrote antibiotic prescriptions several times for her chronic ear infections. I did not fill any of them. (Nor did I tell the doctor I wasn’t going to fill them; I’d prefer to keep Child Protective Services off my doorstep.)

By then, I’d learned that over 90% of ear infections are viral, not bacterial, so I didn’t see any point in the antibiotic, and I knew the “circling the drain” spiral I’d be in (and the lifetime of compromised health they’d suffer), if we went that direction. (We went other directions.)

Bronchial infections can be aided and abetted by a weakness you developed when you were young, but it’s also compounded by eating an acid-forming diet (more on that immediately below). 

Acidity = Disease 

You may have noticed that I’ve mentioned acidity multiple times throughout this post. That’s because an acidic internal environment underlies most chronic disease. This is nothing to take lightly, and you’ll do well to learn about and minimize as many sources of internal acidity as possible. 

So let’s suss out some of the primary ways that we acidify our bodies:

• Junky and toxic foods: While most of us know that eliminating sugar, dairy, flour products, and other highly processed foods is important for health, we often think of body weight or diabetes as the reasons to do so. But another primary reason to ditch these health destroyers is that they are highly acid forming. Which doesn’t just mean the food itself has an acidic pH — it’s more than that. You don’t have to pucker when you eat it, or have acid reflux, for a food to create the acidic internal environment that promotes disease processes. 

• Antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals: I’ve already mentioned that pharmaceuticals are highly acidifying. That’s just one of many reasons to minimize or eliminate them, if possible, from your life. In particular, people who have been on antibiotics are especially prone to thick, acidic mucus that sticks around for a long time. Not only does that mucus make you uncomfortable for longer, but again, that acidic underlying internal environment is a perfect host for cancer overgrowth.  (You may know, if you’ve been reading my blog posts, that we all “have cancer.” It’s just some of us whose cancer gets the upper hand over our immune system, which otherwise constantly breaks down and eliminates aberrant cells.)

• Chronic stress: Stress that is more than temporary and situational can be a major acidifier of your physical body. (We all have stress; living in chronic stress, fear, depression and anxiety is the problem. Obviously wherever possible, we should resolve our stresses — change whatever is causing them to be chronic. Obviously that’s a whole other book, not just a blog post. Read my bestseller, Vibe.)

So, since the average American is stressed out, basically lives on processed food, and is on antibiotics at least once a year, there’s some rehab to be done. 

Whole Plants + Fermented Foods: The One-Two Punch

There’s another thing I did besides switching to a whole-foods, mostly plant-based diet that really moved the needle for my family: When I added fermented foods to that healthy routine, not one of my children ever got significantly ill again. And I have seen many others deploy these strategies with incredible success, as well. 

So let’s talk about fermented food:

I’m not a big fan of kombucha, with its sugars (I don’t believe whatsoever that the ferment “eats up all the sugar — you can taste it, to see that’s not true!), but fermented foods that work for us are:

• Sauerkraut (easy to make with cabbage you buy or grow).

• Kefir (when my kids were little I fermented raw goat milk for my little kids, using milk kefir grains. Now, I ferment coconut liquid with water kefir grains, and make it the base of my morning Hot-Pink Breakfast Smoothie)

There are many other options for fermented foods. People sign up for courses to learn ferments — and that’s a subject you can dive deeper into, if you want. My 12 Steps to Whole Foods video masterclass is a good place to start. (It’s free.)

I find that people go overboard when they start to realize the importance of replenishing the gut with cultured foods. It’s definitely eye-opening to learn that virtually every ancient culture used cultured (or fermented) foods!

You really do not need to ferment everything you eat, or try every single kind of ferment. You just need the whole-food plants in your diet to carry a significant number of probiotic strains — and nature helps you do that.

You don’t have to go crazy with the fermented foods. A little side dish of raw sauerkraut, or using a ferment as the base of your smoothie a few times a week, is plenty.

Add a (Real, Living) Probiotic to the Equation

Along with eating lots of whole plants and incorporating live ferments into your lifestyle, maintaining a robust population of healthy gut bacteria is another key to keeping sickness at bay.

In addition to the factors I already mentioned (poor diet, pharmaceuticals, and stress) here are more  reasons to consider a live probiotic (in addition to ferments) in your diet: 

• Difficulty in elimination/chronic constipation.

• Gas, bloating.

• Smelly stool (a sign of meat/dairy use, but also of waste spending days or weeks in the GI system).

• Stomachache.

I’ve twice tested all the probiotic brands my audience has sent me and found 80% of them to contain no living probiotics at all. And another 10% to have very, very few living strains. You can watch me do it here: How to Test Your Probiotic Supplement: An Easy At-Home Experiment

Because of this, I developed a supplement called PreZymePro, which I formulated to be a total gut health solution. I formulated this product myself, rather than slapping my brand on an existing probiotic product manufactured by a giant pharma-owned conglomerate.

PreZymePro contains the following: 

• 15 different probiotic strains (more than most!), and 7 billion organisms per dose. We make it in small batches because we insist on the probiotics being alive, which means we often sell out.  (Remember, probiotics are the “good guys” that you wipe out with antibiotics —  hopefully along with whatever pathogen you were gunning for … so you want to feed them well!)

• Enzymes to break down fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Since most people aren’t eating mostly enzyme-rich living, raw plant foods (again, greens, vegetables and fruits!), supplementing with excellent enzymes can be very helpful. I just put them in the same supplement with the probiotics, which no one else was doing. 

• Prebiotic fiber: Fiber is the “food” that probiotics feed on so they can to continue proliferating in your gut. Prebiotics optimize the ability of probiotics to do their important work. The specific prebiotic fiber in PreZymePro is known as FOS, or fructo-oligosaccharide, which probiotics especially thrive on.  

With this powerful triad — 15 strains of probiotics, plant-based prebiotics, and 6 digestive enzymes — PreZymePro’s unique formulation can be a game-changer solution.

I hope if you get some PreZymePro that you’ll do the comparison test, to document for yourself that our product is full of live, robust living organisms that radically improve digestive function. We constantly hear glowing testimonials about the product. Here’s one:

Detox to Knock It Out of the Ballpark

Your gut is the hub of your immune system. Without a healthy gut microbiome (aka the community of microbes in your gut), and a highly functioning liver, the immune system is impaired. 

I am afraid that most North Americans and Europeans, with our acid-forming diets, have clogged gallbladders, clogged livers with low enzymatic activity, and a probiotic-depleted environment in our 30- foot gastrointestinal tracts.

I did my first detox when I was 28 years old and had a breastfeeding baby and a toddler. I couldn’t exactly put the two of them on a detox program. But my cleaning up my act helped clean up theirs, as well. 

And what’s great about helping a little child get well is that their immune system is lively and they rebound more quickly than we do.

You can learn more about my 28 years of research in human detoxification, here. (I’ve now helped 18,000 people do the program, which is based on what I did, when I was so very ill, for four years.) It’s just four short videos you can watch, to summarize the decades I devoted to getting myself well and then assisting others in doing the same.

Recap: Whole Foods + Probiotic + Detox For the Win!

This post has been the briefest-ever overview of how to shift your pH to be more alkaline — because entire books are written on this topic. (I read voraciously on this, as I got my family back to health.) So this is just the Cliff’s Notes version, because I can get you to read a midlength blog post, but maybe not a book.

To recap, I’ve suggested the following three resources to you:

1. 12 Steps to Whole Foods: This free video masterclass is my guide to shifting to a whole-foods, plant-based diet. (Fermenting foods is just one of the 12 habits I teach in that course, which moved the needle for my family, and which we still employ today.)

2. PreZymePro: The guaranteed alive high-quality probiotic that I formulated to be an all-in-one gut-health solution containing probiotics, enzymes, and prebiotic fiber. 

3. 26-Day Detox: In this free video masterclass, I teach you how doing a dedicated detox for 26 days can decrease your toxic body burden; clean up your gallbladder, liver, kidneys, blood, and colon; and strengthen your immune system. This may not be for a toddler, though you can clean up their diets and achieve the same effect, since toddlers don’t have decades of bad habits to undo!

I write about these subjects because I feel like this information was far more readily available, from legitimate, incredibly authentic holistic doctors, before functional medicine got big and commercialized and became not much beyond ordering expensive lab tests and prescribing expensive supplements.

In our culture, we don’t talk much about mucus as the “canary in the coal mine.” But today I “went there!” 

People from other cultures talk about mucus and poop and bodily functions as the common daily events that they are — and they reap the health benefits of maintaining awareness of what these vital messengers have to teach us.  

(I can talk about poop in another blog post, if you ask. It will be another contender for the least popular thing I’ve ever written, but there’s important stuff to know, there, too — and how would you know if the whole subject is taboo in your culture?)

I hope this discussion of the least-sexy topic ever has at least been a good teaser to think about mucus as a “canary in the coal mine,” a wake-up call as to the state of your internal toxicity.

Thanks for subscribing. If you feel to make a contribution because this work is valuable to you, I’m fine with going without a paycheck, but my staff isn’t, and they’re key to my providing quality content on many platforms all over the web. We’d love a one-time contribution, or better yet, a $10/month subscription. For those of you who can’t, though, we’re still here for you.

And by the way, I’m on Twitter now that somebody new owns it, who just fired a ton of paid censors and claims free speech is now available on that platform! I’m at @Robyn_Openshaw. And, please assume that some of the links I may share, compensate my small business.