Kelly Engelmann: Wellness is a practice, not just a word. Welcome to the Synergee Podcast, where myself, Kelly Engelmann and Lori Essary shed light on powerful tools and topics that nourish your body.
Lori Essary: And most importantly, feed your soul.
Kelly Engelmann: Welcome to the Synergee Podcast. We are so excited you’re back with us today where we believe we’re stronger together, and today we are super blessed to have the co-director of Hippocrates Wellness Institute with us, sharing his wealth of knowledge.
Lori Essary: So a little bit about Brian. Brian is the director of the internationally renowned Hippocrates Wellness Center located in West Palm Beach, Florida. It’s the world’s leading center for working with affliction and reversing premature aging, and is frequented by the likes of Sir Anthony Hopkins, Elliot Page, Mick Fleetwood, and Elle McPherson for over 50 years, Brian’s limitless love and passion to mentor and guide hundreds of thousands of lives into semblance of balance and well-being have led to countless hours of practical and clinical experience positioning him as one of the world’s leading progressive thinkers and teachers. We are so excited to have him today.
Let’s get started with today’s episode.
Kelly Engelmann: Hi Synergee listeners, we are so excited to be back together with you today in production. We are delighted to have Hippocrates Wellness Institute on with us today where we’re gonna talk to Brian Clement, the director, co-director of Hippocrates. We are gonna pick his brain all kind of ways about food. Food is medicine we believe that, and we wanna dig in and kind of teach you guys some new or exciting or intriguing ways to boost your nutrition status. So, Brian, tell us your story. How did you get Hippocrates?
Brian Clement: Way back in the 1960’s, I was a pioneer in American obesity. I was one of the few very fat people you saw running around, and thank goodness, an older woman in her seventies at that point who had reversed cancer naturally smacked me in the back of the head. She was bold and said, you’re gonna die. You can’t even walk upstairs without stopping. Now the three packs of cigarettes and the joints I was putting on both sides of my mouth didn’t help either. And in one fell swoop, she said something I never heard from my loving, wonderful parents, I had great parents and grandparents and family. She said, you’ve got to eat correctly. You’ve got to eat vegetables. Now, the only vegetables I saw in my house, on rare occasions, we’d have like butter with green stuff floating in it. That was rare. And usually it was, white potatoes since we’re Irish. And so that had much butter on, every single meal. My two brothers and I would get a quarter of a pound of, you remember the square quarter of a pound butter, they’d put it in the spuds and it would melt, and then you’d put the white bread and dip the gravy and that was the best thing I ate, by the way. Everything else.
Kelly Engelmann: Oh goodness.
Lori Essary: Wow.
Brian Clement: God knows what, so I obviously need it. So in one fell swoop, I became a plant-based eater before people knew what a vegan was or a vegetarian was, or the organic was and this woman guided me, thank God, and I lost in 18 months, 120 pounds.
She then said to me, Brian you’ve gotta do this work now I was already at university in biochemistry and science, and I said, where do you learn this? She said, you have to learn it, we’re gonna go to the experts. So there, even today, sadly 53 years later, there’s still not a formal school in North America now, Harvard, Yale Loma Linda, we’ve created one in Europe and we can speak about that later. We can get masters in doctorate degrees in lifestyle medicine. And so once I fully engaged in this, in 1970, it was I was just new at it and very young. I did my first lecture, thank God you weren’t in the audience cuz I didn’t know much, I knew more than the people in the audience thank God. I was out lecturing all over America. And by 1975 I asked an important question, who has the most experience? Who has the most success? And everyone said it was Hippocrates, which started in 1956, so we were the founders of the alternative health movement. We were the founders of self-care. We were the founders of lifestyle medicine. These are the words that came out of Hippocrates because our founder, I wasn’t there obviously, but our founder was told in 1952, Ann Wigmore by the Harvard doctors in Boston, she had 90 days to live. So she went home, and ate the way peasants did in Europe, which were plants. Healed it. And in 1956 recognized that what was lacking in healthcare was self-care and opened the doors at the very first center like this on the planet. And so we’ve been going consecutively now, soon, three years, it will be our 70th anniversary.
We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people come through. Our reputation comes from people healing, catastrophic disease, and those of us that live this way, I’m well in the my seventies now. We just don’t age the way the rest of the population does.
Kelly Engelmann: Brian you said, healthcare, what was lacking in healthcare was self-care. And that was back in the fifties, right? And so as I’ve experienced medicine for the last 30 years as a provider, I’ve seen that like it is so blaringly in my face on a daily basis, like our culture has lost the art of self-care. I had no idea that it went back to the fifties. Right? I thought that was something we invented in the eighties and nineties, but you’re telling me even from the fifties, that it was recognized.
Brian Clement: There was more humanity. Let’s be honest. When I was young, the doctor was a respected human being. They came to your house, we really loved them. I know they cared for us, they were part of our family. And I was interviewing a doctor who’s my age about two years ago. He really summed it up in a way nobody had ever done so for me at least, he said we had freedom. We went to school years, 12 years, we were educated. They gave us the freedom to help people the way we wanted. And then before you know it, they created rules and standard of practice and insurance clerks told us what we could. Give a patient or not. And the heart and soul in the seventies and eighties, as you pointed out, rightly happened and it was a switch. But I still think that women like you and men who get into healthcare and become doctors and nurse practitioners and PA’s do it for the right reason. When I was young, I used to be angry at the doctor in improperly. I don’t know any that I’ve met I know 2000 by name, that did it for the wrong reason or just make money or to be greedy. But when you’re educated by a broken system that has one objective to sell pills to you, then you lose your heart and soul sometimes if that’s the participation you’re involved in. And today, thank God for people like you and doctors all over the world that are moving rapidly into this area, integrative. Healthcare and alternative healthcare and holistic healthcare, that they understand that it’s not just about pills and it’s not just about genetics, it’s about epigenetics. And everywhere in the world they know that and they do research on it, except here where they keep having the old broken record and that’s why the healthcare system’s broken.
Lori Essary: And I definitely agree and we can all agree today, is that our healthcare system is broken. And I love what you just said about. Believing that we got into it because we genuinely care for people. I too don’t know anybody who would sacrifice years and years and years of education and finances to get that education to not care, but unfortunately, the fee for service. Care model, in addition to who drives our algorithms and our decisions. Basically they say, take care of the patient, but we’re gonna hold your hands behind your back and blindfold you and see how you do it. So it does take a lot of I would say not only energy, audacity broad shoulders, courage. Yes. Courage to swim upstream and to do things differently. But Kelly and I, as you had said, and we’re so grateful for the last several years, I would say 30 years cumulatively, 17 years for me, and actually a little bit more than 30 years cumulatively, but doing things differently and truly loving, we call it, Fun medicine, right? Because it’s definitely medicine that makes a difference, and it’s using tools in our toolbox that are food, like you said. And I also love what you said is it’s not just food. It’s nourishing your heart, nourishing your soul, nourishing your body through lifestyle, exercise, movement, breath work, all of those things. So, love it, love doing it.
Brian Clement: But I mean, the reality quite simply is the data is in. The number three killer in the United States, Canada, and most of Western Europe is pharmaceutical medicine. Now, how can we allow this system to keep working? And I’ll give a story back in 1978, the most blessed day of my life came April the 17th when I was in Stockholm, Sweden, and met my future wife. And she was running Europe, the world’s most famous center on inflammatory disease. She was the director there. And,
Kelly Engelmann: So time-out Brian. You said, what year was that?
Brian Clement: 1978.
Kelly Engelmann: So 1978. So we didn’t have headlines for inflammation in the US, until the nineties.
Brian Clement: No, not at all.
Kelly Engelmann: Right. We didn’t even think, we didn’t connect the dot of inflammation as the primary driver for disease until,
Brian Clement: And this is the difference between systems that have to do the right thing because they’re giving it to everyone and systems that have to profit. No matter if it’s the right thing or not. So when I found out that the center people were flying from the United States to go there all over the world, Asia, that it for Swedish citizens. In Sweden, it was free to go there. And that was stunning to me because we were battling at that point, not against only the allopathic field, but the government which supported in the pharmaceuticals.
And I wasn’t the battle there. I’m loving when it comes to that, but they were battling with us. There they went in, and they said let’s do some research, and they found out they were getting a 93% reversal rate on inflammatory diseases they worked with. So the next day, not the next month or year, they started to pay for Swedish citizens to go.
In 1982, I talked to one of the government officials and said, why do you do that? He said, yes, we’re nice people in Sweden and we do care for fellow suite, but it’s purely economic. So that’s what really doesn’t make sense. So what the work you’re doing, the work we’ve done here for nearly 70 years where we reverse diseases, we don’t reverse it, but we give tools and people reverse diseases. Do you know how many trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars globally that would save a year? The gross national product of the United States. Very soon, 25% will be healthcare. That doesn’t work, in practically any case. How does that work? It doesn’t work.
Lori Essary: No, it doesn’t.
Kelly Engelmann: So let’s talk about what does work, right? Nutrition. Food is medicine.
Brian Clement: Yes.
Kelly Engelmann: So I’m fascinated. Lori and I had the opportunity to come on site at Hippocrates, and I’ll have to tell you, it’s been a dream of ours for, we’ve been talking about it for over 10 years. And we just never, carved out the time, and the space, to experience that for ourselves. So we’ve had the opportunity to be on property twice recently, walking into the lunchroom, smells like Chlorophyl.
Lori Essary: What?
Kelly Engelmann: You can’t just breathe in the air and get well, you don’t even have to eat it. Just stand there and breathe the chlorophyll.
So help us understand that. Like, tell us about it.
Brian Clement: Well, this is an interesting thing. So when I was just a youngster, of course, I was working off the biochemistry and the physics and the biology I learned, and then I started to realize probably my early thirties. I have gotta study natural history, quantum biology, quantum physics. And when I did that, it was overwhelmingly simple for me and everyone else, if you do this to figure out what we should eat.
So right now as we’re sitting here talking, in the very center of the sun and zillions, and that’s not an embellishment and zillions of protons are born. And they immediately start banging back and forth on neutrons. And so when you walk out. Where you’re living and I’m living, you can feel that, friction coming down in the form of sun waves.
But now listen to this part of the story. It’s amazing. This happens for a hundred thousand years on in this star we call the sun. It’s a star and bouncing back and forth the a hundred thousand, it works its way very, very slowly towards the surface of this gastric sun. Remember, the sun is 98% gastric, 2% particle.
And then it shoots off so rapidly. Listen to this one. It goes from matter and turns into light, goes from a proton to a photon. Now, here’s the interesting part of the story. What evolved on the planet earth to capture the energy from the sun, which is all energy. You, me, plants, where you’re sitting, the house you’re in, everything is the electric light came from photons, green leafy plants.
That’s what evolved here. And the very first animal didn’t show up until 550 million years ago. That was a trilobyte, that looks like a horseshoe crab. And we didn’t show up in this form till a few thousand years ago. Homo sapiens in this form. So what is the original lifeform, green leafy plants, what have we been giving clinically observing with hundreds of thousands of people green leafy plants, their diseases go away. We fight aging. And by the way, finally, mainstream science is getting to this conclusion. So it’s not brain science, it’s common sense. And that’s what sprouts give you. So in the middle of a snowstorm in Alaska, in January, you can grow green leafy plants in the kitchen window in a snowstorm, and in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida. New North Carolina in the middle of summer, we can grow green leafy plants inside of our kitchen. So I mean, the other wonderful thing I’ve had the opportunity to work in countries around the world with the United Nations years ago in India and Egypt, I was in villages with starving people. They were giving them condensed milk and they were dying, surplus butter. What did that do for the people? We were sprouting. We took a hundred pound bags. This is biblical, but factual. And produced a thousand pounds of highly nutritious food that their bodies could digest and utilize complete proteins, complete vitamins, complete minerals, essential fats, and what we’ve discovered over the last 50 years.
Hope, hormones, oxygen, phytonutrients, and enzymes. That’s the medicine in these raw plants, and once you cook them, finito gone.
Kelly Engelmann: So I’ve been juicing for many, many years. I grew up, preferring brownies over broccoli, I’m just gonna say,
Brian Clement: Of course,
Kelly Engelmann: And, realized that was not helping my body. And needed to really be aggressive with changing my pallet. And so I used juicing as a way to change my pallet. However,
Brian Clement: That was smart.
Kelly Engelmann: I have not, Ever juice a sprout.
Brian Clement: Oh, that’s got to be your new thing.
Kelly Engelmann: That’s got to change, right? I sprout and I eat sprouts, but I’ve never juiced a sprout, so I wanna know about that. Like what happens when you juice a sprout?
Brian Clement: Juice a okay. When you were here, I saw you drink a green juice. And so, that one green juice you had. Had the protein, the average American absorbs in three days. So the two most obvious things we see here are overeaters, are satiated, so they’re not hungry, and blood sugar conditions where we have the numbers to prove it. They’re getting well so quick with type two diabetes and hypoglycemia your head spins, we’ve gotta watch if they’re taking insulin, they don’t go into shock. And so that our medical team has to be on top of that. And the fact of the matter is when you can have that much nutrition. Now remember, when you take a seed it’s nourishing an organic seed, but when you germinate it, it’s eight times more on average nutrients, eight times more A, B, C, D, E. Eight times more, that digestibility radically goes up as I’m as healthy like you are as can be. But when we chew seeds and nuts, we don’t chew them well enough and we don’t digest them. When you germinate them. They become 17 to 57 times, not percent more digestible. So you start juicing that stuffs. Before you know it, you’d be flying.
Kelly Engelmann: Okay. I hope my husband’s listened to this podcast because he is my juicer. He keeps me fortified with juice on a daily basis, and I so appreciate that. And so I, unfortunately, I get up at 5:00 AM. And two days ago, he’s just waking up at six 30 and I’m in his ear about juicing sprouts.
He’s like, what are you talking about? What are you reading? Like, help me understand. I’m trying to wake up and I’m like, but we’ve gotta be juicing sprouts. We need the protein.
Brian Clement: Well, most women are gonna envy you, they can’t even get their husbands to say, sprout or vegetables. And your husband’s up at five in the morning juicing for you, six in the morning. God bless. He must really love you, honey.
Kelly Engelmann: He’s a keeper. He’s absolutely 100% a keeper, for sure.
Brian Clement: Yeah, that’s it.
Kelly Engelmann: So, tell us the difference between microgreens and sprouting.
Brian Clement: Okay, so we differentiate that in a simple way. So what you can grow in a jar, it’s so easy. It’s like you can put alfalfa seeds and clover seeds and radish seed, and if you were a farmer, you throw them on the field and hope for rain or sprinkle it.
That’s all you need to do in a jar. Now, others need roots to get larger, stronger, and have more nutrient density to it. So a sunflower, which grows so rapidly. Now, this is an amazing story. You put a little black seed in the ground in seven weeks. It’s 15 feet tall, has hundreds and thousands, not hundreds, about two to 3000 of seeds, and it moves. In the morning, it’s facing the east and at night it faces the west. So you want to put that on soil. So microgreen is that, all of the seeds any seed can be made in the microgreen. So now it has roots and of course the soil you would choose is organic soil. Sure you can buy that in a container but it’s sterilized, better to go out to the woods near your house with a shovel and a big bucket, a 50 gallon garbage bin and put it in there and then you recycle it. When you’re done with the mats, cuz once you cut things these put together mats, throw them like here where we live in the south, you throw them in your backyard. In six weeks you have richer and richer and richer soil. Here in the morning, back at our gardens, in our compost pile, every single animal from South Florida is here knowing this is the best diner in the whole state.
Lori Essary: We just talked about composting a few podcasts back, Kelly, didn’t we? About the importance of composting. Yeah, definitely.
Brian Clement: I thought if you haven’t had em on, you’ve gotta have Dr. Zach Bush on. He just did the forward. This guy’s amazing. He’s a medical doctor that left recognizing if we don’t work with farmers and get the soil back, we’re all gone.
Lori Essary: Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. So I wanna understand. When people begin to change their diet, obviously their GI tracts, in many cases, they’re not used to it. Yes. So, Kelly talked about changing her palate with juicing, but I wanna hear like, what are the things that you guys see on property when you begin making those changes with adding more vegetables.
Brian Clement: So we were the people that sort of popularized the term detoxification. And boy you are, a better word for it now, 53 years later is exorcism.
I mean, when you’ve been sitting and I was a sinner, you were a sinner too. I mean, you’ve gotta be exhumed and I mean all of that stuff you’ve been eating over decades. Literally, is stuck in your intestinal tract, the ventricles of your body it’s created plaque. Your cardiovascular system is clogged with this stuff comes out. Now the good news is Dr. Arthur. Out in San Diego did a study, it ended up costing her 2 million over time. She found out in the first seven days, most of us eliminate about 60% of the waste in our body.
That’s why you feel like you’re hit by a truck, getting on this pristine clean diet. So people are moaning and groaning and saying, this isn’t working cause I feel sick, it is working. You gotta clean the pathway. So now the organs start functioning the way they should. Now, the second week, people start to say, wow, I feel a lot better by the third. They get it, and it’s 21 days to change habits, to change mindsets, and we’ve learned through our medical team here, the biochemistry of the body radically shifts by 50% between the 14th day and the 21st day.
So a lot comes out, but the real work is done 14 to 21 days. Two weeks to three weeks. And so you can go through that, but it’s a needed process. And if you’re a woos or a sissy, you’re not gonna like it. But if you want to be forgiven for your sin, nature will do it.
Lori Essary: It sure will. You are so right. And I think there’s a lot of mental shifts that have to happen during that time too that I can imagine that you really have to support your guests with, to let them know, listen, it’s, you’re not gonna feel great, this doesn’t feel good, but honestly, your body wasn’t doing well before. This is a part of the healing process that you have to walk through.
Brian Clement: If you put a cork in a cesspool, you don’t know there’s a cesspool. So when you pull the cork, all of that waste has to, and our doctors support them but more so, everyone gets psychotherapy here. With gifted psychotherapists, because it’s when I joke, but I didn’t really mean it as a joke, even though it sounds funny. You are going through an emotional and spiritual exorcism. Because, Cellular memory is not a new age philosophy. It’s a biological fact. And so you’re holding on pain and suffering, unresolved issues, and a lot of that eating. When I was obese, even though I had a great life and was loved, I didn’t like myself much. So I was not taking drugs. I wasn’t an alcoholic. But I did it with food. And most of us use food as a weapon against ourself, because we’re not willing to deal with change, and that’s what we do here. It’s, as you know the base program’s called the Life Transformation, we have comprehensive cancer and Mindfulness Program, Immune Boosting Program, Fitness Program. Next year we’re gonna have a longevity program. My book will be out the end of this year, called How to Live 220 not cuz we think so we know you can do that. And so I’m doing that with a doctor whose wife came here 20 years ago and reversed stage four melanoma. Which in modern medicine is incurable. How many people I’ve worked with that did that?
And the good news is, you just have to support nature. We don’t have to do the work. Nature lets it happen. And so those of you listening out there that this sounds so new and maybe even frightening to you, a lot of you say you have faith, but you don’t really have faith. A lot of you say you wanna live naturally, but you’re really not living naturally. You’ve gotta let go. You’ve gotta just embrace, if you believe that there’s a creator and there’s a universe, you’ve gotta really now engage in that and let go of all of our preconceived notion. And before you know it, you’re gonna heal and you’re gonna become a human being like you’ve never been before.
Lori Essary: Achieving your best. Yes. Reaching your optimal health. And you’re right, it really is a grieving process of sorts, don’t you think? People go through denial and they, anger and likely resentment and they’re moving towards the acceptance of these are the things I need to do to achieve the life I wanna have, and you either decide to do it or you decide not to do it, but it’s, the ball is in. Everyone’s court individually to do that. You give them, as I understand it, the tools and the resources. You don’t treat them, you give them the tools and resources to heal themselves, as I understand it.
Brian Clement: Everything, we we’re mono focused. We have several departments, energy medicine department, our partners, which you’re involved with. Boost the Immune system with IV’s. Are you a psychotherapy department, we have a kitchen, we have nutritional department but, it’s all about boosting the immune system. Cuz at the end of the day, the universe figured this out. The immune system is, and you know this, but the listener may not, is a gathering of brilliant cells. And those cells, each and every one of them have a unique job. Some go after bacteria, some viruses, some molds, some yeast, some fungus, some parasites, some amoeba’s and some cancer.
And, when you can encourage the immune system to do the job that nature in the universe meant it to do, there’s nothing you cannot reverse. Some of the people I’ve had the privilege to work with over the half century or more that I’ve been doing this have been written off multiple sclerosis, early stage Parkinson’s disease, every form of cancer you can imagine. And every one of these people by the way. Have the capacity to heal themselves if they have the self-respect, the self-love, and the correct tools to do it.
Lori Essary: And I noticed you just got a delivery of juice. If I’m not, so you better drink it because I understand that it oxidizes in how many minutes or seconds? Tell me.
Brian Clement: 15 minutes
Lori Essary: There you go.
Brian Clement: Yes. Made now. About half sprouts, sunflower sprouts, pea sprouts, complete proteins, and the rest cucumbers, organic, of course, cucumbers, celery, parsley, these type of things. And I’m gonna tell you that is where, you remember the word photosynthesis. Where all energy comes from.
Lori Essary: Yes.
Kelly Engelmann: Yes. Making me thirsty to see you. Cheers to you.
Brian Clement: Thank you.
Kelly Engelmann: Drink on.
Brian Clement: Eventually we’ll have something we can sip through the internet.
Kelly Engelmann: Right, right there. Absolutely.
Lori Essary: Absolutely. Yes.
Kelly Engelmann: So what’s coming up for Hippocrates? Are there any events that we should know about? Is there anything that you wanna highlight for our listener?
Brian Clement: Well surely, I mean my newest book just came out. You can get it on Amazon. It’s called Self-Healing Diet. And it not only talks about what we’ve talked about, nutrition, this is one that is weight regulation under and overweight. But for instance, one of the studies in there show that people who are chronically using cell phone, which is 67% of us that do, by the way, 67% of the people are have an addiction to cell phone use. Weigh 30% more than the rest of the population.
Now we know because of micro toxins including plastics and other study came out yesterday that this is something that contributes to weight gain and in some kinds emaciation, with it. And cancers obviously. There was studied on at Oxford not long ago. The top bush oceanographic scientist said, if you consumed only three fish meals a week, I used to do three in a day. At the end of a year, 365 days. You have two ounces of plastic in your organ systems. Now you and I know as physicians that kills people. And forget just the cancer, how about neurological problems. In do that too? So, we’re in a world of septic poison at this point, no government anywhere in the world, including the United States, is serious about changing it. And corporations control governments and people who run governments and your life. And we’ve gotta just, divorce ourself from that poison and live as clean and as pure, both mentally and physically as we can. And you will see the reality, what humans were meant to be, because we are good people. We’re not killers, we’re not fighters, we’re not racist and sexist. We are people who want to love and be loved, but you’ve gotta have a clean, pure lifestyle to do that, you’ve gotta have the integrity. So when you go to bed at night, you’ve done your best. We’re not perfect, there’s no such thing as perfection, but the fact is, that is what creates your human spirit.
Kelly Engelmann: True, that is true.
Lori Essary: I also wanna ask the question about modalities too. You guys offer quite a few modalities too, between cold water plunges, you have energy work. What are some of the other modalities that Hippocrates offers to pair alongside of the food side?
Brian Clement: Well, about 29 years ago one of my close friends, he’s an American that went through Germany and helped him create magnetic resonant imagery. Decades ago, he let me know that hyperthermia killed microbes and cancers. And from the day after he said this to me he has five expertise as an MD, I’ve been doing my wife’s been doing an infrared sauna, and when I travel often not an infrared every day. This is not a joke. I just got back from a European lecture tour. If they didn’t have a place I could go to the sauna. I say no no. That’s how important it’s. This is what takes out the micro poisons, the microtoxins, the plastics we’re talking about. We also have steam bass, everyone gets body work, but it’s not rub dovey, feelgood stuff. It’s neuromuscular, sometimes. And it doesn’t