Optimum Health Throughout the Lifespan: A Clinical Conversation with David Minkoff,MD,and Robert Rountree,MD

David Minkoff, MD, co-founded LifeWorks Wellness Center in 1997, one of the largest integrative medical clinics in the United States. In addition to his traditional medical training, Dr. Minkoff has extensive post-graduate training in complementary and integrative medicine, including functional medicine, allergy elimination, European biological medicine, neural therapy, and longevity/aging medicine. In 2000, he founded BodyHealth, a nutrition company which offers a unique range of dietary supplements to the public and practitioners. Dr. Minkoff is passionate about fitness and is a 43-time Ironman finisher.

Robert Rountree: Can I ask what your current age is and how many times have you competed in the Ironman triathlon?

David Minkoff: I'm 74. I've done the full Ironman 43 times. My first season was 1982. I've done probably a few hundred other half Ironmans, Olympic distance. This is my 43rd season of racing. I have a full lineup starting next month, so I'm sort of never stopped.

Dr. Rountree: That is a truly amazing accomplishment! I definitely want to dive into your thoughts on healthy aging because you're clearly doing something that we all want to know about. Let's start by talking about where you grew up and who your early influences were. I believe you went to University of Wisconsin, correct? I know that you initially specialized in pediatrics, so I'm curious how that became your interest.

Dr. Minkoff: Yes, I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. My dad had always wanted to be a doctor, but he was a depression kid. At 16 he got his pilot's license, and when World War II started, he was a couple years too old to fly an Air Force plane. So he fudged his driver's license to be five years younger, went into the Air Force, became a navigator pilot and flew B-25's and B-29's. He was shot down twice, once over North Africa, once over the Aleutian Islands, was in a coma for a month at the end of the war. He went back to Wisconsin, met my mother at the university, and they fell in love. Her father wanted to support him, so that he could get through school. My dad had his own pride and wouldn't take help from anyone. So he went to work for her dad and never went into medicine. He had regrets on that. My mother had three brothers and two of them went into medicine. One of them lived with us while he was going to school, living with my parents and us. I decided at five years old that I wanted to be a doctor.

I don't know why, maybe past lifetimes. I just knew that. In high school they had us do career exploration, somehow I ended up with I either want to be a chemist or a lawyer. Then when I got to college, my primary thing was that I wanted to do a year abroad in another country. The country I wanted to go to was the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. So I started taking Hebrew and I did a lot of math, advanced math, and we were there for a year, and came back. In the summer before my last year of school, I realized I didn't meet my pre-med requirements, so I went to summer school. I ended up as a Hebrew major with a minor in mathematics. I took the Medical College Admission Test and I did good somehow. I was the first language major to ever get into the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine.

I had to work really hard because I'd taken one zoology class and one chemistry class. I really was in with people who had been science majors. I worked really hard and I loved medical school. I love to study and I love learning, I love books. I graduated medical school near the top of my class. I was Alpha Omega Alpha Society, so it's the top graduates every year, get honored. Then I just didn't know what field of medicine I wanted to do. I just liked a lot of things, so-

Dr. Rountree: You liked all of it?

Dr. Minkoff: I liked all of it. I applied to several different schools. In the meantime, I had gotten married. We took a tour, we went to New York, Einstein and Mount Sinai, and we went to University of Arizona, UCLA, USC, Seattle, UC San Francisco and the last stop, I didn't have an interview appointment for. My wife and I were camping the whole way. We had stopped in San Diego and we heard about a rotating internship program at UC San Diego. It was hosted at Mercy Hospital. We thought, what the heck? We'll just stop in there and see what it looks like.

So it's a Saturday morning. We've been camping. So I've got a t-shirt, shorts and flip flops on. We walk into the lobby at Mercy Hospital in San Diego, and there is a nun standing in the lobby in a full habit, with a gigantic medallion around her neck, with a Jewish star on it. She looks at me and she says to both of us, my wife and myself, “my children, you've arrived.”

I'm like, “what?” She said, “yes.” I said, “I'm here to look at the hospital, and I don't have an appointment, and it's Saturday morning.” And she says, “there's no problem with that, I'll get the director down from La Jolla and I've got a resident here that'll tour you, and by the time you're done with the tour, he'll interview you and this is going to be just fine.” The program director comes down, I do an interview with him. At the end of the interview, the selection process for internships and residency is a matching program.

I think they picked 20 slots. They put the first 40 people that they want on the list, and then you put the ones on your list in order, and then this goes for the whole country. At the end of the interview, the guy said to me, “I'll match you first, if you match me first, you're in this program if you want it.” And that's what happened.

Dr. Rountree: That's what is called the “stars lining up.”

Dr. Minkoff: The stars lined up. This nun became one of my best friends. She was in her 50s at the time. She was a complete renegade, she was a spiritual, she was a saint. She was just wonderful.

When I got there, I was supposed to do a rotating internship. I was going to do three months of pediatrics, three months of medicine, three months of surgery, three months of gynecology. My first three months were pediatrics. The program director then about halfway through, said, “oh, you're good with children, you should be a pediatrician.” And I thought, oh, I should be a pediatrician. I thought, Why not? I like children. I'm the oldest of four children. I was a counselor at summer camp. I was a lifeguard, I don't know, it was fun.

In the program everybody had to do four months of neonatal ICU. Each year we had to do it. So after three months, I switch it. I do pediatrics for six months, and then I did medicine rotation and I did a GYN rotation. I was automatically in the UCSD pediatric residency program, this counted as a year of residency. I did it in pediatrics. When I finished the third year, the director of the program said he wanted me to stay an extra year, be chief resident. It was a big pediatric program. So I did that and it was loads of fun. I basically managed the pediatric ICU. Then when I finished that, I still didn't really know what I wanted to do.

There was a very fine infectious disease program at UCSD. I did a mixed fellowship in infectious disease where we did adult and pediatric infectious disease. I had a research program where I was working on ribavirin. The drug still exists, but we were looking at it to see how effective it was for herpes zoster. I published a couple of papers on that.

When I finished the fellowship, one of the guys had a private practice in hospital infectious disease and office pediatrics. I went into practice with him, and that was fun because we were attendings at the university. We had a hospital practice in infectious disease, and this is like 1982, and it's the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The hospital was full of very unusual infectious disease with guys with AIDs. Then there was a whole Mung population from Southeast Asia that was brought to Camp Pendleton in Southern California. They had just massive amounts of parasitic and just unusual stuff. It was really interesting and I loved it.

Dr. Rountree: You were able to treat all the esoteric infections we learn about in med school but don't get to see much anymore.

Dr. Minkoff: Yes. There's a unit called Flying Samaritans, and they had a volunteer pilot, nurse, doctor and a dentist. We would fly into the Southern Baja, California, land on the beach, have clinics. We would do it on weekends, so I got a real experience in sort of rural medicine, primitive rural medicine. Everything we had was donated from excess stuff, from various companies. It was super fun.

I was in practice there for 10 years, and I was interested in learning more. I took a six month sabbatical, came to Clearwater, Florida and put my kids in school. And thought, why don't we move here? The family was just really solid and we loved Florida. I saw an ad in the newspaper for an emergency room job, and I had moonlighted in emergency rooms. I had spent a lot of time in a trauma emergency room in Southern California and the emergency room. I was board eligible for emergency medicine. Anyway, he calls up, they're desperate for a doctor at this emergency room, and I'm board certified in pediatrics, I've done an infectious disease fellowship. He was so desperate. I said, I can do emergency medicine, I've done a lot of it. And he said, okay, you're hired. So I started doing emergency medicine and we sold out of the practice in California, and we moved here to Clearwater.

Just to back up for a second, when I moved to San Diego, in my first year of medical school, within a month of starting medical school, my dad, who was 53 years old, had a massive heart attack. I remember my uncle, who was a cardiologist, taking me into the ICU to see my father.

I got scared and I thought I had played sports in high school, but I hadn't done much in university, in medical school. I thought I better start running. So I started running, and when we moved to San Diego, there was a running boom there. San Diego's an outdoor town. So I got into it and I ran five marathons and I just loved being outside. I loved running, I loved the training. In 1982, I'm sitting on a Saturday afternoon with my best friend, and we're watching Wide World of Sports, if you remember that show. They showed a film of Ironman. It was in Hawaii. We watched the whole thing and the end of the race, a San Diegan, who I knew about because I lived there, named Julie Moss, was about a hundred yards from the finish line and she collapsed. There's this famous footage of her trying to get up, trying to walk. She's all wobbly. Then another gal from San Diego, her name was Kathleen McCartney, runs by her and wins the race. They do this whole thing about the joy of victory and the agony of defeat. He and I saw that and we looked at each other and we said, “we got to do this race.” We shook hands on it. Next morning, I looked in the newspaper. I found a used 10-speed bicycle. I joined YMCA, got into a swim master's program, and this was February of ’82. In October ’82, I was on the starting line in Kona, Hawaii to do my first Ironman.

Dr. Rountree: There can't be very many people in the world that have done 43 of them.

Dr. Minkoff: Not too many that could do one. Anyway, so that became sort of a parallel hobby. My wife got into triathlon. She loved to do the shorter races and my kids got into it. Just to fast-forward, we're in Florida. She had become a nurse and she got interested in natural health and nutrition and started going to seminars. Dr. Jeffrey Bland was one of the guys on the circuit. She heard him and she said, “This guy's one of the smartest guys I've ever seen. You got to see him.” We went to Orlando. We did a two-day seminar. I thought, “Yeah, he is one of the smartest guys I've ever seen.” We then got really interested in integrative medicine, functional medicine, call it what you will. She decided to get the mercury out of her teeth, and it was done by a dentist who didn't know how to do it and so she had some problems with it.

She started a business, a home health nursing business. Next door to her shop, a dentist had moved up here. On his marquee, it said “natural dentistry.” One day, I was picking her up and he was walking out of his office, and I had just asked him, “What is natural dentistry?” He said, “Well, we believe that the mouth is actually a part of the body and you wouldn't do anything in the mouth that you wouldn't do in a lung, or in an arm, or in a liver. You wouldn't leave in a dead piece of liver if it was… or a dead piece of bowel, or a dead toe, a gangrenous toe.” He says, “Well, we don't believe in things like root canals. Mercury is probably number two on the list of most toxic things. It's liquid at room temperature, but it boils at 110 degrees, and you put a drill in there and you drill it, or you eat hot food, a cup of coffee at 160, 180 degrees, it'll aerosol. We never do that.”

I'm like, “Wow.” I have this conversation with him. My wife had these fillings taken out and she wasn't feeling well. I'm in a very good big city hospital emergency room, top 100 chest pain centers in the United States, and the guys I know don't know what to do with her. I said, “Hey, listen to this story.” He listened to the story and he says, “Oh, your wife's mercury toxic. You better go to Seattle because there's a guy there named Dietrich Klinghardt, and he's a trained doctor. Two weeks later, I was on a plane. I went to Seattle and I did all his courses. I learned how to do his autonomic reflex testing, and how to detox, and herbs, German medicine, neurotherapy, and started using some of this stuff with her. She got better. And then we had friends who started calling us and said, “I got rheumatoid arthritis.” Or, “I've got chronic migraines.” Or, “I've got ulcerative colitis. Can you help me?” I'm like, “I don't know.”

In her nursing office, she had an extra room. I said, “Emergency room shift to work.” I was doing 14, 12-hour shifts a month. I had a couple days in between my shifts, and I said, “Well, this Tuesday afternoon, I'll meet you over at,” my wife's name is Sue, “I'll meet you over at Sue's office and we can play.” I just started to see people. We were going two weekends a month to seminars—American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM), Academy of Comprehensive Integrative Medicine (ACIM), and International College of Integrated Medicine (ICIM). We were going everywhere. We were just hungry to learn everything that we could. I started playing and people started getting better. I was just flooded with patients.

Dr. Rountree: You were seeing people that hadn't gotten better and with conventional stuff.

Dr. Minkoff: Yes. They hadn't gotten better with conventional stuff. We were actually figuring things out for people. Next to her nursing office, on the other side from the dentist, there was a 3000 square foot space. We renovated it. I stopped working at the emergency room. I started doing this, and then hired a nurse practitioner. We went to ACAM and learned how to do chelation, so we started to do chelation. Within about a year, we needed more space. We found a building. We renovated it. It was about 9000 square feet and it just filled up. Now we have 70 employees, 2 MDs, 5 nurse practitioners, 4 separate buildings with treatments.

I love new technology, so I got every modality that exists practically to help people get better. It's just fabulously interesting all the time. Most of the things that we're seeing are chronic unsolved illness. A lot of cancer, Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, people come from all over the world. Our average patient is seeing 13 doctors. They come and spend a couple of months with us. It's sort of an intensive program. About 85% of the time, they get better. We're seeing a lot of advanced cases.

Dr. Rountree: Let me stop and reiterate: you're saying that a typical patient will spend a couple of months reorganizing their life while on your program?

Dr. Minkoff: Yes. I tell them usually between two and four months. They know when they're better, and they tell me, and then they're done. It just depends on what's going on. For a cancer patient, they'll be there five days a week, five hours a day in the clinic getting various treatments. The Lyme ones aren't quite as extensive, but it's what it takes.

Dr. Rountree: When someone's health has gotten way out of balance, that can't be fixed overnight.

Dr. Minkoff: No. It's a motivated person that really wants to get better and then has the means where they can come and do this because it takes money. Most of the stuff isn't insurance-covered. They just want to get better. Their lives are in ruin. We have thousands of success stories from patients who get better. They just get better, and they're happy, and they love it. Usually, I'll do a follow-up with them. Once they go home, maybe a three and six-month follow up. If they're cruising, I try to find them something locally to just do their health maintenance, because they don't need me anymore. Now I have worked with some very high-end athletes. Of course, high-end athletes want performance. People who have chronic fatigue, they want performance too. The stuff that you do with these athletes is the same stuff that you do with the sick personnel.

The athletes are looking for a hundredth of a second in a 100-m butterfly, and the other person is looking to be able to walk around the block, but it's the same stuff. Everything from NASCAR drivers to Tour de France caliber cyclists. My love of learning has just not stopped. It's increased. I still read probably a book every week. I just love knowledge and I love learning, and I love seeing how this stuff can be applied to people to really help them. There's so much new technology that becomes available, like harnessing quantum and energy medicine in a measurable way that you can really affect their system to bring it back to how it's supposed to be. I'm doing all this stuff myself, and it makes a difference.

I'm training seven days a week, and I love that too. I enjoy it. I see improvements in myself. I'm in a master swim group, so it's an hour workout three times a week. I did that swim workout. It's very hard. Friday's always a sprint day. It's very hard. I'm in the pool and I'm the oldest guy in my lane. Most of the guys are between 40 and 60, and I'm hanging in there with them. I came home and I did a fairly hard run, and the Garmin watch today said that my VO₂ max was 40, which for my age, is in the very top percentile. It made me happy all morning that, “Oh, geez. It went from 39 to 40 and my fitness is improving.” I'm going to Hawaii in June to do a half Ironman. I'm training hard and I'm seeing improvement. For me, that's very exciting. I'm old, but I can still go.

Dr. Rountree: I'm thrilled to hear that your fitness keeps getting better with training. On the other hand, I see a lot of triathletes here in my hometown of Boulder that train really hard, but at some point they burn out, and get chronically fatigued. They compete successfully in an Ironman or another intense athletic competition, but afterward they crash. What are they doing wrong?

Dr. Minkoff: They're overdoing it. You have to keep a balance with sleep, and exercise, and nutrition, and work, and family. Being in the medical profession I think has helped me. I've worked with a lot of people who have gone through that situation. I've watched the indicators of when my body is getting on the edge, and you have to back down. You can't cheat that. Each of us is different and we all need different things. I'm pretty ruthless with my nutrition and my supplementation, that my first thing in the morning is I get up and I drink a pint of coconut water and 38 vitamin tablets. I don't like it a lot of time, but I'm doing it.

It's a lot of pills but with the environment the way it is, and the sort of other stress level of electromagnetic field everywhere and news everywhere, unless you shore yourself up and have a real program to keep yourself together, you'll just fall apart. I think that, on the athlete front, a lot of them have deficiencies that nobody's looking at, and they've got bugs in their gut and parasites that the regular guys aren't looking at. One of my first patients was an Olympic cyclist and he had chronic fatigue. Turned out he had mercury poisoning. His hobby was a glassblower. He was a doctor. He was an Olympic cyclist, and had glassblowing as his hobby and got mercury toxic. He lived in California, I'm in Florida. He comes here. We've become very good friends, and he got better.

It's early March, he's got to be tour ready by July. The guy's lost a lot of weight, and he's got diarrhea, and nobody can figure out what's wrong with him. We do electrodermal screening on him. Finally, he's got parasites and treat him for parasites. I started giving him this amino acid concoction that we put together called PerfectAmino to get him anabolic and restore his muscle mass, because he would go out for a ride and his heart rate would go to 150 and he wasn't even trying. He was really depleted and he was very lean, his body was depleted from all the diarrhea. He starts taking PerfectAmino. By July, he's tour ready. He does his best tour. He won a mount on stage and it was just insane. He was just like, “This stuff is amazing.” I've had some experiences like that, where with the athletes, you have to debug them, figure out what's wrong, and the guys that burn out are doing too much. The cortisol levels are in the toilet. They're just overdoing it.

Dr. Rountree: Our modern world seems designed to destroy mitochondria. Do you agree?

Dr. Minkoff: Totally agree. We do bioenergy tests on people, and it's a very, very good way to look at mitochondrial function. A lot of people are toxic. They can't make adenosine triphosphate, and they're anaerobic, and they don't circulate. You throw in all the stuff now, like 60 some percent of the population is on pharmaceutical drugs—antidepressants, and sleep drugs, and over-the-counter acid blockers. These are all poisons. They're never the solution. People get conned into this stuff and that just makes them worse. I'm not anti-pharmaceuticals. Sometimes there's emergencies and a guy's got way too high blood pressure. He needs a drug. He's got pneumonia and a fever, he needs a drug.

I just don't want the drug to be a solution—like the gastro intestinal (GI) guy who prescribes an acid blocker and says, “Well, you're 40 and you can take this for the rest of your life other than you're going to get stomach cancer, and mineral depletion, and parasitic overload because you have no stomach acid and you won't digest your proteins.” The GI guy's just clueless about what he's doing long term. These are the things, they're just very basic practical things. Half the time, science is wrong. When I started medical school, the first lecture by the old professor with the long gray beard, I never forget this, he said, “Listen, we are in very exciting times with medical knowledge and medical research. The medical knowledge and research is doubling every two years.” He said, “That's wonderful. We're learning all this new stuff.”

He said, “The problem that we face is that, in about five years, half the stuff we're teaching you is going to turn out to not be true, and the bigger problem is we don't know which half.” This is like walking on a tightrope, and the only way that I've figured out is that people can fudge literature. They can fudge lab results. I was in academic medicine. I know the push that you have to publish if you're going to get your seniority and you're going to get your tenure. A lot of unethical stuff goes on. At the very highest levels, you see what's unraveling now with this whole COVID thing. They just lied, and lied, and cheated, and lied. At the very highest levels, nobody's trustworthy.

The only thing you can trust is what's the outcome? Is the patient better? Does he measure better? Does he feel better? Is his energy better? That's my ultimate test. When the patient comes to me and they say, “Oh, well are you going to repeat all this lab tests when I'm done?” I say, “We'll repeat some of it, but my goal button for you is you tell me you're better. You went out for a run today and you felt good. You made it through a whole day without having to take two naps. Your brain is clear and you can read or watch a movie and follow it to the end. That's the real test of is the treatment working or did the treatment work.”

Dr. Rountree: I've long felt the irony was that our insurance system, a third party payer system, says, “We only cover approved protocols.” If I appeal a claim they have denied by saying, “the patient has been getting better on the program I prescribed,” the invariable response is “that doesn't matter, because we're not paying for the patient to get better. We're paying for them to get what's approved.”

Dr. Minkoff: Right. Well, the whole system is corrupt. By and large, there's very little openmindedness. I've had a few guys at the big cancer hospital here that I have had patients that were seeing both of us, and I even get some referrals from them. But by and large, the medical community is just blind and deaf to things that aren't traditional, at least in this town.

Dr. Rountree: There's an old saying that science advances one funeral at a time. In order for things to change, you need a new generation of people that are willing to be open-minded and think differently. It's a slow process.

Dr. Minkoff: It's a slow process. Now, I have been, for quite a few years, trying to recruit new doctors to come join me who have just the right mindset to learn this new technology. I think there's more of us. And with things like your podcasts and books and guys out there who are promoting, more people are catching the wave. And I think it's going to change.

Dr. Rountree: The paradigm is changing very slowly—almost imperceptibly at times—but it's definitely changing. Before we finish today, I want to talk about your latest scientific interest, which is dietary protein. Could you tell us what you've learned from your research about how we utilize protein and what conventional nutritional science has gotten wrong about taking protein supplements for muscles or for overall health?

Dr. Minkoff: Oh, sure. I'm an experimenter, constant experimenter, what works, what doesn't work. And I was a vegetarian for a long time, and I thought that that was the ultimate diet. And I was training and working and everything seemed to be fine. And then about probably 12 or 15 years ago, I injured my hamstring and I couldn't get it to heal. And I did everything you could do. Injection, cold, hot, chiropractic, massage, Reiki. I did everything. And I couldn't get it to stably heal. And every time I tried to push it, like go to the track and push it, I could feel if I kept going, it was going to tear.

So I didn't know what to do. I started experimenting, and it dawned on me one day that maybe my diet was insufficient. And I was doing panels from, at the time it was called Metametrics Lab, now it's Genova Diagnostics. I did an Individual Optimized Nutrition (ION) Profile, and my amino acid levels were just really low. And I was like, “What the heck?” So I started to experiment.

Dr. Rountree: This happened despite eating what seemed like an optimal diet?

Dr. Minkoff: Yes. I'm vegetarian, but boy, I'm eating my beans and rice because the deficiency in the beans will be made up by the protein in the brown rice, etc. Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé was my Bible. So I was like, “Oh my God, this is not working out for me. Plus my leg won't heal.”

So I started experimenting with combinations of amino acids and essential amino acids, and came up with a combination through some help with some other people. And I started taking these amino acids, and in about six weeks, my leg pain went away, and I could push that leg and the darn thing healed. And I went to Ironman Canada, and I had the best time I'd ever had. My Ironman was 11 hours and 18 minutes. And if you do a 12-hour Ironman, that's running an equivalent to a three hour marathon. That's a very hard course. The water's very cold in that lake, like high 50s, low 60s. It's a mountain, two big climbs. Hour climbs over big mountain passes and a very hilly marathon. And I had the best time ever.

And I wrote an article in Triathlete Magazine. The other thing I noticed was I gained, I think it was nine pounds of lean body mass. I did not look any different on the outside. My muscles didn't, my legs and my arms didn't measure bigger, but I put on nine pounds. And I was lean, and my body fat hadn't changed. And I started asking around to nutritional biochemists, and they said, “Well, you were protein malnourished, and this void is probably in your bones and in your organs and your lean body mass.”

So I was deficient. And I set a new record for maximum heart rate. I was training with a heart rate monitor, and I'd never seen anything above 172. And then on a real hard mountain climb on a hot day, I see my heart rate hit 186. It was like 12 points higher than I'd ever seen. And I thought my physiologic function is really improving and the difference is I'm taking this combination of amino acids. So I write an article for Triathlete Magazine, I get 3000 replies. “What is this? Where can I get it?”

I already had a company called Body Health, which we were doing products for detoxification, because when I went to Dr. Klinghardt, he had people taking 14 things. And I was like, “People aren't going to take 14 things.”

Dr. Rountree: You thought, “we've got to roll all these things together.”

Dr. Minkoff: Let's roll them together. So I did a multi that had all the liver detox stuff in it, and then some natural chelators. And so we had a little company that was going along and I thought, let's manufacture amino acids, and we'll put this out. It's called Perfect Amino. And we just got a massive response to it—a bunch of New York Yankee homerun hitters and all kinds of NASCAR drivers, all kinds of different people. And the response was like, “Oh my God.” And then the menopausal woman, “I got energy back, my hair's growing again. Hey, my nails aren't brittle like they used to be.”

And it was hitting a niche where people are deficient and they don't digest well, or they don't eat enough protein, and you take 10 g of this product every day and it'll change your life. And so we have thousands of success stories from people who take it. And we got 21,000 people now on a VIP group at bodyhealth.com because they can lose body fat and gain lean muscle because the product has no calories. And instead of having 3 or 4 or 500 calories of a steak or chicken, if you use Perfect Amino as a substitute for your protein, 10 g has only four calories. So you can keep your protein high, but your calories low, and you can gain lean body mass and lose body fat because you can do calorie deficit.

And all these people are doing keto, most of them are in a protein deficit. It is not good for them. They're not getting a gram per pound of protein, which is what they need because they're holding back protein and they're substituting fat. And you can add Perfect Amino, it won't take them out of ketosis, and it doesn't spike insulin. And they can hold their protein and not really do themselves in by trashing their lean body mass.

We did an experiment with a few hundred people where when human chorionic gonadotropin was all the rage for weight loss. We did a few hundred people where they're only eating 500 calories a day. And yes, they lose body fat like mad, but for every four pounds of body fat, they lose a pound of lean body mass, and that's hard to get back. So we found if we gave them Perfect Amino, we could hold their lean body mass. They could lose fat without losing lean body mass. And that is a big thing. And I think that has a general usage.

Now I've done thousands, maybe tens of thousands of these ION panels and looked at people's fasting amino acids, and 9 out of 10 people are really low, no matter what they're doing. And if you add Perfect Amino, give it to them for three to six months, they come back and then they get various physiologic improvements for their bodies, sometimes it's neurotransmitters, they're depressed or they're anxious. You do neurotransmitter tests and you find, well, they have no GABA or they have no serotonin. Well, you need amino acids to make those things. Or osteoporosis is a huge one. You could pour calcium on osteoporosis all day long. It doesn't help because osteoporosis is a decay of the collagen that's in the bone where the mineral has to stick. And if the collagen is breaking down, the mineral won't stick, and that's osteoporosis. And if you give people Perfect Amino, they build back their collagen. And by the way, giving collagen doesn't work because collagen's deficient in one of the essential amino acids, so it isn't very effective.

So there's all kinds of uses for this, and many, many physicians are using this and having great success with it because it's really unique and it's kind of a revolution. I got asked to speak to the American Academy of Nutrition. I told them about the truth on protein metabolism. And it isn't anything what you read in the dietician books or in the nutrition books. It's all wrong. And which proteins are good. Like how well can the body utilize the protein to make protein?

And if you look at the scale, whey protein is the most touted, most researched, most promoted product, but only seven, 16% of the amino acids in whey protein, are utilized by the body. Eighty-four percent get turned into a carbohydrate. So you might as well have a banana.

And collagen, if you eat it with other things, you will make some protein, but it's missing tryptophan and you have to have all eight essentials to do it. And then you look at eggs. So 48% of egg protein is incorporated into the body. That's the best protein. But Perfect Amino is 99% incorporated. It's double what anything else is. So it can be very helpful no matter what the condition is.

Dr. Rountree: I want to applaud you for thinking outside of the box—not just regarding what's wrong with our nutrition, but for asking how we can think in innovative ways about dealing with all the chronic illnesses that people are confronted with today. If people want to see you as a patient, follow your work, or find out about new research you're conducting, what's the best way for them to be in touch?

Dr. Minkoff: I have two companies. One is called Body Health. The website is bodyhealth.com. There's a free newsletter on there. There's hundreds of videos on there on all kinds of things including protein, detoxification, cancer, all this stuff. And they can subscribe to the newsletter, it's free.

And then my clinic is called LifeWorks Wellness Center—www.lifeworkswellnesscenter.com. And same on there. There's hundreds of videos. There's a bimonthly or every other week newsletter from there. And if people are interested in becoming patients, there's a new patient signup form so that if they fill that out, then one of my people will call them and see if what they have is a good match for what we do.

I wrote a bestselling book a couple years ago called The Search for the Perfect Protein. It's very readable. It's sort of my story on amino acids and what's happened in a lot of patient stories. That can be bought on Amazon. The PDF could also be downloaded for free on the Body Health website.

Dr. Rountree: Or, people can watch videos of the latest Ironman and watch you coming across that finish line!

Dr. Minkoff: Yes, keep your fingers crossed for me. I'm in a new age group this year, and to get to the world championship you have to qualify, and usually in my age group, you have to win your age group. So I'm working hard. I'm going to this qualifying race, and I'm hoping I can win my age group. It's a new age group for me. I'll be in the 75-year-old age group because that would be fun. I made it there eight times so far over the last 40 years to be in the world championship, and it's always a thrill. So I'm working on that.

Dr. Rountree: Well, I'm wishing you the best of luck. Keep up all your great work, and we're all excited to see what your next accomplishment will be.

Dr. Minkoff: Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on this.

Robert Rountree: You bet. I look forward to chatting in the future.▪

To Contact Dr. David Minkoff, MD

David Minkoff, MD

LifeWorks Wellness Center, Co-founder

BodyHealth Inc., Founder

Board Certified Pediatrics

Fellowship trained Infectious Disease

Board Eligible Emergency Medicine

Websites: www.lifeworkswellnesscenter.com

www.bodyhealth.com