Recently, I have had the pleasure to interview one of the Vancouver’s most talented healers, Ryan Carnahan on a very interesting topic of detox. Heavy metals are one of the most serious pollutant and disease causing factors out there. Learning how to detox naturally may add months and years to your best friends life. I hope you will enjoy this interview.
Dr. PD:
Hi everyone, I have the pleasure to introduce you to Ryan Carnahan who has been very kind and agreed for me to interview him. He is a person who has a deep knowledge on the level of nutrition, supplements and energy healing and I would like you to hear a little about minerals and their function and foremost, how they contribute to getting rid of heavy metals in the body.
Ryan, what is your background?
RC: I have been in practice 17 years, in my practice, I combine homeopathy, osteopathy, herbal medicine, energy healing and of course nutrition. I integrate all these in my practice to provide people with a well-rounded approach to maximize health and longevity.
I have also heard that you’re a new owner of a dog?
RC: Yes, Reina, we have had her for eight months, she is a rescue dog from Mexico. We are very blessed to have her in our life and she has really taught me a lot and I have learned a lot from you in our discussions in how to take care of her.
What has she taught you?
RC: She is an ongoing reflection of what is going on in my life. I have always known that pets are very similar to children, but experiencing this is very different. In my practice, I see the dynamics between children and parents and see how directly children and pets are influenced by the things that happen in the families and may be outside of the awareness of the parents. I can look at Reina and I can see what is going on with me. It is apparent that they pick up the energy in the household and they adapt to the household and other relationships. It is a constant reflection of ourselves and it takes away some self-centeredness of ourselves because we devote our life to taking care of someone else and it is an honor to do so.
I would like to go back to the topic of minerals and what function in the body they have and what happens when we provide a whole food source of minerals.This is quite important and I know you have picked up on it when you created GreenMin by seeing that the best quality raw diet can be still deficient in minerals. We can be feeding the highest quality diet from the most pristine environments but the plants are growing in soil that is lower in minerals than it once was. The body needs to use these nutrients for detoxification and maintaining health.
The liver is the most important detoxification organ and it requires a huge selection of nutrients in order to detox the body from a wide range of toxins – including those produced during metabolism and from microbes such as bacteria, yeast, as parasites as well as environmental toxins.
The liver is constantly working to metabolize these toxins and if the body is not receiving the full-spectrum of nutrients such as minerals and vitamins, the liver’s enzymes will not be able to process these toxins efficiently and they will start to create health problems.
So when we talked about GreenMin, I was thinking especially about minerals and how the animals may be benefiting from that. Animals eat food with bones and organs and these contain heavy metals. Particularly the kidneys and brain can contain high levels of mercury and other metals like cadmium. Lead is often stored in the bones. If our animals eat bones and organs, which is a part of their natural diet, their liver, kidneys, bowels and lungs – all of the detoxification routes – need to metabolize and process toxins in the best possible way. In order to do this, they need a full spectrum of nutrients to handle this.
Coming back to some of these minerals like sulphur, selenium, zinc, magnesium etc – these are crucial in the production of detoxification enzymes in the body and the liver.
Mercury is a real problem and it comes from the environment, vaccinations that the farm animals and our pets get and these compound into the pets bodies and hopefully, if your pet is healthy, it will be able to excrete as much of the heavy metals as possible. Sulphur, selenium, zinc, manganese, magnesium and others are all required for these enzymes, especially in the liver for detoxifying these metals.
Now coming back to mercury in specific, sulphur and selenium bind to mercury in the body so what happens is that mercury attaches to these minerals and can create a depletion of these minerals in the body.
Zinc will compete with cadmium, lead can compete with calcium and become deposited in bones, so these toxic metals have a way of sneaking in and using our metabolism and nutrients that we are ingesting to wreak a little bit of havoc. So it is important that we have a really healthy supply of the good minerals so that our detoxification enzymes can be in the best form possible and so that they can help shovel these metals out of the body.
So if we are in a nutrient deficient state, like many of our pets are who may be on a very poor diet to begin with, you compound that nutrient deficiency with the environmental toxicity with the toxicity of the vaccinations and all of these things and they are really not in the best place possible to be able to recover and rebound.
Now, it can sound kind of doom and gloom, but ultimately we don’t have to be afraid of environmental toxins. We need to be wise, we need to be prudent and we need to be informed. We just have to do the right thing so that we are in the best place possible so our bodies can be the natural detoxifiers that they are.
Our bodies will eliminate toxins through our bowels, our hair, our sweat, our urine, but they need the proper nutrients in order to do that and that is where I products like GreenMin can come in and really put the animals in the best place possible for the toxicities that may be in the food that they are eating.
Dr. PD: So if I understand well, the minerals are basically the soldiers of the body for the detox system and they work really hard to eliminate any heavy metals or any toxins that are in the system through being part of the liver and the enzymatic system and just helping to eliminate. That makes a lot of sense because we have seen this especially in middle-aged and older animals that are probably much more burdened by heavy metals and different toxins, they suddenly can look renewed and that is most likely what is happening.
Now some of our listeners and clients and customers have been wondering whether they have to put vitamins and essential oils in the food on top of minerals and some of them also believe that if they put vitamins and maybe essential oils that they do not need to put minerals in.
What is your opinion about that?
RC: Well, you know minerals, vitamins and oils are all very different categories of nutrients. You can try and just put eggs and flour in a cake and see how that tastes, but really you are going to need a little sugar, a little baking powder and whatever you need to make the cake that tastes its best! In my book I talk about the three top supplements.
For me, it is a good quality multivitamin, a high-quality fish oil- and I say high quality because there is a lot more popular fish oils coming out there now that are not high quality. So yeah, fish oils are important. They don’t have to be fish oils, omega-3s can come from a plant-based form but they are not as potent and bioavailable as the fish oils. And the third is a probiotic supplement. So we have these top three things that I think are very important.
Ryan, I have always believed that the health of people and their animals come along together. It sounds like you may be a perfect person for some of our listeners and clients to be in touch with. Where do you work and what do you do? I know that you work in the human field and I would like to know a little bit more about your practice.
RC: Sure, I practice in Port Moody, BC ( Vancouver Lower Mainland region) and work with a wide range of people dealing with conditions ranging from back pain to digestive problems, immune system problems, etc. I specialize in chronic pain, but I do treat a wide range of ailments. As we spoke about earlier, my approach is quite holistic and I use different modalities to approach the body to try and look at it from as many angles as possible to really see what is going on.
The goal of the treatment is really about balancing the body so it can heal itself, it is as simple as that. So we identify imbalances on a physical, mental, emotional and energetic level and then use herbs, homeopathy, osteopathy and energy balancing to restore balance to the body. It is all about balance and once the body is balanced it will heal itself. And I say the same thing about animals. If we are providing the nutrients that they require, the body will tend to go back into balance and that will in turn create much better health. So this is what I aim for with my clients.
Dr. PD: I love the simple approach to healing because I usually say that we need to eliminate toxins and what doesn’t belong in the body and then provide the body with nutrients that it needs then rebalance and realign the energy and that is all that needs to be done because the body does the rest. I think we will have a lot of opportunity to talk in the future and I believe that you are still open to new clients although I know you are very busy. What is your website address?
My practice site is www.RyanCarnahan.com and I have another website which is healerathome.com, where I offer a series of ebooks covering the most important natural first aid remedies and there is a free ebook on treating colds naturally, which I am really excited about because it is just packed with good information that can be used on a regular basis.
It has been great talking to you Peter – what we really focused on today is the physical aspects of health, but the other important aspect of health is the mental and emotional aspect of ourselves and our animals. This is also very important for detoxification as well – perhaps we can talk about another time.
Dr. PD: Thank you, Ryan. Those are definitely topics that I would like to have the future discussion on.
Take Care
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© Dr. Peter Dobias, DVM
