No.1 Fatigue Expert: The Real Reason You're Always Tired (and how to fix it)

Copper Deficiency And Modern Fatigue
Morley Robbins 0:00

Let's go back to the 1930s. The average American diet delivered four to six milligrams of copper per day. And now, today in the modern era, we're told that 0.9 milligrams is enough. It's absolutely not enough. A third of the Earth's population is told that they are anemic. It's a very serious situation.

Dr Pompa 0:23

We have a soil problem, and it is a big issue. You can't just pull this chemical right now. Cure your fatigue. Could it be that as simple as literally one mineral? Well, it could be. All right.

Why Copper Drives Cellular Energy
Dr Pompa 0:52

Well, I am here with the author, Morley Robbins, and we're going to discuss this one mineral, copper, and how it affects just about every process in your body. Oh boy. Yep. And we're going to talk about the D deception. Yep. Vitamin D deception. If you're taking vitamin D, you better listen in. You're going to find out about magnesium. Okay. You're going to find out, oh, and all the wrong things there. And most importantly, iron. Are you iron deficiency? Do you have an iron deficiency, or you've been told that you do? Well, you better stay tuned because it may not be that simple. Oh, in taking it, yeah, it could be a problem. All that's going to get answered on this episode of the Dr. Pampa podcast. So morally, I'm excited for this topic.

Morley Robbins 1:40

Well, I'm thrilled to be here.

Dr Pompa 1:42

Look, I, you know, you did. You changed my view on copper some time ago. And uh I was one of those that thought, hey, whoa, you know, don't take more than 0.5. God forbid you take a whole milligram or two. That's right. Um, in no time, you're gonna be copper poisoned. But all in all, though, I still knew that copper was important for people's hormones, right? And the copper had all these important functions in the body and how it relates to iron. And then I think recently, you know, with all everyone with COVID taking zinc, um we're gonna learn uh uh about this relationship between copper and zinc. It's not what people think. Um as a matter of fact, with COVID, because of all the zinc overload, people could have gotten themselves in trouble.

Morley Robbins 2:26

Totally gotten in trouble.

Dr Pompa 2:28

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 2:28

And in fact, during COVID, uh it was about April of 2020. I went, wait a minute. Everyone's taking high dose of scorpic acid, high dose vitamin D, high dose zinc. Well, not everyone has the level of proficiency around minerals that I have.

Speaker 2 2:45

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 2:45

And I went, those that's the perfect triad to kill copper in the human body.

Dr Pompa 2:50

Yeah. And we're gonna learn about vitamin C.

Morley Robbins 2:53

So then I renamed COVID. COV stands for Copper's Vanished, ID stands for iron's dysregulated. And the part that most people don't know is that if copper's low, iron takes off in the body. It's an unchecked response, and it will begin to build in the liver.

Dr Pompa 3:11

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 3:11

And that's not where you want it.

Dr Pompa 3:12

Trevor Burrus, Jr. And right now it's very in vogue in um our alternative health space that iron is poison, iron is bad, iron don't take iron, don't eat on it, blah, blah, blah. Avoid iron. Um, and you know, you're saying, hey, it's really a copper problem. We're gonna build on that thought, you know, because I want people to understand that um it really is a copper problem. Even uh we're gonna talk about uh vitamin A, because people will say, oh my gosh, vitamin A toxicity is a big deal. You've got to be careful with vitamin A. Well, could that be a copper problem? Uh yeah, I would argue yes. And even you're gonna learn the um the deception about vitamin D. The deception, did you get that? Um, because there's a lot of deception. People are loading up on zinc, loading up on vitamin D, staying away from copper, uh, and people are loading up to your point on ascorbic acid, vitamin C, especially when they're sick. And again, you've taught me, hey, that's not a good thing. And there's a lot of problems with that. So I want to break into all that. That's great. You know, and obviously magnesium. I think most people watching this understand magnesium is missing in the soil because of a chemical called glyphosate. Right. But let's start right into the copper issue because I really do believe, and and you see the book here, uh, the CU standing for copper. So cure your fatigue. Um, you're basically right up front saying, hey, copper is a big part of why many people are fatigued.

Morley Robbins 4:43

Right.

Dr Pompa 4:43

Right.

Morley Robbins 4:44

And I'm really I'm building on the genius of Douglas Wallace. He's a famous geneticist and and biologist at uh Children's Hospital, Pennsylvania.

Dr Pompa 4:52

Aaron Powell Move your mic just a little closer just because you're a soft talker.

Morley Robbins 4:55

Trevor Burrus, I am a soft talker. Carry a big stick, though. He does. But um every every scientist has a signature article. Uh Dr. Wallace's was 2005. And in the very first sentence, he's admonishing his scientific and clinical peers, saying, you don't know how energy is made. And what he's referring to is cellular energy deficiency. We call it fatigue. It's the number one reason why people go see their practitioner. I'm tired, I'm fatigued. And they go. And and I think, truth be known, most practitioners don't know how energy is made inside the body.

Speaker 3 5:34

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 5:34

And it's and it's not overly complicated, but but there's a series of events that need to take place. And if the mitochondria don't have copper, they can't make they can't make the energy.

Dr Pompa 5:44

Through the uh mitochondrian complex four, that's where you literally make the the NAD needed for energy um through simple oxygen and water, I believe.

Morley Robbins 5:55

Well, exactly. The the beauty of that complex, it actually goes back to the beginning of time. We dialed back two and a half billion years ago. Um but when oxygen started to appear on the planet, it was copper that saved life on the planet. And it's absolutely fascinating. What it does is every everybody has a kitchen. I'm sure you have a stove in your kitchen. What's it made of?

Dr Pompa 6:21

Probably iron and own.

Morley Robbins 6:24

So does uh does uh stove know what's for dinner tonight?

Speaker 3 6:27

No.

Morley Robbins 6:27

No? Does the stove know what burner to put on?

Speaker 3 6:29

No. No.

Morley Robbins 6:30

Gotta have a chef, right? Yeah. All right. So in the mitochondria at complex four that you're talking about, complex four, there's two heme groups. Okay. Heme A and Heme A3. And guess what they do? They hold oxygen. But you can't make heme A and heme A3 without copper.

Dr Pompa 6:47

It needs copper.

Morley Robbins 6:48

Gotta have the copper. And so then by holding the oxygen, they allow this copper enzyme, cytochrome C oxidase, to slice and dice the oxygen and turn it from O2 into two molecules of H2O.

Dr Pompa 7:02

Yeah, water.

Morley Robbins 7:03

And when that happens, it can only happen in a perfect pH of seven. It releases ADP into the uh electron transport chain, and then a complex five, which is spinning at 30,000 revolutions per minute, that's 500 revolutions per second. I'd be impressed if you could do one revolution. Yeah. 500. And there's an alpha and a beta subunit to complex five. Well, beta doesn't work without copper. No one ever talks about the beta subunit.

Dr Pompa 7:35

So basically, I if you don't have enough copper, and we're going to talk about there's a lot of reasons why people don't today. Absolutely. It's a different diet. I I think a lot of the foods that they're even told to avoid are the copper-rich foods, oftentimes, and then you know, even how how it plays into vitamin A. But okay, so the lack of copper is really a main player in this energy production in the mitochondria.

Morley Robbins 8:01

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Absolutely.

Dr Pompa 8:02

Yeah. So just by adding copper, um, some you know, many people go, oh my gosh, I feel incredibly better. Um, so uh you made the argument um of that copper is placed there. Now, I I guess people out there, let's get right into why are people so copper deficient? And then let's talk about what they can do to you know become non-deficient. And I do want to hit on the toxicity issue because we do have a lot of practitioners that watch this are gonna be like, you guys are gonna poison people. Uh copper causes heart attacks, it's leading to strokes. And we hear the same about iron, and we're gonna get into that next. So we're going from copper to iron here because the world is iron deficient, yet you know we're being told we're gonna be poisoned, but copper's role in iron is the key. Okay.

How Farming Changed Copper Intake
Morley Robbins 8:50

So let's the key is farming.

Dr Pompa 8:53

Okay.

Morley Robbins 8:54

And let's go back to the 1930s.

Dr Pompa 8:56

Right.

Morley Robbins 8:56

The average American diet delivered four to six milligrams of copper per day.

Speaker 3 9:03

Okay.

Morley Robbins 9:04

That's a that's a bolus of copper. Uh by the 1960s, it had dropped to two to five milligrams. And now today in the modern era, we're told that 0.9 milligrams is enough. It's not. It's absolutely not enough.

Dr Pompa 9:22

So uh how did we if if we knew that people produced or uh ate that much copper and that and again, I think the deficiency has come from the chemicals used like glyphosate that binds copper. Yep. We know it does. Um and then the soil depletion itself now. Right. Right. So we're getting less copper, but how did we end up going, oh my gosh, don't take more than you know a milligram.

Morley Robbins 9:46

It's a great question. How how did it happen? And I've studied it.

Dr Pompa 9:50

Join me live in Houston in October 16th through the 18th. First time ever, doing a public seminar for 20 years doing doctor seminars. That's why I'm really excited about this. Look, for my followers, people looking for an answer, want to know more about mold illness, want to know more about heavy metal toxicity, want to know more about hormone conditions, thyroid conditions, and even find what's wrong with you. Well, that's what we're doing at the seminar. Oh, yeah, you're gonna take the very test, something called a visual contrast sensitivity that can look for something called biotoxic illness. You're gonna fill out our AI version of our neurotoxic assessment that all my doctors use. Okay, because we're going to involve you in the discovery. Why? Because people are looking for answers. So I said if I'm doing a seminar, I want people to experience what I do, what I've been teaching. And look, of course, we're gonna have amazing teachers. We're gonna have breakouts on these topics, right? You're gonna hear breakouts about weight loss resistance, health in children, you're gonna hear breakouts about mold, how to build homes safely, what you need to do in your home to make it safe. We're gonna be blowing the lid off of some of these topics that really nobody's talking about is causative factors for why so many people are sick. I'm gonna put a link below. All the details are there, but it is October 16th through the 18th in Houston. People are flying in from all over the world, so can you. Look, you want answers? Uh answers that you're never gonna hear at another seminar. Come to this one, you're gonna be blown away. Check it out. Yeah, you're you're a historian on this topic, honestly. I it's one of the reasons why I look forward to this conversation, just because of your historical uh background. It's amazing.

Morley Robbins 11:32

It really goes back to the first world war. And at the end of the war, they had a lot of munitions left over. And guess what they had inside them? NPK. Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. That's how they were yeah, that's what they were using. It's amazing to think about. So uh they convinced farmers that this was the fertilizer that they needed. Well, what people didn't realize, and it was it was um borne out in a book called Soil Grass Cancer by Andre Valsin in uh 1947, that NPK blocks copper uptake by the root system of the plants. Well, if it doesn't get into the into the grass, it can't get into the animal. And suddenly we've we've lost the the mechanism of of restoring the copper. Um then as you know, the 70s and 80s is the introduction of glyphosate.

Glyphosate As A Copper Chelator
Dr Pompa 12:21

Yeah. So yeah, so even before this chemical, it was the fertilizers that were blocking carp copper, now enters glyphosate.

Morley Robbins 12:28

People need to understand that um it was uh it was developed as an industrial pipe cleaner. That was its original patent. Get rid of the plaque in the industrial pipes.

Dr Pompa 12:39

Yeah, because it's mostly minerals. Yeah. And it binds minerals.

Morley Robbins 12:42

Exactly. And so then it became an antibiotic. And then someone happened to notice the runoff at a plant and there was no vegetation where the runoff was and they thought, oh, we've got it, we've got an herbicide here. And so um it's been studied very carefully. And people need to know that glyphosate chelates minerals on a logarithmic scale. So if you're familiar with earthquakes, earthquake of three, dishes rattle, no one's earthquake of twelve, no one survives. So it turns out Don Hubert at Purdue University is the one who developed this scale. Um glyphosate chelates calcium and magnesium at a three. Okay, that's not too bad. Zinc and iron at a nine.

Speaker 3 13:31

That's pretty high.

Morley Robbins 13:32

Yeah, it's pretty high. Copper at a twelve. So then so what we're faced with is well, what does that mean? Because those those are are significant numbers. Well what it means is that glyphosate is chelating copper a thousand times faster than iron or zinc, but a billion times faster than calcium and magnesium. And the problem we've got, Anne, is when people see big numbers like that right over their head and said, Well, I don't understand that, so it can't be important.

Speaker 3 14:02

Right.

Morley Robbins 14:02

When in fact it's really important. And so when I was in college, my mom was the executor of her dad's estate. And with the proceeds, she bought uh Mercedes 350 SL. And so what did I do with that car? I was driving in Florida at twice the speed limit. I was going 140 miles an hour. It was a real rush. Thank God it didn't get caught. But I was going twice the speed limit.

Speaker 3 14:26

Okay.

Morley Robbins 14:26

No, I was born in 52 when I was just a little tyke. A guy named Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier. So he's going 10 times the speed limit.

Speaker 4 14:34

Yeah, right.

Morley Robbins 14:36

We can't relate to a thousand times, a billion times.

Speaker 4 14:40

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 14:40

And so what people need to understand is that the the country that was most opposed to glyphosate introduction back in the 80s was France. They were vehemently, they didn't ban it, but they were very opposed to it. So they did a study in 2022. They thought, wow, the the French were against this. I wonder how it affected their mineral status. I wonder what's going on. And what they discovered is that 99% of French citizens in 2022 were peeing glyphosate in their urine. Which means glyphosate now is worldwide, it's in the air. It's in the water table.

Dr Pompa 15:16

That's right.

Morley Robbins 15:17

It's no longer just on the commercial soil.

Dr Pompa 15:19

Right.

Morley Robbins 15:19

And so we just have to really come to terms with that. That that there is this uh and it's I've read that glyphosate's the ninth most most threatening chemical in farming.

Dr Pompa 15:30

I'm like, I don't even want to think about the other thing. Yeah, I I do a lot of pieces on uh you know this chemical because it's even opening up the gut barrier, the blood-brain barrier, it's making uh disrupting, uh causing more heavy metal issues. I mean, it it's very, very disruptive. And uh recently I'm on the Maha board, right? Okay. I think the Maha um Bobby took a lot of heat because, well, why aren't they able to ban glyphosate? You know, and you know, it was uh national security, it's protected on the national security because what people don't understand is that we many crops will not grow without it right now. I know. We have a soil problem, and it it is a big issue. You can't just pull this chemical right now. We're trying to build the soil. And Bobby's spending a lot of time in conversations around this. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Morley Robbins 16:24

I I've talked to three separate soil agronomists, very intense conference. These are really talented people. And and in the course of the conversation, they're saying, so what so what you're saying is you want to ban glyphosate. I said, that's exactly what I want to do. And to a person, they said, can't do it.

Speaker 3 16:40

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 16:41

Not not short term, to your point. Yeah. It's just we're too dependent economically.

Dr Pompa 16:46

I mean, but it sh it shows you the devastation it's caused in the American diet in our in the soil. Uh you know, it's banned in places like Italy when you go there and you eat a tomato or anything, you say, What? Like, I mean, I I buy organic here. I yeah, you know, why can't I taste something like this? Why does this taste so much better? And it really is the lack of glyphosate.

Morley Robbins 17:08

Yeah, absolutely. And it's it's not complicated. Um, people may know about the shikamate pathway, which is really important for the bugs, not so much for us, but our intestine doesn't work without the shikamate pathway.

Dr Pompa 17:19

Yeah. And our brains don't work without exactly.

Morley Robbins 17:22

And and it was in 1987 the chair of chemistry at Harvard published an article talking about how glyphosate was knocking out the very first enzyme of seven in the shikamate pathway. Well, guess what? It was copper dependent. They knew in 87 there was a problem.

Dr Pompa 17:40

So this pathway is basically your body makes um certain neurotransmitters for the brain, so your brain functions.

Morley Robbins 17:50

It it absolutely alters it.

Dr Pompa 17:51

Yeah, exactly. So you're saying that glyphosate alters it and then it knocks out the copper, which is it's copper dependent to make things like serotonin, etc., so your brain functions normal.

Morley Robbins 18:04

Yeah, it's it's like a battery. Copper's like a battery in many in many functions. You take the battery out, it's not gonna work.

Speaker 2 18:10

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 18:10

And so people aren't aware of that. They don't what they don't realize is that technically they're only 11 copper enzymes. Doesn't sound like a lot. But but these are blockbuster enzymes. Like we were talking about cytochrome C oxidase. Every molecule of oxygen that doesn't get turned into water is going to become oxidative stress. Well, you you're the master of oxidative stress. You know that as well as anybody. And so oxidative stress is just a sign of lack of copper. But it's the cop the antioxidant enzymes, superoxide dismutates, glutathione peroxidase, um, catalase, they don't work without copper.

Dr Pompa 18:53

Well, and and I know copper has a a profound effect on many hormones.

Morley Robbins 18:57

Oh, yeah.

Dr Pompa 18:58

Right. So, you know, talk about that relationship because you know, a lot of people they start a I've watched it, people start adding copper back into their, you know, diet, uh and their hormones like absolutely it's just like they come back. Yeah, they come back.

Morley Robbins 19:17

Yeah, the the way I've um come to understand it is the hormones key off of oxidative stress. I I I take a very different view of a lot of the practitioners. I don't believe that um the hormones run the body. I think they respond to stress. They're very powerful chemicals. That's right. But if the oxidative stress begins to build, that's going to have a decided effect on the hormones. You bring copper into the equation, and suddenly you've changed the level of oxidative stress. Think of it as like barometric pressure. And so when the barometric pressure changes, the weather changes. And I think that's really what happens to the hormones. That we've been led to believe that that the hormones are the driver, or that this bowtie uh gland in our throat runs our body. Well, not not really.

Dr Pompa 20:08

I mean, when you get into the Well, as many people have taken their thyroid out, I think we we've realized that they're still living.

Morley Robbins 20:15

They're still ticking. But but there's a really famous uh endocrinologist in Germany named Jens Meitag. He wrote a wonderful article in 2012. And in Europe they're called endocrinologists. You're in the States they're called endocriminologists. But um but he wrote this beautiful article that really described what the thyroid hormone is. And this is I think it's really useful for your listeners uh and followers to hear this. Every hormone is a signaling peptide. And every hormone has a location where it does its job. Right? And so receptors. Receptors, right? So the T3 hangs out at complex four of the mitochondria. And what's it's it's it's sniffing for oxidative stress. How's how's how's the level of superoxide? How's the level of hydrogen peroxide? And when it begins to rise, it's a signaling peptide. It sends a signal back to the liver to make more ceruloplasmin, which is the copper protein that I'm sure we'll talk about. And uh and what is ceruloplasmin? It's a supply line for copper to feed the mitochondria to lower the oxidative stress. It's it's the most elegant explanation for why the thyroid is so important, but it's not running the show, but it's making sure that the copper-driven mechanisms are doing their job.

Ceruloplasmin And The Copper Toxicity Myth
Dr Pompa 21:43

Yeah. So again, copper at the heart of it. Well, you brought up the Ceruloplasma because there's, I think that's where some of the myth around copper toxicity started. Am I right on that? So you take us through that history because there are there are people out here going, well, wait a minute. I, you know, my doctor, my alternative doctor. Or my chiropractor, they told me to be careful with copper. I was one of those people. Okay. I've turned, you know, um over the years, but most people still believe that.

Morley Robbins 22:09

Aaron Powell No, it's it's the very first thing. If I'm talking to a practitioner and I'm trying to bring them up along, I can see their tensions building inside them. Yeah. But isn't it toxic?

Dr Pompa 22:19

Yeah, exactly. So let's discuss that.

Morley Robbins 22:22

So you've it's fascinating to talk about a protein. It's what probably one of the biggest proteins in our body, a thousand forty-six amino acids. There's there's very few proteins that are bigger than that. But when it was first discovered in the 1940s, it was first formally written about in 1948, but um it had eight copper atoms inside it. There's nothing like that in the body. Laurel, Holmberg and Laurel, um they made a very specific mention that ascorbic acid denatures ceruloplasmin, which causes it to leak the coppers out. Well, what does denature mean? It means unfold it. The folding of a of a complicated protein like that's gonna be pretty sophisticated, but it causes this uh unfolding process and the copper comes out. And then that has been interpreted by by many people as oh, the copper is now toxic. Well, what people need to understand is that um that really goes back to an article written um by Carl Pfeiffer in the 1960s.

Dr Pompa 23:40

Yeah, it all started with Carl Pfeiffer.

Morley Robbins 23:42

Right. And he made reference to copper unbound from Ceruloplasm. He said it right, but then later in the article he referred to unbound copper.

Dr Pompa 23:52

Okay, so unbound copper, but then it went from unbound copper to unbound copper's toxic copper.

Morley Robbins 23:57

Exactly, exactly. And medicine's never been the same. And so what's important for people to understand, think maybe the there's a blueprint that runs our body. Think maybe that unbound copper or it does, it's technically not unbound. It's either going to be bound to albumin.

Dr Pompa 24:14

Albumin it'll bind to, yeah.

Morley Robbins 24:16

Or transcuprene or histidine. Those will be the one of the three. But when the copper comes outside of its protein, it has a job. It's not there to to be toxic. It's actually the the neutrophils, which are the marines of the immune system, they can't get into phagocytic burst without copper. And it's that copper that comes out of Ceruloplasm that's feeding the neutrophils in the in the body. That's a big deal. Um, another function that people may or may not know about we have um we have a lot of iron in our body, and iron is has a positive regulator and a negative regulator. So a positive regulator on a football team would be the quarterback. They're making the plays, calling the shots, making the pass. Um and we've come to accept that. Who's the negative regulator on a football team? It's usually the middle linebacker, shuts down plays. Dick Butkus, 54. Boom, most feared player.

Dr Pompa 25:20

I would I I would talk about Lambert. Okay, of course. Okay, Jack Ham. Yeah, right, exactly.

Morley Robbins 25:26

I forgot your origins. Exactly. But um, but the thing is, a negative regulator is very different than a positive regulator. And so when copper becomes unbound, um, it's going to affect an iron hormone called hepcidin. And hepcidin is a blockbuster hormone that a lot of people don't know about. People usually know about the steroid hormones. But um hepcidin was discovered by Thomas Gans and Elizabeth Nemeth at um UCLA back in 2000. So it's really a fairly new um part of our uh awareness of how the body is run. But what hepcyden does is it shuts down the iron recycling system that we rely on in our body. Every second of every day, we're we're taking offline two and a half million red blood cells every second. Every second. And in the course of 24 hours, it's 200 billion red blood cells. And and if if you're under stress, if you're taking iron supplements, if you're dealing with an infection or an inflammation, hepcyden is going north in a big way. And what it does is it shuts down the release of iron in that recycling system.

Dr Pompa 26:50

And so now you're storing it. Now you're storing it into ferritin.

Morley Robbins 26:55

Into ferritin and into what's called a labile iron pool. People probably have never heard that term. But there's the and labile does not mean happy, does not mean free, it means highly reactive, and the labile iron pools are hanging out not just in the cell, they're hanging out in the mitochondria and in the nucleus, and in the lysosome. And these pools of iron are very dis disruptive, especially when you have a lack of ceruloplasm. But but the thing is the um the hepcidin is very, very disruptive to our overall physiology. And the reason why the unbound copper is important is hep cidin comes in three flavors. There's hep 20, hep 22, and hep 25, referring to 20 amino acids, 22 amino acids, and 25 amino acids. Well, the HEP-25 must have copper to activate it. It's a really big deal. And the reason why hepcidin is so important is that if you do have an infection, or if you are dealing with inflammation, you want to get iron out of circulation to keep it from the pinch.

Dr Pompa 28:08

You know, I matter of fact, I've I've watched that you know happen to people. It's like, well, yeah, I have this infection, you know, but uh, they also tell me I have low iron, so now they're going to give me iron. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You have low iron because the body's pulling out the iron.

Morley Robbins 28:26

Absolutely.

Dr Pompa 28:27

Yeah. And people don't understand that. When people say, oh my um, you know, because right now it's very in vogue to look at um someone's stored iron and their ferritin levels and go, you're in danger. Right? It's like, well, it could be elevated just because of inflammation, it could be a virus, it could be sickness, bacteria, and it's sequestering it and storing it. So it's not so simple.

Morley Robbins 28:51

No, it's no, it's not. And let's let's take that on directly.

Hepcidin And Iron Getting Trapped
Dr Pompa 28:55

And I wouldn't I want to just hold that thought because I want to clean this up for people. A lot of you use a lot of words. I know. I mean, that even things that I don't understand. So I know my viewers may not understand it. So let's just bring a cap on it. You did say one thing. You said that ascorbic acid, which we're probably gonna have to have a separate conversation about, the vitamin C that everyone's told to take is actually part of the problem of copper toxicity. Did you reference that? Exactly right. Yeah. So if you're taking a bunch of vitamin C, you could be um creating a topic copper issue.

Morley Robbins 29:28

That could be.

Dr Pompa 29:29

You are. You are so that's a separate conversation. I want to get back to that. Okay, because people have to understand that ascorbic acid is not vitamin C that they're getting in their orange, so to speak. Okay. All right. Now you've made the point that um copper in this relationship with iron is very important. Uh you know, absolutely important. Yeah, exactly. So again, when we're talking about fatigue, iron is a big issue. But it's not like this iron topic is not what people think. So simple terms, let's peel this apart.

Morley Robbins 30:02

So great. Um the most important thing to understand about iron is it needs to be on it needs to be recycled at a micro level and at a macro level.

Speaker 2 30:13

Okay.

Morley Robbins 30:14

The macro is this, it's called the reticuloendothelium. Reticuloendothelium.

Dr Pompa 30:19

Endothelial system.

Morley Robbins 30:21

That's all right. No, it and and so it took me two years to figure out that reticuloendothelium meant recycling.

Speaker 2 30:27

Okay.

Morley Robbins 30:27

That's all I find figured that out. Okay. So that's the macro system. The micro system is in the mitochondria. So technically, they don't know how oxygen gets into the mitochondria. We know that iron's the the paymast are carrying it, but they don't really know technically how it gets into the mitochondria, which is an amazing thought. The closest they've gotten is Wittenberg-Wittenberg 2007. But they can't break through.

Dr Pompa 30:55

One of God's mysteries.

Morley Robbins 30:56

Exactly, one of God's mysteries. So iron is very important for delivering the oxygen, but it's also very important, as you know, inside the mitochondria, you have heme proteins and what are called iron sulfur clusters. And what the mitochondria people love to refer to it as the uh um energy factory of the cell. No, think of it as like a GM plant that's making cars and they have their own energy source. And so the mitochondria is very engaged in a lot of activity. It's recycling calcium, it's recycling iron, it's recycling amino acids. It's an these are incredibly uh active organelles, but they've got to have a power source. And that's really what complex four is about and complex five. And so what happens though is that if the individual gets under stress, know anybody under stress? Like everybody, you're going and you're you're going to the stress capital of the world in a couple days. Oh, yeah, right. But um when you're under stress, it changes your minerals. We know it causes magnesium loss. But what as you alluded to, it causes a sequestering of iron. Well, the if the iron starts to get trapped in the mitochondria, that's what causes the fatigue, the cellular energy deficiency. And there's different models. You you can have a model with uh 60% loss of energy, 80% loss of energy, 90, 96% loss of energy, all based on how much iron is building in the mitochondria. And the corresponding relationship would be lack of copper. What what people need to understand to really, as you say, put a cap on it, copper is the general.

Speaker 3 32:45

Yeah, okay.

Morley Robbins 32:46

And iron is the foot soldier. And so in our body, uh ide under ideal conditions, we have a hundred milligrams of copper. Well, that fits on the head of a one-inch stick pin. It's a very small amount of copper. But we're told if you when you get into the iron literature, we're told that women typically have about 4,000 milligrams of iron and men five thousand. Um because of our testosterone, we can handle more iron. But years ago, it was actually um on the on the eve of my 65th birthday, I called up the the uh the dean of iron biology, his name is Robert Crichton. He's in the Netherlands. He didn't know me from Adam. I called him up. I was I was amazed that he even answered the phone and explained who I was, and I said, I I I'm gonna ask a favor. He said, Sure, what is it? I said, would you sign one of your his textbook is used in all the medical schools around the world. I said, would you sign over uh a book to me? He said, I would be delighted. And so he's taking down my address, and then he said, Now, Morley, you know that we accumulate one milligram of iron every day we're on the planet. I said, Yeah, I know that. I've read your I've read your book, I've read your articles. And so we we need to have a a moment to to let that sink in. I'm 73 times 365 means I've got 26,000 milligrams of iron in my body. Is that true? That's absolutely true. Oh yeah. You have less, but you've got way more than 5,000. And what people need to realize is that aging is not complicated. Aging is iron accumulation. Every symptom, every facet of aging is the buildup of iron that's going to create oxidative stress.

Dr Pompa 34:38

And that's where iron's got a bad rap. Exactly. Right? You know, it's caught it's oxidative. But but again, it's it's um yet there's all these people who are iron deficient in an odd way because they can't access it.

unknown 34:54

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Morley Robbins 34:54

Iron deficient on paper, not iron deficient in the tissue. Right. And that's the mistake that people are making, is they're not realizing that when iron is showing low on the blood test, it means it's stuck in the tissue. It's very well documented in the literature.

Dr Pompa 35:11

Aaron Powell But would that even express itself in ferritin levels, which is stored iron?

Morley Robbins 35:16

You know, I mean how much time have you given? Yeah. Because you want to talk about

Ferritin Confusion And Better Iron Clues
Morley Robbins 35:23

ferritin?

Dr Pompa 35:23

I I mean, I there's a lot of debate. I mean, again, I'm well here's the thing. I have two groups of people out here, right? I have the average person who's like just fatigued. Police, we're gonna give you answers. We're gonna tell you how much copper you need to make you we're gonna give you answers to what you know, why you don't feel well and what to do. I promise you. But there's also another group of people out there that is very privy to this elevated ferritin, knock down your ferritin, blah, blah, blah. You're gonna die because of it. If you're over 100, for goodness sakes, you're gonna die. But it's not that simple.

Morley Robbins 35:56

So let's talk about ferritin for just a minute. Oh my stars. Um 2018, I'm having a conversation with Douglas Kell. Uh, at that time he was um at the at the University of Um, he's now at the University of Manchester. But he's got more degrees in the thermometer. He's got this big wall of books behind him. Just we're the same age, very affable guy. Again, like when I find my whole strategy for this research, and I've read about 12,000 articles, but when I find an article that I'm really impressed with, I'll just call the author, say thank you. And that they don't get a lot of calls. I've done that myself, yeah. But they don't get a lot of calls.

Dr Pompa 36:37

So um one thing They're always honored, actually. They love it. They really do. And you can't get them off the phone, actually. But anyways, no other show.

Morley Robbins 36:43

So we so we were having a call on one um, it was back then um wasn't Zoom, whatever the the platform was. But um I said, Dr. Kell, what's the ideal ferritin for a human being? He holds up his hand, he says, Zero. I said, What? He said, Morley, I want to make sure you understand. And this he's the world's authority on ferritin, mind you. Um his signature article was 2009, iron behaving badly. It had 2400 footnotes. Usually an article that has 100 footnotes is a lot. 200 over the top, 2400 footnotes. But he said, I want to make sure you understand this. He said, rising ferritin on a blood test is not a sign of iron vitality, it's a sign of organ pathophysiology. Do you understand what I just said? I said absolutely do. And and everyone's got got it wrong. They don't understand what ferritin is about. I think it's an immune marker, it's not an iron storage marker. And so what we have to do is back up and let's talk about I I tend to agree with that statement. Yeah, it makes more sense.

Dr Pompa 37:55

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 37:55

And so um ferritin comes in multiple forms. There's heavy chain and light chain.

Speaker 2 38:05

I didn't know this.

Morley Robbins 38:06

Okay. So heavy chain means it has the ferrooxidase enzyme function that's found in ceruloplasmid. It's a really big deal. And so ferritin ideally is an ATM machine. Put iron in, take iron out. Iron in, iron out. Light chain is like a bank ball. It doesn't work the same way. And so the the the nuance is you have heavy chain, light chain, and if the light chain it gets involved in uh what's called ferritinophagy, autophagy applied to ferritin, and it doesn't complete its cycle properly, ten amino acids get cleaved off, and then it gets secreted into the bloodstream. It is a sign of organ pathophysiology, just as Dr. Kell said. But the dilemma we've got is we don't know what that serum, that serum ferritin, they're empty shotgun shells. There's no iron in that.

Dr Pompa 39:12

And that's what what are people measuring when they ask for their ferritin for their doctor?

Morley Robbins 39:17

They're gonna get it they're gonna get a serum ferritin, and it's it's not gonna tell them whether it's heavy chain or light chain. But then then there's something called denatured ferritin, and it's called hemosiderin. And hemosiderin is where iron goes to die. So that ferritin will hold 4,500 atoms of iron. Hemosiderin 45,000 atoms of iron. So there's a tenfold increase in potential disruption in the body. And where does hemociterin hang out? In the bone marrow, in the spleen, and in the liver.

unknown 39:54

Okay.

Morley Robbins 39:54

Where the iron the macro iron recycling system and so the world is being hijacked now because there really are three critical ways of measuring iron status in the human body. You want to know their hemoglobin. Hemoglobin and myoglobin account for 80% of the iron in our body. And from the time of the Civil War to 1972, when a very important article was written by Jacobs, who's a famous hematologist in England or in Wales, um, suddenly they put the spotlight on ferritin. But hemoglobin was the standard for measuring iron status inside the body. Then you and that's again, that's 80% of the iron. It's a huge bolus of iron. 10% of the iron.

Dr Pompa 40:44

So, I mean, just looking at hemoglobin that carries it, I mean, so elevated hemoglobin, they would say that's elevated iron?

Morley Robbins 40:50

Yeah, yeah, right.

Dr Pompa 40:52

Well, because yeah, okay. I mean, it is how accurate is that compared to just looking at serum ferritin?

Morley Robbins 40:59

Well, I I would say it's more accurate because there's a lot more of it. And and hemoglobin comes in one flavor. Ferritin comes in multiple flavors.

Speaker 3 41:08

Okay.

Morley Robbins 41:08

So we don't really know what we're measuring when we get the serum. And so then we've got 10% in in the ferritin protein, but it's supposed to be inside the cell. It's not supposed to be in the blood.

Dr Pompa 41:19

Right.

Morley Robbins 41:19

Blood is outside the cell. So when it's showing up in the in the blood, we have a problem. That that's what people don't appreciate, is that now the the controversy is high ferritin is easy to understand. We know there's it's most likely a liver breakdown. And there's the the ferritin protein is being secreted into the blood. And it's really trying to let the practitioner know we got a serious problem here. It's the low ferritin that's very confusing for people. And what I've come to realize, and it's not, there's no article that says, oh, here's the answer to low ferritin.

Dr Pompa 41:55

Well, yeah, but you're confusing me because you know he said that ferritin should be zero. So what is low ferritin then? Right.

Morley Robbins 42:06

Thank you for picking that up.

Dr Pompa 42:07

And then high ferritin, I mean, what is high ferritin then?

Morley Robbins 42:10

Aaron Powell So when ferritin gets above 150, people should be taking notice of it. When it gets above a thousand, you have a serious problem. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Dr Pompa 42:18

Well, that could be hemochromatosis.

Morley Robbins 42:20

Aaron Powell Not likely, but it's possible. It's possible. Okay.

Dr Pompa 42:24

If someone said I have a thousand, I'd be like, you most likely have hemochromatosis.

Morley Robbins 42:28

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: More likely that the serum, that the serum iron is going to be elevated than the serum ferritin. But but the thing is, uh I absolutely understand the confusion. Because it it doesn't make sense. If it's supposed to be zero, why are we worrying about this low ferritin?

Speaker 3 42:42

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 42:43

And there's no good explanation for it. It has been it's part of the zeitgeist now is when ferritin gets low, gets below 50, people start to get really tweaked.

Dr Pompa 42:54

They do.

Morley Robbins 42:55

Yeah.

Dr Pompa 42:55

I mean, I've had As a matter of fact, that was going to be one of my questions.

Morley Robbins 43:02

Yeah. But but the but the question is, we need to know what their copper status is.

Dr Pompa 43:07

When we're looking at iron, okay, so please put a cap on this for the average person, right? Because you know, copper has a very important relationship with this iron issue. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Exactly. And all people watching this want to do is like, well, you know, how do I you're telling me iron is very important, but too much is bad. You're telling me copper is so important with iron, you know, help.

Morley Robbins 43:30

No, the the the key is I I think our ancestors knew how important copper was in the diet because it it's most prevalent in like organ meats. I remember growing up having liver every Friday. It's just like um but that but that's what I grew up with. Oh, and you also get your vitamin A and vitamin A, absolutely got a lot a lot of nutrients in that organ meat. But that's not the only place to find uh copper. Obviously, shellfish and you know, um nuts and seeds. But the thing is, there wasn't a lot of discussion about minerals when you were growing up. The doctor never talked about minerals. That wasn't part of their lexicon. But I think what's happened is we now live in a society where they started fortifying food with iron in 1941.

Dr Pompa 44:22

Yeah, but it's it's literally flake iron. I mean, what do you call it? My assistant back there, Hallie, do you remember we took the high-powered magnet and we took Cheerios? We ground up Cheerios. She was part of this, right? Because and we took a magnet and went in all these literally iron filings. Filings. There's the word I couldn't come up with. I remember? And it was like just yeah, and from baby food too. And from these filings, they formed strings to the high-powered magnet. I mean, they were putting filings of iron in baby food Cheerios. It's still there. That was a year ago we did that.

Morley Robbins 45:02

Well, I, you know, again, back to putting a cap on it. We know as of 2020, there's more to the story. And really, what the book, Cure Your Fatigue, is, is to introduce people to the idea that there's more to obtaining health than what we've been led to believe. And we've got to get down to a granular level of understanding how is energy made inside the body, inside the cells. You're the master of the cell. But you've got to understand what is that process of recycling ADP and ATP. And iron is absolutely essential. Just like your stove doesn't work, if the stove's not made of iron, it's not going to work right. And what we've been led to believe is we don't need a chef. When in fact our body, our metabolism, our immune system is absolutely dependent on the chef, and that's copper. And so it plays this pivotal role of regulating iron and oxygen at the same time and not creating static.

Dr Pompa 46:06

So, really, copper is really the key to utilizing your iron, not storing too much iron. So, therefore, if you have right copper levels, you're going to age slower. Exactly. But you're going to have much better energy, and it's going to be regulating all of these mineral processes, you know, energy processes, oxygen processes, I mean, that's exactly I mean it it is literally the conductor. Grab me the book that you just gave. This is a presentation. Yeah, grab me that. Okay. So why do you have a picture? Okay, this is a whole presentation that you did um on copper, right? Why do you have right here circled on this big massive ship?

Morley Robbins 46:51

Aaron Powell So this big massive ship has a rudder. And on the rudder, there's a section of the rudder, it's called a trim tab. It was developed by Buck Mr. Food.

Dr Pompa 47:00

If you're a boater, you know what that is.

Morley Robbins 47:02

Okay. Well, he he was actually working at the Navy, the Navy during the war. And in 1943, they came to him and said, the ships have gotten so big, they have too much power. They can't turn the rudder. They can't turn the ships now. And he was faced with how do I solve that problem? And he came up with this trim tab. And then when the captain of the ship wants to turn the ship, he's turning the trim tab, which then allows the rudder to turn. And and copper, I think, is the trim tab in our body.

Dr Pompa 47:32

Trevor Burrus, Jr. I mean it really is what controls. Exactly. Absolutely right.

Morley Robbins 47:36

And so the key is that people have never been led to believe that. And so what's the meaning?

Dr Pompa 47:40

It's cool too because it it's a great analogy because it's something very small.

Morley Robbins 47:44

Very small.

Dr Pompa 47:45

Look at the size of that boat. I know, right? It's something very small. It's a small amount of copper in the body.

Morley Robbins 47:52

And that trim tab is made of brass.

Dr Pompa 47:53

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 47:54

It's always made of brass.

Dr Pompa 47:55

Yeah, which contains copper.

Morley Robbins 47:56

Yeah. It's 88% copper. So the thing is, the meme that's playing in medicine, in conventional medicine, is you're anemic and you're copper toxic.

Speaker 3 48:09

Right.

Morley Robbins 48:10

And as long as I can get you to believe that, that I've got a customer for life. As long as I can convince you that you need more iron, stay away from that copper thing. It's it's poison. And that's been running the show for a lot of years.

Dr Pompa 48:22

And again, iron's great. Take a great form of iron, you'll get it in your food. But really, again, it it's copper is what's been misplacing the iron causing problems.

Morley Robbins 48:34

The lack of copper allows iron to run amok.

Dr Pompa 48:38

And and you know, it's the way I the way I refer to iron is And then it's end up in the tissues being oxidative instead of being utilized.

Morley Robbins 48:45

Exactly. I I refer to iron as a four-year-old with a hammer. So go go back in time. Picture you've got a four-year-old and you hand a hammer, and then you go next door to have a cup of coffee with your neighbor. Well, no one in their right mind would do that. And so people need to realize that that iron, we can't live without it. It's a it's a central part of our physiology, but it is a very reactive substance, especially in the presence of oxygen. And we're breathing air, it's got 21% oxygen. Well, something's gonna happen. It's only a matter of time. And so the the regulation of the iron and the oxygen is critical for the health and the well-being of the individual.

Practical Copper Intake And Food Sources
Dr Pompa 49:30

How much you said it earlier, actually, because you said what was in the diet, but for people listening again, how much copper do you need daily?

Morley Robbins 49:40

What I let me back up. When I realized the problem in 2020, I helped inspire a copper product. And it's called recuperate. And it has two milligrams in that in that um product.

Dr Pompa 49:56

And what I do Because they're getting some in their diet.

Morley Robbins 49:59

So very small amount.

Dr Pompa 50:01

Very again, you you you don't less than a milligram.

Morley Robbins 50:04

Oh, absolutely less. Yeah. In fact, uh Leslie Clevet, one of the world's uh authorities on copper, uh, he did a study back in 2011, and about 75% of people are not getting anywhere near the amount that they need.

Dr Pompa 50:17

So very small amount in the uh I think I read it somewhere from you that um I think the diet in the 1800s, maybe early 1900s, was uh four to six milligrams a day.

Morley Robbins 50:33

A day.

Dr Pompa 50:33

The diet. Right.

Morley Robbins 50:36

Again, the soils were different.

Dr Pompa 50:38

So wouldn't we emulate that too? Exactly.

Morley Robbins 50:40

And that's what I do is I tell people to start with one capsule, which has two milligrams, get up to two, or at four, see how you feel at six. Now I stop it there. What my clients do, they've I've I've had clients take a lot more than that.

Dr Pompa 50:56

Really? Oh, yeah. Why? Because they just keep feeling more they keep feeling better. And again, in review, because it's having an effect on their iron and their their mitochondria, their, you know, I mean their thyroid hormone, other hormones. Absolutely. Yeah.

Morley Robbins 51:11

I've I have a a client, he's actually a friend, uh world-renowned scientist. I won't identify him by name, but um, he has diabetes. He's had diabetes ever since he came to the States to go to Hopkins uh to get his doctorate. And I guess I was this probably goes back about eight years ago. So we're both 65, same age. And I said, Why am I here? He said, I want you to cure me of diabetes. I wouldn't say that I've cured him per se, but he takes a lot of copper and he's rocking. He can't believe how much better he feels. Blood sugar is very stable. He's able been able to get off almost all of his medications.

Dr Pompa 51:53

So right now, copper peptide is very popular. Very popular. It's not copper, it's more like a chaperone. It affects copper. So kind of talk about copper peptide because women are taking it for their collagen, their hair. Right. Right.

Morley Robbins 52:06

You know, so it's it's actually a naturally occurring uh form of copper. The GHK copper peptide was uh um discovered by Lauren Pickert back in 1970. And um, and then he he wanted to develop a supplement. Well, the FDA said no. So he so he made it transdermal. And and they said, sure, it's not gonna work, but in fact, it probably works better. But it's a very uh very popular form. Um you can get it both in a tablet and in transdermal. Um but I think that ideally what we want to do is get it in our diet. And the the key is to make sure it's getting into the copper enzymes. And the reason why that's so important, you keep referencing uh vitamin A, what people need to know is that there are enzymes in our body that are copper pumps. And there's one pump that's designed to just make ceruloplasmid. And what it does is it loads copper into that protein, into that 1,046 uh amino acid protein. But that enzyme gets activated by a derivative of retinol, by a derivative of vitamin A. And that's called ATP7B. And it's a a sister enzyme called ATP7A that loads all the other copper enzymes. Again, the key is retinol. It's actually retinoic acid, but the but the key is those enzymes don't fire up without retinol. And what I think people need to understand is the the reason why um this protocol is so helpful is it's looking at a finite number of steps that people need to take in their diet and in their supplement routine to get the right nutrients to fire up these copper enzymes. I don't know that you get that with the GHK copper peptide. You're just getting, you're getting three really important amino acids in the copper, but you need to have the other nutrients to fire up the um the loading process.

Dr Pompa 54:13

Retinol, I mean, there's a lot of again, I it it's a oh god, there's so many conversations here, right? Uh and and very important ones. And I know the biochemistry is deep, but it's so worth listening deeply because retinol, again, we're told that it can be toxic. Um but again, there's a difference. You know, people taking beta-carotene and everything. And beta-carotene does not simply convert to retinol. Um a cow eats the grass. Correct. And you know, they benefits like vitamin K, right? They they take it and they make retinol, which is a form of vitamin A that we're able to utilize very easily, unlike beta-carotene in the grass. Um so you know, that form is different in the beta-carotene. I don't even know if there's a benefit of the beta-carotene map.

Morley Robbins 55:02

Well, there is. But but the thing is, it takes 12 beta-carotene.

Dr Pompa 55:05

To make one. It's 12 to 1 ratio.

Morley Robbins 55:07

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: 12 to 1 ratio. And so you know, God bless the cows, right? But the thing is, there's a lot of confusion around it.

Vitamin A Retinol And Copper Enzymes
Morley Robbins 55:14

And I think where there's a lot of confusion with the vitamin E.

Dr Pompa 55:16

Yeah, because just to put a cap on what I said, you have I've read that the it's the copper that really affects the copper deficiency, can affect the retinol toxicity. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Morley Robbins 55:28

Absolutely.

Dr Pompa 55:28

And then you even went on further to say, but it really probably is stemming from glyphosate.

Morley Robbins 55:33

Absolutely.

Dr Pompa 55:34

You know, that really is at the top of this whole problem of why we're starting to see these vitamin A toxicities.

Morley Robbins 55:39

Aaron Powell Yeah. I mean, when you when you get into the literature and you find out how does the immune system work? How does how does the body signal? How does how does energy get made? And you really find out how important these nutrients are, like copper, like vitamin A, like magnesium, things like that, you're saying, well, why do we believe that there's such a thing as toxicity? And it's a very contrived scientific conditions to create the toxicity. And I'm not denying that it happens, but the scale of it is not anywhere near what people have been led to believe. And so the the key is getting people to realize that our ancestors, without the benefit of all the science, I think were actually much healthier than we are, because they didn't have the poisons in their farming that we have today. Yeah. And it's just it's a very different world.

Dr Pompa 56:27

Yeah, it's a very, very different world. So just again, these toxicities, right? Copper toxicity actually could be linked to a retinol issue. Right. Retinol toxicity could be linked to a copper um problem and a glyphosate issue. Exactly. So again, what it does is it puts copper at the, you know, the again, it it's the the commander, the chef.

Morley Robbins 56:51

Exactly. And so uh I've I re I um I teach a course, it's a 16-week course for practitioners in the public to learn how the body really works. And um, one of my students uh from Switzerland was really banging on this copper toxicity. Just like, okay, I can't, I can't.

Dr Pompa 57:12

Well, people will bring up Wilson's disease. I'm sorry. Wilson's disease, it's a genetic disorder and you know, a copper.

Morley Robbins 57:19

So that's one in 30,000. So there's 7,500 people in the United States that have Wilson's disease. I've worked with 8,500 clients. I've yet to meet a client that they thought they had Wilson's, but they didn't. They didn't. Yeah. I've not met one person yet. But the thing is, um he, by virtue of his uh Chinese water torture, he got me to write another book, which is which will be coming out in the fall, on the myth of copper toxicity. And it really got me to to delve into what is this all about? And uh to your point, uh, there are only three recognized conditions of copper toxicity. Wilson's disease is one of them. The funny thing is, the the Wilson's condition, Wilson's disease condition, it's not a copper issue, it's actually a retinol issue.

Dr Pompa 58:05

Yeah, I led to that. And only because I've read your stuff, right? So it's like, yeah, it's it's actually a retinal issue, vitamin A.

Morley Robbins 58:11

And and and Ludmilla, I mean, um it's about Lana Lutsenko and Hopkins developed a synthetic form of retinol and cured people of Wilson's disease, which is mind-blowing to think about. But Wilson's disease is one of them. Uh second, when a woman gets pregnant, uh, it was actually um uh uh Kreb Krebs who figured this out. Uh Adolf Hans Adolf Krebs, um in 1928, he discovered that when a woman gets pregnant, their copper level doubles. That's an enormous change in the body. And then subsequent to that research, they found out that the ceruloplasmin level triples inside a pregnant woman's body. So if copper is toxic, why would Mother Nature double the copper presence and triple the ceruloplasmin presence? So that that doesn't pass the sniff test. And then the third comes by way of research by uh Jamie Collins, who's a very gifted professor of uh minerals and nutrition at University of Florida in Gainesville. Back in 2011, he uh let the cat out of the bag. He said, the only time that copper becomes toxic is if you are truly iron deficient. It's it's called absolute iron deficiency, not not the scam that a lot of people think they have, which is functional iron deficiency. But when you have absolute iron deficiency, when it's not just low in the blood, but it's low in the tissue, um, copper is filling up in the liver. It just builds and builds and builds, and that's the physiological response to low copper. And what the really reason behind it is the body is trying to capture the iron wherever it can, and it's gonna come to the liver first. Oh wow.

Dr Pompa 59:59

And that's why it's by the way, that c that how I found your work, um I had thought I was copper poison. So interesting. I was it was when I first started, this is many years ago here, but copper peptide just came out, right? And I was like taking it. And I was also rubbing it on my skin because I'm like, oh, the transdermal works, right? So I was trying this, trying that. And um anyways, I I started getting these waves of nausea that was like you know, so I start, you know, look I'm like, uh, I I think I have copper toxicity. So later, I you know, I I've dug deeper and then I think I found just some random thing that you had wrote. But anyways, it was like, well, no, that's the iron. Exactly. I was getting nauseous from the iron, so I was more iron poisoned than I was copper toxic. Was I right?

Morley Robbins 1:00:54

You're absolutely right. And and yesterday, it's it's really funny, uh divine intervention. Uh, one of my students, she's a a nurse in uh Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and she she emails me this article, which I I don't I would not have found this on my own, but this comes by way of the Salk Institute. And it it just it just got published this week. This is right off the press. But they're looking at it's called sustained dysregulation of iron and glutathione homeostasis induces what they call chronopheroptosis. There's a big word, right? So it's ferrooptosis is iron-induced cell death. Chrono is over time. And and what uh these authors, uh Darr and um uh mayor, basically this article is validation of what what the book is about. It's interesting. Yeah, that's and that's a copy for it.

Dr Pompa 1:01:54

So in a nutshell, what did it say? And why what's where they why glutathione? What's going on there?

Morley Robbins 1:01:59

Well the thing is, what they what they've been able to prove now, they're look they're looking at Alzheimer's conditions, that's their primary focus, and Parkinson's. Um what they're able to document is it's the iron accumulation in the neuron that becomes so destructive to the resilience of the neuron's ability to make energy and respond to the environment. And in the the uh lead author, uh Dr. Mayer said, iron's not the problem. I'm like, okay. She said, it's the accumulation of the iron. And what she reveals is that the iron. Iron can't get out. But what's the one word that's not in that paper? It's a 50-page article. Not one word about copper.

unknown 1:02:42

Wow.

Morley Robbins 1:02:43

Not one word.

Dr Pompa 1:02:44

Yeah. So again, iron's not the problem. No. It is the copper.

Morley Robbins 1:02:48

It's the lack of copper that doesn't let the lack of copper. The lack of copper that doesn't let the iron to recycle properly. Yeah, yeah.

Dr Pompa 1:02:55

I and I out of everything we said, I think that is the takeaway for people. You know, because you can get two groups, like how important iron is. The world is iron deficient. Well, there's truth to that. But then there's the other group. Iron is toxic, iron is oxidative, there's people having heart attack, strokes if you're it's like, okay, so how could they you know both be wrong or right? Well, copper is what they're not talking about.

Morley Robbins 1:03:20

If I had a magic wand and I were sitting with Secretary Kennedy right now, there's only one thing I would ask him to do. Mandate that going forward, no copper research cannot ignore iron, and no iron research cannot ignore copper. And then suddenly you have the union of the metals so that people understand the interplay and interdependence that they have.

Dr Pompa 1:03:45

Okay.

Morley Robbins 1:03:46

And that would change the science.

Dr Pompa 1:03:48

That puts a cap on it. People can understand that. Right. Okay.

Zinc Overload And The COVID Mineral Trap
Dr Pompa 1:03:51

We did start this conversation about iron and zinc, right? Zinc is not being depleted by glyphosate. Zinc is, you know, we're getting plenty of zinc, right? But the world went crazy with zinc through COVID, right? And zinc, we could, you know, there's benefits to zinc too. So you know, we're not throwing zinc completely under the bus. But right now in the space, it's like there's this thing of you can't do copper without zinc. Or if you take them together, they neutralize each other. Where's the truth here? I I because I don't even know.

Morley Robbins 1:04:21

No, it's uh again, we're we're back to Carl Pfeiffer. Thank you, Dr. Pfeiffer. Uh I always worry when people get the PhD before they get their MD. He bec he was a pharmacist before he was a doctor. Like, okay. Um he wrote a very important book, um, Mental and Elemental Nutrients. It's a monster of a book. Um but but he didn't really understand copper and iron. And I think he only confused it by introducing zinc. So when you study the literature from the 1920s to the 1950s, there's an obsession with copper and iron. Those are the metals they were studying very intently. You know, um Otto Warburg, he was obsessed with copper and iron. He only talked about iron, but he knew about copper. But the thing is, um, why were they so concerned about copper and iron? Because they were really preoccupied with making energy. They wanted to understand the mechanism at a cellular level about how energy is made. I I think there are certain um head fakes that are introduced, and I think uh Pfeiffer introduced one of them. And he he pointed out the fact that there's very similar relationships between copper and iron. But what p people don't realize is that zinc blocks copper uptake in the body.

Dr Pompa 1:05:46

Okay. And zinc also is very so basically zinc could make worse an already huge deficiency in the populace.

Morley Robbins 1:05:56

Absolutely. And and zinc is also very disruptive to. Iron metabolism. Very, very important.

Dr Pompa 1:06:04

So it could technically then make your iron levels in tissue go up.

Morley Robbins 1:06:08

Yes, exactly. And so the the you start to drop in zinc into the equation, and not suddenly you're affecting both the metals, copper and iron. And what people may not know is that not only does zinc block the copper uptake, zinc has known properties to stop cytochrome C oxidase at complex four.

Dr Pompa 1:06:30

That's not a good thing. It could affect energy as well.

Morley Robbins 1:06:32

Affects energy. But it also goes on in 2010, a very famous team of Australian uh mineral researchers discovered that zinc was blocking the ferrooxidase enzyme function in our brain. The very stuff that they're talking about in this article, they knew that zinc was very disruptive in that. And again, what happened in 2020? Everyone was told, oh, use the zinc to stop the replication of the virus, right? We knew that became part of our thought process. There was only one article published in 2020 that I could find that talked about how copper kills all pathogens, bacteria, fungus, virus, and parasites.

Dr Pompa 1:07:14

So it works kind of like silver.

Morley Robbins 1:07:17

Yeah. But we're we're gonna get into some real dicey discussion now because silver blocks copper metabolism. And so what happened in in 2020, everyone bought the Kool-Aid, oh, I need zinc. They didn't realize the downstream effect it was gonna have on copper metabolism and subsequently iron metabolism. And and what I'm trying to piece together now is why is the serum ferritin running so low consistently? Something happened in the last few years, and uh there's no one's writing about it. There's nothing in the literature, but but somehow the um the level, and again, I I I know what you're gonna say, but Kel says it's supposed to be zero, but everyone doesn't believe Kel. So when we get down into this 20 to 50 range, people get f freaked out, or below below 20 is really where the where the uh train comes off the track. And the thing is of ferritin. Yeah, but something happened, I think, with the zinc to cause that.

Dr Pompa 1:08:20

And what what I've just So you're saying uh when people are overloading on zinc, their ferritin's dropping. Yes.

Morley Robbins 1:08:26

And I've and I just found research to that effect a couple days ago. I haven't really delved into it in a deep way, but zinc has an effect on um serum ferritin, and it causes it to go low. And oh my gosh, if that's in fact the the mechanism, we got a serious problem.

Dr Pompa 1:08:44

So it's kicking it out and then it's ending up in other tissue. Um I'm I we don't know.

Morley Robbins 1:08:52

All all I know is this one study that I found from 2011 is that they uh were working with um women who are menstruating, and they gave them a lot of zinc and they found that their ferritin drop.

Dr Pompa 1:09:07

Some people uh watching this would be like, well, that's good, because again, we've been taught you already said, hey, if it's above 150, be careful. If it starts to get up above you know 300,000, 400,000, you better be really concerned.

Morley Robbins 1:09:22

You should be very concerned. The nuance is um I think we have to really accept the fact that ferritin is this immune marker. It's not an iron storage marker. And we've got to really rely on the fact that hemoglobin is a much more prevalent, consistent indicator of of iron status. And we really need to know what copper, what what's the serum level of copper, what's the um serum level of ceruloplasmin. Again, if I had a magic wand, I would I would ask for one test to be allowed. The ferrooxidase assay, it's barred by the FDA. We're not allowed to know the actual intelligence of the ferrooxidase enzyme function, and that would change everything.

Dr Pompa 1:10:10

Right, but we can't. So you say is copper levels in serum accurate? Can we measure that? And how pro I mean, can we even order such a test?

Morley Robbins 1:10:19

You can absolutely can. Uh I developed a blood test called the Full Monty Iron Panel. Gotta have some fun with it. And there's 12 markers in it. And two of them are one is copper. It's measured.

Dr Pompa 1:10:30

Where can people get that test?

Morley Robbins 1:10:31

Uh requestatest.com, ultalabs.com.

Dr Pompa 1:10:36

Okay. Requestatest.com.

Morley Robbins 1:10:38

Or ulta, U L-T-A-Labs.com.

Dr Pompa 1:10:42

Okay.

Morley Robbins 1:10:42

And these are these are um patient-directed ordering uh platforms. And the the the nuance is we have a lot of people under that. I hope that'd be great. Um the the nuance to it is the practitioners that they might be working with aren't familiar with these lead results. And they're not really esoteric.

Dr Pompa 1:11:03

Yeah. And by the way, that's the problem, is that's why practitioners don't want to run certain tests because they don't know how to interpret them and they don't want to deal with that.

Morley Robbins 1:11:12

So they and it's not complicated. There's a whole I've trained a thousand people. They're called RCP consultants, root cause protocol consultants. People can go into our website, rootcauseprotocol.com, find these people, and they'll know how to interpret the the results. But the what what's important is we're looking at not just iron status, we're looking at zinc, we're looking at copper, we're looking at cerilloplasma, we're looking at vitamin A, we're looking at vitamin D. And there's a relationship between those two that needs to be showing up in the blood.

Dr Pompa 1:11:44

Wow.

Morley Robbins 1:11:44

And and we live in a D-only society, and that's not good.

Dr Pompa 1:11:47

Yeah, and we have to talk about the deception around D as well. Um okay. And we haven't even spoken about magnesium yet.

Speaker 3 1:11:56

I know. Okay.

Dr Pompa 1:11:58

Uh, it's really important topics, though, right? And you're already told everyone don't take ascorbic acid, right? So they're gonna say, is there a better form of vitamin C? We mentioned a food form. Um what about these liposome forms? Do you have a form that you like? Uh yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:12:16

No, the liposomal is just ascorbic acid on fat.

Dr Pompa 1:12:20

Aaron Powell Yeah. But and to your point, though, you don't want ascorbic acid. So there are supplemental um natural vitamin C's from food, right? Yeah. So from food.

Morley Robbins 1:12:30

Formula IQ makes one, innate response makes one. There's a there's a number of different manufacturers that make a whole food vitamin C complex. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Dr Pompa 1:12:39

So you learned that today. No more ascorbic acid. Okay, magnesium, because most women have now heard uh you know it's going to impact their hormones. We know it impacts uh calcium absorption. It's not so much a calcium deficiency as it is magnesium.

Morley Robbins 1:12:55

Right.

Dr Pompa 1:12:55

And you know, so magnesium. You know, let's bring it into a nutshell.

Magnesium Burn Rate Under Stress
Morley Robbins 1:13:01

Okay. So I cut my teeth on magnesium.

Dr Pompa 1:13:03

Yeah, you're like the you're known as the magnesium guy, and we didn't even get to it until an hour into the show.

Morley Robbins 1:13:08

I know, right? Well, the the thing is, I've I was I was fascinated by I was it was actually a book by Carolyn Dean, The Magnesium Miracle. And I spent 32 years working in hospitals as an executive and a consultant. It's like, why is everyone so sick? And and her argument was everyone's magnesium deficient. And I bought that for a number of years. It makes so much sense. But then you start to pick at it. And I started to ask the question, why is magnesium low? And and it took me about five years to piece it all together. But basically, here's the here's the uh the process. When you have lack of copper, iron will rise in the liver. Very, very well documented, going all the way back to 1928. Iron in the liver is not your friend. It's going to create a lot of oxidative stress. And who takes it on the chin with oxidative stress? Magnesium. It's the first first mineral to go. Magnesium and B vitamins are the first nutrients out under the side.

Dr Pompa 1:14:07

Yeah, so we're back to copper being the absolute chef in the kitchen, the commander.

Morley Robbins 1:14:12

No, I think again, there it I look at the minerals as a pyramid. Copper's at the very top.

Speaker 3 1:14:18

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:14:18

It absolutely is at the top. When you think about its relationship with all the other minerals, but especially iron and magnesium and oxygen. And so the the key, and I and I created this phrase, the magnesium burn rate. How much stress do you have? How fast are you losing your how fast are you losing the magnesium? But I thought, well, we can replace it. And that's what I did for a number of years. Let's just take a lot of magnesium. But I thought, wait a minute, why don't we stop losing it? How come we keep losing it? And that's what really led to the whole copper iron dynamic.

Dr Pompa 1:14:53

So how much um do you recommend people take magnesium? Oh, absolutely. How much?

Morley Robbins 1:14:58

Yeah, it's five milligrams per pound body weight or ten milligrams per kilo, depending on how you weigh yourself.

Dr Pompa 1:15:06

In this country, five milligrams per pound give you uh and what form of magnesium?

Morley Robbins 1:15:12

Um and it's multiple forms. I mean, we've got obviously it's in food. Anything that's green is going to have magnesium in it. Um transdermal, amazing magnesium chloride oil, or uh um magnesium sulfate, epsom salt. Wonderful forms for for recovery. Um, but I think the ones that you're referring to are um the chelated forms.

Dr Pompa 1:15:38

Yeah, there's the glycinate, the umate. Malate. Gluconate, glycine. Glucanate, glycinate, citrate. Uh yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:15:46

I I encourage people to stay away from the citrate. Makes a lot of people upset. Good pooper. It is a good pooper, but it's not restoring the magnesium in the way that it needs to be restored.

Dr Pompa 1:15:57

Um hydroxide oxide are poopers too.

Morley Robbins 1:16:00

So but you're not getting the amount.

Dr Pompa 1:16:03

No, yeah. Well, the point is, is the reason it's a pooper is because it's not absorbed. It pulls water into the colon. Exactly.

Morley Robbins 1:16:09

So Magox 400 is very popular, right? Do you know how much magnesium you're actually getting with magox 400? Yeah. It's 16 milligrams.

Dr Pompa 1:16:17

Yeah, I was just gonna say probably not much.

Morley Robbins 1:16:19

It's not much at all. And so uh I think particularly as people are dealing with stress, they gotta know their um formula, know their weight, multiply it times five. But the the the way you measure it is you want your bowel movement to be formed and soft. And when it starts to get too runny, dial back on your magnesium. There you go. But the but the form that I've used the most has probably been the magnesium malate.

Dr Pompa 1:16:47

Okay. And it's definitely like if you have muscle cramps, that's the one that it feels like. So that tells me that it's getting in. Exactly. Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:16:55

Right. And and using where magnesium will show stress the fastest, it's going to be in the feet, in the hands, and the twitch of the eye. If you've got those any one of those three, you've got a serious magnesium deficiency and you need to bulk up.

Dr Pompa 1:17:12

And but again, magnesium without copper?

Morley Robbins 1:17:15

No, it does. I mean, a lot of people do it. And I was there for a number of years. What I'm what I'm trying to do with the the root cause protocol is get people to realize that there is this game plan. If there's things you got to stop taking, yeah.

Dr Pompa 1:17:29

We've talked about carbic acid. Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:17:31

Stop taking iron, stop taking calcium, stop taking vitamin D only.

Dr Pompa 1:17:35

Okay. Yeah, we're what let's go there next.

Morley Robbins 1:17:37

And then getting people to focus on the the uh the starts, people find that they really start to perk up very quickly.

Dr Pompa 1:17:45

Okay. So yeah, they they do. So okay, um, let's talk about the vitamin D, right? I mean, I'm a huge fan of vitamin D from the sun. Um, I mean, I think that there could be some reasonable uh times to take it. But we did talk about vitamin A, um, and the sun plays a critical role with vitamin A because it it separates vitamin A, makes it usable in the body. So the sun has a lot of impacts on all the fat solubles. Right. I'm a big fan, like I because I really understand the value of the fat solubles, I absolutely love egg yolks. Oh, sure. So, you know, it's like, I mean, I there's like I think the these food sources are absolutely incredible for the fat-soluble vitamins. But okay, so that said, let's look at this D, the deception around D.

The Vitamin D Deception And A D Balance
Morley Robbins 1:18:39

Um again, in nature, everything's in pairs: calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, you know, uh copper and iron. It's not copper and zinc, it's copper and iron. Copper and iron. Um, but A and D is a very powerful relationship. Um what's fascinating, which again go into the literature, in the 19 teens, there was an obsession with retinol. Nobel Prize is being given out for the research that was being done. What were they doing with the vitamin D fraction of those studies? Throwing it in the garbage. Wasn't even on their radar screen.

Dr Pompa 1:19:15

It's funny. And then how they isolate things like that, right? Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:19:18

And then suddenly in the 70s, D. D. D took off. And um, and it wasn't just DNA, it was just D.

Dr Pompa 1:19:26

And by the way, the the danger is always this, and I've done a lot of videos warning people about this. If you just load up on D, you create a functional deficiency of A. If you load up on A, you create a functional deficiency of D. And by the way, that's where I think the medical community still sits. Well, A can cause, you know, lead to cancer problems. D can cause hip fractures. And it's the opposite.

Morley Robbins 1:19:51

It absolutely is. And the and the thing is, within the root cause protocol, we worship at the altar of bioavailable copper in its form ceruloplasmin to express the ferrooxidase enzyme to regulate the iron and the oxygen. Very that's that's the whole nutshell of the of the program. And so retinol is of paramount importance in that program. If you don't have access to viable sources of retinol, pre-formed vitamin A, not precursor, but preformed, you're not going to be able to fire up the enzymes. You're not going to be able to run the metabolism of the body. You're not going to be able to make the energy. But the thing is, what really became the obsession was the immune system. And everyone keyed off of vitamin D's ability to uh interact with the immune system. And that it's undeniable. But there's a difference between how vitamin D interacts with the immune system versus vitamin A. Vitamin D suppresses the immune system. Okay, under certain conditions, that's probably a good thing. But what does vitamin A do? It downregulates. Well, what's the difference between suppression and downregulation? It's huge. If someone's trying to fall asleep, suppression is putting a pillow over their head. Downregulation is singing a lullaby. Very different actions there. And so I think the world got my phrase is misled and misfed, with a lot of uh dictums, one of them being you must take a lot of vitamin D. But um I grew up in Baltimore, as I mentioned. My nickname is Baltimore. I worship at the altar of Hopkins. They're not they're not perfect, but there's some pretty smart people at that institution. And back in 2014, Mohammed Amer did an all-cause mortality study. This is pre pre uh COVID. I I get that. But but as a seminal study, that there was no clinical benefit to having storage D above 21. Wow. That's a mind-blowing conclusion. That flies in the face of all the functional programs, right?

Dr Pompa 1:22:07

Yeah, they're saying uh 60 and above.

Morley Robbins 1:22:10

60 and above, absolutely. Uh the the part that's missing, this is this is really important for the for the listeners out there. Um, when was the last time you had your active D measured? And there's a relationship between active D and storage D. And I I've got one of my students uh who he's a dentist practicing in Manhattan said, I've got this really um high profile functional doctor who wants to talk to you. Would you be willing to? I said, sure. And I I won't mention his name, but he's a big name. And he said, Um, well, I I'm really happy with your work. I'm really thinking you've brought some important concepts to light. He said, but I completely disagree with you about vitamin D. I said, that's fine. I said, I'm just curious, what have you found with the active D measurements that you've done? He said, the what? I said, well, you're measuring active and storage. He said, no, I've never done that.

Dr Pompa 1:23:08

And tell people what they are.

Morley Robbins 1:23:10

So the storage is called 25 hydroxy vitamin D. The active is called 125. And and again, what is vitamin D? It's not a vitamin, it's a hormone. And hormones get storage.

Dr Pompa 1:23:26

Vitamin A is a pro hormone, too.

Morley Robbins 1:23:27

Right, exactly. And so um hormone D, just like all the other hormones, has a location and a job. Its primary location is in the colon or in the intestine. I'm not sure exactly where where in the intestine, but it's in the intestine, to absorb more calcium at the expense of magnesium. And so you start to um really bulk up on on vitamin D supplements, you're going to alter the absorption of calcium and magnesium. And there's a very famous study done by um John Um Ferris at Yale Medical School. Oh, that's probably a pretty good school, right? 1962, he the headlines of the of the article vitamin D supplements cause renal potassium wasting. Well, that that's a very serious declaration. And when I started this work, um I did a lot of hair tissue mineral analysis. And what did I see? Potassium was always tanked. 100% of the time, potassium is always at just one or below one, which is that's not a good thing. When potassium is low in the cell, do you know what is allowed in?

Dr Pompa 1:24:48

Sodium? Potassium and sodium, I don't know. No, iron.

Morley Robbins 1:24:52

Oh when potassium starts to leave the cell, iron has free access. And so then suddenly we've got a serious problem with iron. And so gosh. Then there's another study that was done, um, so that was 62, I think it was an 89 study done, and what the what the scientists realized was that the impact on the kidney was allowing more iron into the tissue and it was tanking energy production. And I and again, I think uh I have a whole um uh program. It's a it's an hour and a half, it's a masterclass that people can can access uh behind a paywall, but it it's research that they don't know about, about the the downside, the dark side, the deception of storage D-only uh supplements. And people need to realize that everything in nature is in balance.

Dr Pompa 1:25:46

Aaron Powell Yeah. So um people in uh with dark skin living in northern climates, um taking vitamin D really helps them. But you know, because they're up there, they can't get sun. Um you and I would make the argument that the best way to balance your D is get sun.

Morley Robbins 1:26:06

Aaron Ross Powell Well, get sun or get it in your diet.

Dr Pompa 1:26:09

Yeah, of course. Uh you know, there's there's dietary miles.

Morley Robbins 1:26:12

Our Scandinavian ancestors, they knew what to eat. And they and they were getting it through the diet. And you made reference of a very important reference that I'm not sure people picked up was the relationship of sunlight to A and D and all the and all the fat solubles. But the but the mechanism is really important. It's called folate.

Dr Pompa 1:26:34

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:26:34

Right?

Dr Pompa 1:26:35

You need folic acid to actually, you know, utilize the retinol and that whole pathway from the sun.

Morley Robbins 1:26:42

Exactly. And you need the folate to to make the vitamin D.

Dr Pompa 1:26:45

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:26:46

So when you're in sunlight, the minute you go out into sunlight, you're gonna start to synthesize D. That's great. But what are you gonna what else are you gonna do? You're gonna begin to break down the vitamin A. Both mechanisms key off of folate.

Folate Sunlight And Copper’s Bigger Role
Morley Robbins 1:27:01

Well, in one of my seminal conversations with uh Leslie Cleve, again, he's a cardiologist who's a world-renowned copper expert, in 1973, when a lot of excitement was taking place in 1973 around statins, um he he did a study and discovered that copper deficiency causes cholesterol to rise. That's a pretty powerful finding. And for that finding to become science, only one other lab, only one other lab needed to replicate those findings. Since 1973, over 30 labs have confirmed Dr. Clevet's findings. That copper deficiency causes cholesterol to rise. Why? Very important.

Dr Pompa 1:27:47

Cholesterol solvate.

Morley Robbins 1:27:48

Well, cholesterol takes eleven molecules of oxygen to make one molecule of cholesterol. So cholesterol is an oxygen sink. Cholesterol is the wisdom of the body. Knowing it doesn't have enough copper, so it's creating cholesterol to protect the oxygen that it's going to need to make what hormones and other chemicals make energy down downstream. And as soon as the body gets the copper back, it can begin to release that and allow the body to to get back to homeostasis. So the the thing is in a conversation with Dr. Clevet, uh this goes back to 2011, I think. Was the very first conversation I had with him. And I I had I uh again was responding to one of his articles, and I said, you know, Dr. Clevet, I have this theory. He said, I think that um all the B vitamins are copper dependent and they all regulate iron. And he was he's a real gentleman. He said, Well, Morley, I can't speak for all of the B vitamins. He said it's a very interesting theory. I he said you've you've definitely got my interest. He said, But what I can tell you for a fact is that folate is copper dependent. Yeah. B9. And folic acid is not folate. People need to know that that the folic acid that they've got in their supplement does not have the coffee. And so we're again we're back to the pyramid, copper's at the top, running the the sunshine show. And in fact, uh, I've got a colleague in Australia who's a 40-year veteran of chiropractic and a 40-year veteran of naturopathy. But he's been studying copper and iron as an alchemist for 30 years. He said, Well, it would it would be good for you to know that copper has a magnetic attraction to sunlight. I said, That makes sense. He said, It also has a magnetic attraction to ammonia. I went, You gotta be kidding me. I said, No. He said, he said the first of the four enzymes in the liver to break down ammonia, the first is copper dependent. So what does that mean? Copper is the alpha and omega. It's the beginning and end of life. And so it's it's just getting people to realize that this enormous body of knowledge, it exists. There are so many articles out there about the the mystique of of copper metabolism. Oh, but they're just not readily accessible, and it's only going to get worse with AI.

Dr Pompa 1:30:24

I know. Because what does AI Because AI just picks up what's already there?

Morley Robbins 1:30:28

Picks up what's already there. It's always incomplete. That's what AI stands for. Exactly. Always iron. Yeah. They'll always lead with iron. Yeah.

Dr Pompa 1:30:38

And and I I did a Yeah, it's so many things are getting worse because of AI. Oh, yeah. Because it takes a dominant, already false theory and just makes it more and everyone believes AI.

Morley Robbins 1:30:48

That's the scary part.

Dr Pompa 1:30:50

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:30:50

And they don't realize how manipulated it is. So I was asking recently, probably about four or five months ago, asking about this particular mechanism. I said, What are the ten reasons for this mechanism taking place? And I came back with were ten very legitimate responses. But six of them I knew had a relationship with copper. And so I was working with a buddy of mine who's really adept at working with AI. I said, Okay, what about copper? And this is a response from AI. This was like six months ago. He says, Oh, you know about copper. Well, let me tell you what I know about copper. And he completely changed the response when copper was introduced into the question.

Dr Pompa 1:31:34

Yeah, well, and you would have to introduce it into like, you know, other names that understand copper to get AI to go there and pull it.

Morley Robbins 1:31:43

Well, what we've developed within the root cause protocol, we've developed the RCP constitution. It's about a six-page document that we feed into AI and say, take this into account before you answer our question. It's totally changes the responses that are coming back.

Dr Pompa 1:32:00

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and your book uh you know outlines the root cause protocol. I mean, everything we're talking about here is there. Right. You know, what not to take, um, what to take, you know, the balance of it. So you know, right now, I mean, we've highlighted copper a lot. There is some benefit I mean, people talking about the benefits of copper because they ha sell the all copper water jugs now, um, water bottles, I should say. Absolutely and the jugs to get copper. Can you get is that a good way to get copper?

Morley Robbins 1:32:30

Aaron Powell Well, uh again, uh I think people are taking it out of context. Where where was that really popular? India was really really the the civilization that perfected that. It's more for sanitation than for supplementation.

Dr Pompa 1:32:42

Because bacteria doesn't gr grow in there. Trevor Burrus, Jr. It can't grow in there.

Morley Robbins 1:32:45

So you're you're gonna get microscopic levels of copper.

Dr Pompa 1:32:48

You're not gonna get enough.

Morley Robbins 1:32:52

Copper bracelets, people wear them all the time.

Dr Pompa 1:32:54

Yeah, yeah. What are you gonna absorb? So okay, great. It it's it keeps your water clean.

Morley Robbins 1:32:58

Aaron Ross Powell And the thing is, what what's really popular now are copper socks, copper bandages.

Dr Pompa 1:33:03

Yeah, copper. Yeah, you're right. I didn't bring that. Copper's all over the place. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:33:07

Where you need your copper is inside your body. Yeah.

Dr Pompa 1:33:09

So you need to be s eating it, supplementing it. Absolutely. Trevor Burrus, and your to your point, um nuts, seeds, um uh organ meets shellfish. Organ meets shellfish shellfish, yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:33:21

Broad broadleafy greens, um, collard greens, mustard greens. Yeah. They're very rich sources of copper. The the part that that people may not know about, um everyone's heard of photosynthesis, right? Well, the mechanism that runs photosynthesis is three enzymes. There's photosystem two and photosystem one, and they they involve manganese and and magnesium, but there's uh something in the middle called plastocyanin. Plastocyanin is a copper-dependent enzyme that moves the electrons from two to one. And what's really important about ceruloplasmin, the protein, is it has six plastocyanin centers in it. And so this whole mechanism of light, everyone's really obsessed with light now.

Speaker 3 1:34:10

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:34:10

It's all about copper.

Speaker 3 1:34:11

Yeah, that's amazing.

Morley Robbins 1:34:12

I w I would argue that the copper that ceruloplasmin inside our body creates a prism. It creates a full spectrum of light. Now I don't have clinical proof, I don't have scientific proof, but each of those plastocyan centers has a different frequency. Well, every the the light spectrum is a different frequency of light to get from ultraviolet to red. And so it's like I think there's more to the story, and I think copper is going to be.

Dr Pompa 1:34:43

I know, right?

Morley Robbins 1:34:44

But the beauty of the red lights is uh they're really important. And I'm sure you've had patients that have gotten a lot of benefit from those red lights. They are an electronic crutch for a copper-deficient body.

Dr Pompa 1:34:58

And so the Well, because it it does the copper's effect in the mitochondria complex four is is huge. And the light can help that.

Morley Robbins 1:35:09

Aaron Powell And what the red light does is it blocks nitric oxide from stopping the cycle. Yeah. That's the key. That's why red light is so useful. But ideally, we should be able to generate the light within. If you can't do that, do it without.

Speaker 3 1:35:23

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:35:24

And let it be an external source while you're rebuilding your body.

Dr Pompa 1:35:27

Yeah. Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:35:28

So important.

Dr Pompa 1:35:29

Wow. Okay. I mean, just blew us away. I, you know, I again, I I knew this would be action-packed. I I knew it would be a lot of incredible biochemistry, but all of it is in cure your fatigue, where we started. And so many people have the lack of energy because, you know, right there, the CU, the copper.

Morley Robbins 1:35:52

And the one thing I would just to emphasize on one point real quickly, uh there are a lot of people out there. A third of the Earth's population is told that they are anemic. It's a very serious situation. What we have to understand is that iron's the number one element on the planet. 36% of the Earth's composition is iron. Okay. Pre-COVID, I would have argued that humans were probably the most evolved species on the planet. Now I'm not so sure. But but to believe in anemia means that the most evolved species on the planet can't metabolize the number one element on the planet.

Dr Pompa 1:36:32

What I really want to be something else involved.

Morley Robbins 1:36:35

Might be something else involved. But what I really want to emphasize is I want people to realize, as we alluded to earlier, there is a difference between low iron on the blood test and high iron in the tissue. If the blood test comes back low as and it comes back low a third of the time now, people need to ask one question. Why is it low? And could copper be part of the problem?

Speaker 3 1:37:01

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:37:01

Or lack of copper be part of the problem. And get people to challenge this idea that the phrase that's used is iron deficiency anemia. That's the popular phrase that's used by the World Health Organization and everybody else. But it but technically there's two forms of anemia. There is absolute iron deficiency. You do not have iron in your body for whatever reason. You've been in a car accident, you've been shot, whatever. There's been a massive blood loss. That does happen, but it's very rare. But absolute iron deficiency is a very small percentage. The bigger percentage is functional iron deficiency. The recycling system is not working because the person's got an infection, inflammation, under stress, don't have copper in their body. And that's creating the illusion of anemia when in fact it's a functional breakdown in their recycling system.

Dr Pompa 1:38:02

And how does that um people hear the term megaloblastic anemia? They're looking at B12 as being the problem, hemoglobin, it affects your hemoglobin, et cetera. Where does that all fit in?

Morley Robbins 1:38:14

Again, when you B9 and B12 are very important for the production of the red blood cell. Well, B9, we've already figured out, has a relationship with copper. The symptoms of B12 deficiency and the symptoms of copper deficiency are virtually the same. In fact, in 1934, they gave a Nobel Prize to three physicians who cured anemia and pernicious anemia, B12 anemia, using the same product. Do you know what it was? Beef liver. They gave a Nobel Prize in 1934 to three uh one physician from Hopkins, two from Harvard, for using beef liver, which is teeming with nutrients, but it's the richest source of copper in our body.

Dr Pompa 1:39:03

And pernicious anemia is um another topic, right? Involving the B vitamins where people get that diagnosis.

Morley Robbins 1:39:10

Yeah. And the and the other side of it is people need to know that uh when you start talking about B12, you're gonna get into methylation. Well, the the head of the methylation process is an enzyme called methionine synthase. Doesn't work without copper. It's gotta have a copper battery.

Dr Pompa 1:39:27

It even is showing its hand in methylation. Oh, absolutely. And you can't adapt to stress without normal methylation. Copper's at the top of that, too.

Morley Robbins 1:39:36

Well, and here's just to take one quick deep dive and then we can wrap it up. Um you you made reference to um the copper peptides. Yeah. Well, what's really popular now, as you know, are peptides in general. Right?

Speaker 2 1:39:54

Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:39:54

Everyone's gotta have my peptides, right? Have have you wondered why peptides are so important now?

Dr Pompa 1:40:02

Well, I I think that it's because people are trying to biohack around this hormone problem. Right. Yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:40:08

So it turns out there's 4,700 signaling peptides in the human body. That's a lot. And according to the research, over half of them get activated with one enzyme. It's called the PAM enzyme. And PAM stands for peptidyl glycine alpha amidating monooxygenase.

Dr Pompa 1:40:32

Never remember that.

Morley Robbins 1:40:34

36 letters long. I get a dollar every time I say it. And what people need to understand is that um glyphosate is creating copper deficiency, which is affecting the PAM enzyme, which requires two.

Dr Pompa 1:40:51

So the PAM enzyme that controls, you said, half of those peptides.

Morley Robbins 1:40:56

Yep. Things like oxytocin, vasopressin, insulin. You've heard of insulin, right?

Dr Pompa 1:41:04

Oxytocin, yeah.

Morley Robbins 1:41:05

GLP1. GLP1 doesn't get activated without the PAM enzyme.

Copper Dependent Peptides Genes And Methylation
Dr Pompa 1:41:10

And the PAM enzyme is copper dependent. Copper dependent.

Morley Robbins 1:41:13

Two atoms of copper. The reason why I wanted to bring it up real quickly is I think um the the the big rage in modern medicine, hormones, peptides, and genes. Right? Yeah. It doesn't get any bigger than those.

Dr Pompa 1:41:29

No, yeah, it's true.

Morley Robbins 1:41:31

Um so it turns out you can't transcribe genes without copper. And if there's a copper deficiency.

Dr Pompa 1:41:40

See, I always say the battle is always spiritual.

Morley Robbins 1:41:44

Yeah.

Dr Pompa 1:41:44

So and I also have my 180-degree principle, which means in health especially, take a hundred and eighty degrees opposite of what the majority is saying, the media, everyone, and somehow the truth lies on the other side.

Speaker 4 1:41:58

Exactly.

Dr Pompa 1:41:58

So I think we could have realized, oh, copper's toxic. That's what we're being told from everybody. Flip it around. Flip it around, 180 degrees opposite. Oh, they're telling us copper's toxic and bad for us. So could it be that it's actually the most important?

Morley Robbins 1:42:14

Bingo.

Dr Pompa 1:42:15

And I would say yes.

Morley Robbins 1:42:16

So let's stay with this PAM enzyme for just a second. A husband and wife team, Betty Iper and Richard Maines, studied the PAM enzyme at Hopkins for 20 years. That's a long time. Then they went north to uh University of Connecticut Medical Center, UConn Medical Center. Get it? UConn. They studied for another 25 years. And in 2010 and 2014, they had two very talented graduate students. Uh one uh just a straight-up biochemist, the other was an MD with a PhD. But they did very similar studies. What they wanted to do was create what's called haploinsufficiency in the PAM enzyme so it's not firing right. So they were able to manipulate the genes to create that, and the enzyme expression was significantly reduced. And then with another group of mice, they reduced the copper intake in their diet. And they created the exact same level of enzyme expression. So low copper diet, haploinsufficiency, right? And then they but in both studies, they increased the iron, excuse me, they increased the copper in the diet. And what happened? In both groups, both the copper deficient group and the haplo-insufficient group, they both restored enzyme expression back to normal. So my challenge is that there are many, many different gene issues that people are freaking out about. I would argue that I bet many of them are lack of our nutrition, not the broken genes. Well, to get people out of that thought thought that they're broken.

Dr Pompa 1:44:05

Yeah, because again, we can turn on and off genes for good and for bad.

Morley Robbins 1:44:10

Right. And they respond to stress.

Dr Pompa 1:44:12

Absolutely. And they respond to stress, physical, chemical, or emotional.

Morley Robbins 1:44:16

Exactly. And as soon as stress goes up, epsidon's rising, iron's coming in. What do you think iron's doing inside the nucleus?

Dr Pompa 1:44:23

You know, it's this whole iron thing, uh you know, I I have said before I even understood this that it's not so simple. It's like it's not that everyone has all of this iron issue because they're taking it, et cetera, et cetera, and they have to just bloodlet it out because there's something wrong with human. It's like, no, it it in you know the answer to that was well, in the past, you know, humans would lose more blood. I'm like, okay, that's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Because it's not it's about this, it's about the copper issue that's making the iron issue that much more of a problem. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Morley Robbins 1:45:03

It's absolutely at the center of it.

Dr Pompa 1:45:04

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, it's at the center. Uh, you know, and it's so it's uh less about the iron and more about the copper.

Morley Robbins 1:45:09

Aaron Powell And what's important for people to really um focus in on is that our our body has an elegance to it, and there is a blueprint to running the human metabolism. That blueprint runs on energy. If you don't have energy, you you know that far better than I do.

Speaker 2 1:45:29

Absolutely.

Morley Robbins 1:45:30

The whole thing falls apart. But the key is making the energy the primary focus and getting people to realize that once that spark comes back, the body goes, wait a minute, I know what to do now. It's absolutely amazing.

Heavy Metals Copper Displacement And Wrap Up
Dr Pompa 1:45:43

You know, I don't want to complicate the issue. I I we have had so much amazing information, but you know, a lot of my study has been on how certain heavy metals um cause problems in the body. One of the things that I had found is how mercury, and and there's others, uh even lead, interferes with copper.

Morley Robbins 1:46:02

Yes, indeed.

Dr Pompa 1:46:03

So high heavy metals can displace copper. And of course, that's at the top of the chain. Right. So it's like that's amazing. And back when I was like figuring out my mercury issues, I realized it was affecting copper. You know, and I I was one of the things I realized is like, man, no wonder so my hormones are dysregulated. It's like, oh, this is complicated.

Morley Robbins 1:46:26

No, but it's all connected to it.

Dr Pompa 1:46:27

Yeah, it is. That's the beauty of it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so high heavy metal issues, yeah. Good luck. You're gonna have trouble, you know, with copper and uh and other minerals because of the displation and um uh so many other pathways I don't want to get into. But exactly. Yeah, uh look, uh cure your fatigue. Where do I put where do people find it?

Morley Robbins 1:46:46

Um they they can go online, Amazon, a bunch of online player players, but uh Barnes Noble carries it in physics physical edition.

Dr Pompa 1:46:54

And uh what about you? Do you have uh where what is where's your home sites?

Morley Robbins 1:46:58

Um well the rootcauseprotocol.com. Okay. Uh that's probably the primary site. We're on we're on all the social media sites.

Speaker 3 1:47:05

Awesome.

Morley Robbins 1:47:06

Um and what I typically uh let people know is that they're always welcome to reach out to me personally. I give out my email address, Morley Robbins. That's it.gmail.com. Wow. And my phone number. Yeah. Uh 847-922-8061. And I've I've learned so much from those conversations.

Dr Pompa 1:47:24

That's amazing. I I love when people do that. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Uh Morley, what a pleasure. Uh, it's an honor. I couldn't wait for this conversation. And uh it could just keep going on because I I I would probably bore people to tears, uh, you know, because I would just take it down these little nugget holes. But I feel like you're a guy who has so many little nuggets.

Morley Robbins 1:47:45

So it's I just it I think there's a there's a divine side to this. Yeah. And I'm just kind of um I'm I've been guided. Yeah. There's no question I've been guided.

Dr Pompa 1:47:56

Yeah, there's there's no question about it. Yeah, there is no question about it. All right. Well, listen, share this show because you know how many people you know that have a copper deficiency? Probably everybody. So, and it could be as simple as that with all of the expensive uh peptides and hormones they're presenting. Imagine if it could just be copper. Uh yeah, cure your fatigue. Go get the book for sure. The Root Cause Protocol, go to the website, check it out. Love the conversation, share it. Thank you again for being here.

Morley Robbins 1:48:26

And thank you again for the opportunity.