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Aging Well With Pharmacist Ben
World Mental Health Day, the Safety Nervous System, and the Secret Behind HLH
On World Mental Health Day, Pharmacist Ben spends a solo hour on the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, tracing loneliness, anxiety and a listener's wife's HLH diagnosis back to how safe or unsafe the body feels.
Opening Remarks and World Mental Health Day
Pharmacist Ben opens the show from Boulder, Colorado, thanking Doug Newsom and his brother Donald Newsom for his slot on BBS Radio and giving out his call-in number, 888-627-6008, for questions, comments and success stories. He introduces himself as a nutritional pharmacist who favors vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fatty acids over pharmaceutical drugs, tracing his skepticism back to pharmacy school in the 1980s and to his work in skin care and nutrition at the Blistex Corporation since 1983. He promotes his free Zoom calls through Pharmacist Ben's Academy, including a session on plant-derived colloidal minerals set for the next morning at live.dailywithdoc.com. He observes that despite unprecedented numbers of doctors, drugs, hospitals and insurance companies, longevity has stalled while cancer, heart disease and mental illness keep rising. He announces that October 10th is World Mental Health Day, quoting the Reverend John Watson's line that everyone is fighting a hard battle, and turns toward a discussion of loneliness hiding behind ordinary, successful-looking lives.
Loneliness Epidemic and the Safety Nervous System
Ben expands on the loneliness epidemic, citing World Health Organization figures that one in six people worldwide feels lonely and that 470 million suffer from anxiety disorders, even though roughly six billion people use the internet. He calls this contradiction the lonely crowd, people surrounded by connection yet starved for trust, affection and recognition. He distinguishes loneliness from solitude, noting that someone living alone can feel connected while someone surrounded by family can feel profoundly isolated. Comparing people to bees removed from a hive, he argues humans evolved to depend on tribe and community, and that rejection activates the amygdala, the brain's survival center. He recalls the isolation measures of recent years as the worst possible response to crisis, and credits Youngevity's community of distributors as the kind of tribe that counters loneliness. He promises to finally explain the nervous system behind safety and emergency that he introduced on a previous broadcast.
Two Nervous Systems and the Senses
Ben explains that the nervous system translates the outside world, sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch, into internal biochemistry, and that every sense ultimately works through touch, whether light touching the eye or molecules touching the tongue. He describes a voluntary nervous system governing movement and an autonomic nervous system running the heart, liver and digestion automatically, itself split into two branches. The sympathetic nervous system, the fight, flight or freeze response, dilates the pupils, speeds the heart and shuts down digestion to prepare the body for danger, a leftover from outrunning predators. The parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest response, constricts the pupils, slows the heart and restores digestion. Ben argues most people, especially the chronically sick, spend too much time sympathetic, and that watching the news or arguing during meals actively suppresses digestive juices, since the body was never designed to eat while fleeing a threat.
Brainwaves, Open Focus, and Vulnerable Love
Ben connects the two nervous systems to brainwave states, explaining that slower alpha and theta waves accompany parasympathetic relaxation and suggestibility, while faster beta waves accompany sympathetic focus and critical thinking. He notes that commercials and hypnotists exploit slow, rhythmic movement, like syrup pouring on pancakes or a swinging pendulum, to induce an alpha state where viewers believe rather than question. He adds that shifting from narrow, central vision to wide peripheral vision, open focus, is one of the fastest ways to trigger parasympathetic calm, a technique he says spiritual traditions have used for centuries. Turning to practical remedies, Ben says the quickest way out of chronic fight or flight is to love or care for something vulnerable, citing soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan who are given dogs. Because a dog, a baby or a child is weaker and safe, caring for it activates the safety nervous system more effectively than any supplement, drug or surgery.
Warm Baths, Blood Pressure, and Original Separation
Ben walks through physical signs of each nervous state, from dry mouth and chronic constipation under sympathetic stress to increased saliva and relaxed digestion under parasympathetic calm, citing a listener's email about a seven-year-old with daytime bladder accidents as a case of sympathetic overdrive. He recommends a warm bath as one of the fastest parasympathetic triggers, explaining that it echoes the total safety of the womb before birth, which he calls a primal wound of separation. Drawing on the Latin root of sin, meaning without or separate, Ben argues that disconnection, not any specific food or germ, is the deepest cause of disease, and that the cross symbolizes reconnection between people and God. He challenges listeners on blood pressure medication to take a reading, sit in a warm bath for ten to twenty minutes, then measure again, predicting a dramatic drop, and recommends Youngevity's Healthy Brain and Heart Pak alongside the practice.
Robert's Letter and the Offending Agent
Closing the hour, Ben reads an email from a listener named Robert whose wife has been diagnosed with HLH, hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, and is being treated with steroids and chemotherapy. He breaks down the Latin roots, blood cells, white cells and tissue, to explain it as a severe autoimmune condition in which the immune system attacks the body's own cells, producing fever, an enlarged liver, rashes and neurological symptoms. Ben insists every chronic illness, including HLH, is inflammatory and defensive, meaning some offending agent has entered the bloodstream, almost always through food, since the digestive tract is the body's one major opening to the outside world. He argues modern food is engineered not to nourish the body but to please the brain, making natural eating harder to sustain than processed alternatives. Ben closes by directing listeners to pharmacistben.com and Pharmacist Ben's Academy, promoting tomorrow's free Zoom call on plant-derived colloidal minerals, and signing off until Monday's broadcast.