Selected transcript highlights from the Alex Jones Radio Show broadcast from January 25th, 2013 with guest Pharmacist Ben Fuchs. Video courtesy of TheAlexJonesChannel.
Alex Jones: Start getting into these chemicals, what they’re doing. The inserts say they make you mass murder. Why? The answer is give big pharma more money, more access to kids to stop mass shootings, always connected to these drugs.
Ben Fuchs: Well, the most important thing, Alex, for people to recognize is that, far from the happy, bliss inducing, joy inducing neurotransmitter hormone substance that serotonin is portrayed to be by the mainstream media, by mainstream medical professionals, it turns out that serotonin is a hormone of vigilance. It’s a hormone of awareness. It’s a hormone that’s designed to keep us on our toes, so to speak. It’s a daytime hormone that designed to keep us able to handle the ups and downs, and the vicissitudes, of day to day life. So when you start to monkey around with the serotonin system, what you’re monkeying around with is the awareness system. The end result of too much serotonin is hyper-awareness, hyper-vigilance, paranoia, and this hyper-focused sense that people have when they’re freaking out.
Alex Jones: Artificial schizophrenia.
Ben Fuchs: It’s like a type of schizophrenia. In fact, LSD is very similar to serotonin.
Alex Jones: It’s in the same class.
Ben Fuchs: Same class!? It’s basically the same substance! Basically it’s the same molecule! And, if you want to know what the effects of too much serotonin are, the kind of effects that you get when you start to manipulate the serotonin clearing system, which is how these SSRI drugs are, think of the last time you saw somebody on some type of LSD trip. LSD was actually discovered when they were researching ways to manipulate the serotonin system. So, serotonin is a neurotransmitter that is involved with the vigilance response. Now, you obviously need to have this vigilance response, but you’ve got to be very, very careful with it. In addition, serotonin is largely produced by stress cells in the digestive system. Your digestive system is always on the alert for poisons, and for toxins, and you have these stress cells, cells that are literally similar to adrenal cells, that produce serotonin, just waiting for you to eat some kind of poison or some kind of toxin.
Alex Jones: Is that why Prozac is linked to diabetes?
Ben Fuchs: Prozac is linked to diabetes for other reasons, we can get into that in a moment. That’s a very important point. That’s why Prozac is used as an appetite suppressant. Prozac and serotonin have an impact on the digestive system that is much bigger than the effect it has on the brain. 90% plus of the serotonin in your body is actually produced by these stress cells in the digestive system. So, this feeling of butterflies in your stomach, the feeling of nervousness you have before you have a date, or if you have stage fright, these are all serotonin mediated. They are the alert response that’s produced by serotonin in these digestive stress cells. In the brain, serotonin is involved in the wake-fullness response. And, if you want to know what serotonin really does, think about melatonin, which is the exact opposite of serotonin. We all know that when you take melatonin, you feel groggy, you feel sleepy, you feel relaxed. Well serotonin does the exact opposite.
Alex Jones: We gotta go to break. But, from my research, but your the big pharmacist and the expert, but what other experts have told me, after you’ve been on these drugs awhile, it burns you out, then they put you, usually, on more, then you’re in a hyper-awake form of sleep. You’re in a dream state, or daydreaming state, but hyper-awake having a hallucination, and that’s why people then go and use a meat cleaver to chop up their one year old baby and drink the blood, when the woman was a Sunday school teacher.
Alex Jones: Talking about these mass shootings. In almost every case, people chopping up their kids, drowning them, killing them. Women who have never had a criminal record, Sunday school. They get depressed, put them on the drugs. A year later they kill all four of their kids. You see it in the news. And they still send them to prison! The guy that killed eighteen Afghans who had his foot blown off. He didn’t wanna go back, the fourth tour, the Sergeant, they put him on psychotropics. They won’t release which ones, but he was under psychiatric care on them, and he flips out one night and he goes and kills people. So, if it’s hyper-awake, how does it make you then not remember? Pharmacist Ben Fuchs.
Ben Fuchs: Hyper-awake is one component of serotonin, but it’s real role is to help you handle shock and help you handle stress. So, one of the mechanisms for helping handle stress is hyper-awareness, but another one is withdrawal. Another one is getting away from the situation. Another is becoming numbed-out. So these are all mechanisms that the body has for dealing with overwhelm, for dealing with stress, for dealing with some kind of shock. And this is what serotonin is. That’s why you never wanna play around with this system. Especially considering, by the way, Alex, that people suffer from serotonin depletion for lifestyle reasons, for reasons of choice. They suffer from serotonin depletion from too much sugar, for one. They suffer from serotonin depletion from not enough sun. Did you know the sun is one of the most important ways to build your serotonin?
Alex Jones: I was depressed last week, went and got a ton of sun, I feel like a could take on a grizzly bear right now! Break down what the sun does. Go through the metabolic facts. It’s not like this is a secret. Big pharma knows this, but the sun’s free, all these vitamins that can give you the stuff you need. Break down that one chemical you were talking about that’s so key to giving you the good chemicals you need.
Ben Fuchs: The point about the sun is, we’re convinced, we bamboozled to believe that the sun is some kind of demon in the sky that’s hell bent on our destruction, when the fact of the matter is that, through substances like serotonin, the sun is an anabolic stimulus. It turns on growth. It turns on building. It’s much the same with cholesterol. Cholesterol’s the same way. It turns on growth. It turns on building. So, via these messages that we get through the media, and through mainstream physicians and the medical model for staying out of the sun, and using cholesterol lowering drugs and not eating cholesterol, we’re almost like, we’re being systematically destroyed! Humanity is being crushed! Our ability to grow, our ability to repair, our ability to recover, our ability to thrive, is being suppressed by this kind of wrong information. So, the sun, much like cholesterol, is not the enemy that it’s portrayed to be, and via the serotonin, the sun actually turns on the production of serotonin. So, if you’re considering an SSRI drug, you’d be far better off getting 20 minutes of sun, getting a sun lamp, getting something that produces blue light which seems to be much more effective for producing serotonin than any other kind of light, and laying out in the sun without a sun screen. That’s the last thing you ever wanna do, by the way, if you’re interested in building your serotonin, is wear sun screen because the sun screen blocks the ultraviolet rays that turns on the production of this incredibly important substance. I would present to you that one of the main reasons we’re dealing with serotonin problems is because we’re so terrified of getting out into the sun.
Alex Jones: Continue breaking this information down.
Ben Fuchs: Melatonin is another one. Melatonin is converted from serotonin. So, once your serotonin levels start to drop from things like not getting out into the sun or poor dietary strategies, then your melatonin levels drop as well. Then you deal with insomnia, then you deal with problems with waking up in the middle of the night. Melatonin is one of the most powerful anti-aging substances, anti-oxidant substances, anti-cancer substances that you could use. So, once you start playing around with this serotonin/melatonin balance, not only are you effecting your mood via serotonin, but you’re effecting aging, you’re effecting cancer, you’re effecting youth and repair via suppressing melatonin. Now, here’s another very important point that nobody talks about. Serotonin regulates something called ‘learned helplessness.’ Learned helplessness is a phenomena where you just learn to feel helpless. You learn, like, you don’t have any control over your life. You learn you have no control over your decision making. Well, guess what folks, serotonin regulates this feeling of learned helplessness. And, playing around with your serotonin levels, artificially manipulating your serotonin levels, increases the likelihood of the sensation of learned helplessness. And, to me, this is one of those insidious features of these SSRI drugs and could very well be linked to the feelings of rage and violent behavior that a lot of people on Prozac and Zoloft feel.
Alex Jones: In the rest of this segment get into the tryptophan, you know, what’s in meat. They don’t want us getting that. Explain to somebody on Prozac, I know you’re not their doctor or pharmacist, but what you would do personally. I say Prozac, the whole class of dozens of, what is it thirty or forty of these on the market or more right now? Some numbers are over seventy, but they’re not quite the same class. Well, you’re the pharmacist. Break down what’s not in our body, how they know this, why it says on the insert could make you cause mass murder, could give you schizophrenic mania. Obviously, they want more crazy people, so they want to put you on something that makes you crazy. What are things out there, naturally, that would actually help people, because of the deficiencies in this toxic system. You have the floor, break it down.
Ben Fuchs: Well, there’s so many ways, and we’ll talk about that in second. I want people on SSRIs to understand this; the chemical imbalance theory of depression. The idea that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, and that you build your serotonin and you’re not depressed. Number one, it’s simplistic and naive, and number two, it’s never been shown to be the case. In fact, drugs that block serotonin have been shown to have anti-depressant activity just as well as drugs that increase serotonin. So, please do not be fooled by the simplistic idea that all you do is raise your serotonin and you’re not depressed anymore. That is drug company propaganda. That is marketing and advertising information that has never been shown to be the case. That’s first of all. What has been shown to be the case is that elevations in serotonin, super high levels of serotonin, such as the kind that are caused by artificially manipulating the serotonin systems are associated with agitation, with restlessness, with diarrhea, with hallucinations, with fast heartbeat. Serotonin itself, the very word sero-tonin, means ‘sero’ for blood, ‘tonin’ for tightening. That’s because serotonin’s classic effect is blood clotting and hypertension. Let me say that again. Serotonin’s’ classic effect on the body is blood clotting and hypertension, and it’s in the very name ‘serotonin.’ Now, blood clotting and hypertension are two iconic signs of the body’s stress response. And, given the fact that 80 million or more of Americans are hypertensive, and some of the best selling drugs on the planet are blood thinning drugs, and among the most toxic drugs. So, clearly, blood clotting and hypertension are big problems in this country. It seems to me that anybody considering taking a drug that would manipulate serotonin levels, that would up serotonin levels, that would increase the amount of this neurotransmitter that’s associated with blood clotting and hypertension would wanna think twice, especially considering this chemical imbalance theory has never been shown to be the case. Now, what we do know is that serotonin is the hormone of awareness, it’s a hormone of vigilance, it is a summertime hormone. It is a daytime hormone. It is associated with the sun, and it’s associated with light, which is why the best way to get your serotonin is to make sure you’re getting some sunlight. And, not only that, take your sunglasses off and make sure you’re lookin’ at the sun. The rays from the sun, photonic energy from the sun will go through your eyes, it’ll go into your brain, and it will help up-regulate serotonin production. In addition, Alex, as you mentioned, there’s wonderful nutritional strategies that you can use to up-regulate your serotonin system. Earlier we talked about how digestive stress cells, they’re called enterochromaffin cells, are the largest producers of serotonin in the body. One of the best ways that you can make sure that your serotonin system is running cleanly is eliminate problem foods, number one. That means any types of food that the body will perceive as a toxin. That is processed foods, that is things like excitotoxins, MSG for example, artificial flavors. And, secondly, make sure you’re addressing something called h-pylori. H-pylori is a bacteria the overgrows in the digestive tract. As we get older and our digestive system becomes more compromised, as our acid production in our digestive system, in our stomachs, starts to become more compromised, this bacteria overgrows and that is a big time stresser on the serotonin system, the digestive serotonin system. So, addressing your digestive system by clearing out h-pylori, using things like apple cider vinegar f0r example, digestive enzymes for example, probiotics, unbelievably important for supporting digestive health, and supporting the digestive serotonin system. Then, there’s the supplements you can take. You mentioned 5-htp and tryptophan. Well, in order to understand the importance of tryptophan and 5-htp when it comes to serotonin, we have to understand a little bit about how biochemistry works in the body. The body’s always taking chemical A, turning it into chemical B, turning it into chemical C, turning it into chemical D, sort of like tinker toys. Imagine when you were a kid, you used to play with tinker toys. You’d stick a little piece in the tinker toy, and you’d create some kind of a little constructive piece. Then, put another piece on, a different constructive unit that you’ve created. You put another piece on and you’ve created a different constructive unit. This is how chemicals work in the body. Well, serotonin starts off with tryptophan. Tryptophan gets one piece stuck on, and it becomes 5-htp, or 5-hydroxytryptophan. You stick another piece on it, and it becomes serotonin. But, it all starts from tryptophan. So, you say, gosh, tryptophan must be important stuff. You better believe it’s important stuff!
Not only is tryptophan critical for making serotonin, but tryptophan is an essential amino acid, which means it must come in the from the diet. You have to be eating tryptophan. Tryptophan is found exclusively in high protein foods. You could find a little bit, perhaps, in broccoli and asparagus, and you’ll find some in soy, but most especially it’s found it dairy, and it’s found in meat. It’s especially found in high concentrations in whey protein. For anybody who’s dealing with SSRI’s, or wants to get off SSRI’s, the first thing you wanna think about is getting yourself on some good whey protein, a good whey protein supplement. If you can’t handle it from a digestive standpoint, make sure you take it with digestive enzymes and a little bit of apple cider vinegar. And, another way is, tryptophan will boost your serotonin levels. But, there’s another way you can boost your serotonin levels, and that’s by taking the direct precursor to serotonin, which is this stuff 5-htp. Now, 5-htp is unbelievably important and helpful for people who are dealing with depression, anxiety, it’s a wonderful sleep aid, it’s a wonderful appetite suppressant, it’ll help you lose weight. It’s crazy cheap, it’s like 10 or 15 bucks for a 3 month supply. You take about a hundred milligrams, or two hundred milligrams a night, and that too will boost your serotonin.
Now, when it comes to making serotonin in the brain, it’s not just protein. Even though serotonin comes from tryptophan, it’s not just protein foods that help you build serotonin. You actually have to have carbohydrate with your protein. So, you wanna make sure you’re getting carbohydrates, but you wanna make sure it’s not super-fast burning carbohydrates like processed foods and soda pop and desserts. You wanna make sure it’s a carbohydrate that’s got a lot of fiber in it, especially vegetable carbohydrates. There’s a big, big problem, and there’s an important relationship between sugar intake and serotonin. When you eat sugar, this is perceived biochemically by the body as a major stress. Sugar is very, very explosive stuff. If you ever put a marshmallow in a fire, and you see the marshmallow go ‘poof!’, you can see how explosive sugar is. Well, in the body, that same type of explosivity, that same kind of explosive reaction occurs. So, when you eat sugars, especially fast burning sugars, dessert kinds of sugars, the soda pop kind of sugars, the body’s stress response is triggered, and the stress response involves serotonin. In fact, the hormone insulin and the hormone serotonin, work hand in hand. Today we have a big problem, maybe the biggest health crisis of all is something called insulin resistance. This is when the body stops listening to insulin. And, going hand in hand with insulin resistance is serotonin resistance. And, just like insulin resistance will keep the body from listening to insulin, serotonin resistance will keep the body from listening to serotonin. Of course, then you’re gonna go to the doctor, and he’s gonna give you an SSRI drug, when all you really need to do is reset this insulin system by reducing your intake of fast burning sugars. So, you wanna make sure you have some carbohydrate with your protein. You wanna make sure it’s fibery carbohdrate. You wanna make sure you’re getting enough protein, especially tryptophan containing protein, and you wanna make sure you’re getting 5-htp.
Now, in addition to this, there are co-factors that the brain uses, the body uses, to help make serotonin. Chief among these is vitamin C and the B complex, especially vitamin B6, and to a little bit lesser extent, minerals like zinc and magnesium.
Alex Jones: That’s why you need to take the Beyond Tangy Tangerine at infowarshealth.com. I mean, it’s simple. My children act like demons when I let them have processed sugar. But, when we are on the job and only feed them organic and healthy food, they’re little angels, and everything’s great. If I’m on the road and am dumb enough to eat a piece of cake or something, I feel like I have a hangover the next day. Going over this, if people go to infowarshealth.com. There’s many of the products you and others, and Doctor Wallach have formulated, and this is no joke folks. Again, we’re not giving any advice because it’s very dangerous to go off the serotonin reuptake inhibitors. We have a report here we’re gonna show people in a moment. What would you do if you were, say, a 35 year old man, or woman, who’s been on psychotropics for, say, six years. They’ve got you on three of them because, quote, the others didn’t work. You don’t know who you are anymore and you’re kind of eating a regular McDonalds diet. What would be the the brief process that Ben Fuchs…And again, my Dad’s a dentist oral surgeon, the people he respects more than anybody aren’t even doctors and people, it’s pharmacists, because he knows, especially long time master pharmacists, you guys kill people if you make a mistake. And, so you guys really went to school to know what the drugs do, I don’t know 20 or 30 times what doctors do, so that’s why you’re the guy to talk to on this. What are the dangers of going off the serotonin reuptake inhibitors or other anti-psychotic classes?
Ben Fuchs: Well, first we have to understand how serotonin reuptake inhibitors work. When the brain secretes serotonin it immediately sucks that serotonin back up again. So, serotonin will get released, and then it’ll get uptaken, reuptaken, it’ll get sucked up back up again into the nerves so that it doesn’t have too much of an effect. This is called reuptake and it’s a standard process that occurs in the body, or in the brain. Reuptake inhibitors inhibit that process. So, the serotonin stays in the system.
Alex Jones: It creates a chemical imbalance.
Ben Fuchs: A major chemical imbalance. That serotonin is artificially kept active. So, you get off your serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and because this uptake mechanism has been shut down, now you’ve got all this serotonin that has left the nerve cells, you run into a major, major risk of serotonin depletion because the serotonin is not getting taken up back into the cells. So, you want to make sure, if you’re gonna ween yourself off, if you’re gonna get off of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, you ween yourself off of them very slowly, and you build your serotonin levels back by, number one, making sure you’re getting out into the sun. Make sure you get 10 or 15 minutes of sun three or four days a week. You don’t wanna burn, but you wanna make sure you’re getting some sun.
Alex Jones: Yeah, the ultimate Prozac is climbing mountains, I’m telling you that right now.
Ben Fuchs: Absolutely, the ultimate Prozac is the great outdoors. Nature and the divine force. That’s the Prozac that we need.
Alex Jones: Oh my God, I want more of it!
Ben Fuchs: Right, we get out into the sun. Alex, don’t we all feel better when we’re out in the sun?
Alex Jones: Are you kidding? If I had my way, all I’d do is climb mountains.
Ben Fuchs: How do we let the medical model bamboozle us into thinking that the sun is this demon in the sky that’s hell bent on our destruction?! We’ve been bamboozled and entranced to believe this nonsense!
Alex Jones: And, you point out, that when we don’t have the vitamins and minerals, we do get sunburn!
Ben Fuchs: Well, that’s another thing. If you wanna prevent yourself from getting sunburn, make sure you’re getting nutrients that get stored in your skin to protect you from the sun. Carotenes, flavanoids, vitamin C, zinc, vitamin E, they literally get deposited in your skin to protect you from the sun. And, let me tell you something. Skin cancer rates are increasing dramatically.
Alex Jones: Because we’re not in the sun!
Ben Fuchs: Well, how do you like that! The sun is actually protective against skin cancer! The sun is protective against skin cancer and people are using sunscreens like they’re goin’ out of style, and skin cancer rates are increasing by hundreds of percent.
Alex Jones: Aluminum based.
Alex Jones: Okay, so, continuing. Basically, you’re saying get out into the sunshine while you ween yourself off. There’s difference regimens online. Doctors say it takes two months, generally, depending on the type. But, obviously, consult one of the physicians. The problem is, the psychologists aren’t really physicians, and they’ll tell you ‘stay on it,’ or their answer is ‘more of it! This isn’t working, we’ll stack ’em, that’ll fix it!’ So, we’re not telling you what to do. I’m saying, get out, exercise, fresh air, pray to God. If you don’t believe in that, meditate. All the studies show it works. For whatever reason, praying helps. There are no atheists in foxholes. Ben, why do the studies show, I’ve got ’em right now, that the praying helps?
Ben Fuchs: Well, relaxation response. You know, that’s why people have religion in the first place, is this idea that there’s something that can help them and take control over their lives. I’m not a particularly religious person, but I’m a very spiritual person, and there’s a lot of good that can be had.
Alex Jones: When you pray, what do you focusing on? The great void, the great unknown, the universe. You’re forgetting all of this. You’re ahhhhhh.
Ben Fuchs: The magic of the body, the amazingness of nature, the cosmos. There’s a hundred trillion cells in your body, and each one of them has eighteen feet of DNA. If you added all the DNA in your body it would go three hundred billion miles. You coordinated, tightly choreographed system that is beyond belief just in a tiny cell. A hundred trillion, it’s unbelievable Alex!
Alex Jones: It’s unbelievable!
Ben Fuchs: We’re the most unbelievable creatures! We should be only be focusing on that, let alone the cosmos that is trillions of upon trillions of light years.
Alex Jones: One piece of human DNA, as you know, three billion long. Three billion long, one piece! We are incredible!
Ben Fuchs: Incredible. Alex, do you know what a cell is? We talk about cells so glibly, but what is this thing? It’s a tiny, little animal, that if you took it out of your body and put it into a petri dish, it would walk to food, it would run away from poison. It excretes, it reproduces. It has a skeletal system and it’s one-one hundredth the size of the head of pin.
Alex Jones: We are just like jellyfish, we are a colony creature. You know about that, don’t you? The fact that our tissues make up a colony.
Ben Fuchs: That’s right, we’re a one hundred trillion cell colony.
Alex Jones: The reason I get so excited about this is, the truth is laying around all in front of us. And, it really makes me mad at the power structure. And, you’re a nice guy, you say, well, most people and doctors don’t know this, and that’s actually true because I know a lot of doctors because my dad knows a lot of them. But, a lot of them in the power structure, they do know. And, it’s very cold blooded that, you know, in double-blind studies sugar pills is better than Prozac. I mean, what’s happening is Harris and Klebold, and all these guys, who are on these drugs when they go crazy and have that same million mile stare, you know, crazy look in their face. What’s happening to ’em when they’re playing murder simulator video games, and they’re on four or five drugs, and an amphetamine drug on top of it usually, and they go and kill everybody. I mean, they’re highly suggestible.
Ben Fuchs: Violence and paranoia are part of the hyper vigilant response. Vigilance is important, you know, you gotta be aware. But, it is hyper vigilant response that’s akin to paranoia. What we call paranoia. It can be defined as hyper vigilance. When you start messin’ around with serotonin, pharmacologically manipulating its levels, keeping serotonin activity high artificially, you run the risk of this kind of paranoia hyper vigilance, which is where rage comes from, and where rageful behavior comes from. You can’t mess around with your brain chemistry artificially and not expect to create problems. And, this whole idea of chemical imbalance manipulating the brain. Alex, do you think there’s a test for serotonin? Do you think you go to the psychiatrist and he does a test to see how high your serotonin levels are? They just give ’em to you! They give ’em to you like they’re M&Ms, or like they’re candy. The fact of the matter is the history of psychiatry is not very pretty. The history of medicine in general is not very pretty.
Alex Jones: The inventor of the lobotomy, as you know a hundred years ago, did thousands, thousands, where he would go before a carnival and take mentally retarded person and jam an ice pick into their brain in front of people.
Ben Fuchs: That’s how they used to cure depression. They’d hack your brain out, or electroconvulsive therapy where’d they shock you into being happy. This is the history of psychiatry. But, Alex, the question is, why are we complicit? Why do we participate? Why do we listen to anything they tell us? When, like you say, the information is there plain sight. Perhaps hidden in plain sign, but it’s in plain sight.
I sent you a stack of information that took me all of 15 or 20 minutes to gather that information. It’s everywhere. The fact of the matter is, you do your research you will see. Serotonin is a sunlight, daylight, awareness, vigilance hormone. This is another very important point. Serotonin absorbs light. Serotonin contains tryptophan, or a tryptophan-like shape. Tryptophan itself contains light chlorophyll, which is the ultimate light absorbing substance, gets it’s light absorbing power from tryptophan. So, when you eat tryptophan, not only do you uptake serotonin, but you help your body utilize light. Alex, we are photosynthetic beings. We absorb light from the sun. That sunlight gets turned into batteries, it gets turned into biochemistry, it gets turned into physical matter, most especially serotonin. In fact, by the way, tryptophan is a part of our visual pigment. We actually see via the activity of tryptophan. We receive light from the sun in our eyes via the activity of tryptophan.
