Cluster Headaches treated by high-dose Vitamin D, etc. (interview and transcript) - Feb 2022

0:00:07.3 Craig: Welcome, welcome, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back, Inspired Conversations with Craig. And today we are talking the Vitamin D anti inflammatory regimen for cluster headache and migraine. Before we go any further, I just wanna say, disclaimer for you all, it ain't medical advice, but I hope you find some good educational material that is of value to you. Now, before we move any further, I wanna say my sympathies are with you if you're a sufferer of cluster headache or daily migraine like I was since 2013. My heart breaks and my heart goes out to you. I know how personal and I know how hard it is. In particular if you're finding this video and you've just started your journey, again, my heart breaks. So today my goal is to introduce the founder of the Anti-inflammatory Regimen, the guy that came up with it, but I just wanted to premise before I introduce you to Pete, to say, ladies and gentlemen, as I look down the camera, it works. And you'll hear it in my voice, so I have a lot of thanks to Pete. I was in a very, very dark place in 2015 when I found this thing and within eight days, eight days, I hugged my... If you've seen my previous video, I hugged my wife and I got my life back. So from a personal perspective, it works. Pete Batcheller, here he is on screen, say hi, say hello to the folks, Pete. Give them an introduction, tell them who you are and what your background is.

0:01:55.5 Pete: Hello, fellow cluster headache sufferers. I know what you've been going through if you're still having problems. And the good news is it does not need to be that way. My name is Pete Batcheller, I'm a 77 year old retired Navy fighter pilot. As I was growing up, I wanted to do two things, I wanted to be a doctor and I also wanted to be a pilot. Well, I got to the University of Washington after two years of junior college and I was doing really well in chemistry and I said I think I'll make chemistry my degree just in case the doctor bit falls through. And in my junior year, a good friend of mine, a high school classmate says, "I just got a ride in a Navy T-34, that's a Beechcraft Bonanza that's been militarized and it's painted red and white with a T tail instead of a V tail." So I said, "Can I get a ride?" He says, "Oh, sure." So I drove out to Sand Point Naval Air Station, the other end of Lake Washington from the university. Got a ride. It was so much fun, I couldn't believe it. So I went back the next day and I said, "Can I get another ride?" He says, "Yeah, hold up your right hand." I was, "Oh, good, cool."

0:03:06.9 Pete: So I was in the Navy. And thoughts of another seven years of school and changing bedpans went out like a flash and I was gonna be a Navy fighter pilot, that's what I ended up doing. So, my degree was in chemistry but I did a lot more than that. I took biochemistry, genetics, comparative anatomy, zoology, a lot of the natural sciences that go along with being a doctor. I even went down to the University of Washington School of Medicine and sat up in the operatory theater and watched them do surgeries. So I was pretty, pretty much on the road in the right direction until I got to be a pilot, then all that went away, but it's coming back to me now. I'm a fellow cluster headaches sufferer. I started in 1994, didn't know what they were. Fortunately, they only lasted for maybe two weeks and then they went away and they came back the second year and they went away and the third year. And I went on for almost four years before I was diagnosed. I was episodic.

0:04:16.2 Pete: 2004, my cycle started again. Oh, by the way, in 2005 they diagnosed me as chronic, that's after one full year of daily headaches, three times a day minimum, sometimes up to eight. I hit 10 one time, that was an all time record. And I got really good at oxygen and I developed a method of oxygen therapy that requires hyperventilation, another story, we'll get into that later, but it works very effectively and you can abort any cluster headache up to a nine in about seven minutes on average. The lower the pain level, the fewer the minutes it takes but when you get up around eight or nine, it's going to take eight minutes. But the average for all of them is about seven minutes. So I was busy trying to improve my abort times with oxygen by starting a number of supplements, calcium citrate, anything that would kinda elevate the pH which is very important to cluster headaches, love acidic, low pH conditions, but they don't like elevated pH or alkaline conditions. And I was doing pretty good with it for about a year and then in 2010, I got to looking at my logbook and I had three summers where I was pain free for almost two weeks. And I said, What was I doing? I looked at calendar and said, "Oh, I was outside in a bathing suit taking care of my neighbor's garden."
[vocalization]

0:06:01.2 Pete: Vitamin D3. I ran down to Costco, picked up a bottle of 5000 IU, took all the supplements that I'd been taking and two of the 5000 IU for a total dose of 10,000 IU. I slept almost through the night, I had one cluster headache. Prior to that I was hit, hit, hit four times a night and they all required oxygen. So I got up with the first one, I sucked on the oxygen for about two minutes and it was gone. I said, "Wow, like that," and went back to bed. I got hit a second time and I was sitting up trying to get ready to go for the oxygen and it went away all by itself. I said, "I like that even better," so I went back to bed.

0:06:41.6 Pete: The next day after the second dose, went to bed, slept all the way through. Six o'clock the next morning, I threw an elbow into my wife. I said "Wake up! I didn't have a cluster headache last night!" And she goes, "Go to sleep. Tell me in the morning." I said, "This is the morning! I made it all the way through the night, pain free." You don't know how wonderful that feels. So long story made short, I started sharing my experiences with this combination of Vitamin D3 and what we now call the co-factors: Magnesium, Zinc, Boron, Vitamin B, Vitamin A, Vitamin K2, Omega 3 Fish Oil. All those things come together and they all support Vitamin D3. So, as time went on, more and more people started following my example and they tried it. So by... Oh, I think, well, Joyce started it. Joyce was my wife, was a migrainer she says, Do you think it will work for migraines? So I said, "Let's give it a try." So she started it. She hasn't had a migraine since. She was getting them once a month. Three migraines. Just like regular as clockwork. Once a month, she'd be sneakers up. "Don't bother me, I got a migraine." She hasn't had a migraine since. So we know that works. Anyways.

0:08:07.4 Craig: And so Pete that's probably a good time just to ask you what is the vitamin D regimen? We can bring a picture of it up on screen in terms of the five or six bottles that constitute the daily regimen and the chart people are gonna be very familiar with having visited the Wiki Link. We'll put that up on screen, as well. There you go.


0:08:30.7 Pete: There it is!

0:08:31.5 Craig: Yeah.

0:08:31.8 Pete: There it is. Basic anti-inflammatory regimen. On the left there's an eye-dropper bottle and a little white bottle. The little white bottle is what we call Biotech D3-50. That's a 50,000 IU water soluble capsule of Vitamin D3. Water soluble. Every time before, when you saw the liquid soft gels, they were oil based and everybody said, "Aha!"

0:08:58.1 Craig: That's right.

0:08:58.2 Pete: There's a regimen that I take daily and the number of pills in front of the bottles. I suggest them by brand. The overriding factor here is, this is not a single cure, a one time cure. You need to start this regimen and stay on it, until you start pushing up grass from the wrong side of the air grass barrier. You're gonna need to take it for life. So I wanted to keep everything as easy as possible and as inexpensive as possible, yet making sure we had quality good vitamins and minerals.

0:09:35.6 Craig: Yeah.

0:09:36.1 Pete: All of these vitamins have third party evaluations for purity and strength. They're all by and large, manufactured in the US. The vitamin D3 comes from wool grease and I think some of that comes from Australia, New Zealand, so I can't vouch for that, but it's processed here in the US.

0:10:02.3 Craig: We will include some links below of recommendations from Pete, in terms of reputable brands and companies. So that's the basic regimen in front of you. Now, Pete, it's a bunch of vitamins. And that's how I saw it in 2015. I think it's important that we delve into a little bit about how it works and I guess the pathophysiology of cluster headache and migraine.

0:10:35.5 Pete: Okay, there's two parts. I'll try and keep this as simple as possible because it gets very, very complex with a lot of moving parts. But there are two parts to vitamin D3 therapy or vitamin D therapy. Pharmacokinetics, big buzzword, that's what the body does to Vitamin D3. And then you have Pharmacodynamics, that's what vitamin D3 does to the body. And in simple terms, the Pharmacodynamics means that the active form of vitamin D3 Calcitriol 1,25-OH 2D3 physically goes into the cells of the body and attaches to the nucleus and physically attaches to a strand of DNA. And when it does that, it spawns off a segment of RNA, which is called a messenger RNA and that starts doing wild and wonderful things. It up regulates good genes and it down regulates bad genes. And the same gene may be doing good things one day and bad things the next, if it doesn't get enough vitamin D3. So there's the hint that you need to keep all of your genes happy.

0:11:50.8 Pete: There's some over 2000 genes in the body that have vitamin D receptors. So it controls by and large every organ in our body to several different levels. Okay, so that's the simple high value look at what we're doing. Getting back to the Pharmacokinetics, that starts with absorption. And that gets back to one of Craig's questions, "When do we take this?" Well, you take it with the largest meal of the day. Because that usually contains the most fats and vitamin D3 is normally fat soluble. But this version we use is water soluble. But all the rest of them get dissolved a lot faster if you take it within 20 minutes of your biggest meal of the day or 20 minutes after. And the big reason there is the stomach is full of acid at that point. If you took that chalky multi-mineral multivitamin and took it on an empty stomach and drank water, it's likely it would proceed all the way to the nether end of your GI tract undissolved. It's just chalk. But if you drop it into your stomach and your stomach is loaded with acid, it breaks down real fast. You can do this at home. Pour a little glass of water and add about half as much of that of vinegar and drop each one of your vitamins in there and watch what happens to them. They'll dissolve in acid a lot faster than just plain water.



0:13:24.8 Craig: The folks who are seeing the graphic up on the screen with you talking about, you know, the influence of Vitamin D's active form on the genes and so I think it's important to talk about the particular genes in respect of cluster headache and migraine because those genes and vitamin D treatment are related and many of the other treatments that folks take for cluster headaches also work on these neuropeptides. What's a neuropeptide in relation to mRNA synthesis and protein synthesis? The picture we've just had up on the screen.

0:14:07.9 Pete: This is the... One of the slides, where we talk about up or down regulating gene expression. Every gene in our body has a mission to do several things, by and large, they up-regulate or they down-regulate genetic products, in this case, in most cases, that's a protein. Now, that protein can be a signaling agent, very much like hormones and what they do is they signal the cell to start doing certain things. So in this particular drawing, you see a molecule of 25-OH 2D3, 1,25-OH 2D3 calcitriol and it's dimerized, two atoms in a molecule, with an RXR, that's a retinoid X or Vitamin A and they land on a special place on the DNA. And they start this process of peeling off a layer of RNA, which is called a messenger RNA, mRNA. If you've been watching the COVID-19 vaccines, that's what they've put in those vaccines, is a messenger RNA and its instructions are to make the glycoprotein spike. But for our case, that's a very unique vitamin D3 enabled messenger RNA, so this is... Our body runs on this process that's in this slide, so you can see on the left that the messenger RNA is spun off the DNA helix, it's passed out of the nucleus into the cell cytoplasm where it's picked up by ribosomes.

0:16:05.7 Pete: These are little factories that read that strand of messenger RNA like a computer program or a recipe, if you will for making certain peptides and it draws the components that it needs from the cytoplasm to build those peptides. And there are millions of these peptides in every cell, millions of them, the largest cell in the human body happens to be the oocyte, in women, the egg and it's big enough to see and it's got almost a trillion of these... Several billion, I should say, of these little factories in there and the ribosomes do all the grunt work of taking that messenger RNA, The Book of Life, the library of the world and creating the proteins we need to signal that cell to do what it needs to do. Stop making the bad stuff, start making the good stuff. So for the purpose of cluster headaches, Greg already mentioned it, we have these peptides, which are a big protein and they're neuropeptides because they're made by neurons within the brain and then specifically in our case within the trigeminal ganglia, we have two of them on either side and the four primary neuropeptides are calcitonin gene-related peptide, CGRP, that should sound familiar because there's some monoclonal antibodies that try to nail down CGRP, but they don't do a very good job of it and there's a good reason why.

0:17:55.3 Craig: That's Emgality?

0:17:57.2 Pete: Emgality, that's another one, yeah.

0:18:00.9 Craig: Yeah.

0:18:00.9 Pete: We can get into that a little later, why it doesn't work. The second one is SP, which is they didn't come up... They couldn't find a good name for it, but they called it Substance P, which is another peptide. And there's VIP, VIP, that's Vasoactive intestinal peptide. And then the fourth one is PACAP, which comes from the pituitary adenylate-cyclase-activating polypeptide. That one came out of the woods about two years ago and nobody even knew about it and then all the molecular engineers started delving down into what was happening during genetic transcription and translation and they started looking at those four particular neuropeptides. Very important. So that was my focus for... Oh gosh, up until 2019.

0:19:04.7 Pete: In 2020, what happened? You know, we had the pandemic come to our shores and that brought a whole new view, I changed my lens of what I was looking at to include more of our immune system, so we're not just talking about up-regulating and down-regulating neuropeptides, we're talking about up-regulating and down-regulating very small molecules that are associated with our immune system. We wanna upregulate the T cells. We wanna upregulate the B cells. We wanna upregulate a whole number of cytokines, chemokines and all kinds of little nasty gremlins that all create inflammation. Hence the name of this protocol, Anti-inflammatory. Everything in there is an anti-inflammatory agent. Some more powerful than others.

0:20:02.7 Craig: Just so the penny drops for people, am I understanding you correctly in that in cluster headache and migraine sufferers, they tend to express more of these inflammatory neuropeptides than, say, control groups and the normal population? And so vitamin D, through this process of genetic transcription and translation, is downregulating those inflammatory peptides to prevent the cluster headache from occurring or at the least, maybe make them les severe? Have I understood you correctly?

0:20:43.6 Pete: That's correct but what I'm saying is, once you introduce the immune system as a key player in the pathogenesis of cluster and migraine headache, you just open the doors up. Headaches have traditionally been the bailiwick of the neurologist and what my studies over the last 12 years have pretty much revealed is that's not necessarily the case anymore. You need to have a geneticist involved in your treatment, you need to have internal medicine people involved in it, virologists. It just opens the door all over the place and the guys who take care of your immune system and the best thing to do for your immune system is take a lot of Vitamin D3 plus the co-factors to boost your immune system functions, because there's a whole lot of nasty gremlins that get in there that agitate the trigeminal ganglia.

0:21:44.3 Pete: And the buzz word, I think, to use is the trigeminal vascular complex. That's the blood vessels in and around your trigeminal ganglia. And you've got two of 'em, one on either side and you wanna keep them all happy. But one of them is normally with cluster headaches, one of them is normally associated with a pain on one side of your head. Some people are switch hitters. They get one on one side and they get one on the other. Very few get them both at the same time, but that does happen. So there's more to preventing and controlling cluster headache than just taking care of the neuropeptides. You've also got all the immune system cells to worry about and vitamin D3 helps do that for us. Okay, next question.

0:22:37.6 Craig: Yeah, well, look, before we move on and talk more specifically about the regimen and each of those items that were spoken about, people will be interested to know, how many people have benefited? Are we talking about one to 10, a group of your mates? 100 people? How many people have taken this?

0:22:58.1 Pete: Henry Lahore asked me this question last year and he says, "I've got to update your slides on VitaminDWiki, so I gotta put down how many people are following this protocol." Since I started talking about it on clusterheadaches.com and Clusterbusters, those are two websites for cluster headache sufferers, there are others specific to other countries but these are the two big ones and I was tracking the number of people who said they started the protocol and I got to about nine months after I started sharing the information and I was already over 200. And then I said, "Well, I guess I better clean up the protocol and the list of supplements, so people can go to the store and buy them." So I had a page all done with that. There were so many hits on that particular web page, on both clusterheadaches.com and Clusterbusters that I started getting complaint calls "I can't find your treatment protocol." So in 2017, I moved it over to VitaminDWiki, which has a counter every time it's downloaded. Well, at last check, it went online in January of 2017 and as of yesterday, there was over 76,000 downloads. So if you apply the rule of 1 out of 10, 10 people downloaded it, one out of the 10 will probably try it, so we're over 7000, pushing to 8000 right now and that's a conservative resident.

0:24:45.0 Craig: Of the people that did complete your poll Pete, in terms of a percentage, are we talking one in two people found it efficacious or is it one in three? What does that look like?

0:25:01.6 Pete: I guess the end of December, I was really torn because I knew I was on the right track and we needed to attract the attention of neurologists who would possibly have the wherewithal to conduct a study on this. That was my goal, get enough information to do it. Now, how would I gather that? Well, I came up with a questionnaire with about 35 questions and it was specifically designed for people who were following the anti-inflammatory regimen. So I think the last time I harvested the database was in December of 2019. COVID-19 has put everything in a corner right now but at that point, there were over 700 people had started it and 313 had completed the survey and submitted it. So those are the only ones that I'm allowed to use for data. The ones where they started it, some of them answered maybe one or two questions and that was it. They didn't get down to the meat of the matter. So out of the 313, we have a number of very good statistics on how this is working. Basically, 82% of all the cluster headache sufferers that started this are experiencing a significant drop in the frequency of their cluster headaches. How big a drop? Well, they drop on average from three a day to three a week.


0:26:49.6 Craig: Wow. Wow.

0:26:51.1 Pete: So that's basically 21 to three. You can do the math and that'll give you the percentile, but it's pretty good.

0:26:58.2 Craig: I guess burning on the question... Burning on the minds of chronic sufferers that may be watching this as well as daily migrainers, are they gonna see the same kinda results as an episodic cluster headache sufferer?

0:27:16.3 Pete: The answer is yes. There's a slight advantage to being episodic cluster headache sufferers. When I break out the chronic versus episodic, the episodics come out about 87% and the chronics come out about 64%. Now, episodic cluster headache sufferers have a problem differentiating a positive or favorable response with end of cycle. This is a problem that confronts all the studies on vitamin...

0:27:57.7 Craig: Of course.

0:27:58.7 Pete: On basically cluster headaches sufferers, episodic cluster headache sufferers. They don't know. So one of the things that they do in those studies is they try and select people who are just starting their annual cycle. So they're not gonna be confused by end of cycle. So if you look at the chart here, you can see these are normal distribution curves. The black curve is of the 313 that submitted their blood test information, that's their 25-OH to start with. And the mean was 24 nanograms per milliliter. That's the top of the peak, 24 nano. The big guy at far end was 47 nanograms per milliliter. Now, I don't have my calculator with me, but basically, two and a half times that to get nanomoles. After a month, which included a loading cycle, they all moved over under the green curve and there's a P value of 0.0001, which means this is really good. This is not just a happenstance. So that factor is out the window. This is real. This is real data, statistically significant with respect to the change in 25... Serum 25-OH.

0:29:26.3 Pete: So I put a question in the questionnaire and it says, "When during your cycle and divided up into 10 parts, did you experience the favorable response?" Well, I... And I let the computer do all that work for me and it brought me back a graph and it turns out that about 20% of the cluster headache sufferers, the episodic cluster headache sufferers experienced the favorable response near the end of their... At the nine and the 10 position, when you divide out the time frame of their individual cluster cycle. So I can realistically subtract 20% from that 87 and I'm down to 67 to 64, or 67 to 62. That's awash. It's the same. So for the people... And, oh, by the way, that 64 number is also the percentage of CH-ers who started this treatment protocol, who experienced a complete cessation of cluster headaches.

0:30:45.0 Craig: We talked about...

0:30:45.4 Pete: My goal was to hit 50% of people starting this thing having a complete cessation and we're up to 64%. I think the data I'm looking at now, I haven't analyzed it all, but it looks like it's closer to 67% to 68%.

0:31:03.4 Craig: Right. And from personal experience, I mentioned earlier, we're gonna talk more about favorable days for response. But I can also tell you, personally, I've had a member of my family who'd had migraine for over 20 years. And within a week of starting vitamin D-3 on the loading dose, the migraine stopped and she got her life back. So I'll tell you what, it moves onto our conversation Pete to say, Why don't more people try this? There are some objections. And for me, speaking personally, in 2015, when I first found that Wiki website, man, I... It was just really complicated. I couldn't get my head around it. The second thing was, my doctor just rolled his... Really rolled his eyes at me, did not wanna have a conversation around vitamin D at all. And then one of the other big things was that I looked at the recommended daily intake here in New Zealand and it's 400-600 international units. So I looked at... Yeah. And I looked at your regimen and it's 50,000 units per day for 12 days, for a total of 600,000... You can imagine how apprehensive I was. So what would you say to that as we move into a conversation around safety?

0:32:40.0 Pete: This is... You bring up a very good point because every cluster headaches suffer, I strongly recommend you take the treatment protocol and go talk to your primary care physician, not your neurologist. They're too busy and they're too expensive. Go to your primary care doctor, GP, general purpose guy and give him a copy of it, but you'll probably have to explain it to him because he won't have time to read it. So just tell him, "I'm gonna take a loading dose, a total loading dose of 600,000 IU of vitamin D3, spread over anywhere from five days to 12 days and then I'm gonna drop back to 10,000 IU a day as a maintenance dose. I'm also gonna be taking a whole bunch of what we call vitamin D3 cofactors, magnesium, zinc, boron, vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamin K2, omega-3, vitamin C, all of those things." So when you look at what the medical schools, who by the way are funded almost exclusively with grants from the National Institutes of Health and Big Pharma, neither of which wants you to take a lot of vitamins because then you get too healthy and you never come back to see them again. Remember, the average medical doctor goes to a medical school where the primary goal is to teach them, there's a pill for every ill.

0:34:15.8 Pete: Now, if you happen to be lucky enough to go to an ND, not an MD, but a November Delta, that's a doctor of nutritional medicine, they get the same four years, but when they walk out, they can hang up their shingle and start treating 'cause they've been treating people for the last three years of their medical school. They look under the sheets to find out what the underlying dietary problem is that's causing this problem. They solve that first. Vitamins, minerals, diet, fluid intake, they look at everything. Lifestyle, get out and do some exercise. It's not gonna kill you. So they do that first, where the MDs, no, they've been taught in a medical school, the only thing you can do about vitamins is you treat the RDA, required daily amount. Well, there's a really neat guy, he's since passed away, Linus Pauling and he says, "When you talk about the RDA, what is the RDA? That's the amount of vitamins you need to take to stay alive." But if you ask the question, How much can I take to be better, to be more healthy, well, there's not a lot of literature on that when he did his presentation back in '93, but there is today. We have a boatload of information on how to improve your health with vitamin D3 and the cofactors, there's just an incredible amount of information.

0:35:55.4 Pete: And by and large, they're saying take 10, 20, 30 times the RDA. He was giving a presentation on vitamin C and vitamin C they said, "Oh... 400 milligrams a day... " So I'll tell you right now, I take 18 grams a day, not milligrams. 18 grams, 18,000 milligrams, 18 grams a day. Now, all of his detractors and people who thought he was totally crazy and they told the world, "Don't listen to Pauling. Pauling is crazy. Pauling is crazy." He had two Nobel Prizes, the first for chemistry and the second for peace, because he stopped the above-ground nuclear testing. And when he died at age 93, he still had two more individual Nobel Prizes than any of his critics and he had outlived most of them.

0:36:53.6 Craig: There you go.

0:36:58.5 Pete: The medical establishment has been short-cheating their patients for many, many years, it's because Big Pharma and big government medical read HHS and NIH have been short-cheating you. They don't want you to know about how much vitamins you can take. It's been inculcated and indoctrinated into physicians as they go through medical school, but if you get an ND, a doctor of nutritional medicine, oh, it's a whole different story. They say take as many as you want. No one has died from vitamin D3.

0:37:36.4 Craig: I guess that's where the conversation moves to, but, hopefully, they get the support of their doctor, but if they don't and they wish to pursue it, it's good to understand from a safety perspective, are they gonna kill themself. I'm gonna put up on the screen for folks that are watching this, the warnings that are displayed on the government's website in my country. It's pretty scary stuff, including heart arrhythmias and whatnot. So no one has died taking vitamin D. That's certainly something Pete. No one's died doing the regimen.

0:38:20.3 Pete: The first time I saw all that stuff, I went to Wikipedia and they said, "Oh, vitamin D3, that's a rodenticide." And so I looked up the LD50, that's the lethal dose at which 50% of the rodents die and that worked out to something around 5 million IU in a single setting. Well, you've got a problem if you're taking liquid gel caps, because that many pills, the gel in the gel caps would bind the gut up and block the gut and you would be in agonizing pain before you ever got through the second bottle.

• Note by VitaminDWiki - Lethal dose of rodents is 40milligrams/kg of body weight. This would be 128 million IU for an adult human = 25 bottles of 50,000 IU capsules

0:39:06.2 Craig: Certainly. I mean, if you drank enough dose makes the poison, right? And so, you could die of many things if you consume enough. Sticking with the safety aspect, there's been no deaths taking vitamin D. Are there any circumstances where a cluster headache sufferer taking other medication cannot do this? Like, if I'm taking sumatriptan or prednisone, verapamil, lithium, anything that I need to be aware of before ordering the vitamins and starting the regimen?

0:39:44.1 Pete: Okay. Basically, you take this on top of whatever your doctor has prescribed. No problem with the abortives. I mean, sumatriptan, succinate, either pill, nasal or injection, no problem. You need to be able to knock the pain down while you're waiting for the vitamin D3 to do its thing. I would also recommend, when you go in and talk to your doctor, you demand an oxygen prescription with at least 15 liters per minute. Don't take no for an answer.

0:40:16.5 Craig: Yeah and the path...

0:40:17.7 Pete: Because it's dangerous, I've done the math on it, it's far more dangerous driving to the doctor's office. You're more likely to die in an automobile accident driving to the doctor's office than dying from oxygen. Now, there have been some idiots, that were smoking while they had their oxygen running and they set themselves on fire. But there were also idiots who went out and smoked while they were putting gas in their car. I mean, you can't fix stupid.

0:40:42.5 Craig: Yeah, don't check my channel for the video on how I burnt my face last year, [laughter] in that case, on a coal cooker. Okay. So, the standard treatments, no problem. And I'll tell you what, I've...

0:40:54.8 Pete: No problem with verapamil. What I found in working very closely with hundreds, if not thousands of cluster headache sufferers following this regimen, is they eventually came around usually within the first six months after a favorable response, but clearly within a year and they go, "I don't really need the verapamil anymore, do I?" I said, "No. Taper off of it." Now I only know a few people who are keen on lithium. And as a chemist, I know lithium is an extremely chemically reactive compound and it scares me to think people are putting a lot of lithium in their body, even though you're down in the milligrams. And I don't recommend lithium, it's just...

0:41:41.4 Craig: Right.

0:41:43.1 Pete: It's too harsh. The body was not built to run on that much lithium.

0:41:48.1 Craig: Right.

0:41:49.0 Pete: It runs on sodium, it runs on calcium. Those are the primary salts that the body runs on most of the time. It likes a little iodine.

0:42:00.3 Craig: In terms of... There may be people watching us that don't have cluster headache or migraine, but are becoming more and more aware of how important vitamin D is and may wanna try this regimen now, I'd just like to ask, are there any kind of other health conditions that stand out that people should be aware of before even considering... I know vitamin D is... And chemotherapy are two things that do not mix. What are some other things that come to mind?

0:42:38.4 Pete: Well, you can go to VitaminDWiki and look up cancer treatments and vitamin D and what you'll find is the American Cancer Society has been fighting a pitch battle and a losing battle killing people with chemotherapy and radiation therapy. I mean, I grew up around nuclear weapons in the Navy, I don't like them. I stay away from them if at all possible, 'cause I know what ionizing radiation can do to the body. The chemotherapy can be a problem because most of the chemotherapy is designed to kill cells in cell division, because cancer cells divide faster than the other cells. If they kill all the cells in cell division, boom. "Hey, we got the cancer." Well, in the meantime, your hair falls out and you start having all kinds of problems. And what you've done is, you've created a horrendous amount of inflammation throughout the body. That's when you really need vitamin D3 and the co-factors. So there are a lot of physicians who are trained in vitamin D3 said, "By all means, take vitamin D3 all the way through your chemo and radiation therapy."

0:44:00.7 Pete: But if you listen to the oncologist who never got any training in vitamin D3 therapy, "Oh no, no, no, no. Hiss, hiss, hiss. Do not take vitamins while you're doing my chemotherapy, or radiation. No, no, no, no, no." Dumbest thing in the world, worst thing in the world and that's what's killing people. The inflammation caused by chemotherapy and radiation. Go to vitamind... Believe me, there are hundreds of studies in this area. Go to vitamindwiki.com and look up vitamin D and cancer and you'll find tons of studies.

0:44:41.6 Craig: Yeah.

0:44:42.5 Pete: Now, most of the studies have to follow the legality rules. They can't say, "Well, it cures it," unless the study is strong enough and there are several studies that are strong enough, at least three gold standard messages... Gold standard studies, blinded, randomized, placebo controlled, triple-blinded in most cases. And then they'll say, "Okay, okay. See this is all controlled by the...

0:45:17.2 Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:45:19.2 Pete: The mafia. The medical evidence mafia." But they weren't there when Pfizer and Moderna did a study in the back room, never gave anybody access to the raw data for those vaccines and they said, "Oh, it's good. Yeah, yeah, it's good, it's good. It's 94%... Oh yeah, it's good." Bullshit. And then tell you 1 to 40, I mean, actually closer to 1 to 100. You gotta treat 100 people to prevent one case and right now, the virus is mutated, the mRNA that they developed was for the alpha variant two years ago. We've moved on and so has the virus. So it ain't worth crap.

0:45:58.0 Craig: So sticking with the contraindications the last one I'm gonna ask about is hypoparathyroidism or folks that maybe have adenoma. What is the consideration around starting this regimen? It's a condition that is more common than I would have realized in older females so I think it's worth covering.

0:46:25.1 Pete: Okay, before anybody starts to, as you said, go talk to your doctor, the other thing, the second part of talking to your doctor is obtain the lab test for your serum 25-OH, calcium and parathyroid hormone. Those three lab tests are key to understanding what's happening with your calcium homeostasis, that's a balancing act that the body goes through to keep your serum calcium at a very narrow range in the blood stream, so that's very important. What we've found is roughly 1% of people who go in for their first lab test for 25-OH are hypercalcemic, in other words they've already got too much calcium in their blood stream. So then the question is, well, why? Why, why, why? Well, one out of a thousand has basically what we call an adenoma on one of the four parathyroid glands, they're located on the back side of the thyroid gland, which is right below your speech box and they're on the back side of it. You can't see them, but they can take pictures of them with really advanced neuro-imaging and one of them will stick out glowing like a doggon' neon light. And that particular critter has gotta be excised, removed surgically because it's making way too much parathyroid hormone and hence the condition hyper, too much parathyroid hormone; too much PTH. Well... Go ahead.

0:48:05.8 Craig: And so it's certainly something folks would wanna consider now. Some folks will be curious looking at the chart that's on screen in front of them, Pete. Now, that vitamin D level, whoo, crikey, if I was your doctor, I'd probably be giving you a call to say, "Stop taking that vitamin D immediately." But I think it's just a good chart so people understand the relationship between the three tests that you're talking about. I also just wanna make it very clear that Pete's labs in front of you are measured in nanograms per milliliter and you'll see underneath 277 he's denoted what that equals in nanomoles per liter. Do not make the mistake of not converting if you live in the UK or New Zealand, your labs will be in that nanomole per liter. Yeah.

0:49:08.5 Pete: I can't see it but I put my cheaters on, is that 623 nanomoles?

0:49:13.5 Craig: Yes, 692 was the...

0:49:17.7 Pete: Oh, alright, 692. Okay, 692. Okay, that number's right up there.

0:49:22.1 Craig: Alright. And so again, just to understand the efficacious range that we're talking about is around that 80 to 100 nanogram per milliliter mark. At least it was for myself and that's what the standard regimen is calling for. Now, we've covered testing, we've covered safety, now I wanna talk specifically about vitamin D. Pete, I know you've got a brand you would recommend for people that can get it in the United States, is that Pharmacal, Bio-Tech Pharmacal, is that what you still recommend?

0:50:01.2 Pete: Both of them are available from Amazon and I think you can also get them from iHerb from anywhere in the world.

0:50:16.3 Craig: Yeah.

0:50:17.1 Pete: So these aren't exclusively available in the US, the Bio-Tech D3-50 is physically packaged in Myanmar. The raw material is done here in the States and they ship it over there 'cause they got the little guys in Myanmar that can stuff it into capsules and they bottle it up there.

0:50:37.3 Craig: Right.

0:50:38.6 Pete: They watch that factory very closely.

0:50:42.5 Craig: And in regards the gel capsule versus sublingual and I just wanna ask this on behalf of my sister, I know she's had her gall bladder removed, so it might be... Is it relevant for her maybe to be taking one of these nanoemulsions you've been talking about? Just explore and flesh that, yeah. What does that mean, Pete? I'm not...

0:51:07.7 Pete: Okay, what they've done... Well, these are two of the best forms of vitamin D3 you can get. They're inexpensive and they're effective. The water-soluble Bio-Tech D3-50, once you come off the loading dose, if you're one of those people that respond in that first five days, you can drop back to one of those capsules, 1 50000 IU capsule a week, that's 74000 IU a day. The capsule cost 23 cents, so you're down there under, well a little over three cents a day. You can't get a cheaper form of vitamin D3 unless you're buying it in five kilogram bags. The liquid gel caps that you get in most stores, 5000 IU would cost you 6 cents USD. So you if you're taking 10000 IUD that's 12 cents a day, where we're getting by with just a skosh over three cents a day with the Bio-Tech D3-50, taking one of them for the whole week.

0:52:10.0 Pete: Nano emulsion, that's a different... That's a slightly different story. What they've done is they've processed the vitamin D3 molecules and made them... The atoms, or the molecules of vitamin D3 tend to clump. And what they've done is they've basically put them in an anti-clumping process and it broke them down to just almost naked vitamin D3 molecules by themselves. And that's what's referred to as nano, meaning very, very small. Emulsion, water, oil, emulsion. And that emulsion will go right through your mucus membranes in your mouth, under your tongue. Go to a bathroom, lift your tongue up and look at your... Under the side of your tongue in the mirror and you'll see a bunch of veins and arteries there and that sublingual goes... Right into the underside of the tongue. It also is taken buccal. B-U-C-C-A-L. That's between your cheek and your gum on the lower side. People used to go... Put snus there. This is what you're doing here. You're putting a drop, a half a milliliter of this stuff. That's 40000 IU, a lot.

0:53:29.8 Pete: So what we found is that there are some people who have GI tract absorption issues. They've gone through bariatric surgery. They've shortened the gut. They don't have 12 feet of small intestine anymore, they may only have six feet or two feet. Some of them don't have any. And I've got a very dear friend in Ireland who's a cluster headache sufferer and his wife was too. And she had a terrible problem and they removed basically her small intestine completely. So she had no absorption. So she gets... She has a tube stuck into the vena cava, the big vein going into the heart and she gets fed by a big syringe three times a day or four times a day. They put it into her bloodstream directly. So you've got a very specialized person who understands how to do that. And it's all mixed up carefully. And I said, "You gotta make sure she's getting her vitamin D3." Well they just switched over to the nano emulsion. She's getting along fine. She's doing just fine.

0:54:41.8 Craig: So yeah. So good for absorption. And in terms of taking a dose like that, is there any kind of... Is there any noticeable immediate... I'm just... Conjecture here. Any immediate effects?

0:55:00.5 Pete: Well, I hesitate to call this a slower version of an abortive, but I've had some nights... I do a lot of testing... I stop taking vitamin D3 until... I call those burned down tests, 'cause I'm burning down my 25-OH... Until I started having cluster headaches. People go, "Well, that's dumb." And I say, "Well, I'm not that smart. I'm just a fighter pilot." But I trust how well vitamin D3 will get me back pain-free, so I'm willing to go out on a limb and not take any vitamin D3, until I just start having the twinges that... Okay, I'm gonna get a cluster headache. And then I'll shoot some of this. Or I'll take more of the D3-50. I call those burn down tests. And it's very interesting. People ask, "Well, what's the half-life of 25-OH?" I say, "Up where I am, it's a long time." I don't drop more than about 15 nanograms per milliliter per month, when you're up around 150 to 180, it's probably even a little bit less. We'll explain the... That goes into and that goes out of when it comes to vitamin D3, because your body wants it and it's gonna do everything it can to keep it and protect it. It's not gonna waste it and it's not gonna pee it over the side.

0:56:33.4 Craig: Tell me, Vitamin D2, some folks may have support of their doctor who writes them a script to support the loading dose. Now, are there any considerations around vitamin D2, people should know about, Pete?

0:56:49.7 Pete: Well, for a long time, there were several vitamin D experts who said, "Well, there's very little difference between D2 and D3." Well there's a big difference. D3 is naturally occurring, D2 is manufactured. It is a pharmaceutical. And it's not the same animal. And when they got down and they started doing the real efficacy testing, D3 was hands down bigger and better. And not only that, but every time you took more D2 it occupied the vitamin D receptor that the vitamin D3 was trying to get into, so you're getting even less benefit from the vitamin D3, 'cause there was a D2.

0:57:36.2 Craig: I just wanted to say a lot of folks, including myself, will be challenged to remember taking a set of pills every day. Can I do the regimen weekly?

0:57:49.6 Pete: Oh yes. I don't have a slide handy right now, but there's a very beautiful slide that shows a dose of 100000 IU and you can see the vitamin D3 content spike and it starts coming back down after about 20 hours... It starts coming back down. But it never gets below where it started for almost two weeks. So you can go a week and you're still gonna have more vitamin D3 molecules in your blood stream that have yet to convert through the liver to 25-OH or 25 hydroxy vitamin D3. At the same time, you see that big spike, then you'll see the 25-OH starting to ramp up. So it basically tell us... That's one graphic right there that says, yeah you can take it once a week. 50000 is fine. You can take 100000.

0:58:50.1 Craig: In terms of the cofactors, they're something you should do daily?

0:58:55.4 Pete: Well, for many years, I pushed daily because I wanted to keep a constant level of D3 and at 10000 IU a day, you gotta add that times seven for the weekly dose, so you're talking 70,000 IU a week in one dose as opposed to 10,000 IU a day, every day for a week. So, once you do the math on that you go, The body is gonna end up with the same about when you're all... When the wash comes out of the wash machine and goes into the dryer, you got the same amount of 25-OH in your blood at the end of the week that you had, if you went in with 10,000 IU a day or 70,000 IU a week. So your 25 0H reaches parity. Now, if you go beyond a week, you go out to two weeks, now your D3 is dropping below where it started and that's not good, you wanna have D3 in your system all the time. This is when we get into the hormone theory, where you have to have...

1:00:07.5 Craig: The free hormone...

1:00:08.7 Pete: Just enough vitamin D3 in your system, so.

1:00:12.8 Craig: Yeah, the free hormone hypothesis.

1:00:15.7 Pete: You have the free hormone, certainly. The vitamin D3 retake gets attached, it has a high affinity for the vitamin D protein and it's got another high affinity for another protein that's in the body all the time, that's produced in the kidneys. Between the two of them, the vitamin D3 has a higher attraction rate, so the factor that we talk about in chemistry is the disassociation from the bound version of vitamin D3 to the free version, which is a naked molecule all by itself and that's about you know, what, one tenth of 1% or three tenths of 1%, very low. So that's the little rascal that's doing all the good.

1:01:06.7 Craig: The free hormone hypothesis will be a lot for folks to get their head around. Co-factors though, talk to me about co-factors. I mean, the regimen includes them. We've seen them up on the screen, I'd just like to talk about each of them, particularly, starting with fish oil, right? What does it actually do and what are the safety considerations, particularly since I saw a comment saying, you better not be taking aspirin with fish oil.

1:01:44.8 Pete: Co-factors are given that name because they enhance the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of vitamin D3. Without the co-factors, you don't get the absorption, the process of hydroxylating it to 25-hydroxy vitamin D3 and all the way up to 1,25-OH 2D-3 calcitriol. There's enzymes in there. Many of these co-factors are essential for expressing the enzymes. We're gonna get back to expressing again, you express a smile. Well, genes express different proteins and compounds, genetic products. So, one of the things that genes make is enzymes. Well, we need the enzyme as a catalyst to add that hydroxyl, that oxygen, hydrogen group to the Vitamin D3 molecule at the 25th position. That gives us 25-hydroxy. We need another enzyme to add it to the first position.


1:03:00.3 Pete: Now we have 1,25-0H 2D-3. And then there's one that comes out of the woods, that is a 24-hydroxylator, that adds a hydroxyl group to the 24th position of the vitamin D3 molecule. And when that happens, all bets are off. That 24-hydroxylated, either vitamin D3 25, 24-25, 0H 2D-3, or 1... OH 2-D3, or the 1,24-25-OH-3-D3, all of them fall out of circulation and they get cannibalized. The body breaks them down into their small sub-components and they get dumped out over the side in urine or they go into the bile and are eliminated in the bowels. So, it goes out of the system. 10% at least of all the vitamin D3 we take gets 24-hydroxylated. It's like paying tax, you earned $100, you got a 10% tax on the $100, you only got $90 left. So your 24-hydroxylation comes right off the top. So you lose that right away. So, that brings us up to the question on dosing and why do we go to higher doses. That's a pretty important thing. But then, moving on to the next... I got off track. What's the next supplement?

1:04:26.5 Craig: Yeah, well, I mean...

1:04:29.5 Pete: Magnesium, we need that.

1:04:30.1 Craig: Yeah, magnesium, correct.

1:04:31.5 Pete: That supports the enzymes. Zinc. Wow, that really supports the enzymes and both of them also boost the immune system. So you're getting a double bang for the buck.

1:04:45.2 Craig: Yeah, talk to me about magnesium for a second Pete, right? Because I remember the first time I took the regimen in 2015, the next morning, mate, I have to say, like, I was off to the... Yeah, the bowels were released.

1:05:05.8 Pete: It has a tendency to liquefy things, magnesium metal is one thing, a magnesium salt is what we're talking about, that's a product of a metal, ion and an acid ion. So we could take magnesium chloride, drop a chunk of magnesium in hydrochloric acid and you'll get magnesium chloride. There's magnesium orotate, which is a really good one, that's an organic acid. Magnesium oxide, chalk, the cliffs of Dover, that's what it is, is chalk. Some people find it doesn't cause so many problems at all because it's got a lot of magnesium in it, but some people find it stimulates what we call Osmotic Diarrhea and part of that is the magnesium was not dissolved in the GI tract where it was supposed to be dissolved and that's in the stomach. There's a really neat set of X-rays... A lady came in, she says, "I am just having a terrible time with this Magnesium. I've got the trots all the time."

1:06:31.6 Pete: And I says, "Well, when are you taking it?" "Well, I take it three times a day." "Well," I said, "That's part of your problem. You're probably taking too much. 400 milligrams a day is about what you need. Tell me, are you taking it with a meal or not?" "No. I take it whenever I need to take it with a big glass of water." And we looked at the X-ray and there's two of the capsules that are... Two of the tablets in her stomach, two of them half way down her 12-foot smaller intestines and two of them down there her tail pipe ready to go out with the next flush. All six capsules were still intact because she did not take them with the biggest meal of the day where there's a lot of acid in her stomach to dissolve all that chalk. So that's part of the problem. Some people find that there are different salts have a less laxative effect. I have no problem with magnesium oxide, none whatsoever. Magnesium citrate, I can get loose as a goose on that.

1:07:37.5 Craig: Okay.

1:07:37.8 Pete: So it's just one of those things you gotta... Try one, if you get too loose, split the dose and make sure you're taking it with a meal.

1:07:47.4 Craig: Yeah, yeah.

1:07:48.1 Pete: See if that solves the problem and then go to a different salt.

1:07:52.2 Craig: Right. And also, I mean I found I got used to it. I didn't change. I just... My tummy settled down. We've talked about zinc. Tell me about boron. It's in the multi, right?

1:08:10.1 Pete: Yeah. Boron's in the... You got I think 10 milligram in the Boron. Everything we need, just about everything we need, is in that Kirkland Adult 50 Plus Mature Multi. It does not have enough magnesium. It's only got 60 milligrams. We need 400 milligrams. It does not have any vitamin K2. It has vitamin K1, but not any K2. We need K2.

1:08:34.0 Craig: Yeah. Talk to me about K2...

1:08:35.9 Pete: And then it doesn't have any Omega 3.

1:08:38.1 Craig: Yeah. So all the boron we need is in the multi, K2, yeah. This comes up a lot, right, because people will say, you say, "Oh, I'm taking D3." "Oh, well are you taking your vitamin K2. You must take K2 with D3." Some folks say it's no biggie, you don't need to. What's happening here? And can you just tell me about MK-4 and MK-7? And regardless of cost, which one is the best choice to make?

1:09:12.6 Pete: There's two basic varieties of vitamin K. K1 is the clotting vitamin, as the Germans would call it. That's the one that balances your blood clotting mechanisms. K2 is a combination of two menaquinones. K1 is a phylloquinone. It comes from green leafy vegetables, things like that. K2 are the menaquinones and they come from natto fermented vegetables and fermented soy. Nasty stuff if you lived in Japan, I used to get it. Terrible. But the Japanese love it and it does a good job for them. So MK-4 is one version, MK-7 is the other version. I say take them both and I take all three of them. So what I suggest and this keeps your clotting system happy, you wanna keep it happy so you're not bleeding too much or clotting too much, you wanna keep it right where it's supposed to be in the middle and that's why we go with a super K, which is K1 and the advanced K2 complex of MK-4 and MK-7.

1:10:26.1 Craig: Okay. Thank you. I mean, I've just been...

1:10:28.4 Pete: One capsule a day is all we need. We've gone around the Rosie bush, ring around the Rosie, looking for, well... You gotta take more vitamin K2 if you're taking more vitamin D3. Well, that's not necessarily true. We have not been able to quantify an answer to is there a benefit from increasing the K2 complex with increased doses of vitamin D3? There is no answer. Nobody's answered that question.

1:11:01.2 Craig: Are you kind of thinking from a loading dose perspective, people saying, "Well, if you're taking 50,000, you really should be taking 5 of those K2 tablets per day." And is that what...

1:11:12.8 Pete: Not necessarily because they're 26 cents a piece.

1:11:15.6 Craig: Yeah. Right.

1:11:16.3 Pete: Everyone, I'm trying to keep this thing affordable. If you follow what's...

1:11:20.7 Craig: We know.

1:11:20.9 Pete: If you follow what's in that picture, you're talking about between 35 and 50 cents a day.

1:11:28.4 Craig: Now, I can't see the retinol there, it's not because of my eyesight. [laughter]

1:11:34.6 Pete: No, no. The retinol vitamin A is inside the Mature Multi.

1:11:38.8 Craig: And, Pete, are you sure that we get enough retinol vitamin A from the multi because I don't eat liver anymore, the only time I ate liver was when I went to Nan's house. Surely, it makes me wonder all this press, all this interest in Vitamin D, is it possible we're missing something with Vitamin A?

1:12:00.8 Pete: Well, no, vitamin A is in the Mature Multi.

1:12:06.3 Craig: Okay, okay.

1:12:07.6 Pete: I've looked over all of the back labels, the supplement facts label and you should always look at that on the back and the first thing you wanna look at the top of the supplement facts is, what's the dose? Sometimes it's one capsule, sometimes it's two capsules. If the dose is two capsules, that's what you get on the front of the bottle when it says you're getting 3000, that's for a dose of two capsules. But if it says dose of one capsule and you're getting 3000, ooh, that's pretty good. That's the other thing I look for, bigger bang for the buck. The most per capsule at the lowest price.

1:12:37.7 Craig: I'd say it was like, it would have been before you were born, but in the '30s and '40s, retinol or vitamin A was all the rage mate, it was... They were advertising it left, right and center, so I just thought I'd ask the question. The other thing listed is calcium and you know I'm from New Zealand, we're a big farming community down here, drink plenty of milk. Is there any considerations taking this level of vitamin D around consuming too much calcium?

1:13:13.6 Pete: Okay, you need calcium all the time. We have this thing called bone remodeling. There's a cell type, it's an osteoclast, it gobbles up bone and you get an osteoblast that comes along and it lays down new bone. That's a very very important process that keeps our skeletons healthy. So if you break down... Take a piece of bone and you break it down to its component elements, you'll find you got calcium, phosphorus and another really neat article that you get from only taking vitamin C. You got to have vitamin... Collagen, that's the third. What does collagen do with bones? Well, it keeps them from becoming brittle, it allows them to flex but not break. So, what about 20% of your bone is collagen, actually a little bit more than that, because if you look at the trabecular bone, that's the funny foam stuff inside the long bones, that's almost exclusively the soft pliable form of bone, that's made possible by collagen, collagen, collagen. And our bodies cannot make collagen without vitamin C. So when somebody says, "I'm on a bone-building regimen," if I don't see any vitamin C, I go, "You're missing a third of the components in the bone that you wanna build up, you need vitamin C."

1:14:47.2 Craig: Wow.

1:14:48.7 Pete: Well, how much do you need? Well, Linus Pauling took 18 grams a day. 7-8 grams a day is good, really good. And the best way to do that, the cheapest way to do that, what I do, 'cause I'm cheap, is I take... Well, I'm not cheap, I'm pretty expensive at times, but I take a level measuring teaspoon in an 8 ounce glass of water and I take a second one, two level teaspoons in 8 ounces of water, stir it, I do that every morning and I take sips of it all day long and by the time I get to bed time I drain the last of it. That's 8 grams of vitamin C. It tastes like unsweetened lime juice, no big deal. Now, what I recommend is you keep a water glass alongside of it, so every time you take a sip of the vitamin C, ascorbic acid, it's sitting there trying to etch your teeth, so take a gulp of just plain water, swirl it around your mouth and swallow it, 'cause remember part of this treatment protocol is 2.5 litres of water a day. No, yes, no, or maybe, you need 2.5 litres of water a day. Next question. Oh, next supplement.

1:15:58.6 Craig: So the next part, that's the cofactors covered off pretty nicely, right? So if you had all of those and you wanted to start the regimen, we start talking about a loading dose at the start. Now before we start talking about the 600,000 international unit loading dose, I wanna say, what are the chances of a cluster headache sufferer having an adequate vitamin D level before starting the regimen?

1:16:30.4 Pete: Well, that's why we wanna start with, see your doctor and get the lab tests for 25-OH calcium and PTH. And you'll find you're gonna be under that black portion of the chart there, normal distribution, you're gonna be somewhere between 6 and 47 nanograms per milliliter and on average, you'll be about 24 nanograms per milliliter.

1:16:54.8 Craig: And just for any New Zealanders watching, 24 nanograms per milliliter is the average serum of kiwis in New Zealand.

1:17:05.8 Pete: No you measured in... So 2.5 times that.

1:17:10.6 Craig: No, no, no, no, I've converted that for people watching, so yeah.

1:17:12.9 Pete: Okay, alright.

1:17:15.3 Craig: Yeah, 24 nanograms, 24.2 nanograms.

1:17:16.6 Pete: So you're in a hurt locker for a number of reasons. COVID-19 infections are more severe for people with 25-OH less than 30, down around 25 to 20, it even gets worse. You're gonna stay in the hospital. You get below 10, you're gonna have a hard time staying out of the grave. Bad, bad news. You wanna stay above 50, that's gonna require, if everything was working for you, a minimum, an absolute minimum of 5000 IU a day and that's after a loading cycle of at least 500,000 IU.

1:18:00.9 Craig: Yeah, so sticking with the cluster loading regimen and I understand you've changed it recently, so it used to be, I think 12 or 15 days, so now folks can take that 600,000 international unit loading dose at the start of the regimen to quickly raise their level up to kind of a range where the headaches stop or become far less severe. Talk to us about loading dose. It's okay to do it over six days at 100,000 per day?

1:18:35.0 Pete: Okay, what we've come up with is what we think is the fastest and safest way to elevate serum 25-OH and that's with the loading dose. I'm trying to find a slide here. Maybe it's this one. So we're looking for roughly 100,000 IU, or actually a total of 600,000 IU. Now, you can do that in six days at 100,000 IU per day, or you can do it in 12 days at 50,000 IU per day, or you can add the nutrasal nanoemulsion, which will jack it up even faster and you add half a milliliter which... The eye dropper is calibrated in 1 ml, in quarter milliliter segments, but halfway up is a half a milliliter. That's 20 drops, 2000 IU per drop, so that's, yeah, 40,000 IU of vitamin D3. So we're talking a loading dose to go real fast, of 140,000 IU a day for five days, do the math, that comes out 700,000. That's a pretty good start for basically the chronic cluster headache sufferer and the migrainer. So that's why I would say, that's what they need to take and I'm taking it too.

1:20:07.6 Craig: Right, right. Okay, so yeah, there's some changes there that people that have been following the regimen for a long time might have noticed those changes if they're making recommendations to people that are chronic or are looking at this from the migraine perspective. Pete, how important is it to get calcium and parathyroid hormone down at the start? Like, if you're in the throes of pain, sometimes getting to the lab and particularly if you live in the country side like you in the middle of nowhere, it can't be the easiest thing to do. Is it safe to just start and test later?

1:20:55.6 Pete: Well, starting this treatment protocol represents a commitment you make to yourself. So, we tend to be very... Cluster headache sufferers tend to be very impatient. We expect instantaneous results. We take a pill, we wanna be better. It doesn't work that way. It takes a while to build this stuff up. That's why we went to the loading cycle, we want to square that curve, because the slide here, this is what's called the time course 25-OH response. So, if you started taking 1000 IU a day, you'd be on the second line and you'd be right back where you started from at the end of six months, yeah, 180 days.

1:21:47.5 Craig: Oh, I know, look, I get it. As you know, you can only buy 1000 International Units, maximum dose in New Zealand before needing a prescription and running a vitamin D test business, I can't tell you the amount of people that say, "Oh, hold on a second, there's something wrong here. I've been taking 1000 International Units every day for the past year and your test is telling me I'm deficient and it's like, "Yeah, you know, it is."

1:22:19.9 Pete: Yeah, 1000 IUs a day is gonna prevent scurvy, but that's about it. It's gonna keep you alive, scurvy will kill you.

1:22:27.9 Craig: And so, when people are doing this loading dose, either over 6 or 12 days to do 600, 700, depending on whether they're episodic, chronic migrainer, in terms of the other co-factors, they're just taking the standard one of those per day?

1:22:49.4 Pete: Well, what I do is I take them all at the same time, usually right before I eat dinner or immediately right after I have dinner. The biggest meal of the day with the most fat in it. I'm looking for maximum results, the most acid in my stomach to break down the chalk and dissolve the capsules. Man, I wanna have everything going... And I gulp it down usually in two handfuls, sometimes even one handful.

1:23:11.5 Craig: At least you are...

1:23:12.3 Pete: 10, 15 pills at one time, it's just... I get it done, I get it over with. And I gulp down a lot of water.

1:23:20.2 Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're a brute. What I was meaning... I just don't want any confusion, so if I was taking... If I had brought myself the 10,000 International Unit capsules and doing the loading dose, I might be taking five D3 capsules per day, but that doesn't mean I need to take five of my magnesium and five of my multi...

1:23:40.5 Pete: No, you need to double the magnesium, the rest of them stay the same.

1:23:43.7 Craig: Stay the same. Yeah, right.

1:23:46.4 Pete: Stay the same. When you're doing a loading cycle or schedule, a loading schedule is a loading dose over time and days, that's the schedule, you really need to double the magnesium, take 400 mg with breakfast with the food in the morning and another 400 mg with the evening meal. That prevents both capsules... That gives them 12 feet separation in the GI tract and 12 hour separation, so they don't arrive at your tail pipe at the same time. You wanna avoid that.

1:24:17.6 Craig: No, a really good advice. I hadn't heard that before, but I tell you what I hear all the time, people suggesting up your magnesium as you start taking vitamin D, so I feel that's good advice. Next, I wanna talk about non-responders and dose response. I think both of those kind of morph into a conversation together and I'll give you a background, right? Like, I had a friend that started taking D3, just for optimal health, having the pandemic and stuff down here in New Zealand, he's taken 1,560,000 International Units, that's 30,000 Intentional Units per day for about a month and a half, two months. His level's only 50. Now, if he had been a cluster headache sufferer and he had done the standard regimen, he would have arrived at a point where he was like, "It doesn't work, it's not working for me. My level's not increasing." Why is that? Why are some people gonna find if they do your loading dose, they may still be like 40, 50 nanograms per milliliter and they'll get disheartened. I wanna talk about that.

1:25:33.9 Pete: If they know that's a problem that they saw... One of the other problems was just they got a test at 30 days, otherwise they would never have known that their 25-OH had not responded like he expected it to.

1:25:46.4 Craig: Okay.

1:25:46.7 Pete: So, if you follow the protocol, you're gonna load for anywhere from... You're gonna take 600000 to 700000 IU, anywhere from five to 12 days. And then at 12 days, you're gonna shift up. If you have not experienced a favorable response with a reduction in the frequency of your headaches, now you need to step on and go for the full monty, that's another whole clutch of vitamins and minerals, but you need to look at the 30-day lab to find out where you really are. Have I moved my 25-OH up to where I expect it to be, around 80? And if the answer is no, well, then you've got a vitamin D3 resistance and that can be due to a couple of different things.

1:26:40.0 Craig: Stick with the example I just gave you, of the gentleman I mentioned, at 1,560,000, that hefty dose. Prior to taking that level of vitamin D, his level had tested at 22 nanograms per milliliter and after that dose, it was 51 nanograms per milliliter. So there was a response, but it wasn't the response perhaps he would have hoped for if he was a cluster headache sufferer now, what should he do?

1:27:12.2 Pete: The question then is, where was the calcium and where was the PTH? What we're looking for is, if you look carefully at the calcium and the PTH, you'll see an equal but opposite response. In other words, as the calcium goes up, the PTH goes down. Actually, you can see it also when the 25-OH goes up, the PTH goes down. But it's almost a mirror image between calcium and PTH. So if you get to the last test of the year, I'm just shy of going into the pink zone on my calcium, but it's always been normal and my PTH is down, around nine, which is a little below the 12 to 14, the bottom of the green zone. Not bad, but it shows, that mirror image shows that I've done something to my PTH. Actually, you can't see what I did to it because that happened... About three years prior to this chart starting, I was using a different lab.

1:28:28.3 Pete: I was using the lab in my doctor's office and we finally... He didn't believe my vitamin D3 value, so I went across the street and I had it done at Quest Diagnostics back-to-back. Quest was 15, no, it was more than that, almost 20 nanograms per milliliter higher than his test. I said that's the difference between the two lab tests. Anyway, so I stick with the lab that uses the liquid chromatography, dual mass spectroscopy for vitamin D3 and they do the calcium and PTH together in one test, so you know they're all being done at the same time, that you can't get a better reading on, what's my calcium homeostasis doing? And what this chart shows is I got a great calcium homeostasis. It's doing everything it can to keep me from getting toxic amounts of vitamin D3.

1:29:26.2 Craig: It's dropping your parathyroid hormone and your calcium serums about right on the upper...

1:29:32.9 Pete: PTH is depressed, which... Yeah, so what we're seeing in these three panels is, I am getting the maximum benefit from vitamin D3. What this is saying, I don't need to take anymore. What I've been taking... What I was taking then at that point was sufficient. Taking more is not gonna do me any better.

1:29:54.3 Craig: Yeah, yeah.

1:29:54.6 Pete: I'm not gonna get any benefit from taking more. Now, what was I taking then? I was taking pretty close to 140000 IU a day for over a week. Oh, actually, over 20 days. A 140000 IU a day for 20 days.

1:30:10.7 Craig: So what my client should have done in reviewing his calcium, PTH and vitamin D3, if he was still getting attacks, his level had only increased to 52 nanograms per milliliter, his parathyroid hormone was still mid-range and his calcium was in the safe position, he could continue loading D3 until he responded favorably. Is that kind of what you're saying?

1:30:43.2 Pete: Yes, yes, yes and then I would say cuddle up your doctor and say, "Look, we're gonna do this. I don't care what you say, we're gonna do this and I want you to run my labs every two weeks until we get where we wanna go. And if you've got a problem with that, then we'll negotiate another doctor if we have to, but I gotta do this to keep my head from falling off."

1:31:07.3 Craig: Yeah. And so talk...

1:31:08.3 Pete: This is not dangerous, this is not dangerous, I repeat, this is not dangerous.

1:31:14.3 Craig: Talk to me about the cluster headache sufferer that has finally got around to trying a vitamin D regimen to see if it can help them and they get up to that kind of 80 to 90 nanogram per milliliter level, they notice some improvement, but it's just not there yet. The right course is, again, review these three labs, if there is still room to increase your vitamin D dose, are you suggesting that they need to keep on loading until they see a favorable response whilst keeping these labs in safe ranges, is that the take-home?

1:31:56.5 Pete: Yeah, there's a couple... Let's break this down to two problems. One, I can't elevate my 25-OH high enough, fast enough, so then I say, go to a larger loading dose and add the real master blaster, the nanoemulsion, because that's gonna kick it up, that goes into the blood stream through the mucous membrane in your mouth and under your tongue. It bypasses the GI tract, there's no 12 hour wait. Boom, it's going in there and it's there in about five minutes. You can squirt it under your tongue and it's in your blood stream in about five minutes. Now it's still got a lot of other things to do, it's gotta dissipate all the way through your body and it's gotta get into the cells, in your trigeminal ganglia and not very much gets in there because you didn't put a whole lot in to begin with. And then you gotta wait for the process of genetic expression to take place and that's another 55 minutes. That happens pretty fast once the Vitamin D3 gets inside the cell. It's a matter of minutes and it's expressing. It's doing its thing.

1:33:12.2 Craig: Yeah, yeah. If you've seen... If you're watching this, you've seen my comments before and read Batcheller's comments on the cluster headaches forum, now we're gonna start talking about non-responders and a couple of things. Inderal and then we're gonna talk about the full monty. So Pete traditionally, when folks haven't responded, people on the chat forums, they're gonna suggest to them, chuck in a first generation histamine. Talk to me about this whole situation and just break it down nice and simply for folks.

1:33:55.8 Pete: Okay. Non-responders typically means they're still having cluster headaches, they haven't responded with a cessation of cluster headaches or a decrease in the frequency of cluster headaches. That's one problem. The other problem which can be related is my 25-OH is not responding, is I'm not giving the increase in 25-OH commensurate with the loading dose that I've been taking, or the maintenance dose I've been taking of Vitamin D3. So you kinda have to look at them separately, but also combined because they do interact with each other. So the first thing to do is you wanna get your 25-OH up, go to a larger loading dose, go to the nanoemulsion and that you'll start driving it up, I guarantee you it'll drive up. If 140,000 IU doesn't do it, try 190,000 and if that doesn't work, try 240,000. People have taken much, much larger loading doses than that. You just don't wanna be taking it for too long a period of time without having a lab test to verify your calcium is still normal and your PTH hasn't gone down through the floor.

1:35:21.3 Pete: If you haven't seen a drop in the PTH, that's key, if your PTH is still high, you still got a vitamin D3 resistance, so keep loading until you see your PTH start to drop. Once it starts dropping, you want it to go down to the minimum, but stay right on the edge between the green and the pink. And you'll have to adjust your vitamin D3 dose to do that. But knowing when and how to do that means you're gonna get frequent lab tests. So like I say, make friends with your doctor, say, we're gonna do this, I gotta do this, 'cause I'm not gonna live with the pain. This is safe. On a safety factor, people go in and take rat poison to control their clotting factor. Yeah, so the doctor changes the dose and he says, you gotta come in next week, so we can take a blood sample, measure your clotting factor. If you screw that one up, you're gonna kill somebody. Nobody has died from vitamin D3 poisoning.

1:36:27.3 Craig: And I mean if I... We're still looking at this lab on the screen here, you had to go pretty darn high before there were some considerations in and around PTH and calcium. Wouldn't it be fair to say, well, the question is, do most people not see...

1:36:48.0 Pete: Most people would not need to do what I did. This is kind of an exception and basically, the doses I was taking put me in a category of the Coimbra protocol. Coimbra protocol developed by Dr. Cicero Coimbra is a vitamin D3 therapy exactly like mine, except his starting dose of vitamin D3 is 1000 IU per kilogram of body weight. So if I weighed 80, I do weigh 80 kilograms, I'd be taking 80000 IU a day. That's the starting dose for the Coimbra protocol and it goes up from there.

1:37:29.4 Craig: And again monitoring those labs.

1:37:29.8 Pete: 140000 IU a day for that last set of labs.

1:37:36.0 Craig: Yeah, yeah, so talk to me about anti-histamine and the full monty, kinda lay it out.

1:37:44.4 Pete: So now we're back to... I haven't responded to the regimen with a reduction in the frequency. You get to the end of the first five days of the loading cycle and you haven't seen any improvements at all, time for the full monty. The full monty is basically four, actually five supplements. You wanna take turmeric three grams a day, turmeric curcumin.

1:38:11.4 Craig: And sorry can I... That turmeric mate, does it have to be something in particular? Like I've got turmeric in my spices bloody thing in my cabinet. Is that good enough or does it need to be like something bought from...

1:38:23.1 Pete: I would go... I bought a bag of medical grade turmeric, but I don't know what the strength of it is in order to get the right dose. I would buy the dose.

1:38:39.3 Craig: Okay, okay, yep. Next one.

1:38:41.3 Pete: The next one is resveratrol. I would strongly recommend ordering grapes, as a good fruit to eat. Eat a handful of grapes a day. Resveratrol's in wine. I don't recommend drinking a lot of wine because you can't drink enough wine to get the amount of resveratrol you get out of three capsules of 1000 milligrams each. So you want three grams a day of resveratrol. You need three grams a day of the... What's the next one? Oh yeah, quercetin, Q-U-E-R-C-E-T-I-N, quercetin. That's the one that's really potent and powerful when it comes to beating back a COVID-19 infection, if taken with zinc. Quercetin is a zinc ionophore. Zinc is water-soluble and the cell walls are made out of fatty acids, water and fat don't mix, so the zinc cannot get through the cell walls into the cytoplasm where the virus are. But if you wrap them with a little quercetin, it acts like a soap bubble and the zinc slides straight through the cell well gets in there and zinc stops the enzyme that allows the virus to replicate. If the virus can't replicate, you are not going to get sick. So, that's where quercetin comes in, you also need at least three grams a day of omega-3 fish oil, that's the DHA EPA combination. You want that as high as you can get.

1:40:18.2 Craig: Sorry, so that's part of the standard regimen or...

1:40:21.6 Pete: Yeah, but you're gonna take a little bit more of it, where you take two capsules, I'd be taking three and four.

1:40:26.7 Craig: Oh yeah. And just again, tell me, like you kind of talked about cell transfusion with the resveratrol, isn't that kind of what fish oil is doing? Or what is it doing actually?

1:40:43.3 Pete: Each one of these things has a number of different benefits, omega-3 is an anti-inflammatory, it's also a co-factor that works hand in glove with vitamin D3. And it's got an anti-antigen, in other words, it's good at calming down reactions to histamine, virus, bacteria and fungus. So does vitamin C. Vitamin C does all those things too. Plus, it stops a rapid oxidation that takes place with some of these chemical reactions that go through our body. It's an anti-oxidant, vitamin C. Six to eight grams a day of vitamin C is part of the full monty.

1:41:46.2 Craig: And you're talking about...

1:41:48.1 Pete: And I would also add to that, melatonin, at least 10 grams a day, melatonin. So the full monty is a whole array of other supplements and you stay on them until you get a positive response.

1:42:02.3 Craig: Sorry, did you say 10 grams of melatonin?

1:42:06.9 Pete: 10 milligrams.

1:42:09.1 Craig: And, can you just tell me the vitamin C... Like, do you buy it in a big like... Because it's a bit vitamin C, I have to tell you.

1:42:20.7 Pete: I order on Amazon, probably daily. And this one looked like I got a good deal. Natural melatonin and they're five milligram tabs. They're actually really sweet and you can put them under your tongue and let then dissolve there. I just gobble them down and drink 'em with water. So I take two of those a day, as part of the full monty.

1:42:43.9 Craig: Any particular time of the day? I associate...

1:42:46.7 Pete: I usually like to do them about... Most of these are water soluble. I like to do them before the main meal of the day, right up to 10-20 minutes before the main meal of the day. Sometimes I take three or four, three in the afternoon, four in the afternoon. Why so early and not with a meal in this particular case? Well, if you take it with the Omega-3, you're getting plenty of fat. There's plenty of fat in the omega 3 fish oil, so they're not going on water-based alone, you take the fish oil, you're getting plenty of fat. And I do that because you gotta wait until it gets out of the stomach and into the small intestine, where absorption takes place. You don't get any absorption in the stomach unless you're doing it sublingual or under the tongue.

1:43:43.7 Craig: Yeah, right.

1:43:44.3 Pete: You gotta wait until the stomach is ready to go, I am ready. Look out small intestine, here it comes. And it squirts it into the small intestine. Now you start absorbing it, that can take upwards of an hour to two hours, depending on what's in your stomach.

1:44:02.0 Craig: So how long would someone kinda throw in the full monty?

1:44:06.2 Pete: Full monty, I'd say stay on it until you start seeing positive results. And then back off by dropping one of them a day, go for a couple of days.

1:44:19.0 Craig: To the base regimen. Now...

1:44:22.6 Pete: For example, I was on full monty for close to three weeks. I haven't taken anything for the last five days. And I haven't taken any vitamin D3 either.

1:44:39.5 Craig: Like, I have to say, I've been quite lucky in that I've got by with just the base regimen. I didn't realize your recommendation as part of the regimen was a litre and a half of water too. So I don't know if I drink that much. Well I should be. Heavens I should be.

1:44:58.8 Pete: And coffee doesn't count. For every cup of coffee, you need to drink two cups of water. Coffee is a diuretic. You're gonna pee out that cup of coffee and another cup of bodily fluids for every cup you drink.

1:45:11.9 Craig: Well there's probably problem number two for me, so convince me now Pete, like I'm almost on the fence of doing this last part of the regimen that I haven't needed to do because the basics worked so well for me. But lay it on the line, talk to us about keto. I've heard about this diet many times in the group, people saying, Wow I started keto and I... Less attacks, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

1:45:39.7 Pete: Yeah.

1:45:40.7 Craig: Talk to me.

1:45:42.0 Pete: Well, the ideal diet and you can... There have been studies done on it for both migrainers and cluster headache sufferers and both benefited from this diet, is an Atkins diet, ketogenic diet. It's a combined Atkins ketogenic diet. In simple terms, what you're gonna do is avoid all carbohydrates, you're gonna eat lots of proteins, avoid grains and wheat products. Avoid grain oils like Mazola, corn, unfortunately the stuff coming out of Canada, Canola, that's made from rapeseeds. Why do you want to avoid those? A couple of reasons. They're not good for you. And number two, most of them are loaded with glyphosate. What the hell is glyphosate? That's the herbicide in roundup. You might as well go drink a cup of roundup. Now that's gonna kill off all the microbiota in your GI tract called the microbiome. That's a whole 'nother... All those little critters living in your GI tract, that's a whole 'nother organ all by itself. 70% of your immune system is in your GI tract. You've got a lot of immune cells in there and in the surrounding blood vessels that surround the GI tract. Well you think about it, how do germs get in our body? We inhale them through our nose or our mouth, we eat them.

1:47:13.2 Craig: Sure we do.

1:47:13.9 Pete: So where is your best defense system? The body's best defense system is located around the GI tract and the lungs.

1:47:21.3 Craig: Yeah, absolutely. Our mucosal barrier is like the entry point, isn't it? So like it looks alright. I just I miss my meat pies and whatnot but at any rate.

1:47:43.8 Pete: The slide is up there, eliminate all sugars, that includes fruit juices. I love fresh orange juice. You're better off eating the orange. Fresh orange juice has got two kinds of sugars in it, it's got glucose in it which is not good for you but is essential at some point. And it's got fructose. Now glucose is a six carbon atom or molecule, fructose is a five carbon. So instead of having that perfect hexagon shape, it's got a pentagon shape. It tastes really, really sweet but it doesn't do squat for nutrition, but it does make fat. So you don't need it. You don't need fructose. Table sugar is a 50-50 mix of glucose and fructose... Actually sucrose and fructose, boom, boom, boom. And sucrose, that's table sugar. Sucrose is made up of glucose and fructose. Two molecules, one of glucose, one of fructose. That's why table sugar tastes so sweet. You don't need it. It's an inflammatory.

1:48:51.7 Craig: Yeah. And I'm...

1:49:00.0 Pete: So put a skull and crossbones on that loaf of bread. Put a skull and crossbones on the sugar container. You don't wanna take any of those. No grain products. No grain oils. Oh what am I gonna do? Well there's one of the dairy products you can do and that's butter, that's gonna be good for you. Extra virgin olive oil, that's good for you. Avocado oil, I like that. And my favorite is extra virgin coconut oil. Matter of fact I do a poll, take a big heap, a tablespoon of that, put it in my mouth and let it dissolve. Don't spit it down the drain, it'll clog your drain. [chuckle] Spit it into a paper towel and throw it in the garbage or put it in the fireplace 'cause it'll start a fire real fast. But that pulls bacteria in all kinds... It's better than a mouth wash. And your mouth is happy when it's all done and if you get some on your hands, you wipe it around. They have this thing in the tropical islands, Maori maybe as well, but the Hawaiians, the Tongans, all of them, when their girls start coming of age, they rub their bodies down with coconut oil so guys can walk up and put a dollar bill on their skin and it'll stick.

1:50:19.6 Craig: Bit of a factoid that... [chuckle]

1:50:21.6 Pete: Their mothers are watching, there's no hanky-panky, it's just boom.

1:50:27.8 Craig: And there will be plenty...

1:50:28.5 Pete: They've got the softest skin. I mean, you wanna make your skin happy, rub it down with coconut oil. I mean... If your feet are dry and cracking, rub it down with coconut oil. You'll have... They'll be pink and sweet, just like a baby.

1:50:45.5 Craig: Yeah, okay, okay.

[overlapping conversation]

1:50:49.5 Craig: That's a good.

1:50:50.8 Pete: Salmon, halibut, wild caught fish, bit thing is no farmed fish, no farmed salmon, they're terrible, bad, bad, bad. Because most of them are fed grain and what's in the grain? Glyphosate. Glyphosate is in everything, it's really bad. Organic, non-GMO green and colored veggies, that's good. Fruit, stick to the dark berry fruits or grapes. Blackberry, blueberry, raspberry, some nuts, dark grapes. Pomegranate, that's also pretty good.

1:51:31.5 Craig: It's kinda like in order to do it, a change like this, it really is a change in the way you look at life and approach nutrition. And like anything, we're habitual creatures, I know that if I got to day 28 of following a diet like this, I would probably be through the bulk of my complaints in terms of...

1:51:56.0 Pete: I tell you what, if you do it right, you won't be hungry.

1:51:58.0 Craig: Yeah.

1:52:00.0 Pete: You can eat all the meat you want. All the free range, organic meats you want.

1:52:03.0 Craig: Okay, okay.

1:52:04.8 Pete: Port, lamb, I love fresh lamb chops. Oh man! A leg of lamb. Yeah, any day.

1:52:10.6 Craig: Pete as we look to wrap up at this part of the talk, any neurologists, any clinicians, family doctors that have heard about vitamin D, that have watched this talk, maybe watching now, is there anywhere that they can go to review the clinical kind of data that you've put together on this thing?

1:52:32.9 Pete: Yeah, if you download the treatment protocol, my email address is on there.

1:52:40.0 Craig: Okay, great and I'll ensure that that information is linked in the description.

1:52:47.5 Pete: Sure.

1:52:47.6 Craig: For the folks that wanna give it a go and perhaps haven't got the support of their doctor, but they're gonna push forward anyway, where's the information? Where's the latest copy of the regimen?

1:53:01.9 Pete: Yeah, the diet is a very important part of it. There's a third leg of the stool, which you also have to consider and that's getting some exercise. The body runs best when it gets some exercise. But if you're an old geezer like me at 77, just walking up and down the driveway is more than sufficient. But I'd like to get at least 100 yards, maybe 200 yards. And I gotta do that because come the end of May and the first of June, it's almost a half mile from our house on Pelican down to where we keep the boat moored. And every morning I'll walk that all the way on down to the boat to stay in shape. Now I'll ride the golf cart coming home with all the fish, but I'll walk that in the morning and I wanna stay healthy. So I do get my exercise. I've got three chainsaws out there and a log splitter, a hydraulic log splitter and I do all the firewood for the house.

1:54:01.7 Craig: No that's very good Pete. Exercise of course is probably, together with good nutrition, is probably the most important things that you can do for your health. Where does vitamin D rank? I would suggest it's number three on that list. And so look, team, if you have been watching, I hope this has been helpful. All of the links are below. The graphics kinda speak for themselves, it's easy to follow, this regimen is not difficult. And I'll tell you what, if it worked for you like it did for me, well you'll be jumping for glee and coming back here to post a comment on this video, just to give others the confidence to know that this thing, it actually works.

1:54:54.3 Pete: Yes. There's one point you started to make there that I've gotta follow up on, it works very well and I have many doctors who are also following and most of them are headache sufferers, some of them are migrainers, but most of them are cluster headache sufferers. But I have a few more that are taking it because they wanna stay healthy and they wanna keep their immune system boosted, they've been listening to the Malones and all the other doctors who are saying, "Hey, you gotta take... You gotta treat this COVID early and strongly with good stuff, good vitamins and minerals." Healthy stuff that the old country doc made you take all the time.

1:55:34.0 Craig: Yeah. Yeah.

1:55:34.6 Pete: So that's good. The other interesting part is, I gave a presentation on the results of the study in 2019, in... Gosh where were we? I guess we were in Austin, Texas. I gave it at a cluster headache conference. And I was second to the last presentation, the final presentation was a panel of neurologists and there were four neurologists up on the stage when I finished. And one of them stood up and he looked around the room, there was about 150 people in attendance there and most of them are cluster headache sufferers. Some of them are supporters and wives. And he looks around the room and he says, "Okay, how many of you are following Batcheller's regimen?" Now I was up in front, so I had to turn around and look. 50 hands went up and I went, Holy crap! Here's 50 out of a 100, a third of the audience is saying, yeah, I'm following Batcheller's regimen. Then he asked the next question, "Okay, how many of you found it didn't work?" And I looked around, only five hands went up. He looked at me and he mouthed the words, We gotta talk. Yeah we gotta talk alright. I moved over to his table, said give me your email address and I sent him everything I had.

1:56:45.8 Craig: And you know, like...

1:56:46.8 Pete: I went back up to the room, did a dance in the room locker, I was just coming up, my Mac went ping! You have an email, it's the doctor, he says, I wanna do a study of your protocol. I'm like, Oh God that's fantastic. But you know it's kinda hard to come up with the funding. Click, return. Went back in the bathroom, finished shaving, ping! Pulled it up. I have the money. I responded, You have my complete attention. I just started recruiting two months ago.

1:57:15.4 Craig: And I think that's the thing, like if you've made it through this talk, Batch, there's no sign up now. There's no, I need your email address so I can pitch you a guide book to sell you on how to do this. It's not about that for this gentleman or for myself, it's just about doing the right thing and sharing this information with you wonderful people so you can get your lives back. And more than that, so you can prime your immune system to live in a goddamn world where there are bugs, where there are viruses, where there are organisms and you know it's like, shock horror team, you're supposed to breathe those suckers in, like every breath that you take. I've gone off on a tangent here, Pete, but it's just so unnatural that for me to go up the road after this interview to the supermarket, I've gotta cover my goddam face. And it's just like, you guys are missing the point that humans have come to a point now, we think we are separate from this world that we live in. That we need to protect ourselves from all of these bugs. It's like, it makes you really, really sad for where we are at as a species, does it not?

1:58:43.1 Pete: I did a lot of work in intelligence in my last seven years in the Navy. In fact almost exclusive in intelligence work. And I was also... They call him a crisis action planner. I worked at the US Paycom. That's the Pacific Command in Hawaii. And he's responsible for everything from the West Coast of the US all the way to the gates of the Persian Gulf, including Korea and the Coast of China and the East Coast of Africa, that belongs to the Southcom. So the biggest AOR other than Space Comm, which owns all the space above us. So I spent five years out there. After the first two and a half years, they like me so much they said, "You're not leaving, we're gonna keep you for another 10 and a half years." So I spent five years out there. And most of the time I spent it in the command center, this is the nerve center for everything happening in the AOR. Something happens over there, we know about it within seconds and most of the work was done with intelligence. Well, why intelligence? Because if you know what the bad guy is about to do before he does it, you got a leg up on it. And if you study him enough, you know all the things he's capable of doing.

1:59:48.6 Pete: Well, I kind of apply that to cluster headaches. And the intelligence part of it is research. Digging into all the different studies, finding who did what. There are a number of studies that are called... I'm trying to think of the right name for it. They're challenge studies, they wanna provoke, provocation studies. Well, what's that? That's where they take a cluster headache sufferer and they give them a shot of histamine, see what happens. Holy crap, he comes down with cluster headaches, out like that. Do it to a migrainer, guess what? Migrainer starts having migraine headaches. So there's a lot of commonality between cluster and migraine headaches. I sent you the link for the paper on it, excellent paper on it. And there's so many areas that they overlap and are the same and very few where they're off. So I know from my wife and many other close friends who are migrainers that it does work.

2:00:55.8 Craig: Like I said earlier, Pete, I went and met my uncle for the first time. I'd not seen him since I was a young boy. And I said, "You're married?" "I've got a wife, she's downstairs." I said, "Go and get her mate, I'd love to meet her." And he said, "No, I'm sorry she's got migraines, she gets really bad migraines. She just likes to stay in a dark room." And I said, "Mate, just get her to take vitamin D." And he gave me the look my doctor, everyone that I speak to about vitamin D, apart from yourself and a few select people, give me this look of, roll your eyes, you're a snake oil salesman. But I sent the D3 to their house and a week or so later, I get a call from him and he's saying, "Craig, what can we give you?" It makes me cry almost every time I tell the story, it's like, Mate, I don't want anything from you. It's just good to know that she's able to go outside and live a good life, amen to that, you know?

2:02:00.5 Pete: There you go. My goal is once I get the cluster headache sufferer be it the guy or the gal up on the regimen and they're experiencing the benefits, they're getting that holy crap, wonderful feeling that I slept the night without cluster headaches. I might have one or two a week, but I can live with that. Or boom, they're gone, gonezo. Then I say, Make sure your spouse is taking it, you don't wanna out live your spouse do you?" And oh, by the way, if you happen to be of child-bearing age, make sure you're taking at least 10,000 IU all the way through pregnancy and before you both need to be taking it and then you got this picture... Is it safe? That's my granddaughter, Fred, AKA, Winnifred at one month and about, I think, about eight weeks with a bandana, she is just incredible. I've got three grandkids who are bathed in maternal vitamin D3 from conception through breastfeeding. Once they got up to solid food, they get 50 IU per pound of body weight a day of vitamin D3. These kids have T-Rex immune systems. They don't get sick. There's no colic, there's no rash, there's no crap and all that.

2:03:25.6 Craig: Yeah, I spoke with Henry about the 6500 international units minimum for a woman carrying in order to have a sufficient vitamin D level for both mum and baby.

2:03:39.6 Pete: And I think that's low, and I think that's... Personally I think that's low. My daughter, my niece all took 10,000 IU a day, matter of fact, my niece went up to 25000 IU a day, 'cause she also had a problem with asthma and she gets over 20000 her asthma goes away. So her last trimester was boom, taken 25,000 IU a day of vitamin D3. And her little critter, I don't have her picture in there, just... Keto bugs here. Oh, by the way, they're all budding Einsteins. They're Mensa candidates and they got neuro motor skills that just blow you away, they're all Olympic class athletes.

2:04:15.7 Craig: Well that was what I was gonna ask you, but you know, the philosophically speaking and you start looking at the other implications of making sure your new family's addition, your new baby, the outcomes on life, intelligence and the sexual health, all of these aspects that may be the low-hanging fruit in terms of vitamin D.

2:04:41.1 Pete: Now the other thing, when I get couples together, I solve the cluster headache problem for one, the supporter is not doing anything, so I'll get the supporter on it too. I say, "Are you guys of childbearing age?" "Yeah." "Well, you both wanna be taking vitamin D3. But be careful." [laughter] "Fertility goes way up when you're both taking vitamin D3."

2:05:04.8 Craig: There's a really good graphic...

2:05:07.4 Pete: If you're not planning on a family, be careful.

2:05:09.4 Craig: I'll put the graphic up on the screen, just while we're wrapping up, in terms of that just show how vitamin D is involved throughout pregnancy. It's quite an illustrative graphic.

2:05:23.4 Pete: It's fascinating. Totally fascinating.

2:05:25.1 Craig: And in terms of preeclampsia, the risk of needing to have a cesarean section, all of that increases as your vitamin D level decreases, believe it or not. And I know that following the cluster headache groups that many times mums will come on and say, "I've just had a baby and the attacks have started." It's just from my perspective, knowing what I know about vitamin D now, it's like... It's no wonder that the attacks have started because you've been providing vitamin D for yourself and for a precious little human from the past nine months. It's crazy stuff.

2:06:07.0 Pete: It's so natural. It's like falling out of bed or falling off a log. I mean, once you get up on vitamin D3, everything starts working better. I mean, every system in your body starts working better.

2:06:19.1 Craig: And I think that's the problem, right? Because it just looks and appears to be this low hanging bit of fruit that people will go, Well why hasn't my doctor picked up that bit of fruit? Why hasn't the whole medical community picked this ripe bit of juicy fruit that is Vitamin D? And that's why they think that potentially it's snake oil. But I tell you what, if you're watching this, it is not. Head over to the vitaminDwiki.com, the link's in the description. Pete...

2:06:51.3 Pete: Henry's done a marvelous job.

2:06:53.8 Craig: He has. You can check out the interview with Henry Lahore on my channel. Thank you for watching. And Pete, thank you. Thank you, thank you and thank you again for what you have done for myself, for my family, for my uncle and his wife, for the Mary fellow that lives 500 kilometers away from me down the coast. He owns a barbershop. Thank you on behalf of him. Jason down, he's about 50 kilometers in the country. He's got an orchard, a really nice guy, on behalf of him, thank you. All the Kiwis that have benefited from this regimen and from the people that will benefit from it, thank you so much.

2:07:36.1 Pete: Craig, you're so welcome. I mean, it's a pleasure having this interview because it's a chance to get some information out that many people desperately need. And thank you for doing this. You're doing a super job.