Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcription has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, founder of Yes to Life, the UK charity that supports people with cancer in accessing and learning about the many scientifically based benefits of integrated medicine, a synthesis of conventional treatment and a vast array of lifestyle and complementary therapies. One of the things I like to do on this show is to look into the way that things work as our understanding of the body and of cancer is growing and changing at an increasing pace and it’s really important that those whose life is on the line know of any and every resource that could help. So today I’m going to be speaking to one of my regular guest experts, Mark Bennett, who is also someone on a mission to know more and an inveterate explorer of both the science and the clinical application of knowledge. It’s been a while since you were on the Yes5 show, very pleased to have you back.

Mark Bennett
Thank you, Robin. It’s been too long, so thank you for getting in touch and stirring up this particular conversation, you’re sure about that.

Robin Daly
Great so yeah I’m very pleased to be introduced by you to a new arena of cancer therapy that at this point I don’t know a lot about so many thanks for bringing it to my attention and we’re going to be speaking about carbon dioxide as a therapeutic agent. Now CO2 generally doesn’t get very much good press these days so it’s good to hear they could actually contribute to our well-being in some way. I’ve had a little delve into some of the material you sent me to look at and it’s clear that today’s investigation could prompt some quite fundamental re-evaluation of ideas around cancer. So I’d like to start off by asking you to revisit what we know about CO2’s more popular companion oxygen in relation to the development and progress of cancer.

Mark Bennett
Well, I mean, the focus, that is exactly the point. The focus is always on oxygen and, you know, oxygen is, you know, we believe that we breathe purely because we need oxygen. Well, yes, we need oxygen to literally combine with glucose or fats to actually create energy within the mitochondria down the electron transport chain. And that is, you know, a fundamental instrumental basis of energy production. You know, you’ve got glucose plus oxygen. It creates energy, adenosine triphosphate, plus water, plus carbon dioxide, plus heat. I mean, that’s the basic equation, isn’t it? So, you know, obviously we focus on the energy substrate, whether that’s a fat or a carbohydrate. And and then we combine with oxygen. So, of course, we think purely about what oxygen is essential.

Mark Bennett
We’ve got to have it. And of course, it’s essential. We can’t live without oxygen. But the thing that is never discussed is the fact that oxygen literally cannot do what it’s supposed to do at a cellular level without the presence of carbon dioxide.

Robin Daly
You know, that’s very different than it because it is my mindset is well carbon dioxide is the kind of waste product If you like you see it happens to benefit other life forms, but for us, it’s just that thing you’ve done done with that Let’s get rid of that

Mark Bennett
It’s a waste gas. That’s how we view it, is waste gas. It’s like, well, actually when one looks outside the whole molecular biology aspect, we’re talking about carbon dioxide being the devil in Canada when it comes to, you know, the health of the planet. Well, maybe just maybe we need to reevaluate that. And, you know, that’s a much bigger conversation, that particular topic. But what I’m saying is, is from the point of view of just viewing it as a waste gas, it could not be further from the truth. And Robin, seriously, I have only recently, I say recently, in the last six months, I’ve really started to delve into this, okay? And I am still on a big journey, learning journey myself on this. But I wanted to raise it to you because I am, I’m using this in clinic with my clients who have cancer on an integrative basis, okay?

Mark Bennett
And they want to understand things that they can do to help them get as much control as possible over this condition. And it’s not just cancer, it’s all chronic disease. It doesn’t matter what shape or form, the disease comes in, you know, dysfunction and disease. Quite frankly, if one actually optimizes carbon dioxide levels in the body, you can sometimes see quite significant changes occurring from a symptomatology perspective and possibly even disease progress perspective. So let’s, you know, let’s look at this in a slightly different way, in a very different way, which is carbon dioxide is not just this deadly byproduct that we all have to sort of breathe out. As Adopt, I can’t remember the name of the doctor at this point in time famously said, carbon dioxide gives oxygen wings.

Mark Bennett
So what he was saying was, was that you cannot release, you cannot release oxygen to the cells in order to undertake the equation that I just talked about in terms of energy production, okay? You cannot release oxygen from hemoglobin, which is, you know, red blood cells, which of course, pick up oxygen from the lungs and then transport it throughout the body to every single tissue. How does the red blood cell physically release oxygen from itself in order to give that oxygen to the cell and the mitochondria to be able to produce energy? And that bond is strong between, you know, between hemoglobin and oxygen, it’s very strong. And the only way, the only way that that can happen is if there is sufficient level, there’s sufficient levels of carbon dioxide, okay? In that environment, in the cell. And that obviously is a byproduct of energy production.

Mark Bennett
So if you are already under producing energy on a cellular basis, then clearly you’re gonna be producing less CO2. If you produce less CO2, you’ve got less ability to release the oxygen needed for that equation to occur. So it’s like a sort of feed forward mechanism. The more energy you produce, carbon dioxide you produce, which means you can carry on producing energy, whereas the opposite obviously takes hold if you’re not doing that. So it’s called the Bohr effect, the BOHR effect. And it is, I mean, I remember the Bohr effect just about in my O level chemistry class. And of course, I had no knowledge about, I had no inkling that it would ever be anything that might be of use to me later on in life or talking about this sort of stuff to clients. But the Bohr effect is absolutely fundamental to the whole process, where basically the increase in CO2 actually reduces the pH or increases the acidity, which therefore allows that bond between oxygen and hemoglobin to be broken.

Robin Daly
Okay fascinating stuff, eh? So I’m going to stick with oxygen a bit for this first bit of the talk because I want to make quite clear you know how oxygen plays into the whole picture with cancer and then we can see how this new ingredient was not new obviously but how that plays into it as well. So during the last two decades I’ve seen oxygen therapists for cancer go from being kind of under the radar approaches very quietly done in back rooms to being quite well known coming in at a variety of forms that perhaps is most commonly seen as hyperbaric oxygen therapy and now that’s available on the high street. So this has got good evidence of its effectiveness in a variety of scenarios both in cancer and other conditions but maybe you could just give us the known benefits of oxygen therapy in this way.

Mark Bennett
Well, I mean, oxygen therapy, I mean, if you really boil it down to its basics, it’s all about creating energy within the cell. If the cell has got abundant energy, it starts to do what it needs to do and it actually repairs itself. It actually doesn’t become susceptible to disease. So if you look at an overarching principle of health and well-being, I mean, this is very reductionist, but this is a worse setting. It is the lack of energy production, the capability of the cell to produce abundant energy, OK, which ultimately causes problems. So if one is looking at the the efficient energy production process within a cell, you’ve got two ways of doing it. You do it with oxygen or you do without oxygen. OK, and with oxygen, you basically create multiple. I mean, you create 36, 36 to 38 units of adenosine triphosphate, OK, which is the currency of energy that we need to produce. OK, as opposed to in an anaerobic form, you produce two. And it’s like there’s a huge discrepancy between those two processes.

Mark Bennett
So so oxygen is a fondant, as we all know, we know we need to breathe in order to physically stay alive. And that that is obviously we’re bringing in oxygen. But what is interesting, though, when you look at like hyperbaric oxygen chamber treatments and you look at things like ozone, you know, which, of course, is another way of putting in oxygen in a different form into the body, what are the benefits? What might be the benefits, the additional benefits of actually mixing carbon dioxide as sort of three to five percent with hyperbaric oxygen? I mean, what would the benefits be? And that’s a really interesting question. And there are people doing that now where they’re actually getting a bit of carbon dioxide into the into the oxygen chamber in order to actually give oxygen wings. So it’s not just about humping and forcing oxygen towards the cell. You’ve got to be able to utilize it efficiently. And that’s the point. So the CO2 gives oxygen wings.

Robin Daly
So, apart from just increasing the supply of oxygen, you’re saying, yeah, okay, so it’s not much use if we can’t use it, but it does have other effects as well, isn’t it, the oxygen in terms of our immunity.

Mark Bennett
Well, oxygen is fundamental to our biochemistry, but I’m not going to, I don’t know enough about that particular subject to go into the fact that it does this or does that in the body. What I do know is that as an overarching principle, if you’ve got abundant energy production, which needs to involve oxygen, then you are basically creating abundant cellular energy. And if you’re creating abundant cellular energy, then in a really, really simplistic way, your cells will have a much less chance of malfunctioning and creating any form of disease. It doesn’t matter whether it is cancer or dementia or motor neural disease.

Mark Bennett
It doesn’t matter. So energy production, and this is very much down the sort of pro metabolic route, which I am now really, really diving down in terms of my clinical practice. And lots of things are shifted because every day is another day of learning and you begin to realize that a lot of the stuff that one was originally talking about may not actually be optimal in terms of where one actually takes advice. And of course, I said recently to somebody, I try to be as wrong as little as possible. And what has to be aware of the fact that a lot of training is based on the paradigms and those paradigms are not necessarily correct. And of course, there’s that famous quote by a doctor to junior doctors, I can’t actually quote it word for word. But what he was saying was, congratulations on receiving your doctorate, but actually please remember one thing, which is in five years, half of what you have been taught will be wrong.

Mark Bennett
Which half are your patients going to get? That’s quite a powerful four percent. And so what I’m saying is, is that when it comes to things that we believe are absolutely indisputable. I mean, we know when people say we know that this is the case or the science is settled. That’s always a dangerous comment. It’s settled. Science is about questioning things. It’s constantly questioning things and understanding things and having a broader view on things and being able to understand it in a more in-depth way. Because you can very easily get led down particular paths that are reductionist in thinking. And, you know, this oxygen thing is a classic example, you know, more is not better. You know, it doesn’t necessarily mean that, you know, if you put a hundred percent pure oxygen into the body, you’re going to do better with it.

Mark Bennett
It does depend on how that oxygen is used. And we’ve got to understand the pathways and the processes upon which we then utilize that oxygen to create energy, which ultimately fuels everything that we want in the body. So if one takes this, you know, how can we use this conversation about carbon dioxide, for example, to actually help us, you know, use some basic testing? I mean, if you go to your GP surgery, you’ll probably see on your blood test day, you’ll probably see the word bicarbonate, you know, stroke CO2. Well, how much time does one actually give to that line, you know, that line, the number of times I see on people’s blood work that is classified as normal? Yeah, well, normal is not optimal, we know that. But normal blood work, oh, everything’s normal. Well, OK, your CO2 levels are low, they’re not optimal. So if your CO2 levels in your blood work, your bicarbonate stroke CO2 levels are suboptimal, what does that potentially tell you about the production of energy within the body?

Mark Bennett
It tells you instantly that there is suboptimal energy production going on. And actually, low CO2 bicarbonate is a surrogate marker for suboptimal thyroid function, because the thyroid is actually the master controller of energy production within the body. So if one is looking at it from that perspective, it’s a very useful tool to be able to say, well, look, OK, the energy process, the energy production process of that equation we talked about right beginning this conversation is just not happening efficiently. So why, you know, what is it that carbon dioxide does apart from giving oxygen wings? You know, there’s so many other things that it does within the body that are never, never discussed, never normally discussed. OK, and those things include vasodilation. It’s one, it is the master vasodilator in the body. We think of nitric oxide as being the vasodilator in the body. But nitric oxide is actually the backup vasodilator when you haven’t got enough carbon dioxide.

Mark Bennett
It’s interesting. So nitric oxide, but just to finish that bit off about the vasodilation, nitric oxide actually inhibits the energy production process on the electron transport chain. So too much nitric oxide is a problem. We don’t necessarily want more nitric oxide. So if it’s a backup system, so vasodilation is a really important part of this process. So if you do a CO2 bath, if you bathe in CO2, which we could talk about, you know, we can talk about how to do that, but CO2 bathing tends to give you a warm flushing feeling, which is that vasodilation process actually on the skin.

Robin Daly
Okay, yeah, we must dig into a bit more. Very interesting, all of that, yeah. And just to pick up on your point about science, I think it’s an unbelievable challenge for people to remain open-minded when they’ve learned so much, to actually be always putting in there they could be wrong. It’s a difficult part of the picture to keep in focus. Science, all too often I describe as, they used to think they knew but now we know, is the way it tends to operate. Anyway, okay, well look, I read in one of those things you sent to me, we’ve known since 1940 that under clinical conditions, low oxygen and low carbon dioxide generally occur together. So here we’ve got a piece of information that’s the best part of a century old, but despite the exponential rise of cancer, has received scant attention, really. So I’ve embraced a new word to describe low levels of CO2, hypercapnia, never heard of it.

Robin Daly
Maybe we’ll hear more about that one as time goes on, but it seems it’s related to hypoxia, which were quite familiar. So would you say more about the direct connection between the levels of CO2 and other levels of oxygen, if they move up and down together, what’s going on there?

Mark Bennett
Well, they are integrally related, so if you have a lack of CO2, you are going to not be able to release the oxygen you need from hemoglobin, so therefore your CO2 levels, your tissue levels of O2 will actually fall because you haven’t got enough carbon dioxide to physically break the bond between hemoglobin and oxygen. So they literally mirror each other. So yes, if you’ve got an oximeter on your finger, I’ve seen this recently in hospital with a very odd one who was actually in hospital, and his O2 levels were apparently lower than they wanted it to be. So what did they ask him to do? They asked him to deep, deep breathing, to actually hyperventilate effectively, which actually is the wrong thing to do because it actually, what you’re doing is you’re basically pushing out CO2 from the body, which actually reduces the chance of releasing oxygen at that point in time.

Mark Bennett
So restricting intake, actually air intake, or actually under breathing as opposed to over breathing will actually release more oxygen towards the tissues. Okay. I know that sounds

Robin Daly
That’s really counterintuitive, yes.

Mark Bennett
And so if you, I don’t know whether you come across, or you would have come across a book, Breath, by James Nestor, fascinating book. And he talks about how, I think it was in the 80s, the US Olympic team were training in a particular way where they were actually trying to restrict breathing, in order to actually improve performance. So it is really fascinating. I mean, I’ve tried running a couple of times, just breathing through the nose. It’s very, very distressing to do. I mean, you feel like you are gonna suffocate. Yeah, I can imagine. It’s not a good, you know, it’s not a natural thing to do. I mean, I try and breathe through the, in through the nose and out through the mouth. That’s the way I would typically do it, yeah. But interestingly, overbreathing, you know, breathing more rapidly is a sign of dysfunction on its own.

Mark Bennett
Okay, because things actually feed into each other. So there’s actually this inverse relationship between, for example, carbon dioxide and lactate, lactic acid, okay? And this actually is highly relevant to cancer because lactic acid actually is a very potent stimulator of metastasism cancer, okay? And the VEGF, you know, the stimulates growth. And so if you actually have these, this low level of carbon dioxide, lactate levels actually rise, okay, within the tumor, which then actually promotes growth and metastasis, okay, of the cancer. But interestingly, lactate as it builds up actually increases your breathing rate.

Mark Bennett
It’s stimulating this this it’s a vicious cycle Yeah, so the so the so the the less co2 you have the more lactate which then dries more breathing Which actually then rids the body of carbon dioxide. So you end up in this tailspin Yeah And this is why the you know breath work proper breath work And there’s a lot of really dodgy breath worth that breath work out there by the way and you know, I’m not a breath work specialist, but You really want to be focusing on a breathing technique that is going to reduce the frequency of your breathing Okay, so you breathe less you actually restrict intake the boot a co Dr. Butakos Breathwork is all about carbon dioxide. It’s all about you know Breathing in a more efficient way and by breathing in a more efficient way We’re talking about at rest in a non-stress situation. You might be breathing Twice a minute. Yeah, you know, it’s like, you know, that’s that’s low breath work.

Mark Bennett
I mean, you know, yeah Yeah, and and and but that’s when you’re in a non-stress situation in Katie and not exercising in you know You’re you’re in a sort of meditative state, but it’s really fascinating. Just just just Focusing on breath work. I mean even if you just say well, I’m gonna breathe in for four seconds I’m gonna hold it for four seconds and then I’m gonna breathe out for four seconds and I’m gonna hold it out for four seconds That dramatically changes the the breath in the body that box breathing concept Yeah, and that’s I’m not I’m not a specialist on this. But what I’m saying is boot a co-doctor but takers Work and working with a boot a co-practitioner is can be transformative, you know And you can actually that the study is done on this particular process to do with just asthma You know reducing the requirement for asthma medication by 90% by just thing in this particular way Because when people get sick, they over breathe you can see it I mean, he’s ridiculous you actually go into society.

Mark Bennett
You can see people mouth breathing mouth breathing overbreathing

Robin Daly
Interesting, interesting. Well, you know, yeah, some of those things you’re saying are quite counterintuitive. There’s definitely, we have a thing built in. I think it’s quite endemic within the kind of intuitive medicine world that with oxygen more is good. And that’s sort of always the case that more oxygen is good. And the picture with regard to CO2 and oxygen, certainly for myself, and I think for many people, it’s a kind of either or situation. As one goes up, the other goes down, that kind of thing. But we’ve actually known for a long, long time, this is not the case, it’s strange, isn’t it? That’s not the general thing that we are told.

Mark Bennett
But it’s a classic example of the Mark Twain quote. It’s what, you know, for sure that just ain’t so, yeah. And, you know, I mean, how many times, Robin, does that come up in this field? You know, it comes up so often time and time again. I honestly, it’s one of my most, it’s one of the best quotes, I think, for this space, which is, oh, we know that to be the case. We know that, you know, it’s like saying, well, we know that diabetes is caused by eating very high carbohydrate diets. Well, actually, when you lift the lid on that comment alone, it’s actually to do with mitochondrial. It’s actually the inability to oxidize glucose efficiently within the mitochondria that causes the backing up of the blood sugars. And so it’s not the carbohydrate per se. It’s the fact that your mitochondria are just not oxidizing or burning glucose efficiently, which they should be able to do. So the next question is, is why are the mitochondria not?

Mark Bennett
Why not? Then you start looking at endotoxin, you know, which is, you know, actually the exhaust of, and this is relevant to cancer, but it’s just as relevant as to diabetes. So endotoxin being produced in the gut. Well, how many times have we talked about gut health being absolutely integral, the microfluorine, the microbiome, the balance of the microbiome, whatever that perfect balance is, because everyone’s got a unique identity. But what I’m saying is the overarching principles, okay, of certain species of bacteria may be overgrowing and causing problems and causing LPS, this endotoxin. Now, endotoxin shuts down the mitochondrial process.

Mark Bennett
It literally shuts down the process of creating energy, okay? So if you want to shut it down, you produce more endotoxin within the body, and we can talk about why endotoxin is produced. That’s another huge conversation because then you start talking about the so-called healthy foods like resistant starches, which, you know, everyone says you need more of because they feed the bacteria in the gut. But if you’ve got dysbiosis and imbalance in the bacteria of the gut, okay, and most of us are walking wounded in the modern world because of the way that we were born or how long we have breastfed, et cetera, et cetera, oral contraceptive use, stress, toxins in the environment, poor dietary choices, I mean, literally the list goes on.

Mark Bennett
Well, assuming that most of us are walking wounded, then we’ve actually got overgrowth of bacterial species which produce, typically these are gram-negative bacteria, the more sort of opportunistic, aggressive ones, and they produce this endotoxin which is like the exhaust that comes out of them, which then literally comes out of your gut and poisons you systemically from your gut. And that shuts down your mitochondria, which means you then produce less CO2, okay? So you then actually start this tailspin, and it’s not just the endotoxin that’s the issue, it’s the fact that we could literally talk about polyunsaturated fats, the sort of seed oil obsession, the fact that we should all be cooking everything in seed oils and fried foods, and the fact that our intake of these seed oils is grown dramatically over the last 30,

Mark Bennett
40 years, and to the point where we are dripping in it. Okay? And this stuff, again, shuts down the efficient energy production. So everything we just talked about from a dietary perspective through to, or from your gut health perspective, through to food choices being based on what we believe could be healthy. Oh, we should be cooking in rapeseed oil as opposed to butter. Actually drives mitochondria dysfunction, which actually reduces CO2 production, which means you have less oxygen going to the cells, which means you’re getting yourself into a really, really difficult situation. So each of those elements we just talked about, we could do four hours on, honestly. We could talk about hours. But the point here about just going back to endotoxin is resistant starches, which is believed to be really healthy, dietarily, okay?

Mark Bennett
As in, you know, you should be having, you know, potato salad because the potato has been heated and then it’s been cooled and there’s a lot more resistant starch in it, or white rice that’s been heated and cooled, a lot more resistant starch, and it feeds the bacteria, the beneficial bacteria. Yes, it does feed the beneficial bacteria, but it also feeds the bad guys, okay? And if you’ve got dysbiosis, that is then going to spew out endotoxin, which is going to make the whole thing worse. So it’s all about what one eats, okay, and the balance of that bacteria. And when you start to look at this from the point of view of gut health, it’s really interesting how an increase in CO2 levels in the gut is actually what you want. You actually want higher levels of CO2 in the gut as opposed to oxygen. So the bacteria that tend to thrive in an oxygen environment in the gut are the bad ones, okay?

Robin Daly
It is secondated and I just want to put a spotlight back on the thing that she really mentioned in many ways throughout the talk and which has been my experience. Over the last 10 years there was the beginnings of a conversation about 10 or a few more years before about this sort of convergence of chronic diseases pointing towards the same causes for all of them and this has just gone on and on. It’s marched on and I think the more we know the more we narrow it down to a few quite fundamental processes usually around energy are involved in all these chronic diseases and it’s just the different manifestations of the same problem and that’s something we really need to pay attention to.

Mark Bennett
that is absolutely spot on from my perspective, that is exactly where my clinical practice is going. And actually the irony of all this is, is that the more I do this, the simpler it becomes. Though it does because actually you begin to realize that there are, and again, how do I summarize this? There are overarching principles that apply. The principles apply to all of us, Homo sapiens. We are all part of the same clan. We’re not like, you know, one of us is an alien or something. It’s like, we’re all part of the same clan. But there are nuances, okay, in terms of how one applies those principles. And we need to be 100% aware of what we should be doing with our lives, as opposed to the things that we think we should be doing with our lives when it comes to optimal health and wellbeing.

Mark Bennett
And so every aspect of how we interact with our environment, our environment being what you eat, what you drink, how you think, how you move, your viral load, your bacterial load, your toxic load, your stress load, everything that makes you who you are, because you are in the center of all those inputs. And your biochemistry is shaped by those inputs. It’s like, it’s no more complex than that. And actually, if we have too much of the wrong thing going on, then you actually start to create dysfunction. And that dysfunction will manifest in whatever the weak link is in your backdrop. So yes, I think there isn’t a huge amount of truth about the fact that there’s a lot of commonality between these various conditions, these chronic diseases, which none of us want. And ultimately, we put labels on things because that’s how our minds work. We don’t have to… Embox the map. Yeah, but later just has dysfunction.

Robin Daly
Okay, so we’ve not got a lot of time left. I’d like to have a quick word about the acid-alkaline balance in cancer, something that’s been spoken about in the world of alternative medicine forever. But it seems like what is still there hasn’t got a way. You know, this is also known as pH. Well, can we just say a little bit about how it changes and the effect this has and tell us why it’s an important feature of cancer to understand?

Mark Bennett
Well, I mean, the first thing I would say is that the body, you know, when we talk about acid alkaline balance, yes, there is obviously we got to have a very finely managed balance between acid and alkalinity in the body. And the blood does that very, very, very well. I mean, the body systems, the body has multiple systems, including bicarbonate systems, which are CDO2 based to actually to actually balance pH in the blood. And you know, if you start, you know, you know how people say, well, I’m measuring my urine acidity and alkalinity with with urine sticks. Well, yeah, the urine pH will change based on what you are doing to yourself. OK. But the body actually balances its pH in the blood incredibly tightly, because if it varies by a very small fraction, you will die. Right. And so and so I can’t remember the exact number for the pH in the blood, but it’s, you know, it’s slightly more alkaline than it is acidic.

Mark Bennett
And and the systems that we have are intricate and overlapped. And there’s lots of backup systems to make sure that we maintain that pH. But of course, CO2, going back to this topic about CO2. CO2 is when it’s dissolved in water, is of course slightly acidic. And it’s it again, it comes down to how the biology that we’ve just been talking about is impacted by a slightly more acidic situation, which by the way, in order to release the oxygen from the red blood cells has to be slightly more acidic for the Bohr effect to take to take account or crack in. So so it’s and then you’ve got the build up of lactate and you’ve got the opposing the opposing effects of CO2 and lactate. So it’s yes, alkaline acidity is a big is a big deal. But when it comes to and this is my personal opinion based on, for example, acid alkaline diets, for example, it’s just too simplistic of you to say, well, I need to eat all my food needs to be alkaline or I need to be drinking alkaline water.

Mark Bennett
What you need is abundant levels of of these bicarbonate irons in the body. OK, so you’ve got access to these things. You need abundant access to everything that ultimately allows the body to maintain that very strict pH level in the blood that’s got to be maintained. So if you’re not giving the body the things it needs through everything, it’s not just nutrition, but actually proper breath work and actually environmental factors that ultimately drive us like stress. I mean, stress is a is a is a massive problem, massive issue. OK, not just the stress of work, but the stress of relationships, the stress of the world, the stress of EMS, the stress of human pain. OK, it’s like these are massive issues. So so it’s I do think obviously the acid alkaline balance is is fundamental to optimal health and the systems there are going to maintain that. But when it comes to, for example, saying, well, I need to meet a more alkaline diet, I would you know, I was originally thinking that nine, ten years ago.

Mark Bennett
OK, whereas now I just don’t even give that a thought.

Robin Daly
Right okay so you’re looking at rather than trying to sort of modify the balance from the outside you’re supporting the body and giving you the good balance it should. Exactly and

Mark Bennett
And you can go, oh, you can do a urine test and go, oh, I’m acidic today or I’m alkaline tomorrow. It’s like, well, that’s just the body basically compensating for whatever is going on deeper in the system.

Robin Daly
I want to spend the last little bit talking about the practicalities of CO2 as a therapy. What does it look like? I mean, what do you do if you want to support this really, really good

Mark Bennett
So there are so many different ways of doing this. Okay, so one can look at this, you can use it as a medicinal tool, and you can try and increase your co2 production, okay, by, for example, taking sodium bicarbonate, you know, which is, I mean, bicarbonate, soda or sodium bicarbonate, a food grade product, like almond hammer, for example, on Amazon, is a couple of pounds for, you know, it looks scary, because it’s got pots and pans on it, and you think, oh my God, oh, yeah, it’s food grade is absolutely nothing wrong with taking that. I mean, I actually use it every day myself. And we’re talking like half a teaspoon on an empty tummy, do not consume this with food is just, you know, really, you’re going to shut your stomach acid down.

Mark Bennett
So the last thing you want to be doing is taking anywhere near food. So take it well away from food, half a teaspoon, you know, in water. And people take it many more times a day, you know, especially when you’re starting to feel unwell, you’ve got a cough or cold coming along, there’s loads of there’s loads of evidence to suggest that taking sodium bicarbonate multiple times a day away from food can absolutely change the outcome of coffee, cold or anything you’re presenting with on a long-nosed basis. So that’s a really cheap, easy way to do that stuff. You got, yeah, you then got bag breathing. I mean, you just see for paper bag, you just just very, just for a very short period of time, just re inhale what you exhale. And if you do that, for example, just before bed, that can make a difference to how you sleep, you can actually bring down that that session alone can actually bring down blood pressure by about 30 points within minutes.

Mark Bennett
I mean, because it’s a basal dilator. So, you know, if you’re upping your your CO2 levels, I mean, it’s a sandwich bag, a paper sandwich bag can literally be medicinal. Right. Great one. What, what about CO2 bathing, you know, as in bathing? I mean, there’s an economical way of doing this, or there’s an expensive way of doing it. So what you can do is you can get a leaf bag, you know, those big leaf bags that you get from B&Q, you know, so a huge leaf bag which you can get in, you can get a CO2 cylinder for a home bar, you get a regulator from Amazon, you get some tubing. And yeah, we’re talking like 28 quid for the regulator and a few quid for the tubing. And we’re talking about four pounds for the leaf bag. And then what you do is you just put with the regulator, you just put a you just let the carbon dioxide go into the leaf bag.

Mark Bennett
And then you know where the carbon dioxide is heavier than air. So what you do is you use a candle and I’ve done this, you know, it’s jaw dropping because you think you’re going bonkers because you’re like filling up this leaf bag with nothing. Yeah. And it’s like, what’s starting to go? Well, what’s in there? Okay. And then you use a candle and actually drop it into the bag. And of course, the candle goes out goes out on the CO2 level.

Robin Daly
You’ve got the bag standing up and the stuff stays in there cause it’s heavier than that. Yeah.

Mark Bennett
And you basically take your clothes off and sit in front of the TV and you can bathe in there for an hour. And it’s like you’re doing a CO2 bathing session. And again, this is all on the back of Dr. Ray Pete’s work, who unfortunately is no longer with us. But he was talking about the naked mole rat. I knew nothing about the naked mole rat. And the naked mole rat lives 30 years compared to the average life expectancy of a standard rodent, which is three years. And the naked mole rat literally burrows a hole and breathes out carbon dioxide. And then of course absorbs it transcutaneously through the skin. And bats are the same thing. Bats hang in caves. And of course, they sit together in caves and their CO2 from each other breathing actually increases the carbon dioxide in the environment, which then means they live a lot longer than a standard rodent would.

Mark Bennett
So, you know, nature has a lot of clues about this. And CO2 bathing is something that’s really, really, really easy to do. And you can buy, if you want to go expensive, you can go to something called body stream, which is actually like an adapted sort of dry suit. And you literally, you suck out the air and then you put in carbon dioxide and you look like a Michelin man and you can bathe like an hour a day. Or you can use a carbo and aloe, which is literally mixing three to 5% of carbon dioxide from, let’s say, I don’t know, a soda stream, gas cylinder straight into, you breathe it through a mask and you just get about three to 5% of carbon dioxide going with oxygen.

Mark Bennett
And you do that after a few minutes a day, you know, that can dramatically improve it. But the big one, the big one is diet. Because, and this again will sound controversial based on all the things we’ve been talking about for years, but this really is about, funny enough, if you look at carbohydrates and you look at fats, carbohydrates have 50% more carbon dioxide releasing potential than fats do. So, so actually it’s about eating the right type of carbohydrate in the diet and not necessarily going towards fat burning, which, you know, a lot of us have been talking about myself included, okay, when it comes to ketogenic diets. And therefore, and this is my point about this whole subject, Robin, is that you have to reevaluate what you know, and then keep thinking about the principles. Okay. So actually, what is it about carb, carbohydrates are going to release a lot more or create a lot more energy, okay, in terms of adenosine triphosphate and therefore carbon dioxide.

Mark Bennett
So it’s actually 50% more carbon dioxide is produced by eating appropriate carbohydrates in terms of energy production within the cells. So, you know, you’ve got to create it internally, but you can also use externally absorbed or given to the body in an external form, exogenous form. And obviously if you’re doing both, you’re going to increase your carbon dioxide.

Robin Daly
Okay, and in 30 seconds any caveats things people should be aware of.

Mark Bennett
Um, well, just like anything, never rush into things and never just overdo them. You know, more is not better. You can’t just say, well, you know, I need to now be flooding myself with carbon dioxide and, you know, I need to have more and more of this. It’s the same principle to say, well, you know, I need more oxygen. You know, it’s like, well, we need to do with all these things is move slowly towards shape making changes that ultimately improve, um, levels of this particular, um, substance in the body. And one year, one really simple technique we, which you could do to monitor this indirectly, for example, would be to do temperature and pulse rate tests. Um, which ultimately would be the best measure of thyroid function. This is far better than running a thyroid test. Okay. Blood tests. This is actually saying, well, look, you know, if your basil temperature, so you measure your temperature actually first, when you wake up 20 minutes after breakfast and mid-afternoon, okay.

Mark Bennett
And you measure your pulse rate. And if your, if your basil temperature is 36 and a half degrees centigrade or less, you have definitely not creating enough energy. Cause obviously the by-product of energy production is heat as well as CO2. You know, you could actually measure how changing your breath work or eating in a different way, okay. Actually impacts your energy production in your cells by just doing this simple test at home.

Robin Daly
Okay all right thanks lots of great cheap tips today and no expensive therapies here. Okay very good thank you very much indeed Mark very fascinating all lots of new stuff for me there stretch my brains quite significantly. I always enjoy talking to you so a big thank you for coming on the show.

Mark Bennett
Thank you Robin and a real pleasure indeed. Bye.

Robin Daly
Fascinating stuff. Who knew that a way of getting more oxygen is to increase your CO2? Not all that many I reckon. If you found that useful and or interesting remember there are nearly 500 back editions of the show accessible via the Yes To Life website where you can search by guest, topic or keyword. Just go to yestolife.org.uk scroll down the homepage a little until you see the link that takes you to the Yes To Life show page. Thanks for listening today. I’ll be back as usual next week with another Yes To Life show here on UK Health Radio. Goodbye.