#410 Copper, Ceruloplasmin, Iron & the Energy Crisis Inside Your Cells with Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC

This week on The Less Stressed Life, Morley Robbins returns to unpack the misunderstood role of copper in energy production, iron regulation, and chronic fatigue. We explore how stress, poor soil quality, and modern health trends have created a widespread mineral imbalance—and why copper might be the missing link for those struggling with burnout, low energy, or hormonal chaos.

If you’ve ever been told you’re “low iron” or feel like your energy tank is always on empty, this conversation might just reframe everything you thought you knew about your metabolism.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Why you can’t make energy without copper
• How stress and glyphosate deplete bioavailable minerals
• Why most iron labs miss the real issue
• The difference between copper supplements and true bioavailable copper
• How to start supporting your mineral balance

ABOUT GUEST:
Morley Robbins is the creator of the Root Cause Protocol and founder of the Magnesium Advocacy Group. Known as the “Magnesium Man,” Morley left a decades-long career in hospital administration after a personal healing experience led him to question everything he thought he knew about health. Since then, he’s become a passionate educator on mineral balance, performing thousands of consults and digging deep into the roles of magnesium, copper, and iron in chronic illness. Through his research and coaching, Morley helps people get to the root cause of fatigue, inflammation, and hormonal imbalances—one mineral at a time.

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://therootcauseprotocol.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therootcauseprotocol/

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY OF LESS STRESSED LIFE:
🍽️ Over restriction is dead
🥑 Whole food is soul food and fed is best
🔄 Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
🤝 You don’t have to figure it out alone
❤️ Do your best and leave the rest

Transcript

[00:00:00] Christa Biegler, RD: All right. Today on the less stressed life we have back Morley Robbins, who is widely known or was, or is known as the Magnesium man. He's also the creator of the Root Cause protocol, which is how I feel that he's more widely known now. And then founder of the Magnesium Advocacy Group. He has a VA in biology from Dennis and University and an MBA in healthcare administration from George Washington University.

He transitioned from a 32 year career in hospital administration to focus on natural healing after a personal health crisis. He's conducted over 7,500 consults worldwide, emphasizing the critical roles of magnesium, copper, and iron and health. And his work aims to address chronic fatigue and disease by correcting mineral imbalances and oxidative stress through the root cause protocol.

Welcome back. 

[00:00:48] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Thank you. Yeah. 

[00:00:51] Christa Biegler, RD: So on May 7th, the episode or eighth, that week, we had an episode that came out about vitamin D and how we have been oversimplifying vitamin D, and I know that you're true. Desire was to talk about copper. And so here today we're talking about copper. And last episode we opened with talking about your frozen shoulder, how you met your wife, Dr.

Liz, and how it changed your trajectory from I don't do witchcraft to my goodness. There's a lot of other things and it's been quite a rabbit hole would be an understatement probably from there. And I wonder when did all of this kind of start? What year was it when you started the mineral rabbit holes I or the natural healing rabbit holes?

[00:01:33] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: 2009. 

[00:01:34] Christa Biegler, RD: 2009. All right, so we're in 2025 now. So a good amount of time. Quite, quite some time over a decade and a half. So you were first, we talked about this in the bio. You were first, I'll call it, obsessed with magnesium, I think, right? You were known as the Magnesium man had this magnesium advocacy group.

And that, how long was that part of the rabbit hole? Because now there's a focus and a switch to copper. And I wanna understand, because we could spend an entire episode talking about magnesium. Of course, there's over 3000 biochemical reactions, and so I don't know how long you wanna stay on magnesium.

And of course, they all dance with each other to some extent, of course. So when, how long were you in a deep dive on magnesium before you had some epiphanies around copper? 

[00:02:22] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: It was probably about five years. I started with two key questions. Why is everyone so sick? And how's anemia possible on a planet or iron is the number one element.

Which makes no sense at all. We don't have to get into that right now. And the, my focus is around stress and. We're all under stress. There's no one on the planet. If you're above ground you're under stress. We all have varying degrees of stress. COVID was global stress. It was an insane time.

But people, I don't think, put it into the context of what I call the magnesium burn rate, that the more stress we're under the more we're gonna lose magnesium. But there's a very specific reason why that we go right into fight or flight. When you're under stress you're either fighting the bear or you're running from the bear.

And when you're fighting the bear, you better have a lot of adrenaline and cortisol and same if you're running from it. But what people don't know is that there's a metabolic price to pay for that. And what took me. Several, many years. It's four or five years after I was focusing on magnesium.

I was very arrogant about it. I was just un insufferable. And one practitioner finally said more if it was that easy, if just taking magnesium would solve the problem, we would've figured that out. And I, of course would respond you don't understand it the way I do. He was right.

I was wrong. And what I continued to research was what is causing this magnesium? It isn't enough to say that we have stress and it's gonna cause B vitamins to be depleted and magnesium depleted. I really wanted to know why what's the mechanism of action? And it's very simple. There are kinase enzymes.

They're stress enzymes heat sensitive enzymes that Cleve phosphate off. So we can get energy to respond to stress. And the best definition of stress I've ever heard comes my way of Mark Hyman and something he said many years ago. Stress is the body's inability to make energy for the mind to respond to its environment.

It's a beautiful definition of stress. And we've at the end of the day, we've gotta make, yeah, we gotta make energy. We can't make energy to respond to the stress. We're gonna, we're gonna pay a price and we're gonna lose ground as a result of that. And when the stress is chronic, people don't realize it.

And under acute stress stress again, you have this adrenaline and cortisol response, but adrenaline drives iron deeper into the tissue. That's a good thing to know. And cortisol increases the production of metallo thine four to fivefold. But why is that a problem? Because metal thine binds up copper a thousand times stronger than it binds up zinc.

And we live in a very zinc centric society now, and copper's toxic, but you cannot make energy without copper. And in fact, it's in the literature. People haven't taken the time to study it, but it's well chronicled did zinc kills Complex four of the mitochondria. Oh, I didn't know that. So the the evolution of my thinking took place over several years, and it began to realize that it was the stress induced impact on these minerals.

But the greatest stress on planet Earth, hands down is the stress of iron and oxygen. Oxygen is the second most reactive element on the planet. After flooring gas, it's not our friend. We can't live without it, but we can't age without its oxidants and iron. It's 36% of the Earth's composition.

There's a lot of iron on this planet. And now we're adding iron in our food and our supplements and our infusions. And people don't realize what price they're paying, but there's only one element on the planet that can regulate both oxygen and iron at the same time. And that's copper. That's what makes copper standalone in its metabolic importance because it can regulate those two, keep 'em in proper balance inside the body, inside the tissue, inside the mitochondria, and allow the creation of water.

Because that's really what happens inside the mitochondria. There actually are water wheels and if there isn't enough copper, they become Ferris wheels referring to the Ferris form of iron. And when the, when you lose the ability to make water, you lose the ability to release energy. The creation to turn O2 into two molecules of water is the most important obligate chemical reaction on the planet to make energy can't release energy any other way.

So I began to really fixate on that and begin to understand the vulnerability we have as a species if we don't have minerals in general in our diet, but especially if we don't have magnesium and copper and the copper's gotta be bioavailable and that's code, or it's gotta be complex with its enzymes.

If it's not hooked up in ullo plasma, it's not hooked up in dopamine beam, mono oxygenase if it's not hooked up in the PAM enzyme. And we can go on for a couple days talking about the different copper enzymes, but we won't. But there are many, and they're not taught for a reason because it kills the business model of organized medicine.

The less you know about copper, the better off big pharma heads, the better off doctors are. And that's a very annoying thing to say, but it's true. 

[00:08:57] Christa Biegler, RD: I wanna just stop and unpack for a moment. The difference between some copper supplements and bioavailable copper. You just talked about it. But I don't wanna go past it too fast.

'cause I think it could be once we get into, as you very well know, once we get into minerals, there's a lot of nuance around. Okay. Morally, you've just told me why I should care. I think we'll cover, we'll try to highlight those pieces again. You just told me a little bit about why I should care. I can't even make energy without copper.

That's one of the sales pitches to me for copper. Copper's the only thing that can regulate some oxidizing or aging substances that include iron and oxygen. Would that be another sales point for copper? Can't make energy without copper. Can't reg or copper is a main thing that can regulate these two other pro aging ingredients.

What's another sales pitch for, I know there's a lot of sales pitches, but I was just trying to underline a few of the sales pitches for copper and then unpack some other stuff. 

[00:09:58] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Copper clears, exhaust. There's always exhaust given off. Anytime you drive in your car, anytime you're making energy, there is a residual amount of exhaust that superoxide or hydrogen peroxide needs to be turned into a usable form.

That's copper. Thank you very much. Copper colors, everything. And the melanin pigment is copper dependent. It relies on an enzyme called ities and all of the colors. What they like us to focus on is our hair and our eye, and our skin. Now it's the organs you need to be worrying about. The heart needs to be red.

The liver needs to be brown. The gallbladder needs to be green. The spleen needs to be purple. And that color dictates its frequency and its function. It's very important. Copper connects everything, 45% of our connective tissue. Excuse me. 45% of our cells are connective tissue, and there's one enzyme called lyse oxidase that knits collagen, which is strength with elastin, which is flexible.

And it's a zipper like function that brings those two together so that our connective tissue, our blood vessels, our ligaments, fascia all of the connective tissue needs to come together with ly oxidate. Nobody knows about that. And there, there's probably eight or nine others, but that gives people a much broader understanding.

I think one of the most important is it conducts electricity. It's been really good. When the Morris Code came out, when the telegraph came out, they first used iron wire. Until they discovered that copper was three times faster. And there's a German acupuncturist who claims that the meridian meridians that run our body are lined with copper.

So it's just, and the early, in the early life forms, before there was a nervous system copper was the nervous system, copper was the communication. And I think the other one that I think is worth noting is there are hundreds of what are called signaling peptides in our body. People have heard of their sex hormones, steroid hormones, but they've also heard of things like insulin.

They probably have heard of amylin. They may have heard of hemo they've heard of hepcidin. But there are things like oxytocin, vasopressin, cholecystokinin, and there are hundreds of peptides like that, that the body, our body makes them like parked cars. Is your car in the driveway of any value?

No, not until you turn it on and you can get on the highway. Does it become valuable? There's one enzyme again. It's called the Pam enzyme stands for peptid glycine alpha emanating mono oxygenase. Wow. I get a dollar. 

[00:13:13] Christa Biegler, RD: That was a mouthful. 

[00:13:14] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: No I get a dollar every time I say it, but it's, I think after cytochrome oxidase to make water.

The ability of Pam to activate these hormones is profoundly important. And why is that significant today? What do you think the buzz is about? Peptides, we don't have the copper to turn 'em on, so they're selling us turned on peptides because they know we don't have the copper because of the changes in the diet and the food system and the farm farming system.

And so we're bumping up against extinction level events that most people don't know about. 'cause if you can't make energy, if you can't turn on your signaling peptides, if you can't communicate, not gonna make it. And that sounds draconian, but I'm trying to get people's attention. 

[00:14:10] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, 

[00:14:11] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: And copper stands alone.

And everyone loves to get all excited about all boron and, cadmium and molybdenum and it's wait a minute. A pecking copper's at the top. 

[00:14:23] Christa Biegler, RD: So I wanna cover a couple specific topics and we can go whichever place next. I thought we were gonna go to, I think we'll go to a couple of copper supplements versus bioavailable copper and then we'll talk about how people understand it in themselves, which usually we were, we refer to testing to understand things we cannot understand sometimes.

But, we can unpack what that sort of looks like. But let's go back to copper supplementation versus bioavailable copper. And I think this is gonna lend itself nicely to a new hot topic, which is copper peptides as well, because you just brought it up. So I wanna talk about you, you started to talk about this and then we wanted to highlight, what are copper's big selling points.

But let's talk about, and so you already covered a little bit that bioavailable copper was a copper complex with enzyme processes. So will you. Go into that a little bit more because sometimes we hear that I need copper. And so then the solution is to supplement with copper. That's just something that's just the natural thing that happens in our human brains.

And so I wanna understand more the varieties of copper supplements on the market versus bioavailable copper. And then I'll prompt you, if we don't tie in copper peptides in there, which I feel is a slightly different angle. Potentially. 

[00:15:45] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: No the there wasn't a lot of buzz about copper 10 years ago.

Years ago. I've done my small part to stimulate people's awareness about it. And now there's about 50 different supplement companies promoting copper, which I think is great. Rising tide raises all boats. I think it's fine. The the key though is. Unlike magnesium, which I absolutely love and use it daily and still use jigsaw, SRT.

It's great product. The body knows what to do with magnesium as a standalone mineral, and then it gets complex with other end enzyme. Did you say it 

[00:16:25] Christa Biegler, RD: doesn't know what to do with it as a standalone, or It does. It does. 

[00:16:28] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: It does. It does and it gets complex with a TP. The biggest use of magnesium is it's magnesium, a TP, the magnesium between the second and third phosphate.

And when that kinase, enzyme C cleans off the phosphate, that's why magnesium goes into the urine. It, that's the magnesium burn rate is the actual loss of magnesium. But copper's different copper, there's a very sophisticated network of chaperones and transport mechanisms to get copper into the cell, into the mitochondria, into the lysosome for recycling of ferritin or other components of the cell.

It's a very sophisticated process, and there's a very important network of enzymes that are used to load copper into its enzymes. And those are called copper loading enzymes. A TP seven A and a TP seven B seven B is what makes the master antioxidant protein salo plasmin, which I'm sure we'll talk further about.

It's very important. It's the master antioxidant inside the body. Glutathione is the master antioxidant in the cell, and melatonin is the master antioxidant inside the mitochondria. These are very important chemicals as but they're all copper dependent. People don't spend the time talking about that.

And the a p seven B principally in the liver, but other tissue as well. But the principally in the liver is loading copper into the end of the protein. So plasma for the mechanism to turn on those copper loading enzymes is retinol, and retinol is out of favor. Now, oh, we're supposed to suck down vitamin D and we're supposed to be afraid of retinol 'cause it's toxic.

Wink, wink. This has been going on for a century now, but they move the cheese and tell us not to do this and do that, and people fall for it every time. They're like, oh, they did it again. They moved my cheese again. And we're like, oh, yeah but maybe this next time they're serious. No. Stop thinking that.

Please. So retinol is very important for these copper loading enzymes and the atp, seven, eight loads. All the rest, they're probably about 30 different critical enzymes that are copper dependent. But the, it's the order of magnitude that's difficult to impress. We have, at the risk of overwhelming people with big numbers, we have a hundred trillion cells in our body.

Okay, that's a lot of cells. But we have 40 quad trillion mitochondria. Okay, that's about 500 per cell. And some cells have as little as 500, and there's some neurons that have as many as 2 million mitochondria. And so when we say that, oh, there's only one enzyme, cytochrome the oxidase, it converts oxygen into water.

It's happening all over the body. It's like every cell has hundreds of these mechanisms. But we tend to downplay that. And we don't think about the enormous importance of that one enzyme and loading copper into lyal oxidase. Loading copper into the PAM enzyme, loading copper into tyrosinase loading copper into amine oxidase, and on are really important activities that nobody knows about and the buzz in the, on social medias or em, and we're copper toxic.

And it's just, we live in a world of 1984. Everything's upside down and backwards, and that is not true. And the body has very sophisticated ability to regulate is copper. And when copper becomes unbound from its protein op plasma, there's a reason for that. It's trying to activate the immune system, principally the function of the neutrophils.

That's a very important thing to know. And and the mechanism of copper is not known. It's I would equate it to if you've ever walked around a lake and seen ducks swimming in that lake, you see these beautiful birds sitting on top of the water and they just look so majestic as they move through the water and we don't think about the thrashing of their feet so that they can keep moving in that water.

Where the thrashing that's taking place in our body is copper, trying to regulate iron and oxygen. And we just, we've never been exposed to that level of detail, and so we've been taught to believe in disease. There is no disease that it doesn't exist. What does exist is stress induced mineral dysregulation that causes metabolic dysfunction that leads to symptoms lead to energy loss.

That leads to symptoms and the symptoms lead to a label which gets tattooed on our forehead. And then we go to the internet and look up that label, say, oh my gosh, that's exactly what I have. I've got diabetes, I've got, children's disease, I've got arthritis, I've got appendicitis. But they don't stop to say, was there more to the story?

Could there be an energy crisis in that tissue that's not allowing for proper communication? Could the signaling peptides be blocked from doing their job? And, are, is the iron being properly recycled in my body? The two and a half million red blood cells that need to be turned over every second of every day is my body minding the store?

Is there enough copper to do that? And that's the part that I think is missing and it's not. Wildly difficult to understand. It's new and it's a lot of moving parts. And so people for, since the beginning of time, will believe a simple lie than the complex truth. It's easier to believe that I'm anemic then.

Actually you're copper is dysregulated and your iron is stuck in the tissue. What does that mean? And just the whole thought process comes to a standstill. So I think that the idea of historically we got copper in our diet, it was very prevalent in organ meats, very prevalent in shellfish, nuts and seeds, broad leafy green vegetables.

Those were the principle sources of copper snails for the the jet set. But over time, I. The availability of that copper has been challenged by the farming system that after the first World War, it was NPK that blocked copper uptake. And then in the last 50 years, we've had the challenge of farming being exposed to glyphosate and what did 

[00:24:14] Christa Biegler, RD: you call the first one?

[00:24:14] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: M-P-K-N-P-K nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. It was was used in munitions during the First World War, and there was a whole lot left over, so they turned it into a fertilizer, wink, wink, but it blocks copper up, taking the root system of the plant. And that's not my idea. That's, Andre Vasan, world renowned biochemist who, whose hobby was being a dairyman.

He loved milking cows. And he wrote a very important book called Soil Grass Cancer. He outlined this whole concept that takes your breath away when you realize how prevalent NPK was in farming for decades. And so the access to these critical minerals has changed over the course of our lifetime.

And it's out of sight, out of mind. If you don't know about it, you don't think about it. But once you learn about it, then you start to say, wait a minute, what do I need to do? And that's really what this conversation is trying to help people understand that there is more to the story. So the challenge we've got now is how do we restore these minerals, but specifically copper so that we can get the full benefit of his actions in our body.

And, for a long time people would rely on the diet. I don't know that you can rely on the diet anymore because of the impact of glyphosate worldwide because it's a copper chelator and it's not a casual copper chelator. It chelate, glyphosate, chelates copper a billion times faster than it chelates calcium or magnesium.

That's a big deal. Yeah. It chelates copper a thousand times faster and it cates iron or zinc. And again, we're back to big numbers. We 

[00:26:14] Christa Biegler, RD: And this is good and, but I wanna understand, I want to, and we're dancing around a little bit on how we ended up copper deficient and we're now talking about whole food sourcing and how whole food sourcing may not be enough to replete.

And I know that I've got some questions coming up that I know will come up for people because. We don't have a universal agreement whatsoever online around copper. And so I want to make sure we understand why whole food copper or why bioavailable whole food supplementation or however why bioavailable copper versus copper supplementation and is there a place for a couple milligrams of copper supplementation?

Because the reality is that there's people online that promote very large amounts of copper now as well. And so this is, if you, if someone was out there just looking on the internet it could get confusing. And so I wanna make sure we definitely underline the different, the main difference.

And I feel like, do you use, I think you were referring to this, so do you consider copper a car? Is that the analogy that you use or is it something else? 

[00:27:22] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: It, what I was referring to earlier is copper enables the car to get started. That's the car being the signaling peptides. The challenge we've got, Krista, is there's not a really good way to measure copper status in the body.

Let me digress real quick. Run off. I'll, 

[00:27:42] Christa Biegler, RD: I love how the camera follows. 

[00:27:44] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Yeah, the camera. That's fine. Good little camera. Good boy. Yeah, it's fine. So I'll make sure you get a copy of this article. 

[00:27:52] Christa Biegler, RD: So the article is called Plasma Pepto Glycine Alpha emanating Mono Oxygenase Pam. So Plasma, it's Pam and Clop. Plasmin are affected by Agent Copper status and rats and mice.

[00:28:05] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Okay. So this is an article written by Joseph Ska in 2 0 0 5, world renowned copper expert.

But what he's doing is he's revealing that these two enzymes the plasma and the PAM enzyme are a true biological clock for humans, particularly as it relates to aging. I've been, I just found that article two days ago. I thought I had died and gone to heaven because it reveals what they knew 20 years ago about how to measure true bioavailable copper status.

[00:28:52] Christa Biegler, RD: Ah tell us, 

[00:28:54] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: no, neither of the test is allowed to be done. Ah both tests are against the law. Why should make, why? Because it blows up the big pharma model. 

[00:29:06] Christa Biegler, RD: What is the te just to try to understand though. Did he discover a test and then it's not on the market? I don't understand fully. I don't 

[00:29:15] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: know what the test for op plasma has existed since the forties.

He didn't discover that test. The test for the Pam enzyme has existed since the early eighties, but that was developed by Betty ier and Richard means at Johns Hopkins. He didn't discover either test, but what he was doing was creating an interface between the two tests to say, wow, do we have a way to measure copper status in mammals?

It's never been done before, and lo and behold, we do, we're not allowed to do it. And so your listeners are going that doesn't sound right. That doesn't sound fair. Welcome to the world of organized medicine where things are mandated left and right to, to benefit the corporations. To keep us enslaved.

And it's, people don't realize the power of bio available copper to guarantee sovereignty. See, if everyone wants to feel better, they want their health. What health has become in America is symptom relief. Symptom relief is not health. It's sovereignty. I don't need a doctor. I'm on my own.

I've got a good diet and I can generate energy to the extent that I want to. And I don't need a apologist for every part of my body that is true health. Yeah. Where you rise above the demand of the practitioner and most people think, oh, if I could just make the pain, stop. I feel better. 

[00:30:49] Christa Biegler, RD: I understand, right?

As humans, everyone wants to treat the thing. I am a huge fan of health autonomy. I think once when we get to a place where we're in some homeostasis or I don't dunno, maybe I shouldn't say it like that. I think that health autonomy comes with experience putting in repetitions experimenting with yourself.

A lot of details, right? I think health autonomy is a journey. And you call it health sovereignty, and I think they're, they seem they're similar. Similar to me. It definitely, a topic I care a lot about is listening to your body and listening to the message. It shares over testing. And yet I'll bring this in here because you bring up I can understand how we are as humans is, and I'll use a couple examples.

When people take magnesium, they almost immediately feel better. Given the right kind. Yeah. No matter what, people can take magnesium and say, I feel different if I have enough magnesium. Most many people, I would say that's a pretty common, there's some very, 'cause it, it does many pretty quick things, but as soon as 

[00:31:57] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: you stop taking magnesium, you don't feel better.

Yeah. And the problem is what's causing the magnesium loss. It's unchecked iron. Unchecked oxygen that's supposed to be regulated by copper. And so the intake of magnesium is lovely to keep your symptoms at bay. The minute you stop copper symptoms come back. 

[00:32:21] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm really I appreciate completely that you interrupted to include that because a lot of what we're describing here needs repetition or we need to think about it from different angles and so I think so I appreciate that a lot.

And then when people take copper in. They do not feel immediately better, and yet they need it to stop losing the magnesium. So I just, I bring that up just because as humans, it's tricky to want to have the stamina to take something if we don't feel different or if we don't see a measurable change.

And so one of the things we were just talking about was how do you measure copper status? There are some, even you have some recommendations, at least historically, at least as part of the root cause protocol for measuring copper status. That includes this protein that we have not fully cracked open yet, which is clop plasmin.

So I don't know if, do you wanna go there? You wanna talk a little bit about measuring that? I know you were just talking about it a bit, but these are natural human. I'm, I wanna offer, I wanna be the curious listener and interviewer. And I wanna also say, I also wanna be the advocate of Oh yeah, but Right.

These are how our brain, our human brains are going to sometimes process these things. So these are a couple of those basic principles of okay, how can I understand this in a way that makes sense to me?

[00:33:48] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: So let's go back to the 1930s, the average American diet at four to six milligrams of copper daily.

By 1960s it had dropped to two to five. Not a big drop, but a drop. Do you know what the RDA for copper is today in 2025? 

[00:34:06] Christa Biegler, RD: Probably not very much at all. 

[00:34:09] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Nine tenths of one milligram. 

[00:34:11] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, because usually with supplementation it's usually just one to two milligrams. So these numbers don't surprise me.

And usually the RDA is much less than that. 

[00:34:21] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: But the message is, the reason why copper doesn't work is 'cause people aren't taking enough. Now I'm not advocating 20 milligrams, I'm advocating maybe we need to go back to that four to six. Maybe we need six to eight. The upper tolerable limit, according to the NIH is 12 milligrams.

And so people have been trained like circus bears to be very cautious about copper. Oh, it's gonna make you toxic. No, that's not true. That is pure narrative as far as I'm concerned. And there's a lot of very sophisticated research to back that up. And. The people when we realized we were onto something with the root cause protocol.

This goes back to circa 20 11, 20 12, we were starting to talk about copper and people started to take it, they were eating beef liver for the first time in their lives, and they found out they had more energy than they knew what to do with. And they found out they need, didn't need to take thyroid meds anymore.

You can take magnesium all day long, it's not gonna touch the thyroid. And so suddenly people are like, Hey, I can get stuff done. And then we began to say, wait a minute, what is going on? We hadn't pieced it all together by that point. Yeah. And so I think we've gotta be really careful about, oh, I feel better on magnesium.

I don't feel better on copper. 

[00:35:46] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk 

[00:35:47] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: about, let's talk about dosing and let's talk about the stress that you're under, and more importantly, let's talk about the fact that you're iron toxic. Even though it shows low on the blood. And if you, in order to really unleash the energy in the human being, you've got to donate blood regularly.

Even if you're a menstruating woman, you've gotta donate blood. Maybe it's only a couple times a year, but otherwise, if you're menopausal woman or a guy, you should be doing it quarterly because it's a tonic. It's like changing the oil in your car. And it has an amazing ability to revitalize the physiology of the blood, which is what's delivering our in that we can't live without.

And we better have the copper there to activate it. And the part that everyone's missed with anemia, which I think is, it's almost comical, body's not stupid. Why would hemoglobin go down? 'cause the body's really smart. And those, there isn't enough copper in the tissue to activate the oxygen that's being carried by the hemoglobin.

So let's downregulate hemoglobin production to match the amount of copper we've got. And people don't think about that. It isn't an iron issue. That's all postmodern narrative to get everyone to think they need more iron. The, there's so much iron in our environment. So much iron in our food, so much iron in our supplements.

It's is the iron bio available? Is it usable? If there isn't enough copper in your diet, it will not be usable and it will get stuck in the tissue 'cause the recycling system's not working. 

[00:37:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I agree with you and I've written lots of iron notes and I wanna come back to some of the blood donation conversation with iron.

I know we are gonna dance between them. I just wanna make sure as the listener that I. I'll always get these questions answered. And so when we think about, I love, I'm a huge fan of of dosing as well, because I think about this with omega threes all the time. People are like, oh, I tried mega threes.

I'm like, did you try an actually effective dose of, makes a huge difference. And it's more than people usually think. So similarly with copper. And so part of the conversation is we've talked about some of the foods that are rich in copper. Historically, yes. 

[00:38:08] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Historically, 

[00:38:08] Christa Biegler, RD: organs 

[00:38:10] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: no longer. No longer.

[00:38:12] Christa Biegler, RD: So and so that makes 

[00:38:14] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: that, it's very uncomfortable. It's a very uncomfortable concept that No, I, 

[00:38:16] Christa Biegler, RD: I agree. And a lot of the food based, if there's a food based supplement like organ complex, it doesn't usually show how much copper is in there. Same with chlorophyll a huge thing I love as well. It doesn't really show, so it sounds to me, you haven't directly said it, but it sounds to me like there's room for the food-based source.

Of course there's always gonna be room for the food-based sources. And it's always, by the way, I think this is a human thing as well. Always the food-based sources of copper, including organs, including chlorophyll, et cetera, it's gonna look like several caps usually 'cause food takes up more room. You put food in a capsule and now it's a lot of capsules. But it sounds to me like you would say there's room for copper glycinate, for example, in at least a couple of milligrams potentially in addition to bioavailable. Is that correct or is that incorrect? 

[00:39:04] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: There's a reason why the product recuperate exists.

Which was to create a more bioavailable form that has the desiccated beef liver, which has co-factors that we don't fully know all the co-factors. It has spirulina, which is amazing source of superoxide es, which is a very important enzyme for people. It has tumor to help us deal with the inflammation that everyone's battling.

And it comes with and without boron, I think the recuperate product is hidden shoulders different than the straight up copper lycinate, which is just the copper because it doesn't have the cofactors. People don't realize that this is a, it's a unique mineral that is very sensitive to its cofactors, its functionality is very sensitive to the cofactors.

And there are different forms. We've got copper sulfate and copper chloride. Copper gluconate are some of the more nodal, the GHK copper, which is what everyone's all excited about. The peptide form that was discovered by Lauren Picker's, a world renowned copper expert who just died this past year, last February.

But he discovered that in 1970, but it took him a long time to, to perfect it and get it, make it available. I've never gotten any buzz from GHK Pop Copper. I've tried it. I've I've tried copper gluconate, didn't get any buzz from it. The, 

[00:40:37] Christa Biegler, RD: are you telling me you get a buzz from food-based copper?

[00:40:40] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: I do. And for years I used standard process, had a copper liver chelate, and they stopped making that, but probably seven or eight years ago. But. Dr. Liz and I got that call from Standard Process, said, we have you, you get the last 500 bottles. And we bought 'em all. We were using it so much that they wanted to make sure we had a supply.

I still have 20 bottles downstairs. 

[00:41:09] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I wonder why they stopped making it.

[00:41:11] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: You can make assumptions. 

[00:41:13] Christa Biegler, RD: I think 

[00:41:13] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: they said it was quality control. I think what they're, what they were coming to realize is that there was a compromised amount of copper in the liver and people don't realize what that means.

And simply dousing or taking copper bisg, glycinate, it's better than nothing. But it's not the same as the food-based forms. 

[00:41:39] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I think that the takeaway that I'm hearing is that you probably will to be able to get to the amount of copper that you may need. And I think this is, I think this is generally, you can apply this generally across the board, is that each nutrient is gonna need co-factors typically.

And so anytime you're dosing a standalone nutrient for a long time at a high dose, just generally speaking, you're gonna potentially create other issues. And so therefore maybe there's some room to dose that up initially to see how you do. Maybe initially means a month, maybe you assess, I'm just throwing this in here for tangible experimentation purposes, but there's always gotta be the food-based copper as well.

And I say this as a person who sees low copper on hair tissue mineral analysis and sees challenges bringing it up on food-based copper.

[00:42:30] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: I think the, what's holding you back. You're address iron side of the equation. If people are not, if people are not doing blood donations, the iron is blocking the copper.

And that's the work of Jamie Collins at University of Florida, Gainesville. It's very powerful. It's very effective. And everyone forgets to think about iron. 

[00:42:52] Christa Biegler, RD: And if iron shows normal and let's, we go to, it'll 

[00:42:55] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: always show, it'll always show 

[00:42:57] Christa Biegler, RD: normal. 

[00:42:58] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: The iron in the blood is not at all representative of iron in the tissue.

Yeah. And that's Bruce Ames. There could be 10 times more iron in the tissue than shows in the blood. That's just research in 2 0 0 4 and 2 0 5. And so this idea that the blood is representative of what's going on inside my body, we gotta stop thinking that it's not true. 

[00:43:24] Christa Biegler, RD: I am referencing tissue iron, actually.

How are you measuring on hair, tissue mineral analysis? 

[00:43:31] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: That's not a valid measure. Hair, tissue, I love tissue, hair, tissue, mental analysis. I'm a big fan. That is not an accurate measure of tissue iron. Why? Because the first thing they do to the hair sample is oxidize it. They burn it so they freeze the oxidation state.

All you're seeing is O2. It's, it was FE two. You don't know what's going on with F fe three or other forms of iron. You don't, do you don't know the hair is not telling you what's happening in the liver or the kidney or the pancreas or the heart. It's just, it's not representative in that respect.

[00:44:09] Christa Biegler, RD: You are saying something that I've concluded this year, which is there's only so much value testing can give you however. So if tissue, if hair tissue, mineral analysis is not accurate for iron and serum analysis is not accurate for iron, let's talk about how you would and I'm gonna bring up something else.

We just talked about how people feel better on magnesium when they take it. And this, we're gonna bump up against friction here no matter what. Because when people have really low iron and they take iron, they feel better for a while. So we need to cover, let's talk about iron toxicity, let's talk about how someone knows how they're actually doing with iron.

If no test is accurate, maybe there is an accurate test. I'm not sure. So let's talk about that and let's talk about why people feel better on iron implementation. 

[00:45:01] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: It isn't that the testing isn't accurate. It's not complete. And so we have hemoglobin, ferritin and serum iron, the three markers that are gonna come back and they.

One can be off or all three can be off, but there's a reason why they're off because there's not enough bioavailable copper. It's very rare in this day and age for someone not to have enough iron in their diet. We need to get 24 milligrams of iron through our recycling system system and one milligram from our diet.

And today people are getting upwards of 18 to 25 from their diet. We don't know how the recycling system is working, but it's not where it needs to be. It's a famous study by Robert Hodges in 1979 where he tracked people who were involved in this iron study for over three years.

And he was trying to demonstrate the importance of betacarotene and retinol. In terms of regulating iron status, it's one of the most important studies I've ever read, and it shows exactly what medicinal iron infused iron does to create this false sense of recovery in hemoglobin, which only lasts for six weeks, goes back down and the recovery doesn't really start until the patients are exposed to betacarotene and retinol and then suddenly the hemoglobin takes off and then levels out where it's supposed to be around 13 and it's a very impressive study that you just have to sit with it.

I understand it. 

[00:46:46] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[00:46:46] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: But the feeling and 

But the feeling of feeling better is an illusion. It's a six week illusion. And what people do is they. Like Tarzan, they go from one vine, six week vine to another six week vine, and they're constantly going through this process. And if there is an ongoing need for iron, constant need for iron, then you've got a serious copper problem in your body.

People don't know that and they think that, oh, I can take, iron ad libido as much as I want, when in fact no, it's gonna build up in your organs and it's gonna wreak havoc, especially when you get older. 

[00:47:28] Christa Biegler, RD: I agree with both, I've seen both scenarios, right? Where people who have, I'm gonna say the word ferritin, less than 10, less than five, that feel like death, that get an iron infusion and they're like, I feel like I can function.

And I've seen people who've been in that scenario. They do not feel better. And they do need co-factors as well as many other things as, as well. So I've seen, I've just seen both of those scenarios play out multiple times. And I would say like from the human perspective sitting there, right? You're not for the human whose ferritin is three and gets an iron infusion feels better.

You wouldn't be able to convince them that the next phase is needed until that doesn't work. And that they need these other co-actors. I'm just saying it is the human experience. 

[00:48:14] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: I know, but that's symptom management, that's not recovery. And what's completely ignored in the ferritin of three is what's ola plasma status, what's the copper status, what's the zinc status?

What we don't have access to is hepcidin. 'cause when ferritin is low, hepcidin is high and hepcidin keeps iron locked in. The iron recycling system can't get out. There is no blood test for hepcidin. I test it every six months to see if it's available. And to me it's a crime against humanity because ferritin and hepcidin neuron sea salt.

I know that from a conversation with Douglas Kelp who's a world renowned iron expert, so that when Ferritin's low hepcidin is high, which means that iron is stuck in the tissue and getting an iron infusion creates the sensation of feeling better, but it only adds insult to injury. I've got two clients who are both without hemochromatosis gene, both who got multiple iron infusions to feel better 'cause they're ferritin so low, and both now have hemochromatosis gene defects.

So people have gotta start thinking about what is the price I'm willing to pay to feel better, and maybe I should do it mother nature's way. Not this artificial iron, forcing iron. I don't call them iron infusions anymore. They're iron invasions. They're very toxic to the body. 

[00:49:46] Christa Biegler, RD: I wanna mention, you referenced the iron recycling system and I talk to clients about the iron recycling system.

So Morley was just saying that because of the iron recycling system, we need to input one milligram of iron while our body should produce the other 23 or 24 milligrams or whatever it is to get to the daily needs of iron that we need in our body. The nutrient co-factors. I just wanna mention this because I do think that this is important because when I have people present with low iron.

Based on their blood work, I am discussing iron recycling system and co-factors for creating iron in the body. But the nutrients that are involved in the system to make iron include magnesium, include retinol form of vitamin A. Now. And include bioavailable copper. I wanna remind us, because we've been talking at a level where I don't know that we've acknowledged this retinol is the animal-based form of vitamin A, right?

So to get that, you either need to convert that in your body or consume it. And there's not a lot of food-based sources. Not as many as, we think of vitamin A as like carrots and orange things, but that's betacarotene. It needs to be converted into retinol. And we can get that through cod liver oil, which is in the root cause protocol.

Right? That's one of the reasons I'm sure that it's in the root cause protocol. But I just bring that up because we've been you've mentioned that iron recycling system, which doesn't mean anyone knows what we're talking about there. And so I wanna bring up that there are nutrient co-factors for creating that in the body.

Overall, 

[00:51:22] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: it's important for people to know we need to turn over 1% of our red blood cells every day, and it amounts to 200 billion red blood cells. We have a lot of red blood cells in our body. But 1% need to come offline every 24 hours. And the part that's mind numbing is that it only takes 25 milligrams of iron to create 200 billion red blood cells.

And the reason why we can't process it is that in each milligram of iron, again, this, these numbers of Crohn just go over people's head. But each milligram of iron has six times 10 to the 19th atoms of iron. It's a lot of iron in a milligram of iron. And so far better for us to recycle existing iron than introduce new atoms of iron in a body that is struggling with copper.

And that's the, and the process of recycling, any process of recycling in the human body requires copper. Autophagy requires copper. 

[00:52:34] Christa Biegler, RD: It's, 

[00:52:34] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: it's very sensitive. That's 

[00:52:35] Christa Biegler, RD: important. That's important too, autophagy, right? Your cellular janitor in your body. When we don't have our cellular janitor, we just have a lot more crap to deal with and push around.

That's right. Very true. I'm smiling, I'm thinking fondly of the time I hemorrhage during childbirth. About 13 years ago, my middle child just turned 13. And I remember calling my practitioner who was very like western, a price centric at that time, who recommended a couple bottles of chlorophyll as the solution post hemorrhage.

And I'm just thinking about this fondly. I'd forgotten about it. This was so long ago. I was thinking about it fondly because what a great source of copper to support iron recycling and red blood cell. Great source of, 

[00:53:19] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: but what your body was telling the wisdom of your body was. Krista has too much iron.

This is a chance to get rid of it. Oh, 

[00:53:28] Christa Biegler, RD: It was medically induced. 

[00:53:30] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: It was Pitocin. Okay. So the thing is, that's the catch. Pitocin is not oxytocin. Oxytocin is what Mother Nature makes. It needs to be activated by the PAM enzyme. Pitocin comes out of a test tube. The function of oxytocin is twofold.

Print it's severalfold, it's the love hormone. It's the bonding hormone, but it is in fact the chemical that cinch encloses off the blood vessels. It's the mechanism to bring the mom back to morphology that she had before the pregnancy. And you can see right away in women who are carrying an infant.

Who are bigger than they were before they, they got pregnant, that they have no oxytocin in their body because they've not come back to their ideal body weight. And so Pitocin is a synthetic joke compared to oxytocin, which is what the body knows how to make naturally, but it requires activation by the PAM enzyme, which requires copper.

And I think the challenge is getting people to realize that the synthetic is not the same as the real deal. We've grown up with plastic wood panels in our car thinking that's wood. It's not white. And so we've gotta, we've gotta get beyond this illusion that we're okay. And the amazing thing about oxytocin is it's nine amino acids long in just for context, insulin is 45 amino acids long.

Nine, one fifth of insulin is oxytocin. And if you transpose two amino acids, you get what's called vasopressin. And why is vasopressin important? 'cause it stops high blood pressure. Again, we're back to of the body having the wisdom of knowing what to do, but if it doesn't have the mineral key to turn on these hormones, no.

Can do. 

[00:55:42] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. On this note, when we think about the pecking order, you brought this up earlier, you said copper's at the top, and at least the way I learned HTMA analysis and root cost protocol, sodium, potassium came first. I don't think that there's a wrong place to put copper in. I think you can put it in immediately.

Is that, do you agree with that? You can. Say 

[00:56:05] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: that again. 

[00:56:06] Christa Biegler, RD: Can copper come in at any time without negative? Sometimes if you bring in magnesium, the concept is that it blocks maybe potassium being repleted. 

[00:56:17] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: I think with great question. With magnesium, what you've gotta be careful of is not overwhelming the sodium and causing adrenal fatigue because they do run on that, that balance beam together.

And you can overwhelm the potassium side. The issue with copper I think the most important thing is to bring it in with food with your diet, with your regular diet. And I think as people are intrigued by this, what I would encourage them to do is just go to our website and read about the protocol and there's a very specific.

Set of things to stop doing, set of things to start doing. It's sequenced and copper is in the first phase, but it's in sync with four other things. And just get people to realize that there's some method in our madness, but I've had clients just dive in and do the full RCP and they've been fine.

Yeah. I've had some clients be overwhelmed by it, so it depends upon their sensitivity to their situation. But yeah, I think for the most part, copper's fine. I would encourage people to make it part of this holistic turn to trying to return to more balanced mechanism. Yeah. 

[00:57:32] Christa Biegler, RD: That was a later question I had about simplifying things.

We're we're talking about topics that are, that buck the system a little bit right now. And, while we're on the topic of iron, I'll share this and I'm okay with this right now, I think. The beauty of getting into health autonomy and not being in a, I think that when you're in a health crisis, whatever that health crisis is, there is a level of desperation that humans have.

There is a level of wanting results within a certain amount of time, being able to see changes. I am not in that phase. I'm thankful I've been through several of those phases. I am thankful I'm not in that phase. And because I'm not in a desperate, very, in a health crisis scenario, I can say that I can go about this with without my logic being blocked and i'll just share with you, 'cause I think this is interesting, both my husband and I sometime, I don't know, the years blend together, I'm sure you don't have that problem the years start to blend together. I think it was probably a year, maybe a bit more ago, where the iron on our htma, which you said is not.

Accurate. Were substantially higher than I'd seen anywhere else. Mine was four something. His was seven something. This is atrocious. It should be like around one on this test, right? Yeah exactly. And so I hadn't really seen that on any other client. And I'm still discerning this. My theory is that it was due to, we have a cabin where all the soil is completely red and the water is held in a tank.

It's a well share and I think it's the water because it's happened after a certain frame in time, et cetera. And I'm thankful that I'm like totally freaking out, but I was very diligent around, around blood donations for a long time. And actually that brings me to a question I wanted to un, I wanted to expand upon a little bit more.

You talked about the importance of blood donations earlier. We didn't always have blood donations, right? Women get rid of blood when their menstruating with their menstrual cycle. Men do not. I know that the iron has changed on the planet earth over time. There's like a whole mechanism you go through in your book.

So we don't necessarily have to unpack that. But when we're thinking about, blood donations, which are the way to clear excess iron, it's there's not other good ways to do that. And for me, I'm trying to discern do I have any inputs coming in Right? Where the hell did this iron come from?

Those are the questions I have for myself. And it's interesting 'cause it's testing water, for example. It's not straightforward. I was trying to have this conversation. My mother-in-law last night, I'm like on a water testing journey this summer that is, is over, is coming over from like past summer.

It's just, it's a journey. 'cause it's not, it's, there's not a good test. It's I wanna know this and this. Where am I gonna get that information? And so anyway, but talking about blood donations we'd never used to have blood donations. Is there ever a time where you see that is not.

It's not the right time to do a blood donation. I don't know. What do you want? What else do you wanna say about the concept of blood donations? Has to do with clearing, clearing excess iron, right? That's built up right. And there, is there anything else we wanna cover with blood donations? I just felt like there was maybe a little bit more to say there.

[01:00:45] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: I don't want, I don't wanna come across as being cavalier. Oh, just get a blood donation. But most people in North America, most people eating a western diet have been exposed to so much iron they didn't know about. And either through food or supplements. And it isn't accurately represented in the testing.

It's not, it's great that hair test made you realize that, oh, I've got a water problem. But yeah. But all too often the only way to get real, you wanna get really sophisticated about it, do a needle biopsy of your liver. Or do a Tesla one and a half of your liver, tho those are the two most invasive.

Tesla, the Tesla is not, the MRI is not invasive, but it's expensive. And the thing is, what number Tesla are hospitals using today? Seven Teslas hospital. Seven Tesla 7.0. And the only one that picks up the iron is 1.5. So they've blown past the technology to find out is iron a problem in the body?

And again, it's just the system is so stacked against us being able to manage these two these are called redox metals. They're involved in reduction oxidation. What does that mean? It's involved in making energy and they're passing electrons back and forth. And the circus that runs our body, the three ring circus is copper, iron, and oxygen.

And the, and copper and iron are the only metals that interact with oxygen. And iron creates rust and oxygen creates energy. And that's a good thing to know. And are there situations in laboratory settings where they can jury rig the copper to create problems? Yes. And they do it all the time and blame copper for causing the diseases of the body like cancer, but not tell you about the iron status, the raging iron status, that there's five times more iron in a cancer cell than the healthy cell next to it.

They like to ignore that, keep that behind the curtain. And so I think that people are well advised to think differently about their symptoms. There's a reason why they have fatigue. There's a reason why they have aches and pains. There's a reason why they're having trouble sleeping, and I would be willing to bet dollars to donuts.

It has more to do with copper, iron, and oxygen, and less to do with, oh, I have sleep apnea, or I have congestive heart failure, or I have diabetes. These are all very significant symptoms, but they're all caused by the same three ring circus. And just depending upon where we carry our stress, it plays out in the body in different places.

But just a, it's a very different way of thinking about the process of imbalance, metabolic imbalance, metabolic dysfunction, mitochondrial dysfunction, and just getting people to realize that there's a common point of origin. 

[01:03:55] Christa Biegler, RD: Before we, and I don't know if we need to wrap up, but before we do, I wanna make sure I isolate the conversation around testing for copper, because when you take copper and you don't see a difference, it's hard for humans to know if.

It's hard for us to have stamina on something sometimes if we're uncertain. So I wanna talk about that piece. I wanna also talk about your lived experience a little bit there as well. But I also wanna cover clop, plasmas, which is gonna just dance in there no matter what. So I think I've asked you this, or we haven't really, I don't know that we've arrived at this answer.

If someone wanted to test their copper status, would there be an answer? That is okay. This is as good as we have right now. 

[01:04:38] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Yeah. The metals should all be a hundred in the serum, zinc, iron, and copper. And that goes back to the 1930s. Otto Warberg Hans Krebs, Dr. Schultz, LVM, these big names in, in mineral metabolism back in the day, back in the twenties and thirties.

So they should all be a hundred. And in 1960. Two professors of medicine from Harvard Medical School ended up in a, I still can't figure out why they did this, but they did important human op plasma studies in a at and t laboratory in upstate New York. I'm not sure why they didn't do it at a laboratory in Cambridge, but for some reason they didn't.

But Storm Believe and Scheinberg who then went on to go to Einstein Medical Center very talented hematologist but they discovered in 1960 is that copper should be a hundred reaffirming the findings from the 30 years before, and that relain level should be 30 and that the ratio should be 3.33.

Now, here's where it gets exciting. When you're testing Ullo plasma the master antioxidant protein, there's two ways to measure it. There's height, the level, and it's activity, or it's iq. So how tall are you Krista? 

[01:06:10] Christa Biegler, RD: Five foot, six inches. 

[01:06:12] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Okay. I'm six feet, so that means I'm smarter than you, right?

Because I'm six inches taller. No, it doesn't mean that at all. And that's the problem with testing ceruloplasm level is it creates the illusion that if the ceruloplasm is higher, it's better and we're barred from knowing the activity level. Don't want us to know the IQ of copper because it reveals too much.

And the copper and what also happens when people when the ratio is above 3.33. Which is the ideal ratio that gets up into the forest and may, may be as high as five. You know that there's inflammation in that body, which means they have too much iron and the iron is coming out and it's causing the inflammatory process.

If the ratio is below 3.33, what's revealing is the body needs more copper and the, it would be ever so much easier if we would be able to know the activity level, so we would know exactly what's taking place in our body. But the the use of the ratio is very effective. And it's, what it reveals is the level of stress that the individual is under.

And I think the part that's missing in most medical programs or nutritional programs is it isn't just the number, the numbers are, what the numbers are revealing is, wow, this person must be under stress. Then the conversation needs to start with, so what are you dealing with? What's causing you to be out of balance with your minerals?

'cause the minerals are a reflection of the stress level that the person's carrying. 'cause if you have stress in your world, you are going to have oxidative stress in your body. That's a given. It's well established. And what I think a lot of practitioners tend to overlook is this person in fight or flight in a chronic state of fight or flight that's keeping their energy production down, keeping their mineral dysregulation high and not allowing them to get the full bene benefit of recovery.

And I think that's where a lot of mistakes are made in conventional healing is we're not looking at that emotional stress side as much as we should. We are just focusing on the numbers in the lab test. 

[01:08:39] Christa Biegler, RD: Well, a hundred percent. I just didn't, we didn't even unpack that today. We're talking about that here all the time.

I'm always talking about, for me, one of the biggest crises I see is unrealized stress or just that chronic stress is the normal, it's hard to identify something when it's just become the norm. So I actually, and I don't know that I make this clear enough all the time to my clients. The reason I started completely changing how I was supporting clients around emotional stress was because I just couldn't handle continuing to see these depleted minerals and then people are trying to take minerals and it's you feel better on the minerals, but you're not getting to repletion without adjusting the stress.

That was when we saw the changes, but that's the hardest part. That's absolutely the hardest part. 

[01:09:23] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Absolutely. It's because people don't easy to 

[01:09:24] Christa Biegler, RD: take a supplement or to eat the food. Especially when that's what you believe your problem is.

[01:09:29] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Exactly. Yeah. People love to take one, there love type of pill.

[01:09:34] Christa Biegler, RD: I love to say that I try not to tell people they have a problem. They don't think that they have. It's like a, beating a, it just doesn't necessarily work, right? It's and that's my, that was my goal. Definitely the first conversation we had was I wanted to do my best job as possible to try to frame the conversation to allow for an open mind, that, hey, we're oversimplifying vitamin D, we do oversimplify iron.

I think the, probably the sticking point for part of this conversation is people trying to identify it for themselves, right? And if there's not a home run test, I, to be honest though. Is there a home run test for anything? There's very few home run tests in my opinion. I think you have to correlate.

I will use, I'll say something that might be a little dissonant to what you said. It's like you have to be able to acknowledge that the symptoms are even more important than test results, right? Because many people have perfectly normal test results and they have lots of symptoms and it's clearly there's something wrong if you have lots of symptoms.

But the conversation is how do we holistically bring systems into balance? To me, it's repletion removing the things that are stressing the body, which I think we're aligned in generally. 

[01:10:45] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Oh yeah. I think the other is you've had kids, so you know the five habits of daily living. Did you get a good night's sleep?

Did you wake up refreshed? Are you hungry? Are you able to make enough energy to get through the day? Are you able to eliminate your waste? And is your mood in keeping with your situation? Those are great markers. There's five markers that will tell you. Am I in, in balance, in, in harmony with my life?

And you don't have to get super hyperbolic about testing, just, Hey, did I wake up feeling good? Did I feel refreshed? Do I have the energy? Did I have a good bowel movement today? Those are really good signs of homeostasis and we don't need to be really sophisticated about that, just as a parent would monitor a child's activity on a daily basis.

[01:11:39] Christa Biegler, RD: I don't wanna glaze past this. I feel that you may have just covered this, but I explicitly had someone want to know, who does a lot of testing and testing analysis and data analysis about, we didn't really, we talked about ceruloplasmin, we didn't necessarily define it as this protein that helps with transport.

And maybe you wanna say very different things. Maybe I'm saying misstating it, but clop, plasmin is a test that you can. Check. You were just talking about that, but you were saying we cannot necessarily just look at the level, but the question I had received from someone to ask you was about, wow, it's hard to increase through low plasmin when it's low.

And you just acknowledged that oh yeah, it might be actually hard to raise it. It's actually more about the ratio than it is about the level. Is that correct? 

[01:12:27] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: It's about the ratio. What often happens is people will have elevated op plasm, and as they get more aligned with their system and they're dealing with their stress, the ceruloplasm number might actually go down.

But that's actually a good thing. 'cause their ratio's gonna get better. The ceruloplasm 

[01:12:47] Christa Biegler, RD: and I'm sorry, will you just reference the ratio is ceruloplasm to copper. 

[01:12:52] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Copper to ceruloplasm. Again, a hundred units of copper to 30 units of clop plasm ratios, 3.33. And I regard it as a logarithmic measure so that when it goes up to four or five, it's a big deal.

It isn't just, oh, it's an incremental, it's a really, it's a quantum change in function. But I think what we have to be careful about is

those, so rule ulla it's responding to a lot of stress. It's the master antioxidant protein and it is keeping track of 15 different substrates. It is keeping track of nine different enzyme functions. And the one that's only written about in the literature is called ferro oxidase. To iron, but people don't know its role dealing with histamines or dealing with amines in general or dealing with phenol groups or diol groups.

And so it's a very important mechanism of regulation when the op plasma is not changing, it's important to know about our body and step back. Liver's over here. It's a big giant triangle, right? And the part that's closest to the midpoint of the body is a smaller triangle, and that's where op plasma is made, is in that little triangle within the big triangle.

But here's the catch, when we don't have enough copper in our diet, this little triangle here, whoops, get back here. This little triangle here fills up with iron. When did they first know that? 1928. Two separate studies at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Kentucky. And so if someone is bumping up against, oh, it's hard to get my selo plasma up.

It's not like trying to fill a beaker with water. You gotta get the iron out of the liver. You gotta get it moving, get it recycling so that the body can catch its breath and reestablish its metabolic processes. And that's more complicated than a simple add more water. And the beaker fills up. And that's what people want.

People want simple. They we're looking for the simple button all the time. And I understand, I get that. I really do understand that. But it's that the body is more sophisticated than that. But it's very straightforward if you know the fundamentals. That's what we think we've laid out in the root cause protocol.

So that resistance to rising op plasm is probably 'cause your liver more than likely. It's because the liver is struggling to make selo plasm because it's filled with iron and that's a very prevalent condition. And there's a company out of Australia, but it's now worldwide and it's called Ferri scan, excuse me, F-E-R-R-I-S-C-A-N.

And they do a Tesla 1.5 and they can tell you exactly how much iron you have in your liver. I don't know how much the test costs. I haven't done it yet. I'm intrigued. I'd like to do it. But the thing is it's not like there's a hundred reasons why you're not making op plasma. It's gonna be more finite.

Do you have retinol in your diet? Do you have copper in your diet? Are you managing your stress? Are you dealing with your iron? What are there medications in the mix that might be getting in the way? It's a finite number of factors that are gonna prevent proper, optimal recovery of SW plasma.

[01:16:34] Christa Biegler, RD: Cool. That is helpful. Okay. So finally, I think finally, maybe not, I don't wanna glaze over. As I mentioned before, we don't universally agree about copper in the internet in the world. So there are, there's a new subset in the mineral as minerals have taken more spotlight in the last decade, which is good.

There are people that promote really large amounts of copper. We've talked about. A little bit of the dance between supplementation and bioavailable and food-based and some of the limitations with food-based just because of the way the food supply is. And I think importantly, and I see this with iodine too, it's just like we have a lot of things going against us to even be able to get that, nutrient from the diet or it I don't know that steals is the right word, but it's displacing it maybe, or. Impacting it in some way where it's not able to be taken in. However, there are people who, there is a copper toxic corner as well, and I know you have opinions about this and I have also seen people who say, wow, when I was dealing with copper toxicity, my mental state was not okay when I took anything with copper.

And the only thing that helped was molab, denim, et cetera. And so I, I personally tend to I will either believe clients, I certainly wanna validate any lived experiences. I have a tendency to believe clients as well as sometimes re, re what do you call it, reorient them into actually here is maybe what's happening instead.

And so you might have some thoughts on that also with copper toxicity, because my issue is I don't believe in invalidating people's. How they're feeling around something. And so if someone's feeling like they're dealing with copper toxicity, which is usually gonna look like severe mental stuff, and we, I mean there's ways we look at that on hair tissue mineral analysis.

Where would that potentially come from? Maybe a copper IUD or copper pipes is the conversation, that's been had. What's your take on this whole topic of copper toxicity stuck in tissue? 

[01:18:35] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Copper's really good at what it does and it's designed to mobilize iron. And when people have these nausea or racing mind, which is the two principle symptoms that people have when they take copper, they blame the copper and ignore the iron that's being released and mobilized in the tissue.

Where is a lot of iron found in the body, in the stomach and the brain and the liver of course. But the stomach and the brain. And so when copper comes into the ecosystem of our body, it's going to mobilize that iron. So it is not copper toxicity, it's iron toxicity. And this perpetual need to blame copper when in fact copper's the general copper's running the show.

If we had six hours, I could really get into the metabolism of it and get people to realize, oh my gosh, I had no idea. I had never heard this before. What I, here's what I learned today. Here's today's aha. There's a famous physician who loves to tell us to stop taking lectins 'cause they're really bad force, and I'm not gonna name him by name.

[01:19:48] Christa Biegler, RD: We know who he is, 

[01:19:49] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: but we know who he is. I've always wondered what is that mechanism, because it's bothered me for years and I finally figured lots of things like that. No, I finally figured it out today. There's a specific peptide. It's about this long. I memorized it, but it's, it starts with phyto.

Phyto hemoglutinin is its formal name and it's PHA and it disrupts the production of interleukin two, especially in the spleen in, and when that happens, it causes ru low in the red blood cells. 

[01:20:36] Christa Biegler, RD: It causes what? In the red blood cells, 

[01:20:38] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Ru low stacking of red blood cells. That's a very bad thing because ru is found with inflammation, infection and cancer.

But rule all means that the red blood cells are stuck together. They've lost their individuality and they can't get in the capillaries, so the tissue can't work. And all of this. Because what's essential for making interleukin two copper? Where is this particular form of lectin coming from?

Red kidney beam, which has historically been a source of what? Copper. But in a post glyphosate world, it doesn't have the copper. And so the lectin the di the recommendation doll back on the lectins is because they know we're eating food that doesn't have copper in it and it's causing rural, it's causing micro clots.

And what I learned in my time in London with Professor Kel Douglas Kel brilliant iron biologist, his whole presentation was on micro clots and he was talking about the need in the body to break down those fibrin clots. And so I Google, was this 

[01:21:57] Christa Biegler, RD: pre 2020 or post 2020? 

[01:21:59] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Post 2020. This was just two.

This was 10 days ago. I was doing a presentation with him, and I'm Googling as he's talking. Wanted to find out what is the most effective agent to break up rule, low and micro clots. It's called ullo plasma, the master antioxidant protein that should be in her blood. And if you have a reaction to lectins, if you have ullo, if you are having negative reactions to your environment, you don't have enough ceruloplasm.

That's what that's telling us. And so people are not aware, they're not fully aware of the genius in our body, the absolute innate intelligence that we are designed with because the system is designed to keep us fat, dumb, and happy. Sell us bad food, sell us supplements, sell us medications, make a lot of money, and laugh all the way to the bank.

And this, it's a very sounds cynical, doesn't it? But that's where we are as a system. And so that realization, I finally pieced that together this morning. I went, okay. I would, we don't tell people, we wouldn't tell people to stop taking lectins. We tell people, increase your copper so you can deal with the lectins.

Is the lectin, and deal with 

[01:23:23] Christa Biegler, RD: your histamines, which I like as well. That's a, I see that more prevalent than I, I rarely have people concerned about lectins, but histamine is always a issue for Absolutely. I'm working with it absolutely. Yeah. So for that reason alone, I am a fan of copper for that reason alone.

It's that big of an issue to Oh, huge. Myself or clients for sure. Absolutely. Yeah. So I wanna actually finalize, I think I'm finalizing I wanna ask you with this lived experience, I think going back to the beginning, you were obsessed with magnesium for five years. You started this whole process in 20 2009.

So by 2015 at least, or the last 10 years, you've been interested in copper, by my estimates of your conversation. Maybe it's not that long. 

[01:24:08] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Yeah. At least. Okay. Maybe. Yeah. 

[01:24:11] Christa Biegler, RD: Okay, cool. I feel, to be honest, your book that came out, I don't know, a few years ago, I don't know when is largely is it, is 2021 is on the book, is it, is a significant, I'll call it summary of some of, some of this or really much more expansive than this conversation.

But the point is. You've been on this train for a while, you've been on this rabbit hole for a while around copper, so quite a, quite some time. Definitely long enough to give us some input on what do you see when people introduce copper? After how long, we've talked a little bit about dose.

I'm gonna, 'cause I was gonna ask how much, but we covered that. It's maybe we need five milligrams more, but we need twice that much, for a bit or something like that. Even though normally it's around a couple of milligrams and the issue is in food, it's hard to measure even though food is king.

So that's somewhat, we talked a little bit about that, how much you are welcome to amend. If I misstated there of course. But what do you see when people are introducing copper after how long? I know it's all different for different things. I know that there's an entire protocol, but I wanted you to share, we as humans, we are also, we also like evidence.

[01:25:14] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Sure. No, I think that's fair. I've had people get better in three days. I've had people take nine months. Biggest variable is, and it's a very sincere. It's qualitative, but it's a very sincere measure. To what extent does the individual believe in their body's natural ability to heal itself? Not everybody's there.

In fact, most people have doubt 'cause they've been chronically ill for a long time. Yeah, that makes sense. And so they don't have that visceral conviction. Yeah, I'm just missing the nutrients. I just, that's all I need. Most people think they're broken, genes are broken. My tissue's not working right.

I got all these symptoms. So when people get on the protocol and they're dealing with their emotional issues and they're dealing with their dietary issues, everyone has a, I've got a pretty good diet and to ask what is your diet? Then you find out it's not really a very good diet and it takes a while for that to come to the forefront.

But

the biggest consistent. To people having, to the protocol. I've got so much more energy, I'm just amazed at how much more energy I've got. And energy hides a lot of sin. But unless you get stuff done and does everyone suddenly, does their sleep issues disappear? Does their hair loss disappear? No, it doesn't.

But I have more energy today than I had 20 years ago. I have more mental function today than I had 20 years ago of c colleague down the street who's just a few years younger. Me, he says, he said, you are working at 1.4 of a, of an average person. He said, I've never seen, you're like a, like an energizer bunny.

And I'm just part of, it's my passion, part of it's feeling like I'm helping people, but part of it is I've got the energy, I wake up feeling refreshed. My bodily systems are all working. Thank you very much. And I'm like. I'm on fire. And is that everybody? No, but it's a lot of people and people can go to our website and look up the testimonials.

We've got over a hundred testimonials. We're working to get a thousand testimonials. 'cause there's a lot of people out there that have benefited from this protocol that just go off into the sunset and we're inviting him back to say, help us understand what happened so that more and more people know what the benefit of this approach.

And it's not pride of authorship. I dust it off. Mother nature is what I did. I just took age old principles and applied modern science to it to see, how does the body make energy? And what, and when you're making energy, what does that keep at bay? It keeps, what keeps iron at bay keeps pathogens at bay.

It keeps, a lot of stuff begins to go out into the woodwork or out of the body and it's that's what we want. We get back to what was the term that I was using? Sovereign sovereignty. What's your word? 

[01:28:17] Christa Biegler, RD: Autonomy. Health. Autonomy. I love, 

[01:28:18] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: I love health autonomy. I think that's, I think that's a really powerful concept because that's really where we need to be.

That's where our ancestors were health, autonomous. They were not dependent. And here's something I just learned the other day. In the field of cardiology, modern medicine has lowered the death rate 40%. That's not bad. That's a, that's a, and I think it's in the last 20 years, a 40% drop in death rate.

What they didn't document, what they identified, what they did not document is what is the increased dependence rate on drugs. I'm sure it's still so that so we can lower your incidence of death, but we're gonna increase your dependence on the system. Is that progress? I don't think it is. I don't think that's really what Mother Nature wanted us to do.

We were designed to be sovereign autonomous beings doing what we love to do and being able to help each other grow and have our experiences learn our lessons. But this idea of what I heard secretary Kennedy in a recent interview with Gary Breca he said, if you have your health, you have a thousand dreams.

If you have chronic disease, you only have one dream. And that's to feel better. Yeah. And he said 60% of the American population has one dream. That is such a powerful metric of we're failing as a society if 60%, over half of our citizens don't have the energy. Don't have the autonomy, don't have the sovereignty that we got work to do.

[01:30:08] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. 

[01:30:08] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: So 

[01:30:08] Christa Biegler, RD: one place I really, I really align with you. I align with you on many points many points, and one of them is that one of my favorite symptoms that I like to go away is low energy. I just prefer, I feel I just believe in people feeling vibrant, and so I know that's your thing as well.

It's it, there's, it's just one of those things we've almost accepted too much low energy. We've normalized it. It's almost like the stress thing. It's like we've taught people to believe that like low energy is acceptable at different phases of life. Oh, I'm aging. Oh, I've had children. It's yeah, you're living laugh life half full.

With that thought. Just because we don't know that there's something else and I feel that with the podcast, my goal is always to open our brain to, there's always options. There's always options. That's my true feeling, my true perspective. That there's always options. And I'll also mention.

I feel like these last when this started for you, which I think you said again was 2000, I think that was the beginning, not the midpoint, that is when I feel like you really started to, I'm guessing, after the 30 plus years in the healthcare industry, really it's the last 15 plus years where you really started to live fully alive and Oh, totally.

And since we're thinking these big picture concepts, which are just like good inspirations to live through, et cetera, I reminds me of Dr. Gay Hendricks work, who I've had on the show, and he, I think, was the person who coined this whole zone of excellence versus zone of genius. And I think about this as like the legacy project as well to me.

And I think morally, you're living in your zone of genius, right? You're not like stuck in this zone of excellence. Maybe you were good at being a healthcare administrator, right? Where people you could have been maybe half, half full happily, right? You could have been lived life half full.

And so anyway, I just think it's really beautiful when people find this passion that they're like, I just want everyone to know this. And on that note, people might say, morally, this makes my head hurt. But there is a simple, you have actually simplified it exponentially. We just didn't get to that today.

So it's very much simplified in the root cause protocol, and you very much, I think, give away a lot of root cause protocol foundations for free. We 

[01:32:22] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: do absolutely do. Just go to the website, RCP 1, 2 3, do org. There's a lot of information, the protocols there. There's different versions of the protocol.

People wanna dig a little deeper. Get the book, cure Your Fatigue, join the community, the RCP community. We're enrolling people for the class now, the RCP Institute, if you wanna take a deeper dive, we really encourage people to, to join us for the 16 weeks to really immerse themselves in the truth of how the body works.

It's not how it's taught on the internet in most circles, and it's not complicated. You don't need to be a scientist to do it. In fact, a third of the people who go through that training are moms. A third of people like me who didn't have any license, just wanted to help. And a third of people are people with a license.

It better. Yeah. And so really encourage people to give that a shot. And between July and like first week in November, you'll be, your neurons will be stimulated. But there's a lot. I think there's a lot of ways people can learn more about this. And I just, I'm grateful for the chance to have this kind of exchange.

And I love the the gentle pushback. 'cause there are people out there that really wanna know, what about this? And I think you, you did it beautifully. You really, you stressed, tested the concepts and not everyone is gonna bowl over and say, oh yeah, I'll just start doing the RCP.

They're gonna wanna think about it. And I appreciate this kind of conversation to get people over that intellectual hump of resistance because this is asking people to do things differently. It's really important. 

[01:34:05] Christa Biegler, RD: And even though. If your mind hurt at all throughout this conversation. I would just say that the really good news with the RCP is that it's very gentle and whole food based.

And so I don't really see a negative personally which I'm sure you would appreciate me saying. I just don't, I don't see any negatives. It's I don't think you can go wrong by getting rid of isolated single nutrients that are creating other deficiencies and putting in whole food sources of nutrients and filling in gaps.

I just don't really see a problem with this. I don't think we have any issue. And I do think also, I think the only downside is it can take time and so that's just a, and that's the thing. And that's why I weave in some other things with my practice on purpose just to help people get results.

But I want them to land with synergistic whole food nutrition for the long game, that's, so anyway. 

[01:34:52] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Makes perfect sense. No, that's great. I really, again, I really thank you for the chance to have this and. Can certainly continue the dialogue. It might be fun for you. Do the blood. That's always a fun conversation.

I've done that. Eight to different podcast hosts. 

[01:35:09] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, that would be fun. Yeah, we should do that. Because I have an original and I need to do a follow up one, but I would, that 

[01:35:14] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: would, that would be a blast to do that. Yeah. I think 

[01:35:16] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna throw in, I was actually pondering this. I think I need to throw in, I'm gonna do some really ex, some signif.

I was meaning to do this. I have like in the back of my mind, I will have I wanna run these experiments and I think it's important to not run too many experiments at once, depending on your outcomes or goals. So you can know which thing. And I have time, like it's okay, I'm not in, as I mentioned before, it's a different conversation.

We do run more experiments on people when they're in more distress. Because we're looking for faster results. And when you support multiple systems at once, you can get faster results. For me, I am like okay, I would like to see how these have changed, but actually I know I have this potential iron problem and I'd like to see what happens when I throw in more copper than I have.

'cause I've already done food-based copper and I just wanna experiment with a little bit more. So yeah, we can plan to review that just 'cause that is fun. And I do think sometimes when we can apply these concepts and I'm always happy to share how I'm like a freak of nature. Like why is my iron, four and my husband seven?

And also that's also great, right? To have two people in the same household that have these really high amounts. It's there must be something in the environment, right? There must be something in the environment. So anyway, to be continued. Thanks so much for coming on today morally and for Absolutely helping us unpack copper.

[01:36:31] Morley Robbins, MBA, CHC: Absolutely. Thanks again.