Saunas to Detox Chemicals From Your Body
Toxic-Free Talk Radio
Archives of radio interview transcripts with leading toxic-free innovators recorded 2013-2015
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Choosing and Using Home Saunas to Remove Toxic Chemicals from Your Body
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Wendy Myers
Date of Broadcast: April 15, 2015
My guest today is Wendy Myers, CHHC, NC, founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. Wendy highly recommends the use of home saunas for detox to her clients and knows all about them. We'll be talking about how regular time in a sauna can benefit your health, different types of saunas and which work best for detox, how to use a sauna, and how to choose a sauna to purchase for home use. Wendy is a certified holistic health and nutrition coach in Los Angeles, CA., She is also certified in Hair Mineral Analysis for the purpose of designing Mineral Power programs for clients to correct their metabolism and body chemistry. She is currently seeking her masters in clinical nutrition at Bridgeport University in Connecticut. Wendy hosts the weekly Live to 110 Video Podcast and the Modern Paleo Cooking show on her Live to 110 Youtube Channel. liveto110.com
Transcript:
DEBRA: Hi, I'm Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free. It's Wednesday, April 15, 2015. I hope you all have your taxes done and out doing something fun. I'm still doing my taxes, but I'm doing something fun, talking to you right now. I love doing this show, I really do. And then I'll finish my taxes.
Then a friend is visiting me today and it's his birthday, and we're celebrating his birthday. And so it's a good day for me and I hope it's a good day for you too.
Today, we're going to be talking about saunas. We haven't done a show on sauna before and people ask me questions about saunas all the time, and I don't know as much as I should about saunas although I've spent a lot of time in saunas. I've even done some detox programs in saunas, and I read books where they talked about saunas. And so I know that a good way to get toxic chemicals out of your body is to use a sauna.
And a lot of people buy saunas for their homes, but there are different types of saunas, and they do different things. And lots of questions come in to me.
So today I thought we'd get them all answered by Wendy Meyers who has been on the show before. She's the founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. And she and I are very complimentary in the work that we do. She does a lot of things about detox and nutrition and she really is trained and certified to do a lot of things in the healing end of it, where I am focused on reducing our toxic chemical exposure. But we both agree that toxic chemicals should not be in our bodies, we shouldn't be exposed to them, and that they contribute to ill health. And getting them out of our bodies and our homes produces good health. In fact, we both agree (because I talk to Wendy a lot, so I know that she agrees with this), that if you want to get well, you really need to take the toxic chemicals out of your body.
So hi, Wendy!
WENDY MYERS: Hello, and how are you?
DEBRA: I'm good. How are you?
WENDY MYERS: I'm doing great. Thank you.
DEBRA: So first, before we talk about saunas, I know in my description of the show today, I put all these letters after your name. So you're actually, Wendy Meyers, CHHC, NC and now, FDN, as of yesterday. So would you tell us about all of these letters mean and what you actually do?
WENDY MYERS: Yes. Well, I'm a Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist. So that means I can play doctor and I do all kinds of medical tests. And I do all kinds of testing, genetic testing, parasite testing, chemical toxicity testing, et cetera, et cetera. I also am a Nutritional Consultant. I got that when I got certified to do hair mineral analysis, which I'm big on, to discovery people's heavy metals that they have in their body and their mineral deficiencies. And I am also a Certified Holistic Health Coach, which I got when I went to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.
DEBRA: So Wendy has a lot of ways she can help you from her particular viewpoint, anything from detox to all these blood tests now that she can do – or actually, let's just call them medical tests or diagnostic tests. I'm not sure I should call them medical tests or blood tests because they are more than blood. You're not a doctor. But anyway, tests, she can do tests of your body and help you in a lot of ways once she knows what's going on. She has a lot of training about how to use nutrition in order to help get at the root cause of what's going on.
So let's start talking about saunas. Tell us why it's important to detox?
WENDY MYERS: Well, detox is my first love, and I think it is incredibly important to detox your body in order to be healthy. I personally believe that all the dozens of heavy metals and hundreds of toxic chemicals that are known to be in people's bodies, we have to remove those in order to be healthy. They are one of the underlying root causes of disease.
And after some of your listeners have learned from you how to clean up their toxic environment and use healthier cleaning products and beauty products, you have to do something about the chemicals that are in your body. The EPA has established these studies and found that people have on average 700 chemicals in their body, and the World Health Organization did another study, and they found that we had over 200 chemicals in our body.
So either way you look at it, there are hundreds of chemicals in our body. They are obviously not creating health in your body. And I think that infrared saunas are one of the best ways to just sweat out these chemicals because our livers are so overloaded and most people's livers are so toxic. They just can't handle all these chemicals and they're also being blasted with sugar and alcohol and all the other things that we put in our bodies.
So I think it's wise to bypass the liver to detox and use an infrared sauna and just sweat them out through your skin.
DEBRA: I agree. One of the things that I learned from studying toxics is, well, first of all, the detox system (as I know you know, but we'll tell the listeners anyway), the two main organs of the detox system are the liver and the kidneys. But what most people don't know is that these are the two organs that actually get hit first because both the liver and the kidneys are actually processing the toxic chemicals that come in to your body. So the kidneys are filtering your blood in order to remove things which shouldn't be there including toxic chemicals. And the liver actually has this whole process that it goes through to turn fat-soluble chemicals into water-soluble chemicals so that they can leave the body through the intestines.
So they get much more exposure because they're getting all this concentration of all the chemicals that are coming through the body and they're processing them. These are exactly the organs that we need in order to detox our bodies. And yet, they're damaged, they're overwhelmed, they're overloaded and these poor organs.
And so what a sauna does is that it goes ahead and starts removing toxic chemicals from your body through sweat, through the skin and so they don't need to be removed through these other organs, and you can start giving them a rest and they can start to heal. Did I explain that right?
WENDY MYERS: Yes, exactly. That's perfect. I think it's so important to do this because for a lot of these chemicals, there is no other way to get them out of your body except for sweating. And many people, if they have nutrient deficiencies, the detoxification mechanisms in our liver don't work properly.
And not only that, but heating up your body with an infrared sauna, heating it up just naturally induces this faux fever, where you're killing off bacteria, parasites and fungus. You're killing cancer cells before they turn into tumors. If you have a tumor that you don't know about or had been diagnosed with, tumors are very intolerant to heat.
So the heat works in a number of ways to kill off chronic infections and parasites and other things you have in your body, candida, et cetera. In addition to activating aspects of your immune system, it activates heat shock proteins. There is about 90 of those that are part of our immune system, and those become activated when you heat up your body. You release human growth hormone. There are just so many benefits infrared sauna has.
DEBRA: As I'm listening to you talking, I'm thinking about, here, we've just been coming out of winter and I remember there was a day not long ago and it had been cold here in Florida. Sometimes we get cold winds from the north. And then all of a sudden, the sun came and I was outside, and it was just that feeling of warmth on my body, I think, that we just like it. Our bodies like to be warm. That's part of the healing process when we get sick. Our bodies naturally, we get a fever and it burns everything up. And as you said, sauna gives the same effect.
So we need to come up to break in about 15 seconds. So I'm not going to ask you any questions because I don't want to interrupt you. But when we come back, I want you to about different kinds of sauna because I know that the kind that people are using at homes are not necessarily the same thing that you're going to find in the gym, and why a sauna and how is that different from a steam room, for example. And we'll talk about those when we come back.
You're listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I'm Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Wendy Meyers. She is a CHH and CFDN, founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. And her website is obviously Liveto110.com, lots of information about detoxing and living healthy there. Go take a look. We'll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You're listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I'm Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Wendy Meyers. She's the founder and head writer of Liveto110.com, which has lots of information about how you can detox your body and live healthier.
So Wendy, tell us about the different types of saunas.
WENDY MYERS: Yes, well this is the biggest source of confusion for many people. People think that they can just sweat with exercise and that's not nearly enough. I get that question a lot. People cannot exercise and detox at the same time. When people are activating their sympathetic nervous system, they create this fight or flight mode and you do not detox in that mode.
So just sweating from exercise doesn't cut it.
When it comes to the different saunas, we have a traditional sauna. This is what most people think of when they think of a sauna. It's called a Swedish or Finnish sauna, and it consists of a small room or space that's heated with a heater that sits in one corner. It can be electric or gas or a wood even that powers the heater. But it must be really, really hot to work properly. And this means you can't tolerate it very long.
Many of these saunas are 200°F and above. I don't know about you, but I can't sit in a sauna for more than about 10 or 15 minutes. So you don't get a ton of benefit. But you are detoxing a little bit.
DEBRA: Well, I once sat in a sauna for five hours. But you can't sit in a sauna for five hours straight. You have to come out and take a shower in cold water and cool your body down and then go back in to the sauna. But it was a rigorous sauna program for detox. And I can't tell you if I measured. I didn't measure, but I know that sauna works to detox if you do it right. So go ahead with what you were saying.
WENDY MYERS: I love my sauna, but the most common infrared sauna that people know of is a far-infrared sauna. And these are the kinds of saunas you see at health spas or acupuncturist's office, et cetera, beauty spas. Some beauty spas have them. And these use metallic ceramic or black carbon elements, kind of these black fabric panels that you see throughout the sauna. They're usually in a wooden sauna. And they emit far-infrared energy.
DEBRA: And what is that? What is far-infrared energy?
WENDY MYERS: Well, these are rays that penetrate about one to two inches inside your body. And infrared rays are part of the spectrum that the sun emits. We also emit far-infrared energy from our skin. And that's actually how night vision goggles work. It detects infrared energy coming from our skin. Yes, very interesting.
DEBRA: It is.
WENDY MYERS: And so these rays, they penetrate inside our body and they heat you up from the inside out. It's the same mechanism behind how they heat up hamburgers at McDonald's. They actually use these red heat lamps. They're like lightbulbs. These are near-infrared saunas and they heat up the food from the inside out. And that's what they're doing to your body. They penetrate inside, heat you up from the inside out so you get a deeper benefit, and it vibrates your cells as they release their toxic contents.
So you can have all these toxins coming out from various stored sites in your body that otherwise wouldn't be able to mobilize to be removed from the body.
DEBRA: Good. You just said far.
WENDY MYERS: Yes.
DEBRA: So the one that you like is near?
WENDY MYERS: Yes.
DEBRA: What's the difference?
WENDY MYERS: That's my favorite. Well, far infrared saunas definitely have a lot of benefits. They're better than nothing. But my favorite saunas are near-infrared saunas. These are using red light bulbs that emit near-infrared energy. They just have many benefits over and above the far-infrared saunas. They penetrate your body about three to four inches. Some people claim up to nine inches. So they can penetrate far deeper, and you get some color therapy from them as well. Additionally, they are very inexpensive. And these light bulbs are even found at most hardware stores.
So they're not expensive, people can build their own, and you can just put them in. I have mine hanging in my shower. And I just seal it off with a sheet to increase the heat. I think they're a solution for most people because most people can't afford $2000 or $4000 for the infrared sauna. And with the near-infrared sauna, you can set one up for as little as $100.
I have ones in my store. You can get at store.Liveto110.com that are more professional grade and will have a little canvass tents around them, or even have wooden near-infrared saunas. There's a whole range of saunas that you can get. I believe in near-infrared saunas have a lot more benefits and are less expensive.
DEBRA: So you're basically using these red lightbulbs. So if you just want to go into a hardware store, what would you ask for?
WENDY MYERS: Well, you're going to get 250 watts red heat lamp. And Phillips carries them, other brands carry them. But they just say heat lamps on them. They don't say infrared lamps because that's not what people are looking for at the hardware store. But that's what you get. You can get them off Amazon as well.
I have many clients that just create their own sauna at home. You can even buy a single bulb, just one bulb. While it doesn't produce the sweat that you need to have a full detox effect, the one single, red heat bulb (I have those in the store as well), they just come with a fixture and you can shine those on any area of your body that needs healing like a sinus infection or a throat infection, a gut infection, a pulled muscle, toe fungus. You can kill toe fungus quite nicely with a red infrared bulb. And there are just lots of different uses for a single bulb as well.
DEBRA: How many do you need to make a sauna?
WENDY MYERS: Ideally, you want four. I've used saunas with just three bulbs and it wasn't quite enough heat. So I really like ones with four. More is always better. But four is enough and you can add a little space heater to it to increase the temperature a little bit too. That's what I do.
DEBRA: And so you need to have an enclosed area, right? So could you just have it in the bathroom?
WENDY MYERS: You can, but you need to have a little bit of a smaller space, just enough space to contain your body because if it's any larger, you need about a foot or so from the bulb, but if it's any larger than that, I find that it just doesn't get hot enough. It's hard to heat up a larger space. So ideally, you want to build an enclosure or get like what I have in my store, the tented enclosure.
DEBRA: The little tent. I've seen that, yes. We need to go to break again. So we'll go to break and we'll come back and talk more about saunas. You're listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I'm Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Meyers, and she's from Liveto110.com. We're talking about saunas, and you can go to her website and she sells all these things that we're talking about to make your own near-infrared sauna. Actually, you don’t make it, but you set it up in your own home and get all the benefits of sauna. We'll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You're listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I'm Debra Lynn Dadd and my guest today is Wendy Meyers. She's the founder and head writer at Liveto110.com. We're talking about saunas today.
Wendy, there's a new study that was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Finnish middle-aged men where the mortality rates and incidents of heart disease was drastically reduced in the group that was doing frequent saunas. Can you tell us more about that?
WENDY MYERS: Yes, well, this is a really interesting study because it basically showed that regular use of an infrared sauna can reduce the incidents of heart disease. And the Finnish study, it emphasizes the healing life extension benefits of frequent hyperthermic therapy.
DEBRA: I like that, hyperthermic therapy.
WENDY MYERS: I don't think they were using a far-infrared sauna. I don't know. I think they were just using regular, traditional saunas. But it still shows that the hyperthermia can kill off parasites and get bugs and increase your circulation and increase the health of your blood vessels, et cetera. There are additional benefits for the near-infrared sauna therapy that really aren't addressed with traditional saunas.
DEBRA: Well, I'm very happy to hear that I can actually make one and then I don't have to spend a thousand dollars to get one. I have people around me who can make those kinds of things. So as soon as we get off this show, I'm going to find out about getting a sauna.
So how long and often do you need to use a sauna? If you have one in your home, what's the protocol?
WENDY MYERS: Well, when you're starting out, you just want to do maybe 15, 20 minutes to start out because it can stir up a lot of stuff and have detox symptoms. That's normal. Many people don't feel great after using a sauna. Some people do feel good. It feels very good. But because you do stir up a bunch of stuff and it can take a couple of days for it to be removed from your system, some people do feel tired or can feel headache-y after a sauna, et cetera.
So you want to start slow. I do it for 50 minutes, 5-0 minutes. I recommend people do it about 30 to 60 minutes, five days a week because you do have to do it pretty frequently for about two to three years to detox the bulk of the heavy metals and chemicals and kill off chronic infections that everyone has in their body.
DEBRA: The first question that comes to mind after hearing you say that is, is that the amount that you need if you're doing nothing else, but sauna? What if you're doing sauna and you'd doing other kinds of detoxing or should you not be doing other detoxing? I mean, you know so much about detox, what about doing more than one detox at a time?
WENDY MYERS: Oh, you can do all kinds of things at the same time. The near-infrared sauna is definitely an adjunct to your current detox program. I think it's the most effective detox thing that you can do. But I think zeolites, I use a detox foot pad that I have in my store as well. I do all kinds of stuff. I'm doing a parasite cleanse right now that’s on my site. I really like Global Healing Center products. They have an amazing line of products. It kills gut bugs and parasites, et cetera. I do coffee enemas. I mean, I do all of the above to help detox and clean out my body. So you can do all kinds of things at the same time.
DEBRA: I do a lot of things at the same time too. I take zeolite every day and I also take a homeopathic remedy. I definitely think that I need to add more sauna and more sweat to what I'm doing.
So now, let's talk again about you were saying that exercise, the sweat from exercise doesn't detox you. Can you explain more about that?
WENDY MYERS: Well, a lot of my clients ask me, "Does sweating from exercise count?" And of course, exercise is healthy. But the thing is, to detox, you have to be in your parasympathetic nervous system. And when are you in your parasympathetic nervous system? That's when you're…
DEBRA: I don't know. When you're asleep?
WENDY MYERS: Yes. That's when you're resting, digesting, and detoxing. So you have to be in that mode to detox. When you're exercising, you're activating your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight mode. And this actually draws blood away from your skin. It actually inhibits toxin elimination. You have to be in that calm, parasympathetic state to detox and release toxin.
So people do get benefit from sweating, but it's just not the same thing as sweating in a near-infrared sauna.
DEBRA: What about sweating outdoors? I live in Florida as you know and the entire, from about April to October, you just walk outside and you sweat. When I first moved here, I used to change my clothes three times a day because I couldn't go outside without sweating.
WENDY MYERS: Yes, I know! I'm from Texas so I experience that same heat. I know what you're talking about.
DEBRA: Yes, are we getting detox benefit from that kind of sweat?
WENDY MYERS: Well, you definitely get a little bit. You do have a few toxins coming out of your sweat no matter what type of sweating that you're doing. But it's not going to be the same as these near or far-infrared rays penetrating deep inside your body because we need to get the toxins that are deep inside your body, not just from the surface of the skin. And so you need those rays to penetrate inside you to activate that detoxification that everyone so desperately needs today.
DEBRA: So I'm trying to understand technically how this works. So when we're just walking around at the beach in the sun, the rays, whatever rays are coming from the sun, are just not penetrating very deeply into our skin, but the near-infrared goes much deeper than even the far-infrared. And so that's why it's so powerful.
WENDY MYERS: Yes, exactly. The sun does emit some infrared rays, but it's just not strong enough to have the therapeutic effect.
DEBRA: So should you do something like – oh, we're going to come up to the break in just a few seconds anyway. Well, let me ask you the question and we'll talk about it when we come back. Should people do something like exercise prior to get things moving in their bodies? That’s the next question to talk about. So we're going to be coming out to the break.
WENDY MYERS: I wasn't answering the question. I'm sorry. I thought you were waiting for the break. But it's a good idea. You can exercise right before the sauna at some point. It's really not necessary because the sauna gets that circulation going real nicely.
DEBRA: Good. That was a nice, short answer. You're listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I'm Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Meyers. She is the founder and head writer of Liveto110.com. And we're talking today about sauna. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You're listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I'm Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Wendy Meyers. She is the chief writer and everything actually at Liveto110.com.
Wendy, are there any warnings that you want to give people about the use of near-infrared sauna at home?
WENDY MYERS: Yes, there are some people who are not good candidates for saunas. Children that are under seven years of age, they don't have their mechanisms in their body developed to reduce body temperature. So we don't want to heat them up. We don't need to. They're not super toxic just yet.
Some children I test are quite toxic because we inherit our toxicities from our mothers. So whatever toxins they have, you get into the child. Typically, copper and aluminum and other toxins are passed onto the child.
Additionally, other people that should avoid the sauna are people that are really, really infirm, maybe the very elderly. They may not be doing so hot with the sauna. Also, people with rosacea don't do too well with heat. Also, people with metal fixtures like hip replacements, titanium fixtures. Those metal plates or pins. Those could heat up in a traditional sauna. But you can probably use just a single bulb lamp where you need to. And at least get some benefits that way.
There are some doctors that say, "You shouldn't go on an infrared sauna if you have breast implants." I don't find that to be the case at all. I find that you absolutely can do use a sauna if you have breast implants.
DEBRA: Good. So after you do the sauna, is there anything that people should do like drink a lot of water or rest or anything?
WENDY MYERS: Yes. Well, I'm a big fan of using minerals, taking mineral supplements anytime you're doing a lot of sauna use because when you sweat, you sweat out minerals. So number one, people definitely have to take magnesium and other minerals as well.
Magnesium is the number one mineral that's lost when you have any kind of stress or excessive sweating, et cetera. So people need about five times their body weight in magnesium in milligrams. So that's quite a lot. If you're 150 pounds, that means you need about 650 milligrams a day. I'm sorry, it's 750 milligrams a day of magnesium.
I take different forms. I take glycinate magnesium citrate and magnesium malate to cover my bases at a lot of different forms.
People also need to take a multi-mineral supplement. I like Designs for Health’s Multi-Min. That's a nice. I also like Seeking Health’s Trace Complex II with no iron and copper. That's a really nice one. I also take a trace mineral supplement. I like Anderson's Mineral Drops. I have that in my store, but I graduated to Dr. Drucker's IntraMin. That's a fantastic product, carbon-based, carbon-bound mineral.
So I always encourage people to take minerals if they're doing sauna use. But they can also drink coconut water. That has lots of really nice electrolytes in it. Eat lots of sea salt. Add sea salt to your water and what-not when you're in the sauna and after the sauna.
DEBRA: And should you rest at all after you do the sauna or just continue your daily activities? And what time of day is a good time to do sauna? Like would you want to do it and then go to bed?
WENDY MYERS: Some people can be stimulated by the sauna. I can do it before I go to bed and I'm okay. But I've had a lot of clients find they have a little trouble sleeping if they do it at night. So everyone is a little bit different. But the morning and the evening time are probably the best times to do it. But everyone is a little different.
Really, any time you do a sauna is good as long as you're getting into one. Just get in one. It doesn't matter when, just whenever you can fit it into your schedule. And when people get out of the sauna, definitely you want to shower off right away because you've done all this work, to sweat out these chemicals and metals and toxins, shower them off right away.
Sometimes, I'll run to the shower because I find that my sweat dries really quickly, and then I'm terrified that the toxins are going to get absorbed back into my skin. So run to the shower.
DEBRA: Well, they do! Yeah. No, I can see that. I think about when I take my shower (I don't sit here and think long hours about when I take my shower), I consider when I take my shower during the day in relation to other things that I do. So if I'm going to do some exercise or go work out in the garden or something that's going to make me sweat, I'll wait and take my shower after I do that instead of taking a shower and then sweating, and then taking another shower.
And so it just seems to me that a good time to do it is before you're going to take a shower anyway or just take a shower afterwards. But I think the shower component is really important to consider that you need to do that as well.
WENDY MYERS: Absolutely. And there are lots of places you can go to that have saunas. They all have the far-infrared saunas. I've never seen a near-infrared sauna facility. Those are usually only for home use. But there are places, there’s a franchise chain called The Sweat Shop. There's another one called Planet Skin or Planet Fit, something like that. I have it on my website. If you search for infrared saunas, there's an article called Infrared Sauna, and it has all the sauna places that you could go to.
You can go on SpaFinder.com and search for a place near you with your zip code that has an infrared sauna. And when you go to these places , they all have a shower in the stall with the sauna. Like the Sweat Shop, it's got 10 saunas and each little unit has a shower in there as well for that very purpose.
DEBRA: Well, we only have a few minutes left, four minutes to be exact. Is there anything else that you'd like to say that you haven't said?
WENDY MYERS: Yeah. Well, something I like to do right when I get into the sauna, I like to take a dry brush. It’s kind of those back scrubber or what-have-you. I take a natural dry brush and do a dry brush with my skin before I start sweating. This helps loosen up any dead skin cells and really more importantly, gets that lymph flowing. It helps your body to get rid of the toxins. Getting that lymph flowing, that's where you're going to be transporting a lot of these toxins, et cetera.
So I do that over my entire body, and it's a really pleasant feeling and help to really stimulate your skin and your lymph system.
DEBRA: I do that too before I shower. It really does feel really good. I do feel stimulated. It makes the skin wake up.
WENDY MYERS: Yes, I love it so much and there's really so many other benefits to saunas we didn't talk about. People can improve their wound-healing. Human cell growth increases by 150% to 170% and wound size can decrease by 36%.
There's a study done by NASA that found that wound-healing was increased. You can get pain relief. The penetrating heat from the saunas have been proven to reduce pain in joints and muscles and reduce inflammation and increase circulation to the area of discomfort. It reduces blood pressure. German medical researchers concluded that one session in an infrared sauna for an hour can significantly reduce blood pressure because it's due to persistent peripheral vessel dilation. So this helps to reduce blood pressure. It causes a release of nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels.
There are just so many benefits. I can't even go into it in this one hour that we have to talk about. It reduces radiated cells. So a lot of people are exposed to radiation. They get radiation poisoning from bomb testing and Fukushima Fallout and just living in urban areas. And one of the best ways to destroy cells that contain radiation is with an infrared sauna. These are weaker cells that can safely and easily be destroyed and prevent any cancers that they may eventually cause when they begin to mutate.
DEBRA: Wow! And everything I like about sauna is that it has a very long history and natural origin. And just during the break, I've been looking at different pages about saunas and here's one that says that Indian Sweat Lodge has been in use continuously for 40,000 years. I mean, there's such a history to sauna.
And here's something that says that the near-infrared lamp sauna was actually invented by Dr. Kellogg a hundred years ago.
WENDY MYERS:Wow! I didn't know that.
DEBRA: And it says that electric lightbulb had just been invented by Thomas Edison and he made the first infrared lamp, sauna, and it used 40 small, just regular lightbulbs. That was the first thing I knew. Nobody knew what to do with it or why you should have a sauna made with lightbulbs, but here we are.
Well, thanks so much, Wendy.