Accelerating Fat Loss With Copper – Extended Interview With Morley Robbins

Today we are talking about accelerating fat loss with copper.
Who knew copper has been known as a natural antibiotic and essential nutrient for over 8000 years. Even Hippocrates who is said to have commanded copper compounds as early as 400 BC however scientists are still uncovering new information regarding the functions of copper in the human body and the benefits of copper supplements.

I created Accelerated Scalar Copper™ because of its ability to help support the immune system, skin, hair and eyes and so many other things, but I didn’t know how copper was connected to fat loss.

So many of you have been complaining about unexplained weight gain over the last couple of years so we’re going to really get into it with the expert Morley Robbins. He is back, he is the Creator and founder of the Root Cause Protocol and the Magnesium advocacy group. He’s received his BA in Biology from Denison University in Ohio and holds an MBA from George Washington University in healthcare administration, he’s also known as the Magnesium man and we might have to have him come back and talk about magnesium due to his extensive research into an understanding of magnesium’s role in the body.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Sara: Welcome Morley how are you today?

Morley: I’m delighted to be here Sara I’m really looking forward to our discussion.

Sara: I am too and last time you were on we touched on some of the other health benefits of copper. Eye health, hair, skeletal, but I want to get into some of the hidden facts I always talk to people about copper as it’s like that hidden hero. It’s the backstage guy that makes the lead singer look really good and without it, the show doesn’t go on so let’s talk about insulin resistance relation with copper.

Morley: Something light lol.

Sara: I really want to start, and I meant to say this, is that when people are looking for weight loss they are going for the quick diabetic drug to do so and there’s a reason because when you correct insulin resistance and fatty liver obesity goes away. You don’t lose weight to get healthy you get healthy to lose weight. There’s this connection between fatty liver, insulin resistance and what’s going on in society today and copper might be the missing element.

Morley: I would go a little farther and say Copper is the missing element.

40% of people on planet Earth have what’s called metabolic syndrome. It’s a spectrum disorder, as you know, that involves heart disease, cancer, fatty liver disease, and diabetes being a principal factor. All these conditions are related to each other.

If you understand the many metabolic functions of bioavailable copper. Again copper is unique I love the phrase hidden hero I will still steal it but I will give you quote recognition for the phrase, but the thing is, people just don’t understand what this mineral does and we will have a chance to get into the weeds of it as we have this discussion about insulin resistance and trying to improve fat metabolism. But when you get into the world of non-alcoholic fatty liver diseases there are some very important studies that your listeners probably would like to dig into.

The easiest is Song and McCarthy. They have articles from 2012, 2015 in 2018 and what they do is link low bio-available copper, low retinol and high iron, as the principal agents to create fatty liver disease.

And so, what happens inside the liver is, what people need to understand, is that the liver was designed by our maker and Mother Nature to be a storage depot for copper and retinol. It was never intended to be an iron locker and that’s what it’s become in the modern era. But since 1928 scientists have known that if you deny copper in the diet, iron will rise in the liver.

It’s axiomatic, it’s like a sea salt. As soon as copper goes low, iron goes high and as that iron builds in the liver it begins to disrupt many of the enzyme functions that are critical to take place inside the liver.

One of the key mechanisms is for that metabolism to take place, and what a lot of people don’t know, is that the mechanism to get fat into the mitochondria it’s an acylcarnitine transferase (enzyme). Well, that enzyme doesn’t work without copper, so right out of the blocks we got a problem we can’t get fat into the mitochondria well then we have what is called beta-oxidation enzymes they don’t work without copper.

Now I’ve read probably about 10 000 articles in the last 14 years I found one, ONE, that revealed the difference between burning sugar and burning fat in the mitochondria.

When you read Primal Body Primal Mind what the author tells us is that early man and early woman ate the fattest meat they could find. We are designed to eat protein and fat, we’re not designed to eat sugar that’s not a mitochondria really not designed to do that and you got to have copper.

The catch-22 is you can’t absorb copper unless you have fat in your diet and then the flip side is you can’t metabolize fat unless you have copper in your body and in your cells and so the scientists have been studying this dynamic between copper and iron and retinol for a couple decades now as it relates to fatty liver disease.

What your listeners might know is about fructose and high fructose corn syrup. There’s no faster way to mess up the liver than with high fructose corn syrup because what it does is it blocks copper uptake in the front door and to some extent the garage door for getting copper into the cell and copper into the metabolism.

The front door is called CTR1 copper transporter 1. It’s a very important front door copper. High fructose corn syrup has been established as an inhibitor of getting copper into the body.

Sara: So I want to stop you real quick to emphasize this because if you’re listening and you think you’re eating a healthy diet and you’re not eating the sugary foods that are packaged in the market I have a package of wagyu beef hot dogs in my freezer that I thought were healthy when I bought them and I look on the package and there’s high fructose corn syrup in it. So this is hidden in our dairy, in our meats, in our foods that we thought were healthy so you have to be more proactive in looking at these labels and really sticking to a whole food diet so everybody be on guard that this is in everyone’s diet. Unless you are being very persistent with looking at your labels.

Morley: and you’re lucky that they listed it as high fructose corn syrup because about a year or two ago they changed it to ‘corn sugars’ because they know that people are catching on to the game. As soon as you see the word corn you might just put the package back you just don’t want to get anywhere near it. All the juices and drinks that we used besides water are going to have high fructose corn syrup to guarantee it. It’s an absolute metabolic poison and it has a particular affinity for the liver you can’t break down fructose anywhere but the liver and what it does is fructose causes energy loss in the liver it’s just the metabolic properties.

What happens is there’s a principal pathway to break down sugars it’s called the glucose pathway it’s what just about every article will describe. Well, there’s an alternate pathway for breaking down sugar and it’s called the AR (aldose reductase) Polyol pathway. That polyol, the ol, is referring to ‘sugar alcohols’.

You probably have heard of inositol or sorbitol you know Mannitol, well those are sugar alcohols and they’re broken down in this pathway. And what triggers this, and there are books about this now with David Perlmutter Drop Acid or Rick Johnson’s Nature Wants Us To Be Fat, I was actually in a meeting with Rick about a month and a half ago and I said nature does not want us to be fat nature wants us to be in balance and he smiled and he said you’re right Morley, and so the thing is if we don’t deal with this fructose problem it’s going to burn out our liver and the issue is that all those aldose reductase polynol pathways, and it’s a beast inside our body, why, because it creates a copper crisis and when fructose gets broken down.

The next sugar that gets created is called sorbitol. Sorbitol is not our friend. Sorbitol, and this is based on Research from Dr Briggs from 1981, sorbitol chelates 98% of the available copper. Basically, sorbitol is a vacuum cleaner to pull copper out, so we’ve got this dynamic. We’ve got fructose at the front end blocking copper uptake, we’ve got sorbitol, the next metabolic proper next metabolite, is sucking up copper and then it begs the question well where’s this copper coming from? It’s a really good question. I think we’ve talked about the copper protein called ceruloplasmin it’s a very important protein in our blood it has many different functions but one of its principal jobs is to deliver copper to the mitochondria. It’s really important, especially the liver mitochondria. And just to put it on scale, the liver, the hepatocytes have about 10 000 mitochondria per cell so it’s real important that they get access to copper because the mitochondria are dependent on copper to do their work.

And so we’ve got this crisis with copper, we’ve got the liver is not getting access the way it’s supposed to, and we’re losing energy because to break down fructose you have to expend energy to break it down and then what’s going to happen is we’re going to start to make more uric acid. Uric acid is not our friend and when I was having lunch with Rick Johnson I swallowed hard and I said Rick I have this theory I said when we’re not making energy when we’re not making ATP we’re making uric acid and he smiled and he said you’re absolutely right Morley.

Sara: So to emphasize this, food is supposed to make energy, you’re supposed to get energy from food, and fructose is actually stealing energy from you. And I had this conversation with my teenage daughter who’s an athlete because she wants to use apple sauce for quick energy to have right before a workout and I said just so you know that fructose without the fiber is actually stealing the energy that you think you want for your workout.

Morley: Yeah it’s absolutely mind-numbing what that one sweetener does. And so what’s really important to connect though is that when blood sugar is rising in the body because it’s not being metabolized right it blows up ceruloplasmin and the copper comes out of its protein and so we have this rising level of what’s called Unbound Copper. Some practitioners love to call it copper toxic or copper toxicity. Copper’s never unbound. It might not be bound to ceruloplasmin but it’s going to be bound to albumin, it’s going to be bound to histidine, it’s going to be bound to some copper protein transcruprine or something like that but it’s never unbound. The amount of unbound copper inside the cell is .210. There’s just no unbound copper inside the cell and that’s the research of Svetlana Lutsenko at Johns Hopkins. She’s a world-renowned copper expert but back to the story.

So we have this liver that’s struggling to make energy and it’s now being exposed to a lot of uric acid and what’s really behind it is there’s a basic metabolic breakdown in the mitochondria and when the mitochondria can’t make energy they start to break down the scaffolding. They’ll do anything to find sources of phosphate.

Think of it this way. Picture being in a log cabin in the dead of winter and you start to run out of firewood and so you start taking apart your log cabin so you can burn fire in the firewood, and that’s what’s happening inside the mitochondria it’s breaking down nucleotides and in the final nucleotide that’s left is it’s called xanthine and then xanthine becomes uric acid. And uric acid, when it’s in our blood, it’s considered an antioxidant. When it’s rising in our cells it’s a pro-oxidant and it’s wreaking havoc and that’s where the real crisis is taking place. The irony of this whole thing, I think you’ll find this fascinating, why your listeners are benefiting from your product I’ve got one and there are several out on the market but the point is I was stunned when I found an article from the 1980s it indicated that copper blocks the polyol pathway. So that’s how our ancestors got away with it. They weren’t being exposed to glyphosate. They weren’t being exposed to high fructose corn syrup. They weren’t being exposed to the level of antibiotics that we are, and so their copper status was not as compromised as ours is in the modern era.

I’m not sure people realize that copper is the target, but it is because you can’t make energy and you can’t burn fat without it, and so what happens is when the beta-oxidation enzymes can’t work, the signal goes over to the nucleus to start what’s called fatty acid synthesis. It’s the FAS Gene (fatty acid synthase), and what it does is it makes fatty acids and it’s really good at and it starts to make triglycerides and related lipids and they start to build up in the liver and that’s why it’s called fatty liver disease.

Most people don’t know that, most practitioners don’t know that, but as soon as copper goes into a deficit position the FAS gene kicks in and you start to make fatty acids instead of burning them.

The other really critical step in this process there are two more blockbuster issues I think you’ll enjoy Sara. One is there’s an enzyme it’s called PDE3, Phosphodiesterase 3. And in order to burn fat, copper needs to come in and block PDE3, and if you can’t block PDE3 you’re not gonna be able to burn fat. So copper is an obligate inhibitor of PDE3 so that beta-oxidation can take place.

But now, let’s get into the graduate-level dynamics because I think this is really important. It’s initially going to make people feel uncomfortable because it’s new information, but as they hear it more and more, and we have other conversations, I think it’ll become more commonplace.

We live on a planet where, as you said we’ve got to make energy from our food, and the way we do that is we oxidize it we use oxygen to burn it, and if we burn a unit of glucose we can make anywhere from 32 to 36 ATP, that’s pretty cool.

If we use fat, a unit of fat, we can get 140 units of ATP that’s why fat is so important you’ve got this multiplier effect of making energy. If we don’t have oxygen it’s called fermentation and we make two units of energy.

Well, what is cancer? It is fermentation. But there are a lot of cells, and so it’s making up for the loss of energy by making lots of cells that are fermenting. Where does fermentation come from? Lower life forms. That’s how they make energy and it was Otto Warburg who figured out why oxygen was so important for humans and other animals and other mammals because of our ability to oxidize the fuel and have this multiplier effect in terms of producing ATP.

The whole process of monitoring the amount of sugar and other nutrients in our diet becomes really, really important.

You got to have sensors that are saying ‘Hey, do we have enough oxygen, do we have enough sugar, do we have the right fats in our diet and are we able to burn them’? And the primal mechanism for that is called AMPK, AMP Kinase, and it turns out it’s copper-dependent. It’s the most sophisticated energy sensor we have in our body and it’s connected to the mitochondria as you would expect.

Playing in the background are hormones and I’m not you know, by no means, a hormone expert and I’m not an endocrinologist and I’m not an endocrinologist, but hormones are really important for breaking down our food. There’s a triad in our gut called gastrin, secretin and CCK, and cholecystokinin.

Sara: This is one of my favorite hormones and I’ve talked about it with you Morley, that CCK is what tells your brain I’ve had enough to eat. This is a really important hormone so really pay attention to what Copper’s relationship is to this hormone.

Morley: These three hormones work together, you’re absolutely right about the signalling in the brain, it turns out that that that neuropeptide, cholecystokinin is called a neuropeptide, your hormone but neuropeptide’s official name, has the highest expression in the brain.

News flash: why are people getting neurodegeneration? They don’t have enough CCK. But here’s the catch.

We make about 150 hormones in our body and we’re talking about three of them; gastrin, secretin and CCK.
What the body makes is called pro-hormones. Think of a pro-hormone as your car that’s parked in your driveway. It’s there but it can’t do anything. When does your car become useful? When you turn on the engine and then you can drive it sometimes. All these hormones need to be activated and the official term is called Alpha amidation. That’s a very biochemical way of saying activation. But what’s happening is these hormones have a glycine residue at the end of what’s called their carboxyl Terminal C, Terminal C for carboxyl. There’s an enzyme, it’s called the Pam Enzyme, and that enzyme leaves the hormone, cuts off the glycine in the carboxyl group, and attaches an amino group which is nh2 and then suddenly it’s turned on- it’s literally like starting your car, it’s literally like turning on the lights in your room and turning on your computer– it’s that profound. It’s dormant and it’s active and the name of that enzyme Pam stands for peptidyl glycine the glycine residue peptidyl- peptidyl is peptide the peptide glycine Alpha amidating, amidating at the alpha carbon the number one carbon mono-oxygenase means it’s taking oxygen and using the energy of that oxygen to make this change it’s a major big deal and what’s particularly important about it, it requires two copper batteries it doesn’t work without copper.

This was first discovered in 1982 and then over the next 40 years they’ve been studying it intensively and so those are three really important digestive enzymes that need to be turned on with copper but wait there’s more.

You’ve heard of insulin right so I think everybody has.

Sara: Insulin has become extremely dysregulated over the last couple of years we have to be careful with how we talk about it but what we’re seeing is that it has become extremely dysregulated in the same person eating the same food nothing changing insulins being dysregulated which could be leading to some of the unexplained weight gain but let’s get into it.

Morley: Let’s explain what’s going on. So insulin is made in our pancreas, we know that right, what’s really important to understand about these hormones is every hormone has a receptor that’s got to fit into it all and these receptors are where the download of information takes place. But it’s got to be a secure connection and that’s what the activation of the hormone does. Once the hormone gets activated it can fit in its receptor perfectly. If it’s not active it doesn’t fit, can’t get in.

If I were to give you a toy that requires a battery but forgot to put in the battery and we went clinical, studying your reaction to that toy, we would say, well, Sara seems to have play time resistance because you’re not playing with the toy because it doesn’t work there’s no reason to play with it if it doesn’t have the battery. Well, that’s exactly what’s happening inside our body. Insulin resistance is really the insulin that can’t be activated to make a secure connection.

But there’s one more step.

Insulin has a regulator. There’s another hormone that regulates insulin secretion. Its formal name is called incretin, another name for it is called GLP1, you may have heard of that.

Well GLP1, also made in the pancreas, gets secreted but it needs to be activated. GLP1 has to be activated in order to release the insulin, which also has to be activated before it can clear the sugar. And the reason why this is also important is that a really powerful model for glucose intolerance because sugar is not your friend it’s a very caustic element as you probably know. Well, the most glucose-intolerant people on planet Earth are children with what’s called Menkes disease.

Menkes affects the garage door and it’s an enzyme called ATP 7A and its sister enzyme is called ATP 7B well 7B is making ceruloplasmin 7A is making everything else and ATP 7A is a copper pump; these are copper pumps that get activated with retinol, fascinating, retinoic acid is what activates those pumps, but the ATP 7A is what loads copper into the Pam enzyme and so if the garage door is being affected by high fructose corn syrup, being affected by glyphosate, being affected by antibiotics, we’ve got a problem on our hands right.

Insulin resistance it’s highly correlated with iron accumulation right, I think you can find it in the literature. It’s oxidative stress. Well, what creates oxidative stress is iron playing with oxygen. But why is the iron building? Because there is not enough bio-level copper in the liver to regulate it, and so the iron starts to build, the oxidative stress starts to build, the receptors can’t get the connection because of the Pam enzyme.

You talk about a hidden hero well copper is the hidden hero, but also the granddaddy mechanism, the true unsung hero I would argue, is this Pam enzyme that stopped working a long time ago because of the changes in the food system and farming system that we’re alluding to. And I think the more recent events have been very hard on our minerals and I renamed what COVID stands for so COV stands for Copper’s vanished and ID stands for irons dysregulated and so that’s a very different way of thinking about the drama and the trauma that we all live through but if as you come up the learning curve of minerals you will see that Dynamic playing out in our immune system. And so it’s a very powerful mechanism in the dynamics between copper and iron and what people need to understand is that copper is the general and iron is the foot soldier.

If you want to really crystallize your understanding, picture the Battle of the Bulge with no General Patton. Patton’s not there, what would have happened it would have been a disaster and so that’s what’s happening our generals are missing, and our liver foot soldiers are building up.

What are foot soldiers like when they’re when there’s no General around? They’re just going to act out that’s what they’re going to do and they will create oxidative stress and they will prevent optimal metabolizing of the fat because they’re not going to allow for the copper. The Copper’s MIA, the copper is not available, copper can’t stop that PDE3, copper can’t activate the movement of that into the mitochondria, copper can’t facilitate the beta-oxidation enzymes, copper can’t activate the dozens of hormones and all I’ve identified are five. I’ve just identified five. Folks depending on the author it could be over 70. 150 the highest I’ve seen is 279.

Let’s just leave it at 70 hormones. 70 hormones.

Here’s another dimension that you may not have even thought of Sara. You’ve heard of a thyroid right? This little butterfly right?

Sara: I definitely want to get into the copper and the thyroid because if you have hypothyroidism which I believe 9 out of ten people are suffering from now are you you’re not going to be able to lose weight I wanted to just emphasize if anyone else missed this when Morley mentioned it GLP1 have we heard that before GLP-1

GLP-1 is what Ozempic and Wegovy and all of these diabetic drugs that people are using for weight loss play off of, so we are talking about copper as an integral part and your weight loss natural alternatives to these diabetic injections for non-diabetics. I just wanted to emphasize that if anyone missed that, let’s get into the thyroid and copper.

Morley: yeah it’s absolutely fascinating. Everyone is aware of their numbers I’m sure. If they’re at all concerned about their thyroid they know their T4 and T3 free T4 TSH, TRH, all of those need to be activated they need to be Alpha amidated.

We’re all used to working with computers you and I are talking to each other via a computer, everyone who’s watching us right now is most likely doing it on a computer or a device like this, but most people are probably watching on a computer. Well computers have what it’s called a motherboard, and we have a motherboard too. Our motherboard is called the HPA Access Hypothalamus Pituitary Adrenal Axis. We can’t do anything without the HPA access.

Well, the highest concentration of the Pam enzyme expressions in the hypothalamus and where is TRH made? Oh yeah, it’s made in the hypothalamus. Well, TRH Thyroid Regulating Hormone, it’s the general for the thyroid. It sets the tone for the thyroid. And if the general is drunk because there’s not enough copper the major, which is called TSH, starts to scream, starts to yell and so if your TSH is rising, if it’s well above, I mean shouldn’t be above two, but if it’s like in the fours and fives and sixes, which would send most endocrinologists into a tizzy, all it’s telling you is your copper deficient and there’s very interesting research coming out of Europe.

So in Europe they have what are called endocrinologists in the U.S we have what are called endocriminologists and so in Europe they’re very focused on how the body really works. It turns out, and this is the work of Jens Mittag 2012, so it’s ancient history, but it’s brilliant, and what they discovered is that T3 is an oxygen sensor. It’s smelling for oxygen and oxidative stress. Where is T3 hanging out? In the mitochondria.

Now, the narrative that everyone’s been trained by is that T3 is what runs the show and it activates the mitochondria and that is a bold-faced lie. T3 is an oxygen sensor that’s a big job in and of itself but what Dr Mittag was able to figure out is that hormones are what? Signalling molecules. When T3 senses that the oxygen level, the oxidative stress level, is rising in the mitochondria, it sends a signal back to the liver and it says hey we need more of that ceruloplasmin thing because we need more copper in the mitochondria to respond to the oxygen that needs to be turned into water to release the energy molecules. It’s absolutely amazing that what Dr Mittag did was he put the thyroid community on its ear and explained that T4 correlates beautifully with serum copper. T3 correlates beautifully with ceruloplasmin, and not many people know that. Not many people would dare to go into something into literature that’s more than a week old and some of the best articles I’ve read are from the 1910s 1920s, not last week. I don’t trust last week anymore. It has too many vested interests.

But the thing is I think there’s way more to the thyroid and the reason why is that we’ve got this hypothalamus and we have this pituitary that’s right above the thyroid so TRH is instructing TSH is then instructing thyroid hormone production most people who are hypothyroid have low levels of retinol in their diet. Why is retinol so important? Well, retinol is what’s activating ATP 7A. Retinol is what makes copper bioavailable that’s what makes the Pam enzyme work. 

Anyone who has low thyroid function hypothyroidism has low retinol and I would argue they’re very likely low in copper but no one’s ever taken it in that way like Dr Mittag has in Germany.

So it’s a very different world there and so when the copper is right when the retinol is right the thyroid hormone is getting made and then the thyroid hormone can be activated so it can do its job.

Now the part that I don’t know yet Sara is what is the metabolic impact of a hormone that’s supposed to be activated but it’s not?

What does cck that’s not activated do inside the body in our brain?

What does thyroid hormone do when it’s not activated? Does it still have some capacity to stimulate change or simply some kind of function? It’s very murky in the research but then we get into things like erexon and gosh vasopressin and again we can have a field day just talking about all the different hormones that get involved in this process the love hormone oxytocin. I thought that meant it had something to do with oxygen no. Oxytocin is Greek for ‘swift birth’ and what’s fascinating about oxytocin is it only has nine peptides in it.

Oxytocin and vasopressin both have nine peptides and the individual scientist who figured it out his name was Vincent du Vigneaud he was famous biochemist who got his degree at the University of Rochester in 1953 a year after I was born. He’s up in Rochester and he’s isolating oxytocin, he’s sequencing oxytocin, he’s replicating oxytocin, and he’s activating oxytocin. 1953. And that should make your listeners a little uncomfortable because that means well they’ve known about this a long time and what is not taught in doctor school?l Everything that Sara and I have been talking about.

Sara: Well Morley, I mean we could go on forever we are definitely having you back but I want to emphasize a few things that we talked about, copper and the thyroid, copper and the regulating hormones for appetite, copper and insulin resistance and fatty liver disease. All of these mechanisms are part of unexplained weight gain and copper and GLP-1 and we didn’t even get into iron dysregulating leptin hormone. We didn’t get into copper and its relationship to colitis I and IBS which can also be a cause of weight gain so there’s so much more into this discussion so before we go tell people where they can find you and learn more.

Morley: obviously on social media on the mag Facebook group or the RCP page the website rcp123.org. I’m not sure when this is going to air but I’ll just share that we’re having open enrollment and for the RCP Institute if you want to learn the deep dive of what we’ve been just talking about this afternoon uh we’ll get into that in our classes and it’s um a 16-week program that people find absolutely fascinating and then I I’m a regular on a podcast like this I’m so grateful to Sara and her colleagues out there who allow me the chance to share this wisdom and let people know that there’s more to the story that’s the key if you want to read my book it’s called Cure Your Fatigue and I don’t go into the deep deep dive I did today but it’ll give you the basics of wow why don’t I feel right why am I fatigued and I can’t make energy well you can’t make energy because you don’t have enough buy available usable copper and that’s really at the very base of our metabolism.

Sara: amazing, and the book is amazing. I read it and Morley you’re just a wealth of knowledge we will be having you back and continuing the discussion and this is literally why I came out with the Accelerated Scalar Copper. Like my silver and like Accelerated Gold it is made with scalar copper technology and it’s the only Nano scalar copper solution treated with water implosion technology and enhanced with scalar frequencies to enhance the absorption. 99% absorption made with ozonated and UV sterilized distilled water and um 99.99 ultra fine pure scalar copper so just wanted to mention that it has been a part of my protocol I even sprayed on my face for my skin right and I sprayed in my scalp I do it I bathe in it just like I do with the Accelerated Silver so thank you Morley.