Always Tired? Let’s Talk Minerals | Caroline Alan, Ep 234

Jennifer Norman:
Have you ever gotten so used to feeling exhausted that you've stopped wondering why? You get through the day, you meet your deadlines, you take care of everyone who needs you, and somewhere along the way, feeling good becomes something you hope to get back when life settles down. My guest today, Caroline Alan, knows that experience personally. Caroline is a health survivor, mineral expert, and educator on a mission to shift the way we think about cellular health. After a demanding career in the high-tech corporate world left her physically, mentally, and energetically depleted, she began a personal journey to reclaim her health. That path led her to the world of plant-based minerals and their profound ability to help the body restore its natural balance. Her transformational experience sparked a deep dive into the science of minerals and human physiology. Caroline explored microbiology, molecular and cellular biology, agricultural soil science, and decomposition to understand why minerals are essential and how they truly work in the body. Through that research, she became a passionate advocate for nature's way of supporting energy, detoxification, hydration, and vitality at the cellular level.

Jennifer Norman:
Now, as co-founder and CEO of Beam Minerals and author of the new book, The Mineral Reset, Caroline's all in on sharing this vital knowledge with the world. Affectionately known as the Mineral Geek, Caroline is with us today to share her story, unpack what minerals actually do and talk about how to make sense of all the claims that we hear about energy, electrolytes, hydration, and supplements. My hope is that you'll leave with a better understanding of your body and better questions to ask about what it needs. Let's get started. Caroline, welcome to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. I am so glad that you are here.

Caroline Alan:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Jennifer Norman:
This is so wonderful. Now, of course, I must get the medical disclaimer out of the way. The information shared on this podcast is for general information and educational purposes only. It does not substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Listening to this show does not create a doctor-patient relationship. Always seek advice from your doctor or qualified health provider with any questions about a medical condition. And of course, if you have a medical emergency, call 911 immediately. Phew.

Jennifer Norman:
Okay. Now we can really get started. I would love to hear your backstory because you do have a really compelling aha situation going on before you were the Mineral Geek. Please tell us what happened. What was an ordinary day like for you? How were you feeling and how did you start this whole journey into discovering the power of minerals?

Caroline Alan:
Yes. Long before I became the Mineral Geek, I was a person who worked in high tech. I was a project manager for hire on large software development projects. And I was also very ill. So it's about 10 years ago, a little more now. I, at that time, I had 2 young boys. They were like maybe 8 and 10 years old. I had, or maybe a little bit older.

Caroline Alan:
And I had flatlined adrenals. They'd been flatlined for over a year. I had bad inflammation in my gut. I'd definitely been Gluten intolerant most of my life, and I had struggled with elimination issues, bloating, and even though I was gluten-free for 7 years, I could never get over the inflammation that I had.

Jennifer Norman:
Mmm.

Caroline Alan:
I also had inflammation in my mouth with bad periodontal disease, deep pockets, and soft dentin in my teeth.

Jennifer Norman:
Mmm.

Caroline Alan:
I also had bad sinus infections that would recur.

Jennifer Norman:
Right.

Caroline Alan:
I'd had a, a mold exposure event, which had really attacked my sinuses, and I was unable to get over that continual recurrence of the sinus infections, which of course caused lots of headaches. And then I also struggled with sleep. So I'd always been an insomniac my entire life, but I, at that point, as I hit into perimenopause, I started waking up 4 or 5 times every single night. So I was having lots of interrupted sleep, which then caused brain fog. And I struggled really with getting my thoughts together with those executive functions, making decisions, all of that stuff that happens when you have intense brain fog. So I was in bad shape and I had been to every kind of doctor. The other 2 things is I'd had struggles with my hormone balance, of course, as I get into perimenopause. And also I had Hashimoto's, so I struggled with thyroid. So you name it, I had it.

Caroline Alan:
Okay.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow.

Caroline Alan:
And I literally had spent, um, probably over $100,000 on my health going to different specialists, doctors, practitioners, you name it, I've tried it. And the interesting thing is that at right about that time, I met my business partner, a man named Dan Howard, and he handed me this little cup of liquid, like 1 ounce of liquid one morning. And I said, what's this? And he said, it's minerals. And I was like, minerals? And he says, yeah, it might help you. So I drank it. It tasted like water. And I was like, huh, interesting. Okay, sure.

Caroline Alan:
Nobody had ever, none of the doctors, practitioners, experts, specialists I went to had ever mentioned minerals to me. Never. Maybe zinc. That was it. To uplevel my immune system, that's it.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan:
So I started taking them daily. And the first thing that happened is I went to my dentist to have my teeth cleaned after about 2 months. So this is not something that happened overnight, but it happened slowly over a period of time. 2 months in, I went to the dentist. She looked in my mouth. I'd had no bleeding when I'd had my teeth cleaned. My tissues looked pink and healthy. The pH was radically changed.

Caroline Alan:
She was like, what happened? And I said, you know, I don't know, maybe it's these minerals I've been taking.

Jennifer Norman:
And you've been taking a cup every morning, not just that one time.

Caroline Alan:
Yeah, 1 ounce of liquid every day. That's all I had changed. I didn't change any other ways of eating, any other supplementation, nothing. I just was adding that. You have to understand, at that point when I was handed that little cup of liquids, I was pretty much done because I had tried so many things to get healthy.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan:
And I was just like, I'm not going on another detox. I'm not gonna do another whole supplement regime. I'm not gonna go do some new protocol. I'm done. But this was easy, so I did it.

Jennifer Norman:
Okay.

Caroline Alan:
And so then 4 months in, I went to my naturopath and I had, we were reading the results of my adrenals test. And at my last appointment, she had recommended I take hydrocortisone, which I was not going to do. She really wanted to jumpstart my adrenals, but I hadn't, she had given me a prescription, but I had never filled it. At that visit, my adrenals were 1/3 of the way up, up the chart. And that was after a full year or more of trying all sorts of different things to get my adrenals to get active. So this was an amazing change.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan:
So then over the space of 8 or 9 months, all of the symptoms that I described and more, including hair loss, just ashy skin, so the gut inflammation, the inflammation in my mouth. the sinus infections, the brain fog, the sleep issues, they all resolved. They all resolved. And I was like, wait a darn minute. And I kept going back to my friend going, really? Like minerals? And he started handing me pieces of information. Like, why don't you read this article and read this scientific piece and read this? And I was completely ignorant. Like, I didn't even know most of the words. I mean, you use a word like bioavailable.

Caroline Alan:
I was like, well, what does that really mean? And I started really studying deeply so that I, ultimately what I wanted to do was understand why minerals in general, and why particularly this little cup of liquid, had made such a difference. So that meant I needed to understand what minerals are, how they work in the body, why, like, pills and powders don't really work.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan:
And why this liquid mineral, plant-based mineral replenisher was so effective in upleveling so many parts of my, or chronic symptoms.

Jennifer Norman:
This sounds miraculous. It's almost like, you know, we almost gave up hope and then all of a sudden this little thing, which is so simple seemingly, was just dropped in your lap almost and, and really helped a number of different issues holistically.

Caroline Alan:
Yeah. We have to remember that when somebody is so physically beset with chronic symptoms, what happens to the emotional state? I was—

Jennifer Norman:
Exactly. I was just about to say that.

Caroline Alan:
I was depressed. I had anxiety. I was, because I was struggling to—

Jennifer Norman:
The sleep alone. Yeah.

Caroline Alan:
Just sleep. And then I had to get to work and I had to operate at a high level and also take care of my kids. There, it was, it was really untenable, really bad situation. So to have so many of the symptoms just resolve without going to another doctor and spending a lot of money, another specialist, another protocol, another, et cetera. That was phenomenal. And that's why I was— maybe one thing had changed, I wouldn't have done the research, but because so many things changed, I wanted not only to understand what had happened, but be able to explain it to other people in language that they would understand.

Jennifer Norman:
I appreciate that so much. And you've really developed such an amount of expertise when it comes to minerals. You've, I mean, you went all in, you went deep dive and learned about all of the different aspects, where they come from, what the difference is, what they do, how they get into the cells. And so let's break this down for people who are probably not nearly as familiar with minerals and maybe just think about them in their multivitamin, or maybe they take zinc, or maybe they know that they should be taking electrolytes for cramps or something like that. I mean, they, a lot of people just have a very basic 101-level understanding of minerals and what they do. So why don't we start from the beginning and talk about what is a mineral and then how are they helping? How are they helping in all of these cells that we have all over our body?

Caroline Alan:
So here's the first thing, and I love this part. You have to understand, I'm like so excited about minerals. So they're so humble and most— they're so fundamental to everything, and yet they're so humble we don't even think about them. So if you're in your room somewhere listening, or you're in a room, or you're in a car, or you're taking a walk and you're listening to this, I want you to look around you at all of the structure, the building, the chair, maybe the car, the pavement, the trees, all structure in the universe is minerals. It's all minerals. And in fact, if you look at your body, all of the structure in your body is minerals. And in fact, if you took all the water out of your body, you'd just be a little pile of minerals. That's how fundamental they are.

Caroline Alan:
Literally, they create all of the structure in the universe. And there are many, many, many minerals. Now, there are about 18 minerals that your body utilizes on a daily basis, moment to moment. Now, here's a question. Like, so first of all, they're the structure in your body. Second of all, they are the cofactors for all biosynthesis in your body. So whether it's making thyroid or it's making adrenals or it's making reproductive hormones or it's making digestive enzymes or it's making proteins, it's all of the biosynthesis that happens in your body to regenerate bones, to, to make your body work requires different minerals as cofactors. So while we've been focusing mostly in the world now, we focus on macros, fats, and proteins.

Caroline Alan:
Guess what? None of those can be utilized by your body if you don't have all of the mineral cofactors necessary to turn those things into energy.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm.

Caroline Alan:
So that's the next thing. So minerals are structure, minerals are cofactors for biosynthesis, and next, they are cofactors for most energy generation in the body. And most of that energy generation happens inside the cells. So inside your cells, you have something called mitochondria. And these are like little energy-generating units. They're tiny. They're called organelles, and they're very tiny. And I like to think of it like a potential campfire.

Caroline Alan:
So one mitochondria creates the potential for a little campfire inside your cells, which is energy generation. And the fuel for that campfire, the heavy wood that you would use for a campfire, is minerals. And then there's the tinder, the kind of the stuff that lights on fire easily, and that's amino acids. So to have a campfire, you need to have minerals and amino acids. And then you need a match, something that's gonna light that fire and turn that fuel into energy. And that's the mitochondria. It's the thing that has the ability to take those 2 things, that fuel, and turn it into energy. Now, the cool thing is if you have all the fuel necessary, your body can generate, we say, about 1,200 watts of electricity per day.

Caroline Alan:
So, and some people say it's like 1,000. Well, we will just stick with the 1,200 watts of electricity every day, and that's enough to plug in your blender or your toaster. Okay. So it's a lot of energy. But if you don't have the fuel, what happens is your body can't generate enough energy. And if it can't generate enough energy at a cellular level, very, very tiny unit energy units, then what does it do? It has to pick and choose. And so it says, well, we don't have enough energy to reproduce the dentin in your teeth.

Caroline Alan:
We don't have enough energy to remove that inflammation in your gums, in your mouth. We don't have enough energy to remove the inflammation in your gut. We don't have enough energy to create adrenal— do that process, all of the endocrine functions in your body, or create reproductive hormones, or create digestive enzymes, or create all of the neurotransmitters that that create all of the physical experience that you have in your body. And so you start experiencing problems because your body can't generate enough energy to do all it needs to do. So it does things at a low level and it keeps the critical elements going, but, or it does it at a lower level than it could.

Jennifer Norman:
That is such a helpful explanation. Thank you so much. I think people have got a good visual of what that is. Now, I think that some people will say, well, I have a healthy diet, or maybe I take a multivitamin. What is going on when somebody says that, but they still might be mineral deficient?

Caroline Alan:
Yeah. So just so you know, there've been studies done that showed 98% of Americans have mineral deficiency of one type or another. And in many cases, deep depletions in some areas. So why is that?

Jennifer Norman:
Why?

Caroline Alan:
It's because the sad, sad fact is our food supply is extremely mineral deficient. Okay. And there's been studies. They studied food grown in 1950s versus food grown in 1999. We're already almost 20 years or 30 years past that. Right. So, and they found a marked difference in the nutrient density, much lower nutrient density in the foods grown in 1999. Now, why is that? Let me explain.

Caroline Alan:
So when a plant grows in the soil, the The way that it creates all of its structure and generates energy to grow is by taking minerals from the soil. Remember how we said all structure is minerals? So it actually absorbs minerals through its roots and it uses those to create its structure. In nature, what happens is a plant grows, ultimately it dies and decomposes. And when it decomposes, it delivers all of its minerals and nutrients back into the soil for use by future plants.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan:
But what we do is we cultivate. So we grow in soil, we take the minerals out of the soil, goes into the plants, we harvest, we take that food away from the soil, we eat it, we do all sorts of things to it, we dispose of its waste far from where it's grown. And so what happens, it's sort of like a bank account. If the soil is a bank account and you're just taking minerals out, it's like taking money out, taking money out, taking— you never put the money back in, you never get the minerals back into the soil. So what happens to the soil? It's just like that bank account. And the challenge that we have of getting minerals back into the soil is the same challenge we have with how we get minerals back into humans. So that's, we can talk about that in a moment, but I want people to really understand that there is an absolute reason that our foods are deficient.

Caroline Alan:
So to get the same nutrients from an apple your grandfather ate, you might have to eat 6 apples today.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan:
To get the same nutrition from a cup of spinach that your grandfather ate, you might have to eat 6 cups. So you can't eat enough volume of our food that you buy at the grocery store. Even if you grow it in your backyard garden, you have to learn how to get minerals back into the soil, 'cause you're doing the same thing. You're pulling nutrients out of the soil. You need to get— figure out how to get it back in.

Jennifer Norman:
So even if you're eating organic— Notwithstanding the way that people are eating today, which is the standard, you know, the S-A-D, the SAD, Standard American Diet, which is not even healthy... it's very calorie dense and nutrient poor, even on top of the fact that not everybody's eating raw vegan diets. And even if you were, you're still not getting the kind of nutrients that our forefathers had.

Caroline Alan:
Exactly. And one of, one of the other problems that people aren't really aware of is water. So when I was a kid, we used to drink from the hose. We just drank tap water. I'm not suggesting you do that, but the difference between like your reverse osmosis or distilled water, which is a lot more expensive water or Brita-filtered water is it's taken all the minerals out. And the problem with drinking— we call it empty water, water that has no minerals. It actually goes straight through you. And as it goes through, it grabs minerals from your system.

Caroline Alan:
So one of the reasons we have a great rise, like a huge trending issue with mineral deficiency. In fact, it's so trending that the World Health Organization coined a term for it and it's called the hidden hunger.

Caroline Alan:
So the hidden hunger is that sense that there's something missing. Maybe it's an hour after dinner and you just feel like, I just need that one more thing. And you find yourself opening the fridge or the cupboard for that one last little thing. And that's your cells literally going, we don't have what we need here. We don't have what we need here. Go looking, get up. We need something. And so your whole nervous system is amped up.

Caroline Alan:
You end up feeling this low-level, unsatiated feeling that has you you go looking. So once— water is really important. You always wanna be drinking mineralized water. That means spring water, natural spring water, or you need to take your reverse osmosis filtered water and add minerals back in. So, and don't buy distilled bottled water. Buy spring water preferably, or water that's had minerals added back to it. Very, very important. Important.

Caroline Alan:
So, and then the last problem that we have is that glyphosate, which is a weed killer that's sprayed on genetically modified food foods. And it's really, you can't get out of exposure of that. Everybody, everyone has glyphosate in their urine at this point. There's, there's been many studies that have shown that.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan:
And one of the big problems with glyphosate is that it chelates minerals in your body. That means it binds to them and removes them from your system, some very important minerals. So all those 3 together create chronic mineral deficiency which means your body can't do all the biosynthesis it needs. It can't create all the structure it needs, can't generate all the energy that it needs. And finally, it becomes less conductive because minerals are also the conductive material. So all of your neurology is like little electrical impulses that move through your body.

Jennifer Norman:
Like batteries, yeah.

Caroline Alan:
All of those. Yeah, it's like the battery and they all require minerals for those processes. So when you have low minerals, why does my cognition, why was I struggling with cognition? And having brain fog because literally my brain was less conductive. We call it a low voltage brain.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. I suffer from that on a daily basis. I'm gonna have to see about my mineral intake.

Caroline Alan:
Okay.

Jennifer Norman:
So thank you so much for that explanation. And now we're gonna get even a little bit deeper because not all minerals are alike. You know, certainly there, there, there are the ones that a lot of people have heard of, your sodiums, your magnesiums, your potassiums, but there are other ones that are just as important. Can you describe that? And then you also talk about humic versus fulvic. So I wanna give a little bit of an education to our listeners about all of these important aspects of different minerals.

Caroline Alan:
Yeah. So let's say you can understand that you're mineral deficient. Unless you are actively getting minerals replent— your body replenished with minerals in an effective way, you're deficient. And you probably have one or two deep depletions or imbalances. So this is probably the biggest thing I learned was how do we effectively get minerals back into our body? And one of the things that I learned is there's a lot of misunderstanding. So we're taught to look at the back of the nutritional facts panel, the supplement facts panel, and it says, okay, this product has X milligrams of magnesium, and that's a certain amount of your minimum daily requirement.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan:
Or your recommended daily allowance, something like And so people think because it says that the recommended daily allowance of magnesium is, I don't know, 500 milligrams. Some people would say 1,000. I don't know. Depends on who you speak with. People are thinking, I need to put 1,000 milligrams or 500 milligrams of magnesium in my body every day. And then not only magnesium though, because they know they've heard they need chromium and they need zinc and they need selenium and they need iodine and they need potassium and they need sodium and they need on and on. Okay. And there's 18 of them, many that are called, several that are called the macrominerals.

Caroline Alan:
So the ones you use a lot of, we often call those the electrolytes. Why do we call them electrolytes? Those are minerals with a high electrical charge. That's why they're called electrolytes. It's the only reason. They're just minerals with a high electrical charge. And they're also macrominerals. Your body uses a lot of them. So magnesium, potassium, sodium, calcium, boron. That's probably one a lot of people haven't heard of, but it's a macromineral your body uses a lot of.

Caroline Alan:
And then there are what we call the micronutrients. These are the elements that your body uses in smaller amounts, very, in some cases, very tiny amounts, but they're absolutely required. And things like molybdenum, vanadium, many people know they've heard of copper, but did you know you need to have it in your body every day? Things like that.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Caroline Alan:
So there's about 18 of them. I'm not gonna name 'em off. No one will remember them all. You can go look that up on the internet if you want. But here's the interesting thing. You can't think of your body like a car and go, okay, like relative to recommended daily allowances, I need 500 milligrams of magnesium and I need so many milligrams of potassium and go down the list and look at all those milligrams. And then like a car, go down to the health food store, fill up with pills and start taking those every day. And there's several reasons.

Caroline Alan:
So the whole concept of mineral supplementation was designed, like, and recommended daily allowances was designed in a lab and it was designed to understand what was the absolute minimum that a body needed so it wouldn't expire. So you wouldn't actually die. And they did this, it was actually done in the '40s after the Depression. And when they had huge, lots of hunger in the United States, they had the Dust Bowl. I mean, it was a really, it was a terrible time for the United States. They wanted to know, like, if we have food shortages, what's the minimum people have to have?

Jennifer Norman:
Mm-hmm.

Caroline Alan:
So that's not about optimal health. And I'm not saying if it says 500 milligrams of magnesium, you should take double because here's the misunderstanding. All of those minerals need to be in balance in your system. So your body works more like a forest than it does a car.

Caroline Alan:
You can't just go down and fill up the tanks with certain milligrams of different things, 'cause your body doesn't work like that. And if you think about nature and you think about your entire body is made of single cells that work together in incredibly awe-inspiring and miraculous ways to do— each cell has an intense It has an intended purpose. It knows exactly what it's supposed to do. And given the energy and the cofactors to do what it does, it will do it perfectly, mostly. But without those, it will struggle to fulfill its intended purpose. Now, in nature, what happens is all these minerals, which are the cofactors and the energy production units, they're all the fuel that's needed, are delivered in these balanced ways. And that's the cool thing that I learned is in that little cup of liquid that I was drinking every day, I was using what I call Mother Nature's mineral replenishment technology for all cellular systems on Earth. Because minerals have to get inside, they have to get to inside the cells.

Caroline Alan:
So that means you eat food, it gets broken down in your gut into tiny, tiny ionic components, like one magnesium molecule that hits up against your gut lining, the gut lining. The cell on the gut lining says, "Oh, that's magnesium." It lets it in. It gets absorbed into your bloodstream, and then that same magnesium molecule has to hit up against a cell, and the cell says, "Oh, that's magnesium." Let it into the cell, and that's where the mitochondria can utilize it. So it's a long journey. But Mother Nature, because every single cell on Earth needs minerals to function, Mother Nature had to say, "Okay, I'm going to have to get all these 18 minerals into the cell in these balanced ratios." So what did it do? So we created a pre-formulated molecule that can deliver all the minerals in those ratios directly into the cell.

Jennifer Norman:
And where is it sourced from?

Caroline Alan:
It's sourced from decomposed plants. So here's the interesting thing. At a cellular level, this is one of the things that I found awe-inspiring and really interesting, is at a mitochondrial level. So that campfire level where you're— you need the fuel and the match, that the mitochondria is the match that's gonna turn that fuel into energy. At the mitochondrial level, all cells use the same ratios of minerals. The same ratio. So a redwood tree, the mitochondria in a redwood tree and the mitochondria in my liver or in my gut or in my skin uses the same ratio of minerals.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow.

Caroline Alan:
And it kind of makes sense because we all come from the same place. And because we're all single cells, we're all made of single cells. Those single cells started and grew on this Earth and they all work the same way at a very, Hmm. So it makes sense that nature would create a method because otherwise cellular life on the planet wouldn't have thrived.

Jennifer Norman:
Right.

Caroline Alan:
So it created a method for not only creating a pre-formulated molecule, but also, and that's called fulvic. And fulvic is, it comes from decomposed plants. So when I talked about the plant grows in the soil, it dies and it decomposes. And as it decomposes, it goes through a microbial decomposition process that results in a pre-formulated molecule that is available for future plants to grow, to use as energy for growth. So these molecules, and it's actually the molecule that first results is called humic. And that humic molecule is a large molecule and we actually extract, fulvic comes out of that molecule and becomes a molecule that enters the cell and delivers full spectrum of minerals directly into the cell. So it's like, it's It's a phenomenal technology, really, truly a technology.

Jennifer Norman:
And humble, to your point. I feel like this is just nature's sustainable, regenerative property that is available to us, but we've, we are so used to discarding all of these waste factors and not even recognizing what they could do to benefit our body when we are reconsuming and reharmonizing with nature. I really love that.

Caroline Alan:
Yeah, there's this hubris that we have as humans where we always think we can do it better. And instead of looking to nature and see how nature does it, we tend to go into our labs and then, and we try and figure out a better way, you know?

Jennifer Norman:
Right. It's so true. So then what is happening when we do that and we get into the lab and we create these powders and we create these other things? And you were saying, well, there's something different. There's something that might not be as bioavailable or maybe not as balanced.

Caroline Alan:
Yeah. So there's really 2 models, and one is called supplementation and the other is called replenishment. So let's talk about supplementation. That's the bottles of pills on the— go down to your health food store and look at all the bottles of pills on the mineral aisle. And most of those are made from rocks, bones, and shells. Then there's others that are called the electrolytes usually, and those are made from salts. Both have, all of these have issues. So the rock, bone, and shell ones are made from minerals.

Caroline Alan:
Rocks, bones, and shells, the main problem is they don't break down well in your digestive tract. Your digestive enzymes are not well suited to breaking those things down. That's why when you eat a piece of bone or you get something in your mouth, a shell or a rock, you spit it out because you know it's just gonna go straight through you. And even though those pills are powdered and they seem very small, the component size they actually have to be broken down to is so small that what actually happens is 90% of it ends up in the So you take 500 milligrams of calcium and only a small percentage of it gets broken down to the component size where it's ready for absorption.

Caroline Alan:
Just, that's just the first stage, right? Just broken down to the component size. So here's the other interesting thing. The lining of your gut, your small intestine, is lined with, they're finger-like structures, they're called epithelial cells, and each one of those is lined, they're called villi. And each one of those is lined with epithelial cells. And interestingly, each one of those cells is lined with receptor sites. And I call those receptor sites kind of like catcher's mitts. If you imagine like a cell membrane, it's got all these catcher's mitts on it, but each one of the catcher's mitts is specific. It's not like anything that attaches to it can just get absorbed into the cell.

Caroline Alan:
No, you, they're actually designed in ratio. So you've got a lot of catcher's mitts that are magnesium catchers, a lot that are potassium, a lot that are calcium. But you've got many smaller number of ones for molybdenum and chromium and selenium and iodine and zinc and et cetera, et cetera. And they're designed specifically in those ratios. So even if you put 1,000 milligrams of magnesium in your gut, you can only absorb so much because you only have so many receptor sites available. So now what we have to do is, the problem with the supplementation is, first of all, that it uses rock, shells, and bones. which don't break down well in your digestive tract. But the next thing that those large concentrated, I call them megadoses, so they're measured in milligrams, they're concentrated minerals.

Caroline Alan:
Even if it's like a mineral blend and somebody said, we figured out exactly what your body needs and we're gonna tell you, and you've got like 8 or 12 or more minerals in there, I'm telling you, they have no idea. That formulation has really nothing to do with you. There's no way they can tell you what you need because your body has certain genetics, certain epigenetics, the way that those genetics are expressed.

Jennifer Norman:
Right.

Caroline Alan:
You have different eating style. You have different— everyone has different eating styles, different levels of activity, different health issues they're dealing with. So there's no way for me to tell you how many minerals you need in your gut in a day. So, and the other thing is that the gut microbiome absolutely works like a natural ecosystem. It's filled with all, like, hundreds of thousands of different bacteria and different probiotics. And different microflora, microorganisms, when they really like a very balanced ecosystem. It's— they work like a forest. So if you took a wheelbarrow of magnesium and threw it on a forest floor, what would happen to the plants in that area? They wouldn't really thrive.

Caroline Alan:
They'd be like, ah, too much magnesium. They'd burn. And they'd wait for water and whatever to bring that area back into balance. Interesting. So instead, so that supplementation model believes that we can figure out what we need and how much we should take, and we should put it into our ecosystem in these imbalanced, concentrated forms. And what we're doing is we're actually making a huge amount of work for our system. So our system's like, oh my gosh, I've got too much. Now I've got to grab water.

Caroline Alan:
I have to grab balancing minerals from other places, and I have to try and eliminate all this extra... And so you're overworking your liver, you're overworking your kidney, you're ending up, especially if you're using salt-based electrolytes on a regular basis, you're really creating a saltwater problem in your freshwater system of your gut. The digestive tract is a freshwater system. You'd never throw a whole bunch of salt into a lake or a river because you know that the plant life, the animal life in there thrives in a fresh Interesting.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow.

Caroline Alan:
You see, so the blood is like the ocean. It's close to the same salinity because those are both the recipients of nutrients that come either from the rivers into the ocean or from your bloodstream. So it's really totally different thing to think about. Okay, how am I going to bring a full spectrum of minerals? How am I going to replenish a full spectrum of minerals rather than supplementing? How am I gonna replenish a full spectrum of minerals directly into my cells where they're needed? I'm gonna use nature's replenishment technology.

Jennifer Norman:
I do love everything that you're saying about balance, about doing it from a natural perspective, not having to think so much. I think that's where the confusion lies is like we're trying to almost self-diagnose and a lot of people think more is better. And so they will go all in on, you know, a magnesium or on electrolytes and they're not realizing what it does potentially in terms of throwing your body out of balance in another direction. And so taking an ounce a day of something that is perfectly balanced and harmonious that comes from nature, that comes from plants that we know is bioavailable, that is easily digestible, and that actually gets to where it belongs to do the work. It's no wonder that you were able to receive so many benefits from it after just 2 months even.

Caroline Alan:
Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Norman:
You were able to see a lot of things healing in your own body and certainly you're an one and everybody is unique and different and may benefit or have a different kind of reaction, but it's something that makes perfect sense as far as just biology and the way that we're made.

Caroline Alan:
I mean, if you think about your body as an ecosystem, a natural ecosystem—

Jennifer Norman:
Which it is.

Caroline Alan:
Yes, which it is. What do ecosystems like? They like small incremental changes consistently over time. They don't like droughts. They don't like too much rain, floods. They don't like volcanoes. They don't like tsunamis. They don't like forest fires. I mean, all of those things are very stressful for ecosystems.

Caroline Alan:
So what you wanna do is shift your thinking. I'm not— instead of, if you're not sleeping at night, as an example, instead of using magnesium in megadoses to get you to sleep, it does work, but you're actually creating havoc in your gut ecosystem, particularly.

Caroline Alan:
And what happens when you put a large amount of magnesium into your gut, the balancing minerals for magnesium are calcium and phosphorus. So here's what your body does. You put magnesium in your gut, I don't care what form it is. People are always like, well, I use this and I use that.

Jennifer Norman:
That's right.

Caroline Alan:
I don't care what form it is. It's a megadose. It's a large amount of magnesium. And the body says, I've got too much magnesium right now. I need to balance that with calcium and phosphorus, and I need to pull water from the body to start eliminating this excess because I need to bring this ecosystem back into balance. This gut, I mean, this is what the body is, a homeostasis machine. It's constantly trying to create balance and that natural balance everywhere in your body. That's what it's always doing.

Caroline Alan:
It's incredibly miraculous. So it will work to get rid of all of that excess or balance it with those balancing minerals. And where does calcium and phosphorus come from?

Jennifer Norman:
Your bones.

Caroline Alan:
And teeth. So if you're a woman in her 40s hitting perimenopause and you're struggling with sleep, you'd be much better to get a full spectrum mineral replenishment tool like fulvic and humic in your body on a regular basis. That will make you over time, not right away tonight, but over a month, you will start to sleep better. I mean, I'm a perfect example. So I was an insomniac all my life. And as I hit perimenopause, I started waking up so many times. Now I sleep through the night most nights.

Jennifer Norman:
That's amazing.

Caroline Alan:
Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
Now, speaking about fulvic and humic, I had heard you mention that humic also is something that helps to take the toxins, if you will, and actually remove them from your body. So it's helping with natural detoxification as well.

Caroline Alan:
Yeah. So humic is an amazing tool. I call it Mother Nature's janitor because it literally hangs out in your system 24/7. And it picks up the trash. And by trash, I mean bio waste, toxins, heavy metals, glyphosate, nanoplastics, viral detritus like spike proteins that cause long COVID. Even things from if you had vaccines and you want to get rid of things like graphene oxide that come from those. All of that stuff gets bound to the humic molecule, and ultimately this molecule, the people who study. studied it like for 60 years or so who've been really studying humic, they call it the God Molecule because of its incredible capacities to bind, gather, sequester elements that are inflammatory or problematic in a cellular system and remove it from the system entirely.

Caroline Alan:
And it doesn't all go through the kidney and liver. It can use every detox channel, including your tears, your snot, your sweat, your saliva, your earwax, just sloughing off skin. And so that means that you're more able to get rid of toxins in your body gently, consistently over time, as opposed to doing a very intense detox protocol.

Jennifer Norman:
I was just going to ask about that. Yeah.

Caroline Alan:
That can cause all sorts of intense detox symptoms, especially with chelation, which is, you should never do without a practitioner. So what you really, what I say is there are certainly times where somebody who's extremely toxic in some specific thing may need to do an intensive protocol working with a practitioner, but otherwise, the best way to just take out the trash every day, 24/7, is having humic in your system.

Jennifer Norman:
And so as far as those 18 minerals go and in balance, that's really all providing both the fulvic and the humic. And so you're essentially getting replenishments of those vital nutrients, those minerals that will do this beautiful work for you. It'll make your mitochondria work better. Your whole machine will work better. Every cell will be more powerful, and you're also detoxing.

Caroline Alan:
Yeah. So with humic and fulvic, they are, again, they're really a technology designed by nature to both replenish minerals and nutrients into cells, like much more effectively than a single molecule of magnesium.

Caroline Alan:
So because that fulvic molecule brings the full spectrum of minerals into the cell, and then also to detoxify cellular environments, both from inside the cell and around the cell. So both intercellularly and intracellularly. So the fulvic delivers the minerals into the cell, the full spectrum in the balanced ratios. Then it travels around in the cell, gathers the biowaste, and takes it out of the cell and drops it in the bloodstream. And then the humic molecule binds all that stuff up and carries it out of the body. They're literally partners. They exist in nature everywhere. Your body recognizes them because all cellular systems on Earth recognize them.

Jennifer Norman:
I love that. Well, this has been super, super powerful. You have written this wonderful book, The Mineral Reset, where I'm sure that you go over a lot of this and more. Where can people find your book?

Caroline Alan:
Yeah, I highly recommend people, if they're interested in learning more, I wrote a book called The Mineral Reset. You can get it at mineralresetbook.com. It is a great way to learn. It's written not in a scientific way. It's written with lots of stories, very, very easy read, very accessible. And if you order it from mineralresetbook.com, You'll also get some tickets to a mineral reset program that I put on about, I think, twice a year, maybe, maybe we're not sure exactly the timing, but you'll be able to have me walk you through the program of how you can get reset on your mineral levels. And we always recommend getting more than one book. So get one for yourself and a friend so you can talk about it together and get one for that person in your life that has given up hope of feeling better.

Caroline Alan:
I'm telling you, minerals could be the game changer for them. So mineralresetbook.com.

Jennifer Norman:
And there are so many people out there, Caroline, who are just on their last legs. They feel like they've tried everything, they've done everything, they've seen every practitioner that they can imagine, and this might be something that hasn't necessarily come to the forefront. A lot of people will do their labs and they'll say, oh, everything looks fine. This might not be something that shows up on labs. I mean, you went to every practitioner and it wasn't really something that was as visible. And then once you started to feel a little bit better, a little bit better, and then you had these markers that said, oh my gosh, this has actually improved, that has actually improved. How did that make you feel? I just want to see what the journey is like for people who feel like that, you know, they've given up hope. What was it like to you to finally have hope?

Caroline Alan:
Yeah, it's an amazing thing to have spent years watching your health decline and feeling, and going to all the doctors and all the practitioners and they're like, we don't know. We don't really know. You know, maybe you should, you know, maybe it's allergies. Maybe it's this, you know, well, and, and then you spend lots of money on all these things. And, and then to, I mean, I literally was on my last legs and then to have this little cup of liquid makes so much difference in, in a relatively short period of time. I mean, I started to feel more energy in weeks and just having a little more energy can make so much difference. It's why I wrote the book because I realized if this helped me so much, think how many people could be helped by just understanding how minerals work in their body, by just beginning to think of their body as an ecosystem rather than a car they're going to fill up all the tanks every day. Shifting— it's really like the work you're doing of helping people to think holistically.

Caroline Alan:
Your whole thing about your B Corporation, which I love so much, it's like, what's the impact that we're having in the world? And if we start with ourselves, how can we have a positive impact working with our body rather than trying to affect it. And that's why I wrote the book to help people really shift their whole paradigm of thinking.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, caring for ourselves is the first step. It really is. And then we can better serve, but we've got to be able to serve from a full cup, not an empty one or an imbalanced one.

Caroline Alan:
It's so true.

Jennifer Norman:
Well, Caroline, I just love our conversation and thank you so much for all of this helpful, helpful information. I know that it's really going to spark a lot of interest with a lot of people. So at the end of each podcast, I do close every conversation with 3 questions to all my guests. And my first question to you is, what makes you beautiful?

Caroline Alan:
Oh, what makes me beautiful? Well, definitely is minerals. I mean, I have to say, it makes my skin glow. The minerals make my skin glow. They make my hair shine. They make my eyes bright. They have—

Jennifer Norman:
Wow. Oh, that's very sweet. What a great answer.

Caroline Alan:
We say that what minerals do is they make you come alive from the inside.

Jennifer Norman:
I like that. Very good. My next question, what does it mean to be human?

Caroline Alan:
I personally, for me personally, what it means to be human is to accept the fact that I'm probably not in control of what's really going on here. And I probably, my small brain probably will never be able to completely understand everything that's going on. completely understand the enormity of the universe. So it's— I think it means to be very humbled.

Jennifer Norman:
True. I love that. And finally, what is one truth that you live by?

Caroline Alan:
Ah, one truth that I live by. I think the one truth that I live by is to try and to do my best in every moment to be as authentic as possible. So to have personal integrity.

Jennifer Norman:
That is a really, really good and important one. Well, Caroline, I want to really thank you so much for sharing your story, for helping everybody to ask more thoughtful questions about minerals in particular, but also holistically about our health and our part in this whole ecosystem, which is nature and the universe. To everyone listening, if you recognized yourself in that feeling of just getting through the day, I hope that you will give it some attention. You deserve to have your concerns heard, even when you can't quite explain what feels off. We will absolutely link Caroline's book and the resources from our conversation in the show notes. If something today raised a question about your own health, then write it down and bring it to someone qualified to help you explore it. Thank you so much for spending time with us. I'm Jennifer Norman. This is The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. I'll see you in the next episode.

Jennifer Norman:
Thank you for listening to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. Be sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty Movement is a community-based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media, and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at thehumanbeautymovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.