What You Need To Know About The HPV Vaccine

If you are considering getting the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine, or having your teenager or young adult get it, you need to first understand why the vaccine was created in the first place, the risks involved with getting the vaccine (compared to the risk of contracting HPV) and how cervical cancer can be prevented through nutrition and lifestyle changes.

These are exactly the things that Dr. Nathan Riley reviews on today’s podcast. He offers insights for all of us on the financial incentives for pharmaceutical companies developing vaccines, the dangerous side effects of the HPV vaccine, in particular, and what he has learned about the risks and outcomes for those who do get the HPV vaccine and for those who do not.

Check out Nathan’s website: belovedholistics.com

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Listen to the podcast here

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Dr. Nathan Riley.

There was an intense campaign in the mid-2000s targeting teens and young adults, urging their parents to get them the HPV vaccine. Why the urgency at that time? Was it a health crisis or was something else at play? This is episode 460 and our guest is Dr. Nathan Riley. He is a board-certified home birth-focused OBGYN and the host of The Holistic OBGYN Podcast.

In this episode, Nathan gives us the backstory on the HPV vaccine campaign explaining that the motivation of the pharmaceutical company was quite likely financial. He goes over the problems with Gardasil 9 and its poor track record on safety and efficacy. The risk of adverse effects from the HPV vaccine, quite frankly, according to Nathan, far exceeds the chances of getting cervical cancer. Finally, Nathan covers how to optimize health and prevent cervical cancer through nutrition and lifestyle.

Before we get into the conversation, censorship is real. Let’s have a direct line of communication. Join The Weston A Price Foundation’s email list to stay abreast of action alerts in your area, along with important topics of interest, food freedom, upcoming events, and more. Click on the yellow button on our homepage to sign up. Keep in mind that our guest expresses some views that The Weston A Price Foundation does not share. When it comes to viruses, the foundation holds that viruses do not exist and therefore do not cause disease.

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Check out Nathan’s website: Beloved Holistics

Join the Weston A. Price Foundation email list

See our website for more resources

Visit our sponsors: Paleovalley and Optimal Carnivore

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Welcome to the show, Nathan.

Thanks for having me. Hilda. Based on your name, I was wondering if we’d be doing this in Spanish or English but I’m glad it’s in English because that is my native tongue.

You were a Spanish major too so I know you’re pretty good at that but let’s stick to English. Maybe one day, you’ll be on the Tradiciones Sabias Podcast. You never know. It’s our sister podcast in Spanish. I love it so much. Let’s dive in. I know you have so much to offer. I want to ask you right off the bat here, when was the HPV vaccine introduced and why?

Back in around 2006, it became one of those universal vaccines that everybody was talking about. There had been a developmental process, as with most drugs or biological devices, whatever you want to call them. The company that ultimately released this vaccine is called Merck. There’s a very interesting story as to why this vaccine was introduced. Like with many things in the pharmaceutical industry, it was very profit-motivated.

If I can, let’s backpedal from 2006, Merck released a medication called Vioxx, which worked very similarly to something like Ibuprofen. It’s a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. What happened was they launched this drug, and like with many drugs, the stories of bad adverse effects started rolling in. With Vioxx, it was specifically heart failure, heart attacks, and that type of thing. It was withdrawn, and the FDA withdrew its approval for this drug.

Merck was left with tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of lawsuits, which nearly bankrupted that company. They took what they had left and threw a Hail Mary, “Let’s get everybody scared about HPV and launch a vaccine.” It was through their B1e less campaign. When I was in college, I was a male boy at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

I remember seeing this poster in every single doctor’s office when I was delivering mail. I’m sure you remember this, it was B1 less. It was children speaking as if they were speaking to their mom or dad like, “Don’t you care, Dad or Mom? Am I going to be one more statistic?” They started pushing this, paying doctors upwards of $5,000 to $10,000 to hold little public gatherings to talk about the importance of this vaccine and preyed on people’s fear.

I’m also a hospice and palliative care doctor, in addition to being board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology. I have seen a lot of people die from cervical cancer. The big question is, why are people getting sick from this disease? Cancer itself is pretty controversial because we don’t yet know where it comes from or how to fix it. We’re going to prey on this fear, the big C-word, Cancer. We’re going to get every mom and dad out there to be inoculating their children, as young as age nine, against this terrible virus.

There’s that word. That is at the forefront of everybody’s brain. If you can protect your children, they won’t die of cervical cancer. That answers your first question. We can unpack that in any way because we can talk about the safety and efficacy of this vaccine. “What is this virus? Is this something we should be worried about?” We can go from there.

I was chuckling when you were talking about viruses and how viral that word has gone because you and I both know that the foundation doesn’t believe that viruses exist. Cervical cancer, a condition that is causing some illness, yes but linked to a virus, no. How did Merck make that connection since as we know, cancer is not always clear where it comes from?

This term virus is oftentimes attributed to the microbes of the world, which in my eyes reflects that there are living things out there that if our immune system falls out of balance, you can dive into an infection from bacterial sepsis that shuts down your kidneys and send you on your way. Are viruses living things? They’re not. They’re little strips of nucleic acid, which is a bunch of nucleotides, a little fragment of DNA that’s surrounded by a protein envelope and travels around the world, outnumbering bacteria, at least 10 to 1.

If viruses are the bad guys and they’re out there to “get us” or contagion, then we’re royally screwed because they are everywhere. They’re in and on us. They’re on every doorknob. They’re in every neighborhood, bedroom, toilet, and everywhere. We haven’t had a great understanding of this. If you want to look at some of the researchers and more thoughtful, we’ll call them medical philosophers, and many of whom are associated with or at least support The Weston A Price Foundation, they’re asking the right question, “Is this virus the cause of illness?” It is very hard to prove.

You’d have to look at the original Koch’s postulates whereby if you get the virus, you get cervical cancer. That is not at all the case with HPV, nor was it true with COVID or many of the other viral “illnesses” of written history. We have to consider then, “Why do some people get sick from certain things in the environment and then ultimately develop cancer?” Your OBGYNs have probably convinced many people. This is not to their discredit, I don’t like to do that but it does lack a little bit of critical thinking.

They say, “You have this virus. This virus is going to cause cervical cancer.” Without asking, why do some people not develop cervical cancer? Most people don’t develop cervical cancer, even if they have HPV that hangs around for a while. HPV stands for Human PapillomaVirus. If you were to screen every single person, over 90% of people have been exposed to this but not over 90% are dying of cervical cancer.

Most people don’t develop cervical cancer, even if they have HPV that hangs around for a while.

The likelihood of dying from cervical cancer, even compared to other cancers, is extremely low. We’ve got a problem there in our linear and materialistic thinking of what’s outside is coming to get us, and what tools do we have to mitigate these risks? That’s where I come in. I say, “Let’s throw a lot of that away and look at this a little bit more critically.”

Let’s do it. If indeed many of us have been exposed to what they’re calling the HPV virus and we don’t have cervical cancer, what does your critical thinking lead you to believe that we don’t need the vaccine? Are there things we can do to shore up our health to avoid cervical cancer in the first place? Let me backpedal for a second. What is the incidence of cervical cancer and the population in the United States? Do you know?

The incidence is very low. Cervical cancer accounts for about 0.8% of all cancer deaths. We’re talking about a lifetime risk of probably 1 in 1 million. There are not a lot of this. Let me turn you to what a more compelling piece of data. Look at what is the risk in a place where we see a lot of cervical cancer. If you were to compare the risk in let’s say, East Africa, and we’re talking Malawi, Zimbabwe, that’s even more South but that whole area is known for having high rates of HIV, TB, malaria, and cervical cancer compared to the rest of the world. Even in a highly endemic area like East Africa, like Malawi, which is where I spent a lot of my time in college, the risk of a severe adverse reaction from the vaccine is higher than your risk of dying from cervical cancer.

Wise Traditions | Nathan Riley | HPV — HPV: Cervical cancer accounts for about .8% of all cancer deaths. We’re talking about a lifetime risk of probably one in a million.

Your risk of dying from cervical cancer, even in a country that has a high prevalence of cervical cancer or incidents, whichever way you want to look at it, is lower than the risk of having a severe adverse reaction, which includes all of the things that people think about with vaccine injuries from the Gardasil 9. I’ve got two little girls. I’m thinking, “You’re not in East Africa. You’re in a very wealthy part of the country.” We’re living in a major city. We’ve got enough money to buy grass-fed beef and eat well-raised organ meats, farm fresh eggs, and all of this stuff.

The likelihood of you dying from cervical cancer is so minuscule. The safety data from Merck’s safety trials show that there is a demonstrable difference in how these children develop through the lens of long-term health when they get this vaccine versus not. If you add that to the other 70-plus doses that they’re going to get over their lifetime, we’ve got a sticky problem here.

They were preying on parents’ fears of being callous toward their children’s health concerns. They’re not showing these stats to the parents, showing them what little risk they have or what alternatives they have to the vaccine. They’re trying to push something on them perhaps to recover from the blow they got from the Vioxx fallout.

This was creating the illusion of a big problem for every parent. Everybody out there who’s a parent does not want their child to die early. That is the worst nightmare. They’re preying on that nightmare but it gets worse. There’s ongoing litigation in every 1 of the 50 states against Merck for what they were advertising. They were advertising a way to prevent cervical cancer. This gets into one of your original questions which we can follow up with.

The issue is that when you can detect HPV, whether that is a foreign invader, what I like to think is, “If we’re detecting HPV, that’s a signal that your body is not integrating the message from the outside. You could look at this through terrain or exosome theory. It’s like upgrading your old MacBook with the new operating system and the MacBook starts to slow down and fry. There’s something going on upstream within your body that’s making it hard for you to integrate the message from the outside.”

If I were to detect that, it takes months to years for you to start seeing changes to the cervical cells, and then it takes years to decades for those changes to the cervical cells to ultimately progress to invasive cancer. What Merck did was instead of testing the efficacy of their Gardasil vaccine, which is the only 1 of the 3 available that have been FDA approved, which hits the nine most common nucleic acid strains that are found in cervical cancer tumors. What they had to do was, “If it takes decades to develop this cancer, we can’t study this for two decades before we release it.” They were desperate to make their money back from all the lawsuits, which is what happened in COVID.

We expedited these things without doing our due diligence as medical scientists to evaluate their efficacy and safety. Instead of using cervical cancer, which takes decades, they used the early changes to the cervical cells, which is called cervical intraepithelial neoplasia. These surrogate markers were used. The problem with using the CIN 1, 2, and 3, or those surrogate markers is the majority of even those advanced lesions are going to regress if we support the immune system and a person’s overall health through the lens of holistic medicine. They’re going to clear that. Their body knows how to scavenge these abnormal cells but we have to give the body the tools to do that.

The body knows how to scavenge these abnormal cells, but we should give the body the tools to do that.

I know women who have been told, “You have pre-cancerous cells in your breast. We’re going to go ahead and do the radiation and all the treatment as if you had cancer.” If I dare say, we have many precancerous cells in our body. That means they’re regular cells that will change and morph depending on how we support our body’s functions.

There was a great paper by a guy named Judah Folkman. It was looking at thyroid cancer. We’re removing everybody’s thyroid, thyroidectomy. It’s like being on Oprah and they’re giving you a thyroidectomy. Everybody gets a thyroidectomy. The issue with doing that as Folkman described is that most people have cancerous cells in their bodies. That’s normal.

Cells fall out of alignment with the greater organism and ecosystem that is you. Fortunately, your immune system, if the immune system is supported, is scavenging them. They’re like, “You got to follow the rules. We’re all in this together. If you’re not going to be a team player, we’re going to knock you out,” and they do. This idea that cancer is another invader coming into our bodies is not in alignment with even our modern or conventional understanding of the biology of cancer.

In the meantime, what can be done to support the body? The signal is this persistent HPV infection. What is being done in the meantime? Merck has convinced most doctors, nurse practitioners, and lay people who are the consumers of healthcare that getting this vaccine is going to prevent you from getting cervical cancer. Don’t worry about any of the other stuff. You worry about that. Similarly, with birth control, into a variety of other devices and medications that I was trained to use for every single person who walked in the door.

There’s nothing in the meantime. In other words, it’s this vaccine or nothing. There are no tools offered by OB-GYNs or practitioners as to what they can do. How often do they recommend that a young person gets screened for HPV? I’m curious about that.

It depends. If you’re younger, they don’t even recommend screening for HPV. If you are under the age of 30, roughly, you’re going to be recommended to do a pap smear every 3 years or so. Once you get over the age of 30 up until the age of 65, you’re going to be recommended a couple of different screening options every 3 to 5 years unless something comes back abnormal. Let’s say HPV is there or you have a slightly abnormal pap smear. These are screens.

Before you come back, they’re going to say, “Come back in 6 to 12 months,” depending on what they find. They’re not telling you what you can do in the meantime to ensure that you’re going to have a negative screen on the follow-up. If you don’t have a negative screen on the follow-up, you might end up finding yourself with a very painful cervical biopsy, or not the worst case scenario because that would be cervical cancer, you might even end up undergoing a procedure where we excise a part of the cervix altogether.

That doesn’t fix the problem. Nobody has looked upstream to figure out why was your body not able to integrate this environmental message so much so that your cells are starting to become dysplastic and ultimately can develop into an invasive cancer. It’s not the virus causing that. It’s the body’s inability to fix itself and that’s where we’re letting people down.

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Let’s go back to Malawi where there’s a very high incidence of cervical cancer and look upstream because what’s happening there could happen in other places too, I suppose. What is happening environmentally or nutritionally? What are the factors that are not equipping the body to be healthy?

I couldn’t have fed you a question any better, Hilda. We’ve seen this with the polio vaccine, smallpox vaccine, a variety of pertussis, and a lot of the vaccines over, let’s say, the past hundreds of years. What we have seen is these incredibly contagious viral illnesses, which pertussis, is not an example of a viral illness but the variety of things that we inoculate against our viruses. By the time a vaccine was universally introduced, we had seen incredible changes in animal husbandry practices in the care of decomposing bodies, better hygienic practices, just not wiping your butt and going to eat your food.

It’s very basic things there, and this is very relevant to Malawi, including malnourishment and a tremendous amount of stress on a group of people who don’t have many means economically of rising above the very lowest poverty levels in the world. In the countries where we see the worst poverty and nourishment, we’re seeing a lot of these issues emerge.

That is the same approach we should take in the United States. Unfortunately, we have a population here that is starving and very malnourished, even though we are obese, everybody’s very sick, and has plenty of resources around, even for the poorest people. It’s a very stark contrast between the people who are having a lot of these health issues arise in these malnourished countries like Malawi.

In the United States, we’re overfed and undernourished. You will see obesity, diabetes, and different conditions. The person is getting enough food, supposedly but it’s more food-like substances that aren’t serving their body well.

I did all of my training in LA. There were many people living on the streets and meanwhile, there were millionaires at the top of the hill. The people living in the streets are going to have a lot more health issues because they’re deficient in nourishment. They’re eating and drinking whatever they can get their hands on to keep their brains and adrenals going. Do we not ever see any of these otherwise reversible chronic conditions in the rich and famous? Of course not.

We see it there as well, which tells us that even if you have a ton of money, this is important to consider. How are you nourishing your body, not just on a physical level but mental, emotional, and spiritual levels? That’s where we see when we fall out of alignment there. We have opportunities through the salutogenic model to supply the body with the resources to strengthen and optimize how it functions to live the longest, happiest, healthiest lives that we can.

This is what Dr. Price found. He wrote a book called Nutrition And Physical Degeneration. He went around the world to find the healthiest people. These people were not rich in the sense in which we measure it in the US. They didn’t have a lot of money.

Materialistic abundance.

They were eating their local traditional diets and were thriving. They had broad faces and room for other teeth in their jaws. I could go on and on. I know you could too because you came across the work of Weston A Price. How many years ago? How did it shape what you’re doing?

I was the kid who was at seventeen reading food labels. I became obsessed with it. At the time, I hadn’t found Weston A Price but I was eating all the fat-free and all that. I was thoughtful about my macronutrients. That’s what was on the cover of Men’s and Women’s Health fat-free diets but then I entered med school and had one of the anatomists there. He was an anthropologist and anatomist. He looked at things through the lens of evolutionary biology. It got me on like, “We can tell something about a person’s health through their teeth and jaw.” I found Weston A Price, Paleo f(x), and Ancestral Health Symposium. I helped volunteer to coordinate those events.

It opened the door for me to be able to provide the clients that I was in the future going to be caring for with the tools to optimize their health. I would also be trained in surgery, pharmaceuticals, and some other things that would be helpful in an emergency but it’s on us. It’s on me as the doctor to educate you and provide you with the tools so you don’t have to keep coming back to me.

In med school, I was not rewarded for that. It was mostly pharmacology and surgery that we were learning. There was maybe one hour of nutrition. I was the guy who was constantly being called into the principal’s office for raising my hand during the GI lecture and asking about gluten intolerance and being told in the middle of the class, “There’s no evidence that that exists.” I go and start taking gluten out of my diet and all these other things. I’m like, “I feel great.” I was doing an Ironman distance triathlon. I figured, “If I go into obstetrics and gynecology, I won’t like any of the other specialties.”

I saw it as an opportunity to help women who are the gatekeepers. Many households improve. There are a lot in life that do not require surgical intervention and maybe even home births can do all of that. It has led me down a path where I feel I’m unique but also very lonely because I don’t think many doctors appreciate that we don’t need these pharmaceuticals in every single person who comes through the door. If we were using our privilege and credentials to promote systemic change around local farming and eating more nourishing food, maybe we would be out of business but I’m okay with that because that would give me some time to focus on some other things.

It makes me think of what Sally often says. She says, “Modern medicine, the training has become like a paint by numbers. The person has this symptom. You give them this pharmaceutical drug. It’s so unfortunate.” How many hours of nutrition training did you have in your medical training?

One hour.

I thought it was at least four, which is nothing compared to all the years you have to spend in school.

For over 14 years, maybe 1 hour of formal nutrition education. I was an OB-GYN resident. That was my first specialty. I started collecting notes on every single person whose birth I had attended. I probably have attended thousands. I don’t know anymore. At one point, I was careful. It was 12 or 13 vegan clients coming in. I say clients because you’re not sick by virtue of being pregnant. I want to clarify that’s why I’m saying client. They came in for support with their hospital birth. At that point, I hadn’t yet gone to home births. In these vegans, two issues arose.

One is they would generally tear their perineum way more so than a person eating a lot of organ meats, even grass-fed beef or protein in general from animal products. The vegans would have these gnarly tears. The only other types of people that I would see that in were smokers or diabetics. Maybe they were diabetic but let’s give them the benefit of that. They’re non-diabetic. They’re doing all the things that vegans have to do. Not only did the tissues tear in funny ways but when you put needles into the tissue to try to bring it back together, the needles would shred through the tissue. We had weak undernourished tissues. There’s something to explore here.

I know Lindsey Meehleis has been on the show. She talks a lot about the placenta. If you hold the placenta up, it’s like beef liver. There’s a capsule around it and it has a tur to it. As pregnancy gets further towards the 40 or 42-week mark, the placenta does start to necros a little bit and fall apart. With a vegan, it wouldn’t even hold under tension. It would be like ground beef falling apart.

Those are two reasons for us to be very thoughtful about not just how we’re nourishing ourselves but how we’re even relating to the purpose of food. How are we relating to the cows? Are we going out and meeting the farmers? Are we collecting fresh farm eggs? If we can do those things, you’re going to have fewer pregnancy complications and the option to have an out-of-hospital birth. You won’t develop issues that risk you out of midwifery care. You’re going to have a healthier placenta, meaning you don’t have to be induced.

Your baby’s going to come out when they’re ready because their life support was intact. You’re going to find that these things like persistent HPV are no longer an issue. Endometriosis is gone. Abnormal periods are gone. Your adrenals are reset. That’s great. All of that stuff is the goal here. It’s not to treat disease in the way that Sally described paint by number. We get good at that but that isolates us or narrows our thinking to myopically looking at everything as a disease as opposed to, “How can we prevent this in the first place?” It sounds cliché but this is where I hope medicine goes.

You don’t have to be induced. Your baby will come out when they’re ready because their life support is intact.

That’s real medicine. Nutrition is foundational. I’m so glad we’ve spent much time on that. What other lifestyle shifts could we make if we want to avoid cervical cancer or maybe any cancer in general?

There are six foundational principles which laid out nicely by a friend and mentor of mine, Paul Chek. He has this big holistic lifestyle coaching business. I was their OB-GYN. I got very close to them. We’ve stayed friends. I saw him in Southern California

He’s been on this show.

He’s one of those interesting guys who never even finished high school but he doesn’t have this blueprint that you’re invested with when you go to some good Ivy League academic program. Instead, he’s being curious. He reads, integrates, and synthesizes. When I met with him for the first time around the time of their second baby coming, he shared with me his book. In it, there are these 6 foundational principles and 4 doctors.

The six foundational principles are super simple, “What are you eating? How are you thinking?” It includes stress management, hydration, breathing, sleep, and movement. Each of those could be an entire ten-hour conversation in and of itself. The point here is that you have to balance all of those. The four-doctor model that he presents, and I feel like this is becoming an ad for the Paul Chek Institute, but he’s done such good work in simplifying these things. The four doctors are Dr. Quiet, Dr. Happy, Dr. Movement, and Dr. Diet.

If any of these buckets aren’t being proactively managed so that they’re all equally balanced, you are going to fall out of homeostasis, and that’s where pathology or dis-ease emerges. We could unpack any of those issues. The two that I want to mention are hydration, using living water, or getting natural spring water. There are Vortexx devices out there. I’m not sure how well any of them work but Greenfield Water Solutions has the best one that I’ve been able to find at a reasonable price.

I studied Viktor Schauberger’s work and I was like, “There’s way more to this water thing because I have water coming out of my tap that does things that the city water doesn’t do in my garden and within our health. It helps me. I have better mental focus. There’s something to this.” The other one is sleep where I think of all of the things, the freebie here is going to bed earlier and getting off of social media, stopping reading the headlines, going to bed, and resting.

That’s probably what your body needs, whether you’ve got persistent HPV, you’re struggling with your weight, or you’ve got diabetes. It is almost always in American society where we value productivity over pregnenolone, the mother hormone that is used to generate all of your adrenal hormones. That’s probably the one thing people should be most focused on. It doesn’t cost any money. It requires you to put your phone down, turn off your Wi-Fi router, darken the room, cool the room, and get 8 to 9 hours of sleep at night.

These things you’re describing, I have seen among indigenous people groups around the world. I was in Ethiopia with some tribes in the Omo Valley. They didn’t have electricity. They explained to us how after the sun went down, pretty much they went to bed. They might build a fire and chat for a bit but they go to bed and then get up with the sunrise. They have certain ceremonies and things they do. Their rooms are dark. It’s only natural light there. It’s amazing.

We “modern people” have much to learn from the traditional people who are living this way. They certainly had those 4 doctors and 6 principles. Those buckets were filled because they weren’t as stressed as we were. We don’t realize that our devices are energy sucks for us. They are draining us instead of giving us energy so people get off of those things. They’re more depressed, discouraged, and stressed than they were when they started.

If you wanted to have a little litmus test for how you’re doing from an adrenal health standpoint, if you wake up in the morning, jump out of bed, you’re ready to rock and roll but then you find that you’re crashing before noon and you need to bump the coffee and caffeine. In the afternoon, if you find that you’re irritable with yourself, family, friends, coworkers, or whatever your day looks like, that irritability is due to hypercortisolemia.

Over time, your ability to return to that state of feeling overall well is going to be diminished. That state is called adrenal fatigue. A better term is probably hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-axis dysfunction. Probably the pandemic that we should all be talking about is this lack of sleep and overly stressed and overly stimulated environment that we’re all living in.

I meet people a third of my age and they seem like they’re twice my age in terms of how their mood is. They have no time to think because they’re always producing. They have no concept of rest and even feel guilty if they take a break from something. It’s a crazy time. You’re right. People are walking around very depleted.

You’ve been focused particularly on women and ushering in these new lives to be as healthy and happy as possible. That’s fantastic because that’s another priority of The Weston A Price Foundation. Weston Price himself noticed how indigenous people groups isolated from modernity made sure to provide a strong foundation for the next generation, even preconception.

The people were eating sacred foods that they knew would build the healthy bodies of their babies. As we start to wrap up, we’ll say at the end where people can find you, but beyond these 6 principles and 4 doctors, is there something that you would recommend? If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

It’s hard to emphasize enough the value of the sleep that we described but if people wanted one single tool apart from getting better sleep first, do that. Whether you’re having fertility issues, immune system dysregulation, abnormal periods, moodiness, energy levels, or whatever there is, you’re probably lacking micronutrients. The greatest source of micronutrients provided by nature, the single food is going to be high-quality beef liver.

Find some way to get it into your diet. I know it doesn’t taste good. It’s because you’re not used to it. Tomatoes didn’t taste good when you were a kid. I get it but now they probably do. You got to figure out a way to incorporate that in. We probably eat about 5 or 6 ounces per each of us per week. I don’t think that there’s a prescribed amount. It’s whatever you can fit in there. It’s hard to eat too much beef liver.

It’s not like you’re going to get toxicity from vitamin A. In theory, yes, that’s possible. Sit down and eat 1 pound of beef liver. You’re never even going to get through half of the plate. A little bit goes a long way. Fox Hollow Farm is a biodynamic farm down the street for about twenty minutes. It’s $4 for a pound of their beef liver. These are biodynamically, regeneratively raised all organic, all grass-fed beef liver. A 16-ounce ribeye from them is about $25. Let’s do the math. That’s my recommendation for people.

You get the best bang for your buck. It’s economical and so nutrient-dense. That is a great note to end on. Thank you so much for being a part of this conversation, Nathan. It’s been phenomenal.

My pleasure, Hilda. Thank you.

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Our guest was Dr. Nathan Riley. You can visit his website Beloved Holistics. For a review from Apple Podcasts from Case Bradford, “Awesome. Tremendous podcast. Tons of great info.” Case, thank you for your review. It means a lot. Feel free to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts as well so other people can know if they should bother visiting the show. I’m glad that you do. Thank you for reading. Stay well. Remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

About Dr. Nathan Riley

Nathan Riley, MD, is a board-certified OB-GYN and fellow of ACOG who left the medical industrial complex due to his disillusionment with the “standard of care” within the conventional maternity care model. Dr. Nathan Riley is now a home birth-focused OB-GYN who hosts The Holistic OB-GYN Podcast, and who focuses on upholding the traditional practice of midwifery. He supports midwives as a collaborative physician for midwives of all varieties in over twenty states. He is an advocate for home birth and still attends births for those in need. He boasts a c-section rate of <5%, which is one of the best in the U.S.

His mission is to uphold midwifery as the art that it is and to honor birth as a sacred process and the transition to parenthood as spiritual transformation. Dr. Riley empowers women to have babies on their own terms, using nature as our guide. He helps fathers embrace the opportunity to connect with birth and their partners through pregnancy and birth, encouraging them to go deeper versus distancing themselves from this stigmatized but magical rite of passage.

Dr. Riley is the father of two, the second of whom was born at home, and he is proudly married to his high school sweetheart. In his spare time, he walks in the woods, makes Dad jokes, paints, and drinks coffee with amazing people.