If you want your body to stay healthy, you must learn to get the bad stuff out and keep the good stuff in. Eddie Stone is helping people do exactly that through their healthy supplements at Touchstone Essentials. He joins Zach Gurick to share how he leads the charge in making pure, clean, and whole food nutrition easily accessible through their organic products, allowing people to live vibrant lives inside out. Eddie also breaks down different biomarkers to monitor and daily activities you can do to further boost the effect of your healthy supplements.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Detoxing The Body Using Healthy Supplements With Eddie Stone
We’re exploring one of the biggest health challenges of our modern world, the toxic load our bodies carry, and how we can safely and naturally lighten that burden and also put good things in. My guest, Eddie Stone, is the Founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials, a company built around one simple but powerful belief that pure, clean, whole food nutrition should be accessible to everyone.
After a personal wake-up call and a crisis in his family’s life, Eddie began investigating how environmental toxins affect energy, longevity, and everyday wellness. That journey led him to understand natural minerals like zeolite. He ultimately created The Good Inside, which is a global company helping people detox, rebuild, and thrive.
In this conversation, we’ll talk about zeolite and what it is. We’ll talk about healthy supplements and what the science says, how we can detox safely, and how to separate real health breakthroughs and healthy supplements from internet hype or ones that aren’t so great for us. We’ll also explore Eddie’s philosophy on longevity, mindset, and what it truly means to live a clean and vibrant life inside and out. Settle in. This is an episode that might help you clear the path to your best health yet. Here’s my conversation with Touchstone Essentials CEO, Eddie Stone.
Thank you so much for being with us. Ever since we met, I’ve been excited about this conversation. For me, personally, I want to learn from you, your experience, your wisdom, and your expertise, and to share the amazing work that you’re doing with our audience. Thanks for taking the time to be with us.
I’m happy to be here. I’m excited. As I’ve learned more about your community and who we’re talking to, I think they’ll appreciate the information. This is a real honor.
How Eddie Found His Passion In Producing Healthy Supplements
I always find it interesting. It seems like a lot of people that are in this space and in these industries that we get to meet, oftentimes, their passions for their work come out of their own life, a crisis, a problem they had, or something that happened in their family or to themselves. I know you’ve shared that story a little bit, but could you share your origin story of what got you into this business and what’s the background there?
I’ll get to the end point on a few things. As I sit here, I’m 62 years old. I’ve been doing this for nearly 40 years. There are two things that nudged me in this direction. The first one was in my mid-twenties, through my work, I was asked to take a health check or a checkup for an insurance policy associated with work. When the blood work came back, it wasn’t great.
In fact, my lipid profiles and some of the numbers of my sugars and things were terrible. The guy said, “We’re going to have to rate you like you’re a heavy smoker,” and I wasn’t a smoker at all. It was one of those things, like, “I need to pay attention here to what I’m eating and my lifestyle choices.” I probably was like a lot of people. I was somewhat athletic in high school, and I maintained some of that while in college. Once you get out, you throw yourself into work, and no one is telling you to do these things.
I slipped away. I could look at the refuge of fast food bags and things in the back of my car to know exactly where my problems were. It was a real wake-up call to think about a couple of things. One is that I don’t think we often think about how much of what we put in is what we get out from a health standpoint with our bodies, whether we’re talking about what we eat, exercise, or things like that. There were a lot of comments and stuff I had ignored.
What we put in our bodies is what we get out of it from a health standpoint.
A few years later, while I was more or less getting involved with sales related to nutritional supplements, my mom had a real serious and somewhat mysterious health scare. At first, it was a common cold and cough. She was tired and lethargic. It dragged on for 3, 4, 5, and then 6 months. We realized she didn’t have some kind of lingering flu or cold.
We sought a lot of medical advice at a local level. I live in North Carolina. We’re fortunate to have a lot of medical universities. We’re stretching 12 to 18 months, and we’re not able to identify why she’s losing weight, her health is going backwards, and whatever it has to be. My mom had me when she was young, so she wasn’t very old. At that time, she was probably in her mid-40s. You certainly wouldn’t think of someone going backwards like that.
Ultimately, two years into the journey, someone recommended a doctor out of state, and not with flattering recommendations. They more or less said, “We know this guy, but he’s a quack,” but we were so desperate that it did not keep us from going and checking things out. At the end of the day, what this guy was doing, which was different from a lot of the thought process and a lot of mainstream medical, was that he looked at toxicity issues and parasite-type issues as reasons why often people were sick in ways that weren’t clear in the standard medical parlance.
In her case, through IV chelations that were aggressive, maybe more so than should have been knowing what I know about that industry, but she had breast implants when she was younger, and she was having a ferocious autoimmune reaction to them. In fact, one was seeping material. It was coming unraveled, or I don’t know what the proper medical terminology is.
Through the chelation therapies and through getting those removed, her health returned. She’s in her 80s, alive, well, and healthy with no issues associated with that. It reminded me that sometimes, the answers are obvious. There’s probably more about the world we live in from a toxicity standpoint and things we’re exposed to that play a role in our health than we realize. It was a real wake-up call for me.
How Eddie Started Touchstone Essentials
Thanks for sharing that story. Ultimately, that led you down this path to ultimately launch The Good Inside and Touchstone Essentials. Could you tell us a little bit about the company?
Yeah. I continued on my path. I was involved with what I call traditional or conventionally produced supplements, which are what you might find as, let’s say, 99% of what’s out there. Supplements are an interesting business. I’ll be right upfront. I believe in the role supplements can play in helping a person bridge the gap nutritionally from where they are and where they want to be.
Most people I talk to, you don’t have to be a biochemist, a doctor, or someone like that to appreciate what can happen here. Most people, if you gave them a quiz, would pretty quickly know, “Here are the do’s and don’ts. I need to eat less ultra-processed food and probably more fresh fruits and vegetables,” but knowing that doesn’t often change the outcome of what people’s realities are if they keep score or track.
Most people are on this course of how they eat and what they eat. They tend to eat the same fruits and vegetables at the same restaurants all the time. That’s why when you look at national information, whether that’s from NIH, CDC, or the American Medical Association, most people are woefully short on the amount of fruits and vegetables in their diet. Some of those important micronutrients, antioxidants, minerals, and other things are missing, so we become more vulnerable to lots of different chronic diseases and even more everyday problems. The immune system without the proper fuel is not going to function at its highest possible level.
I have a great belief in supplements, but when you’re deep inside the industry, it’s almost like the Wizard of Oz. When you pull back the curtain to see what Oz looks like, it’s like, “This is not what I thought.” Lots of supplements, and when I say lots, I’m talking about 99%-plus, are manufactured like ultra-processed foods. I’ll give you an example. You might see vitamin C represented on a label in the ingredient panel, and then the word next to it says ascorbic acid. Maybe it’s ascorbyl palmitate.
If you take ascorbic acid, for example, which we represent as vitamin C, that’s 1 compound of 8 that make up a vitamin C molecule. In this case, that could be described as the egg shell, but not the egg inside. We would all know intuitively that an eggshell is not an egg. There may be some value to eggs, and, in fact, there is, in some cases, in eggshells, but what’s inside is where the proteins and other things come from if you’re a person who eats that type of product.
It was one of those things where I realized what consumers felt like they were buying, whether they were buying something for $200 a month or $5 a month at a big box store, was this gap. I began to believe based on research and experience in looking for more whole ingredient solutions. Broccoli or whole broccoli extracts, not just try to synthesize the calcium or the vitamin C out of broccoli. Not ascorbic acid, but whole vitamin C compounds in complete form, which you can get from acerola cherries and other things.
A better solution and better representative of what people were looking for when they bought a supplement to supplement was the nucleus of starting Touchstone Essentials back in 2012. We felt like the public was underserved. Stats show that. When we began, in my mind I thought, “This is a boutique idea. People have to be super educated to understand this approach.”
Within a few years, with material like Fast Food Nation, farm to table, and all these other dynamics that wound up educating the public, the interest exploded for us and others that do the type of work we do. Green drinks, vegan proteins, and things like that. It’s a global demand. We serve in 50 countries. We have warehouses in Europe as well as the US. We know there’s an educated supplement consumer, and you don’t even have to be that educated. You have to understand these things, the difference between fast food and not. That’s what has allowed us to reach a larger audience.
The Loophole Of Assembling Supplements Using Imported Material
You’ve identified a problem. We talked about this before. When we met, you mentioned going to some of these supplement companies and seeing the Wizard of Oz, the wizard behind the screen there. You understood that even if it says made in the USA, maybe the things that are going into that are coming from other places that aren’t necessarily manufactured up to the standards that most people would like. They’re being put together potentially in the USA. Could you explain a little bit about that? That was eye-opening to me.
Yeah. You have a romantic viewpoint that if you see a bottle that says, “These are antioxidants,” which we all know, being scientists, are coming from fresh fruits and vegetables. They play an important role in terms of what supplements can do in arresting radical damage and things like that. You might think, “They’re going to have some blueberries over in the corner being crushed and some strawberries. There’s going to be a bag of dried broccoli or whatever,” but that’s not the case.
You go in there, and there are these pallet-sized bags of white to brownish powdered material that’s coming in from places like India, China, Vietnam, and other places that are being assembled in the States. These are all isolated products, offshoots either of corn or other products like that, or they’re synthetically synthesized. They’re assembled here, but they’re not made here. It’s a loophole in the system.
The supplement industry is about as bad in terms of transparency as anything. We’ve villainized, in the US at least, a lot of ultra-processed foods, as well as using dyes, chemicals, synthetics, artificial sweeteners, and things like that. Your supplements can be a source of excipients and things that you’re unexpectedly being exposed to. It didn’t take long before I realized that here I am, telling friends and family, and I’m a power user of supplements, but it’s nothing like what I thought. I felt like I needed to separate myself from that and go to a different environment where I want it to be.
Let’s take the case of greens. Greens products should be made from broccoli, kale, cabbage, and other cruciferous vegetables, which are these powerhouse nutrients. You need to try to carefully process them. In our case, and there are other companies that do this, too, we use USDA Organic. They have terrific standards. We use products that are grown either in the US, Canada, and a few other places, but principally, in the United States.
They can be cool or what’s generally referred to as a cold process, so not flash pasteurized or pasteurized at 185 degrees Fahrenheit, which denatures the majority of those very delicate phytonutrients. Once you get past, let’s say, 118, 119, or 120 degrees Fahrenheit, a great many of the native enzymes in a fruit or vegetable, which help break it down, are going to be denatured and no longer active. It’s sourcing. It’s processing.
I’ll tell your audience right upfront. We are not delivering farm-fresh fruits and vegetables to you that are organically grown in your backyard, but we are delivering to you something as close as possible to that because you’re probably not getting that anyway. There’s that role it can play if you don’t have that wonderful organic garden. If you do, I applaud you, but for most people, those are not realistic options. If they can find a green powder or a capsule product with the same dynamics in it, the goal they are looking for is available.
How To Determine What Your Supplements Are Made Of
A lot of us probably have supplements in our cabinets or on our shelves that are doing more harm than good, maybe. You’ve helped solve that problem by sourcing, packaging, and putting together supplements that have the health benefits that we need in a safe way. I’m thinking, “I need to go home and look at all my supplements. Where’d they come from? What’s in them?” How do I determine what’s in those? Do you have any tips for us?
Yeah, I do. One, you can Google things, or use your ChatGPT or whatever it is. You can take ingredients, particularly when something is not obvious to you. I tell people all the time, “Like with food, if you read an ingredient label and it looks like it came out of a chemistry set, have some level of caution. Take a few minutes to be an educated concern because you might not want to be putting that in your body.”
If a supplement’s ingredient label looks like it came out of a chemistry set, have some level of caution.
I know there’s a federal regulation on Red Dye No. 2. I don’t even know if we need that. If most people look up and find out what Red Dye No. 2 is, I don’t even think we’ll need them to tell us to back off from consumption, aspartame, or things of that nature. We also have a guide on our website. We’ve done that homework. It’s an accumulation of five facts to know about supplements. We’ve got a guide to give people a comparison of what a typical label says, what that means, and what it could mean.
I don’t want to overwhelm anybody. I hate to give people this notion of, “I need to throw everything away in the kitchen.” It is amazing, though. I discovered people accumulated a cabinet of supplements, and they’ve done it over a long period of time. Most of them are probably out of date because they never used them. The reason they probably started to stop using them was, intuitively, there wasn’t anything happening for them.
I believe when you utilize the right supplements, you don’t have to be an expert to know, “I’m sleeping a little bit better. I got a little more energy. There’s a little more pep in my step. I got better at concentrating over the course of the day.”
For people who use products with caffeine, I’ll give you an example. There is a vast majority of caffeinated beverages and energy drinks. We could spend a lot of time on that, but I know you’ve got a great audience. I’m assuming they’re not spending their day drinking multiple high-sugar energy drinks. If they are, I hope they’ll think about that.
I hope they aren’t.
In most cases, those caffeine sources are synthetic caffeine sources. When they hit the system, which is what these drinks are designed to do, it’s a rapid, quick rise in energy level. It starts as a nerve stimulation, which has its own challenges because it creates hormonal responses. Those aren’t necessarily a good thing.
If you have natural caffeine, let’s say caffeine through water processing that’s soaked out of green coffee beans, which is one example of these kinds of sources, that caffeine won’t hit that fast. It’s a slower rise, limiting the amount of hormonal response from the body. With cortisol and things like that, we all know that, particularly as we get older, too much of that’s going to interfere with sleep and the immune system. There are all these dynamics.
The public, at large, has this experience of a lot of these things. They have things where they crash. Generally speaking, it’s because somebody isolated. In this case, they isolated the primary active ingredient in caffeine. There were no constituents or cofactors around it to soften the blow, have it rise, and then slowly drop. Instead, it’s up and it’s down.
For one more common-sense example, let’s take apple juice. Most people reading will realize that if you drink apple juice on an empty stomach, that’s a heck of a sugar spike. Apple juice can be delicious. You might love it, but that’s a sugar spike. A very high glycemic food could be a proper term. That’s not going to be much different than a candy bar or a soft drink.
You can argue that apple juice has a few more nutrients, but I don’t think that’s a material victory because it’s probably worse from a sugar standpoint. All of a sudden, your pancreas responds with a lot of insulin to manage that sugar. You might go up fast, but then you crash more quickly. If, instead, you ate an apple, you’d have all the pectin and the other 700-plus chemicals found in an apple that are natural chemicals with antioxidants. Those are great things for your body. The old adage, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” there’s real truth to that. It’s a good idea. That sugar spike is minimized by all the fiber and the digestive properties necessary for the apple.
Anytime you isolate, you have this problem that you don’t find in nature, which are all these cofactors that enhance the performance of any type of food. This is why I advocate as much as possible to eat the whole, if possible. Do I, on occasion, enjoy a good glass of orange juice or something? Absolutely. You try to balance these things because, with the absence of fiber, the apple is not as good for you. That’s the thought process I try to lead people with.
Exploring Some Products By Touchstone Essentials
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for that. I want to check out the guide on your website, and then go through my cabinet and things like that. I’d love to dive into some of the things that you guys are selling. We’ve had Dr. Andrews, who I know helped you guys along, on our show. He’s fantastic. I would encourage our audience. If they haven’t checked that episode out, go back and read the episode with Dr. Andrews about telomere lengthening and keeping our telomeres healthy.
You guys have a great product that he mentioned called Telo-Vital, which is, as he mentioned, the most effective natural telomere protection that he’s found. I know that’s one of your great products that you guys are making. Could you tell us a little bit about that, and then maybe we can dive into some of the others, like zeolite, and fulvic acid, things like that?
I’m excited to. I’ll give folks an overview. Our thought process is this. “Let’s get the bad stuff out of the body.” We think of detox as a first strategy from a health standpoint. Without going too deep into that subject matter, because that could be a 3 or 4-hour subject matter, we live in a world where there’s probably 100,000-plus manmade chemicals out there utilized in consumer products, industrial production situations, farming, and things of that kind. Lots of them are subsets of petroleum or oil. They can fracture chemicals in this way and make almost anything you can imagine. It’s what fuels the modern world. That’s a step even, to me, beyond thinking of the industrial world and how we operate.
I don’t think anybody has given up their modern conveniences. None of that in my mind is going away. It’s so large and global. I’m not even sure if our government could say singularly, “Let’s deal with this,” like they have the capacity to do. It’s a big, giant issue. In my mind, the consumers are on point for managing this dynamic.
Thankfully, there are a lot of people who manage exposure to toxins, whether that’s organics, heavy metals, or environmental pollution, although they do accumulate over time and create problems with thyroids. They play a role in obesity. There are all these dynamics. There’s a lot of population that have acute problems, whether that’s skin-related issues or other more serious illnesses.
The body has great pathways for detox. We try to support it with natural products. The backside of that philosophy is to put the good stuff back in. That’s where we talk about greens, fibers, and some of our wonderful capsule products. We put back in some of those things that are missing from the diet. Then, we go into more nuanced and specific areas. Telo-Vital is in that area.
Dealing With Aging From A Lifestyle Standpoint
We’re all going to be older tomorrow than we are, because aging is a thing. That clock doesn’t stop. We can try it, but the clock doesn’t stop. In aging, there are a couple of ways to think about it. I’m sure Dr. Andrews spent a little time on this. There are a lot of things you can do from a lifestyle standpoint, as much as what you don’t do and do, to help you age more gracefully or in a healthier fashion. For some people, maybe it’s longevity. They’re like, “How long can I live?”
What we find in surveys is that the majority of people want to live the most energetic, healthy life they can while they can. They want to live like that instead of in those latter years, where there is a decline to the point where they’re confined to a chair. They wore their body down, or they wore their mind down. They’re technically alive by modern standards, but not in the way they wanted to, and the ability to enjoy life.
There’s a lot of advice that can be given, like how you eat, movement, managing stress, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, and other common sense stuff, but the ultimate governor of your age and how long you can live is the telomere. The telomere sits on the end of a DNA strand. I’m not going to try to give everybody a biochemistry education here, but the bottom line is we all know about DNA. DNA is the mapping of the software necessary for cell replication.
This is constantly a process of aging cells turning over. What keeps that cell turning over in the right way is your telomere. Every time your cell turns over, it gets shorter. Being able to protect it and hold onto its length over time can extend the quality of life, perhaps even impact the length of life. If you take everything that we know, there’s no circumstance where we can identify that people could live past 125 because of the governance of the telomere. Most people don’t even approach that number because lifestyle’s gotten in the way, as well as accidents and disease.
Toxins.
Bill’s work his whole life has been, “How can I affect the production of this enzyme that protects the telomere?” This product represents decades and millions of dollars worth of research and the examination of 30,000-plus different individual ingredients to find these half dozen or so organic-certified ingredients that we know promote the production of telomerase to protect the telomere.
I don’t care if we’re talking about the pharmaceutical arena. I don’t care if you’re talking about gene splicing or DNA therapies. There’s nothing available to us. Maybe in a lab somewhere that you and I don’t know about, but nothing is available to the public to be able to have this impact. We have found there’s an incredible appetite, particularly with people who are already making some efforts. I’m making this effort, so let me do everything I can to protect this aspect of my aging, which is the most dominant. We are proud to couple that with other parts of our product line.
We also have blood sugar control products, a series of natural enzymes to control blood sugar spikes. I probably don’t need to say more about that because everybody realizes what an epidemic it is associated with Type 2 diabetes. Type 1 has a way more difficult challenge associated with genetics and other things. The bottom line is that we try to develop convenient tools for people who pay attention to their health, and it matters to them. We make them either taste good, affordable, or what it happens to be, so that they’ve got these choices to address quality of life and health.
Taking The Bad Stuff Out With Zeolite
I love that framework that you put together. Let’s get the bad stuff out, put the good stuff back in, and then tweak it, optimize, and look for ways to extend your health span and add vitality. Can we talk about what you’re using to get the bad stuff out? Detox, I know that’s a big thing that we need to cover.
It is. For anybody in the audience who has ever looked at detox and used detox products or cleanse products, which are slightly different, but are the same idea, what we’ve chosen to do is utilize a natural mineral called a zeolite. In our case, it’s called clinoptilolite, which is a category of zeolite. Maybe most people in the audience might not even know what a zeolite is.
Zeolite has a very long history of human consumption and has GRAS status from the FDA, equivalencies, and many parts of the developed world. We mine ours here in the United States out of the ground. It’s prop 65 compliance. It’s a great ingredient. Zeolites are interesting because there is a natural occurrence or a natural mineral that grows when a playa lake or salt water collides with lava or lava ash.
This is a natural constituent that grows, almost like things you played with in a little chemistry kit when you were in high school. It has a natural crystalline structure that’s quite remarkable and remarkably strong. It can withstand the natural version, not the synthetic. The natural version can withstand the pH changes and heat of the gut without breaking apart. Its structure is the same from its very smallest point to its largest point, so it doesn’t change.
Envision a crystalline structure with channels or tunnels in it, almost a little bit like Swiss cheese. What makes it effective is that those little chambers have a native negative charge. This is the way that it’s made up with its five carbons. It creates this negative charge. When it comes in proximity to heavy metals like cadmium, lead, mercury, or aluminum that have positive charges, they’re attracted to one another like the north end and the south end of a magnet. They’ll bind. Once they bind, they’re not going to fall apart. Your digestive system won’t break them apart.
Here’s what’s important for us. Zeolites are not an essential mineral, which means your body won’t hold onto them. We’re assuming normal body function for about 4 to 6 hours. It’s processing out of your system. When you use it, it goes in there. Based upon proximity, it attaches and binds with some of these heavy metals and other things in that category. It’s going to process out of your system. It’s a very elegant process. It’s simple. It can be repeated constantly.
Some of these Herxheimer effects or other challenges people have with cleanses or detoxes, which can make them very uncomfortable, that’s set aside. We’ve sold millions of these bottles since we launched years ago. I have been associated with zeolites since 2005. It’s very easily tolerated. Maybe somebody on occasion needs to drink more water or something. It’s great because it’s a daily tool.
You don’t live in a bubble. People will say, “I’m going to detox one time, and I don’t have to worry about it.” Unless you somehow avoid breathing the air that’s out there, these exposures continue. It’s an important tool for people who are trying to work with their physicians and things to detox odorless and tasteless. That checks a box there in that regard. It’s exciting for us.
We have two versions. We have one that’s called Pure Body Extra. That’s nano size, which gets into the cell structures. That’s important because a lot of these heavy metals are angstrom-sized. They are very small, and they sit inside the cell. We also have a Pure Body Regular, which is a larger particulate. The reason we need that is because it’s too large to migrate out of the gut. You have so much that you want to do to support gut health.
Our Pure Body Regular is very supportive with a balanced pH in the gut. It helps the natural processes in the gut and the bowel that manage toxins and other unwanted substances in the system. People don’t realize that gut health is critical, even for simple things like happiness, because the majority of your serotonin is produced in the gut.
It gets a little bit of a deep dive to talk about a gut-brain connection. Your gut acts as a little bit of a pharmacy for you with things it recognizes. There are so many dynamics. In fact, I tell people this in shows like this all the time. They say, “What should I prioritize?” I’m like, “There’s a long list I want you to prioritize, but a healthy gut is a great place to start.”
As your gut goes, so does your happiness, your disposition, your immune system, and even your central nervous system. Paying attention to those things, not living what I call the antacid life, which is not a great idea, are great places to start thinking about. Access to fruits and vegetables and detox will all help to support those dynamics.
The Pure Body Regular is more for your gut health. What was the other one called?
The Pure Body Extra. It’s a cellular health product. People will say, “What’s my priority?” It’s hard to say what an individual person’s life is, but if you took it as a whole, your cell structure, trillions of cells in the body, that Pure Body Extra is probably that. If I’ve got to make a budget decision, that’s probably where I start. It’s also the easiest to use. It’s a little spray bottle. You throw it in your purse, briefcase, backpack, or whatever. It’s easy to keep around and use. I think of it as a daily use after all these years. I’m on airplanes constantly and things like that. You’re exposed when you’re out in public, so I do anything I can to support the system.
That’s a simple way to detox your body on a daily basis. It’s binding to those heavy metals and other things, and then getting flushed out of the body relatively quickly and easily. It doesn’t cause any challenges to the liver, kidneys, or things like that.
It probably would be supportive because it’s an aid. If you have a lifestyle and you’re not trying to pay attention, or you’re not able to nutritionally, your body still has some great functions. You have your kidneys, liver, sweat glands, and lymph nodes. You have a lot of things that act as detox pathways, but try to help it.
Things like this are supportive in a very profound way in a toxic world. You combine this with trying to pay attention to getting some fiber in your diet, either from food or a supplement. All these things accumulate over time. I’ll tell folks, “If you’re looking for some cathartic moment, like, ‘I started to use this, and I feel like I’m eighteen again,’” that’s unlikely. Most people do see in about a ten-day period of time a little energetic response. They’re sleeping better, which may impact that energetic response. I tell folks there’s an accumulative impact on your habits and decisions.
Give your body a runway. Give it something to work with for 60, 90, 150 days, or 6 months at a time. If they can somehow capture, “Here’s where I was six months ago, and here’s where I am now with these new habits,” they can feel like a new person. As it didn’t happen overnight that you wound up maybe more unhealthy than intended, returning to health is not normally overnight. You’ve got to give yourself a little bit of time.
Biomarkers To Monitor To Measure Your Health
Are there any blood tests, biomarkers, or things like that that someone could measure and then start taking some of these detoxifying supplements and then measure again? What biomarkers would someone be looking for to see the difference?
It depends on local labs, people’s insurance systems, and things like that. There are a variety of blood tests. There’s also hair analysis. Believe it or not, a hair analysis is a pretty good way to judge where you’re at from a toxicity standpoint because things will accumulate in the hair. It’s like the rings of a tree. It captures a bit of history. People will dig a little bit. There are longevity aging magazines and things like that, where you’ll see ads for labs that can give you reports on heavy metals and environmental pollutants at the surface level.
It’s been a few years. There’s National Geographic, which I don’t know if we see that much anymore. Maybe the audience will remember that magazine title. One of their reporters wanted to see how toxic they were. This is somebody that traveled the globe and been on all kinds of airplanes their whole life. One of the funny conclusions the person made was that, “My skin had so much flame retardant in it from flying. I probably could have burned there.”
It’s a little facetious, but you can spend six figures on tests to identify these things. Even simple blood tests or a hair analysis will tell a person where they’re at from a toxicity standpoint. They can take that test now or six months from now to see where their improvements are. Urine discharge can help, but very often, these products will encourage an increased discharge. It’s got to be a long window that you’re trying to measure. I don’t know if that is necessary, as people might think.
One of the telltale signs is, “How does my skin look? When I look in the mirror after a shower, is there a certain clarity? Does my skin look healthy? Is the color return there?” You can tell when you grayed a little bit or it’s not quite what it should be. You adopt some new health habits, particularly movement. Do breathing exercises. Breathe a little bit heavy. One of the things I advocate for is to try to breathe heavily a few times a day. Your lungs not only play a role in managing toxins and the release of toxins, but they also play a role in the release of stress.
Lungs play a major role in managing and releasing toxins and stress levels.
Your lungs need to be worked. When you’re younger, you run places and do things all the time. Your lung capacity is probably at this high level. As you get older and have a more sedentary lifestyle, lung capacity shrinks. It also shrinks because of aging. Your lungs can grow. The more you breathe heavily and the more you do to keep those lungs expanded, it will help with the quality of skin clarity. People are chasing all these lotions and potions.
There are some of them that do have some excellent qualities. Having breathing exercises or breathing heavily and plenty of water can likewise improve the quality of the skin. We find a lot of people who, if they give it six months, even taking some selfies, they go, “My skin looks better.” You don’t need blood work for that. That’s common sense.
You’re probably going to feel better. You’ll maybe have more mental clarity, less brain fog. You’ll sleep better and a lot of those kinds of things, too.
That will help with the skin. Believe it or not, quality sleep will play a role in how your skin looks, skin tension, elasticity, and a lot of those dynamics.
More Incredible Products By Touchstone Essentials
That’s great. Zeolite, the Pure Body Regular, and the Pure Body Extra, that’s like, “Let’s get the bad stuff out.” Can we shift gears and talk about how to put the good stuff back in? Fulvic minerals are another one of your products. Is that a part of helping put the good stuff back in?
That’s right. Fulvic lives a dual life because it’s got some zeolite in it. It’s supporting the dynamic of getting the bad stuff out. For those who don’t know, fulvic acid comes from decayed plant material. Think of what creates rich, dark topsoil for growing. Conventional farming gave up on crop rotation and microorganism counts in the soil. Instead, they’re using petroleum-based fertilizers to put back some of the nitrogen and other things that the soil needs to grow a plant.
We talk about organic farming, but it was almost all used to be organic farming because that’s what your practice was. You till back into the soil remaining plant material after harvest. Farmers used to rotate different crops on their farm, so there was a variety of things growing. That’s important because different plants call on different nutrients out of the ground and the micronutrients that live in the ground, which are very important. The ground is alive. We want it to be alive.
Those practices largely have gone away. That’s because with modern technology and chemicals, they can get you a plump-looking vegetable that you’ll buy in the store that is very attractive to your eye, even if the nutritional count is not what it used to be. That missing material often came from humic and fulvic minerals that were found in the decayed plant material.
It’s not that there are nutrients in there. There are also a lot of trace minerals that are found there. Your body needs trace minerals. Your body is more or less an electrical system. It needs those minerals for electric conduit, transfer, and those other dynamics. I’m simplifying a very complex biodynamic there, but people know what I mean.
Your body is, in essence, an electrical system that needs minerals for electrical conduction and transfer.
We get out of a pristine, certified organic blog in Canada fulvic testing on their website to show its safety and its content. We combine it with a little bit of our Pure Body Regular because we’re trying to address gut health at the same time. With trace minerals that are sea-based trace minerals, they are tested and organically sourced.
For people who are looking for a trace mineral supplement, I don’t think you can find anything better from a performance standpoint. In fact, for us, it has one of the highest levels of retention and repeat purchase from consumers. That’s simply because they like it. They like what it’s doing for their bodies. That’s a great place to start.
In fact, if you can take that Pure Body Extra and combine it with fulvic and our super green juice. What a stage. What a platform to give your body something to work with. If you can expand that portfolio and utilize our fiber product, which is this combination of soluble and insoluble fibers that is a real variety, with some vegan-based protein, you give your gut and your system stuff to work with.
It wasn’t too long ago that I heard this on the Joe Rogan Podcast. My relationship with that podcast is up and down because it doesn’t have a consistent theme. Somebody was asking him. He was eating a salad at lunch or something. He was talking about his buddy. He said, “What are you doing that for?” He says, “I am desperately trying to give my body something to work with.”
That’s what greens are to me. I know it’s not the favorite subject for everybody in the world. Maybe fiber is a less sexy subject. Giving your body some greens to work with is important. If you’re not eating them on a regular basis, then get something you can throw a scoop in water or whatever you need to drink it, which has a pleasant taste. Get it down in 30 seconds. That’s a great way to give yourself a start from a nutrient standpoint.
We’ve got some other categories as well. We have some plant-based amino acids and other fatty acids to support your health. Everything we have is an unconditional money-back guarantee. There are 50,000-plus 5-star reviews. I’m willing to state that you do some of these things. If not us, get it from somewhere. Get it in good quality. It’s going to feel better.
I like what you said a while back. When you take a supplement, you want to feel the difference. I imagine you take some of these things, and within a few days, you’re going to feel more energy and more mental clarity. Your skin elasticity might get better. Your sleep is going to get better. It’s all going to work together. Give it a shot for a few months, especially, and you’ll start to notice a difference. That’s all by putting the good stuff in with the fulvic acid, fulvic minerals, trace minerals, and then your super greens as well.
What Does Eddie’s Daily Routine Looks Like
The fiber product with the protein sounds interesting, too. Amino acids are the building blocks of all proteins. We need those to make the proteins that we need as well. This is all helpful. I’d love to ask you. What does your daily routine look like? What does the day in the life of Eddie Stone look like in terms of your health? Which of your supplements are you using on a consistent basis? What are you doing for exercise? Any other biohacks and that sort of thing? I’d love to break that down.
I’m a power user. I do more than just talk about this stuff. It’s important. At this point, it’s ingrained in my life. I’ve probably been on this path since my late 30s. I’ve had a serious development of these habits. I’ve come down to several things. One, I do want to keep it as simple as possible. I’m an early riser. Regardless of what the schedule looks like, I’m up and out of bed by 5:00. Probably a lot of people tuning in are the same way. That’s one thing as you get a little bit older.
You’re asking about biohacks. I make sure that the phone is not the first thing that turns on. I might grab it because I need to turn the alarm off, or maybe I’m going to kick off a book I’m listening to, a podcast, or something. It’s not to check text. It’s not to check email. I do think we clutter our minds a little too much. Part of self-care, to me, is trying to keep a mind as clean as possible until you have to.
At some point in the day, you have to jump in, but I don’t want to do that first thing. I probably spend anywhere from 1 hour to 1 hour and a half, and do some light exercise from Tai Chi to yoga to stretching. I’m not trying to get into heavy-duty lifting and things like that. I might do that later in the day, but for that first hour or two, it comes down to that.
I’m an intermittent faster. I don’t generally have a meal until around lunchtime. I’ve learned to develop a habit where I don’t eat much meat or animal protein. I eat a little bit, but I won’t have that as my first meal of the day. I eat twice a day. I’m big on water. I do love coffee. I like good, organic black coffee mixed with water or hot water. That’s what my day is.
I stay away, by practice, from soft drinks or things of that nature. Any kind of liquid carbohydrate or sugar source like that, I’ll avoid. I’ll have either a good no-fat Greek yogurt or a good oatmeal. I am pretty limited with nuts and fruit. I do not have bread and things like that in the first part of the day. I’ll give myself a little bit of license at the end of the day if I want to enjoy pasta, bread, or maybe a lean cut of meat. That’s twice a day, and in between, I’m using my supplements.
I’m big on the greens and the fiber. That protein is in that fiber in part. There’s a satisfaction that comes with a little bit of protein. It’ll curb my appetite. I’ll make a shake with the greens and the fiber before I eat so that I don’t eat too much. You can overwhelm your system. In today’s world, you can get 1500 calories from a meal before you blink your eyes. There are so many menus like that. That’s overwhelming to the system. Being able to stuff it in doesn’t mean that’s a good idea. Probably getting 800 to 1200 calories at one sitting, we’re bumping up on the max that the body can fully utilize before it gets into a taxation.
Lots of people don’t know that digestion in most body systems varies by person. 50% of your energy used over the course of the day is digesting food. You can make a meal a little simpler to digest. Fermented foods, things like good yogurts, and things like that, are more easily digested. Taking enzymes allows you to do this better. You’re going to have more energy left over for organ repair, living life, your brain function, or whatever happens to be.
Around 40% of your energy is spent on digesting food. If you can make meals a little easier to digest, you will have more energy left for organ repair or for living your life.
I’ll tell the audience that I’m in the advanced program. I’ve been doing this for a long time. If you’re reading this and going, “I don’t know what this guy is talking about. This is way too much,” I get it. What I would tell you to do is start somewhere. Maybe more water and less soda. Maybe get to bed a little earlier and get a little more sleep. Maybe avoid caffeine after 1:00. If you’re eating a lot of meals out and a lot of fast food, can you do 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 meals less a week? If you accumulate, or what I call stack these hacks and winds, you’ll feel better. Your motivation and energy to do more springs from that.
I’m an advocate for our company and our products. I think we’ve got some great stuff, but if that doesn’t appeal to anybody, that’s okay. Take some of these thoughts and apply them. If you have somebody sitting here saying, “I’m not where I want to be. I don’t feel great when I look in the mirror about what I’m seeing. I certainly think I feel too old for my age,” find a few places where you can make some subtle improvements.
Maybe it’s a few fewer electronics that are getting in the way of sleep. If you have a couple of energy drinks a day, try one. Let’s slowly erode those things that are getting in the way, and then try to stack a few positive things. I want to encourage people in this way because I know they’ll feel better. People finding that better part of themselves and that potential from a health standpoint is a driving energy for us as a company.
I love that. Stacking those habits together creates that compounding effect. Then, everything starts to feel better and work better. It makes a significant difference for us.
The next thing you know, you’re walking around the community and somebody says, “What are you doing? I don’t know what’s happening here, but something about you is a little bit better.” All of a sudden, it’s all like, “This is why I’m doing it.”
You had a limited budget. You’re like, “I could spend X dollars a month, and I can only buy one thing from the website.” What would you buy? What would you tell people to get?
At age 62, it would be Telo-Vital. It’d be the longevity and the aging, for sure. I can’t imagine only being able to use one. At this point, I see the clock. That’s where I’m going to focus my time.
Touchstone Essentials’ Internal And External Plans
That’s great. Was there anything on the horizon that you’re super excited about as you think about the next 5 to 10 years out in terms of medicine, healthcare, and this part of it? What are you most excited about? What’s on the horizon, even for you guys?
I’ll give you two things. One external, one internal. Externally, it does seem the public at large is recognizing that while there’s convenience associated with ultra-processed food, it also has its challenges. In constant consumption, a person is paying a price. I’m not trying to tell anybody, “Never have any again,” even if that’s a good idea. I know how the world is. Less is better, and people are recognizing that. That’s exciting for me. As education grows about the impact, every day, people realize what they put in their bodies and how much that matters.
I do think it’s important we do this individually. I don’t know that the finances of big food and big pharma work are going to help us out. They have a strong self-interest, which I understand, in the use of their products. It probably comes down to us to pay attention. Big food has got some things, but we don’t need to have big food every time. The trends are that way. It’s very encouraging to me because the more people do that, the larger economy it creates for organic, biodynamic farming, and better products. Better products come when there’s a marketplace for them.
For us internally, building off of our work with Bill, we’ve got other anti-aging products and different categories that can also have an impact. We’ve got a topical version of the Telo-Vital that could have the same restorative qualities and impacts on telomeres in the skin. We will release it before 2026 is over. We’ve got a vegan collagen product. People know that category. When I say vegan collagen, they’re like, “What are you talking about? Is that possible?” It absolutely is.
We have some things that we’ve been investing in. For us, it takes anywhere from 2 to 5 years for our ideas to make it to the public shelf. We’ve got quite a few products that’ll come online in 2026 that we’ve worked on for several years. We’re excited about that. We know there’s an audience. People ask us all the time. There are a lot of good things. Coupling that with the public’s interest and looking at food more critically has me excited.
Get In Touch With Eddie And Touchstone Essentials
That’s very exciting. The more awareness of all of the things that we’ve been talking about, the more demand there is going to be, and the more that the companies that are creating those ultra-processed foods are going to have to change. The more market for it, the better everything is going to turn out here. This has been super fascinating. Thank you so much for the amazing work that you are doing at Touchstone Essentials and for starting that company.
Thank you for sourcing products that will help people who are not processed and are whole foods and whole ingredients. Thank you for making it easy for all of us to get the nutrients that we need. Thanks for the amazing work you’re doing to help us get the bad stuff out, get the good stuff in, and then even optimize with things like Telo-Vital. What’s the name of the glucose control one as well?
Gluco-Control. It’s a simple design to control a person’s glucose. Thank you for the invite. It’s a privilege to speak to your community. If they have follow-ups, our website’s got chat, email, and all these things. We have lots of answers and FAQs. I hope we stimulated a conversation for your folks.
Can you tell us where we can find you and Touchstone Essentials?
Yeah. The easiest is TheGoodInside.com. If you need to have communications with me, there are chats and things where you can signal and say on there, “I’ve got a question for Eddie,” or communicate otherwise. That’ll make it to me. If they go to TheGoodInside.com, it’s all right there.
There you go. Thank you so much for being with us. We appreciate you. We’ll have to have you back sometime in the future to talk about more of this.
That sounds good. Thanks.
Thanks so much. Bye.
‐‐‐
I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with Eddie Stone. I learned a lot, and I hope that you did, too. I hope that you learned some things that are actionable. We always want these episodes to help you take action and do something to improve your life, extend your health span, or live a little bit healthier. These things can compound in our lives.
I love this framework that we discussed to get the bad stuff out of our bodies first. We all live in a very toxic world with all kinds of toxins and things coming into our bodies that are potentially harmful. They are building up in our bodies, like these toxins from heavy metals and other things. How do we get those out?
It could be using a product like Touchstone Essentials’ zeolite, which they call Pure Body Regular or Pure Body Extra, for the gut. That gets into the cellular level. That can really help us remove those things and get them out of our bodies with relative ease. We get the bad stuff out so we can stay healthy and detoxed.
How do we get the good stuff in? Oftentimes, our food is lacking, as we talked about the soil and a lot of those issues that I’m sure you’ve read a lot about already. Even if we eat a healthy diet, we might be lacking in certain nutrients, minerals, and things like that. We should have fulvic minerals or fulvic acid trace minerals, super greens, fiber that has a little bit of protein in it, and plant-based amino acids.
From there, we can actually go on to other things to optimize and tweak it, like Telo-Vital, which we’ve talked about before with Dr. Bill Andrews. That really is effective in lengthening and protecting our telomeres. There’s also Gluc-Control to help us monitor the glucose levels, sugar spikes, and things like that in our blood.
For Touchstone Essentials, you can find them at TheGoodInside.com. As he mentioned there at the end of our conversation, if he were to choose one, he’d probably have to say Telo-Vital. I’m super interested in all of these things for my own personal health, staying detoxed, and helping keep the good stuff in. Check them out, Touchstone Essentials and TheGoodInside.com. We’ll see you back here next time. Thanks for tuning in.