Chlorophyll: What is it, and what are the nutritional factors?

You’ve probably seen chlorophyll popping up in drinks, supplements, and green wellness trends, but what is it really, and does it live up to the hype? In this episode, we break down the science behind chlorophyll, the compound that gives plants their vibrant green color, and explore its role in human nutrition.

We’ll discuss potential benefits like detox support, energy levels, skin health, and overall wellness, along with what the research actually says. Plus, we’ll cover natural food sources, supplement options, and whether adding chlorophyll to your routine is truly worth it.

www.drjimmysteger.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Nutrition Factor. I'm your host, Dr. Jimmy Steger, and today we're going to be talking about the power of chlorophyll. What is chlorophyll exactly? Chlorophyll is a fat-soluble pigment, which is the green-coloring material in plant leaves. We see it all around us, and if you remember anything about grade school science or biology, you'll recognize chlorophyll as the compound present in most plants. It's all around us, and it's responsible for that green color we see. Indeed, chlorophyll is an important part of photosynthesis, is what allows a plant to convert sunlight into energy and the nutrients it needs to survive. In the past 15, 20 years, chlorophyll supplements and high-green vegetables have increased tremendously in popularity. And the chlorophyll has found many, many roles in our society in every manner of health, medicinal, and curative purpose you could possibly name. And in the 40s, they used chlorophyll to fight the awful smell, or what we call the stench, in army hospitals. Back in 2001, the Chinese indicated that chlorophyll tablets, when taken regularly, could help fight off a particular kind of fungal toxin that contributes to a kind of liver cancer. And the incredible benefits of chlorophyll just goes on and on and on. So before I talk a little bit about it in depth, I want to taste some of the best foods you can get your chlorophyll from. My Lifeguard Nutritional Submit Company has a product that we build called Pro Greens, and it is loaded in chlorophyll by taking the five best sources of chlorophyll that you can get in an organic form, which we're fixing to mention, and I put them into a powder form so you can drink them first thing in the morning. So if you're trying to find a way to increase your chlorophyll, which can help detoxify the blighty and the blood, helps with odor control, helps with wound healing, helps with gut health, your overall energy. Chlorophyll is just a wonderful product for helping build strong red blood cells. So if you're having a problem eating enough chlorophyll-based foods, give us a call or go to my website, dr Jimmy Steiger.com, and you can order your pro greens and get all you need in one simple scoop a day and eight ounces of water for breakfast and get your day started. So let's look at some of these chlorophyll-based foods. Spinach is one of those overall good for you vegetables for about a thousand different reasons. And as a leafy green, it's probably by far the best leaf-based source of chlorophyll you can get. Now, take consideration if an individual has a problem with high calcium oxalate stones forming or kidney disease, spinach, I would probably not put on their diet program at all because it will produce that. Other than that, um spinach is probably my top of the list go-to foods, and it's extremely high in uh protein fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C, K1, uh, vitamin B9. Uh it's got iron and calcium in it. And so as far as the plant compounds are concerned, it contains also lutein, which is extremely beneficial for the eyes. Camphorol, which is an antioxidant, and chrisin, another great antioxidant we use. Zixanthane, which is great for the eyes. So it's probably by far the top of the list for good quality chlorophyll. Number two would be probably parsley. Parsley is typical a food that most people never touch, especially if you're a picky eater. Uh, you may not have ever actually eaten parsley, but um at the very least, when used as an herb and cooking, you might not notice you're eating it. Even still, it's an incredible nutritious little herb loaded in uh chlorophyll. Chlorella, chlorella is a very important uh food. It's barely even eaten as a plant at all. In fact, chlorilla uh is a type of algae, and uh it's almost more like a bacteria than a plant. Chlorella is extremely healthy for your cells. Uh, in fact, it's uh 50% protein and has all the nine essential amino acids your body needs to function. On top of that, uh, when taking in chlorella, it's loaded in B12, vitamin C, folic acid, as well as plenty of iron, magnesium, copper, potassium, calcium, and zinc, and uh has a bunch of fiber and omega-3s as well. So this is a great product. Spirulina would be next. It's um great product. Um it's very nutrient dense as well. Um Protein, for one thing, as far as vitamins go, it's packed with B vitamins as well, including B1, B2, B3. And where it really shines is it has copper. Copper is extremely important, which we're talking about here with this chlorophyll show today. So I'll talk to you a little bit more about that in a minute, but um, it has iron, magnesium, potassium, and manganese. And you also get uh some healthy omega-3s comparable to eggs, chicken eggs in this particular green. Barley grass is a cereal grain. We don't typically think of grains as being green. Indeed, barley is um typical brown by the time it's harvested and turned into uh any type of manner of food. Barley grass, however, is harvested when it's young, basically just sprited when it's still green, extremely important for you. Wheatgrass, a lot of people are juicing wheatgrass now, and the young form of wheat is harvested when it's young and it gives you a lot of delicious nutrients as well. Um so wheatgrass is really good. Arugula, which is a form of lettuce, I put on a lot of my people's diet programs. Uh arugula is another green leafy salad, and um a lot of people are not familiar with it until I put it on their program. So arugula is very good. Seaweed, it's usually something many of us think about um not eating. The Orientals eat it every morning for breakfast with their rice, extremely important, and um most people think of seaweed as something you want to avoid at the beach. However, um it's really healthy for your body. It's a papery green black substance, and they use it overseas to wrap rolls with and it's very, very high in um chlorella. Sprouts, sprouts is just a not really a single vegetable, it's similar to seaweed, and it isn't a single organism. Um it's very deep. You'll find various types of sprouts ranging from alfalfa to beans to grains to nuts. Any seed that turns into plant can be left to sprout and harvested after a few days. Um is extremely good for you. Extremely young, healthy plant are the best. They give generally the same range of nutrients you'd expect from um some of these other grains. You get folate, which is extremely important, magnesium, phosphorus, manganese, vitamin C, vitamin K, with a few other nutrients that depend on the source of the plant. But uh, this is a very, very good product. Basil, most people don't think anything about basil being another chlorophyll-based product. It's uh another leafy green herb, similar to baby spinach or parsley. It's used um a lot in salads. Very strong flavor, making it more useful really as a spice. So basil is good for you. Hemp seeds really might not strike you as something full of chlorophyll since you rarely see them green. Once again, they're picked with the stuff along with the um where they lot, a whole lot of besides, but they're very nutritiously dense. Probably the most anything on this list. A 20, probably about 20 grams serving will get you a whole hundred and eleven calories, six grams of that of protein, about 10 grams of fat, two grams of carbs. So hemp seeds are very important, they're very healthy for you. Um crest, garden crest is a kind of sprouted vegetables small and tasty, but most people are not familiar with that. And it's not to be confused with water crest. Garden crest is similar, but it's related to mustard. It's pungent for sure, so it's a little different. Broccoli is very good for you. We all know about broccoli basically, it's extremely good and it can be tasted in a delicious way by roasting it. Most people don't think of roasting broccoli, but it's really good. I like to eat it raw and steam it myself. It's loaded in a vitamin C, vitamin K, B9, potassium, iron, manganese. It also has a lot of trace nutrients. Asparagus. Asparagus is really good. Kind of a um weird kind of grass, really. It's quite pretty when it's flowers, but long after otherwise it's harvested to eat, you take the flowers off of it. It looks kind of like a big long green bean with a weird top on it. But asparagus is really good. I put on a lot of my patients' diets. Very, very healthy for kidney disease, especially asparagus extract tea. Um, Brussels sprouts are probably the last thing on my list as a high chlorophyll-based product. It's probably one of the most hated vegetables to all my patients. Um, when I talk to people about eating Brussels sprouts, most people kind of turn their nose up at it. But um, it's really healthy for you. So it's got the vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin K, B9 as well as manganese, iron, and fiber in it. So Brussels sprouts is a very important chlorophyll-based product. So that's probably my 15 top chlorophyll-based foods that I would suggest anyone get on. Um, so chlorophyll, the power of chlorophyll is indeed uh should be a part of anyone's diet program. I love to get young children on chlorophyll-based foods right after they finish nursing because most kids aren't getting it, so they don't have a taste for vegetables as they grow older, and this is a big problem in our society. So, mothers that are nursing, please get your children on vegetables as soon as you finish breastfeeding them, so you can teach them and their tongues can get used to eating this fat-soluble nutrient. Um, chlorophyll is uh naturally associated with fat-soluble vitamins uh such as vitamin E, vitamin K in the complex form, and A. And the F complex probably is the most important factor of all, and is only found in the young seedlings, like we talked about on some of those foods a moment ago, during the period of the most rapid growth. So if you're out picking this stuff, the younger the seedling, the better. If the chlorophyll is to be made water soluble for the body, it must be separated from these synergistic factors and reduced to a chemically pure form, which is refined, and the magnesium molecule it carries be partially substituted by copper. The chlorophyll then becomes a blue, bluish blue instead of a green color when we dissolve it in water, and the natural form is insoluble in water. And chlorophyll is known as a uh nature's deodorant. Uh Orientals learned this many years ago, and if you want to use chlorophyll in a natural form and to help your body with body odor and halitosis, the way you do it is you take and you mix 100 milligrams of the water-soluble form and use it in water, warm water, and if you use it regularly, um it's harmless for the body, and the amount of synthetic copper chlorophyll um, if taken in too large amounts, can be toxic. However, it's not going to fuse what I tell you, it's just about 10 to 15 milligrams a day, would be the limit for the use of this product. And if taken day in and day out, this will definitely help you. Um, I put this in my Progreens formula once again that I sell from Lifeguard Nutrition. The natural fat soluble complex is harmless, very healthy for the body. However, copper can be a dangerous trace mineral if it's in a synthetic form or taking in too much. Uh so gambling with the dosages of more than about a few milligrams a day, however, is the main nutrient that holds the arteries together, which prevents all forms of aneurysm. I lost my dad to an aneurysm. So when I was 25 years old and uh was studying nutrition, I had my first doctorate degree. I was studying aneurysm at the highest level because I wanted to find out what caused my father to pass. And the three acting physicians that were operating on my father could not tell me what caused aneurysms. So at 25 years of age, as a young doctor, I set three of these 65-year-old physicians down and told them very quickly what caused aneurysms, which blew them out of the water. So if you want strong arteries, you need copper in your diet. Very important. So chlorophyll helps come into play and build strong red blood cells. The primary component inside the artery is copper, which will make your arteries super strong. And if you keep your body alkaline, you won't have aneurysms in the human body. Um, foods or any type of water that's contaminated with large amounts of copper are known to be specifically destructive to the optic nerve. Uh blindness, um, which having been caused by the use of hot tap water used to make coffee, which I don't suggest anyone carries traces of copper from the coals of most of the water heaters. So you have to be careful with hot water, um, carrying too much copper to the body, because this can happen. Rapid assimilation into the brain happens very quickly. Um, even some of the hot water heater manufacturers will tell you not to use the hot water for cooking, as some kinds of water take up copper a little bit more readily than others, depending on the fluorine content or fluoride content in the water. I tell all my patients to cook in stainless steel pots with a good source of water to prevent this. No tap water. We don't use tap water, it's just most of it's terrible for your body. Uh, chlorophyll has two definite effects when taken into the body. It destroys guanadine on contact and promotes elimination of bad cholesterol. We need healthy cholesterol for the brain, something the medical industry doesn't really want you to get much of, and that's what causes the destruction of the brain. So we need small amounts of cholesterol, but we do need to eliminate the bad cholesterol in our body. Uh, guanadine is a poison that is produced by the breakdown of phosphogen. It precipitates calcium, and the function of the parathyroid is to eliminate guanadine and restore the presence of otherwise precipitated calcium in the body fluids. Too much of the wrong type of calcium is not healthy, and the guanidine is disposed by its anabolic regeneration into phosphogen, and phosphogen is dipotassium, creatine, hexote phosphate, and is the energy source for all mammalian dynamics, meaning all mammals need this product. The male sperm, for instance, is loaded with phosphorgen as a power source, just as a air tank has compressed air or charge storage battery to take it into its intended destination. This is what phosphrogen does. This is why the male economy, uh, meaning the human body, human species, never waste creatine in the urine. Um, while the same creatine is a normal component of the urine of the female, phosphogen is so easily broken down that simple mild trauma in the human body or uh heat releases its components, which are highly irritating to nerve endings in the body throughout. For instance, the prick of a pin causes a pain by its reaction, no matter where you prick your body at. But free guanadine is probably the main toxic agent in severe burns. So we use chlorophyll for burns to help heal the skin. Chlorophyll acts much like a vitamin F in treating burns, extremely good component for skin damage, especially type 2, type 3 burns. It um helps nullify the pain, and the quicker we apply chlorophyll to the burn, the less the severity. Uh, for the toxic agents are destroyed before they do any damage to the skin. So the quicker we can get chlorophyll to damage skin or burn victims, the faster we can get them to heal naturally. Chlorophyll applied to the extract of tooth sockets, for instance, stops the same type of pain. So people are going to get teeth pulled. I'll give them some of my pro grains and teach them how to use this. And it stops the agonizing, irritating pain that keeps the patient awake at night, and this is hard to alleviate with narcotics, which we don't suggest at all. Uh, so for you parents that are going to get your teeth uh pulled, your children's teeth pulled, always consider chlorophyll uh for the tooth sockets which are open and exposed because that oxygen hits that pain uh that root causes severe pain in the body. Chlorophyll will help you with that. The vitamin F restores the uh diffusible calcium that is precipitated by guanadine, so its parallel action is rational. Vitamin D and F operating as a complex together. Such as in cod liver oil, are obviously paralleling the action of the parathyroid, both protecting the blood calcium levels, extremely important. And uh we know that castrated animals are known to be immune to titanic seizures if the parathyroids are removed from the body. So very important thing to think about there. And since the male hormones promote the retention of creatine and guanidine for building phosphogen for the sperm cells in the body, the parathyroid is essential as a creatine catalyst. And as this catalyst to guanidine into creatine and the prevention of excretion of creatine takes place in the kidney, the parathyroid function is confined to kidney reactions, and prostate phosphatase is a partner in phosphogen synthesis. It is significant that prostate disease seems to be a vitamin F deficiency state in most of the cases that we've seen over the past 40, 45 years. When we do nutritional testing on our patients, we can look at this and help our prostate patients tremendously by putting the correct nutrients back in the body, dropping the meat. Most people eat way too much meat, which destroys the prostate because the uric acid settles in the lowest point in the male body, and that is the prostate gland and the feet or ankles, which can cause gout as well. So uric acid is another subject we'll talk about later. But uh the other known effect of chlorophyll is to help eliminate excess cholesterol from the body, which we talked about a moment ago. Cholesterol is a material used in cellular activity as a regulator of cell wall permeability, and if excess becomes deposited by a reason of failure of the proper balance of the body fluid, fat controls the lipotropic factors. There is an increase in blood pressure and increase in sedimentation rate. The sedimentation rate is high in most toxic states, pregnancy, chronic constipation, arthritis, infectious disease, and so forth. Chlorophyll seems to be a synergistic effect of the lipotropic factors, and these include seril phytates, as in brown rice, which is generally good for hypertension because it supplies phytates that afford anositol, betane, choline, and lessin to be delivered at the same time, which is extremely important. I love brown rice. I love to put it on the majority of all my patients' diets for this reason here. It's very important, and a lot of people want to stay away from rice because they think it's too many carbs, it's going to hurt their diabetes, whether it be type 1 or type 2, which is nonsense. I put all my diabetic patients on brown rice and get amazing results and have been doing so for over 45 years. The natural complexes of these lipotropic factors are far more potent in a form, uh pure form, uh when combined together, and it is uh hard to get a patient to take in enough choline to accomplish the desired purpose. However, the natural form, which when it's combined together, brown rice, is not needed really more than one-tenth um in the volume to get the same results in most cases. So brown rice, whether you people believe it or not, is extremely healthy for the body. And for those of you people that are thinking I can't eat rice because I'm going to get fat, that's nonsense. I've spent a great deal of time in China and Japan overseas studying with the oldest living people in the world. And I can clearly tell you they eat rice three to four times a day, large amounts of it, and none of them have a problem with diabetes or gaining too much adipose tissue or getting fat, as we call it here in America. So there you have it. Chlorophyll, a superfood for the human body. Once again, if you want a good source of that, think about the vegetables I mentioned earlier. Extremely important for everyone, including making your red blood cells super strong. Kind of like Popeye. He ate spinach every day, and uh he was known to be very strong. So, if you want to be healthy and get your chlorophyll in daily, I like to put my patients on chlorophyll two or three times a day in an organic form by eating it if they need it in a supplemental form, which most people do, especially kids are not getting enough chlorophyll in their diet to make their red blood cells strong, builds their immune system up. We put them on ProGreens, my formula from Lifeguard Nutrition. If you want to learn more about that, go to dr Jimmy Steiger.com, go to our website, give us a call here at 251-660-1240. If you're interested in being a patient, it doesn't matter where you live in the world. We have patients all over the world we take care of, and we can take care of you the same way. Until next time, I'm Dr. Jimmy Steiger. Stay healthy and God bless.