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Clint Ober – Everything You Need To Know About Grounding

Content by: Clint Ober

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week, I’m excited to welcome Clint Ober. Clint is a 30-year veteran of the cable television industry, who began investigating the effects of electrically grounding the human body to the earth. Over the past 18 years, he has supported a host of research studies that collectively demonstrate that grounding reduces inflammation and promotes normal functioning of all the body systems. In this episode, we talk about the science supporting grounding, and how we can easily implement this practice into our everyday lives. Over to Clint.

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downloaditunesListen to Stitcher Questions we ask in this episode:

  • Can you have inflammation in a grounded body? (24:13)
  • What are the best surfaces to ground ourselves? (37:34)
  • Is grounding safe for everyone ‘kids, pregnancy etc’? (44:11)

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Full Transcript

Stu

00:03 Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and welcome to another episode of The Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness and human performance, in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long-lasting health. Now, I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do.

Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products too. That’s right. We’re into whole food nutrition, and have a range of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website. That is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay. Back to the show.

This week, I’m excited to welcome Clint Ober. Clint is a 30-year veteran of the cable television industry, who began investigating the effects of electrically grounding the human body to the earth. Over the past 18 years, he has supported a host of research studies that collectively demonstrate that grounding reduces inflammation and promotes normal functioning of all the body systems. In this episode, we talk about the science supporting grounding, and how we can easily implement this practice into our everyday lives. Over to Clint.

Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition, and I am delighted to welcome Clint Ober to the podcast. Clint, how are you?

Clint

01:29 I’m doing very good. I’m really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to visit [inaudible 00:01:34].

Stu

01:34 Well, I appreciate the time. Very, very interesting and intriguing treating topic today and I’ve been, I’ve been fascinated by this for forever, so great to be able to connect with you and actually understand the science behind it and your story. But first up, for everyone out there that may not be familiar with you or your work, I would love it if you could just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself please.

Clint

01:59 Okay. Well, I grew up in Montana. USA in Montana, and I grew up kind of in a rural environment, kind of an earthy environment, a cowboy, I guess, and back then a cowboy was somebody that stayed with the herd and just babysat them, and if you see one that’s not doing well, you take them out of the herd and then you go ride the pasture and find out what’s going on in the pasture that might have affected the cows.

So anyhow, that’s where I started out. But after that, in my work life I spent about 30 years in the communications industry. Primarily television, cable television, microwave, blanks, down lights, you name it, a little bit of everything. But in that industry, I learned most importantly about grounding, and there you have to ground everything to the earth in order to maintain electrical stability in order to have good quality sound with no interference, pictures, data and everything. So, the world we have today, it’s because of what we learned along the way in developing that industry and grounding everything. So, that’s where I started.

I’m 75 now, and about 20, 21 years ago, maybe 20 or something like that, I was playing with a computer one day and it kept crashing, and this was back before the internet was very much, I mean, very active like it is today. But anyhow, the old computers that we had, the PCs, they would, if they weren’t grounded, which they weren’t back in those days, they were very unstable, and if you had static electricity on your body you could touch them and get a glitch and lock up the software. So, anyhow, I tried to figure out how to ground myself because it was happening too much, so I laid a piece of copper tape across my desk and connected it to a wire connected to like ground, and then I would touch it before I touched the computer, and then I never had any problems.

But, at that same time, I could go on, you know, a lot of stories in there. But that day that I did that, I intuitively, I walked outdoors and I sat on a bench, and I was in Sedona, Arizona, and a tour bus pulled up and the tourists they got off of it, they were obviously a Japanese tour group, and they all had these big white tennis shoes, like they had just been to a strip mall, or a outlet mall, and they had Nike shoes on sale. But for some reason, I looked up at the trees and I noticed the power lines and I noticed, and I just intuitively ask, “I wonder if there is a problem with humans no longer being naturally grounded?”

And that came out of nowhere. So anyhow, I didn’t know, but as the day went on, I took a little bit of interest in it. I went home that night, started playing, I drug out a volt meter, and started measuring the difference in electrical potential on my body when I was grounded, not grounded, in the house not grounded, in the house grounded, but anyway, that night I was intrigued with the readings that I was finding on the volt meter, so I went to the hardware store and bought a roll of metalized aluminum duct tape, and I had a laid it across the bed, and threw a wire out the window. And there was a reason I was in the bedroom, because that’s where the highest level of electric fields are generally, because you’re laying in bed, and your head’s close to the wallboard, and behind the wall are where all the electrical wires and stuff are. So anyhow, but that’s where you have a little more exposure to the EMFs than not. And so anyway, I figured, well, so I did it in the bedroom, and it was late at night anyway, so I wanted to just lay down and watch TV, so I put the tape on the bed, through a window, I had one wire out the window and connected it to a ground rod, threw the second wire out the window, connected it to the ground, but connected to the volt meter.

Stu

01:59 [crosstalk 00:06:30].

Clint

06:29 So, when I laid down on the tape, I could touch the volt meter and I could register the voltage on my body. So, I disconnected from the tape, then the voltage would go up, connected back the tape, the voltage would go down. So, I knew I was grounded, and that was kind of interesting, and I didn’t really know what to make of it yet other than electromagnetic interference in the industry that I came from is a big problem, and you deal with it, and you deal with it through grounding. So, anyhow, I remember the next morning I woke up and the volt meters are beside, laying beside me, and I thought, “Wow, this is pretty incredible.” Because at that time I was early fifties, and I had lots of pain. I grew up on a … I was a cowboy, skier, played tennis. Any kind of injury you could possibly generate, I’ve done. You know, go ride junior steer riding when I was a kid, it was endless, it was nuts. But anyhow, I survived all of that. But today, I don’t have any pain fortunately. But back then, the chronic pain … But back then I had to take Advil to go to sleep at night, and I had to have Advil and coffee in the morning to get up and get going.

And so, anyhow, and as a byproduct of that experience, a couple of my friends I asked one of them, I said, “I’ve been playing with this thing, and I want you to experiment and see what you think.” So, I made the tape up on his bed, same outfit, his wife wanted to just throw us both out of that house. But, anyhow, so we went through the same thing, and then another friend took interest, so there was two other people besides myself, and the third guy had flaring arthritis in one of his wrists, and he was suffering from my [inaudible 00:08:23] arthritis, I guess, forever. And so we grounded him, everybody, and in about two or three days later everybody said, or this one guy said, he said, “Do you think this could have any effect on my arthritis, because my arthritis was getting better?” I didn’t think too much about it, but then I realized that my own pain had decreased significantly. And I said, “Well, there’s something to this because I’m feeling better. I just feel better. I have more energy. I feel better.” And so, thereafter, I said … I was kind of, I was retired at that time, so I set out to find out what I could on the internet, which was very challenging at that time.

But I ended up going down to the university of Arizona in Tucson and asking questions, checking out the library, what is the effect of grounding the body? And first of all, nobody had ever heard a word of grounding the body, except during surgery. You have to ground the body, before they open you up, because if there’s static electricity, then it can create a cardiac event. So, grounding does exist, and everything in surgical centers, clean rooms, environments where they manufacturer software chips, all of those kinds of things, they ground their employees. Everything has to be held at earth potential in order to prevent static sparks. Dynamite industry, gasoline industry. So, there was a lot of information out there, but nothing related to the body, and more specifically, I wanted to know how it was reducing pain, and there was no information whatsoever.

So, I went on for a few more months playing with it. And then one day I said, “This is something significant here.” So, I want on to UCLA, and ask them to help me out a little bit, and they kind of pretty much laughed me off campus. I mean, one of the guys, I remember, he’ll never will forget it, and I tell him every day, but one of the guys, one of the guys there, he says, “You expect us to believe that somebody is going to drive a nail in the ground, tie a wire around somebody’s toe, and it’s going to make them sleep better?” He said, “Get out of here.”

But it was kind of the more I played with it, the more I realized that there’s a phenomena there. Didn’t understand it, so I decided to go ahead and do the first study myself with the help of a couple of university students and a nurse, and what we found, we validated the results that … You know, this was anecdotal, but everybody slept better. Everybody had decreased pain. A lot of people had, like PMS, cramps and things that didn’t manifest like normal, but there was a long host of other just day-to-day things that happened to people. TMJ reduced, and so on.

And so, then that led me to do another study in San Diego where we made sure that … This is with a retired anesthesiologist who was very knowledgeable on everything, and again, he wasn’t convinced that there was anything there, but he, like me, was retired and he said, “Let’s go find out.” And so, we did the study and took a dozen people, and measured everybody’s circadian cortisol. Every four hours for 24 hours, and then we created a profile, and then we grounded them for six to eight weeks, and we went back and again, measured their cortisol every four hours for 24 hours, and created a new profile, and then compared the two. The first group, I mean before grounding their cortisol was like spaghetti. It’s got a perfect profile it follows during a 24-hour period, but it was all over the place. The older ladies were very low cortisol. You can relate that to exhausted adrenals. The younger people were high anxiety and they were little high. And so anyhow, but at the end of the study, they all kind of all synchronized. The older ladies came up in their morning cortisol, and the high anxieties came down. So, they all synchronized into a nice band. So, we knew then that the earth itself was affecting the cortisol secretion, 24-hour cortisol secretion.

And what’s significant about that is at 4:00 AM, that’s when your cortisol begins to spike, and it rises rapidly. That’s what gets you out of bed. On the other hand, if your cortisol is, I mean slowest at midnight, but if it’s not low, if it’s elevated at all, you can’t sleep. So, there’s a whole story on that too. But, so anyhow, we figured that out, and then that led to a host of studies. We’ve produced 24 peer-reviewed published studies now over 20 years. It’s been 20 years. I was a young youngster when I started this, and so I can go on and get into more and … But maybe you want to guide a little bit here.

Stu

13:35 Yeah, sure. So, I’m really, really keen, and I know that we’ve got a whole heap of resources to better share with our audience as well, in terms of those clinical studies. We’ve got thermography case studies that talk about accelerated wound healing, inflammation, sleep, and a whole heap of other applications as well. I’m really keen to hear how did you ground your test subjects when you were talking about the, like the cortisol for instance? How long did you ground them for, and how did you do it? Was it sleeping? Was it just a earthing through feet on the grass? What did you do?

Clint

14:15 Okay. What we did is it’s impossible to test anybody during the day because everybody’s on the move. So, there’s no constant there. So, what we did is we made up a pad that was like a one-inch wide, they were two-feet long. You know, one-foot wide, two-feet long. And it was made of conductive material, and we bonded it to a, like a quarter-inch, or not a quarter … but like an eighth-inch felt pad, so we had body, and then we connected, because it was conductive, we connected to a ground wire, threw it out the window connected it to a ground rod, and put it underneath their sheets. So, they were sleeping on it.

Stu

15:02 Okay. So time then for grounding is very much an important aspect in terms of the longer you ground, the better is going to be for the outcome? Would that be correct?

Clint

15:16 That would be very correct. And I can say that, when I started grounding and doing a lot of the subjects in the first anecdotal study, three of them had lupus and MS, and the rheumatologists were the ones who would give them too me, and said, “Here you can have them. I don’t want them cause.” Because there’s nothing they can do for them, and so on. But, anyhow, what we found was people who health is very compromised, like flaring MS or lupus, and/or arthritis, they’re really all kind of the same thing. So, when they have flaring, they need to be grounded eight hours, they’ll sleep be good, they’ll feel better in the morning, but 10 o’clock they’re back where they in trouble. So, we ground them to noon, then they had significantly better results, and then they started burning out around four, four in the afternoon. So, we found that people with MS, lupus, or who are in a chronically, in a state where their health is really compromised, you almost have to get grounded and stay grounded, 24/7. Now that’s people who are in trouble.

Then, but to add something to that that might make a little sense is, it’s like animals who live in the wild, they’re grounded 24/7. We used to be grounded 24/7, and this has to do with our immune system, which I can explain a little later, but so the animals who live indoors with their owners, they all manifest the same health disorders as their owners. Autoimmune …

Stu

16:55 Right. Right.

Clint

16:56 They all have the same level of the death rate of cancer, or death rate of various things. So, we know that it’s environmental from that point of view, and we know that the only thing that’s really different there, I mean the food is different, the water’s different, whatever, maybe, but we know that what is significantly different is animals that are, yeah, standing, living on the earth, their bodies are negatively charged. Animals who are living indoors, they have positive charge.

Stu

17:24 Right. It’s fascinating, because I remember back when I was a young boy, and I’m 47 now, so many, many years ago, back in the day when televisions had antennas on the top, and you had to physically go and hold the aerial of your radio if you wanted to get any decent reception, and now of course, fast forward to today, you don’t have to do that anymore. You don’t have to tune really anything. It’s just all, it all works.

Clint

17:55 [crosstalk 00:17:56].

Stu

17:55 So I guess that all, yeah, that technology has been incorporated into all of that kind of stuff, so I’m really keen to hear what did you do from that point forward then when you realized that, well, there is absolutely something to grounding human beings? Because you’ve been through the studies, you’ve looked at cortisol levels, and you’ve seen that it’s almost paradigm-shifting, profound, in as much as you can physically reduce the inflammation in people’s bodies, and inflammation nowadays is being touted as the root cause of most health issues.

Clint

18:31 Yes.

Stu

18:31 So, where did you take that?

Clint

18:34 Well, what I did is after we did the cortisol study, we knew we had something there, but nobody understood it, but we knew that cortisol is a stress hormone, fight or flight, so on. So, that was a good place to start. But anyhow, and we did also get heart rate variability at that time, and we had significant change in heart rate variability, but nobody knew what that was at all

19:00 Wholeheartedly.

Stu

19:00 Yeah.

Clint

19:01 Inflammation was not a word that was in the language back then. No doctors, no researchers, nobody talked about inflammation. It wasn’t until 2004 that the word inflammation surfaced. But anyhow, about 2001, 2002 this Dr. [Ghaly 00:19:16] who helped me with the cortisol study, he was aware of a gentleman, Dr. Stephen Sinatra, who is a cardiologist back East. He was attending a conference there and he said, “Let’s go over and catch him and see if he can ex … Tell him what we’re doing, tell him what we’re experiencing, and see if he has any ideas. Cardiologists you think electrical?

Stu

19:41 Yes.

Clint

19:42 So, that was the motivation there. So we went over and we sat down with Stephen. We talked to him and played with him for about an hour and a half, grounding him and a couple of his other friends, or whatever. He said, “You know, you do have something here. This is very significant.” He says, “The body is electrical first. Your muscles, your heart, your brain, everything, every cell in the body is electrical,” because it’s got a negative charge on the outside or positive on the inside. when they depolarize they have to repolarize, And that’s how nutrition gets in and out of the cells, and so on and so on. I knew none of this. I’m just an electrical guy, I know everything electrical but I know nothing about biology.

Anyhow, he says, “Clint,” because we kept talking about pain. He says, “Clint, you have to understand that you need to go research inflammation.” Nobody knew exactly what it was. He says, “Because you can’t have pain without inflammation. If you do have pain then you have chronic inflammation,” if it’s a chronic pain, and the same with an acute injury. It’s the inflammation, the oxidation of the tissue, that’s causing the hot burning pain. So, everything … He says, “You have to go back and study inflammation.” Well back then nobody was talking about inflammation and there was very little research out there, but I did come across a couple of papers and they were talking about neutrophils …

Stu

21:17 Right.

Clint

21:18 … and they were explaining how a macrophage neutrophil, whatever. Let’s say you have a pathogen, or a damaged cell, so the first thing the immune system does is send over a neutrophil, or the neutrophil is there and he knows what to do. It goes and it encapsulates, it actually encapsulates, it brings it into the cell itself and then it releases reactive oxygen species. As soon as I heard the word reactive then I knew that, “Okay, this is an electrical phenomenon,” because reactive means that it’s hot, it’s charged, …

Stu

21:56 Right.

Clint

21:56 … and it can go steal an electron. So how the neutrophil works, and how the immune system reduces pathogens, is it encapsulates the pathogen and then releases the reactive oxygen and that rips the electrons away from the structure and destroys it. That’s how the body works. That’s how the immune system works.

Stu

22:17 Fascinating.

Clint

22:18 Yeah. So then we kept saying, “Okay, well why?” So eventually we got to the point, … Well, we didn’t know exactly how all of this worked at that time. It took us to another eight years to really get to the bottom of it, but what we found was … There’s a couple of stories behind also that … We did one study where we were grounding people, and I was kind of still in [inaudible 00:22:44], well, the EMFs and stuff are affecting this, but in our studies we looked at in some of the subjects’ homes that we were measuring, we would always measure the electric fields. Some homes have very high, some would have little or none, just by nature of their living style. But as an end result we started looking at it and whether they had high EMF or no EMF the results were always the same for people who had arthritis, lupus, MS, or these chronic pain sleep issues. we said, “Okay, so this has to do with the earth, not with the environmental noise.”

Stu

23:24 Yeah.

Clint

23:24 Again, electric fields are what you would call an environmental noise, like a radio or TV signal or any kind of signal out there. So, we started investigating a little bit further. We knew that the earth was negative, meaning the earth has a slight negative charge. What that means, and that’s the reason we ground everything to the earth, ground all electrical appliances that need to be, communication systems, and the like, and for lightening protection. So, you ground everything to the earth and then what happens is anything connected to the earth will equalize with the earth, meaning it’ll have the same surface charge as the earth itself.

Stu

24:13 Right.

Clint

24:13 So, when you stand barefoot on the earth you are negative about 20, 30 millivolts. Now, I know today you can’t have inflammation in a grounded body because that’s why we ground everything electrical to prevent charge, to prevent electrical event, to prevent noise, static, and so on and so on. Now, as soon as you disconnect from the earth, or you put shoes on, or you walk in the house, now your body is an antenna. It will attract EMS, static electricity, it’ll build up steady charges. Then, as you breathe oxygen and just live you’re depleting yourself of free electrons …

Stu

24:54 Yes.

Clint

24:56 … because you’re breathing oxygen particles and everything, and your immune system has to maintain 24 hour, 24/7. Anyhow, I don’t want to get lost here so I got to go back. That’s my problem, I get sidetracked.

Stu

25:16 You said one thing and it just sounds to me like this could possibly be so radically important for our health. You said you can’t have inflammation on a grounded body, which is huge, surely.

Clint

25:33 The reason we know this is because we can take an electrode patch, put it on a flare of any kind, or if you’ve just had surgery, doesn’t matter what the pain is, and put it to, connect it to a ground wire and connect it to the ground via an electrical outlet or the earth itself then the pain will go away in 5, 10, 15 minutes. Now, there’s two kinds of pain. One is that hot, burning pain, that flaring pain, that’s oxidative pain.

Stu

26:03 Right.

Clint

26:03 That means there’s tissues being damaged. Then, once you put that out, put that fire out, the neutrophils, the cytokine storm, or the neutrophils, or whatever it is, once you dampen that, put it out … As soon as you flood the body with free electrons that stops because what happened with these neutrophils … I have to back up and fill that in. That’s what I was trying to do.

Stu

26:26 Okay.

Clint

26:27 When you are not grounded and your body is short of an electron … The only way you can have chronic inflammation is you don’t have enough electrons in your body readily available to reduce these radicals …

Stu

26:44 Right.

Clint

26:45 … that are being produced, the excess radicals. Let’s say a neutrophil encapsulates a pathogen and it releases the reactive oxygen and destroys it. Now if there’s any remaining radicals they have to be neutralized, and they’re only going to hang out for a few nanoseconds then they’re going to steal an electron from the closest adjacent thing that they can get an electron, and that’s a healthy cell generally.  So then, when it rips an electron from a healthy cell so now we’ve set up, it’s kind of like a fire, so now the neutrophil will go fix that one and then again collateral damage and it goes on in a chain reaction and that’s what chronic inflammation is, because inflammation in the body, in the human body, is abnormal. You have inflammatory cascades to burn up pathogens and so on, but not to stay. They need to be neutralized. You need … It’s called redox potential. You have to have a certain amount of negative charge or free electrons to reduce these radicals instantly, and when your body is grounded … I’ll fill in the gaps here a little bit.

Stu

28:01 Okay.

Clint

28:02 What we did is we know the earth is negative 20 millivolts approximately. It could be 50 in some areas, and negative means there’s an abundance of free electrons that can move and do work. The only work they do is reduce charge. There’s nothing else for them to do. So now, when you ground the human body, and this, we didn’t discover this until about 2012. Dr. Sinatra had me come back to Essex, Connecticut and he had a dozen of his medical friends, and they went and drew blood on every one of them and looked at it, and then they grounded them for 30, 40 minutes and looked at the blood again. What we saw, almost everybody had a little bit of rouleaux formation, or different levels of thickness of the blood, sticky blood as he called it. But 30, 40 minutes later everybody’s blood separated.

We thought that was interesting but we didn’t really understand what happened there or why. So then, we went back to California and got ahold of Dr. [Savaya 00:29:13] who was with the California Institute of Human Sciences at that time, and he set up a test where we took a group of people and we drew the blood before grounding, and then he was able to measure the change in the electrical surface charge on the red blood cells. What we did is we increased the free electrons, or the electrons on the surface of red blood cells, by nearly 300% or a factor of 2.7. So, what happens then, so the blood cells around, and now they’re more negative, so the more negative things are they’ll start like little magnets they’ll push each other apart. So now the red blood cells push each other apart and they can’t stick together. You have to have a positive charge over there for them to stick. So when your blood sticks together you’re short of electrons. It’s like static electricity in a bag of peanuts, plastic peanuts, where if you have …

So what we … This is cowboy logic. As soon as we saw that we said, “Well, the earth is 20, 30 millivolts negative, and here’s the blood 20, 30 millivolts negative, so this is a phenomena of nature. When you’re grounded your body is negative. So now the body’s got lots of free, … I mean the red blood cells have lots of negative charge, but what mostly it thins the blood, as Dr. Sinatra says, “It makes it more like red wine rather than ketchup.” He says, “Now the red blood cells can get in and out of the capillaries easier. They can oxygenate the tissue, and the first thing we see in 5, 10, 15 minutes of grounding is everybody’s face pinks up. You get improved circulation in the facial features. It reduces wrinkles because your blood is more … There’s more … I don’t know how to explain all of that. So, for the ladies we call it a beauty treatment.

Anyhow, so now, and then we also assume that, but we didn’t measure it so we don’t know, but we also assume that every cell in the body is more negative. So now it’s less likely for any kind of a radical to damage a healthy cell or to damage … Because now the red blood cell it’s got 300 more electrons than before. It can give up lots of electrons before any damage can be done, and by that time it’s gone through the whole system in a minute or so and picked up more electrons and it maintains. I hope I stayed …

Stu

31:53 No, you did. You absolutely did, and it’s fascinating because there’s a whole heap of studies, and clinical research, and we can share the links to those, as well, and also the Earthing movie, that we’ll talk about a little bit later, really beautifully depicts the live blood analysis that you’re talking about in terms of … It’s almost like a static picture versus a video, the before and after. The blood flow is unbelievable in terms of what grounding has done. People might think, “Boy, there’s a whole heap of science there. It’s really confusing,” but ultimately all you need to do is go outside, take your shoes and socks off, walk around in the grass, sit down, connect with the earth, and perhaps for as little as 15 minutes and you’re on the road to recovery. Would I be right in thinking that?

Clint

32:47 Yes. Electrical … First of all, electrical works at the speed of light. So, chemical is a whole different process, although it’s electrically related, because you have to move an electron somewhere to do anything. So, what we’ve found is when you ground the body … There’s so much inflammation in the body sometimes it takes time for it to clear. The younger you are the more you can get away with without grounding. The older you are just the opposite.

Stu

33:21 Right.

Clint

33:23 So, 15 minutes is … You’re certainly going to feel better because what you’ve done, every time you go for a period of time ungrounded, and if you go exercise, you go workout, you do all these things and you never ground, what you’re doing is you’re creating lots of inflammation in your body. So you go to sleep and you get up in the morning you’re stiff and sore, and if you’re just getting into yoga or some kind of exercise you’ve got delayed onset muscle soreness in three days and you give it up and don’t go back. So what we tried to do with a lot of the athletes … We worked with a lot of athletes over the years, Stanford running team, the swimming team up there, and so on. They started running around the track for 15 minutes barefoot before working out on the track.

Stu

34:18 Right.

Clint

34:19 Then after they worked out, they’d make them run for 15 minutes again to get the inflammation out of their body. That’s fairly common with athletes now. They don’t talk about it much. Nobody talks about … The athletic world, they don’t talk about anything that’s going to help or hurt anybody.

Stu

34:32 No, that’s right, secret.

Clint

34:35 Yeah, it’s a secret, bag of tricks is what they call it. But anyhow, they can take a child who’s been in school all day, he’s on carpets with rubber soled shoes so his body is fully charged with static electricity all the time they’re in there, and then you’ve got the electric fields raining down from fluorescent lighting. These poor kids are just wired. Literally they are wired.

Stu

35:02 Actually wired.

Clint

35:02 You go to a lot of the schools, here anyway, and they go outdoors, all you have is concrete and asphalt. There is no green. If there is any green you can’t go on it. You can see a little bit in the movie about that and the schools. So, you’re letting kids out and getting them grounded for 15 minutes at a time is life changing. If a kid’s having an asthmatic attack or whatever just take them outdoors, take their shoes off, either throw them in a swimming pool or put their feet on the grass and they’ll stop rather instantly. If somebody has an asthmatic flare the first thing … You know what that is that’s a cytokine storm. You breathe in some pathogens and the immune system goes to work and then all of a sudden there’s not enough redox potential to clean up the excess of the cytokines and then they do more damage to the lungs, and so then it’s damage creating more damage, creating more damage.

As soon as you ground a person, you can put electrode patches right there, you can put their feet on the ground, their hands, throw them in a swimming pool, anything, and it’ll stop immediately because instantly when you ground the body it stops that out of control oxidative [crosstalk 00:36:15] [burst 00:36:15]

Stu

36:15 Fantastic. I’m just … I guess talking to our listeners now, so think about perhaps how you would typically operate on a day-to-day basis. So you’d get out of bed, you might put your feet on the carpet after sleeping all night, and who knows whether you’ve got electrical wires underneath your bed, you’ve got the lamp next to you, you might have a fuse box behind the wall. So you are quite conductive and you’re very subject to all of this electromagnetic fields that surround most of us at all times. So you have a shower and then you put your shoes on, get into your car, drive to the office. You’ve got your shoes on all day long. You go through your working day, you might go back to the gym, you might swap your work shoes for your training shoes, you workout and create lots of oxidative stress through what you’re doing in gym at that time, come back home, have a shower, feet on the carpet, relaxed.

I can see now that there is a huge missing piece of the puzzle right there in … Well, we’re like this battery, this buzzing charged battery which is primed for inflammation.

Clint

37:33 Right.

Stu

37:34 Just fascinating. So, a couple of questions then about grounding just so I fully understand and our listeners do, as well. I guess the first one is the best surfaces to ground in terms of grass, concrete, sand, water. What would they be?

Clint

37:54 Well, I’d like to fill in the gap before we answer that.

Stu

37:57 Okay.

Clint

38:00 You know, you take the description that you described getting up in the morning, doing whatever, coming home. And we can do all the best things, do all the right things, go work out, do whatever, and we still have all these health problems.

Okay, so what you have to pull into perspective is in 1960, 90% of the visits to a practitioner were for infectious disease, acute injury and childbirth. Today, 60 years later, 90% of the visits to a practitioner are for a stress-related health disorder, and they’re talking about the immune system is so compromised that it can’t maintain health. So this process that we go through everyday… I mean, our immune systems becoming compromised, but we’re not even aware of it because we adapt and we adapt, and then all of a sudden, disorder shows up and manifests, and so on.

So, there is a big shift that has happened in the last 60 years, and it was 60 years ago that we invented polymers. First thing we did is put them on the soles of our shoes, and then we carpeted all the homes, and so on.

So, the best place to ground… you have grass, of course; you have any kind of earth, because even in the desert when you stand on the sand, if you sweep it away just a quarter inch down or so, there’s moisture. So any kind of earth is ground, any kind of concrete that is laying directly on Earth is holding some moisture. It’d be better if it were damping down a little bit, but it is a good ground.

In your homes, that’s like patios, are good grounds. Again, just hose them off a little bit before you sit down and you get this better ground. Walking on a sidewalk is okay, because, again, there’s moisture in it. But beyond that you have to, I mean in a home, if you have salty old tile, you know clay earthen tile and it’s put down with concrete grout rather than the plastic grouts, they’re, pretty conductive. But everything else is like most tile are baked and their glass so they’re an insulator, not a conductor. And so beyond that you have to touch a cold water pipe, you have to touch something metal in your home and that’s connected to ground. It’s kind of absurd. To think that, here’s something that is one of the most natural things a person could do, stand barefoot on the earth. And something that we did from eons of time and here we are. In less than 50 years we’ve insulated ourselves from the planet to the point we can’t get back in touch with the planet. But we didn’t know, no one knew that this was happening. So what we did in our studies is we created ground planes and the ground planes were very simple. In some cases we would just use an electrode patch connect a groundwork to it and stick it into an electric outlet or stick it on the bottom of the feet. We did that in many tests. And we would do biofeedback measurements because that’s how we simulated or replicated standing barefoot on the earth.

Then we made the, the bed mats, which were one foot by two feet and then we made them bigger and bigger because the bigger they are, the better they work. And so we ended up with, a couple, three or four primary product. I call them products. I always try to make clear, I didn’t get into this business to sell products. The products are an accidental accidental business. Because as we did the studies, the subjects and the researchers, everybody wanted more. And so we ended up accidentally creating a business out of this. And it’s an essential business now that we know. So we in talking to one of the guys and gals at the NIH about what we were doing, they said, well, you know, before you go out there and tell everybody they have this problem, which we agree and we know you said you have to give them solutions.

You have to give them no cost or low cost solutions. And so the no cost solution is very, very simple. Take your shoes off, turn the TV off and go out doors where we all started. 70 years ago when I was a kid, you couldn’t get us in the house. But anyhow, that was the no cost and, and then there’s other ways that are no costs. But then the low cost is giving them something that everybody could afford. Aa one foot by two foot mat. Make it practically affordable for anybody. We tried to do that. And then we made the bed pads and the bed pads are really the best because you don’t have to do anything cause the hardest thing to do is to get people to comply with anything.

So here you put it on the bed under the sheet it’s on the mattress and then you just put your sheet over the top of it and all you do is go home and lay down, go to sleep. The next night, the same thing. You don’t have to do anything. So we knew that that was the best because now we can get them grounded for eight hours a day, on the average. Most of your healing, you recovery is during sleep, so it’s the most important time. The most important thing we felt that we could offer was that. The patches are for acute. If you have surgery, acute injuries, sprained ankle, you want to get rid of the pain, you won’t have any swelling, just put a patch on it. Even after having a tooth pulled or having surgery, you can put those patches on, there’s no hot burning pain. The hot burning pain can’t exist when you’re grounded cause your body’s flooded with free electron and it prevents that oxidative burning.

Stu

44:11 Fantastic. Fantastic. So with the grounding mats and the mats for the bed as well, people at this point in time, perhaps are not familiar with what they look like and have never heard of them before. And some people might think, boy, you know, I’m going to put a mat on my bed and plug it into the wall. Like, is that, is that safe for my kids? Is that safe if I’m pregnant? Is that, are those questions that perhaps you get asked?

Clint

44:44 Oh yeah, we’ve been doing this for 20 years and we’ve put together a little group called The Earthing Institute dot net and in there, any question that’s ever been asked is answered and they’d been boiled down to so that… But no, that’s the number one thing is, “Oh my goodness I’m going to plug myself in.” So you’re not really plugging yourself into the electrical. Basically every home and I’m not… but Australia everything’s pretty well grounded down there. So in your home, you have your electrical wires running, one’s hot and one’s neutral, and that’s how the electrical works. But the ground is a third and it’s not really connected to the electrical. There it’s a safety to absorb or to reduce charge. And so it’s really quite safe.

And we also put a resistor in the ground cords that that prevents the flow of electricity charge above… It’s got 100,000k resistance. So what that means is electricity can’t just light the light bulb. What this does is, it’s like if you take a hose and connect it to a water faucet outdoors, you turn it wide open and it’ll fill up a bucket in 30 seconds. So what we do is you turn the, the nozzle down until it’s barley dripping out. So basically the body’s going to equalize with the earth in 20, 30 nanoseconds rather than instantly, but that prevents any kind of an electrical event. And that’s what everybody in the ESD industry, electrostatic discharge industry, clean rooms, all of those things, they all use grounding wires with resistors in them to prevent them from being harmed should they accidentally touch a live wire.

Stu

46:37 Got it. And for everybody that wants to find out more about this there are a couple of places that I can go. Obviously we spoke a little bit earlier about the Earthing movie and we’re going to be sharing a link to that for a limited time screening for our audience as well, so they can really immerse themselves in that. And I think on your website you’ve got an abridged version of that as well haven’t you, a shorter version of that, 10 minutes or so.

Clint

47:05 Yes, the shorter version is a 15 minutes segment. That was done two, two years ago, and that was kind of the pilot for this. And then the one that was just released, it’s an hour and 18 minutes, but it’s well worth watching for anybody who has any health issues or any member of their family has health issues. They’ll find them very beneficial and very rewarding.

Stu

47:35 And also I want to mention that you’ve written a book as well called Earthing, the Most Important Health Discovery Ever, which is an excellent resource. So that would be a great place to point people if they wanted to find out more and just, love reading.

Clint

47:49 Yes. Yeah, I mean the Earthing book, we published it first edition in 2010 second edition in two 2012 it’s now published in probably 23, 25 languages. And around the world, all total there’s probably at least a million copies in circulation. And it’s got a life of its own. We’ve never advertised it, we’ve never done it, it’s just one of those things that people read and pass on and talk about.

Stu

48:17 Fantastic.

Well, what we’ll do, well we’ll leave all of the links and all of the directions in the show notes too, to be able to do this. But we’re slowly coming up on time. So I did a bit of a question that was more personal to you and I’m keen to hear how you personally manage your day with grounding in mind. So what does the grounding expert do to ensure that are on top of your health and wellness with grounding?

Clint

48:44 Okay, well first of all, I sleep grounded. I have a mat underneath my sheet and if I have any issue, you have to remember I am 75, so if I do have any issue, it shows up and most of all it would be, like cold, or anything shows up, first thing I will use those electrode patches. And I’ll patch my lung or whatever because I had pneumonia three times when I was younger, so I have a compromised lung. So I use that to maintain that. I have pretty much perfect health. One of the doc said, you know, for your age, you’re healthier than anyway anyone in the whole Valley. And he was talking about the Palm Springs Valley, which is about a hundred thousand people.

But anyhow, I have been grounded for 20 years, So then when I go sit at my desk, I have our grounding mat underneath my keyboard. I have a grounding mat adhered to the plastic chair mat that, so that when I take my shoes off, well I don’t have my shoes on most of the time. So I have my feet in that area so I’m always grounded there one way or the other. And then I do have a nice little backyard here and I spend a lot of time there. And the home I have has got some [inaudible 00:50:10] tile, so I’m pretty well grounded where ever I go. In order to support my grounding, I do take a handful of supplements that my cardiologist recommends. I have a couple of eggs and avocado in the morning at lunch, I’ll eat some Turkey or whatever. I’m pretty much Keto.

Stu

50:33 Oh, okay. Fascinating.

Clint

50:40 It makes me feel better, you know, as long as I stay away from the carbs. If I get the carbs then automatically you just get slowed down. It’s so frustrating to be able to get good food when you’re traveling and to know where it’s from and to know if it’s safe to eat. And then I have a little exercise routine, I try to get in like a mile to two miles a day. I don’t run I just walk, climb up a mountain out here. Probably about two or three mile walks sometimes going up the mountain and down. But I just take my time. I enjoy myself, but my body is taught, I’ve got energy muscle and my vagal tone is level and so I’m pretty happy.

Stu

51:30 Fantastic. Well, you’re an absolute inspiration and I know that our audience will be so voracious in wanting to find out more about this because it makes so much sense. There are so many studies now to… Clinical studies that present in such an easy to understand manner how this can be so very beneficial for our health. So very, very excited about sharing this with our audience. So the earthing movie, we’ll send out a link to that as well. But, crikey, you’re so busy. What’s next for Clint Ober? What have you got coming up?

Clint

52:07 Well, we just finish most of the studies. We have a couple left that are being published. The book is out. Been working on a couple of projects with Mariel Hemingway to do some magazines that are more focused on Earthing stories or human stories. The movie is out. It’s still going to film festivals. It’s won major film festivals as a best or audience choice award and all that kind of stuff. So basically what I’m trying to do is clear the decks so that I can focus on going out… Earthing is about education. It’s not about selling products because nobody knows what they are. You have to educate people and get them to go out, or spend time grounded. It’s just about education. So from here on it is what can I do to share what we’ve got.

Stu

53:04 Yeah. Fantastic. Well you’re clearly doing that. For our audience then that want to find out more about you, they want to find out more about your products, the science behind it. Where would be the best place for me to send them?

Clint

53:16 Well, The Earthing Institute is one. My Facebook, all I ever put on there is stories about earthing. That’s about what all there is, is the Institute. We’re just kind of, poking our head up right now. I’m trying to figure out which way to go.

Stu

53:37 Clint it has been an absolute honor and a pleasure to speak to you today, and I am literally buzzing with excitement to share this information, because it is literally life changing. And I watched the earthing moving, and of course, like everybody else. The very first thing that I did was I went outside and just thought about what I’d seen with my feet on the grass.

Clint

53:59 That was the motive. That was.

Stu

54:02 It worked. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you again, really appreciate the time and cannot wait to share this with our audience.

Clint

54:13 Okay, well, I’m really grateful for this opportunity to meet you and to be able to share this and anything I can do in the future just let me know.

Stu

54:22 Brilliant. Thank you so much.

 

Clint Ober

This podcast features Clint Ober who is CEO of EarthFX Inc., a research and development company located in Palm Springs. He first learned of grounding when marketing and installing Cable TV systems in Billings, Montana in the early 1960’s. A decade later, he formed Telecrafter Corporation and built it into... Read More
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