Marla Miller: 0:35

Welcome back to Open Minded Healing. Today we're going to be talking to my guest, Samuel Shepherd, who was diagnosed with a rare and untreatable bone marrow cancer back in 2003. When conventional medicine offered him no viable path to recovery, he turned to his own expertise in science and innovation to successfully treat the inflammation that was destroying his body. Today we're going to dive into what that particular treatment was and why it was successful. And we'll find out how Sam is doing today. Welcome, Sam.

Samuel Shepherd: 1:12

Thanks, Marla, for having me and this opportunity to at least get word out. This product has only traveled. We've done no sales or marketing. It's only traveled by word of mouth. When people get healed or see a positive result, they tell a hundred other people. And it went completely around the world.

Marla Miller: 1:30

That's amazing. Before we get into exactly what you created, I want to go back to 2003 when you were diagnosed and find out what symptoms you were experiencing and then how that diagnosis came to be, how they delivered that news to you.

Samuel Shepherd: 1:49

I went probably for a year, maybe two years is when it started. But I was noticing when I would lay down in bed, I was in AFib and uh I had heartbeat skipping, and then my heart would just pound. And it was difficult to go to sleep. It was that annoying. And so I went in and thought maybe there was something going on with my heart or my coronary health. And went in, they did sonograms in my heart, they did scans, they put me on a treadmill, bicycle, and I passed everything. And that went on about three days for those testings. And then on a Sunday night, I get a phone call from a nurse, and she tells me that the doctor wants to see me at 7:30 Monday morning. I can assure you, if you ever get that call, it's not good. Doctors don't like coming in at 7:30 in the morning. So I went in and I sit there in a chair, and he came in, just sat down on one of those little chairs, wheeled up, put his hands on my knees, and he said, I've got some really bad nose. And I said, What's that? He said, You've got a bone-blood cancer called polycythemia vera. And I had never heard of it before. And I said, Wow. I said, What about you know chemoprotocols or radiation? And he shook his head, no. He said, There wasn't anything. And he said, only about 15,000 people had been diagnosed with this type of cancer. And it starts in the bone marrow. And the stem cells that make your red blood cells or your white blood cells, you can go either direction, they go completely out of control. They don't die and they just keep producing red blood cells. Typically, we would produce three to five million red blood cells every day. In my case, I was doing 35 million to 60 million every day. And my blood was like ketchup. It was thick. And I was having problems with my blood pressure. My blood pressure typically was 280 over 160. And it had been that way for quite a while. And I ended up with an enlarged heart as a result because of the high blood pressure. I still have that enlarged heart. So when I asked him, I said, What are you telling me? He said, Sam, this is terminal. He said, uh, the only way we can keep you alive, we have a urea-based product that we can give you, but the best way to keep you alive is to phlebotomize you, is to bleed me. So I said, Well, how much time do I have? He said, In your current condition, you have 10 minutes to 10 years. 97% of the people will perish within 10 years. In your case, your blood is so thick that you could throw a blood clot to your brain, your heart, or your lung as we're sitting here, and it would take me 10 minutes to declare you did.

Marla Miller: 4:46

My gosh.

Samuel Shepherd: 4:47

So off to the hospital, I went. That was my first phlebotomy. And it's the old analogy: the solution to pollution is dilution. So I would go in, they'd take my blood out, and they'd have saline on the other side, and I would donate a lot of blood. And that would bring my iron content down and bring my hemoglobin levels down. And I did that for four years. And at the end of that four-year period, I was under a lot of stress. I knew I couldn't get my blood pressure under control. Meds didn't work because it was a viscosity-related blood pressure. My blood was just too thick. And one very dark morning, I got up and set at the table. And at that point, I just pretty much gave up. I was no longer in control. And I was in control of, I thought, in control of my life all the way up to that point. I'd started several companies, was independently wealthy. I had a huge portfolio of technologies to take to market. I had several contracts with the Department of Defense. I didn't want anybody to know I was dying. This is how narcissistic it got. Because nobody wanted to do business with a dead man. So I didn't tell anybody that I was dying. I didn't even tell my family that I was dying. But I reached a point where the blood pressure got so high, I thought my eyes were going to come out of my head. I could feel that much pressure. And um, I knew I was going to throw a plot to my brain or to my heart or to my lung, and I was going to become disabled. All those thoughts go through your mind. And the moment I just said, God, I quit. I'm done. If this is my purpose, then so be it. And I was probably just going to end it. And it came to me, go find the animals that don't get cancer. There had to be some animals. And so did this come to you as you were sitting at the table? Yeah, almost like an epiphany. It just says, okay, I'm not the only one with cancer, but there's got to be some animals on this planet that don't get cancer. It's not ubiquitous throughout all of nature. It's not even ubiquitous within human beings. So it's got to be something that doesn't get cancer. So I had access to a to a database called ProQuest. It was a government database, and you could do a lot of research on that. So I queried it and I asked it to uh give me all the known animals that there's no recorded cases of cancer. And it came back with five: salmon, pink flamingos, sharks, elephants, and naked mole rats. So I went to Scripps Oceanographic. They had done a lot of research on tissue analysis. And one of the gentlemen that was on one of the teams with me, he was able to do a mass spec and identify all of the molecules in those species. But we put a screening algorithm in. And that screening algorithm was we didn't want any molecules, proteins, enzymes, carbohydrates, lipids that are ubiquitous to that organism. So we wanted only the molecules that the organism doesn't produce and yet is found in all five of those species. And about four months later, they come back and said, We found one. And I said, Really? And he said, Yep. He said, we found this molecule called astaxanthin. It's in all five of those species. Shouldn't be in any of them. It has no purpose that we can figure out in any, but it was found in all five of those animals. Since then, we know shrimp and lobsters also don't get cancer. So I found out where the astaxanthin comes from. It comes from an algae species called Hematococcus pluvialis. Hope everybody's taking good notes because there will be a test shortly. So I went to the University of Texas and I asked them for an algae species. They have a whole library there of all the algae species of the world. And they gave it to me. I came home and I got one of those in-text blow-up hot tubs. I put it in my backyard, I put nutrients in it, began growing that algae, and I began eating that algae. And it was 3.8% astaxanthin. And um started out with a dose of about four milligrams per day.

Marla Miller: 9:32

So can you go back a little bit? I I think I missed something, but when you brought that to your house and you started growing the algae, what did you put in the water?

Samuel Shepherd: 9:43

Yeah, it's actually a green algae. It's photosynthetic. So when we begin growing it in the Salton Sea area, this algae also grows. Well, it turns really red, almost to the point of burgundy red, when its pond begins to dry up and the salinity begins to increase. So that's how the algae, the green algae, could recognize that in fact its pond was drying out and it had to produce this antioxidant to protect itself from the UV radiation from the sun. So if its pond dried out, it fell into the sandy bottom. And it would sit there in this insisted form until it rained, maybe a hundred years later, and it would repropagate again. And so it was a defense mechanism that protected it from the inflammatory conditions of ultraviolet radiation. And so we now know that that's why it produced it. So when I put it in my pool, I could force it to go from the green to produce the algae simply by adding salt.

Marla Miller: 10:51

Oh, so it's like drying it out. So then it creates a defense mechanism, which is this astazanthin. Right.

Samuel Shepherd: 10:58

It thought that since the salt content increased in that tub or in that reactor, that its pond was drying out, and it within 48 hours, it converted from green to red. That's how quickly it could adapt.

Marla Miller: 11:13

So, how did these animals that you came up with, like the elephant and the naked mole rat, um actually get it? Yeah, how did they get it?

Samuel Shepherd: 11:25

It took me probably a year of looking at their behavior. And the way the elephant gets it is the elephant goes up to a water pond and all the animals are around it. So they urinate, defecate all around the pond. The nutrients from that flow into the water. So this water is loaded with these nutrients. Well, the thing that eats those nutrients is this algae. So these ponds in Africa that the elephant sucks up the water is loaded with this Astaxanth and it digests it, sucks it right into its stomach, and in huge amounts. It's drinking, you know, hundreds of gallons of water a day out of these ponds, and it's saturated with this red algae. The flamingos get it when it sifts the algae. You see its little beak going through the soil, but that's what gives it its pink color. It gets that from the Astaxanthan or the xanophyll. Sharks get it by eating fish, it gets bioaccumulated. So protozoa eat the algae, then rotifers eat the protozoa, then small fish eat the rotifers, then herring eat the small fish, salmon eat the herring, it bioaccumulates until the shark eats the salmon. But it's also what makes salmon pink. Natural salmon are all pink because they bioaccumulate this astanthin. Farm raised salmon are not, they are as white as a piece of paper. So they feed the farm raised salmon astaxanthin to pinken up their tissue. So that's sharks, elephants, flamingos, the naked mole rat. The naked mole rat. There's a yeast that grows in the roots of plants, and it also produces astaxanthin. Well, the mole rat eats those roots, and it eats that fungus that's on there, and that fungus is loaded with Astaxanthan. That's one way of actually growing and commercially capturing Astaxanthan, is through that fungus.

Marla Miller: 13:31

That's incredible. Through one insight from, I would say the divine, a divine insight, you were able to come to all these conclusions. That's incredible. Well, maybe now would be a good time to share with people a little bit more about your background so they understand how you had all this ability to do all the science behind this.

Samuel Shepherd: 13:53

Yeah, I graduated with an undergraduate in chemistry from Ohio University and stayed there and got a BS in chemical engineering from Ohio University. And then went to graduate school at Murray State University in Kentucky and got a master's in biochemical and environmental engineering there. Right before COVID, I had time on my hands. I went back and got a doctorate in divinity, strictly for philosophical reasons, because I was a trained scientist. I was trained in evolution, I was trained in the rigors of the scientific community. And yet I still had this fundamental issue of philosophically, why was I put in this position? There was some reason why I was pinched. Otherwise, there'd be no purpose to my life. And then when I began to look at it, in hindsight, everything that I learned in all the projects I worked on all coalesced into that single pinch point. I couldn't go forward anymore. I could either go under the wall or I could figure out a way to climb over the wall, but I couldn't go forward anymore. And at that point, God and I got really close because I gave up. I realized that I could no longer do this. And I just sort of surrendered. I just said, if this is it, if this is all there is, then I'm out. I'm gone. And there are stages to dying. And surrender, I think, is one of them, or acceptance is one of them. And then that question came to me. You're not going to give up yet. Something's still out there that you don't know. And where it came from was a question in my mind.

Marla Miller: 15:44

I do believe that there are answers for everything on this earth. Whether someone knows it in that moment or not is a different story. But I do think people are maybe open to it. And like you said, they surrender the control. Because when you think you're in control, you're looking at very specific outcomes. And yeah, yeah. And there's so much more available to us if we just release that control and understand that there is that greater power out there. And that we have a lot of power within ourselves. That's amazing that your condition really lent itself to your background, like the answer to the condition.

Samuel Shepherd: 16:27

Yeah, I look back for 50 years, I was putting tools in the toolbox and didn't realize it. Because every project was so different. Some of them we were going to Mars. Some of them I was developing ballistic shields for bullets. None of it made sense. They were opportunistic, single-placed projects. But I got to tell you, in this one, when I reached this point in my life, I called every single thing I learned and every one of those projects from chemistry, physics, kinetics, thermodynamics, calculus. Who would have thought you could ever use calculus? And I did. Every single tool out there I relied on in being able to not only ask the right questions for the research, but be able to read and understand the research because it's very complicated. And fortunately, when I lived in Houston, I decided to at night, I had spare time, taught a biochemistry course at Lone Star College in Houston, Texas. And I didn't have a reason to do that. I don't know, I got maybe $200 a month. It was just something that allowed me to stay current. And I always believed if you want to learn, teach. That's the real time when your learning picks up. So for me to stay current and some of the things, I just will go teach night classes. And then all of a sudden I get sick. And now I'm living what's in that textbook. I can explain exactly why I'm sick from what's in that textbook, not clinical data. This is textbook, absolute facts. I don't need clinical data to do this. Every doctor is taught this. I taught pre-med doctors. So every doctor is taught what? What particular principle? They have to take a biochemistry course, and it's difficult. It's not an easy course, but that's how pathways, for example, how do you process glucose to be able to get enough energy for us to have this conversation to get that electrical energy? Well, there's like 27 chemical processes, enzymatic processes that have to happen. If any one of those is interrupted, you don't speed. You die. So every one of those has to happen perfectly, each and every time. It's not as simple as eating sugar and being able to function with your brain. There's 27 different chemical reactions that have to happen before the effect of eating sugar is, you know, you get a response from that. So it's very difficult to talk to lay people who have not had that kind of background. And yet I'm teaching it and learning it probably five to seven years before I ever got sick. You start to wonder what was all of this preparation for? Looking back, and then it got to the point when I realized that the astaxanthin that I had grown in that pool, I daffted out. It's called dissolved air flotation. And I collected it, dehydrated it, and I knew it was 3.8% Astaxanthin. So now I could dose myself by eating so many grams of the biomass. And I started out at four milligrams per day. And after about four months, my phlebotomies, instead of being once a month, was now once every two months. And statistically, it wasn't all that significant. But my fear was I'm eating a red algae and it's going to kill my liver or my kidneys. I'm going to have some sort of organ failure because I always believed that things that are red are red for a purpose. They're probably toxic. So I got my blood test back. I was probably pre-diabetic. My A1C was 6.2, and all of a sudden my A1C dropped down to 5.4. And that was pretty positive. And my hemoglobin, the rate wasn't climbing out as fast. And so I thought, okay, I'm all right from a health point of view. Let's just triple the dose. So I bumped it to 12 milligrams per day. And my phlebotomies got pushed out to once every four months. That was statistically significant. I had to control once a month. I was phlebotomized. Four milligrams once every two months, 12 milligrams once every four months. Now I had three data points that I could use to calculus, but I could calculate how many grams of astaxanthin do I have to take so that I'm never phlebotomized for the next 50 years of my life. And the calculation came out to be 96 milligrams per day. So I started taking 100. And that was a lot of biomass to eat. But my phlebotomies ended, and my blood became normal, normalized. And I thought, wow, this is like really good. So then I thought, as a chemical engineer, you always try to concentrate things. I wanted to use the pure Astaxanthin. So we extracted the Astaxanthin, put it in olive oil, and I began taking that for a while. Well, taking the raw material, the concentrated form, my cancer came back. And I watched my hemoglobin start to climb again. And I'm taking which I thought was a pure form of the Astaxanth, not eating the biomass, but the pure form of it. And you can buy that on Amazon. Well, I kept increasing the dose till I got up over 800 milligrams per day before I could turn it around. And it eventually turned around, and that's called a concentration gradient. I increased it to the point that I, by brute force, forced it into my blood system.

Marla Miller: 22:31

I just need clarification on that. So initially, the more you were taking, the less you needed to go in for them to release the blood.

Samuel Shepherd: 22:42

I was eating the astaxanthin that was in the biomass at the equivalent of 100 milligrams per day. When I extracted the astaxanthin from the biomass, mixed it with olive oil and equivalence, olive oil and 100 milligrams of astaxanthin and 100 milligrams in the biomass. Those were my two. Yeah, it didn't work. When I pulled that astaxanthin out of that biomass, it became ineffective. The reason is I found out about a year later, when I looked at the astaxanthin in the biomass, it had a glucose sugar attached to it. So there was a sugar molecule attached to the astaxanthin. There's also a lipid that can attach to the astaxanthin, also, but that glucose, it's called a glucosidic. So in that form, it's glucosytic astaxanthin. Well, glucosidic astaxanthin is readily absorbed in your small bowel and gets into your bloodstream very, very quickly and easily. When we cracked it with what's called CO2 supercritical extraction to purify the astaxanthin out of the biomass, I cracked that sugar off and I got the pure astaxanthin mole. But it wasn't easily absorbed.

Marla Miller: 24:09

So you had to learn how to extract it. The olive oil was still good, but you had to also attach the glucose molecule or what did you call it?

Samuel Shepherd: 24:20

Glucosidic. So then what I did is I went back in from working with electromagnetic pulse systems and electrochemistry. I knew how wave functions could vibrate molecules at certain frequencies to make chemical reactions happen. And so I went back in and I reattached the glucose to the Astaxanthan. And that's called Velasta. Velasta is the name of the company, and Velasta is also the name of the product. So I actually made it back into its natural form. I filed a patent on the process of attaching that glucose to the astaxanthin. And the patent office approved the patent. It's the only natural supplement that has ever been allowed to be patented. And that was a major breakthrough. The title of the patent has sent ripples through the entire industry because the title of the patent is a method for the process of using astaxanthin to treat inflammatory disease, particularly to treat cancer. Well, treat is one of those words that the FDA does not like for you to use, but the patent office approved it. So now I got two government agencies in conflict, but I'm obligated on the packaging, on the patent, to say this product can be used to treat inflammatory disease. And then the FDA requires us to put a label on it that says this product cannot be used to treat, diagnose, or cure any disease. So I got a little bit of a labeling conflict. So now I've got the glucocytic astaxanthin. And as soon as I began taking the glucocytic astaxanthin, my cancer went away. So I knew that it was the glucocytic form of the astaxanthin was the key. All of this research was going on over an eight-year period. So when I began to look at cancer, uh I focused a lot on the Warburg effect. And Warburg was a doctor who got his Nobel Peace Prize on identifying that cancer cells live in an acid environment. They don't like to be in an alkaline environment. So when I began to look at cancer cells, what I found was because cancer cells have such a metabolic requirement for sugar, they use 16 times more sugar than a monal cell to get the same amount of energy to stay alive. So the OHs on the sugar molecule crack off and they become what's called free radicals. OH, oxygen hydrogen, with a zero charge. Now what that means is that there's an unpaired electron in the outermost orbital of the OH free radical and makes it highly reactive. So anything that that OH zero charge bumps into, it swipes an electron and it changes the electronic structure of the molecule that it stole the electron from. The cancer cell produces the OH zero charge. Now the OH zero charge has a pH of 5.2 to 6.8. It's acid. And it pushes those OH zero charges out through the cell membrane and it kills adjacent cells and makes room for the cancer cell to grow because our cells don't live in an acid environment very long. So the scale for acidity is what? Seven's neutral. Anything below seven is acidic. Anything above seven is alkaline, and our blood pH is 7.35. You cannot change that. You can't drink baking soda and hope to change the alkalinity of your cells because you can't get past the blood's pH of 7.35. So around that cancer cell, it has an acidic, it has this OH zero charge. Well, when the cancer sees that glucosidic astaxanthin, the cancer will absorb that glucose. It's called a Trojan horse, but it'll pull that glucose inside the cancer cell, and enzymes will crack that sugar off and use it for energy. Now the astaxanthin molecule is inside the cancer cell. So now that OH0 charge becomes an OH minus one. Now that's a hydroxyl ion that carries a pH of 12. And inside the cancer cell, it's like putting line on the inside of a cancer cell. There's a chemical process called saponification. If you have an OH minus one, like lye, and it hits the fatty acids of the cancer cell membrane, it will burst it apart. It forms soap, becomes water soluble. And now all the guts of the cancer cell flood into the system and the cancer cell dies. Now you're cancer free.

Marla Miller: 30:13

That's amazing, the science behind it all. So you created this at home. You did your own experiment, and then you realized all right, I can't just put it in oil. I need to also make it glucosidic. And so you found a way to do that. And now you have a potent and patented formula. Of astaxanthin that is unlike any other supplements out there that have astaxanthin in them, right? Correct. So I know there's fish oils out there with astaxanthin in them and other supplements, but this is unique and different.

Samuel Shepherd: 30:51

Yeah, you'd have to take eight times the dose to get the same effect as what we get with our product. Eight times. So when you look at that, now the cost is prohibitive. Well, you got to pay eight times more to get the same effect. Pure astaxanthin doesn't work. And you're just going to waste it out. It's just going to turn your stool red and you're just going to waste it out. I began to give it to family and friends who had stage four cancers. These were people home with hospice, two to four, three to six months to live. And they volunteered, they wanted to take it. And anywhere from 30 to 60 days, they reversed their cancer. Hospice went home. And as far as I know, they're still alive. That was remarkable to me. And they also, these people were saying, Well, my arthritis pain went away. We had one lady in Pennsylvania, she was in her early 80s, and we gave it to her for arthritis. She had arthritis really bad. And we gave it to her within seven days, her arthritis went away. And she called my wife and I on the phone. And she said, This is remarkable. She said, I'm a patient of Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania. And she said, they're at a loss. And she said, but there's something I didn't tell you. And I said, What's that? She said, I have severe Parkinson's. She said, I can't even hold food on a floor. Her tremors were so severe. She would throw food in a restaurant into the next booth. And she was too embarrassed to go out and eat. She said, Since I've started taking this, I no longer have those tremors. And I thought, how in the world did it do that? She said, Hershey Medical doesn't have an explanation. They've taken me off of Parkinson's medications, and they're at a loss. She said, I told them that I was taking this Velaster and they poo-pooed it. They said, no, no, no, that's not what did this. It's like a miraculous remission. So I went back in to look at the chemistry and what's called the Gibbs-free energy calculations. And what I found was we got it completely wrong about Parkinson's. For the longest time, we thought Parkinson's was caused by the lack of dopamine being produced in the substantia negra part of the brain. Well, it turns out that's not true. When we began to look at it, we found that there was still a lot of dopamine being produced by Parkinson's patients. But there was an increasing amount of a chemical called hydroxy dopamine. Well, hydroxy dopamine is what we give to animals to give them Parkinson's so that they can test Parkinson's medications all. Oh. For me to find it in the brain, in Parkinson's patients, was a game changer because now I knew the chemical reaction. The chemical reaction is dopamine plus the hydroxyl-free radical yields hydroxydopamine. You got two reactants and a product. Well, current science focuses on the dopamine part of the reactant. So they give you dopamine, levadopa, carbidopa, to increase the concentration of the dopamine on the left side of the equation. Pretty soon, because you're not dealing with your stress level, the hydroxyl-free radicals come up and neutralize the dopamine that they're giving. So you've got to keep increasing the dose, the dopamine level. Well, your stress level keeps matching. Now you're producing so much hydroxydopamine, it's terminal. Parkinson's is going to kill you. Now, what we focused on was we said, okay, let the brain produce the dopamine. We'll just remove the hydroxyl-free radical. And that reaction stops. And people don't have Parkinson's anymore. The same thing with testosterone, the same thing with estrogen. When women get inflammatory breast cancer, what do they tell them? We're going to put you on estrogen-blocking chemicals. We're going to take the estrogen out because that's feeding the cancer. That's not true. If that was true, then all those young girls would be having cancer when their estrogen levels are at maximum. So when I go back in to look at the chemistry, it's estrogen plus the hydroxyl-free radical yields hydroxyestradiol. Hydroxyestradiol is a known carcinogen. So what do they do? They say, well, to stop the hydroxyestradiol, we're going to remove your estrogen. They do the same thing with men with chemical castration. They remove the testosterone. The hydroxyl remains there. I don't care how they do that, they can never get a woman's estrogen level to zero. You're producing it all the time in every cell in your body. That's the XX chromosome. You can never drive it to zero. What we said was the hydroxyestradiol is the problem. We have two options. I can either take out estrogen or leave estrogen the same and take out the hydroxyl-free radical. Well, current medical doesn't know how to take out the hydroxyl-free radical, but astaxanthin does. And that's what has them now on their ear. And they're having a hard time saying the only way they could take the hydroxyl out was with uh chronic steroid prescriptions. And nobody wants to do that because of the side effects of steroids and having it chronically. So we just remove the hydroxyl-free radical and their inflammatory breast cancers go away.

Marla Miller: 36:51

Wow. That's a great example, especially the Parkinson's. Well, what are some other types of things you've seen it be successful with? Like what about the autoimmune, the Crohn's, the different things like that?

Samuel Shepherd: 37:06

Yeah. From disease, Hashimoto's, the thyroid are all inflammatory. So all of that can be taken care of with this. The real key to this, and that the blood test that you want to run is called an HSCRP. High sensitivity C reactive protein. That is a direct correlation to your inflammatory disease state. The higher that number is, the more danger you're in in getting one of these diseases. And everybody sort of presents different diseases, but it's the same cause. So the best analogy I have is think of a big oak tree. You have the root structure down in the ground, and all those roots are representative as diet, smoking, worry, raising children, stress, everyday stress, cortisol, epinephrine releases, fight or flight reflex, pollution, alcohol use, fructose ingestion. Fructose is a poison, by the way, and that's why I don't eat fruit. But that's another topic. All of those things in the roots of us living our daily lives create these free radicals. The H2O2, which is the peroxol, reacts with the iron and what's called a fentan reaction and generates these highly reactive, damaging free radicals. So all of those roots funnel up through the trunk. And that trunk is what we call ROS, reactive oxygen species. And there's four of them. Those four, if you're chronically running a high-level concentration of those four free radicals, you will get a disease. And that's what the branches represent. Type 2 diabetes, cancer over here, lupus, irritable bowel, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS. But the doctors will only treat the tips of the branches. Once you present with a disease, then they'll treat it. They have no interest in the trunk of that tree, which is what's causing it. So what Valasta does, Valasta cuts the tree at the trunk. So none of those diseases can present. And that's what we're finding. We now know what causes disease. 92% of all death comes from those four free radicals. And Astaxantha neutralizes all four.

Marla Miller: 39:37

Now, what about, as if that's not incredible enough, what are some other types of things that you consider inflammatory diseases? What types of back issues would be inflammatory and which aren't?

Samuel Shepherd: 39:52

Anytime you generate pain, your body's response is it recognizes pain as an inflammation. Something is damaged. So let's take pneumonia, for example, or COVID. People who were on Velasta didn't die from COVID. The COVID virus didn't kill anyone. It was the inflammatory response to the COVID virus that killed everybody. So if you got COVID in your lungs, your body recognizes it because it's tearing up and destroying some cells and it creates a debris field. That creates a response, a neutrophile, basophile, or macrophage T cell attack to try to figure out what's going on. Is the bacteria I got to kill? Something I got to clean up. Well, the body responds by pumping water in. The solution to pollution is dilution. So the body pumps water in to try to dilute all of this debris field away to your kidneys or to your liver for processing. Well, if the rate of processing is less than the rate of generation, you're going to fill up with fluid and you're going to drown in your own mucus. And that's what happens to people. When we get a sunburn on our skin, the radiation causes inflammation. It destroys some cells from the radiation and it turns red. Well, what does your body do but push fluid in and create a blister, a water blister, to try to dilute all of that damaged tissue out to your kidneys and get rid of it? Because if it stays in there, it's going to keep magnifying the inflammatory response. It is remarkable what's going on in our bodies. It's what got me away from evolution and more into a creationist type of a design, because all these things had to be created instantaneously. Otherwise, the species would never survive. And that's what sort of swung me over when I began looking at these defense mechanisms. And it's violent. If you ever see a T cell attack and kill a cancer cell, uh, once it recognizes it as a foreign entity, in less than four seconds, it kills it and it's dead.

Marla Miller: 42:07

So, how do you make sure you don't get too much? Or it's so you kind of explained how you make sure your body absorbs it, making it glucidic. But how do you make sure you don't get too much?

Samuel Shepherd: 42:21

Uh, very good question. We've been as high as 3,000 milligrams per day on a lady who had stage four, home with hospice, inflammatory breast cancer. She had tumors in her brain and in her colon. And we didn't know what dose to give her. So I just said for 60 days, I'll do 3,000 milligrams a day. And she volunteered, but there was no side effects. And within 45 days, the tumors in the brain went away, the tumors in her colon went away, and her cancer went away. They couldn't find it on the next PET scan, which was 90 days after. Hospice went home, she lived a normal life, and she's okay. So, can you overdo it? You can't overdose because you can only absorb so many molecules of the astaxanthin. And the nice thing about this Velasta is when it's metabolized, it doesn't itself become a free radical, unlike vitamin C, for example. High dose vitamin C can give you liver inflammation. And it's because the vitamin C is metabolized, and in the metabolic process, it generates these hydroxyl-free radicals. So you can actually get non-alcoholic fatty liver disease from high dose vitamin C, high dose vitamin E. Vitamin D to some extent, but we all need some vitamin D. We're usually short that.

Marla Miller: 43:51

So you have certain suggestions or guidelines of what would be good based on someone's weight or health issue, right? Correct. But people don't have to worry about well, are there any contraindications? What about the blood thinning aspect?

Samuel Shepherd: 44:09

Yeah, yeah, that one has come up. And people who are on warfarin or heparin, like stroke, they try to keep the blood as thin as possible. Well, one of the things that we got very early on was people that were taking Velaster, and on that, their sedates, their platelet, their blood approached very, very low clotting factors. Well, I kept telling them, then cut the warfarin out. They said, Oh, no, I can't do that. The doctor won't allow me to do that. I said, Do you understand the Velasta is making your blood normal? You don't give warfarin or heparin to people with normal blood flow. And then all of a sudden it clicks with them and they go, Oh. And I said, You're no longer diseased. Why would you be taking warfarin if you don't have that electronic problem at your plate level? And then it begins to make sense. So people looked at Velast as being a contraindication and making the blood too thin, and they classified it as a blood thinner. No, it's not a blood thinner. It just allows you to get rid of your blood thinners because you're now becoming more. No other medications have we found any contraindications. The only complaints that we've gotten is their stool is red, which sometimes freaks people out. So if you're taking velastin, your body doesn't need it, it just wastes it out through the colon.

Marla Miller: 45:37

Is that a way for you to tell when you've hit the limit? Is if you see a red stool. If you don't see it, it means your body's still absorbing it because it's using it.

Samuel Shepherd: 45:48

That's right. So we sort of use that as an indicator. If it's real red, cut back on the dose. And the only other complaint I think we get is nobody likes paying the $200 a month. But with Velasca, we make it a point that economics cannot be a reason why not to do this. So we'd probably give away 30% of our product because cancer people are at an economic disadvantage. They've already spent their money trying to save their lives. So we want to recognize that. And if it's too much of an economic burden, this is too important from its health benefit. I had a gentleman, he's on our website, his name's Greg Genovese, and he called me and he said he heard through a mutual friend that I had this cancer medicine. And I said, Well, what's going on? He said, I've got stage four melanoma. He said, I'm home with hospice, the doctors can't do anything. He said, I might as well try it. I said, Well, there's no downside. And he said, Well, there is. You have to pay for it. I said, That $200 isn't worth your life. And he said, Well, I said, I tell you what, I said, I don't want you to pay for it. Your money's no good here after that comment. I said, I'll just send it to you. He said, No, no, no. He said, I'm not a cheapskate. And I said, No. He said, I'll send you a check. I said, then I'll be your worst nightmare because I won't cash that check. And you'll never balance your checkbook ever again. So he sent me his address. I sent it to him. And in 30 days, his cancer went away. And he does two testimonials on our website. And his skepticism, he sort of goes into it a little bit, but I was skeptical. You know, as a scientist, I thought it can't be this easy. We've spent the last 200 years in pharmacological science and applications and trying to find a cure for cancer. We've spent our treasury trying to figure out how to stop this disease. And all of a sudden, we find it in the lowliest creature of God's creation, a single-celled, slimy, green, polluted lake organism. And it made me pause, and I have to sort of you know bow down and look out the corner of my eye, like, how great art thou? Man completely failed, and it's still failing. We're still giving people chemo. 100 years from now, we'll look back and go, What in the world were we doing? Yeah. This is not a game. I'd listen to probably anywhere from 10 to 20 people dying every day. And grown men that say, you know, I want to see my daughter graduate high school. And they've told me I've only got a couple months left. And death is real. These people are dying. And why this isn't accepted, I have several doctors now taking it. I have several doctors prescribing it now. So we've come a long way. When it first started out, I was a snake oil salesman. But now there's NIH research papers you can see on the website where they thought that I truly was a snake oil salesman. But they allocated money, I think, to prove me wrong. And all these research papers have proved that my science was right. They're proving me right. So if you go on your search engine and just search NIH, National Institute of Health, and Astaxanthan, and whatever disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, irritable bowel, arthritis, there's thousands of peer-reviewed articles now showing that it works. That's incredible. That's I think that's why the patent office gave you the patent.

Marla Miller: 49:56

Well, that's incredible. And that people can look that up and see for themselves.

Samuel Shepherd: 50:01

And then you don't take my word for it.

Marla Miller: 50:03

Yeah. And also the fact that you can try this, and like you said, you'll notice certain symptoms disappear rather quickly. It's not like wait a year and see if it works. What do you have to lose? And it's so quick for people to use money as an excuse not to do something. But like you said, aren't you worth it? Isn't your health worth it if it's something that really can work for you? Well, I want to know back when you were diagnosed and then you were trying to find these answers to save your own life. What was the biggest obstacle you faced, would you say?

Samuel Shepherd: 50:44

This is going to sound sort of narcissistic, I guess. I was in business and working on very high-level contracts. I didn't want anybody to know that I was dying. I didn't even tell my family. And so I was in this alone because nobody wants to do business with a dead man or a dying man. I never partnered with anybody. Only my doctor knew that I was in trouble. It was the loneliest period of my life.

Marla Miller: 51:17

And were you married at the time?

Samuel Shepherd: 51:19

I was, was at that time.

Marla Miller: 51:22

And she didn't know?

Samuel Shepherd: 51:23

No. And it resulted in a divorce. We ended up getting divorced. And I thought that was okay because I'm going to lose anyways. And I gave her everything. I cashed out. And her attorney even said she'd never seen a divorce like that. And her attorney said, Is he going to commit suicide? What's going on? I got asked that question by my own attorney, and I wouldn't answer. So they probably thought that I was going to do something sinister.

Marla Miller: 51:52

But so did you ever have a conversation after the fact and after you healed about what you had been holding back?

Samuel Shepherd: 52:01

About eight years later, I survived and she sort of moved on. And I moved on. And so when you look at life-changing events, I truly cashed out. I didn't think I would make it.

Marla Miller: 52:19

So what was the greatest lesson you learned?

Samuel Shepherd: 52:24

I wrote a book. For 40 years, I kept a journal. And I wrote a book. It's on Amazon. It's called Live Your Life Fearlessly: The Journey of a Stoic Christian. But I give some stories in there. I don't talk about the Velastas story in that book. The publisher wanted me to interject certain things in my life that I had experienced that would cause me to lose all fear. Because I don't have any fear anymore. I don't fear anything. I don't fear being shot. I don't fear losing my children. Fear is not a part of my life anymore. I died in 2003. I was given a whole new life. And the guardrails came off. I've done more inventions since I was given a death sentence than I did in my entire life. Projects I'm working on right now are uh the elimination of lithium iron phosphate batteries by the development of supercapacitors. And I've got a patent filed for that. It's going to change the entire lithium market, the geopolitical market. Lithium iron phosphate batteries want to go away. They're obsolete. And this technology is very, very simple. And it takes about 90% of the weight and the hazard away from lithium iron phosphate batteries. And we still maintain the same energy density. So there's projects out there that I would never have gone down this path if my life was in one direction to that point. And now from that point on, it completely changed.

Marla Miller: 53:58

So you have no fear of any of those things because you already faced the greatest fear, which was dying.

Samuel Shepherd: 54:05

I guess I all fear left me. When I had that epiphany that God was in control and I am not, it was freeing. It was, man, I can do all of this stuff. Where's all of this wisdom coming from? Where is all this knowledge coming from? These aren't things I knew. And I don't have the answer, other than there's something else divine going on. Why didn't somebody else come up with this before me? There's people as trained as I am with these human skills, more so. They didn't come up with it. And why is it happening now? What's going on at this point in history that all of this knowledge is being unveiled? I I don't have the answers for that. I don't know why. If it wasn't me, it was going to be somebody else. That's the best way I can look at it. There's nothing special about me. I died, other than I didn't take my last breath. But mentally and philosophically, my life ended in 2003.

Marla Miller: 55:17

That's incredible. What was the greatest kindness shown to you during your healing journey?

Samuel Shepherd: 55:26

People and friends began to accept it where I was concerned that it was going to be very, very difficult to get this message out. And Dr. Fred Beeshe in New York is a very kind man. He's the founder of the raw vegan diet for 60 years. He's eaten nothing but raw vegetables and raw fruits. The number of people who have taken a positive approach in promoting this, because this is not easy to promote. And there's enough skeptics out there. And the people who went sort of before us, all those people with cancer, they didn't die in vain. Why did so many people have to die of cancer to get to this point of understanding? Maybe someday we'll have the answer. My own family sort of rejected me. Now my mother did take it. She was a diabetic since she was 48 and at uh 93 she passed, but she was a diabetic until she was at 90. And I began giving her Velasta. And she was taking 60 units of insulin a day, and we got her down to four. And she was still having low blood sugars through the night. And I told her, I said, you got to get off the four. And at 90 years old, she says, I'm not shutting my insulin off. I said, Mom, you don't need it anymore. You're no longer diabetic. She said, Well, she said, I'm going to keep it here. And if I got off of it, my doctor wouldn't prescribe it anymore. And I said, Why are you taking it? She said, I want to get up every morning and have two or three pastries. And I just shoot myself up with the insulin and it takes care of my sugar load. I'm going, it's like being a drug addict, you know. But she's 90. So who am I to? I said, okay. I actually went up there and stayed with her the last year of her life. And she was no longer diabetic. She died in a fall, and uh, she didn't make it, but she didn't have diabetes, didn't have cancer, 93 years old. And I'm 73, and I have nothing. I have no arthritis. I wish it would make my hair grow, but things happen.

Marla Miller: 57:45

Well, definitely you have found your purpose, and I'm sure this is going to have a massive impact on the health of people around the world. So, where can people find you?

Samuel Shepherd: 57:58

Through Velasta.net. And we're now shipping to 27 countries. So it has gone completely around the world by word of mouth. We've not done any programmed sales and marketing effort. People get their cancer cured, they tell 100 people.

Marla Miller: 58:18

Yeah.

Samuel Shepherd: 58:19

Those 100 people know somebody with cancer, they tell 100. And in three years, went completely around the world. This is way beyond anything that I was capable of doing. I was a technical guy.

Marla Miller: 58:32

Well, you were certainly being guided, and I'm glad you got that little message that told you to look at the animals who didn't have cancer. That's incredible. Well, I do want to ask one quick thing, backtracking about the fruit. Do you want to touch on that? Just why would fruit be bad? Because I always look at things that are sort of natural or God-made that have benefits in them. So why would the fruit be different?

Samuel Shepherd: 59:01

Fruit is a sugar, it's where we get our sweetness from. But it can't be used by a single cell in your body. Glucose, which is a sugar, is used by every cell in your body. But fructose is not. So fructose is a poison. High fructose corn syrup was introduced in 1966. The reason is pretty interesting. Up until 1966, cancer was only one death out of 50. And everybody smoked. After 1966, and in the early 70s, cancer became one in three deaths was cancer related. So something happened in 1966. So when I went back and began to look epidemiologically, what happened? Well, Lyndon Johnson needed money to fight the Vietnam War. So he went to the USDA and he says, I'm cutting off your corn subsidy because Congress won't approve money for me to fight unless there's a declaration of war. They won't give me money to fight the war. So he told USDA he was going to cut the corn subsidy. USDA countered and said, You can't do that. You'll bankrupt all these farmers. But USDA countered and said, if you allow us to introduce high fructose corn syrup into our food supply, that gives another revenue stream for the corn growers. We'll forego that subsidy. So Johnson signed it into law allowing high fructose corn syrup into our diet in 1915. 66 to 1968 is when it came in. And we immediately saw a surge in inflammation. The HSCRP test, which is a measure of inflammation, was a standard part of our blood until about 20 years ago. And doctors can't treat to it, so they just stopped running the running the marker. So fructose, chemically, when you ingest it at a level higher than your antioxidant ability to neutralize it, it goes to the liver. The liver converts it into triglycerides. It's called the Cops disease because Cops always had a problem with their blood work because their triglyceride levels are too high because they spent too much time in donut shops. So your triglyceride levels get up around 400 nanograms per liter. And once it hits that level, your liver converts the triglycerides into LDL cholesterol. All of our cholesterol can be traced back to fructose, not animal fats and not oils. They lied to us. The food pyramid was all wrong. And there's certain fruits, and I've been able to lock it down that most people can metabolize fruits that are less than about four grams of fructose per 100 grams of fruit. Now, when I look at the fruits in that range, there's blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, watermelon. Bananas are 4.8 grams per 100 grams. So it's just over the edge. But in older people, I tell people that because of the potassium content, it's always good to eat a banana. I'd prefer them not to eat a ripe banana because the fructose content's even higher in a ripe banana than it is in a plantain or a green banana. I haven't eaten fruit in 20 years. I don't eat fruit. And I don't hear of people getting scurvy because we pick up enough vitamin C in our vegetables and our peppers. So we're picking up enough vitamin C. Lemons are okay. Limes are okay. No oranges, no orange juice, no fruit juices, no apple juice, no dates, no grapes, no pears, certain apples, Granny Smith apples are right at the borderline, but no Fuji, the big, big apples. Like I said, the fruit growers get more money the sweeter they make something. Well, the sweeter they make it, they put more fructose in their apples. They make them bigger. I calculated on an apple, the antioxidants in an apple are in the skin and in the seeds, but the fruit is inflammatory. So there's got to be a balance. At what point does the antioxidants offset the inflammatory response I'm going to get if I eat that apple? Well, when I begin to calculate it from a molecular point of view, the apple is smaller than one inch in diameter. And I have to eat the whole apple, seeds and all. That's as big an apple as anyone should ever eat, so that the apple was not causing an inflammatory response.

Marla Miller: 1:03:53

Are you possibly saying that the fruits from the past, you know, from years and years and years ago, were made differently?

Samuel Shepherd: 1:04:00

Absolutely.

Marla Miller: 1:04:01

And so now the problem with the fruit isn't the way it was originally designed and created. It's what we hybridized added to it.

Samuel Shepherd: 1:04:13

You increase the size, you increase the price. Always follow the money. Crab apples we ate in the 1880s, they were all fine. Nobody got sick. Back then, an apple a day would keep the doctor away. You eat an apple a day today, you have the doctor at your doorstep. We've been lied to and led down a very bad path. And it keeps the money flowing. The more inflamed, more patients, the more money. Well, they figured it out and they published the food pyramid, and it really brought a lot of money into the pharmaceutical world and into the medical industry because we all got sick.

Marla Miller: 1:04:54

Thank you for detailing that. So when people go to your website, they'll be able to find out a lot more information about this Velasca and how to take it and what it's good for and all of that, right?

Samuel Shepherd: 1:05:06

Yeah. And there's research there that they can do. The NIH research papers, when they come out, I immediately publish them or have them published onto the website. So we're staying ahead of any new research that comes out there. Doctors are not. Doctors aren't going to deviate from what they know. They're still going to give you chemo, destroy your white blood cell count to the point that you run out of money from your insurance company and they send you home with hospice, and somebody else will step into your shoes and keep the money flowing to the oncologist. Oncologists are the only doctors that get paid cash when they put you on chemo or prescribe chemo or radiation. The only doctors. Each patient is about a quarter of a million dollars to the oncologist, whether you have cancer or not. So what they do is they put you on a chemo pill, even if you don't have cancer or you've got a clear scan, they say, well, there's always this probability that your cancer will come back. You need to be taking this chemo pill. Don't take pills unless you have a disease, because the chemo will give you cancer in 87% of the cases. But if they give you chemo and in three years you get cancer again, they'll always say, Well, it's a reoccurrence of your previous cancer. No, it isn't. Chemo is one of the most notorious arcinogens on the planet. It creates those free radicals. Hopefully, it would destroy the DNA of a cancer cell, but they also destroy the DNA and mutate normal cells.

Marla Miller: 1:06:45

Well, thank you so much for all of your time and deep explanations. It's such an incredible story you have of your own personal recovery and then the discovery of this treatment that really is effective. Thank you.

Samuel Shepherd: 1:07:00

You're more than welcome. And the public needs to know this. People are now becoming aware of their health. I don't think people knew how to get, they relied on their doctors to guide them. They wanted somebody else to take care of them. But at least now they're being proactive. And I've debated with a lot of doctors, and they capitulate. They say, absolutely, I'm on the right path. The director of oncology of Johns Hopkins came up to me after a talk in Washington, D.C. And he said, You have this figured out. And I said, Yeah, I do. I know why we get sick and I know what disease is. And he said, Well, this is going to have a negative impact on the entire industry. I said, I'm more focused on people's lives and their overall health. I'm not interested in fulfilling your paycheck.

Marla Miller: 1:07:53

Yeah. Good note to end on. Thank you so much.

Samuel Shepherd: 1:07:58

Thanks, Marl, for having me.