- [Clint] I grew up around Native American people,
primarily the Cheyenne and the Crow.
I remember coming home one day,
and we were going to go into
one of the kid's tepees with his parents,
and the mother said, "Take those shoes off."
"They'll make you sick."
It was just strange why she would say they would make you sick.
I wouldn't have had a clue at that time.
(dramatic drumbeats)
- In simple terms, grounding is literally
putting your bare feet on the ground.
When you do that, you're in contact with the Earth,
and Mother Earth is endowed with electrons,
and these electrons are literally absorbed through your feet.
It's like taking handfuls of antioxidants,
but you're getting it through the feet.
- [Clint] In 1960, we invented synthetic materials.
The first thing we did was
we put rubber soles, synthetic soles, on the shoes.
- We started wearing sneakers.
- [Dr. Sinatra] 95% of people walk insulated on the Earth.
- This was the single thing that happened that probably caused
the proliferation of inflammation-related health disorders
far and above anything else.
(upbeat rock music)
- This is so incredible.
This is Nobel Prize material.
- [Clint] I got involved in the cable industry in the early '60s.
I first learned the need to ground cable signals
as we were developing the industry.
When you run a wire into the house,
before you can go into the house, you have to ground the cable.
You have miles of wire hanging up there in the air.
If there's lightning in the air, it's going to hit the cable,
and so what you want to do is
create a path to ground for the lightning
so that it doesn't enter the house or blow up a TV or create a fire.
One day, I was sitting at a computer, and the computer kept crashing.
I knew it was static electricity,
so I put a piece of tape across my desk and grounded it.
Then, I realized in that process that the outlet wasn't grounded,
so I fixed it so that I could get rid of the static electricity.
And I didn't think too much about it.
I walked outdoors and I sat on a bench, and this tour bus pulled up,
and it looked like they had just been to one of these outlet malls
and white Nike shoes were on sale.
It just dawned on me, I asked the question,
I said, "I wonder if it's possible that humans are ...
"We're no longer naturally grounded.
"I wonder if these shoes could be interfering with us."
(upbeat rock music)
So that night, I went to the hardware store
and I bought a roll of metal duct tape.
And I just taped it across the bed.
I threw a wire out the window.
And I had a ground rod outside.
I connected to the ground rod on one side
and connected to the metal duct tape that I had laid on the bed.
So when I laid down on the duct tape,
I was grounded because it was connected to the Earth.
I woke up the next morning, and I thought, "Holy cow.
"There's something going on here,"
because normally, for me to go to sleep, I had to take Advil.
So I tried to find out what I could.
The Internet was hardly anything.
This was back in '99.
Went down to University of Arizona
into one of their medical libraries, and there was nothing.
And in fact, I even tried to find the cause of chronic pain.
The cause of MS was unknown.
The cause of arthritis, unknown.
They didn't know.
Nobody knew.
So I thought, "Well, I'll go out to LA.
"I'll go to UCLA and ask them."
They pretty much laughed me off campus.
They said, "You expect us to believe
"that somebody is going to put a nail in the ground,
"tie a wire around somebody's toe,
"and it's going to make them sleep better?"
They said, "Get out of here.
"Go away.
"You're nuts."
So I ended up having to put together my own study.
And we grounded 60 people,
and the reports that came in were unbelievable.
TMJ disappeared.
PMS disappeared.
Inflammation reduced, pain.
Everybody slept better.
Found an anesthesiologist in San Diego.
And he says, "I don't think there's anything to what you're doing.
"This has got to be an anomaly here.
"But I'll entertain you."
He says, "I will prove that you're wrong."
And we did the study.
It's the first study that I did
that was a legitimate study where we had quantifiable data.
Then, we decided, "Well, we're going to do a big study now."
And we ended up attracting scientists and physicists.
When they saw the study, everybody said,
"Well, this is really pretty interesting."
(dramatic orchestral music)
- I first learned about grounding maybe 12, 13 years ago
through one of the trainers for the Tour de France team from the US,
and he was using it with many of their athletes
and with surprising results.
And I think that surprising best summarizes my response to it,
because it didn't seem to make sense.
I think I became a believer once I started to explore the science.
- If you take a microscope and you look at a piece of wood
and you go down, down, down, all of a sudden, there's nothing there.
There's molecules, but they're not even connected.
What's holding them together?
What's the force that's holding everything together?
Our body is electrical.
This is all electronic equipment.
The heart, the lungs, the brain, this is electrical equipment.
It's all electrical.
Everything is electrical.
(intriguing piano music)
- [Dr. Chevalier] Unbeknownst to us, we live inside a battery.
The surface of the Earth is charged negatively,
and the ionosphere,
which is a layer of the atmosphere about 60 miles up,
which is ionized by the Sun,
meaning that the rays of the Sun are so strong
that they split the molecules
into a positive charge and a negative charge.
The negative charge are transferred to the surface of the Earth
through lightning mainly, and the positive charge stay 60 miles up.
The problem arise when we don't have negative charge.
So we need grounding just as we need air and we need sunshine.
- [Clint] Stephen Sinatra, who was a cardiologist from back East,
was attending a convention.
I sat down with Stephen and told him the story of what I was doing.
Now, he said, "Well, if you're affecting pain,"
he says, "you need to be researching inflammation.
"You don't have arthritis, you don't have cancer,
"you don't have all these health disorders.
"What you have is chronic inflammation."
- [Dr. Sinatra] We have so much inflammation in the body,
and it comes out in illnesses.
We go to a doctor with all these complaints,
but a lot of it is silent inflammation,
including my specialty, heart disease.
Heart disease is an inflammatory process.
So how do we reduce inflammation?
- [Clint] Inflammation is produced by neutrophils,
which is a white blood cell.
You have an injury.
You have a damaged cell.
And so these white blood cells come over
and they encapsulate the damaged cell
and they release reactive oxygen species
which rip electrons from the damaged cell,
and that destroys the damaged cell.
If there's not enough free electrons there
to reduce the remaining radicals,
they're going to steal an electron from a healthy cell
and in the process damage it.
Then, the message goes out to the immune system
and another neutrophil does the same thing, eliminates that cell,
and then you end up with a chain reaction.
- [Dr. Mercola] ATP is short for adenosine triphosphate.
It's the energy currency of the cell.
We're bioelectrical beings.
That's the currency of our body.
That's how it works.
That's how we run our biological systems,
is by generating this electrical energy, this transfer.
And when we connect to the Earth
through a conductive surface in some way,
there's a transfer of electrons that slowly go into our body.
In situations where we are insulating ourselves
from this surplus of electrons into our body,
we're going to get the absolute opposite.
So instead of having low levels of inflammation and a thin blood,
we'll have thick blood that's more likely to clot
and our levels of inflammation tend to increase.
- [Clint] You could take anybody who has chronic pain,
it doesn't matter who they are, it doesn't matter what's wrong,
and ground them, and you're going to have
a significant reduction in pain.
If inflammation is the cause of all these health disorders,
then I know that not grounding is the cause of inflammation.
- [Chevalier] Can we measure the effects reproducibly?
The answer to that is yes.
We now have 20 studies.
- We have 20, 21 published studies in the medical literature
on earthing and grounding, and this is peer review stuff.
In simple terms, what earthing does
is literally it squenches the fires of inflammation,
and if inflammation is the source of all root illnesses,
including Alzheimer's disease, cancer, heart disease, diabetes,
I mean, the list goes on and on,
if you can impact inflammation and squelch it,
kill it, stop it,
we're going to be healthier beings.
So why hasn't it caught on in mainstream?
I can only say it will.
- [Dr. Mercola] There's a well-established,
traditional, conventional system that relies on expensive intervention,
and so they'd like to perpetuate that
and they're not too interested in having some competition come in,
and for a lot less expensive, to sabotage their profit levels,
because their goal isn't to help humanity.
Their goal is really, as corporations, is increase their profit.
- I ground every day.
Hey, I want to be connected to the Earth as much as I can.
- I would say about 95 percent of the day I'm grounded,
because I believe it's just a no brainer.
- [Clint] Go outdoors, take your shoes off,
stand barefoot on the Earth or sit on the Earth,
put your feet and your hands on the Earth,
and you will instantly notice
the pain and inflammation begin to drain from your body.
"I got my life back," is probably the most common refrain that I hear.
"Thank you. I got my life back.
"I got my life back."
(inspirational music)