Let’s Consider Non-Vaccine Solutions to COVID with Nathan Jones, CEO of Xlear: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Saul Marquez:
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Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket, Saul Marquez here today. I have the privilege of hosting the excellent Nathan Jones. He was born in Kansas City and he spent his formative years in Idaho in a small town where his father was the town doctor. If you guys have heard, I’ve done a couple of episodes with Dr. Lon Jones. That’s his dad. So it’s a privilege to have Nate here on the podcast. Later in a pursuit to provide needed support for the entire family of 14 kids, Nathan’s parents have made the decision to move to Michigan, Mexico City, where he spent most of his childhood when he was 16. The family made another move, this time to Utah, which is also where Nate graduated from high school. He attended college for a year, spent a year in active duty, and also went on a two-year mission with his church. He moved back home in 94 and started attending Utah Valley University. Later, he made a transition to Seattle, where he attended school to become a commercial diver. He used his skills from this education when he worked as a diver in oil fields in Louisiana between 95 and 2000. Another transition occurred when he moved back to Utah and founded Xlear in two, where he has been ever since. We’ve discussed clearance and the work that they do and using xylitol and sinus care. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to the episode of Dr. Lon Jones, listen to it. He talks about how it helps you prevent covid and reduce your risk of COVID. And today we’ve got this awesome son, Nate, who is the CEO of the Xlear Incorporated company, joining us to have a great discussion. So, Nate, such a privilege to have you here.
Nathan Jones:
Well, thanks for inviting me.
Saul Marquez:
Absolutely. It’s our pleasure. So before we dive into the work that you guys are doing at Xlear, talk to us a little bit about what inspired your work and health care. I mean, you’ve done such interesting things before this.
Nathan Jones:
Well, that’s a kind of a loaded question, because when I was a kid, I always thought I’d grow up to become a doctor. And when I was going to college, you know, I was going on the premed course. Then I went down and I did some volunteer work at the emergency room at the local hospital here in Utah. And what I realized is that I can never be a doctor. It was a great job and it was a great thing. But doctors normally have some patients that die. And I don’t know that I ever want to put myself in a position to have to tell someone that their loved one is dead, because I would sit there and I would watch doctors do that. And the emotional toll of that is it’s insane. And I just do not ever want to put myself into that position. And so that’s when I made the decision to go do something else. And I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. So I went to commercial diving school, as you mentioned, in Seattle, and was out working on the oil rigs. I’ve always had a high-risk personality. When I was in the military, you know, blew stuff up and jumped out of airplanes a bunch and I really enjoyed that. I enjoyed underwater welding, which some people think is a risky job, but I didn’t think it was. And being an entrepreneur by its very nature is a risky job. But what I enjoy about it now is I love that I go to work every day. And my goal is to make money to support myself. But by doing it in a way that makes other people save money by staying healthy. And, you know, we bring that up all the time because our products are designed toothpaste, mouthwash, chewing gum, all of that, and the nasal spray. They’re designed to help keep you healthy, their hygiene products that we can show through science how it’s going to improve your health. So it’s going to save you money.
Saul Marquez:
Well, I think it’s fantastic. And I never knew about you guys until I heard about it through your dad and the studies you guys have done around how keeping your nose clean and with your product, but also the impacts of xylitol on dental health. It’s fantastic. And so talk to us a little bit about how you believe Xlear with an X, it’s Xlear folks if you’re looking them up, is adding value to people’s lives.
Nathan Jones:
Well, I think it adds value because first of all, your smile and we’ll start by discussing the research behind the products. But people’s smile is one of the first things that people notice about other people. And a lot of people will sit there and say, well, its white teeth is a good smile. And what we want to do is, we want to make sure that we’re adding value by keeping it healthy. OK, we want it to be healthy. And there’s a whole slew of other systemic issues that all arise from bad oral hygiene. And so what we want to do is we want to make oral hygiene simple. We want to make it easy, and we want to make it cost-effective. And that’s really what xylitol does, it allows us to do that. And so if we can get people using xylitol, it’s adding value because they’re going to save money by staying healthy.
Saul Marquez:
I think that’s great. And it’s clear. So it’s funny because we had Dr. Jones on the podcast the first time and I thought it was a good idea. And then we had him on again and I hadn’t tried it. And finally, I said, oh, my gosh, like Dr. Jones. And same with you, right? I’m like, mate, we got to get this going. And we have and we’ve noticed the difference. Right. Just using the toothpaste and also nasal spray. We are breathing better. We feel like we’re we haven’t gotten sick because of it. So what do you think makes what you do different or better than what’s out there today?
Nathan Jones:
No, because health care in America is really focused on making sick people better. And that is a very, very expensive way to manage health care. And you know what? In my opinion, what I think needs to be done is I think there needs to be a titanic shift in our CDC and our governmental agencies to push that equation back to where people are being motivated to stay healthy. I mean, the CDC and the NIH and all of these government organizations, you know, what they should be doing is programs out there in public health to keep people healthy. And xylitol would be top of mind in almost all of those because it’s such a cost-effective way to manage your oral health and your airway health.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. So it’s not a drug. And I want to hone in on that with you if that’s OK for all of us to understand that better. What is xylitol?
Nathan Jones:
It’s sugar, it’s a non-exos sugar. And what that means is the sucrose, the glucose, the fructose and even the sorbent, the six carbons sugar alcohols like submittal mannitol multiple. All of those are six-carbon sugars. And most of the pathogenic bacteria in our bodies live and thrive off of six-carbon sugars. In the human body we eat those sugars and we use them also. But the amount of six-carbon sugars that we as a human race have started to consume over the last six, seven hundred years has just been ridiculously increased. If you go back, let’s just say five hundred years, we did not have refined sugar. People ate fruits, which is the main source of fructose in season. So for two or three months a year, that was it. Other than that, we really didn’t have a whole bunch of sugar that we were eating like we’re eating it today. And so xylitol is a five-carbon and there are other sugar alcohols like resveratrol. And all of these other nonsexist sugar alcohols and sugars are very healthy for us. And we’ve shown in multiple studies over the past two decades that xylitol blocks bacterial and viral adhesion of all of these bacteria in the viruses.
Nathan Jones:
And one of the ways that you can get xylitol is using it in toothpaste, using mouthwash, using it in nasal sprays, or you can get it by eating broccoli and cauliflower and woody fibrous plant because if you go back five hundred years, that’s where we got it. And when you’re looking at it systemically, there is a great paper that was published last year. It was a what was his name? Anthony Chin. And I know I’m saying it wrong, but it’s a guy in France and he wrote this paper explaining how xylitol blocks adhesion. And he was using specifically the Sars-Cov-2 virus, how the Xylitol blocks the ability of that virus to enter the tissue. And the same thing is, is that bacteria are using those same receptor sites. And so the xylitol binds up on these receptor sites and that just hangs out there. And until the body needs it and then it goes somewhere else, but it’s blocking those receptor sites for five, six hours.
Saul Marquez:
That’s amazing. Thank you for highlighting that and just blows my mind that a nondrug, something like a five-point sugar, is helpful like this. And it’s not expensive and it’s so easy to use. My wife and I have been using the Xlear nose flush and we do three to four flushes per nostril and we keep it next to our toothbrush. And I’ll tell you, we’re breathing better. It’s a great thing. And in the back of my mind, just knowing that helping along with other social distancing and cautions right, helping myself and my family be healthier, it’s awesome to be able to do so. How do you think you’ve improved outcomes during these past few months with the virus?
Nathan Jones:
Well, as a business, there’s an increased need for upper respiratory health products. And so what we’ve done is obviously we have expanded the ability to produce the products. I mean, that’s that in itself was a huge task because with half of the world shut down, we’re trying to buy equipment so that we can actually make more products. We’re getting more people overseas that are asking us to make products for them. I mean, we have there have been a couple of the governments in Latin America that have actually expedited the registration process. They’re allowing us or I should say allowing us. They actually asked us to put antiviral on the label so that they could sell it into the Dominican Republic and into Haiti and into Brazil and some of these other countries. And so that in and of itself is also quite a difficult thing to get done. But we have done it because I think we have a great team here and they’ve really stepped up to it.
Saul Marquez:
Congratulations on that. I mean, that’s just something to be proud of. And as I understand to you guys, have a new, I guess, nationally recognized date. Do you want to share that?
Nathan Jones:
Yes. We had registered March 11th, which is the one-year anniversary of when the WHO declared this upper respiratory pandemic. And we now have that listed on the register of days. How they do that as the National Wash Your Nose Day. And what we want to do with that is we just want to emphasize that not only during a pandemic, an upper respiratory pandemic but the rest of the year also people should be washing their noses. It just seemed like a very suitable day to have that baby. But I don’t know if my dad ever mentioned this, but almost seventy-five percent of the visits to two primary care physicians are for upper respiratory issues. It just makes sense. I mean, you’re getting ear infections and sinus infections, colds, flu allergies, all of those things are all started in the upper airway. And so it just makes sense that people should be washing their nose.
Saul Marquez:
Clean your nose, people. So, Nate, at the beginning of the podcast, actually before we started recording you had mentioned it took one hundred and fifty years for people to realize that it was important for us to wash our hands. You’re hoping that it doesn’t take us that long to realize that we need to wash our noses.
Nathan Jones:
Correct. So Ignaz Semmelweis, who is a Hungarian, but he was living in Vienna. He wrote the first paper, published the first paper in the I can’t remember the Vienna medical paper, whatever it was at the time. But he published it in there. And it was just a paper saying, hey, you know what? I started washing my hands between seeing these sick people and dead people and pregnant women and the rate of death of the women that he was the babies and the women that he was delivering went down to less than one percent of the other doctors in the city. They were having an epidemic of it’s called peripheral fever. And they were losing upwards of twenty-five percent of the babies. And where it comes from is the doctors would be in doing dissections on dead people and they go straight from there into a lady giving birth. And so the doctors and cells were carrying that disease and giving it to their patients. And even though Semmelweis published his paper and said, hey, I just started washing my hands and mine is down under one percent. And all the other doctors laughed and they mocked him and they ran him out of town. And it wasn’t until 50 years later that Lister came up and said, hey, you know what? Maybe we should disinfect our hands before we do surgery. Then it wasn’t until 1998 that the CDC made it standard of care for doctors here in the United States to wash their hands between patients. And the reason for that is because of the it was it was in 1998. It was a hep C epidemic. But that’s what one hundred and fifty years later, something we all understood since we were kids is wash your hands. But it took that long for all of the doctors get on board with doing it.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, it’s unfortunate that it takes these things. And I mean, I’ll be honest with you, like we’ve always been hand washers, the pandemic, the COVID-19 virus has elevated it and introduced you really, you guys and your philosophy around those washing to us and to our community. So I’m grateful that you guys are sharing this message and you’re spreading it and you are drawing parallels to these other pandemics. And the challenge is let’s not be part of the masses here, everyone listening, and let’s clean our noses. I invite you to clean your nose. And in the show notes, we’ll have a link where you could access Xlear. It’s very low cost. It’s so nice. And actually, I was just learning about some other cool stuff that they have. So you guys also have candy for kids. And I didn’t know you guys offered that. I guess overall when you compare this xylitol to sugar. I mean, how is it, calorie-wise and I understand you can also use it as a sweetener.
Nathan Jones:
It looks like sugar tastes like sugar. The only difference to it is if you eat a lot of it or if you’re drinking like you don’t want to make soda pop or you don’t want to make lemonade out of it because it has I can’t really remember the bird, but it pulls water toward it, which when you’re using it in oral care products, when you’re using it a nasal spray, those are very beneficial. But when you’re doing that in your gut, not so beneficial. So if you eat a lot of it, you’ll get it in osmotic diarrhea and your body will adjust to it. And Dr. Cannon has actually pointed out that when your body adjusts to it, the xylitol is actually prebiotic. And so it actually feeds the good bacteria, the healthy bacteria for people that have IBS and have some of these other gastrointestinal issues. But he’s published a couple of papers in the medical literature pointing out that by cutting out the hexo-sugars and going to five and four and three and two carbon sugars, you can actually clean up a lot of those gastrointestinal issues because you’re switching over from an unhealthy microbiome to a microbiome that is much healthier historically.
Saul Marquez:
Fascinating. Fascinating. So just some really neat stuff to think about. And so as you think about some of the setbacks you’ve had, especially around this time, or maybe even what you have seen across the country, what would you say one of those is? And what’s been a key learning from one of those?
Nathan Jones:
A key learning, I guess, is learning to deal with the government. I think that government does more to stifle innovation that’s helpful than any other organization out there, I guess. But no, you just have to learn to navigate through.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, that’s fair. Finding out the path, best pathway to get what you guys are doing so well, that and really increasing the access to it. And you guys are doing it in a really great way. You’ve increased production. What would you say you’re most excited about today?
Nathan Jones:
I am most excited about the future. We have filed for emergency use authorization with the FDA. We’re going to push that forward. Our last communication was they want to make it a drug because they understand that it works, but it’s not going to be a drug so that becomes a non-issue. We just have to figure out how the messaging is that allows us to say what it does without making it a drug. And so that’s part of what I think is interesting. And then, on the other hand, you have the FTC who’s coming in and saying, you know, you don’t have enough science. And so it’s confusing, but it’s intellectually stimulating, trying to navigate through that. Let me put it that way. And if we can get any of that done, I’m just excited to get this whole pandemic behind us. I mean, we have enough vaccines now for those people that want to take a vaccine. I just wish that our CDC would start talking about other options because there is a huge chunk of the population out there that just doesn’t want to get a vaccine. And I think that our CDC and I think that our government should be looking for options for those people instead of just trying to ram the idea of a vaccine and saying, hey, this is the only solution. I think they should be looking at any other solution that may or may not help. We actually filed a petition with the CDC to ask them to discuss the topic of nasal sprays because it just makes sense. And if it’s OK, I’d actually like to ask your listeners to sign that petition. You can go to our Web page and there’s a link to it right there on our Web page. You can read through it, and if you agree with it, you sign it.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. So the petition is about making nasal sprays. Tell us a little bit more about it.
Nathan Jones:
It really just goes through the reasoning and the logic behind using nasal sprays, nasal hygiene in light of the current pandemic.
Saul Marquez:
There you have it. And then you guys will provide a link to that petition. So, folks, if you’re interested in signing it, if you feel like this is something you want to line yourself up with, by all means, take up on the request to also sign the petition. I think it makes sense. I think it makes a lot of sense. So be sure to give us that link. We’ll put it in the show notes for everybody that wants to participate. And, you know, before we close out our session today, I love if you could just give us a closing thought, Nate, and the best place that the listeners could get in touch with you or your team, should they have any questions?
Nathan Jones:
My closing thoughts is something that I always try to do, and that is to be part of the solution. There are things that people can do. But if you’re always trying to be part of the solution, then then you’re probably going to be doing the right thing to get closing thought.
Saul Marquez:
And I believe you guys are. And I was excited to get you on it to talk more about what you guys are doing to help us improve our health overall. I’m grateful that you came on to chat with us. If anybody wants to reach out or learn more, where can they reach out?
Nathan Jones:
They can go to our web page is the easiest place they can. I mean, they can email. I mean, my email is Nathanclear.com, and obviously our Web page, they can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, we have all those social media pages. The postings are pretty, not very strong at all because of our governmental oversight, I guess. So we can’t really post that much of the information, the studies. But you can follow us. And as information becomes available, we’ll forward it as much as we can.
Saul Marquez:
Outstanding. Well, we appreciate it, Nate. And folks, again, it’s clear with an X, so xlear.com, nate@xlear.com, we’ll leave those links instead of the show notes on today’s episode. And Nate, just want to say thanks again. Appreciate all the work that you and your team are doing to help keep our country safe.
Nathan Jones:
Hopefully not just our country. Hopefully, it’s the world.
Saul Marquez:
The world that’s true. You know, the majority of our listeners are in the States, but certainly, we do have our international listeners. So the globe safe. I appreciate you correcting me there. Thank you, guys. Really appreciate you tuning in. And then, Nate, thank you for being with us.
Nathan Jones:
You’re welcome. Any time.
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