Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
A podcast about practices to promote healthy lives featuring experts, businesses, and clients: we gather to share our stories about success, failure, exploration, and so much more. Our subscription episodes feature some personal and vulnerable, real-life stories that are sensitive to some of the general public.
Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Own Your Health: From Toxic Load To Longevity with Eddie Stone
Feeling stuck between wellness hype and real results? We sat down with Eddie Stone, founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials, to cut through the noise and focus on what actually moves the needle: reducing daily toxic load and fueling the body with clean, verifiable nutrition. Eddie shares the wake-up calls that shaped his approach, from early labs that didn’t make sense to a family health crisis that spotlighted how hidden exposures can quietly chip away at our resilience.
We dig into practical detox and daily nutrition—why consistency beats extremes, how a well-crafted greens powder can deliver phytonutrients without the cleanup barrier, and where a zeolite-based detox fits in a simple routine. Eddie breaks down the sourcing and testing that separate trustworthy supplements from slick labels: farm visits, recognized organic certifications, identity checks on raw materials, and third-party labs for potency and purity. If you’ve wondered whether that “clean” product is actually clean, you’ll get a clear checklist to evaluate it.
We also explore targeted support for modern needs: fiber that helps with blood sugar and gut health, and botanical blends aimed at stimulating telomerase for telomere maintenance as part of a broader longevity plan. Throughout, we return to the pillars that matter—sleep, movement, stress management, and whole-food nutrition—and how supplements can fill gaps without pretending to be the foundation. The takeaway is empowering and doable: pick your main concern, start small, and judge progress by how you feel over weeks, not hours.
Ready to turn intention into action? Listen now, then grab the special first-time discount link in the show notes to try the products discussed. If this conversation helped you rethink your routine, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review to tell us what you’ll start with first.
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Well, hello, and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and we've got a very special guest today. His name's Eddie Stone, and he is the founder and CEO of Touchstone Essentials, a lifelong entrepreneur and advocate of healthy living. Eddie is uh leading an e-commerce detox and wellness brand with the vision of touching lives with goodness, looking for clean supplements. And it looks like Eddie's got a lot of information about this. And you know, the audience is always looking for good sources of good products. And there's so much garbage out there and so much bad marketing and so much uh misinformation. I'm looking forward to hearing um about what you do and how you do it. But first, I'd really like to say, welcome to the show, Eddie. And how did you come to this place? Like, you know, this isn't like uh I don't have a hundred people reaching out to me from your point of view. So, you know, what caused you to come into this space?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. And number one, Joe, thank you for having me. Appreciate this opportunity. And we always love to uh talk with audiences and kind of just establish a dialogue. I've got, I mean, it's there's a business here, but I've got a lot of passion for the subject matter. So I'm I'll give you the the quick overview. Um I'm 62 years old and really have been involved in health and nutrition since my mid-20s. So for me, it's a it's a long career. And I'll say right up front, things that I thought I had figured out in my mid-20s, just like a lot of people, my perspective is far a different today. Um, I think when I when I first got to nutrition, I was, you know, involved in some triathlons and things like that when I was in school. Nothing at too high a level. I was not some ultra athlete, just somebody trying to stay modestly fit. Sure. But I really found out when I got out of school, right? Which is somewhat of a coddled environment. You get into that real world, those early jobs that are 60-hour week grind. You're you're not a lot of time to work out or I mean, frankly, even being thoughtful with food. But I, you know, when you're that age, I don't know that you think much about it, right? You're getting something to drive through window. So big.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, whatever came by, quickest thing I could grab, I ate it. If it was in the fridge, I ate it. If I drove by it, I'd eat it. I I'd eat it, I'd eat everything. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm I'm I'm with you. I made a lot of Taco Bell in my life.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um, but I I had a couple little wake-up calls. I mean, one may be more bigger than another, but I I was doing an insurance for work thing, blood work, and my blood work came back really terrible. You know, I'm in my mid-20s, and the blood and risk factors for insurance of like a a heavy smoker, I didn't smoke. I mean, I you know, it's like, what that's what's going on? And so my cholesterol and triglycerides, just basically all the lipid profiles and things are kind of terrible. And the guy said, Hey, you're you're too young for this to be a thing. Right. This isn't right. Yeah, he I said, You think it's your lifestyle? And I was just thinking about the backseat of my car and all the fast food bags. I thought, yeah, it's it's it's a choice. And so I, you know, I began to think about this stuff and took a career pivot and started working in nutrition, basically in in sales. I was kind of intrigued with the subject. Um, and then my mom, about a year or two later, she had a situation where she got sick and it's kind of unidentified, right? We we we took to a lot of local doctors. I live in North Carolina, we took her to the local university hospitals, and this was dragging on for a couple of years where they couldn't figure out what was going on. And ultimately we found out through a referral to a doctor in Georgia that she was fundamentally toxic. She had had breast implants when she was younger. She's having this autoimmune response, and nothing that conventional medicine had sort of even pointed towards, right? Just took these extra steps. And so she went on an IV chelation. And I didn't even know what that was. But ultimately it's it's designed to detox pretty aggressive, maybe a little too aggressive, but it worked out for her. And so it just kind of opened up my mind to the fact that, hey, it's not just what you put in your body, it's important, right? The inputs were important, but it's what you're exposed to. It's it's how do you manage the toxicity? I tell people all the time that you know, one of the dirty little secrets of modern living is just how sort of toxic the world is from a perspective of there's probably a hundred thousand plus man-made toxins that are involved in the production of, I don't know, consumer goods, uh, fertilizers, fungicides, pesticides.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, all this stuff that just sort of not even talking about the forever chemicals in your water and microplastics. And you know, it just seems like it's getting more and more toxic, not less and less.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I I just read something. I think I said I'm 62. By the age of 60, most men have between three and five grams of microplastics in their body. Yeah, prostate and brain collection points, particularly. So, yeah, I mean, there's some things to think about. Look, the truth, though, is that the human body is really adaptable and we can overcome a lot of stuff. But for some people, they really have acute problems, skin issues, headaches, I mean, just all kinds of stuff. And for the general population, it's just like your car. If you don't pay attention, you never tune it up, you never change the filters, whatever, things don't run as well as they used to. And that's true with people. So as my career developed in nutrition, I paid as much attention to the fact that you got to support how your body naturally detoxes, as well as really considering, you know, the clean or uh the quality of the supplement you're putting in. And that's that's really the evolution of really why I'm here. And it, I mean, it's turned out it's it's a big subject matter. We operate in 50 plus countries. Yeah. We really deal with millions of people, and and so we've recognized it's a it's it's a big deal and sometimes really give careful consideration to.
SPEAKER_00:Well, as you can imagine, um, this podcast deals a lot with diet and um biohacking and longevity and uh just wellness in general. So we have a lot of discussion about ingredients, products, um, you know, sources of things. And I think that it's a worthy conversation. There's so much um, you know, it's it's become a fashionable thing. Um, and it kind of has always, there's always been uh snake oil salesmen riding into town with their magic elixir, and and you know, nine out of ten times it's either some brandy or or you know, some piss water, some some sort. And you know, people will listen to a story, and and you know, the guy with the Pied Piper just kind of reels in his little crew and has his shells out there, you know, talking about how great everything is, and you know, they sell products, and there's probably some element of placebo effect that will cause even uh a person that's being duped to find some benefit in a in a nothing or worse product, but we can't rely on that. And I think that there are good products and there are good companies out there, there are good farms out there, there um there's good information to be had. And I think to sort of lay out a clearinghouse or a platform, which is kind of what this podcast is about, that says, Well, let's have a conversation. And if you get through, you know, the questions I have, I would probably say you're worth listening to. Um, if you start stuttering and stammering, I'll go, well, here goes another one.
SPEAKER_01:No, listen, I'm on board. And I mean, the the good news is over the last really couple of decades, the number of people paying attention to these issues, right? Which is when I talk about these issues, I'm not just talking about sort of managing your health from a crisis standpoint, right? It's great that we have Western medicine and you break your leg or you need surgery, there's a lot of medications that can be important at mitigating risk factors for disease. But if you want to go beyond that, so that we're not just thinking about how long we live, but the quality of that life, right? What it means. Because you you, if you're not careful, you can get to your late 60s, early 70s and wind up being a bit of a prisoner to your body, right? Because of just the deterioration and and and things that occur. Sure, you you can stay alive with dozen or so medications, other things like that, but I don't know that anybody wants that to be the design, right? There's a there's sort of another more thought.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. Uh uh hooked up to an IV or or you know, having to be on this cocktail of drugs, you know, you like you talked about a lot of people over 65, you know, you say, Well, what are your meds? And they pull out a little container with, you know, your daily stuff. And I'm like, whoa, like who wants that? I mean, how do you even keep track of it? And, you know, with modern medicine, I think one of the biggest problems is it's symptomatic in its treatment, it's about treatment, not curing. And your body can cure itself if you give it what it needs and and remove what it doesn't need. And I think that's kind of what this conversation's all about.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I I agree with you. It's and and you to me, I try to think about the incentives, like kind of follow the money. And the reality is whether you're talking about big food or big pharma or some of these dynamics, and and that is not to say that everything going on with big food and pharma is bad. I'm not that person.
SPEAKER_00:Things come, yeah. Yeah, but many, many lives have been saved by drugs that maybe I wish I wouldn't have to take. But if I was in a situation where that was the thing that was gonna change my life, hey, I would think differently for sure.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. But if you look at their incentives, prevention, keeping you from showing up, right, filling the script, whatever. That's it's not a priority. It's not that they're against it, right? But it's not their focus. And so we really have to be as self-reliant as possible. I don't, I don't think people always realize that. They're just kind of kind of following this general plan. But the truth is, if you dig in even a little bit, there's just even a few tweaks. People do not have to, you know, live off the land and graze for their food. There's there's mediums, happy mediums there between just paying attention and you know, embracing the world we live in without all eating every meal ultra-processed.
SPEAKER_00:You have to be your own advocate. And in doing that, you have to do your own research and find out which truths affect you. And really, that's it's your responsibility. You know, I'm I'm all about ownership, you know. Like I'm dealing with uh uh overcoming a really aggressive cancer, and I've had to learn a lot and be an advocate, and I've done many episodes on that whole journey. But the point is, I had to own it. I brought this thing to myself, nobody did this to me, and nobody was gonna fix me. I had to go and find my answers, and I think that applies to everybody in every situation, whether you're just getting old, whether you have an injury, an ailment, or you're reasonably healthy and want to stay that way.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that I I couldn't agree more about you're saying, right? It's being your own uh best advocate, right? Is really what this comes down to.
SPEAKER_00:100%. So, in doing that, you know, like I said, I spent the last year and like a crash course of finding truths. And when you start to become aware of certain things, whether it's about your diet, about your your your own health, or or pathways to the answers you're looking for, you come to find out there's huge amounts of information. Like today, we live in this crazy world of information. You know, when I started studying herbs, there was no computers, and I had to go to old bookstores and get old herbal books, and I I I just taught myself the old-fashioned way, and I did it and I tried and I failed and I tried and I succeeded, and I I learned from those things today. You know, with AI and Google, I mean, you just type in a couple of keywords and things just start rolling in faster and you can process it, but there's good intermixed with the bad, and a lot of the good has maybe a bad edge to it, and a lot of the bad might have a good edge to it. How do you find your way through all this?
SPEAKER_01:You know, for us, we we do a few things, right? There's sort of a portfolio of things that we're looking at when we're trying to make decisions. And number one, we we try to look at hey, what what's really something where people need help with? Okay, what can we help them with? And so I'll give you a prime example. We've we've got a greens product, right? It's popular, it's very successful. Greens support the body's natural abilities to detox, both with their chemical makeups as as well as the fiber and other things found in greens. The challenge is that most people on the go-go life pattern that really is the modern world, right? With generally two adults working, whatever that happens to be, access and time. You know, it's a it's a great idea if you say one of juice, right? People think that's oh, that's an interesting notion. You go, you go buy the juicer and it spend all that money. You start stocking up the grocery store, you start trying to create a tasty juice, not easy to do necessarily. Lots of these things are bitter. You get involved in the cleanup. Next thing you know, you juice two times, but you just set that$500 product aside on the counter because it just doesn't fit, right? And so we're advocates of people trying to do as much as they can, but when they can't, right? Something that mixes easy. We our products 44 different organic fruits and vegetables. It tastes nice, it's good, it's cold processed, teeming with all those native uh enzymes and nutrients that you find in in uh delicate uh phytochemicals in in fruits and vegetables. And so we try to meet that consumer where they are and just give them something because here's I'll tell the audience, right? I believe in supplements in this context. They're designed to supplement where you're at, where you want to be. What are the shortfalls just based upon knowledge, lifestyle, and availability? And the same thing goes with our detox. We've got a natural mineral, it's called a zeolite. We harvest it in the U.S., it's clean out of the ground, it's a proprietary process to prep it so it's effective. It's a it's odorless and tasteless. You spray it in your mouth, and so it's designed to be stuff that people can do day in and day out. And that's the context of we've been in business now for close to 14 years. We're selling our products in 50 countries. We have really millions of customers, but we don't have really about 16, 17 products because we're not trying to be everything. We're just trying to fill in those gaps that can make a meaningful impact in somebody's schedule in their day and just help them with a little bit of sort of mental comfort. Okay, it's not perfect today, but I did pretty decent. I gave my body something to work with. That's uh it's it's a habit I try to get people to buy into. End of the day, did you give your body something to work with? Did you do a little movement, a little exercise? Did you a little breathing, a little management of stress, a little decent food, right? Maybe every meal wasn't perfect. Did you get one? And so just, you know, try to finish with some good things to say to yourself about what you did do. And I think that's really where this journey starts for most people. You know, how far they take it, how committed they become, that'll be based upon how they feel. They're using they got a new set of habits for six months, all of a sudden, oh, I feel pretty good. My clothes fit a little looser, I'm a little more inject, sleeping better. You know what? They're likely to return to those same habits. Because I just think it's hard for people to make these like dynamic wholesale changes because it just doesn't fit in life. And that's really what we're striving for, is to find a sort of an on-ramp into somebody's habits so they can see this difference as they go down the road.
SPEAKER_00:So when you talk about supplements, you know, there are all kinds of companies that have all kinds of products, and some of them have what they would call like a nutrition system or something that would almost be like an all-encompassing, we're gonna give you everything you need. But when you think about a supplement, the idea is that your job is to take care of most of it, and the supplement sort of like you're saying, fills in the fills in the holes or or or maybe augments some of the things. Like, you know, you can go through and have a pretty healthy diet and still find yourself um deficient in one thing or another. Like I'm on a very rigid diet with my cancer, and it's um particularly uh when it involves proteins, and and um I restrict my proteins pretty uh intensely. But what that's done is it's caused a little imbalance, and I have to I have to manage that and be aware of it that you know my zinc intake's gonna be um hard to get to. Um I'm little iron problems, you know, I'm prone to below red blood cells, so I've got to balance and figure out, you know, the the food or the supplements or the combination that will cause that. But I go through regular blood work, so I'm I'm on top of it. I don't think most people do that. And so I think it's important that um when you're looking at something, whether it's a nutritional system where you know you take a five scoops of different powders or whatever, there's all kinds of different approaches to this, but as a supplement, it seems to me, based on what I'm hearing, is that you've got these nutrition or these um pillars of health, I call them. You know, you sleep, you got diet, you've got exercise, you got stress, and it goes on. And and and there's these different sort of pillars that if you don't have one, you know, you end up being like a three-legged table and you don't stand up so well. And um have them all, you can still have a weakness, and um you find a way to balance that out with, like you say, with these different supplements. So you got Touchstone Essentials, a company that uh manufactures or distributes different products. You said 16, 17 different products. What is the focus of these products, or do you have, or is it sort of broadly spectrum?
SPEAKER_01:No, we it is there's a focus here, and and and that's in part to try to make decision making easier for consumers. You know, what we found is that if you give them a table full of stuff, they don't even know really how to approach it, right? They'll start sitting around now. Now your your cancers caused a hyper focus from you in education, right? So you're really dialed in on what I need from a dietary standpoint, proteins and otherwise. But that's not most people's circumstances. And so where most people's concerns are, they're sort of broad. I'm I'm sort of sick and tired of being sick and tired. I don't sleep well. I got some kind of undescribed brain fog every day. Why am I needing a monster energy drink twice in the afternoon? You know, whatever these dynamics are. It's more based upon you know what's their their concern. So our approach is this one, let's give you a tool to get the bad stuff out, knowing that there's nobody we're gonna check that doesn't have any lingering chemicals in their body from nonstick carpet, cookware, whatever. If you've ever been on an airplane, you you now have flammantary material embedded in your body. Is it causing an immediate problem? No, but it always accumulatively creates an ongoing inflammatory response. That's right. Yeah, none of that's healthy. And so we've got a natural mineral, we've got greens, we've got things that will support this idea of how your body detoxes itself. So kind of number one. Number two, put some good stuff in. You got enough fiber in your diet. We've got a great fiber product that tastes great. It's not your grandfather's fiber, right? It's not about just making you regular. This has got other dynamics, blood sugar measurements and stuff like that. And then we've got specialty items, blood sugar control products, natural enzymes to basically bind with excess glucose in the gut, turn it into a resistant starch so it doesn't cause your glucose to rise. Or, and this is really one of the most dynamic things we work with. We have a product called telovital. Um, telovital is a series of plant materials and herbs. Through decades of research and millions and millions of dollars, this recipe's been identified to stimulate the production of something called telomerase, a natural enzyme in your body when you take this that repairs, and here's what's critical the telomere on the end of your DNA strand. And I know the show's not designed for this whole thing.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, we've actually had um a couple of guests that have gone deep into telomere restoration. So it's it's a topic that I'm very familiar with and it's important.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So if you what we know from a clinical standpoint, the only way to sort of in a proven fashion help to repair and restore a link to a telomere is through telomere. It's the body's natural enzymes. You just got to stimulate it, and that's what that product does. So that's for that category of person that's really thinking about what am I what am I doing about my longevity, you know, the quality of getting older, not just getting older. Do I need to control my blood sugar? So we try to give people really identifiable categories. Say, hey, this is this is a concern for me, right? I'd like to try something. So here's a set of products that are USD organic, you know, certified products with unconditional money-back guarantees. So things that give the consumer a chance to find a place they want to enter and give something a go. Maybe they're trying a couple of things, maybe they're trying five, maybe they're trying one. We're just trying to meet that consumer exactly where they are.
SPEAKER_00:So uh in in your bio and some of the information I've done looking you up, um one of the things that kind of got my attention was, you know, your focus on um ingredients and you know the quality of these ingredients. Um you know, I I manufacture natural skincare products and and remedies and things like that. And so I'm always sourcing ingredients and it's it's difficult in a lot of ways, in a lot of cases, because you know, there's certification and third-party um lab testing, but all of that is only as good as its source. And when somebody hands you a credential and you don't know anything about how they got it, it you know, might be legit. It might just be, you know, the Snake Oil guy would printed it up on his on his color printer. Um so tell me about sort of the the rigors that you use in sourcing um the components or even even the products that you're dealing with.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so number one, everything we do, it's our own recipes. Um, so we're not working with anybody's white labels or anything like that. So, and and really does start with sourcing. It's good that you have that background because you're a smart consumer, kind of understand what's going on here. So we work with farms or co-ops that initially, right? The first thing is are they certified? Is there a history? Can can we go see them? Can we put our boots in those fields and kind of see what's going on in that respect, right? So it's not just a series of paperworks. Then, because our expertise is only our presence, right? We use third-party verifications such as QAI or Oregon TILF that's going behind us on all of those certification paperworks, right? Just making sure that things are lined up how they're supposed to be. You then do uh DAID on that raw material when you're looking at it, when you're buying it, and then when it arrives in your warehouse, you make sure that matches. Right. So that nothing happens along the way. And then we do third-party testing, not only for potency and consistency, but to make sure it's clean in the way that we're looking for. And so it's an elaborate process. Now, we've been in business a long time and we do a lot of business, so it's one that we're experienced with and we know how to do this, but you have to stay on your toes. Otherwise, you might think you're buying from a farm in Des Moines, but it's actually just a shield for something coming from Southeast Asia that's not the least bit certified or anything we want. In fact, one of the things I've come to recognize, and most consumers would probably shock, 98 plus percent, maybe 99% of what you see from a supplement standpoint in the United States, it was assembled in the United States, but that raw material was coming from places that were not as clearly regulated and or monitored in the way we might appreciate. In fact, you might see uh pictures of fruit on the label and there's no fruit in the product. Right. So it's it's the the summit industry is is regulated, not regulated, right? There's this real mix that allows for bad actors to participate. And so people are proper and right to be skeptical.
SPEAKER_00:100%. Well, listen, um, as it always happens in a good conversation, we run out of time pretty quickly, but I always like to uh give our guests an opportunity to consolidate their thoughts and and wrap it into a sort of an elevator pitcher, a parting shot for our listeners.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and and listen, thank you for the time. Appreciate the chance to connect with your your group. Uh touchstoneessentials.com, that's the website. However, we always try to do something for audiences we speak to. So I'm gonna send you a link to put in the show notes that if people want to try our products, buy our products, we'll give them a first timers discount. I think it's as much as$50. So it's a chance to save. And again, that does not diminish the the guarantee that's out there for people. We I think we got 60 some thousand five-star reviews, and and that came because we work hard for our customers. The thing that I would tell people is what's your main concern from a lifestyle standpoint? Do you feel like toxicity, toxins, exposures is that a concern? We've got a great product called Pure Body Extra that's just simple and easy to use, and we know is effective. Millions of people have used it around the globe successfully. Are you more concerned about nutrition? Because you you're just not getting there for a fruit and vegetable standpoint or whatever. We've got some we've got a green's powder that's fantastic, we've got a vegan protein, it's easy to mix, great product tastes good, got a great fiber powder product. So where your concerns are is where I'd focus. I mean, you you could get it all, that'd be great, but I don't know if that's a great place to start. But I think people should start kind of hyper-focused on something and see if they can make a difference in a few months with what they're using, and you know, and and ultimately what what habits might grow from there. So we love to just kind of establish a relationship with folks and grow with them over time. That's the nature of what we do. And so I hope we get that opportunity and appreciate the chance to share with you.
SPEAKER_00:Fantastic. And how do people find your products?
SPEAKER_01:The primary website for the products is the goodinside.com. But we'll give you a version of that for your show notes that give them an auto discount so that they've got that, um, save some money, right? Um, we live in an economy where saving money is a good idea. And so we'll give them a discount link. And and so that's uh that's a good, and then our online support system is very robust. There's an online chat, email, phone number to call, and so whatever people need to get their needs taken care of.
SPEAKER_00:Excellent. Well, Eddie, it's been a pleasure having this conversation. I I I definitely want to learn more about your company and test out some of your products. And I want to just thank you for joining the show today.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Joe. Good luck with your uh treatment and everything as you go forward.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, absolutely. We're well on our way. Well, this has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumban. I want to thank all of our listeners for making the show possible, and we will see you next time.
