The Health Detective podcast is dedicated to Uncovering Health Truths for Your Body, Mind, and Soul.
The show is hosted by Dr. Lauryn, a former TV news journalist and ex-chronic illness patient, gone health detective and functional medicine expert, bringing you over 25 years of clinical and personal experience so you can take your health into your own hands.
On this show, we’re all about disrupting diet culture and conventional wisdom, and in our episodes, you’ll eavesdrop on “real talk” topics and conversations with both myself and a variety of interesting guests who are all “health detectives” in their own unique way.
Ultimately, get ready to quiet the noise in the health, food and wellness world and reach your optimal potential.
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Dr. Aumatma is a double board-certified Naturopathic Doctor & Endocrinologist, in practice for close to 15 years. She specializes in fertility and is the best-selling author of two books: "Fertility Secrets: What Your Doctor Didn't Tell You About Baby-Making” and “(In)Fertility: Struggles, Secrets, & Successes.” In this episode, Dr. Aumatma and Dr. Lauryn talk about age, fertility, and helping patients live healthy lifestyles. Stay tuned!
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Highlights
0:28 - Dr. Aumatma talks about what got her started down her career path in fertility
2:58 - The myths around fertility
4:00 - Thoughts on “high risk” pregnancies
9:14 - Dr. Aumatma shares what it’s like working with her older patients
16:13 - The relationship between mindset and fertility
21:36 - Optimization tips for helping with wellness and fertility
27:48 - How dieting can affect your fertility
31:52 - Dr. Aumatma talks about optimizing unique plans for each of her patients
33:59 - Seed Cycling
40:58 - A lightbulb moment Dr. Aumatma has had in her own health journey
42:51 - A wellness hack!
44:59 - How to learn more about Dr. Aumatma
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About Dr. Aumatma
Dr. Aumatma is a double board-certified Naturopathic Doctor & Endocrinologist, in practice for close to 15 years. She specializes in fertility and is the best-selling author of two books: "Fertility Secrets: What Your Doctor Didn't Tell You About Baby-Making” and “(In)Fertility: Struggles, Secrets, & Successes” Dr. Aumatma was awarded the “Best Naturopathic Medicine Doctor″ award locally in 2015 & 2020 and recognized as a top “Women In Medicine” Doctor in 2020 & 2021.
In addition to supporting couples through individualized care in person and long-distance, Dr. Aumatma also trains practitioners who want to specialize in fertility. She has been featured as the holistic fertility expert on ABC, FOX, CBS, KTLA, MindBodyGreen, The Bump, etc., along with being interviewed for countless podcasts on topics of fertility, pregnancy, and postpartum health.
Well, Dr. Aumatma, I'm so happy to have you in the house, and I, you are absolutely one of my favorite people to talk to about the topics of hormones, but, and also really fertility, which is your specialty. And would love before we tackle the, the problem, so to speak, of age being a factor or maybe not being the only factor in fertility give us a little bit of overview of what got you into doing this work you're doing in the world.
Yeah. that's a great question. I was in my very, very early thirties kind of married, woke up married to this man, realized that he was starting to talk about kids, and he was like, ready to get into it. And I, I, like everything in my body would just go, like, be screaming no. Every time he said that. And I was like, I married this person, I should really wanna have kids with him. And I tried and tried and I could not get myself to get on board with that. And simultaneously my hormones had gotten out of whack, which I think was like a direct reflection of my body, just screaming, no. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> like, you're not doing this with this person. But it took, it took me about nine months of research and kind of like diving into the deep end of hormones and fertility to come out with a very clear sense that a lot of the myths that we're often, that we often hear and are taught even in medical school, even in naturopathic medical school around like the fertility cliff at 35, they just weren't true.
And there's a lot of data around that, but we ignore the data for, for some of these myths that got created in the 1800s, not even through science. So I can, I'm happy to share more about that, but I just feel like that is one of the major things that had me, like, take a step back and say, whoa, if everything that I have been taught is founded on this myth that fertility drops off of a cliff, what else is possible? If that's not true, what else is not true? And then how can I approach this differently? And that's really where I started and why I got so passionate about fertility.
Yeah. So personal experience, that experience is always the best teacher there, <laugh>. And I just love the onion layers of of health and functional health too. And just really exploring like, you know, the world is not flat. Huh. And that's something that we've been told. And so yeah. You talk about the myth of fertility dropping off a cliff. Like where, why is that? Or like what are some of the reasonings of that, perhaps conventional thought puts behind that?
Yeah, so the, the myth actually traced all the way back to the 1800s in France where the Catholic church noted that women over 35 did not come to baptize their children. So their assumption was that because women over 35 were not baptizing their children, their fertility wasn't intact anymore. So then that myth got created and got adopted by science. There's actually no research to back this up. So that, that has been perpetuated for over 200 years and we still are like touting this thing that got created in the 1800s.
Wow. I love history lessons and that's amazing. And how interesting how something like that can spread like wildfire. What about like the reality in quotes, or perhaps what we're told is high risk pregnancies happen for women that are, if it's 40, 35, whatever that age is, right?
Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about the what's actually true. So some of the more recent studies, there are some countries that have picked up this myth and they're like, well, that's definitely a myth. So what can we do about it? And what are we doing to test it? And what they found is there's a 3% decline from age, comparing age groups 25 to 29, and 35 to 39, a 3% decline, which is really okay. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, yes, there is, there's some changes that are happening as we age, but it's so small compared to the overwhelming majority of everything else that's going on. So that's partly true. Then we have the idea that the longer the eggs have been, and not even eggs but follicles like primordial follicles are in our ovaries at birth, the longer that those follicles have been exposed to toxins, our stress, our lifestyle, our lack of good nutrition, all of the things, the longer those follicles are exposed to it, the lower the quality of those follicles.
Right. But that's not to say that's irreversible damage, that's just to say that yes, there is, if you're just walking off the street and get pregnant at 43, then sure there is a likelihood that that pregnancy may not last or that there are potential complications or there's a higher risk of genetic abnormalities, epigenetic abnormalities with the child because of the exposure to all the, the stress and lifestyle of present reality. However, most of those things are reversible. So when we look at what's actually true, like is it always the case that a 35 year old is considered geriatric in western medicine? So is it always that I'm a geriatric pregnancy if I'm over 35, I'm high risk if I'm over 35 or 40 and super high risk over 45. That's kind of what is accepted in, in our common world. But I think it really discredits and discounts women that are proactive about their health that are like, I don't drink, I don't smoke.
I try to manage my stress, I do yoga, I meditate. We know these women, right? Like we are some of those women. And I remember when I was pregnant at 38 and my OB-GYN was like, oh, you're a super high risk pregnancy, but you're healthier than my average 20 year old pregnancy. Right? And, and I was like, do you really tell people that they're geriatric high risk? And she's like, oh yeah, we're required to tell them we are required by, by insurance companies, by legal standards to inform the woman that she's geriatric because she's over 35 and she's high risk at certain points. So I think that it really, it doesn't account for individuality, it doesn't account for what's possible if you actually dedicate time and energy to reversing a lot of the damage that could have been caused by lifestyle. And, and that's not a, a blame or a finger pointing. It's more like, let's just be proactive. Let's plan for our babies as long as, at least for the amount of time that we planned for a wedding. So if you dedicated nine months, a year, a year and a half to planning your wedding, dedicate that amount of time to planning your pregnancy,
I love that. That's such a great rule of thumb and so true. Like a big life event. That same thing, if that's kind of the runway that folks could be proactive, it makes me think of actually one of my clients who recently, she was actually trying for probably over a year with her husband to get pregnant and she's, she is in her early thirties. But like they were really, really struggling and just they were just consistent, they were about to go into IVF actually. But just dedication to her health meditation. Like she was stopped doing really intense workouts and doing more yoga, eating really well, feeling her body like it happened. And I think just like the release of stress for her, like kind of just really is what moved that needle forward is what she's told me. And it's just like so true how much our lifestyle and the daily things can really make a difference even if we don't really, and see the elephant in the room, like stress mm-hmm. <Affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, so to speak. But I would love to know like what are some of the like geriatric patients that you worked with or like the oldest pregnancies that you've seen and perhaps like some hope there. And then we can talk about like what are the proactive steps for optimal fertility?
Yeah. So we've had, we, like the oldest people that I have supported through pregnancy are 45 mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So that's not super high. Like I wish I could say that we have 50 year olds and 55 year old, but we are...
<Laugh>. You're right. <Laugh>. but 45 I feel like is reasonable and a lot of tho those people were actually told a that they should use donor eggs b, that they'll never get pregnant. Probably one of my favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite patients is she was 43 when I started working with her. And most of the time in, when you're in your mid forties, like all of the world is go do IVF, go, go as quickly as you can. Do it now. Don't waste time. And this woman was like, I know that every other doctor that I have consulted with, natural included, have told me that I need to get into doing IVF as quickly as possible. However, my inner wisdom is saying that I should focus on balancing my hormones, figuring out my fibroids. She had a mass of fibroids as big as a basketball, like you could see it sticking out of her abdomen.
Her, she was bleeding for 10 days out of every 20 days. So she basically like 10 day period, 10 days off, 10 day period, 10 days off. Oh wow. And that was her, she's like, this has been my life for years and no one has helped me with this. I'm at the point where I'd really like to have a child and I'm gonna be a solo mom by choice. Mm. but I wanna do it in a way that I know is like healthy and I wanna make sure that the child is healthy. Can you help me? And, and I'm looking at all of her hormones. Her estrogen was off the charts like nothing unexpected based on her symptoms that she had described. And I was like, absolutely, let's do this <laugh>. It took us eight months just to shrink her fibroids. And we got it down to like a patty, at which point I was like, okay, we've worked on this long enough, maybe go consult a surgeon about it.
And they like did the surgery, really speedy recovery. I'm glad we did the surgery cuz at that point we just needed to like move on to other things. But it was, it, it, and then it was another year before all of her hormones were rebalanced. We got her iron levels up because she had been bleeding so much for so long that wasn't working. Her thyroids, her adrenals, this woman, oh my god, like super rockstar, badass, but her adrenals were totally shot. So it took us a long time basically is what I'm saying, to like restore every piece of the puzzle till we got to the point of, okay, the hormones are great, your gut health is great, your adrenals are great, your thyroid is good. Like everything is check, check, check, check, check. Now go in for an IVF cycle. And the clinic like started yelling at her cuz at that this point she was like 44 and a half or like close to 45 and they were like, this is ridiculous.
We talked to you two years ago, you should have just done a cycle when we told you blah, blah blah. And they like railed in on her and she knew that she knew this going in. Right. I already had warned her that this was gonna be the story. So she was like, totally understand, I got it, don't worry about it. Just do the cycle <laugh>. And they ended up getting 23 eggs from her, which at her age is unheard of. They 17 fertilized to grade a embryos also unheard of. Wow. <laugh>. And then they, they, so this clinic doesn't test embryos even for older women. They believe in survival of the fittest. So they suggested to her to implant five or seven or something like a lot. Yeah. And she was like, I am a solo mom, I cannot have seven babies. Yeah. and they were like, don't worry, they're not all gonna take, even though that they're grade grade a embryos, we should just let nature do its thing. And sure enough, only one took and she ended up having that baby <laugh>.
Yeah. Yeah. So I feel like she is, she is a rockstar in so many ways, but I, I really believe that being able to modify our, to optimize all the different components of what can underlie fertility that goes a long ways in supporting, even if you are gonna do IVF, which for her was already a known choice since she's a solo mom. But it was like pre, even when it's pre-planned, there's this space to really like transform all of the underlying things to have the best IVF outcome. And she was like, Dr. A, like, I only have one. I have money for one cycle, this has to work <laugh>. And I was like, don't worry, we got this. Like, you are gonna be fine.
Yeah. I would love to know like, are there any themes that you see, like mindset wise? So I, I do a lot of study with German new medicine and like how our issues can show up in our tissues. And fibroids are interestingly, I mean, they're connected to like the inability or complications during pregnancies for some miscarriages history of them. For some it's having had an abortion or perhaps just not being able to get pregnant or not getting pregnant with a partner. And that's a generalization. And just like seeing that with like a variety, like constipation, I see a lot with like overwhelm mindset, constipation is what I call and just feeling heavy in our lives and like kinda like these whack-a-mole of symptoms and dis-ease in our lives can show up as disease in the body or I balance in the body. Right. And I, I didn't know if like is you've been doing this work for so long within fertility, are there anything in the mindset components that you see as being thematic for optimal fertility or the lack thereof?
So the overachiever mindset type A control freak is self-identified, of course. <Laugh> mm-hmm. <Affirmative> is very much like a mindset that underlies the fertility struggle. Right. So I feel like so much of our work when we're working with people is to help them relax, but that relax is not a like, oh, just go and go on vacation and relax. Like, sure, that's good. But really like that internal relax that comes from, I trust my body, I have faith that it knows what to do if I let go. And that's a, that's the deeper transformation that I often am looking for. And when that happens, I just know for sure that they're gonna get pregnant because that level of transformation is backed up by, hey, my hormones are in check my, like, I've done all the physical work, but I've also worked on transforming my mindset. And like, yeah, it's just so beautiful when it happens. It's like one of the most powerful transformations that I get to see in my practice
That's really cool. And something that, you know, is not really in a medical textbook, like to talk about that. And yet, and it kind of makes sense just from like even a stress perspective. Like I personally am a overachiever or like type A performed type A
Type B maybe B plus <laugh>. But just totally get how much like stress can be internally created from that. And so I imagine just like all the stress signals and inflammation coming from the brain to the body, to the ovaries, all that yeah. Play a big role.
Absolutely. And I, and I think like fertility almost feeds that side of us, right? So women that are going through IVF cycle, for example, just as an example, or even if they're trying on their own, they're going through like checking their temperatures every day, checking for cervical mucus, what is it like? And like micromanaging every piece of that journey mm-hmm. <Affirmative> or they're going through an IVF cycle and oh, today I have to like do this dose and oh my God, am I like producing too many eggs? And there's this constant like monitoring and needing for perfection when in reality, like if we can perfect all of the underlying things and I'm, I'm saying perfect, almost as like there's no perfection mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it's just like, is this the right thing for you? And finding those pivot points where we can focus on that ideal optimization in our own bodies and then relax the fertility stuff.
Like instead of trying to micromanage and, and like oversee that process. Just know and trust that your body knows what to do. Like when our hormones are in perfect harmony, I say this all the time, you'll, you see the temperature spike right after ovulation happens. So you'll see a spike in your basal body temperature. You'll see production of cervical mucus start two or three days before that spike that tells you to start having sex. And, and then usually if, if someone's being super observant, they'll see, oh, the cervical mucus thinned out on the day of ovulation and then it started to thicken again. So that's like a five or six day period. And the genius of our bodies sex drive goes way through the roof if all the hormones are in balance. So when all three of those things have clicked into place, you can relax, you can continue doing all of the things, but you don't have to micromanage it. You can just say like, Hey, I'm feeling super jazzed and sexy, let's go have some sex. Yeah. And trust that your body, when it's all aligned, is doing all of the things that it needs to do to ovulate and conceive and implant.
Yeah. The body's like an olive branch I feel at peace now or like when Yeah. That energy is there and listening. It's intuitive, I guess. Yes. That's what it sounds like. Yeah. Yeah. Well talking or leaning into like what are some of those optimization pieces beyond just like, you know, eating well and sleeping like, I mean, even more granular than that because I think, I mean as you mentioned, a lot of folks are already doing all the things or perhaps like aiming to do all the things and stressing out about doing all the things. Yeah. But what are some of the like simple game changers that you see kind of thematically being helpful pieces in that puzzle of wellness?
Yeah. yeah. So I guess the biggest themes I would say is there, we're in a culture of so many different diets, like there's just so many diets out there, right? And what I find is a couple of themes with diet one, you really have to customize it for your body. You could be eating the healthiest thing on the planet and your body doesn't like it. It's creating inflammation. That inflammation in your gut is going to impede implantation. So even if your egg and sperm meet, it's not working out because it's not implanting mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. so that inflammation will have a huge role to play in whether or not you're getting a positive pregnancy test and whether or not that embryo is sticking to turn into a healthy child. So that's the first thing. The second thing is there we're, I feel like we're in a culture of like anti-carbs.
There are so many diets that are like, no carbs. No carbs, no carbs. They're so bad for you. In reality, not eating carbs puts you in a place where your body is not producing progesterone, which is a major hormone for fertility. If you don't have progesterone, you can forget about having a baby. So when you cut out a major food group, like complex carbohydrates, and when I say carbs, I'm not talking about pasta and bread. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I'm talking about starchy vegetables, like sweet potatoes and squash.
Yeah, hardier vegetables we're talking about like unprocessed, brown rice, wild rice, black rice. We're talking about millet, quinoa and like you can be gluten free and still eat carbs, right? Like you can, you can do the varieties of diets that are out and still modify it to make sure that you're getting carbohydrates mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. and really realizing that cutting out that food group is gonna go nowhere for fertility. So that would be the second piece of dietary stuff. And then the third piece I find is people are really dehydrated, which sounds so basic, but good quality hydration will go a really long way in nourishing the sperm and the eggs. So if you don't have enough fluid, our bodies are 80% water, right? Like Yeah.
In water. So really having that the flow of blood is reliant on hydration, the flow of blood imports nutrients to the ovaries, which are then gonna feed the development of those follicles. And this is mirrored in men for sperm. So men are not that different. They need hydration too. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So really like getting the right nutrients to the organs that are gonna help support the growth of follicles, egg and sperm is gonna be vital. And then to make cervical fluid, you need hydration, right? Like, so that's important. And then I feel like a lot of people, what they're, what they're calling hydration is any fluid intake, your body doesn't process any fluid intake. It processes water, it needs pure water.
And then we can go to the level of is your water purified? Is, does it have a billion and one chemicals in it? Are you using a refrigerator filter or a Brita, which basically just takes out chlorine and sediment? Or are you, or you have a really high quality filter that is actually getting to remove all the crap that's in our water. And, and then making sure that there are minerals in your water. Cuz things like reverse osmosis though, it'll pull out everything will also pull out good healthy minerals. And minerals are vital to egg and sperms. So
Yeah. So there's a lot to water and like hydration and making sure that you're getting the right amount and the right quality of water to support the healthy production of all of the fluids that are needed in your body to support fertility.
Yeah. No, I mean, and those are, I mean, that's just baseline, you know, like as far as like diet and water and like there's like that, those are some great tips that are still, I think the little dial turners is what I call them. And I see a lot of the, those missing links as well and practice. Yeah. Would love to know, like, so I, I work a lot with women that have histories of disordered eating. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, call it an eating disorder. I would say 75% of women will have some sort of dieting in their history. Yeah. Or like body, like, you know, I just went to bootcamp every single day and ran myself into the ground for like X amount of years kind of thing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> whatever it is. And so perhaps have some irregular cycles, maybe don't have a cycle. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, what have you seen from a fertility perspective, perhaps even in a hope perspective? Like I've heard hope stories of women that haven't cycled for many years actually getting pregnant and maybe they were ovulating but not bleeding. The, you see a lot more than I do on the, in the fertility space, but have definitely seen women recover their periods too, just by really like stressed being the elephant in the room again mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. but yeah, I was just like, what you're,
I I think there's so many pieces there. One is like dieting will, dieting and over exercising is a stressor on the body. So a lot of these women are like, oh, I'm not stressed, but yet their body is like massively stressed, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, every time you're on a weird diet, you're limiting your body's sources of basic nutrition, carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Like, like the very, very basics. We're not even talking about the complex complicated stuff. Getting all three of the food groups is essential. Then we add, so that level of stress will over time, especially when it's done over years, that your, your adrenals took a toll from being on whatever those plans were or boot camps or whatever you were going through. That's gonna have some repair to do for your adrenals. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if your adrenals were taxed enough, there might be an impact on your thyroid.
And, and then most diets, if they're not well rounded and well balanced, shot the microbiome in the gut. So then you have neurotransmitter dysfunction, which then goes back and affects hormonal dysfunction. So serotonin and dopamine have an impact on estrogen and progesterone. So the gut microbiome being super important, the gut lining we talked about reflecting the uterine lining and whether or not implantation can happen. So there are a lot of pieces to repair, not that it has to take forever, but it really like making sure that all of the underlying components have really been healed and repaired before even start trying. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> is important. And a lot of times under nutrient, under nutrition or not eating enough will shut off the period over exercising will shut off the period. So getting the getting those levels restored can sometimes be all that people need to start cycling again.
And once you're cycling, then we can say, okay, like now what do the hormones look like? Measure the cycle day three hormones and then see if, if it's like not enough estrogen, too much estrogen, not enough progesterone too, too much cortisol, whatever. So you get more information once your cycle restarts. But it really has to start with all of the foundational things being restored and rebuilt to, to get to that point where fertility can happen. Yeah. Yeah. And it, it's, it's not impossible. It doesn't take forever most of the time. But being able to restore all those underlying things will often go a long ways in helping
Yeah. Kickstart. Do you have any strategies that you use with clients that are very hesitant to change lifestyle? Because I feel like with it's, we can know one thing we know like not exercising too much is good for us or for fertility. Yeah. and same thing with diets, like eating carbs is good for us, but like then there's kind of a fear component there. Like also the habit. Yeah. That of like, you know, well my community for example, I go to all these classes, fitness classes and I don't wanna give that up. So like, I always like to think of alternatives or like, what is the strategy to go, not necessarily cold turkey with it, but like how to ease into a new way of doing things. I don't know if there's anything that you suggest for women.
Yeah. It, it depends on how much time we have <laugh>. So if it's a 39 year old that's wanted to be pregnant since she was 35, they have very little time. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and her track is gonna potentially be more intense, but there might be a 30 year old that's like, Hey, I'm just like starting on this journey. I'm not super pressured to like have a baby today, but I know that I have all of these things that I wanna work on healing than absolutely the slow and steady path is better there. So figuring out where the person is is gonna make a huge difference in what their plan looks like. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> with someone who maybe has more luxury of time, I would say the focus is really gonna be slow and steady and making sure it's synced with the cycle. So for example, the high intensity exercises like boot camps and stuff like that, if you do that in your follicular phase, it's okay. But in your luteal phase you're really doing the restorative things. So really shifting how we think about the things that we're doing. It's not that it's bad always for anybody ever, it's more like what part of your cycle are you in? And then if you're not cycling, we can talk about how to phase it for them. Exactly. Yeah. When we don't know, then we just take the moon that's
Yeah, so New moon to full Moon is the follicular or cycle day one through 14. Okay. And then full moon to the next new moon will be the, the luteal phase.
I think that's great. Have I seen it like magically transform your hormones? Not really. Yeah. That would be my honest, honest to God. Like it's, I would love for it to work.
I would love for it to be as magical as like so many people purport, but at least in my practice, I feel like that is a good foundation. That it's, it's not a, oh, I don't need to do that anymore. It's more like, yes, let's do that as a foundation and then let's figure out what we build on top of it because that just may not be enough to get us to the goal that we want to get to.
Yeah. And it's really, I guess about optimizing the essential fatty acids that are helpful during those phases too. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, so mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah. I very, I've done it with a few patients and they, I think that more than anything it's like about intuitive, like it really gets you more connected to your body Yeah. And just like nourishing it, caring for it in a really unique way. So Yeah. Yeah. That can be fun.
Yeah. it's tough and it's tough to like break the patterns of mental training that you've had because whatever diet you put yourself on, you really bought into that diet. Right. You bought into like, like, oh, this is gonna be really good for me. That's why you did it. It wasn't like, oh, this is the, you know, latest and greatest and I just wanna do it for the heck of it. Yeah. If, if, if the food that you were eating was working for you, you probably wouldn't have gotten into it. So I think that it's important to remember that whatever diet you adopted, whatever philosophy you adopted was because you thought that it was gonna support your health in some way. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> when you're making a shift, it's important to understand why am I doing that shift? And we, we like call our, our diet, if it's a diet, it's more like a way of eating, I should say. There's no dietary restrictions, right. Outside of like, the
How Gut and Oral Health are Related with Trina Felber
lundi 28 novembre 2022 • Durée 35:31
Trina Felber is the Founder and Creator of Primal Life Organics, the original “Paleo Skincare” company. In this episode, Trina and Dr. Lauryn discuss the close relationship between oral and gut health. Trina shares the oral health products we should avoid and even recommends a few we should implement into our routine! Stay tuned!
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Highlights
5:45 - Trina talks about her background and what got her into the work she does
13:28 - Trina and Dr. Lauryn talk about ulterior motives that could influence the American Dental Association
15:29 - The relationship between our mouth and our gut health. They also discuss what bad breath really means…
19:05 - Trina shares her thoughts on “conventional” dental health products
29:49 - Dental health products that Trina recommends.
31:26 - How to learn more about Trina
31:44 - How to get a whiter smile
33:29 - A wellness hack Trina is excited about
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About Trina Felber
Founder and Creator of Primal Life Organics. Life roles include: wife, mother of three, dental health and natural skincare expert, Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist, Yogi, Paleo advocate, and educator. By nature, Trina loves creating products that heal, soothe, mend and repair the body and soul.
Trina is your Natural Health and Beauty Nurse, and she is improving the way you feed your skin. She is a 34+ year nurse with a Masters in Nursing Anesthesia. Trina is the international best-selling author of Beauty’s Dirty Secret, skincare and health related speaker/writer and her food-based skincare products have been featured on TV stations all over the country including ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox. She is dedicated to helping others realize the dangers in everyday cosmetics and skincare, and spreading awareness for the importance of using plant-base, nutritional skincare products.
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Deconstructing EBV (Epstein-Barr virus) with Dr. Kasia Kines
lundi 21 novembre 2022 • Durée 41:31
Dr. Kines is the CEO and Founder of Global Epstein-Barr Virus Institute. She is a leader in recovery therapy for chronic EBV, author, wellness expert, and a highly respected doctor of clinical nutrition, a graduate of the prestigious Bastyr University. In this episode, Dr. Kasia and Dr. Lauryn talk about all things EBV, what it is, what the symptoms are, how to live with it, and much much more!
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Highlights
4:04 - Dr. Kasia talks about her background and what inspired her to pursue the world of the Epstein-Barr virus.
9:30 - What is EBV?
11:11 - How do you get EBV?
12:03 - Studies that are correlating COVID and EBV
14:29 - Symptoms of EBV
16:48 - How to distinguish symptoms as EBV symptoms
18:45 - How accurate are EBV tests?
20:12 - How Dr. Kasia interprets EBV tests
22:01 - What causes EBV to be reactivated
23:56 - What to do if you have EBV
28:47 - The role of binders and detoxification
30:34 - Common misunderstandings
34:58 - How to learn more about Dr. Kasia
35:55 - A health hack that Dr. Kasia has recently learned
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About Dr. Kasia Kines
Dr. Kines is the CEO and Founder of Global Epstein-Barr Virus Institute. She is a leader in recovery therapy for chronic EBV, author, wellness expert, and a highly respected doctor of clinical nutrition, a graduate of the prestigious Bastyr University. Since 2005, Dr. Kines has built an international reputation as a functional nutritionist, from being sought after by Johns Hopkins University to her ground-breaking Amazon best-seller book The Epstein-Barr Virus Solution.
Replenishing the Nutrients your Medication Depletes with Sarah Morgan
lundi 14 novembre 2022 • Durée 35:09
Sarah Morgan is an author, inventor with several patents, and founder and CEO of Even. In this episode, Sarah helps us better understand SSRIs, medical foods, and how nutrition can help support our mental health. Stay tuned!
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Highlights
3:20 - Sarah talks about her background and what inspired her to help people. She also talks about the “pesky” side effects of medicine.
6:51 - How many women are on birth control?
7:33 - The usage of SSRIs in light of COVID.
9:30 - What exactly do SSRIs do to our bodies, and what is their efficacy?
15:51 - Sarah helps us understand serotonin
20:25 - How nutrients and SSRIs interact
24:25 - The ways Sarah goes about educating her clients
27:39 - What to look out for when sourcing your vitamins and nutrients
30:14 - How to learn more about Sarah and her company
31:16 - An “aha” moment in Sarah’s health journey
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About Sarah Morgan
Sarah Morgan is passionate about infusing nutrition into every aspect of human health. She has a Master’s degree in Clinical Nutrition, training in nutrigenomics and worked in clinical practice for 15 years. She is an author, inventor with several patents and founder and CEO of Even.
Kashif Khan is Chief Executive Officer and Founder of The DNA Company where personalized medicine is being pioneered through unique insights into the human genome. In this episode, Kashif shares his approach to genetic testing and how, with the proper information, we can learn more about our bodies and get ahead of illnesses!
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Highlights
3:03 - Kashif talks about his background and what got him interested in Genetics
5:22 - Information that Kashif learned about his genes that changed his life
7:51 - How a common clinical protocol doesn’t work for everyone
9:22 - Supplementation as related to methylation
11:39 - Kashif’s response to those that are skeptical of how useful genetic testing is
15:45 - Taking responsibility for the root causes of illness
19:52 - The role hormones can play in illnesses
22:43 - The role estrogen plays in men
24:04 - The profile of their genetic testing
24:59 - The types of genes that are the most actionable
26:38 - Kashif shares a personal example of how genetics can predict people’s behavior
29:28 - The diets of our ancestors, and how strictly we should stick to them
32:32 - Genetic testing in relation to the gut microbiome
35:00 - Where to learn more about Kashif
36:28 - Kashif’s epiphany
38:12 - A chronic wellness hack that Kashif is excited about
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About Kashif Khan
Kashif Khan is Chief Executive Officer and Founder of The DNA Company where personalized medicine is being pioneered through unique insights into the human genome. With the largest study of its kind globally, The DNA Company has developed a functional approach to genomic interpretation overlaying environment, nutrition and lifestyle on the genetic blueprint to create personalized and deterministic health outcomes.
Picky Eating Solutions with Jess Sherman
lundi 31 octobre 2022 • Durée 36:11
Jess Sherman is an international speaker and author, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® Practitioner and award winning Registered Holistic Nutritionist™, board certified in Practical Holistic Nutrition. In this episode, she talks about the roots of picky eating, her approach to helping patients, and much more!
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Highlights
3:17 - Jess talks about her background and what got her into helping resilient kids
8:04 - Jess talks about the granular approach she takes to analyzing a picky eater’s diet
10:04 - The roots of picky eating
13:52 - Creating a culture of nourishment in your family
16:21 - Working with teenagers
20:48 - A good approach to teaching picky eaters about nourishment
24:11 - Jess goes into specifics on how she helps her patients
27:33 - The importance of making sure a child’s support system is on the same page when it comes to their nutrition
29:55 - The importance of community for parents that are on this journey
32:20 - Where to learn more about Jess
34:04 - Some epiphanies Jess has learned as a health detective
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About Jess Sherman
Jess Sherman is an international speaker and author, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® Practitioner and award winning Registered Holistic Nutritionist™, board certified in Practical Holistic Nutrition. She is also a certified teacher and holds a masters degree in Education from The University of Toronto.
As a family health educator she has guided parents in at least 44 countries towards safe, natural and effective tools to improve the lives of their children with learning differences, anxiety, ADHD, autism and mood disorders.
Back when she was teaching high school, Jess became deeply concerned to learn that at least 60% of her students were on medication - either to help them learn, focus or stabilize their mood, or to help them sleep, poop or manage their allergies. When she discovered the profound impact of nutrition and stress on resilience she set her mind to helping the busy, frustrated, worried parents of these kids find natural, simple ways to help them thrive.
Parenting Do-Over with Dr. Marny Turvill - The Health Detective Podcast
lundi 24 octobre 2022 • Durée 29:11
Dr. Marny is a former Pediatrician who invented the Parenting Do-Over by living it. In this episode, Dr. Marny talks about the experiences that led her to develop the Parenting Do-Over and shares what a Do-Over looks like in practicality. She even goes over the 7 Key areas of transformation that she covers with her clients, so be sure to stick around!
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Highlights
0:37 - What inspired Marny to start parenting do-over
5:32 - What becoming a better parent looks like in practice
17:41 - Advice for parents that want to change the nutrition habits of their kids
26:25 - How to connect with Dr. Marny
27:15 - One of Marny’s epiphany’s on her own health journey
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About Dr. Marny Turvill
Dr. Marny is a former Pediatrician who invented the Parenting Do-Over by living it. When her children were very young, she suffered from Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, a debilitating illness that created many parenting moments that she wanted to "do over." For ten years she accumulated frustration, guilt, and sadness because the dreams she had for her life and her family seemed to be lost forever. Nothing she had learned in her medical training or in the best parenting resources was helping and her family was suffering tremendously.
In 2011, Marny finally found the first piece of the complex jigsaw puzzle that led her to fully recover her health and discover how to "unmess up" herself and her kids.
Dr. Marny has learned that all good parents unintentionally mess up their kids when they haven’t dealt with their own baggage across the seven key areas of life. Her mission is to eliminate this generational cycle of trauma so that parents and their kids thrive in all aspects of life, and kids enter adulthood healthy, capable, and ready to shine in their unique purpose. Through her Functional Medicine practice and her Parenting Do-Over coaching Dr. Marny helps her clients to identify the root causes of the baggage that can cause years, decades or even a lifetime of dysfunction and discontent and guides them to release their baggage and create a life they love.
The Wild West of the Thyroid with Tiffany Flaten - The Health Detective Podcast
lundi 17 octobre 2022 • Durée 40:38
Tiffany Flaten, M.Ed., MSN, CNS, and wellness coach and is a thyroid expert in nutrition. In this episode of the Health Detective Podcast, Tiffany and Dr. Lauryn explore the Wild West of the thyroid, discussing symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of this widespread epidemic.
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Highlights
4:08 - Tiffany talks about how her own thyroid conditions led her to her to study nutrition and help others
8:47 - Some hallmarks symptoms of thyroid conditions.
11:45 - The importance of the thyroid
14:21 - The unfortunate lack of thoroughness when diagnosing thyroid conditions.
17:59 - Causes of thyroid conditions
20:44 - The connection between pregnancy and Hashimoto’s disease.
23:28 - Common causes of stress that Tiffany sees in the people she works with.
26:24 - The type of people that tend to suffer from thyroid conditions
28:38 - How to start healing your thyroid condition
31:33 - The nutrients linked to thyroid health
34:57 - Foods that tend to cause flair ups
36:29 - How to find out more about Tiffany and her work
37:25 - A cool health insight
38:44 - A chronic wellness hack
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About Tiffany Flaten
Tiffany Flaten, M.Ed., MSN, CNS and wellness coach and is a thyroid expert in nutrition. As founder of Rock Bottom Wellness and Tiffany Flaten Health, LLC, Tiffany helps thyroid patients improve their symptoms through proper nutrition education. She’s helped hundreds of women and men get to the root cause, find a way up from rock bottom, be their own best advocate, and shortcut the path to an amazing life. Rock Bottom Thyroid Treatment: An 8-Week Thyroid Diet for People with “Normal” Thyroid Test Results to Thrive, Not Just Survive is Tiffany’s first book. Meet others on the journey to better thyroid health at. Book a free Thyroid Breakthrough Session with Tiffany at to get a personalized plan for the next leg of your thyroid journey.
Holistic Parenting with Dr. Madiha Saeed - The Health Detective Podcast
lundi 10 octobre 2022 • Durée 52:47
Madiha Saeed, MD, also known as HolisticMom, MD on social media, is a practicing board-certified family physician in the USA, an international speaker, and a best-selling author. In this episode, Dr. Saeed shares the methods and benefits of holistic parenting. If you’re a parent or you know a parent, you don’t want to miss this one!
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Highlights
6:02 - Madiha talks about how a horrific incident with one of her children led her to the path of integrative holistic functional medicine.
12:15 - The difficulty of parenting when you deal with chronic fatigue
15:12 - The importance of sleep
17:22 - How to help babies and young children that don’t sleep through the night
22:34 - What does Holistic Parenting mean?
27:08 - How to deal with the nuances of children’s picky eating and ultimately, teach them healthy nutrition habits
32:50 - Her kids are able to make educated decisions because of their nutritional understanding
36:07 - The importance of the mind-body connection, especially in kids
40:18 - The go-to meals and ingredients that Madiah always has in her kitchen
47:28 - Madiha shares some of her favorite wellness hacks
49:42 - Madiha talks about her book!
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About Dr. Madiha
Madiha Saeed, MD, also known as HolisticMom, MD on social media, is a practicing board certified family physician in the USA, international speaker and a best-selling author. Her best-selling book The Holistic Rx: Your Guide to Healing Chronic Inflammation and Disease, a functional medicine children’s book series, Adam’s Healing Adventures (one of Dr Mark Hyman’s favorite pics), The Pandemic Prescription: Restoring Hope from the Quran, Sunnah and Science, The Quranic Prescription: Unlocking the Secrets of Optimal Health, and The Holistic Rx for Kids: Parenting Healthy Brains and Bodies in a Changing World empowering the world towards healthier living.
Harnessing the Power of Anxiety with Dr. Chloe Carmichael - The Health Detective Podcast
lundi 3 octobre 2022 • Durée 41:00
Dr. Chloe Carmichael, Ph.D, is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, consultant, and much more! She has been featured as an expert on VH1, Inside Edition, ABC Nightline, and other television; and has been quoted in the New York Times, Forbes, Vanity Fair, Shape, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, and other print media. Today, Dr. Chloe shares ways in which we can benefit from our anxiety and not just see it in a negative light. She also shares a few techniques from her book on how to harness the power of anxiety, so stay tuned!
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Highlights
4:19 - How teaching yoga inspired Dr. Chloe to get a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, which eventually led to calls from major media outlets and a book deal.
6:40 What does it mean to harness the power of anxiety?
9:09 State anxiety vs. Trait anxiety.
11:41 How the pandemic has impacted the broader public’s anxiety levels
13:56 How Dr. Chloe has been sharing this information with the public and the corporate world’s attitude towards the conversation.
15:36 Dr. Chloe shares a few of the nine techniques that we can use to harness the power of our anxiety.
22:00 What is “Worry Time”?
26:36 The HUGE relationship between our body and mind.
27:54 Is generational trauma real?
31:03 Dr. Chloe discusses her technique, “Thought Replacement”.
39:15 How to connect with Dr. Chloe!
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About Dr. Chloe
Dr. Chloe Carmichael, Ph.D, is a licensed clinical psychologist, known as Dr. Chloe. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Long Island University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, with a bachelor’s degree and departmental honors in psychology from Columbia University in New York. Her practice in New York City employs multiple therapists to serve high-functioning business executives, people in the arts, and everyday people seeking support with personal or professional goals.
Well, hello, Health Detectives. Just another day here at the office, busy quieting the noise in the health, food, and fitness world and flipping both conventional health and holistic wisdom upside down. I'm your host, Dr. Lauryn, former TV news journalist gone health detective and functional medicine expert by way of my own 26-year-old long battle with different chronic illnesses spent seeing over 50 different doctors and trying countless diets, and Dr. Google searches under the sun that could not help until I figured out how to solve the underlying health mysteries from the inside out with an approach I now help hundreds of clients worldwide use today in my virtual functional medicine practice. Something I've been doing even before the pandemic made Zoom calls and yoga pants wearing a thing. And today, I also love helping you solve your greatest health mysteries and challenges on the show. Talking problems like dental health issues, so things like cavities or if you're like me in my former life, a lot of tartar and build up on your teeth or perhaps even bad breath.
So much of our own health is based in our mouth, and this is an insight I didn't really fully, quite grasp until my own dental issues improved. And that's when I improved a lot of my own lifestyle issues as well. So for years, as long as I can remember, I had a lot of tartar and buildup on my teeth. Every time I'd go to the dentist, it would just be like caked on there. And for whatever reason, I didn't eat a lot of sugar at all, especially during my adult life and my dieting days. And I thought I lived a pretty healthy lifestyle. Well, come to find out, a lot of our mouth health or oral health is a byproduct of our gut health and vice versa. A lot of our gut health is derived from our oral health. So suffice it to say, I had gut issues for most of my life, and I actually had a lot of recurrent SIBO, candida, and just overgrowth, bacterial overgrowth, and dysbiosis in my twenties adult life.
And I never really correlated that with my oral health until I began to address my gut help. As my gut improved, I cleared up SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. I even discovered I was living in mold at a time and got out of the mold and just cured some of the systemic fungal issues in my body. My oral health dramatically improved, and today I have very little tartar on my teeth and very rarely feel like, you know, I need to go to the dentist. Meaning like I used to feel like I needed a cleaning like three or four times a year just because it was so bad. And all that to say is like health is really an inside job. Your total body health is very much connected to your oral health, and your oral health is a big window to what's going on in your gut health.
Today I'm so excited to have Trina Felber in the house, who is a registered nurse by background, gone primal life organics skincare founder, and now she does body care as well. So all things care, including dental care products and the beginnings of her company, really began in her pregnancy when she discovered that her high-end skincare products were loaded with tons of toxic ingredients that could hurt her and her growing baby. Why didn't these products carry warning labels, she wondered? And worse off, why hadn't she ever read these labels before? All that led her to found the company Private Life Organics, which is the first paleo skincare branded company on the market for over 10 years. And since that time, she's also dove into the world of dental health, and on today's episode, we are nerding out on all things the mouth and giving you a mouth makeover, so to speak.
So I really think today's episode will bless you a ton if you have been using conventional products in your mouth for quite some time. So think about Colgate or whatever the other, I forget all the names of the products now because I really do use all-natural ingredients, but this episode will rock your world if you are looking to uplevel your health in an even mightier way. So without further ado, we'll get to the show. If you're liking the show, please don't hesitate to leave a review and click the five stars button in the iTunes app. I absolutely love and appreciate hearing from you, and it helps us cultivate more health detectives just like you in the world. And, of course, if you need any help in your own health journey, don't hesitate to reach out. I equally love hearing from you on my website, drlauryn.com, and helping you create your own healing in your life and helping you heal your root, too, and our amazing functional medicine-based programs over there, helping people worldwide change how they look, move, feel, and think. Okay, that's all. Let's get to the show.
Well, Trina, so excited to have you in the house talking all about primal life dental health, really oral health, which is a topic I don't think is talked about enough and a health mystery out there as far as there's just a wild west. But before we dive in, I would love it if you could just give us a little bit of background about who you are and what got you doing this work that you are doing in the world.
I'm a registered nurse. I've been a nurse, oh gosh, since I think 1992. And then, I graduated in 2007 with a master's in anesthesia. So I really have a good grasp of internal health, and I've never been someone who's really loved western medicine and following like one pill treats a, you know, a symptom, and I've never been down that road. So to make a long story short, I've always been a very natural, very healthy person. And I started primal life organics mainly because I couldn't find healthy products. I couldn't find products that weren't loaded with toxins. I discovered that skincare, which I didn't realize, skin and dental care products are just loaded with cancer-causing ingredients. They cause allergies, they're neurological damage, they, they cause so many different kinds of problems. And when you talk about root causes, we have all these mystery things happening, mystery illnesses, and symptoms that we can't explain.
We feel like we should be healthy, but something's just not right. And sometimes it goes down to the products and the things that you're using on your body. And when you stop and realize that most products contain 10 to 20 toxins, you can really become toxic overload very, very easily. And even if those products themselves aren't directly causing injury, they're definitely causing an immune response, which then causes a cascade of other issues. Some of the problems with dental is the nitric oxide production. If you're using the wrong products, you're not gonna be producing nitric oxide because the nitric oxide has to be your balance inside your mouth of your microbiome has to be good as well as your gut in order for nitric oxide to be produced. However, to get to my dental story, my two-year-old daughter had a molar come in, and I had been making skincare products for probably two to three years at this point.
Hadn't dabbled in dental, just was working on skin care. And my daughter, at the age of two, had a molar popup. The molar, we were brushing it one night, and my husband's like, what is that? And I take a look at it, and it looked like it had a cavity. So we took her to the dentist. The dentist took one look at the tooth, and we said, yes, that's a natural cavity. It happened in utero during development. Most likely, I had a bacterial wash, I had a viral flood or some fever, or some stressor happened in my body the exact moment that tooth was being developed. And so a natural cavity happened. So he said it's a pretty significant defect. We'll treat it like a cavity, we'll just put a temporary filling in it because she's two. And the filling will probably last about two to three months, and every time the filling falls out, we'll just decide if we put another filling in or if we just pulled a tooth.
He suspected that the tooth would need to be pulled within a year. And my knowledge of tooth meridians, I knew that every tooth in the body is connected to an organ during development. And that connection goes both ways. Your tooth communicates to the organ, the organ communicates to the tooth. And when that is severed, such as in root canals and things like that, that can never be reestablished, that that connection's gone. So I didn't want to lose her tooth. So when I was leaving the dentist's office, I'll never forget he knew I was concerned. He said, don't worry, mom, we put a temporary filling in it now. We just hope for the best. And I thought, there is no way this mama is hoping for the best. So I started doing my research. I just thought you know what, I'm just gonna see what it would take if you can heal a cavity or make it more healthy or prevent it from getting worse.
And I was astounded to find out that if I kept using the products that I was using, which really was a natural toothpaste at the time, I was not gonna do any good for that tooth. That tooth would be pulled in a year. It didn't have any minerals in it. It wasn't alkaline to support the microbiome and remineralization process, and it wasn't doing anything to help her teeth stay healthy. So I found Dr. Weston A. Price, I discovered his research, and he's a dentist from the early 1900s. If anyone's not familiar with him, he was way before his time he discovered the link between sugar and cavities and really wanted the ADA to omit sugar in the diet. And there were two sides, of course. His side who said sugar causes cavities we need to get rid of it. And the other side that said, oh no, sugar's not bad, we need cavities cuz we need, we need fillings to fill otherwise, where's our business? And the ADA went with the side that said sugar's, okay, we need cavities. And Dr. Weston A. Price basically did his research, but it was very hush-hush. Nobody knew about it. So I was astounded. So I thought, you know what? I wanna go with this guy. I wanna figure out what he found. And so what I discovered through his research was there are three things that the mouth needs in dental products in order to stay healthy, support your microbiome and remineralize your teeth. Remineralization is a natural process. However, because of our diet and our dental products, we are destroying the body's natural capability to remineralize the teeth ending up with cavities. That then results in inflammation, not just inside the mouth but internally, then leads to all the other health issues like dysbiosis in the gut, and the microbiome in the gut.
You have to realize that you're swallowing everything inside your mouth. If it's bad bacteria, you're swallowing it into your gut, heart disease, diabetes, preterm labor, all those things. So to make a short, long story short, I created my dirty mouth tooth powder as my solution to dental issues. And my goal was to get her tooth to one year and one day. If I could get that tooth past that one-year point, I knew I was doing a good job. And I'll tell you that tooth, the end of the story, is amazing. We brushed with dirty mouth tooth powder, she brushed with it as soon as I made it. That tooth fell out naturally at the age of 12, and the original filling that was only supposed to last two months was in place, never needed another filling, never needed any dental work. And that the enamel, her enamel, grew over the filling to protect it so bacteria couldn't invade underneath the actual filling. So that's the story. That's how I got into dental health.
Oh yeah. My kids have never had any cavities. They've, you know, and I grew up eating sugar, of course, you know, I'm in my fifties, grew up eating sugar, and I have a mouthful of metal, or I'm, you know, replace the metal now with the better stuff. But, so you know, they don't eat much sugar, but they definitely have brushed with the right things.
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. Yeah. That's amazing. And way to go, mom <laugh> too, and kind of started a new leg of your business too. Something that you said that really was very eye-opening is like, you know, Weston A. Price went one way, and then basically the dental industry, the ADA is that what American Dental Association? Goes another way. And that really they're in business, and they make a lot of money in products, off products that like, you know, are for cavities and for bad dental health. So it would make sense if, like, the diet's not really being talked about and or just like actually healing the mouth in that industry.
What's interesting is, and I know quite a few biological dentists, and they all say the same thing, that you know that during dental school, they're basically taught that they need the cavities, they need, they need to do the procedures to able to sustain their business, which is totally false. That's totally false because if you have a healthy mouth, you don't need to spend your time doing procedures. You just have your dental hygienist doing all your cleanings, and you have more free time as a dentist, and your patients are happier, and they're healthier. It's interesting one of the biological dentists told me that really dentists should be the ones diagnosing your risk of heart disease related to the condition of your gums and the amount of plaque you have. And I was astounded. I don't know of any dentist that is telling their patient you're at risk of heart disease. We need to get this cleared up. So a biological dentist is usually what I recommend when I, you know, when customers ask me, you know, what do we do about our dentist? I usually recommend going to a biological dentist because they have a better understanding of the mouth, the healthy microbiome, and the products to avoid, and what to use inside the mouth to keep it healthy.
Yeah, that's what I transitioned personally to over the past couple of years and never have had cavities but always had a lot of tartar in my mouth, and come to find out, a lot of times our gut, I mean our mouth reflects actually the small intestine, the bacteria, the same bacteria in the small intestine. And I had lived in mold unbeknownst to me for several years and also had recurrent SIBO candida problems because of it. And as I like healed from those things and got out of the mold healed the SIBO, like the tartar in my mouth is like really diminished. It's like normal again, not overly built up. And so I just love how the mouth is really a gateway to our internal.
Yeah, it's that relationship between the microbiome, and it's, you know, what came first, the chicken or the egg, the bad bacteria inside the mouth, did that spark the SIBO? Because really the bad bacteria inside the mouth, if you think about it in utero, a baby doesn't really have any microbiome. They don't really have an immune system. It's not until they're delivered through the birth canal. And the birth canal is where they get the bacteria from the mom's vagina in their nose and their mouth. So with the first breath, they inhale good bacteria, it's supposed to be good, and they swallow with the first swallow microbiome as well. And that is what starts their immune system. This is why vaginal delivery babies have a stronger immune system, and this is why cesareans don't, and if they do sometimes they'll do a vaginal swab into the nose and the mouth of babies that are C-sections.
So they can't start the immune system. But I always say that like your mouth, what's inside your mouth, it's like honey, when you're eating local honey, you're getting the flavor of the environment, the things in that environment, same thing inside your mouth. Inside your mouth is where viruses and bacteria should stop because your saliva has properties in it that are antimicrobial, antibacterial, antiviral. And so, really, most bacteria and most viruses and fungus is supposed to be killed inside the mouth. The problem is, is our mouth is so acidic because the products that we're using and the foods that we're eating that we render our saliva ineffective. So then you swallow these live creatures, and then now you end up with a gut dysbiosis that's either started from inside your mouth or gets worse because now your bacteria since your gut can't protect you against that either.
So it's just really interesting, and the whole phenomenon of the nitric oxide, nitric oxide is, you know, it helps your immune, it's very immune supportive. It's vasodilatory, and the bacteria inside of the mouth and the bacteria and the gut have to be healthy for nitric oxide to be produced. If one of those is not right and not good, then nitric oxide production is greatly diminished and your higher risk of a lot of things, including impotence for both men and women, you know, sexual dysfunction and heart disease and not sleeping as well, immune compromised. Bad breath. When I talk to people, and even as I before I started this company and got into the dental health, I just thought bad breath was a factor of life. I thought that it was normal and waking up with bad breath and bad breath, midday chewing gum, I thought it was just normal.
And it's the very first sign that there's an imbalance in the bacteria inside your mouth. Bad breath is not normal, and you should not wake up with bad breath. The only time you really should have a stale taste in your mouth is when you're slightly dehydrated from either activities that you're doing or even talking. I know a lot of times when I do podcasts, or I speak on stage, my mouth will get a little foul, and it's just because I'm slightly dehydrated from talking so much. The bad breath is the very first sign that you have a problem, and if you don't fix it, that's when you're gonna end up with cavities, gum disease, and then the inflammation of both of those things causes internal inflammation.
So thinking about products, there is a wild west of products. There are also a lot of like "natural" products and or perhaps some greenwashing that happens always in the holistic industry. But can you just kind of break down like what about conventional products is bad? Like fluoride gets a lot of talks, for example.
Yeah, fluoride, I won't even go into mainly because most people understand to some point it's not healthy for you, it's not healthy for your teeth that your, you were not born with fluoride in your body unless your mother had excess fluoride in her body. So fluoride actually replaces your normal healthy minerals in your teeth and in your bones. So, unfortunately, an overdose or too much fluoride can cause problems with bone, not just teeth, and actually weakens the teeth. Then, the actual research on fluoride; the reason everyone thinks fluoride is so good is because the initial research that they did years and years ago, it might have been in the 1920s the initial research showed that it strengthened the enamel. What they didn't tell you, and they buried, is that that research, they continued it and that ultimately showed that the fluoride weakened the teeth in the enamel, and they buried that so no one would know.
But that is the final result was fluoride was not good for your teeth and your overall health. So what to avoid, I pretty much tell people, I'd rather you understand what to look for because, unfortunately, most products out there contain all the wrong things or they don't contain the three things that are essential for good dental health. So obviously, you wanna avoid things that are overkill for the bacteria, and that would be alcohol. So mouthwash, most mouthwashes, I'd probably say about 95% of the mouthwashes on the market, are out of the picture. You should just dump it down the toilet, dispose of it, don't use it. It's doing more harm than good because it's killing not just the bad bacteria but all of your good bacteria. Your good bacteria is what is gonna create the alkaline environment to remineralize your teeth. It's also going to help prevent viruses and bacteria from thriving because viruses and bacteria like an acidic environment.
So alcohol's out because it kills your good bacteria as well as the bad. Anything like sodium lauryl sulfate, triclosan. Triclosan is a bad one. They've studied triclosan, triclosan is in toothpaste, it's in mouthwashes. Triclosan, you will swallow regardless of what you believe. Mouthwash and toothpaste does get swallowed to some degree. No matter how careful you are, you will swallow, and they've discovered that triclosan because it's an antibiotic, it's like it's a very potent antibiotic. It destroys the gut bacteria. So you end up with a dysbiosis in the gut, which really started inside the mouth because you swallowed it. The problem is, what I like to say is if you're brushing with something that has triclosan or SLS or alcohol or peroxide in it, it's like taking an antibiotic twice a day for life. And if you know what antibiotics do to your gut microbiome, it does the exact same thing for your mouth, and let's just call a spade a spade.
Your gut starts inside your mouth. So I always like to tell people that there's no difference between that long tube. The whole tube that goes from your lips all the way to your tail is your gut, it's your digestive system, and it starts inside your mouth. We have to stop thinking that our gut starts inside our small intestine because if we don't stop that thinking, then we've totally missed the first 12 to 14 inches of our digestive system. And that is one of the most important parts because it's linked to internal health as well. So I guess going back, those are the key things I would say to avoid if you're buying one of the C products because most of the conventional products, believe it or not, start with a C I would say you just ditch them. I haven't seen one that is going to actually promote the health of your teeth.
Some of them may not do as much harm because they try to make them more natural. However, when you understand what the goal inside your mouth really is, you'll understand that those products aren't doing anything to promote health. They're just doing their job of cleaning your teeth, and that's really not the function of brushing your teeth. The point of brushing your teeth isn't to clean your teeth because your saliva really if your mouth is healthy, your saliva and your chewing motion and your food itself, the food that you're eating, if you're eating healthy food like carrots and the crunchy stuff at the end of your meal, the combination of all of those are supposed to actually help clean your teeth. So really, the reason to brush your teeth is threefold. And this is really where it links to what is important in your dental products.
So when I was doing my research with Dr. Weston A. Price, the three takeaways I had is that the product has to be alkaline, your mouth has to live primarily alkaline, the foods that you eat. Most of the foods are acidic by nature. So that's the meats that we eat. Coffee most of the drinks that we drink are acidic. Dental products are acidic as well. The more acidic those are, the more the bad bacteria can grow. The more acidic your mouth is, the less your saliva can protect you. And your saliva really is your lifeblood of your body. It's really the, I always say it's the secretion no one's talking about. Your saliva is very important in nitric oxide production. It's important in your immune system. Like I said, it, it has antimicrobial properties to it. It contains the minerals from your body. The only way to naturally remineralize your teeth is through your saliva, but your body, your saliva, and your mouth has to be alkaline.
Your saliva's neutral. It wasn't meant to neutralize a super acidic environment because our foods back in the day, our ancestors, they weren't eating sugar all the time. They weren't eating processed foods that were acidic. They were eating healthy vegetables and meats, and their saliva could function because their mouth wasn't super acidic. It was more of a neutral to slightly alkaline or acidic so that they're, their saliva could semi-neutralize it and then remineralize their teeth. So you really want something that's alkaline. What signifies that it's alkaline? The best ingredient is baking soda. Baking soda in your dental products will indicate that it is an alkaline product and that, therefore, will support the microbiome and remineralization. The second thing that it needs is it needs to have minerals. Without minerals, you will not necessarily remineralize your teeth enough to prevent sensitivities or cavities. Mainly because of all the gut issues.
Like you mentioned, you had SIBO. A lot of people have SIBO, candida, they don't even know it. That leads to malabsorption syndrome. So you're, you might be taking supplements, you might be eating healthy food, but you're not absorbing those minerals. Your saliva then becomes depleted. This is why pregnant women end up with a cavity after they deliver their baby. Because baby takes the minerals from mom to create their own teeth and bone, mom becomes mineral depleted even though she's taking supplements. And at nine months of being mineral depleted, your teeth suffer because your saliva is the weak point. Like your body is going to keep the minerals where they need them the most, and your saliva doesn't need them as much, it's not as imperative. So your saliva becomes mineral deficient, which means you end up not being able to remineralize the, the minerals that you're losing. Every time you eat or drink something that's acidic,
the possibility of losing a mineral from your enamel is high because, during an acidic environment is when minerals leave. It's during the alkaline environment and or an alkaline food or alkaline toothpaste or powder. That's when those minerals go back in. But the key is while it's alkaline, the mineral has to be present, and it's a lock and key. You can't replace a magnesium mineral with calcium. So many dental products contain calcium and phosphorus cuz that's the main, that's like your hydroxyapatite, that's the main minerals of your enamel. However, your enamel also contain silica, manganese, and other minerals. And if, if you lose a manganese, you can't replace it with a calcium. It's a locking key. So that's why one of the main things I love for mineralization in dental products is clay. Clay has a significant amount of minerals, not just calcium and phosphorus.
It contains all the minerals in your enamel. So I always tell people to look for hydroxyapatites very important. We just added it to our dirty mouth. Tooth powder makes a big difference. But also the clay, we blend three different clays because the blend of three different clays is anti-inflammatory but also contains all the minerals that hydroxyapatite doesn't contain. And then the last component that's really important for keeping your mouth healthy is that you have to have something that's gonna detox the tissues of your mouth, the tissues I'm talking about like your gum tissue, but also your tongue, your palate, your soft tissue of your inside, your mouth. Your mouth is dirty. That's why I love calling my toothpowder dirty mouth. Not because your mouth is so dirty, but also because we use dirt or clay to actually cleanse your dirty mouth and then actually make it cleaner and make your teeth stronger.
Clay binds to toxins. So heavy metals, a great portal of entry of heavy metals is through your gum tissue, believe it or not. Heavy metals are in a lot of things that we are not aware of, including water. And water is a component of most dental products. It's a component of a lot of foods that we eat, and a lot of times, it's just tap water, or I call it crap water, and heavy metal is found in crap water. So we are exposed to heavy metals. Even if you're brushing with a toothpaste that uses tap water and the heavy metals can get into your gum tissue, your soft tissue of your mouth, and then work its way into your vascular system because your gums and your mouth is highly vascular. By brushing with a clay-based toothpowder or toothpaste, the clay is gonna bind to those heavy metals very strongly and remove them very quickly. So that's why I say detoxing your tissues of your mouth is gonna reduce the inflammation, help reduce gum disease that's gonna help your gums actually heal or regenerate and help keep your teeth healthy.
Wow, thank you for all of that. That's a lot of good little nuggets there that we can look for in our products and just helps cut through a lot of the weeds and seems like there's a lot of weeds out there, <laugh>,
There's a lot of weeds out there. And what I did, Lauryn, just so you know and your readers know, your listeners know, I put together a dental detox kit, and it contains my dirty mouth tooth powder on morning formula and a nighttime formula. And I also included everything else you need. It's a 60-day supply of tooth powder, and you get a bamboo toothbrush that has activated charcoal bristles. Sustainability, eco-friendly is my mission. So everything that I create is very eco-friendly. It's sustainable. It also contains a copper tongue scraper. If you take care of your copper tongue scraper, you'll have it for life. You'll never need to replace it. You have a gum serum. So this replaces mouthwash. It actually does so much more than mouthwash and helps to keep your gums healthy and fresh in your breath, supporting the microbiome.
And you also get dental floss. The dental floss is a dental pick. It's made from corn starch, so it is completely biodegradable. The string is bamboo, so it's sustainable and eco-friendly, and then it's got charcoal infiltrated into it. So it will help with detoxing between your gums as you're brushing or as you're flossing. And all of these, I'll give you the link because special for you and your listeners. They can get it at a special price, and especially if you order more than one kit like if you have a husband or a wife or children or family members, you can order more in the more of the kits that you order, the bigger that you save.
Primallifeorganics.Com is our website, and then we do a lot on Instagram. I have tons of videos on YouTube about dental health and skincare and all sorts of things. Facebook as well. We're on Facebook as well.
The very first paleo skincare. I just wanna mention I know we're short on time. I wanna mention, too, that I created, I know most people want a whiter smile. You will get a much whiter smile just by switching to a clay base that's gonna help erase the stains off your teeth and rebuild your enamel. But I developed a natural teeth winder that uses both red and blue LED lights to help reduce the bad bacteria inside the mouth and help increase blood flow for the gum tissue and reduce inflammation. And then, I created the gel that goes in it or comes with it is a peroxide-free gel that contains everything that I talked about. So it's kind of like on the toothpaste, on steroids, it's the gel has the, it's alkaline, it has the minerals in it, it's an olive oil base, so it's very soothing to the gum tissue and it has essential oils that help support the gums.
And using that with the LED lights will help not just whiten your smile, but help with your breath, help with reducing inflammation, but also it's gonna help build your confidence and do it in a natural way. So I just wanna let you know that because I also have an offer for anyone that is interested through a link that you give. So just make sure you click through the links that Dr. Lauryn has mm-hmm. <Affirmative> because you get a 60%, it's more than 60%, it's almost 70% off the LED kit, and then you get the special pricing on the detox kits as well.
Amazing. I already know some folks that will benefit from that. So thank you so much, and yeah, thanks for helping us come to solve some health mysteries. One question for you would just be, what is like one wellness hack you've been into lately and for your own health?
For my own health, gosh, I do a lot of things. So I guess I have to go with using the light therapy is the wellness hack. And I like to say it's the LED for my mouth because I like to like using red light therapy for your skin. A lot of people use that because they can see the difference in, in the red light. But the hack for me is putting it inside the mouth because I always say when you, when you have a dark, damp space, things always go wrong. Like until you turn the lights on, you never know what's really happening. And that's when the bacteria and the virus and all the bad stuff, the fungus, can grow. But putting the light on, turning the light on opens your eyes and cleans it out. And that's what LED light does inside the mouth. So I do my LED light, I do it probably four days a week, and my smile is, I mean, I always get compliments on how, how white my teeth are and how my smile is, and that really builds your confidence. It totally builds confidence.
Yeah, you know what, I'll send you one so that you can try it. So when we're done with this, just send me your address if I don't have it. And I'll send it to you so you can let your listeners know exactly what you think.
Dr. Kines has developed an effective proprietary evidence-based methodology to EBV recovery and successful EBV Recovery Program for those suffering from EBV and also trains other practitioners in her methodology in Clinician EBV Training and Certification Program and EBV Practitioner Workshop.
Dr. Kines is a passionate advocate for debunking common misinformation about EBV in medical community and lectures on this topic extensively. She is on a mission to bring the truth about EBV and solution to the world globally, so no one needs to suffer needlessly from this misunderstood virus and its complications. She lives with her husband and their companion animals on San Juan Island, WA.
Welcome to the Health Detective Podcast, a show dedicated to quieting the noise in the health, food, and fitness world. I'm your host, Dr. Lauryn, a former TV news journalist and chronic illness patient gone health detective with a master's in Functional Medicine, Nutrition, and my doctorate in occupational therapy, bringing you over 20 years of clinical and personal experience helping patients radically take their health back into their own hands. On this show, we have real conversations with a variety of interesting guests who are all a little bit of a health detective in their own way. Like today's guest, Dr. Kasia Kines, an EBV or Epstein-Barr virus expert and founder of the Global Epstein-Barr Virus Institute. She's the leader in recovery therapy for chronic EBV, an author, a wellness expert, and a highly respected doctor of clinical nutrition from the prestigious Bastyr University. Since 2005, Dr. Kines has built an international reputation as a functional nutritionist, from being sought after by Johns Hopkins University to her groundbreaking Amazon bestseller book, the Epstein-Barr Bar Virus Solution. Dr. Kines has developed an effective proprietary evidence-based methodology for EBV recovery, and this episode is power packed and full of juicy information on understanding all things EBV, which is something that at least 90% of the population has been exposed to at some time, believe it or not. So if you're ever familiar with the mono virus, maybe during college or high school, even the kissing disease is what it may be known as. You have been exposed to the Epstein-Barr virus. And while most many folks will recover from this virus and have antibodies for life, meaning like they have remnants of the virus in their body, but it's no longer an active infection, an unprecedented amount of people actually will have chronic EBV because the virus was never fully resolved, or it's been dormant, and it becomes reactivated when exposed to stressors, especially stressors in our environment.
Things like mold to our diet can definitely impact our flares, so to speak. And EBV, as we discussed today on the episode. So if you've ever wondered about what this EBV thing is about, or you may have even heard, uh, that some people have things like viruses, what is a virus? Um, how can it become reactivated, et cetera? How does it impact things like your energy to, your metabolism, to your brain function? Then you're not gonna wanna miss today's episode. Now, before we dive in if you're liking the show, please click the five stars button and leave a review in your podcast app. I absolutely love and appreciate hearing from you, and it helps us cultivate more health detectives just like you. And, of course, if you need help in your own health journey, don't hesitate to reach out. I equally love hearing from you on my website, drlauryn.com, and helping you heal your root in our amazing functional medicine-based programs over there, helping individuals worldwide change how they look, move, feel, and think. Okay, that's all, folks. Let's get to today's show.
Dr. Kasia, I'm so excited to have you in the house to talk about a very wild west topic, EBV, that I think a lot of folks, you, you know, better than I, um, have touched before in their lives at some point and could be an underlying root cause of why all the things are not working, and I'm sure you get that a lot from your patients that you serve. But before we dive in, give us a little bit of background about what got you doing this work you are doing in the world that's near and dear to your heart.
Oh, okay. Sure. Uh, and thank you for having me here. I'm really delighted to support your community. I think I'm just like you, you know, um, a result of a journey. And so as long as you are open and listening and watching, it just, it just takes you there. So, you know, I was a busy clinician and for many years, and there were some patients that I just couldn't help no matter what we did, not for the lack of trying. And then, you know, you hit the wall, and you're frustrated, and you really focused on the fact that there's just so the handful of people and that you can't help you forget about all those that you can help. And, so you ask the question to the universe, what is it? What is it? Why is it not working? And at the same time, I had a friend, um, who, out of the blue, was, um, landed in ER, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and that happened six months before I immigrated to the states from Poland.
And so my years as an immigrant kind of paralleled with her years fighting that illness. And, um, after about 20 years, she lost her life. And, um, it was pretty devastating. And I was frustrated because I had tried to help her here and there, but I didn't really understand. I didn't know. And then, in my desperation, I remember talking to a medical intuitive and asking, you know, what was the cause? Why did she get so sick? And the virus was mentioned. And then I also had, I think, three different patients at the same time asking me my educated opinion on the book called Medical Medium. I'm sure you heard of it.
And so I was busy, and so all I could do is buy the book and take it on a plane, uh, to a conference, <laugh> mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So I was sitting on the plane and reading the book, and I almost drop off my seat because what the claims made in that book were about the people that I was not able to help. It's like, wait a second. It was a very blanket statement saying that all these illnesses, all this and all that is caused by EBV. But I was thinking, even if half of it is true, what if? And so when I went back home, I literally started to, uh, dive into medical research, and I started from lab testing and, you know, how do you actually assess? And then, the testing was really messy, I learned later. And so, but I started to test properly, you know, ask to test properly.
And we started to find a lot of EBV in my population. And, and that was also the population that had thyroid problems, uh, thyroiditis, Hashimoto, thyroiditis, you know, it's just, just, you know, it's just a journey, and you just, you take one step at a time and just honor the process. And so, so when I realized how deep that virus is, how devastating it is, I started to see patterns in, uh, my population, and I started to learn what I could about medical literature existing. Then the magic started to happen, and people started to reverse engineer their lives. And I was lucky, cuz you know, when you ask the universe, the answer comes. So I was lucky. I actually had virology in my doctoral program. Uh, and it was the only time that person taught that program. And that's when I started on the protocol.
That's when I learned about viruses in general. Cause actually, you know, I was frustrated. I went to the best schools, and you never really studied virology, let alone EBV. Nowhere was there any training on it ever. And so I felt my job was to bridge whatever medical medicine was claiming. Cause it's a, you know, far extreme, you know, on, on one extreme and what medical community needs on the other extreme in the middle was all the medical research, all the science, and all my experience and all the protocols I created. So people in the middle could actually get help. And then we can move this towards the medical community so the doctors can train and they can actually be versatile in it and understand the virus and help people because people don't have to suffer or let alone die. You know? So that's kind of the trajectory. My job was to just bridge the gap.
Yeah. So if you have, what is it, 3 million people in the states every year have mono, and that's just reported mono. So I don't know how many more cases of mono you have. And some of this mono, which is an acute infection, will go chronic. It depends on the person and the circumstances, you know, and a lot of factors. But it's very, it's relatively easy to heal from, from EBV. It's relatively easy to be chronically bound to it and develop autoimmunity later or chronic complications. Like it's really relatively easy either way. That's the weird thing about the virus. We have a lot of tools.
Well, let's paint the picture first. Like, what is EBV exactly like? Yes, mono is what perhaps maybe people are most familiar with, although may not be familiar with the link or actually that that is EBV.
Right. So mononucleosis is, uh, commonly known in acute infection. It's kind of like the worst flow in your life when up to six weeks, you're people are often bedridden. And, uh, it often hits, uh, young people or college students when they have to take a break from a semester. That's commonly what people know. Sometimes when, uh, when you're younger, you could have had unexplained illnesses like, uh, juvenile, rheumatoid arthritis and be out of school for a few months as well. But that's, you know, that's not as often. But then, uh, a lot of women may have Hashimotos. We have an epidemical thyroid, uh, issues, and, um, women are over medicated for thyroid. But doctors are not testing for autoimmunity. They're just testing the thyroid. And so we look at the literature and we see that majority of cases of low thyroid function is actually autoimmune thyroid function. And out of this, a large percentage is probably driven, caused by EBV. So that's, that, that part even is, you know, looking like an epidemic.
Yes. That's what I'm very familiar with. EBV or looking for assessing or perhaps even just correlating a lot of the thyroid issues that are epidemic nowadays with EBV. Now. So EBV is known as the kissing disease, right? How do you get EBV otherwise?
Yes, saliva, you know, larynx, uh, tonsils, you know, that's the entry right there. So yeah. And college students, you know, you drink from the same glass, you've <laugh> or bottle when you drink beer, or you know, just that's our cigarettes, that's how you contract it. But the truth is that, you know, it's a herpes virus that has been on this planet for a couple of millions of years. So if you look at statistics, 90, 95% of the global population has it. In fact, one of the companies that are running the, uh, vaccination for covid is also now running a pilot study on vaccination for EBV. Goodness gracious <laugh>. So
It is a problem. Yes. There's some, so the, luckily, there are some studies, um, correlating covid and EBV they're looking at it at least even at the beginning. And the Wuhan, they, they did the study on a group with Covid, and they saw that, uh, a larger percentage of that group also had EBV. It's an opportunist. And we also see that up to 73% of long covid cases, uh, actually also had occurred EBV infection. And so, you know, who's pulling on the strings? Cuz I would say that EBV is more of an opportunist. So is the long haul really covid, or is it, is it EBV? I mean, we know that covid testing is not ideal. The testing is not ideal. May be a little misleading.
Yeah, I think, um, I haven't heard so much EBV, but also like chronic Lyme or like other just underlying autoimmunity being perhaps or latent viruses being at play or infections. So that may make a lot of sense in the long hauler syndrome. That seems like, where is this coming from? Out of nowhere?
Exactly. It's, it's not out of nowhere. 95% of us have it, we have the virus. And, uh, so to give you an example, it's not that we have to kill it and get rid of it, we just cohabit. Um, I tested my EBV first time in the fall, just literally a few months ago. And I never had a need to test it, but at that time, I tested because I had so much mold exposure in the last, you know, one and a half years, and I was, it was taxing on my system. So I said, you know, I bet I'm reactivating EBV right now. I had a couple of symptoms that are unusual, you know, other people would know, but I know. So it wasn't a big deal, but I could say I'm very healthy otherwise, so I could, I could handle it really well. And I, I was positive slightly, I was reactivated, and you know, I took measures, and that went away after I retested. So that's an opportunist. And it will, it can turn on anytime. If you pay attention, you'll know.
Yeah, so if anyone, uh, listening has had mono, you know, sometimes people can pinpoint they had that mono, and they were bedridden, and they felt awful, and then they kind of never went back to the baseline. It was always a little worse, and so on. And then it's trickling effect. So then maybe there's chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia develops or rheumatoid arthritis or lupus, you know, or suddenly you're sensitive to gluten and you know, which you didn't before. Uh, you can develop celiac straight from EBV. We have studies on them. EBV can turn on the celiac genes if you have them. Multiple sclerosis is actually laying the same way. And so is diabetes, type one. So these are, you know, big conditions. But oftentimes, people have problems with tonsils, with uh, lymph nodes in the neck. Uh, my neck may be hurting. There's clearing throat, um, throat maybe hurting 75% of cases of more acute infection.
Actually, people have headaches. People don't realize you can have nose bleeds, you can have sensitivities to mosquito bites, you can have low platelets. I mean, you know, you can have, uh, for me, it's a pain in my left ear. This is because of the way I was born, and you know, that's always been the way some people will develop ataxia. So, uh, lack of coordination. Some people can develop ringing and buzzing in the ear, and some people can have, uh, vertigo. And actually, when I reactivated recently, I had slight vertigo, and it was directly related to emf uh, exposure that I had. So I cleaned that up immediately, and that went away. So, you know, people can have all kinds of symptoms. It could be joint pain, fibromyalgia kind of pain, or just chronic fatigue. Deep, deep fatigue, leg fatigue, and brain fog. <laugh> brain function goes like your marbles go. You can't think or are in a cloud. So tons of stuff.
Yeah, that's a great question. What I used to do with my patients is I used to recommend my book, and I would just say, read the book and think about your timeline in your life through the eyes of the virus and see if you can connect the dots. And people would come with like, you know, light bulbs in their eyes. Like, oh my gosh, I could track my childhood. I could remember my depression. Everything that happened to me makes sense. This is when I had, uh, EBV, and that is when I had EBV, and that is when I had EBV. It was just misdiagnosed on this or that. So it really is kind of a possibility throughout your lifetime. And also just testing <laugh>.
The shortcut is testing, testing done properly. And also putting that lab result in the context of your medical conditions and how you're doing. Because you know, if you don't have EBV, if you have a condition, if you're treated properly, you should be fine. Right? But if you don't, if uh, you know, you work with a functional medicine doctor, this is what happened to me. I was working with these people, and we were doing everything right, and we were hitting the wall. And if you look at the medical literature, the researchers are saying if you have a patient that is not responding to chronic illness protocol as expected, expect EBV, chronic EBV, and test for it. And then there are studies that say if you have idiopathic cases and idiopathic cases mean unexplained chronic idiopathic cases, test for chronic EBV.
And is the testing for EBV accurate? Just like even through a quest or normal blood draw to see, um, I mean, I would say 90% of panels I run where EBV like there is a previous exposure at least to it. And my patient population.
You're correct because, as we said, 90 95% have what will have those two big antibodies for life. Because we've had the virus, you know, the whole planet has had the virus. Now it doesn't mean much. So like I said, I have those two long-standing antibodies as well. I will, I never tested them before because I didn't have a need because I was healthy. So it depends on the context of your presentations, on your life, on your conditions, on what is happening. You know, I had molds, and molds can really reactivate EBV. The labs have to be interpreted correctly, and that's, that's the unfortunate part. And hopefully, with the book and with the resources we have on the website, um, some doctors are actually revisiting them and testing properly, so people are actually diagnosed properly. Cuz the labs are, especially a few years ago when I started, there were a lot of people falling through the cracks and being misdiagnosed because the labs were not done properly. And that was unfortunate and unnecessary, and some people lost years of their life because of that simple, stupid, wrongly done tests, you know?
Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Well, and if EBV is reactivated, will you see numbers off the charts more? Or, like, how do you distinguish reactivated versus like just speculating these symptoms seem like this is reactivated? Will testing show that?
For most people, early antigen is the one that will be elevated, but you also have to test it within two, or three weeks of when the person really feels the worst. Because early antigen will normalize, so you'll have periods of early antigen, normal, high, normal, high, that's the virus. The point is, you know, the sicker the person is, the more often they may have the reactivation periods, but if you wait for a month or two months, you may actually not cut it anymore. So you would assume that, oh, it's only past exposure. My favorite story is when I had a clinician student in my training program, and she says, you know, I had a person, it's classic EBV, I can see it. Uh, the only problem is that her early antigen was normal when she tested. So I said, okay, so when did she feel like the track ran her over?
When was the worst time? She said Thanksgiving. When did she test? January. Well, you see what I mean, she needed to test during Thanksgiving and right after to really see if that was caused by EBV or not. She missed that opportunity. So that early antigen already normalized, but you know, you just have to track it. So I tell people, you know, test when you feel really the best and test when you, you know, feel like the track run you over, you've been just hit by a track. You know that's how, that's how people describe when they have reactivation, they feel like they've been hit by a truck.
Yeah. And would you say, so it sounds like that person started to feel better in January that typically if it's gonna be reactivated, it is gonna be then from an exposure that's activating it, such as mold or dietary, like maybe around Thanksgiving time that person was eating something that was triggering it?
Yes. So a couple of things. Thanksgiving, you know, for some families, it's a happy time for many families, dysfunctional families, it's a traumatic time. You know, people are retraumatized, they have to travel, it's stressful. And then the food, absolutely we know that more of the junk food can increase NF kappa B and that actually is what the virus needs to replicate. It loves NF kappa B, it's an inflammatory marker, and um, it increases with, uh, American diet, it just increases. We have studies on it, so it's an invitation for reactivation. And so that's a possibility. And we know if the nutritional status decreases, then the virus becomes more virulent. So plenty of opportunities and stress is number one, a reactivating factor of all factors that I've seen environmental. But stress is number one.
For everything. But literally, literally, it is, you know, there are tons of studies on that for EBV, but even astronauts in space, proactively take antiviral medication because they have a higher likelihood of EBV reactivation in space, and it's because of different stressors, you know, physiological stress changing, circadian rhythm, uh, physical space, diet, everything changes. Gravity, you know, lack of gravity and all that. So all these changes are stressful on the body, even though you are in topnotch shape, you know, you're an astronaut, you're the best of the best. So we compete with astronauts. So I say that to people often, so they don't feel bad about their EBV.
Well said. Well, let's talk a little bit about like what to do about EBV, and it is something that folks will always have to maintain if they've had...
Yeah, to maintain the virus where you need it is, you know, you have to maintain a better respect for the physical limitations of the human body and the emotional limitations of your human body and spirit <laugh>. So I would say it's a great teacher because the virus is almost like a computer virus. You know you turn it on, you turn it off, it's pretty predictable. And if you know, if you understand, like if you read the book, if you understand it, then you can take measures. It's, it's a no-brainer. It's not that hard. It's like, ah, I get it. So it's predictable and treatable. And this is also medical literature. It's treatable, preventable, and it's pretty predictable. What you have to do is you have to realize that we have a pretty high load of toxic loads in our environment, and it's water, and its air in its mold. We have a lot of mold because of the building practices and the laws that allow these <laugh>.
It's just a contractor's quality of work. Be aware if you have a brand new home, it, you know, shortcuts may have happened, and so things may be lurking behind the shower. <laugh> and then the diet, we have a lot of toxic load in the diet. Then, the nutritional status and the nutritional density in our diet are decreasing, which opens the door for viral infection as well. We need really stable, foundational nutritional support, and stress, as I said, is big. Just being aware of how stress affects you and what measures you can take. And with the diet, no, we need a lot of antioxidants because antioxidants curb the oxidation stress that EBD creates, and a lot of these antioxidants actually have anti-EBV activity directly or indirectly. So a lot of actually minerals and vitamins are highly antioxidant in nature. And so you can actually stock up these in your favor.
Selenium, we talked about thyroid issues, and selenium is such a multitasker is depleted in soils. So in enough, you mean the diet, but it is instrumental for the thyroid function. It also is a building block for glutathione in the liver. Uh, it supports the liver and detoxification, and it's one of the best things you can take to turn off the replication of EBV. And so you know, you have, you have a lot of these uh, zinc, you have a NAC, um, and they're great for covid as well. You have licorice, we have studies on covid as well for licorice. We have vitamin C, vitamin E, uh, lysine. Lysine has been studied covid as well. It's like suddenly <laugh>, you see where I'm going with this?
Yeah, yeah. So we have a lot of tools, and the easiest way to look at diet is to load up on antioxidants. Where are antioxidants? Plant matter, plants, fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes, you know, plants. Eat plants. You have a lot of ravages, you have a healthier, stronger microbiome from the ravage from the fiber and your microbiome is your immunity. That's just how it goes.
Across the board. Yes, yes. Honestly, you know, it's almost like it's like a wake-up call because the toxicity is unheard of. We've never been in an environment like this, so just breathing and eating regular food is not enough. Some, you know, at some point, you're gonna get sick. It's just not sustainable. We have to take some supplements. I'm sorry to say when I started my practice, I wanted to do everything with food. It's not enough.
Yes. You know, the apple your grandmother was eating is not the same apple we are eating. It's not the same nutritional makeup. We have to compensate for that.
What about the role of like binders, um, and or any detox type of agents? Do you find more just like a supportive approach with antioxidants or that any detoxification is helpful?
That's a great point. Uh, we have an entire module on detoxification in the EBV recovery program just because people don't understand how detrimental cleaning can be. And um, you know, you can't do any binder, you don't need any binders, and you don't need to kill EBV. One of the problems that I'm seeing is a lot of practitioner use things like mono or lower sinin, but that doesn't provide any support. That just kills. And when you kill pathogens, you create a lot of toxic load that brains sometimes it's even more toxic than the pathogen when it was alive. And then you have to get that out of your system before damage is done. You have to move bowels, uh, binders can constipate you. You have to be moving your bowels twice a day If you want to do any binding, you can't do it just indiscriminately. You can get sicker. And so it's not necessary because fiber is your best binder and the best fiber is in your food. So you just have to eat a lot and poop a lot.
What would you say, if anything, is like a misnomer in the holistic health space, uh, around EBV that you really try to, to clear up with your folks and or just, I don't know, as we, the wild west of functional medicine space can mean well, and sometimes we can also be misguided if not an expert in a certain particular area and or um, just if a practitioner's following, oh this is the EBV protocol, et cetera.
Um, I would say the biggest issue I see in functional medicine is relying on botanical medicine. It's not gonna mold the needle, and it's not gonna provide protection and support that things like selenium. Well, it's just it's not a match. That's number one. Number two, the autoimmune paleo diet, low carb diets, and keto diet really not some of the worst fit for a person with EBV. When you have EBV, it's when by the time it's chronic, you have chronic stress causing changes in your adrenals. And adrenals require good quality carbs. That's how they will repair it. Plus, your brain requires it, and the brain can be quite toxic from oxidative stress from the virus, the brain, you know, the virus can go into the brain. So I think even black diets, just because they're trendy and everybody does, you know, you have autoimmunity, you go autoimmune paleo. Autoimmune paleo can induce deficiencies, nutritional deficiencies, and sometimes, you know, I have to do damage much control and bring people back because they're losing too much weight and they start to react more and more foods anyway.
So I don't know why some practitioners just use blanket diets. The paleo autoimmune is just like any therapeutic diet. It should be short-term while you are resolving the problem. So if we have, uh, Hashimoto, it's not a paleo diet that will heal it, it's looking for the cause, and if it's EBV triggering it, then if you turned off an EBV address it, people no longer have Hashimotos. so they can eat <laugh>. So yeah, I think sometimes, uh, you know, the intention is good, but practitioners are going into extremes. But what is the point of a diet like that? You know what I mean? Long term, you can't live like this, you don't have to.
Right. I'm so happy you mentioned that, and I see that across the boards and whatever put the name of the disease or the condition in and um, just, I, I don't even know if it's always intended to be a long-term from the practitioner and yet the patient's just not informed that it shouldn't be a long term <laugh>.
Correct. Correct. Exactly. I just, I was just reading a note from somebody I'm gonna talk to next week who was writing that, uh, she was put on an elemental diet, and she stayed on it for a year. It's like,
Well, Hello, Health Detectives, just another day here at the office talking about flipping health and wellness upside down. I'm your host, Dr. Lauryn, former TV news journalist and chronic illness patient gone health detective and functional medicine expert, helping others take their health back into their own hands. Can we just have a moment? It's been a year or more, like two years, and we all definitely need a reminder sometimes to just breathe. Today I had so much pep in my step, and I think a big part of that goes back to my own social media and news habits. The less I check those things at all, the more happy and encouraged overall I feel. So what about you? Today was one of those days I was definitely not in the weeds of, say, emails or social feeds, or news headlines, and it really does make all the difference.
Today on the show, we're specifically talking about anxiety and depression and SSRIs or antidepressants, the good, the bad, the ugly. These drugs saw about a 40 to 60% increase in use over the past two years alone as the rates of anxiety and depression also jumped. And today, we have guest Sarah Morgan in the house who wanted to do something about that. She's the founder of a company called Even, helping people feel even when they feel anything, but specifically through medical foods. And today's conversation is eye-opening to helping you dial in the key nutrients to enhance your own mental health and emotional health, and well-being. I've had Sarah on the show before to talk about her other product for birth control or overcoming post-birth control syndrome, which is a whole nother topic. And I absolutely love the message she shares throughout her company and her mission.
It's not about demonizing the drug industry or an us versus them mentality, like holistic versus conventional health is really about bridging the gap and ultimately helping people heal their root no matter what direction they come from. I think today's episode will really bless you, and if you know anyone that has struggled with anxiety or depression or is taking SSRIs, thinking about them antidepressants, this is a show you definitely don't wanna miss. If you're liking the show too, please don't hesitate to leave a review. It really helps us cultivate more health detectives out there like yourself. And if you need help in your own health journey, don't hesitate to reach out for support. I love hearing from you on my website, drlauryn.com. That's Dr. Lauryn l a u r y n.com. And take advantage of our amazing functional medicine-based programs to help you change how you look, move, feel, and think. Okay, that's all, folks. Let's get to the show.
Well, Sarah, so excited to have you back in the house. I just absolutely love talking to you, and I love what your company is about, just really feeling even and getting even basically for our health again after maybe years of imbalance for a lot of folks that maybe stumble upon you and your company and your products. But before we kinda get into today's topic, we're talking about SSRIs and just mental health, the wild west of mental health as a whole, and medications in that field, give us a little bit of background, just what got you doing this work for helping people feel even.
Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me back on. And really, the genesis of Even started because I had my own side effects from my medication <laugh> when I was, let's see, about, I don't know, I was in my early twenties. I went on birth control, and I just quickly felt moody, off, I was fatigued, I had headaches, I had low libido, <laugh>, and I stopped, and I was like, What in the world is going on and am I the only one experiencing this or is this a common thing? <laugh>? So I went to my most trusted advisor at the time, who are my girlfriends, and they were also taking the pill. And I started asking, Do you experience any issues while you're on your birth control? And they all looked at me, and kind of started laughing. They're like, Oh, Sarah, welcome a club of mood swings, weight gain, digestive issues, headaches, breakouts, low libido.
The list goes on and on. And in the moment, I laughed it off, but I knew deep inside there had to be a better way to get the benefits of for me birth control without the backlash. And my vision expanded as I learned why this was happening. So, first of all, I started digging cuz I'm a why person, I'm a problem solver. And I was like, okay, it's not just me. There are other women experiencing this as well. So I started digging into the scientific literature, and I realized that medications cause nutrient depletions. And this is something called MIND, medication-induced nutrient depletions. It's a pharmaceutical truth. As long as pharmaceutical medications have existed, they're awesome. They benefit us in many ways. I'm not knocking them in any way. But what's happened is we have now continued to advance our understanding that while you're on a medication and the way it works in your body, it can actually use up more nutrients.
It can start to deplete nutrients through absorption issues, transport issues. There's a lot of different mechanisms of how it happens. And this is actually the reason why a lot of people don't feel great while they're on their meds. And then we have these clustering of what we call side effects. Now I'm not talking about adverse effects. Those are the really serious allergic reactions to meds, very serious things that put you in the hospital. These are more like the pesky things that I just listed with birth control. Or, as we dive into antidepressants, there's a whole list of those, and they're very solvable. And I saw a gap that really <laugh> was a major problem that needed a solution in the way that we do medication use. Cuz right now, it's like, here's your med have fun suffering with the side effects, and it doesn't have to be that way. So I created Even because I want to unite medications and nutrition solving for mine, these nutrient depletions of medication so people can feel well, they don't have to suffer unnecessarily, and they can have a better quality of life while they use the medications they need.
Yeah, I mean, I love where there's a problem presented in our own lives. That's where the solution digging comes and the inspiration there. And I think a lot of folks could probably relate to what you just said just about the variety of A, birth control pills. How many women are on birth control pills, or what's the statistics that
Yeah, we go off and on them as women <laugh>. But on average, in the United States, about 25 to 30 million women are on different hormonal forms of birth control. So that pill, that patch, it's IUD, it's implanted like Nexplanon in your arm. There's a lot of different forms of hormonal birth control now,
Just how common those are. And then also with the antidepressants and SSRIs, I mean we've seen such an uptick in mental health, anxiety, depression, even post covid during covid times. That industry, I'm sure, has boomed. What have you found there as far as usage of SSRIs?
Yeah, during the global pandemic, I guess we could say it's still going on, There were certain SSRIs, so those are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors to define that class of medication. And we tend to call them antidepressants, but they're also used to treat a lot of different medical conditions. Anxiety, O C D, post-traumatic stress disorder. There's a lot of things that SSRIs are used for. And several of them were on the FDA drug shortage list during the pandemic because so many people were using them and the supplies actually got so low. So on average, about 70 million Americans use antidepressants in what's called the reuptake inhibitor category. So that's SSRIs, SNRIs, SSNRIs, There's a lot of different forms of them that are out there now. And we saw a month-by-month increase, I believe, of about 40 to 60% during the global pandemic. So it's definitely higher. I think one of the reasons we use this class of medication is to get us through circumstantial hard stuff. Some people are on the long term, but I think the global pandemic is a really good example of sometimes in life, it gets really hard, and you need some help. And an SSRI can definitely be a tool to be used that way.
Talk a little bit about how SSRIs are targeting the brain as we shifted into this conversation there. What are, so things like Prozac and Lexapro come to mind of maybe brand names people may be familiar with Zoloft. We see commercials. What are they doing for the brain? And also, what is the efficacy of these substances? Cause I've heard in research pretty low efficacy, it not working for everyone. And why would that be the case?
Yeah, so I'll start with examples. You listed a few. So Zoloft, Lexapro, Prozac, Lexa, and Paxil would be some of them. And again, they're used to treat things like depression, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and lots of different things. Now, antidepressants again in this reuptake inhibitor category. And if we talk about serotonin specifically, one of the mechanisms of action number one is blocking the reuptake of this feel-good neurotransmitter called serotonin so that there's actually more in this little, what's called the synaptic gap. So it can send more signals to give you more of that feel-good response. And that's based on the theory of depression. That's this mono immune deficiency, meaning these neuro transfers, we think, oh, we're deficient in these neuro transfers. That's why people are depressed. And so these medications were created based off of this theory. Well, now what we've learned is there's a lot of other things that are related to depression.
They can be genetics, inflammation, micronutrient deficiencies, mitochondrial dysfunction, the microbiome, there's lots of them. So what's interesting is we've learned like we do with so many medications, that a lot of times they have these, I call them bonus benefits or additional benefits. And the second way SSRIs work is they actually do reduce inflammation. And we now think that's potentially one of the main ways that antidepressants work and why people have a response to them is actually because they're lowering certain cytokines that are little fireballs of inflammation, and then they can actually increase anti-inflammatory cytokines. So the things that kind of spray the fire down. So really cool how they work that way. And then number three, antidepressants work by improving limbic function. So this is a part of your brain that's responsible for your emotions, your motivation, and your memory. And a lot of times, what happens with depression is the limbic system becomes imbalanced.
So you have issues with just how you handle emotions and your motivation. A lot of people with depression are like, I can't get out of bed, I don't wanna work. There's a lot of things that happen. And so it's really cool how this class of medications helps rebalance the brain. Now when you talk about efficacy, I think I know a lot of phenomenal psychiatrists. So, first of all, we do wanna note that about 30 to 50% of individuals who start an antidepressant are non-responders. So that can mean two things. One, it doesn't work, the antidepressant doesn't work for them. And two, the side effect profile is so severe for that individual that they can't continue therapy. A good doctor is going to work with a patient to not only get the medication right cuz there's a lot of different types of antidepressants there's different doses. With an antidepressant alone, it does take about six weeks to really start to notice differences.
So you've gotta be patient, which is one of the major pain points with using this class of medication, especially when you're in more of a mental health crisis. So one of the things that's really cool about Even for antidepressants and is we designed it with nutrients that actually increase the efficacy of this class of medication. And in some research studies make it work faster, about twice as fast as normal. So what I would say is there's always hope to get your antidepressant to work well. And some healthcare systems, too, I just wanna give props to Kaiser Permanente, by the way. They're actually creating whole programs that people go through for their mental health, for anxiety, for depression, where they not only work with their physician, they work with a mental health counselor or coach, they do some group things. They're really talking through their life situation, their sleep habits, their movement, their diet in addition to their medication, and there's check-ins of how you're responding. Are you experiencing side effects? Let's address those. And that's really the best way to get the best response is to look at this situation from a really comprehensive lens. And even as part of that comprehensive lens.
That's so cool. I've not heard of that program, but I'm so happy that exists, and you're so right. Just the comprehensive, not perhaps that's the reason why the efficacy is not there in general with the medication use for some is just the other holes of nutrient optimization in the diet, sleep, gut health, all the things are not there. It makes me think too, when I was going through my own eating disorder treatment, there were multiple times that I was prescribed various, like Zoloft at one time, Lexapro, and Prozac. I think I tried 'em all or oftentimes say I was given the pot roast pizza and Prozac diet and treatment <laugh> but most of the time, I just remember feeling very flat and not myself and them not working. But it makes a lot of sense looking back on it now, if I had struggled with anorexia, my body was just, there's no nutrients in there. So you're talking about the nutrients that will help just optimize the efficacy. That makes a lot of sense in hindsight.
Yeah, we need those nutrients to make our neurotransmitters right, <laugh> it's really important. And if we're missing those nutrients, we can't actually make serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine and all these really important signaling molecules in the way that help us feel like ourselves.
Serotonin, talk a little bit about that. That's a, I think, buzzy word. Serotonin is 90% plus produced in your gut microbiome. What is serotonin, and how do we get more of it?
Yeah, serotonin is, so a lot is produced in the gut, but it is produced in the central nervous system too. So we have that messaging, but it is produced in the brain and used kind of separately in the brain too. But what's cool is the brain and the gut talk to each other on this kind of super highway that we call the gut-brain axis. So there's really important research that's been done showing if your gut's in a good place, a lot of times, it can help your brain and your mood. So that's definitely something that's really important to target. Interestingly enough, antidepressants actually do modulate and change the microbiome, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. And I'm happy to dive into that with you if you want. But to serotonin, what does it do? Well, there's behavioral effects. So our pain response, how much pain we sense, our emotions, and our stress response it's responsible for things like appetite and even addiction.
When we have an addiction, it can be a sign of low serotonin. Also our sexuality in terms of behavioral effects, serotonin is really important. And then in our central nervous system, even motor control, our sleep rhythm, something we see when people are depressed, a lot of times their sleep is disrupted. Body temperature, if you're hot, cold, or feeling like you can't regulate yourself, serotonin does play a role in that. And then, like you mentioned, the gut, serotonin is important for gastric secretion. So how we are able to digest our food and the motility of the gut. So sometimes SSRIs are actually used for gut issues, and different, like IBS, they can be very effective for that. And then also colonic tone. So your colon, how well it's functioning. If people have constipation or diarrhea type of stuff, SSRIs can be used for that and the pancreas. So there's a lot of ways that we see serotonin, I guess, impact our body overall.
And when we think about how do we produce more of it, So serotonin comes from an amino acid called tryptophan, and tryptophan is converted into our feel-good serotonin and our sleep-well melatonin. So there's a whole pathway that it goes down. So one, make sure you're eating tryptophan-rich foods. We think about Thanksgiving dinner, why does everybody feel kind of happy and relaxed afterward where there's a lot of tryptophan in turkey and then we have certain cofactors or these little nutrient helpers that go from tryptophan to serotonin that we wanna make sure that we have enough of. And those are B vitamins, some antioxidants, and minerals that are really important for proper serotonin production.
Yeah, so magnesium is a big one, and a lot of us are deficient in magnesium. And especially if we're anxious and we're stressed, and we're depressed, we're burning through magnesium, vitamin B6, and vitamin B6 as P5P pyridoxal phosphate is a more activated form your body likes to use. folate, which is vitamin B nine, is really important. And just an example of that, deplin, some people maybe have heard of deplin is a medical food similar to even is an or We have medical foods, and deplin is used alongside antidepressants to actually improve response to the antidepressants and help with depression treatment because it's gonna drive more serotonin production. And then we have things like vitamin C and zinc as well that are really, really important in that pathway When we're looking at tryptophan to five HTP to serotonin
I would say any food that you think of that's a higher protein source of food is gonna be higher in tryptophan, or I should say a good source of tryptophan.
So would you say these nutrients are necessary obviously for healthy brains, Are these nutrients as well that by taking SSRIs, antidepressants that are more stripped when you take them or are they siloed differently, they just help with supporting?
That's a great question. So I don't think anything in the body's ever siloed <laugh>. The more I learn, I'm like the more everything's interconnected. We look at the gut, and we look at the brain and how everything's interconnected. When we put together our formula, and we worked with our medical team with, even for antidepressants, we put a lot of the B vitamins, like thymine is vitamin B1, folate, which is vitamin B nine, cobalamine methyl cobalamine, which is vitamin b12. And we have B6 in there and several of the B vitamins, niacin as well. We did that because they're really important co-factors in these pathways. And there's actually randomized controlled trials showing that when you dose these nutrients alongside an antidepressant, people have much better responses. Vitamin C is another one actually that works very well alongside an SSRI or an SNRI to help improve response, meaning people feel better faster, and the antidepressant works better in terms of their mood and all of the different things that they're experiencing with let's say depression, anxiety or whatever it may be they're being treated for.
It does. Now I will say if we think about depletion, something that's really interesting because I have some people are like, No, SSRIs don't deplete any nutrients. And I'm like, well, here's really interesting tryptophan is kind of on a teeter-totter, and it can go two different ways. It can go to five HTP and then serotonin, or it can actually go down what's called a kynurenine pathway. And actually, 95% of our tryptophan goes this way. What's interesting is the enzyme here, it's something called IDO. SSRIs actually slow this down. And this was a fascinating find for me. And the reason that this is helpful, this is the mechanism of how s SSRIs actually start to reduce inflammation because this pathway has something, this inflammatory fireball called quinolinic acid. And when you have high quinolinic acid, lots of literature about depression, anxiety, even strokes, like all kinds of different neurological issues that can happen over time because it's so inflammatory to the brain and the nervous system.
The same pathway, though, if you keep stepping down the pathway in the liver, it actually creates niacin, which is vitamin b3. So SSRIs are actually slowing this pathway down, and the thought is, are we actually depleting niacin? And it's something that researchers believe to be true. And if we look at low niacin, what are symptoms of low niacin, depression, headaches, GI issues, some of the things that can creep up with an SSRI when you're using them that you wanna be very aware of. So niacin was put in there more as something that actually is depleted with SRI use.
It's so fascinating to me how nutrients that discussion of them is really not something that is talked about. Just thinking back again to my own experience, even with so many different medications that I was given. And so that is such a big piece that I think for listeners listening to this could be something to definitely talk to your physician and your practitioner about, I guess how do you even go about educating or doctors don't necessarily go to nutrition school. That's what a nutritionist does. So that conversation that it may not know what they don't know to on this front. And I know you're doing a lot of work on the grassroots work with education for pharmacists as well, but yeah, where does that conversation even begin if, say, a patient is kind of thinking about these things themselves?
Yeah. Well, one, I would say if you're listening to this and you're like, Oh my gosh, this is so cool, I wanna give this a try. You can purchase medical foods on your own as a consumer, but they are to be used under the supervision of a physician. And the reason for that is your medical provider knows your full history and all the different medications you're on and can review the medical food to make sure it's a fit for you while you're using it. And we actually have a product information sheet that's designed for consumers to bring to their doctor, to their pharmacist, and say, Hey, I wanna give this a try. And it goes through what's in it, what the intended use is for what some of the contraindications are, meaning there are people that should not use our medical foods <laugh>, and it's not a fit for everyone.
So it is important to talk to your physician about that, but it's a great thing to learn about and to bring to your physician. I think, again, our healthcare system is set up in such a way that with your conventional medical doctor, nurse practitioner, PA, they have about seven to eight minutes with you. So they really care. They really do. I know so many phenomenal physicians, but they're not given enough time to really dig in our traditional system. So sometimes, patients bringing it to the doctor is the best way to initiate that conversation and get the ball rolling. And it's really cool, almost on a daily basis now, I hear from our customers, Oh my gosh, Sarah, I feel like myself again while I'm on my antidepressant, my sexual dysfunction has improved. I have my libido. About 80% of people with antidepressants have some form of sexual dysfunction.
And it's very fixable. It's not magic, it doesn't happen overnight. But if you're patient and you give it a good month or two, most people start noticing improvement in GI issues. Sometimes again, antidepressants can change the microbiome and our product has a spore forming bacillus probiotic in it that's phenomenal for the diversity of the microbiome, which antidepressants over time can impact negatively. So sometimes, sensitive individuals need to go slow. They need to start with one capsule a day, take it with food, and increase to two over time. And that's also where bringing in your healthcare professional is important. We also have Even experts on staff that can help people navigate that too. But it sometimes does take navigation cuz our, we've designed our products to be very effective, they're powerful. And so sometimes we have to help people navigate how to use them properly.
Well, and as you talk about the design, talk a little bit about just quality. So there's a difference perhaps in going to CVS or Target or Whole Foods even and finding vitamins on shelf versus some companies, perhaps such as yours, that really the quality standards that is a very wild west within supplementation.
Yeah, so I would say this, one of our advisors was someone who helped write the DSHEA laws and the FDA DSHEA laws, which have raised the bar. One of the things that have started to raise the bar years and years ago on supplements. And there's a lot more raising the bar that's happening, which is pushing companies out who are doing things in a bad way and making the good companies really shine in terms of their quality. So as a medical food, we're actually in a different category than a dietary supplement. So we have different requirements that are even more rigorous. One of those being all of our ingredients actually have to have grass status according to the FDA. And that is generally recognized as safe. I would say about 60 to 70% of dietary supplement ingredients are not grass status. So you know, can have people who have elevated liver enzymes when they go on different dietary supplements because they're using something that's actually not safe for their situation.
And it's just a consumer being able to take whatever they want with a dietary supplement, which is good and bad. I'm all about empowerment, but again, nutrients are not benign. If we use them in the correct way, they're very powerful, and if we use them in an incorrect way, it can cause problems. So as a medical food, we also are addressing the nutrient requirements associated with disease or condition that's being treated by a medical professional. And for us, we're also targeting the medications and the nutrient depletions that occur with that class of medication. For us, we have to run all of our every batch through third party testing. Again, we have to have documentation of our grass status with the FDA. It's very rigorous. It's very actually limited of even the suppliers that we can use because our standards are so high. So yeah, I think the other thing I would say, too, is what's in our formulas, and then the doses that are being used more therapeutically are something that is why medical foods also come alongside with a use under medical supervision. It's not something to be scared of, it's just if somebody's like, Wow, I took this, and this happened. It's like, oh yeah, because it's actually impacting this pathway or doing this, and you just need a healthcare professional to explain that and help you navigate that.
Yeah, the best place I would say, is feeleven.com. So, oh, I wanna feel better. I wanna feel even I want my nutrients, my body to be in a balanced place. And we also have social media. Instagram's probably the best way to find us, and that's actually evenhealth is our handle there. And we have lots of educational materials on social media on our website too. I will say if you go under evidence, you can really dig, and we have a whole Even journal of all kinds of different articles where you can look at, like, okay, why does low libido happen with antidepressants, and what can you do about it? So we've got great articles there that are very educational that you can also share with your healthcare professional.
Amazing. Well, Sarah, one of my favorite questions to ask at the end of our show is, as a health detective yourself, what is one cool insight or aha that you've had in your own health journey recently?
I would say recently I actually have never shared this publicly, so I think I'm in a place to share this publicly. I got very sick at the beginning of 2021, actually on New Year's Day in the evening when I flew in. And I later figured out, after seeing many, many healthcare professionals and going into clinics and getting lots of testing, that I actually contracted Hepatitis A and went on a very long journey. It's been about nine months, I can say I'm recovered now, but it was very, very challenging. Lots of ups and downs. I should have been hospitalized probably multiple times, but I knew how to keep my electrolytes and my fluid levels at home. But I was told that nobody knew what was wrong with me. And it was the most heartbreaking thing as someone who knows a lot about health. And I did not give up, and I kept digging, and I kept testing myself, and I figured out that it was Hepatitis A that made me sick.
And I called on some of my most brilliant medical doctor friends, one of them being Dr. Jill Carnahan, who's one of the best functional medicine doctors in our country who helped me recover. And I'm forever grateful for that. So what I would say in that is one, if you're in a place where today we talked about mental health, if you're in a place where you're struggling, I just wanna say one, I get it. Not only did it beat up my body, but let me tell you, it beat up my mental wellness and my emotional wellness. And it was such a journey of perseverance. And it is so okay to get help if you need it. And if you're down and you're feeling beat up, and if you've also been someone who's been told like, we don't really know what's wrong with you, or you've been labeled a certain way, but you just know instinctually that's not it, don't give up on yourself. Keep believing in yourself and keep digging. There is hope, and there is recovery on the other side. And there are incredible people in our world who want to heal and bring life and bring you quality back that maybe you feel like is lost potentially forever. So I just wanna say all that as we've all walked through this crazy global pandemic, crazy politics, crazy everything. Our lives have been disrupted. And with that, I think a lot of us have struggled, and there's always hope and light, is what I would love to say.
Thank you so much for sharing that. And that is our greatest setbacks are our biggest comebacks too. And you're such a testimony to that and just the resiliency, and gosh, I feel like experience is always the best teacher too. Just kind of digging deeper, and thank you so much for sharing that. And I do love Dr. Jill. She's great
Well, Sarah, thank you so much, and we'll definitely be keeping up with your work, and yeah, thanks for helping and enlightening us on how to feel even.
Well, that's it for the Health Detective Podcast. Again, don't hesitate to reach out for support. If you need help taking your health back into your own hands, over at my website, drlauryn.com, love hearing from you, and also, please leave us a review. It helps us cultivate more health detectives like yourself and get the word out. Okay. Until next time, have a great week.
Prior to his tenure at the DNA Company, Kashif participated in a number of high growth start-ups where he took an active role as an angel investor and advisor. He ran two successful marketing firms where his client list comprised Canada’s top earners and most affluent individuals. From Canada’s largest company to small neighbourhood businesses, Kashif has advised on business strategy in industries ranging from luxury retail, technology, finance, fine arts, healthcare, tourism and real estate. He participated in over $300 million in revenue in his own retail business prior to launching consulting services to help others thrive.
Growing up in Vancouver, B.C., Kashif’s drive started from witnessing his immigrant parents’ struggles to establish themselves in their new country. Inspired by their iron-clad work ethic and resourcefulness, Kashif developed an industrious entrepreneurial spirit from a young age. While his high school peers were languishing in minimum wage jobs, Kashif was hard at work starting his first business.
As CEO of The DNA Company, Kashif later learned that his neural wiring was actually genetically designed to be entrepreneurial. He has since made it his mission to build The DNA Company into a business that has impact and who’s success is measured not in dollars earned, but in lives improved.
Well, hello, welcome to the Health Detective Podcast, a show dedicated to quieting the noise in the health, speed, and fitness world. I'm your host, Dr. Lauryn, former TV news journalist and ex-chronic illness patient gone health detective, bringing you my 20 years of clinical and personal experience helping patients radically take their health back into their own hands. On this show, I love having real conversations with a variety of guests who are all a little bit of a health detective in their own way, trying to fight and solve the problems of health and wellness kind out there. Ultimately get ready to uncover truths and expose lies in both conventional health wisdom and diet culture as we know it so you can reach your optimal potential. Today we're talking all about the wild, wild west of genetic testing and DNA. Is genetic testing reliable? Is it necessary?
Is it effective? Only if we use it effectively. We have Kashif Khan in the house, who is the co-founder of the DNA Company, a company all about doing things a little bit differently in genetics using genetic testing strategically. This conversation changed my mind a lot about using genetic testing, and it's definitely something that I'm gonna be incorporating even more so with my patients in clinical practice and just really love how they are using only a select number of genes. There's so many genes that can show up on our genetic panel testing. So say, like a 23andme, consumer kind of testing, consumer-facing testing, but really the DNA Company is doing things a bit differently and just looking again at that handful of genes that are gonna make differences in protocol slash what supplements you take, what foods you're eating, et cetera. So I think this conversation was really fruitful and insightful for myself as a health detective, and hope it is the same for you. If you're liking the show, please don't hesitate to leave a review. Your reviews mean the world to me and helps others become their own best health detectives for themself. And of course, don't hesitate and be a stranger. Reach out at my website, Dr. Lauryn.com, D R L A U R Y N.com. Would love to share more about how I'm helping patients take back their health into their own hands as well as love hearing about interesting podcasts or topic ideas that you guys wanna hear about. So without further ado, let's get to the show.
Well, Kashif, so excited to have you in the house today and to talk about the wild west of genetic testing. I know there's a lot of consumer-available genetic testing out there at 23andme, for example, that have become very popular, and sometimes maybe we're not using them as effectively as we could for really what are we gonna do with this information kind of testing. And I know your company has a really unique approach to genetics testing in general for really helping cure the problem of chronic illness or the way we manage and treat chronic illness, rather, not just manage but treat and address it. Well just would love to know a little bit of background before we dive into that, though, about what got you doing this kind of work that you are doing in genetics.
Personally, I come from left field. I have nothing to do with the industry. I actually used to sell luxury goods. We're in Canada, we're in Toronto, and our company had the record for the most valuable painting sold in Canada, but the most valuable vintage Patek Philippe watch for over a million dollars, that type of thing. So I was networking with the high net-worth people of Canada, and I realized what I was good at was the sort of PR and marketing of it didn't matter what the product was, I knew how to get in the media and talk about it and that type of thing. And so I actually shifted gears that that's what I'm good at, and that's what I enjoy. And I started doing that for other people. I was now running two businesses and I sort of worked myself into sickness.
My business partner would have to drive me home with debilitating migraines. I would literally just start vomiting from the migraines. It was so intense. I had eczema, psoriasis, like brain fog, you'd name all the typical things that point to a doctor can't figure this out. It seems like some kind of autoimmune issue, and that's why you end up going to a functional medicine clinician to figure out the root cause. So in that journey, our PR company was working with some healthcare companies to help them sort of grow. There's a lot of innovation here in Toronto, and I started to use that to learn about myself cause I literally couldn't work. I was so sick. I learned that decoding my instruction manual, my genetic manual, was a thing that separated me from here's all these symptoms I'm talking about eczema, psoriasis, brain fog and nausea, and migraines. There's one or two things, the hub that's pointing to all these folks
<affirmative>. And I was doing a couple things wrong and those couple of things being fixed kind of resolved everything. And that blew my mind that the change is so easy. I didn't need this cream and that pill and this, this whole basket of stuff I was doing, there was a cellular health problem that was leading to this. My body screaming you're in bad shape, better get back into it. And so I literally took the keys for the PR company that I had built, gave it to the staff, and I said, You guys, thank you for all the work. It's yours. I found what I need to work on. And I focused on the DNA Company.
So this goes back to what you said, that in genetics, it's not about a list of genes. And then try and figure out what it means. The interpretation is key. Everybody can test. You can literally go buy a genetic testing machine and put it in your basement, and start tomorrow. But when it spits out a report, you have to understand what is, how to make that actionable, and what does it mean? And in order to do that, you have to be able to mirror the genes to the biochemistry. How does the body actually work? It's not this gene, this gene just the body's not 22,000 independent genes. It's systems, hormonal system, cardiovascular system. And you have to batch and mirror that. So what I learned in that is that my systems, my detox system, glutathionylation, which we talk about, the ability to bind on to a toxin, send it to the liver to metabolize, get rid of it.
I literally was missing some of those genes. Forget about what version or what snip or variant, I didn't even have, my ancestors didn't need them. They lived a beautiful clean organic life. They just didn't need this extra layer of detox protection, which western Europeans, having gone through the industrial revolution, had a lot more alcohol in the culture, these types of things, they needed it. So they developed it. This is why my half-Scottish, half-Irish business partner has an extra copy of the detox gene that I have zero copies of that I'm missing. So that was a big one. Then it was, now that I know that these toxic insults are sort of free-flowing in my blood because I don't clear them well, they're causing that inflammatory load. My body should be able to methylate and deal with the inflammation. So we mapped out the entire methylation system, and it sucks for me, and it's not any one gene. The entire process from beginning to end of methylating, I don't do well. So not only am I not clearing these toxic insults, but the damage that's being done, I'm not able to cope with it.
I can't. So now all of a sudden, migraine inflammation, nausea, migraine inflammation, eczema, psoriasis, inflammation of the skin, these are all tied to the same thing, but in healthcare, treated as siloed independent problems when they're not. Yes, the symptom is independent, it's in my skin, it's in my head, it's in my gut, but it's all starting from the same source.
Understanding those mechanisms. So for you, so for example, without the genes for being able to clear toxins, I mean with supplementing with glutathione wouldn't necessarily work, would it? Because if you're introducing glutathione, you're not gonna know what to do with it anyways.
I can tell you how many clinicians that we've shifted their protocols where, and in fact, there's a very well-known person in the healthcare space whose wife was bedridden because she was taking a glutathione IV because of her sort through blood biomarkers, able to see that her toxic load is a little too much. We gotta clean this up, <affirmative>. She literally ended up in bed. Why? Because if you don't have the genetic instruction putting glutathione to work, it's gonna start binding onto minerals and nutrients and everything else too. It doesn't know what to do. What is a gene? A gene is an instruction. It's literally a set of instructions that tell your cells what to do. If you don't have the instruction, you're not doing it. So for me, I didn't take glutathione, which would've been the logical, direct, oh glutathione problem, take glutathione kind of like hormones. And we do a lot of work there. Oh, testosterone is low? Take testosterone, that doesn't always work. And we can get into that. So I started taking some of the precursors like alpha lipoic acid, selenium, NAC, glycine, these are some of the big ones that they just go to work, they don't need the instruction, and all of a sudden psoriasis is gone, eczema was gone, et cetera, et cetera.
So your body had that engine. And then how about the same thing for methylation. So we can see a lot of times, say, run a report, and a person's an under methylator that's most talked about. We can also have over-methylation, perhaps from too much supplementation. But perhaps, I mean, is there a reason why a lot of these supplements may not work for just high doses of B12 and a methyl folate and everything as well?
Yeah, so firstly, when you look at a typical methylation report, the focus is on one gene, MTHFR. And yes, that's the sort of the star of the show. That's that central hub. But there are six or seven genes up and downstream that are supporting characters. And if you don't understand what they're doing, you don't truly know the net. And this is why clinicians haven't adopted genetic testing in practice because they say, well, it's not really precise, just like anything else, it's trial and error. It's kind of pointing to something, but we still have to test it. What we're saying is if you map the entire system, it is certain you take it away from that probability base, you got an 80% chance of some genetic predisposition to, like here's you a hundred percent. So going to the supplements, take b12, but what does that mean?
Is it sublingual under the tongue? Is it a methylcobalamin.? Is it adenosyl? Like there's different versions. Do you have the ability to actually absorb it in your gut because your ancestors actually ate beef and didn't eat goat For the ancestors that didn't eat beef, which is a lot of people where they ate more sheep, lamb, goat, or poultry, You can't absorb the B12 in your gut because you don't have the genetic instruction to do so? And so you need the sublingual, under the tongue, and they do really well with the IV also. So that level of personalization takes it from, hey, you're not a good methylator, but now what do we do about it? And then we can get very specific, where on the get-go, they're doing exactly what they need to do, and they feel great right away.
A hundred percent, and kind of what you've addressed right now is a big reason why until meeting you guys and understanding kind of like that there's more to genetic testing. Why I have not really used genetic testing is cuz I would see it as like, okay, it sounds cool, it seems like a lot of people are doing it, but what am I gonna do with this? I really believe more so in epigenetics and how things in our environment or also our internal system, like our gut, what's going on there or hormones which actually are related to our genetics, I later learned can be influenced more so than just knowing here's my genetic blueprint, I know I'm prone to celiac disease. And so kind of change our minds about why, I mean as you already are, but perhaps why traditional testing where it does run into a roadblock and then how you guys are addressing that.
It goes back to something we were talking about before we got online today where, so look at the healthcare model. The same thing happened to genetics. Everyone knew there's a jewel inside us, this instruction manual, which, if he understood, should obliterate disease cuz now we know why it happens, but we didn't get there. Why? So if you look at our healthcare system, we have a great acute care system. Break my arm, have a heart attack, go to the hospital, amazing service. So long as financials are not an issue, you can get taken care of in an amazing way in North America. That same toolkit is now applied to chronic disease, meaning react. You don't call the doctor until you're sick, and then the measure of success is the thing that you're complaining about. This hurts, this cholesterol level is high, my hormones or whatever, if I get rid of that, I succeeded just like eczema, psoriasis, and headache are separate things,
I have to deal with each one of them separately when in fact, they're rooted in one thing. So that same approach was applied to genetics. The researchers started to say, what does each gene mean? Let's figure out if I can figure out the gene, I'm gonna build a product, and I'm gonna become a multi-billionaire, right? So genetics then turn into genetic condition tools, meaning you're born with sickle cell syndrome, certain forms of autism, you're born with it. There are other diseases where you know that this is a genetic switch that was turned on or off, and you now have a direct correlation. The belief was you can't work on chronic disease or chronic conditions. The gap in the middle was the epigenetics, meaning if you have a suboptimal profile that doesn't equal a disease, that equals a risk for poor cellular health or inflammation, et cetera.
But that doesn't mean disease, which is the way the medical system looks like. It looks at it, right? So what means the disease? If I have a suboptimal cardiovascular profile, I'm not born with a cholesterol problem, I'm not born with diabetes. It happens in and around the age of 50 because it takes many years of doing the wrong thing, the epigenetics to express the disease, and what are those wrong things? Environment, nutrition, lifestyle. So what we don't do, we don't measure epigenetic expression, we just reinterpret DNA to tell you epigenetically what to do. And this is what's been missing based on my suboptimal profile. What would cause me to go from, I have risk to I'm sick. What's the things that the load that I would add that would actually, and what are the things that I should do that I'll never get there, that I'll actually avoid this problem?
So we kind of took all of it and said, genetics does a really good job of pinpointing things accurately, but then you don't know what to do. Epigenetics does a good job of telling you where you're at, but you also don't know what to fix. So we worked in the middle and said between the two, here's the environment, nutrition, lifestyle choices for each condition, each gene, each profile, whether it's hormones, cardiovascular, et cetera. And now, all of a sudden, people are reversing disease, they're preventing the things that their ancestors had, et cetera, et cetera. So that's where we've taken things,
Right. Well, and let's then kind of talk about the nitty gritty, the gray zone where perhaps protocols go wrong. So, for example, with the glutathione issue, a lot of times in the detox world or going through mold illness, it's like okay, take some glutathione, but those that are not getting better, or we may see this in mass cell activation as well. I mean, you know more about genetically what could be going on there for a person, but if they're reacting to everything, I've even had patients react to water <laugh>, for example. And so it's just where the body's in that heightened state of stress. And there's also a limbic and brain component there. But what about the nitty-gritty of functional medicine, I see a problem as the protocols can sometimes become the pill for an ill mindset as well of okay, just they have Hashimotos, we'll do the Hashimoto protocol, or they have candida, do the candida protocol, and yet still every body is different, and it can be confusing and a bit overwhelming.
So what we are talking about is exactly, when it comes to the ultimate solution, it's combining both the how do I mask the acute problem, Hashimoto's? I've now put this in the Hashimotos bucket so I can relieve the person and make them feel better by dealing with that. But I also need to take the functional approach of what causes the Hashimotos because it's, that's not the beginning of it, that's the end of it. That's, I've been doing something else for 10 because get rid of the Hashimotos, guess something else is gonna happen cuz you haven't dealt with the root cause. So let me give you an example. So cardiovascular, that's probably the number one thing. 50% of Americans are expected to have a cardiovascular event and it's taken for granted that it is just supposed to happen. Oh, genetics, my family has it, I have it, it's gonna happen.
That is not at all the case for the most part. So typically, cholesterol numbers go up with some kind of blockage. The doctor starts to tell you, you got a problem, it's now labeled as a disease, and you're dealing with either a Lipitor pill or something to reduce that thing. So that's that acute, let's resolve it. And I still think you should do that to be healthy, meaning that you don't want it to build up and become a heart attack. So allow the doctor, allow the Hashimoto specialist, allow the mold specialist to calm things down that emergency response. But you then have to take responsibility to kick the ladder out from whatever's causing that thing. So let's take again cardiovascular example. Cholesterolemia is happening, that's not the disease. That is your body actually responding to inflammation in the endothelial. So the inner lining of the artery, this lining where the blood actually touches and flows through, is called the endothelial, right?
There are different versions, and genetically we can determine do you have the stainless steel version? Do you have the somewhat okay? Or a paper-thin version. If you have the paper-thin version, which many, many, many people do, which is why 50% of people get cardiovascular diseases, it's more prone to inflammation. So having said that, you could grow up on a beach eating fish out of the sea, sleeping well, with no stress, and you're never gonna get sick cuz you weren't born sick. If you have bad hardware, doesn't mean you're sick, it just means it can't take as much abuse. Now fast forward to someone in North America, not sleeping properly, eating poorly, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We then start to look at combining them with my profile, where I had poor detox genetics. So if you had poor detox genetics, all those toxins getting in are going to cause that inflammation here.
We have a patient that we dealt with with the number one source of what we diagnosed as his health concern was golf because he was golfing four days a week for four to five hours a time. He was breathing in all these toxic pesticides, which by the way, in Canada are highly unregulated, and there's more regulation in the US, but Canada's not. So he's breathing in four days a week, four or five hours at a time. All these toxic chemicals from the golf course to make it look so beautiful without the ability to clear. Now 38 years old, he had a crazy cholesterol issue that he couldn't suppress. So he was on a pill that wasn't working. When toxicity comes here causes inflammation, and cholesterol is actually deployed as a hormone to reduce the inflammation. That's why the cholesterol's there. It's actually there to help you
And when the cholesterol meets toxicity, it hardens and gets deposited, and it starts to build up. So the disease of, and this is why I say you gotta kind of do both. Yeah, let the doctor help you not have a heart attack. But that's not, you're gonna be in treatment for the rest of your life if you don't also realize what's causing the inflammation, which is then leading to the cholesterol, and you can reverse the disease, you don't even need to have it.
Right. And it's a combination of figuring out the external factors such as the toxins or the gut dysbiosis, et cetera. And also just your genetic wiring and how your body is mechanically working. Are there other common themes that you see aside from the detoxification genes that you find to be really big effectors either way for folks
For sure. I would say the big one that continues to fly under the radar is hormones. And particularly in women with estrogen toxicity. This is why 64% of women that have their first cardiac event are expected to die on that first cardiac event with zero previous symptoms, with no warning signs, you get the heart attack and you're gone. It's much more severe for men than it is for women. Why? Because for the 64% who had the worst result, but some didn't, you also have to look at the people that didn't have the worst result, what were they doing right? How are they genetically wired? The difference is estrogen toxicity. So now in our hormonal cascade, you go from progesterone to testosterone to estrogen. That's what you do every month as a female. Once you produce those estrogens, you then have to convert them into a metabolite before you clear them.
That's either two, four, or 16 hydroxy estrogen, you don't need to know those words. But two is the clean one, four and 16 are toxic, and some women make these two, you still should be okay. Now, if you add to that the North American story of 85% of women going on a birth control pill for some elongated period and to just more estrogen, which converts into more estrogen toxicity. A larger number of menopausal women are now starting to take hormone replacement therapy. Or even premenopausal, even women in their thirties now are saying, Hey, I'm gonna start early. More estrogen adding fuel to the fire. Estrogen mimics things in the environment, foods that we're eating. So all of a sudden, you have this cardiac event which is happening because of the other reasons we talked about inflammation, et cetera. But a load of that toxic estrogen causes an additional layer of inflammation, the vasculature is already under so much stress, and your genetics didn't know that you were gonna take birth control pill for 10 years or that you're gonna start hormone therapy for. So it wasn't designed to protect you from that.
It's two things. If you have the genetic construction to convert estrogen to four hydroxy, the more estrogen you have, the more this you're gonna make. <affirmative> birth control is estrogen, so you're just gonna have this more pool. So that's one. The second is yes, the clearance. So now that I have it, how well do I get rid of it? And if you have that combination of I make a lot of it, and I also don't clear it well, you're not going to do well when it comes to inflammatory diseases. And that's something like to answer your question that people don't look at.
Yeah, for sure. So same thing, there's this belief that man testosterone, woman estrogen, that's not at all the case. That's the average answer of dominance. There's more estrogen in a woman, which makes you a woman. But there are men that are estrogen dominant, and there are men that are estrogen dominant that go onto hormone replacement therapy where their doctor says, Here, take some testosterone. That's gonna make you live longer and be younger. But what if their genetic instruction is to convert all that testosterone into estrogen? Then we've actually had patients like you just said, that had ended up with gyno-like man boobs because they take so much of this, these hormones, and what is the answer? The sad thing is I didn't give you enough. You need more. Right? Because they don't understand the cascade. The thinking is if I gave you testosterone, you should have more testosterone. No, guess what? It converts, for some people, into estrogen. For some men, it may convert into DHT, which is that manly man version of testosterone, which gives you the nice big jacked ripped muscles. But guess what? It also inflames your prostate. So give that man more testosterone, and you might be giving him a prostate issue
It just makes so much sense to just know what you got and how to then work. So would you say y'all work with about a profile of 80 genes? Is that right? Or 80?
Yeah, so we test for many hundred just in terms of banking the data that in the future, if more is learned, we'll be able to give it to you. But the ones that we find are highly actionable, and this is funny because you look at genetic testing and you go to a website, and they'll say, Well, we test for a hundred genes, we test for five, or we scan the entire genome. More is not necessarily better because if it's not actionable and you can't interpret it, what is it even doing for you? Right? Data doesn't mean much unless you know what questions to ask and how to interpret it. So yes, to answer your question, we brought it down to about 80 or so genes that we believe are actionable and important. We test for another 700-ish where we believe that it's coming. Eventually, we're gonna be getting it, and the rest of it we don't even bother testing for cause it's not actionable.
Yeah, I would say if you look at the root cause of disease being inflammation, we already agree on that. What it causes then inflammation is poor cellular health. So what causes those things? Yes, detox issues, methylation or anti-inflammatory issues, and then hormone issues. So those are the three things that we've mapped out in systems that typical genetic companies don't look at. So we do a lot more with a lot less. The other area which we can dive into, where we also map it out, is mood and behavior of the brain. Because once you figure this out, here's what my body's doing, you also have to figure out how do I perceive it and what am I gonna do about it? And if you don't understand how your brain's wired, we can't put you to work. So a lot of our work has to do with how do we actually talk to this person? How will they actually adopt behaviors? How will they actually want to do this? So that's a big part of what we do.
Everything about the way you deal with stress, emotion, and trauma. Are you reward-seeking? Are you a binger, are you an addict? Are you irritable? Do you procrastinate? Everything about your mood and behavior traits is already genetically determined.
That makes a lot of sense. And perhaps why a lot of times families have similarities. Yeah, I'm my dad's daughter, and we are very similar in our personalities.
And I can give you an example there. For example, if I'll put myself on the spot. So my family on my father's side has a history of addiction, and we thought it was a cultural thing we didn't understand what it was. So what I've learned about myself is that where does pleasure come from? The dopamine chemical. So dopamine allows you to experience both pleasure and reward. I ate some tasty food, or I did something good at work. So we can determine with the DRD2 gene how dense your dopamine receptors are. So your ability to actually bind and experience that pleasure reward. And I have the least density way down here. So when it comes to that tasty pizza again, it doesn't give me that hit. So I need a little more, right? I need. So that leads to that addictive behavior. So now also there's an enzyme called comped which clears neurochemicals.
So once you've had that experience, you need to get back to normal. So comp comes along and gets rid of the dopamine. I had the fastest comp. So it's like that in between the two, there's a gene called MAO, which helps metabolize and break the dopamine down. I also have the fastest mao. So I feel its way down here. By the time I'm in the experience, it's already being broken down, and the enzyme is clear, it is getting rid of it. So I hardly feel pleasure or reward. So I have three potential outcomes, depression cause I just don't get it out of life, addiction cuz I went down the pleasure route in terms of feeding myself that reward, and you always need more and more and more. That's how dopamine hits work or achievement. Cuz I went down the reward path, and luckily this had nothing to do with my genetics at the time I didn't know. I went down the reward path and became entrepreneurial. So I fed that dopamine hit through achievement, and that's why I switched gears from selling million-dollar Patek Phillipe watches to opening a biotechnology company, which I have no business doing because I could see it and I couldn't say no to it.
Keeps you healthier too. More balanced in that way. Well, and also just interested ancestrally, genetically it seems like we're wired and from a food perspective, for example, if one is from just different parts of the world, do our genetics just ride throughout generation after generation? When I'm working with people from different cultures, for example, if they're coming from Asian descent and rice is a huge staple in their diet, whereas perhaps on a paleolithic kind of approach, rice is definitely not on that, but perhaps they can actually digest that. Or if a person's from India and vegetarian diets are really common there. And so perhaps the diet that their ancestors were raised on,
There are a couple things there. First of all, genetics make it very clear what and how you're supposed to eat. The second thing is interpreting that because going back to the Asian example of, well, my ancestors ate rice, why are you telling me not to eat rice? Right? And we've had to deal with this problem. It's like it's my culture. We ate rice. Why are you telling me it's gonna give me diabetes? Cause we have, I can't tell you how many Asian South Asians that we have to tell them to stop because we can clearly see diabetes coming, that insulin response, et cetera. What's changed is not that they don't have the same genes as their ancestors. The rice has changed, they're ancestors. So the way we get rice today is the white grain. That's what people think. They don't even know what rice looks like,
most people. The natural rice has a hull on it. It has an outer shell that is pure fiber. And actually, most of the nutrition is actually in that hull. That's removed because of the way we're globalized in order to store and ship rice, the white rice you can dry, and it lasts for a long time. Thathullattracts bacteria because it's very nutritious and it doesn't store very well. So rice processing, the standard has become to remove the hull and just sell the white rice molecularly. It's basically sugar. It's literally eating spoons of sugar by the time it goes through your system. That fiber that's on the hull counteracts the sugar, that carb or insulin response, which is the miracle of the food, it's already naturally designed to be good for you. The nutrition, the vitamins, the fiber, it's all in the hull, which we know. And guess what they do wi
She now reaches parents around the world through her book, Raising Resilience: Take the stress out of feeding your family and love your life, her virtual community, and her online coaching program. Jess has been featured as a nutrition and family health expert for online and offline audiences where she has spoken about the impact of nutrition and connection for audiences of parents, medical professionals, social workers and teachers. She is a regular contributor to blogs and print magazines, where she translates complex research into practical action steps for busy parents.
In 2019 Jess received the award for Clinical Excellence from The CSNNAA for her work with families and was picked as a featured speaker in The Future Of Health series at the Mindshare Leadership Summit where she spoke about the challenges of raising resilient kids today.
Hello, welcome to the Health Detective Podcast, a show dedicated to quieting the noise in the health, food, and fitness world. I'm your host, Dr. Lauryn, former TV news journalist, an ex-chronic illness patient gone health detective with my master's in functional medicine, nutrition, and my doctorate in occupational therapy. Today, bringing you over 20 years of clinical and personal experience helping patients radically take their health back into their own hands. On this show, I love having real conversations with a variety of interesting guests who are all a little bit of health detectives in their own way, like our guest today, Jess Sherman. Today we're talking about the problem of picky eating and behavior problems in kids, which are often related to food. Family wellness specialist and nutritionist Jess Sherman is the founder of the Resilience Roadmap. She helps parents and families create systematic plans as well as nutrition solutions for ultimately helping build resilient kids in your own lives.
Picky eating and letting food be thy medicine are two of the frontal topics of today's conversation. And absolutely just loved this conversation because I have 20 years of my own experience of working with kids and families as well. I remember when I was 10 years old, starting my own babysitter's club. I was a solo babysitter at the time, but I just absolutely loved working with kids. And as I began to become more of a healthcare practitioner, realized a lot of the things that I was seeing kids for in my therapy clinic, such as ADHD, sensory processing, autism spectrum, just like chronic anxiety with kids, were really related not only to the food they were eating but also what was going on under the hood. So things like their gut microbiomes and their limbic system slash brain health and how they're processing stress. And so today's conversation is just really rich and meaningful in that way of health really is an inside job, both for us adults and for our kids.
And hope today is really empowering. If anything, I hope this conversation is empowering for you, and or if you have any parent friends in your life and or folks that you think could really resonate with this episode, don't hesitate to share it with them. If you're liking the show, also don't hesitate to leave a review. Your reviews mean the world to me and help others become their own health detectives, best health detectives for themselves, by getting the word out there. And if you have a podcast topic or idea, also love hearing from you. Don't hesitate to reach out to me on social media and or my website. My handle is at Dr. Lauryn d r l a u r y n, my website same dr Lauryn.com. D r l a u r y n.com. Without further ado, let's get to the show.
Jess. So excited to have you here. And just to talk about building resilient kids and using food as medicine for our kids and for our kids with maybe behavior issues on quotes or our kids that are struggling in school, <laugh>, <laugh> or kids that are super picky or is all the above. Oftentimes like Let food be thy medicine could be the missing link that is not always tapped into. And so, but before we get into that topic, really just give us a little bit of background about what got you doing the work you are doing to build resilient kids and families.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Lauryn. Oh, we have so much to talk about with building resilient kids. I got into this, I started as a teacher. I started, I was really interested in working with kids. I started working with them actually in an outdoor environment, taking them on trips and teaching them skills in the woods and that sorts that of stuff. And that took me into the classroom. And I was teaching in the classroom, and I was noticing that kids were just really struggling, you know, it was getting worse and worse and worse. And I was getting really burnt out, and I was teaching with an exceptional team of teachers, I worked with fairly challenging kids who were already looking for something a little bit different from the normal educational system and came into our school because they didn't really fit elsewhere.
And so we were super creative, and we, it was an amazing team. We got the kids outside, we changed the classrooms around, we threw out the curriculum and focused on community building, and we were doing so much amazing work, and still, kids were really struggling. And I got really tired and really curious about what we were missing. And so I took a sabbatical, what I thought was gonna be a sabbatical ended up being a career change. And I started to dig into children and their bodies and what makes them tick. And it's really interesting to me now to look back and think that I didn't, or, and see that I didn't take a sabbatical to learn more about education or learn more about how children learn or, you know, learn anything about special education or, or things like that. I left to study holistic health and nutrition because somehow I had a gut instinct that was where I needed to focus.
Something was going on in their bodies that was making it hard for them to cope with the expectations that we're putting on them as teachers. And you know, so hence the anxiety and the ADHD and the aggressive outbursts and the, you know, the, what I call now re lack of resilience, which is our capacity to cope with stress. They couldn't cope with stress. Some of them could, but some of 'em couldn't. And I wanted to understand the difference. And so then my mind was just blown open when I started to learn about the connection between what we eat, what's going on inside our bodies, our biology, and our capacity to tolerate stress, which is our resilience. So that's what I do now. I started screaming that from the rooftops cuz I was like, ah, <laugh>, everyone needs to know, Every teacher needs to know. That would be, I would've been, a totally different teacher. Well, I'd say that now, but who knows? It changes how I teach, it changes how I parent now as a mom of three. And yeah, it just, it changes everything when you see this different perspective.
Yeah. Well, I'm so inspired by your story because I just absolutely love working with kids and families as well. And yet just with that epiphany and that awareness that you had, because I think I should, before we started recording, I worked as an OT occupational therapist for quite some time both in pediatric clinics as well as in the school system. And just like already was kind of woken to like using food as medicine in my own healing journey from chronic eating disorders as well as working outside of the scope with or outside of those environments with adults. But really like just seeing these kids come in and like, you know, they're having like red dye in their fruit roll up or like asking them just like curious like, what'd you eat for breakfast this morning? And it's like, you know, pop tart or they got donuts on the way to school or something.
There was just a very clear parallel or just like very clear cut driver for them, and seeing that these kids that were being diagnosed with ADHD or sensory processing issues, a lot of anxiety. Like the theme that I began to like uncover was that the food that they were eating was not feeding their brains or not serving them. I think to the greatest capacity that they could feel their best or to even have the opportunity to not just be told like, Hey little Johnny, stop moving so much. Or oh, you just like, he needs like to go to the special to me <laugh> to OT time and like just being I think the teachers seeing the teachers frustrated, the parents frustrated and the kid just like <laugh> not know he's just operating as his body is telling him. And seeing also kids discharged a lot faster from clinic. When I would work with the families on the diet piece, it's like not, you know, the end all be all. And yet it was a very big propeller I saw in a lot of like the health optimization.
Yeah, and it's so interesting, too, cuz I see, like when you like zone in on this population, I see a variety. Like sometimes it's really obvious that, you know, they're just, they're just not eating whole foods, and they're just not eating the right foods. But sometimes it's less obvious, and sometimes parents will come, they'll be like, I cook everything from scratch, and it's all whole foods, and it's all organic, and I'm just doing, I'm doing it all right, and still my kid is struggling. And that's when we can really get granular and look at, well, are they eating the right foods for their bodies? Do they have nutrient imbalances because of their genetics? Do they, you know, is there stuff going on in their gut so they're not receiving the foods very well, they're not digesting them very well? So like, I just wanna point out, like if you're, if you're listening to this and they're just like, oh my gosh, I'm just, that's not me. I don't give my kids red dye. I don't give my kids, you know, all the candy and all the stuff, and they're still struggling. There still is a lot we can do with food even despite that.
Yeah. I'm so happy you mentioned that one of my favorite stories that come to mind is working with an almost three-year-old super picky eater when like just ate chicken fingers is what he liked and like maybe cereals, and like come to find out just had a lot of gut dysbiosis, some candida going on in his little tummy. We did a stool, a poo test <laugh> and just like really gently took a pediatric approach with treating that was a little bit of Biocidin drops some probiotics and just would present the food like on his plate or at dinner family time. No pushing or forcing the food, though. And this little boy just began to be, his palette changed or his openness to trying new foods without so much that struggle too. So that's a, a thing I would love to talk to you a little bit about is just like picky eaters as well and like, I mean there's definitely can be a control piece like that just need, we all have for want to control, but also the gut piece as well that could be at play with picky eating.
Oh yeah. I mean there, there are so many potential roots of picky eating. I think fundamentally, parents need to understand that like to deny yourself the building blocks that your body needs to grow by not eating is not a healthy state of being. Right? That's sort of foundational. So, and I say that because I think, you know, sometimes parents of picky eaters will just fall into this kind of routine around, well, you know, he's just picky, he's just like that. She's just like that. And I think first recognizing that children need a diversity of food to grow and to develop to their fullest potential, that's a thing, right? Like it's important. So it's important. It's, it's worth spending a little bit of time and energy to figure out why. Always asking, just get curious about why are they so picky. And yeah, often I do see that I do see as we look into the ecosystem in the microbiome, and you can see all kinds of opportunistic bacteria flourishing, and the, and the good normal flora that should be protective of us and help drive our appetite and our hormones is sluggish.
Like exactly what you just said, rebalancing that can open up the palette, and it's mysterious, and it's wonderful when you see it, and it's a big leap of faith on the part of parents to say, okay, we're gonna give these drops and see what happens. But yeah, I do see that, I do see that a lot. And like you brought up the control issues, yes, we don't want to create fear around food, right? We need to make sure we remember that your child's relationship with food is the longest relationship they will ever have in their entire life, and it needs to be a constructive and a positive one. So we need to keep that front of mind when we're teaching them about how to nourish their bodies. But if they're not nourishing their bodies and you find yourself stuck in these battles, there's a reason, there's some kind of reason and, and maybe it's in the gut, maybe it's driven by nutritional deficiencies cuz kids get stuck in this vicious cycle of not wanting to eat and then not eating, and then their hormones go all out of balance, and then their hunger cues get messed up.
And so they are stuck in a vicious cycle, and maybe it is around control as well and their sense of felt safety around food and around their family, which sounds really harsh, but that very much can be brought into the picky eating picture. But essentially, that is also a stress management issue, if that makes sense, right? Because if a child feels stressed around food, so there's pushback and there's, there's reactivity, they don't have a very wide window of tolerance to stressful situations, right? If a food offering them a new food is gonna throw them into a tantrum because they're so stressed out about that, then there's work to do on the stress tolerance, the window of tolerance to stress is what I call it.
Yeah, there's a lot of layers, it sounds like, to building quote-unquote resilient kids and very customized to the child. And like whether it is they're overtly just struggling with picky eating sensory issues or if it is more the like, you know, the behavioral ADHD, just a lot of anxiety kind of issues as well. So kind of like, where do you first start? Because I think a lot of them probably have under similar undertones too. The ultimate goal is to like nourish a child to be their most optimal self. Man, if only I had known now what I know or known then what I know now, like as a kid too, cuz I was definitely, I ate a lot of processed food up until probably age 26. I didn't know what non-processed food was. So
Can we just talk about that for a second because Yeah, because we can't fault our kids for eating processed food if we give back to them, right? Like, because we can't expect our kids to know how to do something unless we teach them how to do it, right? So if processed foods are highly available, inexpensive, very addictive, and tasty, right? And so, of course, that's where they're gonna go if, if they're allowed, if that door is open, right? And I don't think it's fair of us to make them feel bad about their choices if we haven't taught them how to make different choices. That's, that's something, right? So every time I have a family come into my world, and we start working about that, we talk a lot about creating a culture of nourishment in the home, right? What does that look like? What language are you gonna use around food?
What are meal times gonna look like? What are your expectations around food? And it's gonna be different for different families, but it's so important for parents and the number of parents who were like, Oh, I wish I had started this, you know, when I was pregnant or before my child was born or you know, earlier because you, you go on, you get on this treadmill as a parent and life is fast and busy and crazy and stressful and then all of a sudden your kids start struggling, and when you step back, and you realize that you never really talked about food and were considered its position or its place in the family, it's worth doing, it's worth having that conversation with your parenting partner if you have one or with yourself, if you don't have one. Or with your extended family if they're involved to really talk about your values around food and what you wanna communicate to your kids around nourishing their bodies.
I would wonder too, like, I mean, you do a lot of work with different families, kids of all ages, like what about with teenagers? Because, like, once teens are kind of set in their ways I'm, I work with teens whether it's struggling with over-eating disorders or picky eaters as well that have just somehow managed to make it to age 16 or 17 just eating like a select number of foods, maybe five foods and like that's their comfort foods and they're definitely more adult-like and that they can make their choices and decisions and go to the kitchen prep their meals. So like, it's just what they're eating and say, like, how do you even begin to address that with older kids as well because starting young is, like, it would be ideal.
Yeah, I think so if you have created this culture of nourishment in your home at any point in time, you can always come back to it when things fall off the rails <laugh>, right? As they do when life gets busy. But if you haven't and your kids are older and now facing the situation, I mean, I think what's happened is they're making their own food choices based on a lack of information, right? They don't actually know what is required to keep themselves healthy, and sometimes nor are they interested, right? But it's ideal when we work with the kids who are sort of preteens to start to help them understand what their body's needs are because then we can graduate them, right? Because we can be like, you know, okay And the same thing, it's the same way I approach things like, like disciplinary things. My job is to keep you healthy and safe until you can show me that you can make decisions that keep yourself healthy and safe, and then we can gradually transfer the decision-making power over to you.
So when you have a 17-year-old who is making unsafe and unhealthy choices by limiting their diet to four foods, my feeling is we need to back up and say, listen, you're not making healthy choices, so I'm gonna make them for you right now. And I say that fully understanding the control issues, right? There are lots of control issues, and this is where a really good therapist who understands attachment and trauma and things like that really comes into play because there's healing to do there. It's not all about the food. So you gotta unravel it and work very, very gently. But I think if we were to zoom out and say like, okay, what's the framework we're gonna work in here? The framework would be, you know, you have a, a late teen who is working with the information that, like a, a child might have in terms of their, what their bodies need. So they're not equipped with the tools that they need yet to make the decisions that they're supposed to be making at 17. Does that, does that make sense? I I want this to come across not as blamey or, you know, it's not anybody's fault, this happens all the time.
Definitely, they just don't know what they don't know. And I mean, I so can relate to that cuz at age 17, I was like, I mean my processed foods are, were diet foods, it's like snack wells, a hundred-calorie snack packs or like just not eating much. Cuz I was really struggling with my eating disorder, and yet no one was there to educate me. It wasn't really until I went to, through my nutritional kind of training that it was just like a big aha where I began kind of like cultivating that nourishment just like, I guess, methodology and mentality with food in such a new way because knowledge is power, especially as you age.
Well and I would love to hear like from your experience, cuz what I see is that when you're working with teens or anyone really over the age of maybe like eight-ish, if they don't have a goal that makes sense to them, then they're not interested,
Yeah. Like if you just tell 'em all, you have to eat better, you have to nourish your body. Especially if there's an established eating disorder, it's like that doesn't make any sense to the, to that brain, you know? But if there's a goal like, you know, you want better skin, or you wanna be a better athlete, or you just wish you could stop waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares or like, because I can assure people listening and you know this, that food affects absolutely everything. Absolutely everything. So if you can come up with any goal physical or mental wellness related, maybe they want better grades, whatever food is going to be a part of that or can be a part of that, it's gonna impact that. So I think you can have a constructive conversation with your child to say, hey, you know, what are, what are your goals right now? What are your aims, your wishes, your desires? And then your next comment could be food's gonna play a role at that. So can we take a look at that and we explore that together?
Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that's really well said. And like yeah, tapping into the motivation cuz it's like if a parent just says, or dieticians that I worked with just said just eat this. Like that's kind of why eating habits for me at, at such a young age through teens and early adults did not stick cuz I was doing it for others or others telling me just what to do, <laugh>.
Exactly, you know what's so interesting is that when I went through my education degree, I was studying experiential education. So the whole concept was how do we create experiences for kids that help them understand who they are, develop into who they're going to be, create a sense of self come to their own conclusions, right? That's what experiential education was all about. And one of the things we talked about was that you can lead someone through an experience from the top, like pull them through an experience and have very prescribed outcomes of here's what we're gonna do and here's why we're gonna do it and here's what you're gonna learn from it. That's one way to take someone through an experience. And then there's also this idea of leading from behind of constructing the environment, constructing the experience and setting things in place and then letting them explore and being there sort of on the edges to be like, Oh, that's interesting.
Maybe we should try this. Oh, let's go over here, let's explore this. But basically who the person who's going through the experience is left to draw their own conclusions. And that is so much more powerful of a learning process to lead from behind like that. And that's how I approach all things with food, too, right? Like you can come in and like you just said, like here's your diet, here's what you're gonna do, here's what your body needs, I know best, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you that would be the top-down approach, which works in some cases but isn't a very powerful experience and is very much opening yourself to push back and, and things. But this sort of gently coaxing through, that's why I focus on creating this environment of nourishment, this culture of nourishment in your home, facilitating this experience. And you know, I coach my family just a lot to say, you know, just get curious, say, isn't that interesting? And we're gonna try this now <laugh> and just kind of coaxing things through. It's so much more powerful.
I'd love to know some specific tactics you use, too cuz one of my favorites in clinical practice, and I think what you just, I mean the whole leading from behind it explains why diets don't work, plans don't work, and like why we as nutritionists, like I think early on in my career I would like bang my head of like, you know, I'm just giving them the protocol like just do it. It's so easy seemingly like, but there's, I mean, a lot of factors that can play into that and or just again, tapping into that motivation piece as well and, and why 99% of diets fail is like a person can follow it for so long, but like if there's not the discontinuation of even connecting, like I like genuinely feel better versus just like, oh, I achieved the goal or the weight, then it's not gonna stick.
And so I do a lot of intuitive eating type of work early or just like awareness. So whether it is food logging and not to track your calories, but to really log symptoms around like how you feel for a few days and just to really understand and correlate that with what we're eating can be really eye-opening for some. And I know there's like biofeedback kind of devices others will use if you're into tracking like HRV kind of monitoring, like what are some tactics that you help with that coach your parents on maybe with helping guide their kids a bit more specifically.
Well, you need to, you need to, this is another thing I learned as a teacher is that you don't need to know everything about the subject you're teaching. In this case, nutrition, but you do need to stay one or two steps ahead of them, <laugh> right? Ahead of the kids. And our kids need to know how to nourish their bodies, right? So that means we need to know a little something about nutrition. And I don't know about people listening, but when I became a parent, I actually probably knew more than most about nutrition from a technical nuts and bolts perspective. A lot of parents don't have a clue because they were never taught it by their parents, right? It just wasn't part of their growing-up culture. It was like grab and go eat on eat in the car, or you know, a lot of families don't have dinner together and things like that.
So, but what I didn't know as an early, early on in my parenting was how tough it was going to be <laugh> to implement all I knew, right? Like I knew all of the things, I knew what all my, what my kids needed to eat, but I didn't know how hard it was going to be to actually get the food on the table and into the mouth, right? So I think the very first thing, just from a really strategic like nuts and bolts perspective, is to learn about nutrition and beyond. Like there's the protein, fat, and carbohydrates that your children need in terms of the macronutrients, but also there's the vitamins and the minerals and the phytonutrients and the enzymes and the probiotic bacteria, which are also, those are the micronutrients that your kids need every day. So they, they need all of these categories of foods, and I don't, it's not helpful to like pick it apart and be like how many, how many grams of protein, how it, our brains just, it's not a practical way to think about things and it, it makes people very obsessive, but it, it is important to know what they are and be able to, to look at a meal for example and recognize, oh wow, this is a really carbohydrate-dense meal, and there's no fiber in it, and there's no protein in it.
So what can we do to this to make it a little bit better? And that's, I mean, we spend in my resilience roadmap program, we spend the entire first month just working on that skill of being able to recognize food sources and being able to look at your child's favorite meal and kind of get a sense like not pick it apart into grams and milligrams but get a sense like, could we add some more vitamins in here? Could we add some more color in here? Could we add some more protein in here? So I think that's, that's the first thing is to sort of think about where you're at in your knowledge of this stuff. Recognize, like, give yourself tons and tons of love if you don't know this stuff because where do you learn it? Like you, you don't <laugh>, right? Maybe like grade eight health class or something, if that. So cut yourself some slack but just take stock. Like, do you have a good sense? Do you have that skill? And if not then, then that's where you should focus some energy.
Yeah, definitely. That kind of foundations just being probably modeling too, I imagine, like as a parent, like also or in it together as far as if there are dietary shifts happening.
Oh yeah. I mean, gosh, our kids are little sponges, right? They learn much more from what we do than from what we say. And, that goes for both parents if they're living together, even if they're not living together so many times like parents are not on the same page in terms of in terms of food and you will dr you'll drive yourself crazy if everybody is not on the same page and that that <laugh> we can get into like the diets thing. Everybody needs the same diet. Everybody needs the same diet, which is real foods, whole foods, and not a lot of junk <laugh>. That's it, right? There are nuances in there because some people don't digest certain foods very well, but that's not because of the diet itself. That's because the body is not receiving that food at that time very well. So that's where the nuances come in, and people are like, oh, those shouldn't be eating grains, or you shouldn't be eating fat, or you shouldn't be eating whatever. So I would say put that stuff aside and say, first and foremost, everybody needs a diet that is full of whole foods, full of color, full of variety, and doesn't have a whole lot of non-foods that are masquerading as foods in them.
Yeah. That I think that simplifies things cuz I get those questions all the time. Like what's the best diet for a child? Can a child be on keto or paleo or, you know, whatever? And I mean that's the, my first question is like, well are they eating whole real foods because that's where you start.
Definitely, and then kind of like in helping implement this, I know you talk a lot about just like not going it alone too, and like that's really why you've cultivated a community of support, especially for those parents that may be out there and they go to a doctor, say their child has ADHD or behavioral issues, not just picky eating and the cure may be a prescription and perhaps like, I mean some folks listening to this may be like curious as to thinking like, well what is possible possibly like what haven't we fully tapped or what haven't we fully tapped even within the underlying the gut health kind of symptomology if we are trying to tap into the food piece. So I mean, tell us a little bit about just where parents can connect and perhaps have a community of other like-minded parents that are just on this journey.
Yeah, I mean this, so I mean my, my focus is the kids who are struggling in school are struggling with mood and struggling with behavior, and then as offshoots of that, usually they're also struggling with things like sleep and constipation and food allergies and these things that are, that are compounding the problems they're causes, and they're also secondary to those issues. So it's a whole big mess of the game. It's all connected because it's such a holistic kind of problem with inter it's an interconnected web of things. Parents drive themselves crazy because they go to this specialist and then that special, they go to the brain person, they go to the gut person, they go to the, you know, the GP. They go this test and that test, and it's, it's all really compartmentalized, and there's nobody to really pull it together to say yeah, the gut issues are related to the brain issues, which are related to the learning issues, which are related to the sleep issues, which are, you know, and really connected lines between all of those things.
That's what I do. And it's so empowering for parents to not only get that kind of strategic map but also to hear, you know, I do a lot of my coaching in groups and, and to hear what other parents are going through and what other parents have figured out because we wanna help our kids. I mean, I work with the most amazing detective parents who, who are just always, you know, listening to webinars and summits and, and this and that and going to other doctors and stuff. And then they come back to our group, and we put it into the context. We give it all context, and that's invaluable. And then, you know, other parents will hear that be like, Oh, okay, I remember I was told that once too. I didn't understand what it meant at the time. And, and the, just the clicks and the light bulbs really come together, so it's not easy, or I think even possible to do this by yourself, nor should you, it's gonna take 17 times more time. <Laugh>, you know, and our children are only children for a short period of time, right? We don't have the luxury of years and years and years cuz they're developing their sense of self, and they're developing their, capabilities and their, their self-esteem. And so we want them to be super healthy during that developmental period. So it really accelerates the process to do this as a group.
My home base is at justsherman.com, and there's a lot of S's in there. There's three S's all at once. But that's where people can find out about my common clear kid's program. If they're more like a DIYer and they just want go on a strategic plan and they can, then they can just kind of go at it. Or the resilience roadmap, which is really the full meal deal of the we handhold, we get you the right labs and the right supplements and the right diet plan and the whole bit to make sure that your, your child is, you know, essentially what it is. I call it the resilience roadmap and not like your plan to reduce ADHD or your plan for autism or whatever. Because what we're doing is we're looking underneath all of those diagnoses into resilient, into the capacity to navigate stress, tolerate stress. And there's a great recorded seminar on my website called The Biology of Behavior. If folks are interested, maybe you could link to that, which outlines what's going on in a child's body when they struggle to cope. So that could look like autism, that could look like anxiety, that could look like ADHD, that could look like explosive outbursts, all of these things, right? It's not a diagnosis, it's a what is causing the behavior from a biological perspective. So that might be really informative.
Yeah, definitely can put that link in the show notes. And well, Jess, thanks so much for coming on just and helping us build some resilient kids and maybe resiliency ourselves. This show is called the Health Detective Podcast, so I'm just curious, what is something cool you've personally learned or uncovered lately? Like a light bulb with me, you've had as your own health detective?
And I say that with full like humility because I spend way too much time sitting at my computer and trying to help people get healthy and moving your body. This goes for our kids, too, though, right? Like the kids who struggle to get off the
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Connect with Dr. Marny
eGuide “7 Keys to a Successful Parenting Do-Over – How to un-mess up your kids and love your life!” at http://www.7keysgift.com
Well, Dr. Marny, I'm so excited to have you in the house today, and you're just a woman that I so admire and respect and just so accomplished I know in your career and your career path and such a heartfelt entrepreneur and healthcare provider. And so today, we're really excited to talk about Parenting Do-Over, like what that means and what that's all about. Cuz I think there is a lot of noise in the parenting world as it is just even in one's own head about parenting, and you totally get that. But before we dive into that, just give us a little bit of background about what got you inspired into even starting Parenting Do-Over.
Well, I needed to fix my life <laugh>, right? So I was a pediatrician for 16 years, and then I got really sick, and my illness drastically affected my parenting. It also drastically affected my marriage because when you're really sick, you are not your best self. And I wasn't able to do things with my kids. I was irritable with my kids and my husband and partly because I wasn't getting any help with the illness. Like I was going for help, but nobody knew what to do with me, right? I got that classic, Oh, it must all be in your head. Which it was not. As you know, you, you've heard the, you know the whole story, but it's an illness that's typically thought of as in your head. I had multiple chemical sensitivities, which is a version of chemical toxicity and post-traumatic stress all wrapped together in a very ugly package that you look fine on the outside, but you're totally not fine on the inside <laugh>.
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I just got to the point about four years into that where I actually left one part of my two part hospital physician jobs because I needed to be a better parent. And I thought that getting out of that chemical environment would help, and it didn't. And I ended up starting a retail store that was chemical-free, and that didn't help. And my parenting situation got worse and worse because I was stressed, my husband was stressed, and the kids were stressed. And it really was about finding out how do I get healthy again. And then, as I was learning more and more about getting healthy, I was discovering that it's not just the medical side of getting healthy that has to happen for you to be your best self. So I had to address my thoughts. I had to address my emotions. I had to address the spiritual side of my life.
I had to address my self-image, all these things, and learn relationship skills that I hadn't learned in order to really get healthy. And each one of those additional pieces I learned and put into place in my life made my life better and made me a much better parent. Right? And so in just applying that and teaching some of those things to my kids different, you know, stress management things or emotional mental health things, you know, had my kids get better as well. And so that's where it came from. And, it's interesting cuz I started in pediatrics because I've always had a passion for kids and families, and I thought, well, if I go into pediatrics, then I'll start with healthy babies, and I'll be able to teach them how to be healthy as adults. And it, you know, when I got my own illness, suddenly out of the blue, I really realized that pediatrics didn't give me any tools to meet that goal that I had. The conventional medicine world doesn't teach us how to be healthy. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it only teaches us how to manage illness, and it poo-poos all the things that make you healthy. And I didn't realize that at first. And now it's so exciting that I do have all these things to help people be healthy. And that's how I got into it.
Well, that is so cool. It makes me smile, too, because it is really like no parent is given a manual on how to be a parent. I mean, maybe you go through, like, before preparing for your baby, like how to go into labor, but after that, there's not really a parenting class and
That's, that's right. There's manuals for how to set up your nursery. And there's manuals for how to go through labor, but after that, it's all done. And I kind of look back and laugh cuz I thought about writing a parenting manual when I was a pediatrician. And I just look at it and go, Well, that would've been totally inadequate <laugh>. Yeah. You know, now knowing what I know now. But, it is a really lacking thing. And the truth is, the more you do to better yourself to get rid of all the baggage you've accumulated in your life before you're a parent, the better a parent you're gonna be. But it's never too late to make yourself a better person and be a better parent and give your kids a better experience. Even if, even if your kids are already adults. Yeah. It's not too late to, you know, improve on that and give them a little better set of tools for life.
Right. So it's kind of like, where does one even begin? And we were talking a little before the show started about like putting on your own oxygen mask and like kind of doing the work for yourself and perhaps releasing some of the pressure on just the parenting skills itself and like doing the work even that you did within your own health healing journey for sure. And that, that internal work, so to speak, and that sounds kind of abstract maybe to the listener. Can you give us some like specific concrete ideas and examples of like what some of this becoming a better parent slash, like flexing those muscles, really looks like in practice?
Yeah, I think actually parenting skills are probably the least important part, which is maybe good news, maybe not good news. I don't know. It depends on where you are with that. But it's really about getting you into a place where you can be a good parent. So that means managing your health. So there's seven areas that I cover when I coach my clients on the Parenting Do-Over process. Right? And there's a, there's a distinct process that we go through where we look at, you know, what is the baggage they have, what are the things getting in in their way? We look at seven areas, which I'll come back to in a second. We look at what is the thing that is most bothersome to them right now in their family life. Where do they wanna go? And then we dissect it down into, well, which of the seven areas which things need to be managed to get from where you are now to where you wanna get.
And we're talking about a short-term goal, not the rosy grand ideal scenario that we, I mean, we should have that, but that we, we aren't gonna leap from here to there in one fell swoop. So we come up with a short-term, you know, single scenario thing that's going on and look at what are the components affecting that. And then, we look at the seven areas and then come up with a plan for activating slightly different habits or better-coping skills, better stress management, and better thoughts. So the seven areas are your own health, and sometimes it's just little tweaks you need to make. And sometimes you really do need to get some help from someone who knows how to restore health. Someone like you or me outside of the conventional healthcare system, which I don't like to bash. But the truth is that they're not good with chronic health issues.
The conventional healthcare system is really, really good with acute emergencies. And I want them there for me should I have an acute emergency. And with chronic health, they're only taught, and I was one of them for a long time, so I can easily say this, we are only taught how to manage illness. We're not taught that the body can actually heal and what to do to have it heal. And it's complex what to do to have it heal. Because it's not just about how you manage your body, it's also how you manage your thoughts and how you deal with past traumas and how your spiritual practices are. And they're many components to it, which is why I say parenting skills are kind of the least of it, right? So we look at health physical health, we look at mental health, which I talk about as your thoughts and your language.
We have like 60,000 thoughts a day, most of which are negative and on an autopilot loop mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And those are very stressful to us. And our brain is also our humble servant. And it will make happen what we tell it to make happen. So if you go around all day saying, Oh, my back is killing me, my head is killing me, these kids are driving me crazy, your brain actually takes that as a command mm-hmm. <Affirmative> to make come true. And if you stop and think about it, there's so many things that most people say that you don't really want to come true. You know, So it's learning how to catch those and put positive thoughts in your mind without being a Pollyanna, a sun, you know, Susie's sunshine unrealistic, but making sure that you are giving your brain the commands you really want it to follow through on. Right?
Then the emotional health is looking at your past traumas and what, if anything, have you done to release them. Our traumas live in our tissues, which a lot of people don't know they get the body takes 'em in. And if we don't know how to deal with it appropriately at the time, which almost nobody does, because that type of healing has really only come into the forefront in the last five years, I'd say, you know, it's been growing for the last 15 or 20. But now, if you look in the alternative world, you'll see it everywhere. Trauma, healing, and all sorts of different ways to heal old wounds and new wounds. But our parents didn't know how to do it, so they couldn't teach us how to do it. And it was always just this, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep going mentality that we've had, and that keeps us going.
But it also keeps the trauma stuck and doing damage in our bodies. So looking at how to release old traumas, but also looking at what are your day-to-day trauma triggers? What puts you into the fight-or-flight response? What has you fly off the handle? What has you go into road rage? What has you yell at your kids or yell at your spouse or be really frustrated with yourself because those are all damaging relationships, and they're setting a bad example for your kids, who only learn by what we do? We can talk all day long at our kids, but they're gonna learn what we do. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. They're going to model it. Right? So that's another part. And gratitude's a huge big part. What do you focus on? Do you focus on the good parts of life, or do you focus on the bad parts of life?
And what do you, what do you see? It makes a big difference. The fourth area is your self-image. So how do you, how do you see yourself? How do you talk to yourself? How do you care for yourself? How do you take responsibility for yourself? Like, stay out of the drama triangle. Like how do you own it when you've made a mistake instead of trying to put it off on someone or something else? These are also things your kids will model. And when you can get better at that, you'll be much more at peace. These are all just things that add to our cumulative stress load. And the more stressed we are, the more badly we behave. <Laugh>. Yeah. And the less well we feel. So fifth area is your spiritual health. We were all, I believe we were all put here for a reason.
We each have a purpose that's unique from everyone else's purpose. And we were given the gifts and talents for that even though it may be a little bit hidden and we may not have automatically gone in that direction. So what's your purpose? Who are you, what are you meant to be? A lot of people went into whatever their job or career is because it's what their parents wanted them to do, but it doesn't feed their soul. Right? And, so, if you're in a job that is sucking your soul dry, you can't be a good version of you. Which means you can't be good in your relationship. You can't be as good as a parent as you wanna be. So it's, look, looking at those things and also intuition, we have been, we have downplayed intuition so much that people don't know how to listen to it.
So that's another piece of it is learning to listen to what's right for you, even if it maybe goes against the grain, a little bit of what your friends or family are doing. Pay attention to that. The sixth area is relationship health, which I think is huge because that's another thing that could have a manual right, is partner relationships, relationships with kids outside of parenting. Most of us weren't taught how to have a supportive relationship. We expect other people to know what we're thinking. We expect other people to have the same priorities as us. We expect other people to behave in the same way we would behave, and they're not going to because they're not us. But we get mad at each other for being different instead of celebrating each other's strengths. And how do we bring those strengths together to create an even stronger relationship where I can support you, and you can support me with our talents where the other one is weak and how do we speak to each other kindly instead of blaming and shaming and come up with win-win situations instead of I win, you lose.
So that's kind of the relationship part. And then the last one is actually about kids, and it's developmental health. So the first six are really about you, the parent, making yourself better. And as you do it, you'll pass that on to your kids so that they will, you know, get these skills 20, 30 years sooner than you did, which is an awesome gift to give them as a parent. So the last one is, I call it, developmental health, which is really understanding the different stages of child development and what kids need at certain ages, what kids can and can't do at different ages. A lot of the trauma that kids take on from their parents, unintentionally, of course, I love to say that all good parents unintentionally mess up their kids because we weren't taught how to not do it. And so our baggage and, and just not knowing what we're doing causes trauma to our kids and those little microtraumas, but those microtraumas add up, and they add up into a poor self-image or, you know, bad coping mechanisms that get in the way of the, are kids doing their best as they enter the adult world.
But so when you understand what's appropriate for kids at different ages, you can minimize those little microtraumas and give them what they need and give them even more important is like giving them age-appropriate challenges. Cuz kids need challenges to grow, just like adults do. The only way we ever really learn is through adversity and having to figure something out. And if we coddle our kids, they're not learning anything. You know, my kids are, well, they're 19 and 22 now, so one's a freshman in college and the other one just graduated, and they look at the other kids in college, and their jaws just drop because my kids have been doing their own laundry, cooking their own foods since they were before they were 10 and cleaning the house and these other kids and, and managing their finances. And they look at these other kids who so many of 'em can't do any of that stuff. And we don't, you know, we think we're doing our kids a favor by doing stuff for them, but we're not. They have to learn, you know, we all learned, you know, less than our, our parents learned more than we did by themselves. We learned, and still learned. And now, now we've like gone this weird flip thing where we're doing everything for our kids because we want them to be kids. Yeah. Well, kids have to learn.
So I would love to know. So there's a couple of parents that come to mind. I've worked with a lot of families and parents over the years. Like I started my own babysitter's club at age 10 and then just, from then on and worked in pediatrics for a time as an occupational therapist and nutritionist. And then just in my clinical practice now, I still see the lifespan just depending on what their struggles. I see a lot of avoidant, restrictive food intake disorder, actually. So a lot of picky eaters, and one parent comes to mind right now with their child, 17 years old, and only eating about five foods like bagels, pizza, cereal, a couple of cereals, and chips. And that's kind of like the diet,
Exactly. Mostly grains and sugar. But really, I mean, working with both the parent and the child, the child is a hundred percent unmotivated to change because there's just no need to change. Like they really enjoyed the food they're eating, it's very comforting for them. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then working with the parent, it's, I mean, she wants it so badly for her child to just be able to have food freedom because she sees like what that would give him in his life outside of like the home and just taking his food everywhere he goes and being scared to go places, et cetera. And so she wants this more than he does. So working with a parent like that who really is like, you know, she's doing, been in herself over backward and like on the phone calls for him and he just every week, Nope, I don't wanna try anything. Nope. I'm good. And I find it's a lot, it really weighs on her own worth and just seeing this as her as a parent as well and just seeing, Yeah. What would Dr. Marny advise and kind of like do in a scenario like that?
Different scenario. But both of my kids have had some major health issues. My son is fully recovered from a year of mystery illness, totally healthy, but he also doesn't eat a lot of food variety. My daughter has had severe scoliosis, well, moderately severe scoliosis, and she has autoimmune thyroid and food sensitivities that she hasn't wanted to deal with, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and she, she's gotten her gluten under control, but there's some other ones that she hasn't been ready to deal with yet. And she was like, this kid you described, she wasn't super sick, she was probably having more trouble than the kid you're describing cuz she had migraines, and she had fatigue that was pretty crippling. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And she gets a lot of back, you know, muscle muscular skeletal pain from scoliosis, and I just couldn't get over myself like, I'm a bad parent if I can't get her to do this, and people are gonna think badly of me, and she's gonna struggle.
And I just really wanted more than anything for her not to go through the devastating health issues that I went through mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And it made me be an awful parent to her because I was nagging her, I was pushing her, I was criticizing her for her choices, always pointing out what she was doing wrong, and never pointing out what she was doing right. And I give her so much credit, she has such a voice for herself that she kept speaking up to me and saying, The more you do this, the less I wanna comply. And I had to really sit back and think and realize that I wouldn't have made those changes if I didn't feel horrible. Right? And even an occasional migraine, I could, you know, most people will blow off. Well, I eat that stuff all the time, and I only get migraines every two or three weeks, so it can't be that.
So there's a hard and fast rule that people of any age will only change and make changes when the pain of changing is less than the pain of not changing. And no matter how much a parent wants it for a kid, they cannot make it happen beyond a certain age. You got a really little kid, and parents totally in control, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But once you get to 10 and certainly 17, it's all on the kid. The parent can set a supportive environment and be a good role model. But the more we push, the more we nag, the more we criticize, the more we're in fear, the more the kid puts up their defenses and resists and would rather do the exact opposite of what we want. Right. So it's a great example of how we have to become our best self and look at self-responsibility and what are we responsible for as a parent and what is that kid responsible for, and how do we teach them to be self-responsible? There's no easy answer for the scenario that you put out there, but the answer is certainly that the parent has to back off mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and the parent has to get comfortable with, I'm a good enough parent, maybe I'm even a great parent. And despite that, my kid developed these picky eating things for whatever reason. And even if it was something about you as a parent modeling lousy eating earlier in the child's life, okay. Start modeling good eating.
Start talking about how good you feel when you eat well, when you sleep well, when you exercise, when you're not at your computer all day, just talk about how the changes you've made have helped you feel better without saying you should do it too. Or when are you gonna get onboard or any of that stuff? And we have to realize that we've all like look back at all the crappy behaviors we did when we were kids. None of us ate well when we were teenagers, not one of us <laugh>. Right? And it's not to say that that's not the goal, that is the goal, but you're not gonna take a picky teenager and overnight make 'em into a good eater. Yeah. Right. We can instill really good eating habits in our kids when they're young. If we have really good eating habits and it's a family affair, they'll still probably deviate in their teenage and college years because of all the temptation and examples out there in the peer pressure. But they'll notice that eating that way makes them feel worse.
And then they'll go back and start eating healthier again when they get outta college or when they start living off campus and have more control over their food. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know,
A lot of the work we've been doing is just like on the intuitiveness, like how do, how do you actually feel like talking with the child or the teen <laugh> to really like begin to, to at least parallel because even though he thinks he feels fine, he's so tired all the time and just like a lot of, I think unspoken feels not grades too, you know, like bloating, gas, that kind of thing. That's just normal for so many that we don't even think of it as being not normal.
Right. And that's the thing that's perfect because you do have to, like, get into perspective. People will say, I'm fine, there's nothing wrong. And they'll compare themselves, like my daughter who has these, these health issues, she'd look at her peers in college and say, I look healthier than them. They're on all these prescription medications for anxiety, depression, for ADHD, for acne, or whatever.
Why am I having these issues? I'm like, you're having them for all sorts of reasons, mostly because of food sensitivities that you know, you haven't dealt with yet, and you're much healthy. You are much healthier than they are. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. But it's just in your face because you know that you have
You know, that it's not normal to be sick, and they just think it's normal. Like one of my favorite sayings even before I was, even, even when I was still in conventional pediatrics, was just because something's common doesn't make it normal. Mm-Hmm.
But it's not normal or healthy. Right? Yeah. And so we have to kind of get to looking at those, those different things, and it is about, like, what's the underlying, So you said a really good thing about getting in tune with your body and really realizing we're taught to deny like we're taught I said it before, pull up your bootstraps and go on. I'm fine, I'm fine. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, I mean, we've learned even as adults in our culture, you can be on five or six prescription medications for all sorts of chronic illnesses, but as long as you're not having symptoms, you've got great health. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> no.
Right. But that's what we're taught. There's so much denial about health and the effect of our lifestyle on our health because no one wants to be the one to admit that they're suffering
Right. And so the whole point is like, you know, I work with people who are, say, who are willing to say, this isn't working for me. I need some help creating a better situation. Yeah. Like I had all these dreams for how I wanted my family to be, and they're not happening because of this, that, and the other thing. And they're real, those dreams are important to me, so how do I get back to them?
And, and the answer's one step at a time through these seven different areas and changing habits. And one, it's like climbing a mountain, you know, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step and just one after another after another. And it becomes an upward spiral of improvement instead of a downward vicious cycle spiral of things getting worse.
Definitely. Well, Dr. Marny, you're just a wealth of knowledge, and thanks so much for coming on. Where can people find out more about you and the work you're doing in the world?
The best place to find out more about me is I have a little e-guide on the seven keys to a successful parenting do-over. So it'll review, you know, some of what we talked about today, and it's got a lot more than what we talked about. So that is accessible at seven. The number seven keys. K e y s gift.com. Yeah. Seven keys gift.com. And that's a great place to start. And from there, they'll get all the other ways of getting in touch with me if they wanted to. And I do also have a functional medicine practice where I see adults and kids.
Very cool. We'll definitely put links in the show notes, and yeah, just something I'd love to ask, too, is like, what is something cool you've been learning lately or uncovered lately, like a light bulb epiphany you've had as your own health detective?
Ooh. you know, I would say the best epiphany I've had lately is really learning how to stay out of fear when a health challenge is presented. And really being grateful for the body's healing abilities. Because fear and stress, I mean, fear creates a stress reaction. So stress is the number one thing that keeps us from healing. We can't heal when we're in stress. We have to be relaxed. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So as you know, I've had a little challenge lately, and then I've really been practicing that, and it's been a huge big shift and key to just be trusting my body to heal. And staying out of fear is a huge one. And it goes for all areas of life, whether it's a health crisis or a school crisis with your kids or an eating thing with your kids. The more we can learn to stay out of fear and to create positive vibrations, really a positive frequency for ourselves, the easier any challenge is to solve.
Well, that's all for today's show. If you like today's episode, feel free to share it with someone who may like it too. And I also love hearing from you. Don't hesitate to click the five stars button in the app and leave a review. It helps us get the word out to other health detectives just like you, who could benefit from uncovering health truths for their body, mind, and soul. And if you need anything, reach out to me over at drlauryn.com. All right. Until next time, go out there and keep it real.
Well, hello. Hello. Welcome to the Health Detective Podcast, a show dedicated to quieting the noise in the health, food, and fitness world. I'm your host, Dr. Lauryn, former TV news journalist, and chronic illness patient, gone health detective, and functional medicine expert, helping patients worldwide radically take their health back into their own hands. On this show, we have real conversations with a variety of guests who are all about being a little bit of a health detective in their own way, from New York Times bestselling authors, professional athletes, research nerds like myself, serial entrepreneurs, business owners, underdog, overcomers, and expert clinicians. Ultimately get ready to uncover the truth and expose the lies in both conventional health wisdom and diet culture as we know it so you can reach your optimal potential.
Well, today we're talking all about the wild wild west of the thyroid, which is something I personally dealt with at thyroid condition, Hashimoto's, hypothyroidism, as well as I would say 60 to 70% of the patients that I see in clinical practice.
And a lot of my own thyroid issues stemmed from a history of chronic stress, chronic dieting, <laugh> definitely in my eating disorder days. And on the back end, just recognizing and being diagnosed with all sorts of autoimmune conditions in relation to stress and both my gut microbiome, which we're gonna nerd out on some more. Today we have Tiffany Flaten in the house. She is a nutritionist, thyroid expert, and wellness coach. Also the founder of the company Rock Bottom Wellness. And she really helps thyroid patients improve their symptoms through proper nutrition education. That is her wheelhouse. She's written a book, "Rock Bottom Thyroid Treatment" and "Eight Week Thyroid Diet for people with normal thyroid test results to thrive, not to just survive". And you are gonna love hearing her story. You know, experience is always the best teacher, and Tiffany is no different. Her own health journey took her down the trajectory she's on today, now, empowering so many people, so many patients, and clients to really take their health back into their own hands as well.
So this show is for you if you wanna know all about Thyroid 101, how to know if you have thyroid conditions, what to look for, classic signs and symptoms. Yes. also looking at which lab test can help show you that, to treatment actually for it. And all the angles that you can come from supporting the thyroid beyond just taking a pill for the ill, which in some cases can be helpful for somewhat thyroid conditions. So we do talk about just the Wild West, not only of thyroid conditions itself and being diagnosed, but what to do about it. I learned some interesting hacks from her, and one hack that she shared with me off the air was how supplementation with which is an amino acid supplement, actually she has seen that significantly lower folk's antibodies basically from a Hashimotos perspective.
So if there is that flare happening from an autoimmunity of the thyroid, which goes misdiagnosed a lot, that hack with that amino acid supplementation can be really helpful, she shared. So really excited to get to this episode. And, of course, if you guys are liking the show, please don't hesitate to leave a review. Your reviews help others become their own health detective in their life. So that five stars is so appreciated. Of course, if you have questions or you have a topic idea, something you'd love to see us dig a little bit deeper and be detectives four on this show, please don't hesitate to reach out to me on my website, dr Lauryn dot com. That's Dr. Lauryn d r l a u r y n dot com. Can't wait to hear from you. All right, let's get to the show.
Well, Tiffany, I'm so excited to have you in the house today to just chat about the wild west of the thyroid, which I think we're gonna have a lot of ears peaked towards that because it is a widespread epidemic really amidst modern, especially womankind. But we can kind of get into that in a minute. But would love to know a little bit about really your story background and what got you doing this work that you're doing in the world.
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Any opportunity to, you know, to explain to people, like you said, the wild wild west of the thyroid and how you can actually help yourself is so important. So thank you. My background and my history of why I'm doing what I do now, it comes from my own issues with my thyroid. I had What I truly believe was an undiagnosed thyroid condition. I'm just assuming hypothyroidism. I don't believe I had the autoimmune piece as in Hashimotos or Graves, but I believe I had undiagnosed thyroid conditions because my TSH was always in the, you know, normal range, and that's all that was tested. But I had all kinds of symptoms, depression, anxiety, were probably, you know, at my worst probably that was the worst symptom, but there was the debilitating fatigue was a part of it that would sort of ebb and flow throughout my life starting in high school actually.
And so it got worse and worse through college. And then after my first child, it got worse, you know, which you hear so often. And then eventually, you know, jumped a few years after that first child, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer just at a regular checkup for a yearly checkup, and she palpated in my, my throat, and she noticed a lump, and it was pretty big. And actually, after I knew it was there, I could just see it by looking in the mirror. So I don't know how I missed it for all those years. And they had said, you know, it's still growing, thankfully so, but it said that it had probably been in my system for about 10 years based on the size and that it had spread to the lymph nodes at that point. So, of course, that drives you into fear mode when you hear the C word.
It kind of just raises a whole nother level of stress and anxiety and worry, you know, just changes things. And I just went through the process, the typical process of surgery and treatment and then surgery again cuz it came back a year later and more treatments and then just watching it, the watch and weight method of scanning and that kind of stuff Yearly or actually I was going every four months for a while and checking things out with my blood work and my medications. And the biggest problem for me, yes, the cancer was a problem, but I had horrible symptoms, and I would say the majority of my symptoms or the most frustrating was the fatigue. It was unbearable. I can only describe it as pregnancy fatigue. So if any of your listeners have gone through that, that's the only way I can describe it and kind of relate it to people, which made it hard to do my job, of course, and to, you know, deal with little kids and, and just have any interest in going to anything social, going to a movie with friends or anything.
It was just not going to happen. And it was just super frustrating cuz I could not get back to what I tried to describe as normal, and I didn't even really know what that was. I just knew it was better than what I was feeling, and I wasn't getting any support and help, any guidance from my doctors. It was just, this is how it is, get used to it, you know, this is all we can do. Take your Synthroid and be done. That's it. And I just wasn't gonna take that <laugh>, I wasn't gonna live like that cuz I, it was not living actually. So I went back to school to become a nutritionist, and where I'm located, you know, I went through the process of getting a master's in nutrition and doing the certified nutrition specialist board certification so that I could practice and help people do the same thing and overcome their issues and to at least support what they're doing with their doctors, with managing their medication cuz that obviously needs to be done.
And so I just have been finding more and more people who have those same but different kinds of scenarios that are just not getting support. And that's what I wanted to focus on because it took me probably a good eight to 10 years to start feeling like my old self and that old self that was from a long time ago. I mean, that was from early high school probably where I felt with, you know, with energy and all that kind of thing and, and not being depressed, and I just wanted to really help people not have to deal with that for 10 or more years until they could live life. So that's my story, my background.
Definitely. And so cool that, yeah, you are living life now and helping others get their lives back. And just, let's kind of like paint the picture here first. So wild west of thyroid, it is very synonymous with a lot of just everyday conditions or everyday symptoms rather than probably experience. Can you kind of share what would be some of the hallmark signs and symptoms of a thyroid condition first?
Yeah, so it's true, it overlaps with so many things, and it gets explained away by, you're just stressed out, you know, know you just have a lot on your plate. So I would say the telltale for sure or the obvious thing would be, you know, some kind of growth, a goer, or some kind of nodule around your neck area. That would be definitely something to look at. Those are not always cancerous, actually a lot of them, most of them are not cancerous. So that, but then the fatigue that is just unrelenting and gut health is a big factor in a lot of people with thyroid issues, and I would say anxiety. Those are the things that bring people into me where they need resolve because they've been on antidepressants, they've taken PPIs for 20 years, and they have a normal thyroid, but when they bring their tests to me, they look not optimal. You know, they're not optimally functioning, and nutrients sort of tell us a different story when you look at their cellular level nutrients, and you can do a lot, a lot with that to help bring, resolve a lot of those symptoms. But those are the tell tales that, that I see.
I see too a lot of inability to like lose weight or like feel like they're at a body composition even for gain weight for some like, just like an unhealthy weight. Either way. I know in my like elevated T3 syndrome when I had that I had a lot of weight gain resistance and then hair loss I see a lot of as well.
Yeah. So the things I mentioned were sort of those things that I need to go get help. Those are the symptoms that they are to the point where they can't handle anymore. They look for that one more person to help them. They always come with the hair loss. I can't lose weight. Some I, I've only had a couple that are the opposite. So yeah, they mostly wanna do that. So we, it's like those things sort of work itself out, and they, it's like a secondary concern for them personally, which is weird cuz weight loss is always a thing for most people it seems like. But by the time they come to me, they're sick and tired of being sick and tired, and if they can feel normal and have energy to not nap every single day for two or three hours at a time, they are like, great, that's awesome. Now, if the weight sort of starts to come off and resolve, awesome. But that's not their first priority by the time they come to me, which is kind of unusual, but they're done, they're over it
Before diving into kind of like how to even know if you have a thyroid condition, et cetera, let's kinda like talk about, besides the symptoms, like the actual diagnosis of it, what does the thyroid do? Like why is it important? We hear that word, and I feel like for just a human population, we're not always educated on our own bodies, like what all the functions and structures do. And yet we can hear like, oh, I have a thyroid issue because I've, I feel these symptoms. But, like, yeah, what is the magnitude of the thyroid, and why is it so important for the body?
It's interesting you say that you know, my background and even interest prior to going into undergrad, always interested in the human body. And I knew that the thyroid, you know, you think of thyroid, and you think of energy and weight, of course. So those are the two things people mostly know of. So it's funny you say that, though, about people who don't really know what their body does. That's very, very true. And even for myself, who someone is interested in, I used to teach, when I was diagnosed with cancer, I was teaching anatomy and physiology, and I got diagnosed on October 12th, 2007. And I went back to the classroom, you know, the next day or whatever, we were starting a unit on the endocrine system, and the first thing was the thyroid blend. And I was reading, and I was preparing some stuff, and I was ready to talk, and I, I've taught this many times by now, and the sentence, it's like it came 3D off the page, it said the thyroid gland affects every cell in the body.
And that was the first time I'd ever read that and heard it like that where it's, this impacts everything. So we need to have a healthy thyroid. So basically, you know, we know that the thyroid creates with the direction from the pituitary gland to create the thyroid hormone sort of in a negative feedback system, like a thermostat in your house for your furnace, your air, air, and your cooling and heating in your house. And it makes a hormone to produce and send out to all the tissues to, you know, regulate body temperature, metabolism, and many other things. So it's very involved. And so when it's off a little bit, you know, and everybody has a different threshold of where they feel symptoms, you know, it can be pretty impactful in an, in a negative way a lot of times.
Yeah. Also, in clinical practice, I oftentimes talk about the HPAT axis. Yes. So like yes, hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal, and thyroid axis all work together as your body's like balancer stress management system down to like the energy system as well, metabolic and mitochondrial affecting our energy. So knowing that you have a thyroid condition beyond the symptoms like, you know, thyroid conditions go missed still oftentimes and like hence the work that you're doing and perhaps like the underlying before having cancer was probably something for you there as well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But talk a little bit about why that is, and I'm just so flabbergasted still just from a diagnostic perspective that there's usually just two markers looked at on most people's blood work in general. Why is that?
Yeah, I don't understand. I've asked, when I've interviewed people on my podcast, I've asked why are we looking at just this and not always, you know, on air, so to speak. And the answers I get are, you know, it some, it's tied to how the insurance wants you to run those tests. And I've had pushback for my own daughter to have a full panel run, and they just will not do it. So I, I don't understand why, but I can't remember, remember what you asked right before that?
Yeah, just diagnosing it. So, so we look, so the two markers we're talking about are TSH and T4 for those that are listening on a blood work panel. Whereas, like, I don't even know the number of markers that you can run for a complete thyroid panel. And just considering that 90% of thyroid issues are actually related to an autoimmunity of the thyroids. So like A Hashimotos or Graves and the antibodies are typically never checked in a conventional setting.
They aren't. And so what I tell people if they're, if they're not sure if they have not been diagnosed, and I also have people who have been diagnosed, and they still don't get full panels, run every, you know, at least yearly. So that's interesting to me, being their own medications and stuff. But I would say you gotta have the free t4, free T3 to know how conversion is and then the TPO antibodies and the thyroglobulin antibodies and then you know, reverse t3, which I know in my experience, I know the providers I have seen laugh that one off and I don't know if that has changed. I have not asked for that for a long time from them. So maybe it's becoming a little bit more mainstream, I guess. I don't know. But it's interesting because we have that range that are pretty large for especially TSH.
And then we have what's more optimal and functional. And I see often people have a lot of symptoms primarily, you know, the inability to lose weight, the fatigue and a lot of the low like depression, low stomach acid, that kind of thing. Even though they're in the normal range but they're high normal, and they just get sort of passed off as that They just need to eat less, exercise more, and just power through, fake it until you make it kind of thing, which is how I lived for a lot of years. And it's exhausting. It's stressful.
Right. Well, and also considering like what are the norm ranges too? So like on a TSH, I feel like it switches sometimes between like 2.0 to 2.5, but anything below or above that rather would be subclinical. Whereas the current cutoff on a blood work panel is 4.5, I believe, for a TSH. Is that accurate?
Yeah, I think, and it changes between labs, too. When I first started, the range for normal was 0.5 to 5.5. Now I'm seeing more 4.5, and you know, 0.5 to 4.5, and I've even seen a couple of labs that are a little lower than that. So we're moving in the right direction, tightening that up, I think.
Well, and then also the different shades of hypothyroidism, and you can actually have hypothyroid symptomology without like you're saying, expressed fully on, on blood work too. And kind of talk about the undertones of, like, what would be causes of that. Because you know, there's hypothyroidism overtly high TSH would be just one shade of hypothyroidism and there's like, I think there's like 26 in my studies with like Dr. There, but kind of like what would be some of the other, I guess, drivers of thyroid and thyroid issues that are really common that you do see, like from a clinical perspective?
I think specifically the one thing is high level of stress or an event, I'm thinking of two scenarios that are, were really obvious where they ended up with an actual Hashimotos. They had a two-year work project where it was, you know, burning the candles at both ends 80 hours a week. It was a high stakes, you know, project for almost two years, and a couple of years later they, or not even a couple of years it was, it was sooner than that, ended up with Hashimotos. You see that with pregnant women and after, you know, within six months to a year, they end up with a Hashimoto's results. So that's a really stress based that HPAT, you know, that whole access at play there. And then the other thing is just that debilitating fatigue. I see that a lot where they feel like they need to sleep all the time. They can sleep 11 hours at night and wake up and feel like they've never slept. And so that's what I try to help work on them with nutrients to help support that whole process, the whole day-night patterns for themselves and you know, support that stress management system nutritionally.
So like, kind of as from a functional perspective, we like to think about what are the root causes of this thyroid issue versus just like, okay, we found the thyroid issue, like let's suppress it now. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> for context, for the listeners that are not familiar with that word, Hashimotos, we've talked a little bit about it here, but that's really just the body's attack of the thyroid tissue itself. Self-attack and autoimmune can present in multiple ways. So some people have like a genetic predisposition to have like Hashimotos, whereas others may have celiac. It's interesting that you say that about pregnancy like I see that a lot too, like post-pregnancy, post-partum Hashimotos being on set, and I think, I don't know about what you see thematically like why that would be the case beyond stress because there is lack of sleep happening in postpartum.
Yeah. There's a lot of stress on the body going through such a change and, but I see the gut microbiome also being significantly a big part of that because your microbiome shifts dramatically, especially in that third trimester. And they've done, I mean, like in just studies comparing a woman's microbiome in that third stage to those with like obesity and find that they have similar microbiomes mm-hmm <affirmative> just because of like harvesting calories, like how things are operating down there normal part of pregnancy or going through that. But if you're not optimizing with nutrients like you're helping your patients do as well. I imagine the gut microbiome has a big thing to do with like why Hashimotos happens postpartum.
Yeah, there's lots of connections to that, and one of the biggest ones is it seems that thyroid patients often have really low stomach acid. And so then what you're, what the problem is is you're not able to digest and absorb especially bigger molecules like proteins. And so that does not get assimilated into the body and become more nutrient-deficient. You can be malnourished in pregnancy sometimes you can't eat, you know, because you're sick, you know, so it just is sort of a, a perfect storm, I guess you could say, which when the baby's born oftentimes, you know, you think okay, everything is gonna change back and sometimes it can just put you over the edge enough to cause your body to wake up and say, okay, I'm fighting against something. And that's where that autoimmune system comes into play. Also, I think the blood sugar balance, which that causes a lot of stress on the system.
So that's all connected, and you know, the problem is so many times in the conventional setting we get treated very com it's very compartmentalized, and it's sort of like this doesn't have to do with that. So blood sugar imbalance, whether it's not that it's even prediabetic even or type two diabetes, it's imbalanced, and it causes stress on your system and we have to deal with the stress and the blood sugar in, you know, nutritionally as best as we can. And that helps to level things out, too, and relieve that stress. But if we're not taught or talked to that these things all interrelate, you know, we don't even see them. So as a patient, if you're going through this kind of thing, it's really important to really self-advocate and try to connect dots and find someone who will help you connect the dots.
Yeah, and kind of like piggybacking on that stress, like, you know, stress goes beyond just mental stress or perceived stress, like stress over like a deadline for work or a paper or being stuck in traffic. And like I know in my own health journey with the thyroid issues specifically like T3 syndrome, which would be like that low t3 basically the active thyroid hormone. A lot of the stress in my life comes from overtraining and living in mold and like chronic mold exposure. And then just kind of like even, I'd say insufficiency dysbiosis like in my gut, gut balances from eating the same exact foods every single day. So like, just not much variety, and that was just like enough for my body to be like, you know, I'm outta balance, and so it's just like it's gonna extract from my energy source, which was my thyroid in order to keep up running from, keep running from my bear. But kind of like, yeah, what are common stressors you see in the folks that you work with that perhaps go and mental can be a part of it as well?
For sure. I like that you brought that up because it's that there's stress causing issues in your body, and then there's our perceived stress. So I'll talk to people on sort of a, you know, a pre-call to see what we're gonna do as far as working together, and they're like, Oh no, no, I, I love my job, and my marriage is good and all these things. So I'm like, okay, there's maybe stress isn't really impacting them too much now we get into the call, and they're like, I take care of my elderly parents. My brother died, I have, you know, financial issues, I have a diagnosis of this, that, and the other thing. I mean, it's just, it's just funny how we get used to the stress and strain, and the push struggle strives in our life because that's just like modern-day society or something.
And so they downplay all the things that are impacting their health in order to just, I suppose just, push through. Cause you can't just stop living cuz, you have all these things coming at you. But I see that sometimes you have to coach them on, okay, this actually does impact you in this setting. But it's things like, I mean, it's definitely job stress, it's financial stress, it's relationship stress. And then if they have their own health stress with the diagnosis, a lot of times I see people that already have been diagnosed with two or three other autoimmune disorders and chronic pain, chronic pain and IBS stuff, you know, gut stuff where there's that stress of came in a new place. I'm not sure where the bathrooms are. I'm not sure if I aid at the right time before coming here, so I don't have issues. And that constant stress because their symptomology of all these different things are impacting them, and then they've commuted to work, and they've been in traffic bumper to bumper for, you know, an hour and a half or something, and all of that adds up in a big way. But most things are their chronic stress from life. Things like their family or financial, those types of things. If they have stress from a health issue that they already know they have. I would say those are the two main things.
You know, in German new medicine, we even do a lot of work with like our issues showing up in our tissues. And so, like how and most disease symptomology is onset by significant emotional stressor and this can happen multiple times throughout our lives. So there's usually some stress component that like leads to that like tipping point perhaps where like the rugs like pulled from underneath you. And Louis Hayes talks a lot about this in her work, too but like the thyroid being connected to lack of communication in our lives, like in that throat chakra. Do you see that, and what would be like some themes that you see like just within your patients and like yeah, how they show up in the world or how they like Even treat themselves talk to themselves?
Yeah, I love that question. I think what I see are people who are sort of rule followers, they don't make waves, they don't say how they really feel. They're just those good girls and boys, you know, just do whatever they need to do to get the job done, finish their project. They're not gonna speak up about someone else maybe taking credit for their work. You know, just, just a general example, I see that a lot. There's that common theme of people just not using their voice and feeling sort of, you know, like a shadow and just a wallflower, and that is a common connection
Yeah, amazing. Like epiphany when we look back at our own health journey like that's what was going on. Part of that well talk, talking about kind of like getting out of a thyroid issue or like, you know, it's not something I think a lot of folks think like they're stuck with like hypothyroidism forever is something that can be reversible. Sometimes there is also medication intervention that perhaps has to and does and can be really effective for folks, and it's not like medicine versus like herbals or like natural. There can be a blend right there as well. And perhaps sometimes actually when you bring up or boost your gut health and like improve your nutrient status, sometimes your medication needs change perhaps like in like I see a lot of that with my patients having to adjust their dosage but kind of like, yeah there is a lot of avenues you can go down. We've talked about blood sugar, we've talked about the gut, we've talked about just like overt nutrients, stress, like where do you start climbing out of a thyroid issue? And there there's also could be viruses or like environmental influences like Xeno estrogens and BPA water bottles too. Like I talked about mold. So there is quite a wild west, too, of just like options for avenues for treating or healing from a thyroid condition and and feeling better getting your energy back. Where do you start?
Well, where I start because that's my wheelhouse is looking at nutrient deficiencies. That's mostly where I start with people depending on their location, just, you know, other parameters. But we look at cellular level nutrients and look at nutrients that go into supporting, you know, that energy system, that Creb cycle. But also, you know, what is impacting what, what deficiencies do they have that maybe are impacting their ability to manage their stress and their adrenals, the adrenal nutrients, what nutrients might be deficient that are affecting their gut health and therefore their absorption of nutrients in general. What nutrients are deficient that may be not supporting the thyroid function as well. And what I have seen, I mean obviously, I don't diagnose a thyroid issue or medicate people or write prescriptions, but what I can do is say you need to go back to your doctor and you know, in a few months after working through this protocol and changing your diet and get your levels checked again cuz you might need to modify your medications cuz you don't wanna start being overmedicated and all the symptoms that come from that.
And so that is really impactful. But if they're working on, you know, all of those things, it's, it's not just, okay, we're gonna take some zinc and selenium, and that'll support your thyroid, and all your troubles will be gone. We have to look at that stress management system that gut health, we need to look at blood sugar imbalance, we need to look at obviously then the thyroid nutrients and a lot of times its nutrients that they would never, ever make a connection to. People, I think, are pretty, they understand that zinc and selenium we hear about that are tied to the thyroid all the time, but no one really talks about vitamin A or iodine or, you know, anything like that. So that's where I start with people, and if I have a full panel to look at, which is ideal, you know, we can look at that thyroid hormone conversion issue so that T4 to t3, if that conversion isn't happening, so many times I see people, it gets improved while they manage that stress and support those adrenals with, you know, all the B's and vitamin C to really help their adrenals function better.
So that conversion issue becomes less of an issue. That's like the first place I start, and then I, you know, have to refer out to if, if we wanna get really into the mold and that kind of stuff because in, you know, different viral things or you know, then we move on to people who specialize in that because that's a whole other animal <laugh>. Yeah. You know, it's huge. Yeah, yeah.
Well and deficiency wise, nutrient wise, like the most common themes like you mentioned vitamin A, like talk about a little bit about the food sources of these deficiencies and as well as like iodine we hear about like is it good, is it not good? It exacerbates, for some, is it just because there's a deficiency of actually selenium that's not paired with the iodine?
Yeah, it's hard, and the, the testing that I do doesn't include the iodine, so I honestly don't deal with it too much because of, you know, there are people that it can exacerbate symptoms, especially if they're in that autoimmune situation. So I will only talk about that really if they are actively working with their thyroid doctor, you know, their endocrinologist specifically for that to monitor those things. And looking, looking at antibodies on a regular basis. But I'd say the vitamin As far as foods go, it's always, you know, nuts, seeds, lots of fruits and vegetables, lots of produce, and focus on yellow and orange for the vitamin A. Sometimes if you're so deficient, some people are having horrible gut health symptoms, and if you have a vitamin A deficiency, it's amazing what high doses, you know, like a therapeutic level of vitamin A in a certain form.
Retinyl palmitate is the preferred form. If you have that severe deficiency and that mucosal lining is kind of messed up from years of eating poor foods or being on PPIs or whatever it might be. That really helps to support that. You might have to add that with those, you know, yellow and orange foods to really boost that vitamin A level that helps with that. Keeping the or you know, that if you have a deficient zinc level and you have a kind of a moderate vitamin A level, if you can boost zinc, then vitamin A usually will follow. So it just really depends on the severity of their symptoms. It depends on the levels of their deficiencies and then how they're medicated and how they're working with their doctor on their medicine. Yeah, so nuts, I mean whole foods, I mean whole foods plants good quality. If you're eating animal products, good quality grass-fed animal products to up the, you know, omegas and the, and the zinc like grass fed beef, for example, things like that. Brazil nuts for the selenium. That's, that's kind of my focus on that.
She is the director of education for Documenting Hope and KnoWEwell. She sits on multiple medical advisory boards including Wellness Mama and is the president of The International Institute of Islamic Medicine. Dr. Saeed and her children speak internationally at the most prestigious holistic conferences, TV (including ABC, NBC and CBS), summits, radio, podcasts (including Mind Body Green), newspapers and the United Nations recently published her paper on religion and the food system. Dr Saeed's children host "The Holistic Kids' Show" podcast, interviewing the biggest names in the functional, holistic and integrative medicine world, and helping kids empower and educate other kids.
Well, hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the podcast. A show dedicated to quieting the noise in the health, food, and fitness world. I'm your host, Dr. Lauryn, a former TV news journalist and chronic illness patient gone health detective and functional medicine expert, helping my patients radically take their health back into their own hands. On the show I'm all about disrupting both conventional wisdom and diet culture as we know it, bringing you root-cause solutions and insights that actually work to reach your optimal potential. And today we're talking all about optimizing the potential of our kids, specifically in the wild, wild west of parenting and parenting a holistic kid. Specifically, we're getting into the weeds of picky eating and sleep training, which both can be really big challenges that parents that I've worked with for many, many years seem to deal with. I'm not a parent myself, but I've worked with parents and kids for well over 20 years.
I actually started my own babysitter's club back in the day if you ever read the Babysitter's Club books. I was a huge fan girl and started my babysitter's club of one <laugh> at age 10 and just really have cared for kids of all ages from then on. I also began my career actually as a pediatric OT when I got into the wellness field occupational therapist and was transitioning out of journalism. So working a ton with some of the kids with the most chronic of illnesses. And I say neurological and physiological, both genetic and systemic, and a lot of gut-derived issues that I would later figure that out too. But tons of picky eaters, tons of sensory processing, say like ADHD, autism spectrum, allergies, and food intolerances galore. And I totally can relate myself. I was a child with tons of, I would say, chronic illness now looking back on it.
And even though looked healthy and normal on the outside, I had tons of strep throat infections and ear infections that were recurrent antibiotics galore there. And just lots of gut issues, gut issues from as little as I can remember, age two, <laugh> constipation, bloating, gas. I popped tums like candy and drank Miralax every night as dessert for a time as well. And a lot of that spearheaded me too also into my anorexia and anxiety in my early teens and up and through my twenties. And so just seeing this landscape of like what we maybe consider as normal conditions nowadays, like just because something though is common does not mean it's normal and kids of all individuals should be the healthiest, most robust creatures of all walking this planet and it's such a time in our lives where yeah, immunity is so fresh and being formed and brain health, gut health, all the things.
And so as I was working in the clinics and seeing this landscape, it was super challenging. I found that in the work that I was doing, I oftentimes felt like I was just remediating or just teaching skills and strategies as an occupational therapist to help these kids with healing or mitigating their symptoms, but not really seeing them like overcome that hump, like seeing these diagnoses that, that seemed like incurable. And so when I just began getting into the work of functional medicine though, and nutrition, and really began utilizing that kind of underground wise in the clinics and just educating and talking with parents about their children's health and adopting my Family Fuel program, which was like a nutrition-based program I've created for helping parents and kids really change the landscape of what's on their plate as well as helping heal the gut, specifically like doing some stool testing with kiddos and just some smart, I call it supplementation with helping reshape the biome, proper probiotics and or herbs to help mitigate any dysbiosis.
But seeing kids heal a lot faster, discharge a lot faster from the clinic, like within two to three weeks, sometimes seeing kids that had tons of issues with ADHD or picky eating for example, just really make an overnight seemingly change by supporting their gut and really focusing on the nutrition piece. So fast forward to today and really health is an inside job, something that I've witnessed in my own life, and I believe the same to be true for our kids. And why I'm really excited to have Dr. Madiha Saeed and the house who is better known as the holistic mom on all things social and on her website, and a medical doctor by training who has since just really like taken the role of an educator and thought leader and helping parents in very practical ways time wise and financial wise really become a holistic parent for their children, which then radiates down to the kiddos.
And she's got four amazing children she'll tell us more about. And we really dive into the weeds on this episode about sleep optimization for the parents, sleep optimization for your children, as well as picky eating. So if you're a parent or you know a parent, this episode will really bless you. And don't forget to keep up just with all the latest and greatest on the podcast and show notes, et cetera on my website, drlauryn dot com, and at Dr. Lauryn on social media. So without further ado, let's get to the show.
Well, Madiha, I am so pumped to have you in the house today and just talk all things holistic kids and parenting as well, which can be difficult in this day and age, seemingly. A story we tell ourselves. Before we dive into all that though, please give us just a little bit of background about who you are and what got you doing this work that you are doing in the world.
Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me, Lauryn. You are so amazing. I've listened to your work. You are phenomenal. So I'm so incredibly honored to be here. I was like most Americans with chronic health conditions and you know, I just had all those same bad habits that have led most adults down the road to chronic health disease. And what is so crazy was that I continued on that hamster wheel and continued on the hamster wheel thinking, you know, constipation is normal and chronic pain is normal, chronic pain fatigue is normal. And you know, all of these issues were all normal. Not knowing that no, they're not normal, You can actually live your life full of energy and no pain and actually pass bowel moments normally like normal people. But unfortunately, that's not the norm anymore. But I continued on the hampster wheel even through residency and me and my husband were both interns, and we were both working 80-hour work weeks until one day my husband had this gut inclination.
He goes, Can you go check up on our 10-month-old at daycare? And I was just gonna, you know, I'm like, He's fine, don't worry about it. But when I went over there, I walked into every mother's worst nightmare. And the lights were dimmed, the daycare providers rocking back and forth, back and forth in her chair. You know, I hear a sound in the back and I run back then I see my 10-month-old arms and legs tied down by the receiving blanket, passive virus in his mouth, his Winnie the Pooh blanket was wrapped tightly around his face. His eyes are bloodshot, his face was swollen, his cheeks were glistening with tears. He just couldn't breathe. I picked him up, and I ran out. And that day I promised I would take care of these kids the best that I know how because that day God saved my child and I made a solemn vow.
But then that's where I had to really take a step back and think, Okay, wait, I'm a family physician. I don't even know how to take care of myself. I'm falling apart. I have all of these literally for the - I know when I was dealing with this, I was for the year, I had severe indigestion, you know, I had fissures. I was popping all these pills, a thyroid and Hashimotos and lupus, and even shingles. I mean, my, literally, my body was literally falling apart because <laugh>, I was in my twenties and I had diseases of like 70-year-olds. So this is ridiculous. So I was like, I had to then look for answers, and when nobody could help me find answers, because specifically with the lupus and the Hashimotos and you know, severe digestive issues, I felt stuck. And so I went to the doctor to say, What can I do to stop these chronic conditions?
And they say, Oh, here's a, you know, here's a steroid suppository, or here's this and here's that. And I was like, I can't just keep on using steroid suppositories and taking all these medications. I need to figure out what's causing this so I can stop this in its track. They're like, No, no, you just sit back and let the disease take its course. And I'm like, Are you freaking kidding me? I can't let this disease just take its course. That makes no sense whatsoever. So I discovered integrative holistic functional medicine as I was already studying parenting. And the combination of both those worlds blew my mind. I not only was able to help improve my own chronic health conditions. Actually, I no longer suffer from any of those chronic conditions that crack my life. But I was able to help my children currently their ages 6, 8, 10, and 13.
And I'm able to currently help them build, you know, healthier brains, bodies, behaviors, you know, to help them. Just like I was able to help myself put my body back into balance. I'm able to help them to recognize when their bodies are starting to get out of balance and how to fix it on their own along with all of those key pieces that helped me heal and helped my thousands of patients heal, I'm able to help them incorporate that into their daily routine to really optimize their health from now to the future. And that's what I'm so passionate about, is really saving our future. And thereby holistic mom, MD was born <laugh>. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and I, you know, wanted to show people the journey of what I went through and what I'm doing on a daily basis. I'm not perfect, but as a family physician, if this crazy world was difficult for me to understand and I've been through all the research and the studies and then how to actually implement it in our lives. And I feel like that's a lot of things that people don't do is that they tell you the research but then they, we have no idea how to really implement it into our crazy daily routines. And so for me, I love to find cost-effective, time-effective strategies that we can incorporate into your daily life that can optimize health on a daily basis. So becoming a lifestyle sort of medicine.
Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. And just your story just makes me think instantly of an oxygen mask on an airplane of like, in order to help others, i e your children, you must first help yourself, and also just gives I think, perspective. I was sharing with you before the show, and I worked with as an OT, occupational therapist, and pediatric clinics and school systems and just seeing tons of kiddos with a lot of chronic health issues or neurological issues autism spectrum sensory processing, just really picky eaters, et cetera. And it makes me think like, you know, maybe the parents themselves like are also feeling out of sync and imbalanced, <laugh>, it's, it's just like maybe a family I don't wanna say even issue, but just like it models on down or like can radiate on down when you're not feeling well, it's hard to help your children too. And so but would love to know what you have seen thematically like between parents and kids based upon your own health journey. Like you were not feeling super well, so able to maybe like foster some of these healthy habits for your children that you talk about now. What did that look like when you were sick?
When I was sick, it was difficult. You know, when you're fatigued and when you're tired, and you're having joint pain, and you feel like you're basically just trying to get through all of these obstacles just to do simple daily tasks, that gets really complicated. And I know as when I was dealing with, you know, chronic fatigue and I'm like, this is tired, they're like, Oh no, you're just stressed. And I'm like, I know I'm freaking stressed, but I can barely, I feel like I'm being trapped in my own body. Like I feel like my mind wants to do all of these crazy things and fun things when my body is like, Nope, sorry, I'm not gonna let you go nowhere. <Laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative>, that's when I really needed to find answers because as a mom or as just a human being who just doesn't feel well, you can't even contemplate doing some of the things that I'm doing now, right?
Like for example, what we're doing or what you, what a healthy, somebody with tons of energy able to do. Like even just a thought of doing extra interviews or extra work or you know, taking out the dishes. It's just so much extra work or just playing with the kids. I can barely get up myself. I can barely take care of myself. How am I gonna take care of you? So I think that as mothers, as practitioners, as caregivers, we need to start taking care of ourselves first so then we can then really give to others because we can't give out of an empty cup. You can only give out of a cup that is, you know, has flown over into the saucer and you only give out of the saucer. So that is my analogy because for me what I was doing for so long was I was giving out of an empty cup, and that cup had really nothing to give.
And so there's only so much that you can actually give to your children and your families. Until I started taking care of myself and now I feel like I can handle like everything that's around the house because my husband works full time, he literally works like 90 hours a week and <laugh> maybe even a hundred hours a week actually. And with the in-laws. And then I feel like now I'm able to handle home and business and then still do so much more easily because I, and I'm gonna still give time to the kids and because I have that energy because I was able to take care of me first.
You saying that instantly brings to mind several of my patients who are young mamas in sleep being probably one of the number one issues that for them of just a season of life and maybe multiple seasons of life if they have back-to-back kids of just not sleeping. And we all know how much sleep is a nutrient for health optimization. Would love to know how you if you see that for one and how you address that and help parents address maybe, I see that as being a really big issue and the patients that I work with.
Absolutely it is. Sleep is a big issue, especially with all these electronics that are <laugh> going on, right? Because people wanna get their stuff done right when they put the kids, especially as new moms or moms, we want to make sure that, you know, like we put the kid's bed and now, oh, now I can finally do my things, and I know I'm working on that myself, but I try to get, I like prioritize my eight to seven hours of sleep every day. That is a must in my house. But the thing is if you look at what's going on in the world, we are all so sleep deprived, and specifically our children, our children are saying that you know, 6 in every 10 middle schoolers and 7 in every 10 high schoolers are not getting enough sleep. Studies have shown that almost half of children in the United States don't get enough sleep but... Recommended nine hours of sleep.
So when we as adults and children don't get enough sleep, our bodies can't complete those important tasks it really needs to keep our children's brains and bodies and our brains and bodies to work effectively. And they've done studies where one week of sleep deprivation can actually alter a function of 711 genes, including the ones that are involved in metabolism, immunity, inflammation, and even stress. So just the lack of sleep, it increases the chance of developing problems due to inflammation, hormone imbalances, influences bad decision making as it you know, decreases the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala as it leads to inflammation, negative emotions and even addictive behaviors, which is craziness. So prioritizing sleep is one of those big pieces of the puzzle that we as parents, need to first role model for our children, <laugh>. Cause if we're not gonna be prioritizing our sleep, our kids are not gonna prioritize their sleep. So I think it really starts with us.
Definitely. Well, and how about for kiddos, like babies for example, that are waking up in the middle of the night? Like is that also just sleep training being part of...
So that is a crazy world <laugh> because a lot of people are like, Oh yeah, that's the way we need to do it. And we've sort of let children cry it out for such a long time that we just don't know how to do that anymore. And I, and I, for me, that just is not the way that we need to do it because it causes a lot of stress for mother and child. So for sleep training specifically, we need to, you know, really take into consideration the child's brain and body. We need to just use logic, use our own logic to see what works with our family. So everybody's different. And so just because we've been taught quiet out and sleep training, this is the only way to do it. Just let them cry, like sort of abandon them in a room and let them cry.
Like just think, I mean that doesn't even sound, would you wanna do that? <Laughs>, like if you had no idea, is that the way you would wanna sleep? I wouldn't wanna sleep like that crying myself to sleep. And that just doesn't even make any sense until there's different pieces that we can put with that that will help to really decrease some of that stress responses right before the child sleeps. So we know that sleep is important, but then leaving a child crying in a room can actually lead to increased stress activating some parts of the brain that are actually activated during pain. But if you can then comfort this child like a child, which helps then, in turn, to turn off stress cycles and studies have actually shown that these times of early stress can actually lead to cell death and other important structures in the child's brain.
I mean this idea has been around since the 1880s. So what I really like to do is to decrease this stress because kids then start to, you know, they need to start to learn how to create like a soothing routine. So similar to older children and teens and adults, it's important to create like a sleep routine to the best of your ability because the prefrontal cortex is still developing. So the brain needs a routine, and when they are newborns they might be a little difficult, but the earlier we can start the better. So for example, for me, my children will start doing like a bath and then start a story then that will then help regulate the child's bodily arousal systems. And then my children till this day actually have like this bedtime routine that they've had since they were newborns. Just the calming activity, the shower, the back, reading a book, and then even having scripture or you can put a song on right before they go to bed.
So really puts their minds in okay, now it's, I'm gonna go to sleep. And remember, consistency really matters. And then now that you mention sleep training, so gentle, mindful sleep training is really important. So not all sleep training is bad for the brain. Holding a child's hand, having them play with like something that you're like a scarf hugging them every time he tries to get out of bed and letting them know that you're still there, that you're safe, that you are with them will help to calm their immune and the immature brain systems. So for a baby, like what I would do is I would, when the kids were really young, I would hold their hands while singing to them while they were in their beds. And therefore the crying was not that much because they knew that mama's not going anywhere. But I said, No, you gotta stay in this bed.
There would be a little bit of crying, but I would hold onto them, they would hold a scarf of mine, I'm holding their hands through the crib. They would sit there and then they, okay, they realize, oh, mama's not... Okay and just stay here and lay with mama. And then I'm near them patting their back, so they know that they're supposed to stay in this crib, right? But then you're patting their back, you're holding their hands, you know, for a little bit. It's gonna take, maybe the first day they won't, it'll be a little bit longer. But that's like as gently. Because for me, especially when you have one child after another, you can't have 'em all on your bed. You need to, you need your own sleep. So having them in the crib, but then how are you gonna get them in the crib is by being really gentle and knowing that you're there.
Because this is your time to sleep, you know? And but having this routine and remember that any learned behavior takes time and stick to your gut, but every situation is different and what works for one family may not work for another. So talk to your primary care physician really to determine what works for your individual situation. But you can, there's so many ways that we can use like holistic parenting to help mold this. A mindful child is able to prioritize their sleep, learn the signs of insufficient sleep because I know my kids immediately when they recognize, oh I'm feeling a little agitated. And then they'll go back, they'll do it on their own. Now my seven-year-old, my six-year-old actually do it. He goes, Mama, yesterday I woke up, I think I only got like eight hours of sleep instead of 10 hours of sleep. And I don't feel good, I'm gonna go to sleep a little early today. Okay, good. And this six-year-old, actually six years old, he to sleep on his own early because he was able to listen to his body and then go to sleep.
Yeah, so holistic parenting, I mean we are mind, body, soul. Our children are mind, body, soul. And holistic parenting can help nurture those child's mind, body, soul from the inside out with the skills they need for like emotional intelligence, enduring deep friendships, making correct decisions, managing stress, and being able to remain resilient all throughout adulthood no matter what life decides to throw at them <laugh>. Cause we know their life is not gonna be smooth sailing cuz no ones is. So how are we gonna then create these mindful children? Because mindfulness we know allows us to see our internal and external environments so much clearly showing us how best to respond and be fully aware at many different levels of perception all at once. And holistic parenting can then help educate and empower children to be mindful of their bodies and their brains and their emotions and their social life, their environment, their sleep.
But basically, everything that's going on around them, learning how to keep it all in balance. And when it starts to sway a little bit here and there, we're able to recognize that and then fix it on their own before it really becomes a problem. Increasing resilience in any situation and environment, but holistic parenting can really influence our children's DNA, their cells, their mitochondria, microbiome, their immune cells, and even their brains. And we know that when children are coming into this world, I wish it was just one and done in the bedroom, but it's not. So therefore when they come out into the world, they're born with this blank canvas with lots of different cells and very limited cell connections. And depending on how they live their lives is how we can start to inform these connections. And we as parents can use holistic parenting to then help our children organize and create these beautiful cells and connections that will help to benefit them not hurt them. Because specifically when it comes to our children right now, their brains are literally being hijacked.
There's two main pieces of decision-making. There's a prefrontal cortex, and there's an amygdala. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for the rational decision-making. It examines the pros and the cons and helps our children think through their actions after taking a look at the whole picture. While the amygdala is a reactive part of the brain, it's responsible for primitive impulsive fight and flight type of responses. And in order for your child to make a thought-out decision used in the whole brain, you need both of these two pieces to work in unison. But because our children's lifestyles are completely out of balance with unhealthy diets, the decreased limited diet variety, lack of sleep, lack of nature, lack of exercise and play, negative social environment, increasing exposures to toxins in and outside the home, all that can contribute to an imbalance child. And inflammation is one of those underlining reasons for chronic disease. And that inflammation then can actually disconnect that chronic inflammation actually hijacks our children's brains. And studies have actually shown that inflammation was found to decrease the strength of the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. So now you have a child who's unable to use their whole brain to make a logical decision leading to a child who is thinking us versus you mentality. Increased violence, increased anger, poor relationships, the brain is not able to function appropriately.
That is a big problem that I see stemming a lot from what we do put in our body as well. Just in my nutrition background, would love to know kind of like how you help parents from a holistic parenting perspective approach like that wild, wild west of like picky eating, kid food, what we're nourishing our kids, what they will and won't eat, et cetera. Cause I know I feel like that's probably if we think about food as medicine, one of the first lines that can impact our physiology, especially when I think about back to my younger years like I, I never saw a processed food until I was a nonprocessed food rather until I was in my late twenties. And so I grew up on processed foods, and that was just a staple and the diet. So yeah, would just love to know from a holistic parenting perspective where you start with nutrition and parenting and integrating that into kiddos. And then working with the nuances of things like picky eating and kid food and yeah, all the things.
Yeah because you know our children's brains and bodies are made from food. So if our children are eating the wrong foods currently, they're not eating the right amount, the right types of foods and we're also overeating, and all of those are really causing our children's brains and bodies to suffer. Because if you think about it, our children are at a critical phase of neurodevelopment that's of hormones and structural and behavioral and molecular connections. So children specifically adolescents are vulnerable to stressors that lead to behavioral changes. And when our children's bodies and their brains are not getting the nutrients they need from real food to function, how do we expect them to work properly, right? So when we put junk food in our children, we are only gonna get junk behavior, junk body, junk brains out because bad food, fake food destroys the gut microbiome and leads to inflammation imbalances our hormones and it threatens our children's prefrontal cortex and hampers their ability to function optimally creating bad behavior and even impairing intellectual development.
The studies have actually shown that kids who ate ultra-processed foods had 10% smaller brains and seven points lower IQ. So that's craziness. So food is the single most powerful tool that can really impact our brain's bodies and our children's behaviors. And we have to understand, I think that junk food shapes the adolescent brains in ways that impair their ability to think, learn, remember, perform lower on memory tests and even control impulsive behaviors, increasing risk of teenage depression and anxiety. And they've actually shown how junk food really affects an adolescent's brain because the adolescent's brain is not fully formed yet and actually leads to three problems as their brain is still developing. The ability to assess the risks and control their actions. The teen's brains are more... Like get more pleasure than adult brains do from these rewarding behaviors, as adolescents have more dopamine receptors in their brains, and adolescents' brains can actually be more easily influenced by their environment.
And actually, just a recent study just came out last week where a research team actually studied 9,000 children in 50 schools, and they found that the type of breakfast and lunch they were eating were significantly associated with their well-being. Which we knew, but they say that these kids actually the ones that were eating more vegetables and less processed foods, actually had better brain health. And it's so crazy, so crazy that more and more research is coming up, but we're still not doing it, right? Because of this picking eating because we think that, oh this is too complicated. But I think really starting with educating and empowering your children is the biggest piece of that puzzle and to really role model this behavior. So in my house, the kids don't ever not get something besides junk. We just replace it with healthier options. Like for example, the kids want pasta, we use lentil pasta, and then in the meats a little bit of the meat sauce, I'll put cauliflower rice, I'll put broccoli sprouts, I'll put mushrooms of all different colors and kinds, and they can't tell and now they, they're having pasta, but it's like a healthier version of that. Because I feel like a lot of times in these houses, there's a lot of, no you can't do that.
No, you can't do this. No, you can't do that. Stop doing this, stop eating the sugar, eat your food. There's so much stress around food. And so if you can compile your pantry and stock your pantry in your fridge with all of the foods that they can eat and not have all the junk food in their house and artificial foods, I mean my kids have chips, but they're ones that literally looked like, you know, they look like Doritos, but they're made out of cassava flour, and they taste equally as delicious. My kids can get cookies, but then we'll do them out of almond flour or coconut flour, or cassava flour cookies. Today my son had, my 10-year-old, he reminded me, he goes, Mama, we have a, we had a fall party today, and so they're gonna serve popcorn and Oreos. So then I said, Okay, what do you wanna do?
He goes, Can I make popcorn at home and then organic popcorn at home, and then I'll take some of your cookies that you made? And I was like perfect. So he doesn't, he's not gonna feel left out. He has alternatives that taste equally as delicious, and my house is stocked up with the foods that they can eat. So I'm never worried that they're eating the wrong foods because even if they're eating like a cookie, it has almond flour, it has pasture-raised eggs, it has avocado oil, it has honey in it. And all of those ingredients are so nutrient-dense and packed with antioxidants and healthy fats for the child's brain. So here he's eating a cookie, and I'm like, Good job for you <laugh>. You should never really have a child feel they're being left out or put any negative connotation against real food.
They know how they feel after that. And on top of that, my kids have really been educated and empowering them. So they know starting from very young when they were just looking, they're like, Mama, I want this. But then I'm like, what's the difference between this and this? They're like, No, no. And like it looks the same, but then one will go through the ingredients and say, Oh this one has red number 40 in it, but this one, look at this, this one just has beat, you know, flour in it just to give a color. So then which one do you think is better? Do you know what a beat is?
Yeah, but do you know what red number 40 is? No. So let's go ahead and when we get home, let's go ahead and check what that is. And so then they'll look at, they're like, I'm like, I'm like, Oh no, they're like, what mama? They'll, I'm like, then when they get old enough to read it, they'll read it on their own. They'll be like, that can cause cancer, that can cause hyperactivity, that can actually destroy our brain cells? I mean the list goes on and on, but that's how you educate the child about what they're actually consuming and putting in their bodies and to be mindful of that. And so as the kids have gotten older, they don't even see this other food as food anymore. So it's literally disgusting to them. Even if I take them to a party where I know my, one of my best friends I know that she only has like the cleanest ingredients.
So I'll take them for a birthday party, she'll make the cake, you know, whatever it is, they'll still be reading the ingredients cuz they're so used to, and they're like, No, I'm not, I'm not in the mood of putting organic <inaudible> in my body right now. So you know, even that, but that's their own decision to make. But that's what you get when you give the children the autonomy, right? When you talk about autonomy and parents. But the problem is you can give the child the autonomy, but if they're constantly making the wrong decisions, how is that autonomy gonna matter? So you have to give them the autonomy and then provide them the environment that they can be in to really create that healthy decision. Their brains are not working, they're obviously gonna be making an amygdala decision or their limbic system, you know, where you're a fight and flight type decision making.
But if you're able to like use the whole brain to make a rational decision. Weigh out the pluses and the minuses, be mindful, look within it is so powerful. And that's where, I mean my children have, what's so much fun is, and it's really rewarding when you're, when you have like a seven-year-old when you have a seven-year-old, and you walk into them eating sauerkraut for breakfast. And I said, Why are you eating sauerkraut for breakfast? And you said, well mama, yesterday I had I think organic sugar at Nano's house, and Nana's house and I woke up a little agitated, and I think that's why it was so I wanted to keep my good bugs happy and healthy. So I'm eating the sauerkraut. And that's all literally he had for breakfast. He was feeling agitated when he woke up. So he thought that maybe it's, he immediately started looking within, tried to figure out where his imbalances could be. I have them go down lists. I go sleep, social, spiritual, I call it my digestive health, and detoxification of where his stress sleep, social and spiritual health. And they're able to take a look at all of those pieces and then look within and figure out which ones are imbalanced and then how they can fix it all on their own. And can you imagine if all of us could do that?
Yeah. So it sounds just like really educating one, but also really encouraging kids to tap into how they feel can be really empowering for that food-body connection. Mind, mind, body connection.
Absolutely. And it's so powerful. Well, you talked about like picky eating. So for picky eating, I mean for me in my house, what I do is, again, for picky eating, I feel like there could be some sort of like food sensitivity even or deficiencies. They even say that sometimes there's actually a zinc deficiency with some kids with picky eating. But what I really try to do is make sure that if you can put
Dr. Chloe is the author of the book Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Anxiety, endorsed by Deepak Chopra! She is a member in good standing of the American Psychological Association, as well as the National Register of Health Psychologists, an elite organization for psychologists with gold-standard credentials. She is also a consultant at Baker McKenzie, the third largest law firm in the world. She is an Advisory Board member for Women’s Health Magazine (Hearst), and a featured expert for Psychology Today. Dr. Chloe enjoys relating with the media, as well as public speaking. She has been featured as an expert on VH1, Inside Edition, ABC Nightline and other television; and has been quoted in the New York Times, Forbes, Vanity Fair, Shape, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, and other print media.
Well, welcome to the podcast, a show dedicated to quieting the noise in the health, food, and fitness world. I'm your host, Dr. Lauryn, a former chronic illness patient gone, health detective and gut health, body love, and food freedom expert. Helping patients now radically transform their health too. On this show, we're all about disrupting both conventional wisdom and diet culture as we know it with root cause solutions that actually work because health is an inside job. Today we're talking all about anxiety and harnessing the power of anxiety in our lives. Now that may sound like a little bit of an oxymoron, especially used in one sentence and in a landscape where at least one in four people I think statistically have some sort of anxiety, be it anxiety disorder and or just like chronic everyday lingering anxiety, It's an issue. We've really seen this creep up statistically as well over the past couple years amidst pandemic times and just really being stripped of all the things, our coping tools really that brought us less anxiety, especially during the early days of quarantine and, and just really the unknowns and things like going to the gym and or like connection with community and people and church and just joy and things that brought us life prior to the pandemic. life, as you know, has really dramatically shifted and changed.
And along that we've also seen the uptick and just a ton of anxiety nationwide and worldwide. But, um, I really can relate to this even prior to the pandemic; I say I struggled with anxiety for about 30 years of my life until I really worked on both the mental and the physical game and the aspects. It is a journey to understand, number one, gain that awareness as to where anxiety stems from. Is it from former traumas and the ways that we cope and deal in order to get through life? Is it physiological? Especially the gut microbiome? We hear a lot about the gut-brain connection and it could not be further from the truth. Your gut greatly influences how you think and feel and actually 80% of your thoughts in your brain are directed from your gut and your gut microbiome. So as you can imagine, if you have dysbiosis and imbalances in your gut, what's going on in the brain as well and just some of that inflammation, we call it neuroinflammation that can be created physiologically, um, as well as just like systemic and um, circumstantial type of anxiety such as the pandemic or such as going through just challenges in your life.
We have financial challenges or relationship challenges or um, again world <laugh>, state of the world challenges. Um, so today I'm so excited to bring you guest, Dr. Chloe Carmichael, who is a Ph.D. licensed clinical psychologist who has an honors in psychology from both Columbia University as her bachelor's and her clinical psychology degree from Long Island University in New York. So Dr. Chloe is also the author of the book, Nervous Energy, Harnessed the Power of Your Anxiety, endorsed by Deepak Chopra. She is a member in good standing of the American Psychological Association as well and the National Register of Health Psychologists. And today we are just bringing a lot of just normality to the topic of anxiety. How can we use it for the powers of good? Uh, it's not just all a negative light, and really what are some ways that we can take back our chronic anxiety or state of just like a tendency rather to be more anxious in certain moments in seasons of our lives, how can we really re-engineer that,
and Dr. Chloe's gonna teach us quite a few tactics and techniques that you can use to take your health and anxiety back into your own hands. So without further ado, let's get to the show.
Well, Dr. Chloe, so excited to have you in the house today just talking all about the famous topic of anxiety that's been on a lot of people's minds this past say like 18 months, two years. But before we get into that, would love to get a little bit more info on you, what got you doing the work you're doing in the world, and inspired you down this trajectory.
Sure Lauryn. It's good to be with you too. So it's a funny story I guess as to how I became a clinical psychologist, which is what I am now, and an author, my new book, Nervous Energy: Harness The Power of Your Anxiety I think I mentioned was endorsed by Deepak Chopra. But it all kind of began; I wanna say like 15 years ago I was actually teaching yoga in New York City and just to pay the bills I had found that teaching individual sessions was a better financial fit for me than teaching groups. But what the side effect of that was that I hadn't realized at the time is that people who can afford private yoga lessons and who actually choose to spend their discretionary time and money on private yoga lessons are usually pretty health-conscious, self-disciplined people. And so I actually found those private sessions I was teaching to be really informative for me just about these people and how their minds worked.
And I got really interested in that. I was doing custom yoga programs for them, like somebody suppose that wanted to find balance in their life, we would do balancing yoga poses and then meditations around balance. And it was so exciting for me to just see how they responded and the changes that were happening in their lives that that's what stimulated me to then just wanna go deeper into the mind. So that's what prompted me then to go get a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and then after, you know, practicing for several years and I started getting calls by the media like Inside Edition, um, ABC Nightline, some pretty... VH1, some
big shows. And it was again just exciting for me to like connect with people on a broader level than just my own private office. And then um, from there I then uh, was offered a book deal and I love to write and it's just been such an amazing journey. I never could have predicted it, but it's been a wonderful journey and I'm really excited and thankful for it.
Thank you for sharing that and excited to dive into this topic of like how we can harness the power of anxiety. That seems like kind of an oxymoron. Talk a little bit about like what that means and yeah, we'll start there.
Sure. So I found that a lot of people coming to my office were, you know, again successful driven New Yorkers, and they would come because they would be having anxiety, but there was also, on the other hand, I noticed something about the fact of their anxiety that at a certain level was helping them, right? So maybe they were somebody that just always double-checked everything and to a certain point that actually helped them in life. They were always well prepared and on point, but then their own habits had almost gotten a little bit haywire and were becoming counterproductive. And so I eventually realized that they were actually more open even to my interventions to help them manage their anxiety if I could first really assure them that I wasn't going to 100% get rid of it because there is a healthy function to anxiety. And deep down they kind of knew that if they got rid of all their anxiety they would just kind of be like, almost like a lump, you know?
So a person with say no anxiety, for example, wouldn't think to look both ways before they cross the street. So the healthy function of anxiety is actually to stimulate preparation behaviors. So when we feel that, you know, a little bit of anxiety, the trick is to understand where it's coming from and what it needs. If it needs us to take some kind of preparation behavior or if we've already done all the preparation behaviors and it's just almost like a phantom anxiety, then it needs some good slow down and relaxation techniques. But we don't always just wanna automatically slow down, breathe in and let it go when we feel anxiety because sometimes the anxiety is actually trying to cue us to focus. So when we do get anxiety, there's even some physiological responses where, you know, our vision can narrow, we can get some adrenaline and we don't always wanna get rid of it. Sometimes the trick is to point that energy in the right direction so that it can help us to prepare for whatever's causing the anxiety.
Do you find this to be the case Like with those that both maybe have chronic anxiety, like just like ongoing, it's part of like their paradigm right now compared to like situation anxiety. Or like I tend to be more anxious of a person. Like is there a difference you think on your spectrum or...
Yeah, so in social psychology, we actually have two different instruments that we would use to measure anxiety. We would look at state anxiety versus trait anxiety. So as you said, there could be someone who's normally very calm, but if they're about to take a test they'll feel anxious. And then there are other people who are just a little bit more, you know, wired around that anxiety. And again, I just think it's really important to understand that it's all on a spectrum. So, you know, you could be kind of a type A person who has big goals and big ambitions and always trying to get out of your comfort zone and grow to the next level and try something new. And by definition, you're kind of inviting a little bit of stress into your life. You're, you're not just sticking in your comfort zone. So there can then be a little bit of stress that comes with that.
But again, there's a healthy form of stress, you know, we stressing our system now and then is how we grow. For example, when we lift um, weights, we wanna lift heavy weights that get so heavy that our muscles might even start to shake a little bit cuz that's how they get stronger. But of course, again, we don't wanna just, you know, always lug around a hundred-pound weight until we, you know, just tax and overtax and abuse our bodies. I'm not saying we wanna thrive on anxiety or dwell in it, but ironically we actually are more successful at releasing the anxiety if we allow it to serve its healthy purpose instead of trying to always automatically stuff it away or breathe it down or you know, just assume that it's something to be gotten rid of.
Well, we've seen a huge uptick and like statistically seemingly an uptick in anxiety just like aligned with the pandemic and everything, um, the past couple of years. But like I would love to know from your perspective since uh, you work with patients on a one-on-one basis, like what you've seen your observations from an anxiety perspective and even statistically seen in practice and is it really related to just like this underpinning of like when we go through emotional trauma in our lives or stressful times like those that maybe have never had anxiety before are more now we're seeing that more commonly, but just would love to see thematically what you've seen and kind of what are the underpinnings or the reasons why one would have more anxiety than others even though we've all been through a very similar experience as humans?
Yeah, sure. So I think on one level, like obviously, we've just had, you know, more cause for anxiety, you know, when you introduce the concerns of, you know, medical concerns and you know, there at first were great concerns about, you know, food and ventilators and even toilet paper, right? You know, so there were like scarcity concerns, which obviously can, and in fact, on a certain level should trigger anxiety, right? Like somebody who's um, unaware or unresponsive, you know, to those factors would have other problems right in, in their life. So we've certainly had more triggers for the anxiety at least in the past. Thankfully at this point I think people's concerns are starting to subside a little bit as the medical community and society at large, at least in the United States starts to um, get a little bit more of a handle on, you know, some of the volatility that the pandemic initially introduced.
But to your point about the increase in anxiety, there was not only a spike in the causal factors of anxiety, but there was also a decrease in the outlets for anxiety. So for example, again, if if anxiety, the healthy function could be stimulating you to get more time with your social support network or to go for a run at the gym and burn off some of that extra cortisol and adrenaline, but yet suddenly you can't get within six feet of your friends and your gym is closed and your church is closed, you know? So I think a lot of the typical and healthy things that anxiety sometimes can stimulate people to do were suddenly unavailable. So it was kind of a double whammy in the sense of an increase in the causal factors and a decrease in the coping opportunities.
Yes, well said there. And I guess like as a clinician, like have you seen such an uptick in like people seeking help? Because I think, I mean people may be looking for help in some way, and has it been primarily through then talk therapy that you have found that?
Yes. So my, my book actually released this year, so it's, it's in October right now for anybody listening at a different time. My book was released in March of this year, 2021. So although there was an increase in calls to my office, I personally was just more focused on, you know, activities related to my book. So I've, I've really been speaking more to organizations and groups about this concept and teaching people more on a group level about how to harness that power of their anxiety. And I do think that corporations and businesses have suddenly either become more aware of the fact of anxiety or maybe they have actually felt like they had more of a sense of permission slash responsibility to bring it up to their employees and to say, Hey, we know that this is a hard time, we're trying to bring you guys resources and so you know, we're gonna bring in Dr. Chloe to like, you know, give everybody a workshop about how to do this. Um, I do have therapists that work for me. Um, and so they certainly have been very busy, but I personally have actually not really taken any new clients this past year cuz I've been, you know, really busy with not only the book but I was chatting with you earlier about master classes and just other ways to try to serve people more on a group level.
Yeah. Well, I know in your book you talk about there's nine techniques in particular for harnessing the power of your anxiety. Well, let's know if you could share with us some of those techniques and how we can integrate those just practically in our daily lives.
Sure, absolutely. So there are nine techniques as you said, and I always tell people it's kind of like a cookbook, meaning that you know, you can choose whichever technique is going to suit you best with one exception, which is the first technique, which is a mindfulness technique with the reason being that I think before you can really choose which of the other eight techniques you need, for example, do you need a technique that's gonna help you relax and slow down or do you need a technique that's gonna help you really face that fear and get in there and deal with it before you really know which type of technique you're going to need, you first need to learn how to calmly really study and observe that anxiety. So the first technique is actually a breathing exercise, but as I explain to people it might look like a breathing exercise, but it's really a mindfulness exercise.
And even the word mindfulness I think has gotten, you know, so overused and confused by people that I just wanna explain that mindfulness, the way that I'm using it here is really about metacognition; it's about thinking about your thoughts, it's about observing your thoughts. And um, as a former yoga teacher, I know that what we would do is we would practice by just observing a random object, and then we would kind of graduate to learning how to observe what we call a semi-abstract object, which is the breath. And then we learn how to observe abstract objects like thoughts and feelings. So, I start with this mindfulness exercise and really help people to understand how to use it as a springboard to observe their thoughts and feelings. And if anybody wants a free video of me going through that technique, they can go to nervous energy book dot com and you can like enter your email and get a free video of me going through that technique and explaining that process to you.
But once you've done that technique then you know you can go ahead and choose from the other eight techniques. And so I'll just choose one here for example, that I really like called the to-do list with emotions. So what we do with the to-do list with emotions, because again, I personally tend to work with a lot of intelligent, driven people; they all have to-do lists, they all have goals, which is awesome. And they sometimes would kind of hit a wall where either they would be doing everything on their list but they would just kind of feel like a hamster on a wheel just knocking out the tasks but not feeling very fulfilled by them with just kind of this free-floating sense of anxiety or restlessness. Or they would suddenly start just totally procrastinating and it would be very unlike them <laugh>, but they would just kind of feel as if they had like hit a wall.
And of course, you know, that was causing anxiety too to just find themselves suddenly procrastinating and not feeling effective doing the things that they need to do. So with the to-do list with emotions, what we do is we look at the things that are on your to-do list and then we ask ourselves what is the emotion that comes with that to do? And of course, sometimes the emotions can be surprising. So maybe on your to-do list is grocery shopping and maybe the emotion is oddly anger, you know, or oddly loneliness. And so then our next step is to say, okay, I wonder why that would be, Um, why would you be feeling those things? And I've had people say, well I guess I feel angry because I'm resentful that I not only have to earn the money to pay for the groceries, I still have to also go out and get the groceries and then I know I'm the one cooking them and I'm the one cleaning them <laugh>.
And that like, they're just feeling very put upon. And when you discover that emotion, then the next step is to layer in a self-care behavior. And so that really getting in touch with that anger could, you know, stimulate you to have a self-care behavior of seeing, you know, I think what I need to do is maybe hire a helper, you know, to do some of those things for me. Or maybe I need to have a very candid conversation, a boundary-setting conversation, you know, with my family and have a conversation about accountability or you know, somebody else who, as I said the other example might say loneliness. Maybe they've just been through a divorce and suddenly they're shopping for one. And so maybe their self-care behavior is to plan in a cell phone catch-up call with a friend while they do the grocery shopping, to just kind of keep them in that sense of being connected and actually have, have a little fun with a positive experience that otherwise would've just brought loneliness. But the reason we have to do the to-do list with emotions is because successful driven people are sometimes kind of good at putting their emotions aside and just getting things done and there's a time and a place for that but they can get almost too good at it, which can lead to, like I said, that free-floating anxiety that they don't really understand because they do have some kind of emotion or feeling that's not getting addressed. And so the to-do list with emotions guides them through a way to fix that.
Well, it's increasing awareness but to me, it's also going a step further. So um, a lot of clients who come to my office say that they're coming because their previous therapists would guide them too often they felt to just sit with emotions, you know, like, Oh yeah, I'm feeling lonely. Okay, let's sit with that. And they're like, No, I don't wanna sit with that. I wanna do something about it. And so the to-do list with emotions not only guides people to really discover the awareness of their feelings, but then it really stimulates them to add on a self-care behavior attached to those feelings.
Yeah, kind of proactive. And it seems like most of your techniques do have that proactive piece and I'm interested to know what is the worry time about. Cuz I think worry, uh, negative imagination is a lot of times what I define that as like what would worry time be? Setting a clock to just worry?
<laugh>. Well that, yeah, that's, that's interesting. So negative imagination, um, that would actually be an important question. So with what we do with worry time is somebody who's, you know, just got a very active mind and you know, maybe they do get pinged with worries while they're standing in line at the grocery store. They're thinking about everything from, you know, do I need to get my renter's insurance updated? And gosh, I haven't called my mom in a long time and oh my goodness, you know, am I supposed to prepare something for my book club tomorrow? Or you know, whatever the case may be. And they're having all these thoughts about the future and future-oriented thoughts and concerns about preparing for the future. It's, it's not a bad thing, but to have it happen in just kind of an unbounded way like that can be exhausting.
And so what I found is that some of these quote like worrywarts, they would get really down on themselves. They would kind of turn it into a black-and-white situation where they'd feel like in that moment in line at the grocery store, they had to either just pull out their dang phone and start taking care of it all right that and there. Or they would be like, I have to just let it go and not worry about it. Stop being a worry wart and almost be mad at themselves for having thought of it and try to stuff it down and forget about it. The happy medium with worry time is that you have a recurring event in your calendar and for some people, it's 10 minutes a day. For some people, it's an hour a week, whatever's best. But then when those little pings get in your mind at whatever random moment, instead of feeling like you have to either deal with them then and there or just tell yourself to forget about them, which actually can be anxiety provoking too, cuz there's a part of you that knows it might be a legitimate concern, you put it into the worry time event details for that, you know, week or that day.
And then at the appointed time, you can actually give that event the undivided attention it deserves. And then that actually frees your mind to really let go in that moment at the grocery store because you don't feel like you just basically almost took a credit card bill and essentially stuffed it under the sofa to just tell yourself not to think about it. You actually put it in a particular bill filing folder where it's going to get addressed and paid at a certain time and you know it. But Lauryn, you brought up something different which is, you know, like imagining things about the future. Like I do have people that might actually have the experience of opening up that calendar event for worry time and noticing that in fact, it's actually not really true legitimate concerns. It's almost silly stuff and they're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I was worried about that. I would say that's actually good news, right? If you discover that in fact like you were kind of worried about nothing, it's still a win because the worry time exercise in the moment allows you to put it out of your head and then you get to actually discover later that your worry time, you know, appointed event is actually gonna be pretty light for you. Cuz there was nothing actually to worry about. So it's good news either way.
Yeah, I think that technique ultimately when you, you mentioned having a calendar with myself to maybe have worry time, then I'm like, wait, I don't really, I think I'm okay. I don't know if I wanna spend that time. Like it, it seems like it would be a good perspective rather...
For some people. Yeah. So I would just say again like every technique in the book is not for every person. So there's, in the book, there are three kinds of archetypes of people. Like some people are worry warts, some people are, you know, kind of OCD, and some people they just, they just smile and laugh. But underneath like they're kind of churning with anxiety. And so different techniques are gonna be helpful for different people.
In your study and research of anxiety, um, would love to know kind of like the underpinnings, I mean definitely emotional situational. I do a lot of work with the gut microbiome though, and like brain-gut connection as well. Like, have you found thematically like if that makes a difference for folks? Like whether it's dietary choices and or just like actually shifting their gut microbiome? I know in my own experience, like with my history of disordered eating and then later like mold toxicity, in both of those seasons in my life, like my gut microbiome was a wreck and my anxiety was pretty high too <laugh>, um, really aligned and as I healed physically as well like I just felt like light bulbs and more peace of mind also kind of take over.
Oh, a hundred percent yes. I mean I almost have like a, like a subset of my practice that's like IBS people, you know. Um, like there's like definitely as again as a former yoga teacher, I almost feel like the body-mind connection just cannot be overstated. So of course the way our body feels is going to affect our mood and our thought process. And of course the, our mood and our thought process is going to affect our body. And that's true, you know, not only certainly for the gut, but even for things like neurotransmitters in our brain, you know, and exercise that we, that we have the thoughts that we think will change the neurotransmitters in our brain and of course the neurotransmitters in our brain can kind of shape the types of thoughts that we're likely to have. So I think it's really such an integrated operation. It's almost hard to overstate it.
Also like what about generational or like, you know, ancestral type of anxiety? Like, do you find that sometimes my clients in the past have said, you know, like my mom struggles with anxiety or like it's anxieties in my family? So like seeing it like kind of systemically in family units, is that something that you see, and there is some method to that madness as well?
Oh, for certain. So I mean there have been many psychology studies that have even shown that, for example, babies literally like within minutes out of the mother's womb, if the mother was say anxious or depressed, those babies will be demonstrably more reactive to certain types of stimulation. So I just wanna say I wasn't behind these studies, I didn't do them. So if, if anyone's listening and saying, gosh, that sounds a little weird to do this to a baby, I would actually say I agree with you. But there have been studies where minutes out of the womb, you know, they might have a baby that they do something that would be like just minorly irritating to it. I can't even remember what it was, but you know, like a, a light scratch or something and a baby that's born to a mom who's, you know, generally calm and balanced, you know, just may not really respond much to that cuz it's just a very, very mild irritation.
But a baby that's born to a mom that you know has been very anxious and depressed will scream his head off. You know, cuz he's just got that reactive state. And a lot of that can have to do even with the fact that in the womb, all of the chemicals as we were just saying the chemicals and the physiology of a person who's anxious or depressed is the physiological environment in which you know, that baby, um, is growing. So there's definitely a lot of overlap there. There's also, of course, you know, the fact of nurturing. So if you grow up watching your mom become hysterical over little tiny things, what you are learning is that those little tiny things must be really awful because look, mom's getting hysterical and so we're kind of internalizing that that must be something to get really concerned about because my mom is really concerned about it.
And then you can grow up feeling, you know, like the world is an anxious place or if you don't have parents that can model healthy coping strategies again, like suppose that, you know, every time that your mom gets a little upset, you know, she, she slaps you, right? You could grow up thinking that that's the way to deal with conflict, right? So there's definitely the physiological in utero component, there's the modeling component and there is also the genetic component as well. Personality traits and things like that are definitely heritable, meaning that they can be passed on genetically.
Yeah. Little sponges, <laugh>, we are, and so much happens in our young lives that we're so unaware of that affects I think, uh, a lot of how we think and see the world. One of your techniques that piqued my interest and it's called thought replacement; a lot of times I'll tell my clients like, you know, our thoughts are not always true and even kind of like statistically 95% of our thoughts being like in our subconscious, like things that we don't think about, uh, that are really wired, but like would love to know what is that technique about and how is that something that you also like kind of share with your folks that you've worked with? Just be gaining awareness over our thoughts and replacing them and what it sounds like.
Yeah, definitely. So I, I like the way you said that Lauryn, that you know, our thoughts are not always true and that is the time that they need replacement, right? Because if thoughts are what psychologists call maladaptive, you know, meaning that they're not true or they're irrational, then they're not helping us and in fact, they're hurting us. And so those would be the ones that we wanna replace. But you also touched on something else which is, you know, that sometimes we're not even really fully aware of all of the thoughts and perspectives and worldviews and beliefs that are getting activated in every circumstance, right? So, you know, for example, you know, suppose that somebody walks into an exercise class, let's say me for example because I'm extremely embarrassingly uncoordinated. I can do great in a yoga class because it's certain moves and I know them and I've done them for decades but put me in a cardio step class and it's, it's an ugly situation <laugh>.
Um, so if I walk in, you know, just to kind of use a lighthearted example, if I think about, you know, walking into a class like that, I might think to myself, I not, I might not be aware of it. I might just be walking in thinking, Oh, you know, I'm, Im a little nervous about this, or gee, I'm, I'm always really bad at these things. Or I might be, you know, replaying some really embarrassing times when I, you know, was uncoordinated in my life and telling myself, you know, I'm, I'm uncoordinated and you know, this is gonna be embarrassing. And if I always have that little script for myself, then I would wanna override those thoughts, you know, with things like, um, there's people of all ability levels in this class. I can skip the complicated moves if I want. The important thing is that I'm taking care of my health and I would just wanna repeat that over and over.
The thing about thought replacement though is that you have to actually memorize your thought replacement. So it's best to only use thought replacements for situations where there's a certain sentence or phrase or perspective that's like a constant refrain in your mind to the point where it actually is worth the, you know, trouble of crafting a very deliberate replacement thought. So if I, for example, for whatever reason had to start going to a cardio step class like three times a week, I would actually create that thought replacement that I just said, you know, something like, um, you know, I, I know I'll get better every week if I just do my best. You know, the important thing is I'm taking good care of my health. If I were a client of mine, I would make myself memorize that phrase to the point where I knew how many words exactly even are in that phrase.
And I could wake up in the middle of the night and, you know, say it the same way I could say the alphabet without, you know, any prompting or remembering. And then when that kind of negative script starts getting activated, you know exactly what to say to yourself. And people will sometimes say, Oh gee, well it doesn't feel natural. And I explain, well of course it doesn't feel natural cuz it's not what you've been telling yourself your whole life. It's kind of like if a person who's been slouching for 20 years suddenly wants to sit with their shoulders back, that's not going to feel natural either, but it's the right way to sit and it's the healthy way to sit. But you, Lauryn, had pointed out something else, which is, you know, sometimes people might not even be fully aware of what that maladaptive thought is.
Like, suppose I didn't even have the awareness that it's my insecurity about my coordination that makes me feel negatively every time I go into an exercise class. And I was like, I don't know why, but I just feel anxious every time I go. Then we would wanna do the mind mapping exercise in the book where you would just write, okay, exercise class. And then you draw a little spoke from that and you put the first few words that come to mind and I might say, um, fearful <laugh> and uncoordinated and embarrassed. And then I would start drawing lines up from those and saying, what's the first thing that comes to mind from that? And from uncoordinated, I might write this embarrassing memory I have when I was, um, a cheerleader in high school and I went the wrong way during the whole varsity, um, you know, floor routine. And then I would start to really get down into the fact that every time I walk into a step class, that kind of sense of embarrassment is getting triggered. And that might guide me to different kinds of thought replacements. Like, you know, I might tell myself this is not a high stake situation, no one's even looking at me. I'll just do my best and be fine. And like that type of thought replacement might be best depending on what's really the underlying negative thought causing distress.
Yeah. Kind of like then backtracking to do the mind mapping that gets that awareness and then you can move forward like kind of bobbing and weaving it sounds like, through some of these techniques.
Dr. Chloe Carmichael (
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