Evan Transue, AKA Detective Ev, graduated from FDN in 2017.
Before finding FDN, he and his mom had suffered from a variety of health challenges for over a decade, including but not limited to severe cystic acne, major depressive disorder, panic disorder, GERD, and Grave’s Disease.
The FDN system transformed his and his mom’s lives so profoundly that his work is now centered around spreading its teachings.
Evan is currently the host of The Health Detective Podcast, owner of Bucks County Light Therapy and Functional Medicine Center, and speaks professionally to middle and high school students about mental health challenges.
He has been blessed to speak to over 50,000 students nationwide and deliver over 500 professional presentations.
This week, we take a look at the findings of a study, which used data involving 45,000 people in Sweden. Authored by Murata et al, the study (called “Blood biomarker profiles and exceptional longevity“) presented an analysis comparing centenarians (people who live to 100) and non-centenarians over a 35-year period.
Rising global numbers of centenarians, doubling every decade since 1950 and projected to quintuple between 2022 and 2050, have sparked curiosity about the factors contributing to longevity. Prior research has shown that not all centenarians enjoy robust health, revealing the complexity of reaching the centenary mark.
The research looked at 12 blood-based biomarkers associated with inflammation, metabolic, liver, and kidney function, as well as indicators of potential malnutrition and anaemia. While the chosen biomarkers were supported by existing literature, perhaps others should have been included. For example, insulin markers, vitamin D levels, and telomeres, might have been informative.
The study revealed some interesting sex-based differences, with women comprising a significant majority of centenarians. The biomarkers exhibited patterns, with glucose levels showing a pronounced (inverse) correlation with longevity – the higher the glucose, the lower the likelihood of reaching 100. Additionally, the study noted higher total cholesterol, lower creatinine, significantly reduced uric acid, and improved iron markers among centenarians. The research also revealed that individuals with lower uric acid levels had nearly twice the likelihood of reaching 100 compared to those with higher levels.
Looking at what we can do if we want to achieve long and healthy lives, the study emphasised the importance of maintaining lower glucose levels, while also suggesting that higher total cholesterol might contribute positively to longevity. Notably, the authors highlighted the need for further investigation into the impact of alcohol consumption and its potential connection to longevity.
Moreover, the study underscored the significance of nutrition, suggesting a diet rich in micronutrients and low in high-glycemic foods might be advisable. However, it also provoked contemplation on the quality of life, underscoring the importance of maximising healthy and active years rather than merely aiming for an extended lifespan.
This comprehensive guide explains how to combine the surprising truth about brain food with the cutting-edge science of brain metabolism to optimize your mental (and physical) health.
This comprehensive guide shows you how to combine the surprising truth about brain food with the cutting-edge science of brain metabolism to optimize your mental health.
Here’s a sneak peek at the table of contents:
The first half of the book focuses on the crucial connections between nutritional quality, metabolic health, and mental health.
Understand why the world finds itself so confused and misguided about what a brain-healthy diet should look like and how that incorrect information—particularly when combined with our modern ultraprocessed toxic food environment—directly contributes to the root causes of mental health problems both great and small. This section includes a whole chapter explaining precisely why associations generated by nutrition epidemiology studies should never be used as evidence to support the health risks or benefits of any food or dietary pattern. There is also an entire chapter dedicated to the uniquely healing benefits of ketogenic diets for specific psychiatric conditions.
The second half of the book is all about food.
Weigh the pros and cons of each food group so you can decide for yourself which whole foods are worth including in your diet based on your dietary preferences and health goals. Learn why red meat is good for you (but not mandatory), grains and legumes are best avoided, which fruits and vegetables are safest and most worth eating, the risks and benefits of dairy products, and positively fascinating facts about eggs that took me completely by surprise! Information from all four chapters about whole foods is then boiled down into a “Quiet Diet” roadmap to better metabolic and mental health. This 8-week discovery plan includes paleo, ketogenic, and carnivore diets that I modified to be “quieter” not only on glucose and insulin levels, but also on the gut, thyroid, mitochondria, and the immune system, so they are especially helpful for sensitive individuals and for people who have tried standard paleo, keto, or carnivore diets and not experienced enough relief from those approaches.
The book also contains:
Simple ways to test yourself for insulin resistance, including a guide to home glucose monitoring
Testimonials from individuals who have put mental health conditions into full remission by changing their diets
A detailed explanation of how ketogenic diets change brain metabolism
Food lists, recipes, and meal plans for all three dietary strategies
Tips for making any diet brain-healthier—from vegan to carnivore, and every diet in between
A curated list of recommended resources
Hundreds of scientific references
I know there are a lot of books about brain food for you to choose from, so why did I think it was so important to write a new one?
This book is decidedly different from existing books about nutrition and mental health.
I wrote this book because:
Most books about nutrition and mental health ask you to pin your hopes on superfoods (which don’t work) and supplements (which often profit the author), rather than showing you how to improve the nutritional quality of your diet in ways that will minimize your need for supplements.
Most books about nutrition and mental health recommend Mediterranean or “plant-based” diets for optimal brain health without explaining the very real risks of these dietary strategies.
I find it heartbreaking to see so many people working so hard to make healthy food choices based on bad information—information that can damage the brain over time and increase the risk for serious problems with mood and memory.
Huge numbers of people are at high risk for cognitive decline and dementia, and most are under the mistaken impression that their risk is all about age, genes, and family history—things they can’t do anything about. The little-known truth is that simple dietary changes aimed at improving blood sugar and insulin patterns can greatly reduce the risk for these serious conditions.
Too many people with mental health problems have given up hope. They have tried long lists of medications and supplements, years of psychotherapy, meditation, exercise, and dietary changes like cutting out red meat, switching from omelets to oatmeal or homemade green smoothies—with little to no relief. They think they have tried everything already and don’t realize there is SO much more they can do.
There are no books currently available that show people how and why to use ketogenic diets (and other targeted dietary strategies) to address psychiatric symptoms. People with existing mental health problems shouldn’t have to accidentally stumble onto the ketogenic diet to discover its powerful mental health benefits—it is my hope that one day soon, this intervention will be included as a first-line treatment option in mainstream mental health care.
It’s time to take the confusion out of nutrition and replace it with science, simplicity, and common sense. My passion is teaching you how to think for yourself about food so you can make your own informed choices and find what works best for you and your family.
Pre-order season: now through January 22, 2024
Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind is now available for pre-order through most major booksellers including Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Hachette, Books-a-Million, Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target.
Robust pre-sales convince international publishers that the book is worth translating into other languages, convince booksellers to stock hardcover copies on their shelves where new audiences can discover it, and motivate journalists to write reviews of the book, which expose new audiences to the content. So, if you already know you’re interested in the book, please consider reserving a copy early rather than waiting until after the release date.
Release Date: January 23, 2024
Hachette/GCP Balance (New York) and Hodder/Yellow Kite (London) will release Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind in print, digital, and audiobook formats on January 23rd in most English-speaking markets around the world including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa.
I’m also excited to share that sometime after the English language version is released, Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo) will publish a Japanese translation of the book. We will seek additional international contracts in 2024.
Stay Tuned for More
In the coming weeks, there will be more exclusive sneak previews of content, opportunities to connect, discuss the book with me, and ask questions, and other exciting ways to engage about the exciting emerging fields of nutritional and metabolic psychiatry, so please stay tuned. If you’d like to be notified of these events, please sign up for my newsletter.
This comprehensive guide shows you how to combine the surprising truth about brain food with the cutting-edge science of brain metabolism to optimize your mental health.
Here’s a sneak peek at the table of contents:
The first half of the book focuses on the crucial connections between nutritional quality, metabolic health, and mental health.
Understand why the world finds itself so confused and misguided about what a brain-healthy diet should look like and how that incorrect information—particularly when combined with our modern ultraprocessed toxic food environment—directly contributes to the root causes of mental health problems both great and small. This section includes a whole chapter explaining precisely why associations generated by nutrition epidemiology studies should never be used as evidence to support the health risks or benefits of any food or dietary pattern. There is also an entire chapter dedicated to the uniquely healing benefits of ketogenic diets for specific psychiatric conditions.
The second half of the book is all about food.
Weigh the pros and cons of each food group so you can decide for yourself which whole foods are worth including in your diet based on your dietary preferences and health goals. Learn why red meat is good for you (but not mandatory), grains and legumes are best avoided, which fruits and vegetables are safest and most worth eating, the risks and benefits of dairy products, and positively fascinating facts about eggs that took me completely by surprise! Information from all four chapters about whole foods is then boiled down into a “Quiet Diet” roadmap to better metabolic and mental health. This 8-week discovery plan includes paleo, ketogenic, and carnivore diets that I modified to be “quieter” not only on glucose and insulin levels, but also on the gut, thyroid, mitochondria, and the immune system, so they are especially helpful for sensitive individuals and for people who have tried standard paleo, keto, or carnivore diets and not experienced enough relief from those approaches.
The book also contains:
Simple ways to test yourself for insulin resistance, including a guide to home glucose monitoring
Testimonials from individuals who have put mental health conditions into full remission by changing their diets
A detailed explanation of how ketogenic diets change brain metabolism
Food lists, recipes, and meal plans for all three dietary strategies
Tips for making any diet brain-healthier—from vegan to carnivore, and every diet in between
A curated list of recommended resources
Hundreds of scientific references
I know there are a lot of books about brain food for you to choose from, so why did I think it was so important to write a new one?
This book is decidedly different from existing books about nutrition and mental health.
I wrote this book because:
Most books about nutrition and mental health ask you to pin your hopes on superfoods (which don’t work) and supplements (which often profit the author), rather than showing you how to improve the nutritional quality of your diet in ways that will minimize your need for supplements.
Most books about nutrition and mental health recommend Mediterranean or “plant-based” diets for optimal brain health without explaining the very real risks of these dietary strategies.
I find it heartbreaking to see so many people working so hard to make healthy food choices based on bad information—information that can damage the brain over time and increase the risk for serious problems with mood and memory.
Huge numbers of people are at high risk for cognitive decline and dementia, and most are under the mistaken impression that their risk is all about age, genes, and family history—things they can’t do anything about. The little-known truth is that simple dietary changes aimed at improving blood sugar and insulin patterns can greatly reduce the risk for these serious conditions.
Too many people with mental health problems have given up hope. They have tried long lists of medications and supplements, years of psychotherapy, meditation, exercise, and dietary changes like cutting out red meat, switching from omelets to oatmeal or homemade green smoothies—with little to no relief. They think they have tried everything already and don’t realize there is SO much more they can do.
There are no books currently available that show people how and why to use ketogenic diets (and other targeted dietary strategies) to address psychiatric symptoms. People with existing mental health problems shouldn’t have to accidentally stumble onto the ketogenic diet to discover its powerful mental health benefits—it is my hope that one day soon, this intervention will be included as a first-line treatment option in mainstream mental health care.
It’s time to take the confusion out of nutrition and replace it with science, simplicity, and common sense. My passion is teaching you how to think for yourself about food so you can make your own informed choices and find what works best for you and your family.
Pre-order season: now through January 22, 2024
Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind is now available for pre-order through most major booksellers including Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Hachette, Books-a-Million, Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target.
Robust pre-sales convince international publishers that the book is worth translating into other languages, convince booksellers to stock hardcover copies on their shelves where new audiences can discover it, and motivate journalists to write reviews of the book, which expose new audiences to the content. So, if you already know you’re interested in the book, please consider reserving a copy early rather than waiting until after the release date.
Release Date: January 23, 2024
Hachette/GCP Balance (New York) and Hodder/Yellow Kite (London) will release Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind in print, digital, and audiobook formats on January 23rd in most English-speaking markets around the world including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa.
I’m also excited to share that sometime after the English language version is released, Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo) will publish a Japanese translation of the book. We will seek additional international contracts in 2024.
Stay Tuned for More
In the coming weeks, there will be more exclusive sneak previews of content, opportunities to connect, discuss the book with me, and ask questions, and other exciting ways to engage about the exciting emerging fields of nutritional and metabolic psychiatry, so please stay tuned. If you’d like to be notified of these events, please sign up for my newsletter.
If extra chewing is effective in suppressing your appetite when it comes to food, what about chewing gum as a weight-loss strategy?
As I discuss in my video Does Chewing Gum Help with Weight Loss?, chewing gum may only burn about three calories an hour, but the calorie expenditure isn’t only working your little jaw muscles. For some reason, chewing gum revs up your heart rate as much as 12 extra beats per minute after chewing two sticks of gum, even if you’re just sitting quietly, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:21 in my video. It also works while walking, increasing your heart rate by about three more beats per minute (and proving scientifically that people can indeed walk and chew gum at the same time).
Does this translate into weight loss? Researchers at the University of Buffalo asked study participants to either chew gum before every single eating occasion or not chew any gum at all for a number of weeks. On the gum-chewing weeks, the subjects didn’t just have to chew gum before each meal, but also before each snack or drink that contained any calories. That may have been too much, so the participants actually ended up eating on fewer occasions, switching from four meals a day on average down closer to three. They ended up eating more calories at each of those fewer meals, though, and had no overall significant change in caloric intake and, no surprise, had no change in weight. See the charts below and at 1:08 in my video.
University of Alabama researchers tried a different tack, randomizing people to chew gum after and between meals. After two months, compared to those randomized to avoid gum entirely, no improvements were noted in weight, body mass index (BMI), or waist circumference. However, some studies have suggested that chewing gum has an appetite-suppressing effect. For example, as you can see below and at 1:51 in my video, in one study, people ate 68 fewer calories of pasta at lunch after 20 minutes of chewing gum, but other studies have shown differently.
Whenever there are conflicting findings, instead of just throwing up our hands, it can be useful to try to tease out any study differences that could potentially account for the disparate results. The obvious consideration is the funding source. That failed University of Alabama weight-loss study was funded by a gum company, so the outcomes are not necessarily predetermined.
As well, different types of gum using different sweeteners may have contributed to the diversity of findings. As you can see in the graphs below and at 2:35 in my video, a study that found that chewing gum may actually increase appetite was done with aspartame-sweetened gum. People reported feeling hungrier after chewing the sweetened gum—and not only compared to no gum, but compared to chewing the same gum with no added aspartame. It’s true that not one randomized controlled trial has ever shown a benefit to “chewing gum as a strategy for weight loss,” but they all used gum containing artificial sweeteners.
There was a landmark study that showed that the size of a sip matters when it comes to reducing the intake of sweet beverages. When study participants took one sip every two seconds or a quadruple-sized gulp every eight seconds, but with the same ingestion rate of 150 grams per minute, the smaller sip group won out, satiating after about one-and-a-half cups compared to two cups when taking larger gulps, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:13 in my video. This is thought to be because of increased oro-sensory exposure, so our brain picks up the more frequent pulses of flavor and calories. But repeat the experiment with an artificially sweetened diet drink, and the effect appears to be blunted, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:38 in my video. So, might a different type of gum have a different effect? The positive pasta study I discussed earlier was performed using gum sweetened mainly with sorbitol, a sweet compound that’s found naturally in foods like prunes, and, like prunes, can have a laxative effect.
Case reports like “An Air Stewardess with Puzzling Diarrhea” unveil what can happen when you have 60 sticks of sorbitol-sweetened sugar-free gum a day. Another report was entitled “Severe Weight Loss Caused by Chewing Gum.” A 21-year-old woman ended up malnourished after suffering up to a dozen bouts of diarrhea a day for eight months due to the 30 grams of sorbitol she was getting chewing sugar-free gum and candies every day. Most people suffer gas and bloating at 10 daily grams of sorbitol, which is about eight sticks of sorbitol-sweetened gum, and, at 20 grams, most get cramps and diarrhea. So, you want to be careful how much you get.
The bottom line is that we have no good science showing that chewing gum results in weight loss. Could that be because the studies used artificial sweeteners that “may have counteracted” any benefits? Maybe, but the most obvious explanation for the results to date “is that chewing gum simply is not an efficacious weight-loss strategy”—and that’s coming from researchers funded by the gum company itself.
How Many Calories Do You Burn Chewing Gum?Watch the video to find out.For information on both artificial and natural low-calorie sweeteners, check out the related videos below.
[00:00:00] Detective Ev: Hello everyone. Welcome to episode 281 of the Health Detective Podcast. This episode is about winning a cancer battle and a neurofeedback discovery.
I love talking to other people about their stories and what they dealt with in the functional medicine space, as well as what they saw in the FDN program. We are talking to Angela Martinucci. Angela is the founder of Mind Balance Neuro and co-founder of the Bay Area Brain Spa. Mind Balance Neuro is at the forefront of providing NeurOptimal® Neurofeedback rental programs and purchasing consultations.
Angela, a co founder of the Bay Area Brain Spa in the San Francisco area, is committed to making the benefits of biohacking and neurofeedback accessible to her local community. Her recent graduation from FDN marks an exciting integration of functional labs and coaching methods into her client services. Angela’s journey with NeuroOptimal Neurofeedback began with a personal transformation following a cancer diagnosis, igniting her passion for sharing this technology.
Over the past decade, she has worked with diverse clients, discovering a particular affinity for peak performers. Her work with a major league baseball team, professional athletes, and corporate neurofeedback programs has showcased remarkable benefits. Angela also finds fulfillment in assisting clients facing complex health challenges, making her FDN certification a natural progression in her quest to support their wellness journeys.
And finally, Angela’s commitment to community outreach and expanding neurofeedback access drove the establishment of the Bay Area Brain Spa. This endeavor facilitates cost effective group neurofeedback training sessions, extending reduced rates to public school teachers, children, first responders, and veterans.
Today, the business has blossomed offering a wide array of wellness technologies to enhance the wellbeing of its clients. Angela, welcome to the Health Detective Podcast, finally.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Finding a Lump
[00:01:46] Angela Martinucci: Thank you. That was a mouthful.
[00:01:48] Detective Ev: Yeah. How long ago did we talk now, man? It feels like it’s been a while.
[00:01:52] Angela Martinucci: It has been a while. Yeah, there’s been two iterations of the brain spa since the last time we spoke. We opened in 2020. I think we spoke some time in 2021 after I met Reed at the biohacking Congress event. I spoke at that event and met him there.
Then, yeah, we spoke sometime between then and now. We’ve moved and expanded the brain spa and added on a second time since then. It’s been quite a whirlwind.
[00:02:23] Detective Ev: It had to be at least a year and a half ago.
We got a lot to dissect today. Let’s start with how we always begin on this show. I’d love to know about when your health symptoms started and what they looked like at the time.
[00:02:34] Angela Martinucci: So, we would go back to 2010. I was in the shower and found a lump under my arm and thought, oh that’s strange. That wasn’t there last week. Went in to be seen at the doctor because I thought let me get it checked out. I had two young kids at the time. My daughter was almost three and my son was almost five. And so, I thought, okay let me just see what it is.
They did an exam and they said, oh, it’s probably just a cyst. Go home and cut out caffeine. And I thought, okay, I don’t know that I’m satisfied with that. But I’m 33 years old and I have no history of cancer. I just have no reason to believe that would even be in the picture.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Gut Intuition
I went home and followed their directions and then something told me, no, you should probably go back and be seen again. That’s when they did the ultrasound and mammogram and turned out to be stage III invasive breast cancer that was in my lymph nodes already by the time I was diagnosed. No symptoms because I was feeling well at the time.
I ended up having surgery pretty quickly. Threw my daughter in preschool overnight. Six months of chemo, radiation, other surgeries with complications. Other than the symptoms of chemo that were extremely awful and the symptoms of radiation, there was also symptoms that happened after all the treatments were done that were pretty devastating.
[00:04:06] Detective Ev: I think there’s a really easy part for people to miss there. I find it significant. You said you just knew that you should go back. So largely the reason that you got the diagnosis when you did is because you knew in your gut that something was wrong, and you went back. Is that correct? Yes, or no?
[00:04:23] Angela Martinucci: Yeah, exactly. If I had just blown it off and thought, okay it’s a cyst. It’ll go away at some point.
[00:04:31] Detective Ev: Yeah. And so, I like to have the balance between those things, right? I really want people to follow their intuition. The reason that I say this is because many people, when we ask, how did they get into the natural or functional side?
Literally 95 percent of the answers are, I just knew, gut feeling, divine intervention. It’s very odd trying to figure out why so many of those people had that same thing. To be fair, that’s my answer as well. I just knew that something didn’t make sense.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Healthy Nutrition
But I love encouraging this because, in your case, it’s not like you said, oh, I just know something’s wrong and I’m going to go to central America and go to an odd retreat in the middle of the jungle and start trying to heal myself. No. You said, I don’t know if this is right. What else can I have to lose, what, a few hundred bucks, from going to the doctor? Maybe that’s covered anyway.
You got the diagnosis, and thank God, because cancer’s a different beast, man. I always say that on the show. If that gets too far in, it actually takes over a lot of the mechanisms in our body that could heal us when we fast or when we do other things. So, you want to get that sooner rather than later. I’m so glad that you did.
As you’re going through these treatments and when you got this diagnosis, were you into natural or functional medicine at all or was there a completely different life and philosophy before all this happened?
[00:05:43] Angela Martinucci: No. I would say, I grew my own vegetables. I was an organic chef. So, I was consulting on gluten free and cooking for families with gluten free and special dietary needs. This was really prior to smartphones. It wasn’t a thing back then like it is today. No, that was definitely something that I was focused on health.
My background was in nutrition. And when I was diagnosed, it was all my friends saying, why you, why not me? I’m drinking Dr. Pepper and smoking cigarettes. Like you’re the one that’s cooking organic and paying attention to this and your babies eat all organic.
Neurofeedback Discovery: An Integrative Approach
Yeah, I wouldn’t say that functional medicine was something that I was aware of at the time. I wouldn’t say that just because I was healthy, young, and I hadn’t really needed to face anything that I needed to see someone for.
[00:06:37] Detective Ev: This is particularly interesting. I do not know that part of your story. Because again, you’re, by definition, living better than most people in today’s world, let alone whenever this was especially if it’s before smartphones. So really interesting.
Did Western medicine then get you to where you needed to go cancer wise? And was it the only treatment that you did since you were already aware of this more natural side of doing things?
[00:07:02] Angela Martinucci: I was in a healthcare system that was very broken. And I asked them what should I be eating during chemo? They said, it doesn’t matter. Just eat whatever you can get down because of the nausea and vomiting.
And I said I feel like I want to take supplements to support my body through this process. And they said, no. You’re not taking any supplements. It could interfere with the chemo. And so I actually found another doctor at the time.
I couldn’t go to them because of my insurance, but he was an integrative oncologist in San Francisco. I had one phone call with him and I just knew I’m paying out of pocket, I’m going here, I’m doing all the extras that he has to offer.
He has an amazing dietitian that focuses on cancer, a massage therapist, and an acupuncturist. So, I would literally get my chemotherapy and then drive across the bridge to go to his office to have all of the integrated approach. So, I just ignored doctor’s orders.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Having Questions
[00:08:02] Detective Ev: Well, you did, and you didn’t. You had a very fair request, and you were trying to do what was necessary and they said no.
The clear answer is that, and this is not medical advice, obviously not every supplement is going to interfere with chemo. Anyone with common sense knows that. And so, to say no supplements at all because of that is stupid. That’s wrong.
So again, this is a more of a common sense one to be fair. But I love this theme so far of the following of the gut. I talked to this person, and I’m sure they sounded good and had educated statements to make. But I love this whole idea of, oh, I just know I’m going to go to that person.
So, you’re following this like inner guidance almost this entire time. What did the next period of time look like? And I say, period of time, because I don’t necessarily know how long it was. Clearly, thank God you’re here with us today, which is wonderful. But what did that look like in the interim while you were healing?
[00:08:52] Angela Martinucci: Yeah, I mean, it was 6 months of chemotherapy, and it was pretty aggressive.
I was extremely sick on the chemotherapy. So thankfully, I had family around to help take care of my kids. Just thinking about, oh, this is poisoning my body and the same time wiping out what I knew was probably a relatively healthy microbiome and like, how do you restore this? These things were on my mind as I was going through treatment.
Neurofeedback Discovery: A Mix of Natural and Western
Then just the radiation, you sign off on this form. At the time I thought, okay, I have two little kids. I was scared to death. The cancer’s in your lymph nodes. All I knew of cancer was people that had died of cancer, right?
So, I felt like I had one foot in Western medicine and trusting that process, and I just gotta get through this and I’m also going to support my body. That was the dance I did throughout. It was a year of treatments and surgeries.
[00:09:47] Detective Ev: After that year though, was it a clear slate? They said you’re good?
Angela Martinucci: Yeah.
Detective Ev: Okay. So, you finish up this mix of Western and call it functional, we’ll call it natural, whatever. And you’re lucky enough and blessed enough to get this, hey, you’re good to go right now.
Angela Martinucci: Yeah.
Detective Ev: I’m sure that there must be a phase now where you’re going research mode or really changing your perspective. And it’s not literally that we’re arrogant in this space. When we’re doing the stuff that someone like you was doing, especially again, before smartphones, even before this was widely available online, you must have this idea that I’m going to be very healthy for most of my life. I’m certainly not going to get a cancer diagnosis in my early thirties.
Did this change your paradigm then in terms of what you were about to go do once you got this clean bill of health? Okay, I need to change some things up to figure out how this happened to begin with.
[00:10:37] Angela Martinucci: Yeah. And I would say for me, it was more like I was going through this and continuing with that gut feeling.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Anxiety, Depression, and a Black Hole
I felt like the whole time that, no, this happened to me for a reason. I’m meant to go through this for a reason. There’s something that’s going to come out of this journey, and I don’t know what it is in this moment, but I will find it.
So, after the cancer treatments and everything, all the meal delivery stopped, and all the support went away and they say, you’re good, unfortunately that part of the journey for most people going through cancer treatments, it’s like you end up like a dog that’s just been attacked. You’re just like, what now? Sitting there licking your wound, like what just happened to me?
You just go into fight or flight, and you get through it when you have to go through it. That definitely hit me like a ton of bricks, and I was definitely not in the headspace really to research or do anything for myself in terms of what’s next.
There was definitely a what’s next. I feel like part of that what’s next was, I ate organic, and I did all the things, and I ended up with cancer, so now what? I don’t feel like that’s the answer. I was let down by all these things I was doing that I thought were the right thing to do. So, I went through that in my head and ended up with just really bad anxiety and depression.
The chemo brain, it was like operating through a fog. I couldn’t remember, oh, did I leave the dog in the car? And I’m trying to parent two little toddlers at the time. So, just trying to get through the day I felt like I was in a black hole that I couldn’t see the light after that.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Discouragement
And I think a lot of it was my hormones were shut down, I had the toxin load. I know now all of it was going on. And then just the trauma to the nervous system of going through something like that.
[00:12:29] Detective Ev: I know there was obviously many factors contributing at the time. But from what I just heard you say, because I was wondering this already, was it discouraging in a sense then?
Because again, you did believe in all this stuff, and it almost seems like it didn’t work in a certain way. So, did that lower your belief or lessen your belief in these principles? I know that again, eventually you expand your horizons and say maybe I just need to learn more.
But I guess that’s got to be pretty humbling and scary in a sense where you think you’re doing something better than 99 percent of people and you still get the big C word, the scary thing that we don’t want.
[00:13:01] Angela Martinucci: Exactly. I had started a healthy cooking blog prior to the cancer diagnosis, and I thought who am I to advise people on healthy living? Look at where it got me. And so yeah, there was this real mind game that happened around that for sure.
[00:13:16] Detective Ev: Obviously you got to where you got today.
So, let’s fast forward then to whatever part of this story goes from the very understandable anxiety and depression that has multiple factors behind it. When does the light at the end of the tunnel start coming out where you start maybe realizing why this happened, some new things to do and implement? I’d love to hear about that.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Subtle Improvements
[00:13:37] Angela Martinucci: I remember sitting on the floor of my room, my aunt called. She said, hi how are you? And I said, oh, I’m fine. She’s like, you’re not fine. Have you heard of this thing called neurofeedback? I think that this might help you.
She had been through the Amen Clinics. And she had a brain tumor like 20 years prior and had learned about neurofeedback. So, she introduced me to that. She actually had equipment, so she let me borrow her equipment and I used it at home. I went a couple of times to a provider, but it was easier to just go ahead and do it at home.
I didn’t really realize that it was doing anything positive, really, I didn’t think I was noticing any shifts from it. So, I played golf since I was 13 and it sounds like a really random side story. But I was out on the golf course with my husband and father-in-law, and I hit the ball. I thought, that is so weird. It went further and easier. This was just so effortless. What’s going on here?
Then I started to think, oh, that’s right. The founder said that he improved. Like he started golf when he was 50 and became a scratch golfer. Maybe something is happening with that neurofeedback. So, it was very subtle, seamless changes. I was dedicated to it because I didn’t want the handful of prescription meds that my doctor had offered me because that was the alternative. And I was grabbing for straws to get through the night. I also had insomnia.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Finding the Purpose
So, I had a cocktail of all kinds of things next to my bedside to try and just get through the night or be able to drive the kids to school and stay calm and regulated. I didn’t even notice how much better I was until I was on a retreat.
I was on the board of directors for a young survivor group in the San Francisco Bay area. So, we were on an overnight and all these women are talking about I gotta go take my Xanax and Ativan and this and that. And I went, oh my God, I didn’t bring anything with me. I’m sleeping through the night.
Like what happened to the anxiety? Cause it just so seamlessly went away that I didn’t realize how much better I was until I saw them. They were like a reflection of myself a month or two prior. That was when it hit me.
And it was interesting because on that retreat, we were having these conversations about why a cancer. I just remember feeling like it happened for a reason, I’m going to find it. It was funny that it was on that retreat that I was like, okay, I’m meant to bring this to this community. It’s not okay that these young women are going through this diagnosis and then handed a handful of prescription meds to function for the rest of their lives.
[00:16:10] Detective Ev: I wish everyone would even just give that a try. What I mean by that is, let’s say you don’t believe everything happens for a reason. That’s fine. What if you acted like it did?
I do believe a lot of these things happen for a reason to be clear, but I actually applied this other philosophy first based on the advice of someone else so I didn’t come up with this. But it was just like, why don’t you just pretend that these things happen for a reason? And I realized the real gift in it is the way of thinking changes.
You were looking almost for these opportunities to find some validity to what this was and why this happened. And then it creates a very positive experience out of something that is otherwise, not even just negative, downright traumatic. So, whether that’s real or not real, I can see both sides of it. I’ve been on both sides of it. Who cares? Act like it is and watch what happens to your thinking and the gratitude level that you have when you approach it that way.
So, let’s define neurofeedback. Because admittedly, I think the only time I’ve really ever talked about this is with you and we already identified that was at least a year and a half ago when we were getting to meet each other. I don’t think I retained much is my point. So what is neurofeedback?
[00:17:15] Angela Martinucci: There’s different types of neurofeedback. The neurofeedback that I work with is called NeurOptimal® Neurofeedback in case any of your listeners are familiar. But it uses EEG sensors to measure cortical activity.
This particular software, it uses two little sensors on the head and then ear clips. Those are measuring the brain activity, sending the brain activity to the software, which is analyzing it and then giving your brain real time feedback.
It’s really being able to put the brain in front of a mirror. When the brain can see itself in real time, it’s prompted to self-correct and self-regulate. Just like when we look in a mirror, oh, my hair is out of place. Nobody told me. Yeah, my hat’s crooked. Like we immediately start making corrections. Or we look at ourselves in the mirror, we might go, eh, yeah, today’s not my day and just keep walking.
The idea is that it’s not entraining the brain in any way. It’s just giving the brain information and allowing the brain to decide whether it wants to be prompted to self-correct and self-regulate.
[00:18:17] Detective Ev: We got to dissect that because that’s something I’m still admittedly confused about. I get the analogy totally. I look in the mirror every day. I’m like it’s about as good as it’s going to get and I accept my fate. There are times where maybe I get a little confident, believe I can change a thing or two. And so then I try to start to self correct.
Is that literally what’s happening? Like the brain doesn’t need any other prompt other than just seeing this?
[00:18:39] Angela Martinucci: Yeah. The participant is listening to music and the feedback is audio. So, you’re hearing little pauses in the music. It almost sounds like a record skipping. Most of your followers probably don’t know what a record is or know that sound, but little crackles or skips in the music.
Those are what is alerting the brain – hey, pay attention. Something just happened here. So, it’s really alerting the brain every time it’s shifting gears. It’s not negative or positive, just bringing its awareness to what it’s doing in real time.
Neurofeedback Discovery: When Are You Done?
So yeah, the brain will self-correct and self-regulate. I’ve seen it with my kids. For example, they started doing it when they were really little. They were, I think, going into first and third grade. So, they used to sit and play Legos and do a neurofeedback session.
The next day they’re making their bed and they’re not fighting. And I’m like, okay, I guess it’s working. Cause I didn’t tell him it was going to help them in any way. But that’s how their brain organized itself and how it showed up for them.
It looks different for different people, but the idea is that it’s training. So, each time the brain has this neurofeedback session, it’s this opportunity for the brain to be more calm and regulated. And with time it builds resilience and flexibility.
If you were to sit for thousands of hours of meditation, that would build this resilience and flexibility in the brain. So, it’s like a hack, but I feel like it goes deeper. It resolved my lifelong anxiety that I didn’t know really that’s what it was and insomnia.
People will say when are you done with neurofeedback? I don’t know. Maybe you’re coming in for sleep issues and your sleep issues go away. But maybe you have something else going on that could have improved if you kept going.
If I had stopped neurofeedback after, oh, I’m feeling better, I’m back to functioning optimally, what I feel is optimal but hadn’t kept going, I wouldn’t have resolved this lifetime anxiety and fear of public speaking, or even raising my hand in class. I had debilitating anxiety that went away after I continued to train. So, it’s a really profound process.
Neurofeedback Discovery: What a Session Looks Like
[00:20:57] Detective Ev: Yeah, it sounds it.
So, what does this session literally look like? I understand the audio component, and I could just be speaking for myself, but we actually have a decent live audience today, which is great. Most of our audience is on the audio side, so they must love the title and be interested in this.
I think what I’m missing right now is I wouldn’t have originally envisioned that I could be doing Legos at the same time as doing this. So, is this just a headset? Is it happening in the background? I’d love to see what this looks like.
[00:21:23] Angela Martinucci: Yeah, it’s totally passive. You have five sensors on.
So, say you’re coming into our center at the brain spa to do a neurofeedback session. We’ll get you in one of our comfy recliner chairs, hook up the little sensors that use an EEG conductive paste, those are again just measuring, and then the audio feedback happens through the music track.
The participant is just literally relaxing back in a recliner chair with a blanket on. They can have a book, they can not be on their phone if they want to. Obviously we encourage them to check out from screens. You start where you start.
And our kids that come in, we can also load movies on the tablet so that the feedback is in the movie and the audio stream. They’re able to come in and watch Toy Story for half an hour. We’ve got plenty of kids that will come in and do that. Really, if kids aren’t regulated even enough to sit down and watch a movie, they can sit and play with blocks or anything that keeps them relatively still in a chair.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Tying in With the Cancer
[00:22:21] Detective Ev: Where does this come into, if at all, maybe, the cancer story? Because obviously, again we already discussed one of the things that would very naturally happen to someone who went through what you went through. Where did I go wrong? I thought I was doing everything right. So, what the heck happened here?
But where does the neurofeedback play a role in maybe that discovery journey of how the heck did someone who is living better than most people end up getting a cancer?
Maybe it’s not fully connected. What I was trying to understand is certainly you would have gone on some type of journey in terms of trying to figure out how did I even get cancer because you’re healthy now. You’re here with us today, thank God. So, you must have changed something in the right direction.
I didn’t know if the neurofeedback was just a part of that or the neurofeedback helped you identify directly or indirectly what habits or what thought patterns led to the cancer to begin with. That’s what I guess I’m trying to figure out.
[00:23:11] Angela Martinucci: Yeah. I’ll say certainly it helped me with the peace of mind of feeling less anxiety around another cancer diagnosis. And I think that was because I just feel like it gave me this sense of purpose. We know that sense of purpose is huge in terms of health and wellbeing.
Really just knowing that I need to be here to share this with others and share my story, if it touches one person, then it’s worth it. I think that’s how the neurofeedback comes into the picture and ties with the cancer.
Neurofeedback Discovery: The Central Nervous System
There are thousands and thousands of people out there suffering, probably millions in this country, that are going through a cancer diagnosis like the clients I’ve worked with – attorneys that can’t go back to work because their brain isn’t functioning. So, if somebody hears this that’s struggling with word recall and whatnot, this can help.
I don’t think many practitioners out there actually know that there is something that helps with chemo brain, or a lot of these symptoms post cancer.
[00:24:16] Detective Ev: Yeah, I’m learning about it myself.
Actually, we have a question here. “What have you seen in your own life as a positive of the neurofeedback?” I know we talked about the anxiety. You’ve been doing it for a while. What are some of the positives outside of the anxiety?
[00:24:29] Angela Martinucci: I like to think of it for like the central nervous system. There’s this spectrum, right? And when the central nervous system is dysregulated on this end and very regulated on this end, we can have all of these symptoms. Those symptoms might be anxiety or redundant thinking or lying awake at night or brain fog or all of these different symptoms that can happen because the central nervous system is dysregulated.
We see as people start training and moving this way, the symptoms dissipate. That’s not always the case, but I’ve worked with countless people. What happens over and over again, they feel more calm and regulated.
And then thinking about most of our suffering happens as a result of thinking about tomorrow or cycling over the past or worrying about this thing or that thing. The more that you are able to stay calm and present, the less suffering happens, right?
Neurofeedback Discovery: Calming & Regulating
So, even when you’re dealing with a chronic health condition, a lot of the suffering is, what is this? What’s going to happen? Just a lot of it is in our head. Not that the condition is in our head, but to get out of our head thinking about the worst-case scenarios can really create changes.
For me as I started training again, all my symptoms went away that I was dealing with. The insomnia, I sleep like a baby every night and that was not the case years prior, even prior to the cancer diagnosis. Then again, the anxiety around speaking or ever going in front of somebody like that would just be like, no way, never. I would never be speaking to you right now, and here we are.
I just think stress resilience, it keeps you calm and regulated. Both of my kids started training really young. They’re a junior in high school and a freshman in college right now. And they absolutely love it.
For them, it was like, my son would have probably been diagnosed with something on the ADHD spectrum. His teachers would say, if he could just sit in class, if he would stop putting pencils in his ears. As soon as we started training him with the neurofeedback, the teacher grabbed me, she’s like, what happened to this kid?
And I thought, Oh no, now what? But she said, Oh no, I don’t understand, he’s like a different little boy. He’s focused and getting his work done. Both kids’ teachers actually pulled me aside after they started neurofeedback and couldn’t understand what happened and why something had happened. My daughter’s reading and writing had blossomed.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Linear Vs. NeuroOptimal
I also saw it in their performance. My daughter’s been an Irish dancer competitively since she was about five. She noticed it in her presence on the stage. So, she used to be extremely shy and just hold on to my leg. It allowed her to be more outgoing and confident on stage. She would do neurofeedback before a competition.
My son as well with baseball, and myself with golf. That’s where the neurofeedback for athletes came in. I started working with athletes as a result of seeing how it affected my golf game and the kids sports as well.
[00:27:28] Detective Ev: I’m assuming there’s some science behind this. How did this come to be? This isn’t something that an individual just randomly thinks of.
[00:27:37] Angela Martinucci: Neurofeedback has been around since the sixties. It’s been used by NASA. Different technologies have been developed as a result, just different iterations as technology advances.
The founders of NeuroOptimal were pioneers in the linear neurofeedback. Linear neurofeedback is different than NeuroOptimal in the sense that you are targeting something. You’re giving the brain a specific protocol, let’s just say. So, the person has anxiety, we’ll put them on the anxiety protocol, which is up training or down training certain frequencies of the brain.
Whereas the founders of NeuroOptimal, Val and Sue, they saw that there was this overshoot, this level of self-correction that the brain would do on its own. So, they figured out, instead of telling the brain what to do, they figured you could just show the brain, mirror back to the brain, what the brain is doing, and the brain would self-correct and self-regulate on its own. It knows what to do, right? It’s just really tapping into the intrinsic wisdom of the central nervous system.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Innate Healing Ability
[00:28:36] Detective Ev: So cool. Chiropractic medicine and these all seem so different on paper. But when you look at the similarities, what I’m fundamentally seeing here in terms of how it relates to FDN is if you can calm someone’s body, if you can help them actually get into this relaxation mode, the parasympathetic and truly not overthink things, that’s when you’re going to give your body a chance to enable or enact its innate healing ability, which is not woo-woo, not hippy want-to-be science.
We all have an innate healing ability. That’s how you healed from a cold when you’ve ever gotten one. That’s how you healed from the paper cut. So, it’s almost allowing these things to happen for more major things, like whether it’s a cancer diagnosis, autoimmune issues, skin issues, whatever it might be. Really fascinating stuff.
And then you had mentioned in your bio, FDN was a natural progression, just wanting to continue your learning and add more services to people. But I am curious. So, you found out about us at the Biohacking Congress, is that what it was?
[00:29:33] Angela Martinucci: I actually found out prior. So, I started doing some research because with my clients, I’d say something about, yeah, you should go get a DUTCH test.
And honestly, back to my journey, frustration with my journey after the cancer diagnosis, really trying to be like, why can’t I deal with this issue or energy, or, oh, you might have a mitochondria problem. But I don’t know, we don’t know what to do with it. You could try this, or we could do this test and it was just like playing Whac-a-Mole. I’d spend thousands of dollars not getting anything that was like, okay, do this program.
Neurofeedback Discovery: The Brain’s Capacity
Seeing my clients only get so far with just the neurofeedback alone, but then, okay, I can see you could use more support at a cellular level or with your hormones. Maybe go see this person and get a DUTCH test. They’d be like, who do I see?
I didn’t really know anybody that I wanted to refer to that I was confident referring to. So, for really personal reasons and my family and just wanting to maybe bring it in house and help my clients with the labs, I started researching functional medicine, can you do it with a nutrition degree? Like how would I go about that? Then I think I had come across FDN. And then I met you guys at the conference. Okay. This is it.
[00:30:54] Detective Ev: Then just a nice disclaimer for consumers here, because I feel like it’s actually the consumer’s fault more often than it is the person preaching it. Neurofeedback is a cool tool, it’s not a cure all for everything. That is not what we’re promoting here today.
[00:31:07] Angela Martinucci: It’s not a cure all. It’s actually just a general wellbeing product. Your brain is doing all the work, it’s not doing anything to your brain. Your brain has the capacity to create changes.
Like you said, it’s main thing is that it comes and regulates the nervous system. When you calm and regulate the nervous system, it changes so much for people.
[00:31:27] Detective Ev: Excellent. For those that don’t know, we include labs in the cost of tuition. You get to have insights into your own health while going through FDN. You get one-on-one mentorship sessions not only to help with the course content, but to go over the lab results as well.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Running the Labs Regularly
So, what happened on those? You’ve been in the space for a while, doing your thing. Was there room for improvement? For most of us there is, right? There’s no shame in that. It’s usually the case. But what did you find while you’re going through the FDN course about your own health?
[00:31:55] Angela Martinucci: Yeah, definitely room for improvement, for sure. That’s a lot of the reason I decided to join the course is I want to understand these labs.
I wanted to be able to run them on myself and be able to create these changes in my diet. And I just loved the concept overall of minimizing the hidden stressors. The impact of that alone is just so profound. That’s not talked about enough going to functional medicine or whatnot. Just that alone has such a huge impact without adding in the supplements.
So, for me, definitely the GI MAP was very interesting. And I’m due for another one after going to Mexico and getting a parasite, which I think is a parasite, whatever.
[00:32:40] Detective Ev: Interesting. I appreciate the transparency.
Plenty of people come into the world of FDN. We’re amazing at helping people who are really sick, but we’re also amazing at helping people who are doing okay and want to find these other things, dot the i’s cross the t’s.
It might be a bold statement, so again, this is not a medical thing. But I would imagine that if everyone was running the foundational FDN labs, it’s one of the reasons I believe in this so much. If everyone was running those on a yearly basis, I think it’d be pretty dang hard for a lot of stuff to sneak up on us.
Neurofeedback Discovery: The Cancer Story
If we can see the way our hormones are going, if we could see our detoxification ability, and the way the gut’s dealing with things or not dealing with things sometimes, I just think it’d be a lot harder for most things to catch up on us.
I’m so glad that you got to see that now because I’m sure you have in your mind like, I’m not going to let this thing happen to me again. And I think with all the things that you’ve done and are doing you probably won’t ever let these things happen to you. It’s amazing that you beat this and then came out on top. The cancer one’s a lot different than many of the things.
There’s, I’ll put it this way, less stories on this show about cancer than virtually anything else, right? Tons of autoimmunity, tons of skin and gut issues, it’s a little less common with the cancer. So, I think it’s particularly inspiring when someone gets on and shares a story like that, and you’re here all these years later. Because again, if we’re going back before smartphones, you’re talking, this is at least a decade plus since the diagnosis, correct?
[00:34:00] Angela Martinucci: Yeah, so 2010. It’ll be 14 years in February that I was diagnosed.
Detective Ev: Pretty darn good my friend.
Angela Martinucci: Fourteen years ago this month that I finished chemo. It may even be today the anniversary of finishing chemo, honestly.
Detective Ev: Pretty dang good.
Neurofeedback Discovery: The Gap
Angela Martinucci: Yeah.
But to your point, it just jogged my memory about after a cancer diagnosis and applying the principles of FDN. If you go through a Western medicine treatment protocol, we see these people all the time at the brain spa where they come in and it’s, oh yeah, I’m done with treatment. But what does that mean?
You’ve been cut, burned, and poisoned and the cancer is not there right now, but what are we going to do between now and moving forward? I think there’s a huge opportunity to really look at people coming out of cancer treatment. There’s just this gap.
So, why did you get cancer in the first place? Cutting, burning, and poisoning is not going to heal your body. I know there’s a lot of FDNs out there, hopefully some are listening. But there are a lot of people that need support in that area. I’ll just plant that seed there that I think that they’re just left to, you’re fine. You might be on this hormone thing for the rest of your life or whatnot.
[00:35:18] Detective Ev: We had a woman named Annie on a couple of episodes ago and she was not into the functional medicine/natural medicine thing at all before her cancer diagnosis. She actually talks about that specifically and supports people in that area post chemo – now what?
You’re right. It’s oh, I’m done treatment. Another way to say it is okay, yeah, you survived. How do we keep you thriving long term? That’s really the key here.
[00:35:40] Angela Martinucci: Yeah. The effect of those treatments, right? At the brain spa, we see a lot of people post treatment. And we have all of our biohacking tools, but that’s like another thing.
Neurofeedback Discovery: FDN Program + Neurofeedback
Are they still using toxic household cleaners? Are they eating processed foods, the seed oils, like what is happening still that they haven’t made those changes? So, how can we also help them implement and run the tests and see what’s going on and how can we support them outside of all the different biohacking tech?
[00:36:12] Detective Ev: Yeah.
Jenny commented, she has thyroid cancer. She’s been cut, radiated, still have tumor markers too high. I’m sorry to hear that, Jenny. There’s a bunch of great stuff on this podcast. Hopefully it can help. And obviously you wouldn’t be watching something like this if you weren’t already doing your own research. I hope we can help in any way with the free information that we are able to share.
Angela, so how is this going to look for you now being one of the rare FDNs, like ourselves with an in-person business where we actually offer services there, but then also the FDN thing? Is it just like a new offering in your spa, or is it just online? What does this look like?
[00:36:48] Angela Martinucci: That is still taking shape. I graduated the end of summer, and we had some new hirings and other things happening at the spa. So, I’m still playing with what it’s going to look like. I have an idea.
So, I still rent the neurofeedback equipment and ship it out. And I have thoughts around a 90-day program doing FDN in conjunction with the neurofeedback – this total transformation package that I can work with people remotely.
And then in the spa, I would say, gosh, we have a really large percentage of menopausal/ premenopausal women who are really looking for support.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Renting the Equipment
I’m looking at packaging something group wise with kind of workshops and testing. So, I just don’t know the bandwidth for working one-on-one. So, I’m just really looking at how we can package more of a group program.
[00:37:41] Detective Ev: You just mentioned something interesting, renting and shipping out the neurofeedback stuff. Tell me more about that. Especially tell me how, if I wanted neurofeedback processes done on me, how would I go about getting this if I’m on the other side of the country? I’m in Pennsylvania, you’re in San Fran. It’s like, how would that look?
[00:37:55] Angela Martinucci: I stick one in FedEx and send it to you. I work with people all over the country with the neurofeedback rentals. So, I have multiple systems. You would book it on my website, and we would talk, and I would send it out. Then we would connect via zoom or phone or whatnot.
[00:38:13] Detective Ev: So, you’re telling me I can podcast live while getting neurofeedback.
Angela Martinucci: Sure.
Detective Ev: All right. You guys wait till episode 283, baby, because you never know what you’re going to see on this show, that’s for sure. I’m actually extremely interested in that. So, I’d love to know about where people can find you and stuff.
It’s amazing how fast this has already flown by. It’s always nice getting a brand-new topic that for me is just, I’ve never taken it in before. I’m like, we could do this for three, four fricking hours.
[00:38:38] Angela Martinucci: I know. I didn’t even hear about your studio.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Angela’s Ideal Client
[00:38:40] Detective Ev: Yeah.
Well, who do you like to serve now? You mentioned this in the bio already, but let’s say someone’s tuning in late or they skipped the intros cause that’s what they do. Who do you like to serve now? And who would best be suited to reach out to someone like you in terms of who you would like to support and can support?
[00:38:56] Angela Martinucci: I have this love for working with athletes and peak performers. So, I was working on site with athletes prior to the shutdown and then we opened the brain spa. We do see athletes in our center, but what I’ve seen go on in the clubhouses of professional sports teams is toxic. I can’t believe this is what they’re feeding and spraying on their bodies and whatnot.
There’s a lot of room for education there, which I think would be really fun, but I do have a soft spot, of course, for my cancer survivors. And I, being a menopausal age woman as well, I think those clientele as well.
[00:39:35] Detective Ev: Then last thing, we chat out specifically where people can find you.
You obviously have a profound story here. We’re so thankful that you’re here with us, not only going through FDN, but man, just to have this story to share with others. That’s my favorite part of the podcast. We can get into the science all we want. I’m all for it. The stories to me mean the world. That’s what inspires people to take action and to give them hope that they can hopefully resolve their conditions too.
Neurofeedback Discovery: Client Testimonial
Do you have a favorite client testimonial that you’re able to share where like someone came into your spa and maybe they’re at the end of their rope and this is someone that you were really able to help and transform their life?
[00:40:10] Angela Martinucci: We see it all the time. People that are really suffering. I would say, we see a lot of anxiety. That’s big for people to move through that.
I have a crazy story that’s not super related. But I was running a retreat for a group of doctors, and we were running neurofeedback sessions on the beach. This one doctor did a session. He walked away and came back and goes, I know this is really weird, but before that session, I couldn’t see out of my left eye. I had a crushed eye orbital years prior from an accident. I haven’t been able to see in the last 10 years. And he was able to see after one neurofeedback session.
Detective Ev: Wow!
Angela Martinucci: It’s just bizarre, right? So, we’re just giving the brain information and his brain was able to like, okay, cool. I can turn on this pathway, and look, you can see.
[00:40:57] Detective Ev: You’d have to think, unless there’s literal physical damage, and even then, might still be relevant, what is all this healing, right? What tells my body, oh, fix this paper cut type of thing? That’s really fascinating.
I think again, it’s one of those things that’s hard for us to comprehend as just the human beings we are. But when you connect some of the stuff that we know to be true, that’s why I go back to the paper cut thing all the time. I’m like a broken record with it.
Neurofeedback Discovery: A Learning Process
But if you think about how profound that actually is that you have damage here and it fixed itself without telling it to do anything, it just knew what to do, I can see that. I can see that happening with someone like this that gets their sight back. Was it like full sight or just a little bit?
[00:41:39] Angela Martinucci: He’s like, I couldn’t see before this and then he could.
I always tell that story because you just can’t underestimate. People are like, what is it going to do for me? We’re giving information, we’re putting your brain in front of a mirror, so we just don’t know. We see all kinds of bizarre things that happen as a result.
Some people, it takes a lot more sessions to see any progress and some people, it’s much quicker. It’s like learning a new language. So, if you’re going to learn German, it might take you a little longer than an 11-year-old to learn German, right? It’s a learning process.
[00:42:08] Detective Ev: As we wrap up here, first of all, thank you for coming on the show. It’s great to circle back with you now, post graduating FDN.
Angela is about as nice as can be. We had talked before when I was developing my health, wellness center, whatever you’ll call it. You were just beyond kind. Like you literally said, hey, we’d be happy to help you out. I can give you some advice on these types of things. I thank you very much for that.
Where can people find you though, if they would like to learn more about this neurofeedback stuff, talk to you, and perhaps even work with you?
Where to Find Angela Martinucci
[00:42:37] Angela Martinucci: I’ve got two different websites. You could reach out through either one. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, come visit us at the Bay Area Brain Spa. You can find me that way.
[00:42:57] Detective Ev: All right. And then our signature question on the show, my friend. If I could give you a magic wand and you could wave it, and now you could force every single person in this world to either start doing one thing for our health, or you can get us to all stop doing one thing for our health, what is the one thing that Angela would get us to do?
[00:43:18] Angela Martinucci: Nature and sunshine.
Detective Ev: Mic drop, period?
Angela Martinucci: That’s it. Yeah.
[00:43:25] Detective Ev: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. This might need a part two to dive even deeper into the neurofeedback stuff, but I really appreciate the introduction. We’ve never talked about this on the show, as far as I can remember, certainly not for a whole podcast.
Again, so glad you’re here. Congratulations on healing something that doesn’t happen to many people. We appreciate you.
[00:43:44] Angela Martinucci: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
The staff and students at the Academy of Culinary Nutrition love meal prep – we find it relaxing and meditative, plus the end result of tasty homemade meals is worth the effort. However, we know that not everyone loves chopping vegetables, blending condiments or batch cooking quinoa. The popularity of meal prep services and meal kit delivery is on the rise, growing from 1 billion US dollars in revenue in 2015 to a projected 10 billion by 2020. In Canada, where the Academy of Culinary Nutrition is located, the meal kit business has doubled since 2014 and is estimated to surpass $3.2 billion by 2027.
The concept is simple: a company delivers meals to your door and you eat them. But are meal prep services worth it?
Why Would Someone Buy (or hire) Meal Prep Services?
When someone else does the meal prep (and grocery shopping) instead, you can still enjoy home-cooked meals that support your health and wellness. Undoubtedly, meal prep services make cooking and eating simpler but that’s not the only rationale for using one. There are other reasons why you might be drawn to a meal prep service. Meal prep services can:
Support people who are unable to prep due to illness, injury or chronic pain (such as arthritis)
Give you more time to pursue interests aside from cooking
Types of Meal Prep Services
There are a few different types of meal prep services. They include:
Meal Prep/Meal Kit Delivery
What Is It? You receive a delivery of chopped and prepped ingredients needed to make a full recipe, along with cooking instructions for the meal.
Best For: Those who want to eat a fresh, hot meal and aren’t a fan of leftovers or reheating. This option is also good for those who enjoy cooking, but not the time it can take to chop and prep the ingredients.
Full Meal Delivery
What Is It? You receive a fully prepared and cooked meal – all you need to do is reheat. If it’s a meal that doesn’t need to be eaten hot (like a salad), you just eat it!
Best For: Those who aren’t interested in doing any cooking at all, or don’t mind reheating foods.
In-Home Cooking
What Is It? A chef or nutritionist comes to your house and creates a set of meals that are customized to your health needs. Many of our culinary nutrition expert graduates do this!
Best For: Those who desire a personal, customized approach from an expert with knowledge in nutrition and cooking for health. You can also have more control over what ingredients are used in your food, as well as the types of equipment used to cook and prepare them.
Meal Prep Considerations
If you’re thinking about purchasing from a meal prep service or online meal kit delivery, not all companies have exactly the same offerings. As you conduct your own research, contemplate:
Quality of Ingredients:
Does it matter to you if the ingredients in your meals are local, organic, non-GMO, sustainable, or fresh? What about sourcing animal products? If anything is unclear about where the ingredients are sourced from, don’t hesitate to ask. And, will the ingredients in each meal help to support your health and wellness?
Variety/Types of Recipes:
Many companies have sample menus online where you can see if the types of meals they provide are the ones you enjoy eating. It’s great to try new things, but it’s handy to know that you are getting at least a few meals a week that you know you’ll enjoy. How much variety is there from week to week? Does the menu change weekly, biweekly, monthly? Can you pick and choose, or is the menu plan set for you?
Cook/Assembly Time:
How long do meals take to cook from start to finish? Given the demographic these companies are targeting, most meal kit services provide relatively quick and straightforward meals. However, if you don’t want to wait 30 or 45 minutes for your dinner, perhaps a meal prep service with more pre-cooked items might be for you.
Prep Time:
How much chopping will you need to do? Some companies offer everything sliced, diced and ready to go, while others may require you to do some light prep work.
Cost:
Meal prep services and meal kit services are more expensive than cooking yourself. Prices vary, though on average you’ll probably pay about $10-12 dollars per serving. Yes, that’s probably cheaper than eating at a restaurant or some takeout spots. However, if you’re a family of four you could be paying $40 to $50 per meal – and you could probably make something yourself for less and have more servings to freeze or take for lunch to work the next day.
Servings:
Two or four servings is standard for most meal prep services, and you can usually choose how many recipes you’d like per week. How big are those portion sizes? We all have different appetites, so it’s worth looking into reviews about this or asking the company if they can give you an approximate yield of food provided.
Dietary Restrictions:
Are there options if you have allergies or dietary restrictions, or can you request substitutions? Many services also have plans that follow the popular diets like vegan, Paleo and keto. If you have severe allergies, you’ll want to ask about cross-contamination in the prepping process.
Packaging:
Meal kit delivery services can use a lot of packaging, as each component of a meal can be wrapped separately and there is also the box itself that the full meal arrives in. Check if the packaging is plastic, or is made from a material that is more eco-friendly and sustainable. The home chef option typically uses the least packaging, as you can use your own containers for storage.
Subscription Commitment:
Do you need to commit to a certain number of meals every week, or can you order whenever the mood strikes? Can you pause your subscription if you are going away for business or traveling with family and friends?
Want to DO Your Own Meal Prep?
Only you can decide whether a meal prep or meal delivery kit service is right for your health, your family, your lifestyle or your budget. If you’d like to try meal prepping on your own before hiring a service, here are some resources to help you:
Bring to a boil 1 ½ cups of water in a saucepan. Once it boils, add the pearl couscous. Bring to a boil and then turn heat to low, cover slightly and bring to a simmer for 10- 15 minutes until water is absorbed
Meanwhile heat saucepan with 1 tablespoon garlic infused olive oil
Add broccolini pieces and sauté for a few minutes, covering pan with a lid to create a steam
Once they start to brown and soften slightly, remove and add to a bowl
In the same saucepan add the frozen peas, cover pan with a lid to create a steam
Cook through and remove from saucepan, add into bowl with broccolini
In the same saucepan add in the halloumi cubes and cook on low heat until they start to brown slightly. Remove from saucepan and add to the bowl with the peas and broccolini
In the same saucepan add in the pine nuts, tossing until they roast. Remove from saucepan
In the same bowl with the halloumi, green peas and broccolini, add in the spring onions, spinach and rocket leaves as well as boiled pearl couscous from step 1
Give it a good toss until everything is well combine
In a jar, mix together the dressing ingredients, using the water to dilute the dressing if needed
Pour the dressing over the top of the salad, sprinkle with the roasted pine nuts and its ready to serve
Serving Options
Have it as it is for a vegetarian option
Add a protein source like grilled chicken tenderloins, grilled salmon fillet or tinned tuna, all work beautifully
Plant-based diets are the single most important—yet underutilized—opportunity to reverse the pending obesity and diabetes-induced epidemic of disease and death.
Dr. Kim Williams, immediate past president of the American College of Cardiology, started out an editorial on plant-based diets with the classic Schopenhauer quote: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” In 2013, plant-based diets for diabetes were in the “ridiculed” stage in the official endocrinology practice guidelines and placed in the “Fad Diets” section. The guidelines acknowledged that strictly plant-based diets “have been shown to reduce the risk for T2DM [type 2 diabetes] and improve management of T2DM” better than the American Diabetes Association recommendations, then inexplicably went on to say that it “does not support the use of one type of diet over another” with respect to diabetes or in general. “The best approach for a healthy lifestyle is simply the ‘amelioration of unhealthy choices’”—whatever that means.
But, by 2015, the clinical practice guidelines from the same professional associations explicitly endorsed a plant-based diet as its general recommendation for diabetic patients. The times they are a-changin’!
As I discuss in my video Plant-Based Diets Recognized by Diabetes Associations, the American Diabetes Association itself is also now on board, listing plant-based eating as one of the dietary patterns acceptable for the management of the condition. The Canadian Diabetes Association, however, has really taken the lead. “Type 2 diabetes mellitus is considered one of the fastest growing diseases in Canada, representing a serious public health concern,” so it isn’t messing around and recommends plant-based diets for disease management “because of their potential to improve body weight and A1C [blood sugar control], LDL-cholesterol, total cholesterol and non-HDL-cholesterol levels, in addition to reducing the need for diabetes medications.” The Canadian Diabetes Association uses the Kaiser Permanente definition for that eating pattern: “a regimen that encourages whole, plant-based foods and discourages meats, dairy products and eggs, as well as all refined and processed foods,” that is, junk.
It recommends that diabetes education centers in Canada “improve patients’ perceptions of PBDs [plant-based diets] by developing PBD-focused educational and support as well as providing individualized counseling sessions addressing barriers to change.” The biggest obstacle identified to eating plant-based was ignorance. Nearly nine out of ten patients interviewed “had not heard of using a plant-based diet to treat or manage T2DM.” Why is that? “Patient awareness of (and interest in) the benefits of a plant-based diet for the management of diabetes…may be “influenced by the perception of diabetes educators and clinicians.” Indeed, most of the staff were aware of the benefits of plant-based eating for treating diabetes, yet only about one in three were recommending it to their patients.
Why? One of the common reasons given was they didn’t think their patients would eat plant-based, so they didn’t even bring it up, but “[t]his notion is contrary to the patient survey results that almost two-thirds of patients were willing” to at least give it a try. The researchers cite the PCRM Geico studies I’ve covered in other videos, in which strictly plant-based diets were “well accepted with over 95% adherence rate,” presumably because the study participants just felt so much better, reporting “increased energy level, better digestion, better sleep, and increased satisfaction when compared with the control group.”
A number of staff members also expressed they were unclear about the supportive scientific evidence as their second reason for not recommending this diet, but it’s been shown to be more effective than an American Diabetes Association–recommended diet at reducing the use of diabetes medications, long-term blood sugar control, and cholesterol. It’s therefore possible that the diabetes educators were simply behind the times, as there is “a lag-time” in the dissemination of new scientific findings from the literature to the clinician and finally to the patient. Speeding up this process is one of the reasons I started NutritionFacts.org.
As Dr. Williams put it, “the ‘truth’ (i.e., evidence) for the benefits of plant-based nutrition continues to mount. This now includes lower rates of stroke, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, obesity, myocardial infarction, and mortality [heart attacks and cardiac death], as well as many non-cardiac issues that affect our patients in cardiology, ranging from cancer to a variety of inflammatory conditions.” We’ve got the science. The bigger challenge is overcoming the “inertia, culture, habit, and widespread marketing of unhealthy foods.” He concludes, “Reading the existing literature and evaluating the impact of plant-based nutrition, it clearly represents the single most important yet underutilized opportunity to reverse the pending obesity and diabetes-induced epidemic of morbidity and mortality,” disease and death.
[00:00:00] Detective Ev: All right. Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 280 of the Health Detective Podcast. I’ll be your host. My name is Evan Transue, AKA Detective Ev. Our guest today is Sophie Shepherd, who’s asking the question, is IBS just BS? I will introduce her bio in a second.
She’s crushing it business wise. She’s in the hotel traveling right now. I am in a full coat with the FDN logo underneath. Today we’re here to talk about IBS and a whole lot more than that. So, here’s a quick background.
Sophie is the founder of She Talks Health and the creator of the She Talks Health Podcast. She is an FDN practitioner like myself, and an NLP certified life coach who helps women transform their hormone gut and thyroid health.
Using a combination of root cause functional lab testing, transformation, subconscious mindset, reprogramming, and diet and lifestyle science, Sophie and her team partner with you to create a holistic approach to bringing your body and mind back into balance. Her mission is to revolutionize the way women claim their health and slay old stories of being in sick bodies. I love that.
So, officially, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on.
[00:01:02] Sophie Shepherd: Thank you. Thanks for introducing me.
[00:01:05] Detective Ev: All right. What we will do today is start in the same way that we prefer to do on this show. I love to hear the stories and then we can nerd out, talk business, but everyone that is an FDN has usually gone through their own stuff.
So, my question for you, Sophie, is when did your health symptoms begin and what were those things looking like back then?
Is IBS Just BS: Out of Control
[00:01:23] Sophie Shepherd: I’m going to tell you a story because I think that’s the best way. So, it was the middle of the night, and I was careening down the highway. My dad was driving the car. It was freezing cold outside.
I was on my way back to school in Pittsburgh. I was a theater student in college, and I had that familiar feeling in my stomach that I was going to have to go to the bathroom. If you’ve ever been in that position where you just don’t have any control, you know what I’m talking about. Not just being your bowels, but also just in control in your life. And I just felt totally out of control going down this highway, 70 miles an hour.
I said, Dad, we got to find a bathroom. I gotta go. I gotta go. And he’s like, you can’t just wait. We’re five miles from school. Been in the car for seven hours. No, I can’t wait. Pull over. Get to the Dunkin Donuts parking lot, jump out of the car, run into the bathroom, and I made it. I just made it. And that was how my life was from when I was 16 until after I found functional medicine and Functional Diagnostic Nutrition and was able to reverse those symptoms.
So, I had IBS, air quotes, tell you about that in a second. For seven years of my life, all through high school, all through college, I was the person with the stinky farts, the one who could not control my bowels. I was so embarrassed all the time and trying to hide it, trying to hide myself, not feeling like I had control.
Is IBS Just BS: Bent Over in Pain
It spiraled from there, getting anxiety, getting autoimmune disease later in life, having menstrual cycle issues. As we know, the body is connected. There were all these problems that connected in through the gut. That was a normal thing for me, that kind of story. So that’s some of the symptoms I was dealing with.
[00:03:09] Detective Ev: Okay. When this was going on, I always like to get back into the person’s head because there might be, I say, the lay person, as in someone that’s not interested in functional medicine. They might watch this and might really relate to what you were going through at the time. What was your perspective in those seven years before you found FDN? Was this a, why is this happening to me? Genetics? Was there any thought in your mind that this shouldn’t be happening? Because we always perceive these things completely differently then, versus once we get educated on it.
[00:03:39] Sophie Shepherd: Yeah, I will tell you there was a pivotal moment. I was about 15 or 16 years old, and I was in my kitchen with my boyfriend at the time and my mom. I was bent over in pain from drinking a glass of water. Not even exaggerating, just the water hurt my stomach.
I wanted to just push past it because I thought this is just my thing. This is my lot in life. Some people have back pain. I have the stomach pain, whatever. And my mom, finally, she said, this isn’t normal. This isn’t how normal people react to water.
Is IBS Just BS: A Diagnosis
We did end up going to a GI doctor. And I, at 15, got scoped and prodded both directions, which if anyone’s had to do that for colonoscopy and endoscopy, is not great. You’re drinking that horrible solution so it can coat your stomach and pretty nauseating. So yeah, that’s when I went to the doctor and that kind of leads into my thought that, is IBS just BS.
[00:04:43] Detective Ev: Yeah, the prodded thing, it’s actually interesting. I was always afraid of going under as a kid. You know it just almost seems like everyone went through some type of surgery eventually. I’m like, oh, I’m going to avoid this, same thing early 20s right around finding FDN. And I had to go back-to-back same hospital trip three days endoscopy, colonoscopy.
The good news is I actually get knocked out. So, I’m not aware of what’s happening here. It made me a little less scared. But there’s something about going under and knowing that tubes are going, as you said, both ways. That’s the very professional way to describe it. So, wouldn’t recommend it to a friend.
What came back on those results? Cause they’re very invasive, but they can be very telling depending on the condition. What came back when you got those things done?
[00:05:30] Sophie Shepherd: I was young and so I accepted this diagnosis, but there was nothing. There was no IBD, colitis, or Crohn’s. There was no celiacs, no kind of concrete, tangible medical diagnosis and that’s when the doctor had diagnosed me with, you just have irritable bowel syndrome.
Is IBS Just BS: A Lot of Emotions
You’re just going to have to take Prilosec for the rest of your life, which is an acid reducer. Give up chocolate, no coffee, no tomatoes, he just listed off all the things that give me joy, crushed all my dreams, and said I couldn’t have any of those.
He did say I had a hiatal hernia, which normally you would think maybe you could have surgery. But he said, it’ll just go away on its own and you’re just going to have to deal with this pain. This is just the way your life’s going to be now.
[00:06:20] Detective Ev: Wow! So, I’m guessing that wasn’t particularly encouraging. It’s one thing to go through that and then hey, we found it. We’ll fix it. Okay. That was worth the tubes. But then no, it’s surprise, it’s nothing. That’ll be a few thousand dollars, even with good insurance, probably.
[00:06:33] Sophie Shepherd: And I didn’t really understand the cost of money for your health. But if you want to go back that far, I’m sure I’ve spent a lot of money on my health and my parents have too. We didn’t know any better. My mom didn’t know any better. We just thought, I guess that’s just the way it is.
I just had accepted that through the rest of high school, through college. It wasn’t until someone stops me. And I will say I think in a lot of ways, I have a lot of emotions tied to that doctor interaction. Because if he was able to help me, then I truly believe I would not have ended up on antidepressants or with autoimmune thyroiditis because we know that the gut is so connected, and it wasn’t just IBS.
Is IBS Just BS: No IBS Toolbox
[00:07:18] Detective Ev: I’m looking forward to diving into that. Again, especially if it’s a lay person coming on, I just want help today because if you talk to enough people, there’s going to be one person out there that this is their thing. This is the first thing they may have ever heard in the functional health space. And what a privilege, right? To get to do that for someone.
IBS, they know it as irritable bowel syndrome, right? Can we explain though, that’s not a real, like when you say, is it BS, it’s not a real diagnosis. So, for someone that doesn’t get why it’s not a real diagnosis, in a certain sense, like what does that mean? I’m hearing about this for the first time. I think I have a diagnosis, but in a sense I don’t.
[00:07:52] Sophie Shepherd: I would say it’s a diagnosis through exclusion. The good thing about our medical system is that they are looking for cancer, polyps, if you have Crohn’s, or colitis, something very serious, that could be potentially life threatening, right? That’s what they are trying to diagnose.
When they come back and they say IBS, it’s like, hey, you have all these symptoms, you’re running to the bathroom, you’re bloating, you have reflux, you’re in pain every day but we have no medical reason to tell you why. There’s not something you can do. It’s not caused by anything. We don’t know why you’re having these pains. And so, there’s not a lot that they can do in their model of the world in their toolbox that they have as medical doctors.
Is IBS Just BS: Gut Issues & Stress
That’s where I say it’s not a real diagnosis because there’s not a lot of steps you can do about it from their perspective. Now we know as FDNs, there’s a lot we can do. We can talk about that today too.
[00:08:42] Detective Ev: Correct me if I’m wrong, then is it fair to say an idiopathic diagnosis like IBS is done when Western medicine or I guess any medicine is noticing, hey, a bunch of people have these symptoms, but we don’t know much about it or what it’s caused by. Then we label this on. Would that be fair to say?
[00:08:57] Sophie Shepherd: I think so. And I think their hands are often tied by the studies that they need and the type of studies, the amount of studies, before they can add a new diagnosis or add a new treatment plan even. That’s how I would think of it too.
[00:09:11] Detective Ev: So, progressing further here, you found the functional medicine thing seven years later after all this started. And from the way that you said the story, I’m guessing that during those seven years, that is when the antidepressants came in and the autoimmunity. When did that start? What did that look like?
[00:09:26] Sophie Shepherd: I think anxiety and depression and the gut are super connected. We could maybe nerd out about the science there. What came first, the chicken or the egg is a conversation I always have.
And I can’t quite remember. But in my memory, I remember the gut issues and then I remember having a lot of stress about getting into college and trying to prove myself, be good enough, and excellent at everything, get A+’s and be like that.
Is IBS Just BS: Antidepressants
And then I just remember feeling like I couldn’t cope after college. I hope this is okay to talk about, but I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, my first adult relationship. That’s really where the antidepressant came in because I had no other stress coping skills.
Of course, we know with FDN, it’s the DRESS protocol and one of the S’s is for stress. I had no other tools in my box. So that’s what was presented. I’m not sure how much it’s safe to share on here, but it got really bad. The depression/anxiety was very bad to the point where I needed something to intervene, for my life to go on.
[00:10:31] Detective Ev: Just so you know the conversations get as real as you’d like. And I shouldn’t even say real, that’s not a fair way to put that. It’s as transparent as you’d like it to be. Some conditions, we don’t need to talk about every little thing, but we allow anything on here. So, it’s up to you.
I’m curious then if you ended up in this obviously very negative and abusive relationship, and that seemed to precede some of the anxiety and depression stuff at one point, I don’t know if I misunderstood, you said, you believe that some of the antidepressant usage might not even have been done if the doctor recognized that to begin with. What does that mean then? If the person was abusive and that caused more of the antidepressant thing, but you also believe that if you got the proper treatment at 16 ,15, you wouldn’t have been on it. Did I understand that correctly?
Is IBS Just BS: A Box of Stress and No Lifeboat
[00:11:12] Sophie Shepherd: Yeah, I think it’s both, right?
It’s like you have genetics, right? That’s one set of things. You have maybe, predisposition for certain things. Then you have environmental or mental emotional stressors and we’re not really talking about ways to support our mental health in this country; it’s stigmatized. Then you have, in my opinion now, and knowing what I know about the gut brain connection, I had seven years of neuroinflammation.
I already had the anxiety. I had no skills to cope with it. I didn’t know about meditation or breath work or EFT or any of the things out there that I do now. Then there’s a trigger on top of that of let me put you into this box of stress and give you no lifeboat.
I think that’s where I ended up and it’s not necessarily anyone’s fault. I think it’s just the way my life happened, the series of events. And then it was like, okay, it’s to the point where I really need help here. And the help that was provided when you talk to a therapist is antidepressants.
[00:12:15] Detective Ev: This is my favorite question on the show. I’m just fascinated by these answers.
We already discussed; it was seven years. Something happened then at that seven-year mark that takes Sophie from this person who was like all of us at one point, knows nothing about this stuff, trying to figure it out, suffering with the symptoms. And then some aha moment comes where you try something new. What happened there that finally got you into this functional space?
Is IBS Just BS: The Influence of Food
[00:12:37] Sophie Shepherd: There were two things. One was I happened to be on an off-Broadway show. That’s what I used to do is theater. And my boss had three autoimmune diseases. She listened to my brain fog, my fatigue, I had gained about 30 pounds, my hair was falling out, I had anxiety, depression, and all the gut issues. And she listened to my symptoms. She said, have you heard about gluten?
I had no idea what she was talking about. So, she taught me. She was like, why don’t you just try going gluten free for 10 days to two weeks and see if it makes you feel any better? I didn’t know what that was. So, there I am in New York city, avoiding New York bagels, avoiding New York pizzas, whatever. Okay, this crazy lady thinks it’s going to help.
So, then after two weeks, I’m like, I don’t know if this is really helping, and I have pizza before the show. I am not kidding you, Evan. I fell asleep during my job, which was backstage managing a theatrical off-Broadway show.
[00:13:34] Detective Ev: Wow!
[00:13:37] Sophie Shepherd: Fell asleep, brain fog, couldn’t function. Luckily, she understood. So, she was able to step in and support me. But that was hard. Wow, I can’t do gluten ever again.
That was like, whoa, wait, something’s linked to food here and how I feel. That was the first time I realized that food could influence how I felt in that way, aside from the doctor telling me not to eat tomatoes. Then the new symptoms, the brain fog, the hair falling out, the deep depression, the exhaustion that was new from just the gut stuff.
Is IBS Just BS: Parting Ways
That’s when I went to the doctor and said, something’s wrong. I’m 22; I feel like I’m 80 years old. What’s going on here? She said I think you’re just depressed. What’s your response? I said, I didn’t realize that depression could make your hair fall out.
[00:14:26] Detective Ev: Right.
Again, someone listening maybe for the first time, we could not be less against Western medicine. We pride ourselves in that at FDN. Because we are one of the most objective places in terms of mixing the best of both worlds.
I do not need an MD to know that does not make sense. Depression does not cause hair loss. Come on.
[00:14:46] Sophie Shepherd: And I think that’s why we have integration. Because there’s certain tools that we have that Western doctors maybe don’t and vice versa. That’s why we have to have both, in my opinion, to really thrive.
Anyway, she decided reluctantly to run the labs and showed up that I had hypothyroidism. She’s like, hooray, you have a diagnosis. Here’s the medicine. And I was so excited.
Six months later, I still had the symptoms. Went back, my labs were normal. Something we hear often. She didn’t look for Hashimoto’s antibodies; she didn’t know to do that. That’s when I just ended up parting ways with that doctor and finding someone who did more root cause integrative approach.
He sat down with me for 90 minutes as I do now with all of my clients on the first call. And he listened to me. He told me that my gut was the reason I had Hashimoto’s. They talked to me about autoimmune disease and explained all the symptoms. He explained the integrative approach that we were going to take to self-treat and heal my body.
Is IBS Just BS: Another Diagnosis
[00:15:50] Detective Ev: You said something interesting that I don’t think many people can understand unless they’ve been through their own version of this stuff. Especially early 20s at the time of all things getting, hooray, I have a diagnosis. Man, that’s a unique category of people.
I’m not saying we’re victims, it’s just to explain what people go through. When you’re excited about the diagnosis, I think that’s very telling. You’re like, thank God, someone can finally tell me what’s wrong with me.
[00:16:18] Sophie Shepherd: Cause remember I had this IBS thing and there was nothing really that I could do about it. But this was like, I can take medication. I was jumping up and down on my bed for joy thinking I have the answer. I’m going to be fine. Like I tuned out the part, and you’re going to be on medication for the rest of your life.
[00:16:43] Detective Ev: Yeah. A very similar thing, not that we diagnose or treat anything at FDN, but a very similar phenomenon can happen with the labs. Even if it’s not a diagnosis when we run these labs with people, you’re showing them often for the first time what correlates with their symptoms.
We’re like, has anyone ever told you that you have this freaking parasite? Has anyone ever told you that you’ve been exposed to mold and have mycotoxins, whatever it might be? You’d think that’d be something that would scare people. But 99% of the time, it might not be jumping up and down on the bed, but there is a hooray where you’re like, thank God, someone’s telling me what I can do here so that I can go change hopefully and get better.
Is IBS Just BS: Making Things Too Complicated?
Before we talk even further about the functional medicine thing, I’m always focused on this only because I hope to do our best here at this podcast to help people make these transitions for others in their life even quicker.
So, you get the diagnosis and then you said, oh, I ended up at this more root cause integrative type of person. But Sophie, that is not something that everyone does. And obviously you’re a very intelligent person. So maybe that’s half of it, but it’s certainly not something that a young person does, right?
I think again, you’re more accepting of these things. So, were you just doing your own research? How do you go from hooray to what many people might look at as like a hippie doctor, right? That’s not your first option.
[00:17:55] Sophie Shepherd: Yeah.
So, in between the first and second running of like the six months where I started the medication and then went back with the same symptoms and thought, oh, I just need more medication. I had done a lot of research about hypothyroidism, and I’d of course found the connection to autoimmune disease, and realized that she had only run the thyroid stimulating hormone. And when I went back to the doctor, I was like, hey, I would really like you to run a full thyroid panel, including the antibodies, to see if I have an autoimmune disease.
This is probably not the best reflection of this doctor, but it is the truth. She just told me that I was making things too complicated, that there was nothing else she could do for me and that I just had to take my medication.
Is IBS Just BS: Lucky Chance Happenings
Basically, I did fire her because I was like, I don’t feel well, and this doesn’t make sense. Like I shouldn’t feel this way. And I think maybe because I was young, I was like, I have so much more life to live. This can’t be it.
Then I think I just got lucky because on another show, in that year, I met somebody who had worked with a functional medicine doctor, and that was the referral. She said you really gotta go all the way up to 181st Street, go see Dr. G, he’s going to help you, I promise.
I went, and yeah, he was the first person to really understand, hear, and seem to have a comprehensive approach that it was just a no brainer for me at that moment. I feel like I got lucky that I met the right person who had worked with somebody already because functional medicine was not a big thing. This was 12 years ago.
[00:19:25] Detective Ev: Correct. And it’s still amazing how many people to this day, we live in our bubbles. I do acknowledge that the bubble is expanding, but there are so many people who have no idea what the heck we’re talking about. And it’s really their first introduction.
I appreciate what you said about luck. That’s one of the reasons I think many of us, in a sense, feel obligated in a positive way to go do these careers that we have. When this happens to you, you realize if these chance happenings didn’t occur the way that they did, let’s say that person never told you to go off gluten. How much longer do you think you would have been going through this before ever figuring something out, if ever? It’s crazy.
Is IBS Just BS: No More Settling
[00:20:01] Sophie Shepherd: I support women with hypothyroidism amongst many other things, all these symptoms that we have, and they have gotten the diagnosis from their doctor. We support through the DRESS model of diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, and supplementation and, of course, the functional labs.
I can’t tell you how many clients I have who waited 20 years. And I don’t mean that’s on them. They didn’t know, they didn’t get lucky. So, it takes much longer for them to get to feel better too, when you’re in that spot.
I just feel so grateful for those people in my life. They were pivotal to my transformation and my health.
[00:20:39] Detective Ev: That’s why I appreciate the explanation because listen everyone’s different with their interests and stuff. No, not everyone’s going to be like us and sit at home and research these things.
But something that they can take is having the courage to do what you said jokingly, but also literally, no, you’re fired. Not because I’m arrogant and acting like I know more than you. You’re not doing that. You knew it wasn’t working. You knew you didn’t feel well. That’s called having confidence to say, I need to go try something different. That’s not arrogance. That’s confidence.
[00:21:06] Sophie Shepherd: And self-worth.
A lot of that, just linking it back to the emotional abuse, like all of my self-confidence had been stripped away by this relationship. And when I got out of it, I realized through my parents, through my friends that I was worthwhile and that I deserved happiness and health. So, I was not going to settle for I don’t knows and I have nothing else to offer you. That was just not an option for me anymore.
Is IBS Just BS: The Herbicide Company
[00:21:32] Detective Ev: Sophie, best part of the story, probably when did you decide that this is what you want to be when you grow up?
Again, tons of people go through this. You might’ve worked with the doctor, and you feel better. And then you still go back to whatever you were pursuing before. But you said, no. This is life now. And my gosh, I’ve seen you in FDN as long as I’ve been here, I think. I’m not sure when you graduated, but you’ve been around the block with this is your thing.
So, when did you decide this is what you want to be when you grow up?
[00:21:54] Sophie Shepherd: I have a really good story for you guys. And you might have to ask some follow up questions because there might be some words I use that are strange if someone’s never heard this before.
After theater, I decided to go into events. It’s ironic cause I’m at a hotel right now because my husband now is in events and I’m actually helping him out tonight, which is so weird. Cause I’m an FDN, but I’m helping.
Anyway, I did events, and I was at an event for some conventional farmers, thousands of our nation’s farmers. The keynote speaker, the main event, the headliner speaker for this conference was the key lobbyist for a certain herbicide company named Monsanto.
Remember I was in theater, my job was to help the speakers, the people that were presenting, get their coffee, get their presentations ready, make sure that they were safe on stage, all that stuff. He was literally my responsibility.
Is IBS Just BS: Walking Off
So, there I am in the back of this auditorium having just recovered my health through this functional medicine doctor that I had worked with and a big part of it was food and organic food and fresh food and no antibiotics and all the things, right?
And he’s standing up there. There are boxes of herbicides in the middle of all of the tables in front of all of these thousands of farmers. And he’s telling them that this herbicide doesn’t do damage, that organic food isn’t better for us, all this stuff. And I literally turned to my boss and said, I can’t be in this room. I literally walked off.
I went and I bought, this was my IIN, I did IIN before FDN, I bought my IIN health coaching certification on a credit card. So, I had no money, I just did it. I was like, I can’t. This is not in my value system anymore. I went through that while working as an event planner for the next year. Quit, had no idea what I was doing.
And then about a year after that found FDN. Because as a health coach, I was working on things without the lab support, and I was finding that 80 percent of my clients would get better, of course, because of nutrition and rest and exercise and stress reduction. But getting specific about the supplements based off of understanding more about them through the labs seemed like a really good approach, because that’s what my person had done for me.
So that’s where I got FDN. And then I just haven’t really looked back.
Is IBS Just BS: Successfully Sued
[00:24:26] Detective Ev: What a heck of a coincidence. Again, this is why these stories are amazing sometimes. You talk about luck or unluckiness, depending on how you look at it, but what are the odds that you end up being this person?
You know what, the following statements are not on behalf of FDN, they are on behalf of Evan Transue. And you can happily sue me for this. Some of the scummiest of the scum, man, absolute BS, and that’s proven. That’s not an opinion because we know that they’ve had ghostwriters for studies. They’ve been successfully sued for that. Look up Stanford Monsanto scientists. They actually paid off a scientist to ghostwrite studies to get their stuff on the market. Successfully sued.
That’s not an opinion, that’s not slander. It’s a fact. Not to mention the beginning stuff that happened with GMOs when they first came out with that in Europe. Holy crap. Then how is this still allowed to operate? We have glyphosate now.
[00:25:17] Sophie Shepherd: It’s in our rainwater.
[00:25:19] Detective Ev: If you and I made a supplement line and that supplement line caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and all the other crap that it’s doing, we’d have to shut down tomorrow. Instead, they get favored treatment and say, you guys just have to remove it a little bit over the next several years. And I think it’s still going to be used commercially. This is insane.
[00:25:39] Sophie Shepherd: It’s so sad. Unbelievable. And that’s the other thing. A couple of years ago, they got sued. I believe it was by a farmer who claimed that it was causing him to have cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and he won.
Is IBS Just BS: Taking a Stand
[00:25:55] Detective Ev: Yes. That set the precedent.
Sorry, not that it’s the main topic, but you got me going because GMOs are the first thing I learned about health. It was at 16, making some questionable decisions at that time. But I was learning, starting to plant the seeds.
The farmer did sue. And now they’ve been successfully sued for, might be over a billion now, hundreds of millions of dollars. That was the precedent for this. So, we know it does this.
And if I tested every single person watching this right now via urine, assuming you live even remotely local to other people in America, you have some level of this in your urine right now. So do I, so does Sophie. And yes, we all eat well. We try our best.
They have destroyed the environment. It’s insane. And then, oh slap on the wrist. Just start taking that off the market over the next several years. But you guys can keep doing it. Cause you’re a big company. I’ll stop, but that one gets me. It is so blatantly wrong what happens. And you know what, Sophie, the average person has no idea.
[00:26:50] Sophie Shepherd: They don’t. And now you can see why I literally did the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever done. I was just like; this does not align with my values. This feels so wrong on so many levels. And I just couldn’t do it anymore.
I was like, there’s no way that I could ever put myself in a position again, where I have to nod along and support this person or these types of people. I just can’t do it. So, I was like, I’m going to choose a different path.
Is IBS Just BS: A Pattern of Dysbiosis
[00:27:14] Detective Ev: Yeah, you certainly did flip that abusive relationship upside down. Because what you did with the doctor and what you did there, not everyone has that. And I encourage everyone to have that after this and something like this. It’s standing up for what’s right. Having the confidence in yourself. If we all just apply that, I think we solve 50 percent of this mess tomorrow. The other 50 percent can be solved by the functional work, right?
So as someone who, again, you work with a variety of people, you talked about how you help them with thyroid stuff as well, but I’m curious specifically with the IBS. Yes, there’s no known causal stuff in the world of Western medicine. Which certainly as a well-versed practitioner, you’ve seen some things on labs that might come up consistently with people who have IBS.
What are some of the things that you found in your practice over these years of working as an FDN? What’s coming up that maybe these people commonly deal with?
[00:28:02] Sophie Shepherd: One of the foundational, I think it’s a foundational lab now. I went through FDN a long time ago, but I know that they teach the GI MAP now. And that’s one of the foundational labs that we can access for our clients and see if they want to self-test themselves to see what’s going on in their gut.
What I’ve seen in their gut is a few things actually. I would say a hundred percent of the people that I’ve seen a GI MAP on had what’s called dysbiosis, which is an imbalance of the good and bad bacteria.
Is IBS Just BS: Eradicating Overgrowths
We have an overgrowth of this opportunistic, inflammatory bacteria and not enough of the good stuff that protects our lining in our gut, protects us and helps us to create nutrients like vitamin K and B vitamins in our gut. How cool is this, by the way, that our bacteria do this? I had no idea back when I was like, what’s gluten?
So, there’s like the dysbiosis, this overgrowth. There’s, I would say maybe 30 percent of the time we see a parasite. Which people think, oh, I have to go to a foreign country to get a parasite. Absolutely not true. We have them in our water; we have them in our food.
And really, we teach in FDN it’s what’s going on with the host? What’s going on with us? How is our stress? How is our immune system functioning that might allow for these bacteria and parasites and things to come in?
We know parasites eat our food. They cause inflammation. They just wreak havoc, right? And a lot of them have been associated with the symptoms of bloating and diarrhea, things like this. Bacteria have been associated with constipation, diarrhea, all these symptoms. The symptoms that are labeled as IBS.
A lot of people have H. pylori, a lot of people have yeast overgrowth. So, all these different things that can grow in our gut that we’re testing through stool have the same symptoms as IBS. So, it’s my belief through my own experience of my body that when my doctor diagnosed me with IBS, I had overgrowths. I know this to be true because I did a protocol to eradicate those as best as I could and then I felt better.
Is IBS Just BS: Leaky Gut
And then the other part of it is the leaky gut conversation, which is, of course, the lining of our gut being one cell thick as our founder Reed Davis always taught us. There’s a mucus layer that protects us from the onslaught of these bacteria, these parasites, gluten, glyphosate, which is that herbicide that is in Roundup Ready, all these things coming into our environment every day. We have a protective mechanism there.
But over time, stress, alcohol, gluten, glyphosate, parasites, they break down our barriers, right? And that’s where we see this then moving into the gut and then the brain connection or inflammation elsewhere in the body, autoimmune disease connection to the gut. That’s where I really feel like the IBS is coming from is potentially that, plus the emotional stressors. Because, of course, we know if we are stressed up here, a lot of people will feel it down in the gut.
So, I think it’s two things, but I think that those are the two I see the most with my clients.
[00:31:07] Detective Ev: Yeah. There really seems to be this bidirectional or even synergistic relationship between what’s going on up here, for those on audio, I’m pointing to like the brain and mind, and then what’s in the gut.
In fact, this might not be up to date, this is several years ago. But I had read something that said there’s a 40 percent comorbidity rate of anxiety and depression with those who have IBS or have been given a diagnosis labeled as IBS. Which is crazy because you have to sit there and wonder, that’s so overrepresented.
Is IBS Just BS: NLP, Anti-Inflammatory Supplements, and Gut Work
Of course, it can go both ways because we know if you’re in constant fight or flight, which could easily happen with an anxiety condition, one of the things that shuts down first, not literally, but is your digestion. Because your body is saying we’re in fight or flight. We need to protect you; we definitely don’t need to digest this food this one time to save our lives. But it isn’t one time, is it? It turns out being a chronic thing.
[00:31:56] Sophie Shepherd: Especially these days. Everyone’s just in fight or flight, I think, like all the time.
[00:32:00] Detective Ev: Yeah. And then you brought up one of my favorite topics. You already had mentioned before this whole neuro inflammation thing and it leading to anxiety, depression or other things.
For those that might be unfamiliar or still stuck on (and I do think there’s validity to this, by the way, I just don’t think it’s complete), for those stuck on the idea that wait, no, depression is a lack of serotonin, right? Or there’s something wrong with my GABA and I need Xanax if it’s anxiety. What’s going on with that neuro inflammation aspect there that’s leading to the mental health symptoms?
[00:32:27] Sophie Shepherd: It’s Interesting. I’ve also, by the way, transitioned myself off my antidepressants 10 years later. About a year and a half ago, I was able to do this with a combination of the, when you introduced me the NLP life coaching, which I would love to just mention as part of this, because that’s a big part of the stress component. That with the supplements for neuroinflammation and also working on my gut is like a trio thing going on here.
Is IBS Just BS: Holistic Support
When you think about neuroinflammation, we think about neurodivergence, we think about ADHD, we think about depression, fatigue, brain fog. There is a lot of conversations about this idea of leaky gut, leaky brain, right?
The idea that if we only have one cell membrane, basically, keeping us from the outside world meaning the water, the soil, the foods, like all that’s coming in, then that is gone, we have established there’s leaky gut. And now those toxins, those food particles are hitting our immune system and our bloodstream. Our bloodstream could go anywhere. And maybe depending on your genetics or depending on your luck, it goes to your brain, right?
And so, we see this high correlation of people dealing with mental health issues and IBS because we know it’s connected through the vagus nerve. We know it’s connected to the microbes, that they’re communicating. And we know that inflammation can leave the gut and travel elsewhere, including the brain.
How does that manifest? It can manifest as anxiety and depression, that neural inflammation. And so, if we want to actually address and support someone holistically, as we always do as FDNs, to me, it makes sense that we apply the learnings of supporting the gut, and of lowering inflammation in the body.
So, we do all those things, but we also support that S in the DRESS foundations. And that is really important so that it can stop sending this biofeedback of negativity to itself.
[00:34:26] Detective Ev: I’m a broken record with this study. So, apologies to anyone who actually might listen regularly. But I think everyone needs to know this because this proves the point of what you just said.
Is IBS Just BS: The Meta-Analysis
There was this meta-analysis done, I think it was in 2017 or something. I only looked this up because I kept hearing anxiety/depression is neuroinflammation, or it can be, right? And I had been anxious my entire life. So, I figured, okay, if it’s inflammation, then shouldn’t things like anti-inflammatory drugs temporarily help?
The meta-analysis also looked at curcumin, which is in turmeric. It looked at omega 3s, which I thought they must be someone like us. It was particularly astute to do that because, of course, Western medicine, the first thing they’re going to say is, oh, it’s just a random side effect that we don’t know about; that’s why NSAIDs lead to that. Pretty hard to argue when it’s NSAIDs, omega 3s, and curcumin which we all know are anti-inflammatory agents.
I don’t think that’s just a side effect. I think lowering that inflammation actually helps these symptoms, which is fascinating. Because we all know that as much as we try, Sophie, we’re still walking around mildly inflamed because of the things that are happening, like our wonderful friends at Monsanto, who’s now under Bayer for those that don’t know, the pharmaceutical company.
Sophie Shepherd: Which is not terrifying at all.
Detective Ev: You can’t make this stuff up. You literally couldn’t make it up. Why they would want to buy them if they rely on people taking pharmaceuticals. But yeah.
[00:35:57] Sophie Shepherd: Yep, I am with you. I was actually at an event when I learned that because I was like, wow, that is insane.
Is IBS Just BS: Lifestyle Changes
I won’t name the name because I do respect this company, but I was at a gut health thing a couple Fridays ago with a few other FDNs. They were pushing and pushing the supplements, pushing the curcumin, the omega 3, and the probiotics. I’m like, that’s all great. But we have to deal with the thoughts, emotions, and beliefs that are up here that are causing us to feel not worthy, stressed out, perfectionist, like we have to deal with the stress.
That’s one of the reasons I love FDN so much is because it’s more holistic. We can’t just supplement our way through inflammation in the body. We actually have to address, why do I have the inflammation?
[00:36:49] Detective Ev: Yeah, thank you, because I get lost in these and I’m really enjoying this conversation. Then I forget.
Yeah. If someone, my gosh, if they just heard that for the first time, they’re like, oh, I’ll go take an Advil for my fricking anxiety or depression. Either way, this is not medical advice, but no, that’s not what we’re saying. What we’re saying is those things work indicating an inflammatory aspect here. The next question should be, how do I lower the inflammation and change my lifestyle in such a way that hopefully I can get it to a point where I’m not relying on any one thing to do that? Excellent point.
We only have about 10 minutes left but no rush. I just wanted to make sure we truly highlight what you’re doing nowadays. You’ve been doing this whole functional coaching thing for quite some time. So, who is your favorite type of client to work with? Not even just conditions, like the personality behind them.
Is IBS Just BS: Sophie’s Ideal Client
Because I want someone that resonates with you not random people reaching out. I want your dream client and I want you to be their dream practitioner. So, who’s the typical type of person that you like to work with? And what can they expect if they give you guys a call?
Sophie Shepherd: There’s two. The first one is someone who is newer to this, who maybe hasn’t ever experienced this and really does need the foundations – the diet, the lifestyle, the stress reduction, the supplementation. And they’re willing to invest in their health and want to run those labs and want to take some advice, do their own research and decide if it’s for them, someone who’s going to be interactive with me.
[00:38:11] Sophie Shepherd: We are not doctors. We’re not dictating to you. We are sharing information and suggesting things that could be helpful for you. And then having that relationship and that partnership in your health is really important to me.
The addition to that, as in my bio, I also do the NLP subconscious mindset stuff. That’s really been a huge part of my journey, like I mentioned getting off antidepressants, like the mental health part of things. After all, we know stress is at the root of everything, whether it’s physical stress, chemical stress, or emotional stress.
So, I really, now I do this merger of helping people with their emotional stress and the physical stuff that we’ve learned through FDN. And so, my dream is a woman who wants to go all in and wants to address the fact that they might have some emotions that are stuck or have some patterns in their belief system.
Is IBS Just BS: Sophie’s Protocols
By the way, I’m not talking about religious belief systems, but I’m talking about things like, I’m not worthy, like that belief. That’s holding them back, causing them anxiety and depression or things like that. Someone who’s really willing to work with me as their partner and their health on the mental/emotional level and the physical level.
So, we have two options. We have just physical and then we have this hybrid. But what I’m finding is that if we can do that hybrid, people have not just health changes, but full life changes. Their parenting gets better, their kids are happier, their marriage is better. They are going for the dream job. I have full body chills thinking about it right now. That’s where I’m at now six years into the practice.
[00:39:52] Detective Ev: And it’s amazing!
I love what you had just said about how the other areas of your life change. I always say this because I experienced it myself and every person who comes on this podcast that is on, I won’t say the other side as if it’s a destination that you reach because it’s a constant work in progress, you’re over the hump, you’re over the initial hump. You know what to do. This is a personal development journey with health as their vehicle, right?
[00:40:14] Sophie Shepherd: Yes, it is! Especially that and then owning your own business.
[00:40:17] Detective Ev: If you really want to test it out, go do both of those.
Is IBS Just BS: Coaching People Up
[00:40:20] Sophie Shepherd: You’re right though. Because think about it. When I was 22 and I found this functional medicine doctor, he was like, okay, you have to change your entire diet. You have to take 10 supplements. I would suggest you get off birth control.
Now he was a doctor, so he could advise on that. But there were some major things that he was telling me to do. I didn’t even know what gluten was two months earlier. My parents looked at me like I had eight heads. They were supportive, but they were like, what is all this food you’re bringing into the house? And, I’ve never seen these many vegetables.
As a coach now, I see this is where there’s that intersection. Because if we don’t have boundaries and we can’t stand up for ourselves, can’t claim what’s rightfully ours in our health, that’s the personal development part of this. This is the difference between FDNs and a functional medicine doctor. No disrespect to my doctor, but I went through that journey alone. He told me what to do on a piece of paper and then I walked out of his office with instructions, and I did it myself.
As an FDN, we’re really coaching people up, coaching them through these difficult things and helping them see alternatives so that they can make empowered choices, not as personal development. There’s a lot of transformation that’s possible.
[00:41:28] Detective Ev: Yeah.
Sophie no rush on this, I’m just curious though. I always like to highlight this, especially when someone’s been working with people for a while. To the degree that you’re able to share because I know privacy and stuff, but are there any particular one or two client testimonials that stick out?
Is IBS Just BS: Client Success Story
I’m interested in stories of someone that’s at the end of the rope coming to someone like us. Then we get the blessing of being the ones that are able to help them. Is there anyone that sticks out as just a favorite client testimonial from working with you?
[00:41:53] Sophie Shepherd: My favorite client testimonial is Erica, and she knows this. She came in, she was just like me, all the same symptoms I explained on the podcast, including Hashimoto’s. She’s 24, 25, just exhausted. And she was a scientist, so she didn’t understand why this was happening to her.
We worked together for a year. She ended up having mold, mycotoxins, parasites, mineral imbalances, hormonal imbalances, inflammation, leaky gut, dysbiosis. Everything that we learned, she had going on.
We supported through an anti-inflammatory diet, supplements that would be specific based off of suggestions from the labs to lower down the metabolic chaos and supported with minerals and nutrition.
Then we worked on her mindset cause that’s the other part of my practice now. We worked on boundaries and on speaking her truth and all these things. Her antibodies were so high that the test couldn’t measure them for her thyroid. That’s when she came in.
She dropped her antibodies by 600 points working with us. Her hair is long, down past her breast. She has long fingernails. Her cycle used to take her out every single month, she would have to call out of work. Perfect cycles, no pain. She has clear skin, lost 35 pounds, and has so much energy that she’s coaching softball in the evenings now on top of her full-time job.
So, she’s my favorite success story. She went all in, committed to her health, committed to her mindset. And she’s a different person.
Where to Find Sophie Shepherd
[00:43:40] Detective Ev: Oh, that’s beautiful. It’s so much fun talking to the FDNs that are experienced, right? Because we have new ones on all the time and that’s great. We love highlighting them too. But when someone’s been through this and you work with a lot of clients, I love how that story just stuck out so quickly. Like you knew exactly who it was. So, it’s amazing seeing stuff like that.
It is a personal development journey, and everything gets better. If you can go through this, it’s tough. But the changes that you need to make to overcome these chronic health challenges, it requires you to change as a person. It’s not just as simple as removing a food or whatever. You got to deal with the social aspects. You got to give up old habits. That’s a personal development thing.
Sophie, this has been amazing. Where the heck can people find you if they’re like, okay, yeah, this is my girl, I got to work with her.
[00:44:20] Sophie Shepherd: Everything is, She Talks Health. So, my podcast, we’re relaunching it in 2024, but there’s tons of resources there for the last three years.
My website, shetalkshealth.com. And I’m on Instagram. You can DM me. Or you can email me at Sophie@shetalkshealth.com. I’m happy to have a conversation with you. Book a call with me and see if it’s the right fit. No pressure.
Signature Podcast Question – Slow Down
[00:44:43] Detective Ev: Our signature question on the show, just to finish up here, my friend. Especially as someone who’s very well versed, I’m always interested in these answers.
If you could wave a magic wand and you could get every single person in this world to either start doing one thing for their health or you can force us to all stop doing one thing for our health, what is the one thing that Sophie Shepherd gets us to do?
[00:45:05] Sophie Shepherd: Slow down. Slow down. You’re not going to be able to heal yourself if you are constantly on the hamster wheel of life, stressing out about every single thing, worrying, not sleeping, all that stuff. You gotta slow down.
I know how big a deal that is. But even if it’s for five minutes a day, find some quiet, find some peace. That’s like probably the hardest thing I could tell someone to do and it’s the most important.
[00:45:38] Detective Ev: It’s always the people who have the most knowledge in their brains on this show, the most experience, that end up giving you the most seemingly simple answers.
Labs are great. Protocols are awesome. But remember, if you’re not doing this kind of stuff, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. There’s no point in the expensive labs and protocols until we get some of this stuff down. And that’s stuff that FDNs can work with you on.
* This week’s study made media headlines worldwide and generated much interest on Twitter.
* It claimed that having examined data from 216,695 people, red meat intake (total, processed and unprocessed) increased the risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes (T2D).
* This makes no sense from the outset, as diabetes is a glucose handling issue and meat contains no glucose. It would be more obvious to suspect the buns, fries and fizzy drinks that hot dogs and burger are consumed with.
* I reviewed the paper and found 14 issues. There may be more:
Issue 1 – the inaccuracy of Food Frequency Questionnaires (upon which this study was based).
Issue 2 – the reported intakes were changed (the researchers ‘calibrated’ the reported intakes, which increased risk ratios.)
Issue 3 – the definition of red meat included sandwiches and lasagna.
Issue 4 – the serving sizes have changed since the original Food Frequency Questionnaires.
Issue 5 – the intakes used to compare people have become more extreme.
Issue 6 – the study claimed that women consume more red meat than men; that would be a first.
Issue 7 – total red meat was claimed to have a higher risk than both processed red meat and unprocessed red meat. Total red meat is the sum of the other two. It can’t be worse than both.
Issue 8 – the healthy person confounder. The red meat eater had a higher BMI and was more likely to smoke and less likely to exercise. We can’t adjust for a completely different person.
Issue 9 – the reported calorie intake was absurd.
Issue 10 – the characteristics table reported all food intake except the relevant ones – sugar and grains.
Issue 11 – the headline claims did not adjust for the higher BMI.
Issue 12 – even if there were no issues 1-11, the study could only suggest association not causation.
Issue 13 – the relative risk numbers grabbed the headlines; the absolute risk differences were a fraction of one per cent.
Issue 14 – the plausible mechanisms proposed applied far more sensibly to the bun, fries and fizzy drink (which were ignored) than to the burger.
The bottom line can be summed up by surgeon captain Peter Cleave. “For a modern disease to be related to an old fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life.”
Introduction
I lost count of the number of emails I received asking me to look at this week’s topic. On October 19th, 2023, there were headlines across the pond claiming, “Eating red meat twice a week may increase type 2 diabetes risk, study finds” (Ref 1).
This makes no sense. Diabetes is essentially the inability to handle glucose. Meat contains no glucose. Carbohydrates contain glucose. My immediate thought was – don’t blame the burger for what the bun, fries and fizzy drink did. It’s also the latest paper from the Harvard epidemiological paper production factory. All their papers promote plants and condemn animal foods. This is just their latest attack on red meat.
The paper generating this week’s headlines was called “Red meat intake and risk of type 2 diabetes in a prospective cohort study of United States females and males” (Ref 2). The article was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The lead author was Gu. Other authors included Frank Hu and Walter Willett. It used the standard US population studies – the Nurses’ Health Study (women) and the Health Professionals Follow Up Study (men). It used both the Nurses’ Health Study I and the Nurses’ Health Study II.
I checked back for previous posts on my site on this topic and found one from 2011 (Ref 3). It emanated from the Harvard epidemiological paper production factory. It generated media headlines “Two slices of bacon a day increases diabetes threat by 50” (Ref 4). The article was called “Red meat consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes: 3 cohorts of US adults and an updated meta-analysis” (Ref 5). The article was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The lead author was Pan. Other authors included Frank Hu and Walter Willett. It used the standard US population studies – the Nurses’ Health Study (women) and the Health Professionals Follow Up Study (men). It used both the Nurses’ Health Study I and the Nurses’ Health Study II.
Spot the similarities; twelve years apart.
The study
Epidemiological studies, also called population studies, start with a large population of people. They gather lots of information on them at baseline and then follow them for a number of years, continuing to gather information. Researchers review the data to look for patterns. E.g. did the smokers end up with more lung cancer? These patterns, called associations, are then supposed to be tested in randomised controlled trials (RCTs). This doesn’t happen nowadays. RCTs are too expensive and take too long. Researchers just publish associations and they’re happy for people to infer that A causes B. The clear inference from this study, and the media headlines, is ‘eat red meat and get type 2 diabetes (T2D).’
Let’s go through what was done and reveal the issues along the way.
To capture the facts up front. The Gu et al 2023 study used data from 216,695 US people:
– 84,315 women in the Nurses’ Health Study I (NHS I) (started 1980);
– 42,163 men in the Health Professionals Follow Up Study (HPFS) (started 1986);
– 90,217 women in the Nurses’ Health Study II (NHS II) (started 1991).
They were followed up for a total of 5,483,981 person years. This will be useful for calculating absolute risk later on.
The issues
Issue 1 – the inaccuracy of Food Frequency Questionnaires.
At baseline, participants in the NHS I, the NHS II and the HPFS would have completed a Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ). The 1980 FFQ used in the NHS included 61 items. In 1984 and thereafter the FFQ included 120 items. On the FFQs participants were asked to report their average intake of each food or drink over the past 12 months. This is known to be inaccurate to start with (Ref 6).
This reference links to the original 61 item FFQ (Ref 7). You can see the meat questions on P4. Participants were asked “How often did you eat the following over the past 12 months…?” (How accurately could you answer these questions for the past year?)
The amounts were in 9 categories: 6+ per day; 4-6 per day; 2-3 per day; 1 per day; 5-6 per week; 2-4 per week; 1 per week; 1-3 per month; almost never.
The meats were:
i) Chicken without skin (6-8oz);
ii) Chicken with skin (6-8oz);
iii) Hamburgers (1);
iv) Hot dogs (1);
v) Processed meats (sausage, salami, bologna etc) (piece or slice);
vi) Bacon (2 slices);
vii) Beef, pork or lamb as a sandwich or mixed dish (stew, casserole, lasagne etc); *
viii) Beef, pork or lamb as a main dish (steak, roast, ham etc. 6-8oz).
* For (vii), note that no serving size was given and meat sandwiches and meat lasagna (carbs) were considered meat.
Issue 2 – the reported intakes were ‘calibrated.’
The authors proved that they know that FFQs are inaccurate because they changed the results. They called it calibration: “we calibrated self-reported red meat intake with weighed diet records for the first time.”
We need to introduce two other (smaller) population studies at this point – the Women’s Lifestyle Validation Study (WLVS) and the Men’s Lifestyle Validation Study (MLVS). Participants of WLVS and MLVS were recruited as subsets of NHS, NHS II, and HPFS participants and members of a Boston-area health plan. Among the WLVS and MLVS participants, there were 1,207 people who provided 7-day weighed diet records and FFQs. The weighed diet records are more accurate, albeit over a much shorter period.
Gu et al cited two papers as evidence for how to correct errors in FFQs using 7-day diet records (Ref 8). They then adjusted the intakes for all 216,695 participants based on this. The paper reported “Stronger associations between red meat intakes and T2D risk were observed after calibrating dietary exposures. Before the calibration, a 1-serving intake increment in total red meat was associated with a 28% higher risk of T2D; after the calibration, this was 47%.”
This calibration exercise thus increased claimed risks (Ref 9).
Issue 3 – the definition of red meat included sandwiches and lasagna.
The above categories of red meat (from the 1980 FFQ) continue to be the definitions of total red meat, processed red meat and unprocessed red meat. The Gu et al (2023) paper reported that total red meat intake was the sum of serving intakes of processed and unprocessed red meats. Processed red meats included beef or pork hot dogs; bacon; processed meat sandwiches; and other processed meats such as sausage. Unprocessed red meats included lean or extra lean hamburger; regular hamburger; beef, pork, or lamb as a sandwich or mixed dish; pork as a main dish; and beef or lamb as a main dish. The sandwich/lasagna (carbohydrate) confounder can thus occur in both processed and unprocessed red meat categories.
Chicken – called poultry in the paper – was not included as red meat. Poultry intake was not reviewed as a risk factor in the paper.
Issue 4 – the serving sizes have changed.
The serving sizes used were identical in the 2011 and 2023 papers. “One serving of unprocessed red meat equals 85 g of pork, beef, or lamb; one serving of processed red meat equals 28 g of bacon or 45 g of hot dog, sausage, salami, bologna, or other processed red meats.”
The first nurses recruited were asked how often they consumed 2 slices of bacon. The bacon serving size is now 1 slice of bacon (28g/1 oz). The original 1 hot dog would equate to the 45g of hot dog used today. Did participants realise that a slice of salami meant 45g? The FFQs asked about 6-8oz intake of chicken, beef, pork, lamb etc. A portion is now defined as 85g, which is 3 oz. How has this been adapted? If a 1980 nurse ate 5oz of beef every day but never ate 6-8oz of beef, did she translate her consumption into 6-8oz equivalents?
Issue 5 – the intakes used have changed.
The 2011 paper reported risk ratios for a one serving a day increase. The Pan et al study reported “The pooled HRs (95% CIs) for a one serving/d increase in unprocessed, processed, and total red meat consumption were 1.12 (1.08, 1.16), 1.32 (1.25, 1.40), and 1.14 (1.10, 1.18), respectively.” i.e. they claimed that there was a 12% higher risk in developing T2D for 1 serving a day more unprocessed red meat, a 32% higher risk of T2D for 1 extra serving a day of processed red meat and a 14% higher risk of T2D for 1 extra serving a day of all red meat.
The 2023 paper reported intakes differently. This paper put participants into five similar sized groups (called Quintiles). They compared people in the lowest intake group (Q1) with people in the highest intake group (Q5). Women in the NHS I, for example, consumed 0.46 servings a day of all red meat in Q1 and 2.62 servings a day in Q5. Men in the HPFS consumed 0.24 servings a day of all red meat in Q1 and 2.42 servings a day in Q5. We have another issue…
Issue 6 – men vs women red meat consumption.
This study claims that women consume more red meat than men in servings per day. (This held for NHS I, but not NHS II). As far as I recall, this would be the first study to assert this.
Comparing the top and bottom groups, the 2023 paper claimed, “Comparing the highest to the lowest quintiles, hazard ratios (HR) were 1.62 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.53, 1.71) for total red meat, 1.51 (95% CI: 1.44, 1.58) for processed red meat, and 1.40 (95% CI: 1.33, 1.47) for unprocessed red meat.” Now 62%, 51% and 40% higher risks for developing T2D are being claimed for total red meat, processed red meat and unprocessed red meat. We have another issue…
Issue 7 – processed red meat vs unprocessed red meat.
In other studies I have reviewed, (including the 2011 one) processed red meat has the highest claimed risk; unprocessed red meat has the lowest risk and total red meat is somewhere in between. This study claims that total red meat has a higher risk than both processed and unprocessed red meat. Total red meat is the sum of the other two. It can’t be worse than both (Ref 10).
I found a fundamental error in the 2011 paper (see the original post), which was acknowledged and corrected by the Harvard experts. Is there another fundamental error in this paper?
Issue 8 – the healthy person confounder.
The characteristics table is the place to start in any population paper. This is usually Table 1 in the paper. It tells us the baseline characteristics of people in the study. The characteristics table is categorised by the subject of interest – in this study, that’s red meat intake. Hence the 216,695 people in this study were split into columns by red meat intake.
Table 1 retained the original data from each population study so the 84,315 women from NHS I were separated from the 90,217 women from NHS II and the 42,163 men from HPFS. Each of these three groups was split into a further three groups – the lowest intake of red meat (Q1), the middle intake of red meat (Q3) and the top intake of red meat (Q5). The top and bottom groups were compared with each other, as we saw above.
When you look at the characteristics table, you can immediately see differences in people in the top and bottom groups. The red meat intake is never the only difference. In this table, the highest red meat consumers had higher BMIs, they were less physically active, they were more likely to be current smokers and they were less likely to take multivitamins. There is always a healthy person confounder. The burger/hot dog consumer is less healthy than the quinoa/kumquat consumer in many ways – not just red meat.
Issue 9 – the reported calorie intake.
The striking thing about this characteristics table was the energy intake. One look at Table 1 and a peer-reviewer should have rejected the paper. The average (mean) total calories were as follows:
We are being asked to believe that (take NHS I first), women in Q1 (the lowest red meat intake group) averaged just 1,202 calories a day. The 2,032 calories a day for Q5 seems far more accurate for nurses (on their feet all day) in 1980. Take the HPFS, do we really think that male health professionals were averaging 1,684 calories a day in 1986? I suggest that people in the bottom groups did not complete the questionnaire properly.
(The study excluded women with an energy intake below 500 or above 3,500 calories and men with an energy intake below 800 or above 4,200 calories. It is common to exclude extremes as being clearly unreliable. However, the bottom group – and the middle group – still had calorie intakes that were literally unbelievable.)
Calorie intake was then adjusted for, but it was so obviously wrong to start with, any adjustment would have been wrong. The paper should be ignored for this alone.
Issue 10 – what was missing from the characteristics table.
Table 1 reported intakes of a number of different foods in addition to the foods of interest – total red meat, total processed red meat and total unprocessed red meat. The other foods reported were poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, nuts and legumes, fruits and vegetables. All of these were adjusted for, although many of them were barely different in servings per day between the groups. Taking the NHS I as an example, poultry and total dairy were barely different in servings/day between Q1 and Q5. Nuts and legumes and vegetables were higher in Q5 than Q1. (Where were the headlines, higher vegetable, nut and legume intake is associated with higher risk of T2D?)
(As an aside, given that the calorie intake in Q1 was so ridiculous, it would have been interesting to see intakes as a proportion of calories.)
However, which food groups were missing from Table 1? There are nine food groups: meat; fish; eggs; dairy; vegetables; fruit; nuts and seeds; legumes and grains (Ref 11). There is also sugar, which is not a food group, but which is prevalent in processed food, and which has an unquestionable impact on T2D. The two significant omissions in Table 1 are thus grains and sugar.
The footnote to Table 2 claimed that all food groups were adjusted for – including whole grains and refined grains. So why would whole grain and refined grain intake not be reported in Table 1? Then we could see, at a glance, the grain intake of the group that was most likely to develop T2D.
Issue 11 – the headline claims did not adjust for BMI.
Once I’ve dissected the characteristics table in a population paper, I look to see where the headline claims come from. The abstract presents the headline claims. In this paper the headline claims were 1.62, 1.51 and 1.40 risk ratios (for developing T2D) for total red meat, processed red meat and unprocessed red meat respectively. These numbers could be found in Table 2. They came from Model 3.
There are usually a few models presented. Model 1 adjusts for very little. In this study, Model 1 adjusted for age and total energy intake (good luck with the latter). Model 2 adjusted for everything (BMI, race/ethnicity, smoking, alcohol, physical activity, family history of conditions etc, and other food group intakes.) Model 3 adjusted for everything that Model 2 did, except BMI. Model 3 was not adjusted for BMI. Model 3 was the one that provided the headlines.
As we saw in Issue 8, people in the highest red meat intake group had significantly higher BMI. In NHS II, for example, the average (mean) BMI in Q1 was 23.5 vs 25.6 in Q5.
The paper justified not adjusting for BMI as follows: “Because of the likelihood that weight gain mediates at least part of the association between red meat intake and risk of T2D, we did not adjust for adiposity in the primary analysis.” The researchers have thus assumed that BMI is higher at least in part because red meat intake is higher and therefore BMI should not be adjusted for. BMI could have been higher because grain and sugar intake was higher, BMI could have been higher because activity was lower, but no, let’s keep the focus on red meat.
Issue 12 – association not causation.
We’re now into the classic issues with every population study (it’s just that this study had multiple other issues before we got to these). Population studies can only suggest associations, not causation.
Notwithstanding all the issues above (1-11), even if this paper had been robust, it could still only claim associations. The Bradford Hill criteria advise that, unless associations are double, don’t bother looking for causation (Ref 12). None of the associations claimed in this paper are in that territory.
Issue 13 – relative vs absolute risk.
Another classic issue with all population studies is that they claim relative risk differences; absolute risk differences are usually tiny.
I calculated the absolute risk differences for the 2011 paper. This paper claimed 12%, 32% and 14% higher risk in developing T2D for 1 serving a day more of unprocessed red meat, processed red meat and all red meat respectively. In total, 13,759 incidents of T2D were recorded from 4,033,322 person-years of follow-up. That’s a 0.34% incident rate. The relative risk of 14%, for all red meat, would be an absolute risk difference of 0.36% vs 0.32% (Ref 13). Who cares?
For the 2023 paper, there were 22,761 cases of T2D. All cases were self-reported by participants. These occurred in 5,483,981 person-years of follow-up. That’s a 0.42% incident rate. Even though the 62% claim for relative risk for total red meat does not withstand scrutiny, this would be an absolute risk difference of 0.52% vs 0.32%. Who cares?
Issue 14 – plausible mechanism.
The discussion section of a population paper needs to offer a plausible explanation for the association claimed. This one tried to do this (many don’t even try). Suggestions given were:
– “Saturated fat, which is high in red meat, can reduce beta cell function and insulin sensitivity.” Red meat is not high in saturated fat. Meat is mostly water. Protein is usually the next major part. Of the remaining part that is fat, there is more unsaturated than saturated fat. The main fat in meat is invariably monounsaturated fat. Dairy products are the only food group with more saturated than unsaturated fat. If saturated fat is the mechanism, then you needed to study dairy products (Ref 14).
– “Heme iron increases oxidative stress and insulin resistance and impairs beta cell function.” i) poultry and fish provide heme iron, not just red meat, so where was the review of poultry and fish and T2D for rigour? and ii) a number of groups of people are at risk of iron deficiency and heme iron is the optimally absorbable form, so let’s worry about too much once we get enough (Ref 15). (This brings us to the wealth of nutrition generally in red meat, which would be lost if Harvard succeeded in their plant diet aim.)
– “Processed red meats often have a high content of nitrates and their byproducts, which promote insulin resistance.” That’s three claims for insulin sensitivity/insulin resistance being the mechanism of harm in a food that contains no glucose. How about examining the impact of burger buns, fries and fizzy drinks on insulin sensitivity/insulin resistance as a far greater issue?
This brings us full circle back to my first thought. What do hot dogs and hamburgers get eaten with? Buns, fries and fizzy drinks. The paper claimed to have adjusted for these (Table 2 footnote) but failed to report them in Table 1 so that we could see the extent of the difference.
There were so many issues with this paper. A number of the ones reported above should have been peer-review showstoppers. You can use any of these issues to rebut the continued non-sense that red meat is even associated with T2D. However, my favourite simple rebuttal to any research claiming that meat causes diabetes is this:
The ultimate test for red meat and T2D is to examine carnivores. Shawn Baker consumes 24 85g portions of meat daily. He will have zero concern about T2D and nor should he (Ref 16).
References
Ref 1: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/oct/19/eating-red-meat-twice-a-week-may-increase-type-2-diabetes-risk-study-finds https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/well/eat/red-meat-diabetes.html Ref 2: Gu et al. Red meat intake and risk of type 2 diabetes in a prospective cohort study of United States females and males. AJCN. October 2023. https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(23)66119-2/fulltext Ref 3: https://www.zoeharcombe.com/2011/08/red-meat-diabetes/ Ref 4: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2024603/Diabetes-threat-slices-bacon-day-increased-50.html Ref 5: Pan et al. Red meat consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes: 3 cohorts of US adults and an updated meta-analysis. AJCN. Aug 2011. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21831992/ Ref 6: References from my PhD for the unreliability of FFQs: – Beaton et al. Source of variance in 24-hour dietary recall data: implications for nutrition study design and interpretation. Carbohydrate sources, vitamins, and minerals. Am J Clin Nutr. 1983. – Kipnis et al. Empirical evidence of correlated biases in dietary assessment instruments and its implications. Am J Epidemiol. 2001. – Cook et al. The problem of accuracy in dietary surveys. Analysis of the over 65 UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2000. – Willett WC. Nutritional epidemiology issues in chronic disease at the turn of the century. Epidemiol Rev. 2000. – Archer et al. The Inadmissibility of What We Eat in America and NHANES Dietary Data in Nutrition and Obesity Research and the Scientific Formulation of National Dietary Guidelines. Mayo Clin Proc. 2015. Ref 7: https://nurseshealthstudy.org/sites/default/files/questionnaires/1980long.pdf from https://nurseshealthstudy.org/participants/questionnaires Ref 8: Yuan et al. Validity of a dietary questionnaire assessed by comparison with multiple weighed dietary records or 24-hour recalls, Am. J. Epidemiol. 2017. Al-Shaar et al. Reproducibility and validity of a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire in men assessed by multiple methods, Am. J. Epidemiol. 2021. Ref 9: Table 2 in the main paper reported intake in servings/day and calibrated intake in servings/day. I’ve extracted the relevant numbers below:
In all cases, calibration narrows the range from Q1 to Q5; and quite substantially. This would attribute smaller differences in meat intake to the same differences in diagnoses. This would make one serving ‘riskier.’ The calibration implies that women underestimate intake in the lowest group, get it about right in the middle group and overestimate in the highest group. Men underestimate, but less so from bottom to top. This could be a review in itself. Ref 10: I checked the raw data from Table 2 and calculated raw case rates from cases and person years for each study and each quintile. This confirmed that, using unadjusted data and using Q1 as the reference 1.00, the total red meat case rate was 1.77; the processed red meat case rate was 1.86 and the unprocessed red meat case rate was 1.60. The total red meat number was between the other two, as would be expected. Ref 11: https://www.zoeharcombe.com/2015/05/food-groups/ Ref 12: https://www.dietandhealthtoday.com/2016/09/the-bradford-hill-criteria/ Ref 13: I have built a simple calculator where I enter cases and person years and claimed relative risk difference. The calculator can then be used to find the numbers that meet the two criteria of i) averaging the overall case rate and ii) having one number higher than the other to match the relative risk difference. Ref 14: https://www.dietandhealthtoday.com/2022/04/meat-saturated-fat/ Ref 15: https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Iron-HealthProfessional/ https://www.dietandhealthtoday.com/2018/10/heme-iron/ https://www.dietandhealthtoday.com/2022/10/does-meat-cause-cvd-t2d/ https://www.dietandhealthtoday.com/2021/04/meat-disease-again/ Ref 16: https://ultimatepaleoguide.com/people/shawn-baker/
Denver, Colorado, is not just a city of breathtaking landscapes; it’s also a haven for food enthusiasts. In this blog, we’ll take you on a delightful tour of some of the most amazing places to eat in the Mile-High City.
Went to the west side for dinner for the bison and scallops, where the flavors are bursting and food feels like a warm hug Rootdown is a must-visit for several reasons, especially if you appreciate farm-to-table dining and a commitment to local and natural ingredients. Here’s why you should check it out:
Farm-to-Table Philosophy: Root Down is renowned for its strong commitment to the farm-to-table concept. They source a significant portion of their ingredients directly from local farms and purveyors. This ensures that the food is incredibly fresh, seasonal, and supports local agriculture.
Seasonal Menus: Root Down’s menu is thoughtfully crafted to reflect the changing seasons. This means that you’ll experience the flavors and ingredients that are at their peak during your visit, enhancing both the taste and sustainability of your meal.
Creative Cuisine: The chefs at Root Down are known for their innovative approach to cooking. They take these local (60%) and natural ingredients and transform them into delicious, creative dishes that are a true culinary delight. Expect inventive flavor combinations and beautiful presentations.
Sustainability: Root Down is dedicated to sustainability beyond just their ingredients. They’ve taken steps to make their restaurant more environmentally friendly, from their interior design to their waste reduction efforts, making dining here a greener experience.
Vibrant Atmosphere: The restaurant itself boasts a unique and vibrant atmosphere, with a converted gas station serving as its home. There are three different places to sit with 3 very different vibes. Al the waiter was fantastic!
Dietary Options: Whether you’re a meat lover or have specific dietary needs, you’ll find something delicious to enjoy.
In summary, Root Down in Denver, Colorado, offers a culinary journey that celebrates the flavors of the region, embraces sustainable practices, and creates a memorable dining experience that’s not only delicious but also environmentally conscious. It’s a true gem for those who appreciate the farm-to-table and local, natural aspects of dining.
An all plant-based spot that I would definitely recommend! Here are my favorite things to highlight:
The quinoa vegetable stir fry with local vegetables was delicious and felt so good! The sautéed Brussels sprouts with capers and house parmesan was my favorite dish of the evening!
Delicious Plant-Based Cuisine:Watercourse Foods was actually one of the first vegan restaurants in Denver! Known for its diverse and delicious menu of vegetarian and vegan dishes. Whether you’re a plant-based eater or simply looking to try something new, their offerings are flavorful and satisfying.
Local and Sustainable:Watercourse Foods emphasizes using locally sourced and sustainable ingredients when possible, supporting the community, and reducing the carbon footprint.
They provide filtered tap water.
They offer a vegan Mac n cheese that is also gluten-free! For someone who is gf and dairy-free this is a real treat!
Health-Conscious Choices: If you’re looking for healthier dining options, Watercourse Foods focuses on fresh, whole ingredients, making it a great choice for those seeking nutritious meals. I loved the quinoa stir fry with local vegetables.
They cook with non-GMO canola and coconut butter. Better than conventional oil y’all.
Variety: Their menu includes a wide variety of dishes, from classic breakfast favorites like pancakes and omelets to hearty sandwiches, salads, and creative entrées. There’s something for everyone.
Cozy Atmosphere: The restaurant offers a welcoming and cozy atmosphere, making it a great place for a relaxed meal or brunch with friends and family.
Ethical Dining: Choosing to dine at Watercourse Foods aligns with ethical and sustainable dining choices, which can be important to many people.
So, if you’re in Denver and looking for a vegetarian or vegan dining experience that offers tasty, health-conscious options, a visit to Watercourse Foods could be a great choice.
It’s burger time at 5280 Burger Bar in Denverwho serve Colorado beef and bison
5280 Burger Bar is a great choice for several reasons, particularly if you’re interested in natural, organic, and local ingredients. My burger was a custom with beef, avocado, pickles, avocado, onion, and a GF bun.
High-Quality Ingredients:5280 Burger Bar is committed to using high-quality, natural, and organic ingredients in their dishes. This means you can expect fresher, tastier, and healthier options.
They make their own in-house ketchup, sweetened with agave instead of corn syrup or refined white sugar. It’s delicious!!!
Local Sourcing: The restaurant places a strong emphasis on sourcing ingredients locally. This not only supports local farmers and producers but also reduces the carbon footprint associated with transporting food long distances.
Customization:At 5280 Burger Bar, you have the freedom to customize your burger, allowing you to choose from a variety of natural and organic toppings, condiments, and sides to create a meal that suits your taste and dietary preferences.
Sustainable Practices: Many of their practices are environmentally friendly. They often use sustainable packaging, which reduces waste, and aim to minimize food waste in their operations.
Transparency: The restaurant is likely to provide information about the origin of their ingredients, helping you make informed choices about what you eat.
Overall, 5280 Burger Bar offers a dining experience that not only delights your taste buds but also aligns with your values for natural, organic, and locally sourced food.
Ash’Kara is the place to go for Mediterranean food, the hummus was outstanding and the chef cooked gluten-free pita in the wood brick oven!The first time I’ve seen a gf pita offered at a restaurant. I had the local lamb which was great!
Vegetarian and Vegan-Friendly: Ashkara caters to a variety of dietary preferences, making it an excellent choice for vegetarians and vegans. Their menu includes a range of plant-based options that are delightful.
Chic and Cozy Atmosphere: The restaurant boasts a warm and inviting atmosphere with a touch of modern elegance. Whether you’re on a romantic date night or a casual outing with friends, Ashkara provides a charming setting for your dining experience.
EDGE Restaurant & Bar is a premier American steakhouse influenced by cuisine and culture from around the world.Edge Steakhouse had a dream menu including sea bass, NZ lamb, scallops, tuna poke, and octopus. They also offer gluten-free bread with olive oil.
A few things to highlight:
Prime Cuts of Meat: Edge Steakhouse in Colorado is renowned for its top-quality, prime cuts of meat. Whether you’re a fan of succulent steaks or tender chops, this restaurant excels in serving perfectly cooked, premium meats.
Artful Culinary Creations: The culinary team at Edge Steakhouse takes pride in their innovative and artful approach to cuisine. Expect dishes that not only taste exquisite but are also beautifully presented, making your dining experience a feast for the eyes as well as the palate.
Elegant and Upscale Ambiance: The restaurant offers an upscale and elegant ambiance, making it an ideal destination for special occasions or a memorable evening out. With its sophisticated decor and attentive service, Edge Steakhouse creates an atmosphere of refinement and luxury. The restaurant is located in the Four Seasons Hotel.
If sugar consumption is considered to be the one and only cause of cavities, can we have any sugar? How much is too much?
Dental cavities may be humanity’s most prevalent disease, affecting 35 percent of the global population. The average number of decayed, missing, and filled teeth has been estimated at more than two by the age of 12. In the United States, the oral health of our elderly may also be in a state of decay, with one in four missing all of their teeth. “In terms of economic costs,” it is estimated that $100 billion is spent on dental diseases due to sugar consumption.
As I discuss in my video How to Stop Tooth Decay, sugar consumption is considered to be the one and only cause of cavities. It is often referred to as a multifactorial condition, with other factors including bacteria, plaque, saliva, brushing, and flossing. However, those factors appear to have only mitigating influences. All of those other factors simply modify the speed by which sugar causes cavities. “Without sugars, the chain of causation is broken, so the disease does not occur.”
“Numerous studies from decades ago showed that in countries where sugar consumption was very low, dental caries [cavities] was almost non-existent,” and “new analyses show that the life-long burden of caries increases as sugar intakes increase from 0%E [zero]…The most comprehensive national data are from…Japan…before, during and after World War II,” where the incidence of cavities tracked per capita sugar intake as it dropped from about 8 percent of calories down to just 0.1 percent, which is less than a teaspoon a week, before rebounding up to about 14 percent. Such studies show that cavities continued to occur even when sugar intake comprised only 2 to 3 percent of caloric intake. Given that more extensive disease in adults doesn’t appear to manifest if sugar intakes are limited to less than 3 percent of caloric intake, a public health goal to limit sugar intake to below 3 percent has been recommended. This led to the suggestion that traffic-light food labels be used to mark anything above 2.5 percent added sugars as “high.” That would make even comparatively low-sugar breakfast cereals such as Cheerios “red-light” foods.
The recommended 3 percent cap on total daily intake of added sugars wouldn’t even allow for young children to have a single average serving of any of the top ten breakfast cereals most heavily advertised to them, which you can see below and at 2:21 in my video. Obviously, soda is off the table. One can of soda has nearly two days’ worth of added sugar.
The American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry adopted the more pragmatic goal of recommending sugar intake stay below 5 percent for children and adolescents, matching the World Health Organization’s conditional recommendations for both children and adults. That’s about where added sugar consumption dropped in Iraq when they were under sanctions, and cavity rates were cut in half within just a few years. Of course, the sanctions may have cut other things, too, like the lifespan of children, though that was apparently fake news—a consequence of the “government of Iraq cleverly manipulating survey data to fool the international community.”
If we were really interested in minimizing disease, the ideal goal would be to drop the intake of free sugars (meaning added sugars) to zero. These are not the sugars naturally found in breast milk or the intrinsic sugars in fruits. When it comes to the intake of added sugars, there does not seem to be a “threshold for sugars below which there are no adverse effects.” An exponential increase in cavity rates can begin for sugar intakes starting as low as 1 percent.
A Kellogg’s-funded researcher agreed that we might be able to get rid of cavities if there was no sugar in the diet, but suggested that “this ideal is impractical.” The “dictatorial use of foods ‘friendly to the teeth’…might promote a philosophy of dietary celibacy…[that] would not be applicable or acceptable to all individuals.”
“Instead of recommending draconian reductions in the amount of sugars intake,” the sugar industry responded that “attention would be better focused on…fluoride toothpaste.”
That’s the perfect metaphor for medicine’s approach to lifestyle diseases in general. Why treat the cause when you can just treat the consequences? Why eat more healthfully to prevent and treat heart disease when we have all of these statins and stents?
[00:00:00] Detective Ev: Welcome again to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast. This will be episode 279 about beating cancer and using nutrition to influence mood. I will read our guest’s bio here.
Her name is Annie Mabashov. She is a certified FDN practitioner who helps people struggling with their health get to the root cause of their health issues using functional lab tests and personalized health building programs.
As a cancer survivor, she knows firsthand the impact that functional based nutrition and lifestyle changes can make to help regain health. After completing chemo back in 2013, she was cancer free, but still suffered from a weakened immune system, chronic fatigue, and recurrent infections. Traditional Western medicine tried to help but did not provide long term solutions to rebuilding health.
Three years after the chemo, she still felt awful and started seeing a functional medicine practitioner who took the time to go through functional lab work and put her on a new protocol that transformed her life and helped her regain her energy and health. Subsequently, she decided to pursue training in functional health and became an FDNP so that she could help others.
Obviously, we’ve connected before, I always thought this was a really cool niche. There have probably been two in all the episodes that we’ve done so far. But I’ve never had someone with this exact story that serves this exact audience. So, it’s going to be a fun topic today. Not that it’s the main point of today per se, but of course we’re going to dive into your story.
Welcome to the show.
Beating Cancer: Doing All the Tests
[00:01:27] Annie Mabashov: Thank you so much for having me, Evan. It’s so good to reconnect with you, I really appreciate it. I know that you’re doing the back-to-backs today and just keeping that energy up. So, I really appreciate and love it. And thank you for that introduction.
[00:01:40] Detective Ev: They know secretly I would do five of these a day if I could get people to tune in live.
[00:01:43] Annie Mabashov: I feel like you have enough energy for it. Now I wish I could bottle up that much energy; I love it.
[00:01:49] Detective Ev: I almost need five of them so that I can go to bed peacefully. Yeah, get it all out of my system.
[00:01:53] Annie Mabashov: Yeah, I can see that.
So, that pretty much summarized it. In my former life I was a lawyer. When I was on maternity leave, I found out that I had stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
That was crazy because if you looked at me, I looked super healthy. No one would ever know that I was sick. I did chemo, 6 months of the highest dose of chemo you can do. And afterwards I just, for years, I felt awful. I just kept going from doctor to doctor trying to figure out like what’s going on. Why am I getting sick all the time? My hair is not growing back. I can’t get my energy back. I couldn’t figure it out.
Finally, I went to go see a naturopathic doctor and they did all the tests that I now do for people, and you do as well as an FDNP. We were able to figure out like my gut was shot.
Beating Cancer: Incomplete Form of Healing
My immune system was super low. Everything was just not working. Working through the nutrition part of it and the functional health part of it, I was really able to regain my health and get back to myself. I’m so grateful to be here in that capacity.
I know you have a similar story in the sense that you’ve also had your own health journey. And I think that a lot of us in this field, we get into it because we have had our own health struggles and are on the other side of that. And we want to help people feel their best.
[00:03:03] Detective Ev: You’re right. Because even without cancer, it’s still conceptually identical stories. We have this usually very surprising or shocking set of symptoms or diagnoses, but what the heck’s going on? Of course, naturally, the common sense route is to go to Western medicine first, then we’re normally left with some side effects or an incomplete form of healing from that, so we move on to the next thing.
We’re focusing more on, again, the nutrition and mental health side today, but I’d still like to dive in even more to your story. So, you said it was super surprising when you originally got this diagnosis because from the outside and probably subjectively, you felt and looked healthy. What symptoms led you to going and getting this diagnosis? Or was it just by sheer chance that they found out?
[00:03:45] Annie Mabashov: I was really tired, but I had a newborn that wasn’t sleeping. That was just like par for the course, right?
Beating Cancer: The Diagnosis
I had this cold, and it wouldn’t go away. I went to the doctor, they gave me antibiotics, didn’t work. And I had this kind of like cough that I couldn’t get rid of. One night I started coughing up blood and I went to the ER. It was so funny; I was just rereading the story of how it happened the other day.
I went in and to be honest, I was annoyed to go in. So, I was like, why am I going? This is like a cold. It’ll go away. I don’t even know. Like my husband told me I need to go to the ER. I’m like, fine. Okay.
I go in there. We’ll just do an x ray just as a routine thing just to be safe. They were almost like apologetic about it. Oh, I’m sorry to put you through this. It’s so annoying. So, we did that, and they were like, okay, we’re just going to do like a CT scan just to make sure everything’s okay. We’re sure it’s nothing, but we always like to check for blood clots and stuff like that.
So I was like, okay it’s 10 o’clock at night. I’m dying to go home already, but I’m like, okay, I guess I’ll do it. And the doctor came back in with a very solemn face. He was like, you have a mass on your chest that’s been pushing down on your lungs and that’s the reason that you have this cough that hasn’t gone away. It’s most likely lymphoma.
My husband and I were in the room together and my jaw dropped cause I was like; I didn’t actually even know what lymphoma was. I asked him, I was like is that cancer? He’s like yeah, it’s cancer.
Beating Cancer: No Symptoms
It was shocked. Like, I couldn’t even imagine. I was 31 at the time, looked super healthy other than obviously being like a tired mom. But I had no other symptoms. I didn’t have enlarged lymph nodes or a lot of the other symptoms that people with lymphoma have night flashes and stuff like that.
[00:05:25] Detective Ev: Wow. I just really want to dive into this to almost show a point to people.
If anyone’s a lawyer, you gotta be super smart. You’re hardworking as heck, right? These are not 30 hour a week jobs. This is intense. So, with that said though do you think there was a chance that you were pushing some symptoms off because of your strong mindset, or did you really not feel much of anything negative until you had this call?
[00:05:49] Annie Mabashov: I really honestly didn’t have any symptoms. I was home on maternity leave. So, I was home with my son. But really, I was fatigued, again, like I wasn’t sleeping. So, it’s that kind of stuff I was just pushing off because it was par for the course. But really, I didn’t have any of the traditional symptoms whatsoever.
And I actually asked my doctor about it once. Let’s say I had not discovered this, at some point would there be a point that I would have had symptoms? And he’s like probably in a few years. If you hadn’t come in and discovered this kind of on chance, your lymph nodes would have been more enlarged. Like things would have happened eventually. They just hadn’t happened yet in the process.
Beating Cancer: Be Smart
[00:06:27] Detective Ev: The reason I asked is because yeah, sure, I have my own health story. But really there’s been this fascinating set of revelations as I’ve interviewed more and more people on here because it’s all different types of health issues.
This is not the first time I’ve heard this but it’s only with people who have some sort of cancer. Again, it’s not every cancer by the way. But the only time I have heard it is what I’m saying, the diagnosis ended up being a sort of cancer. Where people swear everything was actually pretty good and then something happens rather rapidly and then it’s like, holy cow. This has obviously been growing for a while. It didn’t grow in the last two weeks before you went in. It’s like something’s going on.
Unfortunately, that even happened with my aunt. We literally had Christmas Eve altogether. Everyone’s happy as can be. She was getting some headaches apparently for just the last few weeks that we didn’t even discuss on Christmas Eve. Looked healthy as can be. She was super thin.
Goes in three days later, just for the headaches, brain tumor. And it’s like what? So, I don’t know what that is. It is interesting to me that this is happening in this sort of population. So, you obviously go through the normal Western medicine treatments, totally understandable. I don’t think I’ve had anyone on here yet that’s opted out completely.
Cancer is a different ballgame. So, be smart with these things. That’s not medical advice, but like seriously, use the best of both worlds. I think that’s the best option. But you were not into any functional medicine stuff when you were doing the treatment for cancer.
Beating Cancer: No Inclination
[00:07:52] Annie Mabashov: No. Then just to be a hundred percent transparent at the time, we didn’t even eat organic. I thought organic was a scam at that time.
It was really bad. I was super thin. So, I was drinking diet sodas and eating all these fat free salad dressings that have a million chemicals and stuff. But I really had no inclination. I’ve always ate a lot of fruits and I’ve always cooked, that I’ve always done.
But in terms of eating cleaner and being aware of a toxic burn and all that, I really wasn’t into any of that. I thought it was like a little woo-woo for me. It was really not a field I would have expected myself to go into.
[00:08:27] Detective Ev: What a crazy irony.
I totally can respect that because even though I’ve been into this stuff for a while, I can also see other people’s perspective. This is not the default way of thinking. It is normal if you’re sick to go to Western medicine. You need to have these experiences happen to think outside the box. It would be weird to go to the other thing first, unless you’ve studied it in some way or had a family influence.
The reason I said it’s ironic is because of all things, you’re not eating organic, like you said, and we know a lot of the non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas now are associated with glyphosate.
They’re getting sued completely. And we’re trying to take it off the market very slowly, which is amazing that we can’t do that overnight. Because if you and I sold a product that did that, we would be shut down immediately. But they get a special thing where you can remove it over several years. Crazy.
Beating Cancer: Functional Lab Results
Thank God you’re still here doing obviously well. And it inspired you to get into the space.
With the labs that you did with that functional doctor, were they similar to stuff that FDN would do or what did you look at, if you remember off hand?
[00:09:35] Annie Mabashov: We did a gut stool test. My commensal bacteria were really off. I had dysbiotic growth, H. pylori. We dealt with that.
In terms of hormones, they were really low. Actually, the chemo put me in early menopause basically. So, my hormones were completely off. My cortisol was really high because it was stressful. All of that was obviously something that we worked on.
She also did a micronutrient test. That was really good to see because a lot of my nutrients were super low. Especially some of the ones that are super critical things like my B vitamins, omegas, glutathione levels, all those things that are protective against cancer. I had really high levels of inflammation.
And the thing that’s always so crazy to me is I just remember, and I love my oncologist to death, like he saved my life. But I will say, when you ask your oncologist what should I be eating during cancer? They’re like, eat whatever you want. Some things make you nauseous, have a bagel or cereal or whatever. They never tell you to eat like healthfully, they’re just like, whatever makes you feel good.
And obviously I studied on my own and I did eat more healthfully during my treatment, once I knew I should. I think that’s not like the traditional thing in Western medicine.
We were definitely working on all of those functional lab tests and doing the supplement protocol, the nutritional part of it. That was very helpful.
Beating Cancer: What Does the Science Say?
[00:11:02] Detective Ev: It is insane to me, too, because unfortunately, the stuff with my aunt was rather recent. And I think anyone that goes into the functional space that has these experiences where, once you’re dealing with your healing, and it’s going really well, you want to spread this on to everyone, right?
You want to give it to everyone, and you eventually come to the next stage where you realize it is not your job to go save everyone. In fact, it’s quite rude in a certain sense to push yourself into everyone’s conversation.
So, my philosophy now is if I find out someone that I care about dearly gets a diagnosis, I send an initial thing. I’m so sorry, I have people that I believe that can help. If you’d ever like that, let’s talk more. You will never hear me bring it up again. And that’s the approach I took with my aunt.
Unfortunately, she passed away. She was not willing to do the dietary stuff. I’m not judging her, this is not her judgment, it’s the recommendation she was getting. The stuff she was eating with a full-blown cancer diagnosis, two years into this thing at our family parties, were stuff I wouldn’t even eat like right now today, I would still not eat and drink because I know how badly that would affect me.
And I’m not also blaming the oncologist, right? That’s why these things are very complicated because this problem goes so much higher than all these things. Because quite frankly, the oncologist doesn’t even know what I’m about to say most likely because they’ve never been presented with this. But you being told to eat whatever you want, that is not science. That is not what science says about cancer.
Beating Cancer: Annie’s Niche
It is very clear that they respond, most cancers at least, respond extremely well to high levels of glucose. So, to say, yeah, just eat the bagel, drink the red wine still, he literally told my aunt to still have a glass of red wine at the family parties. I’m like, What? This is crazy. You’re going to have something that converts purely into sugar for a cancer patient. I don’t want to become ranty. Obviously, that’s still a personal thing, so I won’t go too far down that road today.
But it is wild to me because it’s one thing to be a little ignorant of functional medicine where we do mix common sense with science. It’s not always just purely I can prove this with a peer reviewed thing, it’s like common sense tells me eat real food, right? That seems safe enough. The science does not support that you should eat whatever you want or can as a cancer patient. So, I hope that we continue to support these people at a higher level.
Now, obviously, the main point of today is talking about how mood can be affected by nutrition and supplements. So, is this the niche that you ended up focusing in? And how did you go from this cancer and post cancer kind of story to focusing on that type of thing?
[00:13:32] Annie Mabashov: My niche, I really work with busy professionals and moms that are between the ages of 30 to 65 that are in some form of perimenopause or menopause. I like to work with people who are smart, motivated, but like they have some kind of stumbling block, whether they’ve been trying to lose weight and they can’t do it, or their energy has just been super low.
Beating Cancer: The Synchronicity
And it’s using that health detective part of what we learn in our program to figure out what is it that’s preventing them from getting to where they need to be? I think a big part of that is the mental health component.
Obviously, we know that if we’re feeling depressed or anxious or tired, we won’t want to exercise, or we maybe won’t want to put together a salad. We’ll want to reach for some pizza or burgers and fries. That’s just like what we’ll want. There’s a chemical reason for that. Literally our neurotransmitters are super low. And we’re just craving things that are going to help boost us up.
Once I work with people and they start feeling better and their minerals or vitamins, their neurotransmitters or hormones, all of that are like more in line, then they automatically make those better choices. So, there is a synchronicity between mental health and just nutrition and wellness when I work with people that I see a lot.
[00:14:50] Detective Ev: I love that you described it this way. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say it this way on the podcast. I get this from experience because I had the mental health issues, right?
The longer I do that what the outside world calls discipline, like they’ll be like, oh, you’re so disciplined. I really don’t consider myself a particularly disciplined person; I would say I’m in the bottom half of that kind of stuff and I can be impulsive.
But what does discipline imply? Discipline implies that you are fighting an urge to do something. You’re saying that I have an urge to do this, but I’m not going to do it. There’s my discipline, right? I wouldn’t say I’m fighting a lot of this stuff.
Beating Cancer: Four Angles on Nutrition
I would say when your brain is healthy and there’s not that fog and there’s not that extra inflammation, better decision making becomes very clear.
I do not mean this for one side or the other, I’m condemning both sides right now. It is hilarious when I look at the political state in the United States of America, and I can’t help but thinking all these millions of people are voting and half of us, the majority of us are sick. Sixty percent of people have a chronic disease. You can’t even learn new stuff half the time when you’re this sick.
And we’re all making huge decisions like this on who to vote for and then wonder why half the country’s pissed off at the one side and the other half pissed off at the other. Maybe we make worse choices when we can’t even make the basic choices of our day, let alone these very big ones that kind of impact the entire world, right? So, I always think about it from this grander scale.
I love what you say about the mental health side. It’s if we can get this down first, all of a sudden, these other things that we need to do for our health become a lot easier. So, how do you approach that initially with your clients? Let’s say someone is dealing with some depressive type symptoms or anxious type symptoms, how can we start getting them on the right track if maybe they’re a little resistant to change in the beginning?
[00:16:40] Annie Mabashov: When I think about nutrition, there’s four areas I really look at. I look at neurotransmitters, inflammation levels, gut health, and minerals. Those are like the main area. I want to work on each one of those individually.
Beating Cancer: Starting the Day Right
Neurotransmitters, for example, like what creates neurotransmitters, right? So, neurotransmitters are created by amino acids, things we get from proteins, chicken, eggs, dairy, beans, all of those things. Those help create neurotransmitters, which in turn help us feel better.
One thing, just to give you an example, I have a lot of my clients start their day off with a paleo shake. What that does is it really keeps them really full, and it helps them get through to lunch. But also, all the amino acids in it actually really helps their mood. It puts them in like a good mood for the rest of the day.
So that, for example, is one thing I would do with somebody to help start them off to a good day. And protein is basically like a satiety hormone. So, as soon as we start our day off with a sufficient amount of protein, all the decisions that we make from then on are going to be good decisions.
I have a lot of my clients start off their day with a paleo shake, and it has a protein powder, fiber from greens, a healthy fat, and lots of water and hydration, automatically their cravings from there are going to all just be like congruent with that. Like they’re just going to crave vegetables, protein, healthy fats. They’re not going to crave sugar because those hunger hormones have satiated that part where they’re not going to have a big slip in their glucose levels in an hour.
So that for example, is something that I do in terms of starting off their day to make them successful.
Beating Cancer: Utilizing the DUTCH
[00:18:16] Detective Ev: I know many people don’t, that’s why I’m curious. Do you do anything with the neurotransmitter testing that’s offered through the functional space, or is this just using common sense hey protein breaks down amino acid, creates the neurotransmitter?
[00:18:28] Annie Mabashov: I’m a big fan of the DUTCH test. Basically, it’s a hormone and stress test and there are neurotransmitters on there. I think it’s like dopamine and serotonin levels. So, when I’m working with someone, I always do look at that.
I actually have a client right now who had a really interesting story, but he basically grew up taking antidepressants in and out for probably 20 plus years. He recently got off of them and we tested his neurotransmitters. They were super low, and it was just made so much sense because he had been on them for so long. I think he probably wasn’t able to create them anymore. I’m sure it’s hard to create them once you’ve been on antidepressants for a certain period of time.
Obviously, we supplemented with neurotransmitters, but also helping with the nutritional part of that again, like making sure he’s getting enough protein, making sure he’s getting those healthy fats, getting him lifestyle supports, exercise and all of that kind of stuff that helps naturally create all those endorphins that keep them happy. So, I use the DUTCH for that really more than anything else.
[00:19:24] Detective Ev: And I’m sorry if I misheard, but I think it came across as you supplement with neurotransmitters. Did you mean you supplement with amino acids?
[00:19:32] Annie Mabashov: Sorry, yes. Amino acids. Things like tryptophan.
Beating Cancer: Reading the Person
[00:19:38] Detective Ev: I asked because we had Dr. Josh Friedman on, a psychologist, who’s super, super big into this stuff. It was a hugely successful episode. People love the topic.
So, how do you get the dosage for the person? Do you have a structure or system that you use? Or again you can use common sense with this stuff. The studies actually show that a self-report is more accurate for guessing the amino acids that are better for the person than a lot of the tests out there.
I’m not hating on anyone. Because the DUTCH test is for something else primarily and then they use the organic acid markers for the neurotransmitters. I get that. But there are also neurotransmitter tests out there that can be real hit or miss. And again, the current science shows a self-report is actually better correlated with the effective amino acid treatment. It’s weird.
So, do you just have your stuff? Do you know what to do now? Or is there a system or survey test that people can take to figure out what dosages might work for them for some of these amino acids?
[00:20:33] Annie Mabashov: I think it’s a combination of like self-report, like you were saying. And I totally agree with you. I think self-reported symptoms are probably the best.
Sometimes even when you use the DUTCH test and you look at the neurotransmitters, they’re not always exactly accurate. So, you want to always use reported symptoms. You don’t want to just read the test; you want to read the person.
When I work with somebody, I’ll ask them, I’m like how has your mood been? Have you noticed any changes since we’ve changed your diet? Where are you at?
Beating Cancer: Sufficient Nutrients
That really impacts the levels that we start, but I always tend to go very conservative on supplements. So, I always start at like the lowest levels and I keep it that way for a while. Then I’ll slowly titrate up if the person needs it, and a lot of times they don’t need it. I don’t believe in just supplementing to supplement, only if it’s really absolutely necessary. And a lot of times people don’t need it.
I had a client, for example. I’m going to say this is a silly example, but he was telling me, he’s like, yeah, every time my husband doesn’t put dishes in the dishwasher, I get super annoyed with him. We worked together for a few months.
And he told me one day, he said, today I checked the dishwasher, and my husband hadn’t done it. He was like, it didn’t even bother me. I just emptied it because I was in such a good mood that it didn’t even bother me. And we just did nutrition, we didn’t even touch supplements.
So, I think sometimes even just getting sufficient amount of nutrients can make such an impact in your mental health. You don’t even necessarily need to go to supplements.
[00:21:47] Detective Ev: Absolutely.
I think the amino acids are fantastic as a, for me, they’re like a frontline thing. And it’s all completely, shout out to him, Dr. Josh Friedman was the one who introduced me to that. It’s Julia Ross’s work in the Mood Cure that he bases it a lot off of. But I have seen those things turn someone around in a couple of days.
Beating Cancer: Amino Acids
And this is as safe as can be for the most part, right? Don’t take them in unlimited amounts. But like generally speaking, taking some 5HTP or some tyrosine, this is not going to kill anyone, man. Like this is good stuff. It’s very interesting what it can do for people.
I also think it’s funny that you just mentioned, like when you’re in a good mood, the same thing cannot trigger this stress response for you or you’re able to handle it better. The example that I’ve heard brought up before is imagine your first falling in love, right? We all know how that is.
Nothing can happen bad in the world. Tornado could come through and you’re like, ah, that’s okay. We can rebuild, right? That love thing is so strong in the initial stages, especially that you look at the world differently. Not that we can stay in that state forever. That’d be wonderful, but that’s not realistic.
The reason I bring that up is because I think it really proves the point. All the external factors of life can be the same, but how we perceive it can be different based on our mental health and our state, right? When you’re in love, there’s nothing wrong. Not that the external world got any better, it’s still pretty crazy out there, man. But we’re perceiving it differently, right?
You also mentioned the inflammation side of this. I love this aspect of the mental health and mood conversation because, thankfully, even Western medicine seems to be shifting a bit because we know it’s not just neurotransmitters. It is absolutely a part of it, otherwise, the amino acids, for example, when it works so well.
Beating Cancer: Inflammation
But when you say inflammation, if someone’s clicking on this, especially on the YouTube or Facebook thing, they might really just find this in a search, they might have no idea what FDN is, who the heck we are. And so, they’re wondering, what does she mean inflammation can cause mental health issues? So why do you work on that? Can we uncover that a little?
[00:23:46] Annie Mabashov: Yeah, absolutely.
Inflammation is essentially, I always like to picture it like when you fall down and you skin your knee and it gets red and puffy, that’s inflammation. That’s like good healing inflammation. That’s your body regenerating.
Bad inflammation is basically when that happens on more of a cellular level and it’s just chronic, it happens all over your body and it doesn’t get better. Inflammation is at the forefront of every disease, right? It’s at the forefront of cancer, diabetes, heart conditions, everything. We know inflammation obviously is negative.
And so, one of the things I always work on with people is like an anti-inflammatory diet. From a diet perspective, the things that I find to be the most helpful for inflammation are things like berries, antioxidant rich berries, things like blueberries, raspberries, cherries. I love a wild blueberry. I don’t know if you ever use those, but there’s like teeny weeny ones. They have tons of antioxidants, great for reducing inflammation.
Leafy green vegetables, anything green, like kale, chard, any of that. Throw that in anywhere you can, whether it’s like a smoothie or a stir fry. That’s amazing. And I also love like a cruciferous vegetable. Cruciferous vegetables are also powerhouses.
Beating Cancer: A Meta-Analysis
I remember when I was going through chemo, cauliflower was something that I read tons and tons of studies about how that helps reduce the size of tumors, basically just eating straight cauliflower. There’s that benefit as well.
The anti-inflammatory diet, it’s basically very similar to a Mediterranean diet. That historically has been really shown to be very effective to reduce levels of inflammation and restore health as well.
[00:25:17] Detective Ev: It’s fascinating!
Obviously, the inflammation, we can call it a hypothesis in a sense. It’s not fully proven, so a hypothesis in a sense of mental health, it’s a weird connection and it sounds really good.
Years after first hearing it, it’s not like I came up with this right away, but I had this thought, Annie. I was like, wait a second, if inflammation can lead to mental health issues, why wouldn’t something like an Advil temporarily relieve mental health symptoms?
And then, of course, someone could say correlation isn’t causation, that’s just a random side effect. This meta-analysis, they must have been people like us, because the way that they did this was so smart to make an argument. They also looked at omega 3s in there, and they looked at curcumin.
Beating Cancer: Omega 3s & Curcumin
Now it’s very hard to write off that it’s just an unknown side effect of Advil. Because you could argue that. It sounds weak, but technically speaking, you could. But when you bring in two other known anti inflammatory agents, and it showed the efficacy of all of these things for anxiety and depression, that’s pretty dang hard to argue.
We’re having a positive conversation; I don’t mean to be negative about it. I actually hope it inspires people to take action. How many people are having suicidal ideations or even worse acting on that when it was inflammation that would have led to that depression stopping? That’s had to have happened by now. You’d think someone has unfortunately passed away from suicide that otherwise could have been treated through addressing their lifestyle and getting that inflammation lower. How crazy!
[00:27:09] Annie Mabashov: It’s so crazy. And I totally agree with you. I think that there is such a connection between inflammation and anxiety, depression, brain fog, all of that.
I know, for example, even like for my kids, they’re anxious little guys, so I give them Omega 3s and that really actually helps calm them down. I really do agree with you there is such a connection between inflammation and mental health.
Sometimes I feel the first thing is just to give you some antidepressants or something with our mental health, where honestly, you can get amazing results, like you mentioned, with things like omega 3s or curcumin that’s been proven to reduce inflammation by crazy levels.
Beating Cancer: The Serotonin Theory
I remember I read a study about how in places like India where maybe chemotherapy isn’t as readily available, they use high doses of curcumin, and it actually helps reduce tumor growth. It’s amazing what the power of some of these naturally occurring vitamins and minerals can take and they can actually impact your mental health just as much.
[00:28:09] Detective Ev: It’s nuts to me that this is happening; that it’s not addressed. And even scarier to me is that people are not properly informed about how they’re getting treated with mental health.
When you take an SSRI half the people probably won’t even look it up. The other half might, because we have access to the internet and it’s very natural no matter what the condition is, start looking up the stuff that you’ve been diagnosed with or are taking for the diagnosis. It’s pretty human. You look it up and you assume, because you’re not a PhD, most likely, that at face value it does what it says it’s going to do.
So, what people don’t get with the SSRI thing in particular, those selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the claim is that it inhibits the reuptake of serotonin. In theory, that would make more freely available serotonin.
The reason I say theory, and again, the consumer’s never told this, is because it is a theory. One, we have no idea if serotonin alone is actually correlated with depression. I do believe that, especially with what we do with the amino acids. It seems to make a lot of sense. But the point is, we can’t actually prove that.
Believe it or not, folks, it’s actually pretty hard to measure stuff that’s going on in our brain. We’re not great at that. So, we can’t prove that.
Beating Cancer: Side Effects
And then we also can’t prove that SSRIs actually do what we think they’re going to do, and even if they did do that, that it would lead to an increase in happiness or lack of depression.
I don’t mean to be confusing and use a bunch of negatives but that’s literally true what I said. At the time of recording this, we do not know if that’s the actual mechanism of the medication. We don’t know if serotonin even matters in a sense for depression, although I would lean towards it probably doing that.
And then you say, okay, it’s worth the risk if it helps people. Sure, but a lot of these SSRIs these are black labeled medications now. They’re not side effect free. Some of these side effects are suicide, like actual attempts.
It’s one thing if we’re doing something that and hey the worst you get is a headache every now and then, but it could potentially help you out. I’m fine with that. We can experiment.
When we have this amount of side effects for these things and then we’re giving it to people who, because they have other jobs and passions or just aren’t interested in this, are never actually going to do the research to realize what they’ve just been given. I don’t mean to get overly passionate about it. Obviously, we’re hitting on a topic today, again, both with my aunt and with this for me personally, it’s a personal show today in a sense. I get a little frustrated with it, right?
I’m not recommending people go do this, I’m wondering if you’ve seen this in your clients. Have you seen people that maybe came to using medication that no longer required it once they were done the work with you?
Beating Cancer: Seeing the Most Progress
[00:30:46] Annie Mabashov: Yes. I always say listen to what your doctor says. Let’s do the things complimentary. And when we’re done working together, if you feel like it’s something that you don’t need anymore, let’s talk about that.
That definitely has happened in my work with people, where I’ve had people come in who have had, let’s say, lots of anxiety or depression or other mental health symptoms. And through the work, changing their diet, and doing the lab tests – I do a lot of stuff around lifestyle change, a lot of natural stress reduction, understanding how to naturally tame your nervous system that’s such a big part of it.
A lot of people with mental health issues have an overly active nervous system and they just don’t know how to calm that down. That’s something I really work on with people. And the other thing that I found to be really helpful, and I do this with my clients, is I have a hypnotherapy component to the programs that I do. That’s something that I started doing maybe about the past year.
A lot of times what I find with mental health issues, there’s a subconscious level that’s really hard for even anybody to get through on just a traditional daily meditation that like somebody who’s a trained professional and hypnotherapy can really work on with them. That really also helps with the mental health.
So, I really love the idea of nutrition, the functional health, the hypnotherapy, and the lifestyle, like those things together. That’s usually where I see the most progress for people in terms of their mental health, where maybe they can start having a conversation with their doctors about getting off an SSRI or that’s always an option.
Beating Cancer: Hypnotherapy
[00:32:20] Detective Ev: Very cool.
For those that might be a little less familiar with hypnotherapy, and even if you were familiar with it, depending on who you’re talking to, that could mean something as simple as a guided meditation. For others, it could be like picturing the whole watch going back and forth. So, when we say hypnotherapy, what does that mean to you?
[00:32:36] Annie Mabashov: So, I’ve partnered with two trained professional hypnotherapists. Their sessions are included in my programs. I actually came across hypnotherapy when I was going through chemo. The cancer support center that I went to had a hypnotherapist on staff and she’s someone that I still work with. She’s amazing.
Basically, the idea is you go in, the first half of the session you talk about what’s bothering you, what’s going on. And then the second half of the session, you don’t get hypnotized like you don’t know what’s going on. They help put you into a meditative state where you can hear everything, but you’re very calm.
They tap into that subconscious part of your brain and they talk you through, like for me, I get anxious, so, talking about different things that are making me anxious. And so the idea is that, at the end of it, you’ve tapped into certain parts of your anxiety and relinquish that in the way that they help you do it so that you feel better at the end of the session.
So, it’s not like real woo-woo hypnosis. It’s just more getting you into that meditative state where you can tap into that subconscious part of the brain.
Beating Cancer: The Blushing Cure
[00:33:34] Detective Ev: Yeah, and I’m not familiar offhand with the literature behind it, if there is any. But I can say anecdotally, that’s why I wanted to know the definition, many people would call it guided meditation, stuff like that.
Whatever it is, it’s the subconscious thing that we’re trying to work on. I was able to stop blushing during public speaking. Now I’m still an expressive person. I blush with just normal conversations when I’m laughing my butt off, right? That’s who I am.
But it was way too evident in public speaking before when I started out like nine years ago, and I couldn’t get it to stop. I actually did this guided meditation program. It was free off fricking YouTube. And I was doing this thing, hoping for the best.
One of the things that it asked you to do after you got into the meditative state was visualize the bad thing that was going to happen, not for public speaking, I think it was just general if I remember this meditation correctly. So, you actually visualized the bad thing that was going to happen, and then you put up the stop sign. As the meditation continued, you’d progressively visualize the bad less and the good outcome that you wanted more. And someone could say placebo, that’s fine. But it was free, so who cares? You might as well give it a try.
The first time that I public spoke without blushing and being red the whole time was right after I did that audio. Now I had been doing it for about a week, but I knew I had to public speak. I went out, did it, and it was good to go.
Beating Cancer: Visualization
I also did this when I started flying again. I didn’t fly for over 12 years cause I was so fricking afraid. When I started flying again, I’m like, dude this is horrifying, I got to figure this out.
I’m not saying my fear around flying is completely gone. It is not. But this was coming from a guy who when I would drop someone off that I knew at the airport, honest, swear on my life this is true, my hands would sweat. Now, I’m thinking I’m never going to fly again in my life, and my hands would sweat from dropping them off at the airport.
This is a guy who flies all the time now. I’m flying for FDN tomorrow. So, I don’t do it perfectly. I use medication sometimes, prescribed, but going through that and picturing myself on the plane and seeing myself in that calm state, that really helps. So, I’m sure there’s an advantage to working with someone, obviously, that’s trained in it.
But for those that might be like, all right, maybe this is the main takeaway that they had from today’s show, do you have any tips for someone that might want to visualize some of this stuff by themselves?
[00:35:47] Detective Ev: What could they do to start practicing this maybe for free? And I know it’s not going to be as effective, but what could they do if they wanted to?
[00:35:56] Annie Mabashov: Just if you want to try out some free meditations, I love The Honest Guys. They are on YouTube.
Do you love them? They’re the best. I don’t know what it is about British people on meditations, but they’re just better at it. Sorry. They’re amazing and you can just do them for free on YouTube.
Beating Cancer: Free Techniques
I also really love Gabby Bernstein. She’s just like someone who I’ve always followed. She talks a lot about her struggles with anxiety and meditation and manifesting.
If you go to her website, she has a bunch of free meditations that could be really good for that, like you were saying, picturing what the outcome that you want is, manifesting that, being able to get yourself into that meditative state. And they’re all like pretty 10-minute-long kind of meditations. It’s not like you’re sitting there all day or anything. Those are a couple of resources that I recommend for clients to just to do on their own.
Another thing is, and this is like a little bit off topic, but tapping is great. And that’s something that you can do on your own. Tapping is like a combination of acupuncture and meditation, right? So, it’s like tapping certain pressure points, like here. And basically, working through that and saying affirmations.
I think the most popular one is The Tapping Solution. People can just look that up and it teaches you how to do it. There’s like an instructional video and it’s free. But tapping is another really great tool to tap into those anxieties as underlying subconscious fears that prevent us from doing things. Those are some good options as well.
[00:37:19] Detective Ev: And the tapping, you want to talk about something that sounds woo-woo, that’s probably about as far as it goes. And yet, ironically, that has studies behind it. There is something about that, that works. It is very interesting. It’s actually something I should try more. I just, have never really gotten into it because thankfully I was doing well by the time I learned about it.
Beating Cancer: The Ability to Help People
But I know it can be used for a variety of different things, so I’m fascinated by that. Thank you for the tips.
The Honest Guys, the reason I smiled was because that was the first guided meditation I ever listened to in my life when I was 17 years old. That’s how long they’ve been around, let’s put it that way. They were already a big YouTube channel.
It was Guided Meditation, Deep Relaxation, that’s the title. It was like 18 minutes. And I’m like, wow, I feel warm, and this is so cool and I’m relaxed. Then unfortunately, I went right back to smoking pot the next day as a 17-year-old. But I tried. I was working on it. I started doing it a lot more a few years later.
[00:38:08] Annie Mabashov: Yeah, they’re great. My 11 year old son even loves them. I feel like they just resonate with everybody, something about them.
[00:38:15] Detective Ev: Yeah, good people for sure.
Okay, as we come up on the latter end of our show here today, one thing I wanted to ask about is, I talked about clients and how some of them have come to you and then not needed medication anymore with the approval of their doctor, that’s amazing, do you have any particular client testimonials that stand out? It doesn’t even have to be about the mental health thing today.
I just always love to talk to people about client testimonials of someone that maybe came to you as an FDN practitioner, they’re at the end of the rope, and you were the one that was able to help them. Because that’s something that many FDN practitioners have the privilege of being able to do for people sometimes.
Beating Cancer: Life-Changing Client Testimonial
[00:38:51] Annie Mabashov: Yeah. And I don’t know about you, that’s my favorite part of the work is when people have that kind of aha moment and that transformation.
So, I just finished up a program with a client of mine. She was an assistant principal, and she was at the end of her rope for a lot of reasons. Definitely she was really burnt out with her workload, unable to lose weight, had high cholesterol, just really struggling. She had a lot on her plate. Very smart, very sweet woman. And we worked on everything together.
We did an anti-inflammatory diet, talked a lot about removing toxins, making sure her inflammation levels were lower. Then we worked a lot on gut health stuff. She had a lot of GI issues. Her hormones were really low, so that’s something we worked on. And then we just did a lot of lifestyle stuff. She worked with the hypnotherapist as well and she has a recording that she now uses.
I just had my final session with her on Sunday. She actually said to me, she’s like, literally, this was like life changing for me. She’s like, my cholesterol was 220 something; it’s 140 now. She lost 21 pounds. Her blood sugar went down 10 points. It was just really like a radical transformation.
But I told her, I was like, even just looking at you, she was glowing, you could tell her confidence was different. And it was funny. She actually told me in our last session, she’s like I just got offered the principal position at my school so I’m going to apply for that. There’s such a beautiful part of when you make that investment in yourself.
Beating Cancer: It’s an Investment
I always tell my clients, it’s not anything I’m doing. It’s what you do, it’s what you’re doing for yourself. When you make that investment in yourself, like I want to make my life better. I’m just here as a guide for them. All those good things start coming in, new relationships, new opportunities because you’ve made yourself a priority. I think that’s a great story.
[00:40:34] Detective Ev: That’s amazing. And it is a literal investment.
It’s actually sad. I don’t feel like it happens that often with the people that we work with nowadays. But some people only see the price tag on it. And I’m just like, I wish I could fast forward your life for you to see that it is a literal investment. Maybe they’re just not sick enough to get it yet.
But for example, I couldn’t even work a normal 40 hour a week job at 19, 20 years old. Yes, when I spend money to get the lab test done and figure this stuff out, I can work a lot more than that now. So, it’s again, literal in that sense. But yeah, the relationships get better, the health gets better.
It’s a journey, man. FDNs, we do a lot of three, six-month protocols and that’s great for the supplemental side and the biochemical side. This is a journey. It can be called a three, six-year protocol. The deeper you go on the chronic health stuff, like maybe you’re in a good state on labs, but now you still have the psychological trauma that comes with the diagnosis and the shock that came from it. So, you’ll be working on that for a while.
Beating Cancer: A Rewarding Experience
And that’s not a bad thing. It’s a really fun journey. I say this all the time, people that listen regularly are probably sick of it. But I always say this is a personal development journey that uses health as the vehicle. You cannot get to the other side of this without changing as a person. That client that you changed their life, no, they changed. And something happened to them that they are completely different now.
[00:41:56] Annie Mabashov: Yeah, it’s amazing. And it’s the most beautiful thing to see that transformation for people. I feel like a proud mama, like they’re my babies and they really did the work. It’s amazing.
[00:42:06] Detective Ev: Yeah.
So, Annie, we obviously talked about a variety of things today. And I know I had mentioned one time what your specific niche was, and then you corrected me with it. While we shout out your business, I’d love to know where people can find you. But just to be clear again, can you also specify, not that FDNs can’t work with anyone, but who your preferred client is so that if people were listening today and they’re like, I really like this person, she’d be great to work with, they’d know if they’re a good fit for what you offer.
Where to Find Annie Mabashov
[00:42:32] Annie Mabashov: The people who resonate most with me are busy professionals cause obviously that was my background, and moms that have maybe not made time for themselves. I work with women and men. It’s really not necessarily like gender specific, it’s just more kind of that niche.
And you can find me on my company’s name is Well with Annie. I’m on Instagram, and you can also go to my website, wellwithannie.com. And I do complimentary discovery sessions to get to know you and see if we’re a good fit to work together.
[00:43:02] Detective Ev: Very cool.
So, I think you had said you only heard parts of the podcast before, so you probably don’t know our signature question. It’s nothing crazy, it’s just more general in terms of the health advice that you might give here. The question is, if you could be given a magic wand and you could get every single person in this world to do one thing for their health, that means you can force us all to do one thing, literally start a new thing, or you can get us to stop one thing, what is the one thing that Annie would get us all to do?
[00:43:30] Annie Mabashov: Gosh. I know it’s so basic, but just eat more vegetables, like that fiber, the detoxification benefits. Especially if you can get some leafy green vegetables, cruciferous vegetables, just eat your vegetables.
Conclusion
It’s so simple but that’s the one piece of advice I would offer to everyone, with each meal have some vegetables. That’s it.
[00:43:53] Detective Ev: I said it the other day. It’s always the people that come on that are clearly intelligent, obviously well versed. Like you jumped to three different topics that I’m throwing at you and just bam, took it with ease.
And then the advice is straightforward and simple. And what’s easy to do is unfortunately easy not to do right. But as complicated as we can get on the show, as important as the labs and supplements are, don’t forget that if we all were doing the basics long term, I would go out on a limb and say, we might not even need some of this functional medicine stuff.
How many people are actually doing that? So Annie, thank you so much for coming on the show today for dealing with the tech stuff and for dealing with my jumping around. It was awesome. I appreciate it.
[00:44:32] Annie Mabashov: It was a pleasure. And thanks for always having such great energy. I love being on and I really appreciate it.
Food allergies affect up to 20 million people in the US and approximately 3 million people in Canada. For people with severe allergies and intolerances, eating out at restaurants or at a dinner party can be fraught with anxiety and fear. Some people even avoid being social due to their allergies – that’s something I hear quite frequently. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are some simple strategies you can implement when dining out with food allergies that will keep you healthy and safe.
I avoid gluten, soy and refined sugars for personal reasons and when I found out I was allergic to nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplant), my first thought was what am I going to eat and how can I eat out? Well, I am happy to say that in the last two years I have learned a lot about food, nutrition and how to eat out. The following strategies to dining out with food allergies have helped me immensely and can help you minimize risks and stay healthy, too.
Strategies For Dining Out With Food Allergies
1. Do your research in advance
Research is a big part for those of us who either have food allergies or intolerances. Most restaurants have online menus that you can look up ahead of time. Before you arrive at a restaurant, make note of 2 or 3 options that would be suitable for you and be prepared with questions.
If you have a severe food allergy, it’s helpful to call ahead of time to ask questions and advise the restaurant staff of your needs. That way, everyone is prepared and you won’t show up to discover there is nothing safe available for you to eat.
During holidays and events, pre-set menus or buffets are common but don’t despair. Call the location that is hosting the event and ask for the type of service and the menu items they will be serving. Ask for the head chef’s details so you can contact them ahead of time to ask questions about ingredients and food prep, or ask for a special meal.
2. Communicate about your allergies
Communication is key! The more restaurant staff, kitchen staff and friends know of your allergies the better and safer it is for you. Prepare, print, and laminate allergy cards. I have a few in my purse, in my husband’s wallet and in my vehicle. Ever since I started using these, my life is much better not only for me but also for those who are trying to prepare a meal for me. This is what my card looks like:
For the other foods I choose not to eat (gluten, soy, refined sugar) I select menu items that do not contain them and I avoid sauces, condiments and spice mixes as these can often contain nightshades and/or the other food I am avoiding.
At restaurants, hand your allergy card to your server and ask for them to give it to kitchen staff. If they return your card before you have been served, be wary! Ideally, your card will stay with your food ticket until you have been served.
If you are headed to an event, call ahead and speak to head chef and inform them of your requirements and follow up via email. When you arrive at the event, speak to head server and introduce yourself and hand them your card to ensure everything you will be served is okay. In my experience, I have always been brought a separate meal.
If attending a dinner party, let your friends know of your requirements but inform them you will bring a dish that can be shared. Even with our friends’ best intentions, a mistake can be made by simply using a stock, condiment, or spice you can’t have. Your friends will understand and not take offense, plus they will appreciate you bringing a dish because they know you will be okay and won’t feel as stressed either. Most likely there will be other dishes you can still enjoy.
3. Keep it simple
When dining out with food allergies it’s important to keep it as simple as possible. Here are some ways you can do this:
Choose something on the menu that requires the least amount of substitutions. If you are allergic to gluten and dairy, a mac and cheese menu item is going to be tricky to modify. A dish of seared salmon with roasted vegetables drizzled with a cream sauce is much easier because you can simply remove the sauce. Aim for simple meals that only need simple substitutions so you don’t end up disappointed.
When substituting, ask to swap for an ingredient that is mentioned elsewhere on menu. For example, if you are allergic to tomatoes, substitute with avocado if you see it on menu.
Avoid sauces, condiments and dressings. These are often tainted with common allergens (especially if they’re store-bought). I always ask for lemon wedges and herbs because they are great on everything!
By implementing these strategies when dining out with food allergies, you can ensure your evening out is safe and delicious.
What are your best tips for eating out with food allergies?
This article was originally published on Clean Eating.
If you don’t want an aching throat, stuffed-up sinuses or any of the other hallmark symptoms of cold and flu season, you’ve got to get your immune system in shape. There are plenty of tips, tricks and even over-the-counter remedies that promise to give you better immunity – but that doesn’t mean you should use them. It might surprise you, but some of the best-known immunity-boosting advice is nothing more than a myth.
We’re busting some of the most common immunity myths. Get the facts on how you should eat, fine-tune supplements and adjust your lifestyle to help keep colds, flus and other illnesses at bay.
1. Your first step when getting sick is to load up on vitamin C
One of the most prevalent immunity myths out there? Taking a whole bunch of vitamin C will kick a cold before it even begins, or shorten the cold’s lifespan if you’re already sick.
While vitamin C is a great natural immunity booster, it isn’t exactly the cure-all it’s often advertised as. This nutrient does play an important role in immune function, and taking vitamin C supplements can be beneficial. But you don’t want to overdo it, especially if you’re planning to dramatically up your vitamin C intake.
More isn’t always better when it comes to vitamin C. Your body can only absorb so much – and the rest just goes to waste. Stick to the daily recommended dose for adults, which is 60 to 95 milligrams, and don’t go above the upper limit of 2,000 milligrams per day. Getting too much vitamin C can cause problems of its own like nausea, headaches and vomiting.
Plus, research has shown that taking huge doses of vitamin C supplements doesn’t actually help you fight off illness. While this nutrient can be beneficial for immune health overall, it doesn’t have any apparent advantage when you’re trying to keep colds at bay.
2. You should take a whole lot of zinc while you’re sick
(Photo: Akaradech Pramoonsin, Getty)
Here’s a myth that’s often found alongside the previous: You’ve got to take more zinc if you want to shorten a cold.
Zinc, like vitamin C, can have a positive effect on your immune system. It can help with everything from wound healing to immune cell function. And it’s often touted as one of the best minerals for slashing a cold’s typical lifespan to help you feel better faster.
However, zinc isn’t exactly the cold-curing powerhouse you might think it is. While a research study from 1984 did show that zinc supplements may be able to reduce a cold’s severity, more recent results are mixed. As the Mayo Clinic explains, an analysis of multiple studies found that taking zinc supplements within 24 hours of the first signs of cold may reduce the length of your illness by one day. But all of the studies reviewed were limited – they featured too few participants, used different dosages and forms of zinc, and supplemented zinc for varying amounts of time.
So, there’s no truly conclusive proof that zinc will zap your cold in its tracks. It isn’t a bad idea to take zinc – but there’s no reason to go overboard. Large amounts of zinc can be toxic to the body, so make sure you stick with the daily recommended amount for adults to be safe and get what your immune system needs. 8 milligrams for women and 11 milligrams for men daily is just right.
There’s one more must-remember tip about taking zinc. You don’t want to take this supplement on an empty stomach. Doing so can cause nausea – an added symptom you definitely don’t need if you’re already suffering from a cold or the flu.
3. Citrus fruits are the only immunity-boosting superfoods
Citrus fruits are rich in vitamin C, which we know is a much-beloved immunity-boosting nutrient. But just like you learned above, vitamin C isn’t the be-all, end-all for your health and your immune system’s strength. And it’s certainly no cure-all for colds and flus.
Many people turn to citrus fruit in an effort to increase their vitamin C intake naturally. But while the citrus family does offer a lot of vitamin C, it isn’t the only immunity-boosting powerhouse. There are plenty of other immunity superfoods that can deliver the nutrients you need to stay healthy even during cold and flu season.
Citrus fruits contain plenty of vitamin C – a 100-gram serving of lemon, for example, provides 53 mg while a 100-gram serving of oranges offers 71 mg. But there are other foods, including meat and veggies, that can offer just as much of this key immunity nutrient. Here’s a sample of some other awesome options rich in vitamin C:
Yellow bell peppers, which offer 342 mg per pepper
Plus, don’t forget that no fruit, veggie or any other food is a cure-all. While vitamin C is a good nutrient to look for, you can also find immunity helpers in foods like chicken (which is rich in zinc as well as vitamin B6), carrots (which contain vitamin A) and even bone broth. It’s a good idea to eat a balanced diet so your immune system gets every one of the nutrients you need for great overall health.
4. Food or supplements alone will improve your immunity
Your diet definitely plays a role in your immune system’s health and function. But believing that you can simply eat a ton of immunity-boosting foods – or take a bunch of immunity-strengthening supplements – to stay healthy, that’s a myth.
While a diet rich in immunity-friendly nutrients is crucially important for keeping your immune system strong, there are a whole bunch of lifestyle factors that can impact your health. And if your lifestyle isn’t also supporting your immune system, you could wind up canceling out all the good that food and supplements can offer.
Sleep and stress are two of the biggest lifestyle factors to pay attention to. If you aren’t getting enough sleep, you’re weakening your immune system, potentially causing inflammation and stressing yourself out. Try our tips to get a better night’s sleep every time you head to bed. And when it comes to stress, missing out on sleep can lead to increased cortisol (the stress hormone). So if you’re already feeling stressed out by work, your busy schedule or your social life, you’ll also weaken your immune system and up your odds of getting sick. Try creating a calming, relaxing ritual at home with essential oils, meditation or other stress-soothing activities you enjoy.
Additionally, it’s another myth that exercising isn’t good for your immune system. Exercise is actually one of the best ways to boost your immunity – working out helps combat stress and benefits your overall health. Try to fit in regular exercise so you’re getting your heart pumping each and every day, even if you’re taking walks or sticking with short bursts of intense activity.
5. Only fresh fruits and veggies can give your immune system a boost
(Photo: Tanja Ivanova, Getty)
Sure, fresh fruits and vegetables are fantastic for delivering the nutrients you need, whether you’re targeting your immune system or other health needs. But that doesn’t mean you should only consume fresh produce – there are other forms that can offer just as many essential nutrients, and they won’t spoil as quickly.
It’s tough to get your hands on quality fresh produce in the colder months. But you shouldn’t worry about reaching for canned veggies or frozen fruit. It’s a common immunity myth that only fresh produce will do. Both canned and frozen fruits and vegetables are great sources of nutrients, and they can help you ensure you’re getting plenty of healthy variety into your diet.
Plus, as Tufts University explains, frozen can be even better than fresh in some cases. Research has discovered that frozen produce of all different varieties have almost identical nutritional value compared to their fresh counterparts. And while fresh produce can lose vitamins after just 5 days inside your fridge, frozen fruits and veggies maintain their freshness and won’t lose any nutrients. In tests, frozen fruits and vegetables were found to have higher levels of vitamin C – a key immunity booster – along with more antioxidant compounds, lutein and beta-carotene than fresh produce after refrigeration.
Canned fruits and vegetables are similar to frozen varieties. The produce is picked at just the right ripeness, and the nutrients are essentially “locked in” during the canning process when the fruits and vegetables are preserved. This leads canned foods to keep their high nutrient levels regardless of their time on your shelf. Some research has even suggested that eating a good amount of canned fruits and veggies in addition to your usual fresh produce can deliver higher levels of essential nutrients than opting for fresh alone.
Just make sure you’re choosing canned fruits and vegetables that don’t contain additives so you’re getting the nutrients you need without anything else. Look for canned produce in its simplest form, with no additives included in the mix. And don’t forget about BPA. While some canned food manufacturers have begun phasing BPA linings out of their canned goods, it’s still possible to pick up canned produce that includes BPA – so take a close look for a Proposition 65 warning label that can indicate the presence of this harmful substance.
So, while fresh is usually best, it isn’t the only option for a healthy immune system. If you want to stock up while you’re at the store, canned and frozen produce are both solid choices. Or, if you aren’t going to eat your fresh produce ASAP, opt for frozen or canned so you can lock in nutrients without worrying about freshness.
Strokes are one of the leading causes of death and disability in the world. They are the most common cause of seizures in the elderly, the second most common cause of dementia, and a frequent cause of major depression. In short, stroke is a burdensome—but preventable––brain disorder.
What Causes a Stroke?
Strokes can kill instantly and without warning. Most can be thought of as “brain attacks”—like heart attacks, but with the rupturing plaques in our arteries cutting off blood flow to parts of the brain rather than parts of the heart.
Nearly 90 percent of strokes are ischemic, from the Latin ischaemia, meaning “stopping blood.” Blood flow to part of the brain gets cut off, depriving it of oxygen and killing off the part fed by the clogged artery. A small minority of strokes are hemorrhagic, caused by bleeding into the brain when a blood vessel bursts. People who experience a brief stroke may only contend with arm or leg weakness, while those who suffer a major stroke may develop paralysis, lose the ability to speak, or die.
The blood clot may last only a moment—not long enough to notice but still long enough to kill off a tiny portion of our brain. These “silent strokes” can multiply and slowly reduce cognitive function until dementia fully develops.
How to Prevent a Stroke
According to the Global Burden of Disease Study, the largest study of risk factors for human disease in history, funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, more than 90 percent of the stroke burden is attributable to modifiable risk factors. For example, about 10 percent of all healthy years of life lost due to stroke may be due to ambient air pollution. Moving away from a city to a more rural area with cleaner air is an option to modify that risk factor, but it may be easier to quit smoking, which accounts for 18 percent of the stroke death and disability. As I discuss in my video What to Eat for Stroke Prevention, diets high in salt are as bad as smoking when it comes to stroke burden, but not as harmful as inadequate fruit and vegetable consumption. Other factors, like sedentary lifestyles, are at play, but they aren’t as bad as not eating enough whole grains, for instance.
As with heart disease, a plant-based diet can reduce stroke risk by reducing cholesterol and blood pressure, while improving blood flow and antioxidant capacity. Most of the studies on plant-based dietary patterns have found a protective effect against stroke, whereas those looking at Westernized eating habits based more on animal foods, added sugars, and fats have found a detrimental effect.
Yes, wrote the director of the Stroke Prevention & Atherosclerosis Research Centre, “learning to make vegetarian meals every other day is a tall order for most North Americans, but is feasible given tasty recipes and a positive attitude.”
What Foods Prevent a Stroke?
Fruit and vegetable consumption is associated with lower risk of about a dozen different diseases, including stroke. There appears to be a linear dose-response relationship, a straight-line association between eating more fruits and vegetables and lowering stroke risk. Researchers have suggested that the risk of stroke decreases by 32 percent for every 200-gram increase in fruit consumption, which is about one apple a day, and by 11 percent for each equivalent amount of vegetables eaten. Particularly potent are citrus fruits, apples, pears, and dark green leafy veggies, including one you can drink: the green leaves of green tea. Drinking three cups of green tea a day is associated with an 18 percent lower stroke risk.
Garlic was tested head-to-head against a sugar pill and beat out placebo for preventing CIMT progression, the thickening of the major artery walls in the neck going up to the brain, a key predictor of stroke risk. For those in the placebo group, it continued to worsen, but not so for study participants in the garlic group who had been taking just a quarter teaspoon of garlic powder a day, which costs about a penny.
What about nuts? The original PREDIMED study found that an ounce a day of nuts, which is what I recommend in my Daily Dozen, helped to cut stroke risk nearly in half. When it was republished (after correcting for some irregularities in their randomization procedures), the reanalysis found the same results—the same 46 percent fall in stroke risk in the added nuts group, dropping the ten-year risk of stroke from about 6 percent down to 3 percent.
High fiber intake may also help ward off stroke. Fiber is naturally concentrated in only one place: whole plant foods. Processed foods have less, and animal-derived foods have no fiber at all. Increasing fiber intake by just seven grams a day may be associated with a 7 percent reduction in stroke risk.
Though stroke is considered an older person’s disease, risk factors may begin accumulating in childhood. Hundreds of kids were followed for 24 years, from junior high school to adulthood, and low fiber intake early on was associated with stiffening of the arteries leading up to the brain—a key risk factor.
Foods to Avoid to Prevent a Stroke
As I discuss in my video What Not to Eat for Stroke Prevention, when it comes to stroke risk, the worst foods appear to be meat and soda. Eating two sausage links for breakfast, a burger for lunch, and a pork chop for dinner and drinking a 20-ounce bottle of soda may increase stroke risk by 60 percent. Reviewers suggest the meat effect may be its saturated fat, cholesterol, iron-mediated oxidized fat, salt, or the TMAO. The carnitine in meat and the choline in dairy, seafood, and especially eggs are converted by our gut bacteria into trimethylamine, which is oxidized by our liver into TMAO, which may then contribute to heart attacks, stroke, and death.
A 2019 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association following tens of thousands of Americans for a median of about 17 years up to a maximum of 31 years found that “higher consumption of dietary cholesterol or eggs was significantly associated with higher risk of incident CVD [cardiovascular disease] and all-cause mortality, in a dose-response manner.” Those who ate more eggs or consumed more cholesterol in general appeared to live significantly shorter lives, on average, and the more eggs eaten, the worse it was, including for stroke risk.
And dairy? The bottom line is that dairy fat may be better than other animal fats, such as those found in meat, but something like whole grains would be better still. But you wouldn’t be doing yourself many favors if you simply swapped out dairy in favor of refined grains or added sugar. When it comes to stroke risk, vegetable fat is better than dairy fat, meat fat is the worst, whole grains are better, and fish fat, added sugars, or refined grains are statistically about the same.
Food for Thought
The good news is that stroke risk can be reduced substantially by an active lifestyle, cessation of smoking, and a healthy diet. All we have to do now is educate and convince people about the benefits that can be expected from healthy lifestyle and nutrition.
As eaters, we all have a tendency to be creatures of habit at times. In many ways, this is beneficial because it allows us to develop healthy patterns that support our health such as staying hydrated, meal planning and prepping, batch cooking, and reducing our refined sugar consumption. On the other hand, we can easily fall into cooking ruts when we’re grabbing broccoli and carrots week after week. Exploring the produce section of the grocery store and choosing the ‘out of the ordinary’ or ‘uncommon’ vegetables can yield an immense amount of culinary and nutrition benefit!
‘Out of the Ordinary’ or ‘Uncommon’ is Relative
Before we get started, we’d like to acknowledge that ‘out of the ordinary’ or ‘uncommon’ vegetables are relative terms. What’s normal to one person may seem utterly bizarre to the next. In a global context, some ingredients only grow in certain parts of the world, making them commonplace to those who live in that region and unrecognizable to those living continents away. Culture, ethnicity, and family history also play a role in the types of vegetables we are familiar with, and how we traditionally choose to cook and enjoy them.
In this post, we’re featuring some of the uncommon vegetables that you can find in many North American grocery stores, and perhaps you’ve passed them by because they seemed intimidating and unfamiliar.
Culinary Nutrition Benefits of Uncommon Vegetables
Seeking out unfamiliar or uncommon vegetables allows you to:
Explore new flavours and textures
Consume important nutrients necessary for good health like fibre, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals
Add variety and excitement to meals, both in flavour and nutrition
Try new seasonal foods and expand your cooking repertoire
Discover foods that come from a different region or culture, or learn how to cook them in a way you’ve never tried before
Let’s take a closer look at some uncommon vegetables and how you can use them in your kitchen!
12 ‘out of the ordinary’ or ‘uncommon’ vegetables to try
Roasted Jerusalem Artichokes
Photo: Michelle Minnaar
What Are They: These tubers kind of look like giant knobs of ginger and can also be labelled as ‘sunchokes’ at the grocery store. Jerusalem artichokes have a nutty, potato-like flavour, are low-starch, and are rich in fibre and iron. Jerusalem artichokes have a specific prebiotic fibre called inulin, which isn’t digested until it reaches the colon where it feeds the good bacteria in the gut. Warning: if you aren’t used to consuming Jerusalem artichokes or high amounts of fibre, this can make you very gassy! Start off with small amounts and gradually increase as needed.
How to Use Them: Jerusalem artichokes, like potatoes, are wonderful roasted, baked or boiled, sliced for chips or gratins, and they are incredible in dairy-free soups and stews.
What Are They: Sea vegetables are edible seaweeds and they are incredibly nutrient-rich (and delicious!). You’ll commonly find them in Japanese and Asian cuisine. They are high in thyroid-supportive iodine, energy-boosting iron, blood-building chlorophyll, and antioxidants. There are multiple different varieties of sea vegetables and we have a full guide to them that you can consult if you want to learn more!
How to Use Them: Sea vegetables have a naturally salty, umami flavour. They work well in seasoning blends but also add immense flavour to noodle dishes, salads, soups, and stews.
What Is It: Fennel is a sweet vegetable with a licorice-like flavour, often used in Mediterranean cooking. It’s high in fibre as well as Vitamin C, and it’s a good food for digestion.
How to Use It: You can use the bulb, stalks, and leaves/fronds of fennel, and consume it raw or cooked. Raw fennel is lovely in salads and fresh pressed juices. Cooked or roasted fennel is wonderful in side dishes, dips, stir-fries, pastas, stews, vegetable or bone broths, and pairs well with fish.
How to Use It: Rutabagas are wonderful when roasted, mashed, or cut into French fries; they also are great when shredded into fritters. Like other root veggies, they make a very cozy soup or stew!
What Is it: Jicama is a light, crunchy root veggie with a mild, sweet flavour. It originated in Mexico and is also called Mexican yam bean or Mexican turnip. It’s high in fibre – particularly inulin, the prebiotic fibre discussed above in the Jerusalem artichoke section. It also has many antioxidants to protect our bodies from damage.
How to Use Them: Jicama is often consumed raw, cut simply into apple slices or carrot sticks. It is often julienned into matchsticks for slaws, salads and for a crunchy taco topping. You can also bake or stir-fry it, and it’s often used to make fries.
What Is It: Kohlrabi has a sweet, cruciferous flavour; basically it tastes like a mix of cabbage and broccoli. Kohlrabi is rich in minerals like calcium, iron, potassium, and magnesium, and has anti-inflammatory properties. You may only see the bulbs at the grocery store, but if you can find kohlrabi with the leaves still attached, you can use them like any other dark leafy green.
How to Use It: Many people prefer to eat kohlrabi raw in salads and coleslaws, or as a crunchy crudité to pair with dips and spreads. Others love to enjoy it roasted or mashed, incorporated into soups or stews, or shredded into veggie burgers or fritters.
What Is It: Though technically a fruit, okra is enjoyed as a vegetable. It originated in Ethiopia and spread across the globe and to North America by slaves. It’s grown in hot climates and is used in many African, Caribbean, and Indian cuisines, as well as in the cooking in the Southern United States. Okra has a slimy, mucilaginous property that makes people love or hate it; but this mucilage fibre is excellent for gut health.
How to Use It: Okra is typically used in stews, where it can be cooked for longer, or is fried. You can also pickle it.
What Is It: Also called celeriac, celery root has a mild, sweet, and celery-like flavour, with parsley undertones. In addition to B vitamins and fibre, celery root is a decent source of Vitamin K to support bone health and prevent blood clots.
How to Use It: As with other root vegetables, celery root is wonderful in soups and stews, roasted or mashed, or used in salads and slaws. You’ll have to peel away the gnarled bits on the outside, but the inside is smooth and creamy.
What Are They: Also called ramps, wild leeks are only around for a short period in the springtime. They are basically the first sign of spring! Wild leeks are a cross between onions and garlic with an extra bit of sweetness thrown in for good measure and have a milder flavour than traditional onions and garlic. Health-wise, they are beneficial to the detoxification process and contain quercetin, an antioxidant that has anti-histamine properties that can help alleviate allergies, hay fever, and asthma.
How to Use Them: Wild leeks can be enjoyed raw, pickled, or cooked. Toss them into a spring salad, use them in soups, pestos and stir-fries, or you can dehydrate them and grind them into a powder. Basically, anywhere you’d use shallots or scallions, you could easily sub a wild leek instead!
What Is It: Daikon is a type of radish and its name means ‘large root’. It’s used frequently in Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and other Asian cuisines. It is large and white and has a milder flavour than other radish varieties that can be quite peppery.
How to Use It: Enjoy Daikon raw in salads, roast or braise it, or cook it into Daikon cakes. It is also commonly pickled.
What Are They: Yes, these are a fruit, but we’re including them in this list because they have so many savory contexts. Plantains are part of the banana family, but they’re not the kind of banana that you would throw into a smoothie or oatmeal, or peel and eat on its own. Plantains are quite starchy, are very firm when green, are eaten at varying stages of ripeness, and are typically cooked. They are an essential part of West African, Central African, Caribbean, and Central and South American cuisines.
How to Use Them: Plantains are delicious when sliced and baked or pan-fried. There is an extensive guide to plantains here that covers all the bases.
What Is It: Bok choy can also be called pak choi or pok choi. It’s native to China and used in Chinese cuisine but has now spread across the world. It’s a Chinese cabbage with a fairly mild flavour. Baby bok choi is harvested earlier, so it’s not only smaller but more tender and mild than the full grown version.
How to Use It: Bok choy is delicious stir-fried, baked, or seared on its own as a side dish, or incorporated into noodle dishes, soups, stews, and broth recipes.
[00:00:00] Detective Ev: Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast. My name is Evan Transue, AKA Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show on fertility unfiltered.
I have a story myself. From seven different diagnosed conditions at the age of 18, I’m thankful to say at the age of 28, I no longer have any of those conditions. That’s been true for the last several years. And that was primarily because of the things that I’ve learned in FDN. Certainly it’s because of the community in general and the knowledge that we have cumulatively that led me to this healing side. It’s absolutely amazing.
Today we have with us, Courtney Saye. Before I read your bio, Courtney, you’ve actually been listening for quite some time, you said, right?
[00:00:37] Courtney Saye: Yeah, I have. I’ve been listening for, at least a year now. I’ve heard a lot of interesting stuff on the podcast.
[00:00:44] Detective Ev: Awesome. Interesting is the word, right? You definitely get some stuff on here, especially with the stuff that comes out of my mouth. Here’s a quick bio about Courtney, and then we’ll get to the topic of today.
She is the founder of the Fertility Functionally program. She works with women to help them reach their dream of getting and staying pregnant. Having been through a painful fertility journey herself, she knows the frustration, sadness, and hopelessness that it can bring.
This program is designed to help women on this path find answers where they thought there weren’t any and reach a healthy pregnancy without the struggle. It is her absolute honor and privilege to walk alongside people on their journey. That’s really cool.
Fertility Unfiltered: Traumatic Childhood Event
I haven’t set out a goal yet to have kids or anything like that, but it’s very interesting how many people, even if it wasn’t the main topic of their podcast, as you’ve probably heard, it’s a part of their story, right? All of a sudden, they ended up getting pregnant. You didn’t even realize they had infertility issues until 30 minutes into the show. And then the things that they were trying to address led to the successful pregnancy.
I can’t wait to dive into this because I can use common sense and imagine if someone is trying to do this, this is a really important part of your life. It’s not something that you can just do at any age, regardless of how healthy you are for a variety of reasons, just even practically speaking. And so, if we can help people through their health journey, get them this gift, this essential part of life God directs how we’re all here, I think it’s one of the coolest things that we talk about on here.
First, you already know how we’ll start this today. I’d love to get to dive into your journey. What did your health symptoms look like and when did they begin?
[00:02:16] Courtney Saye: I’m going to take it all the way back just in case anyone connects with the full story. And I’ll try to not be long winded.
My symptoms began when I was a kid. I didn’t connect all the dots until much later. But I had a pretty significant traumatic event when I was five, when I was in kindergarten. My brother almost died in an accident, and it shook the whole family very deeply.
Fertility Unfiltered: Birth Control Pills
I was an 80’s baby, and we weren’t in the same place back then with mental health and therapy. Once his physical wounds healed, our family just went on about our lives and didn’t do any work on the trauma it caused. No one was talking yet about how unresolved trauma impacts mental and physical health down the road.
So, a couple years later, these are my earliest memories of issues, about second grade, I remember starting to complain about headaches and stomach aches fairly regularly. That went on for some time. I remember getting an MRI as a kid. Nothing came up, significant, no diagnosis.
When I was in my teens, my period started later than my peers. And I had irregular and painful periods and acne that I couldn’t get under control on top of the original headaches and stomach issues. My doctor prescribed hormonal birth control to help control these issues. That makes me mad to think this is still happening a lot where when teens and women in their 20s even up through their 40s are going in with some of these complaints, the answer is, here go on the pill and that’ll help.
So, I started it in my teens and took it through my early 20s. The pill does do a good job for some people of masking symptoms, it did make the acne better. It gives you a quote/unquote “regular cycle” – giving you a fake cycle, if you will. But that’s probably a topic for a whole other podcast.
My stomach, my GI issues got worse while I was on the pill. I had digestive discomfort, constipation, you name it. And I attributed it to food sensitivities. I always thought maybe I should start cutting stuff out of my diet.
Fertility Unfiltered: The Latest Diet Trend
Because I like to think of myself, even back then in college days, as being very health conscious and watching what I was eating and trying to get enough vegetables and exercising, I started restricting my diet, going anywhere from no red meat, chicken only, pescatarian, all the way to vegan for a few years. I thought those would be the solution. They weren’t. That never fixed my issues.
But I kept pulling things out of my diet and saying I had a sensitive stomach and I had to be really careful. There was a history of GI issues in my family. There’s ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s and the like and I just thought I was not there – diagnosable – but sensitive.
I also continued to struggle a lot with anxiety. But I was the type, I don’t know if you can relate to this from your younger years, who hid it really well. No one would have called me anxious. They would have called me an achiever. I got great grades, graduated from college, started my career, got married, went to grad school. Every time I felt anxious, I channeled it into achieving. I never slowed things down. Through all of this I was struggling silently.
I never felt comfortable after eating anything and had a lot of headaches. So, I was popping a lot of Advil to get through a pretty rigorous schedule. I was always up on the latest diet trend, like I said. And I really had a lot of pride about, I’m eating vegan now. It’s really great. Have you seen these impossible burgers?
I look back and want to shake the old me who was eating like that with what I know now but I thought I was taking really good care of myself.
Fertility Unfiltered: Starting a Family
And on the outside, beyond breakouts, like I had acne, not horrible acne, but it was cystic, and it was hormonal around the jawline like typical hormonal acne, but I covered it well and tried to hide it. So, beyond that, on the outside, I looked like the picture of health. But I was really suffering silently for quite a while.
And so now we’re in mid-twenties. Eventually I mentally felt like I was going crazy with the anxiety. I had this instinct that it was the birth control pills, I knew it was time to ditch those. And I didn’t know what I know now about them. There’s lots of evidence that tells us that is true, that they can cause depression, anxiety, and other mental health symptoms. But back then it was just a gut instinct. Like I got to ditch the birth control pills. So, I went off of them. And like I said, I could go on and on about the side effects of birth control pills that can last for decades if they’re not addressed after you go off of those.
I went off of them, married my husband, ended up pregnant with my first child about 18 months later and had a normal pregnancy. So, I was in my 20s when he was born. I thought I was a fertile gal, that everything on the road to a family was going to be an easy path. Meanwhile, my anxiety and gut issues actually continued to worsen to the point where I was really avoiding a ton of food.
Fertility Unfiltered: A Nervous Breakdown
We wanted another baby, so this is where the fertility journey gets messy. I got pregnant again easily when he was about one, and that pregnancy ended in a really heartbreaking second trimester miscarriage at about 17 weeks. For years after that, I struggled with unexplained secondary infertility. It still makes me emotional years later. Those were really some of the lowest times in my life.
Doctors didn’t have answers. I went through fertility treatments. The drugs they prescribe when you’re going through fertility treatments were like the side effects from the birth control pills on steroids. I didn’t feel like I could handle it. So, I felt really helpless for a long time on that journey. And because, as you can see, it touched me so deeply, that is why I’m taking my FDN work back to work with women that are on that journey.
Eventually, I did have another child, but it wasn’t until 10 years later. So, fast forward 10 years later, I’ve got a successful career in finance, a great family, but on the inside, I keep feeling worse and worse. I decided that the answer at that point was to go through some mindset management. So, I felt like I’d got my physical health, but maybe it’s in my head still.
I went through an intensive life coaching certification in 2020 that taught me a lot about how to manage my mind and started to get my anxiety more in check, but it wasn’t the full answer. This was COVID days, and the stress of COVID really took a toll. I felt my physical health just going downhill to the point where I had something like a nervous breakdown – a nervous breakdown where I thought, I really have to go.
Fertility Unfiltered: Finding FDN
I thought I was dying. There was so much abdominal pain, discomfort, rashes on my legs. If I had a picture, I would show you, but no doctor could diagnose them. The dermatologist thought they were bug bites a couple times. Another doctor thought they were a bacterial infection. I’m convinced now as I’ve cleaned up my gut that it was related to gut issues that I had.
But anyway, I went through a bunch of workups, full GI workup, general doctor, therapists, all the things after this nervous breakdown. The answers were like, let’s put you on an antidepressant, go to therapy. You want to try Spironolactone, which is a pretty strong drug that blocks testosterone for acne, at the dermatologist. And I just decided at that point, finally, I’d had enough. I’d really had enough.
And I started digging around for something else. That’s when I found FDN. I stumbled upon it. And I don’t remember exactly how I first stumbled upon FDN, but somehow, I got here. That was more long winded than I intended it to be, but that’s the full history of symptoms up to a couple of years ago.
[00:10:32] Detective Ev: I really appreciate it. We’ve had answers on the show for the first question that went 30 freaking minutes, I don’t really care. I’m looking for the story and to me that gives us so much to work with. It’s such a clear timeline So, I appreciate you sharing all that.
I don’t know if you’re just humoring me with this too because you said you listen often, but I love what you mentioned about an instinct telling you, maybe this birth control isn’t for me. How strange is that?
Fertility Unfiltered: The Pill’s Side Effects
It’s not that I’m ever saying this is medical advice or just go off of this stuff. That’s not for me to say. But it is fascinating to me how many people have these gut instincts or intuitions. They literally will say, oh, I just knew. You’ve heard it. I just knew that this was something I was supposed to do or not do. It’s really interesting that was, to some degree, a pretty pivotal moment in all of this. Just, I know this isn’t the right thing for me.
It’s even stranger when you talk about birth control, because we have mentioned it on the show before. But my perspective on it shifted even further since the last time it probably got brought up. And I’m no psychologist, but I was listening to some psychologist lecture, and he brought up this really interesting point about not only did birth control change us health wise, because clearly there are side effects to this. And common sense would tell you if you shut off one of the most natural processes that a woman could ever go through, maybe there’s some side effects that come with that, right?
It’s not just you do this and there’s absolutely zero consequence, but it also changed us socially. I know that it’s for health reasons, obviously for you. But when you think about what that did to teenage girls or young adult women, and then what it also does for men, it made this a free-for-all in terms of how we pair up with each other. And it’s very interesting seeing my generation and then comparing it to my parents’ generation or gosh forbid my grandparents generation in how they treated sex and relationships.
Fertility Unfiltered: Passionate About Educating
Again, not the point of the podcast, but I’d never thought about that perspective. I wondered where did this hookup culture come from. Duh, if you give every woman an ability to take away the consequences, the men are like, heck yeah. And the women don’t have the same consequences. It’s, oh wow! That’s a main reason that we’re in this mess. It’s crazy to think about.
Go figure. When you give humans no consequences for some obvious consequences for something that they really want to do, they go do it. I’m shocked.
[00:12:47] Courtney Saye: Yeah. I’m sure we could do another whole podcast on that topic at some point because it’s a big part of the fertility journey for so many.
I really think there are a lot of things that we’re empowering for women with birth control, like the ability to get through school and not have to worry about it and decide how many kids they have. And I don’t discount any of that, but I’m with you on all of this. That culture is not necessarily empowering for anyone.
And the health side effects, no one talks about. Doctors don’t tell you how it depletes your nutrients and can cause mental health and gut issues and increase your risk for cancer. So anyway, I feel very passionate about making sure that people understand what they’re actually putting in their body when they’re using it and then how to reverse some of the damage that was done if they did use it.
[00:13:35] Detective Ev: Yeah. Just to be clear, because again, this is a health podcast. I should probably dot my i’s and cross my t’s. I’m not necessarily giving an opinion on the hookup culture either way. It’s not for me.
Fertility Unfiltered: Consequences
For many people, they think that’s the best thing ever, guy and girl, right? They’re like, I’m happy I can do this, and they’re entitled to do that if they’re consenting adults. I just find it interesting. I never thought about that that’s one of the main reasons that this happened is because if you take away consequences from people, this occurs.
But the health side is really what does matter because there are consequences. Like I said, it’s not obvious consequences, but you do see them later. Namely, you’re masking symptoms a lot of the times. And for someone like me, in my late 20s, a lot of the clients I attract naturally are within a similar age range, but it’s been all over the board.
The biggest influx I’d ever seen in people calling me, by the way, just so people know, I don’t really take clients now it’s all through a separate thing, but when I’ve seen people do this for me, it was all of these girls that I knew coming out of college and it was like the final straw on their health, right? Because now socially you’re supposed to drink, you’re supposed to stay up late, you’re supposed to eat crappy food. We were already a mess beforehand and now we go do this. It’s my gosh, final straw.
But then the thing that never gets talked about is they come off the birth control voluntarily. They’re trying to start a family. And for a lot of them, it doesn’t work. Or the period never comes back, they’re in their mid-twenties, and it’s been a year without a cycle. It’s holy cow! This is not discussed at all.
Fertility Unfiltered: Connecting the Physical Health Piece
So, at what point, was it FDN or something else, did you connect that all of these things that you had dealt with as a kid were connected? Because it’s very interesting to hear you say this on this podcast now. Obviously, you’re an astute functional medicine practitioner because you’re talking about the trauma that you experienced in childhood, all these symptoms leading up. When did you realize that all of these things were connected and not separate in any way?
[00:15:25] Courtney Saye: Like everything else in life when you’re learning, you’re peeling back an onion, if you will. I know that term gets overused a lot, but like every layer of growth is peeling back a little bit more. So, through therapy a few years ago, and then my coach training, my not functional health, but mindset coach training, I realized how impactful that trauma was.
And I don’t want to go too deep on it unless you want to ask some questions, but my brother found a gun at a family friend’s house, shot himself, and I was in the room. So, you’re talking about trauma that is not removed. It was impactful and there was no therapy. My mom and I’ve talked about it since and she’s like, it was the 80s, we just didn’t know.
So, I realized, like wow, that was a defining moment for a lot of my people pleasing tactics, which also anxiety, but I didn’t connect the functional. I didn’t connect the physical health piece, really, until I started digging in on functional health. It sounds ignorant to me knowing what I know now, right?
Fertility Unfiltered: Answers with Functional Labs
But you put yourself in a few years ago, like I thought this stuff was over here and my physical health stuff was different. I thought it was genetics of some sort, like something that was out of my control cause I was doing everything I possibly could. And the mental health stuff I would deal with. So, it wasn’t until I dug in on the functional health stuff.
Really, I think when I saw the functional labs, that was like, oh, okay. All right, there are answers here. Like everybody else for years and years had told me everything looks great. You’re good. When we were struggling with infertility, we went through tons of workups, went through fertility cycles with a fertility doctor. There was never anything wrong.
But that’s another point too that I have women who come to me. They’ve been through a fertility workup, and they’ve received a diagnosis of unexplained infertility, or they say they don’t know what’s going on. But what is frustrating there is that unexplained infertility, to get that diagnosis, the physicians are only looking at your reproductive tract. They run a few tests to look at your reproductive tract and there’s so much more as connected to our fertility than just what’s going on in your reproductive tract. So anyway, tangent that I didn’t mean to go down.
But that’s when I connected it all was when I saw the functional labs because it was like, oh my gosh, there’s answers here. It was a lot of emotions for me, honestly, because it had been so many years.
Fertility Unfiltered: Unexplained Infertility
I love it when someone who’s in their twenties comes to me and it’s just, I need help. Because I think, gosh, you’re not going to go through the years and years of suffering that I did if you’re learning this stuff now. My son’s in high school now. I wish they would teach this stuff to these kids, and they just knew it. That’s my dream is that everybody knows this information.
But I went through all of these years of suffering, and I get these functional labs back. And it’s Oh, there’s answers. I’m not insane. Why isn’t this more of a thing? And why did I have to wait so long to find these answers?
[00:18:37] Detective Ev: Yeah. And thank God, you found them in time.
I always wonder, and I don’t mean it in a pessimistic way, but it’s one of the reasons that I think people like us are so passionate and inspired to share this stuff because for every amazing story that comes on here, and they are amazing, there’s plenty of people it didn’t work out so well, they didn’t get this information.
And again, especially when we’re talking about something like fertility, that’s a time limit no matter what. You can be as healthy as you want, there’s still an obvious time limit on this for a variety of reasons.
So, I’d love to dive more into this because you already talked about, obviously, we know as functional people, it’s not just the reproductive track. And I don’t know if that’s the actual term, but if they really call it ‘unexplained infertility’, I can accept that a little better than just saying, oh, nothing’s wrong with you. Although I’m sure that gets thrown out all the time.
Fertility Unfiltered: The Diet Factor
Because to me, to imply to a young man or a young woman that nothing is wrong with them if they can’t get pregnant, is actually insulting. And I don’t mean this in a judgmental way, it’s not like you’re broken. But this is one of the core things from a purely biological perspective that we are here to do on this earth.
So, it would be pretty easy to make an argument for this, that if I can’t do that as a man, or if I can’t do that as a woman, there’s probably something that went wrong. And just because you can’t explain it doesn’t mean that there is nothing wrong. So, I liked that phrase “unexplained infertility” a little bit better. But yeah, it pretty much stops there, right?
I don’t know them personally, but I know of people that are spending tons of money on this stuff, and it’s really not that effective. When, if you just get healthy, it can happen.
So, what are some of the main things that you’re seeing and that you’ve learned that are leading to this epidemic of infertility? Because yes, birth control is one aspect, but there’s a ton of stuff that’s leading to this. I’d love to dive into that.
[00:20:21] Courtney Saye: Yeah, gosh, good question. So, birth control is definitely one thing. Diet, I talked a lot about my diet early on and how I spent a lot of years not eating animal protein. I won’t turn away clients with a specific diet, but I have a hard time helping someone if they’re not willing to incorporate some clean animal protein into their diet. So, diet’s a big one.
Fertility Unfiltered: Rest & Exercise Factors
And I think we’re so confused by what is out there in the mainstream media. Like, I thought of myself as healthy and knowing everything about diet. And what I did do right was incorporate a lot of fruits and veggies. What I did wrong was I didn’t have any good animal protein in my diet.
Once I ran some of the later tests after graduation, like the DUTCH and the HTMA and saw some of the hormone, and nutrient and mineral imbalances, they were still way out of whack. Could still be from the birth control pills, but also from diet. I think it’s really hard to get all of the proper nutrition if we’re not incorporating good animal protein.
Real rest, I think a lot of us now think of rest as scrolling through your phone, right? I got some free time. And no shame, like we all do it. It’s nice to unwind sometimes. But true rest, where you’re doing something that is revitalizing your body like meditation or prayer and spending time going inside, most people don’t do any of that anymore. So, those are the big ones.
The other one I see a lot with women who are really driven like myself and are push, pushing is they’re doing exercise wrong. They’re pushing their bodies too hard with exercise. They’re like, yeah, I’m all over it. I go to Orangetheory, and I’ve got the Peloton app on there, and I do spin class, and I go for runs too.
And I’m like, hold on, timeout. Moving your body is super important, but we have to be mindful about how we’re doing it, especially if your body’s at the top of the stress limit. Adding super high impact workouts five days a week is really not it.
Those are the big ones. Like stress, managing your stress. And to me, the most simple place to start with people, they’re like, I can’t get rid of my stress. No, none of us can get rid of our stress, but we can manage it.
It’s as simple as grabbing your journal. I do it twice a day, just for five minutes. Sometimes it’s 20 minutes. I’m a Christian, so I pray too. And those two things together do so much to reduce my stress. It could be meditation. It doesn’t have to be a religious practice. So, stress management, diet, sleep, exercise, a lot of the things we talk about in FDN really.
And then the supplementation is great, but I will get clients who are like, what can I take? I’m so busy. We’ve got to work on all of these things together to truly see the results you want to see. Supplements, we’re going to need if you’ve got deficiencies and gut infections and those types of things to work on, of course. But we’ve got to work on it as a whole picture.
[00:23:30] Detective Ev: Of course.
And then, as nerdy as we like to get on here, I also like to think from the perspective of someone, especially with this topic, we really might have the privilege of being the first thing that came up for them when they typed in holistic infertility or whatever, functional medicine, infertility. Gosh forbid, we’re one of the first things that come up and they see it and they click on it and they’re like, okay, that makes sense, be healthier and this will lead to this.
Fertility Unfiltered: Underlying Issues
We don’t have to dive into like PhD level biochemistry, but from your understanding then with not doing the things that you mentioned, what is happening in the body that’s saying, okay, now we can’t get pregnant or maybe we can’t carry to term, whatever it is. Like, what’s going on?
[00:24:10] Courtney Saye: Yeah. That’s where I was going to go next. I’m glad you asked that.
I’ll tell you a little bit of my story and what I’ve worked on too, but a lot of the big things that we see are going on in the gut. So, a lot of your hormones are synthesized in your gut. And you might say, I’m trying to get pregnant, I don’t have a gut issue. Like, I go to the bathroom every day, I’m good.
Then we’ll run a GI MAP, it’ll come back, and you have hardly any good bacteria. You’ve got inflammation markers, you’ve got gluten sensitivity, all kinds of things for us to work on. And as we start to clean those things up, we’ll see other issues start to clean up, like hormones.
So, with women in our program, we always run the DUTCH test. Which for those listening, it’s not one we learn in our foundational training, but it was an advanced training I took for a stress and hormone test. We run that one to see where women are with their hormones.
Hormones give us a good picture of what’s going on, but it’s always something underlying that’s causing those hormonal imbalances, right? We’ll see some of those hormonal imbalances start to clean up as we work on what’s going on in your gut.
Fertility Unfiltered: Lab Results
That and if I just had to pick two that I would say could fix 85% to 90% of the problems, it’s gut and minerals. So, we are also working on mineral balance too and making sure that’s in check. I use the HTMA test with all of my clients and then we start on mineral balancing right away. Then we go work on the gut. That’s when we see a lot of improvement on the hormone side.
One thing I do tend to see out of whack with clients. I’m going to back up a little bit and tell you a little bit more about my story before I dive in there.
When I got my labs back, what we’re talking about here, it’s almost laughable to me now, like the level of helpful bacteria in my gut looked like it was nonexistent, even though I’d been eating what I thought was a ton of vegetables every day. I had poor protein digestion, high anti-gliadin, which is a gluten sensitivity marker. That was through the roof. It was, I think, four or five times the high end of the range.
High oxidative stress, cortisol levels were in the exhaustive phase. I saw this on my first test before the DUTCH too, DHEA was really high, and testosterone was really high. Which, I didn’t understand it yet. But like I said, I was excited there were answers and also sad that it had taken so long.
As I continued to dig and learn more and dug in on some advanced trainings and read more books, I got more and more sad about my fertility journey because I realized that I’ve been living with undiagnosed PCOS for probably all of my life.
Fertility Unfiltered: The Biochemical Agents
And I don’t think doctors ever even thought in that direction, because I’ve always been a normal body weight. So, I think they’re trained in med school, a lot of them, hopefully we’re getting educated on it, that PCOS is a disease of obesity, which is not always the case. They’re saying now it’s only it’s 30% to 70% of the cases. So, no one ever looked at that for me.
And it wasn’t until I dug in on the DUTCH and saw all of the androgen levels there and how out of whack they were. I went back down the list, like, late period, infertility, acne, all of the things. And long story short, for myself personally, I went straight to work on focusing really heavily on blood sugar management.
So, I had things in my gut to clean up for sure and mineral balancing to do. I also had blood sugar management. I guess that was the third pillar that I missed earlier when I was talking about what’s causing biochemically the infertility. Blood sugar imbalance, insulin resistance is an issue in the vast majority of PCOS cases. If we can get that in check and we can clean up your gut and balance your minerals, gosh, does the disease process start to reverse.
Anyway, that was a roundabout way of getting back to the three things that I would say are showing up for people: gut issues, mineral imbalances, and insulin resistance.
A lot of people, even if they come diagnosed with PCOS, they’ll say, my doctor ran the labs and I was within range. They’ll show me the labs and they’re right at the edge of the top range. That’s not in a functional range.
Fertility Unfiltered: The Lack of Self-Care
The deeper I go down this path of working with women and continuing to work on myself, the more I believe that blood sugar management can solve quite a few problems.
[00:28:55] Detective Ev: Sure.
One thing that you mentioned in the beginning of that answer that I thought was interesting, because I appreciate you saying this. Not enough people recognize this. We can get so technical with the hormone side, especially. And there’s always a debate between which types of labs to do and all this kind of stuff. But what you said is the hormone stuff, yeah, it usually is bad, but it’s always something more underlying.
Perhaps I’m just not doing enough, I could make that argument. But I had gotten to a point when I was like actively taking clients all the time, even when I see the labs in my own business, where there’s other people, 95 percent of the time, if I’m being a hundred percent honest, the biggest thing that we got from the hormone test is validating to the person with clinical correlation, why they feel as crappy as they do.
Yes, you can supplement some of the stuff. You can help those things, but we still got to go do the other things. Otherwise, those hormone results are never going to get better. It’s almost never a root causal type of thing. It’s okay, yeah, this is the result of all this other crap that you have going on and the lack of taking care of yourself for years, usually unintentionally. They’re trying to do the right thing, but just like you were trying to eat super well, and it was actually the wrong thing for you.
Fertility Unfiltered: The Androgenic Pathway
It’s interesting too, that you mentioned the PCOS thing. Of course, I can’t diagnose. But there was a time in the beginning of the pandemic that I was taking a lot more clients again, because I wasn’t doing speaking and schools were closed, all this stuff.
So, I had these two women in particular. I don’t think they’d care, but I’ve never gotten direct permission to share their story, so I’ll keep it somewhat vague. But very young. Like we were probably all 25, 26 at the time and they were friends. They both ran it mostly for preventative purposes, not necessarily because they even thought something was wrong.
It was crazy how high those androgenic hormones that you talked about came up. Worse yet, I think this is a bittersweet thing for people, they are fitness-oriented people. They do a lot of stuff on Instagram, and they create plans for people and stuff. These people are like 10 out of 10s. They look about as good as you could in your mid-twenties for women. And so, people are like idolizing them wanting to be like them.
But when you look at the labs, it’s like, oh, this isn’t really a good track for your future here. Thank God we found that stuff when we did, because both of them had very clear plans to have kids one day. And that’s why they were doing a lot of this stuff was to be smart. I’m like thank goodness we did.
I referred them both out. They never got a formal diagnosis of PCOS. Same kind of thing, right? It needs to be a little higher here for us to give you that diagnosis, but certainly the symptoms were highly correlated with this.
Fertility Unfiltered: Particular Tests for Particular Groups
Because of course, typically speaking, the girls aren’t going to tell me this the first time, but when I start asking about the acne and the hair growth, oh yeah, I have that. Like, all right, so we need to address all these things.
I also like how you have your formula now with the hormones, GI MAP, and the mineral side. For someone that might be coming off our website and then clicking on here and wondering, okay, that’s not the exact formula of FDN. I think also something that we’re very open to is, first of all, FDN is not dogmatic. You can do it any way you want, technically speaking.
When you start working with particular niches, you do notice certain patterns. And it’s impossible for me to argue that certain niches don’t actually do better with certain testing. I think pretty much anyone could benefit from the things that you said, to be clear. But it’s very weird. Like sometimes I just love running a particular test with a particular group because I know every time it’s like one of the most useful things that we run.
With all that said, you obviously figured a lot of your own stuff out when you were doing the labs with FDN, because we do include labs in the cost of tuition. Do you remember off the top of your head, some of the big findings on there because you were already on a health journey for quite a while. So, I’m curious what might’ve showed up.
[00:32:35] Courtney Saye: Yeah. So, the foundational labs that I ran during training, they came back and there were lots of answers. That was not long after I had finished a full workup.
Fertility Unfiltered: Data-Driven Motivation
It was what I thought was tons of blood work with my general and a full GI workup, invasive, all the things, an abdominal ultrasound. Like, I thought there’s nothing wrong. But on that first test, the first GI MAP, it was really low commensal bacteria, which is the good bacteria in your gut, which you need to balance the bad.
The gluten sensitivity, I think, was really eye opening for me because I’d eaten so much. It’s called the anti-gliadin marker on the GI MAP. It was really high. I had never in my health journey thought about that. I actually joked about it a lot. Oh, gluten, gluten free ha. And then it was like, God was laughing at me for joking about it.
I’ve since learned so much about how the immune system can attack itself if the gluten’s not agreeing with you. So, I cut that out a hundred percent. That, I think, made a huge difference for me.
I had poor protein digestion, high oxidative stress. We get a lot of information in the foundational lab that we run with FDN. The stress and hormone profile that you get on the DUTCH, the DUTCH just goes a little deeper. And I like that with fertility clients for a few reasons.
Basically, some of it’s to show correlation. And then with people with PCOS, whether they’ve been diagnosed or not, like you said, we’re not here to diagnose, we’re here to help them help themselves heal the underlying symptoms. But if you can see those androgen levels, that is a motivating factor to work on blood sugar and insulin resistance when you start to show them the science behind how all that works. Those were out of whack for me also.
Fertility Unfiltered: Focusing on Blood Sugar Balance
My DHEA, I couldn’t figure it out because all the research and the mentor I was working with at FDN was like, DHEA tends to go down as you age, and mine was really high still. But now after I ran the DUTCH and saw how things were on the metabolites, the DHEAS and the other metabolites from testosterone, it made a little more sense.
So yeah, there were a lot of answers there. Before I ran the DUTCH, I went straight to work really on the gut issues that I had, cutting out the gluten, and supporting my liver, like supporting my detoxification processes. That made a huge difference.
Then when I ran the DUTCH and found out more about the androgens, that’s when I started focusing heavily on blood sugar balance.
[00:35:19] Detective Ev: You have such a cool way of I don’t know if you’re doing it intentionally but mixing in what, to an average person, might be considered more complicated stuff. But then you’re really focused on the foundations still. And I probably need to do a better job of just over emphasizing this on the podcast because you can’t outdo the basic stuff, “basic”, quote/unquote, right?
There are plenty of people that will spend tons of money on labs, tons of money on supplements, and your blood sugar’s still a wreck, right? You’re waking up every day and your fasting blood glucose is frickin 100. If we don’t do this, if we can’t address that, you could spend all this money in it, it’s really no point.
I was just talking to someone yesterday, younger person, right? Early twenties. And we’re talking about labs, we’re talking about all this stuff. And money is a little tighter, especially in your early twenties.
Fertility Unfiltered: The Seesaw of Pain
I was saying to them, there’s zero point in us running any of this stuff. She’s staying up till 4:00 AM on the weekend, hanging with friends. And God bless her, man. I want you to have fun, I don’t want to take away your social life. But I explained this thing that I’ve used over the years to explain this to people of the seesaw.
It’s like the seesaw of pain. So, it’s not as dark as it sounds. But what I mean is, it has to be weighed out. I’m certainly not discouraging anyone from this, I’d love if everyone did these things preventatively, but that’s not realistic.
Sometimes the pain of the social changes or consequences that come from the stuff that we’re doing actually are sometimes worse than the dang symptom, right? Like maybe your anxiety is at a 4 out of 10 most days. You’re like, Ev, I really want to do this naturally. I’m like, okay, but look at what you’re going to have to give up to do something in my world.
We’re going to have to be disciplined with the sleep, disciplined with the diet. Does that even outweigh what you’re dealing with right now? And again, it’d be amazing if us human beings were all smart enough and forward thinking enough to say, before I even have symptoms, I’m going to give up all this stuff. That’s not how it goes.
And guess what? I’d be a dang hypocrite. It took me seven different conditions before I finally said, all right, you know what? I’m willing to give some stuff up to go feel better.
Fertility Unfiltered: In An Ideal World
So, I could never tell someone with not even a diagnosed condition, just someone who had some symptoms, that they need to go change everything. It’s just, we’re all going to die one day, right? The functional medicine people might live a little longer if we’re lucky but that’s about it. So, you got to find that balance.
And I think this is one of the most motivating things that someone could possibly experience, this idea that, I really want to have a family and I want to go do this stuff. But I might not be able to if I don’t take it seriously.
We’ve mentioned mostly because you’re a woman, obviously, we’ve mentioned a lot of the woman’s side. Are you planning to help in any way the men, if they are the ones that are actually, I don’t want to make it seem like a blame thing, but like contributing more to the infertility? I’ve heard plenty of cases where it’s actually the male sperm, not the woman’s body that’s leading to infertility.
[00:38:09] Courtney Saye: That is true. I will say, I see this not only in my practice, but in my life in relationships, the women tend to take the initial ownership for fertility.
In an ideal world, here’s how my practice would look. The couple would come to me together. They want to start trying for a baby in a year. Like, the wedding’s in six months and they want to be pregnant in a year. I’m making up dates, right? And they both want to work through the program and see what’s going on and start to heal themselves. So, they’re in the best possible position to conceive and carry a healthy pregnancy to term and have a healthy baby. That’s ideal.
Fertility Unfiltered: The Zinc Spark
What tends to happen is that I do get clients who are like, I’m thinking about it, especially if they’ve had endometriosis, PCOS, something where they know it might be a little harder. They’ll start thinking a little ahead of time. Or if they’re over the age of 35 or 40, they’re going to start planning, like, oh no, I might not have an easy time with this.
But a lot of people will try for a year. They’ll try fertility treatments, go through a few rounds of IVF before they go, maybe there’s another way here. And usually, it’s the woman first. Yeah, ideally, I have worked with men. But typically, it’s the woman coming first and saying I need to figure this out.
But you’re right. Sometimes when fertility is not working out, sometimes when you’re not conceiving, it’s the male sperm that’s got issues. And men have just as much to work on, on most of the tests I’ve run with clients as the women do. It’s really just like an initiative and motivation issue up front. Usually, it’s the woman that’s driving it.
[00:39:49] Detective Ev: Yeah. It’s a heck of a way to be brought together, but it is motivating for both parties. I just think it’s actually quite unfair. I don’t think it is recognized enough that it’s not just a woman’s body that can be infertile.
One of the things we know is that my generation’s testosterone is 50 percent lower than our grandfathers’. Not good. And one of the things that could be contributing to that, of the many things, is a lack of zinc. You need zinc for pregnancy. If anyone wants a really cool thing to nerd out on, look up the zinc spark on Google.
Fertility Unfiltered: Pregnancies at 40?
It’s this fascinating thing that happens when the sperm meets the egg. But you do need a ton of zinc for this to happen. Really basic, probably way oversimplified, but at the very least, go do some basic testing to see if your husband or significant other has enough zinc. We got to make sure we have the right tools in place for people to be able to do this.
Now, I have a totally hypothetical, not medical advice, question for you. Definitely don’t try this at home. But with what you know now about fertility, one of the things that I find fascinating is you start to realize that the standards we’ve set in Western society and Western medicine almost certainly have to be wrong because the sample population that we’re working with is so dang sick.
So, for example, when you say, generally speaking, the age of around 40, it’s like that number where you’re like, maybe don’t go try to get pregnant. But if that’s what Western medicine says, and we know people all the time have successful pregnancies in their thirties, this is just a belief question.
Do you have a belief or an opinion around what humans were actually supposed to be able to do? Were there women that were supposed to have pregnancies totally healthy in their forties? What’s your opinion on that?
[00:41:36] Courtney Saye: If you look back at history and dig deep and even dig into your own family history, you’ll find that there were a lot of successful pregnancies well into women’s forties, going back for generations. And if you look at all of the factors of lifestyle and health and all of that back then, it’s wait, how come we’re telling women now that they can’t?
Fertility Unfiltered: Getting in the Best Possible Condition
I believe your eggs age, all of the things, like at some point you hit menopause. But can a lot of women have successful pregnancies in their 40s? Yeah, absolutely.
And to your point, that’s a whole other conversation on lab ranges and ranges of normal that Western medicine says. But if you’re under the age of 35, talk to your doctor and say you’re ready to get pregnant. It’s, you try for a year and then let us know. And if you don’t get pregnant, we’ll send you to a fertility doctor who will run a bunch of tests, again, just isolated to your reproductive system.
Then we’ll either diagnose you or your husband with something or say it’s unexplained and we’ll go try IUI and IVF, which is incredibly frustrating and a big waste of time if you’re excited about starting a family. Because you don’t know. It’s back to that whole trial and error thing of let’s see what happens for a year and not work on anything else.
Gosh, is it cool when you spend six months of that year working on making yourself as healthy as possible and then get pregnant. And then if you can’t get pregnant on your own after all of that, you’re in the best possible position to go to fertility interventions. Like, you are more likely to succeed over there if you put your body in the best possible position. So, I have a lot of qualms about how we do it on the traditional side.
Fertility Unfiltered: Courtney’s Mission
[00:43:21] Detective Ev: Sure.
And on a final note with that, it’s like the one good thing about these infertility issues is it’s so dang expensive, even from the Western medicine side, that this is probably one of the only cases, maybe other than certain cancers, it’s cheaper to just come to us anyway.
You’ll actually save money, finally, going to the functional medicine people and you’ll get healthier. Your kid will be better off. Everyone wins with this one.
[00:43:46] Courtney Saye: Yeah. And gosh, like I said, in an ideal world, people would come to me, and their partner if they’re willing, once, and learn these things and make the changes. And then if they want to have two, five, six, whatever number of kids, they’ve already been through it and you’re spending a fraction money wise of what you would’ve spent on an IVF cycle. In my mind, it’s such a no brainer.
And gosh, do I wish that I would have had this. I’m trying to create for these women what I wish I would have had for myself back then when I was so lonely and lost.
Where to Find Courtney Saye
[00:44:21] Detective Ev: If they’re listening and saying, okay, cool I’m ready to take this leap. And again, it’s one of those cases where, financially speaking, it is still the better option. Where can they find you if they’d like to learn more about your work and where they could possibly work with you if they wanted to?
[00:44:35] Courtney Saye: Yeah, for sure. My website is www.thrivefunctionally.com. I’m on Instagram, Facebook, and newer to TikTok, trying it out. And the handle on all of those is @fertilityfunctionally. So, you can find me on any of those. I’m most active on my Instagram page.
[00:44:55] Detective Ev: Cool.
And you already know if you’re a regular listener, assuming that you’ve actually listened to a full 50 minutes of me and you’ve been able to make it through that, you might know our signature question for the end of the podcast.
From a more general health perspective, Courtney, if you could wave a magic wand and you could get every single person in this world to do one thing just for their health, whether that’s literally start doing one thing, or you can get us all to stop doing one thing, what is the one thing that you’d get us all to do?
Signature Podcast Question
[00:45:21] Courtney Saye: I know you ask this question and actually I crossed out my answer a few times. But I kept coming back to this one. It’s to focus on building your meals and snacks around quality protein. We need about a gram of protein per pound of body weight daily, ideally.
So, if you build your meals around protein and fill your plate with organic produce and a little bit of starch, you’re going to be better than 99 percent of people that are on a health journey. Most people make the diet side of things really complicated. And that’s my simple piece of health advice that I think anyone can benefit from.
[00:45:58] Detective Ev: Very cool. Thank you so much.
If you are listening to audio, and you’re wondering how the heck do I see these live podcasts, because they seem to come out before the audio. That is true. We’ll always repost them there, but this is the chance to come on live. Then you can always ask questions if you guys would like.
We’ll probably be doing a more consistent schedule as time goes on so that people can really truly tune into these and engage with our guests if they’d like to. Just make sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn will be one that we are popping into sooner rather than later.
Courtney, full circle, absolutely awesome to have you listening for this long, going through FDN, and then coming on and actually sharing this very useful information for, it’s not really a condition per se, but something that is so important in the health space. There’s really no shortage of episodes for this. We have to do as many as possible.
Conclusion
[00:46:48] Courtney Saye: Thanks Evan. It was great to be here.
