Cyndi O'Meara is this week's guest. She is a Nutritionist, filmmaker, best-selling author, TEDx speaker, and founder of Changing Habits. Cyndi is passionate about teaching people how they can make better choices in their lives in order to enjoy greater health throughout their life. In this episode, we talk about her documentary 'What's With Wheat?', where she shares some fascinating information about wheat.

Selected Links from the Episode

Changing Habits website

What's With Wheat? website

Unstress episode with Charles Massy on glyphosate

Unstress episode with Professor Fred Provenza on nutritional wisdom

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Dr Ron Ehrlich:                    Hello, and welcome to Unstress. I'm Dr Ron Ehrlich. Now, wheat. It has come in for a lot of attention in recent years. And let's face it, it's everywhere. Artisan bread, muffins, cakes, certainly in many processed foods. My guest today is Cyndi O'Meara. Cyndi is a nutritionist, a filmmaker, a best-selling author, a TEDx speaker, and founder of Changing Habits, more about that later. Essentially, her greatest love is to teach people so that they can make better choices in their lives in order to enjoy greater health throughout their life. And she has also done a documentary called What's with Wheat? There's a lot more we discuss, but some of the information about wheat was new to me. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Cyndi O'Meara.

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Welcome to the show, Cyndi.

Cyndi O'Meara:                   Thank you.

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                    Cyndi, there are so many things you are in involved in and you're doing, and I wondered if you could just give us a little bit of background about your journey here into healthcare?

Cyndi O'Meara:                   Well, I was brought up in a family that was very much into health, but a very different type of health. My dad had been a pharmacist in his early career, but by the time I was born, he was a chiropractor.

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                    Wow.

Cyndi O'Meara:                   So, yeah.

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                    Quite a transition.

Cyndi O'Meara:                   Well, definitely because they're two very different paradigms of thinking. And one is very mechanistic and the other one is very vitalistic. My dad swang from giving drugs for a disease to adjusting people for disease. And he was very staunch and very strong and very opinionated about medications, vaccines, things like that. This was back in the '60s. I was brought up without a drug in sight. If I had an infection, he said, "Your body can deal with it." If I had a fever, he said, "Your body can deal with it." In anything, he made sure that our body was given the right resources. So, we were always outside. He was a hiker and a camper. We lived with stunning food. My mom was an amazing cook. We had chiropractic care for our whole life. And so I'm 59 this year and I've never had an antibiotic. I've never had a Panadol.

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                    Wow.

Cyndi O'Meara:                   I've never had an anti-inflammatory. The only medication that I've had is dental, which is interesting. And that is just injections whenever they think it's going to hurt me. So, that's it. That's all I've ever had. And I-

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                    So, he was a chiropractor by the time you were born?

Cyndi O'Meara:                   ... Yes.

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                    Okay.

Cyndi O'Meara:                   He became a chiropractor in '59 and I was born in 1960.

Dr Ron Ehrlich:                    Wow. Yeah. He learned firsthand that pharmaceuticals may not be all they're cracked up to be.

Cyndi O'Meara:                   Well, his first insight was, he ... Two things happened that completely changed him. One, he had this older lady that was very healthy come in for a prescription at the age of 75, her very first.