Gluten Free School Podcast

Have you ever waited months (or years) for an appointment with a doctor only to end up blanking at your chance to tell your health story? It happens all of the time. Even though you know what you’ve been through, it can feel like a real uphill battle to organize your health journey in a way that makes sense.

Rambling in the doctor’s chair isn’t usually to your benefit.

And that’s why it’s frustrating to realize that you forgot to share certain details you knew were important. Once the doctor leaves, it may be months before you get the chance to share what was overlooked.

That’s why keeping your health journey straight and on point during exams is crucial.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably struggled (if not outright suffered) for a long time. And I’d like to see you be better prepared moving forward for every doctor’s appointment you have. It’s my goal to help you get answers more quickly.

When I’ve talked about patient advocacy in the past, creating lists came up. The reason is that it can help you stay focused despite being nervous or anxious about and during your appointment. And they offer you the ability to prevent vital health data from getting lost in the shuffle.

When my mom had open-heart surgery for a congenital defect in 2016, I was her advocate. The thought of having this massive surgery was incredibly stressful for her. So much so that she literally zoned out after the doctor told her surgery was necessary and failed to hear just about everything else he said after that.

If I’d not been in the room taking notes and asking questions, she may have pushed off the surgery for several months thinking it wasn’t urgent.

Every single time we attended appointments pre- and post-surgery, I had lists of questions, symptoms, medication changes, and such right in front of me. And boy, did it help!

This is why I believe in power of lists in order to organize your health. They keep you on track and help meaningfully move the process forward much more than simply relying on your memory.

I hope you will listen so that you too can discover the value of lists to organize your health (and your life)!

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the podcast CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe through iTunes!!! Then take a moment and leave a review on iTunes sharing what you’ve learned and why others would benefit from listening in as well!

You might think that list making is boring or dull. But if you’re here, reading this article and following Gluten Free School, you may want to rethink that.

Lists are key to seeing results. They are a way to organize your health so that nothing gets overlooked.

You know what to say and ask the moment the doctor (or practitioner) enters the room.

You won’t kick yourself afterwards for forgetting a question.

But the doctor’s office isn’t the only place they come in handy! I use lists all of the time when it comes to groceries and weekly menu planning.

That’s why I asked my dear friend Paula Rizzo of ListProducer.com to join me and share some of her top tips to organize your health (and life) with lists.

Paula and I met because she discovered that a gluten sensitivity after going through a traumatic health experience. So she knows first-hand how valuable lists can be both on a daily basis as a TV producer for cable news as well as for your health.

– Why lists can be your greatest asset to organize your health

– Different type of lists that you can make that help in the kitchen or in the exam room

– The best apps to use to organize your health, symptom, and food lists on mobile devices

– The most critical (and most often overlooked) steps people make when using a list to convey their health story to a doctor

– How lists can benefit you especially when you’re brain feels foggy, you have difficulty remembering things, or you’re just down right exhausted all of the time

– and much more…

Paula Rizzo’s website

Paula’s book -–>  CLICK HERE to get your copy of Listful Thinking: Using Lists to be More Productive, Highly Successful and Less Stressed

The post How to Organize Your Health Like a Pro with Paula Rizzo: GFS Podcast 086 appeared first on Jennifer Fugo, CNS.

Do you think that Functional Medicine can heal or cure you? Do you think it’s a surefire silver bullet that’s guaranteed to reverse any amount of damage to your body? Well, I think it’s high time for a dose of reality for managing patient expectations regarding what Functional Medicine can and can’t do for you.

Don’t get me wrong here, I am a fan of Functional Medicine. But what I see online and hear from readers of my newsletter seems like there are some real misconceptions about how this type of medicine can help you (as well as how long it will take to actually feel better). Managing expectations is important no matter what you do.

Remember, there are no magic pills nor any silver bullets when it comes to your health. The longer you put off seeking help, the longer it may take to get better and somethings may not improve. While Functional Medicine is a beacon of hope for many (including myself), it’s important to keep a realistic view of what it can do so that you don’t inadvertently find yourself disappointed.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the podcast CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe through iTunes!!! Then take a moment and leave a review on iTunes sharing what you’ve learned and why others would benefit from listening in as well!

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald is one of the most brilliant minds when it comes to Functional Medicine. Today she joins me to dispel some serious misconceptions that patients often have about what it can and can’t do for their health.

With many years of experience under her belt, Dr. Kara knows what it takes to help patients finally feel better, but as you’ll hear in this episode, managing patient expectations is key.

In this episode…

– Does Functional Medicine have magical powers to heal or cure any ailment?

– Reasonable timeframes to expect for treatment when seeing a Functional Medicine practitioner

– The type of relationship you should expect from a good Functional Medicine practitioner

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald’s Website

Podcast on I did with Dr. Kara on How to Do An Elimination Diet on a Budget

Check out the GFS Podcast sponsor — Intellibed! They’ve helped to change my daily experience with sleeping and moving around without pain. Since I’m such a big fan, they’re helping to make this season of the GFS Podcast possible. If you’re looking for a new mattress, definitely give them a call. Use coupon code GFREESCHOOL to get 10% off your entire purchase!

The post Managing Patient Expectations: What Functional Medicine Can and Can’t Do: GFS Podcast 077 appeared first on Jennifer Fugo, CNS.

Have you ever felt depressed? Depressed enough to ask for and take medication? Before taking antidepressants, I want you to consider that they aren’t just easy-to-pop little pills guaranteed to make you feel better. Despite what all the happy TV commercials say, the side effects and long-term implications can be pretty troubling.

I know the antidepressant battle all too well. Back in my early 20s, I was prescribed antidepressants to treat obsessive compulsive disorder. My first prescription came and went in one dose because I went into an angry, sobbing rage that I barely remember. The second prescription triggered depression (yes… I was taking an antidepressant and becoming more depressed), a deep sense of isolation and an inability to function socially and complete college assignments. Before failing out of school, I reached out for help to get off of the medication.

This conversation today is what I wished I’d know before taking antidepressants. It’s not about gluten… but instead about a staggering trend of antidepressant use in people who might not really need them and were never told of alternatives nor advised of the side effects.

It’s not my intention to say that prescription medications don’t serve a purpose (as there certainly is a time and place for them), but what I hope to provide you with greater insight on antidepressants. While I’ve certainly talked in the past about gluten’s affect on mental health, the fact that 1 in 4 women in their 40s and 50s are on psychiatric drugs is incredibly alarming. It’s further disheartening that these drugs may not resolve the problems at hand and can lead to issues such as nutritional deficiencies. And there is research out there demonstrating that deficiencies are commonly seen in those who experience depression, but rarely addressed during a medical or mental health examination.

Remember that each episode of the Gluten Free School Podcast Season 2 will focus on one particular issue or solution that you can easily implement. Some may take more time than others, but all are highly worthwhile. In an effort to be efficient, each podcast will be as to-the-point as possible because I know that your time is valuable. So I’m packing in as much detail as I can to hand you the tips, tools, hacks, and ideas to help you be a better patient from here on out.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the podcast CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe through iTunes!!! Then take a moment and leave a review on iTunes sharing what you’ve learned and why others would benefit from listening in as well!

This week’s episode on “How to be a Better Patient” features special guest Kelly Brogan, MD, author of A Mind of Your Own. Dr. Brogan is a long time friend of GFS and was formerly on the podcast about 2 years ago. She and I share a deep love and appreciation for empowering patients to make wise and purposeful choices with their health.

Since Dr. Brogan’s book comes out today, I thought she’d have some powerful insight into important considerations around the use of antidepressants. And of course, she did share some sobering realities about them that is worth listening to even if antidepressants are no where on your horizon. Plus she’s got some really great freebies to grab HERE.

Currently A Mind of Your Own is #1 on Amazon’s Holistic Medicine and #2 in Depression categories. I was lucky enough to get an early release copy and have been blown away reading this book. I can’t recommend it enough. If you or someone you know is really struggling with mental health issues, this is an excellent resource to start helping you turn things around.

In this episode…

– Dr. Brogan and I talk about why you’ve got to believe in and be open-minded about whatever treatment you try in order to see results

– The incredibly shocking stats on unnecessary antidepressant use

– What you need to consider before taking antidepressants

– Why getting off of antidepressants can be more challenging (and at times impossible) than certain illicit drugs

Dr. Kelly Brogan’s website

Get Dr. Brogan’s “Better Than Xanax” guide + freebies + an fantastic giveaway to celebrate her book release

CLICK HERE to get Dr. Brogan’s book A Mind of Your Own!

Check out the GFS Podcast sponsor — Intellibed! They’ve helped to change my daily experience with sleeping and moving around without pain. Since I’m such a big fan, they’re helping to make this season of the GFS Podcast possible. If you’re looking for a new mattress, definitely give them a call. Use coupon code GFREESCHOOL to get 10% off your entire purchase!

The post Before Taking Antidepressants, Consider This with Kelly Brogan MD: GFSP 075 appeared first on Jennifer Fugo, CNS.

After taking a bit of a hiatus, I’m back with Season 2 of the Gluten Free School Podcast that I’m calling “How to Be a Better Patient.” Each episode will focus around one step that you can do before, during and after your visits to see better, more efficient results working with practitioners. I know what it’s like to have your health be like a complete and total puzzle that leaves you spinning your wheels for way too long. While I completely believe in the idea that you are your own very best advocate when it comes to your health, there’s no manual on how to do that. And it can feel much to overwhelming when you don’t even know where to start.

I actually got this idea from a podcast I recorded on patient advocacy back in 2015. It was one of many favorite interviews because even though it isn’t loaded with all sorts of juicy health details, it provides you some basic steps to make sure that doctors (and practitioners) hear you and work with you on your road back to good health.

Each episode will focus on one particular issue or solution that you can easily implement. Some may take more time than others, but all are highly worthwhile. In an effort to be efficient, each podcast will be as to-the-point as possible because I know that your time is valuable. So I’m packing in as much detail as I can to hand you the tips, tools, hacks, and ideas to help you be a better patient from here on out.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the podcast CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe through iTunes!!! Then take a moment and leave a review on iTunes sharing what you’ve learned and why others would benefit from listening in as well!

This week’s episode on “How to be a Better Patient” features special guest Amie Valpone of The Healthy Apple. I’ve known Amie since 2012 when we met at a Gluten-Free event in Philadelphia.

While she has been featured and published in big name magazines like Martha Stewart, Shape, Clean Eating, Cooking Light, the Food Network and Prevention (just to name a few!), she’s experienced some incredible health challenges that drove her to see over 500 doctors in order to figure out what the heck was going wrong.

Today she joins me to talk about one of the single most important steps she took that helped her (and her doctors) figure out why she was so sick.

Amie also talks about her upcoming book Eating Clean: The 21-Day Plan to Detox, Fight Inflammation, and Reset Your Body that’s currently #1 in Vegetarian Diets on Amazon a week before its release! I was honored to get a pre-release copy from the publisher and was very impressed. Creative, healthy and clean recipes as well as a lot of wonderful information that Amie learned while trying to fix her health. She boils it all down to hand to you so that you hopefully won’t have to learn the hard way (like she did).

In this episode…

– Amie and I talk about what to do with your health records that helps keep the puzzle pieces together

– Why detoxing is more than just some juice cleanse

– And a few other tidbits that you don’t want to miss!

CLICK HERE to get Amie’s new book!

Check out the GFS Podcast sponsor — Intellibed! They’ve helped to change my daily experience with sleeping and moving around without pain. Since I’m such a big fan, they’re helping to make this season of the GFS Podcast possible. If you’re looking for a new mattress, definitely give them a call. Use coupon code GFREESCHOOL to get 10% off your entire purchase!

The post How to Be a Better Patient with Amie Valpone: GFS Podcast 074 appeared first on Jennifer Fugo, CNS.

Have you found yourself staring at some produce at the grocery store, one row is organic and the other is not, unable to justify the added cost of the organic option? While I’m all for finding creative ways to buy better quality foods, sometimes you’ve got to understand the distinct value of why organic costs more. It’s why I make a point to prioritize buying certain items organic at the grocery store because I know the value and added nutrition behind the higher price tag.

Unfortunately, many don’t seem to know exactly why eating organic is important and so I sat down with a worldwide expert on this topic who shares his deep respect for supporting foods and farming techniques that offer you more nutrition and less exposure to toxic chemicals. Sure, organic is typically more expensive, but what you get for buying it is also far superior. You can’t simply compare the price tag and think that you’re getting more bang for your buck when purchasing conventional produce.

To be clear, this interview is not meant as a judgment or condemnation should you truly be unable to afford organic right in this moment. That’s why I’m a big fan of prioritizing what I spend more on at the store (I share exactly how I do this in my book, The Savvy Gluten-Free Shopper). Strive towards organic and become savvy so that you can shift your budget towards foods that are better for your health.

CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe through iTunes!!!

Jennifer Fugo: Welcome back to the Gluten Free School Podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Fugo. And today, we are going to talk about the reality of pesticides found in food.

Now, you might care about this and you might not. You might feel like this topic is overwhelming and you don’t fully understand what’s wrong with pesticides. I mean, you eat a peach, for example. You wash it off, you eat it, it tastes great. There can’t be any pesticides in there, right?

Well, unfortunately, that’s not quite true.

I asked a really interesting gentleman who’s wrote this amazing book called The Mystery of Safe Pesticides. His name is André Leu. He’s going to join us today and talk about the myths and realities of safe pesticides and is there anything that’s really safe about them.

Now, Mr. Leu is the president of IFOAM Organics International, the world umbrella body for the organic sector. IFOAM has had around 800 member organizations in 120 countries and has a goal of the worldwide adoption of ecologically, socially and economically sound systems that are based on the principles of organic agriculture.

André has over 40 years of experience in all areas of organic agriculture from growing, pest control, weed management, marketing, post-harvest, transport, grower organizations, developing new crops and education in many other countries. He has extensive knowledge of farming and environmental systems across Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa from almost 40 years of visiting and working in these countries.

He has written and published extensively in magazines, newspapers, journals, conference proceedings, newsletters, websites and other media all on the area of organic agriculture including climate change, the environment, agronomy and the health benefits of organic farming.

André and his wife, Julia Rohn, their own organic, tropical fruit orchard in Daintree, Queensland, which is in the northern corner of Australia.

Welcome André to the podcast!

André Leu: Thank you, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Why don’t you tell us how you got interested in this whole organic farming business?

André: Okay. I come from a family farming. When I was a child, I was always the one who would get chronic asthma from exposure to pesticides. Even just going into a silo where the wheat was stored or where I’d visit the shed and just the smell of it, I would become seriously ill. So, I always going to be an organic farmer. The only way I could farm was without pesticides.

Jennifer: How did that turn into you now having written a book and being the president of an international organization?

André: Okay. Two different questions. Maybe I’ll just start with how I became president because I still wake up in the morning and scratch my head to wonder how someone from, really, a very remote area of the world (actually, a remote area of my country) becomes into a national president.

It’s actually a huge honor for me because I was really drafted or selected. People wanted me to run. I got elected to the board. And very quickly, in three years, I was president because of the members. I’m very humbled and honored that the members of our organizations want me to be our president.

Then the other one, why I wrote the book, is I live in a farming area. The rise of cancers (particularly cancers of the sexual tissues like breast cancer and prostrate and ovarian cancer), all these types of cancers is just astronomical here.

Then we look at particularly at the diseases that we see in children like the autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, all these sorts of issue. I started to wonder are these by pesticides.

We’re told by the experts, the regulatory authorities, “No, this isn’t the case because that’s scientifically tested.” So I went and start studying the science and I found that, first, they aren’t properly scientifically tested. That’s a myth. And there is a huge amount of evidence, hundreds and hundreds of published scientific studies linking these chemicals with a whole range of diseases that we’re suffering with in modern society.

Jennifer: For someone who goes to the grocery store – let’s just compare one head of lettuce that’s conventional and the other is organic and they say, “Well, I don’t see a difference except the price tag seems higher for this organic. It’s a little bit about my budget, so I’m just not going to buy this particular head of organic lettuce. I’m going to go with the conventional. I don’t see the difference. It doesn’t look dirty. It doesn’t look like it’s been sprayed with anything.”

I think people don’t fully understand what pesticides are. Could you explain to us what exactly pesticides are? Are they still on the plants when they reach the market? Are they still on the plants when you wash them? 

André: I’m glad you used lettuce. Lettuce is an excellent example of this. Another reason I became an organic farmer was when I started to keep animals, particularly chickens and ducks, one of the first things you read is don’t feed them out of lettuce leaves because the pesticides on them will kill them.

Jennifer: Really?

André: What I thought was, “Ah, instead, do we feed them to our children?”

So then, I wanted to investigate it. Why is it that what is supposedly safe to put on our children’s sandwiches, we can’t feed to our livestock?” And when I looked at it, I found out there’s multiple pesticide residues.

You cannot wash them off for two reasons. One is that when they’re sprayed, they use what are called ‘stickers’ to keep the pesticide on the lettuce. So when you water it, it doesn’t wash the pesticide off.

Then there’s another group of pesticides that we call ‘systemic’. What happens is the whole plant absorbs it. Every cell has it, so that when the insect eats it, it does. Somehow, there’s enough toxin in it to kill the insect, but somehow, it’s supposed to be safe for us.

The other thing I learnt is it’s just not one pesticide, it’s a cocktail. For any plant or any crop that’s approved, they don’t approve one pesticide. They’ll approve several insecticides (pesticides that kill insects), they’ll be fungicides, for instance, to kill fungus diseases, there’ll be herbicides that kill weeds. There will be a whole range of them. It’s actually a cocktail of small pesticides.

And when I investigated, for instance, there is no testing of this cocktail of approved pesticides. The more I got into it and studied the science, the testing that is done is completely inadequate to protect human health.

Jennifer: Why do you think it is that they’re telling people that they’re fine, that the pesticides are safe, that they’re okay, they’re not going to kill you? What is the reason why this isn’t being stressed to the public with a little more maybe pizzazz for lack of a better word?

André: That’s a good question. I can understand why the companies are doing it, because they’re there to make money. So they want to sell their products. To give an example, for instance, one of the products, glyphosate (one of the common names for that is RoundUp), the main company that makes that earns more money than the gross national product of many countries. That’s how much it’s worth.

But what I don’t understand is why the regulators allow this? There are hundreds and hundreds of studies I siphoned in the book, how many published scientific studies has shown the harm of the smallest level?

And also, why they permit what I regard (and what most experts regard) as totally inadequate science. 

To give one example, for instance – or I’ll give you two examples. The first one is when they do the testing, they do it on what they call the ‘active ingredient’, which is the main compound. For instance, if I used glyphosate, the main, active product in RoundUp, they just test the glyphosate. But RoundUp is made of a whole mixture of different chemicals – adjuvants, activants, synergists.

So glyphosate by itself hardly works as a pesticide. To make it work, they have to add these other compounds. But they don’t test. There’s no testing of RoundUp as a pesticide.

We now have a lot of scientific studies on our site showing that RoundUp is far more toxic. We know it’s an endocrine disruptor. We now that it causes the changes to cells that makes them precancerous. We know that it causes breast cancer cells to multiply. So if somebody is in the beginning of the cells turning into cancerous breast cells, the smallest level of RoundUp will cause that cancer to multiply. And yet, that is all ignored by the regulatory authorities.

And the other one, to get back to the letters, you’ve got a mixture. You’re going to have a pesticides like an organophosphate that will kill the caterpillars that ate it. You will have a fungicide that will kill the molds and fungus and you’ll have a herbicide like RoundUp that kills the weeds. You have all those residues in it, not just one pesticide. There is absolutely no testing of this cocktail.

We have very good evidence now where there is testing that the synergistic effect – synergism is where instead of one and one making two, one and one could equal five. In some cases, one and one can equal a thousand. But we do have a lot of data showing that these things can be two or three, four hundred percent more dangerous than the single ingredient.

Jennifer: I wanted to ask about the whole issue with babies. There has been several articles at least that I’ve seen over the last year that state very clearly and plainly that the pesticide load that the mother-to-be is exposed can be transferred to the fetus. Can you share with us any information about that because I know we have a lot of moms that are listening to this? Maybe they’re pregnant now or they’re thinking of getting pregnant or they have children and they want to have another baby. I think this is a really important topic especially for moms, so I’d love for you to speak to that.

André: Jennifer, I’m really happy to speak to this because I believe this is the most important topic. As parents, I believe the most important things we can do in life is give our children the best start possible. When it comes to pesticides, the data is very concerning.

In fact, I have a lot of information in the book on this because to me, this is probably the most important issue.

The data now shows that children in developed countries now are exposed to pesticides before they are born. We know, for instance, just testing seminal fluid and ovarian fluid and the amniotic fluid, we do find pesticides in it. We know that the pesticides are crossing the placental barrier.

We also know because of the work of endocrine disruption that amounts as low as parts per trillion can affect the fetus as they’re developing. They become what are called ‘endocrine disruptors’.

At particular stages when the fetus is developing, they need very small amounts of hormones, for instance, in terms of sexual development, whether the baby is going to be a boy or a girl. It’s the smallest amount of testosterone or the smallest amount of estrogen is really important for the full development of the sexual organs, the sexual tissues and also, the whole sexual hormone system.

This small amount to actually parts per trillion. To give the listeners the idea of what a part per trillion is, if I have three Olympic size swimming pool of water and if I put one drop of compound in it, that is a part per trillion.

What we know now is that a lot of chemicals can actually work as artificial hormones. And particularly what we’re finding as these artificial influence. This, we know now is very important later in life in how the child would develop and particularly, related to this rise in cancers in sexual tissues.

If we look at the rise of breast cancers, ovarian cancer, endometrial cancers in women and in men, testicular and prostrate cancers, we can trace it back to these small amounts of endocrine disruption.

We also know that what happen is as the fetus develop, it gets this very small hormone signals that signal to Jane to develop limbs or develop endocrine disruptions, develop the nervous system (for instance, the brain). And what we’re seeing now (and there’s very good scientific literature) that small disruptions to that can lead to cancers, thyroid disorders, immune system problems.

We have very good data. I’ve gone to that. For instance, one of the most common group of chemicals, the organophosphates, for instance, we’ll end up with children with lower IQs, attention deficit, hyperactive disorder or the autism spectrum disorder. I can say they’re increasing so rapidly.

We see other things like lack of physical coordination, loss of temper, anger management issue, the whole issue of bipolar schizophrenia, spectrum of illnesses. Later in life, we see things like depression.

There’s another issue in our gut, the whole issue of the digestive system problems we’re seeing, cardiovascular disease, reproductive problems as adults later in life and the other one we’re seeing here are deformities of the genital, urinary systems when children are born.

And one of the big ones we’re looking at now is the change in our metabolic systems. We’re seeing this raise in childhood obesity and diabetes. This is because of this endocrine disruptions.

Jennifer: I want to ask about the environmental consequences because even though we’re talking about food, I recognize that when farmers spray their crops, the herbicides and pesticides, they just don’t stay on the plants. They go into the soil. And that, with run-off, can end up in our water. Am I right about that?

André: Exactly! And I give good data from the United States Geological Survey. For instance, virtually, every river system or water system tested in the U.S.A., you can find chemicals.

The two widespread ones, which is Atrozine (which is one of the herbicides that’s everywhere) and the other one, like I mentioned, is glyphosate. That is found in most water systems.

And also, because it evaporates from the field and goes into the air, most rainfall tested will have these chemicals in it as well. And because clouds travel, that rain falls. It doesn’t matter if that farm is a hundred miles away or further, those pesticides residues will travel and fall, go into the water and into the soil in other areas.

Quite a very good study that was done by researchers at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. There, they looked at the levels of pesticides and fertilizer that are found in normal ground water, drinking water in the Midwest of the U.S.A. When they tested that, they found that – this is work done testing on rats. What they found is it significantly affected the fetus when the mother rates were drinking it and the babies were born with thyroid problems. They were born with a whole range of other physiological problems as a result of this small levels of pesticide in the normal drinking water.

Jennifer: And that’s really scary to think that this isn’t just food. This is something we have to think about in terms of water, something that we all desperately need in order to survive. We’re literally contaminating the water tables around us all with these chemicals.

I think that we would know more about it, but we don’t seem to know much about it. So what I want to ask you, we’ve set the stage for people to understand the basics, what can we as women and moms and fathers and sons and parents, what can we do in our daily life to start minimizing our exposure to some of these stuff. What do you suggest?

André: It is very simple. And once again, we have good, scientific studies. Eat organic food. I have quite two excellent studies which tested children, tested the urine of children. And within four days of eating organic food, they could not find pesticide residues. It’s just quick as that.

To me, people might say, “Organic food is more expensive,” but it’s more expensive not to have it when you consider the damage that you’re doing to your children. In terms of the way that you spend money, I believe that organic food is the best value. Children are too precious and too valuable not to feed them organic food and give them the best start in life as you can.

Jennifer: And so in the U.S., there’s this interesting thing that’s happening where some farms will not get certified as organic because the red tape and the application and the fees are so expensive, but they do farm that way. Do you recommend to place that they could maybe go to a local farmer’s market and talk directly with the farmers to see how they’re farming, so when they make their purchasing decision, they could actually support a farm that maybe they aren’t certified organic, but they’re farming in a way that is organic? Does that make sense?

André: I totally agree with this. The idea of certification is that if you are a long way away from the farmer, you have a credible third party that’s checked the system and you have a guarantee that what you’re buying is organic and you don’t have the chemicals on them. But if you know the farmer, then you could build that trust. 

So for instance, in the U.S.A., you have a lot of CSA’s, consumer supported agriculture. Well, if you now that farmer and you trust them, you don’t need certification.

Similarly in farmer’s markets where they have some sort of guarantee or if you do know the farmer, then you don’t need certification. You could build that direct trust. 

Certification is more a case of if you walked into a shop and you’re buying a product where you don’t meet the farmer. You have to have some sort of credible guarantee that what you’re buying won’t have all these pesticides.

Jennifer: And André, I have another question around this and the idea of products. What about meat? So for, say, cattle, we’ll see this trend with cow that they will feed cows massive amounts of corn and that corn is loaded with Bt toxins and all these other things because it’s not organic corn. So we’re talking about conventional beef that is sold in the store.

Is it possible for us then, if I go to the store and buy this conventionally raised beef, am I also ingesting pesticides from that as well?

André: Yeah. Look, it’s not just, for instance, the Bt toxins. I can say there’s a very good study that was done last year in Canada that looked at Canadian pregnant women just in the normal Canadian diet. Not only did they find the Bt toxin in the bloodstream, it was actually crossing the placental barrier into the baby.

There’s very good work showing that the Bt toxin (which as I explained to the listeners, the Bt toxin is the pesticide that is put out by genetically modified corn), there’s very good scientific studies now showing that this Bt toxin is dangerous to people and it’s not safe like the regulators say. But the big concern is that we know it’s crossing the placental barrier.

We also have very good studies showing that the animals that eat it are also being affected by it. There are problems with the meat. But there are other toxins, as well. For instance, there are chemicals that are put in to say, get rid of intestinal parasites, organophosphates and other toxic chemicals. And those residues are in the meat from factory farmed animals.

There’s also very good science on the massive difference in the milk and meat from organic animals and in factory fed animals, particularly ones from grass-fed systems. There’s a huge difference in the types of fats that are much healthier ones.

There are types of fats now that we know protect against the bad cholesterol, protect against heart disease and damage to the arteries as against the types of fats that are found in factory-farmed animals.

Jennifer: I also wanted to add that toxins in the body tend to be stored in fat. That’s another reason, for those of you who may not know, this is another problem. When you eat – and we’ll just use beef again as the example, if you’re buying conventional beef. And again, if you’re not quite ready yet and you can’t afford to buy everything organic, we totally understand, but this is again food for thought.

But the fat that is on that cut of meat, you want to trim it quite well because the toxins hide in the fat. That is one reason why when they say, “Well, you don’t want too much fat on this. You really want to cut it…” Well, in that case, yes. We absolutely want to, especially in the case of eating conventionally raised meat.

So André, just any final thoughts on what anybody who’s listening and they feel motivated to start making some changes, what are a couple, just very simple things that they could do maybe when they go to the grocery store? Any thoughts you’d love to leave with them before we close?

André: Look, to me, it’s very simple. Where possible – and I say, “Where possible” because I’m in the same situation here. I can’t always get foods organically. That’s the reality at the moment until the organic industry grows larger in size and it’s available everywhere.

But where possible, get organic. Reduce the load. My advice to parents, particularly to mothers who are pregnant or families that are about to have a baby, do everything you can to minimize the pesticide load.

And also, for young children. What we noticed is that young children do not have what we call ‘serum proteins’ that detoxify pesticides to the same level as adults. We also know too that the body burden is they actually end up with a higher percentage of pesticides in their bodies compared to what adults have.

So for me, do everything you can to feed your children organic food, to reduce that pesticide load so that you can give them the best start in life that is possible. Our children are our future. To me, it’s not about money. It’s about giving our children the best we can. As parents, that’s our responsibility.

Jennifer: Well, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate this. I will say, it was an overview, but I do think that for many who didn’t fully understand this conversation about why pesticides are not safe and the dangers of them, I think that this information at least will get the wheels turning, so that they can start questioning things and asking their grocer about different items they see in the store.

And then, maybe, also, I love to shop at farmer’s markets. I talk directly with the farmers that I buy from. Ask them the questions that you need information on. The farm that I buy my produce from is not certified organic, but they grow organic food. That’s the method that they use.

Thank you so much for joining us! I really appreciate it.

André: It’s a pleasure, Jennifer. Any time!

Jennifer: Stay in touch with André. He’s got an amazing book. It’s called The Myths of Safe Pesticides. I’ll certainly put a link below. He’s also on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

And if you’d like to stay in touch with his organization, they do have a newsletter. You can visit him on the web at IFOAM.org. I will, again, put a link to all of these below, so that it’s easy for you to access.

Remember to rate, subscribe and review this podcast. And then, head on over and leave a comment below on this post about your thoughts on pesticides. Do you specifically buy organic food? Are you aware of how dangerous some of the pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, et cetera are? Is it a concern? Or do you just not have that space to be able to even deal with it. I’d love to know the difference of what’s important to you right now in prioritizing your diet.

Thank you guys so much for joining me. I look forward to seeing you the next time. Bye bye.

Get Your Copy of The Myth of Safe Pesticides now –> CLICK HERE

André’s website – http://www.IFOAM.org

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/andre.leu.96

Twitter – https://twitter.com/Andreleu1

LinkedIn – http://www.linkedin.com/pub/andre-leu/1a/586/a36

The post Why Eating Organic is Important with André Leu: GFS Podcast 071 appeared first on Jennifer Fugo, CNS.

First it was a fear of fat, now it seems to be carbs. Have you found yourself asking with the increase in popularity of low carb and high fat or ketogenic diets – “are carbs bad for you?”

While I wish the answer was cut and dry, it’s not and part of the reason why so many are confused about what to eat. Believe me, if you find the circle we seem to go in elevating one macronutrient at a time as if it’s the best things since sliced bread to then calling it the devil for making America fat… I’m right there with you.

Maybe we can blame diet books and marketing for that, Perhaps it’s the press that only looks for a snazzy one-sided take in order to keep readers attention. Or maybe it’s that the science of nutrition is still pretty infantile considering no one focused on it until 1785. Regardless, today’s interview will interest you immensely!

My guest is going to answer this frequently asked question, “are carbs bad for you?” The answer will probably surprise you!

CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe through iTunes!!!

Jennifer Fugo: Welcome back to the Gluten Free School Podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Fugo. I’ve got a really amazing guest for you today and we’re going to talk all about carbs. Carbs have been a huge topic in the health and wellness world whether you’re going to go low carb or eat a fat-based diet (ketogenic) or maybe you’re just eating gluten-free and you’re a little concerned about the amount of carbs that exist in your food and food products. Well, we’ve got the guest who’s going to answer many of our questions today.

His name is Dr. Alan Christianson. He is a Phoenix, Arizona-based naturopathic physician who helps people overcome adrenal and thyroid disorders and achieve lasting fat loss and vibrant energy. He is the author of the bestselling Complete Idiot’s Guide to Thyroid Disease, Healing Hashimoto’s: A Savvy Patient’s Guide, and the New York Times’ bestseller called The Adrenal Reset Diet.

Dr. Christianson is the founding physician behind integrative health care and the founding president of the Endocrine Association of Naturopathic Physicians. He trains physicians internationally on the treatment of obesity, thyroid disease and hormone replacement therapy.

Dr. Christianson, welcome to the podcast!

Dr. Alan Christianson: Hey, Jennifer. Thank you so much for having me!

Jennifer: I would love for you to start off by explaining to everyone exactly what carbs are. We talked a lot about carbs, but I think there is a nuanced conversation that’s not had a lot of times such that women don’t fully understand what it means to eat carbs – low carb, high carb, complex carbs. So what’s the very fundamental basics of what’s a carb?

Dr. Christianson: When you go way down to the chemistry, carbohydrate is a hydrocarbon. It’s a simple molecule that’s a chain of carbons with hydrogen atoms attached to it and it’s fuel. It’s a funny thing, it’s our body’s most important fuel. If we don’t have glucose, which is a carb in the bloodstream, we can go into a comma and die.

And there are alternate ways we can make it besides just eating carbs, but ultimate, it is the body’s most important fuel.

Jennifer: With carbs comes this whole idea that they’re going to make you fat. Do carbs cause weight gain, or even obesity?

Dr. Christianson: Well, carbs are a big category. I started writing on this in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. That was a time when pretzels and jelly beans were health foods because they were fat-free. I remember there was this crazy idea that came out at one point where someone discussed about these Mediterranean oils like, “Hey, maybe olive oil is not all that bad if you have just a drop of it” and we tentatively tested the waters and realized, “Wow! Maybe fats are okay.”

There had been a lot of big studies on high carb versus low carb. If you go two years out on a diet, it honestly doesn’t matter as far as how effective it is for weight loss. So just going low carb long-term doesn’t make a big difference alone. Carbs have got a place. I think that the discussion you want to have is looking at the right carbs to eat in the right amounts, but also, at the right times.

Jennifer: And for women who have these ideas that if they go low carb (we see all these man who go low carb and they end up very ripped and in shape, granted they’re exercising and all sorts of things), I have heard that some women don’t exactly have the same benefits of going low carb. And sometimes, it can even be contraindicated for women to go too low carb. Is that a possibility?

Dr. Alan: Totally possible and here’s the reason. Women’s body have got a lot of things that are more complex. You’ve got the menstrual cycle going on wherein your body’s system of regulating your blood sugar has to do back bends and twists and what-not to manage your menstrual cycle.

Also when you come up on perimenopause and menopause, the same systems that regulate blood sugar, they’ve got to work harder.

And you can convert your muscle into glucose. You can very slowly turn fat into glucose, but to do so, you’ve got to use the stress hormone cortisol. Your menstrual cycle and the process of perimenopause make all that a lot harder.

Jennifer: That might be why women might not feel as well going low carb or just too low carb from where they perhaps should be… that optimal point where they feel good.

Dr. Christianson: For sure! And a big tie-in here is the stress response and also the sleep response. You need to make serotonin and melatonin to really unwind during the day and get a good night’s sleep. And if your body is making high amounts of stress hormones to make protein or fat into glucose, then that doesn’t happen. Your body is pushed away from that state of relaxation.

Jennifer: You mentioned the whole idea of perimenopause and menopause. This is a huge point when women tend not to feel well. They feel totally off, their body is changing, they have hot flashes, they feel like their mind isn’t quite as crisp as it was, they feel exhausted, wired at night. Can carbs contribute to this sense of imbalance that they feel?

Dr. Alan: They’re a double-edged sword. The women that blows through perimenopause and menopause easily is a woman who has resilient adrenal glands. What’s happening is that the ovaries run out of eggs around mid-thirties. That causes a big drop in progesterone. And then right around mid-40s, estrogen starts going up and down and up and down. If your adrenal glands are resilient, they can make back-up estrogens and they can also make estrogen blockers to make that process pretty smooth and seamless and happen behind-the-scenes.

But if your adrenals are working overtime to manage your blood sugar, they can’t pick up the slack for this radical change in your ovaries. And that’s why this is a more difficult time for some women than others.

Jennifer: With adrenal glands, do you feel that a swing or spikes in blood sugar can be difficult, like almost a stressor for their body to deal with?

Dr. Christianson: Totally, totally! I’ve had scores of women in perimenopause and they’ve had concerns. Maybe they’re pre-diabetic, maybe their weight wasn’t right, or they’ve had concerns about food cravings at certain times or waking up with their mind racing or hot flushes.

I’ve had them do what we call the “continuous glucose meter.” That’s a device that logs your blood sugar 24 hours a day for seven days a week. So every moment of the day, it scores where the blood sugar is at. I’ve had them make a note when it is that they feel those symptoms. When their mind races at three in the morning or when they get a hot flush or they get an afternoon craving for something sweet, just make a note on that. We go back and look and right at those times, that’s when the blood sugar plummeted. 

And then I’ll have them also do a test for cortisol during those times. Their blood sugar plummets and their cortisol spikes during the time that all those symptoms are happening.

So those are all things that by changing the strategies of balancing your blood sugar and cortisol, you can make those things stop. 

Jennifer: Cortisol plays a role in the circadian rhythm. So how do carbs play into that? Can it actually affect the circadian rhythm?

For anybody who doesn’t know what a circadian rhythm is, it’s the cycle by which we wake up in the morning when the sun comes up and then go to bed when the sun goes down. That nice, little flow through the day that we’re all accustomed to.

Dr. Christianson: Yeah, I call it the “internal coffee machine.” You make this burst of hormones to wake you up and you shut them off to go to sleep. Carbs could affect that. It’s a two-way street. When your blood sugar is low, you change your stress hormones, but your stress hormones can also change your blood sugar.

The new concept that I’ve brought up in the Adrenal Reset Diet is that in the morning, if you have a good high protein, lower carb breakfast, that’ll support the cortisol awakening response. And then at the night, if you have a healthy meal with veggies, quality protein, but adequate amounts of healthy, good carbs, that can support the night time shut down of cortisol that gives you deep, rejuvenative sleep free of hot flushes.

Jennifer: But what time should dinner be at?

Dr. Alan: Yeah, great question. You don’t want to eat right before bed because then, it’s going to come back out. You’re going to get reflux issues. So for most people in most time zones, assuming a bed time of like 9:30 to 10:30, 6:00 is a great time for dinner.

Jennifer: Okay. Now, here’s a question that I have been dying to ask you. I have a beef with certain gluten-free products like gluten-free bread, for example. I’m not the biggest fan. I would really love to know what your opinion is on how gluten-free products could potentially play a role in this whole energy imbalance, perhaps even contributing to weight gain and maybe even a dysregulation of your adrenal glands. Where do you stand on that?

Dr. Christianson: For sure, awesome question. The acronym I use is GFC, ‘gluten-free crap’. Somewhere along the way, gluten-free processed foods, they’re still processed food.

Jennifer: That is so true.

Dr. Christianson: If you imagine that you took a warm surface like a hot street or something where the asphalt is hot and you were to put a shovelful of snow on the hot asphalt. And next to that, you had a big block of ice, a foot on each dimension and you spread out the snow really thin. Well, that snow is going to melt by the time you spread it out. But that ice is going to be there for hours.

You want foods that are like the block of ice that take your body time to digest and break down. You don’t want foods that melt instantly like that snow. That’s what sugar does.

Flour products, in general, even gluten-free flour products, they can be tough on your blood sugar. And in many cases, those same things have a lot of the same random, synthetic chemicals that other processed foods have.

I’m a big fan of the gluten-free grains within the context of getting your good carbs, meaning intact whole grains over flour products.

Jennifer: Now, here’s another good question because people tend not to believe me when I say this. But I know it’s true. I’m actually in the process of doing my master’s degree in nutrition, so I’m studying all about these basic stuff and sharing it with my audience. When you eat carbs, they get broken down into very basic units, a.k.a. monosaccharides. I figured you’re the expert. So is it true that when you eat carbs, no matter whether they’re complex carbohydrates or not, it does get turned into sugar at the end of the day to get absorbed?

Dr. Christianson: For sure. And I always make a distinction between sugar to a chemist and sugar to a baker because they’re different concepts. Yes, carbohydrates in the blood stream do all become sugar. That’s called glucose. But that’s not the same as sugar to a baker. That’s not the same as consuming a processed sugar like sucrose.

The funny thing is that I’ve watched some people that do no carbs. When we monitor their glucose scores on that continuous meter, many of them have blood sugar that gets too high. So whether you eat carbs or not, your body is going to make glucose. And even if you’re burning ketones, your body is making that into glucose.

So there’s no way you can get away from sugar in that sense of sugar in your blood stream. You couldn’t. You’d go into a comma if you did. You would die if their availability was too slow. You’ll always end up with glucose in your bloodstream no matter what you eat. The trick is how much is there and how much insulin it takes to manage that.

Protein and fat also cause your body to make insulin, especially protein. So the trick is you don’t really correct your blood sugar by never consuming foods that become sugar, you correct it by consuming foods that allow you to have stable and steady blood sugar.

Jennifer: As far as someone going to the grocery store looking at nutrition labels, is it important that they at least have a sense of how many carbs are in – we’ll just say the ‘gluten-free muffins’ that they buy. I tend to tell everyone you want to have a sense of how many carbs are in there.

It’s not that you want to eat below a certain amount. I don’t know that everyone should eat low carb or any particular diet. I think everyone’s diet should be unique to themselves to best support their own unique system. But it’s about having some really simple way to kind of identify carbs on a nutritional label.

Do you ever have any tricks that you share with patients, something practical that they can use when they go to the grocery store to understand that?

Dr. Christianson: For sure. If somebody is really out to improve their health, don’t get the foods that have long ingredients list. And you are also really right in terms of amounts.

The calorie model and the counting food model, it’s gotten a bad rep in some ways that it deserves and in some ways that it doesn’t deserve. So the calorie model, if you have controlled environments, it tends to work. But it doesn’t explain why we’re hungry. The weight of obesity in animals and humans is totally skyrocketing. The calorie model has no reason for that whatsoever. Yes, you can say that when someone is gaining weight it’s because they’re taking in more calories. But you’ve to figure out why.

That’s the trick about the health of the adrenals and your blood sugar rhythm. When those things are stable, you’re burning fuel effectively and your body is not storing all of it. When you’re in storage mode, you want more food than you’re burning because you’re storing all of it. So yeah, it’s good to be aware of amounts still.

I encourage thinking about just simple food volumes. Roughly the size of a golf ball as far as any dense carbohydrates, that’s a max for your breakfast. And about a baseball for your dinner is a max for your dinner. Between the two for lunch. So you have less in the morning, more later in the day and some easy visual cues for that.

Jennifer: Okay! So let’s even get more specific here. What would be some of your favorite carbohydrate sources then that you would recommend to your patients?

Dr. Christianson: Easy thing! The best carbs have the most fiber and the most types of fiber. We’ve got soluble, insoluble and resistant. And the worst carbs have the most fructose.

With that perspective, beans and legumes are just incredible in terms of the fiber load and the delay of digestion. And also, there are really incredible things they do to your bacterial flora. Your body weight is all about your bacterial flora. The types of fibers unique to beans are just powerful for giving you the best flora.

Jennifer: This is so interesting because I’ve interviewed so many people in the last year that are Paleo. They don’t eat beans and yours is on the total opposite end of things. I love it!

Dr. Christianson: If you’re eating beans, there’s a thing called phytic acid. And phytic acid is also called the inositol hexaphosphate. Right now, there’s Phase I clinical trials going on about this stuff as a factor or agent against colorectal cancer.

We’ve got scores of studies showing that with the highest bean intake, you’ve got the lowest risk of colorectal, breast and lung cancer. And also the least diabetes and the least heart disease in Mediterranean diets and also the traditional Asian diets which have shown the greatest levels of health, the greatest amounts of longevity and also the best body weights for millennia.

Jennifer: Wow! That’s really fascinating that they’re doing that kind of work. Science is so amazing. It really is!

Dr. Christianson: For sure!

Jennifer: I want to ask you then how does these all play into your adrenals because I think a lot of women don’t fully understand why they are so tired. They wake up in the morning, they’re exhausted. They try to go to bed at night and they feel like their mind won’t shut up. It’s spinning in circles, thinking about everything that they did. How does this relate to your adrenal glands?

Dr. Christianson: Yeah, good question. When you’ve got a nice flow of cortisol, you wake up alert and energized, you go to sleep, your brain shuts off and you burn your body fat for fuel throughout the day.

When the adrenal rhythm is not working right, it’s all the opposite. Your energy is erratic. You always need sweets or caffeine to boost you up or alcohol to calm you down at night. You can’t sleep well and your body is just storing all of it. That’s all about the cortisol cycle because it’s a storage one.

Jennifer: And for the adrenals to get back on track once they’ve been depleted, what should someone do? Is this something that you recommend people just take into their own hands. Obviously, your book is a great resource for them. But my personal concern – I did end up with adrenal fatigue many years ago and my concern is that a lot of times, people will start tinkering with their own hormones, which I don’t necessarily think is a good idea. But you’re the expert. What do you think? What should people do if they believe that their adrenals are kind of pooped?

Dr. Christianson: Well, there’s disease and there’s dysfunction. Adrenal disease is rather rare. That’s things like Addison’s and Cushing’s. You’re right! Those are medical conditions that requires supervision. I manage those diseases. They’re complicated.

Adrenal dysfunction is very common. It affects many. We did a clinical trial showing that just with a simple diet, you can fix it even if it’s off by a lot. Just by timing carbs in a strategic fashion, you can fix it and get it back on track again.

Jennifer: And how would somebody know though that they were in adrenal dysfunction?

Dr. Christianson: Great question! Also, there are different levels of adrenal dysfunction. Simple thing! AdrenalQuiz.com, there’s a free quiz you can do and there’s nothing you’re tied to. It tells you whether or not your adrenals are healthy. And if they’re off, you’ll learn whether they’re stressed, you’re tired or tired or crashed and also, some simple strategies you can do using light and timing and rhythm and food to get them back on track again.

Jennifer: Do you think that supplements play a key role in improving the quality of the adrenal function?

Dr. Christianson: I like adaptogens. They’re not the big needle movers. We did a clinical trial and it showed that really the diet, just being on good foods, made the difference. And in the diet in the clinical trial I did, I took everybody off of gluten. There are so many concerns with it that are medical in so many ways which is just tied up with processed foods. So that was one big step.

But the other big part of it is being strategic about carbs, about not going crazy on bad carbs, but be very specific about good ones at the right times. We showed that in 30 days, we could move the adrenal rhythm back to balance, whichever way it’s off by more than 50%.

Jennifer: You have brought up a really great point that makes me think of several women who I’ve heard from the last few days. They’ve acknowledged that they have gluten sensitivity, but not Celiac Disease. And yet, as a result, they think it’s okay to cheat once a week and eat gluten and that it has no effect on their energy, on their overall health.

What is your feeling as far as from an adrenal point? If you’re consuming something that you’re sensitive to, can that affect your adrenals?

Dr. Christianson: It certainly can. And it’s all a matter of resiliency. If your health is exactly where you want it, you’ve got a little more latitude on things like that and you’ve got more resiliency in place. But if it’s not, if there are things you want to improve, then you need to really give yourself, your body circumstances even better than what might be needed for maintenance to let yourself really heal and repair.

Jennifer: Last question. I think this has been a great basic conversation about how carbs affect the body. What are maybe two or three points that you can share with the audience of where they can begin today as far as changing their relationship with carbs and eating carbs in such a way – you did already mention the breakfast and having a higher protein breakfast. What are a couple of other things they can do to help support their adrenals?

Dr. Christianson: As far as the carbs go, really getting good quantities in the evening and looking at good types. One of my very single favorites would be adzuki beans.

Now, beans and legumes, if someone has been off of them, your flora shifts in bad ways and your flora becomes less able to digest them. So if you do a ton, you could have gas. No surprise. So it doesn’t mean you can’t eat them. It means you want to reintroduce them gently.

I encourage a tablespoon a day for two weeks. That’s enough to get your good bacteroidetes flora strong and resilient again, so they can keep you lean and help to digest the beans effectively.

But the adzuki beans are the highest food source known in magnesium. They’re also one of the slowest burning types of carbohydrates and they’re considered adaptogens and tonics for the kidneys and the adrenals. And they taste good too. It’s so awesome when foods can do a lot of good things like that.

Jennifer: They do! And I’ve actually used them in place of black beans in Mexican food and all sorts of things. So they’re beans that you can flavor quite easily, which is great.

Dr. Alan: Yeah! Well, thank you so much for sharing all of these information with us. We’ll definitely keep our eyes out. I would highly encourage everyone to check out your book, which is, as I’ve said, a New York Times’ bestseller, The Adrenal Reset Diet.

Dr. Christianson: So here’s a quick option. There’s actually a free cookbook with a ton of recipes. It gives you some ideas of the book too. That’s at AdrenalResetDiet.com.

Jennifer: Oh, that’s great!

Dr. Christianson: You can just download that, it has 60 recipes, and get a tons of ideas about it.

Jennifer: Great! That’ll be wonderful to share.

I really appreciate your time in sharing all these information with us. I hope you’ll be able to come back some time and we can talk a little bit more about adrenal health.

Dr. Christianson: I would love to! Thanks for having me, Jennifer.

Jennifer: You’re very welcome. Everyone, please stay in touch with Dr. Christianson. You can find him on the web at DrChristianson.com, as well as his facility that he practices at called IntegrativeHealthCare.com. He’s on Facebook, Twitter and a bunch of other platforms.

I’ll put everything below including all the links that he shared with me as well as the link to his book, The Adrenal Reset Diet, so that you can go and get yourself a copy.

I really appreciate you checking out this podcast. I hope that all the information that we’ve shared today is very beneficial to you. I look forward to seeing you the next time. Bye bye! 

Get Your Copy of The Adrenal Reset Diet now –> CLICK HERE

Dr. Christianson’s website –DrChristianson.com and IntegrativeHealthCare.com

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/DrAlanChristianson

Twitter – https://twitter.com/alannmd

The post Are Carbs Bad For You? (The Answer Will Surprise You) with Dr. Alan Christianson: GFS Podcast 070 appeared first on Jennifer Fugo, CNS.

I thought that MSG was something only found in Chinese food, but apparently it’s found all throughout processed food products including those that are gluten free. This reality floored me because I honestly didn’t know very much about MSG other than it can make you feel awful if you’re sensitive to it and that it’s best to avoid. Turns out that few people have realize that MSG is present in their “healthy” food products, and once you’ve pinpointed the problem spots, removing MSG from your diet can provide massive health benefits.

If you’ve felt better after removing gluten (and casein) from your diet, listen up because there’s a connection to MSG that I never understood before now and I just had to share this with you! My guest on today’s podcast is a brilliant woman who has transformed the health of her daughter (and herself) by removing MSG. Through researching the effects of MSG, she found learned of MSG’s ability to exacerbate autoimmune conditions and much more. This podcast is not just something to check out for yourself — it’s a must share regardless of whether your friends and family are gluten-free.

CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe through iTunes!!!

Jennifer: Welcome back to the Gluten Free School Podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Fugo. And today, we’re going to talk about a topic we have not touched on before, specifically MSG.

Many of us know about it, we’ve maybe heard of it, maybe you believe that it’s really not good for you. But I found a woman who is not only absolutely brilliant, but she is going to explain to all of us why we need to be so concerned about MSG and how it can cause major problems for our health – not just for us, but also for our kids. And maybe if you’ve got grandkids, them too. So this is great information, not only to take them for yourself, but also to share.

Katherine Reid, PhD is the executive director and founder of Unblind My Mind, a non-profit that educates on the links between the food we eat and the chronic illnesses we suffer. Katherine has a PhD in biochemistry with over 20 year experience in biotechnology and molecular diagnostics, training that would find her ideally suited to tackle her most challenging scientific endeavor.

In 2006, she became aware that her youngest child had autism. Through her research, Katherine determined that certain foods common in the western diet were associated with her daughter’s autistic behaviors. Seeing the profound effect of diet on the brain, with many of her clients she’s become a provocateur, questioning medical approaches and food manufacturing practices related to health. Katherine provides the missing link that many search for in managing or restoring health through diet.

Recently, Katherine has presented two TEDx talks, spoke at Curando El Autismo Conference in Puerto Rico, Transform Your Health Summit, and has provided local lectures at schools, local functions and the Unblind My Mind organized conference. She’s been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fox News and New York Daily News along with various radio shows, blogs and podcast. Her website is UnblindMyMind.org. Dr. Reid, welcome to the podcast.

Katherine: Thank you for having me and thank you for the introduction.

Jennifer: You’re welcome! I watched your TEDx talk. That’s how I tracked you down and invited you to be here. And actually, believe it or not, it was one of the podcast listeners that sent me an email suggesting I watch your TEDx talk.

Why don’t you share with everyone a little bit about your journey on why MSG became such a big deal to you.

Katherine: Yes, yes. Like your introduction, I really didn’t focus on the food and associations to health really until my youngest child was diagnosed with autism. The scientist in me started researching brain chemistry, neurological chemistry, immunological activation, inflammation, and really wanting to understand the mechanisms that can either benefit or be deleterious to these big systems.

I started focusing more and more on diet and thinking, “Well, is she getting enough nutrients for optimal brain function?” But there wasn’t a lot of scientific research on the dietary studies in autism and so, I just started on taking this journey.

But I found a lot of parents, parenting children with autism, saying that they saw some improvements with the gluten free, casein free diet. Gluten free is obviously very familiar with your audience, and then casein is the protein found in milks.

And while people weren’t claiming they cured their child, it was clear that the majority were seeing some improvements. And so I went down that road of removing all the gluten and casein products in the diet. I also went on this journey with my daughter so that she would feel that there was company, she wasn’t isolated. And because she’s the youngest of five children, I couldn’t get all the kids to participate, so at this point it was just her and me that were on this food journey.

I did see improvements in her behavior. While she is still considered autistic, I became really curious what’s the connection between gluten and casein that so many are starting to see improvements.

I started to dive – and this is my scientific background – really looking at the proteins of gluten and casein. I discovered that the amino acid (that’s the building blocks of proteins), the majority is glutamate, which is an amino acid found in all proteins. But in gluten and casein it comprises over 25% of the protein, which is unusually high. Typically, it’s about 5% to 10% glutamate amino acid in a protein.

When I started to really dive in to the food manufacturing processes, I realized that there is an entire science behind trying to enrich these gluten/casein food for free glutamate. That means it’s breaking apart the protein peptide bonds and creating free glutamate, which we know in our foods as monosodium glutamate or MSG.

A light bulb went off like, “Wow! I wonder if the removal of gluten and casein is more about reducing the MSG load, and that’s why people are seeing some improvements.” But because those aren’t the only source of MSG in the diet, people were just seeing improvements rather than more drastic reduction in symptoms. 

And so I started to scientifically search this literature about whether or not there was an association between autism and MSG or glutamate. And I honestly felt like I hit the mother lode.

And we were not just talking about autism, but there are all sorts of chronic inflammation, chronic immune activation such as autoimmune diseases, late onset disease like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Even diabetes is now linked to glutamate and MSG consumption.

Not only is this possible, we have what’s called a glutamatergic dysregulation epidemic, meaning that the population is demonstrating the inability to regulate glutamate at balanced levels and it’s an epidemic in modern population.

And so like I said, from Alzheimer’s to early onset diseases like autoimmune diseases, ADHD, autism, a lot of mood disorders can be more early onset.

And so, I really started diving in to the science and decided, “Okay, I’m going to try an experiment here. I’m going to try to remove all the enriched and fortified sources of free glutamate and determine whether or not that would benefit my daughter’s condition.”

And again I went on this experiment with her. Now, at first I received strong protests from my husband because I was about to remove all comfort foods from the house. 

Jennifer: I can only imagine.

Katherine: And honestly, this went way beyond my scientist degree! I had to become a detective because I realized that our food labels are extremely inadequate with providing the consumer enough information to determine what contains free glutamate. And so you really have to go one step removed and actually look at how is the food processed to make that ingredient that then goes in the food.

I decided to try the experiment and determine what would happen if we removed all this enriched and fortified sources of free glutamate that were so pervasive in our supplies. I went on this journey with her. And my daughter is no longer considered autistic. She went from moderate on the spectrum requiring special needs to –

The behavioral dysfunction was causing a family crisis. It was really challenging to figure out how to manage behaviors. All of those went away and she is now the most social child out of the entire family. She no longer requires any assistance for learning. She’s in mainstream second grade right now and doing great health wise.

And myself, I got rid of 40 years of pollen allergies that I suffered with for years. Two months out of every single year, it seemed like I was just sick. I just constantly had headaches and runny nose, all from these pollen allergies, and that completely went away.

Jennifer: Wow! So it makes sense that that whole cleaning out process would have these amazing effects that people feel in a sense of waking up from a fog.

Katherine: Exactly, and obviously, with the engineering of food, the additives are much more than just the enriched sources of free glutamate. But what I do think is that these engineered foods are absolutely increasing inflammation and MSG. Glutamate is absolutely associated with activating the immune response and activating inflammation.

And so when I started to look at the pathways of what was going on with excess glutamate I I began to understand the underlying mechanisms of why did I see such improvements with such a wide variety of different conditions.

But the Paleo and the GAPS and the Atkins, all of these transitions in diets, and even gluten and casein free or gluten-free, you’re removing significant sources of MSG.

When you say gluten-free, you’re moving towards whole foods. I’m also seeing a gluten-free diet where you can start going to more processed gluten-free options and what they’ve done is they’ve enriched for free glutamate to make it taste good because guess how they used to make MSG before they found cheaper ways? They used to take gluten and hydrolyze it or break apart that protein to free the glutamate. That’s how it used to be manufactured. So, they just now add it to these gluten-free products so that people are still getting addicted to these products.

Jennifer: Now, I would assume that those products are not blatantly writing, “Oh, we have MSG in here.”

Katherine: No, no. And that’s the whole purpose of why I started Unblind My Mind, it’s because it really is not widely known that all of these ingredients are really enriching for free glutamate.

In fact, MSG is probably labeled one percent of the time, and less than that I would say, when the food actually contains it. And it’s because food manufacturers are not required to out the final amount of products.

So, if you take a protein, for example, and you put it through extensive fermentation practices where they selected the fermentation conditions to enrich for free glutamate – and that’s exactly what they’re doing – they’re not required to label the byproducts of that fermentation. All they need to do is label protein.

So when I’m talking to people and raising awareness, it’s not only about the education, it really is almost like helping them wean off the addiction and opening up their palates to real whole foods, nutrient-rich foods so they can start to restore health.

Jennifer: So how can someone even begin to find MSG if you’re saying it’s not labeled and they’re not really required – are they not required to label MSG on foods?

Katherine: The way the FDA regulation is that if they added the pure MSG ingredient as a raw ingredient, they’re required to label it. So in order to avoid this, the loophole is that, “Well, I’m not going to add the pure MSG substance. I’m going to create it in my manufacturing of the food and the byproducts are not required to be labeled. So I can take, let’s say, gluten, and I can ferment the heck out of it with all of these yeast cultures and enrich the free glutamate through the actual conditions of my manufacturing practice and I don’t need to label the free glutamate in there at all.”

Jennifer: Wow! So then I guess the question is how do we even begin to look for this because from what you’re saying, it sounds that food companies are hoping that we don’t recognize what it is that we’re eating? All these advocates for, “I don’t need MSG,” – I always think MSG, I think Chinese food.

Katherine: Exactly!

Jennifer: I do! Many of us have heard that thing. You go to the Chinese restaurant and say, “Oh, is your food MSG free.” I think a lot of restaurant had gotten better about it, because there’s been that outcry of not wanting to consume it. But here, what you’re saying is that food manufacturers got smart and started to hide it.

Katherine: Yeah, not only did they get smart, they have become incredibly powerful. So when I recently watched the documentary Fed Up, which is all about the sugar industry and how much the food industry really is powerful, that same message could have been written about the glutamate industry.

The International Technical Glutamate Community was formed right after they’re starting to begin research about the association of MSG and brain lesions. And this International Technical Glutamate Community started to receive money from food industries that have a vested interest in keeping the food additives in their foods. And now that industry – I mean, it’s a trillion dollar industry. It had over 50 different committees formed under this, what they call ‘consulting company’ that’s actually was owned by Monsanto.

And so there are 50 different committees under there. Each of these committees send a representative to the World Health Organization Codex that establishes the standards of what’s considered a safe additive and the labeling practices required.

There’s not an equal representation of the public interest there at all. And so not only have they gotten smart about labeling the foods, they have really become influential and powerful about how to keep it that way.

Jennifer: What are we going to start looking for? I mean, all the women that are listening to this (and the men too, the wonderful guys that listen in as well), what should we start to look for in gluten-free foods that we might not suspect is really MSG, but would be?

Katherine: Yeah, and one of my hypothesis starting out initially was that the wide range of benefits the people were seeing in the autism population with going gluten-free and casein free was what they were replacing those foods with. If they’re replacing them with whole foods like vegetables and fruits and nuts and seeds and such, the improvement was slightly better than if they were replacing it with processed foods.

Where you start to get into a lot of challenge is when you have to read labels of prepackaged foods. I have a list on my website that contains all of the ingredients or list of ingredients that contain free glutamate.

Jennifer: You do it! And I will tell you, it’s a really great list and everybody should go get this. It is a really great list. I’m looking at it now. If you go to UnblindMyMind.org and scroll down a little bit, Dr. Reid has a link to that list and also, her sign up box. So definitely make sure to sign up for her newsletter. But this is a great list!

Katherine: The big offenders are the processed proteins. Any time you see a soy protein concentrate or rice bran protein, any of these isolated proteins, I would start to be suspicious right there. When you start to isolate and enrich for protein, you think, “Now they have the opportunity through their manufacturing processes to enrich the free glutamate.”

It is funny when, like you said, you go to a Chinese restaurant and they say we don’t have MSG and yet they have soy sauce on the table.  “Oh yeah, sure you have no MSG.”

Fermented soy, the reason why it tastes so good in our palate is it has free glutamate. It’s a fermented soy product. Even vegans, when they think they’re being so healthy, they’ve got all these processed soy products like tofu and tempeh and fermented soy sauce in their diet that are really high in MSG.

And so, it’s amazing when people say, “Gosh! I thought I was being so healthy,” and certainly I started out that way too, thinking I was being so healthy until I unblinded my mind.

Jennifer: I’m curious. You have reduced fat milk, skimmed one percent and two percent on your list. And I personally cannot stand milk. It is revolting to me. I’m sorry to all you milk lovers out there, but I don’t understand how people continue to drink it once you know what it is and how processed it is and such. But how exactly did that end up on your list of things with MSG?

Katherine: Like I said, the casein protein has 30% glutamate as part of its protein structure. Raw milk is fine and has very low levels of free glutamate. That low level of free glutamate serves to signal, neurologically signal the body to prepare for protein coming down the digestive tract and the brain receives signals to expect protein, which is a required nutrient and energy source in our body.

But when you start to process it through the de-fattening process, and the fermentations used in yogurt – I mean, when I started looking into the cheese manufacturing processes and what degree of effort they put to enrich and fortify for free glutamate, I was like, “Oh, my goodness! No wonder why cheese tastes so fantastic.”

Jennifer: It’s usually the hardest thing for vegans to give up. Now, another two that are on your list – and I just want to ask because I have written articles about them on my website and I have asked another podcast guest, Melanie Warner. I had her on last year actually. She talked about food scientists and what they do and how they make up foods from powders and all sorts of weird things and engineering food. It was so strange.

We talked a little bit about xanthan gum and carrageenan. So is it pretty much a guarantee, if we see either of those two, which tend to being gluten products, if you see either of those two should you think, “Uh-oh, this product probably has MSG in it.”?

Katherine: Yeah, the xanthan gum is funny because I have received a couple of emails from food manufacturers saying, “Where is the evidence that xanthan gum contains free glutamate?” And so, I sent them a 37-page manufacturing protocol on xanthan gum where they were adding glutamate to the fermentation feed for the nitrogen source of the bacteria cultures that were being used. When you look at the final nitrogen content, the only nitrogen source was glutamate. And so all of that nitrogen is equal to that glutamate content in that food.

So while it may be one to two percent of xanthan gum and the xanthan gum itself is only added one to two percent, what happens is it’s developed a total load in your diet.

So, if you had one single cheat food that had xanthan gum in it, it likely wouldn’t cause too much of an issue if you’re not that sensitive, but if you’ve got – citric acid is another one on the list. Citric acid and xanthan gum are pretty pervasive across the medicines and beverages, and foods that the total load starts to add up until the small amounts in each particular food just creates a high MSG load. But like I said, the biggest offenders are definitely the processed proteins.

Jennifer: My audience for sure is really interested in supplements and herbs. So for you to mention that there can be MSG in supplements I think is probably going to shock everyone.

Is there a way to know aside from looking at these labels that just say vitamin A, vitamin D? They don’t always tell you what is in your supplements. How do you know how to find an MSG free supplement?”

Katherine: Yeah, particularly foods that say “enriched with vitamin D.” That’s a red flag because they are not required to label where they got their vitamins. They’re probably supplementing it or enriching it with the cheapest source and it’s bound to be containing free glutamate.

Jennifer: I was just going to ask those too. In addition to that, what about with our gut flora, does this have an effect on that? I’m thinking to myself, “We’re ingesting all these chemicals and these weird engineered proteins, does this affect the digestive system at all?”

Katherine: Oh, absolutely! In fact, I definitely probably have spent the last year and a half on microflora metabolism and exactly how their metabolism changes with respect to environment, the foods we’re feeding them, so absolutely. You can actually have an overgrowth of a particular species and supplements could actually be feeding that microflora to more overgrowth.

But the whole glutamate story with the micro flora is actually fascinating. The microflora are adaptive. And so whatever the environment is in your gut, the microflora going to adapt to that environment. And if you have a bunch of engineered processed foods that have simple sugars and simple amino acids widely available for them to consume in their metabolism, they will. And they have the ability to keep you addicted to those foods because they can release signals to our neurological system that keeps us feeding that addiction. So they contribute to addictions too.

Jennifer: And what I was going to say then, because this sounds like anyone, in a sense, can be sensitive to MSG then. It just would vary to what degree? Am I wrong in that assumption or headed in the right direction?

Katherine: Oh, absolutely. I do think it’s ironic. When I’m working with people saying, “I’m not sensitive to MSG,” and then the next statement, they’ll say, “I’ve been having a lot of anxiety and sleeplessness,” I’m just like, “That’s MSG.”

People don’t understand how widely variable – because like I said, over 50% of our neurological system is stimulated by glutamate.

We need glutamate in our system to help regulate signaling between our neurological system, our immunological system and metabolic function. But when you exacerbate it by adding a lot of external glutamate, you’re actually sending a stress signal that further helps cascade the inflammation or stress signal throughout the body.

Jennifer: Wow! This is wild. Well, you know what? I want to leave everybody with something positive because I think they’re going to walk away from this going, “My head’s going to explode, I don’t know what to do,” I think the first thing to focus on here is to eat real food, that is number one.

And number two, depending on where you are on your journey, being gluten-free. If you are still eating products, I think it would behoove you – not to continue to push you guys to get this list, but I would highly recommend to go to UnblindMyMind.org, get her list and look all at the information that Dr. Reid has compiled. As I was looking at it even, I was like, “Oh, wow! Yes, I’ve seen that on food. I’ve seen that.” So it is very helpful.

Is there anything else, Dr. Reid, that you could leave us with? Something positive perhaps after listening to all of this is really great information, but I just want to give the audience a couple of takeaways that they could leave with and say, “Okay, I can do something about this.”

Katherine: Yeah, I think the realization that it just isn’t worth the time to try to decipher all these ingredient labels because their manufacturing processes are obscure. I would email the food manufacturers and ask them, “You’ve got natural flavors in there. Can you please let me know whether there is free glutamate in there or what exactly is in there?” Often, I would get a response that “it is proprietary.” And like you said, there is nothing proprietary about what goes in our body. If they’re not willing to reveal it, I think we need to absolutely act.

But I found that the more that I just went to whole foods, it wasn’t so time consuming. It really is about establishing a routine, making fresh foods out of whole food ingredients and really starting to appreciate the taste of real whole foods.

And it isn’t much more time. I think that’s a myth where people think, “Oh, I just don’t have the time.” Honestly, some of my easiest meals, when I pack my daughters snack, it’s like cashews, carrots, sliced apples. And I can make it all raw foods and she loves it. And so that’s really easy.

Jennifer: You also do consulting for people that are interested in getting some help around this for their families.

Katherine: Yeah, we offer email support. People, as they go through their journey, honestly, I’ve had people shooting pictures from the grocery store saying, “what about this? what about this?”, just to help guide people into the transition because it may seem daunting at first. But like I said, once you’ve establish the habits and the routine, it actually is fairly easy to adapt to. It’s just daunting potentially at first.

I also do consultations over Skype and/or with group settings or individuals just to help to guide people for the transitions.

Jennifer: Well, I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing all of these because wow! It’s a total eye-opener, its shocking. And in the same respect, by learning this information and being more cognizant of it in the food we choose to eat, we can then take back more power over our diets, over our health and what-not.

Katherine: Yes, yes. Well, thank you for having me on the show and helping spread the message because I do I feel like we would all, as a population, would benefit with less health issues not just from the healthcare cost (that is a huge factor), but happy, healthy people are better to interact with.

Jennifer: Absolutely, absolutely. I love that point.

Everyone please go to UnblindMyMind.org. Please follow Dr. Reid. She is brilliant. I’ll definitely make sure I’ll post up both of her TEDx talks. I will make sure that there are links, so that you can share them and hopefully, we’ll inspire some other people in our lives to also see the value in caring about MSG and getting to know Dr. Reid’s work further as well so they can improve their health.

Now, remember to subscribe, rate and review this podcast and head over to Gluten Free School. Leave your questions, your comments. If you have a personal story or experience with MSG or removing it, we’d love to hear it. Leave those comments below.

I just want to thank you so much for being the readers and the listeners that you are because we both have the transcripts and we have the audio and you all have showed up consistently. We’ve grown our listenership so much in the last year. It’s just been incredibly astonishing. We look forward to bringing more amazing guests

And please, as is the case with Dr. Reid, if you have a suggestion of someone else you feel has really got a great message to share, email us, let us know and we’ll reach out.

Thank you, again, Dr. Reid. We really appreciate you coming on. We’ll see everybody coming soon. Take care!

Katherine’s website – https://unblindmymind.org/

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/UnblindMyMind

Twitter – https://twitter.com/UnblindMyMind

Pinterest – https://www.pinterest.com/unblindmymind/

The post Why Removing MSG From Your Diet Can Dramatically Improve Your Health with Katherine Reid, PhD: GFS Podcast 069 appeared first on Jennifer Fugo, CNS.

Do you ever feel like a total black sheep when it comes to your health? Getting picked on and teased by family, friends or coworkers who don’t get your dietary or lifestyle choices is by no means fun and at time undermine your commitment to being healthy. It’s normal to want to feel normal and accepted except for one small, critical detail – being “normal” these days unfortunately means being sick (to some degree). Here at Gluten Free School, we believe that being healthy is the new black, so to speak!

I’m here to help inspire and empower you to making better choices that support your health goals and lifestyle because your health is so precious and it deserves your undivided loyalty. Today’s guest on the podcast is a true health revolutionary who is tirelessly working to reframe how we experience and work toward our own best health. I seriously loved this conversation and everyone who had the opportunity to preview it noted that it was one of the best chats out of all of the GFS podcast episodes. Enjoy!

CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe through iTunes!!!

Jennifer: Hi everyone and welcome to the Gluten Free School Podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Fugo. Today, let’s talk about how to get healthy and thrive.

There are so many factors in our world and in our lifestyles that undermine our ability to seek out and nail down a level of healthiness in our lives that many of us dream about. We have good intentions to get there, and yet so much of the world around us is incredibly unhealthy. Today I have a great guest!

Her name is Pilar Gerasimo. She’s the founding editor of Experience Life, an award winning magazine dedicated to helping its three million readers live their healthiest, happiest and most authentic lives. She also serves as Senior Vice President of Healthy Living for Lifetime Fitness and briefly served as the Huffington Post executive editor of Healthy Living.

Pilar’s passion is integrating and sharing the best tools and wisdom she has discovered over the course of her career as a journalist and advocate for healthy change. Her work has received kudos from respected experts like Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Frank Lipman, Dr. Aviva Romm, Dr. Sara Gottfried and Queen Rania of Jordan. Pilar appears regularly on radio and TV, and enjoys teaching at retreat centers such as Omega Institute and Rancho La Puerta.

Her popular Revolutionary Acts column is regularly featured blog at Huffington Post. Her 101 Revolutionary Ways to be Healthy (now available as a free mobile app) has gotten more than half a million like and more than a hundred and eighty thousand downloads. A Fulbright Scholar, Pilar holds a BA with honors in Comparative Literature from Mills College. And she lives with her three legged pit-bull on an organic cooperative farm in Wisconsin.

Pilar, welcome to the podcast!

Pilar: Thank you so much Jennifer, I am really thrilled to be with you.

Jennifer: I am really excited to have you here.

Any time I see the word “revolution” or “revolutionary,” especially when it has something to do with your health, that is right up my alley. I think that’s what a lot of women are doing when they take the reins back. When you want to get back in control or be in the driver seat, that’s a revolutionary thing because it totally changes your life and your health.

I know you’re gluten free and you’ve been for quite a long time. How did you end up here, with where you took back control over your life and your health?

Pilar: My healthy living journey really began when I discovered that I had gluten intolerance. My father, who is now 85, is gluten intolerant and he could never eat bread, pasta, or pizza because it makes him sick. I thought, “Oh, poor dad. That’s too bad!” and I went through my life eating wheat and gluten with impunity until I went to France.

I went to France actually to do the Fulbright. I was living in the most bread heavy experience you can possibly have, eating a ton of bread. I was very stressed out. I think the combination triggered what turned out to be a latent single nucleotide polymorphism gene that is associated with Celiac. The gene is called DQ2, I believe.  I got this from my father. And once that gene was switched on, I became extremely gluten intolerant.

I was initially diagnosed interestingly by a chiropractor who just recognized all of the symptoms that I was having and actually could feel the inflammation in my spinal cord and said, “You know, you might have a problem with this, you should go off of it and see how you do.” It was amazing. Within about five days of being gluten free, I felt and looked like a different person.

And from that time, that was about 25 years ago, I’ve observed a mostly gluten free diet and have been much happier for that.

I’ve recently –in 2013 –finally got my genetic stuff tested and it found out that I had this gene.  But before that, it was purely my own experience and experimenting that confirmed it for me. But what was interesting is that when I started choosing gluten free things – and 25 years ago, there wasn’t lot out there. I realized that the pervasive offerings at almost every buffet and every work luncheon at every restaurant were packed with gluten, as well as a lot of other things that I was trying to avoid like processed flours, sugars and high fructose corn syrup and trans fats and artificial flavors and colors. 

And that was the beginning of my realization that in order to love the way I want to live and have the health and vitality that I wanted to have, I had to go against all of the norm that I was being presented with and make really fairly inconvenient and unconventional choices in order to achieve my personal healthy living goals.

So that was sort of the beginning of my realization. I didn’t have the notion that being healthy was revolutionary at that time, but I think that’s when the idea started. And in some ways, when my idea for the magazine experience life got its start too.

Jennifer: Let’s talk about what that means to be revolutionary. In my own story, which sounds kind of similar to yours where you just don’t really feel well (and unfortunately, I don’t have any genetic testing yet to back up my own gluten sensitivity), but the one thing that I can say is that it caused me to reevaluate my relationship with myself and the level of respect that I had for my health and my body and my diet. And really, it’s so interesting how food completely changes everything.

When you have to as you said “make inconvenient choices” as you’re traveling here and there, especially living in France since it’s not convenient to be gluten free. It’s amazing when you’re willing to go that far, when you’re willing to do what’s best for you, how something inside of you changes and the choice becomes so much more than just, “Oh, I eat this particular way”.

Can you talk to us a little bit about what you’ve discovered as far as being revolutionary in regards to just the food? It all starts with food. I think Michael Pollan said that, it all starts with food and it really does.

Pilar: It absolutely does. And it’s interesting because socially, the revolutionary part is in some ways harder than technically getting at the food that you want. It’s being surrounded in many cases by your family and your friends and their social manners when you don’t want to be inconvenient to people and say, “Oh, I need to get this and not that.” There’s a whole meme now about gluten free people as a total pain in the butt, right?

Jennifer: Yes.

Pilar: You’ve probably seen that viral video that’s going around.

Jennifer: I have.

Pilar: I think it’s kind of funny. I can laugh at that. But when I started having to make these choices, it was out of determination that I do not want to live my life as an ill person. I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to be living my life at my most energetic best. To me, it was a no brainer. I have a choice over what I want to put in my body and I am not going to suffer the miseries and indignities that I have to experience.

Just because it’s inconvenient for other people, I didn’t want to think I’m weird. And I think in some ways, deciding to put myself first was, for me, kind of a feminist act in some ways of realizing, “You don’t have a right to my health and my happiness and my personal freedom.” There’s no reason I shouldn’t be as empowered as I can be. I’m going to show up in my life with my best intelligence, with my best energy and make my best contributions to the world if I’m in good health.

I think that attitude gave me an incredible amount of personal power and willingness to confront the social manners and norms that were working against me.

I think for me too, it also took a little bit of getting mad. I mean, I was really frustrated at how the advice I was reading in conventional health and fitness magazines was so cookie cutter and never really wanted to talk about the ways that processed food were working against my health because all of the advertising in those magazines was supporting those product lines. It was fat-free crackers and sugar-free cookies, and things that would – inevitably, gluten free or not – make me incredibly sick over time.

I was like “Wait a minute! How is this working? These companies want my money. The magazines that are supposed to be serving my interest as a reader want the money from the advertisers. They’re all in cahoots to promote a way of life and a way of eating that is working against my best interest.” It’s like, “Hey! I’m fed up! I don’t want to take this anymore.” I really had to turn away from a lot of the media messages that were very influential at the time. Conventional women’s magazines were full of dietary advice that was terrible, not just for the gluten intolerant, but for any health seeker.

I think that is one of the interesting things about the awareness that people are getting now, how profoundly food intolerance (whether they’re gluten or dairy or anything) affects their health. It becomes a kind of rallying cry.

It’s not just about whether or not you have six pack abs or fit into your skinny jeans anymore. This is like your body and health at stake for the rest of your life. And if you want to stand up for something, I think that is a pretty worthwhile thing to stand up for.

And as far as the food goes, it’s interesting because food is so charged. Like I said, the social and cultural connections with food make it harder in some ways to make revolutionary choices around that than it does, say, about exercise. No one’s going to tell you you’re out of your mind if you decide you want to take a run around the block or you decide you want to take a Zumba class. But if you suddenly start making tweaks to your diet that works against the norms that societies has set up, boy, people really get involved and in your face about that.

And I think that there’s whole movement now, loosely called the skeptic or the “science-based movement” that has gone super aggressive and pro-gluten and is making it sound like anybody but a purely Celiac Disease suffering person who chooses gluten free lifestyle is crazy. They’re out of their minds. They have no science behind them.

I think it’s really helpful now that there is some science coming out. It doesn’t feel as quite as crazy revolutionary to be able to defend these choices.

There was a new study that was published in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology that was really about how even little amounts of gluten in non-Celiac, gluten sensitive person caused real problems. And this was a randomized, double blind, placebo controlled trial. But prior to these studies coming out, I was living this way for almost 20 years and people would just look at me like I had two heads when I said I had a gluten problem for the first ten of those years.

And you know what, at some point I just got very comfortable with it in my own skin. And I’m like, “Yup! This is what works for me. This is something that apparently runs in my family. But even if it didn’t, I know how I feel, I know my own body.” I never had to feel super defensive about it. It was just something I knew to be true of me. I trusted my body more than I trusted the social norms of the time.

Jennifer: And I will add to that I come from a family wherein my father’s a physician. I used to travel with him to medical trade shows plastered left and right with drug companies. The whole thing is funded by drug companies. So are all of the journals and, like you said, even with women’s fitness and men’s health magazines! They are funded by all these food companies. Well, medical journals are funded by drug companies and surgical device companies. They’re not funded by food.

Pilar: It’s interesting, Jennifer. It’s funny that you should say that because actually a lot of health magazines are also funded by pharmaceutical companies. We don’t take any pharmaceutical ads in Experience Life magazine. We don’t take ads for pharmaceutical drugs or interventions, but most of our competitors, all of the other conventional health and fitness magazine that you see in the newsstand… well, it’s hard to go ten pages without running across a pharmaceutical ad and they’re usually four pages long because they have all those side effects to list, right? 

Guess what, four national page ads in a big national magazine cost a fortune! And there aren’t that many companies that can afford to put that much money into advertising within this many titles. But pharmaceutical companies do and can and it often really pollutes the message of what otherwise would be focused on healthy living messages. It gets taken up by these other messages.

And I think we become very afraid to suggest that you should avoid as many of these pharmaceutical drugs as you can reasonably understanding that some of them are very necessary for some people. It just creates a whole mindset that I call the “fix me” mindset. Whatever is wrong with you, your gut is aching, your skin is rashing and bumping out, you’ve got brain fog, there’s a drug for that. Why feel that you have to change your diet when you could take these three pills on a daily basis?

We say being healthy is a revolutionary act, again, not just because it requires these practical revolutionary choices, but because it requires a somewhat cynical mindset, an empowered mindset and a determined mindset that is inherently very revolutionary.

Jennifer: I’m at peace with being gluten free. In fact, I love being gluten free. Everything cooked in my home is gluten free. I have guests over who are not gluten free and no one ever says a bad word. They ask for every recipe and they want to know how I made this and how can they get the recipe and what-not.

To me, it’s a shame that we’re looking for ways to skirt around the issue that we don’t want to be proud of this lifestyle and diet.

I want you to talk a little bit about this idea “delighting in being a deviant” because I think the thought is part of this. It’s like, “It’s okay to be who we are.”

Pilar: Yeah. Well, you know, it’s so interesting because I love the idea of deviancy. It has always sort of appealed to me. My father was an anthropologist, sociologist and often talked about that deviance is really in the eye of the beholder. Society creates a norm and you decide if you’re going to go with the norm or not.

Right now in our society, more than 50 percent of people are chronically ill. More than 50 percent of US adults are suffering from some chronic illness or multiple chronic illnesses. More than two-thirds of us are overweight or obese, and more than 70 percent of us, last time I’ve counted, take at least one pharmaceutical drug a day. So 70 percent of us are reliant on pharmaceutical drugs. That is the norm.

Taking pills is the norm, being sick is the norm, being overweight is the norm. So if you choose to go down a different road, you are effectively choosing to become a social deviant.

I think that for people who can get their heads around the simple choice of whatever the norm is, “If I chase after that norm, I am not chasing after a super great model.” Do we really want to be depressed, sick, reliant on pharmaceutical drugs and see my health going downward with each passing year and decade versus spiraling up and feeling better with each passing year and decade? I think that path less traveled looks a whole lot more appealing.

And I also think that it’s important to keep in mind that as pharmaceutical companies keep coming up with this “solutions” to lifestyle driven medical problems, they come with problems of their own including some pretty nasty side effects.

A lot of people, for example, have chronic skin problems as a result of gluten intolerance. Exposure to gluten, which triggers inflammation throughout their body shows up in a lot places, but including their skin. They go to a doctor with something that looks like psoriasis – okay, let’s call that psoriasis – and they and say, “Oh, this is an autoimmune disorder. You’ll have this the rest of your life. You need to take these immune suppressants.” The immune suppressants will have all kinds of negative impacts on you as you will now not have a fully operational immune system.

“When you get miserable enough, and these drugs aren’t working better, you can come back and we’ll give you a more powerful immune suppressant that could very well result in death among other side effects. And so, we’ll wait until you’re really, really desperate. But in the meantime, you can take all of these other drugs.”

And so, it becomes this slippery slope where we’re suppressing the symptoms or we’re tricking the body into not responding with an immune response or an inflammatory response. But ultimately, we’re tricking it at the cost of the proper function of our body.

Jennifer: People don’t realize this. Your sickness is allowing a drug company to make so much money.

Pilar: Yes. Actually, one of the points that I make in my – I wrote a manifesto for Thriving In A Mixed Up World that is available at RevolutionaryAct.com and it’s the basis for the 101 Revolutionary Ways to be Healthy that you mentioned earlier. It makes this point that the way we’re living is effectively crazy. I mean, that is the first point in the manifesto, that it’s nuts the way we’re living.

And this is part of the craziness. We are giving up our first human freedom, which is our health. What can you do once your health goes? You lose almost all of your freedom. You can lose mobility, your power to make clear decisions, the vitality that you need to pursue your goals in life. Your economic power goes straight into the dump not just because how expensive the drugs and surgeries are, but because your earning power is dramatically reduced when you don’t have the health and vitality, and productivity to pursue your career goals and make advances.

So it becomes a kind of oppressive force, ill-health, that takes people down and takes whole communities down.

Jennifer: Let’s talk a little bit about – we started with this person who feels totally out of sync. They wanted to be normal, but normal is sick. It’s this level of sickness that is just being managed, “Let’s just manage you until you get so sick your body can’t just chug along anymore.” What does it mean to redefine that image in your mind, so that you can start actually identifying and living a healthy lifestyle? And maybe first, I should ask you to define what healthy means.

Pilar: I always include health and happiness in the same sentence. I really think of it as healthy/happy because it’s really difficult to be fully healthy if you’re not happy and that’s it real hard to be happy if you’re not healthy. You can do it, but it’s challenging.

And so I think of health as being the feeling of expansion and potential and being energized and full of life. And to me, the expansion part of it is, “My life is really good right now and it’s just getting better. I have a whole pen of vision for things that I am excited to pursue. I have the enthusiasm and the energy to pursue them. I wake up every morning feeling like ‘Yay! I get to hop out of bed and go do some fun stuff that I want to do,’ or ‘I’m excited about achieving a goal.’” 

If you aren’t experiencing that and what you’re experiencing is that low gear, low energy oppressed/depressed feeling or you’re experiencing chronic pain or chronic itching or annoyance or something in your body not working the way you want or your bowel is all messed up and that’s causing you embarrassment and frustration, that is a feeling of contraction. Your life is getting smaller, your choices are getting smaller, your enthusiasm for life is being constrained, your choices are being constrained.

That dynamic of expansion versus contraction is where I check in. I test my own level of health and vitality like, “Wow! Is my life getting better and I’m feeling ready for anything or is my life getting smaller because I’m feeling held back by my body and mind’s limitations?”

I think that is a really good place to start. And then I think that’s part of what launches you in to a more revolutionary mindset. If you are on a downward spiral and your life is getting smaller and your energy is getting smaller and your vitality is getting reduced, that tends to be a self-perpetuating situation until you deal with the serious intervention either by a crisis like having a major health blow out or a really horrible lab experience where your doctor says, “You’re going to die or have a heart attack if you don’t change something.”

The other option is the inspirational catalyst where you just decide, “I like my life and myself enough that I want things to change,” or “I saw somebody near me, a friend or a family member make a transformation that gives me the hope that this can be done.”

Jennifer: This is my final question because you are everything we’ve talked about today, you’re my total health hero…

Pilar: Thank you.

Jennifer: You talked a lot – you’re very welcome. I mean, I love what you’re doing.

One of the things that you’ve mentioned over and over again was this disability to really experience life and that happens to be the name of the magazine that you founded. Can you tell everyone a little bit about what Experience Life magazine is about because you do have other competitors out there, but I think what you guys strive for in a team is such a different message than what people will see in other magazines.

Pilar: Thank you. Thank you for noticing that and for saying that. I am really proud of the magazine. I founded it in partnership with Lifetime Fitness, which is a Healthy Way of Life company based in the Twin Cities (although they’re national, in fact international Healthy Way of Life company now and they’re also on Canada) and we founded the magazine on the principle of whole person, whole life, health and fitness. It was really intentional that it was not going to be about nutrition and exercise, or even nutrition, exercise and stress and sleep. It was going to be about the whole experience of life in a human body in a context of a culture.

We dedicate our content to three different verticals. We call them different subject areas (although they overlap). One is nutrition and general health and well-being, one is athletics and activity and moving under your own steam and having an active life, and the third category we call the ‘quality of life’. It includes things like stress and relationships and money, happiness, but it also includes awareness of what’s going on in the larger culture and how things like media or environment, both physical environment like built environments and cities, but also the natural environment and the ecosystem and our exposure to toxins and things can affect our wellbeing.

And so, in a typical magazine, there are eighty some pages of content. Well, I should say there’s a few pages of advertising there too. But we really control that space and remain incredibly dedicated in serving a health motivated reader.

Our readers are men and women they range in age from 12 to 90, but the majority of them are probably in their 30s, 40s, and 50s and they really appreciate the difference. What we don’t do is peddle six pack abs and bikini bodies in just 30 days. We don’t fat-shame people. I’m not really interested in telling people in how their bodies “should look,” or even telling anybody what they “should do.” We pretty much banish that word from our vocabulary.

I’m much more interested in giving people interesting research, inspiration, ideas and practical solutions for how they can navigate the challenges that they face on a daily basis – going to work, going to school, raising families, having lives that include other goals besides than just being fit and healthy. These are people who really see their health as a means to a larger end, which is experiencing the life that they want to live.

We really like to support people in pursuing whatever their goals are from a very non-judgmental standpoint and inspiring them to make these kinds of revolutionary choices. The slogan, the tagline for the magazine is “being healthy is a revolutionary act,” and we think that the most important thing that we can do is support people in living healthier, happier lives that bring out the best in them and let them give their best gifts back to their communities and families and whatever is important to them.

Jennifer: Awesome, I love it. It is a really great magazine and I want to direct everybody to check it out. I’ve seen it on different magazine stands.

Pilar: But if people don’t see us on the newsstand, they can always ask. And we are also available digitally, as well as in print, and we have some really great weekly and monthly newsletters that are available for free at our website ExperienceLife.com. People can sign up for those too.

And also, I will say, in addition to our digital edition mobile app 101 Revolutionary Ways to be Healthy gives you a revolutionary act of the day, lets you link in to a whole new beautiful archive of articles from Experience Life. So that’s another way to get at the same content.

Jennifer: Pilar, thank you so much for joining us! This has been a phenomenal chat.

Pilar: Thank you, Jennifer! It’s been so fun to talk to you. And I’m so glad that you’re out there doing what you’re doing. It’s really powerful, revolutionary stuff. We see you as a fellow revolutionary and I’m really glad to be fighting the good fight with you.

Jennifer: I’m glad to be on the same side. It’s so good for all of us to join together because that is how change happens- when everyone comes together who has that same mindset. We can then work toward a common goal to making this whole world a healthier and happier place to live.

Pilar: You got it!

Jennifer: Please go and connect with Pilar. She’s all over social media. I’ll put her links below. She’s got really great platform. Experience Life magazine is a great spot. I mean, the magazine itself is amazing, but even just the website is an amazing resource as well. You can also check her out at RevolutionaryAct.com.

Now remember, if you love this podcast please go subscribe, rate and review. And I’m going to ask you to do one more thing, please share the GFS Podcast with your community, friends and families and encourage them to come and listen because without your support, I wouldn’t be here. We are 67 episodes into The Gluten Free School Podcast and it’s here because of you. I want to thank you for that so deeply. I’m glad that we are a part of the same tribe, on the same side, fighting the good fight and living good healthy lives the best we can in every moment of the day.

So thank you so much, leave any questions or comments over on the blog. I look forward to connecting with you in the next podcast. Have a wonderful day!

Pilar’s website – http://pilargerasimo.com/

Experience Life Magazine – http://www.ExperienceLife.com

Revolutionary Acts – http://www.RevolutionaryAct.com

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/PilarGerasimo

Twitter – https://twitter.com/pgerasimo

Pinterest – https://www.pinterest.com/explifemag/

Instagram – https://instagram.com/pgerasimo

The post Healthy Is The New Black: How to Thrive in an Unhealthy World with Pilar Gerasimo: GFS Podcast 067 appeared first on Jennifer Fugo, CNS.

Honestly, I thought MTHFR stood for a bad word when I first started seeing it pop up on the internet. “Must be some new acronym kids thought of.” But when I learned that the MTHFR mutation was something pretty important and involved with detoxification, I thought I should take a second look at it.

Turns out that the MTHFR mutation is pretty common (affecting about 30% of the population) and according to what my guest on today’s podcast says, many of us who have chronic health problems should probably suspect that something in this arena could be wrong. MTHFR officially stands for Methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase and to make things even more confusing… the MTHFR enzyme (what most people are talking about in regards to detoxification since an enzyme does the work) is coded for by the MTHFR gene (the gene is like the blueprint and instructions for your body to build the enzyme).

If the gene gets mutated, then the subsequent enzyme that’s built would have issues functioning. Kind of like baking a gluten-free cake with out any binders in it because that part of the directions got wet and so you left those binding ingredients out because you couldn’t read the instructions.

MTHFR is involved with a process known as methylation wherein a methyl group is passed around from molecule to molecule until it reaches a certain endpoint to be used for some important functions. Think of it like a hot potato, albeit an important one. And in the process a lot of B Vitamins are used to help move the methyl group around so it gets where it needs to go. As I’ve talked about before, deficiencies in micronutrients can cause some major problems because the B Vitamins used in this process aren’t optional.

To be clear, this interview is much more science-heavy that the typical podcast. Hopefully this little intro will help you understand some of the conversation, but know that it’s not 100% necessary to understand every concept herein. The point of why I wanted to put this together is that much of what’s written on the MTHFR mutation and posted all over the internet on blogs is wrong and, frankly, the recommendations suggested could cause someone to get sicker. I don’t want to see that happen to you.

If you have any questions on this topic or what is discussed, please let them below in the comments so that I can answer them!

CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe through iTunes!!!

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Jennifer: Welcome back to the Gluten Free School Podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Fugo. Today, we are going to talk about methylation and the MTHFR gene. If you have not heard about this, then this is going to be a really great, new topic for us to talk about. If you have heard or read about it on the internet, some of the things that we’re going to discuss today fly in the face of what’s being written about methylation because some of it is, in my opinion, way oversimplified.

I have a really great guest with me. She is back after talking about autoimmunity from this past August. Her name is Tracy Konoske and she’s America’s first virtual nutritionist and a different kind of dietician. She’s trained in natural, integrative, functional, and personalized medicine, and Tracy received her Master’s Degree in Nutrition from Bastyr University, and is on track to finish the Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner coursework in 2015.

Tracy is successfully helping patients who suffer from migraines, IBS, joint pain and most any autoimmune disease, including celiac disease, recover. She lives in beautiful Montana, but her private practice is virtual, meaning, that you can be a patient and live anywhere. Her consultations are either by phone or by Skype and it’s super easy to get in touch with her.

Tracy, welcome back to the podcast!

Tracy: Thanks, Jennifer! It’s great to be back.

Jennifer: Let’s just dive into this. I feel we have to figure out how deep to go here. But I want to start off with defining what methylation is, especially for those who may not have heard of that term and have no clue what this conversation is about.

Tracy: So technically, methylation involves a methyl group, which is really just a carbon and three hydrogen. And that’s just chemistry, but then let’s just talk about that methylation is this metabolic process.

So in our bodies, methylation makes good things happen when it’s functioning properly. Our body intuitively knows how to turn good genes on and bad genes off. Methylation happens in every single cell of our body, millions and billions of times a second.

What you were alluding to, I completely agree because a lot of the big deal about methylation, I think, people think, “Oh, I need methylated folate, or methylated B12” and they don’t really know why. The big key point here, or some of the key points, are that methylation helps us in our ability to make glutathione, which is the mother of all antioxidants, and methylation is also the process that helps us make SAMe.

SAMe is a superhero because when SAMe donates the methyl group, it is how we make RNA, DNA, creatine, melatonin and more.  Methylfolate (which is a form of the B Vitamin Folate that has a methyl group) donates the methyl group to Vitamin B12, making methyl B12.  And methyl B12 continues by donating that same methyl group to homocysteine which then keeps passing it along like a hot potato until we make SAMe.

SAMe then continues to donate that “hot potato” methyl group, and that is how we make DNA and RNA and creatine, phosphatidylcholine, which is around every single cell membrane in our body. It’s how we deactivate histamine. This is how women get rid of our estrogen, meaning we methylate it and excrete it via liver detoxification pathways. It’s how we process our catecholamines like epinephrine and norepinephrine.

So SAMe is super important, but he doesn’t get talked about a lot in this methylation process.  If you just think about folate in food, such as something green. Let’s say you’re eating a salad or having an orange. Those contain folate and our body has to do several steps in order to convert dietary folate into dihydrofolate (DHF) and then to tetrahydrofolate (THF) in order to pass along the “hot potato” methyl group. Then we continue the conversion and turn THF into 5-methyl tetrahydrofolate (5MTHF), and then at the very end, we have “activated” folate (5MTHF) that’s ready to keep the process of methylation going.

But that’s really just the beginning. Even though there were several steps to get to 5-methyl tetrahydrofolate (5MTHF), it just hands off that methyl group (it’s like a “hot potato”) to Vitamin B12. By doing so, we now have what’s called methyl B12 which then hands off the methyl group like a hot potato to homocysteine. There is a couple more steps so that we end up with methionine and then SAMe.

And this happens over and over again, this whole process where folate converts to dihydrofolate (DHF) which converts to tetrahydrofolate (THF) which converts to 5,10 methylene THF (5,10mTHF) and then 5,10mTHF converts to 5-methyltetrahydrofolate (5MTHF). 5MTHF passes off its methyl group to convert Vitamin B12 to methyl B12 who joins up with homocysteine to regenerate methionine. Methionine then donates the methyl group to make SAMe. And this cycle happens over and over and over again.

SAMe stores those methyl groups so we can do some really important stuff in the body.

Image from Dr. Jill Carnahan’s website.

Jennifer: And so for anyone who is thinking, “What? What did you just say?” And here on the right is an image so that you can see exactly what we’re talking about because to be honest with you, Tracy, unless I had written my biochem paper on this topic, I would have no idea what you just said.

So for anybody who is new to this, if you’re lost, please stick with us. This actually is a really important conversation and we’ll continue to break this down. But don’t be embarrassed if you’re confused because I spent weeks trying to figure out this whole pathway. And actually, it’s three different pathways that overlap. Yes, it’s complex. I will admit this, but it is an important topic and we want to try and make it as simplified as possible.

And I will share with everybody — if you’ve heard of folic acid as you probably see it in some fortified foods or you’ve heard of folic acid. Folic acid is the manmade version of folate. So that’s an important distinction to make.

And these biochemical pathways in your body do require a lot of B vitamins. Tracy, you mentioned B12 and folate, which are both B vitamins. It also requires Vitamin B6 as well. So B vitamins are very important to this topic.

And genes are an important part of this conversation too! The genes and their respective DNA code for the enzymes (such as MTHFR) in these pathways to do what needs to be done.

So why don’t you tell us a little bit about how the genetics piece comes into play here?

Tracy: Let me just back up and say, because I want to agree with you that this is complicated. I’ve been studying this since 2011. And it really was a conundrum for me to come up with, “Okay, I feel like I’m teaching people a brand new language, as well as identifying what’s important and what’s not.”

I think the key thing I want to say about all of that is first, we just talked about methylfolate and methyl B12 as being substrates or substances to help a necessary reaction happen. If you give somebody methyl B12 or methylfolate (5 MTHF), each will pass off their methyl group to whatever comes next in the cycle. That’s why you’re even taking them. And the end result of giving somebody methyl B12 or methylfolate is so they can either make SAMe, which does important work for your body, or that we can go down another pathway and make some glutathione. 

But it is a complicated subject and don’t feel bad if that doesn’t at all make sense. I listen to this stuff ad nauseam. And still it’s complicated… it could be a full-time job.

For genetics, I think some really basic stuff for people to understand as we move forward is that there are things called SNP. It stands for Single-nucleotide polymorphism. It’s just a change in the gene sequence. It means that the parts in the gene got mixed up. They’re still all there, but they got scrambled up.

And the big ones you hear about in regards to MTHFR are the C677 SNP and the A1298 SNP. You hear about those a lot in the popular press. And then Amy Yasko really talks about the MTHFR O3, and it’s just as serious as the C677 SNP.

To be clear, a SNP is not a mutation. It’s very similar to a SNP though and people tend to understand the word mutation when they’ve never heard of single-nucleotide polymorphism. So the words get used a little bit interchanged. Technically, what we are talking about are SNPs. The genes just got scrambled and so they act a little a bit differently. But it’s not serious enough to cause something like Downs Syndrome.

You can also have multiple SNPs. If you have one SNP, we call it a heterozygous (hetero) SNP. If you have two SNPs, it would be called a homozygous SNP.

And then you can have a SNP in both the C677 (MTHF) and the A1298 (MTHF) and that’s called a compound hetero (because it’s one hetero SNP of each). 

So again if you’re a homozygous C677 (MTHF), it means two of the genes are in the wrong order. Because of this, that enzyme produced from these genes now only works at about 18 to 22% of capacity. It’s a little bit like trying to win the race when you have a broken bike. You’re definitely not at full speed.

Most of the SNPs are down regulations, meaning that they operate at reduced function. But the CBS SNPs (which regulate the enzyme that sends Homocysteine down the Transsulfuration Pathway) tend to be at an up-regulated (meaning it works faster than normal) and that’s not necessarily good. If you think of two conveyor belts and the first conveyor belt is going along and it’s going to meet up with conveyor belt number two, but it’s running way too fast, then the other one is just at regular speed, it’s just dumping things in.

How that shows up in the body is a little bit like having a hole in the boat. People with CBS SNPs take in a lot of nutrition and it just keeps leaking out. The pathway is running so fast that it just dumps out the other end.

Jennifer: So you may have one or several of these SNPs in your genetic code. I have a friend actually that found out that she has one of these SNPs, but the point here is that it is important to find out what you have. 

But I think that the MTHFR gene gets talked about a lot as a genetic defect or enzyme problem. I think the way that it’s talked about on almost every single popular blog and even the small blogs is incorrect. It’s not that the science is bad. It’s due to an oversimplification of what’s going on in a complex biochemical system and simply blaming everything on this one little SNP affecting the MTHFR enzyme when in reality, these cycles, as you can see in that graphic above that we have shared with you guys, is a lot more than MTHFR.

And I think that while it might seem great to look for a magic bullet of what’s going to help you feel better… and granted some people do feel better… but Tracy, you had mentioned to me that some people don’t do well addressing an issue with MTHFR simply by taking methylated vitamins. Not everyone responds well to them even though they are unendingly advocated for on many blogs covering this topic on the internet.

Why do you think that everyone is talking about MTHFR? 

Tracy: If I just look back at my own history, the very first time I heard of MTHFR, it was in an eight-hour podcast in November 2011. It blew my mind. I started testing for the MTHFR SNP because it was available back then. Almost every single one of my patients tested positive for either the A or the C or a combination of both. And I could look at their chart and start looking for things such as varicose veins or estrogen dominance or cancer in the family or even autoimmune diseases. All the things that I was taught to go along with this, and that’s all I knew at the moment.

It started there. And then I had two patients in the year that tested negative for any MTHFR SNPs. And yet, in all the research that I had done, I knew that there could be other SNPs involved.

Eventually, I ended up digging deeper and reading Dr. Amy Yasko’s books, and going to trainings… like Dr. Bridget Briggs just did a three-part training.

You end up learning more about the other SNPs. And it does get more complicated, infinitely more complicated in that I could spend 40 hours a week just studying this. The really easy out is just to say, “Well, you have the MTHFR genes so just take methylfolate and methyl B12. And we’ll see you on your way.”

But what doesn’t get talked about is that this is multiple relay races going on at one time with MTHFR being in the center, but he’s passing off that methyl group over to the methionine and then it can end up down at glutathione and SAMe.

But also, if he just turns around and hands off the methyl group a different way that’s how we make our amino acids and neurotransmitters like serotonin and tryptophan.

What I’m trying to say is it affects a lot of different pathways. It’s very complicated and it takes time for medicine to change. In the average community, most people here, where I live in Montana, probably still don’t even know what MTHFR is, let alone understand that there are other SNPs, like COMT, CBS, and SUOX.  I could give you the whole list of other SNPs involved. And that’s what actually makes this so dangerous is if you just start giving the whole world methyl B12 and methylfolate, you can make some people very sick. Don’t forget that those people with the CBS SNP, they have a hole in the boat.

You can give them methyl B12 and methylfolate all day long, 24 hours a day, and they’re just going to drain it out in the hole in the boat.

And then there’s a SNP called COMT, and those people can’t chew up methyl groups very quickly. If you think of COMT like a Pacman, well, he’s really slow. (So they are sensitive to outside (exogenous) source of methyl groups).  Don’t forget that most SNPs are down regulations. So if you give somebody with two or four (SNPs) or a double homozygous COMT a bunch of methyl groups associated with their supplements, their Pacman chews up that methyl group really slow. This causes you to become over-methylated and can result in them feeling very anxious and nervous, and can give them panic disorders.

And beyond what I even am very comfortable talking about. I watched a guy named, I think, Dr. Phil Walsh, who talked about people who are over-methylated and under-methylated. And you can be both.  He had a list of signs and symptoms of people who just naturally can be over-methylated (because of the combination of their gene SNP”s even without supplementation). Just because you’re double C677, which is what I am –  a double C677 – so my MTHFR enzyme functions at about 20% of normal capacity, we can’t assume that I’m under-methylated because we have to consider those OTHER genes. I am also a double (homozygous) COMT, so I don’t deal with methyl groups very well and I actually can end up over-methylating very easy.

Does that make sense? I wasn’t planning to share that, but I think it’s really important to make the point that you can’t just give the whole world methyl B12 and methylfolate and instantly solve their methylation problems.

Jennifer: It does. And I think this underscores the more universal rule of why supplementation has to be incredibly individualized. And you can’t just look on the internet and find a solution that worked for one person and assume it’s going to work for you. Because if your head is swimming and mind you, this is a science-y, nerdy conversation, I admit it. It’s a much more science-y than we typically have. But this is just skimming the surface.

If you go deeper and start delving into all the other genetic pieces, and you don’t know any of this, you don’t understand biochemistry, you don’t understand the implications of what may happen with certain SNPs and whatnot, you can really harm yourself. So again, this underscores why you have to find a practitioner, if they’re going to treat you for this problem who understands it and knows how to do the testing as well as the proper approach. One solution is not going to fix them all.

And that leads us to a question. How do you get tested for this, Tracy?

Tracy: There are a couple of ways. You can check out Dr. Amy Yasko, and she’s the queen of this.  She started all of this and she understands this biochemistry more than anybody that I have ever known of. She offers her own tests which I believe are $400 to $500. Then she will guide you through this process of what to do, what supplements to take, what tests you need to take.

And then there’s 23andMe, which is $99. A lot of people think they’re out of business. They’re not. What they got in trouble for and rightly so is that they were offering a genetic interpretation. I did my genetic test with 23andMe a few years ago before they got in trouble. And they gave me back a report and it said, “Tracy Konoske, you’re not at risk for breast cancer because you don’t have the BRAC gene and you’re not at risk for Parkinson’s because you don’t have the XYZ gene.”

Even before they got in trouble, I thought that was crazy. I could easily get breast cancer. If I want to smoke and drink and stay up all night and eat hydrogenated foods, I could easily get breast cancer. Anybody could get breast cancer. You don’t have to have the gene to get breast cancer. In fact, most people who get breast cancer don’t.

But all that said, 23andMe is not out of business. They’d still give you your genetics. You just get a huge zipped file and you have to know somebody who can help you interpret it.

Like you said, Jennifer, it needs to be somebody trained and somebody who knows more than just MTHFR. If somebody is advertising on their website that they’re going to help you with your MTHFR gene and they don’t mention CBS, SUOX, MTR, MTRR, or the 24 or 25 other genes that all “talk” to the MTHFR gene, they don’t know what they’re doing in regards to the complete picture.

I study this all the time and I often feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s just the honest truth. No two people are the same. We know that from twin studies, even when you have two identical twins and you’re looking at the same set of genes, one twin could get an autoimmune disease and one twin is not going to get autoimmune disease. And that’s because what we do, all those choices we make on a daily basis influence how those genes are getting expressed.

One more point about this in regards to getting back results that do show SNPs, for example just because you’re a quad COMT – that’s what I call myself – or an MTHFR C677, it doesn’t always mean it’s a death sentence. Don’t assume in all of this that just because you have a SNP it means that you’re doomed because obviously, I function every day. Our genes make up 25% of our risk of disease and then how we manage our sleep and our stress and our diet, exercise influences how those genes get expressed.

Jennifer: And I think that this underscores why, as you said, your genes aren’t a guarantee, necessarily, of anything. Many doctors have said, “Oh, well, if you have the celiac genes that’s not a guarantee that you’re going to develop celiac disease.”

In our other podcast, we talked about how you can look at different factors that might suggest you could develop any type of autoimmune disease. And there are other things that are beyond the scope of genes. But maybe the genes will give you an indicator, a warning or a heads up way ahead of time.

I think that it’s good to have a picture, but it’s not to say that it’s set in stone.

We all struggle with some sort of health problem. Many of us have autoimmune issues, some of us are dealing with celiac and whatnot. Why should you care about this?

Tracy: If we’re going to look at the whole methylation properly and not just the MTHFR gene, but that whole complex cycle (Image is above), having SNPs in any of these places disrupts normal cellular function. It’s like trying to go through life and you only have 70% oxygen to breathe or you don’t get enough hydration. It truly interrupts the functioning of the cell.

Then this lays the groundwork for chronic disease. When I went through my charts and tested people for MTHFR back in 2011, and only two people were negative, you start to see the significance. Obviously, people who have MTHFR and other SNPs are the people who do ultimately get sick because you can’t methylate, and then you can’t make SAMe as well, and then you can’t make your DNA so you can’t repair your gut lining, or cell membranes, or support your immune system. It’s off balance between the humeral and the cellular immunity. They can’t detoxify as well.

And so these are the people who get sick. And for those who already have celiac disease, they have one autoimmune disease, I did the podcast with Jennifer about predicting autoimmune disease.  And stated that if you have one [autoimmune disease], you’re statistically at risk for getting more, up to seven in your lifetime.

If you don’t optimize methylation, meaning all of these pathways, not just MTHFR, but optimizing the whole set of genes that MTHFR talks to, then your immune system is still off balance and it just makes you more at risk.

Why anybody with a chronic disease would care about this because it really comes down to root causes. I don’t think at this point you can throw me a health condition and I can’t trace it back to this methylation pathway. It really is like not having enough oxygen and trying to get through life and run a race. And you just don’t have the capacity to do that well.

And over time, people get sicker. If you think about being homozygous C677, in my case, I didn’t have a fabulous health as a kid, but I wasn’t sick. Now I can certainly see if I don’t optimize my methylation by the time I’m 70 or 80 or 90, and you have all those years cumulatively adding on top of each other, I can see how people get multiple chronic diseases because things aren’t working well.

Jennifer: I’m curious — we’ve already mentioned this issue that you should see someone who understands this condition so that they aren’t regurgitating other people’s blogs and articles out there that are very oversimplified. And that each person has a complex, unique situation that needs to be considered before any type of treatment can be given. It’s not appropriate to start supplementing with something having no idea what we might be low or high in. What could we do for those who might be listening and go, “Oh, I know for sure, and my hand is raised, I have an MTHFR defect?”

Is there any general dietary or lifestyle suggestions that they could do to help themselves, like any foods in particular they should try to avoid? Anything you found that’s helpful that maybe they might not know about?

Tracy: Sure. Remember I said that we need SAMe to detoxify our estrogen. So we all have some, even men have estrogen, of course. So we need to get rid of it, right? We don’t want it to circulate round and round.

In order to detox estrogen, we methylate it and it goes from 2-hydroxy estrogen to 2 methoxy (methylated) estrogen. It gets methylated in phase 2 of the liver and then it leaves. And that’s what we want. We don’t want estrogen to hang around and stay in circulation over and over again. 

Stress interferes with that pathway. So yes, ultimately, managing stress is important. 

Another lifestyle thing that plays into all of this is that some of these people can’t detoxify very well. So it becomes once again, the same messages I say over and over, it’s really important to eat organic, to get your mercury amalgams out, to drink filtered water or spring water. Do you know what I mean?

Avoid BPA and phthalates – those are endocrine disruptors (or fake estrogen).  The last thing I need in my life is fake estrogen because I can barely get rid of the estrogen I have, let alone fake chemical products like BPA and phthalates.

A lot of the things still come back to all that healthy lifestyle and getting enough sleep, drink enough water, eat organic whole foods, perhaps do some juicing. Or even if you drink green juices all day, you still have to be able to methylate that folate, right? And so, we do need some help and that’s what this is all about. It’s supporting the broken pathways so that with some methyl groups or some active methylfolate.

Again, if I just keep using myself as an example of a double C677, I can’t methylate folate very well. And just to help people with the visual, I could drink spinach, orange juice, fresh green juice, all day long which would be full of folate. But I can’t methylate it very well making it difficult for me to use what I’m eating and drinking here in this example.

So that is where methylfolate comes in. But again, the only answer is not just to give methylfolate and/or methyl B12.

The other thing that happens in all of this is that just because you have genes doesn’t mean it will express as such. And so it’s also really important to work with somebody who can order you some lab tests. And you find out what you’re homocysteine is or your taurine, or your level of sulfates and ammonia.

All of the genes have indicators. So I have a quad COMT and I’m super task oriented and I want everything done yesterday. My husband is a quad COMT. He has a different set of genes. He does not have SNPs for CBS or C677. His genes express completely different and he’s the most laid back guy you could meet. 

So again, just looking at just the MTHFR gene isn’t the whole story and it’s really important to not treat it based on individual genes, but to do some testing and find out how your genes are expressing in real life and look for actual markers. Does that make sense?

Jennifer: It does. And Tracy, I just wanted to specify to everybody that’s listening too. This is a lifelong issue. This is not something that you’re going to take some supplements and then six months, you’re good to go, and you can just forget that you had it. You’re like, “Oh, yes. I had that MTHFR thing, but it’s all good now.” Right?

Tracy: Yes, it doesn’t go away.

Jennifer: We are not talking about something that’s going to go away like you could heal this. This is not a healing issue. It’s in your genes, in every cell of your body. That’s how it works. So this is something that if you suspect you have or you eventually find out you have, it is a lifelong approach to living where you’re going to have to be more mindful, as Tracy said, of your stress levels, of the quality of food you eat. In that instant, you could say, “Yes, I actually need to be mindful of the pesticide count.” “I need to be careful what kind of chemicals I slather on my body after jumping out of the shower.”

You’ve got to really be mindful of all these things.

And as we said, and I cannot stress this anymore, you have to find somebody that understands how to work with this problem. You can’t read the articles on the internet and assume that one approach or one or two supplements are going to solve your problems. That’s probably not a wise idea.

Tracy: I couldn’t agree more. When I agreed to do this talk with you, it was one of the biggest things I wanted to get across is that there are always other enzymes (SNPs) which have roles. And again, just to be clear that as a double homozygous C677 MTHFR, I need methylated groups, but I don’t tolerate methyl groups very well. Because as a quad COMT, meaning I have four SNPs in my COMT, my important genes there, I don’t handle methyl groups well. So on one hand I need them and on the other hand I don’t handle them and it’s a very tricky balance and back-to-back lab testing. Once you get your genes and you find out where you’re at.

So I run certain tests to identify people’s values for all those pathways and so, “Oh, your homocysteine is 4 or it’s 12.” Or your methionine is low or high.

And I can see where the broken pieces are and then supplement accordingly. But it’s true… your genes never change and even if you optimize your methylation and then, God forbid, you go through a divorce, or you lose your spouse or some tragic thing happens, you have to optimize your methylation again. It’s not a static thing because all of our dietary and lifestyle choices affect all these processes.

So it’s a forever thing but also, you think about what methylation does and it opens the door to autoimmune diseases and bipolar and mental health and estrogen dominance, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, things that people on this call are dealing with. Everybody knows somebody who has a fatigue issue or has a runny nose because of too many histamines.

We all know somebody this affects. I told you there’s not a health condition you can bring me that I can’t bring back to methylation. Not that I always know how to fix it, but I can guarantee you that methylation plays a role in optimizing these pathways and does make people feel better.

Jennifer: Tracy, I feel like we’ve talked about so much and yet, we’ve really only touched on such a tiny minute piece of the picture. But I hope that the messages and the ideas here will help either jumpstart someone’s process and looking to what might help them feel better or it will give them insight into a condition they already know they have and perhaps, help them rethink some of their approaches.

One of the greatest pieces of advice a teacher ever gave me was to be skeptical, but not in a negative way. Just take a moment to say to yourself, “Let me step back and look at this picture from as many different avenues as I possibly can and gather as much information as I can to make a decision based on what’s going to work best for me rather than assuming that what one person says is the only way for me.”

Because a lot of times, as you said, that what’s the way for somebody else will leave you feeling horrible.

I really appreciate your time and I wanted to direct everybody too. If you have yet to connect with Tracy, you really should. And wonderful resource. She has a free Heal Your Leaky Gut Guide over on her website at HealthyLifestylesMT.com. She has some Get Acquainted sessions that are available to you. If you’re looking for help with this issue or any others as well as a newsletter that you can sign up for.

Thank you so much Tracy for joining us!

Tracy: You are welcome, Jennifer. I’m happy to be back and just thanks for having me. Good luck to all of you out there in this process.

Jennifer: You’re very welcome. Please leave your questions and your comments below.

Do you have the MTHFR defect? Let us know. I’d love to hear from you as well as how it expresses in you and what you have learned. And if you feel that some of the things we’ve talked about are really valuable, what are you taking away from the conversation? What is it that you’d love to add to this conversation or hear more about? We’d love to hear from you.

Again, thank you guys so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. I hope you have a fabulous day and I look forward to seeing you the next time. Bye.

Tracy’s website – HealthyLifestylesMT.com

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The post MTHFR Mutation: How Most Articles Get It Wrong & What You Really Need to Know with Tracy Konoske, RD: GFS Podcast 064 appeared first on Jennifer Fugo, CNS.

Anyone who is chronically ill can attest that unendingly sickness is no fun. With the rate of autoimmune disease on the rise, some have turned to the Autoimmune Paleo Protocol (AIP) as a possible answer to getting their body back on track.

The problem though is that the Autoimmune Paleo Protocol is, in all honesty, a very restrictive food-based approach to reversing chronic inflammation and damage that begins once your body has lost it’s ability to correctly identify itself from an invader.

While you may have heard of this “diet” from Sarah Ballantyne, PhD (aka. The Paleo Mom) who was a featured speaker on the Women’s Gluten-Free Health Summit, the Autoimmune Paleo Protocol can have some amazing effects. In order to simplify the process and make AIP easier for you, I sat down with Mickey Trescott to talk about her health journey, why AIP worked for her and how you can give it a go without going crazy.

CLICK HERE to listen and subscribe through iTunes!!!

Then take a moment and leave a review on iTunes sharing what you’ve learned and why others would benefit from subscribing as well!

Jennifer: Welcome back to the Gluten Free School Podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Fugo. Today we are going to talk about the Autoimmune Paleo Protocol. This protocol is something that you’ve probably heard about online.

There are several different people who talk about it frequently. But I wanted to approach this topic from a place that’s pragmatic, practical, and something you can actually follow.

Mickey Trescott is the chef and blogger behind the website Autoimmune-Paleo.com, which provides recipes and resources for the autoimmune protocol.

After recovering from her own struggle with both celiac and Hashimoto’s disease, adrenal fatigue, and multiple vitamin deficiencies, Mickey started to write about her experience, in order to help others realize that they’re not alone in their struggles.

She’s certified as a nutritional therapy practitioner by the Nutritional Therapy Association and the author of the newly released Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, a guide and recipe book for the autoimmune protocol.

Mickey is also on the board of Hashimoto’s Awareness, a support and advocacy organization for those with autoimmune thyroid disease. She recently moved to the Willamette Valley, in Oregon, to start a homestead with her husband. 

Mickey, welcome to the podcast!

Mickey: Thank you so much for having me, Jennifer. I’m really excited to be here.

Jennifer: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you ended up realizing that you had an autoimmune issue? Actually, I know that you have at least two that we talked about in your bio.

How did you get in – I don’t know –  How did you find out about it and then get introduced to what this autoimmune protocol is?

Mickey: Yes. So I was about 26 when I started having some health problems. They weren’t anything incredibly specific. When I went to the doctor, they weren’t really able to find the source of them.

But over time, I just had this feeling like something was wrong. I’d stand up and feel like I needed to pass out all of a sudden. I wouldn’t have any endurance when I was exercising. I’d have trouble waking up in the morning and falling asleep at night. It just seemed like things were really off.

Eventually I did get a diagnosis of celiac and Hashimoto’s disease after I had quite a health crash. It was at this bottom when I ask my doctor, what can I  do about this? They basically just told me, “Go to gluten-free and you’ll be fine.”

Well, I wasn’t, and I actually continued to develop neurological symptoms. Things got worse. We did more tests. We could not figure out the source of the problem.

When I was at that point, I reexamined what I was eating because it was clear that I wasn’t finding help from the medical community and I needed to do something for myself.

This is the short version of the story, but basically I had been vegan for 10 years. And I had really dug myself into a really dark place with nutritional deficiency with certain vitamins and minerals and things. Then I was suffering from this autoimmunity and I wasn’t feeling my body properly.

So when I started doing research about diet and autoimmunity, this autoimmune protocol kept coming up. It really appeared to be a tool that people were using. A lot of researchers and doctors were talking about how they were using it with their clients and their patients to help them figure out which foods were holding them back from optimal health.

So I tried it myself and it was really effective for me. It was over probably six to nine months that I really made a recovery.  I went from being jobless, bedridden, and with no hope in life — I was really depressed — to being able to function and work and go back to school to study nutrition.

I started writing my book. I mean it was incredible, the transformation that I was able to have with this. [Now] I have dedicated my life to teaching people and providing resources because it’s just a really amazing process.

Jennifer: I wanted to highlight something that you said. The doctors told you to go gluten-free. And that clearly, from what you were saying, wasn’t enough.

Mickey: No. Other celiacs know this. This is the story that I hear over and over with both people who are diagnosed with celiac disease and people who know that they’re sensitive to gluten even though they don’t have celiac disease.

They removed gluten and they’re told, “Everything will be better.” Well, it actually got worse.

I didn’t develop any neurological symptoms until I stopped eating gluten. I think what happened was I had this low-grade inflammation all the time from the celiac. When that was removed, I was really reacting to all this other stuff in my diet and in my environment. It brought it to the surface.

So that’s usually a really hard concept for people to realize: how doing something really good for someone, like removing gluten from the diet, can actually make you feel worse. It’s just because it gives your body the space to actually have a reaction to foods as opposed to not being able to produce any reactions, which is the state you’re in when you’re always inflamed.

Jennifer: When you say something like “the autoimmune protocol,” I think there are so many diets out there today, so many different approaches, and oftentimes women don’t know which way to go. It’s like you’re at a crossroads with signs pointing in 10 different directions. “Should I do Paleo? Should I try GAPS? How about SCD?” There are so many things.

Initially, I think the gluten-free thing is the most common path people walk, but similarly to you they don’t always feel better. I would even venture to say that most may feel a little better, but at the least I think most people don’t feel 100% better going gluten-free.

So what would be the difference between doing an autoimmune protocol and all these other diet options? Why would someone actually want to choose this path that you’ve gone down for themselves?

Mickey: The autoimmune protocol is actually not a diet. It’s an elimination process. So the idea is that someone removes certain categories of food for a specified period of time. That’s all variable. You can do it for longer or shorter. You can choose to include more foods or fewer foods. We’ll talk more about that in a minute.

Basically, it’s a process by which people can figure out their ideal diet. This is why I really think the autoimmune protocol is a wonderful place to start for anyone who has a diagnosed autoimmune disease or just is experiencing health problems that they haven’t been able to sort out through conventional medicine or through other dietary modifications.

It is geared towards people who have autoimmune disease, so the research that’s backing it has found that the foods that are removed are the ones that are most likely to be problematic for people with autoimmune disease.

They also tend to be foods that people who don’t have autoimmunity can be sensitive to, like eggs, which are a very common food allergy and sensitivity. You go for a period of time without all of these common foods that can be otherwise healthy to see if, once you get them out of your diet and then you reintroduce them, you can tell, “Okay, eggs are a problem.” You might not know that if you’re eating eggs every day.

That’s how it’s different. Paleo has a framework that is grain-free and legume-free and dairy-free. The autoimmune protocol takes that one step further.  We also remove eggs, nuts, seeds, nightshade vegetables like potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, some other supplements like ashwagandha, and sweeteners too, any stevia or anything like that, food chemicals, guar gum.

So the idea is just to get all this stuff out and have a clean slate. Then you add them in one at a time to figure out what’s affecting you.

Jennifer: That, to the regular person, is going to sound overwhelming. “Oh my gosh. What are we going to eat? I can’t have nuts. I can’t have seeds. I can’t have eggs.”

What can you include on the protocol?

Mickey: Jennifer, since you’ve seen my book…

Jennifer: I know. It’s beautiful.

Mickey: …you can see there are actually a lot of foods that you can eat. And you can be very happy and healthy and nourished on this diet. It just takes a little bit of reframing.

So the way that I’ve presented it in my book is just by focusing on all of these amazing delicious, beautiful, easy-to-prepare foods that are compliant with the protocol.

That includes any kind of fish, shellfish, chicken, turkey. Basically any meat is fine. You can have a wide variety of vegetables, cooking fats, tons of fruits. The sky is the limit as far as that — fresh, real food.

And the catch for a lot of people is that these are not convenience foods. These are not things that you can easily walk into a restaurant and order. The trick is to acquire these foods from your grocery and then figure out how to make them and get this food on the table.

Jennifer: That’s always the question. It’s the practical, pragmatic aspect because the truth is – you and I both know this – it’s really challenging to change your diet to something that’s very different from what you’re used to.

It’s difficult to go out and eat. You can’t get convenience food. You can’t say, “I’m just going to pick up this one thing because I running low on energy and I didn’t have lunch and I’m late.” And you’ve got a family. You’re crazy busy. And yet somehow you’ve got to eat.

That creates a lot of stress for people. They say, “I can’t have all this food that I like that’s easy for me and that I know. Then all of a sudden, I’ve got to cook a lot.”

The thing I love about you and your book is how practical it is. It’s very practical. I think it takes away that fear.

So why don’t you share with everybody, in making this practical, how can we prepare?

If someone is considering doing this and giving it a shot, your book is a great template for it. It’s the template you should follow if you’re going to do it for a significant period of time.

How can they do this and start cleaning up the pantry and doing all the stuff to make it a lot easier than it might sound right now?

Mickey: The first thing I always tell people is to start with any food that’s going to be a “never” food. So we’re talking processed food, sugar, gluten. Throw it away, give it away. Get it out of sight. Don’t have it in your house. If you have someone in your family who really needs to have that food and you’re not in agreement about dietary change together, maybe have a designated area and move it where you’re not going to see it.

The next step is the foods that are gray-area foods that are healthy, but you won’t be eating them for a month or two, like the nuts and seeds and some spices and stuff.

Put them in a box and put it in the closet. You can bring it back out when time comes to reintroduce. Not having those foods, not being confronted with them when you’re cooking every day, and not having them be an option is really helpful. 

And then the third step is replacing all of that stuff with food you can eat. So this is maybe getting some different variety of cooking fats, maybe getting some different herbs and spices that are actually compliant with the protocol, and then shopping for really fresh fruits and vegetables and just making sure you have that on hand.

Jennifer: I love that. That’s awesome.

Mickey: Yeah. My whole motto is: Set yourself up for success. If you paste a list of foods on your fridge and expect yourself every time you open it to say, “Okay. Yes to this food. No to that food,” then decide when you’re hungry to not grab one thing and grab another, it’s not going to work. You need to clear it out and actually do some meal planning.

Jennifer: I can tell you right now. If you don’t typically cook that much and you think that you’re going to do this – unless you are one of those uber-committed people and it’s a very small percentage of people that can do that – it’s not going to happen. That’s a recipe for failure from the get-go.

And having a plan. I love that you’re talking about planning because that’s really what does help you get going. Even in my book, I talk a lot about having a menu plan.

I know it’s not sexy, but isn’t it true?

Mickey: Yeah. A lot of people are really turned off by the idea of it, but it is “make or break.”

Jennifer: I have a question for you. How long would someone stay — I assume there are stages of some sort — is there a way to tell how long you should stay on the full elimination and then start reintroducing things?

Mickey: Yeah. I’m really glad you brought that up because it’s a very common question. The answer isn’t as easy as you would think.

You really want to stay on the elimination diet until you feel improvement. It’s not possible to tell if a food is affecting you negatively if you haven’t felt any better through the whole process.

So say someone with psoriasis tries autoimmune protocol. They do it for a month. Maybe their skin doesn’t change. That’s really common. Skin is a really low-priority organ for the body. It takes a long time in my experience for skin things to heal compared to some other issues.

But maybe this person, their digestion, just feels awesome. Maybe they had reflux or constipation or something and that’s all been resolved. That person could start reintroducing some foods if that’s what they wanted to do at the end of 30 days or however long it took them to start feeling better. Or they could decide to go longer and see if they can get some more benefit out of it.

What doesn’t work is when people do it without feeling any benefits and then they continue. They think that chances are unlikely that you’re going to experience, just magically somewhere off in the distance, some benefits.

It’s not really common. Usually there’s an underlying issue why someone isn’t getting better.

Yeah, basically people need to wait until they feel something changed. It makes sense. You have to be able to tell if the reintroductions are going well or not.

Jennifer: Just to clarify that, if someone is on this for a long period – let’s say somebody is on this for five months, six months. If you are on this for a significant period of time and you don’t feel better, do you suggest that maybe now it’s time to go seek help from a medical professional?

Mickey: Yeah. I would say sooner than that. I think five or six months is a long time with no improvements.

There’s a very fine line between disordered eating and food restriction. I’m really not a fan of being too restricted with the diet. 

When you people don’t feel success, I think they should get things investigated sooner than later, maybe a couple of months.

Sometimes, I would actually say a lot of the time it’s an underlying gut issue, so maybe a pathogen or parasite or something that a diet isn’t going to fix.

Jennifer: That’s a great point because I have heard that from many people who have been eating a certain way for a really long time. They tell me, in the letters that I get, they still don’t feel better and they just don’t know what to do.

My point is if you’ve been doing this this long, it sounds like it’s time to go seek medical help.

Mickey: Yeah.

Jennifer: There really is only so much – I mean I love food. I think you and I are probably both in agreement with that, we love food — but there’s only so much it can do.

Mickey: Yeah. And it can be a part of the solution. Food is a part. Lifestyle is a part. Medical intervention is a part. You’ve got to put it all together to get a healthy person sometimes. So yeah, that’s a great point.

Jennifer: Let’s go back to the reintroductions. Where do you start? Do you just pick one and then try it? How does that whole piece of this work?

Mickey: I have a list in my book of the foods that are least likely to affect someone. So you want to start at the top of that list.

That’s going to be foods like nuts, seeds, egg yolks, ghee, which is clarified butter. Those are foods that are highly unlikely that someone is going to react to, even someone with autoimmune issues. It’s just a precaution that we’re leaving them out.

Further down the list are things like egg whites, hard cheeses, butter, various nightshades like potatoes and peppers.

As you graduate along the list, you can check something off. For me personally, I can do nuts. I can do seeds. I can’t do ghee, even though it’s something that’s tolerable for a lot of people. I have a very bad reaction to it. So I didn’t move on to the next dairy. I just don’t do any dairy.

I can do eggs just fine. I can do some nightshades. Potatoes are fine for me, but tomatoes are not. Who knew? I would have never known if I hadn’t gone through this systematically and tried these different foods and saw what happened to my body.

Jennifer: There’s no way to – I think people look for these shortcuts. They’re like, “I don’t want to go through this whole process.”

I do understand that. I really do. This is a process. You have to be committed to it for a certain period of time. It can affect your social life and whatnot. Maybe you’ll have some tips for people about that.

When you are going through this, I think that the challenge is that people want a pill or a test to tell them exactly what to eat. I don’t think we’re really there yet. You really have to see for yourself. You have to test and see what happens.

Mickey: Yeah. That’s a really good point. What you’re learning in this process, as much as you’re learning different things about foods that you didn’t know before how they affected you, is how to feel your body when you’re experiencing something. Something that a lot people aren’t really in touch with is “How do I feel after I eat this thing?”

I know for myself, I never really thought about how I digested things. I really didn’t notice when a food, which I know now, totally wrecks my digestion. I just would be like, “Oh, I have a stomach ache. That’s weird.” I never connected the two.

When you start to have that sense, you notice it even about emotional situations or getting enough sleep or lifestyle stuff. You realize when you put yourself in situations that can make your body feel a certain way.

I think that’s a really important skill for people to have.

Jennifer: Yeah. What would a bad reaction look like?

Mickey: It can actually be anything. It can be – like I talked about before – a digestive reaction. It can be a skin reaction, which is what a lot of people are used to with food allergies like rashes, flushing.

It can be a temperature change. So someone gets really warm or really cold after eating something. It can be a flare-up of your symptoms. So that’s a really easy one. If someone has rheumatoid arthritis, they do the autoimmune protocol, and their joint pain goes away. But then they eat a tomato, and their joint pain comes back. That’s pretty obvious.

Mood changes. Some people get emotional reactions to food, which a lot of people are very surprised to hear.

Even though I have celiac disease, I actually don’t get any gut reactions to gluten. But when I’m accidentally glutened, I have zero tolerance for any stress.

Jennifer: Wow, that’s so fascinating. All this stuff is so fascinating. I feel so intrigued by how the body works and how food affects it. It’s just amazing.

So I’m curious to know this. You did mention lifestyle issues a moment ago. How do those play a part in this whole matrix of healing?

Mickey: Yeah. So when we change our diet, that’s just one facet of health. It’s the fuel that we put into our body, the chemicals that we’re feeding all of our cells with this nutrition. It’s part of it.

Another part of it is, like you said, the lifestyle factors, sleep, stress reduction, getting the proper amount of movement. All of those things are I think really important to being a healthy, vibrant person.

If you’re changing your diet and maybe you’re sleeping three or four hours a night, and you have a serious problem there, it’s unlikely that you’re going to see all the benefits of the diet change when you’re not getting restorative, regenerative sleep.

Same thing goes if someone works in an extremely stressful job. They’re not going on any vacations. They’re not taking any breaks. They’re not reducing their stress. That’s going to hamper them.

So yeah, I think it’s really important for people to address those things too if they can.

Jennifer: That’s great. Thank you so much for sharing your story and clarifying a lot of these points for us about the autoimmune protocol and the practicality of it.

Again, the practical nature of making change is so important. I know we all love following people that are doing amazing research and work. That’s great, but I think sometimes it gets a little hard to make the changes.

I think we need more people that are focused on how you do this, how you make it easy.

I want to ask how listeners get a copy of your book, The Autoimmune Protocol.

Mickey: Awesome. My book is available in book stores. Barnes & Noble and independent stores should have it in stock. If not, they can order it. It’s also available on Amazon. I have an e-book version on my website, which is Autoimmune-Paleo.com.

Jennifer: That’s great. I would highly recommend that everybody do this. But you also have a really great two-week free elimination diet meal plan, shopping list, et cetera, for those that sign up for your e-mail. Yes?

Mickey: I do. Yeah. Everything is there to get started. It’s all free and it includes all the recipes and everything in full. So there really are no excuses not to get started.

Jennifer: So I would recommend to everyone, please go and do that because I think this is a great thing, even if you’re just curious, dipping your toes in and checking out Mickey’s elimination plan that’s free on her website. It’s a great way to get a sense of what is to come.

I will tell you the book is beautiful. The photographs are fabulous. It’s got a lot of great recipes. It’s easy to use. If I were to do this – and it’s something I’ve considered trying – I could follow it every day. It just makes it so easy.

So I would really recommend, if you’re looking for a new book and something that’s not like your regular cookbook, this is a really great resource. It’s definitely more than a cookbook.

Thank you so much for joining us, Mickey. I appreciate it.

Mickey: Yeah. Thank you so much for your kind words and for having me on here, Jennifer. This has been great.

Jennifer: I appreciate it, and thank you for making the time.

So go check out Mickey Trescott. She’s at Autoimmune-Paleo.com. She’s also on Facebook and Instagram. I’ll have all the links below.

You can buy her book, The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook, at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and local retailers. I’ll have some links below. So it’s pretty easy to pick up a copy.

Again, if you’re not quite ready to do this and you’re on the fence, go check out her free two-week elimination diet meal plan. I think that’s a great place to start especially if you’re new to hearing this conversation or it’s something you want to get a sense of what it is and how it works.

And please, remember to rate, subscribe, and review this podcast. Head on over to Gluten Free School, leave your questions and comments below.

I’d love to hear from you. I would like to keep this conversation going. I think autoimmunity is a big topic. It’s been one of the biggest topics over the last year for Gluten Free School members. This is a great place to take a look at some dietary changes that will help you move forward and hopefully see some change. 

All right. Thank you so much for joining me. I look forward to seeing you the next time. Bye-bye.

To Buy Mickey’s Book –> CLICK HERE

Mickey’s Website – http://www.Autoimmune-Paleo.com

Facebook – http://facebook.com/autoimmunepaleo

Instagram – http://instagram.com/mickeytrescott

The post How to Make the Autoimmune Paleo Protocol Doable with Mickey Trescott: GFS Podcast 062 appeared first on Jennifer Fugo, CNS.