Nicole is a licensed Mental Health Counselor that helps people use ketogenic dietary therapy as a treatment for mental illness and neurological issues. She uses a variety of nutritional and functional methods of treatment in her work and provides evidence-based psychotherapy, which supplements the years she spent as a "traditional" counselor. In this context, "traditional" means a counselor who practices with a focus on behavioral, cognitive-behavioral, and dialectical-behavioral therapy, with medication as a major tool to help patients.

This ties to Nicole's value of integrity, because she believes there are too many pharmaceutical and food companies that aren't being honest with their customers. It is not that everyone involved is evil or deliberately trying to hurt others but, for various reason, the result has been a system that is more focused on profit than integrity. Perhaps the leaders of these companies actually think they are doing some good (providing drugs to improve mental/physical health, low cost food options for impoverished people, etc.) but have lost sight of the big picture and what really matters. 

This type of topic and line of discussion is ripe with assumptions, biases, and blind spots. We don't actually know what is going through the heads of the CEOs or doctors involved. Science very rarely has conclusive evidence, so even the various studies that seem to support these claims can be refuted with other studies that provide counter evidence. So Nicole and I factored all of that in and spent a good bit of the discussion trying to entertain the possibility that there was more to the story than we were aware of. 

What I really appreciated about Nicole's approach was that, even though it was evident she has a lot of passion and frustration around this topic, her goal wasn't to prove she was right or that nutrition is the answer to all of our problems. As she stated, she just wants people to be more informed about what they are putting in their body and what options they have for potential treatments.