Mindful Healthy Habits w/Traci & Ellen - Donna Gates of Body Ecology #WoMRadio — Word of Mom Radio

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I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget who I am, 'cause I'm a woman, W-O-M-A-N. I'll say it again, 'cause I'm a woman, W-O-M-A-N. Welcome to Word of Mom Radio.

Hello everybody. Thank you for joining me, Tracy Timmons, and my co-host Dr. Ellen Ferrante on Mindful Healthy Habits with Tracy and Ellen. Today we are very lucky to be able to have a conversation with Donna Gates of Body Ecology. She is the international best-selling author of The Body Ecology Diet: Recovering Your Health and Rebuilding Your Immunity and The Body Ecology Guide to Growing Younger: Anti-Aging Wisdom for Every Generation. She has completed an advanced fellowship with the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. In 1994, Donna introduced a powdered blend of stevia rebaudioside— and she'll let me know if I pronounced that correctly— to the U.S., and it has since become the safest and most popular natural sweetener in the world. She's one of the most respected authorities in the field of digestive health, diet, and nutrition, and for the last 25 years, she has been on a mission to change the way the world Eats.

Wow.

Hi Donna, how are you?

I'm very happy. I'm— first of all, I'm good, and I'm very happy to be here today. I think I've been listening to some of the shows, and I think your whole mission to empower women is fantastic.

Ah, thanks very much.

This is Ellen here.

Yes, we're trying to get the information out to the women and bring on guests that can empower women and give them that information. We're not here, you know, practicing medicine or making medical claims, but there's a lot of information that we need to hear about. So thanks so much for coming on.

Oh, there is a lot of information. It's confusing for people. There's so much. It's overwhelming. So I think when you give it, you know, help people in little bites and pieces, that's ideal. Sounds great.

Exactly, exactly. So the first thing I want to start with, because you've done a lot of work in helping people to eliminate their sugar cravings. So what are the two most important steps? Stat to take to help with sugar cravings?

Well, first of all, I think it's important to realize that it's natural for human beings to want something sweet in their diet. The very first food that we ever ate when we came into this world was breast milk, and it's sweet. So we've got an emotional attachment to that sweet taste. So to completely cut it out of your diet is difficult. But also, the way most people are getting sugar is— sugar is addictive. You know, whenever you eat it today, let's say you had some chocolate candy today, tomorrow around the same time, a bit earlier, your body's gonna start, your brain is gonna start thinking about that piece of sugar and sending signals to give your body some more of that. So it's addictive. But I, years ago, knowing that people could not get well from anything, cancer, candidiasis, anything, if they had sugar in their diet, I went on a search to find an alternative and that's how stevia came about, and you did pronounce it correctly. It's actually, we call it stevia, but it's more of this other element called rebaudioside in the leaf. So these are two molecules that you'll find in the stevia leaf plant, the stevia plant, that are very, very sweet tasting. And so over the years, you know, so years ago I brought it into the country, led a movement with, you know, to get it approved and fought Monsanto because Lansanto had Equal and NutraSweet, and that's aspartame, which is not good for you. But stevia today is very available. It's in many, many products. Millions of people, billions of people are using it around the world, but it's a very safe alternative so that we do have something sweet all the time. And then you can't bake with stevia, so I went on another search. I was working with autistic children at the time, and one of the moms wrote into our email group and she said, "My son's birthday's coming up, I would give anything to have a cake." And I thought, that's true, there's times when you need a gluten-free cake for a birthday party, and so I put it out there to the universe to please help me find a solution. And believe it or not, over in Japan there was a product called Lakanto that they had been using for about 12 years at that time that's a great sugar substitute. And so I brought it over to the country and, you know, over to the US, created the market for it, and then a company moved in from Japan. And you can go to the Lakanto website, or you can order it from us. It's a great sprinkling, baking kind of a sugar substitute. So we have alternatives, but probably the most important thing I wanna say, and really wanna say this to moms, is because we started, if you're eating sugar and you're carrying a baby in your womb, the baby's, getting interested in that taste. Like whatever we eat when we're pregnant, we're already training our babies to want to eat that type of food. Then babies today are, almost all of them are born with a yeast infection, which maybe I'll have a chance to explain or come back to explain. But so they start off, they should not have sugar in their life when they start off. You know, when they start eating foods, they shouldn't have all that fruit that you find in baby foods. You can give stevia to a baby really But the thing is fermented foods are so very, very critical. And what is fermented foods for somebody who hasn't ever heard that term before? You know, they're foods that have traditionally been on the planet since time began. They're foods that have beneficial bacteria in them, like a common term is sauerkraut. I don't like to use the word sauerkraut because years ago when I brought fermented foods into the US and started teaching people about their benefits and how important they were, you know, what they were, how to make them, and so on. People would go in the store and they'd buy a jar of this stuff called sauerkraut, and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't live bacteria. You want— so I changed the term and I called them cultured vegetables, fermented vegetables. But if you start eating those, and so back in the day when I started, there were— you had to make them yourself. But today you can go right into the store, a health food store, And there are a lot of companies including Farmhouse Culture, I think they're everywhere, and depending on what part of the country you live in there's other people who make them as well. You know, buy a jar or a bag of their veggies and start putting a spoonful or two of that on your plate when you eat. That, those fermented foods contain microbes that do really critical things and they, And interestingly enough, they also, when you start eating fermented foods, which are sour, there's other ones besides the fermented vegetables, but they're sour tasting. Sour dampens our desire for sugar. So, for example, with our children with autism, you know, that's all they want to eat are foods with carbohydrates. And so moms would say, "There's no way my son is gonna eat broccoli." And we'd say, just start them on this fermented coconut water or this, these other drinks that I recommend that we sell on our website, but, or the fermented vegetables. Well, kids very often love that sour pickle-like taste, so they would start eating them, and sure enough, they would soon, next thing you know, crawl up in their mom's lap and grab that broccoli off their plate. So it's changing the brain because You're putting these amazing— so the microbes contain trillions and trillions of bacteria in every tiny little, you know, tiny little spoonful. You've got trillions of bacteria that are now in that meal that you've just eaten. They're traveling down your digestive tract, helping digest that food and extract all the good nutrients. They're helping to break it down properly. They're also looking for parasites and toxins in the food and cleaning those up for you. But they get down in the gut, in the colon area, and that is where they do magical things. That's where they live, and there's— in the gut, they, they really are controlling what's happening in our body. We have 23,000 genes. Every single one of them has their own set of genes, so there's trillions of genetic information in your gut coming from these microbes, and they're actually sending signals to the brain. So the brain sends signals to the gut, but there are many, many, like 80% more signals are going from the gut to the brain. So depression and anxiety, which I know you've covered on your show, this is also the way to help people out of that hole.

This is that gut-mind connection.

That gut-mind connection, exactly. And simply by your diet, your diet's key. So we have so many years of proof of this. Like, you know, we have babies— so the Body Code Diet is a fantastic diet to be on when you're pregnant. So we have moms who are on the diet, they're eating these fermented foods and, you know, eating the way we recommend. And then the babies are born and we actually have the moms give the babies diluted juice of the cultured vegetables and put them in the baby's tummy, you know, drop a little dropper and they squirt that into the baby's mouth and right just days after birth. And so our kids are already beginning to get this really healthy inner ecosystem in their gut. They don't have colic. They grow up different too. They're so happy, consistently 100% across the board. Every single one of them is a delight to raise. They're happy, happy kids because these microbes make us feel good. And then, you know, they're— I mean, parenting can be a joy or it can be a difficult, you know, thing if your child is, you know, not happy and sick all the time and everything. So this is a really important thing to do. But again, that brain-gut connection, the kids start speaking very clearly. At an early age, and they also speak, you know, like it's quite noticeable how advanced their language is. So they speak early, they speak very clearly, and they're very present, you know, very present, because again, there's a very, very critical, well-documented with research connection between the gut and the brain.

Very fascinating, very fascinating, and you You speak with such authority and with such passion about this, and we greatly appreciate hearing about this. My kids are grown, and I'm not a grandmother yet, but I did grow up with a son who was learning disabled, not on the autism spectrum, but we didn't pay attention much to that mind connection, and it wasn't really in vogue in those days. But it's so important to pay attention to these things. And sure, the reason I like to come on to listen to shows like this and listen to other people in the field is to educate, and this is such powerful information.

Yeah. Once again, tell us the names of your books.

Donna and Ellen, I'm going to just take a brief pause because we're going to thank our sponsors for today, and then I want to hear so much more about this. This is so exciting. So let's just take a— give them a quick shout-out, and we'll be right back.

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And we are back. This is Tracy Timmons and Dr. Ellen Ferrante with Donna Gates from Body Ecology. And we've been exploring the mind-gut connection, which I hadn't really— I don't want to say I hadn't heard of it before, but I'm really understanding exactly what it means now. And I'm really fascinated, Donna, to hear more about— you mentioned that children growing up with this sort of diet tend to be more advanced in their learning, and then you also mentioned how you've been able to use this to help children with autism. And how it helps with depression and anxiety. So all of that I think is really great information that we'd love to hear a little bit more about.

Well, you know, I think it's a very difficult time to be a parent. There's so many challenges that we face. Look, I'm a baby boomer. I was born in 1946. I'm 72. Wow. Oh my God, you look amazing. Well, that's another thing, by the way. Eli Mishnikoff, over 100 years ago, commented on the fact that people that ate fermented foods seemed to live much longer and live better. You know, I mean, obviously you age, you can't stop that, but you age well and you age comfortably and you're still very productive and have lots of energy and your mind still works and you're very flexible. That's how we are supposed to age. And so what I teach and I have been teaching, I follow, I practice what I teach very pretty religiously. I am passionate about it, but more than anything else, the thing that's kind of always motivated me is the concern for our children, because I almost could— I have an ability to kind of see ahead very clearly, and I can see this coming. So here we are years later in this world where our children are really in trouble. You know, when I— like, not too long— like 15 years ago, it was 1 in 150 children had autism. Now it's down to 1 in 60. And that's very scary, but, you know, it's predicted if we keep going at this rate, every child, or certainly every other child, will be on the spectrum, and that's affecting all of us. Like, who's going to take care of them? And are we going to afford to educate them and take care of them as adults? So this information is really, really important because it's so preventable. One of the things I try to say, and one of the reasons I I kind of moved away from helping so many parents. I was at one point helping thousands of parents through our bedrock group. We had a group called Body Ecology Diet Recovering Our Kids, and I gathered together 6 moms and started teaching them what I thought would be the thing. You know, I wasn't really sure, to help recover their kids, and sure enough, the kids began to recover. All of them were in various stages of recovery. The first one who, The first child in the group is 19 now. He doesn't even know he had autism because he was 3 at the time and he's been recovered for a long time. But we began recovering children where no one had before. And mothers— this is the power of moms. I'll tell you, I learned so much from them about— they tell me what's going on and I give them answers, but they would go and do it. Not only that, they would give each other feedback. We had a very harmonious group of moms that worked together and shared what they were finding out, and then they would share it all over the world because, you know, people have the access today to the internet, to emails, and, you know, I'd say something and teach something, and within months it would come back to me again. And I was just amazed at the power we have to begin to put a message out into the world. And this is a really important message. These mothers These mothers were getting their kids well because they had no intention of having children with autism, and they were going to do whatever they had to do to get their child well. And that's a critical factor in whatever you're doing, whether you're trying to overcome breast cancer or, you know, anything you're doing. You just have to have— do it with a passion, you know, do it with an absolute intention. My child is not going to be autistic, and do what you have to do. And so they I would give them a huge amount of credit for the success of our group. But then, you know, some of the mothers began to have children, a second baby, and there was always a concern that that child would be on the spectrum too, but they never have been. And we have consistently prevented autism for all these years. And that is, to me, the most frustrating thing is that there's not more out in the world. About prevention because it's very, very preventable.

Yeah, I mean, I'd rather prevent something, you know. I feel our time is so much more valuably spent preventing things than, you know, healing them.

I mean, obviously, if you need to be healed—

You need to be healed, but I'm just saying that if we could prevent things in the first place, that seems to be the more efficient way to go.

And I can't stress enough how important the fermented foods are in prevention. And because you're seeing those microbes in your gut and they are your immune system, that's really critical. So this is what is happening. We have a generation of children who don't have a strong immune system and we are vaccinating them. A lot of times the kids go out with the MMR, that's when they regress, and measles, mumps, rubella, and they often, you know, haven't been that well. Maybe they had the flu the week before or something. So you never, never, never want to vaccinate someone without a strong immune system. And the microbes in your gut, they're responsible for 80% of your immune system. So if they're not there or you've got the wrong ones there, you don't have the immunity you need and your child doesn't have the immunity to be vaccinated.

So you feel that Do you think the rise in autism cases and the rise in things like depression and anxiety and maybe some of the other educational issues that people have can be directly related back to this high sugar diet that we've had over recent times and not having fermented vegetables in our diet?

Well, I think that the diet that we have is a very high carb, high sugar diet, refined sugars and all, and they kill the microbes in our gut. Stress is another issue. That's a huge one, I think, for moms, you know.

Right.

And they kill the microbes in our gut. So a stressful life and a high-sugar, high-fat diet, bad fats. I'm not talking about olive oil and avocado oil and macadamia nut oil. These are healthy fats. I'm talking about the, you know, vegetable oils and things that are prevalent.

Yeah, you're talking about the bad fats, yeah.

The bad fats, yeah. That's— they destroy the good bacteria. So we destroy them instead of nurturing them. Instead of— Realizing that we have this garden, this world, this cosmos in our gut and we need to feed it and take care of it so it takes care of us. We don't know that. People have never learned that and instead they're destroying it all the time from the beginning of their life and that's very, very much connected to energy, hormone imbalance, you know, candidiasis is a big, big problem. You know, most of us have had a lot of antibiotics. For various reasons, you know.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking, that the excessive use of antibiotics.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, it's interesting because I've always instinctively kind of rejected the notion, you know, I've been lucky to have doctors who weren't necessarily the type of doctors that do that automatic kind of let me just give you an antibiotic, and then I have always questioned, and not that I've never taken them because I have, but I've always questioned whether or not I needed it because it seems sometimes that that's what a lot of patients want, so then doctors get used to just writing that prescription.

Yeah.

And I've always questioned, "Why do I need it?" Yeah.

Now you're—

here's more for resistant organisms than anything else. But again, we're not thinking about the gut microbes and we should be.

Right.

Well, here's another thing that just to tell you how important they are. So many years ago, I started teaching, you know, people, not as many in those days because, you know, they're It seemed like a very revolutionary way out there idea to eat fermented foods, but they were, you know, they just weren't in our country. There were none. There was just one kind of a, there's yogurt by one company and it wasn't very popular. It was considered kind of a hippie food. So I started teaching about them and their benefits and I started teaching people how to make them. Well, I began to get, I contacted a company with that would make some cultures for me, and I made the culture for a bacteria that had very wonderful bacteria to put into the fermented vegetables called Planterum. Now over time, as scientists began to study these individual bacteria more, Planterum stands out as a superstar. It produces folate, it eats oxalates, which are these little crystals in a lot of our vegetables that are causing calcium deposits and kidney stones and gallbladder stones and all that. Yeah, they eat those up and they degrade histamine. Plantarum degrades histamine, so a lot of people are reacting to the foods they're eating because of a histamine reaction, so they keep that from happening. But they're antiviral and they're not destroyed by an antibiotic. So if you're on cultured vegetables made the way I've been teaching people, and you have to take an antibiotic, and maybe you do, maybe you have a bladder infection, but you end up taking one short term, you're not going to destroy the microbes in your gut, but some of the microbes, like speaking of bladder infections, there's a group of microbes called bacillus. Bacillus subtilis, for example, is very, very effective at preventing and even helping treat a recurring vaginal infection. So they're starting to understand more and more about you know, about the benefit, the how you can, we can use these individual microbes as, you know, a set of drugs. But speaking of bacillus, we have a drink called the probiotic protein shake that's very creamy and delicious and easy to digest. I think it's the best shake out there by far. But it's full of every single time you're drinking a serving, you're getting a whole serving of 4 strains of bacillus that are just amazing. So these bacillus bacteria easily survive stomach acid, get down into the gut, start changing the environment. They support other bacteria that you're sending in that are, you know, help them grow. So the good ones help each other. You know, they feed each other and secrete substances to help the little guy beside them grow, and they help create this wonderful world inside of you. But when you drink this, so we've had, if you go on our website and look at the reviews of the Perfect Protein Shake, we have many, many, many, you know, hundreds and hundreds of 5-star reviews because this is an amazing drink. So people have, a lot of people today have gut dysbiosis, you know, they have gas and bloating when they eat meals or they just don't go to the bathroom or many, many things, they have Crohn's, colitis, a lot of pain. And they can't eat certain foods, but when you start drinking this protein shake in about a month, which is about 2 packages, then you'll notice that a lot of foods that you were reacting to before, you're no longer reacting to them because you've fixed, you've begun to do something really important as far as fixing the gut. So we are reacting to a lot of foods today. It's sort of people, they don't even know what to eat because they think everything I eat bothers me. You have to fix the gut. That's where you always start no matter what you're doing, whether you're losing weight, trying to age well, you know, have a healthy baby, whatever your goal is, you have to start by fixing the gut.

Right. Wow, Donna, this has been so great. Believe it or not, we need to start wrapping this up, but please, you shared a few times some information that we could find on your website, which we will have links to on the show page and on the blog post connected to the page, but would you please tell our listeners where to find you?

Well, bodyecology.com is our website and we have lots of free information there and just, just bodyecology.com.

Great, great. And we're going to have links to their social media as well. And definitely, Donna, this has been really fascinating. So I know that we only got to touch briefly on some of the stuff about, for instance, about stress and, and some of the rest of it. So I would like to think about maybe having a follow-up in a few months with you and maybe bringing you back to go into a little more detail on some of those.

I would love that. I have lots of different topics, lots of opinions about different topics. I would love that.

I would love it also. This has been so fascinating and you've been so knowledgeable, so we greatly appreciate you sharing all of this information.

Well, thank you for doing this, for getting this word out, because there are people like me that That's what we're here to do, and we can't do it without your part of it. So thank you.

Well, thank you, Donna. Make today a great day.

And thank you to everyone for listening to Mindful Healthy Habits with Tracy and Ellen here on Wednesdays on the Word of Mom Radio Network, sharing the wisdom of women. Tomorrow, our Mompreneur Model Show will feature Patrice Maynard. She actually now teaches teachers for the Waldorf School Method. Which is about children learning to enjoy real life and the real world and to become familiar with nature and to express themselves artistically before they become embroiled in the world of technology. And I really enjoyed talking to Patrice and I will really enjoy sharing her with you tomorrow. Don't forget about Cairo's Cafe, the, Community Open Mic at St. John's Lutheran Church at 81 Christopher Street in New York City. It is free to the public. There is a $3 suggested donation that goes to the church in return for use of the space. It's an open mic, so it's an opportunity if you'd like to perform to come in with a song, with some poetry, with a movement piece, with a story, with some comedy, with anything that you'd like to share with an audience, or of course you can just come and be in the audience and enjoy the performances yourself. The ticket links have been up and shared for "You Don't Know How It Feels," the Dark Night production that is in the DreamUp Festival with shows from August 29th through September 15th. And that will actually, we will feature that show and introduce it next Monday on Matinee Monday. So please remember to be happy, be healthy, and most importantly, to be yourself. Make you the best you, you can be. Make today the best day. And we're going to close that again with the incredible song that Smith Sisters Bluegrass has shared with us to remind you that you are brave, bold, strong, true. That woman, she is you.

She is sure. She is strong. She is true. She is brave. She is brave. She is bold. She is bold. She is you. She is you. She is you. She is you. She is sure. She is sure. She is strong. She is strong. She is true. She is true. She is brave. She is brave. She is bold. She is bold. She is you. She is you. She is you. She is you. Sure of herself, yeah, she takes care of biz. Powerful and strong, yeah, she knows her place. Who she is, has integrity. Woman strong and true. You know her by name. See, this woman is you. She is sure. She is strong. She is true. She is brave. She is bold. She is you. She is sure. She is strong. She is true. She is brave. She is brave. She is bold. She is bold. She is you. She is you. She is you. She is you. Adds value and hope. Has proved to be brave. See, it's never too late. Never time to behave. Reaching for dreams. Doesn't matter the age. Believes in herself. Unleashed from her cage. She is sure. She is sure. She is strong. She is strong. She is true. She is true. She is brave. She is bold. She is you. She is sure. She is strong. She is true. She is brave. She is bold. She is you.

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