Elizabeth Yarnell | When Doctors Say, "We Don't Know" Podcast | Episode 110

Welcome to the show. My name is Eva Vennari, founder of the Elevate Institute, and I'll be your host for today's podcast, When Doctors Say We Don't Know. It's an inclusive conversation. So many are craving to share their stories and experiences, and today's guest is no exception. Today's honored guest is Elizabeth Yarnell. She is a board-certified traditional naturopath focused on how food sensitivities influence multiple sclerosis and autoimmune sensitivity. You may recognize her from being featured on CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS, as well as in Good Housekeeping, Health, and even Martha Stewart Living Radio. Elizabeth, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Eva. I'm so excited to be here.

I'm so excited for you to be here. Every time we chat, we have a wonderful conversation, and I'm not doubting we're going to have another great one. So I know that you tend to work with I mean, you've been, you've worked with hundreds of people with MS and autoimmune nationwide in your clinics. Tell us more. What have you heard from clients about that answer? Have you heard of this? The doctors say, we don't know. What's been your experience?

So I loved, I love learning about the title for your show here because that's exactly what every patient pretty much tells me when they come to see me.

Oh, good.

Is they all come with a statement. stack of medical reports, often from many doctors, lots of lab reports, and really it's all been very inconclusive and the doctors just don't know and they feel quite hopeless by the time they get to me. I'm often a last resort, which is unfortunate, but it's all good because I welcome those people. Come to me. If the doctors can't fix you, come to me.

Well, I mean, it's such a frustrating thing for a person. You just meant— you hit the nail on the head. It's about losing of hope. Do you feel like there's some level of responsibility from physicians who are saying that, to say, look, we can't help you, but there may be an answer out there? Just does that finality feel like it's drilled into a person's head, or where are they mentally when they get into your hands?

Well, first, I totally agree with you. I wish physicians would be able to say, I can't help you, but maybe there's help out there for you. But instead, really, they're trained in medical school to say, I can't help you, therefore you're just going to have to learn how to live with it, and sorry, or maybe it's you're making it all up in your head, which is horrible.

Yeah, it is. I've heard that one a lot. I've experienced that one myself. It is very invalidating.

Or they might say, oh, it's just stress, you're just stressed. Um, yeah, that one kills me too. Or, or you're crazy or hysterical. I find that quite misogynist many times.

Oh wow, crazy. Okay, all right, that's— yeah, I hear that one less, less frequently, but I suppose that's, um, still out there. Um, on, on the note of You being outside of— I mean, you've got the traditional naturopath. Is there a difference between a traditional naturopath and what is a holistic naturopath, or do you include holistic in traditional?

Yes, so a holistic naturopath is really a traditional naturopath, but there are 2 kinds of naturopaths. One kind is a naturopathic doctor who also practices some allopathic medicine, can prescribe some pharmaceuticals, can do some minor or surgical procedures. That is not within the realm of traditional naturopathy. I am a traditional naturopath. My realm includes things like herbs and homeopathy and minerals and nutrition and all kinds of natural healing modalities, many of which might seem a little bit outside the mainstream, maybe infrared saunas, all kinds of Different types of healing practices, but not surgery and not pharmaceuticals.

We hear inflam— you mentioned inflammation. It's like that we hear that as an underlying cause. It's a buzzword. People are aware of it. So if medicine is saying, look what I have, we don't know what's going on, maybe it's inflammation, where are people on their journey of medications or self-medication even by the time they get to you because you are that last resort, like you said?

Oftentimes they've tried things like steroids. They've tried all kinds of medications that might have side effects, including maybe nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories like aspirins. They've tried proton pump inhibitors for stomach issues. They've been on insulin. They really— it could range. Let's just say the range of pharmaceutical medications. Allopathic doctors are awesome for when you get in a car accident or you have a major trauma.

Yes.

Like, if I'm in a car accident, by all means, take me to the hospital, put me back together again. But for long-term chronic conditions, Doctors aren't really qualified to care for those and to actually heal them. What they offer is palliative care.

Yes. Yeah, I agree with that. And that's part of this whole message is to allow for the listener and all of us to remember that, is that there's a— all medicine is good, but in an appropriate time. That makes sense to me. And so I asked that question, the first question about what are the medications, including self-medication, because what's the potential? If people are coming to you for all these different things, are you finding— what are you finding is a way forward to becoming free of taking medications, or is that possible?

Oh, I absolutely believe most people can get off probably most, if not all, of their pharmaceuticals simply by changing certain things in their diet and lifestyle, and that is really where I focus, and I help people see what is causing, what is triggering that inflammation to begin with so that they don't have to take that medication to tamp it down.

Because that's more of a band-aid as opposed to an actual—

Exactly, exactly. That's— I'm not interested in band-aids. I'm interested in healing, and I know that the body can only heal in the absence of inflammation. And so that's the number one job, is to get rid of inflammation from the sources that we can identify. And I can say that very easily, right? But that's what doctors in hospitals spend quite a bit of time trying to get rid of inflammation in the body, and they have a whole arsenal of drugs at their disposal to do that, and they all have some degree of side effects. But really what I believe in is let's look and figure out what's causing the inflammation. In my experience, inflammation is not coming from nowhere. It's not spontaneous inflammation. It's being triggered by something and if we do the detective work, we can figure out what that trigger is and then eliminate it from your life.

So is it possible to think that a person absolutely is gonna come to you with some sort of prescription medication or self, you know, whatever they're using for medication because we all use something whether standing in line at Starbucks or CBD oil or you know what I mean? We're all using something to stay awake or feel better.

Right, including things like caffeine.

Exactly.

You're right.

You're right.

So sometimes they do, and I have to say, sometimes people come to me and they say, I really wanted to do this years ago, but I was scared to give up my coffee.

Yes.

And my response is, well, I don't know if you have to give up coffee or not. We're going to do some really super sophisticated state-of-the-art testing on your blood and your urine to see what's really the problem for you. Is it coffee? Maybe, maybe not. It's certainly not for the majority of my patients. It really depends on the person. So if that's the fear that's holding you back, that you're going to have to give up something you love and you don't want to give that up, that's a baseless fear. And just let's do it and see what you should be giving up. And it might not be what you're scared of giving up.

Well, what would you say to the, the person who's taking a prescription medication whose prescribing doctor has said you will need to take this for the rest of your life?

Right, so like with insulin or thyroid medications.

Yeah.

Yes, and not only that, of course, like they'll— doctors will tell you you need to be on a statin for the rest of your life, which is a whole nother soapbox for me. I hate those statins. But my legal obligation is to very clearly state I am not a medical doctor, and if you are being prescribed medications from your medical doctor, then you need to work with your medical doctor to either stop or change those medications as you wish. But you, as my patient or as a person, are empowered to do that. You don't have to have your doctor's permission to wean yourself off of a medication or to stop taking it altogether. And most of these long-term chronic medications that people are on, like say statins or proton pump inhibitors, You won't die if you don't take it. Now insulin, of course, is a little bit different of a thing, and thyroid medication depends on the state of your thyroid and if it still exists anymore. But by and large, many of these chronic medications that people just get up and take every morning without even thinking of it aren't necessarily— they're not necessarily prolonging your life or even improving the quality of your life.

Well, and improve on that point, improving the quality of your life. As you're talking about this, I'm thinking about we take things in rote memories, like, okay, I do this and that's my next— while I'm thinking about what I'm going to eat for breakfast, I'm taking my supplements or my prescription medications. I'm just putting myself into the shoes of a listener who might be in this scenario. And we do things without thinking about it because it's habit. But Is there— have you seen evidence? I know I've seen it in my practice, but have you seen evidence in a buildup of chemical inflammation due to taking prescription medications?

Absolutely. And even worse, because it's just masking the problem and you're still having that inflammation underlying that medicated state, you're still causing damage to your body and you're still um, filling up your tolerance threshold and still running in danger, in danger of becoming autoimmune eventually, because really that's how it happens. So I'll give you an example. I had a patient, he had been taking proton pump inhibitors, I think it was Prevacid or Nexium, for, um, 18 years. And he just thought that, well, that's just the way it goes, you just keep upping your dosage because it's not working and I'm still having stomach distress and heartburn and all these things and I still feel bloated, so I'm just going to take more of the Prevacid and it's been 18 years. And I said to him, I'm like, do you realize you're only supposed to be taking these proton pump inhibitors for like 2 or 3 months, not as a lifetime solution? And he was horrified to learn that. Of course, that's not something his doctor had ever talked to him about. So that was a big goal for him when he came to start to work with me is how could he get off of these proton pump inhibitors that he had been taking for 18 years.

Oh wow.

And now he doesn't have any of that stomach distress. He's not taking the proton pump inhibitors. He dropped like 3 pant sizes. He feels great.

That's a great story. That's a great result and it's oftentimes that fear This is what I'm digging into here is that fear of, well, I've got something that at least is a safety net under me by taking the medications. This is what I feel like is in the mind of people taking medications. But I'm okay, Eva. I'm okay. I'm okay taking this medication because—

And what's going to happen if I stop?

Right. I might get worse. Yeah. Or it's going to come back. And I'm like, you're taking something that is a Band-Aid, not a true fix. It's, it's okay to take it temporarily, like you said, but moving past it, you need someone who knows more about the healing also, like you were talking about, which is really cool.

Or if you're someone who has headaches all the time, yeah, it's okay to take a Tylenol every now and then, but if you're taking like 4 Tylenols a day for months on end, that's not right. There's an underlying condition that needs to be addressed. That's— that you shouldn't be living on pain relievers.

And not to mention the stress that puts on your kidneys and your liver for processing.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, these are things that, that are often, like you said, not really discussed well. But, um, the inflammation factor, it adds to the inflammation is what I'm hearing, as opposed to adding to the healing.

Right, so you get some maybe temporary relief from the inflammation and the pain that inflammation causes, but it's not addressing what's causing it to begin with.

Yeah. And when it comes specifically to MS and autoimmune, autoimmune should be a huge subject right now because the immune system is all about— if you fortify your immune system, we've got this virus, COVID, we've been living with, our unwelcome houseguest for the last many months. Why aren't more people talking about inflammation as it relates to the autoimmune system?

You know, and they should be, right? Because what COVID does is it, it causes rapid increase in inflammation in the lungs, and that's how people suffocate really from COVID and die. But you're right, we are talking about autoimmunity, and we're, we're talking about it as a huge increase in our society. In fact, I just saw a recent statistic that maybe up to 30% of all Americans have some sort of autoimmune symptoms or diagnosed autoimmune condition. So that's huge. This was not what our society was like 100 years ago. I really think a lot of autoimmunity comes from the contamination that's been done to our environment and our food supply, all the chemicals that are around us and surrounding us. The Environmental Working Group did a study a number of years ago where they tested the cord blood in newborn babies across the country and they found that the average newborn already had over 200 chemicals in the cord blood at the moment of birth that have come through the mother. That just shows how contaminated we are before we even open our eyes in this world.

That's amazing. I'm amazed by that. I mean, I know that minerals and imbalances and toxins, they pass from mother to child in the womb. The chemicals I hadn't thought so much about. But that's, that's, that is amazing to me. And the increase, I wonder if that's related to things like being on the spectrum and autism.

I think it's all connected. I think things like autism has to do with inflammation in the brain that's causing misfirings of the nerves or causing too much excitement that's going on inside the nervous system. That's affecting the amount of information that is being processed by the senses.

Wow. And it can feel very overwhelming. So when a person hears all of this, I mean, it might get to the point of, well, why bother? Like, what is the point? But there's—

Because there's hope.

Because—

right? So for me, I had like a classic light bulb moment when I was studying the immune system and hypersensitivity reactions. And I realized that Food sensitivities and hypersensitivity reactions trigger the same subset of white blood cells, the T cells, that are triggered and run rogue in multiple sclerosis. And it made me think that all of my MS doctors, because I have multiple sclerosis myself, have always told me that, well, MS happens when the subset of white blood cells called the T cells go rogue and they start reacting. To your own body. We call it autoimmunity— immune to yourself, or allergic to yourself, I should say. So they can't figure it out. And so they figure— they think, oh, well, maybe it's just reacting to the human body and misfiring, which of course should not be happening in a perfect body. And we are all evolved animals that have evolved to function well. So when something like this is happening with that we're now calling autoimmunity, it means something has desperately gone wrong inside the body. My, my aha moment was that, you know what, if the— if we can see how eating certain foods are causing the excitement of the T cells, and what if we correlated that to say, you know what, I'm diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which is an inflammatory disease, How— what if I look and can I correlate that inflammation, that inflammatory activity, to the foods that I eat? And what I found is 100%, absolutely yes, you absolutely can. And because we can do that correlation, we can determine what we need to avoid individually to help us stop triggering, triggering those inflammatory reactions and responses in our body.

Now, are the foods list to avoid, is that the same for everyone?

Oh my gosh, I so wish it was because then I would write a book and get rich and everybody would know me. But it's absolutely unique, really, for everybody. I mean, one of my most inflammatory foods is lettuce. I mean, lettuce, what could be more innocuous than lettuce?

People think salads are healthy. So what's the deal?

Exactly. And that would, of course, been my first go-to to be healthier. But when I eat lettuce, I, I have MS symptoms where I become very unstable on my feet. And in fact, the last time I ate lettuce, I fell down on a ski run and, um, and sprained my thumb and had to wear a brace for like 3 months afterwards. It was ridiculous. But I can in myself see a very clear correlation for me when I eat lettuce. Now, my son, on the other hand, some of his most inflammatory foods are also foods we think of as being extremely healthy, like lemon, garlic, and broccoli.

Completely different.

Completely different, but also very healthy foods, right?

Right. Foods that we assign as having a healthy label to them.

Right. So when people ask me, well, what is the list that everybody should stay away from? What I feel most comfortable saying is try to stay away from synthetic chemicals. Stay away from artificial sweeteners. Stop drinking commercial soda.

Yes.

Start reading ingredient labels, and if there are chemicals on there that you cannot pronounce, you should not be eating it.

Excellent.

So it's going to take people a little bit longer to shop this week thanks to No, I'm sorry for that in advance, and I always warn my patients when they first come in that they are going to be spending quite a bit more time in the grocery store for a little while while they read all the labels until they can identify the brands that are safe and clean because nobody else is watching out for us.

Right. Yeah, there's no Big Brother saying this is safe for our bodies or not.

Our Big Brother is saying this is good for commerce.

Right. So we are the ones who have to take up the yoke and say, all right, I'm going to take charge of the information, of what goes into my mind, what goes into my body, and then be in control of it because I think that's the only way forward. I agree with you. So you're— I'm just switching gears here because you're into all kinds of things. You're like me, you're a multipotentialist. You've done a TEDx talk, you've written a book, you're an inventor. So where do you want to start?

Yes, a lot of things. So, um, I— my book is super exciting. I actually, when I first was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and I was looking for a healthier way to eat, but quickly learning that when I was trying to prepare all of my foods from scratch, it was taking forever and making a huge mess in the kitchen, which I didn't want to have to clean up every time. And so I ended up becoming an accidental inventor, and I invented and patented a method of cooking one-pot meals in a cast iron Dutch oven that is quick, easy, super healthy, and delicious. And it works really well for food sensitivities and for adjusting your meals to meet whatever your diet is, whether that's low carb or dairy-free or vegan, doesn't matter. You can still use my Glorious One Pot Meals technique to, to whip together nutritious and delicious meals in 45 minutes.

Wow, that's cool. And is it, is it cooking for one or is expandable to cooking for whole families?

You know, I— it's actually cooking for 2, the cookbook is, because I, I invented it when it was just me and my husband, but you can easily expand it to double or triple so you can feed 4 or 6 people or even 8, depending on what your needs are. That was a huge fight when I was publishing my cookbook because so many of the cookbook publishers said, well, nobody's going to buy a cookbook for— that has recipes that feed only 2 people. And I said, you've got to be kidding me. There's tons of, tons of couples and singles out there, and you can easily expand it to feed a family. And it's just much easier than trying to do the fractions to, to drop a recipe down to feed only 1 or 2 people.

There are a ton of people out there who are Part of a family in the same household who, because they have diet restrictions, are basically cooking for one amongst others.

Yes.

So yeah, I, I, that's— I've seen that more and more. Um, I think your publishers might want to see that there are, there are people in this position and we need to be supported. So I think that's a great thing to be able to say.

Well, I think, yes, I think we've proven them wrong because I've sold more than 60,000 copies.

Look at you. What's the name of it? How can people find it?

It's called Glorious, G-L-O-R-I-O-U-S, One Pot Meals.

And is it found on Amazon?

It is on Amazon.

There we go. All right. So go ahead and get it. Well, and tell us about the TEDx. What was, what was that all about?

Yes, the TEDx. So my TEDx talk was— it's called Poisons in Our Everyday Foods. We Are What We Eat. And it's really where I start to talk about all of the toxins that are in our environment and in our contaminated food supply. It was when I was writing my TEDx, I was torn between, do I want to talk about multiple sclerosis and food sensitivities, or do I want to talk about the toxins and the contaminants in our world? And I kind of landed on, I want to talk about something that will affect more people than just people with MS and kind of is the foundation for what I do with MS and food sensitivities as well.

Cool. Every way that we can get the message out, I think, is important because not everybody has the money to take out a commercial like the pharmaceuticals and say all this stuff. So I love that you're part of the conversation here. And I just want to ask, is there, is there a A way that people, as they're hearing, hey, this is me, I want to work with Elizabeth, what's the best way for them to reach out to you? And do you have anything for them to participate in?

Absolutely. So I have a couple of things. I have an infographic and— what am I trying to say— a handout about food sensitivities and MS that you can get at my website at elizabethyarnell.com. And also, I'd love to extend to any of your listeners, if they would like to just get on the— on a call with me and talk about how their— what their issues are for their health and to see, are they a good candidate for this kind of approach? And you can go ahead and very easily book an appointment directly with me, a complimentary consultation at bit.ly/EYassessment.

We will have that link. So it's the bit.ly/EYassessment, and we will have that if you are driving or can't get to a pen in time. We'll have that in the show notes below in this episode page. So very good. Thank you for that. That's very generous of you.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So one final question because we are running out of time. What do you feel is the most important thing to remember when searching for answers?

I feel the most important thing to remember is that there are answers out there. So if the answer you first hear about or first learn about is not the right one for you, then keep looking.

Just keep looking like Dory. Just keep swimming.

Exactly. We are all very unique. Each of us is a unique individual like a snowflake and What works for somebody else might not work for you, and that's okay. But let's— there is hope and there is a path to healing for every one of us. So come and contact me and let's talk about it, and I can show you how you can make it happen for yourself too.

Yeah, beautiful. I love it. Thank you so much. And thank you again for being on the show.

Thank you so much, Eva.

Well, this is it for our show today. Thank you for listening in to When Doctors Say We Don't Know. This has been an engaging conversation. And I'm hopeful those of you listening will hear a message of hope so that you too can turn your experience of pain into triumph. If you're driving and can't click on the links to the show notes just yet, remember you can always hop onto theelevateinstitute.com, follow the podcast links for today's show. There's more to talk about. Tune in next week for our next episode of When Doctors Say We Don't Know. This is Eva Vennari reminding you to question everything.