The Feminine Blueprint: Why Ancestral Cultures May Hold the Key to Modern Women’s Health with Mary Ruddick PT 1

Welcome everyone. I am beyond excited about our next guest. She is one of two people that I knew I had to have them on this show. So I am beyond excited to be introducing you to Mary Ruddick. Mary dedicates herself to the study of ancestral diets and traditional health practices. She travels extensively. She's like A modern-day Indiana Jones without pillaging the cultures for their treasures, but she immerses herself into indigenous cultures to uncover ancient health practices, which she then integrates into her work to help others heal from challenging health conditions. Referred to as the Sherlock Holmes of health for her unique ability to assess and remediate complex health conditions, she specializes in metabolic, microbiome, immune, and nervous system disorders with a particular focus on neuromuscular conditions, infertility, and chronic diseases. Welcome to Everyday Ancestral, and I am your host, James Barry. Please enjoy our next guest, Mary Ruddick. How would you define a strong woman? Because I feel like you exude that. And historically, I say historically, meaning like, you know, the last 40 years or longer in the US. I feel like female strength was defined by male strength, but yet you exude a femininity, you exude a strength and an intelligence, you know, like, I feel like in a sense, maybe you're redefining what a strong woman is and can be.

Thank you. I think to answer your question, I think a strong woman, it is different than a strong man. I think we get our strength from discernment rather than outward power. So by what we say no to and what we say yes to, we've really been the last few decades kind of conditioned and just culturally in this wave of do everything and accept everything and still keep your feminine forgiveness and flexibility. Flexibility is a very important part of health, period, and happiness as well, joy. But I think it's really discernment because for females, it's what we say no to. If we say yes to a bad partnership, we have a terrible life, right? It's what we say no to.

I love that. Isn't it fascinating? Because really we've been in such a patriarchal society, right? For so long, particularly here in the US. But as you're traveling, I even think of like other cultures as being very patriarchal as well. Is that your experience? Like, what are the roles that you're finding women are playing in these other cultures and How are they defining female strength and, you know, in, in these cultures?

I love this question. I'm so glad you're asking this. It's so different because we would probably from the outside define most of the places that I go to, if not all, patriarchal, but it doesn't come with the negative connotations that we have. And it doesn't come with the negative results either. So it's very, very different. Females are very discerning. They know what they bring and what they want and they get it. And they're very calm and joyful. And as a result, they're kind of like flowers. Like even to me, when I come into most of the cultures, they immediately are holding my hand and taking me under their wing and snuggling and cooing me like I'm a child. It's wonderful. It feels so nice. You would never have that in our, in Boston or in Miami. So, right, this just wouldn't happen. Female-male roles, the power dynamic that we've defined them as, as like this person is controlling or all the negative connotations like abusive. No. And this one is submissive and this and this. No, it's very different. It's almost hard for us to cognitize, I would say, without seeing it. I luckily had examples in my own family because I, I'm from a family with really good marriages and relationships, but the male isn't controlling or in charge. He would never see it that way either. It's more that they are like yin and yang. There are 2 sides to a necessary coin. And so the male has different roles than the female. And as the roles are so divided, It's not limiting. It's actually, it gives you freedom. It gives you the kind of freedom, at least from what I hear from women, most are searching for quietly, secretly while they cry themselves to bed at night over their glass of wine, right? So it is, it's really incredible. They get to spend time with their family, their children, their sisters. They're laughing all the time. They're dancing all the time. They're not restricted. Now, Where I think things have turned into all our culture and where it's going and in other places, and what we think that we see when we see, say, a borderline tribal culture, which is a hybrid of modernization and the past, or the traditional ways, is that mental illness comes in and microbiome imbalance comes in. And when those things come in, that's when people get coercive, abusive, manipulative, right? The traditional negative of the male was power and control. The negative of the female is manipulation. We're seeing both and both aren't good. So, so we get more and more of that as I see more mental illness set in and more overall imbalance. And I think that could happen even without a big change in diet like we've seen in diet and lifestyle, simply because a female, our hormones, we require very different things than the male hormones do. We get rewarded by different things. We get punished. hormonally by different actions. And one of the things that makes a female kind of spin out, if we talk about it in a slang way instead of a hormonal, but from a hormonal level, what makes a female spin out is not having safety. And safety is not to be found today. It's not found in your own career. If you get sick, you have no safety. Traditionally, the safety was provided by the whole community. to the females and to the children. It wasn't just to their marriage. If something happened to the husband, then his family took her in. She was never abandoned. And so this kind of, we can all do it ourselves, has caused a great rift in what we think each gender is there for and what they can provide and what they're good at and what they're bad at. And it's all honestly so skewed from what it's meant to be. I am At Weston A. Price this year, I talked about this a bit, and I had to bring it into tropical birds because I thought, knowing the humans I know, who's going to hear me from the level that's not theoretical instead of just hormonal? And so I was like, well, let's use tropical birds because when we watch nature documentaries, we're not judging them for being like that. We're not judging the male bird for spending 5 years building a nest to attract a female for 10 seconds. You know, like, we're not judging them for that. We're not saying it from a theoretical standpoint. It's very, very hormonal as to what's going on, and it actually is with us Wow.

That's a fascinating concept though. Like, I think about when you're like, when I've been in men's groups, for example, one of the first things we do is we create a safe container. And what I hear you saying in a sense is that one of the dysfunctions that's happening societally is that we're not creating a safe container for the society. That in many ways, it's like we're focusing so much on maybe personalities, individualities, and just That we're actually not at first just creating a cultural safe container or a societal safe container. And I think about this thing when I first met my wife, who's Canadian, and I don't think she actually feels this way anymore, but when I first met her, she said, in Canada, I feel like the country's got my back. And I think she was thinking about, you know, from the medical standpoint and just like that there's social, there's services for them. Right. And then she was like, but in the US, I feel like it's the Wild West. Like, I don't feel safe.

Yes. Yeah, I would agree. Having lived in many other countries, it feels very unsafe in America and it's unsafe in funny ways, right? We often think of unsafe as like robber or, you know, violence, this kind of thing. But actually the human body, what it registers as feeling safe, what it hormonally responds to safe versus threat, is so different than what we think. Like being inside is a threat to the body. It pumps out more stress for that than most things we could think of. So it can be very subtle things like not eating at the same time every day, not having loved ones around constantly to hear and to smell, sleeping alone. These kinds of things create a great deal of destabilization. And when you couple that with our modern health conditions without a safety net of any kind of shelter, When you're sick or care when you're sick, that means you're very reliant on the very few people that you were raised with and that they're mentally stable and healthy enough to take care of you as well. So it's a very shaky system. It really is. And for females, when they provide for themselves, and I mean shelter, food, care for the children, okay. And we're talking from a scientific hormonal standpoint. We're not talking from a theoretical. The cortisol is very, very high. The reward is not there. It's a, it's a bit of a punishment. It can be done. We obviously can do it, but it does take a toll. And we're seeing that, especially around perimenopausal years, the cortisol has become too much of an issue for phase 2 and 3 of the liver. And we have a lot of penalties for that. Now, in contrast, when men struggle, of course there's a cap as well, but when you go and you work towards something, someone born a male, goes and works towards something, you get a huge hormonal reward. So it's a very big difference. We get rewarded with nurture, you get rewarded with output. And so the fact that we're all kind of pretending that we're all the same, it's causing huge issues to both genders. And both genders are paying the price with dealing with each other and with ourselves. No one feels too good or too happy.

I want to back up a little bit though, because I just, I want to make sure people understand a little bit more about your past. I learned that you, you went through your own health challenges. Can you share a little bit about that? Because I find it fascinating that at least what you've articulated in some of the interviews I've watched is that the 3 things that helped pull you out initially, because if you look at it as stages, but the first stage was gratitude, affirmations, and mindfulness. And it's like, well, that's not what we usually think about as Healing. I mean, it's healing qualities, but it's not usually like, well, this is what's going to start the process. We just see it as part of the process.

Yeah, definitely. It was a huge part. I was a very healthy kid growing up, so I didn't have any of these issues that other people do. I was very lucky as far as that goes. And I was studying biology in the Bahamas. I was at a field station and I got a Mycobacterium infection, which is Really hard to kill. And we were on an island without hospitals or doctors or roads. Well, there was one road, but my fever of 106 lasted for 6 days. And at the time seemed to permanently damage my nervous system. I was disabled and bedbound for the better part of 12 years with horrific neuropathy, dysautonomia, kidney disease, liver disease. I needed a machine for my lungs. Basically, you name it, double thyroid disease. So the list would be long. But it was incurable at the time. There hadn't been anyone who had gotten into remission, and the, the kidney aspect was quite significant. I lost enormous, enormous weight, couldn't lift a, a mug for many of those years like I am now. We really got to a point where we kind of gave up on Western medicine, not entirely. I still would do my reviews and my lab work, but we realized it wasn't gonna get me to where we needed to go. And I was also running outta time, to be frank. And so we started looking at other things and it, it took 5 years from that point to get into remission, which was lucky at all to get anywhere. But the things that I brought in first were things that I could control. And one of the natures of what I had was just exquisite pain. Like I could have never anticipated or imagined before this happened that really was not touched by any medication. So I didn't have any escape from the pain. It was 24/7. And so as you can imagine, you're, Your mindset is, even if you go in with the best of mindset, you're not exactly thinking about the flowers, you know, when you're dealing with that much pain. So I started working on that because that was something I could shift and really focusing on right now. I started to realize that if I could just take the pain in 10 seconds, I could handle it. It was the idea of handling it for 10 minutes or an hour or a day or a week that was so overwhelming. And so if I brought it down to just these 10 seconds, And then that led to practicing a great deal of gratitude and shifting the focus, never lying to myself or gaslighting myself, but shifting the focus from what was truly terrible to what was also true. That was something neutral or beautiful at the same time. And that really helped my nervous system calm and relax. And it also honestly was a great gift to myself because it was like taking a vacation from the illness. And so I started to cultivate that more and more and more and more, which led to really the space in which I think is so required to heal, because as Carolyn Myss says it so well, you could be doing nothing but, you know, green juice or nothing but carnivore. But if you're eating that with stress and anger and frustration and ingratitude, the cells aren't going to regenerate in the right way. There's too much cortisol pumping. We don't regenerate that cell with all that cortisol pumping and cortisol is our friend. We need it. It just not all the time.

So this part of your journey was before you started going to, into the other countries and exploring other cultures, correct?

It was, yeah. I was always a traveler and I'm from a family that's lived internationally quite a bit. My dad grew up mostly in Egypt, but yeah, I was, I was only 18 when it happened. So I hadn't done a lot on my own.

I have to wonder that process, that journey is, you know, really painted your experience as you entered these other cultures, you know, the humbleness, the mindfulness, the kind of separation of ego that probably came through that process. Because one of the kind of, I feel like one of the white elephants in the room, at least from how people might perceive you from outside without knowing you, Is that here you are, this beautiful, tall, I don't know your full nationality, but let's just say white woman, right? That is going into these cultures. So here comes in once again, the white savior to, you know, research and explore these cultures. Do you ever get that kind of energy from people?

Very rarely, but usually it'll happen from someone online that hasn't heard me, doesn't know anything about my work, just sees a photo or something. Yeah.

What's your experience though, particularly initially when you first started this, this journey in terms of how you were received?

Well, received with the tribes or received back home?

Initially with the tribes, but if it's different from back home, I'd love to hear that too.

Just incredible love anywhere I go. I travel differently. So I was well aware of the injustice done to most of the tribal cultures from the medical community and many of the religious communities as well. And so I never went in with an idea of me getting something out of it. I really went out of curiosity and still do. So I didn't go to learn and I didn't go to teach. I just went to befriend. That was it. And I think that was maybe one of the reasons why I've been able to go into so many communities and especially so many that are untrusting. The other reason is that, at least from what I've seen now, you know, for many years now, gosh, about 8 years now, people have been asking me to take them or film crews, these kind of things. And it's interesting when I lead these groups, I'm really picky about them and when we go and how long, but we have so many time constraints in our culture and the way that we view time and calendars is quite bipolar to the way that the tribes do. And so it doesn't fit. So many people will come in, if they go, they want to stay for like 2 days, not very long. And they want to dip in, dip out and make kind of wide-reaching assumptions. I see this a lot. And that's not how anything works in these cultures. These cultures are very much more like when we're sick, actually. It's more meditative. You go more based on serendipity and on intuition. So for instance, if I'm in the Arctic and I'm in a faraway hunting village, let's say like 8 dogsled days away, one of my friends or guides may say, yeah, I'll take you by dogsled tomorrow to get back to the original town. We'll head back so that you can catch your plane. The plane only comes every 2 weeks if the weather is cooperating, right, during the season. And more often than not, They'll say yes. And then the next day, there's no way you're going because they just won't feel like it. And that may mean that they're intuiting that the weather is about to change or this or that, but they go far more on what they feel than what they said. And that is being authentic in their culture and admirable and honorable. So it's a very different system that requires enormous amounts of time to get to know someone. Or people, and most people from our cultures do not have the time that I've had to go and spend and build those relationships because especially with the truly ancestral communities that I've been to, they simply don't need anything. There's nothing you can trade with them that they're going to care about, so you can't buy your way in. You get to know them by the generosity of friendship. That's how you get to know them. And that takes a lot of time. So yeah, so that's very different. As far as being received back home, usually people are really curious about it. I think everyone's wanted me to cut up the footage for ages, but you know, time. Yeah. And by and large, really good. Every once in a while a photo will go around of me and someone will make an off, off comment about like, here's that, you know, a white woman posing in a photo or something. But honestly, it's pretty understandable because I would say that most of the trips to those, to many of these regions have been for personal gain and that kind of thing. You know, I've really went and still do go, not to go study subjects, but to see what's different. I think this world is pretty magical. I think there's so much more to it than we can see with our eye. I've really seen with these cultures that they cultivate another sense, like an intuitive sense. that I think we all have access to, only they honor it a bit more, right? We're always kind of stifling ours down and it's something that can be cultivated and it's really exquisitely beautiful. I love to go and spend time because it reminds me of those beautiful last years of illness where you just hear the birds and you see the light in the dust and it's lovely.

How do you decide where to go. Kind of coupled with that question is like, how do you even initiate it? You know what I mean? So, so you're deciding, okay, I want to go here, but then how do you then outreach and like actually connect with people to make it happen?

A lot of it is serendipity, honestly. So there have been times where I've had plans where I want to go to this culture or that culture, and I'll, I'll make plans and I'll go, but it, with those where I like outwardly decide, Very pointedly, I'll usually go to a neighboring town about as close as you can get with a moderate, like a mix of civilization, a mix of modernity. And I'll just wait and I'll meet people. And eventually, usually someone grew up in that region where I wanna go and they'll bring me back as a friend. And so that's usually how I go in. That also gives me a bit of time to learn the language as well, which is pretty important. So that's usually how I go about it. Sometimes I get invited, like I was invited by the Sami. Sometimes Honestly, more often than not is serendipity. So while it started with going with some of the, going to some of the carnivore tribes that I had read about in medical anthropological journals when I was sick, then you catch wind of all these other groups. And while many times we talk about, at least in the podcast and book sphere, we kind of hear of the same cultures over and over, but there's so many that are really not heard about because they're tiny. So I'll catch wind of those and usually, not always, but I'll try to find ones that aren't written or spoken of much because that usually indicates, not always, I have been let down, but that usually indicates more ancestral living and less modernity.

Is ancestral living, the curiosity around ancestral living, is that the driver or?

Yeah, I'll tell you, and I know this isn't a good answer, but it is the honest one. Really, since going through the illness, I don't really have these outward goals or output-driven desires. And I don't know why that snapped off of my body and hasn't come back, but I really don't go for any individual purpose. I kind of just follow these open doors and they keep happening and they've been really beautiful. So I enjoy the experience. It's like living out my wildest fantasies as a kid, watching things like Indiana Jones and Seeing these temples in these jungles with exotic animals, it's amazing. So I love that, but I also, I really love seeing the different diets and lifestyles and how it's not rigid. I think a lot in the health sphere, people are kind of hammer and nail, like everyone should do what I did because this healed me. And there's a place for that, and that's very understandable, but humans across time are kind of a unique animal in that we have eaten different diets. from each other. I don't really see that with many other animals, but we do that and we can do that and be in perfect health. So one of the things I was curious about was if people were still healthy enough in these regions to still display that and to show that. And that was just a very quick yes that I saw in the first, you know, year of traveling. But, but yeah, I would say more than anything else, it's affirming. It's very life-affirming to see how humans can live in such harsh conditions, what we would we would consider harsh, right? If I dropped you in the Arctic or in the Amazon, we'd be very lucky to survive. It would be unrealistic too. And yet they're thriving and they're healthier than we are. They're more joyful than we are. They sleep better. They live longer. Like they kind of have our utopia. And I think that speaks so much for the human spirit and it opens doors rather than shuts them in terms of possibility.

I love how you said they open doors and you're in a sense following your own intuition, And kind of spirit to where to go. But I guess the inevitable question that you probably get asked all the time, and I, it would be idiotic for me not to ask this, which is through all these travels, is there any theme? Is there any kind of like, oh, these are very specific human traits or very specific nutritional practices that I believe I should pull from each one of these? And have you compiled like that? top 3 list of like, okay, here's the top 3 things that I think we really, we're, we're missing here in the US. Like, 'cause, you know, when we experience things out in life, I think a lot of times inadvertently the motivation is, well, how do I connect with that? We go outside ourselves and then we bring it inward and sometimes it's inward to outward, right? But there's a constant ebb and flow of that. So I have to wonder, how are all these experiences getting boiled down? inwardly for you and then how you now practice life?

I would say that I had incorporated most of the things that I found before going to these cultures and that it was in that incorporation. And that was just lucky that that matched up, but it was in that incorporation that I got into remission. Things that I think we're missing the most, there's really 4 of them. So like, if you imagine sitting in a chair, you need 4 legs. If you're missing one, you fall. It doesn't matter which one. I think they're all equally important. And there may be more. One is of course diet, and we can go into the nuances of that. So even though there's differences, there's a lot in common. Another is lifestyle, being in the sun a lot, even if it's a cloudy place, being outside, touching dirt, snuggling constantly with humans, never being alone, eating with your hands. There's, there's a number of things. Mindset is another. In all the cultures I've been to, and especially the ones in the harshest climates, You start cultivating character and the characters of virtue from infancy with your children. And so that's a really big piece of, I think we're lacking. We don't cultivate resilience unless we figure out how to do it on our own. Our culture doesn't help us with that. And then the most important I think that we're lacking is community. Honestly, community is everything in these cultures. And To be honest, we need a lot of community for very biological things. Some of the things that are perhaps we could easily be judged for as really bad are also very necessary. Humans, we don't produce some of our reward chemicals like oxytocin without an other, without our tribe and their tribe. And so we often talk about oxytocin as the love chemical between couples and parents and children, but it's also actually a communal hormone, very much so. And so the more tribes see themselves as different or communities see themselves as different, the more oxytocin is actually produced and the more reward. And as we've kind of all become one gender, one culture, one everything, we're losing a lot of that, which leads to a lot of depression. And just panic, right? Yeah. We don't have to define it. It could just be Social upset, but also the community is where we forget about ourselves. And I think that we're really missing that. If I get someone in my office who's depressed, if they're physically able to, one of the first things I'm going to assign aside from diet and some of the lifestyle things is to start taking care of someone else. Because when we take care of someone else, we forget about our own troubles. And that's incredibly important for sanity. Incredibly. And so as we've become more of an isolationist, more of a, everyone lives in their own house, everyone's separate, no one's problems are your problems. We're falling apart as an animal and as a culture.

2 of those pillars that you talked about, I would love to dive in a little deeper with them because they're kind of hot topics. And particularly as a father, one of them particularly is like, When you mentioned, I'm like, oh, well, what's the secret? You know? And it's a resound, you know, so how do you teach kids to be resilient? Because you mentioned that they are getting this from the minute they're born. So what is it they're getting? Because as a parent, I would love to make sure that I'm instilling those characteristics into my child.

They're getting challenges with a lot of love and age-appropriate challenges. So what the child comes out with They're very hard challenges. They're not easy, but what the child comes out with is a true sense of confidence. Confidence doesn't come from us believing that we're capable. It comes from evidence of us being capable. And so what I see a lot is a lot of coddling in our cultures, and then also the opposite, sending them out to the wolves without being prepared. Where I was raised, unless you had good parents, You were not taught how to budget. You weren't taught about the rules of the world. It was very sheltered, honestly. And so you don't have your basic life skills. What these folks do, and it's different in each culture that I go to, they do things that we would get put in jail for, but the kids don't get harmed. So for instance, in some of the cold, wintry, snowy Asian cultures I've been to, you put children out in the cold. to see if they're going to freeze, because they're only allowed to come if they don't, to be a part of the culture. And in some of the Latin American and South American cultures, you take children into the extreme saunas that will break an adult, right? And the children are there. Now, the adults are there to intervene if something happens, but I've never seen them have to intervene. What happens instead is the child becomes so proud of themselves, For facing something so incredibly difficult. And although they may feel like they're doing it on their own, I can't say what they're feeling, but their whole community is outside cheering for them silently. And then they cheer non-silently, very loudly when the child succeeds. The child is constantly tested and then taught that it can do the thing it thought it absolutely could not on its deepest core. And then the entire community recognizes that accomplishment. And what you get from that is a true sense of confidence to go in the world and around the world with, because you never know what's gonna cross your path. You never know the travesties that are gonna bestow you. But if you know that you can get through hard things and that you've gotten through impossible things that you couldn't before, you don't lose your mind in that process. You stay solid.

Oh my God, you're giving me chills. Like, I love this. I'm really understanding like what you're talking about when you say like how important community is and how we're not valuing that as much in American society.

I would say at all, I don't think we value it at all. And I think it's because we haven't felt the full effects of it yet of losing it. I'm sure many of your listeners will remember I grew up on like a Leave It to Beaver street. And so, you know, all of the neighbors, we knew all of each other. We would run in and out of all the children's houses. And it was like all the moms were ours. You know, and there's a different level of community when you've got something like that to where you don't even know who your neighbor is unless there's a power outage. It's totally, totally different. And I think I'm really seeing a real mix of kids getting utterly thrown to the wolves and adults too. I hear when I'm walking about, I walk a lot. So when I'm walking about in cities or if I'm in a restaurant, I hear people talking about some of the things they're going through and how their family or friends respond. And very often, A common response that I hear in the States, if someone is going through something very hard and they share it with someone else, the other person will say, that's not my responsibility to deal with. It's not empathy. It's not, oh my gosh, that must be so hard. How can I help? It's, well, that's not my responsibility. It's very cold. And so a lot of people are getting sent into this world like, well, figure it out. And that is not a way to get confidence. That is a way to disintegrate, honestly, as an individual and as a culture.

Do you think in a sense, and really when we're talking about, when we're looking at some of these cultures, I think we can then jump to maybe this is an ancestral concept, right? Which is, do you think there is an, or was a more sense of ownership of, and I don't mean like, oh, slavery ownership, obviously I'm talking about like Ownership of terms of like, hey, we are humanity here. We are all human and we need to take care of each other.

Yeah, 1,000% to such an extreme level. Like if you take Mongolia, nomadic culture, when you come across a ger or a yurt, right? A tent home. Whenever the family leaves, they may be coming back in 4 months. When they leave, they leave the house fully stocked as if their best friend is coming. So that if someone comes along the way and doesn't have food or shelter, they can use their home. Total stranger. They'll never even meet that person or that family.

It's bringing tears to my eyes. That's so beautiful.

Yes, it's exquisitely beautiful.

But I feel like it's bringing tears to my eyes precisely because of what you're saying, which is I don't typically feel that way. On a certain level, I'm like, this feels like the human experience. Like, this is what we're missing.

It is.

And so I'm feeling both like, oh my God, what a beautiful gesture. What a beautiful way to exist, coexist. And I'm also feeling the space that, oh my gosh, yeah, I don't feel, I never feel that way.

I think that's actually more of our birthright to feel that way. It's a, it's a normal feeling day in and day out. When I'm with these communities, it's a normal feeling. I would say for most who have to go through Herculean effort to heal, Not in the first years, but having seen so many people's journey, I think that happens a lot. I think it's what we have access to, but we don't really know how to get to it because we're not really raised with that. So, you know, in so many traditions, there's this mythology of the homeless person sitting on a box. Have you heard about this one? And they're begging every day. And one day someone asks the homeless person, you know, oh, what's in your box? They're like, oh, Nothing. I've been sitting on it for 30 years, you know, and they open it up and it's full of gold. And I, and I think it's such a good, a good metaphor for the reality of our life, because at any given moment, we can truly be in a very real, very horrific present-day hell, a true one. And we also have the key within us to transform that. And I think the ticket is learning how to use that key. And where that lot goes. And these cultures are very good at teaching that. And we have failed. We have failed ourselves, our children, everyone. Yes.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode with Mary Ruddock. Part 2, we cover some really cool stuff, y'all. So we explore how early life shapes our microbiome and mental health. And the big one, why community is medicine. Oh, I can't wait till you hear what she has to say about this and what we can all do to reclaim ancestral wisdom in daily life. Hey, if this episode sparked something for you, be sure to subscribe and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Let us know your thoughts in a review. It really helps. Catch you in part 2. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestry. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's eatpluck.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.