The MS "Wake-Up Call" That Changed Everything: Whole-Foods Healing With Elizabeth Yarnell

Foreign. Welcome back to the Synergy Podcast where we get to explore cutting edge health strategies to help you feel and perform your best. Today we're diving into multiple sclerosis, inflammation and the power of food as medicine with an extraordinary guest, Elizabeth Yarnell. Elizabeth is a traditional naturopath, award winning author and patented inventor on a mission to transform lives through anti inflammatory eating. Diagnosed with Ms. In 1990, she refused to accept the conventional path and instead pioneered a revolutionary approach to diet and wellness, one that has helped countless people with Ms. And autoimmune conditions reclaim their health. As the director of the Fight Ms. With Food Project, Elizabeth empowers others to uncover the hidden triggers behind inflammation and discover how small daily food choices can make a massive impact on overall well being. Her groundbreaking cookbook Glorious One Pot Meals has sold over 60,000 copies, introducing an effortless way to eat healthfully without sacrificing time or flavor. So grab a cup of tea, get comfy, and get ready for an inspiring and insightful conversation with Elizabeth Yarnell.

So Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here. If you can take us back to 1999. Kind of what was your start? Like what? What started your symptoms with MS? Kind of share your story back in.

1999, I was one of my hats was as a freelance journalist and one night I was working late in my apartment on a story for the Denver Post about cross country skiing and it was getting very late and I was like, okay, well I'm almost done with this story. I'm just going to send it over to my printer and print it out. And then while I was brushing my teeth, I was kind of glancing over the sheets off my printer and I saw three places that I wanted to make edits. But I thought, it's late, I'm just going to go to bed. I'll do it tomorrow morning. But when I woke up the next morning, it was a whole different world for me. When I looked at my pages from my printer that I had looked at the night before, I couldn't really read any of them. It had looked like a goblin had come in through the night and literally taken an eraser and erased huge swaths of text from it. What I could make out wasn't making any sense to me. So even these words I had written just a few hours before weren't familiar at all. And the worst part of it was I couldn't figure out. I knew there were three edits I wanted to make, but I couldn't even find out where they were or figure that out. And I knew I had to submit this article to my editor by the end of the day. And as it happened that morning, my father called me. He's a neurologist. And he said, how's it going? And I said, well, you know, there's something wrong with my eyes. I just can't. I don't know what's going on. And he said, okay, well, hang on, I'll call you back. And he called me back in five minutes and he said, I just got you an appointment with the eye doctor down the hall from my office and you need to come in and get your eyes checked out. And I went in and the eye doctor said, well, you're having something called optic neuritis, which is inflammation of the optic nerve. And your father thinks you need to go in for an MRI right now, which I did. And I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis that afternoon.

Wow, that rarely happens today, right? Where the diagnosis is so acute.

It does sometimes I like to joke that, you know, being a doctor's daughter means you do get some VIP treatment.

Right. Do you feel like looking back, you were having symptoms before that time? Do you feel like there was a prodrome of symptoms that you probably just brushed off and thought, oh, that's no big deal?

There were some symptoms, which I think is probably what caused my father to suspect that maybe there was something more going on when this happened. I had had a couple of months before, I'd had this tingling in my fingertips that was there for like six weeks. I had asked one of my friends who was a med student at the time, and I said, you know, this is really weird. I have this really weird pins and needles feeling in my fingertips. And he said, well, maybe you got drunk and you fell over, fell asleep with the back of a chair underneath your armpit. It's called like drunk, drunk Saturday night sleep or something like that. I'm like, I don't think so. That would be really unlike me to get that drunk where I would pass out over the back of a chair. But. But yes. So there were some indications before, but we hadn't really put it all together. The other thing in retrospect was had recently returned from a big trip to Asia and I had come home with at least five parasites in my gut. And so I had been really struggling with parasites and been put on Flagyl, which is an anti parasitic medication, which is super strong and really blows away everything in your microbiome. It doesn't just hit the parasites, it hits everything. And I was still really recovering from that and now when I think about autoimmune conditions and I look at the incidence of potential or possible parasitic infection, I really think there is a link that is under recognized in our society that believes we are so hygienic that we don't have parasites in this modern sophisticated society, which is far from the truth.

So how bridge that gap to becoming and getting into naturopathic medicine? Like, were you already at the time that you were diagnosed, were you already on a quest to look at your health differently? Or was that the opening of the door towards digging into health and looking at it differently?

So before that day when I woke up blind in my right eye, I really hadn't given any thought to my health. I didn't think at all about healthy eating. In fact, the only staple foods I kept in my apartment were Crystal Light Diet Coke and Gummy bears. So I was not a picture of health. I was moving forward with my life. I worked out a lot, but I didn't eat well at all. I either ate fast food or I ate restaurant food, or I ate leftovers or I just simply skipped a meal. So I wasn't involved in the world of natural health. That wasn't a goal. I really didn't even know about the world of natural health because my father was a neurologist, my mother was a registered nurse, psychologist, and I grew up in the medical world and I didn't even know that such a thing as naturopaths really existed before this.

Yeah, yeah. Consumed around the traditional way of looking at health, right? Yeah. I'm curious as you created these changes or begun to look at your health a little bit differently. Don't know how long that took. How well did your mom and your.

Dad adopt, adapt to that?

Just curious.

That is a very good question and I have to say one that nobody has ever asked me before. But it was really my fiance at the time. He was also on this trip to Asia with me and had also come back with a bunch of parasites. But his trajectory was very different because he was a competitive athlete and he was all into organic foods and cooking at home and all these things that I was not into for the entire decade of my 20s. And he was the first one really in that period, maybe a few days after I was diagnosed, where he said, you know, maybe your diet has something to do with it. You really eat like crap. And I thought, oh, well, nobody. I don't even know what a healthy diet is. My father, the neurologist, what he eats like during a day is basically a Bag of Hershey's Kisses. So it's not like I feel like I have any Browns or any. Any models to look at for what a healthy diet is. So that's when I started digging into and looking and finding books and this. These were the early days of the Internet in 1999, right? Trying to see, well, what is a healthy diet, and maybe I should try to follow a healthier diet. And that's when I started to become interested in the world of natural health. So I dragged my mother along kicking and screaming in many ways, starting first with organic eggs and really pushing on my stepfather about buying cheap eggs and trying to spend more money on quality eggs, things like that. And to the point now, 25 years later, they're more. Much more amenable to that. My father still thinks there's no connection between diet and health, even though. Even when he looks at me and I say, dad, but what about me? How can you explain why I really haven't progressed with ms? And he's like, well, I don't know. Some people do, some people don't. I'm like, there's. There's no appreciation for everything that I've done, including, you know, writing a cookbook and inventing a healthy cooking method and. And becoming a naturopath and going into my own clinical practice. And my father still doesn't see any value to that.

And that's. You know, I know that. I appreciate your transparency in that and sharing that story, because to be honest, I think, you know, Kelly and I have had multiple conversations in which the hardest people to change are the people close to us, the people that we love. And we want to be well, and we want to see them thriving. And, you know, we've even had conversations about. About healthy detachment that we've had to get to a place where we could, in a healthy way, detach from that and still love, you know, and let them be in that. But, you know, it's your father. Right? And I know how important it was for my father to be proud of me in that, and I'm sure he is. He's very, you know.

Right.

He just doesn't accept that there's this connection. So.

But on.

Keep the charge up, because, you know, I do.

I.

We're with you. We truly believe that the way that you eat, the way that you drink, you know, the way that you move, you sleep, and you think those things are. They set the foundation to the way that you live and the way that your cells are. So it's very true.

And I had to separate that out right from am I looking for that feeling that my parents are proud of me, or am I looking to try to keep them healthy? Because one of my mentors said to me very early on, in the world of natural health, some will, some won't, but so what? You cannot force people to change their habits of a lifetime unless they want to. And to try to tie my own self worth to whether somebody eats organic eggs or not is insane.

Yes. Yeah. So good for you. So what connections have you made? Lori and I both have a food first approach in our practices and we see miraculous changes in the world of inflammation with our patients. What are you seeing? What are the biggest drivers of inflammation that you've been able to identify? And then how do you address making those changes?

In the beginning, when I first started talking about how to control multiple sclerosis through diet, nobody was talking about this really. The last person who'd been talking about a connection between Ms. And diet was Dr. Swank. And that was like in the 19, early 1970s, I think is what. And, and mainstream medicine, my father included, really poo pooed anything that he said. Of course, because how could diet have any relationship with your body, which makes no sense to me, how you could base an entire, entire world of healing on ignoring food that goes into your body? Yes. My practice, when I first started trying, people would ask me, well, what is the right Ms. Diet? And I would say, well, I think actually the right diet is individual for everybody. But I can tell you, instead of saying what you should eat, I can tell you what you should not eat. What you should not eat are things that come from petroleum products which you should not eat are artificial sweeteners. What you should not eat are artificial colors you should not eat. All of these additives and preservatives that have contaminated our food supply. I feel so passionate about this that I did a TEDx talk about it in 2014. At the time, what I was saying apparently was so radical that TEDx banned my talk and they wouldn't publish it. I did mounted a huge lobbying effort for about six months to try to get them to post it. And finally they came back to me and they said, okay, well, we'll post it, but we're going to put a disclaimer banner across the top that says TEDX doesn't necessarily endorse what you're saying. And I thought, fine, please just put that banner up, but put it up there, please, because I don't care if you agree with me or not, this is important. And I believe everything that I said in that TEDx talk, and I really think that the biggest problem they had with it was when I talk about GMOs and how detrimental they can be to human health. It's really appalling to me that we have become part of the largest bioengineering experiment in human history without our consent.

And most people that are in functional medicine, integrative medicine, or are looking at health through a different lens naturopathically, we have that personal story that definitely gives us charge. Right. That passion behind. And I love what you said. I don't care. Put that disclaimer up there because you'll find out. You just wait a couple years. And what we do know, it takes 10 to 15 years. And I think even more, I know when I was in my training, they always said it takes 10 years for research to catch up with clinical practice. I personally believe that regardless of the amount of knowledge that's out there that we can, you know, serve and find, I believe that there is a greater distance between that now upwards of 15 or so years because of the, you know, the fixed mindsets right around what I learned in school to be right. Right. And not ever changing and not being willing to open your mind to the possibility that there could be other reasons for that. So I'm, I'm super glad to see your passion around this and hate that it was a story in which you had to experience. Right. Major change in your life. But that's, you know, that's where change happens, right?

It's true. It's true. And it also drives me crazy that there is this idea that nothing, nothing is valid unless it goes through this, this whole stage three clinical trial thing. But in the world of natural health, we understand that each person's body is unique and individual. And if you try to do a stage three trial on a diet for ms, for example, there's no way you can. All those variables. And when I, in my clinic, I do advanced, very sophisticated food sensitivity testing using a test called the Mediator release test. And that really shows me that even two people who have ms, or let me just show this one, I have, I've done twins. And their results are absolutely polar opposites from each other. One of them is sensitive to chemo, and the other one, chemo is very low reactivity for her. So you can't even, even twins, who theoretically should have a more similar genetic makeup. I don't think it really has to do with genetics as much as it has to do with environment and everything.

That gut microbiome has been exposed to from the start of in utero until that current time of onset impacts.

Exactly, exactly.

Behaving. Yeah. So I feel like we know more about Ms. Than ever before and still we struggle for continuity of care and for the word to get out about inflammation. That's the primary driver. Right. So what would you say to that?

I would say that in 2011 I spoke with my literary agent and I said, I'm ready to write another book. And she said, that's great. Your first book was really well received. You sold a lot of copies. I'm sure people are really excited to see another cookbook from you. And I said, I don't want to write another cookbook, I want to write a book about inflammation. And she said, oh, nobody knows what that is. Nobody's going to buy a book about inflammation. But now here we are 15 years later and I feel like the zeitgeist has finally caught up and we're starting to talk about inflammation and it is becoming more of a mainstream concept, even if people don't really understand still what it is.

So did you end up writing that book on inflammation?

So that is my next book that's coming out. It has been a little delayed. It will be out. I'm not exactly sure when it's going to be out, but it's currently called the Multiple Sclerosis Inflammation Connection From Life Sentence to Life Solution. And it's really targeted not only toward people with ms, but toward anybody with chronic conditions, which is the definition of autoimmunity. But people don't understand either that autoimmunity means chronic inflammation. That's really what all, all illness and ailments are, is inflammation at the root. So it's really, in many ways it's an introduction to what is inflammation and, and the fact that it, this is something you can control yourself. You don't need a doctor, you don't need a prescription, you don't need a lot of expensive different materials or supplements or tools. You can do this yourself simply by changing your food choices and doing some self care in terms of detoxing and things like that.

And I truly, I do agree that there is so much that oftentimes people are wanting to, you know, diagnostically prove. Right. Got to do those tests. And you know, I think what I hear you saying is very similar to what Kelly and I say is the foundation is a foundation. You have to start there, right? Change what you eat, what you drink, how you sleep, move and think. Then as you progress or not, then maybe we do have to dig deeper and investigate. As you just said. I heard you say it is. You know, testing is appropriate at points. Looking at the gut, microbiome, looking at food reactivity, but always not circumventing, not skipping those foundational principles that those are just so important. So what are some of those other foundational principles? I heard you say, talking to them through the language of what not to eat.

Right.

Keep those out. But what are some other things?

So when I. When I start working with clients in my clinic, the very first question I asked is, how. How's your pooping? Do you poop every day? And if you do, is it easy? What is. Is it solid? Like, tell me about your poop because we can learn so much. I had a professor who called himself the. The president of swa, Stool Watchers of America. He's like, watching your stool is the best way that you can personally assess your health on a daily basis and see how you are doing. And that is really a crucial thing. And for so many people with chronic ailments, their gut is not right. And if we don't fix the gut, they're never going to be able to achieve a healthy status that they're hoping for, be able to function the way that they should.

So can we talk about poop for a little bit? I know some of our listeners are kind of cringing, but I think it's a worthy topic.

I want to throw one thing in real quick and just say that, you know, one of the things that we say all the time is if you don't have a healthy waste management system, you'll never have a healthy immune system. Right? So, you know, we talk about waste management being, of course, your, you know, your detox organ systems, which we know, the liver and the. The skin and all of that. But the start of it is that football field within your gut, you know, right in here, that midsection. So I'm with you, Kelly. I want to know, can you talk about.

People are curious. You know, I have patients. Of course, we talk about that every day in clinic, and it doesn't bother me at all. And some agents are like, I cannot believe I'm talking about this. So maybe this discussion would be a preemptive to a visit, right, where they can get comfortable knowing what they should be looking for. So tell us, what should they be looking for? What are some signs and symptoms that things are not okay? What is ideal versus what should be considered a problem?

Such great topics. And I have to say, like, you guys, I. I talk about poop at the dinner table all the time. And. And it's always. I'm always shocked when somebody objects because I'm like that. That's my whole world is poop. So what is the big deal?

And you grew up with a mom.

As a nurse, so I think that's kind of it too, because we talked about it at the dinner table too. It became completely okay and almost entertainment.

I have to say. It's my father who always talked more about poop than my mother. She's more of a proper woman, I would say. So one of the things that I give all of my clients is the Bristol Stool Scale. The Bristol Stool Scale was developed in Bristol, England, and it's basically a scale of. Is it 1 to 12? I can't recall. Of poop starting from going from complete watery diarrhea all the way to solid rabbit pellets that can't be passed. And in the middle is the perfect poop. And the perfect poop should be. Look like kind of a little bit of an aged banana, like a soft, brown, fully formed crescent, more or less, that slides out easily from people when you are ready to poop. And that is the perfect poop. And so that is the goal whenever you're pooping. But really, to back that up, the goal is to have a poop every day. At least. At least one poop every day. And if you don't, you're the person who says, I only poop once a week. And that's just my. My metabolism. That is not your metabolism. And shun the doctor who told you that, because that is not healthy and not okay. And if you cannot take out the garbage on a regular basis, then that garbage goes back into your body and you become much more toxic and much harder to deal with. And for myself, I had a chronic constipation problem for a long time. And now I can look back and really attribute it to parasitic infection, which can cause constipation or diarrhea or kind of a alternation between the two of them. And again, we are not taught about parasitic infection in this country, and we don't even think about it. But it's much more common than we have been led to believe. The CDC believes 7 out of 10 adults are carrying parasites in their bodies. The human body does not like to have foreign invaders in it. So it will do whatever it needs to do to try to tell you that they're there. And if you're not paying attention, they're just going to forever live there. Because the goal of a parasite or the role of a parasite is to find a host and set up residence and repopulate and live forevermore really.

So you're saying something like that can either create constipation or diarrhea, or going back and forth between the two. And so either of those challenges would be something to report.

And not everybody who has parasites has gastrointestinal issues. Some people do, some people react more intensively. There's usually an acute phase where might have been where you picked up the parasites, where you might have said, oh, you know what, I had a 24 hour bug, or I had food poisoning, or I had diarrhea for three days when I was in Thailand, or I've never really quite been gotten back after that trip to Mexico or something like that. And that could have been the acute phase where you actually got infected. And then your body doesn't. Your body wants to survive, doesn't want to die. And if you have dysentery for the rest of your life, you will eventually die. So your body kind of pulls back and says, okay, well I'm not going to fight so hard all the time. But what you do get is you get inflammation in the body in different places. So it's often in the colon and in the gut, but not always. You can have inflammation show up as headaches. So inflammation in the head we call migraines or headaches or brain fog or depression or panic attacks. Inflammation in the sinuses we call runny nose, stuffy nose, chronic sinus infections. Even post nasal drip where you have chronic throat clearing. Inflammation in the chest we might call high blood pressure, we might call heart arrhythmia, we might call asthma, breathing issues. Inflammation in the gut we might call acid reflux, we might call it heartburn. We might call it cramps after we eat, you might call it vomiting, we might inflammation in the bowels, we might call diarrhea or constipation or both. And then inflammation in the joints, we might call it arthritis or fibromyalgia or just plain joint pain. Inflammation can be anywhere in the body and we don't really necessarily recognize it.

So these are common complaints that people will have and sometimes settle for because they think, oh, I just have a little arthritis or you know, I'm prone to headaches. But they don't really correlate what's going on in the gut, microbiome or perhaps what it is that they're eating because oftentimes food sensitivities will show up in the same way they'll have an inflammatory response after that meal and not really connect the dots between the two.

Exactly. I have a client who, who has restless leg syndrome, and she was just complaining to me. She said that she had just gone to her doctor and the medication that she's been on hasn't stopped working. And he said the next step are the opiates. And she's like, I really don't want to get on the opiates. I'm like, well, you know, when you're ready, we should look at your diet. Because I know, for example, that you drink a lot of flavored waters that have natural flavors in them. And I know for myself, when I drink those flavored waters, I get restless leg syndrome, just like you have at night. And it's very painful. I know exactly what it feels like. And for me, I know it is natural flavors. So that could be something to investigate. But again, until they're ready, you can't force anybody to do anything, right?

So you have invented an interesting way of cooking and preparing things to help with autoimmunity. Tell us about that.

When my. After my. My fiance, who's now been my husband for 26 years, he. He pointed out that my diet was crap and convinced me that really I wanted to improve my diet and eat cleaner diet, not only of organic foods, but of whole foods. And when I did all of my deep dive into research from the Mayo Clinic and the ADA and things like that, what I synthesized from all of them was that even though they were all kind of giving slightly different advice for cancer, for heart disease, or for diabetes, what they were really all saying is that if you stick with whole foods versus processed foods, you will be better off. So that became my mantra. Whole foods are better than processed foods. But I didn't really know how to cook. So I started taking cooking classes and watching the Food Network, which was in its infancy at that time, and starting to experiment in the kitchen. But what I really quickly learned was that to prepare all of your meals from whole foods is very time and labor intensive. That's why we got convenience feeds to begin with. And I was very frustrated in that and spending three hours maybe preparing dinner and then 45 minutes cleaning up afterwards. And I had Ms. Fatigue is a hallmark of MS, so that really wasn't working well for me. But I was dedicated to cleaning up my diet and focusing more on whole foods. One night we were watching late night TV in the days we only had three channels before we could afford cable. And this guy came on an infomercial. And he said, look, I have this countertop appliance and I can make take this whole meal in this countertop appliance. And he pours in dry rice and a can of tomatoes. And then he puts a metal grate on it, like a barbecue grill type grate. And he puts chicken breasts on top of that. Then he puts another metal grate and puts brownies on top of that, covers the whole thing with a dome, plugs it in and turns it on. And I thought, that is brilliant. I want to be able to make my whole Whole foods based meal in one, in one pot. But I don't have one of those appliances that he's talking about. I don't have any of those metal grates to put in between things. And I really don't care about the brownies. So I went over to my oven and we had just received a gift, a wedding gift of a cast iron, a little cast iron Dutch oven. And we had thought, oh, this is so cute, but what do we do with it? It's so little. I don't never had a pot like this. And so, based on what I had seen him do, I went to my freezer and I pulled out a couple frozen fish fillets. And I went to my fridge and I pulled out some vegetables. I happen to have some fresh herbs from my garden. And I just literally layered them into this cast iron Dutch oven. And then I went to my stove and I said, well, or my oven. And I thought, I bet that countertop appliance gets pretty hot. So I cranked my oven up to 450 degrees. Now, you might be laughing if you know how to cook. You're like, you'd never cook fish at 450 degrees. But I didn't know how to cook. And so it didn't occur to me. And I put everything in and I put the lid on the cast iron Dutch oven and I just put it inside the oven. And in about half an hour, it just started to smell like dinner. And that literally became the way that we cooked. It was just really easy. We just take whole foods and layer them into the pot and didn't really think about it. It was so easy until my college roommate came to stay for a week. And at the end of the week, she said, would you please teach me how to cook like you cook? And I said, well, you know how to cook. Your mom's from Italy, from the old country. You make great food. She's like, yeah, but it's so, so much of a Bigger deal. And your food is so fresh and delicious. And I said, well, you saw me, I just literally throw things in the cast iron Dutch oven. And she said, well, I think there's a little bit more to it than that. So I sat down and wrote what I consider to be an instruction manual and then spent a number of years trying to find a publisher and an agent to do it and finally gave up and published it myself in 2005 and then sold 15,000 copies myself and then sold it to a random house and they republished it. So that's the version that's available now.

That's awesome. I love that. It's not a new appliance. Right. It's. It's just. Well, it's a Dutch oven.

Yeah.

But it's not like a. Yeah, tabletop appliance. It's really something probably most people already have. I have a Dutch oven. I have a couple of Dutch ovens that I use. I would think most people have a Dutch oven in their kitchen. And what a, what a blessing to be able to learn to cook whole food based easy one pot meals. I mean, that's, that's awesome.

So is everything in the cookbook in the cast iron skillet or are there, is there other cookware that you recommend as time has passed?

Well, so not a skillet, a Dutch oven.

Oh, yes, I'm sorry, yes.

And not a crock pot, because that is something people think too. What's called glorious one pot meals. The first thing they think is crock pot, not a crock pot. Because these are done not in six hours, eight hours like a crock pot. These are done in 45 minutes. In the meantime, in the years, the intervening years, because I did get a. Actually they granted me a process patent for this method of cooking because it had never been recorded before. But the other appliances that I use quite a bit in my house, I use a toaster oven a lot. I love that. And it has an air frying setting on it. I love, I have an immersion blender. I love that one. So, yes, there are some other appliances and cookwares that I have come to appreciate just as much as my cast iron Dutch oven. But still, that is the workhorse in my family.

What role, and this is just a question, what role do heavy metals and metals as a whole play in ms?

I actually think heavy metals play quite a bit of a role in, in our health. And as part of my program, I take people through an ionic foot bath therapy for detoxification and it's just really amazing. What comes out of the soles of our feet? That we have like 2000 pores on the soles of our feet and like stones and things come out and how much clearer our brains work when you remove that heavy metal. It can be so hard to remove that heavy metal from the brain. And we get exposed to heavy metal in so many ways. Not to mention the fillings in our teeth and the pollution that we breathe every day. If you live in a city. But also even in my, in my history, I used to pop tums like they were candy and those have aluminum in it or they did. I don't know if they still do.

Yeah. And part of the reason that I asked beyond understanding that relationship, because you know, of, you know, just, you know, our brains and the relationship is, you know, cookware. We, we commonly get asked, you know, what do you use for cookware? What is the safest? And I think, I guess we could apply some of the same conversation about we know what not to do. Right. And we're learning what to do over time. But when I, when you get asked that question, do you have a particular answer for that?

Well, obviously I love cast iron cookware and I probably have 15 cast iron pieces in my house right now. But I also have stainless steel cookware for pots and pans too. And, and I think glassware is very safe. What you should not use are non stick cookwares for, for example, especially if they've been scratched. And things that have miracle coatings on them, I should say, because those miracle coatings often come back to haunt us.

And I see a lot of cookware now being promoted as better options. But they are coded and maybe they are PFOA free, but what else do they have in that coating? That's been my question that I haven't really had clarity on. So I too am a fan of the cast iron. I think that that's probably for now the safest way to go.

I, I also like ceramic. I think ceramic can be really good.

Do you have to be careful about the ceramic as far as like the coating on the ceramic, like what's the, what are the guidelines there for ceramic?

And that's where I feel challenged too because I don't think there are clear guidelines. And yes, it's ceramic, but the coating to maintain it over time. Right.

And I think to your point, I think to your point earlier, I think the coating may be fine, but it's very, very difficult to keep that coating intact. So then when that coding becomes not intact, what are we doing? I Mean, that's my question. I don't know the answer, but I just am concerned about that because we know that, you know, these toxins do bioaccumulate and there is a threshold of tipping point for a person, and we don't know what that is for each individual person. It is dependent on many, many things. But the more that we can do to control the things that we can control for, the better we do long term.

I love that you brought up that threshold because that is. A whole section of my book is talking about that toxic threshold that we weren't taught growing up in school. Nobody told us that we had this, this threshold to accumulate toxins that is different for every person. Some people might be able to tolerate more, some people less, but once you have tipped over into autoimmunity like I have, your toxic threshold is much closer to the top. And you have to be really aware and careful because no one else is watching out for you to make sure that you're not ingesting all of these toxins and adding to that bucket that's full of all these toxins really in your immune system.

And I heard you say earlier about artificial sweeteners too. Do you have a list just of the absolute? No. That is a common question. And, you know, we have a pretty hard stance on this. So I'm, I'm looking forward to hearing yours.

Yes. And I was a child of the 80s. I grew up with that whole philosophy of better living through chemistry. And I bought into aspartame, hook, line and sinker. I thought that was the best thing since sliced bread. I was a diet coke addict. I put equal in my coffee. I thought anything diet low cal, sugar free was the way to go. Low fat, all of that. These mistaken dietary trends that we lived through and unfortunately are still being promoted and are still being sold. So, yes, I, I am a huge advocate of staying away from artificial sweeteners. And those include aspartame, saccharin, high fructose corn syrup, sucralose, dextrose. There are so many now that have names that make us think that they're the same as sugar. And then, and then we have sugar, which is so demonized. Cane sugar, which actually I think cane sugar is a better option than high fructose corn syrup, for example. So if those are your options, then sometimes, and sometimes that is your option is you have to look and see which is worse and try to avoid that one.

Have you played around with allulose? Have you done any utilization of allulose yet?

I Have not. What do you think about that?

Well, I mean, we're using it. We just started using it a few weeks ago. And we're monitoring. We do a lot of continuous glucose monitoring. And we're actually seeing lower blood sugars. Like it lowers blood sugar beyond, you know, if we've got people that were monitoring before and then monitoring after. And I'm just fascinated, you know, Dr. Poormutter kind of put it on the map as far as a way of lowering uric acid. And so I'm just curious at this point. I mean, I think time will tell.

Well, I am excited to see your studies when you publish that, because I haven't looked into that at all. I, you know, I have a lot of people come to me and they're like, what about stevia and what about the sorbitols and the xylitols? And part of me feels like, you know, well, stevia I feel a little more comfortable with because it is. Use a plant as opposed to the sugar alcohols that are, have, are so incredibly synthesized. And I kind of feel like the science hasn't come in yet and I'm not super comfortable recommending them.

Yeah, and we absolutely do not recommend the sugar alcohols. They completely disrupt the gut microbiome. And so many of the other products that are out there, like stevia, are often cut with a product that's a sugar.

Alcohol. Alcohol.

Right. To the expense of it or for whatever reasons. You know, the manufacturers try to do some of that, you know, that shady stuff that they like to do, trick us as consumers. But we're with you. Yeah, it's. I think the, you know, the research is out or that, you know, the, the verdict is out. I don't think that we, we know yet about allulose, but in doing continuous glucose monitoring, which we, you know, are fascinated around metabolic syndrome and, and just metabolic disorders.

Right.

And dysregulation. These, these continuous glucose monitors have allowed us to see point in time when you do something. How does the body respond to that? So, yeah, we'll see.

I think that's really fascinating. Do you. What I don't know is how it processes through the kidneys or the liver and what happens there. Do you. Have you been figuring that out?

Yeah, I don't know that. Yeah. This is so new.

Not yet.

Verdict is out, More to come.

I was just curious about your perspective. So we know diet has a huge impact on inflammation. In fact, the things that we put into our body, 90% of our inflammation comes from what we're Eating right. What we're putting in, deliberately putting into our body. So there's huge power in that.

Right.

I mean, I think there's amazing power in the ability to change what we put in our body in the way of food. What other things, what other foundational things do you think are important for the patient with autoimmunity to be embracing as lifestyle changes and lifestyle factors to be considered in their planning?

Yes, because not only are we being exposed to everything that goes into our mouth, but our skin is our largest organ. So everything we put on our skin, everything we breathe in, in our air, all those aromas. I have a big soapbox about things like dryer sheets and those synthetic aromas that are everywhere in our world that are just so mixtures of chemicals that are created in laboratories and those chemicals are still molecules. And whenever you. I think about those commercials and are like, oh, breathe in the fresh scent of, of your laundry and you go. And you breathe all these chemicals down into the bottoms of your lungs where they get trapped in those little areoles and capillaries and then they irritate because they are completely synthetic and probably at their foundation derived from petroleum, too. And evolution never foresaw us having to process all of these molecules that came from two miles underneath the earth's surface. We didn't intend for it. And I think that that's why autoimmunity has become so common really, since the start of the Industrial Revolution. And it just keeps increasing in incidents more and more and as our world becomes more and more contaminated.

And I would imagine that things like sleep play a role too.

Right.

So do you have a specific amount of time or tell us a little bit about what you would recommend in the area of sleep for your patients?

It's very hard to, I think, mandate sleep for people. I try to encourage people to recognize how important sleep is and to really reject this notion that you have to be working 247 in order to have value or self value or value to others in our society. So I emphasize sleep, but I don't bring it down to a set amount. I think it can vary from people to people. You certainly need more than three hours, but some people need more like nine or 10 hours. So it really, it's what my questions are always. Do you fall asleep easily? Do you stay asleep and do you wake up refreshed?

It is such an individual thing. And I love what you said about, you know, just we, we do have to honor the individuality of the people that we treat and meet them where they're at. And we don't, you know, reiterating and we get into conversations like this a lot. Is that your value and worth isn't your work? Right. It's, you don't have to be working 24 7. You should be taking time to stop and do that. It's very, very tough. I think in the world we live in today, the demands are great, right? It's pursue, pursuit, pursue, and that's leading us down a path amongst others. Right. Our exposures are one thing, but our choices are another. It's just leading us down a bad path.

So I think I've heard like clean air, right? The things we breathe. We want to have clean air, we want to have clean food. I'm assuming clean water. So I had an interesting situation this week. I had ordered a product and I'm not going to say the vendor's name, but it's a very well respected vend in the nutraceutical world. It was a new product with minerals. And I got the product in and I looked at the label and label didn't make sense to me. And so I reached out to the vendor and I said, could you please send over the spec sheet? I want to see like, what are these 84 different minerals in this product? Because all they had listed was potassium, magnesium and sodium. And I got the list back and on the list was arsenic and mercury and lead and cadmium.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah. And they were showing like the, the legal threshold or that's not the right word, but the, the threshold of reasonability, I guess. Yeah, the acceptable threshold versus what was in the product. And it was below the threshold. But then it really made me start thinking about our water. You know, it's in our, it's in the mineral supplement because it's made from. It came from pond water, basically. That's how they harvested it. And that's what's in our groundwater. Right. And so unless we're using some type of filter to filter our water, we're getting exposed to that because municipal plants are only purifying. They're getting rid of the bacteria at best, but they're not filtering. Most of them aren't. And so I think that filtration. I don't know what you talk to your patients about, but I'm constantly talking about clean air, clean food, clean water as a foundation. And I think the clean water kind of gets dismissed because they're drinking, drinking bottled water and they think that that's better. And we know that that's not because number One, the plastic exposure. But oftentimes it's just chlorinated water that's been put into those bottles and still contains those heavy metals. So just thought it was interesting, an interesting thing that happened this week right in the world of trying to do good things.

You know, when I, I went to a natural health workshop in right around 2000 and in this natural health workshop that was the first time I had really learned about the exposure to chlorine from our municipal water supplies which are using it again, antibacterial. But all that chlorine is coming through all of our water. And it's one thing when the chlorine is cold, but it's another thing when you heat it up in your shower, in your bath and then you aerosolize it and now you're breathing in chlorine vapor which is incredibly harmful for human health. So I've since I think it was 2000, we put our first whole house water filter into our house. And now we have a seven step water filter that's in right where the water source comes into our house. So every, every faucet, every shower, every bathtub, everything has filtered water. And then beyond that we further filter our drinking and cooking water. We have a gravity filter that creates alkaline water for that as well and adds minerals back in. But yes, water is a huge factor. And when I see people drink, reach for the tap to fill up a glass of water, I'm literally horrified.

And you mentioned the minerals because when we do filter our water, we remove the minerals. Minerals. And so that can be an area of mineral depletion over time. So we do want to be mindful of like how do we replete those minerals with what we're eating or what we're taking in. And so I do think that's worth. I'm glad that you have a filter that does that for you. So if you want to share the brands of those, I think that would be helpful for the, our listeners too. I have a full house filter, but I don't have anything that remineralizes.

Yes, our full house filter is, is a system called Halo H A L O and I think it's like a seven step filter filtration process. And our first filter, and our first house was just from Sears, which I don't even know if Sears exists anymore. But it was much simpler, but it was still something.

Yeah.

And, and then our countertop filter is a Nikon Pimag filter, which I really, really like and we've had for maybe 20 years as well, and we just replaced the filter and the stones, the mineral stones along the bottom. Speaking of minerals, that's another thing we don't learn in school, right, as like elementary school students, that minerals are the foundation of life. And if your minerals are out of whack, you're not living well, you're not feeling good. It was, I feel like such a learning point for me when I realized that we are part of this Earth, we are part of this planet, and we are made from the same things that this planet is made from. And that is an important part to how our bodies, this amazing complex biological chemical, electrical system works, works. We need minerals. And especially as someone with multiple sclerosis, which is really an electrical dysfunction in our systems, when the nerves or the messages from the brain misfire going to the body, well, all those messages are carried through synapses across our nerves. And those synapses travel just like lightning through a swimming pool. They travel through this interstitial liquid. And if there's not enough and the right amount of minerals dissolved in this interstitial liquid, those that electricity doesn't travel as well.

And minerals are the catalysts for hormones, right? They're the ions that help hormones get intracellular and work better. So for all of our patients that are interested in just hormone balance, better energy, the mitochondria needs minerals to fuel. And so minerals are really our spark plugs. Right.

I still think medical, the medical world is kind of behind on their, on their stress about minerals. They don't really focus on them maybe as much as they should, and they don't really understand them as much as they should.

I just think that our environment has evolved a lot faster than we can evolve, genetically speaking, for sure. But also just from a mindset perspective, you know, our soil is not as rich as it used to be, so our, our vegetables are not as nutritious as they used to be. And, and we just haven't really accepted that and learned like supplementation is often necessary to plug those holes because of what the extent to our environment has changed.

I do, in my clinic, I do like to try to reduce the inflammation first and then focus on supplementation just so that we can suss out what is actually happening, what is being caused by inflammation, what is being caused by deficiencies, and what can. Can we write the boat about by removing that inflammation and just allowing the body to really function the way it's supposed to.

You speak to is just having that strategic approach, right. And that individual approach. Right.

Y. So.

Well, it has been such A pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you so much for using your story to impact the lives of others and the years and years and years of. I, I say blood, sweat and tears. You know, Kelly and I would definitely relate, you know, being a pioneer, if you will. Right. We're just really grateful for the opportunity that we've had to talk to you today and for taking time out of your schedule. How do people find your books? Tell us just your website, give us a little bit more information how they would get in contact with you.

Well, I'm so appreciative to be able to talk with you both today. This has been just a fantastic conversation and I'm so glad that we have done it and I hope people learn a lot from it and, and take home a lot information because I think we covered a lot today. So the best way to reach me is at my website, which is Elizabeth Yarnell.com and my cookbook is called Glorious One Pot Meals. And if you go to Glorious One Meals, glorious like Hallelujah not Gloria, you'll see there's a way that you can sign up and you can get a, a free gift to stockpile your pantry and your freezer to make it really super easy to cook healthy whole food meals all the time. And then my new book that will be coming out soon, that web page is msinflammationconnection.com and you can go there and you can get on the list to hear about when, when the book is coming out and then you'll be the first to know. So sweet. Probably right after me because I don't know yet either.

We have so many, so many good things on the horizon. So wishing you all the best in what's to come. The Synergy Podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor patient relationship is formed. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions.