35. The Secret to Raising Healthy Kids in a Toxic World

The biggest category for exposure for kids is plastics because it's everywhere. It's so ubiquitous in our environment that it's in our water now. So troubling because it's endocrine disrupting. It will blow your mind to see what is in the municipal water. It's unbelievable. Cancer causing chemicals. Endocrine disrupting chemicals.

What are some key factors that are contributing to this rise in disease?

A lot of times when people look at the new childhood epidemics, they're looking for the smoking gun. It is what we call it the total load, the cumulative and synergistic effect of living in the modern world. There's 80,000 chemicals on the market that have never been tested for safety, but they're sitting on the shelves at Walmart and Target.

Beth Lambert, welcome to Rooted in Wellness. I'm so excited to have you here. You know, I was in preparation of this interview, I was equally excited as I was questioning how I was going to hold it together because it's just, it's so overwhelming when you dive into what's happening today with children and our health. So we're going to dive into all of that. But to get started, just so you know, this podcast is all about ancient wisdom in our modern world and really how we can become rooted in our health and our happiness and our well being. I would just love to know what are three things that help you feel more rooted in your life and your health and your happiness.

Yeah. So I think the first thing for me that makes me feel really rooted is I keep a vegetable garden and an herb garden and it's literally my happy place. At the end of the day, if I don't get to go out there and pick something or just play around for a little while, it's not a good day for me.

Beautiful.

So, I mean, what a treat. All my food. But I grow in the summer months and when, you know, I can, I grow a lot. And that really brings me happiness and makes me feel connected to the earth. So that would be one that's probably my top. I think the second one for me is something I've only really more adopted in the last like five or six years, which is a morning walk. So I get up and I feel like it's my time to set my circadian rhythm. I try to do it right around sunrise, if possible. I happen to walk my dog, so that makes it like a twofer. But that also makes me feel like I'm in rhythm with nature. You know, I'm doing what I'm supposed To be doing getting up and going and moving when the sun rises. And I think the third one would be connecting with my girlfriends, like, in person, because I feel like so much of modern life is everyone's, like, connected digitally, but not necessarily in person. And, like, if you think about what a fundamental part of being a human is rooted in community.

Absolutely.

And that's missing a lot in modern world, I think.

Do you find also there's more vulnerability, especially for women who connect and gather Now, I have a feeling my mom did have a circle of friends, but there wasn't ever permission to go deep or to talk about the deeper core issues that we're so aware of today. So it's brilliant. So you talked about acclimating with nature, you and your garden. What you made me think of is you're witnessing miracles. You literally are walking through things that are growing food that you can grow yourself, growing on its own within nature that you get to consume. Like, God, I cannot wait until I have the same garden.

It's an amazing experience because it's this connection to the idea of nature as abundant, too. I mean, that is the best feeling. To take, like, one tiny seed, put it in the dirt with a little water, maybe a lot of water, depending, and you get, you know, 50 zucchini or whatever might come out of it. It's unbelievable that nature can be so abundant with such little effort. Um, so that is always a good reminder of what's possible, too. Just one little seed is all it takes.

Something that we should be witnessing every day, right? Yeah. Those are beautiful. Okay. On the flip side, there are so many people who have these daily habits that they might not be noticing that are uprooting themselves. And some of these things might be considered healthy. They're treating their health as a checklist, but in fact, causing them more stress or more inflammation. What are some things that cause you to feel uprooted?

I think the top one for me is when something disrupts my sleep. I used to be the kind of person who, like, in my 20s, I lived in New York City, and I was like, go, go, go. You know, I'll sleep when I. When I'm dead kind of mentality. You know, I remember that rushy, rushing, busy kind of. And I was young, so I could. I could handle it more. But now I have really learned the value of sleep. And if I don't sleep, I can feel my nervous system become dysregulated. I can feel my cortisol. I, like, I literally can feel the cortisol rise. In my body, I can feel the chemical changes very much. Makes me feel uprooted. If I don't have like a regular sleep pattern, I have teenagers, so that's going to be part of my life. So like I'm, I'm going to stay real and roll with it. But I do the best I can to kind of have good sleep hygiene and take care of it because I know it uproots me.

Yeah. It's such a big deal when I work with my clients. Sleep actually takes the first pillar before nutrition.

That's so good. That's so good.

Yeah.

And it's hard because in our culture we don't value it.

No, not at all. Right. It's like do more. We give accolades and rewards to. The busier you are, the more that you can keep up with, I think especially as. Or wear this badge of honor. If we can like equally work and wear the hat at home and with our kids. Shouldn't be the way anymore.

No, of course not.

Happy you brought that up. Yeah. All right. So I speak about this rise of disease today with all my clients and I'm so fortunate to be able to work within some families also. And it's becoming very evident the rise of imbalances that are happening within our children. So you, I'm sure, talk a lot about this, especially we'll cover your book. So more than half of the US children have at least one diagnosed serious health. Health condition, which makes it an epidemic.

Right.

That's probably an outdated number.

Oh, it's absolutely an outdated number. From 2011.

That's from 2011.

That's from 2011. And believe me, I've looked for it. Nobody has done a follow up study to see what it's like today. Nobody's done it.

Right. And that was published from the cdc. Yeah.

Well, that was actually by a researcher named Christina Bethel. She published it in the Academy of. What is it? The academic pediatrics journal. Everybody refers to it, but nobody knows that it was from 2011.

Incredible.

Crazy, right?

It's wild. If we knew that back then, like this is an epidemic in my mind, with children being our future. We should be stopping everything until we get this resolved.

Yeah.

Which means that since then, as parents, if you, you know, in schools, gosh. The rise of food allergies, asthma, add, adhd, obesity. Right. We're hearing about cancer rates amongst children. Like you just get so angry and emotional at the exact same time. So you talk about this and the rise of illness with this generation as the canneries in the coal Mine. When it comes to chronic health issues. Can you tell us about that? What does it mean? Is it. Why is this happening?

Yeah, our kids are the canaries in the coal mine because they are showing us that coming out of the womb, they've got health issues, things are imbalanced. So what does that tell you? Children are supposed to be healthy. So if our children are not healthy, something is wrong with the environment. Like, I always think about if, you know, any other species out there, you know, like some kind of spotted leopard or a hippo or, you know, a giraffe, something that we love and adore as part of our natural world. And the researchers came out and said more than half of the giraffe babies are sick, or more than half of the hippo offspring are showing these skin conditions and these behavioral abnormalities.

We'd be like, red alert. What's happening?

We gotta save the hippos. But if it's human babies, that for some reason doesn't seem to give anyone kind of the same alarm. We need to start reframing it in that position. And not just that, you know, for each individual child who's affected, of course we need to be thinking about that, but we also need to be thinking about the future of humanity. I mean, we, you know, the children are showing us as canaries in the coal mine, that the modern way of living is not working. But also in young, young adults, fertility rates are dropping. That's nature's way of saying, guys, like, whatever, you're here can't sustain health.

Absolutely. And my heart breaks for all of these children who are getting the diagnosis when they're younger. But we have to consider that the impact is the same across the board. You know, in my world, we talk about this concept of accumulation, right? So everything that they are consuming right now is accumulating with them, which leads to imbalances or, God forbid, disease in the future. Right. So let's talk about what are some of these really, you know, chronic conditions that are being called the new childhood epidemic.

So there's so many there. There's a rise in autism spectrum disorder, which many people kind of bristle at the idea of that being a chronic condition. Because a lot of times people think of that as something that's genetic and brain based, and you'll always have it. In my experience, that is not true because so many people are actually reversing that condition in their children. And even adults who get diagnosed late are finding out some of the underlying mechanisms that are precipitating the symptoms and actually reversing some of those symptoms. So autism, of course, is the most concerning because we've gone from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 36 according to the CDC in 2023. That's a span of like 40 years that we've jumped like that. So how do we get from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 33? A lot of people think 36. We actually have just updated the numbers according to better data and we think it's 1 in 33 as opposed to the CDC being 1 in 36. But how do you make that jump? You make that jump because so much has changed in the way we're living in that 40 years. And there's very specific things and there's generalized things. And those generalized things are hitting all kids. So you talked about the other conditions. One in 10 children have ADHD and it's higher in boys than in girls. We have one in three kids who are obese or overweight. That's insane. Yeah, that's a very high rate. Asthma is 1 in 8. Life threatening food allergies is 1 in 14. And that's. We're talking about somebody who can go into their cafeteria and by accident get exposure to a peanut or milk or something like that and die. That's just, that's not. Shouldn't be a part of childhood. But yet we've normalized a lot of these things. So people are just getting used to it. Like everybody's kid has something, you know.

Do you remember these food allergies when you were younger?

No, of course not. There's none. None. I do remember one girl who's my friend group who had an asthma inhaler. One in the special needs classroom. There was no autism. There was nothing that looked like autism even. There was one child who had cerebral palsy. There was another one who had. I knew the family had some kind of birth trauma that resulted in some intellectual disability, but there was no autism in my elementary school. So, you know, some people there was. And it's not like autism. Koofing appeared 20 years ago. So it's always been there in very small numbers. It's just that it's such an explosion in the 80s and 90s that people haven't even caught up to this reality yet. They don't even know what's going on. They don't, they don't really fully understand it.

I agree with you. There's like a sense of normalizing that's happening. Oh, it's common. You know, I just happen to have a child who has these Allergies or. What I'm finding, too, is the energy around ADD and adhd. It's like, oh, you know, my kid is just one of the kids that have it, and thank God they're able to diagnose it now. But it's like, no. If we know that we can reverse symptoms of ADD and ADHD naturally, then it means that there isn't always a need for medication. Right, Right.

I mean, I understand why people use the medication because in some kids, it can solve the problem in terms of, like, getting the.

The.

The goal for the day, which is to get the child to sit in a seat in school, pay attention, and focus. And the medications are very effective at that.

Absolutely.

But what else is it doing?

It's a.

Affecting their appetite, their weight.

It's.

It's causing all kinds of mitochondrial toxicity that nobody's talking about, nutrient deficiencies that nobody's talking about. So there's. There's a flip side to those medications.

Yeah.

And I personally believe that if the body is giving you symptoms, whether those are behavioral or skin or GI or whatever they are, that's your body communicating to you that something is out of balance and needs to be corrected. But if you put a medication on it, all you're doing is suppressing that symptom and just telling your. Telling your body, shh, shh. I don't. I don't need to hear from you right now. Right. As opposed to just taking the wisdom of your body and listening to it and saying, okay, yeah, all right, I hear you. I hear something's out of balance. I'm on it. I'm working on it. Like, that would be a much better approach.

You know, you are speaking my language. Yeah. And look, I say this all the time. There is a time and a place for medication, especially if it's supporting your child and your doctor is responsible for talking to you about other modalities that you should put into place, like switching their diet, like looking at environmental toxins and stuff like that. So with that said, from your perspective, what are some key factors that are contributing to this rise in disease?

Yeah, well, you said it earlier. So. Well, it's. It's cumulative. It is what we call it, the total load, the cumulative and synergistic effect of living in the modern world. So a lot of times, when people look at the new childhood epidemics, they're looking for the smoking gun, like, what's the thing? So they'll point to things like glyphosate or vaccines or pharmaceuticals or toxins and Everybody has their pet, you know, bugaboo, their pet enemy for what's causing this. The reality is it's all of it. It's all of it. And, you know, you can actually go back and track when some of these things dropped into the childhood experience. So, like glyphosate, for instance, started being widely used in the 80s and 90s. You can look at the number of toxins that have. I mean, every year we add more toxins into the market that are unregulated. There's 80,000 chemicals on the market that have never been tested for safety, but they're sitting on the shelves at Walmart and Target, and we're picking this stuff up because it's normal to 80,000. Oh, yeah, it's more than that. Yeah.

I mean, that alone, there must be more than that. But that alone is like, come on.

Yeah. I mean, if you think about the pace of innovation, human beings are amazing and how they can just innovate and create new things. And the chemistry, it's like, amazing what we can come up with. But we don't have a regulatory mechanism in place that looks at those things that we're creating to see whether they're okay to be exposed to the human body. Like, how does the human body process that new chemistry thing you just created in your lab? And what's more is the regulatory agencies have been captured by the industries, like, you know, the. All the products and consumer product companies that have it in their best interest to not be regulated. They're. They're going to make sure that the policymakers are not regulating them. So we have. We're in a little bit of a bind where we can't rely on somebody else to do the homework for us. We have to do it ourselves.

Yeah. And we always look at policy in Europe. Right. Like, why are things that are banned in Europe so readily available here?

Right.

And it just makes no sense that we need to prove that one specific thing is the contributor or the cause of one disease when we know it is included in the umbrella of things that are causing the imbalances and disease. So for a lot of parents who might end up listening to this, who, you know, up until now it's been out of sight, out of mind. You know, I've been eating these things since I was a kid. Everything is fine. They're not considering everything else. Let's slowly, like, open the gateway to some of the things that we need to be looking at for. So you're a mom. Tell us about, like, some of the things that you did with food with your kids growing up?

Yeah. So one of the first things I did with food, I actually had let, I think a pretty typical. I had a pretty typical food, I mean, standard American diet in my home. When I had my kids when they were little, my oldest two kids started showing some symptoms, though, like, nothing major but like GI symptoms, sensory symptoms, skin symptoms. And it was enough for me to start knocking on some doors of conventional medicine to try and find out what might be contributing to those symptoms. Nobody gave me any answers in terms of what root causes were. But I did finally get into the office of an integrative physician and a couple holistic practitioners who were like, food, hello, food, let's start there. So I actually kind of fell into the whole ancestral way of eating through Weston Price and some other kinds of paleo approaches. I read some of the literature on the paleo diet and I was like, wow, that makes total sense. Why would we thrive on food that's processed in a factory with chemicals when the human body's been evolving for millennia? Eating in a particular way like that is the most logical thing on planet Earth. So that is why I sort of dug into that. Because, number one, it made sense. It's logical to eat ancestrally. But number two, it was having results for my family. Like I, once we started changing our diet and, you know, doing things like sprouting beans, for instance, and, you know, buying meats that were pasture raised and, and were really healthy, clean types of meats and healthy fats. I saw the changes in my children in a very short period of time, like a couple of months. They were different kids because we put something different into their bodies. And it wasn't just about food. We got rid of toxins in our home. We did, you know, all the kinds of things that brought us back to nature. But food is something that's so empowering because you have to do it at least three times a day, you know, and. And it's something that we have a lot of control over.

I think we're living at a time where it's the fact that we're so busy and we're so stressed. And so parents are often really excited when they see, they go down that ultra processed food aisle and they see these foods that are labeled gluten free, healthy fiber. It just says fiber keto. Right? And it's like, it was like, oh, it's got that healthy label on the front of the box. It must be, must be good for me, right? At the end of the day, I really just want to make sure that everyone knows if it comes from a package, it is boxed, dead, processed food. Right. And reading ingredient labels these days, in the past five years alone, specific brands that I would consider healthier, a healthier option. Often when they get bought out by bigger food companies, all of a sudden you see all these different ingredients go in. It's like you don't understand them, but you've got that trust with the brand, so you continue to buy them. Right. And so I hear what you're saying. Yeah. In our house, we really try to focus on purchasing everything from like the. The produce aisle and just, you know, that. That concept of the outer parameters of the store. And we also have teenagers and little kids, and it's like that fun food category. But I think we can also say, gosh, we are at a time when some of that fun food, there's healthier options of what's out there that you can choose. You just have to be so diligent. You've got to make the choices and like, really, really take that control.

Yeah. And you really also need to talk to your kids about it, too, because I think it can go the opposite way where you can, you know, restrict your kids so much from what's out there, the kid food, the. The processed stuff in the aisles, that they. They're going to want to crave it, and they're surrounded by it. It is just ubiquitous in our society, in our culture. So when they go to school or a friend's house, they're going to be like, oh, that is way yummier than what I'm having at home. So I always talk to my kids, I explain the 80, 20 rule. I'm like, just 80% of what we're going to eat. You know, the things that we cook at home, and they get involved in the cooking and then 20%, fine. I'm just going to turn a blind eye. Like, you know, you can have the forbidden fruit, Right. So they don't sort of, you know, go crazy and only want that because they've been so rest. But I explained to them what that consequence is. You know, like, I talk about things like blood sugar spikes, you know, like, you know, when you're really tired after you had that pizza, that's because of a blood sugar spike. And this is what it's doing to your body. And I, you know, I do it in a way that's not like shaming or, you know, trying. I'm just trying to be factual with them and be like, okay, make your own Choices. But here's just some information and I do think that helps and I can, you know, I have teenagers so I've seen them go, come and go from sort of what we've taught at home. But at the end of the day they always are gonna come back to those roots.

You're imprinting on them for sure. That's exactly what you're doing. Yeah. My parents did the exact same thing. And I would even say like my mom getting rheumatoid arthritis. I was born, you know, and she was diagnosed. Wow. But with the result of that and her trying every food possible, food as medicine was the foundation growing home. It obviously led me to what I do today. But she was imprinting. Did I go to my friends houses, where is all that, you know, the fun Cheerios and sugary this and all that. But I knew what was, you know, I knew what would serve my body with my kids. I talked to them about their bowel movements.

Oh yeah.

So love, hate. The fact that in our school system we have incredible opportunities or programs where we have food for kids in need. Breaks my heart that some kids need to get their, their food from school. But the problem is is that the people mandating that are choosing foods that aren't necessarily the healthiest options.

Right.

So at my kids school right now in the morning you can go in, you'll see coffee cake on the morning breakfast menu. You'll see non organic fat free milk which is basically sugar water filled with hormones. You'll see a lot of foods that are sitting on those, under those heat lamps in plastic throughout the day. And of course they'll have some apple slices or some carrots that aren't organic. Then they'll have things like Cheerios and Doritos that are approved by the LAUSD school system.

Yeah.

Like isn't this wild?

It's amazing. But I also see that the systems have constraints. And when I was my kids were little, I actually went into their public school system and sat down with the nutrition director and the whole food services staff and, and tried to understand why they were putting the food on the plate that they were. And I basically, I got schooled. I mean they were like, you guys realize we have, have a dollar and 97 cents per meal and we have to hit all these nutrition requirements which by the way are informed by an ADA that's using science that's like 40 years old and. Exactly. Low sodium, low fat. Yeah. These kinds of guide. This guy.

Outdated.

So outdated. So I was just sitting there, you know, feeling bad for these people who are trying to do the best they can to feed the kids en masse in schools, I do think that there are solutions, though it doesn't mean we need to make an investment. We need to make an investment in a different kind of food infrastructure, which I think is happening sort of more broadly. People are pushing for that, but it couldn't be more important in our schools. And there's a. There's an awesome woman here in LA named Hillary Boynton who's working on. She's got a program called School of Lunch, and she trains lunch ladies.

Yeah.

How. That's kind of. I use that tongue in cheek, but she trains people how to cook whole foods. Based in ancestral wisdom for small schools that have capacity, but large schools don't have the capacity for that.

No. So brilliant. Yeah. And look, my kids know the difference. And, you know, I would say when I talk to them about their bowel movements, they notice the difference when they do have those foods and the impact.

Oh, yeah.

Of what it does to them. And I think that that's like, make them the. The one that takes ownership. Make them understand that food is information for your body and how it's going to function and how it's going to work. So, yeah, I really just wanted to own in on that. And, yeah, starting with our school. Think it's really uncomfortable to be the mom or the dad that speaks up and says no to those, you know, Goldfish crackers and Doritos and stuff like that. But we have to. We have to get loud. We have to work against the stigma against that. You talk about this a lot in your podcast and stuff like that. What do you have to say for the parents who are just like, you know, I want to say more, but, you know, I'm kind of scolded or.

Well, the first thing I would say is I understand how uncomfortable it is. It is so hard to speak up when you see all the toxins and you go to the birthday parties and you see the blue cupcakes, and you're, like, cringing because you don't want your kids to partake in that. Like, it is so uncomfortable to be in that position. And the reason why it's uncomfortable is because that is a cultural norm you're witnessing there. And so when you are speaking up, you are putting yourself outside the group.

Right.

And there's nothing worse for a human being than to not be part of the group, to be on the outside, and to not feel like they belong. But that is what's happening increasingly to what I would call the Crunchy Moms is they're like, like, I don't want to partake in that culture. I don't want to be a part of that. So they, they do put themselves in an out group. So my advice to those people is always like, own it. Bring your own group.

Go.

There's hundreds of Crunchy Mom Facebook groups all over. I mean, I don't know if that's where you have to go, but, like, find the other parents who see things similarly to you and band together, because then you have your own group and then you're doing something that. Yes, while it's counterculture, it's actually the new culture. You're just like the leader on this. You're taking charge and showing people where to go. They'll come along eventually.

Absolutely.

But you just have to not. Not feel insecure about it. You got to be confident and be like, you know what? It's totally fine for me to say no to have toxins in my kids environment. That's. That's absolutely fine.

Oh, my God, I love it. We've got to, you know, make Crunchy Moms cool.

I'm gonna make a bumper sticker.

I'll be granola mom. But it is speaking up because we're impacting, you know, even the fertility of our children in the future. So, like, just think about that. Think about the impact. Okay, so going back to those key factors, let's talk about environmental toxins also. I just. My kids needed new beds. Did all the research in the world on the mattress that was the safest. No chemical off gassing, that was organic fiber that was safe for them to sleep in. Invested a shitload into these mattresses. Great. But I got the bed frames, and I thought I was making the safe choice by choosing the wooden bed frames, like, great. From nature. And of course, it's massive sticker Prop 65. This product contains formaldehyde, gassing. And so, you know, it was in my house, the boxes were open, and for three days, all we could smell was this chemical, which I remember too, when I was little when I got like something new from, you know, IKEA or something like that. Right. But again, one of those other ingredients that's environmental. And I know, you know, you and I, if we went down the rabbit hole of all the environmental toxins that exist out there, but let's just call a few of them out to.

I mean, there's. There's just so many. I think the, the biggest category for exposure for kids is plastics because it's everywhere. It's the plastic water bottles, the plastic packaging, the plastic and it's, you know, it's so ubiquitous in our environment that it's in our inner water. Now as we all know and have heard about the microplastics everywhere. So I think that's one of the biggest exposures and it's so troubling because it's endocrine disrupting. The other thing I'll say about toxins and this is one way where you can to some degree control things is the municipal water systems are horrific in this country in terms of the toxins. A wonderful database on the environmental working group, they have a tap water database where you can put in your zip code and find out what toxins in your water. I kid you not, it's amazing.

All right.

EWG.com yeah, EWG.org and they have, I mean, thousands of municipalities. Thousands. It will blow your mind to see what is in the municipal water. It's unbelievable. Cancer causing chemicals, endocrine disrupting chemicals. I mean all these things that you think, oh well I, you know, we're pretty healthy, we don't buy a lot of toxins. It's there in your water. Water, you have to filter your water. If you live in a city, you just do. And there's really great water filtration systems out there now. So it's not like it's impossible to handle. And wells, if you have a well, you're not going to see it on the EWG database, but you can get it tested. There's a great company called Tap Score where you can send in a water sample super easy. I think it's like 200 bucks. So it's not super cheap, but they'll come back and tell you, you know, they've got hundreds of things they're looking for in there, you know, all the industrial chemicals. It's really an amazing resource. And then again, some well water is better than others. But you can always filter.

Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, so let's just say, you know, putting this into perspective, if they're going to start with three things at home, going through ditching all the plastic. Right. Replacing with glass or steel, just do it. A one time investment and it's done. Looking into your water, whether it's a water filtration system or water delivery. And then third, I have to dive into, you know, the chemicals from cleaners. Right. Fragrances, cleaners.

Yep. And personal care products. I mean those would be, I would put those in the same category. Anything that you buy for your home that's for cleaning, personal care, toiletries, there's always a safer option. So if people feel constrained by the expense of living, healthy cleaning is one category where you don't need to feel constrained by that. You have baking soda, vinegar, lemon juice.

Absolutely.

They're all very effective. And with the exception of laundry, maybe laundry, they're not super effective for laundry, but otherwise you can replace all your cleaners with those three things. With regard to the personal care products, again, you have to decide do I need the like really fancy pretty packaging of the natural organic things that cost a lot of money or do I just want something that's super simple, like castile soap as an example, very affordable. And you can use castile soap for kind of any kind of cleaning your body that you need. You could even use it for shampoo and so. Or toothpaste is another one. Baking soda. People can use baking soda as a toothpaste.

Yeah.

Maybe a little peppermint drop. Those are like the super low cost ways to get toxic products out of your personal care and cleaning. But you can also. There's so many companies now that are offering great alternatives.

Absolutely.

And there are some really, really wonderful stuff. Like there's a company I love called Branch Basics, which has cleaning products that are. The story behind that company is so amazing. Like they had, the founder had a, what I call a canary kid. You know, it's a kid is a canary in the coal mine who had multiple chemical sensitivity. And this mom, I love moms who do this stuff. She went out and found a, a way to make cleaning products that would not be something that would affect her son, that would be, you know, keeping him healthy in, in the home environment. That's what drove her to create the business. Isn't it like amazing? Like moms are figuring this out.

She had to band together.

I know, right?

Just like band together and just make all this happen. Ditch all the other ones. Like literally have a yes category and no catego, then be done with it.

I know, right?

I know. All right, so what do you believe are the key factors then? If we go back to add, adhd, what are the things that are causing the rise in those. But you know, especially within children.

Well there. Well, like with ADHD and add, there's so much literature, so much science behind causative factors. And again, it's never one thing and it's always different combination of things for any particular child. But there are some things that may be more or less impactful. So I'll give you one example. For some kids, adhd is very much a metabolic condition, meaning that they are having too many refined carbs and sugars put in their diet. And I'll give you a perfect example. I have a neighbor whose family consumed a lot of sugar. Three kids, all the kids were ADHD and on medications. Suddenly out of the blue, their youngest child, 9 years old, got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. It just came on. So they were of course devastated because I don't know if you know much about type 1 diabetes, but it is horrific to manage. You think your child, your child could die at any moment if you don't manage their blood sugar. So they just snapped too. And they were like, we got to get on top of this. So in that process of trying to learn how to manage their son's diabetes, they didn't want his blood sugar spiking and having to constantly correct with insulin. So they decided to look into like a ketogenic diet to like do a low carbohydrate type diet. Diet. Long story short, they took all the sort of refined sugars and carbohydrates out of the family's diet, like simple carbohydrates just to manage their son's blood glucose. All three kids, within a few months of changing that diet because the whole family decided to follow this diabetic diet, all three kids lost all their symptoms of adhd, came off their medications and they're all straight A like awesome kids, like just crushing it in school, but where before they were bouncing off the walls and the teachers were complaining and calling the mom all the time. So that to me is like one type of ADHD that is metabolic, but not all ADHD is that. Another example would be what's very common in the modern world is that children, because of nutritional deficiencies and because of sort of modern birthing practices, they end up having underdeveloped airways. Like it's a structural problem where their jaws are actually narrower than they should be. Tongue placement isn't where it's supposed to be. So there's these functional dentists who look for this and they try to expand the palate.

Yeah.

So the reason I bring that up is because many times when a child has that narrow airway and narrow or neurosinus passages and they're not getting enough oxygen at night, they develop sleep apnea or sleep disordered breathing, which is basically they like wake up, like not getting enough air. So these kids are not sleeping through the night. And what happens is they look like they have ADHD because they're just not getting sleep during the night.

Interesting.

So, interestingly enough, I have some friends who are functional dentists who have applied, you know, oral appliances to these kids and have corrected the ADHD symptoms by getting these kids to sleep. So, like, that's another interesting way to look at adhd. Right. So on one hand you have metabolic, another one is structural, and then yet another category could be toxin overload. Microbiome imbalances would be another category because the microbiome creates all your neurotransmitters and what's contributing to behaviors and inability to focus and attention oftentimes is related to the neurotransmitters and biochemicals that are coming out of your gastrointestinal tract because there's a gut and a brain connection. So there's so many categories of what causes adhd, but at the end of the day, it's really about this kid's body is out of balance. And so the behaviors, the symptoms, the hyperactivity, the inability to attention, to have attention, that is just messages and communications from the body that something's awry. So it's like it's your, it's. The door is opening when you see those symptoms. It's an invitation to walk in and start playing detective and seeing, is this metabolic, is this structural, is this microbiome, is it toxin exposure? What is it?

It's so important coming from your perspective too. Just looking kind of globally at the rise of imbalances in disease, taking this multifactorial approach, I think is something that most doctors aren't trained in, of course. And we had Dr. Lydia, an incredible functional dentist on, and she said the same thing, like she considers the structure and shape of someone's job, a child's jaw, as a predictor for their future health. That's the first time that I'd ever heard that.

Isn't that mind blowing?

It is mind blowing. So what are we doing, you know, just like historically that's causing this change in structure. And I have a lot of it, a lot of it probably has to do with change in the types of foods that we're eating. Yeah.

And it's multi generational. So that's the thing. The Weston A. Price organization is looks at what has happened to human health over the 50, 75 years in this modern era, really since post World War II. You could go back to the beginning of the industrial age and start to see some of the changes, but that's multi generational. So if you think about the human diet really changing in the 1800s, you start getting factory Production, you start having things that are preservable. Towards the end of the century, you get refrigeration that change. Each subsequent generation got worse and worse and worse. And we got more removed from the food directly coming from the earth and being connected to that. And so those are going to create nutritional deficiencies. All the processed foods stripping all the nutrients out. So now you have these babies being born underdeveloped structurally, because the diet that they're exposed to just doesn't provide the basics of what it needs. And you can eat healthy, you can go to Whole Foods and buy the healthiest foods that are on the shelf that you know that are available. And you still could be getting nutritional deficiencies because we've depleted our soils, we've processed all the crap out of our food. So here we are, not even aware of it. So it's not like it's our fault. Nobody should feel any guilt for this. We just have to be aware of what's happening and start taking steps to reverse that and pay attention to how this is impacting our kids.

Kids. It all comes down to our choices, right? It's funny thinking back to you, you know, going on a paleo diet, the difference between a standard American diet with those ultra processed foods and a paleo style diet. One diet, the paleo diet, you're chewing more, your jaw is working a lot more than the foods that simply dissolve. They're, you know, these simple sugars or carbs that dissolve in your mouth. You hardly have to chew. Right?

Such a good point. Such a good point. But that's the multifactorial nature of it, right? There's never just one thing. It's just you kind of have to sit back and be like, all right, how are we living right now know, and how is that different from my great grandmother or my great great grandmother? Even better, you know, and it's very different.

So what would you say are like some daily habits that many that might surprise a lot of parents that are linked to the conditions that you're talking about?

Oh, one thing that I think is very common, which most people wouldn't really believe is light exposure. So we know we get toxins, we get food. But there are, there's a lot of research coming out right now about the negative effects, effect of being in artificial lighting. Especially recently, they've gotten rid of incandescent light bulbs. You can't buy them anymore for energy reasons. But the consequence of that is everyone's buying LEDs and halogens and those things are horrible for you. The LEDs actually cause your blood sugar to spike.

Yeah.

What? You know, if you're trying to manage your kid's blood sugar and you're in, in a room, a classroom with the fluorescent lights, it's really sit for seven.

Eight hours a day.

Exactly. And the body knows it. The body's like, wait a minute, I've been been outside in the sunlight for millions of years. The human body adapted and evolved to be outside and we keep our kids inside. I mean if you just think about the average school day, eight hours in school day, and then usually they go to after school programs, daycare. None of that's outside. 15 minute recess.

Sure.

But like that's not even close to our evolutionary roots. So I think light is one of the underappreciated stressor factors in modern living. Another one I think does not get enough credit, but is a major stressor is electromagnetic radiation.

Thank you.

Huge factor.

It's wild. So when we think about, you know, everyone just wants the hard concrete data. Right. So kids are waking up early to go to school with no chance to really go outside and acclimate to nature's circadian rhythm. They're sitting in this classroom under this artificial light every single day. When. Which we all know that children aren't supposed to be sitting still at a young age anyways. Then we're now pushing that they're going on devices at school. And like, I get it. There are so many beautiful things about technology that can help with learning and things that they can watch and see to support them. But they have an iPad or any type of device with that EMF exposure. Guess where it's sitting right on the.

Reproductive organs right there over the. I'm in a daily battle with my son about this. Like a daily battle. He's 14. And I'm like, take that out of your pocket.

Yeah.

I mean it's, it's. They don't understand it. Nobody takes it seriously. Environmental Health Trust is an organization that has tons of published scientific data on their websites. If you're ever that parent who needs to like bring it to a teacher or bring it to somebody that is credible, incredible science behind it. And it is absolutely, you know, it's how many 10, 20 routers are going to be around you in any given apartment building.

There'S like a buzzing that you can feel. And a lot of schools, they've got these generators also. Right. That are putting off so much evo. I mean, I thought about like, you know, electric cars, the amount that we're sitting in those right oh, the batteries.

Are puking out electromagnetic radiation.

And so we think about this one with you think their nervous system. If your nervous system is dysregulated, I can just imagine those fuel all imbalances. Oh, yeah, right.

I talk to any pediatric chiropractor and they will tell you that nervous system is like the root of it all.

Absolutely.

And you can regulate so much by starting there and, you know, doing good. Nervous system regulation is going to help with sleep. It's going to help your gastrointestinal tract. I mean, it makes sense. The body is the systems. It's a whole unit. It's not like it's separate parts. But that nervous system is like command central.

We're also electrical. Like we are electrical beings. And it's like putting in. We're plugging into the wrong voltage, which is like just throwing us off.

It's so true.

I'm talking to the principal at our school right now because there's a. They want our kids on these laptops at night. It's called I ready. So they keep up. They do a certain number, sorry, a certain amount of minutes of work throughout the week and they want to grade them to stay on the back end, how the school is doing and stuff like that. The challenge is a lot of us have kids who are in extra curricular activities or going to sports. By the time they sit down to the screen, it's 7, 7:30 at night, it's dark outside. They're on another screen before they go to bed. It's just. I shut it down. I just got rid of it completely.

I mean, that ask is unrealistic because that blue light that's emanating from that device is also suppressing their melatonin. What do you need at night to go to sleep? Your melatonin. So you're creating a sleep disorder for the kids by requiring that. So that's an insane policy.

God, like, I hear you and like, I just.

I know it's frustrating. I know, I know.

It's not even that. I feel like if there was a crusade of, of, you know, five moms and five dads at every single school to not be the ones. Oh, that's the one that talks about the EMFs. Yeah, that's the one that talks about the granola and like the no Cheerios. It's like if we could just band together. We just have to be viral. We've got to make this just a lot more viral.

I know.

Just for the sake of our future. Okay, so in what ways has our Modern lifestyle, then how have we really strayed from natural rhythms? We talked about circadian rhythm, but what are some other things that we just stray that you know from the past? We're seeing this rise that our parents and grandparents never saw. Our grandparents wouldn't recognize the things that we're doing today. But what are some other natural rhythms that are being thrown off?

I think just being in nature. I mean, even people who lived a hundred years ago spent way more time in nature because like if you think before cars you walked or biked or rode a horse, places, if you had to go anywhere and you probably didn't go as many places, but you know, you were always outside and the natural world was, was everywhere, everywhere around you. Because we hadn't built up these in industrial cities, I mean maybe more than 100 years ago because we were industrial by that time. But pre industrial era, we spent all of our time in nature. And there's so much medical literature on how forest bathing and being in nature regulates your nervous system, decreases blood sugar, helps you breathe in a calm and soothing way. It reduces oxidative stress, reduces inflammation. I mean, it's literally free if you're near nature to go outside and take a forest bath and have all those health benefits. People don't believe it. You know, they're like, it's just too simple. It's too simple to be true. But it's just one of those things that isn't baked into modern living. It's not in our public spaces, it's not in our schools. Like our schools are these concrete, like very unnatury environments. You know, I do see some smaller kind of break off homeschooling and you know, Waldorfy type schools, trying to do a better job at that. But not in our public school systems. There's none of that in our public school systems. They're almost like prisons.

They I want to cry when I go into my kids schoolroom and granted they plaster the walls with, you know, beautiful pictures and stuff like that, but the fluorescent lighting is there, the windows typically have some sort of bars over them for protection and stuff like that. And it's sad and it's depressing. One of the biggest complaints I got from my son's teacher last year was that he was just sit and look at the clock. It was just like look around. If you were 8 years old and all you wanted to do was be outside, wouldn't you be looking at the clock too? Yeah, right.

Yeah. My son, every day from elementary school, after I pick him up at elementary school. I'd be like, what's the best part of your day? Be like recess.

Being outside.

Of course. Of course.

Do you know that PE Phys Ed isn't even a daily part of the curriculum in schools here?

I know.

Isn't that wild?

It's atrocious.

It's atrocious. I know.

And kids need that for brain development too. You mentioned it a moment ago, how important movement is for kids in their brain development. It isn't just during the crawling phase that that's important. It is for the whole trajectory into adulthood that you need to be moving. That's how the brain and the body connect. That's how the wiring is established. That's how we get oriented to our environment and process all the stimuli. It's got to be incorporated into our schools.

It's like the two big changes. Right. When you go to any grocery store, there's the health food food section, that small section. It's like the whole entire thing should be healthy. Right. Cracks me up. But the other thing is going back to those schools you mentioned, there are nature schools out there where when the kids go to school they take their shoes off and they step onto grass. Can you imagine just learning like that every single day, having incremental breaks every 45 minutes to get out into nature. Look up at the sky, move your body ground. Right. It's like there should only be one style or at least like put a tree in every classroom, you know, get different types of light bulbs. Like there's gotta be so many things that we can do to support our kids.

Yeah. And I just joined the board of a very small startup school in northern Virginia, actually western Virginia, that is doing just that is they're creating from the very beginning an entirely nature based school and working with the rhythms of the, of the children and the. It's, it's so inspiring to see it happen because she's incorporating all the things we've been talking about in terms of food and natural lighting and moving movement and also just fostering the independence of these children. And it's small, it's nascent. Right. But it gives you hope because if she can demonstrate that it works, that it's scalable, that this is a model that is something that can move into the future, we've got a chance for kids. It's hard to see how that might scale in the LA school district, for instance. However, I do feel like there are opportunities for us to try and create some better model that incorporates, creates pieces and elements of that that we know, are supportive.

And honestly, Ellie should be the first ones to jump on this wagon because we've got this beautiful weather year long.

That's true.

We literally could have massive farms at every single school where we're growing food. It's just. It's wild. So. Okay, thank you for sharing that. So what I'm really excited to get to and why my heart just burst open when I was reading about you and your work. So you spent 15 years now documenting success, success stories of children who have reversed their chronic disease and illness. And those diseases from their doctor were often considered chronic or lifelong. Can you share more about the peer review papers that you have?

So we just published a paper this summer in the Journal of Personalized Medicine, and this was a case report of a set of twins who were diagnosed at Walter Reed, which is a legitimate diagnostic location with level 3 or severe autism. And these. This family is an awesome family. They did. They just decided. And they had had exposure to our work before and some of our peers and colleagues that have been talking about how you reverse autism. That's part of what my nonprofit organization does, is teaches parents how to do that. They decided that that was what they wanted to do. They were going to reverse this in their kids. So they basically did an overhaul on diet and went kind of that ancestral whole foods, pure ingredients, all organic, pastured, all these kinds of important parts of food. They took all the toxins out of the home. Same thing I was talking about before with the personal care products and the cleaning products. And then they worked with some autism coaches who helped them do some of the neurodevelopment piece. Because what happens in autism, as opposed to say like a life threatening food allergy or asthma, they don't necessarily have that neurodevelopmental piece is they had to go back and revisit milestones that were missed. They had to go back and address parts of their development that had been impaired or interrupted because their total load of stressors was too great during that time period. That's a feature of autism, is you have, you know, maybe the vision system didn't develop the way it was supposed to. The sensory integration didn't develop the way it was supposed to because these kids had too many stressors on them. When they were supposed to be developing vision, they were dealing with putting the inflammation and the fire out. When they were supposed to be doing motor development, they were dealing with excreting toxins from their body. Like that's what happens in autism. So they found these personalized therapeutics that were specific to their girls. Like their girls need something that's very different from another kid with autism. And that's one of the foundational things that people need to understand is it's all about individual. In any case, this family worked really hard for two years and they have fully reversed their diagnosis in this kid. In these kids, they are indistinguishable from their peers. And I have been documenting these stories for 15 years. We have have tons of stories. Rheumatoid arthritis, life threatening food allergies, eczema, adhd. All these kids that have reversed their condition by doing similar things. It's not all the same. There's no protocol. Again, it's bio, individual. Yeah, but the foundations are the same. You have to change your diet, you have to detox your life. You have to look at your child's individual imbalances and look, see how you can course correct. So we actually have a YouTube channel. If you go to Ocumenting Hope on YouTube, you can see all these stories that we've been documenting. We have them on our website, we call them success stories. But there's also stories out there that maybe, maybe the kid didn't totally lose their diagnosis, but they have what we call healing wins. And those are, you know, like, let's say the child had, you know, a stimming behavior or a tick that was troubling.

Yeah.

And they get over that by making these changes. So even the small healing wins are important. And there's tons of these out there. You know, we're not the only ones documenting. There's tons of books about them. The moms again have written these books.

It's not making front page news.

I know we're still living in a.

Society where somebody will go to the doctor, whether it's autism or autoimmune, whatever it is, they're looking for a protocol to go on. And if the protocol doesn't work, then they're left with a loss. It's like, oh, well, this is your genetics and you're stuck with this for life. Right. And you and I know very well whatever your genetic profile is does not dictate your destiny or your future. You can reverse those genes. It's the environment that you're in.

Right.

So what were some of the therapies in this treatment then?

For these girls there's a lovely therapy that's specific for things like ADHD and autism called mnri, which is Moscatova Neurosensory Inter Integration, I think is what it is. I can't remember what the acronym is, but it's a method basically developed by this brilliant Polish woman who learned that when a baby is. Is born, they come up with a set of reflexes, right? They have to suck, they have to turn their head. There's like these certain things that are primitive or primary, and they need to, over time, be integrated. As the child feels safe and begins to do that movement, those reflexes become integrated. So, like, one very common one is a startle reflex. You know, babies, sometimes you see them startle like that, that's built into them. They come out of the womb with that. But that needs to be integrated as the baby again matures and feels safe in their nervous system. Right. Babies who have had some kind of interruption in that critical window could be neo, could be prenatally, but oftentimes it's neonatally, like right when they're born. Some kind of toxic exposure. Antibiotics would be a great example that will do it. It creates that place where the body doesn't feel safe. And so they can't integrate that sterile reflex. They can't integrate the moral reflex, which is similar in that first time period. And so that sticks with the child. And it keeps that nervous system dysregulated. It keeps them in a sympathetic state in the nervous system, like, which is that fight or flight. So they're always pumping cortisol, they're always pumping the stress hormones right through childhood. Children should not be in that state of fight or flight. They should be in parasympathetic. That's the rest and digest and grow state. So this is a common thing that happens. What the therapy does is helps reintegrate those reflexes so that a child can continue back on a normal healing trajectory. And it gets the immune system and the nervous system to kind of like get off high alert. It's like stand out in your safe. That's one of the most fundamental parts of this neurodevelopmental process, is that you can't really develop around along a normal trajectory if the body doesn't feel safe. And it's not gonna feel safe if there's toxins being thrown at it. It's not gonna feel safe if the environment is emotionally stressful for the parents. Think about that piece too. We don't even talk about that, how mom and dad actually have this unseen CO regulation they do with their kids. And you said it before, about how stressed we all are. How are you a new mom who has to juggle a job 40 hours a week and have a newborn and not sleep and not sleep and then expect the baby to be like all peaceful and feel safe. That's just not possible. So I really feel for new moms. I mean, when I went through it, I was actually able to stay home with my children during that period. But I know had I gone back to my 40 hour week, intense stress job, it would have been very, very hard for me and for my children. But most people don't even have that choice.

Like three months here.

Yeah.

Even after C sections, they're just like rushed back to work. It's like your body hasn't even healed. It's wild. So let's hover on that for a second because I think especially for things like autism, we very quickly want to go and blame, we want to blame vaccinations, we want to blame the environment, we want to blame the, the food or whatever it is. So supporting your child's nervous system should be be paramount. Looking at stressors for your child's physiology in combination with taking that kind of like pullback aspect of what are the additional stressors that are happening to the child. Right. And I work with the scientists out of John Hopkins and like, they're not proving that trauma can be transferred through DNA. I know it's like we're coming into the world not only from the toxins from our moms and our grandmothers, but also the traumas from our moms and our grandmothers. So it's really great. I love that you're shining this light. I'm just looking at like a very, very multi faceted approach on what we have to consider for, for healing. Right.

And I think I'm glad you brought up blame because there's so much shame and guilt around parenting. And, you know, we all want our babies to be safe and we want our children to grow up to be healthy. And then when we find out something that might have impacted them, we feel this horrible sense of shame or guilt. And then sometimes we can externalize that and blame somebody. But at the end of the day, there really is no one to blame here. This is a function of a society that has evolved multifactorial reasons for why the society is the way it is today. But it's not like you can lash out against it. All you can do is just accept, acknowledge what it is and understand that you have it in your power every single day to make different choices, to pull out of that matrix and to start living in a different way. And it is going to be hard sometimes, you know, like somebody who has a stressful job and those kind of constraints, like, that's hard for me to say, yeah, just make a different choice than that. You know, it's not always that easy, but I think it's the. The willingness and ability to take the long view, knowing that. That it's possible to make changes, it's possible to turn health around. And you set that as your goal, and you work toward it to the best of your ability with what you've got. But just knowing that, because I think most people, when they go to their doctors, they don't hear that. They don't hear that it's reversible. They don't hear that there's root causes that are addressable. They just hear, here's your script, here's your pharmaceutical go suppress the symptom, and we'll see you in another year or whatever. And that's not really. That's not a choice.

It's not a choice. I remember I was on antibiotics from the age of two up until I was 14. Once, if not two or three times a year, until my mom finally said, enough is enough. We found somebody who's more of a holistic practitioner. I think the first book that we had in our house was from Dr. Andrew Weil also. And then after that, I stopped antibiotics altogether. But the impact of all of those years on my immune system and eventually leading to my heart issues and stuff like that. But. But yeah, we can't undo what had happened to us in the past. So I understand that positive approach on the future. There's nothing we can do. It didn't happen any other way. Right. So we've got to just continue to move forward. Right. Can you shed a little bit more light on the success story? So I know you've talked about, you know, autism and people who've taken away vaccines or they've looked at vaccines, and that was supportive, but it didn't work for everybody. Right. Were there success stories that you can remember where it was like it was different for one family versus the other?

I think that's very typical in the autism success stories that we've docked documented. So, for instance, I think a lot of kids who have ADHD have a lot easier turnaround with diet changes, for instance. But there are many, many families that I know that have been working at this to reverse their children's autism for a long time and not seen much impact. That's very frustrating because there are cases, I know cases where, you know, you had a child who was like 3 years old, severely affected, they took gluten and casein out. And that was life changing for that child for a variety of reasons. And then that child started speaking. You hear these stories, we've documented these stories, but that is not for everybody. So I think that's one of the most important pieces is again, understanding that everybody is individual and the path to wellness for one person is going to be different than the other. So you have to play the detective. We actually created through our, through Documenting Hope, which is my nonprofit organization, a research platform, and one of our studies, we have an IRB approved study called Trust Chirp, which stands for Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention. And the reason we created this study is because we felt people weren't taking this concept of total load seriously enough. So we wanted to measure how children are living in the modern world and then be able to correlate that with health outcomes. So it's the most comprehensive environmental health survey that I know of that takes an inventory of all the things you mentioned, like the epigenetic things like trauma, all the way through preconception, prenatal and into the child's life. What kind of toothpaste are they using? What kind of laundry detergent does a family have? Like what kind of symptoms do they have and anything that might impact a child's health and well being or, you know, positively or negatively. And then we correlate that with health outcomes. And when a parent takes this survey, they're contributing to our body of knowledge and the evidence we're collecting. But they get back a personalized report and that report highlights everything in their answers that they indicated that is considered a health stressor. It's flagged in orange. So you actually get a PDF that you can download and it will like let's say for instance that they put that they use a fluoride toothpaste. We'll highlight that in orange because it tells you there's something unhealthy or stressful to the body in that. So it's almost like a blueprint that parents can use because again, going back to the bio individual piece, how do I know what's affecting my child? Like another one that's very bio individual is mold exposure.

Oh yeah.

So we ask a lot of questions about does your house smell dusty, damp or mildewy or, you know, things like that to try and ascertain if there might be mold exposure. That's not going to be a stressor for everybody, but for some kids, that is the single biggest one. There was a family here in LA that we interviewed on Film, Actually we have it on film. Whose son was diagnosed with autism at 2, pretty severe. And they did all the diet changes and they didn't see any kinds of improvements. Well, one day they found out through happenstance that there was black mold behind the wall behind his crib.

Wow, poor kid.

They removed the mold, took him out of that situation. Detox his body helped, supported the methylation and detoxification. He recovered from autism. So it's never one thing. And I'm not suggesting for that child it was just the mold, of course, but that was such a constant stressor for him that he couldn't make any of the other improvements or changes. Changes. Like I think of it as. There's a great book called the autoimmune. No, the Thyroid Cure by a woman named Michelle Corey. Do you know this book?

Great book.

And what I love about one analogy she uses in that book is that you have to think about modern stressors, toxins, whatever they are, as each being like a thorn in your body and you are going to have thousands of them, thousands of thorns in your body. And so it makes sense if you take two of those thorns out and you don't see any change. Like let's say you take gluten out, you take casein out, you take the phthalates out of your endocrine disrupting products that are all over your house, those are three thorns and you still got 9907. Whatever. You know, it just, it is so many things. That's why we created the report we did for the ChIRP study, so that people could have like something to start with, to start removing all the individual thorns for their child, that is phenomenal.

So I'm going to add to that. I think every parent should go and check that out. But first and foremost, you know, even if these bigger imbalances or diseases that we're talking about don't seem relevant, relevant to the listeners, look for the symptoms. If your child has any symptom, from a chronic runny nose to bloating and gas or diarrhea or constipation or poor sleep or puffiness under their eyes or food allergies, that is that red engine light flashing saying, mom, dad, look at me, like please take care of me. It's up to us to just take action. And what a great resource to finally have to go to.

Yeah, thank you, genius.

So for the parents who might feel overwhelmed with their child's diagnosis, then you mentioned a few things. Where would you go as the first place to kind of start I think.

There would be three things that I would recommend somebody do. One is really just started getting your mindset adapted to this idea of natural. Just lean into natural in every way you can, whether that's food or your home environment, or just paying attention to the labels. Like, just lean into natural. Like, that's the first thing. And you don't have to do it all at once. Once. But it's kind of like, let's start paying attention to all the things surrounding my child and can we provide an environment that's as natural as possible? Light, food, environment, all that. The next thing I would say would be find some friends, maybe a family member. Like, I went through a healing journey with my kids that involved my sister. I'd be on the phone, I'd be like, what did the stools look like in your kids today? You know, like, to normalize and, oh, I'm soaking my beans today. What are you doing? You know, those kinds of things that make you feel like you're doing this thing that's totally normal and you have some help and partnership in it. So if you can find a friend or family member to sort of commit to making changes, the changes are way easier.

Absolutely.

And the last thing I would say, and it's too bad that our system doesn't support this the way it should, but is to find some kind of holistic practitioner to work with because they can provide invaluable insight. It could be a naturopath, it could be a functional medicine doctor, an integrative physician. It could be somebody who practices Ayurveda. It could be. Be any traditional Chinese medicine practitioner.

Absolutely.

Like, there's so many amazing healing modalities out there. As long as they sort of take a systems or holistic view, you're going to get some value out of it. Sadly, a lot of that is not covered by insurance.

No. Terrible. I have to say, some of the most impactful therapies for my son. My son, I had an emergency C section with him, so that was traumatic birth, I'm sure. But over the years, I take him for craniosacral therapy.

How lovely. Yeah.

And. And if you see a child on a table with craniosacral work, like, they will be completely laying back, rested, and then all of a sudden they'll flail their bodies up and, like, have these energetic releases and then go back down. Like, if you see their energetic system, just regulate in front of somebody. It takes a trained person to do that. It's so worth the investment, though.

Yeah, I agree. And that's sort of how you have to see it too, is an investment. So I understand the feeling of being overwhelmed by the cost of healing. And most of the stories we've documented, these families maybe weren't necessarily super resourced. Some of them were, but they decided that this was going to be the investment they were going to make, you know, and they, they made sacrifices. Like, I'm not going to say, like, they still, you know, went along and went on vacations and did the things that they wanted to do. They, they committed to making sacrifices and making an investment. But at the end of the day, that paid off. I know a lot of these families that I originally documented, you know, starting 10 year, 10 or more years ago, ago, who have kids, who are adults, who are getting married. One of my favorite success stories that we have on our YouTube channel is one of our board members who's a holistic health practitioner. She became a holistic health practitioner and a nutritionist because her son was diagnosed with autism at age 2 1/2. Yale child Study Centers. This was not a misdiagnosed kid and very severe. Had no language apraxia. He had seizures. I mean, very severely affected. This young man is now 28. He just got married. He got his PhD from Brown in like environmental engineering. I mean, he's the coolest dude. I've got another video of him, like the greatest guy. That family was struggled in the beginning. Like, they made those changes and it was hard, but they invested and now they are reaping the benefit and enjoying their adult son and watching him live this full, amazing life. Whereas before he couldn't talk, had seizures, was self injurious. Like, those are two paths that family could have taken.

You're giving life back to your child. For my kids, even when I think about the things that I do for their health, I'm like, you know, maybe this is going to give my daughter a better fertility journey or give my son better, you know, emotional balancing or lessen his anxieties. He becomes an adult. Or when he goes through hormonal changes, like everything that we do really, really matters. I think we have to start thinking of it being that important. Giving life or life depleting. Right?

That's a good way to put it.

And you really should. You're so good. You shed that positive light on, okay, we just have to move forward and, and, you know, just take action. I think it does feel really good just for a second to just be angry. Like when we think about the fta, like, I just want to be angry that food and drug are under one umbrella in the usa. And you know, we have to call out that when we make a decision to not buy the foods that we've talked about today that are ultra processed, that have inflammatory oils, that have colors or dyes, whatever ingredients that you don't understand. End. We're fueling the pockets of big food companies who are then creating more food to deliver to our kids that might be making them happy, but it's not making them happy. Like they trust us to give them things that are safe so they're gonna assume that those processed foods are safe when they're not. We have to stop normalizing it. And I think to do that we gotta get a little angry first.

I'm on board with that. I think it's totally appropriate to be a little angry. You know, we, in some ways we were manipulated. We were blindsided. We didn't. No, we were just going along doing what we think is culturally normal. Right. And we were being poisoned or harmed the whole time. Having said that, you can also think of it like the, the Kellogg's thing, like the food companies, the pharmaceutical companies, you know, all these profit driven, like they're just doing their job, they're just making a profit. Like. And by the way, lots of people have sick kids work for these companies.

Exactly.

So like there's no like us and them, like we're all intermixed. It's one big family. But you can almost think of it as like, you know, a really evil friend who did something nasty to you. Right. What are you going to do with that evil friend? You're going to be like, I'm done with you. Like you're, you're no longer part of my life and you move on.

Right.

So you can totally be angry because that friend was mean to you and nasty and hurt you angry. Yes. Get it out. That motivates you. But you just push him to the side. And I do think we are like, we have the capability to move markets that way. And I once met a woman who was going to start an organization. I love this. I wish she'd started it, ended up getting into politics and, and ran as a state legislator, which is fine, she did that. But she was called Mom's Movie Markets. And I was like that, that's it, that's it. Like that's all we need to do. It's like you talked about banding together, but moms need to move markets.

Absolutely.

Just make different choices and start with every little choice that you have in front of you that you can make a reasonable change.

That's an amazing reframe. Okay, so get angry, but don't hold on to the anger, because then it's going to make you sick and then you're giving them more control. So don't do that, but use it as ammo. Use it as fuel. Let's start to say no.

Yeah.

And like me, if you get the bed with formaldehyde, you're going to return it because it has formaldehyde, and you're going to make a stand, and that's going to be what you're doing that day.

And tell the company, like, I am sending this back to you because you're poisoning me.

Like, exactly.

You can do that so that if they get enough of those letters, they might rethink their manufacturing practice. And by the way, there are good companies out there. Like, I visited the Naturopedic, a factory one time. They are doing it right. They've got wool and cotton and, you know, they're doing things without chemicals. And I've seen it happen. It's possible that they can do that. So it's just a matter of, you know, really taking a stand, making those decisions and sticking to them. And if you can, you know, get vocal about it and let people know why you're making those decisions, help them.

Understand, that helps you. Got it. So do me a favor, looking ahead, what's your vision of the future of a healthy generation?

Well, my future vision is I have a lot of hope in sort of the Millennials and under. I feel like the Internet is changing things so much. I sound so old by just saying that because, you know, but really, it's only been around, like, 25, 30 years, like, in any. In any real way in terms of people's access to information.

We're the last generation that will live without. Without. Without the access or not having had it. Exactly. We're the only ones that were that, remember?

Yeah, but this is my point in that, you know, we have people who have immediate access to information, assuming that it isn't, you know, totally locked down and censored. But TikTok and Instagram and all these platforms are. People are sharing about, like. Like Kellogg's is all over my Instagram feed today. And all the. The protests against Kellogg. Of course, that's my algorithm, them, so that makes sense. But I do feel like the young people are like, hey, wait a minute. Those tampons are toxic. I didn't know that.

And they.

And they are starting to care about their health. And the other thing I will say is that I think there's enough young people that are getting the soft signs right now. So when I say young people, I'm talking about like young women and men in their 20s who are like, I have these migraines. I do not want these migraines. Or like I've got this PCOS diagnosis or my period's not regular. Like there's these signs of things, things that they're like starting to wake up to and they're googling it and they're tick tocking and they're finding out from people that these things are reversible. The more we talk about the fact that these have root causes, that they're environmental and they're reversible, and the more it gets out on the Internet, the more these young people are finding the information and making different choices as a result. So my hope for the future is that that crew is going to pick it up and run with it. You know, like, I'm trying to raise attention, raise awareness and let people know, but they're, they're picking it up and running with it. So I do have hope that that next generation is going to pivot and turn things around. Hopefully they'll do it sooner rather than later.

They will. It's conversations like this that are going to enable it. And I'm so with you. And I just, you're just, you're onto something. It's. I think parents are sick and tired of hearing how bad it is. Now with a different lens of hearing about things that are curable or reversible or the success stories that are out there, put a different lens on it completely for them to wake up a little bit. So I'm grateful for you for that. To slowly wrap things up, we asked some quick rapid fire questions. So first one, what are the most mistakes or common misconceptions that women are making with their health?

One of the biggest ones, which is actually showing itself in our chirp data, remember I was saying we're collecting all this data is birth control pills. Birth control pills destroy your microbiome and nobody tells you that. So a lot of times what happens, 80% of women in the United States have been on birth control pills at one time or another. So this is not like singling anyone out like, oh, you're bad, you took birth control pills. Everybody's, everybody does it.

Yeah.

And it's complex and it's fraught and it's nuanced because it's a political issue and there's a lot going on with that. But just know if you take contraceptives, hormone or steroid based contraceptives, you are going to impact your microbiome. Why does that matter? Because you're going to pass your microbiome onto your child. And I'm telling you right now, the microbiome is one of the biggest smoking gun issues in autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. Of course, allergies, asthma, all of it is related to the microbiome. So I think that is one very easy thing that we can take a look at and say, do we want 80% of women screwing up their microbiome?

Yes. Beth. Ah, endocrinopathy. It's like the first stage for kids and irregular cycles can be normal for some people. Thank you.

Exactly, exactly.

All right. What is one way that women are making healing and health too complicated?

Oh, I think that they get too mired in biochemistry. So there are a lot of, like I was saying, this younger generation I think, think are very interested in sort of the biohacking and that kind of thing. And you know, there's all these labs, these functional labs out there which are great, like, especially if you have some kind of mystery diagnosis and you can't figure out what's going on, like use the functional lab labs. But sometimes people go too deep down those rabbit holes trying to like micromanage their methylation and every genetic snip and how do I supplement that and just it feels like like so much work. Too much. Right. Whereas. And even Ben lynch, who's like the expert on genes, will say like you need to just go back to the basics first. Like before you get mired in the functional labs and trying to tweak every gene you have.

Just go back to the basics.

The sleep, the nutrition, the, you know, just detoxifying your life, life, the, the warm loving relationships, like all the basics of being a human being. Start there.

Yeah.

And then don't micromanage your biochemistry.

Beautiful. What is your favorite ancient healing remedy?

Oh, this is, this is one that's actually took me a long while to get to. And it's lemon balm. And I actually, this is funny, I would say I'm a person who's more amped up and intense. Right. Like, so my nervous system is always like, like a little more wired than it should be. And that probably precipitated some of my kids issues for sure. Right. But I, I was always a gunner. I've always been intense and always in my life I've had this weed like in my Yard. It's lemon balm. I'm like, oh, this thing will stop growing. It's everywhere now. I know that was the universe was like, hey, you need lemon balm. So. So now I grow it and I make my own tincture.

Beautiful.

And I love it. And it's not the kind of thing that I think is, like, it's not like a pharmaceutical that you're like, oh, I feel the impact immediately. I take it every day. And I do feel, like, gentle, kind of like I feel more regulated. So lemon balm. And now that goes back to, like, ancient turkey. People have been using that forever.

I haven't used it since I was pregnant. I'm going to pull that back out. Look at that. Universe was presenting itself.

Yeah. It wants you to have it.

All right. If you had to pick one thing about modern medicine that excites you, what would it be?

Oh, what would be the one thing about modern medicine that excites me? I think that. That the. There are conventionally trained doctors that are going back to be retrained in things like nutrition.

Yeah.

That excites me. Like, I feel bad for. Two of my best friends from college are conventionally trained medical doctors. And, like, just watching what the average. What their practice is like, like, it's not set up for, you know, talking to your patients realistically about nutrition and lifestyle stuff. Like, they do that. But it's not. Not. It's not what it needs to be, I don't think, because the system doesn't support that. But I love that, you know, a lot of these conventionally trained doctors are going back and getting additional training and stuff that they didn't get in medical school because they're seeing that it's going to help their patients to become more interested in the holistic piece, interested in nutrition. So that gives me hope that, like, that's where medicine's going, is looking. It's going to take a while because, of course, pharmaceutical industries don't want that to happen. Or if they do, they're going to put the nutrition in the pill, which they've already done and.

Right.

You know, there's that, but it does get me homeworking. Yeah.

You're the first person to say that. I love that everyone's so future forward on what's to come, but it's actually.

Going like, stem cells.

Stem cells regeneration.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but come on. It's like, for me, it's about getting back to the basics. Always, like, cool. If we have these new technologies that are coming that's awesome. But that's not really what we need. Like, the symptoms and diagnoses are because we're doing it wrong. So just go back to the way we used to. To do it, because we used to do it right.

This whole foundation of this podcast, if we just integrate the worlds together, we have so many solutions.

Yeah.

What are the top three things that we can start to do right now to optimize our health?

Circadian rhythm. That's a big one. I underestimated that. And I think until I really read the science on it, I was like.

I don't need to.

I can stay up late, look at.

My phone work first.

I'm resilient. Right. So I think the circadian rhythm and living sort of in that light cycle and making sure you get up and see the light in the morning and then try and see the sunset once it goes down. I think also sleep, just like we said in the beginning, Sleep is so, so, so important and take it seriously.

Beautiful. If you could leave our listeners with just one key takeaway that you're most passionate about right now, what would it be?

Healing is possible.

Yeah, it is.

I mean, that's. That is what I say over and over again. We have a couple of videos we've made that we put on our website where that's. The central message is that healing is possible. Possible because it. Most people don't, first of all, know that for many of these conditions that they're told are genetic. Second of all, they don't believe it until they see it in somebody else's testimonial.

Yeah.

So I think people need to really know. And please believe me when I say healing is possible. It doesn't mean you're going to necessarily completely reverse your diagnosis or your child's diagnosis in a year. It might take 10 years. But I also believe that that's part of the journey. Journey, like, spiritually. This is happening to us for a reason. There's something for us to learn through this sickness or our children's sickness. And I even believe that our children are here, almost like this spiritual cohort. They've come in to tell us and teach us that the way we're living is not conducive to life. And so, like, it's almost like they've taken it for the team to teach us to be our teachers. So I feel like for our children's sake, we have to know that healing is possible for them.

So beautiful. They could believe it. It could become part of their constitution. Right. Like, you can heal yourself You're a healer.

Exactly.

I'm so grateful that you came into this line of work. And not only that, you've got the history to really back this up. And it's just like, what a gift to hear your wisdom today. I really hope that our listeners understand like there is a role for nutrition and movement and proper sleep and hydration. But universe is showing us that right now because of the impact of what we've done. It's just, it's not enough. So, you know, choose one thing. If it's the ultra processed food, if it's the chemicals in the environment, the plastics at home, just start with one category. How can people stay in touch with you and your work?

So they can Visit us@documentinghope.com We actually have an annual conference coming up in November, that's in Orlando, that people can come and hang out with us. We have all kinds of health and healing lectures on how to heal your child. And also I have a website, Beth Lambert.com and they can reach out to me there.

We'll link out all of that, including chirps. I also want them to check out your book, A Compromised Generation, which looks like this, which I cannot wait to dive into. So grateful to meet you. I can't wait to have you back.

Thank you, Monis.

Thanks.