In this episode, Dr. Bryan Joseph interviews his wife, Dr. Olivia Joseph, Doctor of Chiropractic and Diplomate in Clinical Nutrition. Dr. Olivia Joseph shares her personal experience with using food as fuel when she was sick and how it ultimately took her down a journey to become a Clinical Nutritionist.
Food can work against you or it can work for you. Discover three basic things you must do for proper nutrition health and balance.
Dr. Bryan: All right, welcome, here we are today with a very fun, special episode. I get the opportunity to bring my partner in crime, my best friend and my wife, Dr. Olivia Joseph in today’s conversation. She is an integral part of not only my life but impacting a lot of people in a lot of great ways, especially in the realms of nutrition, so one of the discussions we wanted to share … Well, first of all, I wanna say welcome, Olivia.
Dr. Olivia: Thank you. I’m so excited!
Passion for Health and Nutrition
Dr. Bryan: What I’d like to do is start off with understanding you a little bit better because I’ve been all over the place with you, on family vacations, and with our kids, and in our friends and social environments, and the conversation always turns towards you talking about health and nutrition to people. So, I wanna know where the passion came from. Where did you get into this, and why did you get into this?
Dr. Olivia: I think that most people have passion born out of pain, and as you obviously know, I suffered with chronic digestive issues pretty well my whole life. Some of my first words were my tummy hurts. And, really, when it comes to any chronic disease, we’re pretty well failing in our country, nowadays, still with digestive issues and much more.
So, I grew up complaining of my stomach, and I took one prescription medicine, another prescription medicine because obviously my mom was taking me to the doctor because that’s what you do when your child is in pain. And, I remember after my second medication, the doctor saying to my mom,
“It is not normal to medicate a child.”
I think your daughter has a nervous stomach, and I want you to take her to a counselor, so my mom started taking me to counseling, and I had been going for about nine months, and I was nervous to tell my mom, but one day, driving home from a counseling appointment, I looked at her, and I said mom, if you want me to keep going, I will, but my stomach still hurts.
So, my mom was obviously frustrated. I had been complaining for years and years, so when we got home, she called a family friend who was a physician, and he told her to bring me in for some blood work, so they ran a blood test on me, looking for a bacteria called H. Pylori. It’s what causes 90% of stomach ulcers. It’s been linked to stomach cancer as well as triggering autoimmune diseases, and I had it.
So, how do you treat and bacterial infection?
Antibiotics. This one’s a little hard to fight, so you have to take a lot of antibiotics. I was prescribed two medications for the bacteria and two medications for the side effects, and I took my medicine faithfully. I was a very good patient. I didn’t miss a dose, even though it made me very sick.
Dr. Bryan: How old were you when you started feeling like you were having these issues?
I was two or three when I started communicating it. They were literally some of my very first words. My tummy hurts.
Misdiagnosed for years
And, they didn’t think much of it until I was about five, and then at this point, they’re like, “Well, this has been going on for a few years. Let’s try this,” and it was a green medicine, then it’s like let’s try this, and it was a pink medicine, and the doctor I had gone to, the pediatrician, was very, very old, old school, and conservative, which I think is a blessing, and he didn’t wanna keep giving me medication.
In the early 80s, there were no such things as pediatric gastroenterologists because children didn’t have chronic issues, so by the time I got my H Pylori diagnosis, I think at that point, I was probably about 13 years old and a freshman in high school.
So, I took the meds. It killed the bacteria, but my stomach still hurt, so now, they were concerned that I might have an ulcer, so I had to wait a year on a waiting list to see a gastroenterologist that would see a child. I had an endoscopy. I woke up from anesthesia, and they said, “We found the problem. It’s gastritis.” And, I was given antacids, and I was told it could take six to nine months for these to work. Take it faithfully, and I did, but my stomach still hurt, and I didn’t really have symptoms of gastritis, so I was already super into science.
The reason for becoming a doctor myself
I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up, and I strolled right back into that gastroenterologists office, and I said Doctor, you misdiagnosed me. This medication isn’t helping, and my stomach still hurts.
Dr. Bryan: You literally said that to someone?
Dr. Olivia: I literally said that, yes. I mean, I’d been dealing with this my whole life. This is why I said it because this is the time of encyclopedias, right? I don’t even know if we had dial-up internet at the time, so you couldn’t Google your ailments. I had to go to the school library to an encyclopedia, and I’d look up gastritis, and the symptoms are acid reflux, belching, indigestion. That’s not what I had, and I had this ah ha moment. Well, no wonder this medicine isn’t helping me. This is not what I have.
So, I went in and told the doctor, and he kinda laughed at my approach. I mean, this is in New Jersey. This type of behavior is acceptable, and further just think of how many people, kids, that actually have stomach issues that can’t articulate it or don’t take themselves on the quest of trying to figure it out. Consequently, they continue to suffer with it where they just take the prescribed pills, and they never really get to a solution unlike what your journey eventually led you to.
Diet has something to do with it
Well, I think what’s unique about my story, obviously, you know my mother, my father, my sister, my brother, they’re all from Poland. I’m the only person in my family to be born in America, and it’s a very different healthcare system of there. In Europe, they’re very much approaching digestive issues with diet, and I remember my mom said to doctor after doctor, “What should we remove from her diet, or what should we be feeding her?” And, the same answer we heard over and over was, “Diet has nothing to do with this.” I still have patients who come to me who tell me that their gastroenterologists in 2018 are saying, “Your diet has nothing to do with this.”
Dr. Bryan: How do we come to that conclusion? Because, that seems like asinine. Well, obviously, and we’ve lived in this culture for a while of actually seeing people improve their life by improving their diet, but why would somebody actually even say that?
Dr. Olivia: Because of a lack of education, if you look at the amount of nutrition hours a doctor is getting in school right now, it’s an average of two hours. Now, think about how much money we spent going to college for eight years, how much time we spent studying for board exams and things like that.
It’s a lack of education, and I do believe in healthcare we have to get better at saying, “I don’t know,” or, “I am not trained on this,” but the real root cause issue is we’re not trained on it. If you’re specializing in gastroenterology, and you have no training on diet, nutrition, it’s a bit of an issue. If you’re a cardiologist dealing with cardiovascular disease, and endocrinologist dealing with diabetes, and you have no training in diet, I think that’s a huge problem.
Dr. Bryan: I would agree. Well, all right, go back. Take us back to where you were. You were in that early high school situation, so what happened next?
The last straw
Dr. Olivia: The next diagnosis is what happened next. My next diagnosis was IBS, and at that point, IBS was considered a fake diagnosis, so when I was prescribed medicine for that diagnosis, insurance wouldn’t cover it because it was considered experimental. The medicine didn’t help, so I went back, and then the doctor put me on antidepressants because I had a nervous stomach, so I’d come full circle 16 years later to nervous stomach, and I started taking Zoloft, and that was the last straw for me.
I had a horrible reaction, horrible. I wouldn’t wish it upon anybody, and I remember calling the doctor’s office, reporting my reaction, and the nurse said to me, “Honey, you’re just gonna have to tough it out.” They were probably just sick of me being in and out. I was compliant is all I can say. I did what they told me, and I wasn’t getting better, so at that point, I lost hope. I lost faith. I wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t even know if I wanted to be a doctor anymore at that time, and I called my mom, and she said, “I’m gonna take you to one more doctor,” and I said nuh-uh. Nobody else is gonna poke me, prod me. I am not taking another pill. I am not taking another medication. I am done with doctors. And, you know my mom, right?
Dr. Bryan: I do know your mom.
The Solution
Dr. Olivia: She said, “You get your butt home this weekend,” and so I got my butt home that weekend, and she took me to one more doctor, and thank goodness she didn’t give up because that was finally the doctor who ran a food allergy test on me, and we identified not just gluten, right?
There’s no benefit to eating gluten. We know dairy’s acidic and inflammatory. I was reacting to gluten, dairy, potatoes, and corn. I’m a Polish girl. We eat potatoes everyday, so this food was making me so sick. I removed it from my diet, and a lifetime of digestion issues completely went away, and I said that’s it. I’m going into … I wanna be a doctor. I wanna be in natural healthcare, so, after I finished up, got my bachelor’s in human biology. I went to Logan here in Chesterfield because they had the largest nutrition program in the country, and this is 18 years ago. Chiropractors had the largest scope of practice in nutrition more so than any other licensed doctorate, so that was my journey, and here I am.
Chiropractors and nutrition
Dr. Bryan: I think it’s fascinating that it’s not just the fact that it’s a chiropractor, but it’s somebody that there’s doctors out there that actually are trying to get to the root cause, and when we stop just treating symptoms and we start trying to actually identify the root cause, then you can restore hope like was what happened in your life, which is really cool to see and experience. As a consequence of restoring hope, what’s been really cool for me to witness on side by side with you is not how you changed you life, but how you’ve changed so many other people’s life because of being passionate about this subject, so I think a lot of people have had the opportunity to benefit from the pain that you experienced when you were young. Would you agree?
Dr. Olivia: Oh, absolutely, it’s not like I haven’t any health ailments since, and sometimes when you’re doing everything right, your diet’s right, your supplements right, your stress management’s right, and you see things go wrong. You think why? How could this happen? Well, because things are gonna happen. Things are gonna go wrong in your health, but I’m thankful for every single one of them because it gives me empathy for my patients, but it also is a reminder to me that thank you for these ailments because they make me better at helping others.
Motion is Life, Food is Fuel
Dr. Bryan: So, thank you for sharing the story because I think that’s important that we all understand where you come from, but I wanna shift a little bit to one of the statements and the sayings that we always say around our clinic is motion is life; food is fuel. Helping people get well and stay well, food is fuel has really been spearheaded by you. A lot of us were involved with chiropractic care, or rehab, or sports medicine, and you spearheaded the side of the practice that was centered around food is fuel. Why do you see food as fuel?
Dr. Olivia: I think food can work against you, or food can work for you, and I’m a proponent of maximizing your quality of life. I always say it’s not about your quantity of life. People who are cynical say, “Oh, is it really worth it to eat this healthy? What if tomorrow you get hit by a bus?” Well, until that day comes, I have had a great quality of life, so I value that over quantity.
No all foods are created equal
Dr. Bryan: So, you don’t believe that all foods are created equal? Meaning like, I hear this a lot. I’m in rooms with patients, and patients will say, “Well, the FDA approved it, so why is it any different than the other food?”
Dr. Olivia: The FDA doesn’t approve food. They don’t regulate food. What they do is they subsidize farmers more so than anything to create animal feed, things of that nature. The FDA doesn’t regulate food. That’s not their job. Really, what they regulate is drugs and synthetic things; something that’s 100% natural, that’s not the government’s job. That’s not the FDA’s job. So, I don’t think it’s a belief system. It’s kinda like it’s easy to believe common sense, right, but common sense isn’t always so common.
Dr. Bryan: So, one of the things that always sticks in my mind that I find is easy to digest and understand when it comes to food as fuel as you think of it like what we put into our gas tank of our car, right? I always say if you fed your gas tank, if you had a high end Porsche, and it was meant to run on high octane fuel, and that was what was gonna optimize its performance, but you start shuffling Skittles and Snickers bars into the gas tank, what would happen to the car?
Dr. Olivia: Well, the reality is many of us take better care of our cars than we do our own bodies, right? Dr. Bryan: So true.
Dr. Olivia:
You can replace a car. You can’t replace your body.
Dr. Bryan: You can, but eventually that car is gonna choke out if you’re feeding it a bunch of crap. Dr. Olivia: Right.
Dr. Bryan: Right, and so I think the point is so will our bodies, and it’s not that in day one, as a child that was two years old that you actually started feeding yourself crap, so if you didn’t have an opportunity where years went by where you’re feeding yourself Skittles and Snickers to make yourself sick, what are other ways that people actually become sick early like what you did? What do you think triggered this?
Candy is not food
Dr. Olivia: That’s a great question. The one thing I just wanna make a comment on is those foods that you were mentioning. They’re not food, right? That’s one of the biggest mistakes we make. We can’t call Skittles food. We can’t call Snickers food. It’s not food. It’s manmade garbage. It’s toxic. We’re not talking about broccoli. We’re not talking about food that’s growing in nature, so to go back to what you’re saying is what can cause these issues? A lot of things cause these issues. How healthy your mom is when you’re in utero, her stress levels, how you’re born, if it’s a traumatic birth.
Dr. Bryan: Whoa, let me interrupt you, so if your mom or your grandparents for instance didn’t look at food as fuel, and they made a bunch of bad choices throughout the course of their life, and then they chose to have offspring, that could impact you.
Dr. Olivia: Right, so a lot of those habits are gonna be passed down to you, right? We’re taught by our parents and our families what food is.
Dr. Bryan: Not just the habits, I’m talking about the biochemistry.
Genes and germs
Dr. Olivia: Yes, so I like that you say biochemistry and not genes because we went from blaming everything on germs to now we blame everything on genes, yet the reality is 90% of people who get cancer aren’t carrying a gene for cancer, so that’s epigenetics. It’s our lifestyle determines our genetic expression, if the gene is turned on or off. Biochemistry is different. Why do we suggest women take prenatals? Because, if they don’t get enough nutrition, their babies’ brains and spinal cords don’t develop appropriately, so it’s not even a belief system. It’s a fact. If you don’t have the right nutrients when you’re making a baby, that affects it. How that baby is born, there’s so much research done on, not to get off topic, but vaginal deliveries, how much bacteria that baby’s exposed to from their mom. Well, by being exposed to that bacteria, it builds up immunity. Being breastfed heals and seals your gut, builds up immunity.
Dr. Olivia: I said when I was a kid it wasn’t normal to give a child medication, but yet how many kids do we see in our practice that are two, three, four, five years old that have been on rounds and rounds of antibiotics, have acid reflux, colic, ear infections, constipation. We’re accepting these things as normal now. I mean, we’re not that old. When we grew up as children 35 years ago, this stuff was not considered normal, so in some ways, I feel like we’ve gone backwards with advances in medicine.
Dr. Bryan: That’s interesting, so again, food is fuel, not only impacts you, but it impacts everybody around you.
Dr. Olivia: Absolutely.
Food decisions impact our lives
Dr. Bryan: So, I’ve seen, speaking of everybody else around us, we’ve got three kids, and with our kids, the decisions that you’ve made have impacted my life in terms of how I view food, and then it’s ultimately impacted our kids’ lives, and for the people that are listening out there that might have an interest in actually saying, “Gosh, what she’s saying makes some sense, and what he’s saying is food is fuel. I agree,” but I’ve spent my whole life studying economics. I’ve spent my whole life studying accounting. I’m an IT computer guy. How do I start to learn the basics of implementing food is fuel? If you had to boil it down to your top three or maybe five must do’s, if you’re trying to implement this concept in your house, could you boil it down to a couple must do points?
Dr. Olivia: Yeah, I think I can. I think that I can really simplify things and give people some of the first steps to gain hope and start moving their health in the right direction, but let me tell you what we’re up against, what you just said. You don’t need a college degree to understand nutrition. Everything that we need to learn about nutrition, you can learn in nature.
Dr. Bryan: But, I think when I hear people … This is what I actually perceive. When a lot of people hear you’re gonna start giving me suggestions for healthy food, that means I’m gonna be eating dirt and bark. And, they think it’s no fun, and you can’t enjoy the quality of good foods, but it’s so not true.
Food that is good for you tastes good
Dr. Olivia: Yeah, but good food tastes good when you’re not toxic. When you don’t drink water, and all you drink is soda, water tastes bad. Yesterday, I had a husband and wife that I worked with the wife six, seven years ago, and we got her health to a new level, and then she went back to old habits over the last six years, and now she’s here again, six years later with her husband. She’s back to being addicted to soda, and she says water tastes bad. Her husband only drinks coffee, and he says, “Water gives me acid reflux,” and I just kinda smiled, and I said I get it. I don’t like air. Water is essential, and if water tastes bad, then you’re probably toxic and poisoned honestly.
The Role Of Water
Dr. Bryan: So, try, if you could, and I don’t mean to put you on the spot like this, but what would be okay? I know nothing about nutrition. If you had to give me a couple musts, so you at least have to understand the basics. What are some takeaways people can hear today and say, “Look, if I at least incorporate x, y, and z, I’m at least moving in a better direction if I haven’t started anywhere.
Dr. Olivia: Absolutely, water. Dr. Bryan: What do you mean by water?
Dr. Olivia: Ideally, you would drink half your body weight in ounces of water. Water is H2O. Well, what is O? It’s oxygen? What does oxygen do? It gives you energy. The number one complaint I get from people is fatigue.
Dr. Bryan: Do you think a lot of people would start to just feel better alone if they went from no water, drinking soda, and just incorporated half their body weight a day in water. Dr. Olivia: Yes, 100%.
100%, and you could put lemon in that water. You can drink coconut water. You can enrich that water with electrolytes by putting a little Celtic sea salt, pink Himalayan sea salt in there, so you absorb it better. We say dilution is the solution for pollution, right? The more toxins we’re exposed to, we have to drink water to dilute those toxins.
Dr. Bryan: I hear people though say,
“Oh, gosh, you’re telling me to drink this much water. I’m gonna be in the bathroom all day long.”
Dr. Olivia: Right, so you’re in the bathroom when you’re not absorbing water properly because it’s back to dilution is the solution for pollution. If that water is getting in the cell, then you’re not gonna be bloated, swollen, retaining water, and in the bathroom all day.
Yeah, if you drink more water, you’re gonna urinate more, but guess what happens. You drink coffee; you urinate. You drink tea; you urinate. That’s how we remove water soluble toxins, so if you take in fluids and liquids, you’re going to urinate them out, so take in a fluid that’s actually gonna bring oxygen to your cells. You wanna lose weight? Drink more water. You wanna have more energy? Drink more water. It sounds basic, and I mean water. I don’t mean artificially sweetened, flavored, colored water. I mean true water.
A pro tip for gauging water intake
Dr. Bryan: So, let’s hear a pro tip. This is gonna sound like it’s so basic, but it’s something that around the office, you see a lot of us walking around with these bottles.
A lot of patients will say, “I don’t know when I can actually go. I don’t have time to take a break, or I don’t really know when I’m gonna get my water. Why do you carry your water bottle around? How does that make getting half of your body weight easier for you?
Dr. Olivia: Sure, so I keep a one liter water bottle with me. Why? Because, it holds 33 ounces, so I know my goal is I only have to refill it one time, right? If I have to keep track of 10 or eight glasses of water, guess what’s gonna happen. I’m not gonna get them in. It’s more refills. It’s more trips, and it’s more to keep up with. The days I forget my water bottle, guess what happens? I don’t get my water intake in. It’s just it can be that simple.
Dr. Bryan: All right, so foundational point number one, what I’m hearing is all people would benefit from drinking at least half of their body weight in water everyday. Dr. Olivia: Yes.
Dr. Bryan: And, one of the ways you can actually easily incorporate water into your day is actually just get a big jug or a liter or a bigger bottle, fill it up, and actually make sure it’s staying by you, so you can actually pay attention to how much you’re drinking. Dr. Olivia: Absolutely.
Removing Toxins From Your Diet
Dr. Bryan: That’s a great place to start. Now, number two, if you had to build off that, what would you say is the second thing that somebody could do to start to get some fundamentals in place?
Dr. Olivia: Remove toxins from your diet. Remove artificial coloring, artificial sweeteners. If man made it, you should limit it. If nature made it, you don’t have to limit your quantity and your portion size. You don’t have to measure and count calories, so get rid of manmade foods. I think everybody needs to at least, once a year, do a detox, and if you don’t do a metabolic detox, which we could talk about on another episode, at least do a detox once a year every six months, eliminating all processed and refined foods
Dr. Bryan: So, the reason being one of the things I’ve learned from you, just on that topic, and maybe some people, when you say, “Remove toxins,” are like, “Well, why?” Well, toxins don’t sound good, but inevitably what does it do to our body that we may experience? You share with me. I end up getting all this inflammation in your body if you have a lot of toxicity. What else does toxicity do?
Toxins can make you gain weight
Dr. Olivia: Okay, so toxicity makes you gain weight because your body’s whatever toxins your body can’t eliminate, your body’s gonna create a fat cell to store that toxin, so it’s not cut your calories and workout. It’s if you don’t get rid of the toxin, you don’t get rid of the fat cell. People with high levels of toxicity tend to have brain fog, headaches, muscle aches and pains-
Dr. Bryan: Perfect, what I’m hearing is if we … Water has to go up. Toxicity has to go down.
Dr. Olivia: And, keep in mind, toxins are not found in nature. They’re made by man. Why are they made? They’re made to hijack your brain. When I have people tell me, “Oh, I crave soda.” Why are you craving soda? Because, you drink soda because soda is made to make you addicted. This is why we created artificial sweeteners and high fructose corn syrup and many preservatives found in food. That food is designed by man to hook you, to keep you coming back for more, and we beat ourselves up as if it’s willpower. It takes willpower not to buy soda. It takes willpower not to take the first sip, but as soon as you take the first sip, guess what happens. Your brain has been hijacked. Willpower is gone.
Cravings
Dr. Olivia: Then, you crave sugar. You crave sweets, so let me ask you something. Do you crave cigarettes? Dr. Bryan: No.
Dr. Olivia: Why? Dr. Bryan: Because, I’ve never smoked.
Dr. Olivia: Because, you don’t smoke, right. That’s exactly it. When people say, “I crave,” x, or y, or z- the only reason you crave it…
Dr. Bryan: Think about kids, not just our kids, but just kids in general after Halloween and when they get all the trick or treating candy, and they’re just going to town with all these different forms of toxins, then they tend to crave that more often. Is that what you’re saying?
Dr. Olivia: When we see it with our kids, right, so we allow them a little bit, and then they turn into these monsters, and you and I are like that’s it! Party’s over; it’s all gone! Because- Dr. Bryan: You can see their attitude change.
Dr. Olivia: You can see everything change, their immune system. They get dark circles under the eyes, the sleep, their behavior, and I’m thinking to myself a little bit of poison is not okay. It’s not, and I’m not saying you can never have fun. Sometimes, we indulge in toxins, and we’re willing to pay for the consequence, but to have a little bit of toxicity everyday, it accumulates. Toxins accumulate in your body, and then you have problems.
Blood Sugar
Dr. Bryan: So, for upping your water, decreasing your toxins, what would … Is there a number three? What would the number three point say?
Dr. Olivia: Okay, it’s hard to pick. I have two points that I’m gonna bundle into number three. One is I don’t think it’s a complex issue, but I realize it’s complicated to a lot of people because I’ve been teaching it for 15 years, and sometimes people still don’t get it. It’s that you have to keep your blood sugar stable. With blood sugar, the secret is not too high, not too low, just right. When you keep your blood sugar levels stable, you can make muscle, burn fat, and have good energy. When you starve, when your body goes into starvation mode, you start breaking down muscle tissue to get nutrition in there. When you eat too much, more carbohydrates than you’re expending, then that excess sugar turns into fat, makes you sluggish, so with blood sugar, it’s you want it just right. It’s not high carb. It’s not low carb. It’s not no carb. It’s in your food.
Dr. Bryan: Since most people don’t walk around pricking their finger and checking their blood sugar. How do you know if your blood sugar…
Dr. Olivia: Your body tells you. How are your energy levels during the day? How are your fat to muscle ratios? What are you craving? Are you craving caffeine and sugar and salt mid-afternoon? What’s your sleep quality look like?
Can energy be a direct reflection of blood sugar?
Dr. Olivia: Absolutely, as we see it all the time.
Dr. Bryan: And, that’s one of the things that we do see all the time. Probably the number one symptom that we see in healthcare and being in practice for 15 years is people expressing fatigue or being tired all the time, so if we know that blood sugar is obviously leading to potentially affecting somebody’s level of energy, is there an easy way to try to teach somebody to say, “Here’s how you can be more aware of actually getting your blood sugar to be stable”?
Dr. Olivia: Yeah, great question, now, here’s the thing I’m gonna give you some advise, but I can’t stress this is not a one size fits all approach because I see value in keto. I see value in paleo. I see value in intermittent fasting, and what I could tell you is that all of those diets are not good for everybody. They’re not. I see people with very low blood sugar, and I’m trying to get them to incorporate more carbs into their diet because they’re afraid because they think carbs are the devil, vice versa. I see people with higher blood sugar that benefit from lowering and cutting their carbs, so the basic rules is eat within two hours of waking, and don’t go more than four hours without eating. Make sure every time you eat, you’re getting some good, lean protein, maybe some healthy fat, some vegetables, and it’s okay to eat a carbohydrate.
Overfed yet under-nurished
Dr. Olivia: Try to get carbohydrates that are as close to their natural source as possible like a piece of fruit or a sweet potato, and try not to over carb or eat more carbs than your body needs. Because, if you’re putting in a bunch of carbs, and you sit behind a desk all day, carbs are energy units, and if you don’t spend that energy, that energy’s gonna turn into fat, and I guess this would be tip number four, or lump it into three is nutritional deficiencies are a huge problem in America.
We’re so overfed. We’re so undernourished. How can that be? Because, our food is not grown in a way it was 30, 50, 75 years ago. You hear this all the time where people say, “Well, my grandparents ate this, and they lived to be 103.” We’re not eating the same food our grandparents ate.
Supplements
Dr. Bryan: I think it would be very valuable for a lot of people listening for us to do a secondary episode on why supplements get used the way they do because even though we’re advocating food as fuel, sometimes, food by itself isn’t as nutrient dense as it needs to be anymore.Dr. Olivia: Right.
Dr. Bryan: And, so maybe we can spend some time going deeper on regards to why supplements end up filling that gap that you were just referencing there for deficiencies.
Dr. Olivia: Sure, when you talk about diets out there even per se paleo. What paleo is it’s eating local. It’s eating in season. Even growing up, we could only get strawberries in the short season, and we savored them, but now, you can get strawberries year round. And the issue with that is they’re very void of nutrients. Is strawberry a healthy food? Is broccoli a healthy food? Heck yeah, it is, but it’s nowhere near as nutrient dense as when you eat it locally and in season, and we just don’t treat our food that way anymore. We have this, “I want it all the time,” mentality.
Dr. Bryan: I’m with you. My mind’s spinning a little bit. I’ve always loved, not just being by your side, but hearing the passion come out of you in regards to what you share. It becomes inspiring even when I don’t fully understand what you’re saying or if somebody else doesn’t fully understand it to the same depth that you can understand it, you can find a way to boil it down to some of the basics like what you just did here, and we all end up benefiting from it. I know I drink more water than I used to. I know I reduced my toxicity. I know I’m more frequently eating than I once did to stabilize my blood sugar, and I’m also taking different supplements that I wasn’t previously just because of deficiencies that you’ve taught me about.
So thank you so much for continuing to learn and to build off of the story of pain that you experienced, so that other people can benefit from it. I really appreciate all you do, and I look forward to many, many episodes of us sharing and expanding on certain, specific topics of customizing things like why keto works for something, or how to handle autoimmune conditions or what about supplements. There’s probably so many questions that people have that I think we will work our way and try to uncover and unpack as many of these as we can, so thank you.
Dr. Olivia: You’re welcome, and I do think that you deserve a little bit of credit too, in the sense where you’ve shared with me you grew up your entire life. Your diet was gluten, dairy, and Nutter Butters, right? Dr. Bryan: Star Crunch too!
Coming a long way
Dr. Olivia: You’ve come a long way. What I’m saying is you didn’t grow up eating healthy and organic. Maybe I had an advantage because I grew up eating European, and my parents fed me some scary foods. But, you grew up eating a more traditional American diet, and now I rarely if ever see you even touching gluten or dairy, so it’s not where you came from and what you grew up with. I mean, you made choices, not just because you were with me and married to me, but you made choices because when you feel good, you’re not okay with feeling bad. And, I don’t ever want people to think it’s about being perfect. It’s about progress, not perfection.
Dr. Bryan: On that note, I will just tell everybody that if I can do it, you can do it is what she just said. We all should have hope. It’s really not that difficult. We wanna break it down every week or every opportunity we can to try to make it so that you feel that you can live the way you’re meant to live. Thank you, Dr. Olivia, and to all, until next time! We’re out!